Under the Vulcania Page 3

  ‘You still haven’t figured it out, have you? They’re the ones who’ll be having you. And what they take out, they don’t bother to put back.’

  Too true, too true, Roland agreed silently – but some people were less well equipped than others to deal with the facts, and the pair Winston was addressing were among the most fragile. Shaw, for all his vulcanic good looks, flawless musculature, and loud posturing, was painfully sensitive about his recent low ETD scores. They were probably due to too many betablockers. He had been informed and counselled on this: having sworn off them, he was bound to show improvement in the next set of league tables. Meanwhile, Roland had had to go to some lengths to make sure the current set did not become common knowledge. He had also had to cover for the other one, Wing, but in a different way, because Wing was nothing if not a good performer. But this had created problems for him in his everyday life. Having gone through an unusually long honeymoon period thinking this job allowed him to get what he wanted most out of women and get paid for it, he had finally figured out how he was being used. As far as Roland could figure out, he had been reading Marx and misapplied the ideas to his own situation. Now he thought all women, even his girlfriend, even his classmates, wanted one thing out of him and one thing only, and he protected what was left of his virtue with the tenacity that even a turn-of-the-century chaperone would have thought excessive. His problems were compounded, Roland was sure, by the fact that he had the features – and the body – of a Greek god.

  He needed to be reminded – and this was what Roland was trying to do now, and why he had to find a way to counteract Winston’s cynical comments – that a job like this could, if handled properly, be a positive learning experience. There was an up side to the newest profession in the world. After all, it provided much better money, didn’t it, than the usual student jobs in libraries and restaurants. And the hours – weren’t they so much easier to fit into a busy schedule? As for the social side of things – he was sure that the boys made far closer friends working in this environment than they did anywhere else. And sometimes, if a powerful client took a special interest in a beau, he could find himself with a patron for life. As he had been saying only yesterday to Sonny, there was more than one way to use a casting couch, but in putting it so boldly, he had been tempting fate, because now the phone rang, with a warning from reception about one of the most powerful clients of them all.

  ‘Just to let you know that a Mrs Magenta has just booked in. We didn’t let her have her usual first choice and she didn’t seem to mind about that, but bearing in mind that tag you left on her file, we thought we ought to let you know.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll warn Sonny. I can see him from here. He’s on duty at the juice bar.’ He put down the phone, moved briskly over to his computer, typed out a command to have Sonny removed from juice bar duty, frowned at the message that came back. He bleeped Raul, whose stern face appeared on the videophone seconds later. ‘You can’t have Sonny for La Piñata, at least not for the juice bar,’ Roland told him. ‘It’s too risky. That woman’s back, and she’ll be stalking him, and she might make a scene.’

  ‘Why has she been allowed in at all?’ Raul asked.

  ‘It’s a little difficult, if all you’re going on is a bad feeling in your bones, which is all I have. And if the suspect happens to be a well-known journalist, it’s even more difficult. Just a little! All I felt I could do was leave a note saying no bookings with Sonny.’

  ‘If you’re going to remove him from the juice bar, you’ll have to make sure the person you replace him with fits all the specifications for the task at hand.’

  ‘Will do,’ said Roland. But even as he had the computer do its search through the available-beau roster, he knew – in his bones, as per usual – that there was no one who came near to Sonny, not by any yardstick, not by a mile. As much as he hated Madeline Magenta and everything she stood for, he couldn’t fault her for her taste. How could Raul have been so insensitive as to place their most valuable asset in such a vulnerable position? The least he could have done was agree to have him removed to safety before and not after they found a replacement. Some things were more important than keeping up the façade of smooth management. And who was this woman in green anyway? Why was she so important? Why had she been allowed to breeze in at the last minute and demand a service that usually required forty-eight hours’ advance notice? And on top of all that, here was Raul working overtime to make sure she had the Vulcania’s top talent.

