As she was about to complete the job, a sharp pain twisted through his lower abdomen, just above his groin. He told her that he needed to use the bathroom. She withdrew immediately, returning a few moments later with one of her accomplices. He watched the two women as they went through the ritual of locking and unlocking, and, once again, he was struck by how smooth the operation was, as if they had rehearsed it many times. As before, one of the women, the tall one, waited outside the bathroom door while the other one, the one with no fingernails, escorted him inside. She stayed in the room with him throughout, even though he was doing more than urinating this time. It was like water, what fell out of him; it had the pungent, almost rotten smell of game. For once, the woman’s hood seemed fitting—a display of delicacy on her part, as if she were averting her gaze.
When he had finished, she wiped him clean, pulled up his underpants and flushed the chain. She behaved exactly as she had behaved the night before: she was methodical, efficient—matter-of-fact. Afterwards, she stepped back to the hand-basin. There was a flaw in the white porcelain, at the base of the hot tap. He saw her touch it with one finger. She seemed to think it was something that could be dislodged—a hair, perhaps. When it didn’t move, though, when she realised it was just a crack, a murmur came out of her, as if she felt she had been the victim of a practical joke.
While the woman held her hands under the hot water—how odd, he thought, to have someone wash their hands on your behalf—he stood back and looked around, trying to find out more about the room. A naked light-bulb hung from the ceiling. Philips. Sixty watts. The floor was lino—white dots on a dark-grey ground, a kind of stippling effect, like a TV screen when all the stations have closed down. To the left of the toilet there were two larger splashes of white that didn’t appear to be part of the original design. Looking closer, he discovered they were paint. They must have dropped from some decorator’s brush. He nodded quickly to himself. Other people’s carelessness was something he needed reminding of. He had to believe that people could slip up. Make mistakes.
•
Back in the white room he waited until the women had gone, then he turned on to his side and faced the wall. The room still smelled of candle-smoke from the night before, a smell that reminded him, curiously enough, of Brigitte. Whenever Brigitte found herself inside a church, she always lit candles for members of her family, not just for those who were dead, but for the living too, even her cousin, Esperanza, whom she had never met, one candle after another, and her face as mystical, as solemn, as a three year old’s. What would the candle-makers do without you? he had said to her once, outside the basilica in Assisi, a comment that drew an uncomprehending look from her, and then a smile and a remark about English humour and how she would never understand it, not if she lived to be a hundred.
Now that he was absent, would she light a candle for him as well?
He saw her as he had seen her last, no more than eighteen hours ago. . . . She was standing by the canteen window, staring down into the street. He remembered how she had walked towards him, frowning slightly, as if something was troubling her. She had asked him to buy her some cigarettes. He had told her she’d get cancer. She had shrugged and said she didn’t care. It had been a stupid argument. Pointless. Petty. He ran through the scene again from the beginning, seeing it the way it should have been. This time, when she crossed the room, she didn’t have to ask him anything because her cigarettes were lying on the table where she had left them, forming a kind of still life with the ashtray and the coffee cup. She reached down, took a cigarette out of the packet and lit it, then she stood beside him, with her left hip almost touching his right shoulder. He saw how her left hand supported her right elbow, and how she held the cigarette close to her lips, even when she wasn’t actually inhaling, and how the smoke altered from grey to blue as it tumbled upwards through a shaft of sunlight. . . . When she had finished the cigarette, crushing it out in the ashtray, they returned to the studio to rehearse the ballet that was opening in two weeks’ time. The rehearsal ended at seven, after which they showered and changed. Then they drove home, as usual.
A different version of events.
A fantasy. . . .
He wondered what Brigitte would be doing now. Would she be looking for him? How exactly do you go about looking for someone when they disappear without warning, without trace?
He thought of the time he took her to Crete. They had stayed in a village on the south coast, at the foot of the mountains. Every day they climbed on to their rented Vespa and drove to a deserted beach a few kilometres away.
One morning, while Brigitte was swimming, he lay down on a flat rock to read a book. When he looked up he saw her in the distance, halfway along the beach. She was washing herself in a fresh-water spring they had found by chance the previous day. She was naked, her olive skin already darkened by the sun, her bikini a small splash of scarlet on the rocks beside her. Smiling, he turned back to his book.
The next time he looked up, the beach was empty.
He was calm at first, thinking she must have gone swimming again. He scanned the bay. The mid-morning light had a brilliance that hurt his eyes; the water was a mass of ripped silver foil. She wasn’t there. His calmness began to change shape inside him. He felt a kind of panic take its place. Sitting on his rock, he scoured the beach for minutes on end, but Brigitte did not appear. She simply wasn’t there.
He stood up, put on his swimming-trunks. He felt as if he was moving too slowly, and yet he couldn’t see what good hurrying would do. He felt stupid. Perhaps he should just sit down again. Read his book.
