The Sexopaths (24 page)

‘Is okay – Xara – she
will like
you
.’  There’s a definite emphasis upon the
you
.

‘Sorry?’

‘She can choose her client. 
She like you.  She is…
Elite
.’  It’s the most lofty rating on
the website.

‘But so are you.’

The girl shakes her head
forgivingly.  ‘I am just escort. 
Hooker
.’  She smiles
quite wickedly, now taunting him with the word.  She crosses her legs,
revealing the bare flesh above her black stocking tops.

Adam has a hunch that, were she
to make the wrong move, incipient inertia could gain the upper hand over the
momentum to depart that he’d felt a minute earlier.  But it’s not what he
wants.

Victoria adds:  ‘Xara
– she is… in control.’

Inwardly he concurs, and wonders
if she really does comprehend this truth; whether she has perhaps met
Xara.  Or is it just juicy gossip, plucked down from the online grapevine
of message boards and blogs that binds the girls and their more loquacious
punters?  Regardless, it confirms his impression of a dispassionate
intelligence, a trace of animal cunning.  He nods slowly, and then says:

‘Would you do a
two-girl
with Xara?’

She shakes her head
unambiguously.  ‘Xara – she does not do
two-girls
.’

‘Really – I thought
maybe…’  He trails off, recognising the dead end, and looks to retrace his
steps.  ‘I thought maybe I’d read… you know – a field report?’

She shrugs, takes one last draw
and stubs out the cigarette in a glass ashtray beside the bed.  Adam
recognises the cue – time’s up.  Or put more cash in the
meter.  He rises to his feet and stretches his back, arms above his head,
a signal that he’s about to leave; punctuality equals good manners in this
game.

He says:

‘I better get going.  Look
– thanks, it was very nice.  Don’t give up the day job.’

***

Outside, he finds the autumn dusk
well advanced beneath a blanket of lowering cloud.  He turns quickly out of
the building, down the hill away from Monique’s office.  The pedestrian
traffic is thickening and gaining urgency as rush-hour approaches, offering the
swift anonymity of the herd.  The wind has freshened and backed to the
north, and thus sharpened it carries stinging sleety missiles, their glistening
traces revealed as they pierce the illuminated pockets of airspace beneath the
downlighters fixed to the old tenements.  But he welcomes the cleansing
chill of the rain, it numbs the anxiety he’d felt on emerging from the stair,
like a fox leaving its earth, that moment of exposure when the waiting hunter’s
salvo may strike.  And in these conditions nobody is looking around; it’s
hoods up and heads down as they wait at the lights to cross Queen Street en masse.

He’s parked deep in the New Town,
where regimented Georgian terraces become disrupted by the older thoroughfares
of Stockbridge; where Monique for sure will not have left her car today, what
with the hill and the cobbles, and those heels.  Heels – that’s
right, she’s out tonight.  He wonders what she will do with her car. 
He wonders what she will do.

As the spectre of shadowy
liaisons returns to haunt him, catching him unawares, he agonises over his own
loathsome efforts to offset its impact; this default to base needs, the history
made today.  But the hunger is never confined to the past. 
Experience tells him so.  Even now it threatens to return, while Monique’s
quixotic antics daily test his mettle.  And, for him, it’s not the act
itself – that would be easier to thwart.  Where once there was
titillating twilit exotica, now there are only unyielding false breasts and
discarded condoms cast into clinical relief by the spotlight of sordid
familiarity; far from irresistible.  No - it is the
stimulus
to which
he has become habituated, each fix raising the threshold and rendering the next
less effective, until only the most meagre anticipation survives as a source of
exhilaration, briefly masking his anxiety and discontent.  It may be that
his enrolment into Xara’s cast has served of late to raise the temperature of
the performance, an unfathomable de Sade-like drama in which bewitched actors
take their cues, obedient and breathless as the outrageous script unfolds
before them, but in turn the greater anticlimax merely emphasizes the
inadequacy of such a salve.  The drugs don’t work – if they ever
did.  And thus here he is, slinking home devalued, alien female pheromone
again secreted upon his flesh.

