‘Henry Toth. Christ, woman, do you not know who’s supposed to be attending?’
She took a slight intake of breath, barely bothering to hide her irritation. He’d have to think about that too in the morning – he had little time for servants who got above themselves. ‘That would be the young friend of Mistress Elizabeth?’
‘Not for long, I hope,’ Fabio replied. ‘Where is he?’
‘I really couldn’t say. I believe I saw him by the buffet a few minutes ago but if the mistress has taken him elsewhere …’
Fabio smiled at that, relishing Patience’s discomfort. ‘You hate working here, don’t you? A thin stick of ice surrounded by so much heat.’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, sir.’
‘Whatever. I’ll find him.’
He pushed past her and headed straight out to the patio, ignoring the few calls of greeting that came his way. He wasn’t interested in playing along with the social niceties.
He surveyed the crowd, desperately hoping to recognise Henry among the laughing faces. There was no sign of him.
‘Shit,’ he said, nervously clenching his fists.
‘That’s no way to arrive at a party, darling,’ laughed a woman standing next to him. ‘Anyone would think you didn’t want to be here!’
Fabio looked at her, drunkenly recalling her last few box-office performances and ranking her in the way that only a businessman in Hollywood could. ‘Surprised they even let you in,’ he replied, his words slurred. ‘Or has your career tanked so low they’ve got you working as a waitress?’
‘Well!’ she shouted, clearly about to rage at him in no uncertain terms.
‘Shut your face,’ he said, pushing past her and heading out into the garden. ‘I didn’t listen to you in your last three movies and I sure as hell don’t intend to now.’
Fabio ignored the eruption of shocked exclamations behind him as he headed down into the leafy paradise beyond the steps.
Henry was speechless. He had heard enough stories of Hollywood debauchery – famous names bandied around at parties and clubs with their lists of tastes and indiscretions – but he had always expected the tales to be apocryphal. Hollywood built its legends big and he was sure that the stories of sex and death he had heard were no different. Entering the central courtyard beyond the maze, he began to realise that they had barely scratched the surface.
‘Hollywood is about the flesh, darling,’ Elizabeth said, leading him among the sideshows and installations that surrounded them, ‘and here we can celebrate that with honesty. This is where we sweat for our pleasure, where we drain ourselves dry in the name of nothing more than our own satisfaction.’
There was a good deal of satisfaction to be found. No matter the orientation or taste, everything in the garden was catered for: pleasure, pain, dominance and submission.
To Henry’s left there was a row of old-fashioned pillories and stocks, the kind of thing you saw filled with captured character actors in medieval movies. The prisoners here relished their captivity. There were both men and women, chained and positioned so as to expose themselves as fully as possible. Their heads were hooded, making them anonymous, inhuman, vessels to enter or be entered by. A giggling group of partygoers gathered around them, taking it in turns to work their way up and down the line.
‘I’m sure this is Douglas!’ called one woman as she backed onto the inflamed groin of one of the chained men. ‘I’d recognise him anywhere!’ The man bucked in his bonds, thrusting against her but saying nothing as she ground back against him.
‘I think you’re wrong, darling,’ one of her companions said, squatting down to observe the joining of flesh and occasionally help it with his eager fingers. He cupped the anonymous man’s balls in his palm and laughed. ‘Douglas weighs far more than this!’
‘Guessing is half the fun,’ announced Elizabeth, walking over to join them. ‘Though it doesn’t really matter.’ She rested her hands on the knees of a woman who was facing upwards but curled in a foetal ball while swinging between the posts of her harness. ‘They’re not people, not here.’ She beckoned Henry over and, moving to the woman’s head, she pushed her towards him. He took his direction, positioning himself so she could push the woman against him as he entered her. ‘They’re like all of us,’ Elizabeth continued. ‘Holes to be filled.’ She straddled the woman’s hooded head and squeezed it between her thighs.
‘We’re all nameless here,’ she said as the woman writhed, struggling to breathe. ‘Nothing but meat and bones.’
Elizabeth stepped away and beckoned Henry to follow as they left the group to switch places.
