Surrender to Mr. X (21 page)

“Sir Jasper has proposed to you, and you have accepted him,” says Alden, “and he has given you a diamond engagement ring!” I can hardly believe I am so happy. Humble little me, married to Sir Jasper!

My parents have got wind of our plans and are close behind us on the next flight from Knock, but Sir Jasper says we must get married at once before they arrive and try to stop me. I agree. So many difficult people, all trying to stand in the way of true love! I am to believe everything Sir Jasper tells me is true, because I love him and love means trust.

All the arrangements have been made. Sir Jasper's mother has even lent me her own wedding dress and gown, which will be waiting for me at the hotel. All Jasper's side of the family have been invited, and his friends too—and when the cab pulls up, there they all are, in their wedding finery: white ties and tails, and beautiful picture hats.

But I only have eyes for Sir Jasper, the man I love. He kisses me and murmurs words of love, I sigh and tell him of mine. Jasper's mother and sister come to greet me: they take me to one of the bedrooms: and
there's my wedding dress. A glorious, full tulle skirt and a tiny satin bodice, all beaded with pearls. I am bathed and scented, my pussy is shaved—so intimate, but they say it is the custom!—my hair put in rollers and my face made up: pale, pale foundation, just a touch of rouge. The lights are so bright in here! Spotlights shine down, but they say they need good light to get the details right. And then it's time for the wedding dress—Jasper's mother is smaller than me so it's rather tight—but there's a little matching bolero which makes it decent. Out come the hair rollers and on goes the lace veil—adorable—falling from a diamond tiara. It covers my face unless I push it aside. Was ever a girl luckier than me!

The priest who will marry us comes in to see me in my finery. He wears a dog collar and crimson robes: he is rather bald and old and fat, like Friar Tuck. But he's so kind. He talks to my about my duty of obedience and trust and how many things may seem strange to a convent girl like me, but I must accept them. My husband will be there to guide me. The mother and sister get a fit of the giggles and I wish they wouldn't. He blesses me and leaves.

A blink: a blur: we're back to snapshots. I stand before the altar in a church. This is a little confusing; weren't we in an hotel? But it must be a church; there is stained glass, and candles and the smell of incense. And my friend the priest is officiating. He's very clever: he knows Latin. In Nomine Dei Nostri Satanas Luciferi
Excelis, he intones. My dress is simply lovely: lots and lots of white tulle everywhere. Beside me stands Jasper. My day, my special day. I can't see all that much because of the veil. I don't recognize the hymns. They aren't what we sung at school, being rather dirge like and throbbing. “It is the evening of the day, your pleasure is fulfilled: you, our Lord of Ecstasy.” And “Be with us now, oh blessed child of Samael and Lilith.” Sir Jasper slips the ring on my finger and stares into my eyes. Soon we will go to the honeymoon suite. He is so tender and loving.

But first we must have the photographic session. Everyone seems to want to have their picture taken with me. Some of the guests are wearing rather odd gear for a country wedding: tight, black and shiny outfits, hooded gowns with unfamiliar symbols embroidered on them. But here is Jasper, whispering what smart clothes everyone is wearing: isn't that an Armani suit: that hat can only come from Harvey Nicks. And looking again, I see they are.

Cut to the honeymoon suite. I am the virgin bride, alight with eagerness. He comes in the door, closes it behind him and walks toward me, arms outstretched. So handsome! But so bright in here—why is it still so bright?—but Jasper is pushing me back onto the bed, throwing my dress over my head in a great enveloping mass, pushing my legs apart. I struggle and scream, the veil is ripped aside, the priest is behind me, wearing only his dog collar, his hands into the breasts which
no man has seen before—Jasper now casually ripping the pearl bodice of his own mother's wedding gown—I am shamed, so shamed. Now his mother and his sister are there, they hold me down, laughing, the pearls fly everywhere—the priest turns my face to him, his fingers force my mouth open—Jasper's hands are in me—a sudden vision of Dr. Bardsey—I am screaming but the veil is pushed into my mouth—and the sound rumbles back into my lungs, and I hear someone say “how's that for a gurgle?”

