Surrender to Mr. X (15 page)

“Always ninety-three?” I said aloud.

“Nothing to do with you,” said Alden. They were all seated at the table, staring at me as I woke. “That is priestly knowledge.”

“You only 156,” said Lam.

“Scarlet Whore,” said Ray, “of Babylon. Number 156
in the Kabala.”

Good God, the Kabala strikes me as page after page of uninterrupted tosh. It is hard for the eidetic mind to forget anything: it doesn't automatically erase what its owner discriminates against, or judges worthless. I needed to be Joan again, nice Joan, whose mind worked normally if slowly, if only to blot out all those tedious pages: the Kabala, the Judaic book of secret knowledge, like the Apocalypse a hundred times over, wild, drug-induced fantasy, interpreted by people who never saw a drug in their lives. The Bible's Apocalypse is mercifully brief. And then the mind was off again—the flawless red heifer of Jerusalem, who must be sacrificed before the Third Temple can be built. Where could I find a reference to that—of course, Gershom Gorenberg in
The End of Days
, 2,000 pages on the apocalyptic struggle over the Temple Mount, between Jew, Muslim and Christian. Vanessa's poor mind was searching pages, feverishly—“I'm getting up,” I said but Ray now had one scrawny leg over me and his clothes off so it was difficult, but I tried. He had a thin wiry body and a long thin questing penis, standing, waving. It had a kink in the middle of it, as President Clinton's was reputed to do, but Clinton was a fleshy man and Ray was almost painfully thin, so it was the more noticeable.

“Theleme,” said Alden, and I stopped struggling. Best just to get it over, and then get out of here. I hoped it wouldn't take too long.

“Poor Ray,” said Alden. But I was annoyed and hurt, even as Joan. Joan never expected this kind of thing, though Vanessa might well have. Why did he want to give me away? Share me? Did I mean so little to him? Upset must have showed in my face because Alden said, “Do it for my sake, Joan. Be kind to him.”

His chair was sideways to the bed and he stretched out a hand and touched my shoulder, and smiled sweetly. He wanted a ring-side seat, I could see. But for once I wasn't an experimental object, just a straight fuck.

“Ray fucks, he paint,” said Lam, who always got to the point.

And it was Ray's bed, after all.

Ray had few sexual graces. Nor was he the kind you could instruct, like young Hasan, nor would you want to. I lay up against the pillows: he wormed his way into me, and burrowed away. I could feel the kink, and that was exciting, and before I knew it I took myself by surprise by coming, a kind of early morning elation, and Alden was leaning forward, interested, which in itself was stimulating because he usually went away and watched from a distance. There was no suggestion of an incipient threesome—other than Alden's voyeurism, let alone, mercifully, a foursome. Lam seemed to have fallen asleep on his chair. His mighty eyes were closed. I daresay he was in truth just an ordinary rather pale, rather clammy young man with mild thyroidism from a dingy suburb,
of the kind who might flourish as servants, and any other impression was a retrospective suggestion from Ray.

And now Ray had my attention because he was coming and coming, and shouting—it is nice to elicit such a noisy response from a man, pleasant to have such power over another person—but then, without warning, he was weeping. Hot tears fell on me and I felt such indulgence toward him and wanted to comfort him, and glad to be able to offer this service.

“It worked,” Ray whimpered, “it worked. She is the promised 156.”

“Bloody crap,” said Alden. “It worked because you're so drunk you forgot you couldn't do it.”

“I am a master of the universe,” said Ray, and fell off me and fell asleep. Alden and Lam departed and I got up and had a bath and made breakfast. The sun shone in, the work on the easel had come back to life, I found some very good coffee, and as good an apricot comfiture as even the Olivier could provide. I was in no particular hurry to go elsewhere.

I listened to Radio 4, the magaziney trivialities washing comfortably over me, the announcers' voices trained to emphasize meaningless words and raise and lower their inflections in any way as long as it has nothing to do with what they were saying. They could call this anodyne logozac, or wordzac: a comforting muzak of thought and language for people who like me at the moment craved cerebral downtime; unlike
me, though, a lot of people out there must want that twenty-four seven. I was in no particular hurry to go anywhere. The Scarlet Whore of Babylon is at home everywhere. She has no fight with her circumstances.

