by Ben Foster
We raised our glasses to toast this claim.
The grouse had a strong, smoky taste, and it was the first time I had eaten roast potatoes as good as those my Gran used to make. I glanced at the royal guest across the dining hall and it struck me that in Gran’s worldview there was a glaring contradiction. She was a rebel, dyed in the wool Labour, anti-establishment, but in the family photograph album I had inherited there was a picture of Charles and Lady Diana.
Next time I had a free moment, I went to the crematorium to leave a bunch of flowers on the grassy knoll where Gran’s ashes were supposed to have been buried, the first time I had done that since she’d died.
At Christmas, I visited The Lodge with some new books and board games. We spent the holidays with mum in Lowestoft, then took the kids back to the Canary Islands, which I had promised but could ill-afford. The children deserved a treat, I had seen so little of them, and I needed a rest.
The closing months of 2007 had been a struggle. Josh, one of my tenants, an IT graduate who had been working as a security analyst in a software start-up, lost his job and scarpered back to Liverpool leaving two months’ rent unpaid. It was another two months before the agent found a new tenant, a Nigerian girl studying to be a beauty therapist at Guildford College. It was short term, but she paid in advance to the end of her course in July.
I had worked most rest days to cover our costs and, with Dee-Dee, battled with Christian and Anastasia for a share of the Four-Hands treatment. Denny Doyle had left Southley to work in Dubai and had not been replaced. We were still busy, but change was in the air and Dee-Dee needed those tips, the same as me. Thanks to Rudy Johnson, she had got a mortgage on her own flat and had learned how to turn every massage into a seduction. We were living the working-class dream. We may have sold our souls to the sex trade, but we were on the property ladder.
It was at the beginning of 2008, when I learned that the world had become ‘global.’ I heard the word on the BBC news used to describe corporations, banking, finance, the housing market. In the United States, mortgage defaults began to rise as property prices started to fall. Lenders had allowed people with insufficient assets to take out what they called subprime mortgages. When they couldn’t keep up the payments, the banks put in claims that drove insurance companies into bankruptcy, pushing down stock market prices in Wall Street and London. It wasn’t a tidal wave, but Josh, my tenant, had lost his job when the ripples reached Guildford.
When I asked Rudy if the same could happen here, he just laughed. He was as buoyant as ever, his smile gleaming after a session with Dee-Dee. Business goes through natural adjustments. Foreign investors were flocking to London, Russians, Malaysians, Chinese. The housing market had become ‘over-heated,’ but it would settle down and continue its ‘upward trajectory.’
‘Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit,’ he said, quoting Napoleon Hill. ‘If there’s a dip in house prices, that’s the time to buy.’
Rudy was like cocaine. I felt a lift when I saw him, but drug highs never last. I was grateful that my flats were occupied and I carried on like the rest of the global world in an impassive daze. I played Pink Floyd on the stereo and gunned the black Range Rover down the outside lane at stupid speeds. I manipulated every woman who entered the massage suite and, when the treatment ended in a moment of ecstasy, left her with the impression that it had never happened before. Then I went through spells of hating myself for being a user. I’d try playing it straight, only to watch my tips decline like the stock market.
I told myself I wasn’t trapped, but I was. I had grown used to providing my family with a certain standard of living. George would be following Ollie into Willington in the autumn. When Claire started taking ballet lessons, Vivienne sent her two outfits in pink and white from Harrods. Of course, they didn’t cost anything. They were on someone’s account. But now Claire had found where she belonged: on stage, the prima ballerina. The lessons meant another weekly bill.
Vivienne had bought a rundown Ottoman mansion on the Turkish Mediterranean. I managed to get three free days by working double-shifts and told Kelly I was going to treat a patient with a slipped disc. One more lie hardly mattered. I flew alone on a private plane to Antalya. Vivienne was waiting at the airport. She was all in white, a kaftan, harem pants, her hair wrapped in a turban, a turquoise necklace to match her eyes.