Cut to: I am bent over the marble bath, still in a great welter of cloth and the best man and the photographer are attempting to get into my pussy together, and I can see the shadow of the camera: and my nose is an inch away from water and there are people all around, laughing and talking and excited. “Brilliant, terrific reaction shots. Did you see the expression on her face!” And Vanessa is back with me suddenly, saying what is all this nonsense, this is going too far—what have you got us into—and I am struggling to get free—

But my head is dunked into the water and my veil floats to the surface. Brussels lace, Chantilly—Venetian point—Vanessa knows exactly what it is, how old, where from. Joan has been keeping expensive company, prepared to pay a lot for props, high production values. But Vanessa is extremely put out. Joan has let her down. Vanessa is a vocational girl, not a whore. Meanwhile Joan is just about drowning, struggling for breath, blue in the face while she is rammed from behind: her head is
lifted from the water: she struggles for breath—“If I die, you die,” Vanessa snarls at Joan. And down my head goes again—then suddenly I can breathe again because once more my savior Lam has pulled my head out of the water and scattered my assailants.

Snapshot: I am lying face down on a hotel carpet, still coughing up water, choking, though someone quickly gets my face turned to the camera so as not to miss a thing and I am beyond fury, trying to strike it out of the way. “Great,” says someone, “great! Did you get that?” And I collapse, exhausted by the effort, and I can see that lying there wet and trembling, bedraggled and half dead, surrounded by all that damp wedding gown, I make a great not too simulated shot. The extras are already cavorting in some orgy scene in the background. The cameras keep rolling.

Lam is now wrapping me in a soft towel and patting me dry, tenderly, and when I ask where Ray and Alden are he says, 'They go home. Not their show.'

“Oh thanks a million, boys,” I say. “Fuckers.”

“Leased you out,” Lam says.

“Shits!” I shout. Lam does not condemn my language.

On the way home in the taxi Loki passes me a carton of OJ and a sandwich. It's chicken and lettuce in wholewheat bread and butter, not margarine. I am really touched, and grateful. Lam either doesn't understand human appetites—he may even be doing a crash course in them, majoring in sex, to take back to the
Dog Star—or is human, and under orders to keep me hungry, on the grounds that hunger gives a girl a more vulnerable and eager look. Then at least the instructions haven't yet traveled down the chain of command as far as Loki: “Keep her famished.”

I bet the rest of the cast of hundreds from the party settled down after their Black Mass to a really good lunch from the film caterers' trailers I had noticed. I didn't get any. But I suppose I should be glad they didn't decide on a postprandial human sacrifice, un-simulated, and were shooting a tamer Ravished Bride/Drowning Fetish script this time. Girls in the porn scene do sometimes just disappear. The police may look into it but leads are few and far between.

Loki's good Samaritan gesture of the sandwich did more to bolster my spirits than any of Ray's subsequent attempts to overlay trauma with an “under will” memory of what a blissfully glamorous day I'd had. Phoebe says small human kindnesses, if they come hot on the heels of major blows to the spirit, can counteract a lot of the damage done.

F
ROM TIME TO TIME
Clive and Audrey would take me out to suburbia: we'd travel in their grand Mercedes to “real” homes, where we'd act out the rather second-grade scenarios for which the porn public, they were convinced, had developed an appetite. Phoebe told me that Adult Video News had recently run an article on changing tastes in porn, in which it was claimed that films with low production values were currently doing better than the high grade stuff. High could just be too graphic and detailed for the many. Viewers liked something explicit, but at the same time muzzy and homey, more “real,” more like their own lives. I didn't suppose Clive and Audrey actually read AVN, reading was not their thing, but no doubt word got round. There I'd be, on the road, with an amateur camera man and two or three extras following on. Alden and Ray kept out of the way: these particular outings being too cheap and tasteless for artists of their quality. If Lam was somewhere about he kept himself to himself.
A light or two would be set up wherever, in leafy avenue or identikit housing estate: the awful pattern of crimson stair carpet, chosen to not show the dirt, as one sprawled face down, the hard ridge of the cheap kitchen table digging into ones buttocks or breasts, became alarmingly samey.

I would play the heroine. Local lads and laddettes would play supporting parts, or occasionally they'd ship in some pros. But Viagra and Cialis can make porn stars out of the boy next door, or his over the hill grandpop.

