Folly (11 page)

After checking in with the security guards, I drove past some of the well-tended gardens and carefully mown lawns before parking in the visitors' area outside high care. The pleasant surroundings notwithstanding, I couldn't help feeling, as I always did, that as I climbed out of the car I was stepping into a bottomless pool of depression.

It didn't matter that the flowerbeds were a glorious riot of colour, or that the two wheelchair-bound women being taken on an outing by a pair of nurses looked cheerful and waved at me warmly. It didn't even matter that I'd managed to snag the very best parking spot, right opposite the main entrance.

My associations with this place were too deep and too painful. Walking up the path towards the doorway, I felt far more stressed than I had done in my dungeon the day before, raining down blows on Simon's smooth backside, punishing it until the skin burst and bled.

I offered the cheerful black matron on duty my usual brisk, forced smile.

‘How's Mark doing, Gladys?'

She beamed. ‘He is very well. You can go through.' She waved the way down the passage with a flourish, as if she was sure that walking along that polished linoleum to Mark's room was going to be the highlight of my week.

The corridor smelled of disinfectant and cooked cabbage, just like every other health care institution in the history of the world, and despite the fact I'd never actually seen cabbage being served.

High care was where the profoundly brain damaged and physically disabled patients lived. Unlike Mark, almost all the other current residents had been that way since birth. Parents, siblings and friends had spent a lifetime with them, and they had never known them any other way.

It was different for me. I hadn't had much more than a year to come to terms with things.

Initially, the absolute shock of hearing that Mark was in a coma after the accident had given way to stubborn optimism. He
would
get better. I
would
make him recover. I'd spent hours and hours by his hospital bed, talking to him, encouraging him, willing him to regain consciousness.

A month later, I'd been filled with wild hope when he'd started showing signs of responsiveness. Even though the doctors had warned that he was not likely to improve very much, I believed I knew better. I had been expecting a miracle, but when it never happened, my hope had given way first to anger, and then to the bleakest despair.

I felt it now. I always did upon seeing him in his room, so familiar and yet so terribly changed, listing sideways in his wheelchair as he stared at the floor with blank and half-closed eyes.

‘Hello, Mark,' I said in the same falsely cheerful tone, sitting down beside him and squeezing his left hand, which was now, like the right, permanently curled into a spastic claw.

No reaction.

There very seldom was. Sometimes, on exceptionally good days, he would smile. He'd offer up a huge and happy beam, even though it was not directed at me, nor at anyone, and his eyes lacked focus.

He could swallow food, well enough that most times he could be fed by the nurses. But now his mouth gaped open and a ribbon of drool shone from the corner of his lips. He could sit supported in a wheelchair for most of the day, but he had very little coordination. Transferring a one-hundred-kilo man from bed to chair and back again, washing him, turning him over, and changing his nappies was a major operation requiring five or six nurses, and it was the primary reason why, in spite of the saving of costs it would represent, I'd never taken him home.

That, and the fact that occasionally, he suffered from severe fits.

He was well cared for here. I saw that his fingernails had been recently cut – nearly all the way down to the quick, a fact that would have horrified the old Mark – and his hair, too, had been trimmed, so that I could clearly see the white and pink railway tracks of the scarring that traced its way across his forehead before disappearing into his hairline.

I'd brought him some Tennis biscuits, which I put on the shelf above the narrow bed with the padded railings. The nurses would dunk the biscuits in his tea and feed them to him that way. They told me he seemed to like them.

There was a vase of fresh chrysanthemums and daisies up there today. A nice touch for visitors, although Mark could never have lifted his head high enough to see it.

I wondered often if he would have chosen to die rather than live like this. He probably would. He'd always been so aggressively independent, so fiercely opinionated. So crazily enthusiastic about his insane business ventures and pigheadedly stubborn in his refusal to listen to me on those rare occasions when I tried to insist that, this time, I was right and he was wrong.

Now life happened around him. He was a rock in its river.

