The Cyberkink Sideshow (12 page)

The sun had set and the breeze the motion of the car stirred in the dead heat of the fading day animated his hair a little, his face slightly flushed and moist with perspiration.
Victor R. Maynard, Freak
, she considered, studying his bulk in her car. Why did she feel such a pang of shame when she thought of someone seeing the things she’d done with him? Did the way he made her feel mean she was a freak as well, just for thinking that way? What defined the universal standard that made Pikesley and Baxter so dogmatically righteous in defining him as ugly, as disgusting, as abhorrent? What right did anyone have to apply such a standard to something so private and personal as someone’s own body?

“Victor, I think someone’s trying to frame you,” she said at length.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Victor took his elbow off the window and folded his arms tightly over his chest.

“I think it’s my boss,” Sylvia admitted.

“We get this everywhere.” Victor let off an exasperated sigh.

Sylvia didn’t take her eyes off the road, but she raised her eyebrows. “You’ve been arrested before?”

“Myself twice. Only a few months ago Vaughn got arrested in Paris. There is nothing
illegal
in my Sideshow!”

They were approaching the turning to the garden festival now. Sylvia turned in.

“Victor, I want to help you,” she said as he got out at the side of the road. “Please, let’s talk.”

“I don’t want to do any talking. I just want to get home right now.”

“Okay. Well, I’m on holiday starting tomorrow. I’ll come again then. Let’s work out what’s going on and sort this out.”

Victor glanced at her briefly, a grudging sort of gesture. He slammed the car door and walked off into the twilight.

Chapter 6

When Sylvia arrived at the Garden Festival the next day, the place was heaving with police. Dog handlers swarmed over the flower displays, trampling them and leaving brown piles and dark abstract wetnesses all over the paths. All the rides and stalls had been shut down.

The entrance to the main tent had been cordoned off with a blue-and-white-striped plastic ribbon. Sylvia walked around the perimeter. Through a gap in the hedge, a shirtless hairy man in jackboots and leather trousers argued with two coppers. It took her a moment before she recognized him as Vaughn. Without his executioner’s mask he looked unremarkably ordinary: a balding, middle-aged man. If she’d stood behind him in a supermarket queue, it would never even have crossed Sylvia’s mind that he designed BDSM torture devices for a living.

She continued along the edge of the tent, until the route brought her to the caravan park out the back. A cordon stretched around this too, but it wasn’t from the police. Signs notifying that the grounds were private and for the use of the Sideshow staff had been arranged at irregular intervals along its length.

Someone lounged in a deck chair outside one of the caravans, reading a motoring magazine–one of the Hermaphrodite Twins. He or she was unmasked, but this still didn’t shed any light on the twin’s gender. The face had a slightly female look, with big eyes and tousled shoulder-length hair, and a goatee and moustache. Wiry curls of hair protruded from the collar of the t-shirt the twin wore, but the shape of breasts was apparent under the fabric. Two poodle dogs lay in the shade at the feet of the chair. Their woolly coats had been trimmed into corkscrew boas that appeared to spiral around their bodies from throats to tails.

“Excuse me, do you know where Victor Maynard is?” Sylvia asked.

The twin glanced up at her, then at his or her watch. “He’s working out I guess. He’ll probably be back in a few minutes.” The twin shifted in the lounger to lean to one side and point. “That’s his caravan there.”

Sylvia went over to the caravan, a large, fairly modern one with a Land Rover parked to the fore of it. Something green and noxious-looking bubbled away in a large tin suspended over a campfire beneath the long shadow the caravan made in the morning light.

Soon enough, Victor’s broad and easily distinguishable figure came into view. He wore his vermilion silk dressing gown and his hair stuck up in damp clumps, suggesting he’d just had a shower. His face was tense, possibly with anger, and noticing Sylvia there didn’t change his expression.

“They’ve shut the Sideshow down for the whole day!” he shouted at her. “We’re losing money and the rest of the festival’s losing money, and that’s not good for us if we want to continue traveling with them!”

