The meanest Flood (39 page)

At least he hoped so.

31

‘That’s the great thing about detective work,’ Marie said. ‘There’s always something else. I mean it’s ninety per cent routine, can bore the pants off you. But at the point where you start writhing in apathy something’ll happen to make you sit up and take notice.’

‘Ah,’ JD said. ‘The town’s on the brink of imminent flooding. Thousands of people are in danger of losing their homes and you’ve found something that interests you.’

‘Don’t talk to me about flooding,’ she said. ‘I can only get to my house by boat. Yesterday I got in through the bedroom window and I still needed wellies.’

‘But you don’t find it exciting?’

‘Hell, no,’ Marie said. ‘It was exciting when it
might
happen, but once it’s happened it’s inconvenient. It’s tragic, maybe. You could call it a nuisance or a disaster. But it’s not exciting, it’s boring. Boring as hell. It means you can’t go home. You have to live with other people, and when the water’s gone back to normal you’ve got to clean out the mud and silt and you can’t move back in for six months or more, until the place has dried out.

‘What’s exciting about that? Or the fact that you can’t find anyone to insure you? Add to that that the thing you live in is no longer a
des res,
estate agents laugh when you walk through their door. The mortgage you’re paying is twice the value of the house.’ She handed him a look as hard as prison time. ‘No, I don’t find that exciting.’

‘I used the wrong word,’ JD said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You shouldn’t use wrong words. You’re supposed to be a writer.’

‘Yeah, I write books, but I’m not God. I make mistakes.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘I make mistakes.’

They were on the steps of All Saints church in North Street watching soldiers placing another layer of sandbags on the flood defences. The river was roaring past within the limits that the army had allowed it, content for the moment to display its naked power. But it was like a mob, a fury that could turn at any moment, flip the sandbags aside and engulf the town.

‘What was your point?’ JD asked.

‘Sam asked me to research dolls and doll-makers.’

‘Sex dolls?’

‘Yes. It’s amazing. I knew there were these sad things, blow-up girls that guys take to bed with them...’

‘Some guys.’

‘Yeah, some guys. Don’t be predictable, JD, this isn’t about you.

‘I could never work out how they kept them clean,’ she said. ‘I knew there was a vagina, something like that down there, but I imagined the thing just filled up with jism.’ She laughed. ‘You know, as time went on, the girl got heavier and heavier and smellier and smellier.’

‘But it doesn’t?
She
doesn’t?’

‘Yeah, I think some of them do. The cheap ones. But you can get all kinds. There’s balloons at one end of the market and at the other end there’s dolls with a self-lubricating vibrating vagina and anus. You can get them with locks on so the guy you share your room with can’t get his end away while you’re out at work.’

‘Ah, nice touch,’ JD said. ‘Fidelity among dolls. What if I wanted a nurse?’

‘You can have anything you like: nurses, policewomen, French maids, an Asian princess, all the stereotypes.’

‘Black policewoman?’

‘I expect so. You can order anything you like. Mix and match. You want something fitted to size, no problem. Same with animals. You want a pig or a sheep, you can j buy them over the counter. How about a black ewe with a throbbing, erotically noduled mouth?’

‘There was a moment earlier when you were turning me on, now it’s going the other way.’

‘How about this then, big boy? I can get a six-foot-four guy doll with a moustache and chest hair and a penetrating rotating and vibrating tongue and a powered, veined dong all running off four AA batteries.’

‘You can get screwed by a machine?’

‘Where’ve you been, JD? All it is, it’s a vibrator built into a doll. Nobody gets screwed. These things, they’re aids to masturbation. The logical extension of you whacking yourself off in the boys’ bogs at school over a photograph of whoever it was.’

‘Madonna, probably. Though we had a thing about Katharine Ross at the time. Could’ve been her.’

‘The one in
The Stepford Wives?’

‘Yeah, before my time that, but... oh, yeah, they turned her into a robot.’

‘A doll.’

‘But that was an examination of the Frankenstein theme, Marie. Different from sex dolls. What you’ve got with sex dolls are people who can’t hold down normal relations.’

‘Or people who don’t want to. Guys who find a relationship with a woman too complicated, who want their lives to be simple. Someone who doesn’t answer back. That would drive me crazy, someone who never answered back. Living with a doll, can you imagine that?’

‘Think about a single person who has a job. He’s friendly with his workmates, and most of his relational needs are met by them and some guys he meets in a pub in the evening. But he has a problem meeting women, he can’t pull. This is the kind of guy who might end up with one of your dolls. As he gets older his pulling power diminishes but he still has sexual needs. Are you going to deny him a doll? You think he’s causing any harm? It could be that the doll stops him thinking about attacking some kid on her way home from night-school. It might have a positive effect for the guy and for the rest of society.’

‘I don’t wanna ban dolls, JD. What you say could be true. But that doesn’t stop it being sick. It leads us to accept second-class citizens. Some of us are worthy of real human beings of the opposite sex. We can have mates and families and live rounded lives. While there are others, living next door maybe, who get something they have to blow up with a foot-pump. If we accept that kind of thing we’re not a real community. It means we’re not caring enough, we’re losing our sense of compassion. We don’t want to live together any more. We want to live alongside each other, but not together. Do you see the difference?’

‘I hear what you’re saying. But I don’t have the answers.’

Marie watched a young female soldier humping another sandbag on to the city defences. ‘Just one thing you mentioned might help,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t thought about it before, but this guy, the one with the doll with real pubic hair, he’s got to live alone. It’s like you said, he’s someone who doesn’t make relationships with

Women.’

‘And why is that significant?’

‘It’s another link, JD. All the things we know about him, they add up. In itself it might not be significant, but when we come to fit the pieces together it could be very important.’