As for Monique, meanwhile –
who knows?  She might this very moment be poised to tumble through the
gossamer-thin walls that separate the players in the drama that seems to be
enveloping him.  What if – he speculates – Jasmin-Sharon
thinks it would be devilish fun or prudent business to introduce her over a
glass of wine to Xara?  Imagine if they each were recruited, neither
knowing about the other, to discover some drunken confessional moment many
years hence that they had participated together in the same orgiastic
episode.  What if Xara has such a plan in mind, and is targeting Monique
through Jasmin-Sharon?  Right now, at Xara’s beck and call, he doesn’t
know whether he can safely refuse her command, nor whether he is capable of
such a refusal.

As he reaches his car he tells
himself his unwelcome fantasies are running away with themselves, beyond the
bounds of rational possibility.  And yet if any ‘normal’ person were to
see his diary for the next few days – Saturday, a call girl and his wife
and mind-bending ‘accessories’; Tuesday, maybe two call girls and God knows
what else – they would say he has dreamt it up.  And yet, he lives
the dream.  Monique, meanwhile, embarks maybe on the next stage of her
journey of self-discovery.

***

Adam hears the sound of Monique’s
key in the lock.  He notices she fails in her usually unerring aim; it
takes a second, then a third scraping attempt for her to find the target. 
He realises he must have slept: the clock reads after two a.m., and he’d slid
into bed around midnight, a bottle of claret for the worse.  His bedside
lamp burns, his opened book, unread, lies across his chest like a psalter
beneath his palms; he feels like a carved stone knight laid to rest.  He
tracks Monique’s movements about the house, her heels reporting her path in
ascending and descending scales.  Her trademark catwalk step seems steady,
if antisocially noisy on their oak floors.  He’s surprised she’s not being
more careful about waking Camille.  She moves from cloakroom to kitchen,
splashes water.  A glass or mug is filled, there’s silence while it’s emptied,
a clunk as it’s placed imprecisely on the drainer.  For a while she does
something with her phone – types a text, looks at emails? – he
doesn’t recognise the individual sounds, revealing as they may be to a trained
ear.  At some point there appears to be a reply, or maybe just a
coincidental incoming message.

A minute or so later she heads
upstairs, her resonant footsteps suddenly damped as she reaches the carpeted
landing.  Adam decides to play possum.  He listens as she checks on
Camille, her murmuring voice, comforting; there’s a sleepy retort.  Then
she crosses to enter their room, quieter now, and stops for a moment in the
doorway.  He hears her inhaling, exhaling, a little breathlessly, then she
rounds the bed and switches off his light, at the same time extracting his book
and dropping it lightly onto the floor.  The curtains are parted and a
half moon now infuses the far corner of the room with its milky
monochrome.  Beneath the slits of his eyelids he can see she’s wearing a
short tight-fitting skirt and a low-cut top that glistens in the silvery
light.  Again he strains to recall – was this the outfit she wore
this morning? – but again he’s punished by his lack of attention at the
time.  She undresses, quietly, methodically, though she casts aside her
outer garments with scant regard for tomorrow’s creases.   Her
underwear, however, a matching dark lacy set of half-cup bra, g-string briefs
and hold-ups, she smoothly sheds and gathers up and carries with her into the
bathroom, closing the door behind her.  He hears the flush of the toilet,
a tap running, the scrape of the laundry basket, her electric toothbrush. 
Now there’s a silence, a whole minute at least, before she suddenly emerges and
with the faint exclamation of a shiver, she drops into the bed, pulling the
quilt over her with one sweeping movement.  Adam makes a sound that he
thinks is a passable impression of stirring in one’s sleep.  Monique
raises herself on one elbow and leans across to kiss him on the cheek. 
She expires alcohol, though not of distillery proportions.  She whispers:

‘Night, night, my darling.’

‘Aha.’

She reaches out from the covers
and locates his hand, and within seconds – as if his feigned condition is
instantly contagious – seems to have fallen into a deep slumber,
unmoving.  But he can feel the pulse at her wrist, leaping well ahead of
his own.  He wonders what she was doing in the bathroom.  And does
she normally clear away her underwear?  It’s another small detail he can’t
confirm.  Mostly she’s meticulously tidy around their home –
although not at the expense of more basic needs, such as the desire to sleep…
or make love.  He feels alarmed by her choice of lingerie – okay,
she often wears nice stuff, expensive, even for work, but tonight it was surely
disproportionate, the kind she’d put on if they were staying in a fancy hotel,
going out for a meal maybe, a selection made with their private after-party in
mind.  He can imagine her reaction if he were to challenge her –
she’ll say it’s how she always dresses… but, if he were on the receiving end of
such a get-up – in a contractual capacity, so to speak – he
certainly wouldn’t be disappointed.  Nor would he be in what riches it
contained.  Did someone enjoy such delights?  Might she have been
washing her underwear?  He could go to the bathroom and surreptitiously
check.  He weighs pain and gain.  Best not.  Involuntarily he
exhales, a helpless sigh that he tries to cover up as a dream breaking
through.  His own heartbeat has quickened, he can feel its echo in the mattress. 
Do they both lie awake, minds racing, their contact whittled down to the
fingertips across a widening chasm?

