Surrender to Mr. X (19 page)

“Floor clean,” said Lam. “You good girl.”

I was halfway through the polishing when Lam
came in with a pile of clothes, handed them over, and said, “Club time now. You work.”

Tight red satin blouse, tight red satin skirt, black net stockings and suspenders, black patent shoes with very long toes, no knickers, red plastic bag, hoop earrings. Traditional tarts' wear, except no tart I know would ever wear it.

Also what looked like a white mink coat, which I certainly would not wear.

“Wear coat,” said Lam.

“Not wear dead animals,” I said. “Won't.”

My heart beat faster at this display of defiance. I half expected him to roll me up in the coat and throw me effortlessly against the wall, but he just looked at me impassively as if computing something and then said “upstairs now,” and so we went up to the attic, leaving the coat behind.
The Blue Box
had not been touched since I left. The easel was looking positively dusty. But Ray sat bolt upright on the sofa looking purposeful and Alden was looking brisk and positive in his chair. The fire's faux flames flickered.

I felt I was attending an interview, and it wasn't necessarily going to go well for me.

“Well Joan,” said Alden. “I've probably lost a client, Ray's bloody paintbrush won't stick up. Here we are, up shit creek without a canoe. We're going to plan B: we start tonight. I hope you're feeling fresh and rested after your holiday.”

I said, “Yes thank you, I am.” I almost said “sir.” If
you scrub and polish floors you start thinking and behaving like the maid. And I was in this ridiculous outfit. And I was—I assume that my American readers know that we English are masters, and mistresses of understatement—rather hoping to get laid.

“Look into my eyes,” said Ray. I did. He seemed very decisive today, which was nice; shame he hadn't done any painting. “There are going to be no mistakes this time.”

After that it's not exactly memory, it's snapshots or flashbacks. They come to me unasked, like pop-ups on a computer: not necessarily in date order, stubbornly clinging to the screen long after the command to go. Vanessa observes the activities of Joan, and marvels: disassociates herself from them but is intrigued, even fascinated by what goes on. Sometimes Joan knows she is Joan: sometimes she thinks she is whatever Alden or Ray tell her she is. Sometimes Joan play-acts panic and distress: sometimes Joan and Vanessa are as one and I know then that one day we will leave all this behind.

Joan is happily shopping at the farmer's market for organic food for Alden's and Ray's—and of course her own—dinner, and has a sudden vision of herself suspended naked by an intricate mesh of knots, swinging to and fro at the eye level of observers, while a master of Japanese rope bondage demonstrates his technique to an audience of middle-aged men. She can stare closer at the snapshot, and see that it's been taken with a flash, that it's night, the background is
the Divan Club in Soho: Alden and his wheelchair are there, also Ray is leaning against the bar, but there is no sign of Lam. She remembers odd details: the gathering was called a “munch,” the tutor comes from Portland, Oregon, that someone's mobile rang and there was murmur of discontent. That her neck fell elegantly back as she swung: that it was not painful so long as she submitted to the ropes and did not struggle, but that her hair swept the ground and she worried about it gathering dust and dirt. Beyond that, nothing. She remembers the postcard but not the context of the incident.

She has pieced together quite a lot from postcards, and from bits of information let slip by Alden and Ray when she is not under will, when she goes about her menial business in the house: an ordinary girl who just happens to be living and sleeping with two guys and doing their housework and shopping because she loves them. She is so adept at this performance—it is a performance? Surely so—that Alden and Ray are quite taken in by it, and forget she's there and talk without inhibition. Thus she is able to build up a picture of what happened in the weeks of her lovers' and masters' contingency arrangements while they waited for the technology to be restored which would allow their main game to resume.

Joan is to work nightly at the Divan Club. Film, with soundtrack, can be shot here on conventional digital equipment, of saleable quality, and endlessly
editable. There are hidden cameras, and not so hidden ones. Alden has taken a financial interest in the establishment. He has lost several Arts-Intrinsick commissions: the reward for spreading his talents too widely, concentrating too much on his music, and not enough on his design skills, or stroking rich matrons. If Lady Daisy O does not get
The Blue Box
installed in time there will be hell to pay, and he will get the invoice. But now his cash-flow problems are already on the way to being solved.

