Surrender to Mr. X (7 page)

“That's bloody real,” he said. “It's vast.”

“No, no it isn't,” I lied, as Max denied the cash hidden under his bed. “They're Chinese. You can get them at any Bazaar branch.”

The under-wire of the left cup had burst its protective seam and was sticking into the flesh beneath my arm, but I rose above that. With the walking stick he splayed my legs.

“Look again,” he said, but now I did not like what I saw. I was no longer Boucher; it could have been any stupid Essex girl making an exhibition of herself in a cheap trailer-park porn film. I moved my legs together in defiance. He let me.

“You'll get used to me,” he said. “Just tell me if I go too fast.”

So he saw a future between us. My heart leapt—it was not an intellectual reaction: I swear it was banging against my chest. I remembered our dog Vera, how she would leap up with joy and nearly knock my father over when he came into the room.

“Stay just like that,” he said; the door slid open and the wheelchair glided away and out of the room. I felt bereft. With difficulty I eased out the wandering
under-wire from my bra so it stopped jabbing into me: did that count as moving? I took the other one out to make them match, and dropped the two wire semicircles onto the white carpet. I have pretty hands: the nails varnished today in the palest pink. They looked good against the white carpet, long, but not too long, elegantly oval.

He came back, the penis still pointing upward and outward like a crane, his shirt removed, his white chinos halfway down his thighs. His shoulders were very well developed, which was not surprising; his flesh was tanned. A fine figure of a man from the hips up, if you left out his legs which I had not yet seen. He brought with him the bottle of champagne (Cristal—I looked) and chocolates in a green and gold Harrods box.

“It isn't spiked,” he said. “It hasn't been opened.” He eased off the mushroom cork very slowly so that there was barely a pop, and no explosive ejaculation, and swigged some from the bottle. He handed it to me, telling me to be careful not to spill any, which struck a slightly awkward note, as a man does who folds his clothes before he gets into bed with you. But I overlooked it. It was a very, very, white untainted coverlet and a man might well want to protect it. I swigged. It was smooth and prickly.

He opened my mouth and took one of the chocolates and pressed it in between my lips, a cherry chocolate liqueur; it burst in my mouth, spilling over my lips;
but he had a tissue at the ready and wiped my mouth carefully.

“Another?” he asked, and I nodded. One chocolate does lead to another in my experience, which is why I try to avoid them altogether, so it was a relief to have no choice. This one was Cointreau. The next was kirsch. My mouth was a gooey mass of chocolate, gradually dissolving. The cherry had been the best.

“That'll do,” he said. “You've had enough.”

From a shelf in the Lukas cabinet he took out a shiny, brown leather corset and studied it; it was designed to fit from under the breasts to the crotch, with leather thongs in front for tightening.

“I'm going to require some help here,” he said. “Sorry.”

And before I could protest bloody Lam was in the room, with his great spooky eyes, his pointy Roswell-incident face and white polo-neck. The two of them started fussing through the items on the cabinet shelves, like matrons at a Women's Institute bring-and-buy muttering to one another sporadically as they made the right selection.

Cuffs it was now to be, and anklets. I would have liked to have sat and had some say on the choice, but was too languid. There had been something in the chocolates: of course there had. No doubt they had left Harrods innocent and innocuous, but chocolates can be easily injected with a syringe. I decided it was odds on that that had been Lam's job. There's an Agatha
Christie story where the murderer has laced the kirsch liqueurs with cyanide because the almond tastes would blend.

They took their time trussing me up, very meticulous. Alden buckled my left wrist, Lam my right. Lam lifted me up and Alden used the walking stick to push a pretty pink silk coverlet under me to protect the quilt. I was glad they were so house-proud, but I wondered what they had in mind. A sharp tug with the hook of the stick and the French knickers tore. That was okay, they'd passed muster, and the fabric was so fine they'd already frayed a bit. Time they were thrown away. I leaned forward helpfully while Alden buckled on the corset, pulling the cords so tight I felt the constriction on my ribs under my breasts, and my waist being cinched firmly in. It was not unpleasant.