There were various scenarios I got to know rather well. There was “If you won't I know someone who will.” In this the reluctant wife/partner is woken in the middle of the night to find her husband/partner taking his pleasure with a strange girl at the foot of the bed and obliged to be an onlooker. I tie her hands to the bedposts and he then abandons me and forces her. Bedposts are quite a rarity these days, headboards being the thing, but bed restraint systems are readily available. These slip under any bed and provide leashes, rings and cuffs. “That'll teach you to refuse me!”

There was “obliged to fuck the landlord to pay the rent, the whoever to pay the gambling debt, the college fees,” etc. Boring to me because the plot is so minimal. Once the reluctance is established, the girl proceeds to noisily enjoy what happens next, which is any position any one can think of with as many men as can be
enjoyed by one woman at a time. “That proves it, any woman can be bought!”

In the lesbian version, the landlord is a woman: in the gay version all participants are male. In the dominatrix version I stick on a dildo and fuck and generally oppress the male, but it doesn't come naturally.

There's the “be nice to my friends or else,” scenario. I am the wife ironing the shirt or cooking the dinner expecting her man home from the pub. A knock at the door, she opens up, and he's on the doorstep with six of his friends. They need entertaining. She must oblige. They take her from room to room so there's no space unsullied. They tie her to the cooker, to the central heating boiler, to the work bench in the garage. “Don't think you're special, you're not.”

And so on. The revenge of the man on the uppity woman. Always a best seller. I, man, am stronger than you, woman. You may make more money, have more friends, gain more respect, but I am stronger than you.

A
ND
I
'D GET HOME
and we'd settle down, to supper and the TV, and Lam would do juggling tricks with eight oranges, one for each of the stellar Gateways, and I'd see them flash in and out of existence, into space and back again, as far as Betelgeuse and back. Or that's what Ray told me was happening. “See what giant hands he has!” says Ray. “To him an orange is an apricot, and just as well. Maybe a planet is an orange…”

And I see the giant hands. And Vanessa starts up in my head about Betelgeuse, the red giant, whence all the trans-mundane intelligences have their birth: she's running down a page in a publication called
The Oneness
, and I, Joan, have to stamp her down because Vanessa will not for one moment accept that Lam is an alien just because Ray says he is.

“Actually Lam doesn't really come from Tibet,” says Ray. “I was only having you on, Joan. Nor is he an alien. He's from the Dogon tribe in Mali. They all look
like that there, and juggle with oranges because of their hands.”

“Don't talk such nonsense,” Alden says to Ray. “The poor girl is confused enough already.”

I am having a hard time with Vanessa today; since the second incident with a bath she's been quite stroppy. She's back and whizzing through the pages of a work written in 1950, by the anthropologist Marcel Griaule, with help from the Dogon tribe who knew more about Sirius and its unseen star companions than could reasonably be expected. Its title is “Un Système Soudanais de Sirius.” Power devolved from Betelgeuse to Sirius, says Vanessa, at least according to the Thelemites, and a being from the double star was sighted by Crowley in 1918—

“Oh shut up, shut up,” I cry. “Too much information!” and Alden and Ray look quite put out, thinking I am talking to them which of course I am not. Ray puts me under will to calm me, and we all go to bed together which is probably the best thing that can happen. Vanessa hasn't been shopping for a week or so and the Bipolar Two part is getting quite difficult. Alden still can't come and Ray still can't stop himself, but it's cozy and friendly and I don't mind at all. Or Ray says I don't. And at least Vanessa's gone again, the snarky bitch, I'm glad.

We're up in the attic on the sofa. Alden's hum is on the loudspeaker. The tone has changed. The pitch is lower. I have a distinct impression it's something to do
with Bride in the Bath. This is because of something Alden says. “Listen to that,” he says proudly, “it's good. That's what the gurgle input does. That was some gurgle, that was.”

That was the death cry of the virgin he was talking about, at the hands of Sir Jasper and the false priest. The rattle of the death of hope as the bridal veil is thrust down the maiden throat. But Alden didn't even stop in his flow: he is talkative and animated tonight. When Lukas finally delivered the newly-equipped bed rejigged with Bluebeard Alden would be able to map pitch, duration, intensity, velocity and envelope; determine loop length, sample rate, and so on, of similar sounds, and subject the lot to granular synthesis: the new special synthesizers from China would allow him to involve light and intensity movement. Or something. I'd switched off by then, and so had Ray, who yawned, though I daresay Vanessa was listening. But I'm feeling sleepy. I often am, these days.