Then I fucked her, slowly, from behind, from the front, bent double like a suit carrier, legs splayed wider than a ballet-dancer’s, in the mouth and up the ass...
Well, at least I am alive. As long as I can work and feel sensual, things cannot be too bad.
Of course this awakening of the sexual impulse vis à vis Policewoman suffices to kill any love I might have had for her.
Unfortunately, the technology does not yet exist that would have enabled me to have recorded these events on film. So later on I had to make do with several photo-composites of the work I had done on the computer, and these I put into an envelope to send to Policewoman’s home.
Having returned to reality, I read the rest of her file which included extracts of a speech she made to some European Community conference on law enforcement. She took her starting point to be George Orwell’s The Decline of the English Murder (don’t they all?), and argued the increase of the Hollywood-style murder, meaning the apparently motiveless serial killings of women which seem so fashionable these days. There’s something in all of this (although I feel she missed the cultural importance of murder to our society).
I think that I will make a few notes for a paper on this. I could provide her with a few examples. But wouldn’t her understanding have to be deeper than any examples I could give? Have I not got more than I could provide in any explanation? After all, can you really explain to another person what you yourself understand? Really she would have to guess what I intend. But still, I suppose it’s worth a try.
If I could put it into words, fill in the gaps, add some light and shade, colour things in, she would surely be in the picture. I am not saying that it would make things easier for her. After all, the certainty of mathematics is not based on the reliability of ink and paper. But in the same way that people generally agree in their judgments of colour, perhaps we could arrive at some sort of understanding.
I had started to tell you about how when I awoke this morning I had Shakespeare on my mind. I don’t know much Shakespeare. At least, I can’t quote very much. I’ve meant to do something about this, to brush up my Shakespeare as it were. Brush up my Shakespeare? Let me tell you, on this particular morning, I had something rather more lethal than that in mind.
I boarded a train to follow him from his home close by Wandsworth Common, to Victoria Station. From there he walked down Victoria Street and, to my surprise, went into the Brain Research Institute. This was as near as I had been to the place since my fateful discovery. It had never occurred to me that anyone would actually take up the offer of counselling from the Lombroso Program’s staff of psychotherapists.
I waited for him in the Chestnut Tree Café on the opposite side of the street where I had gone on the day of my own PET scan, and from where I had a clear view of the front door. I ordered a cup of tea and looked at my watch. It was three o’clock.
This was a preliminary surveillance. I didn’t plan on actually killing him that afternoon. All the same, I had brought my gun along, in case a suitable opportunity presented itself. After all, this was my day off and it would be several days before I could operate like this again.
While I sipped one cup of tea and then another, I looked at my A-Z, trying to see which routes might best suit me were I to snatch an assassination attempt. A walk through St James’s Park, perhaps. Or a stroll across Westminster Bridge. Those would do very well.
It was then that I caught sight of her coming out of the Institute: Policewoman. Taller than I had imagined, but then television does strange things to people. And of course now that she was wearing clothes, she seemed more formidable than the pliant, approximate reality of her I had been fucking earlier. I wondered what she would make of the photo-composites I had sent her and wished that I could have been a fly on the wall when she opened the envelope.
For a moment she stared across the street at the café, almost as if she had been looking straight at me. The door of her police BMW was open but she did not get into the car. Instead, her driver stepped out and they exchanged a few words. Then, to my horror, she started across the street, heading directly towards the café.
My first instinct was to make a run for it, but a second’s reflection told me that it was unlikely she had anything but a cup of tea on her mind. So it appeared best to stay where I was, to sit it out, examining my A-Z, and pretend to be a German tourist if I was challenged. But at the same time I kept thinking of the ComputaFit picture that Policewoman had issued to the press and, as I waited for her to come through the café door, it now seemed a better likeness of me than ever before. I was glad I was wearing a hat.
I had sat near the door in order to be ready to follow quickly after Shakespeare, and I kept my eyes down as she passed by me on her way to the counter, so close that she could have touched me, and near enough for me to catch her scent in my nostrils and suck it down into my throat. I was not prepared for that. The smell, I mean. Smell is not something that RA has yet managed to simulate. The fact is that she smelt delicious, like some rare and expensive dessert-wine. I heard myself vacuum the air she walked in down my nasal passages as if she had been made of pure cocaine. It was obscene the way it happened, and for a brief moment I felt quite disgusted at myself. Now I started to feel myself colour at the memory of what I had done to an approximation of her body and hoped that she would not find it remarkable that a complete stranger should look so obviously embarrassed at his proximity to her. For several seconds I felt so conspicuous that I even asked myself if, in resisting arrest, I was prepared to shoot her. But then shooting things, real or approximately real, has become second nature to me and so I had no doubt that if I had to, I would.
I heard her ask the café proprietor for a coffee to take away and twenty Nicofree. The next sound I heard was her dropping her change on the linoleum floor. Instinctively I bent down and grabbed a few of the coins before they rolled out of the door. It was done in a split second, without any thought at all, a Pavlovian response to a commonplace occurrence. Something automatic, unthinking, and very stupid.
‘Thank you,’ said Policewoman, rising from the floor where she had found the rest of her change, and holding out her hand in front of me.
Our skins made brushing contact as I dropped the coins into her outstretched palm, an approximation of which had earlier cupped my balls as she sucked me.
‘Do you need any assistance?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry?’
She nodded at the A-Z open on the table in front of me.
I smiled with what I hoped looked like confidence. ‘No, it’s all right,’ I stammered, ‘I know where I’m going.’
Then she smiled, nodded once again, and walked out of the café.
When Policewoman was safely back across the street, I took out my handkerchief and mopped my face. For a moment I felt utterly exhausted, but almost immediately, seeing her car drive away, this gave way to a feeling of exhilaration and I found myself laughing out loud. The very next moment Shakespeare came out of the Institute and, still chuckling like a stream, I followed.