‘You want to do something tonight?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got a practice with the band ’til about nine, then we could have a drink, watch the river rising.’

Marie hesitated. Usually when JD asked her out she didn’t think at all. She just told him no.

‘I’ll take that as a yes then, shall I?’ he asked.

‘No funny business,’ Marie said. ‘I’ll come for a drink with you, but that’s it. I’m not looking for an affair. I’ve got a boyfriend. I don’t want to end up like we were before. You’re not a sexual object for me.’

‘I don’t know how I got to be so irresistible,’ he said. ‘I used to be ugly.’

‘You’re not ugly,’ Marie told him. ‘You’re a friend with all the limitations that come with it. I don’t sleep with my friends.’

‘What about hairy Steiner-school teacher?’

‘He’s not a friend, he’s a lover. And he’s away. If he was here you’d be drinking by yourself tonight.’

‘As I suspected,’ JD said. ‘I’m a substitute.’ He shook his head. ‘Still, I’ll do my best. Make sure I’ve got fresh batteries in.’

Marie drove to Harrogate and found the workshop on an industrial estate south of the town on the A61. A long, low black building with no windows, could have been a factory farm or an outpost of the MoD intercepting and analysing suspect e-mails. Anything with the word Allah in the subject line, or America, or oil. But things are seldom as they seem and inside the unit, once she’d got beyond the deeply unfashionable floral-pattern blouse of the bespectacled receptionist, Marie found only production lines of dolls and parts of dolls.

Deborah Innes, the managing director of Dreambabe, was a young thirty. Could have passed for twenty-seven, nineteen with a bag on her head. She had perfected a breathless way of speaking which made her sound constantly astounded, as though her three decades on the earth had yielded no accessible bank of experience.

‘We started small,’ she said, ‘but we double the turnover every few months. The market seems to have no limit.’

And the costs are minimal, Marie thought, looking at the young Asian and East European women who made up the workforce. The operation was simple, trestle tables for benches with the workers standing around them. There were a few sewing machines and staple guns, adhesives and crimping and heat-welding equipment. At one end of the workshop the heads were connected to the torsos, and these were then moved on to the next bench where arms were added. Legs came next and then the additions and alterations to the Dreambabes became subtler. It was possible to walk through the workshop and see the whole process right through to the grinning peroxide tart in crimson suspenders just before she was packed into a cardboard container marked,
Dreambabe No.
5 -
Margarita the Mucky Slut.

‘It’s a new line,’ Deborah Innes said breathlessly. ‘Most of the girls are putting in a twelve-hour day and we’re still a month behind with deliveries. I’ve taken on ten more people and it hasn’t touched the waiting list.’

‘Why?’ Marie asked. ‘I don’t understand where the customers come from. Who are they? Do you have a target profile?’

‘Not really,’ the managing director said. ‘I can glean a few things from the spreadsheet but we haven’t done in-depth market research. We advertise in the right places, I’m sure of that, the sex magazines and the Internet. But we’re not attracting new customers.’

‘You just said...’

‘I know, we can’t keep up with demand. But it’s not because of a massive influx of new accounts. Most of it’s repeat orders. From established customers. They keep coming back for more.’

‘More? What does that mean? Do they use up the doll

‘Dreambabe.’

‘Do they use up the Dreambabe they’ve got at home and want a replacement or do they order different models?’

‘Both,’ Deborah said with a twinkle. ‘Each time we introduce a new model almost everyone on our books puts in an order. And we get reorders for the same model about once a year.’

‘Is that how long they last?’

‘Under normal use, yes. We have some punters who are heavier users than others. Some of them will reorder four or five times in a year. We call them the sadists. Not to their faces, of course, just among the staff.’

‘Of course,’ Marie said without a hint of a twinkle. They were at the workbench where the mucky slut’s hair was being stuck to her bare scalp. Marie reached over the shoulder of an anorexic Pakistani girl and picked up one of the hairpieces that had not yet been smeared with glue. It was synthetic, bearing as much resemblance to real hair as a politician does to honesty.

She watched as another worker stuck two small patches of smooth white hair around the hole between the slut’s legs. There was little attempt at realism, the pubic hair was reminiscent of the pelt of a baby seal.

‘Do you ever use real hair?’ Marie asked. The anorexic girl laughed self-consciously.

‘No,’ Deborah said. ‘We tried it once with a Marilyn-babe but it put too much on the price and our customers didn’t appreciate it.’

‘Pubic hair?’

‘Goodness, no, we’ve never done that. I meant head hair. I think we sold about two hundred units and went back to synthetics.’

‘Do you know if there are companies who use real pubic hair?’

‘Not to my knowledge,’ Deborah said, turning up her lip in distaste. ‘What would be the point? And where would you get it?’

Good question, Marie thought as she drove away from the workshop and headed south towards Huddersfield and the address of an upmarket doll manufacturer called Lady Friendz. But British capitalists had never been put off by a limited supply of raw materials. If there was a demand for pubic hair there’d be no shortage of entrepreneurs making the disadvantaged offers they couldn’t refuse. Extra beer money for students, more powdered milk for single parents, an additional fix for a squat of wide-eyed junkies. We’re not talking exploitation here. It’s only pubic hair. It’ll grow back.

And then what? Sterilize the stuff in some kind of steamer, dye it if necessary and stick it around the simulated vagina of a life-size doll so some guy can fuck his brains out and pretend he’s not alone. Is this what is meant by a mixed economy? Is this what religious mystics mean when they talk about the interconnectedness of all things?

Marie wondered if she should put an ad in the local paper.
Pubic hair for sale. Good condition. Auburn, crinkly and long.
See how much she was offered. Perhaps put a sample in the post. End up with more than one potential customer and have an auction. Sell it by the strand or charge right over the top for the full set.
Muff for sale, will sell separately.