We drove through country lanes between fruit fields to a house with a walled courtyard where workmen were painting, cleaning, putting new beams on the roof. The site manager was a middle-aged man with sharp brown eyes and a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth like an old gangster. When Vivienne stepped from the car, he bowed low, not in a humble way, but an old-fashioned way that showed respect. She had learned a few words of Turkish. Whatever it was she said made him laugh and he bowed again.
When she introduced us, he looked deep into my eyes as if he were her father and crushed my fingers as we shook hands.
One of the workmen carried my bag upstairs to a room with faded wall hangings, heavy furniture and yellowing photographs of soldiers on horseback with fezzes and long rifles. Vivienne’s apartment in London was white, clean, minimalist. The house with its view of the sea and Greek islands dotted along the horizon was the opposite. Everything needed to be cleaned and restored, but she was content, more herself outside England with its invisible pressure, of things you do and don’t do. In Turkey, we weren’t upper-class and working-class. We were just two more foreigners.
In the bazaar in Bodrum, we drank hot sweet tea from small glasses – burning our fingertips. She bought brass candlesticks and slippers with curled up toes. We made love in an old bed that creaked with the moon watching through the open window. We drove to small villages and sat at rickety tables beneath giant fig trees. We drank cold beer and visited the Sanctuary of Apollo. It was mid-July, hot and dusty.
‘Roman travellers came here to see the oracle and divine the future.’
‘Like us?’ I said.
‘But we don’t have to worry about the Persians.’
She took my hand and we ran up the temple steps. The marble columns were warm to the touch and golden in the sunset. We stood close but didn’t kiss. She was mindful of the customs. I could smell wood smoke and roasting meat.
‘I’m starving,’ I said.
‘You eat like a fisherman.’
‘What do fishermen eat?’
‘The wind,’ she replied.
We drove into Bodrum and ate lamb with grape sauce. We walked around the harbour looking at the boats. She pulled close and held me tightly. It felt like the first time we met, magical, intense, confusing. Vivienne knew everything about me, who I was, what I did. But I was just a single thread in the tapestry of her life. I knew almost nothing about her. I would search the internet and discover obscure articles she had written for Sunday magazines, the death of the honey bee, English teeth, the Dragon’s Blood trees on the lost island of Socotra with herself in Arabic dress pictured beneath those rare trees found nowhere else on earth.
The following morning, we rented a boat and sailed to the island of Kos to see the ruins of Neratzia, a Knights Templar fortress. We stood on the battlements and stared back across the sea to Turkey. I read the brochure, but the history meant nothing to me. I didn’t know the before and after, the connections. I had thought it clever to avoid the lessons at school and regretted it. I didn’t want my children to make the same mistake.
26
EVERYONE WEARS A MASK
I flew back alone to London and didn’t see Vivienne again until the end of July. I had been invited to a masked ball at an estate in Scotland and we met at City Airport. We took off in the Learjet with Maggs, James Chipping, Maddy Page, Zara Swift and two men I had never met before. One was a French politician, loud and opinionated. The other was a Queen’s Counsel, softly spoken, extremely polite and famous for taking on human rights cases.
We arrived in the ear
ly evening at a castle that looked as if it had been built in the time of King Arthur. It was huge with square towers, a moat and a drawbridge. There must have been fifty bedrooms, but there were many more guests and our party shared a room overlooking dense pine woods rising into irregular mountains.
We changed into costumes. Vivienne was in ballerina mode, a black swan with a black feather mask. Maggs was the perfect Marie Antoinette with a big dress, big hair, an elaborate mask, her bust like a cake straight from the oven. Maddy Page and Zara Swift were limber and feline in animal heads and body-paint. The French politician dressed as the musketeer d’Artagnan with a floppy hat and sword. The lawyer was a graceful Harlequin and James Chipping an unlikely Superman.