He wonders how she got
home.  Presumably she didn’t drive.  Her car must be still in
town.  Taxi?  A lift maybe?  Or both – if it were Jasmin-Sharon’s
friend.  He pictures Monique in the black cab with Jasmin-Sharon, drunk
and high and hilarious, sharing their escapade with the laughing driver, a line
of coke for the journey, a last clinch outside their house.  Or Monique
instead leaving some plush establishment, night-porter hastening to hold the
door – a call girl, surely, but so what, look at her – she exits,
turns, gazes up from the pavement to blow a parting kiss to her paramour,
departs.  He runs the suspects through his mind.  He realises the
solution to his competing hypotheses lies glowing innocuously downstairs: her
mobile.  He could steal away now and interrogate it for himself.  But
how likely that she will have left a message for him to find?  Has he not
alerted her to his watchfulness?  Anything remotely controversial she will
have erased – unless, like the other night, he gets there first.  He
thinks again of that text:

‘All is ok?  Am not
hearing from you.  X.’

The kiss, he really doesn’t
like.  He wonders why the message wasn’t in French, and what he might have
done himself in similar circumstances.  He supposes they still see Monique
as British, and conduct their business in English – so maybe that’s the
reason.  Yet if someone had wanted to communicate in code – partial
at least – they’d be better served in a foreign language. 
They?
 
Now he’s doing it.  Lucien.  But maybe the guy doesn’t care.  If
he’s having an affair – or intends so to do – perhaps he doesn’t
give a hoot about the woman’s husband.  About him.  He’s far enough
away, out of the picture, not relevant.  Is this just the way the French
are?  If someone’s wife appears willing, reciprocates, then who is Lucien
to decline an opportunity?  Anyone would do the same.  It is an
obligation.  It would be ill-mannered to refuse.

Moreover, if he and Monique are
co-conspirators, he can rely upon her to cover for him, to re-cast their
communications for Adam’s consumption, and to tip him off – if, for
instance, Adam were liable to put in an unscheduled appearance.  Might he
have followed Monique back across the Channel?  They could easily have
travelled together.  For all he knows, they could have spent last night
right here in Edinburgh; there’s even a hotel not five minutes’ walk from their
house.  He supposes he could investigate, find out where Lucien is
tomorrow morning.  By calling his office they might at least reveal
whether he’s abroad on business… another coincidence if not conclusive proof.

‘Are you okay, my darling?’

So she’s awake.

‘Mmm?’

Guilty of spying, he feels the
need to act the sleeping partner.

‘Do you feel okay?’

‘Yeah…’ he whispers, as if still
half in slumber.  ‘Have a good time?’

‘So, so… when duty calls.’ 
She turns towards him and puts an arm across his chest.  ‘We should sleep,
it’s so late.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Night, night.  I love you,
my darling.’

‘Love you.’

Blog by Anonymous – 6

OMG.  What a
dilemma!  Just as things are developing very nicely with M –
remember, the girl of my dreams? – and Sarah sticks her great oar in and
wants me to ‘do something very important’.  She says it really will be
worth my while, but that I must meet her on Saturday night because she wants to
talk to me about it in person.  The trouble is, with Sarah, you never know
– it might just be some punter who’s after something she won’t do, and
I’ll walk right into it with no way of refusing.  That wouldn’t be so bad,
but I have an appointment with M and I really want to get there.  I just
hope Sarah doesn’t keep me for too long – and I’ll have to make sure I
save some energy, if it is a job that’s on the agenda.  I tried to put her
off but she said it has to be then – thing is, she’s got something I’ll
need for later, anyway, so I don’t have much of an excuse for not putting in an
appearance.  I asked her how long it would be for and she was a bit cagey
– she said that would depend on how I responded… she sounded a bit like
she was coming on to me, though I’ve fallen for that trick before and nothing’s
come of it.  I guess I’ll just have to suck it and see.