He began to walk.
His walk turned into a kind of run as he realised how long it had taken him to think that something might be wrong. He had already wasted so much time. All of a sudden every second counted.
He reached the place where he thought he had seen her last. Yes, look. There was the shape of her foot in the wet sand. He was aware of the weight of the sun on his head, on his shoulders. The beach, grey and ochre, curved away towards a rocky promontory. Its emptiness seemed natural. It even had a quality of indifference about it, as if any feelings he might have were of no interest, no relevance.
What if somebody had raped her, then hit her with a rock? What if somebody had killed her? What if she just vanished? Brigitte, who he couldn’t live without. Brigitte, who he adored.
He had an image of her with nothing on, drinking water from the spring. At a distance of a hundred yards, it was not her face you recognised her by, it was the way she bent forwards from the waist, as only a dancer can, the way her spine and the backs of her thighs formed a right-angle, a perfect right-angle. . . . This is how it happens, he thought, when someone disappears. An empty beach. A stillness. Brigitte had been his responsibility. Her disappearance, if that was what it was, would be his fault. Her death, his fault. He swallowed. Turning away from the spring, he began to walk towards the promontory, but he had no hope now. She had been missing for an hour at least. He couldn’t imagine circumstances that would account for that. He couldn’t come up with a single explanation.
Then he heard a voice call his name. He stopped, looked up. Brigitte was standing on a rock above him, her body pale-grey, every part of her pale-grey, in fact, even her face, and, for a moment, he thought that his nightmare had come true, that she had been killed and was now returning as a ghost. . . . The truth was far less dramatic, of course: while exploring the promontory, she had discovered some special mud, mud that was good for the skin. . . .
That evening, as they sat outside the village bar, drinking glasses of chilled retsina, he watched her turn her head to blow her cigarette smoke into the street. He was still astonished that she hadn’t come to any harm. He couldn’t quite believe she wasn’t dead and gone, as he had feared.
“What is it?” she said.
He shook his head. Being Brigitte, it had never occurred to her that he might have missed her, that he might have been worried, and he knew her well
enough to realise that, if he told her, she would not have understood. She might even have thought less of him for it. She would herself have been astonished.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
In retrospect, you could resent people who lived so entirely in their own skin that they had no idea of what it was like to be in yours. Not just no idea either, but no interest in trying to find out. The thought simply wouldn’t have entered their heads.
This was why he was finding it so difficult to envisage how Brigitte would react to his disappearance. She was so used to being the centre of attention—how would it be when that situation was reversed? Every time he tried to imagine what she might be doing, all he saw were the ordinary things, some element or other of her everyday routine. She was sprinkling food into the fish tank. She was lying in a hot bath, listening to Bob Dylan tapes (which she loved, and he always teased her about). She was sitting on the floor in the corner of the studio, stretching her legs out sideways, or touching her forehead to her knees. She was behaving normally, in other words. She was behaving as if he was still there. Was there a grain of truth in these images (not that his absence wouldn’t affect her, but that she would carry on regardless)? Or did they simply indicate the poverty of his own imagination?
Another memory came to him. It had happened years ago, when they first knew each other. After rehearsal one afternoon he had gone to fetch his car, which he had parked a few streets away. He waited for her outside the studio, the engine running. At last the door opened and she climbed in, her skin smelling of the Chanel soap she always used back then, her hair still wet.
“You’re staring at me,” she said.
He could not deny it. He was captivated by her beauty, and there was nowhere he would rather look.
Even then, or especially then, perhaps, she had felt his love as a weight, a pressure, and at times it had exhausted her. This is not to say that she didn’t love him, only that his love had preceded hers. His love had been instant, irrepressible and overwhelming, while hers had grown slowly, as a complement to his, as a response.
But if that was still true, if she sometimes felt his love weighed on her too heavily, and if that weight was then removed, in its entirety, would she, at some deep level, admit to a feeling of relief?
Or would she feel unanchored suddenly, unstable?
•
Towards sunset on that second day the women appeared, each one dressed identically in black, as usual. They were like doors, he thought, doors into the dark. None of which you would ever choose to pass through.
“We have a request.”
This was the tallest of the women, the one with the slight American accent. Her voice had an abruptness to it, a strident quality, as if she was used to giving orders. He said nothing, waiting for her to continue.
“We want you to masturbate for us.”
He turned his face away. During the day, while on his own, he had been thinking about the dangers of co-operation, one of them being that the women would never be satisfied, that they would keep asking more of him. This “request,” as they called it, seemed to prove the point.
But they were talking to him now, their voices seductive, insistent, over-lapping one another, just as they had in that narrow alleyway.