Alden touch-padded and the bed posts slid nearer together. Cords tumbled down, like oxygen masks in a stricken airliner; the unromantic comparison made me smile and Lam peered down at me curiously, narrowing his eyes. He was now tying the left cuff to the right post but Alden shook his head and Lam desisted. I was grateful that my arms were not to be crossed but merely stretched. I wanted Alden to get on with whatever it was he up to: I wanted to turn the next page of the script.

I was pleased by this formality, the ingenuity. This was in a different league to cheap sex-shop handcuffs, which are so flimsy and ineffective you feel they have
Health and Safety certificates attached, or the silk ties men like to use for light bondage, which are so slippery one can usually wriggle out of them.

Lukas was a different matter altogether: colleague of Alden's in creativity and superstar artisanal, with his Rousselian union of sex and ingenuity, complexity, imprisonment and liberation, his own special master machine. Alden seemed to sense that my intellect was firing up again and started pushing more liqueur chocolates into my mouth, while Lam stood by with a tissue. Every now and then Lam, gently dabbing, blinked, and the closing and opening of his eyelids seemed to take forever, they had such an area to cover. He was the mad scientist's butler in a '30s Bela Lugosi movie.

Now the right ankle to the right post, the left to the left. There was some technical trouble here. One of the posts didn't slide properly, and stuck. Alden cursed Lukas. This annoyed me a little. Sod Lukas, it was taking the attention away from me. They made do as best they could but my legs were not parted as widely as they had planned. They used what Alden spoke of in impatient terms as a spreader instead: a rigid metal bar which went from ankle to ankle and served the same purpose.

I must have been taking too much of an interest in what was going on, because Alden, who clearly preferred me somnolent, now took his time in selecting a cherry liqueur from the box and I opened my mouth to receive
it but instead he pushed it up my cunt as a kind of afterthought, with his long, welcomely accommodating fingers. I needed to be fucked but Alden seemed to have no such immediate intention: it just came nearer and nearer without arriving, like Xeno's paradox. I didn't even mind if Lam stayed around. He was more like an affect-free alien than anything. He probably didn't even have a penis any more than Spock did.

Little patches of mental clarity opened and closed in the downy cumulo-nimbus clouds I floated among, pain-free and comfy as heaven. Whatever was in the chocolates was making me feel very nice.

“The rich are different from you and me,” I mumbled to myself. “They have better drugs …”

Lam raised an eyebrow, but his eyes stayed impassive.

“What did she say?” asked Alden, but Lam just shook his head briefly and dismissively. Alden's wheelchair took him up to the head of the bed; he took each of my hands in turn and with a pair of nail clippers, carefully, took the nails of the first and second fingers down so they were really short and smooth, almost down to the quick. Thumb, third and little fingers stayed long, pinky-silvery and oval. It would look pretty odd tomorrow but I didn't care. Alden was marking me, as a cattle dealer might brand a cow. Let him. If I changed my mind about it in the morning I could always take the other nails down to match. Time would pass, nails, like hair, always grow.

I had only known Alden for a few hours. Very nice of me to be such a trusting person. I congratulated myself. Alden, disadvantaged by a sour fate, crippled since he was a boy, was my good deed for the day, and I felt good about it like a girl-scout helping a crippled man cross a busy highway.

“I do love you!” I confided in him. “I want to cure you and make you whole. I want to make you happy.”

“What a sweetheart you are,” he remarked. “But sshh—you don't need to speak, Joan my pet. Best not to say a thing.” And he gave me a delicate little kiss, which was bliss: the very first time our lips had touched, and it seemed extravagantly romantic.

“Pets need collars,” Lam spoke for the first time, and Alden frowned and gave a sage nod of assent. Lam foraged a studded leather dog collar from the cupboard, which matched the wrist straps and was as wide as I'd ever seen. Alden slipped it under my neck, raised my head, and buckled the collar round my neck, fastening it at the back. Lam handed him a leash which he clipped onto the collar, letting it hang loose—or so I thought, but now I could barely turn my head to see. But there was no mistaking it: an ordinary dog lead, just like the one we used to walk Vera, our over-demonstrative, annoyingly loving golden Labrador bitch. I thought this was touching and sighed affectionately and would have laid my head on one side but I could not. It would just have to stay high, as in a deportment class at school when we walked round with books on our heads. I
felt proud, and saw great symmetrical dignity in the V-patterns my stretched limbs made in the overhead mirror.

