I should have known. Forgeries. The lot of them, I could see it right away. These are good, but they're knockoffs. Why am I not surprised? In a culture that copies everything from Rolex watches to Canadian ice wine, there is a knockoff for every expensive brand name, produced by the thousand in the sweatshops of Shenzhen just across the border. I am suddenly angry.
I say nothing. I ask for proof of authenticity and he shows me the tiny trademark etched into the rattan.
How much? I ask.
"All canes $100 US dollars."
He hands one to me. It feels good in my hands and I test its flex
"Mmm. Okay.. But let me see that one." I point to one in the bottom drawer.
As he bends to retrieve it, I give him a whack across both cheeks of his ample posterior, hard enough to get his attention.
"Ow, ow, ow," he exclaims, straightening up and grasping his backside with both hands. "What you think you doing? You crazy lady? You want to test canes, here, hit pillow, not hit proprietor. I call police."
"Go ahead. Call the police. If you don't I will. These are knockoffs, aren't they?"
He looks crestfallen. The indignation has evaporated.
He says nothing, stares at the floor.
"Don't pretend you don't know, because I do know," I say. "I know the lady who makes them. I know she doesn't sell into Asia."
"Canes made by auntie in Shenzhen," he replies grudgingly. "Top quality rattan, but designs are knockoff. Jade, precious stones, not real. No matter. Many customers buy. More profitable sell canes than copy watch."
I suddenly want to get out of there.
"I'll make you a deal," I say. "You change your ad, change the brand name, file off the fake trademark and I'll let it go this time. But remember I live here, I'll be watching."
"Okay, okay," he nods sullenly and gives his noodles his full attention, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
RattanAmours they are not, but I still want one. I didn't come all this way for nothing. I chose a 32-inch beauty with a jade handle carved in the form of a traditional Chinese lion I land a few practice strokes on a pile of cushions sending up puffs of dust that swirl and dance in a shaft of sunlight that enters from a high window. The swishing sound is fine and right.
The proprietor of the Wang King emporium watches me, still eating
"You want that one? Take it," he says. "No charge. Here, I wrap for you. Give little jar of camphor oil to keep it nice and flex."
Suddenly, he is all smiles. Me too.
I can't wait to get it home.
But at about this time, less than six weeks after I arrived in Hong Kong, Jen's concerns about RC's health began to seem like a warning. He became morose, uncommunicative and nothing I could do would cheer him up. He stayed late at the office, and was quite often drunk when he finally came home. The joy went out of life for him and needless to say, for me too. We stopped having sex. I tried to talk to him about it, but he insisted nothing was wrong.
"Leave me alone. I'm sorry, Cat. I'll get over it. I've been having these terrible dreams."
"What sort of dreams?"
"You know, what happened."
I tried to hug him, but he pushed me away. After a week of this I phoned Jen in Sydney and she urged me to leave him.
"It's over, Cat, can't you see that? He needs help. You can't help him. Get out while you can!"
I hung up hurriedly when I heard his key in the door. He hadn't been drinking, but he had a crazed look in his eyes. He confronted me, demanding I punish him and when I refused, he lost it, grabbing me from behind, tearing off my nightie. I screamed but he stuffed my panties in my mouth until I thought I would suffocate. I kicked at him and tried to struggle free, but I was powerless in his grasp. He tied me to the bed and he beat me. I was sobbing uncontrollably. The pain was excruciating, but I felt more betrayed than hurt. He loosened the bonds. Then without a word he left, slamming the door behind him. I took a deep breath and slowly regained my composure. I was alive. Outside, I could see more darkness than light. The neon that had enchanted me now mocked me.
This is what I did. I took a plumber's saw from under the kitchen sink and I cut the cane into pieces. I wrapped his precious replica in a pillowcase and smashed it with a hammer into a thousand bits. Then I threw some clothes into a suitcase and got a taxi to the airport.
When I phoned Jen, she was just about to leave for work.
