Hello, Susanna? My flower? Are you there my Susie-su, my Susie, my Su?
Got to go. Bye now.
And with a quick tap of her finger she was released from their devil’s pact. The man on the video chat would click over to some other anonymous soul, less threat, more cliché, and eventually work himself up to a disappointing spend.
On the nights when Aaron took Susanna right up to her line, or even across it, she retreated from her internet playground and immersed herself in other things.
She busied herself making elaborate desserts, crème brûlée in a ramekin for one, beignets, profiteroles, éclairs. She put on music to fill the space where their frenzied conversation had been silenced. She picked up the scarf she had been attempting to knit for months and managed to add a few more rows of dropped stitches and wavering tension.
She was constantly distracted by the laptop, sitting innocently on the bench, and when eventually she gave in and reached for it he was always there. Waiting.
Missed you,
he would say, and she suspected he said it with irony. She was certainly not the only person he was chatting with. Sometimes he even described to her the person on the video link.
A man. I have no problem with a man. His cock is bigger than my own. He shaves his chest.
Or once:
I should tell her not to put her face on camera, anyone could be recording this. She looks no more than 18. Imagine if she is underage. Would I be more or less excited if she turned out to be 15? Her vulva is very fresh and pink. She shaves. At least I hope she shaves, wouldn’t it be awful if she were just too young for pubic hair? It makes me soft just thinking it. Her breasts are tiny little things but her nipples are so large and so very hard. And that isn’t lube. I can see it isn’t lube. She is pretty (so young but not too young after all) but I wish she would hide her face. She seems
so
vulnerable. Should I tell her what a predator I am? Should I warn her to be cautious? Ah good. She has figured it out for herself. Goodbye my sweet, brief tryst. Hello, hairy cock and balls. He’s telling me what he would do to me if I were a girl. I am concerned for that girl. I wish she had stayed longer, I would have had a talk to her about it. I should have. I got caught up in the excitement of such an exquisitely formed vagina. Okay, hairy cock and balls has come. Next. Tedious. You certain you don’t want to turn your camera on?
She was tempted. Sometimes when his cleverness made her laugh or when together they took some poor torso out into the woods and unleashed their brutal fantasies upon him, at these times she would almost suggest a visually enhanced date. She imagined that she would take her clothes off at his insistence and touch herself, as he had been touching himself when they first met. Then she thought it would be tame, somehow—bland, simply to find her pleasure alongside him after all the dark paths they had tripped down together. She never followed up that particular whim.
Turn your camera on,
he told her.
And she said,
Not quite yet.
Things progressed in this way for so long it seemed they had become like an old married couple. Often they abandoned the talk of sex to discuss world events, environmental disasters, politics. These conversations would be interrupted from time to time:
Hang on, what have we here? Is that? I think this person
is a hermaphrodite. I have never seen a hermaphrodite in the flesh.
Goodness, no. What can you see? Describe him
—
or is she a her?
Sometimes Susanna forgot that this was a twilight landscape in which they met; that it was not one thing or the other, not real and yet not completely fantasy. Sometimes she caught herself divulging little moments from her day and wondering if she had given up too much information. What if he became obsessed with her? But was she not a little obsessed with him? Didn’t she dream of him, his ordinary body that had become extraordinary, the polite but sensual movement of his hand on his cock?
‘So, you’re single?’ asked one of the actors, the latest attempt to
woo
her away from her little bubble of silence and out into the noisy world of human interaction.
‘No,’ she said and was surprised to find that she really did not see herself as single at all. Aaron Fitzgerald was an odd kind of companion but he was under her skin now, in her blood. Sometimes she found herself using one of his turns of phrase. Once when introducing herself to a new director she said her name was Susie-su and was startled at her own use of the word, his name for her and no one else’s. His Susie-su of the handcuffs and the deserted buildings was striding out with quiet Susanna into the world.
