by Ed Bemand
“What’s your name?”
“Veronica.”
“Hi Veronica. I’m John.” He had adopted the mask of anonymity long ago when seeking his pleasures. That the mask he had chosen was the stereotype of those in his position was not lost on him.
“What are you looking for?”
“I want you to make me cum. Can you do it?”
“Sure.” She smiled wryly. Who asks a bricklayer if he can lay bricks?
She moved straight from pleasantries to price tags. His nodded agreement was enough that she shut the door.
He drove off. In his meanderings he had spotted a suitable car-park where he was reasonably confident that he would be able to take his pleasures uninterrupted. The girl seemed unaccustomed to silence and was casting furtive glances around the interior of his car. Its size and reasonably expensive nature seemed to reassure her, but he got the impression that she was looking for some warning sign.
He had already put the cash he anticipated to need in the pocket in the door earlier that night so that he would have it ready without need for embarrassed fumbling. He held it up between his fingers. It was slightly more than she had asked for, not by a huge margin, but it was what he assumed it would take to make sure that she did what he needed with more than adequate enthusiasm. She nodded and shrugged. He stopped the car. They were now parked somewhere reasonably discrete.
“You want it here?”
“Why not?”
She shrugged.
“Whatever.” It didn’t matter to her much really. The quicker she was done here the quicker she could be back on her corner looking for her next. If she could deal with a few tonight she’d have enough to get what she needed and that was all that mattered.
Alastair undid his belt, unzipped his fly and pulled his trousers down enough that his cock hung freely below his shirt. He had been getting harder throughout his drive. Surely she should be grateful that he had warmed himself up. She reached towards his cock tentatively with her fingers, tracing its curve, lifting it and letting it fall. It was swollen but not hard enough to stand up. She curled her fingers around it and started to tug on it. Her hands were cold from the night air. Her strokes were hurried and a little rough but they got his blood flowing. When he was growing harder she leaned over the divide between their seats and brought her mouth closer to its head. She closed her lips around it and started to suck gently, almost experimentally. He didn’t taste great but it wasn’t any worse than she was forced to put up with from most of the people she dealt with.
After a few minutes of sucking and stroking she was starting to feel tired but didn’t seem to be getting much progress out of it. She pulled back from it to take a break and catch her breath. There wasn’t enough room to get really comfy in the car but she swapped hands to see if it would make any difference. She released her grip on his cock and it flopped back down.
“What have you stopped for? I’m not done yet.”
“You’ve paid me to suck your dick and I’m doing it. It’s not my fault if you can’t get hard.”
“I’m paying you to make me cum, so do it.”
Whether it was fear or professional obligation that motivated her, she kept trying. She sucked harder on the head, ran her fingers over the shaft, massaged his balls, squeezed them hard, even warily pressed her fingers against his anus, wary because for every man that screamed and moaned at that touch there were usually two that objected, thinking it somehow “made them gay”. It didn’t matter. She kept pushing and squeezing and sucking and licking, but his cock was growing softer and smaller. It was limp and flaccid, a failed finger of flesh that seemed to be shrh4ivelling under her contact rather than swelling. She admitted defeat.
“It isn’t going to happen.”
“And you think that’s my fault?”
“It’s no-ones fault, you just can’t do it.”
“What are you saying, that I’m impotent?”
She shrugged, knowing what she thought but doubting that he wanted to hear it.
“You’re not leaving ’til I’m done.”
“Then take a Viagra and come back with a hard-on. There’s no point flogging this dead horse anymore.”
“Dead is it?” He reached down and grabbed at his cock, frantically pumping it, blindly hoping that his own grip would stimulate that which hers had failed to.
“I’m leaving.” She reached for the door handle.
“No you’re fucking not.” He reached out and tapped a button on the dashboard. There were audible clicks as the central locking engaged.
“Open the fucking door.”
“Not ’til you’ve finished sucking my cock.”
He reached his hand towards her hair, intent on pushing her head back into his lap. He clutched the brittle, over-bleached strands. He pulled her towards him, tugging a few hairs from her scalp. She cried out in rage. She grabbed at anything to help her.
There was a pen in the compartment in front of the gear-stick. It was a fountain pen he had been given many years ago by his boss the first time that he had closed a major deal, more than twenty years ago. It was tasteful but expensive, with silver fittings that had weathered the years well and a blue enamel finish that had always spoken of opulence to him. He had kept it close by ever since. He felt like it added a sense of grandeur to the signing of contracts that they were done with a proper pen. He habitually used a rich permanent blue ink in this pen, the permanency of the ink was like a sign of the permanency of the contract.
