He took the Remington down to the firing range and took out some of the secreted stress on holotargets. There was a deep satisfaction to the scattered blast pattern it made that not even the Nemex could equal. He grew to like the weapon in a way he had never allowed himself with the pistol. He used the feeling like a drug.
In the evenings, in the anonymous seclusion of the hotel, he had Liz Linshaw, like a jagged sensory overload on the screen of his feelings. Sprawled elegantly naked across his bed, soaped slick in his shower, pressed against the walls of the room, legs wrapped around, tensed with orgasm, damp with sweat, grinning through her tousled hair.
Her too, he used like a drug. Like a materialised visitation from some soft-porn pay-channel reality the hotel had moored close to. When she wasn’t there - about every third night, just so we stay sane about this, Chris - he masturbated thinking of her. She helped him sleep, helped him avoid overly conscious introspection when at the ragged end of each day he arrived back in the hotel and found himself wondering if you really could live out a whole life this way.
Eventually, Carla came to the hotel.
She called first. Several times. He had her screened out of his mobile and the office phone, but somehow she’d got the hotel out of Mike. The first time she called, he walked into it, head-on. He hung at the end of the phone, weightless, making monosyllabic responses. After a while, she cried.
He hung up on her.
He rang the switchboard and got them to screen and announce all further incoming calls. Then he called Mike, furious. He got an apology of sorts, but what the other man was really thinking came through underneath, loud and clear.
‘Yeah, I know Chris. I’m really sorry. She’s been calling for days - I just couldn’t blow her off any more. She was upset, you know. Really upset.’
‘I’m fucking upset as well, Mike. And I could use a bit of solidarity here. It’s not like I go telling tales to Suki behind your back, is it?’
‘You need to talk to her, man.’
‘That’s an opinion, Mike, and you’re entitled to it. But you don’t fucking make my marital decisions for me. Got it?’
There was a long pause at the other end.
‘Got it.’ Mike said finally.
‘Good.’ Chris cleared his throat, cranked down his tone a little. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at eight, then. Cambodia briefing.’
‘Yeah.’
“night, then.’
‘Yeah. Goodnight, Chris.’ There was a flat quality in Mike’s voice that Chris didn’t much like, but he was still too angry himself to care much either.
Liz emerged from the bathroom, naked, towelling her hair vigorously.
‘Who was that?’
He gestured. ‘Ah, Mike. Work stuff.’
‘Yeah? You look pretty pissed off about it.’
‘Yeah, well. Cambodia.’
‘Anything I should know?’
He forced a grin. ‘A lot of stuff you’d like to know, probably. But let’s talk about Mars.’
She threw the towel at him.
‘I’ll get it out of you,’ she promised, advancing.
The next morning on the way to work, Mike’s tone came back to him and he wondered if the other man was going to have another go after the Cambodia briefing. He rehearsed angry rejoinders in his head as the cab swung around Hyde Park Corner.
He never got a chance to use them. It was the day Hollywood chose to come calling and all Mike wanted to talk about were the hallucinatory figures involved and the possibility that they might get to watch themselves immortalised on screen by Tony Carpenter or Eduardo Rojas.
Carla called a couple more times that week, and then, suddenly, she was at the front desk, asking for him. Mercifully, it was a night Liz Linshaw had chosen not to show up. He thought briefly, cruelly, about telling the desk staff to send her away, then caught a glimpse of himself in a wall mirror and grimaced. He changed into something freshly laundered, slipped on a pair of casual shoes and went down to face her.
She was sitting on one of the sofas in reception, immaculate in faded jeans he remembered buying with her, boots and a neat black leather jacket. When she saw him, she got up and came to meet him, trying for a smile.
‘So. I get an audience with the man of the moment. Feel good, being famous again?’
‘What do you want?’
‘Can we go up to your room?’
‘No.’
She looked elaborately around the quiet, well-bred bustle of the lobby. The hurt barely showed in her voice.
‘Have you got someone up there?’
‘Don’t be a fucking bitch. No, I haven’t got anyone up there. Jesus, Carla, this isn’t about someone else. You fucking left me.’
‘So I’ve got to stand here while you shout at me?’
