“No you shouldn’t. I want it now.”
“I haven’t shaved or washed,” he told her, “in five days. Or cleaned my teeth, or changed my clothes.” They were only token objections. He was surprised at how much he’d been looking forward to returning to his routine. Nothing else with her was simple or uncomplicated, but sex was.
“Yes,” she said, “you smell like shit. The suit still looks good, though.”
“You get what you pay for,” he said, lifting her onto the table. He pulled up her skirt, carefully and tidily. She was wearing silk knickers which, with equal care, he pulled down and left around her knees; an encumbrance, but the essence was to disarrange, not denude.
She waited, patiently but uninterested, while he did all this, even while he made some final adjustments of her skirt upwards and her knickers downwards; then, after pausing to admire his handiwork, he entered her. That was his part done, and now she began hers, taking him inside her voraciously. Such particular intimacies, to a normal couple, might have meant something; but Anwar and Olivia were neither normal nor a couple. It was an arrangement, simple and self-contained, where each party did what he or she wanted, without regard for the feelings of the other. Masturbation for two.
By now she was well into her part. Where he’d been painstaking and obsessive, she was greedy. After five days, greedier than ever. For a moment he felt she’d never let him out again, at least not the way he’d come in. Eventually she did, but only to go another time, and another.
Who was it she was taking into herself like this? Not a real person but a device, a designer dildo. And who was it that he was entering like this? Not a real person but a container, into which he was pumping his contents. It suited both of them perfectly: only a Consultant would have the constitution and stamina to match her appetites.
Afterwards, they sat at opposing places on the table. She smoothed down her skirt; so careful had he been in his preliminaries that it looked no tidier rearranged than it had been when he’d pulled it up.
She usually looked at him without noticing, or noticed him only in passing, and he realised he’d been doing the same to her. But now he noticed. Her face looked drawn, as if she too had spent the last five days in the Signing Room. There was a feverishness in her stare and a downturn, accentuated by lines, at the corners of her mouth. A sort of desperation about her. Arden never looked like this.
“Not enough,” she said hoarsely.
He hoisted her up on the table again, and was about to restart his ritual, but she stopped him. “No. You prefer it naked, don’t you?”
Surprised, he nodded. They started undressing.
Of all the things I’d like to put in your mouth… He did put it in her mouth. Then her hands. And then her vagina, and that surprised him, because this time she took it less greedily. She’s trying to share, he thought incredulously. She was clumsy at it because it was alien to her, and it made him feel embarrassed; and also uneasy, at the apparent shift from their previous routine.
“Don’t do that again,” he said afterwards. “It didn’t work.”
“The other way wasn’t enough.”
“That way was too much.”
She looked away. Then she gathered herself, like she’d done when he tried to stare her down. “I said it wasn’t enough! Go again. It’s not enough any more.”
Like the Reith Lecture, he thought, a small animal baring its teeth. But none of the attacks in the Reith Lecture had unsettled her like this. Not even the one on her life.
They went again, and it still didn’t work. Still trying to share, and she still wasn’t much good at it—her reciprocal movements were clumsy and unsynchronised to his, and she didn’t pick up quickly enough on what he liked her doing. He preferred it when she didn’t care what he liked. This way gave him nothing. He didn’t think to wonder what she might have wanted from it, only that gave him nothing.It didn’t work and it wasn’t the same. Something had shifted.
He stood up abruptly, and started dressing. After watching for a while the play of his almost nonhuman musculature, she too started dressing.
“What’s this about?” he asked, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice.
“What do you...”
“Don’t say, ‘What do you mean.’ You know what I mean. Why isn’t it enough? Why does it have to be different?”
“Something you said in Brighton, about if I hated people less and understood them more.”
“What has that got to do with what happened here? I was talking about fundamentalists, about how you treat your enemies.”
“You were talking about how I treat everyone. I can deal with media and mass audiences, but not with individual people, whether they’re enemies or friends. I’ve never noticed them. I’ve never had a relationship that works both ways, not with any of them. So...”
“So you decided to practice on me?”
“Not practice. Start.”
He laughed out loud. “Start a relationship, with a Consultant?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, not that kind of relationship.” She hurried on, conscious that she’d immediately backed down at the first sign of derision, and was now fighting only for her fallback position. “And I have to start with someone. And I got Rafiq to send you here, and I never really stopped to notice you. And when I asked you things about yourself, I’d forget your answers even before you finished speaking. And—” She was conscious of too many Ands, as if she was scrambling for anything she could find. She took a breath and began again. “—And you’d be only the first. I have to start somewhere.” She knew how lame it sounded, and added “After you I could go on to real people.” She’d meant it to cover her retreat, but it sounded worse; gratuitous, and ugly.
He stopped laughing. “Then skip the part with me and go straight to real people, because this didn’t work. It was embarrassing.”
He wasn’t merely embarrassed, he was burning with embarrassment.It was knotting his stomach. A woman in her thirties trying to learn the elements of courtship, of pleasing a partner. Sucking me into herself. Or, if he believed her fall-back position, trying to learn how to notice and value people. Either way she had years to make up, and he couldn’t see beyond mid-October.
He strode over to the full-length Boardroom window. The early evening view of the Brighton foreshore and the i-360 Tower was beguiling as always, but he wasn’t really looking at it; only turning his back on her.
This mission had threatened to overturn his life, and he’d staved that off by the change that had come over him since meeting Rafiq—the change that had made him take decisive action and let others do the worrying and pick up the pieces. And now that change, and her reaction to it, was in turn threatening to overturn his life. The same threat, from another direction.
“You’re different since you’ve come back,” she said, and immediately knew how fatuous it sounded; she’d only said it to avoid saying other things. When he didn’t reply, shea dded, “Was it your meeting with Rafiq?”
“Yes.”
“What happened there? Tell me about it.”
He told her. As with Gaetano, he omitted references to the names and number of Consultants, and left out the conversation with Arden Bierce, but he was grateful to be able to retreat into the detail. It stopped him saying other things.
“Well,” she said when he’d finished, “it checks out.”
“What checks out?”
“Gaetano told me all that yesterday, and his account was almost exactly the same as yours. He practices—” she hurried over the word “—eidetic techniques. He works very hard at it.”
He would, Anwar thought. Not like me, I was made. He has to work at it. And he’d work with quiet persistence and thoroughness. With near-obsessiveness. He’d make a good Consultant. In fact, maybe he was. Another labyrynthine move of Rafiq’s? A secret twentieth Consultant, unknown to the others? No, now a secret nineteenth. No, eighteenth.
He turned away from the window and faced her. “You said you’d answer my question about that final detail.”
“You started this. You shouldn’t have said that to me in Brighton. If Rafiq had sent someone else, I’d never have heard it.”
“Answer my question.”
“And you should go and get cleaned up. And I must go, too. I have an organisation to run, and a summit in seven days. And I need to eat.” She looked at him. “Alone.”
“My question.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t answer it.”
“You said...”
“I can’t. But if we survive this, you’ll know why I can’t.”