Even though I knew how damaged he was, I had a rule. Nothing negative was ever said in his presence. I always had the lingering worry that despite his nonreactive state, at some level he might understand.

‘Everything's going fine at home,' I told him. ‘I've made some money this week. I've started up a new business venture. It's early days yet, but if it carries on going well, I might even manage to keep the house.'

Silence, apart from Mark's breathing. It was slightly nasal and he made small snorting sounds as he inhaled. He'd always suffered from allergies at this time of year.

‘The cats are well,' I said, not that he would have cared much about that, but at least it was a topic I could speak about without too much effort. I wasn't going to tell him that they all slept on the bed with me now, with Bob the Cat in pride of place on my pillow. That had been forbidden under his rule.

What I did want to ask, but knew I couldn't was: Mark, what happened with my pearls? Did you buy fakes and tell me they were real? Were you conned, perhaps? Or, in a fit of pique following one of those vicious, meaningless fights that we seemed to have more and more often over the years, did you sell them and replace them with artificial ones?

‘They say there's going to be a lot more rain this week. The property is looking wonderfully green. Goodness has been mowing the grass nonstop,' I said, and checked my watch, wondering how many more warm and airless minutes I could endure in the company of my catatonic husband before I could take my leave.

Chapter 13

S
oon after I arrived back home, I heard Goodness calling me from outside the front door. I hurried downstairs and opened it, but instead of seeing him outside, I came face to face with an enormous arrangement of flowers. Multicoloured blossoms – blue irises, yellow carnations, pink and white lilies, roses and chrysanthemums – surrounded by deep green foliage and expertly arranged in a beautiful glass vase.

Goodness lowered the flowers slightly and nodded at me over the topmost blooms.

‘What the …? Where did this come from?' I stood staring at him stupidly until, realising his arms must be getting tired from holding it, I took this incredible floribunda from him. The arrangement was so large I had to back through the doorway with it before turning around.

Goodness waited at the door, watching as I set it down on the dining-room table.

‘Where did these come from?' I asked again.

He frowned slightly. ‘The man, he brought it in the white van.'

‘A delivery van? When?'

‘Ten o'clock.'

‘Where? Here, to this house?'

‘No.' Goodness pointed in the direction of the folly. ‘There. To that gate.'

I turned and stared at the flowers again. ‘Are you sure they were for me, Goodness?' I had a sudden vision of my unlikeable neighbour's birthday surprise landing up in my living room by mistake.

‘It said in the book: Ms Caine.'

‘Oh. So they are for me.'

‘Yes.' Goodness said, nodding approvingly. ‘They are for you.'

Suddenly the day seemed a little brighter.

Turning back to the enormous arrangement, I saw for the first time, half-buried in the blooms, a small white envelope attached to a clear plastic holder. I grabbed it out of the holder and tore it open.

I drew out a red card with gold lettering that read, in cursive script, ‘Thank you.'

The inside of the card was blank.

How beautiful and amazing. How puzzling and frustrating.

I'd had three clients so far and one of them must have sent me these flowers. A bouquet fit for royalty. Their colours sang of summer and happiness, and already their fragrance was filling the air.

The only problem was that I had not the faintest clue who could have sent it. Had it been Lowly? The Judge? Simon?

How on earth was I going to thank the sender when I had no idea who he was? For a bouquet this splendid, thanks were surely in order … but then again, if the sender had wanted to be thanked, he would have signed the card. Or at the very least given a hint as to his identity.

It was a mystery. But, for a change, a good one.

The next day, my wallet feeling bulky and unfamiliar with all the cash inside, I went shopping.

My destination today was the closest sex shop I knew of, Adult Land, which was a twenty-minute drive away. I was shopping mainly for the Judge. This was Mission Anal Toys. But in spite of this fact, as I was driving, I didn't find my thoughts returning to the Judge. I was not dwelling on the memory of his puckered anus and how it had stretched into a perfect ‘O' to accommodate the candles I had slid inside.