Next there was a perverted mirror of the buffet table that Henry had stood beside earlier, though the food was not so neatly served.
‘The Japanese eat like this all the time,’ an elderly man announced, looking like a pompous owl with his protruding belly and his feathered mask. He took a stick of carrot and inserted it into the young woman strapped down among the plates of food.
‘The Japanese will do anything,’ his partner added, licking a trail of pâté from the woman’s thigh. ‘They’re all mad.’
‘Hungry?’ Elizabeth asked Henry as they passed.
‘Not for that,’ he admitted.
There was a splash from the pool and a ripple of laughter. ‘A swim, then?’ she suggested.
‘Maybe,’ he replied, staring up at a man who had been stretched cruciform on a rack, partygoers surrounding him with thin, gleaming needles. ‘That’s just …’ He couldn’t find the words, though they would have been lost anyway as the man moaned when a woman reached up and slid a needle into the soft meat of his buttocks.
‘It takes all sorts, darling,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Who are we to judge?’
‘I guess.’ The human pincushion writhed, glistening in the faint light of the lanterns. He was a confused map of blood trails, the heads of the needles bristling from him like crime-map markers indicating the location of murder victims.
The pool was lit only from within, a shimmering blue light that played around its edges and exposed writhing, thrusting attendants.
Henry was at a loss to tell where one body started and another stopped. The partygoers had become one in the thin strip of tiles that bordered the water. Folded in and over themselves, every part of them was at play, glistening with spittle and sweat as they dragged themselves from one partner to the next.
Elizabeth jumped over them and dived into the water. Turning onto her back she swam back from the edge, beckoning to Henry with her finger. He watched her sail backwards, her legs parting and closing, parting and closing.
He stepped among the writhing people at the edge of the water, standing in the midst of them and feeling them, oiled and eager, rub up against him. Hands reached out, inviting him to join them, clutching at his legs, fingers reaching out to his erection in the hope of claiming it for themselves. He stood there for a moment, enjoying the tease, then stepped up to the water and jumped in.
He swam to Elizabeth who was, by now, pressed back against the far side.
‘Get inside me,’ she insisted, mounting him and flinging her arms around his shoulders.
She pushed them back into the water, Henry struggling to keep his face above the surface as she rode him.
‘The scorpion and the turtle,’ she whispered to him. ‘You know the story?’
He shook his head.
‘The turtle is swimming along the river and the scorpion asks him to carry him from one side to the other. ‘“But you’ll sting me!” the turtle complains. “If I did that we’d both drown,” the scorpion replies. “I promise I won’t hurt you.” So the turtle lets the scorpion climb on board.’ She rubbed herself against him, the water frothing around them as he tried to stay afloat. ‘Halfway across the scorpion stings the turtle. “Why did you do that?” the turtle asks as it dies. The scorpion shrugs. “I can’t help it,” he replies. “I’m a scorpion – it’s what we do.”’
Elizabeth gripped him tight, his legs fighting to reach the shallow end so that he could stand up. She pressed her mouth to his ear. ‘I’m a scorpion,’ she said, ‘and this is what I do. Will you let me sting you?’
‘Yes,’ Henry replied, having finally found the pool’s floor. He lifted her out of the water.
She bit his neck hard enough to draw blood and pushed away from him, swimming to the side of the pool and pulling herself out and into the midst of the bodies coupling there.
He followed, staying on his hands and knees, letting himself struggle against the tide of lovers. Lips found his, hands gripped and pulled at him as he pushed forward. He could lay no claim to who or what he was touching here in the blue-tinted shadows and he didn’t care. Someone took him in their mouth and he dallied a while, before deciding that he needed Elizabeth and pushing forward.
She had circled back around him, her hands gripping his shoulders and pushing him over onto his back, the others sliding out of the way to give him room.
‘I want to sting,’ she said, mounting him.
She rode him for a while, both of them being jostled by those on either side. Then Henry decided he wanted a say in matters and lifted her up and over so that their positions were reversed. His patience for teasing was at an end and he pounded aggressively at her, an attack as much as an act of love. A pair of hands reached out from the mess of lovers and pinned down her arms. He heard shouts of encouragement and was aware of hands at his rear, pushing him on. In his mind all these bodies had become one, a single creature folding in on itself to explore new sensations.