F
OR THE NEXT WEEK I
cleaned by day and fucked by night, like any traditional housewife. They had discovered another use for me, if only by accident. Having found their Whore of Babylon it was not enough: she could clean the house, iron the shirts, buy the food, make the dinner and run errands too. Let her find the envelopes, lick the stamps, and run to the post.

“You can't just sit about here idle all day,” as Alden put it. “You'd be bored.”

They preferred me to live in. Loki drove me over to Little Venice and we came back with a couple of suitcases.

“I don't want too much of your female stuff cluttering up the place,” said Alden. I called Max and told him my mother was ill and I'd be away for a few weeks. Management was so pleased with me—Hasan's family had apparently made a booking for the entire winter season—Max said he reckoned I could come and go as
I liked. But he'd miss me: what had really happened? Had I fallen in love? He was quite a romantic, Max. I told him I thought perhaps I had.

I could think of no other reason for my behavior—transformation of proud independent woman into placid cow—other than that perhaps I really was “under will,” or else that being Joan kept the clatter and torment of wild thoughts at bay, and the sheets of print in my mind safely sealed in their files. My mother always complained that I went to extremes, and I could see that it was true. I either thought too much or too little.

I was given a little room off the master bedroom with the Lukas multi-sensory bed and the white patchwork quilt. It had no windows but it had a vast television screen, a computer, access to the Internet, and an iPod to keep me happy. Not that I was able to spend much time in here. Alden, attended by Lam, would have to be got out of the house to his Arts-Intrinsick meetings: he would have mislaid papers, decided he was wearing the wrong tie, and then he couldn't find the day's entry code that served instead of a house key, and so on. I would have to do the running to and fro.

Ray would be upstairs in the studio painting like a man with a sentence of death hanging over him. Some half of the little squares were finished now, filled in with their manic, fiddly little hairlines, each single one of which seemed to fill Ray with trauma. The mirrors spat back their reflections, bouncing from surface to surface,
back and back into apparent infinity. I was fascinated. He seemed to be constructing a new universe, a new virtual reality which would inform, reify itself in the real world. He was the Intelligent Designer: this was the beginning of some new metaphysical dispensation not of parochial import, but eternal, cosmological in scale, and in which I had my humble, but crucial part to play. Ray sang as he worked, a tuneless dirge, or sometimes listened to Alden's CD, but not when I was in the room because then I just curled up and went to sleep, and neither fucked nor worked.

Alden was working on ways of making the hum music not person-specific, and though he worried that there might be a technical contradiction in this, refused to give up. Joan had responded to the sound of her own heart beats, alas no-one else had. This was for Alden an unwelcome development.

Sometimes they had people to lunch, or for pre-supper drinks, and then I was sent to my room. This increasingly irked me. I did not mind being the cleaner and the whore but I did not see why I should not be treated as a social equal. On a couple of occasions I was sent back to spend the night at Little Venice. I picked up my thesis and stared at it and couldn't make head or tail of it, but my mind started its churning again and I thought my head would split, so I sorted drawers and hung up clothes instead. I had quite got into the habit.

Whether it was Alden or Ray who had decided I
would be the useful and passive kind of person who puts things in order and made things possible for others I don't know. I do know I cleaned Alden's house and Ray's attic as they had never been cleaned before. I moved furniture and sculptures and swept beneath them: I cleaned round light switches and the loos were spotless—it was a big house; there were four bathrooms and two washrooms. I removed heat rings on tables, I polished, I stacked plates properly, arranged pans in height order, handles parallel. I washed paint. I wore gloves, and was sharply spoken to if I forgot.

Lam shook out the rugs for me in the little yard at the back of the house. He had strong wrists: one whack and dust flew obediently. The brass fittings on the lift shone. The buzzer would sound from the studio and I'd whiz up to hand Ray a paintbrush, or find him a better one, or change his turps, or he'd up my skirts—I wore a kind of Victorian maid's outfit, a real one, vintage, not fancy dress, a tough black drill with a little white lace apron and frilly cap—for a quick shag on the sofa. Ray could last for a good half hour now, having agreed to abandon his principles and take Viagra or Cialis, but didn't want to lose good painting time so I could be on and off the sofa in fifteen minutes.