Nor was I drawn back to the image of Lowly, hunched on the floor, his breath coming faster and faster and the lacy panties bright white against his brown skin.

The single memory that preoccupied me on my drive to the sex shop was the sensation of Simon's naked backside against my hand. How his skin had felt; warm and soft. The shock I had felt when I realised I'd touched him and the speed with which I'd snatched my hand away, and then wished I had not.

It was strange, I thought to myself as I turned right at the lights on Jan Smuts Avenue, what one's mind latched onto. Probably, the reason that I couldn't get that single touch out of my head was because I wasn't ready to think about the more explicit and disturbing acts that I had performed.

I parked outside the strip mall, which was also home to a rather dilapidated-looking grocery store, a security centre, a travel agent and a barber's shop. Hot-footing it past the barber's, I pushed open the solid door of Adult Land and stepped rather tentatively into the stuffy-smelling interior.

My feet sank into soft carpet and as I stood there, blinking in the gloom, my first thought was that they should be given some kind of award for energy saving, because the place was lit with a total of about five 60-watt spotlights. Browsing amongst the shadowy interior I saw two other clients, both men.

Both would have to leave before me, I decided. There was no way I was going to purchase multiple vibrators with anybody else watching.

A plump, friendly looking black assistant with shoulder-length braids was perched on a high chair behind the wide glass-topped counter. She gave me a smile but said nothing. I guess ‘Can I help you?' had its time and place in a shop like this.

Aware that one of the other customers was glancing my way, I wandered over to the most innocuous display I could find – the rail of clothing. Here, French maid outfits and skimpy nurses' uniforms rubbed cups and crotches with belly-dancing kits and lacy angel and devil costumes in white and red.

I rifled through the ‘on sale' lingerie, and realised that there were some bargains to be had. Those spangled stockings, perhaps, with this suspender belt, I thought. Both were available in extra large. They would do nicely for Lowly.

Out of nowhere I found myself thinking of Simon's lean, fit body and my hand hovered for a moment over the medium.

Then, feeling foolish for having let my thoughts stray to the least successful of my sessions so far, and the only slave who hadn't rebooked, I chose the extra large and glanced over my shoulder.

One of the other customers was paying for his purchases now, thank God.

I took a quick look at the magazines on offer and picked out one or two that featured black latex on the cover and would presumably appeal to my clientele. And then the other man was leaving the shop and for a while at least, it would hopefully just be myself and the assistant.

As the door swung shut behind him I sidled up to the counter and put down the magazines and underwear.

‘Will that be all?' she asked, with another friendly smile.

‘Actually, no.'

The vibrators and dildos were all displayed on shelves behind the counter.

‘I'd like …' I squinted through the gloom. ‘That pink curved one there and those two black ones, the medium and the large. That flexible looking green one and that orange one – oh, could you tell me how much they cost, by the way?'

The assistant raised her perfectly plucked eyebrows slightly as she gave me the prices. Doing some hasty mental arithmetic, I worked out I could afford to buy about six. The flexible ones seemed to be more expensive.

‘Um …' I said. What did I need? A range of sizes was surely the most important. Small ones for beginners, larger ones for the Judge. My eyes strayed to a massive pistachio-coloured dildo which lay on the top shelf. It must have been eighteen inches long and four wide. Undoubtedly, it would injure, if not kill, any slave unfortunate enough to receive its ministrations, but the threat of its use would certainly create the necessary fear.

‘How much is the giant one?'

‘This one?' She turned and lifted it down.

‘That's right.'

She told me the price. Yup, just as I'd feared, this weapon of mass penetration would also be reaming a hole in my budget. Would it be worth the money?

‘And do you have any strap-ons in stock?' My goodness, it was getting hot in here.

‘Yes, we do. We have a few different types. Would you like to see them?'

Avoiding her curious gaze I stared down at the glass counter, frantically doing more sums in my head, noticing that underneath the glass there was a charm bracelet featuring tiny silver penises.