He stared out the ceiling-to-floor windows. From this height he really was the king of the castle. The apartment was on the thirtieth floor and looked over the whole panorama of downtown Brisbane. Gavin had deliberately left the steel vertical blinds open. The idea that he might be visible to any office worker working late in the building opposite excited him.
His hand crept down his thigh and wrapped itself firmly around his cock. Three strokes later and he was in the middle of an orgy featuring two of his personal assistants and a very cute schoolgirl he’d spotted at a bus stop several days earlier. Groaning, he settled farther into the warm water and submerged his ears, allowing the aquamarine roar of the water to blank out all other sound. The landscape he chose for his fantasy was the empty floor of a parking lot, with his Merc, a toy he’d bought for himself for his forty-fourth birthday, parked in its center.
Gavin liked hard surfaces. To reach orgasm he had to be in an environment where everything that encompassed him was man-made. The three objects of his fantasy lay draped across his Merc like unwrapped Christmas presents. The two women—one a slim blond in her midtwenties, the other a buxom brunette in her late thirties—held the tall curvy schoolgirl between them, spreading her thighs wide. The women’s breasts and shaved genitals had been sprayed with a kind of edible PVC—a recurring motif in Gavin’s fantasies. Gavin, dressed in his tightest, most expensive suit, strode up to the Merc and buried his head between the struggling young girl’s legs, breathing in the pungent smell of pussy and rubber. Nibbling, he began to tear off tiny strips of the PVC with his teeth. The image of his mistress’s glistening childlike slot crowned with the pink bud of its clitoris appeared at the corner of his fantasy like a floating mirage. Feeling guilty about avoiding her phone calls, Gavin consciously dismissed the vision and the hovering vagina vanished instantly. He pulled the last rubber strip from the girl’s genitals and began tonguing her. Above him the other two women were sucking the PVC from each other’s breasts. The moaning grew louder and the schoolgirl pulled him up to her flushed young face. Smiling mysteriously she turned and magically straddled the bonnet of his car, her arse spread high and wide. In a flash he was upon her, his fingers sinking into her creamy flesh. The next second he found himself thrown across the soft fake-leather driver’s seat. It reclined the full one hundred and eighty degrees as one girl sat on his face while another straddled him and he caressed the third with his fingers. His breath grew faster, the quivering of climax building up behind his balls and eyes.
Suddenly the grotesque face of the tramp leered over one girl’s shoulders. Feeling himself instantly wilt Gavin tried to will away the hovering image. The man gestured lewdly and his blackened hairy face faded. Again the property developer was in the grip of his orgy. The encircling tight movements of his hand quickened as nipples, long and hard, brushed tantalizingly across his lips and the smell of hot rubber, faint diesel fuel, the way the schoolgirl’s full arse had splayed over the Merc’s hard metallic bonnet all culminated into a quickening montage that finally sent his seed spurting.
Gavin sat up and opened his eyes. His sperm was a creamy ink blot etching its way through the water like white coral. He watched, fascinated—as he had been all his life—by his own emission. Is this where we begin and end, he wondered, in a shivering moment of forgetting. Such thoughts were the nearest he ever got to introspection.
Sighing, he let the last remnants of tension lift from his weary body, then lathered himself down with a loofah and stepped out of the bath.
In the building opposite, a watching office cleaner reached her own climax with a sudden squeak. Then, as the yawning silence refilled with the buzzing of fluorescent lights and the distant ringing of a fax machine, she pulled down her drab wool skirt and, sighing wistfully, lifted the industrial vacuum cleaner to continue her cleaning.
Leaving a series of damp footprints on the tiled floor, Gavin sat heavily on the toilet and allowed his penis to fall between his legs. After relaxing, he managed to urinate. As his water tinkled down he gazed across the tiles. It was then that he noticed the footprints.
At first he thought there must be some error, some optical illusion. For instead of the unmistakable outline of a man’s foot, he saw something else. Something that, as he stared closer, terrified him more and more.
