Under the Vulcania Read online

  The denunciation was not, strictly speaking, provoked by Bobby, but by the fantasies she had admitted to during the campfire round robin. Apart from Raul, who had refused to participate, saying that fantasies were private matters and that to dwell on them was decadent, the others in the group had come up with scenarios that were far wilder than hers. The ones she had confessed to were recurring dreams, being fucked by a stranger in the dark, only to find out that there were two strangers, lying nude on a hammock while a tennis match went on in the distance, and this – standing tied to a column next to a Roman bath, listening to voices in the distance while the light faded – powerless, wondering what would happen to her, what the men who owned those voices would make her do.

  It was this timid little fantasy – devoid of light, sensation, and even men – that had provoked Raul’s attack. He had called her a professional victim, had said there was no hope for her if all she could dream of were new, improved chains, had said, as he walked off, that he hoped it actually happened to her one day, so that she found out what it meant to be degraded, so that she found out what an unreconstructed imagination could do to its deserving owner. ‘And when that day comes,’ he had cried as he backed into the darkness, ‘I hope I’m there to watch.’

  I hope I’m there to watch. As she recalled these spiteful words, the question mark that had been hanging over her all day turned into a full stop. Just as her dream had come true, so had Raul’s. For the first time she struggled against the cords that confined her. They only dug deeper into her flesh. And she asked herself whom she hated more – Raul for devising what she now knew to be his long-awaited revenge – or herself for asking to be caught in his trap, for walking into the control of a stranger’s imagination so willingly – to find pleasure not just in surrender, but in paying for it.

  What had possessed her? Why had she ever thought this would be gratifying – to hear a rabble approach and, with the returning light, turn into men. To look at the leers on their eight young faces, to hear them laugh as they walked around her, grabbing at her breasts and her cunt, saying to each other, ‘And they call this work?’ One by one, they rubbed themselves up against her. The eighth boy lingered while the others untied her – because she was still oiled, she slipped out of his grasp and swam into the pool, taking refuge on the island in the middle. ‘Go away,’ she said. ‘I don’t want this any more. I’ve changed my mind.’ But this, as far as they were concerned, was simply part of the script. Three of them jumped into the water and headed for her island. While the others cheered, Fiona fended them off, first by kicking them in the face, then in the balls, as they tried to climb up out of the water.

  But she could not fend off all three for ever. One boy was finally able to waylay her from behind as she struggled with the other two. The victor pushed her to the ground. When she fought back, his two friends held down her arms for him. She struggled to keep her legs together, but her attacker was too strong for her. His crowd cheered as he worked himself towards climax, and cheered again as he climbed off her. But then there was another boy at the ready, and after him, another. With the fourth, she gave up struggling. She tried to devise some escape for her mind, but for once, she couldn’t. She was here, stuck in a fantasy come true. What was happening was sordid, was giving pleasure to everyone in the hall but herself. As the last boys had their way with her, she noticed that quite a few other young men had been watching through a plate-glass window. The lust on their faces puzzled her. What did they see here that she didn’t?

  The commotion died down after the eighth boy climbed off her. When she sat up, she noticed how sheepish he looked as he swam to the side of the pool to rejoin his friends. In an icy voice, she said, ‘So I take it that’s all you bright young things can do for me?’

  With meek confusion, they nodded, shrugged their shoulders, mumbled yes. ‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘I’ll thank you to provide me with a fresh set of pyjamas and a clean, dry towel from those shelves in the far corner.’ All eight trotted off to the designated shelves like a troop of scolded puppies. ‘Thank you,’ said Fiona, as she emerged from the pool. She took the towel from them.

  They were so embarrassed that they could hardly even look at her as she got herself dressed. ‘Well,’ she said, as she paused at the door, ‘a final thanks to the lot of you. You really had me at your mercy for a good fifteen minutes.’

  There was a key in the lock on the other side of the door. On an impulse, Fiona gave it two turns and then dropped it into her pocket. ‘She’s locked them in! That wasn’t in the script, was it?’ she heard an outraged young male voice cry out. Looking up, she saw her audience from the plate-glass window. ‘Well, it is now,’ she informed them as she adjusted the thermostat. ‘And the play is all the better for it. The best scenes are always improvised.’

  The door to the main labyrinth did not have a lock in it, so she did not repeat the performance. And she did not notice that a few of the men from the observation hall had followed her through.

  Fiona’s mind was elsewhere – and clearer, more directed than it had been for years – when she walked through the door into the manager’s inner sanctum.

  She found Raul at his desk – and no, it wasn’t strange at all that she hadn’t recognized him. Then he had had a beard and long hair. Now he was close-cropped and clean-shaven. Then he had had a boyish look. Now he looked haunted.

  He was in consultation with a beau – blond, teary-eyed and muscular – who was dressed, unconvincingly, in a priest’s habit. At the sight of Fiona, the fake cleric jumped to his feet and offered her his chair.

  ‘We’ll have to continue our talk another time,’ Raul told him. ‘I’m afraid I have no understudy for you today, so I’m going to have to ask you to stay on in the confessional for the rest of the shift. Do you think you have the stamina?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he sobbed.