  Roland was tempted to get Raul back on the videophone and get him to level. But then, as he glanced over his shoulder and through the one-way mirror at the juice bar, he saw it was already too late.

  Chapter Seven

  When Fiona was a child, her favourite games had all involved pretending that the world around her was in some way a hoax. On trains and other moving vehicles, she had been in the habit of closing her eyes long enough to convince herself that she was travelling backwards rather than forwards. Left to her own devices at home, she would walk around the house ignoring her feet. The thrill was the threat of putting her foot out and finding no floor where she expected it to be and falling down the stairs. But the best game of all – and the one that had seen her through any number of tedious schooldays – was to elaborate on the idea that she was the only living person on earth and that all other humans were apparitions placed there to amuse her and keep her from feeling lonely.

  That’s the way she felt now as she sat on her swivel stool with her back to the bar, enjoying a glass of thick, chilled mango juice, surveying the simulated rain forest around her and the domed, vaulted pink marble pool whose crystal clear water now lapped at her feet. From here she had, as close as she could get to it in this underground labyrinth, a panoramic view. Despite the lack of natural sunlight, the atmosphere still managed to have the fresh, sleepy slowness of early morning. The only people in the showrooms to the left were cleaners – bona fide cleaners with bona fide hoses – while to the right in the Appearance and Reality Centre, the Figures of Fun waited patient and immobile in their parking bays. The only noise emerging from the thickets of tropical greenery was the warbling of canaries, and the occasional shriek of a minah bird, and, every time someone walked through a concealed and far-off set of swing doors, the crack of a whip and the faint moans of a client on the rack.

  Suspended over the pink marble pool in a net hammock, two women dressed in G-strings were fondling each other. They were employees – you could tell because they were smiling fixedly, as if for an audience, and because their movements were too graceful to be anything but choreographed. In the water below, a cluster of young, golden-haired men – also employees, by the look of it – were struggling to jump high enough first to touch them, and then, when they had achieved that, to overturn the hammock. The women cried with feigned dismay, then managed to rock the hammock hard enough so that it swung beyond their reach. Catching hold of a trapeze, one managed to swing to the safety of a treehouse, while the other, having clambered on to a pole, now tried to rejoin her mate via a tightrope. Pretending to trip, she found herself swinging from the rope by her feet. The golden boys swarmed around her, reaching up to catch hold of her breasts, but no sooner had one of them done so than she dropped head first into the water and disappeared. Her pursuers dived in after her, but for nothing – already she was back with her friend and mocking them from the poolside.

  Another well-rehearsed drama seemed to be going on at the juice bar, between the barman (who looked as if he had stepped off a billboard advertising low-tar cigarettes) and a tense-looking woman in her mid-thirties. Fiona would have mistaken her for a client had it not been for the wooden way in which she delivered lines which no real-life woman would be caught dead saying, or at least not caught dead saying in a melodramatic whisper in public. ‘I can’t believe what you’re telling me,’ she was saying. ‘What kind of woman would want that kind of thing anyway?’

  The only words Fiona could make out in the low rumble of his
response were, ‘You’ve just got to accept that this is my job.’

  ‘Then why wouldn’t they let me book you?’ she insisted. ‘If this is your job, I should be able to have access to you like anyone else.’

  ‘Listen. I’ll have a word with the desk and see what I can do about that. In the meantime, I think the best thing would be if you went off to the jacuzzi or something and cooled off.’

  ‘How the hell am I supposed to cool off in a jacuzzi?’

  ‘Listen, I was just making a suggestion. Because I think if you stay here, you’re going to get upset. Because I’m going to have to get back to work, or else I’ll be out of a job by lunchtime.’

  ‘And you think that would make me unhappy?’ she wailed as he walked away from her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the barman said to Fiona, ‘I’m just going to have to ask you to ignore her.’ So, Fiona thought. She was supposed to be the third to make a triangle. She wasn’t quite sure she wanted this.

  ‘Down to brass tacks, then,’ said the barman.