The footprints were not that of a man. Bigger than his own foot they appeared to belong to a creature whose three elongated toes extended into long sharp claws. The heel had disappeared altogether, in its place the third toe. Every footprint was identical.
Dizzy, Gavin sat back on the toilet seat. He wondered whether he hadn’t been concussed by the fall after all. He closed his eyes, waited for a moment, then slowly opened them. The footprints, although rapidly evaporating, remained the same—undeniable glistening evidence that sickened him with its wrongness, its perversity.
Deciding that the best course was to assume the prints were simply a trick of misplaced body weight and water helped by the strange shadow thrown by the line of pretentious lights fitted at floor height, Gavin reached for the medicine cabinet. He swallowed some sleeping pills and headed for bed.
Flitter, flitter. The beating of enormous feathery wings filled his mind and he sensed the shifting of the air around him by their massive sweep; not birds’ wings but something finer—insects’ wings. Welcoming the drowsiness of the drug as it slithered through his veins Gavin pushed himself farther down into the mattress, aching for oblivion. The noise grew louder. His internal vision blinked into life. He was looking down the length of his own naked body but the angle was wrong. It was as if his neck was two feet long and floating twelve inches above his torso. Pinned there, unable to jerk his way out of the nightmare, he was chilled to the bone.
Suddenly his body hair began to grow, new tufts sprouting on his belly, the skin of his hips, the underside of his elbows. The growth accelerated, and thick black hair massed in dark patches, covering his body like a colony of frenetic ants. He watched horrified, paralyzed, as the spiraling hair just as rapidly thinned to fine white tendrils that snaked across his flesh, tips wavering blindly like a speeded-up time-lapse film of plant roots growing. That’s what they are, roots. With the thought barely formed Gavin realized that the “roots” had all curled downward over the sides of his body and were burrowing into what appeared to be the spongy bed of a marsh.
He woke with a nauseating jolt, opened his mouth to breathe, and realized that he was choking. His mouth was full of a mushy pulp, full to the back of his throat. Gasping, he opened his lips as wide as they could go and reached in. He pulled out a leaf and then another and another. Each unfurled as he dropped it onto the bedspread.
He stared at them, then picked one up. Holding it up to the morning sun he saw that it was like no other leaf he had ever seen. Long and thin, like a fern frond, with delicate seed pods or fruit that resembled tiny cones hanging from the end. A fruit-bearing leaf? It didn’t make sense. Convulsing, he coughed up the last leaf, which flew across the bed and stuck like a lump of green chewing gum to the shade of his bedside lamp. The light stuttered and in a moment he was waking again, this time really waking, curled around a pillow, his eyes gummy and his mouth malodorous. Something about the awaiting day hung over him ominously.
Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, he held his aching head in his hands and tried to remember. Ah, that’s right. Cathy, her lawyer, the mediation. That explained the nightmare—some unconscious fear of being buried? Kids’ stuff. Trust him to be so literal.
A sharp stinging on his back broke his chain of thought. He turned to the mirror—across his shoulders ran three long scratches. Seeping slightly, they resembled claw marks. An image of the footprints from the night before glistened suddenly before him. Panicking he pulled back the sheets to see whether something had scratched him during the night. There was nothing; just the polyester sheet, innocently wrinkled. Slightly cheered Gavin tried smiling but found that his mouth was too gummy. Disgusted with his aging body
he stood and threw the curtains open.
“My client would like to point out that her self-esteem has been seriously undermined by her husband’s actions, and, since the onset of his affair, she has required psychiatric help at great expense.”
Cathy’s lawyer, a woman in her early thirties with sensible spectacles and a profile you could cut glass with, reached over and squeezed Cathy’s hand maternally. Maybe not quite maternally, Gavin noted, wondering whether the lawyer wasn’t in fact a lesbian. Cathy, resplendent and silent in a beige Versace suit and D&G sunglasses she had neglected to remove at the onset of the meeting, rewarded her solicitor with a very slight smile. Cold bitch, Gavin thought, then was dismayed to realize that he still found his estranged wife desirable.