  ‘Just bear in mind that it’s mostly just talk. Certainly the script for Box B does not require that you show your face. As for your views on the role of the whip, I’ve noted them here and will make sure you are never assigned to Boxes V, W or X.’

  Fiona watched Raul’s face closely as he spoke to his employee. You would think they were talking about an assembly line in a plant that made running shoes. It was stripped of emotion. And so systematized! She had always thought that she came to this place to indulge in her own secret needs, and that the reason the services the Vulcania offered were so different from your traditional brothel for men was that women were so much more imaginative. But now she wondered if it was because they were so much more pliant, so much more susceptible than men were to the corporate sleaze merchants like this slime of a turncoat of a former friend now facing her.

  Who was pretending to be not at all concerned about the upcoming interview. Having said his goodbyes to the reluctant beau confessor, he now turned to Fiona and asked, ‘Will you have tea or coffee?’ True to character, he did not wait for her answer. Instead he said, ‘Actually, it will have to be Constant Comment, just for old times’ sake.’ He pressed a button on his control panel. The drinks appeared on a sideboard. He had just given out the order to his deputy that he was not to be disturbed, and was lifting his drink to his lips, when she said.

  ‘How do you justify it?’

  It seemed to be the question he was expecting. ‘I simply remind myself, my dear Fiona, that you were the one who asked for it.’

  ‘I would never have asked for anything at all had I known that I was handing my life over to someone with privileged knowledge – not to mention a grudge.’

  ‘I played fair,’ he said, a wave of emotion surging into his voice. ‘I told you my name. I gave you ample opportunity to recognize me – even though, to tell you the truth, I was relieved when you didn’t. I would have preferred it if you had left today without knowing. After all, this is not the kind of job I was heading for when our ways parted. It’s not something I’d like featured in Alumna Records, now, is it?’

  ‘So, wh
at was it, then? What was it that turned you into a monster?’

  He didn’t answer. He just stared into his cup.

  ‘I suppose you’re going to say something clever and self-righteous, like, the proceeds of this place go to support guns for some high-minded liberation army.’

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘this place is owned by a conglomerate. And is headed by a woman. Who keeps as much of the money as she can to herself.’

  ‘Then I suppose what you’ll tell me is that at least, having retreated into capitalism, you have chosen the job which illustrates most perfectly how anyone who works within the system is inevitably prostituting himself.’

  ‘I gave up such self-serving subterfuges many, many years ago.’

  ‘Then I suppose you’ll give me some sob story about having to support a houseful of pathetic refugees.’

  ‘Not refugees, actually. Just my four young daughters.’

  ‘So,’ said Fiona. ‘You did end up managing to talk Wilhelmina into having children.’

  He bowed his head.

  ‘What does she think of your job?’

  ‘She doesn’t. She died eighteen months ago.’

  ‘In Guatemala?’

  ‘Yes. It was an ambush.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘It was, in a sense, the way she wanted to go.’

  ‘That sounds quite bitter,’ Fiona said.

  ‘She was not a happy woman at the end, I’m afraid. She felt she was surrounded by people of weak character in a situation that tolerated only strength. Her greatest source of disappointment was, as you have guessed already, myself. We were not on speaking terms when it happened. And afterwards, the people running the camp were quick to get rid of me. For a long time I had only been there at her sufferance. After her death, I became a liability. And I didn’t want to stay, anyway. I had had enough. But we had never saved any money. Since returning to this country, I’ve had to scramble to make ends meet. As far as my finances are concerned, this job has been a godsend.’

  ‘So you plan to stay put,’ said Fiona.

  ‘I don’t see what choice I have.’

  ‘Do your daughters know what their father does for a living?’

  ‘I try to find ways around it. At the moment they’re still very young.’

  ‘What will you do when you arrive at a birthday party to find all the mothers in attendance are your clients?’

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it’s happened already.’

  ‘Well, come to think of it, you must enjoy the power of knowing all their secrets. I guess you make a hobby of it, really to get to the core of people, really to know what makes them tick. What a wonderful use of your prodigious brain, Raul. You can certainly be proud of the entertainment you provided me with today. And to remember my secret desires in such detail so many years later! God only knows what you could arrange for me if I had the opportunity to update your data-base! What’s it like, Raul? What’s it like to know what women like me really want?’

  Raul waved his hand as if to fend off a bee. ‘It’s … it’s a distraction. Nothing else. I don’t care in the end. It’s just a game to keep myself from thinking more about …’

  He looked at her hard and mocking face and lost his composure. He had been intending to say ‘my domestic worries’, but suddenly the truth flew out, ‘… just a way of thinking less about myself.’

  Although he struggled to control it, his breathing became laboured, his cup of Constant Comment began to swim before his eyes. In his confusion, he was not able to protect himself from Fiona’s next move.

  Reaching out for his hand, she asked, in a softer voice, ‘So what happened? What did this to you?’

  Involuntary tears spilled down his cheeks.