He swallowed and lowered his voice. ‘There’s a bar through there, through that arch. We can sit in there.’
She shrugged, but it was a manufactured detachment. In the corner of the bar, she sat and stared at him out of eyes that shone with unshed tears. She’d been crying recently, he knew. He could tell. He felt a tiny thawing at the edges of his anger at the knowledge, a tiny, aching warmth. He crushed it out. A uniformed waitress appeared with an expectant smile. He ordered Laphroaig for himself, asked Carla whether she’d like something to drink, and watched the formality of his tone stab her through. She shook her head.
‘I didn’t come here to drink with you, Chris.’
‘Fair enough.’ He nodded to the waitress and she went back to the bar. ‘What did you come for?’
‘To apologise.’
He looked at her for a long moment. ‘Go on then.’
She managed a smile. Shook her head. ‘You bastard. You’ve turned into a real bastard, Chris. You know that?’
‘You left me in the middle of the fucking zones, Carla. At two o’clock in the fucking morning. You’ve got some apologising to do.’
‘You called me a whore.’
‘And you called me.’ He gestured helplessly, not remembering how the row had stoked so high. ‘You said—‘
‘I said I couldn’t recognise you any more, Chris. It wasn’t an insult, it was the truth. I don’t recognise you any more.’
He shrugged. Ignored the tiny acid drip at the centre of his chest. ‘So why come here at all? I’m a write-off, I’m unrecoverable. Tender trash. So why waste your time?’
‘I told you why I came.’
‘Yeah, to apologise. You’re not making a very good job of it.’
The Laphroaig came. He signed for it, sipped and put it down on the table between them. He looked back up at Carla.
‘Well?’
‘I didn’t come to apologise for leaving you in the zones.’ He opened his mouth and she made a slashing gesture to silence him. ‘No, listen to me, Chris. I’d do it again if you spoke to me like that again. You deserved it.’
She stared away across the bar, assembling what she wanted to say. Absently, she reached across the table for the whisky tumbler, recognised the automatic intimacy for what it was and stopped herself rigidly. She blinked a couple of times, fast.
‘That’s not what I have to apologise for. I have to apologise because I should have left you a long time ago. I’ve spent the last year, the last two years, I don’t know maybe even longer than that, trying to turn you back into the man I thought you were when we first met.’ She smiled unconvincingly. ‘And you don’t want to be that man any more, Chris. You aren’t that man any more. You’ve found something harder and faster, and you like it better.’
‘This is crap, Carla.’
‘Is it?’
Silence. A tear broke cover under her left eye. He pretended not to see it, reached for his whisky instead. She found a wipe in her jacket.
‘I’m leaving you, Chris. I thought maybe. But I was right the first time. There’s no point.’ She gestured at the hotel around them. ‘You’re happier like this. Living on room service, locking out the rest of the world. It isn’t
just the job you do any more, that fucking tower you run your remote control wars from. It’s everything. Twenty-four, seven, insulated from reality. How long would you have gone on sitting in this place, if I hadn’t come here tonight? How long would you have shut me out like everyone else?’
She got up abruptly. He sat staring straight ahead, out of the windows of the bar to the street outside.
‘You fucking left me, Carla. Don’t try and turn it around.’
She gave him a bright, brittle smile. ‘You’re not listening to me, Chris. I’m leaving you. I’ll need a couple of weeks to get my stuff out of the house—‘
‘And where are you going to go?’ It came out ugly.
‘I’m going to stay with,’ she laughed a little. ‘Not that it’s anything to do with you any more. I’m going to stay in Tromso for a while. Until I can get the divorce sorted out. I’m assuming you aren’t going to contest it, you’ll probably be happier than I am to get free. Give you plenty of room for your new penthouse playmate, whoever she is.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘Oh, please. I’m not stupid, Chris. I saw the way the people at the desk looked at me when I asked for you. I hear the way they react when I try to call you. I’m not the only woman you’ve got coming here. I just hope whoever it is is worth what you’re paying.’
He shrugged. ‘Think what you like. Better yet, check the credit-card accounts. Spot all the charges to escort agencies I must be making. You never did have a very high opinion of me, did you?’