When they came it was to a murmur of approval and encouraged desire. He fell back from Elizabeth and he saw the other bodies fall in to replace him, like hyenas gathering around a kill. Henry let himself fall back into the water, wanting the cool, refreshing isolation that it offered.
He kicked back from the side and watched as indistinct shapes explored the woman he had just left, knowing full well that she was only too happy to be consumed.
If Harrison hadn’t hated actors before he certainly would have done by now. Keeping to the edges of the party, he had been working his way around the property, keeping an eye out for Elizabeth and Nayland. Neither of them were anywhere in sight, though it was hard to tell among the laughing, identical faces that littered the place.
Everyone looks the same
, he thought, sausages shat out of the Hollywood machine, same teeth, same hair, same jewels, same vacuous conversation. These people thought the world ended beyond the studios, a no-man’s-land of dust and emptiness. How quickly they forgot once they left the real world behind and existed in this vacuum of make-up and glitter. How could he ever hope to get a truthful answer out of any of them?
He looked at the buffet table and wondered if he could risk helping himself to a plate or two – there was nothing like a glimpse of food to remind you how long it had been since you ate. He decided against it. He couldn’t hope to blend in with this company – the minute the guests paid attention to his clothes he would be ousted as an intruder. Besides, he wasn’t here to enjoy himself, he was here to take the hosts to one side and demand that they answered some questions. The sooner he achieved that the sooner he could get out of there.
Giving up on the outside crowds, Harrison sneaked around the back of the buffet table and made his way into the house.
Patience was beginning to suspect that her time in the employ of Elizabeth Sasdy and Frank Nayland was coming to an end. Households were little empires, especially here: they rose and fell, had their moment in the sun, then faded away to dust. For all that her employers treated her as invisible, assuming she would simply function as directed regardless of what they said and did, she was no idiot. The acrimony and violence of the last few years was one thing, she could turn a blind eye to all that, it was the bickering of children and she had no interest in it. The last few weeks had been different. First there had been the disappearance of the maid – and still, for the life of her she couldn’t remember the girl’s name – then the sudden transformation of Elizabeth. (And had they thought she wouldn’t notice? Would simply shrug her shoulders and carry on? Of course they had …) Even that miracle hadn’t been consistent. Elizabeth went from flaunting herself to hiding herself, as if she could pass off such a clumsy subterfuge on her housekeeper, the woman who knew her better than anyone else. Whatever Elizabeth had done, what ever treatment she had endured, it was inconsistent and unreliable. That much was now obvious. It also needed regular attention, the constant day trips proved that. Both husband and wife moved around the place weighed down with their secrets, shared looks, silence and a perpetual sense of things unsaid. It was taking its toll on Nayland. Patience had always known he was a weak man, fragile and nervous, the cracks just waiting to spread. Now there seemed to be little keeping him together but alcohol and bitterness. Yes, the household empire was crumbling, the mad empress primed to set light to it all.
Part of Patience felt relieved by that prospect. The regular employment was good, obviously, and her savings were considerable after so many years in service. Still, this was no place to be. It was a poisonous house, a dangerous house. She had a strong suspicion that the maid (Geraldine? Gemma?) had found that out for herself.
Things were crumbling. She just had to hope she could escape their collapse unscathed.
Moving through into the entrance hall, she caught sight of a man who clearly wasn’t a guest. (Patience knew people and this man, in his workmanlike clothes and with his awkward body language, was not someone who should be here.) Was this another sign of the impending collapse? She decided there was only one way to find out.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ she asked, noting with some degree of pleasure the panic that crossed his face at being caught wandering around.
‘I was looking for our hosts,’ he said, pausing for a moment, clearly making a mental decision before reaching into his pocket and pulling out his wallet. ‘I’m with the police and I really need to ask them some questions.’
‘Tonight?’ She had been right, Patience decided: here was the man who might bring the whole empire down around them.