  Chapter Fifteen

  He could have tried to omit at least some of the details and so concealed the truth – not from her so much as from himself. He could have said it was his wife’s irreproachable martyrdom that had broken him. He could have said it was her growing and never edited list of grievances against him that had eventually convinced him that he could be no better in his own eyes than he was in hers. He could have told her about the ill-starred affair and the shaming succession of little infidelities. But instead he went straight to the point and explained to her that he had only ever been pretending to be a doctor during his time in Guatemala.

  Oh, he knew all he needed to know. That wasn’t the problem. He had been brought down by a single mistake he had made at the very end of his time as a houseman. After a hundred hours on duty, he had mistakenly given a patient on the critical list the wrong injection and thereby killed him. He had then compounded his mistake by failing to tell Wilhelmina. He had tried, but the words hadn’t come out. They had been at the camp for four years, practising side by side, before someone sent her the tell-tale newspaper clipping.

  By then it was too late to tell the truth to the others, or so Wilhelmina decided. And so he had continued to practise medicine under her betrayed gaze. He could easily have remained there after her death, but he couldn’t face it. He had lost too many patients – not through incompetence now, but due to understaffing, polluted water and inadequate supplies. There came a point in ‘humanitarian’ work, he told Fiona, when your well ran dry.

  But he did not add what he now saw to be the truth – that he had ruined his life by trying so hard to make it pure. Every mistake he had ever made, he had made because he couldn’t accept that the angel and the whore could live inside the same body.

  Why hadn’t he been able to admit it, when there was still a chance? He had loved Wilhelmina with a love as pure as love can be, but he had adored Fiona, and had ached to touch her in such a way that he knew only now was neither vile nor treacherous. Touch and encircle her the way she was now touching and embracing him. It felt like coming home. It made him feel unspeakably tired, and so, before he knew it, he had fallen asleep.

  It wasn’t long before Fiona had stretched out alongside him on the chaise-longue and fallen asleep, too.

  Chapter Sixteen

  And as they slept, Raul’s untended garden of desire went disastrously to seed. Roland did his best to cope, but for every crisis he was able to solve, there was another that went out of control. First it was a posse of trainees pounding on Raul’s sealed door – in such a panicked and insistent way as to cause alarm amongst the clients at the juice bar. Apparently the Piñata woman had locked eight of their number into one of the private baths. And someone – perhaps this same woman – had turned up the heat, so they were slowly burning up. While he was supervising the handyman with the skeleton keys, the troubled beau confessor burst out of Box B shouting, ‘I can’t take it any more! I can’t take it any more! I can’t take it any more!’

  Deprived of the inner office, Roland was obliged to find a way to calm him down in the public space. He found what he hoped would remain a semi-private alcove and tried to show compassion as the beau confessor babbled on about the fantasies he had been forced to listen to during the course of the day. ‘I don’t know how I am ever going to be able to trust a woman again after this,’ he wailed. By now, he had attracted a sympathetic crowd of females who were old enough to be his mothers. ‘Not a goat,’ they exclaimed. ‘Not a donkey twice in one day. And she said she wanted the giraffe to do what?’ When the angry confessee abandoned by the fake cleric emerged from Box B and began to make a scene outside the sealed management entrance, these older women convinced Roland that they could give the poor boy the comfort he needed while Roland dealt with this other less interesting disturbance.

  There is probably, Roland reflected, no bigger rejection than to have a man you are paying refuse to hear you to the end of your fantasy. So Roland could understand – up to a point – why the abandoned confessee was so enraged. (He was not at all surprised to note that she was Madeline Magenta, the obsessive who had been trailing Sonny.) But he was most worried about her voice carrying, and so it was without giving the matter ample thought th
at he convinced her to take a two-for-the-price-of-one offer in the showroom of her choice. He pressed two of the trainees into service. As he led them to their assignment, he noticed, with a degree of surprise, that the beau confessor had apparently agreed to be massaged by his six comforters and, even more surprisingly, appeared to be pleased at the attention.

  Roland had been intending to stop by again after delivering the disgruntled fantasist and the two trainees to the showroom, but he was once more diverted from his intended course when two women frolicking on separate swings over the main pool collided in mid-air, cracking skulls and falling like dead weights into the water. Fortunately, two of the beaux who were fornicating on the nearby hammocks happened to be certified lifesavers. They both stopped what they were doing and rescued the drowning clients. Unfortunately, the women they left behind pulled the wrong ropes or levers and found themselves dangling awkwardly twenty, twenty-five feet over the surface of the water. It was with a sinking heart that Roland identified them as the off-duty policewomen.

  The only thing for it was to call for the crane and suspend a repairman in a seat attached by a chain. He had it all under way in record time – but any feelings of satisfaction he had at his crisis management skills were destroyed when he ventured a look in the direction of the semi-private alcove – where he had left the beau confessor – and discovered that one of his comforters was now performing fellatio. Unprotected fellatio.

  He knew he had to get over there before the situation got out of hand, so to speak. But he also had to placate the off-duty policewomen who, though rescued, were still terribly upset. ‘Who’s on eunuch duty?’ he cried out frantically. ‘Someone, please, give these women a full English tea on the house.’