“Well, my client would like to point out that if his wife had sought psychiatric help before the marriage began to deteriorate we might not be sitting here now.”
“That is irrelevant.”
“I don’t think that withholding sex for four years is irrelevant if we are talking about self-esteem. My client is a normal full-blooded male—”
“If he’d needed to have sex he might have chosen to have it with an individual who was not a close associate of Mrs. Tetherhook!”
“The young woman in question was Mrs. Tetherhook’s Pilates teacher not a close associate.”
Frustrated, Gavin leaned forward and slammed his Schaeffer pen onto the walnut veneer. “Look! This is not a fucking dick-pulling competition, let’s cut to the chase.”
He swung around to Cathy, who remained icily impervious.
“What is it that you want? And no fucking bullshit—I’m footing the bills of both these morons.” He paused, fighting the desire to rip his wife’s sunglasses from her face.
They all waited: Gavin, his lawyer, his wife’s lawyer. Barricaded behind her shades, which glinted like the sectioned eyes of a huge blowfly, Cathy remained silent. Then, her half-inch-long pale pink nails barely touching the paper, she pushed a folder across to her lawyer, who flicked it open with a frightening efficiency.
“My client wants half your assets, full custody of all three children, a guarantee that you will cover all school and college fees as needed, plus full expenses of any holidays. You will be allowed weekend access to the children—that is, Sundays. Finally, she wants her name exclusively on the Bridgeport development.”
“But I only used her name for tax purposes!”
“As I understand she is currently part owner. Now she wishes to be complete owner.”
“Never!”
“In that case we have no choice but to proceed to court. However, my client wishes to point out that it could be detrimental to both your finances to undergo an independent government assessment of your assets.”
“You fucking bitch!” Gavin lunged forward only to be pushed back by his lawyer, an otherwise jovial man in his late fifties.
Cathy removed her sunglasses for the first time. She stared at Gavin, her eyes devoid of emotion. “I don’t think you understand. I am genuinely inspired by the development of Bridgeport; I have been from the very beginning. It means as much to me as I know it means to you.”
She smiled slightly and Gavin found himself wondering whether there wasn’t a sadistic streak buried deep within the woman he’d thought he knew. He got up heavily and walked over to the window. Bridgeport. The rounded wall of the tall building glittered in the afternoon sun. It had been a vanity project, the one investment Gavin knew wasn’t going to make him money. Instead it was a bid to immortalize him in the history of Queensland landmarks.
It was a piece of architecture that appeared to defy the laws of physics. A triangular wedge with an adjoining curved wall; a lyrical sculpture that soared up into the humid Brisbane sky, gloriously contemptuous of the predictable rectangular buildings surrounding it.
It was the curved wall, a magnificent wave of reflective glass, that really gave the building its distinctive edge. The initial stages had begun before September 2001 and Gavin had managed to hold on to the project despite the deluge of global disasters that had followed the World Trade Center attack, from the stock market crash through to SARS. There was no way he was going to hand it over to his ex-wife now. Bridgeport was his passport to legitimacy, his homage to Brisvegas.
Standing there Gavin became aware of a faint vibration beneath his feet. For a second he wondered whether there was actually a train going under the building but then the tremor grew to a palpable quiver. The others appeared indifferent: Cathy and her lawyer were in the middle of a whispered conference, while his own solicitor was hunched over a file, his bulbous nose and weathered face puckered in disapproval. They hadn’t noticed anything; could it just be him?
Panicked, Gavin looked back outside. Everything appeared normal, the glittering facade of Bridgeport reflecting back nothing but the calm blue of the sky.
Still the feeling grew that something was terribly wrong. It seemed to Gavin as if the light itself was glaring back at him in defiance. Simultaneously he became aware of a loud rustling, as if an invisible wind had entered the room. Gavin steadied himself against the window ledge, praying that the others would not notice the colossal wave of internal panic that had him pinned.
