“Well, as I’m sure you’ll agree is necessary,” Aurora cuts in, “considering the uncertainty as to your identity, your codes and cards have been deactivated. For the moment you’re in limbo, you might say. The database crosschecking is very thorough, as it has to be, since I can share with you that we’ve had a few impostors in here. Journalists.” She frowns as well as she is able to with her stretched face. “And other troublemakers. Trying to unearth – trying to
If all you’ve got is lemons,
When she returns to her cell that night, she finds it empty. Her cellmate is gone; it’s her month back in Consilience. But the other bed isn’t made up, it’s stripped bare. It’s as if someone has died.
They aren’t giving her a new cellmate, then. They’re isolating her. Is this the beginning of her punishment? Why did she ever let herself get mixed up with Max? She should have run out of the room the first minute she laid eyes on him. She’s been such a pushover. And now she’s all alone.
For the first time that day, she cries.
Houseboy
“Honey, cheer up, surely life’s not so bad,” Charmaine was in the habit of saying when they were living in their car, which used to grate on him: how could she be so fucking perky, with the shit that was bombarding them from all sides? But now he tries to recall her light tone, her consolations, her reassuring quotes from her dead Aunt Win.
Every weekday he goes to his so-called work at the Consilience electric-scooter repair depot, where he’s had to fend off questions from the other guys – “What’re you doing back here? Thought it was your month to be in Positron.” To which he replies, “Administration morons screwed up, they got my info mixed up with some other guy’s. Case of mistaken identity, but hey, I’m not complaining.”
No need to add that the other guy is the douche who’s been jumping his chirpy, treacherous wife, and that the administration moron was a highly placed Surveillance spook who’s recorded her husband’s encounters with Charmaine in grainy but surprisingly erotic videos. Stan knows they’re surprisingly erotic because he’s watched them with Jocelyn, sitting on the exact same sofa where he used to sit with Charmaine to watch TV.
That sofa, with its royal blue ground and overall design of off-white lilies, had meant tedium and a comforting routine; the most he’d ever done on it with Charmaine had been hand-holding or an arm around the shoulders, because Charmaine claimed she didn’t want to do bed things except where they belonged, in a bed. A wildly false claim, judging from those videos, in which Charmaine required nothing more than a closed door and a bare floor to release her inner sidewalk whore and urge Phil to do things she’d never allowed Stan to do and say things she’d never once said to Stan.
Jocelyn, smiling a tight but lip-licking smile, likes to watch Stan watching. Then she wants him to recreate these videos, playing Phil, with her in the role of Charmaine. The horrible thing is that sometimes he can; though it’s equally horrible when he can’t. If he roughs her up and fucks her, it’s because she told him to; if he isn’t up to it, he’s a failure; so whichever it is, he loses. Jocelyn has transformed the neutral sofa with its harmless lilies into a nest of tortuous and humiliating vice. He can barely sit down on it any more: who knew that a harmless consumer good made of fabric and stuffing could become such a crippling head-games weapon?
He hopes Jocelyn has been recording these scenes, and will make Phil watch them in his turn. She’s mean enough for it. No doubt Phil’s wondering why he’s still in prison, and is trying bluster –
. Stan takes an acidic pleasure in imagining this scenario, as well as the stonewalling stares and hidden snickering among the guards, because haven’t they got their orders, which come from higher up?
. That twisted fuckwit Phil had it coming.
Holding this thought keeps Stan going during his sexual command performances with Jocelyn, which are a good deal more like tenderizing a steak than anything he finds purely pleasurable.
You get a kick out of it, you must! You know you do, well, most of the time anyway, and every man has those letdown moments, but the rest of the time don’t think I can’t hear those groans, which have to be enjoyable for you, don’t deny it!