She shook her head, drew a hard breath that had tears in it. ‘You don’t know how wrong you are about that, Chris. You’ll never fucking know.’
‘Yeah. Whatever.’
She turned to go. Paused and turned back.
‘Oh, yeah. You’d better come out and collect the Saab. Some time soon. I haven’t touched it, but I’m not sure how long I can stand it sitting there in the drive while I know you’re here fucking some moan-on-demand tit-job. My maturity’s wearing pretty fucking thin.’
She walked away from him.
Chapter Forty-One
Liz Linshaw came over the following evening, and walked bang into the aftermath. Chris was moody and snappish, and when they got into bed he needed a hand-crank start. They fucked, but it wasn’t much fun. He went through the motions, wrestling irritably over choices and changes of posture, and only finally managed to lose himself in the pay-channel perfection of her body as he came. Scant seconds later, he hit the real world like concrete from fifty floors up. No post-coital warmth, no chuckling or smoothing of sweat-soaked skin. There was a raw hollow behind his eyes and in his chest.
They unplugged and lay apart.
‘Thanks,’ she said, staring at the ceiling.
‘Sorry.’ He rolled towards the juncture of her thighs. ‘Come here.’
She pushed his head away. ‘Forget it, Chris. Just tell me what’s wrong.’
‘You don’t want to hear it.’
‘Yes I do.’
He rolled onto his back again. He blew imaginary cigarette smoke at the ceiling. ‘Carla came to see me,’ he said finally.
‘Great.’ she sat up against the headboard, arms folded under her breasts. ‘Fucking great. You seeing her again?’
‘Told you you didn’t want to hear it.’
She looked down at him, angry. ‘You’re wrong. I do want to hear it, I want to hear all about it. Every fucking detail. You’re what I do in the evenings now, Chris. Anything that’s going to ruin it this badly, you better believe I want to hear about it. Are you seeing her again?’
‘Doubt it.’
He recounted the conversation in the bar, almost word for word. When he came to Carla’s parting line, she grimaced.
‘Nice.’
‘Yeah.’ Chris stared off into a corner of the room. ‘Used to scare me sometimes, how she could get inside my head like that. Just read stuff out of me like I was a screen.’
Liz Linshaw’s gaze twitched around. ‘Excuse me?’
‘I mean, the way she knew that—‘
‘That’s what I am in your head? A moan-on-demand tit-job? Well, thanks a fucking lot, Chris. Thank you very much.’
‘Liz, I’m not. That’s not what I meant. It’s.’ He groped after some explanation of what he meant, the way she seemed to form an integrated part of the smooth-lined hotel-suite reality he was living. ‘Christ, you’re beautiful, that’s what I was trying to say, too beautiful to be real, it seems like. Okay? And that must have been what she picked up on in my head. I mean, look, she was right about the tit-job, wasn’t she.’
Liz cupped her breasts at him. The anger on her face robbed it of sexuality. ‘You got a problem with these? Funny, because you didn’t seem to earlier when your face was fucking buried between them. You know, Chris, this is me. I’m here for real, all of me. I’m not trying to sell myself to you as some piece of fucking merchandise.’
‘No?’ A little of his own anger was starting to seep back through the emptiness under his ribs. ‘So why send me the edited highlights of your porn career? Good old airbrushed girl-on-girl action? You wouldn’t call that merchandising the goods?’
She stared at him. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘Oh, come on Liz. You’re trying to tell me you didn’t do porn?’
‘No, I did.’ Something in her face had changed. ‘Back when it was the best way I knew to make money. I just want to know how come you never told me you’d been jerking off to it.’
‘Liz, you fucking sent it to me.’
‘No, Chris. I didn’t.’
‘You’re saying you didn’t mail me a videoclip of you and some blonde bimbette on a, like, an exercise rack or something. You never sent that?’
She sighed and sank back against the headboard. Her gaze rolled out to the middle distance. She seemed to curl into herself.
‘Donna’s Dominion,’ she muttered.
‘Sorry?’
‘Donna’s Dominion. That’s what it was called, that particular piece of classy erotic art. I was Donna Dread, gym training world dominatrix.’ She smiled without much mirth. ‘Pretty infantile stuff, huh?’