Sylvia turned away from him to look at the tent.

Victor pulled up a chair by the fire and exhaled loudly. “Oh well, it could have been worse. We’ve got the big event tomorrow, and if they don’t find anything, they’ll have to let it reopen. Rather today than then, unless your boss finds some way of extending it to tomorrow as well.” He took the tin off the fire and poured it out into a large bowl.

“Is there anyone you suspect might have motive to try to frame you?” Sylvia asked. “There’s very little I’ve got to go on at the moment. I think my boss is involved, but I’ve no proof and no idea who else is in on it. Anything you can give me will help you.”

Victor shoveled his revolting broth into his mouth. He gave Sylvia a critical look. “So, you’ve decided to come here as yourself now, rather than coming here in a mask pretending to be one of us.”

“Oh come on! Nine out of ten people who come here are wearing masks. They all have lives outside of what they are here that they prefer to keep separate. Having a go at me for pretending to be something I’m not is hardly going to hold water.”

Victor rolled his eyes. His mouth groped for an insult. “
Vanilla
,” he at last said.

Neither spoke for some time. Victor finished his soup. He got to his feet and kicked the tin over on the ground. He wrenched open the door of his caravan and climbed into it.

Perhaps it was time to go home. Perhaps she should leave Pikesley to have it his own way and leave these people, who had done nothing wrong, to deal with his machinations alone. Go home, and carry on for the rest of her days, letting life drag her this way and that, and just accepting her lot.

“Victor!”

Victor’s head appeared in the caravan’s doorway. “What?”

Sylvia laughed. “I don’t know. I want to tell you something, about the stuff we did together. I want it to mean stuff, but I can’t make the words for it. I wish I was...what d’you call it...
eloquent
, like you are.”

His shoulders sagged. “Come in, if you want. I’m not doing anything.”

The inside of the caravan was superbly designed, divided into a kitchen, shower-room, and a living room and bedroom with a foldable partition between them. The furniture had been so thoughtfully crafted it made the small space appear much larger than it was. The effect was like walking into a TARDIS. It was, however, extremely warm in there.

“Aren’t these things meant to have air-con?” Sylvia asked.

Victor snorted. “It broke down. Blasted thing needs servicing.” He lay down on the bed.

“Why do you live like this?” Sylvia’s gaze wandered around the caravan’s walls. “You’re smart. You could have been a stockbroker, or something in advertising. Or probably anything you wanted to be.”

Victor’s mouth twitched and he made a scathing rasp in the back of his throat. He shut his eyes. “Why should I want to be a stockbroker or a bank manager or a scientist or some other tedious, quotidian thing stuck in this country, suffering our abysmal winters, when I could travel the world running my own freak show and thinking up pornographic acts that will make me notorious the world over?”

Sylvia couldn’t think of a reply to this. “Touché,” she said.

“Now, answer me this. Why, when you quite obviously have a bondage fetish, have you been alone and dissatisfied for who knows how many years, pretending to yourself that this is normal and nothing is wrong and you are a perfectly ordinary person?”

She sighed. “Like you said, I’m pretending. You wouldn’t want to know. I don’t get involved with people. I can’t have relationships like normal people do. I can’t have sex because I’ve a medical condition. It hurts.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t have
sex
! It means you can’t have a particular type of sex. If you’re that steeped in
vanilla
–” He scowled derisively when he said the word “–you think that’s the only kind of sex there is, that doing it by the book is better than exploring your own body and someone else’s, then you must’ve lived a very sheltered life.”

Sylvia turned to him in anger. “Oh, ya? Well, that might be all well and good for people like you, but for most men, it’s a deal breaker! You know, that’s not what people put in personal ads. GSOH, no sex please.”