"You say your flight leaves in two hours. It's roughly eight hours flying time to Sydney. I'll pick you up the airport." She didn't even press me for details of what had happened. "Even if he tries to find you, he won't know where you have gone. You will be safe here."
And for a while I was.
Chapter Ten
Ever since he met Joanne and visited her little bed-sit in Basildon, George had been determined to learn more about the life of Catherine de Medici. Joanne had given him a brief history of erotic discipline as far back as the Ancient Greeks and had told him that the 16th century Queen of France was notorious for her delight in spanking the bottoms of "the most beautiful and noble" ladies of her court. Now this was something George could relate to, but a lifetime of writing municipal reports had taught him the value of accuracy if you are going to put something down on paper. So when his hero the Time Lord bedded Boadicea, or was seduced by Cleopatra, or broke into the Bastille to discuss erotic literature with the Marquis de Sade, or helped Casanova escape from his jail cell at the Doge's Palace in Venice or, and this George found most fanciful of all, encountered the future Duchess of Windsor in a brothel in Beijing, he would need to be historically on solid ground. What happened during those encounters he would share with his readers, the part that was pure fiction, and no-one could argue with that. George moved Catherine de Medici to the top of the list.
In the politically correct nineties he had helped to draw up the worksafe standards for Putney and District and he reflected with amusement that such employer conduct, even by royalty, would not be tolerated today, but the thing was: Wws it whimsy, or someone's fanciful view of history, or could he find any evidence that Catherine de Medici had spanked her ladies in waiting? So as usual, and with his customary bureaucratic thoroughness, George applied himself to the pursuit of historical plausibility.
During a visit to the dusty archives of the National Museum he found several references in mediaeval documents to a court festival in 1577 at Chateau Chennonceau in the Loire Valley, one of several palaces owned by the Queen. On that occasion, according to one account, Catherine, who was then Queen Mother and in her sixties, "made the ladies of her court parade half naked and smacked them on the buttocks with the palm of her hand." Here was the testimony he was looking for.
Good for her, he thought. If he were Queen of France, he would probably have done the same thing, but unfortunately for George, the aspiring novelist, that was all the empirical evidence he could find. He couldn't believe there were no more details. Here was this incredible event unfolding and no one apparently took notes. However, he found a wealth of other anecdotal material he could use.
Catherine de Medici, by all accounts, was a woman of literary, artistic and culinary interests. Born Caterina Maria Romula di Lorenzo de' Medici., in Florence in 1519 she was 14 when she married in Marseille the second son of the Duke of Orleans, Henry, a boy of her own age.
Those were the days, George thought, as he recorded the details in his notebook.
He reflected ruefully on his own teenage years growing up in East Grinstead. When he was 14 he hadn't even kissed a girl let alone had sex with one; indeed his only experience under the sheets was with one hand on the little fella and the other aiming a flashlight at a pop-up book of nude photos hoping he would make it to the finish line before his mum came to kiss him goodnight.
He sighed and read on.
"Young Prince Henry danced and jousted for his bride and the couple left their wedding ball at midnight to perform their nuptial duties." George chuckled to himself, wondering if jousting was
a mediaeval euphemism for bonking. Apparently it was, because a few pages further on he was astonished to read that the King himself had accompanied the young couple to their bedroom and had stayed until the marriage was consummated, later noting for the record that "each had shown valor in the joust." George wondered if Henry had spanked Catherine on their wedding night propelling her down a sexual path she apparently followed for the rest of her life. The thought intrigued him. If he did, it likely it didn't happen until after the King had left. He remembered his own wedding night in Alicante and was grateful in retrospect that no member of the English royal family had been present to hear the applause. He remembered it was the next day he had purchased el cepillo and back at the hotel when Pem was teasing him, he whispered in her ear that he had bought it for both of them. He remembered how she had blushed when she heard this and had kissed the tip of his nose.
"You all right there, sir?" the archivist interrupted his reverie.
"Yes, sorry, I was miles away. History will do that to you."
"Just to let you know, we close in an hour."
"Thank you, yes, I'm nearly done." He read on, filling pages of his notebook with his neat cursive script.