  ‘What’ll it be? My brief here is to give you whatever you want. It’s on the house, and I mean literally.’

  ‘Do you have to say it so sincerely?’ the other woman wailed.

  ‘Just pretend she’s not there,’ the barman said to Fiona. ‘That’s what I’m doing. She’s just jealous, and do you mind if I tell you why? It’s because you’re too beautiful. This must happen to you all the time.’ He reached across the bar and passed his hand through Fiona’s hair. ‘You don’t mind if I say that to you, do you?’

  Would it matter – would it alter his masklike smile at all? – if she told him she did mind? She neither wanted nor needed such play-acting. She got plenty of that at home. What she wanted now was… just to sit here with her chilled mango juice and feel it make its thick, icy way through her hot, parched chest, and luxuriate in this sense of being out of her body without dwelling on the degradations she had engineered for herself in order to gain this degree of detachment. She just wanted to BE here, and not think about it, but when she opened her mouth to tell him so, the words that came out were entirely different.

  ‘I want to suck your cock,’ she said. ‘And I want you to come over here and sit on this stool while I do it.’

  In less than three seconds he had vaulted over the bar. She stood up, went over to his stool, took his thick penis out of his shorts, kneeled down and went to work with the confidence only known to actors who have become their parts. Although she took pleasure in the swiftness with which it changed from soft flesh to a hard and impatient rod, her detachment remained – she knew it was a character performing, and not herself. But what was the play, and how had she come to be so familiar with it?

  She could not see the woman at the other side of the bar, but she could hear her angry breathing, and the nervous tapping of her fingers on the wooden counter. ‘Now that you have me big and hard,’ said the barman, ‘what do you want to do with me?’

  ‘I want you to lift me up on the bar,’ she said. ‘And then I want you to suck me off until you can’t bear it any more and then I want you to fuck me.’

  In seconds, she was on the bar with her green silk shift hiked up above her breasts, her legs falling to either side while he kneeled to service her. As she wrapped her hands around his head, she closed her eyes and tried to pretend no one was watching her, but of course she enjoyed listening to the laboured breathing of the actress on the other side of the bar, and she delighted in the discovery that she had another witness to her depravity when she next opened her eyes. This was a man in early middle age who seemed, if anything, more upset than the woman by the sight of the barman preparing to enter her.

  ‘You don’t have to take it all the way, Sonny. And under the circumstances…’ The man was interrupted by the woman, who shrieked, ‘Get them to stop!’

  ‘I can’t!’ Fiona found herself gasping. What a slut I am, she said to herself, and with that thought, she came… and came… and came… until he came, too.

  Rather too quickly.

  He climbed off her so gracefully that she began to wonder if he hadn’t had ballet training. ‘That was great,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t work, that was a pleasure. Listen, I still have some time. What would you like me to do for you next?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, slipping off the counter. ‘Go back to your jealous friends.’

  ‘Maybe you’d like to meet later, then. After lunch sometime. How about that?’

  But before he could recite any more lines, she had stripped off her green silk shift and dived into the pool.

  It was just the right temperature. As she glided in an effortless arc, first towards the marble pool floor and then upwards towards the bubbling turquoise surface, she felt herself being washed clean of all the little doubts that had begun to fasten to her like barnacles. Why do I need this? Why do I like it? Why does it please me even more when people watch, when the men who are probing my body are lying through their teeth? As she climbed out of the water, she left these questions behind her. Refreshed, she helped herself to a thick white towelling robe from the pile on the top marble step. She fell back into a reclining chair, wrung the water from her hair, and directed her attention to the Appearance and Reality Centre, which was now springing into action.

  A woman had activated three Figures of Fun. From this distance and in this light, they looked almost human. It was only the diaphanous afterglow that identified them as holograms. They were talking – it was impossible for Fiona to make out the words. All she could hear was the supplicating tone. One by one they approached the woman with outstretched arms. One by one, she walked through them, each time laughing more maniacally, more triumphantly, than before.