Ray needs his erotic responses stimulated further to help him get on with the work. Simple threesomes and a modicum of bondage are no longer enough to keep him from tossing his brush into the electric fire. He is impressed by the drama of his own desperation. He has persuaded himself that any scruples he has about what Alden might make me do under will are of no weight when set against his sacred and imperative duty to paint. He has persuaded himself thus that the decisions about what I am to get up to are Alden's, “Art's,” mine, whoever's, but not his any more.

Lam will be Joan's bodyguard. Alden will have to make do somehow without him. Financial survival is worth a bit of slumming. My inhibitions about remembering Lam's involvement during the two weeks are strong. He is not in the Japanese Bondage snapshot though he is to be seen in the Violated Bride clip, hauling me out of a bath before I drowned. Suffocation fetishists tread a fine line, and can get carried away.
The trauma from that
mise en scène
is one that has not been wiped from my mind: I guess their excitement must have just made them forget to say the exit word. So I must have made an impression, I must have been pretty good. The body remembers what the mind does not. I would find myself trembling during the day, or crying for no reason.

T
HE
D
lVAN
C
LUB, IN
Greek Street, Soho was in a basement which stretched under the whole block all the way through to Frith Street and, with a further emergency exit into an alley which led into Old Compton Street between where they each intersected with it. It was members-only, and security was efficient and professional. The interior was made over in a mixture of Ottoman Empire and Arabian Nights, all marble and mosaics, lanterns and feather plumes, jewel colors, reclining sofas and subdued lights. The barman wore a white turban and silk balloon trousers. The bar was glass: the stools traditional, the glasses you drank from were Venetian ware and elaborate to the point of folly. But the clients liked them, and they were paying. You could bring your wife here, but by no means everybody did.

A man and a woman managed the place: an unpleasant couple called Clive and Audrey, about whom I have nothing nice to say. At all. Clive had
a bouncer's build, a bald head and a red mustache and looked very perverse to me when I first saw him—he wore an embroidered green silk blouson, golden slippers with curling points, yellow bejeweled turban and pantaloons and a scimitar tucked into the sash. Audrey had a big-jawed face, hard eyes, and dried-out blond hair with split ends. She wore heavy silk caftans embroidered with gold thread, in a different color every day. It didn't matter what she wore: if she'd dressed like Mother Teresa she'd still look like the Madame she was, a dealer in flesh. She did not like me, I did not like her and we both knew what the score was. She had not wanted to take me on, saying I trouble, too well-spoken, it would put the clients off. But Alden insisted. He had more insight than her, for I was to prove so popular with the clients that she was able to jack the prices they paid for me, for my various services up, and up: and up. She hated me the more for proving her wrong.

So who got the money? Not me: I didn't, because Alden and Ray insisted that I worked for the simple love of sex. Under will, I was happy to participate.

There was a lesbian night on Wednesdays, and every night was topless night. Loki would deliver me to the Divan, and collect me afterward. Sometimes Alden and Ray would come with me and sit beside me until a client asked me to dance or go with him to the Joy Room, otherwise known as the Dungeon. This was badly lit with optional glaring spotlights, painted in
black and scarlet, and kitted out with every variety of bondage and fetish accessory.

Sunday I was allowed off. Alden and Ray liked to have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and peas for Sunday lunch, and they liked me home to prepare it. I was happy to. They took its excellence for granted and I longed for them to ask someone else to lunch who would at least enthuse a bit, but they never did. Lam was a vegan and didn't eat meat and wanted roast potatoes but not done in the beef drippings so these had to be done separately in oil.