And then he'd have to be packed off to Southgate—socks found, cigarettes, lighter—the more useful I got, the more hopeless he became—he was going to daily Golden Dawn classes. He confided in me that he hoped one day to become the foretold SDA or Sapiens
Dominabitur Astris—Latin for “the wise one who will be ruled by the stars.” Lam would often go along too. They were all nuts but it was none of my business.

In the afternoons there was time for me to go to the hairdresser and the beauty salons, where I would be colored, depilated, smoothed, oiled and generally toned up. The gym was disapproved of—muscles might develop: a soft helplessness was more attractive—and physical energy should be preserved for better things.

After supper I would take a bath, go to my room and Lam would come in and do my make-up. With practice he was getting quite good at it. He could cover the range from healthy pony girl down on the farm, freckles and blue eye-shadow, to kohled Cleopatra, mysterious and sulky, and all stages in-between: secretary, bride, whore, factory lass, leather freak, hitch-hiking student,
Sex and the City
professional. It could be disconcerting because I would see a tentacle rather than a hand reach out for mascara or eye-shadow, and it was hard to keep in mind that this was an illusion, a post hoc suggestion from Ray, not a reality.

Then it was time for the bed, for experiments, for cuffs, manacles, gag-balls, collars, lace corsets: incessant changes of clothes, a horrible metallic dental gadget which kept the mouth propped open wide, ever-changing music, or active non-music (“the hum”), hypodermics, breast clamps, jabbing needles—Lam took blood from time to time, which would be sent off by messenger for analysis of my hormone levels
and God knows what else, the results being fed into his computer. Lam would heave Alden onto the bed, I would bend over the side of it to take him in my mouth, and Ray, emboldened and excited by new opportunities, with new and widened horizons, would enter my cunt and my butt with promiscuous caprice.

Or Ray would be in my mouth while I rode astride Alden: and the cuffs on my wrists and no doubt the seams in my corsets, tight under my heart, would be feeding back to the oscilloscopes, pulse generators, frequency counters, logic and spectrum analysers, plotter loggers, signal generators and all other necessary equipment, the complete story of my sex life, video to be translated into audio, to be incorporated into
Thelemy: The Silence of the Senses
, designed to send Radio 3 listeners aroused to their beds. It was a noble task or an absurd one; I could never be sure which. Joan thought the first, Vanessa the second.

And Lam would photograph and film: cameras round the room, darting here and there. And still Alden never came. Perpetual sexual arousal without end leading to a greater spirituality, the wisdom of Tantrism—perforce—added to Crowleyism, every desire gratified, every impulse expressed, through free experimentation in drugs, sex and physical excess: that tragic explosion in the school lab, once upon a time, creating the second coming of the Beast 666: Alden X.

My unavoidable readings had led me to the conclusion that all those annoying early avant-garde
painters, Vorticists, Futurists, Cubists, Surrealists and so forth were trying to create a new reality through the “infinite complexity” they kept on about. Their friends the musicians were after the same thing. And lo, it had all born terrible fruit, in the form of the computer. And now Alden and Ray were trying to move the whole thing on a stage or two: I, the living me, sex, beauty, warts and all, was being sucked into their audio and visual machinery and being computerized. I was muse to the new computer age; I was hertz instead of music, I and all humanity were reduced to tiny lines upon a canvas, mouse clickers, nothing else. I didn't like it, of course I didn't. No wonder I was bipolaring along like mad.

So far as Joan knew I was in my right mind, and this was not even a variant of normal life, just normal life. This was how I spent my days. But then most people think that of their lives. When I watch people on
I'm a Celebrity
or reality shows, my life as the Whore of Babylon seemed no stranger than theirs.

And then things entered another phase.

I am not quite sure what happened. Some gadgets on the Lukas bed failed: both mechanical—one of the poles wedged and could not be moved—and something to do with his having to put up with incompatibilities between the primitive midi configuration Lukas had used and that which Alden was using in his other apparatus. There was also a failure of “granular synthesis” to cope with the required intensity of orgasmic sound.
Lam clucked and whickered sympathy. Alden swore and cursed all technology, damned the bed as cheap and out-dated, and Lukas for ripping him off, got his wheels tangled in wires, and cursed Lucifer.