I found I was singing the “70s” Coca-Cola song: “I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.” That didn't go down well. I had forgotten the stricture to silence. I soon found I had a rather large red plastic ball in my mouth, attached by a ribbon tied round my head, and all I could do now was gurgle.

Lam then saw to my make-up, which seemed odd, but maybe butlers are trained to do anything. I don't usually wear a great deal—my skin being lovely enough without it, and my eyelashes naturally long and dark: I mostly stick with eye-shadow, eyeliner and eyebrow tweezers. He patted foundation on with his clammy hands, ringed my eyes with brown liner, brushed on sweeps of green and brown eye-shadow. He penciled soft dark-blue kohl along the pale inside lower rims of the eyes. You feel vulnerable around the eyes, but I had to trust him. His hand did not falter. He lipsticked heavily round such of my lips as he could get at for the red ball-gag in my mouth, though the bright red he was using was so unsubtle it would never have made the first round to my dressing table. Then he rearranged my hair to hide the straps which held the gag in place.

Alden watched.

“Now Joan perfect dream partner,” said Lam.

I looked up at myself in the mirror and saw a
bondaged Barbie doll staring back. Then like a sulky child I took offense. Not at what had been done to me, the stripping away of individuality, but because I was attached to an ordinary dog lead of the kind anyone could buy in a pet shop. They had no right to treat a nursery school teacher like this. Alden obviously had all the money in the world. Wasn't I worth better than that? How could he skimp on the dungeon paraphernalia? I struggled, but with legs and arms held fast and the corset only comfortable if I lay still, my leeway was only an inch or two in any direction. “That's enough!” I tried to say, but what came out was mewing. The ball gag muffled language. And I had lost interest in sex: anticipation can devour itself and be reborn as boredom. I felt very, very cross with Alden.

A sudden unexpected sensation up my cunt: another chocolate, I assumed, my mouth being too much hassle to get at or into. And then two more, pushing the others higher: my interest in sex returned. Whatever was in the chocolates was quick acting, and lasted I estimated about ten minutes, but time was hard to assess, as if it wasn't conforming to type but doing something that would interest Einstein.

The pattern of lights changed: I focused on the mirror above, vaulted with repeated me dolls. I was alone in the room. The door was open. Anyone could see in. There was no sign of Alden or Lam. Perhaps Ray might come down and see. I wouldn't want that. On the other hand he might rescue me. I was conscious
suddenly of a tingling at the pulse point in my wrists, my ankles, under my breasts, which intensified and fell away at the same time as a pulsing humming sound began, rising and falling in volume—the hertz waves again, I thought, translated into sound. If I struggled the pitch changed. I tested it out a little. I had a vision of myself as part of some atrocious mechanized disharmony devised by avant-garde composer of evil genius: in other words, from first principles, Alden. It occurred to me that the tingling sensations came from areas where they place the pads if you get your electrocardiogram done. All this had been an elaborate feint, a cover for nothing more than wiring me up for hospital monitoring: I was nothing but raw recording fodder, to be subsumed into
Thelemy: The Silence of the Senses
.

Turn the page of the eidetic memory: here's the digest. Whatever's in the chocolates has worn off. I am beginning to feel stiff. The ball in my mouth is making my lips sore. I take refuge in thought. The Abbey of Thélème, Rabelais' creation, around 1530. “How the Thelemites were governed: and of their manner of living.” The one governance: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law—Fay ce que vouldras. A rule asking to be taken in vain by its adherents, for Rabelais' folk of the Thelemite community were “free, well-born, well-bred and conversant in honest companies, and have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them to virtuous actions, and withdraws them from
vice.” Ironically, it became the motto of Sir Francis Dashwood's Hellfire Club in the caves under his High Wycombe estate two hundred years later, where all kinds of sinister doings went on. Another century or so and “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” became the call to arms of voluptuary and black magician Aleister Crowley, the self-styled Beast 666, born 1875, died 1947, who claimed that the Golden Dawn could be won through the focused attention of the base and depraved into their own voluptuary satisfactions. The thoughts become dangerous. I switch my mind to more immediate considerations.