By Light Alone (3 page)

3

He caught up with Ysabella by the lift. They ascended together. Not a word was spoken. This feature of the tryst was something that George found almost more thrilling than the prospect of actual sex. It was the thought that it was possible to arrange these things without ever having to spell out the awkward specifics in words. That an understanding could be arrived at spontaneously, as it were; like leaves coming voicelessly to the branches of trees, or like whisky-coloured sunlight laying itself down intimately upon the white snow.

He kissed her in the corridor outside her room, and then they tumbled through the door like teenagers. Down they went, onto the crisply made bed. He grasped at Ysabelle’s splendidly ample flesh, dug his fingers in to the contours of thigh and buttock. She pushed him away for a moment, dialled down the glass balcony-doors’ glass, and then was straight back at him, pulling off his clothes with an efficient series of yanks and hoiks. In moments he was naked, and the fact that she was still fully clothed was – well, alarming, really. Perhaps there was simply something subliminally intimidating about her muscular confidence. Not that this did anything to diminish the visible solidity of his desire. He wouldn’t be the first man to be drawn precisely by the desire to be alarmed.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Shall we?’

He went to her, fitted his arms around her broad torso and began kissing her neck, and kissing her face, rubbing his fingers over her bristly scalp. She undid the catch and shook herself free of her trousers. Her knickers fell to silky pieces with a twitch of her thumb. George’s heart was hammering. And in the moment the foreplay was a process of postponing the inevitable, terrifying exhilaration. It was getting the top half of her clothing off, running his mouth and hands over her dark skin, the small, low breasts, the nipples like black olives. It was all that. But it couldn’t be postponed for ever – and
down
we go.

Superfast, superfast, superfast.

He pumped away, despite the tiredness of his thigh muscles, for the longest time, all the while fumbling as best he could at Ysabelle’s cleft with his right hand. But it seemed to take her a long time to get where she was going. She lifted her long, mannish legs and brought the soles of her two feet together somewhere behind George’s head. This neither thrilled him, nor put him off. On and on he plugged, to a rising sound-effect of squelching that made him think, randomly, of jellyfish. The undersea kingdom. Bubbles, and bubbles, and bubbles. Then – finally! – a mist of opal crept over the oily surface of her eyes, and she was gone.

Afterwards he got up for a piss, and loitered a little in the enormous bathroom. With a fine feeling of superiority, he poked a finger in amongst all of Peter’s myriad grooming products on the mirror-shelf. Coming back through he helped himself to a glass of wine from the minibar, and lolled on the bed, watching the screen.

For quarter of an hour Ysabelle lay on her side. She snored with the noise of a fly trapped behind a windowpane. But then she awoke, with a shudder, and stretched out all her limbs enormously, and got off the bed, and took herself off to the shower.

On the news, a stare-eyed US official, his widow’s-peak shaven into a cruciform shape, was being interviewed by a Japanese chat anchor. ‘Repetitive raiding heavily leverages our core capability to break states,’ the US wallah said. The screen ran his words along the bottom:
repetitive raiding heavily leverages capability to break states
.

‘But if Triunion government retains its oppositional—’ the interviewer tried to say.

‘Triunion needs to understand the investment the US Government has
already
made in military intervention.’ He rolled the phrase ‘US Government’ into a single word: five syllables compressed to three. ‘The
financial
investment,’ he added, as if there were any other kind.

George scratched an itch on his kneecap with a circular motion. To the right, the darkened glass of the balcony door had turned the bright sky to a shadowy gentian colour. We are the immortal offspring of the heaven and the earth. The interviewer said, ‘Everything remains just as it was.’ The screen cut to a montage from Triunion. It was the usual thing: crowds surging like fans at a music concert, up and down dingy-looking low-rise streets. All with their crazy trailing hair. Another shot of a courtyard, or a town square, or something, filled with angry-looking longhairs. There was a shot of a military Quadpod pulling its metal legs up and hoofing them down again with almost comical fastidiousness, stepping over the tin roofs, striding up and down the dirt alleys. The guns under its belly looked like ski-poles. People surged, washed up and down the alleyways. The guns spat and sputtered. Here was a shot of a crowd tugging down street-lamps and rushing at the Pods like pedestrian Sir Lancelots. Here was another shot: the fat tiling of a wall of army riot-shields.

Ysabelle came out of the shower with a towel draped over her shoulders, but otherwise superbly, enormously, statuesquely naked. ‘What’s this?’

‘Riots in Triunion.’

‘I don’t want the
specifics
,’ she said, bending all the way down to the minibar to pluck herself a drink. Holding one of the miniature little wine bottles she looked for all the world like a giant, a
vrai
giant, something splendidly and erotically Brobdingnagian. ‘What I mean: you’re watching the
news
?’

‘I like the news,’ he said.

She sat herself back on the bed, beside him. ‘I thought we sorted out Triunion last year,’ she said, shortly, perhaps so as to show George that she wasn’t entirely a news philistine.

But, for some reason, George wasn’t in the mood to be placated. Something vaguely unsatisfying about the encounter was niggling at him. The sex, or the wine, or the anticlimax, or
something
. ‘I don’t believe the Republic of Canada had anything to do
with
it,’ he said.

‘By
we
I mean,’ she drawled, looking through the half-darkened glass at the flank of the mountain. But instead of finishing the sentiment she took a swig of yellow-white wine.