Vivienne never travelled light and had brought in a large trunk a costume for me consisting of a white tailed suit, white shirt, white shoes and a white tie. She painted my face white and I looked out through the slits of a white mask she buckled at the back of my head. On top of my head, she placed a white top hat.
‘Why the white suit?’ I asked her.
‘Because it’s you,’ she said. ‘You don’t wear a mask to hide yourself, but to reveal who you really are.’
‘And you’re a black swan?’
‘Sometimes I’m a white swan.’
As the sun went down, we trooped down the stairs and crossed the drawbridge. Yellow lanterns hung in the trees and nude girls in fox masks and foxtail butt-plugs streaked through the shadows. They were hunted by packs of men who ravished them, then sent them on their way to be caught and ravaged again. It was rapid, exhilarating. There were whoops and whistles. The French politician joined the pack and a man in a scarlet jacket blew a brass horn every time a girl was caught and spread out on her back.
‘Don’t you want to join in?’ Vivienne asked.
‘No. Do you?’ I said.
‘Do you want me to?’
‘No.’
She lifted her mask. ‘We are here at the same time. It is not the same as being here together.’
‘I know that.’
She wandered off with Maddy and Zara. Superman appeared at my side as they vanished from view.
‘Powerful men need a woman as a sign of their power,’ he said. ‘Strong women don’t need a man. She either wants him or she doesn’t.’
‘Meaning?’ I asked.
‘There is never one meaning to anything, Ben.’
We watched as the foxes were caught and the hounds gave them what they had been paid to provide – £5,000 each for the night, according to James. The girls were Russian, he said, new on the scene, blondes with perfect figures and white skin covered in mud and bruises. We cheered as they skipped, tails bobbing, back across the drawbridge into the castle.
The scene was something you might see in a film set in the past or the future. The masks had freed us from normal conventions and turned the crowd into a noisy mob. Men swaggered around with swords, courtiers and cavaliers from various ages. Others were relaxed in leather and chains. There were vampires, the Phantom of the Opera, a Chinese man in a red sarong, a man in a George Bush mask, perhaps it was George Bush? There jesters and clowns, a hangman and an Inquisitor, both in hoods. The women were more exotic, a flock of angels, French maids, courtesans, birds of paradise, the Queen of Hearts. Some of the guests had gone all out with costumes that were stunning and extravagant. Others, girls mostly, were more eye-catching in nothing but their masks.
The moon was rising. We went back into the castle. Musicians in black wearing masks from the new film V for Vendetta played and guests danced beneath ancient candelabra in the baronial hall with armour decorating the walls. The air smelled of candlewax and marijuana. Young men and women in erotic costume sidled through the masquerade with trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres. A midget in the robes of a bishop moved through the hall with lines of cocaine in neat rows on a white mortarboard hat balanced cautiously on his head. In his hand he held a goblet containing short white straws.
We stopped to watch the George Bush look alike ramming into a girl dressed as an Arabic princess.
‘How very apt,’ James said.
I had been introduced once as a highwire walker, so it came as no surprise when James presented me as an MI6 agent to a Russian woman dressed as a princess and holding a mask on a stick. She asked me if I had any new information on Aleksandr Litvinenko, the former Russian security officer who had died from radioactive poisoning – murdered, it was thought, by the Russian secret service.
‘Not at present,’ I said.
‘Insider knowledge is like insider trading,’ James added, ‘and best not spoken of.’
‘The hypocrisy of you English!’ she snapped, before swirling off in her ball gown.
‘The Russians aren’t coming,’ he whispered. ‘They’re here, and they’re here to stay.’
We moved on. I listened as a red devil in a long cape and horns said the war in Iraq was going so poorly, Labour would soon be out on their ears. His companion, the hangman, raised his glass and his voice thundered through his hood. ‘We’ll be able to get rid of the damned health service when we’re back, dumb the thing down and sell it off piecemeal.’
They clinked glasses and I wondered if Vivienne was right, that their costumes revealed who they really were.