  * * *

  ‘Note this scene well,’ said Raul to his twenty trainees as they clustered around the one-way mirror. ‘What you see before you is the logical extension of the industrial revolution. Let me put it more bluntly. Consider yourselves as workers who run the danger of being replaced by the miracles of technology. Look. Here, already, we have holograms that can satisfy desires beyond the physical abilities of any red-blooded man. See before you a woman too angry to be satisfied with the normal role-reversals our establishment was originally set up to provide. If you are to keep one step ahead of technology, if you are to focus on the services technology has not yet managed to identify, you must first understand your target audience. What do you think brought this woman to this point?’

  He looked to his trainees for suggestions – none was forthcoming. ‘It’s surprisingly straightforward,’ Raul continued. ‘Our subject is simply doing to these holograms what she feels men have been doing to her. This is what we call tit-for-tat wish fulfilment. It is common amongst women who have not had the opportunity even to identify, let alone explore, their deeper needs. And that, I put to you, is where you must look if you are to stay in employment. You must watch her, try to figure out what she wants that she herself has not even dared to imagine…’

  Again, he surveyed his trainees, noting with sadness that their eyes had glazed over. Then he turned back to the one-way mirror. To his dismay, the holograms had been abandoned. The woman had run over to the poolside and was now effusively greeting Fiona.

  Thank God their voices did not carry.

  Chapter Eight

  The woman’s name was Jacqui, and she was Fiona’s lunch date. Her Appearance and Reality session had given her the intense euphoric rush that is only known to the desperately unhappy. Only two hours ago, she had been crying next to her phone, and trying to keep herself from making yet another hang-up call to her former lover’s wife. She was not proud of the driving urge to hurt this woman, who had needed all of three weeks to spirit the disputed party back into her clutches – but that didn’t make her hatred any easier to control. Nor, for that matter, her continuing passion for the undeserving man in question. Just before Fiona got in touch, Jacqui had turned to soul-searching – what was wrong with her that men kept dropping her like this?
Two years into her divorce, did she no longer have what it took to be a desirable partner? What was the point of living if you didn’t have anyone to share your bed? Now, as she strode confidently along the side of the pool, she counted her new-found reasons.

  ‘What a good idea it was to come here!’ she exclaimed to Fiona. ‘I haven’t been for ages. Have you ever done A and R? No? Well, I couldn’t recommend it more highly. It has put me into such a good mood I can’t begin to tell you. I just wish I could hire one of those guys and keep him with me all day long.’ As Jacqui made herself comfortable on a neighbouring reclining chair, the A and R Centre sprang into action once again. But all this new customer wanted to do was engage her half dozen holograms in a disco dance. ‘Honestly,’ said Jacqui, ‘sometimes you despair of the female imagination.

  ‘Not that I’m planning anything particularly daring for myself today,’ Jacqui continued. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve booked myself into the Chastity Beltway. I decided that was what I needed most, although maybe it’s just how they put it in the catalogue: “Not just learning to say no, but learning to enjoy saying no.” When I saw that, I said to myself: Righteo, Jacqui, that is exactly where you are emotionally at the moment, so why deny it?’

  It was true, so true that Fiona hardly dared nod in agreement.

  ‘But I haven’t copped out one hundred per cent,’ Jacqui continued. ‘I’ve left the last hour open with the option of a visit to the Halfway House. They have a few new specials going there. I might try out the Virtual Reality Challenge.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Fiona asked.

  ‘Well, basically, there are two black boxes. One offers sex with a real man, and the other offers sex by simulation. I think you have to wear a special suit – I’m not quite clear on that point. Or maybe you’re blindfolded. Anyway, after it’s all over, you get to guess which one was the real thing, you know, just like the Pepsi Challenge. But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’m even up to that. In the meantime,’ she said, as she picked up her briefcase, which looked so incongruous in these surroundings, ‘what I was going to suggest was that you come up to the Beltway some time around one.’