They were silent for a while. The interview continued onscreen for a minute or more: the US guy explaining the scaled punitive tariff that would be applied to Triunion if hostilities continued. A barchart sprang up in front of him to illustrate his words; this many native deaths for this much resistance, this larger number if the unrest continued into next week, this much larger number if—

‘I thought
you Americans
sorted out Triunion last year,’ Ysabelle said, shortly.

‘You’re right,’ said George, changing the channel. ‘It’s boring.’

They watched some sport; then a musical stab-match between two hard-pop superstars. Then they watched a book for a few minutes.

‘Did you say you had two children?’ Ysabelle asked.

‘Ezra you saw,’ said George. ‘There’s also Leah.’

‘And how old is Leah?’

‘Ten.’

They sat in silence and watched a whole book. Belatedly, George grasped that Ysabelle had been prompting him. So he asked: ‘You?’

Her posture on the bed relaxed marginally. ‘What do you
think
?’ she asked.

‘How’s that?’

‘Do you think I have any kids?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ he drawled. ‘How would I know, one way or another?’

She moved herself a little closer to him. ‘Come along Sher
loon
. Would you say my pussy is the pussy of a woman who has had a child?’

‘Sherlock,’ he said.

‘Sherlock, whatever. Use your little grey cells.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Would be my answer. I’d say that pussy is too pristine.’

The way she wriggled with self-consciously girly deliciousness really was not suited to her powerful frame. ‘I have,’ she purred. ‘I gave
vag
inal birth too – my lovely Ernesto!’

‘You’d never guess,’ he said, trying half-heartedly for gallantry. ‘Not by the state of – uh, state of your pussy.’

‘Oh and Ernie was
enormous
, too! One of the largest they’d seen at the clinic. It’s a good thing, for the health of the infant, but
hard work
for me, and for my pussy. But I had a genius surgeon called Mowat, called
Lev
Mowat, a graduate of the Moscow school. He did
amazing
micro-work up there.
Amazing
muscular work.’

‘Amazing,’ agreed George.

‘It’s tighter than it was before! It really is.’

‘I could,’ George began, starting to say
I could tell
. But this would be a ridiculous thing to say, for to say
I could tell
surely implied prior experience against which he was judging it. Instead he said, ‘I can imagine.’

‘He did something with the nerve-endings too. It’s much more pleasurably sensitive in there than it was before.’

‘Excellent,’ said George, feeling uncomfortable. ‘That is excellent.’

Afterwards they strolled down together and had a coffee in the hotel’s Costa. The circular logo circumferenced the company name around the stylized representation of three coffee beans. George’s eye kept drifting to the logo, and its beans, like three torn-out brown tongues. He was in a morbid sort of mood, really. Caffeine wrestled with alcohol in his streaming blood. Ys chattered on. The encounter seemed to have perked her up.

Eventually they parted, and George hung vaguely about the games room for a bit. His Fwn murmured, and it was Marie – breathless and strawberry-cheeked from her exertions. They agreed to supper
à deux
. After the call, George dawdled through the basement-level mall, and bought himself a complete new suit of clothes, all the while thinking that he ought to feel perkier than he did. It was not that he felt
bad
, exactly; but there was an insubstantial sense of apprehension somewhere in his sensorium. He couldn’t pin it down. From the basement he travelled up to the penthouse bar. He ordered a Poppy. He pulled a leaf of the hotel’s viewsheet from the dispenser, but found he couldn’t concentrate on the images, flicking through the channels until he ended up, almost perversely, back at the news.

On a whim he took the elevator down again to the kids’ suite. He stepped in without knocking to find Leah almost upside down in an easy chair – her legs hooked over the back, her head dangling down, a gamescard in her hand. Those fantastically precise fluttery fingers going over the screen, like a Renaissance concert pianist, or something. Or an artist working the canvas – or something. He didn’t know what game she was playing. ‘Hel
low
Leah,’ he said with mock ponderousness, as if he were a fairy tale giant and she a princess to be rescued, or menaced, or however it was those sorts of stories went. She ignored him, of course. Pixels outrank parents in a child’s order of priorities. Ezra was in the next room on the playmat with his toys parading about him in a circle; and Arsinée was on the balcony, her long black hair spread wide and dangling.

‘Mr Denoone!’

‘Arsinée!’ he snapped at her, suddenly very cross. ‘But what are you
doing
?’

What she was doing was hurriedly gathering up her queue, and tucking it away down the back of her shirt; and then she ran blushing through into the room to sweep Ezra into her arms.

‘Arsinée,’ said George, wagging a finger. ‘Are you not eating your regular meals? Is that why you’re sunning behind our backs? What do you do – sell the food on?’ He had only the vaguest notions how that sort of black economy worked, or, indeed, why it existed at all. But of course he had heard the stories.

‘No, Mr Denoone, no! Only, the children were so placid, and the sunlight is warm, and—’

‘I
can’t
talk to you,’ he said, feeling absolutely
superb
in the way he turned his shoulder to her and put emphatic dismissal into his voice. ‘I have a rendezvous with Mrs Lewinski.’ It was an ancient pleasure, this
de-haut-en-bas
play acting. The thing with master-and-servant, as with other games, was to cause the maximum emotional distress and insecurity in the underling with the least possible exertion on your part. ‘I will discuss this with you later. You should consider your position!’

He swept out, past his upended and absorbed daughter. A flash of Arsinée’s aghast face. And, in the elevator going back up to the penthouse bar, he
did
feel a little better. These footling little humps of up-and-down emotion. Demeaning really. Not for the first time in his life he was aware of the sense that he needed some project. It didn’t really matter what, of course; only to find something purposeful to help elevate him, keep him on a more noble emotional level.