On this night they had abandoned all their partners. Susanna had tired of the endless parade of torsos, Aaron had not even
pretended to be interested in them. Instead he settled in to their private chat, a flirty little adventure involving a red strapless dress, a restaurant and no underwear at all. She noticed he was particularly intent on describing each course. The entrée, which was made of foam so light they might be eating nothing but the crest of a wave; the fish, stuffed with herbs and steamed in a delicate sauce of butter, almonds and white wine.
He was moving onto the dessert when she heard the sudden screeching crash, the tinkling clatter of glass shattering onto asphalt, a sound of collision so loud and clear that it might have been her own apartment block assaulted by an angry driver in the car. She forgot the fantasy meal entirely and darted to the window. There was a crowd gathered at the corner of her street and a carpet of glass glittering in the streetlight, but the car or cars involved were around the corner and out of sight. No matter how far she craned her head out of the tiny window she couldn’t see them at all.
It was ghoulish, she knew, but she thought perhaps she might sign out of chat and take the lift down to the foyer to join the crowd. Her curiosity would torment her if she did not placate it. She paused at the window, considering. Just a quick interruption to their evening. She would make an excuse, tell him that she was just popping into the lavish restroom, make it a part of their play. She raced back to the computer, but there was already a message flashing on the screen.
Hang on Susie-su, there has just been some kind of an accident. Back in a sec.
She rested her fingers on the keyboard. Stared at the cursor flashing in the chat window at the bottom of the screen. The wallpaper visible on the screen was the print that still hung on her bedroom wall,
Susanna and the Elders,
the Gentileschi painting. She stared at the old men leering at the coy young girl, so beautiful and so unsettling. Susanna felt an odd unease rising in her gut.
Crazy accident.
The sudden text at the bottom of the screen startled her. She found herself flinching. Taking a deep breath, lifting her fingers off the keyboard as if they had suddenly grown too hot to touch.
Glass all over the road.
She stood and moved back towards the window. A crowd still gawking, the distant sound of emergency vehicles shrieking towards the scene.
Susie-su?
Susie?
Susanna? Are you still there, my lover?
Susanna centred her fingers on the keyboard. The little raised dots on the F key and the J letting her know that she was in the right place, hands centred, everything in its place.
Sorry, I’m here, Aaron.
Wouldn’t it be awful to crash a car like that? One minute wondering if you remembered to pick up milk, the next
—
so awful.
Are the police there?
Not yet but I hear sirens.
Susanna could hear sirens.
There are people staring. Why are we so drawn to accidents? A vision of tragedy, schoolyard brawls. I thought about going down for a look.
Down?
Downstairs. I live in an apartment building.
Odd.
Susanna told him.
I always imagined you lived in a house.
Where would we be without our secrets, Susie-su? I am almost certain that if you knew me in the real world, you would not speak to me anymore and I could not bear the separation. I think it is best like this, don’t you? I don’t understand why people spoil what’s beautiful by meeting up to drink cheap beer in a sordid pub.
Or fine wine in a high-class restaurant.
You would hate me, Susie-su. You would be bored of me in a second. But here we are in a restaurant of our own invention and you are captivated by me just as I am by you. Let’s stay here and drink a toast together. Although I hope you are wearing your panties. I think that gentleman at the table by the window can see up your skirt. Do you see the way he dips his head? And he is sweating uncomfortably.
Don’t you want to wait till the ambulance arrives before continuing our meal?
Not to worry, my dear. They have arrived already.
And they had. Susanna glanced towards the window, the rhythmic flare of lights cutting the darkness of the street, the sound of the sirens snapping off one after another, police,
ambulance. Perhaps even the fire brigade. She no longer felt like going down to the street for a look.
Susanna didn’t know her neighbours. It was in her nature to slip quietly home, swiping her pass card outside the sliding glass doors, entering the modest foyer with her face turned resolutely to the floor. Sometimes she was forced to share the lift with one or another of the residents.
There was often a middle-aged woman, downturned mouth, a face that had once been pretty soured by a lifetime of disappointment and regret. Her fingers were yellowed by cigarettes and there was always a long thin rollie twitching between her fingers and a backup lodged securely behind one ear. Her hair was probably grey but seemed brown, nicotinestained. She sometimes had a name tag on her blue pinafore that suggested her name was Carole and wished you a nice day.