“We want to see the expression on your face—”
“The way it changes—”
“Like you’re lost inside yourself. Like when you dance—”
He shook his head and turned on to his side. The early evening sunshine struck through the skylight, making a rectangular shape on the bare boards. The rectangle was slightly wider at one end than the other. It looked as if a bright-orange coffin had been delivered to the room.
The women were still trying to persuade him. Though he didn’t want to listen, he couldn’t shut the voices out.
“All you have to do is masturbate—”
“Is it really so much to ask?”
One of them stepped closer, until she almost filled his field of vision with the folds of her black cloak. For a moment, he felt he might be losing consciousness.
“Do you remember what happened last night?”
This was a voice he recognised. It belonged to the woman with the darkly painted nails, the woman he thought of as the leader. It occurred to him that he was already beginning to be able to distinguish between the women. It might be useful if he could give them separate identities, somehow. Name them even.
The woman repeated her question. “Do you remember what happened?”
“Of course I remember,” he replied.
“Well,” she said, “we filmed it all. On video.”
He looked up at her in disbelief.
She turned away, walked a few paces. “Of course, it’s mainly for our own pleasure. Our own,” and she paused, “delectation.” She leaned against the white pipes that ran from floor to ceiling. “However,” she went on, “we could always make a copy. We could send it to your girlfriend, for example. You have a girlfriend, don’t you. Or we could send it to the people who employ you. . . .”
“Why are you doing this?” he murmured.
The woman who was standing to his left kneeled awkwardly beside him. “Because you’re beautiful,” she said in a curious, low monotone. “Because,” and she hesitated, and then looked down at the floor, “because we love you.”
The woman standing behind her laughed.
“Well?” said the woman who he thought of as the leader. “What have you decided?”
He felt instinctively that she was not bluffing. Though he hadn’t noticed any filming equipment, it seemed obvious that in a room of this type there would be a hidden camera somewhere. It went with the handcuffs and the rubber mat; it belonged to the same family of objects. If he refused to submit to their demands, they would put the video in the post, and he didn’t want even to begin to imagine Brigitte’s face if she were to receive something like that.
“OK,” he said quietly.
“You will do it?”
“Yes.”
The leader walked back towards him, her hands clasped almost ceremonially in front of her. Under that black hood of hers, he knew she would be smiling. He looked beyond her. The piece of bright-orange sunlight had changed shape and moved in the direction of the door. It no longer bore the slightest resemblance to a coffin. He wasn’t sure if this was a good omen or a bad one.
“If there is anything we can do,” the woman said, “to make it easier. . . .”
He stared at her, not understanding what she meant.
“Men often need something,” she said. “Pornography, for instance.” She paused. “You know,” and she was still smiling, he was sure of it, “a lot of men would pay to be in your position—”
“If I was paying,” he said, “it would be my choice. This is not my choice.”
“But you will do it,” she said, “won’t you.”
•
That night he woke up to find he couldn’t move. Something was resting heavily against him, pinning him to the floor—something warm, alive. . . . It took him a moment to realise that it was one of the women.
She was lying next to him, her head turned sideways on his chest. He could just make out her hair, which was thick and wiry, and the curve of her left shoulder, edged in silver, thin light falling from the window high above.
She appeared to be naked.
He wondered whether he should say something. What, though? Suddenly the situation seemed ridiculous.
Only a few hours earlier the women had put on a show for him. Two of them sat on moulded plastic chairs while a third stood in front of him and slowly, teasingly, undid her cloak. Underneath she had nothing on except her underwear, which was fashioned from expensive-looking, flame-red lace. What struck him first was the difference between her body and that of a dancer. Her body was softer than the bodies he was used to, and less defined. To his trained eye, she looked curiously indistinct, almost blurred, and, just for a moment, he seemed to see
another, leaner figure, the dancer within her, bending, stretching, preparing for a morning class. . . . She reached behind her and unhooked her bra. It came away. Though her limbs were slender, her breasts were heavy—out of proportion to the rest of her, somehow. She drew her knickers downwards, past her knees. She had a faint bikini-line, as if she had been in the sun that winter, and high up on the outside of her left thigh there was a small round scar, the size of a guilder. He began to masturbate, as he was required to, but found that he couldn’t even achieve an erection.
One of the women thought he wasn’t trying.
“I am trying,” he protested. “Anyway, you can’t try. It doesn’t work like that.”
The woman who had just undressed for him stooped quickly, clumsily, and gathered up her clothes. Then, wrapping herself in her black cloak, as if for warmth, she turned towards the door. He almost felt he should apologise to her.
The other women rose out of their chairs.
“Please don’t send the video,” he said.
They left without another word, without a backward glance, which made him wish he hadn’t pleaded.
But now one of them had returned. . . .
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he discovered that he could make out a pale mound, which was her hip, presumably, and, to the left of that, the two much smaller curves of her heels, one resting on the other.
The Book of Revelation Page 3