Under the Vulcania Read online

  ‘I can’t promise to get there exactly on the dot,’ said Fiona. ‘I don’t have a watch.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Jaqui, ‘I’m flexible, and so is room service.’

  Chapter Nine

  There was one clock Fiona could see from her reclining chair. Technically speaking, it wasn’t a clock at all but an intermittent digital hologram. Once every five minutes, it swept its way around the entire labyrinth, gently reminding those with busy schedules that time was money, but sweeping past so quickly and quietly that those with time or something even better on their hands need not even notice it.

  Now it said 11:05. Watching it emerge from the rain forest, dance briefly on the surface of the pool, and then dash up through the rainbow fountain towards the swimming channels, Fiona decided that to follow it would be just the way to fill her time between now and lunch. Once again, she dived into the perfect water. It was just cool enough to refresh and cleanse her, and just warm enough to assure her comfort. She headed into the spray of the rainbow fountain. After swimming through the tunnel of water, she found herself in a dark, warm cave, at the far end of which was a landing stage, where a man sat ready to dispense inflatable rafts, pedal boats and small canoes. In the past, Fiona had always preferred canoes, but this time she decided it would speed her up too much. And she wasn’t in a rush. She opted for a raft.

  Out she went into the Gardens of Babylon. Here the marble floor of the swimming channel sloped upwards gently on both sides to meet with narrow sandbeds that were themselves edged by a thick, low-lying foliage. The twists and turns of the channel created coves, which contained water fountains and resting places of differing shapes and sizes. Half a dozen yards beyond this meandering strip of greenery were the showrooms, where the usual mundane dramas were now in progress.

  In the first, a client was lecturing a classroom of men who were dressed like aviation students. She was wearing nothing but a black lace bra, net stockings, and a matching suspender belt. In the next showroom, a man dressed up as a surgeon was climbing on to an operating table to have sex with a client who was pretending to be either dead or unconscious. In the third, a client dressed in an evening gown was masturbating while two men dressed as construction workers on imitation scaffolding outside the window struggled to gain access. In the fourth, a customer dressed up as a turn-of-the-century maid had just lifted her skirts to reveal to the man in the fourposter bed that she wasn’t wearing any underwear, while in the fifth, a client dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform was also lifting her skirt while the man at the desk marked Headmaster was rounding the desk with his arm raised up to spank her. In the sixth, yet another customer dressed as a circa 1947 housewife was saying goodbye to the postman just in time to welcome the milkman… Honestly, Fiona thought to herself as she drifted past, what was it about uniforms?

  How could it possibly be exciting to play through a scene you yourself had devised? Where was the risk? The surprise? As Fiona approached the first jacuzzi, she was happy not to know what the three men sitting in it had in mind for her. It added zest to what would otherwise have been an uninspired conversation about a recent oil spill in the Pacific. When after five or ten minutes, none had made advances, she said her goodbyes and moved on.

  The one with the long, jet-black ponytail caught up with her just as she was rounding the next curve in the swimming channel. He pushed her raft on to the bank, clamped his hands on her upper arms, and without waiting for an invitation, straddled her. His penis was already stiff and large as it bobbed over her unparted legs. ‘Don’t even try,’ he growled as he let go of her arms. Reaching into the leather pouch strapped to his waist, he removed a condom which was textured in such a way as to make his penis look like a reptile. Without further ceremony, he pushed her legs apart and thrust himself into her. The strangeness of his appearance and the warmth of the surroundings sent her quickly to the edge of climax, but as she basked on the brink, her mind raced away from her, first to the man she now realized this beau reminded her of – the second or third stranger she had ever picked up – and then to the seedy Spanish bar where she had been working that summer – not strictly for the money, because she had more than enough to last her until she took up her internship in the autumn – more for the pleasure she got out of degrading herself by almost but not quite doing it for money.

