What is he seeing? This man who has had to assemble his own erotics by himself, from twenty pixels and a prayer? Where is this flesh he sees, this thigh, lip, arse, neck, tit?
‘Let me get you a taxi.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Come on, Bryon. It’s late.’
‘Fuck you, I know what you think.’ He digs in his pockets suddenly and for a brief moment I have this crazy idea that he’s going to pull out a gun. But no, it’s his wallet. He waves it open. Jesus.
‘Bryon, you’re going to get us mugged.’
‘Ha!’ He pulls out a business card. He shoves it in my face. ‘I know what you think, Connie, and fuck you, so I made a mistake. But they’re here.’ He stinks of whisky and fear. ‘They’re here if you know how to look.’
I wave down a taxi for him and settle with the driver in advance. God knows, Vaux is hardly capable now. I get him snapped into his seat and swing the door shut on him. The taxi U-turns and disappears. I set off home on foot. In my hand is the card Vaux gave me. I pause under a streetlight to read.
‘AMBER’ and a number.
Since these silvered contact lenses became the fashion I have been succumbing, more and more often, to a skin-crawling hunger for human contact. With the sale of Loophole, and the contract I have signed, I have the leisure now, as well as the money, to indulge myself. But the act, however well choreographed, cannot assuage this longing I have for someone, anyone, just to look me in the eye.
I wonder: does Amber wear lenses?
They’re here if you know where to look.
What the hell did Vaux mean by that? There is only one way to find out. I hold my phone in front of the card, and it reads and dials the number.
Without love, lust blooms. It slides about, fixating on the strange, the wild.
But I am, after all, just like everyone else, wielding my disappointments like a club. I talk and expect her to listen. I grumble and expect her to comfort me.
Amber. Her answering service said, ‘Hi, I am a genuine young independent homegrown escort, twenty-nine. Size twelve to fourteen, natural 36F. I can provide a sensuous massage or something more. I’m a normal, everyday, sane kind of person who enjoys a chat to put you at ease – if you want to chat, that is.’
So much for revelation, or a deepening mystery. Though the address, when finally she gave it out, was better than her prices suggested and the house, when the taxi drew up outside, was so big, so white, so ostentatious, I was convinced Vaux had played a joke on me.
A light by the bell said AMBER, so I pressed. And now I’m here. Amber is nice. Not pretty, not passionate, not hardbitten either, not high, not drunk. Not afraid. Just as she described herself, in fact.
The room, though! The room is palatial – but virtually empty. A bed pulled away from the wall. A chair. A mirror. Cameras.
Amber reaches for my hand. I take it and stand close to her. Close enough to smell her hair. Close enough to feel her breathe. She leans back and I kiss her. I take hold of her hair and pull. She arches her back. I run my hand over her breasts and she opens her mouth under mine.
She says, ‘Let me do something for you.’
She has a specialism. Well, what the hell.
She takes off all her clothes. Her shoes. Her belt. Her little dress. Her tights. Her strapless bra. Her knickers. She drops them on the floor. She slips her shoes back on. ‘Is this all right?’
‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘It’s all right.’
She kneels to fasten the buckles. I stare into the shadows her legs make. She stands and walks around the bed. I come over and sit on the bed and as she passes me I run my hand over her flank. She comes around again. My fingers brush her buttocks. After a while of this, I stop her. She kisses me and I reach between her legs.
‘I want to do something for you.’
My fingers come away wet. ‘Okay.’
‘I want to wear some things.’
‘Okay.’
She pulls them out from under the mattress. A baggy long-sleeved sweatshirt in Chroma key green. Gloves and a pillow case the same. The sweatshirt has a cord to tighten it at the waist. She slips it over her head. The gloves are long, velveteen, big enough to hide her wrists, even when she raises her arms above her head. I shake out the pillow case.
‘Put it on,’ she says. ‘Go on.’
I arrange the pillowcase over her head and pull the hood of her sweatshirt over it.
I cross to the chair and sit down, watching her hips, groin and legs move around the bed.
The rest of her has vanished.
The illusion is perfect. The legs step around the bed, deadly and elegant as scissors.
‘Wait.’
She stops for me. I get up from my chair and walk towards her, curious. The closer I come to her, the clearer I can see the obvious and unavoidable glitch. The system has somehow to fill in the body cavity where the girl’s hips leave off and her sweatshirt begins. The wireframe flickers and bends as she breathes – an irregular ellipsis of gridded grey. I stroke the line of her sex. Her small high buttocks, divorced from the curve of her back, are startling in their roundness and power. Her legs tremble as she balances with feet apart, moving against my hand. I feel for the nub of her anus and push a finger inside her, all the while gazing into the blind grey mathematics of her body cavity.
The standard fills are just a blink away. The girl’s body cavity fills with water; instantly I feel my penis engorge. I push my finger deeper into her, stirring the waters there. She groans and bends over, tipping the water away from me. The system isn’t encumbered with much in the way of physics – the watery plane simply tips with her hips, held in place by the gravitational pull of her groin.
‘Conrad.’ The voice comes out of nowhere. It excites me, this disembodied voice so close to my ear, and this extraordinary sexual contraption, at waist-height before me. It stands no higher than my waist. This is what I can’t quite get over: how small she is, reduced to arse and hips and legs. No taller than a child. A cunt and its complicated docking mechanism.
‘Conrad, I want to do something now.’
‘What?’
‘I want you to take your clothes off and lie down.’
I undress, and the legs settle on the bed, facing me. They spread apart. ‘I’m taking off a glove.’
A hand appears. Disembodied, heartbreakingly small, it settles, fluttering, on her sex. A finger uncurls – the tongue of a humming bird – and seeks her clitoris. Her sex is so wet it shines. Her legs flex, lifting her feet off the mattress, parting to reveal her sex more clearly. Her cunt flexes, ensnaring her fingers, chewing on them. Her legs flail like mouthparts. I close my eyes, afraid, listening to her come.
A disembodied hand. Oh God. The other glove comes off. Now there are two. Two white hands, hanging there in space, working at her flesh, feasting on it. ‘God.’
I hunch forward, clamber to my feet.
‘Are you all right?’
The legs right themselves. They snap and rise upon their feet and scythe towards me. I stare at them: the swell and tremble of calves and thighs, up and up to their folded junction. I run.
Beyond the room the house is a wreck, all brick and plasterboard. It’s deserted. There’s usually at least a minder in these places, but there’s no-one. I’m alone with her. Alone. I can’t remember where she said the bathroom is.
‘Hello?’ She’s coming after me. Poor cow. Still trying to do her job. Probably wondering what shitty review I’m going to give her on what shitty website.
‘I’m fine. I just need – I’m fine.’
Very late – stupidly late – it occurs to me to take off my glasses. Without my glasses, the illusion that so frightens me will be broken, and in place of Mandy’s white clown hands there will just be some plain, industrious, vulnerable girl in a hoodie chasing after me. Too late, stupidly late, as my fingers brush my face, I remember that I have no spectacles today. I’m wearing lenses now. I can’t just pluck them out.