Apart from the tall Russian girls, there were oligarchs, cabinet ministers, MPs, members of the House of Lords, the titled, and those who could be described as celebrities were at the ball in their private capacity as members of the elite. We spoke to two American bankers, new to London, who had paid £10,000 to be invited. They had not come for the sex, it was optional, but to make contacts. What everyone had in common was the knowledge that networks which begin at private schools continue at masked balls where you can deny you were ever there.
Why was I there? I wasn’t accompanying Vivienne or Maggs. I was a bit player, an extra. I was a trusted gigolo, trusted to perform, trusted to keep my mouth shut, trusted to have had regular checks for HIV and sexually transmitted diseases. Which I did. I was trusted to take the cash, live the life, lie to my family. I was a male prostitute adding a little balance to the legion of young girls drafted in to open their legs for the rich and famous.
The hall slowly emptied. People wandered upstairs. In every room I saw mating couples, threesomes, moresomes. I saw a girl on all fours giving head to a flabby old guy in a mask with a long nose while another flabby old guy dressed as the Marquis de Sade was giving it to her from behind. Similar scenes were repeated in one room after the after. I saw Vivienne whipping a woman in red. When she caught my eye, it occurred to me how easy I was to spot, the tall man in white in the gloom of the orgy.
I recognised Angela Hartley by the seven moles that formed the shape of the Big Dipper on her upper thigh. In saw Maddy and Zara like a pair of cats lapping at the genitals of Viking in a horned metal mask. The midget with the head tray continued to circle and I wasn’t surprised to see Flippo – Filippo Borghese Pecci – dressed as a razor blade.
‘Is that you?’ he said. ‘You look so classy.’
‘It’s only a mask,’ I replied.
He laughed and gazed around the room. ‘This is what it must have been like in the last days of Rome.’
He took the hand of the Queen of Hearts and they wandered off. If I was there to entertain, I wasn’t very entertaining. When sex is your living, an orgy is overkill. I drank a lot. I descended the long flight of stairs and crossed the drawbridge into the quiet of the trees. Nothing stirred. There were no birds. Perhaps they had shot them all.
The silence was broken as a car started and I watched two cones of light move through the woods and vanish into the distance. It was a clear starry night like you get sometimes when you are out at sea laying nets and life for a few moments is in prefect harmony. After my dad died, I often went down to the harbour with his old pair of binoculars to study the boats moving across the horizon. I knew he had drowned. I went to the funeral. I shook hands with the fishermen who had tried t
o save him. But I had got it into my mind it could have been a mistake, that somebody else was in the coffin, and my dad was on board one of those boats finally coming home.
When I returned to the castle, a lot of people were sleeping, drugged, drunk, sated. In some rooms, they carried on eking out vague pleasures from the dead hours after the musicians stopped playing. Vivienne was wearing her black strap-on which she had inserted into Superman while he bent over the groin of the Harlequin.
She waved her fingers for me to come closer. She slipped her tongue into my mouth through the slit in the mask, then whispered in my ear.
‘I love you.’
It was the saddest thing anyone had ever said to me.
The orgy went on all night. The costumes lost their elegance in the light of day and most people had abandoned their masks. Tables were erected in the baronial hall where a traditional English breakfast was served.
We were due to fly back to London at four that afternoon, allowing me to get home and back to Southley the following day. When we arrived at the airport, we learned that the pilot, a man of my age, had suffered a heart attack and had been rushed to the nearest hospital. Another pilot was on the way to Edinburgh by train, and we would leave as soon as he arrived.
This was an amusing turn of events for the rest of the group. They enjoyed the unexpected. But it meant I would be away for an extra day. I called Kelly first, then Bethany to explain what had happened.
‘I’ll see you when you deign to appear,’ Bethany said, and put the phone down.
I arrived back at work a day late, the first time it had happened, and Bethany behaved as if I had molested one of the clients.
‘Tell me again what happened, I don’t think I heard you properly?’ she said.
‘I was at a party in Scotland. The pilot had a heart attack . . . ’