She grabbed at the pen, her finger topped with a nail coated in chipped polish flicked at the lid, spinning it off and sending it spiralling into the darkness of the foot-well. The nib of the pen was of gold-plated rhodium and it had lasted the years undamaged. Holding it like a dagger, she stabbed it down into his thigh. The nib bit deep into his flesh and he cried out. She hit the button for the central locking. The drama he had made of locking it had given her plenty of time to see where it was. He reached down and pulled the pen from his thigh. His trousers were down and the pain caused him to vent his fury by throwing the pen after her as she opened the door and ran away into the night. There was no point in chasing her. He wasn’t much of a runner at the best of times and having just been stabbed in the leg he didn’t want to even try. He leaned across and pulled the passenger-side door shut. His leg was growing wet from blood and ink but he didn’t want to linger to investigate the damage. He drove back to his hotel.
His leg was hurting a lot by the time he had reached his room and shut the door behind him. His trousers were ruined. The hole the pen had made was quite small but ink and blood had soaked through the fabric.
He sat on the edge of the bath, naked from the waist down but for his socks, his shirt tails hanging and the cold ceramic of the bath digging unpleasantly into his buttocks. He washed the blood and ink away. The nib had sunk deeply into his flesh but a plaster was enough to cover the wound.
He spent hours in his hotel room that night watching over-priced pornography and desperately wanking his cock, but it stubbornly refused him. She had been right. It was dead. The room-service charge for it was enough that it earned a sly smile from the clerk the next morning when he settled his bill. It wasn’t something he usually ever bothered with, it wasn’t like he’d had the need. Most stuff he charged straight to company expenses but he couldn’t face the thought of the accountants noticing just how much porn he had watched. He paid using his own personal card. Hopefully his wife wouldn’t notice it when the bill came through.
For the rest of his life he carried a blue splodge on his thigh from the ink that had suffused his flesh, an inadvertent tattoo that never faded. Maybe brothels weren’t so bad after all.
Seven: When Antoine tried to get over her
Many people will have heard before of the great artist Antoine. He was a tragic figure and possibly one of the greatest artists of recent years. His path was set by the accidental death of his beautiful young lover Adrienne, drowned when the car she was in came
off the road and ended up in a river.
Unable to accept the cruelness of fate Antoine stole her corpse and attempted to preserve her, fighting to retain her beauty with crude attempts at embalming. He spent weeks painting pictures of her as she rotted.
When his actions were discovered he was treated as a criminal. His paintings and Adrienne’s remains were seized and he was taken into custody. His guilt was quickly established and he was forced to spend time in a psychiatric facility.
During Antoine’s incarceration, a wily chancer by the name of Marcel Gautier heard his story in the media and was savvy enough to see the potential in Antoine’s work. He knew that there was a fortune that could be made here by the right person. With the conclusion of the court case the criminal justice system had no particular use for Antoine’s paintings of Adrienne, but it was not in the bureaucracy’s nature to voluntarily give back anything it took so they were left to languish on a shelf deep in the archives. All it took was a discrete exchange of currency and he was granted access to them.
All of the paintings and drawings that Antoine had produced had been seized as evidence. It was a substantial collection. He had been a prolific painter for years and had sold very few of them. The earlier works weren’t that interesting, bland landscapes and a stack of nudes that were technically proficient but failed to actually say anything or provoke a reaction.
He reached the pictures of Adrienne. Again, they were mostly nudes, all of the same pretty brunette. He had seen her photo on the news during the trial. She had been nobody in particular in life, just another fame-seeking young beauty.
Gautier could tell immediately when the pictures moved from depiction of Adrienne in life to her corpse. There was a marked shift in technique. Neat, careful brushwork was replaced by jagged sweeps of colour, but however bold the work it retained control in its excesses. It was still clearly the work of the same talent, but it had found its voice.
Of course, Gautier had seen a couple of the paintings in the media already. They had been used as evidence in court of the derangement of Antoine’s mind. Most of the paintings had been deemed too offensive to show in their entirety even in the context of a news report but careful editing and framing had given snapshots that had been reused every time the case was referred to, along-side the same photo of Adrienne, smiling in close-up.
The next step called for more tact and the application of psychology. Gautier took steps to arrange a visit with Antoine. He was still being held in a secure institution. He told the nurse that he was Antoine’s agent. Antoine consented to see him. He seemed lost and heartbroken. His love was dead and his attempts to memorialise her had come to nothing.
“I didn’t know I had an agent.”
“All you have to do is sign these papers and you will and I’ll be able to start work. Just think how much money we can make.”
“I don’t care about money.”
“Even if you don’t care, wouldn’t it be better to have it? Just say the word and I’ll take care of the details.”
“Exploiting her for profit… that would be a debasement of her memory.”
“What value does your work have sat in a dusty vault somewhere. You should give the world the chance to see it, let them appreciate what you did.”
“It isn’t about me.”