Victor sat up. “Sex isn’t something you get from reading a manual. It’s personal to everyone. The only people whose opinions about it matter are yourself and whoever else you choose to involve. You say you don’t like penetration, well I don’t like penetrating.” He shook his head, almost a shudder. “I’ve never been able to get it hard enough. I’ve never done it. I’ve never wanted to do it. The idea of it...it just leaves me cold. I like
being
penetrated, though. That’s why it makes me difficult to find people like me, what with being a switch. Most people seem to want to be penetrated when they sub, especially women, and when I’m domming it has to be a woman. The mechanism’s different when I sub, so it’s not so important then. Some people would say that makes me less than a man. Some people would say I’m a pervert for that, but that’s the way I am. Do they expect me to waste the life I have, denying myself what is true to me, just to conform to their opinions of what’s correct?”

“Why do you dress up in boys’ clothes?”

He shrugged. “I was the youngest kid in my family. Once upon a time, people always used to tell me I looked too young–when I went into pubs and clubs or tried to buy alcohol and that sort of thing. Then, as I got older, they stopped saying that, and now I kind of miss it.”

“Some people might compare that to pedophilia,” Sylvia said carefully. “Trying to make yourself look like a child.”

“Yes, but I’m not a child, and it doesn’t involve children in any way, so it can’t be anything at all like pedophilia. I wear it because it looks silly. It embarrasses people. If you were to go about wearing a shroud and corpse paint, people wouldn’t compare that to necrophilia, would they? Or if you dressed as an animal, they wouldn’t claim you were promoting bestiality.”

“I suppose not.”

“QED. It’s because people are prejudiced and narrow-minded and uncomfortable with their own bodies, and they think vanilla is better than kink and straight is better than gay and all manner of ridiculous axioms. Ever since I started this sideshow, people have objected to it. People who insist on foisting their morality on others–who just won’t let other people
be
in their own choice of lifestyle. And I hate that. It goes against everything I stand for.” His eyes widened at this declaration, and he pointed an accusing finger at Sylvia.

“Victor, I want to help you. I know what they’re accusing you of has nothing to do with you. Someone’s trying to frame you.”

Victor snorted again. He threw himself back on the bed and shut his eyes. Sheer red silk clung to soft flesh. “You don’t say? Why should I trust
you
?”

Sylvia controlled her voice, keeping the tone calm. “Because not all coppers are bent.”

He said nothing more, leaving Sylvia to stare around the interior of his stuffy caravan. She must have subconsciously expected it to be full of junk food remnants and unhealthy snacks, because there conspicuously weren’t any. Surely someone of Victor’s bulk couldn’t have ended up that way on three standard square meals a day. “What was that soup you were eating?” she asked at length.

“It’s part of a dietary regime.”

“Oh, you’re on a diet?” The observation felt strangely at odds with what she understood of him. He hadn’t struck her as the sort who worried over such matters. He seemed to project his physique as part of his personality–part of his public image–his unique selling point. The mutiny on the larger-than-life ringmaster at the end of the opening night show would have been less funny, less bizarre and less sexy if he’d had an ordinary, well-muscled porn star body.

A halfhearted, ironic laugh broke from Victor. “You don’t understand. It’s the other way round from what you’re thinking.”

“You’re on a diet to make yourself
fatter
?”

Victor arched his eyebrows but his eyes remained shut. “Possibly not a diet many people in the West would be familiar with. It’s based on the diet Sumo wrestlers use, demanding exercise on an empty stomach, followed by a large carbohydrate-rich meal and a rest to digest it in. The idea is to force your metabolism to be as efficient as possible.”

“Does it...” Sylvia was at a loss of what to say. The idea was decadent, indulgent. Exactly the extravagant quantities she was beginning to recognize attracted her to Victor. “...work?”

“I weigh twenty-two stone. I was trying to get to twenty-five, but I started plateauing at twenty, and now I seem to have hit a glass ceiling.”

A guilty thrill crawled up Sylvia’s back at the thought of Victor, bigger, fatter, rounder, the Hermaphrodite Twins struggling to lift him off the ground in the show’s humiliating climax. “Isn’t that rather unhealthy?”