  But now her brave new whoreboy was drawing her back into the present by pounding his great ribbed reptilian cock against the back of her cunt. ‘You like this, don’t you?’ he was saying as his pumping grew more rapid. ‘You could do this all day, couldn’t you? You’ve missed your vocation. You could have been an A-one slut. I’m telling you, lady, whoever you are, you make me feel like I’m the one who’s paying.’ He thrust into her so hard she let out an involuntary yelp. ‘That’s right. Cry for help. But don’t worry. No one’s coming to the rescue. It doesn’t matter who’s paying now. I’m the boss around here. I’m going to come now and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. Why should I worry, anyway? It’s what you want.’

  She had no secrets from this stranger, she thought, and she exploded, the involuntary ecstasy first vibrating her cunt and then radiating outwards. He knows, she thought, as she felt his penis pumping, and then, as he withdrew, leaving her too limp to change her position, she asked herself… how?

  It was a question she had occasion to ask herself again, further along the swimming channel, when she came upon the tennis court.

  By now she had managed to stem the tears that had come, without apparent explanation, as she escaped from the cove of her previous adventure. For some reason, she had felt compelled to leave in a hurry. It had been some minutes before she realized that she had, in her haste, forgotten the raft. This discovery distressed her far more than it ought to have done. Then she had grazed her leg against the side of the channel. The grating sand between her leg and the channel had produced a minor scrape – it was this that had propelled her into racking sobs. She had felt as if she were mourning a death – but whose? This is what she asked herself as she lay flat on her stomach in the safety and seclusion of this new cove from which she could just see, between the clumps of bushes (the terrain being tamer here – not so much subtropical as country club), this reassuringly mundane tennis match.

  Reassuringly mundane, but at the same time strange. Because who could have guessed that she would meet in such surroundings a scene so reminiscent of her childhood? Two men were playing. A third was watching. She noticed now that they were older than most of the beaux she had seen so far. Not too old – they were in their mid-thirties, just like the men she had watched as a teenager the summer she took up nude sunbathing.

  She helped herself to a new towel, which she arranged in a place that gave her some – but not quite enough – privacy. As she lay down on her stomach and closed her eyes, she listened to the steady rhythm of the tennis match begin to falter, as, increasingly (she knew without looking), the players trained their eyes not on the ball but on her naked body.

  It was very warm here – as warm as she remembered that other day to have been, that first time she had indulged in this game as a teenager. Now, as then, she pretended to be offering herself up to the sun and not to their greedy, disbelieving gaze, as she turned on to her back and bared her swollen breasts. The volleys grew shorter and more lopsided and then extraordinarily long, almost mechanical, as she again pretended to put her own comfort first and turned back on to her stomach.

  ‘I’m worried about your skin,’ she heard a deep voice say. ‘I hope you will allow me to rub in some oil.’ It was one of the tennis players. Without waiting for an answer, he dribbled the oil on to her back and then massaged it in, first concentrating on her shoulders, her arms, and the nape of her neck, and then going steadily lower, now kneading her buttocks and her thighs, now prodding the gap between them… gently but firmly he rolled her over on to her back. She felt him rubbing the oil into her breasts, her stomach, her upper thighs… while on the other side of the bushe
s, the match continued.

  How much could they see? she wondered as her masseur entered her. Enough to see what she was good for. Enough to see that she pushed herself up against him with his every thrust, enough to see that when the rhythm took on a life and a logic of its own, she locked her legs around him, so that he could penetrate even deeper, so that when his packaged penis began to throb and release its poison, she could forget without any effort that it wasn’t going anywhere, she could imagine it spreading out through her entire body.

  They could see this, she was sure – enough so that when he stood up and adjusted his tennis shorts, already self-sufficient, already avoiding her gaze, she felt so limp she didn’t know if she would ever be able to move again, and so was unable, even unwilling to object when the second tennis player appeared before her.

  His massage she found even more of a comfort than the first. When he entered her, she felt complete again. When she felt his penis pumping inside her, she felt once again alive. Or was it a drug? So wrapped up was she in her own ecstasy that she did not notice when this man climbed off her and the third tennis player climbed on. Every time she looked up, it seemed, there was a new, unfamiliar face. Meanwhile, the mechanical volleys continued in the tennis court, while sleepily she asked herself, what am I trying to prove? Why am I here, making the same self-indulgent mistakes I first imagined more than twenty years ago? Whose idea was this? Why?