The rustling, like rats scratching at a thin wall, got louder, assaulting one side of his brain then lunging to the other. Gavin’s knuckles whitened as he clutched at the window ledge. The sound accelerated to the amplified cacophony of a thousand leaves rattling in a hurricane. Suddenly a massive gush knocked him to the carpet.
“Nothing but an excess of ear wax.”
His doctor folded up the auriscope and leaned back in his swivel chair giving Gavin a quizzical look. “Everything else seems normal—blood pressure, heart rate, lungs.”
Gavin stared mournfully at the whitened band of flesh where his wedding ring used to sit. This was what he had been fearing: a verdict of physical normality.
“Given the traumatic nature of recent events in your life…” the doctor ventured.
“Give me a break, Doc. I’ve been through way worse than divorce in my time.”
Ignoring him, the doctor doggedly continued. “I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a panic attack.”
“A panic attack?! But I wasn’t even panicking. It was the sound, that awful loud rustling; I felt like a moth caught up in a wind tunnel…”
“Look, I haven’t entirely ruled out a physical cause. I’ve written a referral for a CAT scan—just in case—and here’s the number of a good friend of mine, a psychologist who specializes in both divorce counseling and panic attacks. One often heralds the onset of the other.”
The depressed property developer tried to distract himself by counting the number of houses he’d bought and sold as the sleek car purred its way through the streets. Panic attack. It made him sound like a real mental case—Jesus, he’d be the laughingstock of the company if it got out to his employees. He’d managed to convinced Cathy and her battleax lawyer that it was an inner ear infection. Last thing he wanted was them claiming he wasn’t mentally fit to have even weekend access to his children.
The opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth interrupted his train of thought. He picked up his mobile and checked the incoming call. It was Amanda, his twenty-three-year-old mistress. He switched the phone off. That was the third time she had tried to reach him that day. In all truth, Gavin had never felt this unsexual in his entire adult life. It wasn’t just the divorce—although the unexpected sensation of loss had caused part of him to retreat—it was also the fact that open access to Amanda was, to his surprise, a big turnoff. She was far more alluring as a clandestine liaison. As soon as he’d been thrown out of the family house and moved into his own flat she had transformed from the mysterious creature whose perfect youth and flattering receptivity had originally captivated him into a needy harridan whose insecurities seemed to multiply by the day.
Besides, the last time they’d been together he’d failed to get an erection—a fact that had s
ecretly festered inside him ever since. It was natural to feel vulnerable given the circumstances, Gavin reminded himself, trying to remember if he’d ever felt this way before. Maybe once: the day his father sat the family down and announced that he had lost the farm. The burly farmer had actually broken down in tears. The sight had so shocked his two sons that later they made a pledge with one another never to weep publicly themselves.
The Merc screeched around the corner and up the ramp into Bridgeport. As soon as the car entered the artificial greenish light of the car park Gavin felt better, as if he was sheltered within a great concrete womb of his own making. It was only on the way to the elevator that he remembered the car park had been the scene of his erotic fantasy two days before. Perhaps there was some potency left in him yet. Cheered, he entered the elevator whistling.
He decided to double his dose of sleeping pills. After an accompanying glass of whiskey, he left a message on Amanda’s landline telling her he couldn’t see her for a couple of weeks. Afterward he slept like a baby, floating in perfect drug-enhanced dreamless slumber.
In the morning he woke groggy but invigorated. He leaped out of bed and even managed a few of the yoga stretches Amanda had taught him to ward off backache. He was in the child’s pose in front of the full-length mirror, staring in admiration at his firm buttocks and long muscular thighs, the comforting weight of his testicles resting against his heels, when he noticed the strange dust. The sole of each foot was covered in a greenish powder, as if he’d been standing in a dried-up riverbed. Where had it come from? He’d only just taken off his perfectly clean nylon socks.
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