He read that Catherine de Medici was credited with introducing Italian cooking to France, bringing with her an entourage of chefs, pastry cooks, confectioners and distillers and introducing to the French court delicacies such as pasta, artichokes, aspics, baby peas and broccoli. It is also said she invented women's knickers which made George laugh out loud prompting an admonishing glance from the archivist. George had a mental image of the Queen, quill in hand, sketching a prototype for the royal seamstress. In any event, he thought the invention of knickers to be a splendid achievement at least on par with splitting the atom and such innovation would have been entirely in character with the Queen as the wearing of unmentionables by her ladies in waiting would have greatly contributed to her majesty's amusement, or at least that was his experience. Lowering the last line of defense, be it bloomers of the finest silk, or made-in-China cotton panties, thus gradually revealing in their slow descent a shapely derriere, was always a magical moment in Pimlico when Pem was over his knee.
But back to business with a bit more urgency this time. George learned, for example, that the year 1577 (the year of the royal spanking, as he referred to it) had special significance because on Nov. 24 in front of 78 of the richest and most powerful nobles in the land Catherine de Medici had inaugurated a magnificent new gallery at Chateau Chennonceau constructed in honor of her son King Henry 111. Built on a bridge over the river leading to the castle, it was sixty meters long and was hung with the finest Flemish tapestries and portraits in oil of the nobles of the House of Valois.
Here, culminating in a sumptuous banquet, Catherine staged one of the spectacular court festivals for which she was famous throughout Europe. These epic events known as 'magnificences' sometimes lasted two or three days involving jousting and other martial skills, but most importantly they were a platform fit for the Queen to demonstrate her patronage of the arts. There would be ballet, opera, orchestral music, the reciting of poetry and the performance of elaborately costumed mythological pageants set to the music of contemporary composers. And for the closing banquet Catherine had choreographed performance art that "would delight and astonish" all who saw it. Here there was footnote referencing a book published in Paris in 1886 entitled Princes and Peccadillos: A History of Ribaldry in Mediaeval Europe and rifling through its yellowed pages and translating as he went using admittedly rudimentary schoolboy French, George paraphrased what he read as follows: On the night of Nov. 24, 1577, the Queen issued a royal challenge to the ladies of the court and to the serving wenches who waited on the tables as to who among them in her judgment could display the 'most comely bottom'. The winner's reward was lifetime court tenure, a purse of five gold sovereigns, and, in front of all the nobles and dignitaries of France, she would have her asset spanked by the Queen.
Now that, George said to himself later, as he went through his notes over a pint of bitter, must have been one hell of banquet. What he wouldn't have given to be a fly on the wall at that one. And then it struck him, a moment of genuine literary inspiration. He jotted a few notes on the back of a beer mat and as soon as he got home he put the kettle on and booted up his computer. An exclusive report from the banquet hall, he thought. Well why not. This was a job for Doctor Whom. He began to write.
By Our Special Correspondent
CHATEAU CHENNONCEAU, France, Nov. 24, 1577 – I am a fly on the wall.
I see everything.
I am musca domestica, a common housefly, reporting to you upside down from a roof joist in the Great Gallery of this magnificent castle, which tonight will be inaugurated by Catherine de Medici in honor of her son the King.
Far below me the rich and powerful, bishops and cardinals, the knights and their fair ladies are assembling for what promises to be an astonishing climax to the most magnificent 'magnificence' of the century.
And the buzzzz (no pun intended) is that evening will conclude with a special performance the like of which has never before been witnessed in all the glory of France.
Only Doctor Whom, Lord of Time, now metamorphosed into Doctor Fly, will not be shocked as events unfold. In fact I intend to have some fun with it, as you will see.
But before festivities get under way, I had better log a little flying time. I must have complete confidence in my aeronautical specifications if I am going to survive the night. I do a couple of circuits of the Great Gallery well above the heads of the assembled guests. At my top speed of five miles per hour this takes several minutes, which if you are chasing me with a rolled up copy of the Treaty of Amiens would be hazardous to my health, but I zig and I zag at warp speed. My kind are the most accomplished flying machines on earth.
