Couldn't you come with me? If you don't want to make any promises now, that's OK, but let's do whatever we have to do with those people, then get out of town.'
'Did you say you want me with you?' Nick said, amazed. 'Did I hear right?'
'Yes.'
He laughed. 'Say "please".'
'Yes please, Nick. But what about you? Don't you want to go off on your own?'
'Oh no,' he said, meaning it as never before. 'Not now.'
In the morning, after a sleepless night of plans, decisions, fantasies expressed aloud, they went downstairs to prepare the breakfasts for their guests.
Nick said, 'I never want to do hotel work ever again. Of all the underpaid, unappreciated, unsocial, unrewarding jobs . . .'
'Do you realize,' Amy said, as she cleaned out the coffee percolator, and took from the fridge the lowcaffeine, lowsodium, highzinc, economically sustainable non~ exploitative coffee grounds they had expensively obtained from an independent shipper in West London, 'do you realize that this might be the last time in your life you will have to do this?'
'Nothing ever changes that quickly,' he said.
Remind me you said that in three hours' time,' she said. 'At nine o'clock.'
'What's going to happen at nine o'clock?'
'Something 1 spent all day yesterday setting up for you.'
:What is it?'
Wait.'
Half an hour later, with the guests' breakfast preparations complete, they sat together in the kitchen and drank some of their own instant coffee from the jar: high in caffeine, high, probably, in sodium, and zinc contents unknown.
Amy said, 'We shouldn't trust these people an inch. You should get yourself a lawyer.'
'I already have,' said Nick. 'So should you.'
'That's something else 1 did yesterday.'
CHAPTER 27
Teresa was starting to feel selfconscious whenever she went to the ExEx building; she had become a familiar figure to the staff. She was not used to that. She had been trained to be unobtrusive, to function but to stay low. The knowledge that she lay unconscious in the tiny cubicle, while she roamed the inner worlds of ExEx, made her feel more vulnerable than anything else in her adult life. Perhaps it was this, by reversal, that made her feel so at home exploring the actual scenarios. She was the secret intrusive presence in these fragments of drama, the undetected mind, the will that could be exerted to override the programming and yet remain undetected.
She was learning how to push at the limits of the scenarios. There was a freedom involved. At first it had seemed to be one of landscape: distant mountains, roads leading away, endless vistas and promises of an everunfolding terrain. She had tested the limits of landscape, though, with results that were usually disappointing, and at best only ambiguous.
At last she was realizing there were other landscapes, other highways, the inner world of the consciousness, the one she touched directly the moment she entered a scenario.
This was a terrain that could be explored, this was a landscape that had only tenuous limits.
She remembered the way she had felt herself become Elsa Durdle, and liked doing so; how even without speaking his language she had managed to influence Gendarme Montaigne's movements;
even further back, the old FBI training scenarios, when she briefly influenced events, or failed in trying.
Two days after her first visit to the cowgirl skinflick scenario Teresa again exercised the privacy option, and returned to the makeshift film set.
Luke, the actor in the false whiskers, was waiting on the set beside her, reading the sports page of the tabloid newspaper. In Shandy's guileless persona Teresa tried starting a conversation with him, hoping to move the scenario in a different direction, but nothing she could do or say would divert him from his newspaper until they began filming.
When Willem, the magnificently endowed young Dutchman who played the cowboy, came leaping in on cue to throw a false blow at Luke's jaw, Shandy ducked away from him and deliberately went after Luke. But Luke had become inert again, simply lying in the wreckage of the prop furniture he had fallen against.
While the director yelled at her in fury to get back to the action, Teresa withdrew from Shandy, and, with a quick incantation of the LIVER mnemonic, she aborted the scenario.
You have been flying SENSH Y'ALL
Fantasys from the Old West
Copyroody everywhere doan even THINK about it!!
The moronic music Jangled at her again, seeming interminable.
lt was the next day. She returned to being a cowgirl.
This time, Teresa waited passively at the back of Shandy's mind, while the young woman went with remarkably spontaneous excitement through the explicit but now predictable motions of making the video.
When the cameras had stopped, and Shandy and Willem were collecting the various pieces of their discarded costumes, Teresa deliberately moved forward in Shandy's consciousness. She spoke to Willem, and tried setting up a date with him. Willem spoke only a little English, but Teresa/Shandy pestered him until he agreed to meet her
outside f
ri
utsi
or a d ink.
Shandy walked naked towards the shower cubicle in the corridor behind the set, clutching the tiny costume against herself Teresa loved the way the young woman's body felt from inside: she seemed to glow with healthy relish from the series of convulsing orgasms she had gone through, and she walked with an easy grace. A couple of the men who worked behind the cameras grinned at her as she went by.
Once she was inside the shower cubicle with the door closed, her demeanour changed. She spat dramatically on the floor of the shower, growling in her throat, clearing herself out. She put her lips to the coldwater tap, drank a quantity of the water, then swilled some of it around her mouth. She gargled three or four times. When she was showering she washed herself thoroughly, using soapy fingers to clean the parts of her body Willem had penetrated, and lathering herself energetically where he had jetted his seed on to her skin.
* * * SENSH * * *
She took her street clothes from a locker outside the shower, and dressed quickly. She put on light makeup: a little eyeliner, a touch of blush, no lipstick. After a final look in a mirror she went to meet Willem.
Outside, Teresa found they were in London. She was immediately struck by the details: especially the noise, the crowds, the traffic, the red buses, the advertising signs, the dismal weather, the overall sense of minutiae beyond the strictly essential.
Willem led her to a pub in nearby Rupert Street, and sat by himself at an unoccupied table while she went to the bar to order drinks. He had asked for a Dutch imported beer called Oranjeboom, which for some reason made Shandy laugh. She softly hummed a jingle while she waited to be served. The barman knew her and obviously liked her, and between serving other customers chatted to her about someone they both knew; Shandy apparently had a number of jobs around the West End, working for clubs and escort agencies, and in hotels.
Teresa, fascinated by this glimpse into the young woman's life, lost interest in Willem and listened instead to Shandy talking about the people who owed her money, the man (boyfriend? pimp?) who seemed to control her, the hardships she sometimes had to endure, the late nights, the harassment she received from the police, and most of all the problem of her elderly mother, who lived in the Midlands. Her mother was having trouble with a disability allowance that was being reduced by some interpretation of the rules, and which might mean she would have to move to London to live with her daughter. Shandy's apartment wasn't big enough for two, so she would have to move.