  Chapter Ten

  ‘If all kitchens were as clean as this one, I’d be out of a job,’ said the health inspector, as he snapped up his briefcase.

  And if all jobs were as easy as keeping a kitchen clean… ‘We try,’ said Raul, but even he could catch it now – this mocking edge that threatened to undermine the polite informalities. When he and the health inspector reached the door, he was careful to give him an affable smile with the handshake. He turned away content that he had safeguarded his neutrality – and dreading the woman who was the next item on his agenda.

  Her name was Miranda Simpson and she was a junior partner in the law firm that represented the empire of which the Vulcania was only a small, if much admired, part. There was nothing particularly wrong with her – it was, rather, what she represented. He found her above ground in the – the name still made him wince – the Institute for Continuing Research on Our Bodies, Our Genitals.

  She was just beginning her tour of its bogus facilities. Her guide was the so-called Institute’s self-appointed director, Jane Fanshaw, who was, by a very long shot, Raul’s least favourite staff member. Jane had what he had once called a seminar voice. She was stretching it to its outer limits to give unmerited weight to her rap. This, he noted, had grown more outrageous than ever.

  ‘Our starting point,’ she told a desperately nodding Miranda, ‘is the idea that most women objectify their bodies. Everything we do in here is designed to get them to take back ownership of their private parts. We start with tactile experiences that you, Miranda, probably associate with early childhood.’ She pointed to the room where a group of women were playing with clay.

  ‘Actually,’ Miranda said, ‘I was doing that until just a few years ago. Before I went into law, I went to an art and design school.’

  Jane Fanshaw nodded brusquely. ‘And then there’s the Sensual Quarter. Each room along this corridor specializes in a different stage of educational massage. Mark One is automassage excluding genitals. Mark Two is sister massage – that means women pairing up – also excluding genitals – and then Marks Three and Four are auto and sister WITH genitals.’ Turning to Miranda, she added fiercely, ‘We have no truck with the concept of the G-spot here – in case you were wondering. What we do have’ – here she threw open a wide metal door – ‘is a Specularium.’ She led them into the small, stuffy domed room. It called to mind a planetarium, except that the image beamed on the ceiling was the interior of a vagina. ‘I’m not sure if you’re old enough, Miranda, to remember the speculum. Well, in the early seventies, we used them fairly routinely for self-examination. They were useful little gadgets, but personally, I prefer this larger cousin.’ She gave a little kick to an apparatus the size of a sixteenth-century Ottoman cannon that a rather worried-looking woman with a modified beehive hairdo was straddling.

  ‘AND’, Jane now said, leading Miranda and Raul back to the reception area, ‘we also offer what we call Body Talks. These are sessions in which all communications must be made non-verbally, i.e. through mime and tactile contact. This seems to be the experience that opens people up best to the possibilities of change.’

  ‘And does that result in return custom?’ Miranda wanted to know.

  ‘We have follow-up support groups, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘No, actually I was making a bottom-line sort of question, if you’ll excuse the pun. What I meant was, what percentage do you get relaxed enough to use the facilities downstairs?’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ Jane said in an ominously calm voice.

  Just in time, Raul’s bleeper went off. He excused himself, dealt with the call – a routine head count – in the hallway. When a rather flushed-looking Miranda emerged two minutes later, he took her straight along to the video theatre to see the tapes that were the main reason for her visit.

  She had to determine whether they could be productively used as evidence in a paternity suit filed by a former client. It didn’t look like the case was going to hold water, because, as Raul now told Miranda, all four visits the petitioner had paid to the Vulcania during the period under review had been taped and showed the beaux doing everything by the book, even though the petitioner was trying to trip them up every step of the way. In one she tried to bite the condom while she was giving him a blow-job. In another, she pretended she herself was wearing a polyurethane shield. In the third, she encouraged him to enter her unprotected and then withdraw before coming, and in the fourth she subjected him to a tantrum in a baby voice when he refused not to use a condom. Then she topped it off by withdrawing to a corner and sucking her thumb.