Our wings beat 200 times a second which gets us airborne in 100 milliseconds, three times faster than it takes your brain to tell your hand to swat me. Sticky pads on my feet allow me to walk on walls and ceilings. On final approach I kick my forelegs over my head making contact with my gummy front pads, then with an acrobatic somersault that would do credit to Cirque de SoleiI, I flip over and touch down with my rear feet. Is that brilliant, or what? And I am blessed with extraordinary sight.
Each of my eyes has two thousand lenses giving me multi-angle vision in all directions. Without having to move I can count the hairs on the nose of the Duke of Orleans, while sixty meters away at the far end of the gallery I watch the Bishop of Boulogne, who thinks no-one can see him, slip a fat ringed finger up the skirt of the Dowager Bergerac, recently widowed.
Go ahead, try to swat me. Make my day.
For practice, and with a nod to his holiness, I plunge into the cleavage of the Duchess of Agincourt whom I had observed during my peregrinations has the most magnificently succulent breasts. I take a leisurely stroll around her nipples before she shrieks and clutches at her bosom by which time I am airborne and back to the safety of the rafters.
As I consider how next to test my wings, I hear from the direction of the castle's north wing a fanfare of trumpet, fife and drum. This tells me dinner is about to be served.
And what a feast it is.
There is wild boar, freshly killed in the hunt, spit roasted and stuffed with turnips, carrots and parsnips. Whole lambs there are and sides of beef, roast suckling pigs spiced with basil, rosemary and nutmeg. There are pheasants dressed with their own feathers, peacocks, swans, herons, and other birds dished up in ragouts and pottages and baked into pies. There are herrings from Calais, salted and smoked, and bread rolls baked from the finest flour, spread with fresh butter churned in the castle kitchen. Instinct tells me I should also get stuck in, planting my sticky feet in a succulent side dish of truffles, but I put aside the temptation.
What a fly!
To aid with digestion there are on every table flagons of wine and casks of foaming ale of which the assembled liberally partake. With each course, the
nobles become drunker and more raucous and when the serving wenches begin baring their bottoms – to win grace and favor of Catherine de Medici, not to mention five gold pieces – their enthusiasm reaches a crescendo.
As each wench bows and hoists her skirt the cheers ring to the rafters drowning out the accompaniment of harps and flutes.
I see and hear it all.
At the head table, the pompous Grand Duke of Boesse is becoming increasingly obnoxious. During the first course the smelly oaf monopolized the conversation with a boring and self-serving account of some long-forgotten crusade to the Holy Land in which he had played a peripheral role. By the second course, as the serving wenches move among the tables he gropes at them with bloated and hairy-backed fingers until I can tolerate his buffoonery and bad manners no longer.
I drop from the ceiling and land squarely on his red bulbous nose. Angrily, he brushes me away. I go to one ear, then to the other, provoking more futile batting and flapping then I settle in the crevice of one of his many sweaty chins. He swears at me, a terrible profanity. In response I fly into his mouth and shit on his tongue and fly out again before he can so much as gnash his teeth. Finally, I alight next to a flagon of wine directly before him and sit there motionless, apparently spent. The other nobles laugh uproariously to see such sport and the Grand Duke's face is purple with rage. The fool aims a clumsy blow at the spot where I used to be. But instead of splatting me as was his intent he knocks over the flagon which crashes into the next one and this one into its neighbor until France's finest claret flows off the table in a torrent, pooling in the gowns of their ladyships and staining the doublets of the noble lords.
This provokes a fist fight with an old enemy the Duke of Aubergine and Boesse gets a bloody nose for his trouble. But at the head of the table, seated on satin cushions upon a gilded throne, Catherine de Medici is not amused. These elaborate entertainments have a political and pragmatic purpose supposedly to preoccupy her feuding nobles and distract them from fighting each other. The intent is to divert and delight not to provoke the outbreak of unseemly brawls.
Spank: The Improbable Adventures of George Aloysius Brown Page 14