“Then what about her? Don’t you want to let the world see her beauty? Shouldn’t you do everything that you can to make sure that it remembers her? Isn’t that the fitting testament to your love?”
Gautier had said the right thing. Antoine signed the papers and gave him the authority to do what he thought best to bring Antoine’s work to the world, for a percentage of the profits, of course.
The pictures that Antoine had created were conventional enough, just two dozen paintings of a pretty girl. It was the colours that showed the truth of them. She changed over the course of the series, as life fled and decay consumed her. There was nothing so remarkable about them, but apparently in them people could see the depth of feeling that he had experienced when he had created them. Antoine wasn’t convinced. How many of them would be saying that they could see so much in his work if they hadn’t already heard his story in the media?
The reception to the pictures was vociferous and divided, which, as Gautier had told him, was perfect. Divisive art was art that people talked about and being talked about was a crucial step in converting artistic endeavours into real profit.
There were many that accused him of diabolical perversions but everything Antoine did was motivated by love. How could anyone fail to see the beauty that he was creating in his work? The original mortal beauty was intensified remarkably and became something both tragic and immortal. How could anyone fail to see the power of what he was creating? It didn’t matter anyway. People knew who Antoine was and they were eager to see what he would do next.
Gautier exploited the situation masterfully. Soon, between the galleries vying for Antoine’s work and private investors that had heard the buzz around him and automatically equated sensationalist media reactions with profundity in the work, there was a lot of money being made from Antoine’s work. The humour of the situation did not escape Antoine. When all he did was paint, nobody had been interested. Now that he painted the corpse of his dead lover that he had lived with for more than a month people wanted to know more.
The paintings of his that proved valuable were all of Adrienne as a corpse. The many paintings that he had made of her when she was alive were barely even mentioned. Nobody wanted to include them in the exhibition. It hurt him that the attempts he had made to capture the beauty of his great love when she was vital were spurned while those he had made of her when she was a putrescent corpse were hailed as great.
The attention that his art was getting retrospectively applied artistic justifications to his actions. He was released from the institution. Apparently he was sane now. He didn’t feel any different. Just bored and empty.
It wasn’t something that he wanted to talk about but he had been obliged to many times. To the police that arrested him, the psychiatrists in the facility he was held and worst of all to the countless journalists and slack-jawed troglodytes that attended his openings and who were, his agent insisted, a vital component in his being an artist.
Art in a vacuum could be powerful and meaningful to its creator but without an audience to appreciate and preferably pay for his work, what exactly was the point? Not that Antoine really cared. He needed little and his innate artistic obstinacy made him want to refuse but however little one might value money for its own sake, food is still needed and rent still has to be paid and it was much easier to do those things by spending a couple of hours indulging idiots by answering their facile questions than it was by getting a job and Antoine couldn’t imagine that anyone would give him a real job. He was a famous artist now. Wasn’t that what he had always wanted? Just like her. Adrienne had always wanted to be famous, a model, looked at and adored by millions. She had certainly been looked at by millions now.
He had painted her to be looked at by people, but their scrutiny of the projection of such a raw part of his being was unsettling for him. People felt like they had the right to talk about him personally because of his art. The pictures were never supposed to be about him. They were about Adrienne. People wanted to tell him what the pictures meant about him, as if his pictures gave people the right to open him up and ghoulishly rummage around in his pain. It felt exploitative, but how could he complain? Where before he had struggled to sell his pieces, now people were eager to buy them.
Gautier took care of everything. Antoine didn’t care. He had enough money to pay the rent on his studio and buy the food, wine and art supplies that he needed. What more could he want?
He had painted throughout his time in the institution but he had known enough to abandon his former muse in his work. He had to try to let go of her, however much it hurt to consider it. She was his past and he had nothing left to create from her. The staff supervisin
g him would never have tolerated it anyway. Mostly he painted landscapes. Clichés really, they were just attempts to portray clear and simple beauty in his renderings of the sky, a hill, a tree. They meant nothing.
Outside of the institution and free from the watchful gaze of the doctors he was freer to explore himself and find something new to express, but what was there for him? The only things he had done that people valued were the product of the most agonising trauma of his life and that was not a sensation that could be simply reproduced on demand. Technically he found his skills were progressing as practice and experience improved his brush-strokes but artistically he was lost. Without even the pain of Adrienne he was nothing. She was all that he had been able to portray as true art.
He was able to produce more of his new style of stark, expressive paintings regularly. They weren’t great, but they were plentiful. Most of them were variations on the theme of a sunset. The suns dying blaze sent flames through the clouds and seemed to be reaching out to set light to the land beneath. He favoured strong, harsh colours. They made the images seem unreal but intensified their emotion. They didn’t offer any profound insight into being, but they were evocative. He didn’t paint any more female nudes.