Chris gestured uncomfortably. He was pretty sure he was blushing. Liz Linshaw nodded.
‘Got you hard, though. Right?’
‘Uh.’ He looked away.
She sighed again. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. Stuff’s made to get you hard. As a male, you’d be practically dysfunctional if it didn’t. Youthful tits are supposed to turn you on, and there you’ve got four of them on screen, all rubbing up against each other, and all blown up to hyper-real proportions. You might as well get embarrassed about four lines of uncut NAME powder keeping you awake all night. It’s just another drug, Chris. Refined, maxed-up, bang-on-the-nail sex-chemistry trigger dust.’ Another weary smile. ‘So you liked me, huh?’
He cleared his throat. ‘You, uh, were you really into, you know?’
‘Girls?’ She shrugged. ‘Not really, no. I mean, get someone licking your clit for you, that’s not unpleasant, whatever sex the person doing it is. Once you get used to the six or seven people watching you off camera, that is. And you’d be surprised how quickly you do get used to that. But no, I was never a try-out lesbian, not even a try-out bi. It’s pure theatre, Chris. Just a job. Oh, yeah, and if you stick to girl-on-girl, your health insurance premiums go way down. Less risk, less general wear and tear on the works.’
‘Why did you, I mean, how did you get into it?’
This time her smile seemed genuine. Her posture unwound. She shook her head, reached over the edge of the bed for her bag, and started going through it. ‘Well I wasn’t kidnapped into it by white slavers, if that’s what you mean.’
She found a bent and crumpled ready-rolled spliff, a lighter. Sat back against the headboard again and lit up. She coughed and waved little eddies in the sudden cloud of smoke.
‘You want some of this? No? Sure?’ She pulled down a lungful of smoke, h
eld it for a moment and let go. She looked critically at the embered end of the spliff. ‘Thing is, you listen to some twisted evangelical fuck like Simeon Sands, you’d believe we are all sex slaves by any other name, kidnapped, trapped by drugs, victims of our own unclean, incest-aroused lust - I think guys like Sands like that one especially, you hear the way they trot it out. One hand on the pulpit, one hand below, eh.’ She grinned crookedly. ‘But it just ain’t so, Chris. I mean, it isn’t this other thing the industry wants to sell you either. You know, we’re all dripping wet sluts, just can’t wait to get our orifices stuffed. Forget that. You want clinical and jaded, go watch a porno shoot. It’s work, Chris, pure and simple. More or less professional, depending on who you’re working for, better or worse paid ditto. But no one ever put me under pressure to do stuff I wasn’t happy with, and no one tried to stop me when I quit.’
‘Do you think you were typical?’
Liz held down more smoke. Frowned, then let it up. Shook her head. ‘Globally? No. I heard a lot of nasty stories coming out of Costa Rica and Thailand. Still do. But you don’t need me to tell you about that, Chris. This is what you do for a living. Enterprise zones, political instability. Market forces, weak governmental structure, the poor get fucked. Literally, in this case.’
‘Oh, right.’ The casual way she’d said it stung, made him snappish. ‘So everyone you worked with was smiling and happy were they?’
She plumed smoke, looked at him quizzically.
‘No. Even in Copenhagen, you’ve got some fucked-up girls working the trade. That blonde I was with in Donna’s Dominion? Renata something, I think she was Polish. She had some strange ideas, and those tits were just insane. She had to go to three different plastics guys before she found one who’d give her those implants and then she had on-and-off post-op trouble the whole time. So, yeah who knows? Maybe old Simeon was right in her case. Turned on to pornographic filth because her father abused her as a child. But, to be honest, I think she just wasn’t very bright. Yeah, Chris, there are going to be women doing porn who were fucked up by abuse when they were kids, it makes sense. But most of the ones I worked with were just like me — uninhibited, maybe overly exhibitionistic media wannabes, marking time while they looked for their big break. I went out to Copenhagen, looking for work with the pirate ‘casters out of Christiania. I got into Danish porn instead. It was easier, there was a lot more of it about than pirate work, and it was better paid. It was a couple of years, it felt weird and different and maybe taught me a few things about myself that I wouldn’t know otherwise. And I saved a lot of money. End of story. And. Happy ending, yeah.’
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