  Her ploys were not in any way out of the ordinary – Raul saw them every day. In fact, they were so standard as to feature in his lecture on precautions for trainees. But when he showed the videos to Miranda, he could tell that they shocked her.

  ‘I think we could make a case for the petitioner being deranged,’ she said in a voice she tried to keep from sounding shaky.

  ‘You could,’ said Raul, ‘and you could probably get away with it. Unhappily, these episodes you’ve seen are not uncommon, and so between you and me, we cannot dismiss them as abnormal behaviour – just regrettable.’ He realized too late that young, straitlaced Miranda was in danger of taking this comment as a slur on womanhood.

  ‘It may just be that this kind of establishment attracts that kind of psychosis,’ she suggested.

  If only, he thought wearily, the problem were that simple.

  ‘In any event,’ she continued, ‘we only need these videos as back-up. The DNA testing should be sufficient, so long as we can track down the fifth man. Have you had any luck?’

  ‘We’ve traced him to a bank in Hong Kong. He was not particularly happy about our contacting him – now that he is an executive, he does not like to be reminded of this particular chapter of his life. And he was not – I should add – particularly co-operative.’

  ‘But you said he was Chinese.’

  ‘At least half Chinese, anyway.’

  ‘Well, the baby isn’t, so that may end up being enough.’ She scribbled something down on her notepad, then checked her list. ‘There’s a suggestion from on high that perhaps DNA testing could be part of the induction procedure, so that we have the necessary information at source. If we did that, we could avoid such tracking problems in future.’

  ‘It’s quite an expense,’ said Raul, ‘but if they don’t mind paying…’

  ‘Another suggestion was double sheathing.’

  ‘We tried that, but it lowered the average ETDs drastically.’

  ‘ETDs
?’

  ‘Excuse me, it stands for Estimated Time of Delivery.’

  She still hadn’t twigged.

  ‘Of sperm.’

  She blushed. ‘Oh well,’ she said, attempting a nonchalant laugh, ‘I guess we’ll just have to wait with our fingers crossed until science comes up with a painless and one hundred per cent reversible vasectomy! Or even, I suppose, medically induced retrogressive ejaculation. Which brings me’, she gasped, ‘to the last but possibly most important item on my shopping list. The senior partners have expressed concern about the UI Centre, because the legal problems it could present if things went wrong are truly monumental. So I am supposed to give them a report as to standard operating procedures, hopefully to quell their anxieties. I personally am ideologically predisposed to the concept, but I thought it would help if I could see it first hand while I’m here.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Raul as he rose to escort her. But he knew it would be.

  There were, to begin with, the places they would have to pass on the way. The Ice-Cream Parlour, which catered to women who liked vanilla sex. The Rough Trader Saloon, where the racks were just the beginning. The Halfway House, for clients who couldn’t bear to see who was giving them pleasure. If he showed her the dual monitors – the one on the left-hand side showing a row of women only visible from the waist up, lying on cushioned slabs and gyrating at various rates while they perused magazines and idly filed their nails, and the one on the right-hand side showing a row of young, muscular, and terminally exasperated men pumping away at the same women, here only visible from the waist down – what would she say? And what would she make of the neat little row of confessionals, abuzz with fantasies so bizarre that he sometimes wished he could transmit them straight to the police station and get their inventors locked up. Not to mention the Casino… if Miranda thought all women were good and nice, how was she going to explain why some women only seemed to feel good and nice when they were treating themselves or someone else as objects? He could sense her disapproval as they made their way down this corridor of perversities. He could almost hear her lame attempts to reason it through – that at least it was no longer just men who were writing the scripts… at least it was better that women with such tastes indulged them under these ultra-controlled circumstances, instead of at home in front of the children… at least women had a chance to explore their darker natures now… at least they had choice…