Roast dinners create a lot of dirty dishes, but none of them ever offered to help. They'd watch football or a film while I cleared up. After that I could get away and catch up on some sleep. In the evening I would go up to the studio and try and assist Alden and Ray with their sexual problems—as I often did when I got back from the Divan—but Alden remained in Tantric mode and couldn't find a way out of it. Ray's brush stayed in the turpentine.

I slept in most mornings except Mondays, when I'd go to Harrods for hair treatment, facial, manicure, pedicure, eyebrow plucking and so forth. Before I set off for the Divan, at around eight, Lam would give me a massage. I grew to like them. His fingers were damp but strong; they seemed to feed strength into me. I told Ray once how restorative the massages were, and he just laughed and said he wasn't surprised. I must
remember Lam was a “multi-dimensional of the lighted realms.”

Being “under will” at the time, I took that on board, if only I daresay because the “lighted realms” sounded so much more cheerful than the dark shadows and guttering candles of the Divan's dungeon. After that Lam seemed less alarming, less likely to be hiding tentacles, or to have one of those lizard faces people like David Icke believe many important personages who walk this earth hide beneath their human masks.

Monday evenings and all day Tuesdays we would normally go out filming on location, though occasionally sets were built in one of the many spare rooms behind the Club. The place was a warren, and for years had been used to store imported foodstuffs from Italy. Still, from time to time, as you lay spread-eagled and tied with the red ball in your mouth and your eyes wide in alarm, or stood tied and cuffed to your cross in the Dungeon, you'd get the whiff of basil, oregano, marjoram, rosemary and so on, and the dusty smell of ancient pastas—but perhaps the place was haunted. I would not be surprised.

For some scenarios, simple “under will” was not enough and I would be given a new persona. Alden had more narrative talent than Ray, though he was less good at the “under will” bit. Alden would explain to me that I was a naïve country girl on my wedding day, eagerly expecting her new husband—only to find he'd brought the best man with him to share her: or that I
was the young student walking home when the bad boys leapt out of the bushes and set about gangbanging her—and I would believe I was whoever I was told I was. And then I'd be told I'd liked it, and I'd believe that also.

Their theory was that if I believed the event was real and reacted spontaneously, the resulting film footage would have twice the impact of a simulated scene. You could of course claim that any real scene had been simulated, and prove it by the final shot of the participants all smiling cheerfully together: then the footage could be sold legally and distributed on the open market. And since I was under will for the purpose of the closing all's-well-that-ends-well smiley shot (which would be filmed out of sequence) I would look happy enough.

And then the memory would be removed, so what harm would be done?

I would have asked Alden or Ray to remove the memory of my father's affair with my best friend Jude, and I'm sure they would have obliged, but to do so would have been to disclose the existence of Vanessa. I was in far too deep for that by now, and nothing Alden or Ray had said suggested to me that they would easily accept the idea that they had been deceived. They had cast me as the one deceived: they were the designated deceivers. Vanessa was better educated than they were. They would not want to admit that in many ways their slave girl knew more and better than they did, nor that
she was more confident in her sexuality than they were, and socially more at ease.

Vanessa could tell a bad wine from a good one, a viable piece of contemporary music from one that was not. She could put
The Blue Box
in its historical context. She had probably read more around the Golden Dawn than Ray ever would. As for Lam, she doubted that he was even literate. Lam's head sloped away so sharply at the back and sides there hardly seemed room for the left frontal cortex, or Borka's area, where the reading and writing functions of the brain are located—any more than there was for the parahippocampal gyrus, which governs laughter and mirth. Oh mind of Vanessa, mind, mind, be still!

S
OMETIMES WHEN
L
OKI WAS
driving me to the club I would look out from the dark of the cab at the bright streets of London at ordinary couples, at single people hurrying from jobs or to normal dates, and I would wonder how, why, I had fallen into this most questionable and exotic way of living. Did I fall or was I pushed? I was pushed, but then I must have wanted to have been. Was there some buried incident in my life, or underlying hypocrisy in my family? To do with my father deceiving my mother, my mother for putting up with it? I despised her more than I blamed him.