Carole always rolled her eyes when stepping into the lift. Susanna never took it personally. If the lift stopped for anyone else Carole would mutter, ‘For Christ’s sake,’ under her breath. Apart from Carole, Susanna knew only the maintenance man who lived on the ground floor, a cheerful emphysemic old soul who went as bright as a beetroot if he had to weed a flowerbed or walk up even a single flight of stairs.
She left for work later than usual. Normally she liked to beat the morning traffic, rising before the other people in her building, her shower water travelling down the rusty old
pipes, gently easing the other residents out of their dreams. She liked waiting for the bus alone, or sometimes with a nurse who lived down the road.
Now she delayed her shower, staring down at the waking street, watching the remnants of the shattered glass picking up the colours from the sunrise and turning them to fairy dust on the road. A cyclist rode over the glitter and she leaped at the sound of a tyre popping. The cyclist dismounted, flipped the bike onto its handlebars and crouched, a blaze of yellow lycra illuminated by a ray of morning light.
She ate her breakfast at the bench. The laptop sat beside her, a mute reminder of the night before. Somewhere in the building Aaron would be waking up or sleeping, or stepping naked from the shower. Somewhere within easy reach. She started the oven. Baked eggs and pancetta. She had time now, plenty of time to indulge in a proper weekend breakfast. She set the coffee pot on the stove.
Susanna often heard the next-door neighbour coming and going, and she would wait till she heard his door shut and the sound of the lift chugging away before she left her apartment. She didn’t want the embarrassment of bumping into him in the corridor. But one time she had had her own hand on the door handle, the door a fraction open, preparing to step outside and brave the world. The sound of the neighbour made her pause. She waited. Just the one set of footsteps, light but confident. She caught a glimpse of him passing through the fractionally open door. She thought it was a man at any
rate; she could not really be certain. Maybe it was a masculine woman with cropped hair.
Now she bent towards the keyhole of her door, a tiny scrap of light, just enough to confirm what she had suspected. The neighbour was a man. A man in a blue shirt with a leather satchel. That was all she could see—she only had a scrap of torso to work with, but she was used to that. Unlike the other men, her men, there was very little skin to distinguish him at all. He seemed to be of fair complexion, though she had just caught a quick flash of arm, and there was a sizable masculine bulge in the front of his jeans. She rested her hand on the lock, listened for his footsteps till she heard him pause at the lift, the distant rumble of the mechanism trundling down. Only then did she open the door, as quietly as she was able, gently easing the lock free, pulling the heavy length of door towards her cheek.
He was facing the lift. Medium height, medium build, brown hair; she had never seen Aaron’s hair. His hand balanced on the soft laptop case slung over his shoulder. She studied his fingers. Were these Aaron’s fingers, the hands she had seen a hundred times? There were no distinguishing features on them at all, no scars, no tattoos, no hair to speak of. Aaron’s hands were the hands of any man, the hands of this man, perhaps, or of any other man in her building except maybe the wheezing maintenance man, who sported a spread of liver spots all the way up his arms.
The lift doors opened, the man turned suddenly and
Susanna quickly pulled the door closed.
Peak hour for the lifts was between 7 and 8 am. Susanna chose her best dress, a butterfly-blue cotton check with a skirt that kicked out playfully over a white petticoat. The neckline was low, or at least lower than her usual skivvies and turtlenecks. The plunge of it rested squarely on her chest: just above her cleavage, but not so far above that there was no hint of what lay below. She tied her hair back with a black velvet ribbon.
Ridiculous, of course, to think he might recognise her. She had never even let him glimpse beyond the drape of her scarf. Sometimes she played brunette for him, sometimes redhead, sometimes blonde. She had even let him rest his hands on the silky waterfall of her dark Japanese bob while she played geisha with one of the anonymous men. Still, Susanna had chosen matching underwear in bright blue silk; lace, with elegant blue cups in shades of cornflower and summer sky. She wore her evening perfume, usually reserved for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the parties at the office that she went to reluctantly and left early, to the disappointment of every heterosexual man and gay woman in the crew.