“They say racing drivers talk more and do less about sex than men in any other sport.” She held the orange carcass of her latest victim between finger and thumb and twirled it by its claw over her plate.
I treated her to a bitter smile. The playboy reputation, and its sarcastic flip side, is one we no longer deserve. There is no Baron von Trips on the circuit now, no Count Godin de Beaufort, no Inès Ireland, no Lance Reventlow. Everything has become too competitive and commercial. Indeed, by the nineties the playboy image had all but expired.
“Formula Zero has rekindled our infamy,” I explained. “New cars. New regulations. They want to rekindle the old magic. It’s plastic: packaged. Our sponsors twist incidents into publicity gimmicks. It helps the ratings.”
“It doesn’t anger you?”
I shrugged. “If it didn’t, would I be here?”
The claw broke and the gutted corpse soft-landed in a pillow of saffron rice. It was her turn to smile.
She pushed aside her plate, lifted her PC onto the table, licked her fingers and typed. She read: “Cool, rational, seldom angered, seldom sulks when disappointed—” She gave me a cool glance. “Bisexual, last cruised in Groningen four years ago, in ’42 had a short relationship with hypertext writer, male, in London, longstanding correspondence with lesbian activists in Seattle, New York, and with gays—ex-lovers—in Brisbane, Porto…”
She turned the screen round for me to see.
“Publish and be damned,” I said.
Catharine tutted. “I wouldn’t dream of it. What would be the point? It says here your public image doesn’t interest you.”
“It doesn’t. It interests Havers, of course, and she has a way of buying off the right people before things go too far.”
“You must be quite a headache for her; a ‘new man’ at pole position.”
“Maureen Havers is old,” I said. “Because she’s old, she’s a legend. If a legend runs a company it has an interest in creating subsidiary legends—appropriate legends.”
“So she puts you in the closet.”
“I’m glad of the privacy. If I were Don Juan, she’d use it for a marketing gimmick: I wouldn’t get any privacy at all.”
Catharine stroked her chin. “Is she evil?”
“No,” I said, “she’s sad. She lost her son to Formula Libre in Brazil. Her engineers built a car that cornered too well for him. The Interlagos circuit curves the wrong way round. He wasn’t properly prepared for the G-strain.”
Catharine waved her hand dismissively. “I’m not interested in technicalities.”
I looked at her a long time. I said, “He was still burning when I pulled him out. His visor had melted into his face.”
She had the decency to blush: “I’m sorry.”
“Formula Libre is just what it says”—I went on, ignoring her apology—“a free-for-all, a freak show for fast cars. But Formula One was outdated, and good new designers were turning to Libre rather than be straightjacketed. Havers built up Formula Zero to codify some of Libre’s better ideas. She made it, and dominated it; now, because she’s old, it dominates her.”
“And she is hated, is she not?”
“Havers’ constructors spend half their working lives stabbing each other in the back, but there’s no real power to be had until she goes. But that’s not what you meant, is it?”
A smile played about her lips. “Touché.”
There’s a lot of bad blood between the Programme Pour Femmes Fermes and Maureen Havers.
When she was young and cared nothing about cars, Maureen Havers revived Psyche et Po, Antoinette Fouque’s 1972 outfit which dominated the French women’s liberation movement into the eighties—all red jumpsuits and internecine foulness and right-wing religious overtones.
The Programme grew up at the same time Havers was wiring Psyche et Po’s corpse to the lightning conductor. Ensuing battles levelled the tactical gulf between the two movements till the main differences were intellectual ones. Psyche et Po read Lacan; the Programme read Lévi-Strauss. Psyche et Po were crypto-Capitalist; the Programme were retro-Structuralist. Psyche et Po played the system; the Programme deconstructed it.
The Programme won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Without intending it, they became not unlike Psyche et Po: an élite with no popular support.
Catharine drained her wineglass. “Ms. Havers is not our prime concern. I don’t suppose she will like what we have in mind but—” She shrugged. “What do you know of the language of dance?”
The link between Danseuses Nouvelles and the Programme wasn’t known then. I was thrown. I muttered something vague about semiotics and felt like an idiot.
She told me about Danseuses. I was privileged: some weeks passed before they leaked the news to La Monde.
“Are they the revolution?” I asked.
“A small part.”
I toyed with my food. “Top ratings eight weeks running. Small?”
She was silent for some while, staring at me. I’d touched something important. “Since when did the man uninterested in publicity read ratings?”
“I don’t. My manager does. Danseuses pushed my profile out of prime time last week. TVP wouldn’t negotiate.”
Catharine said: “Danseuses’s dancer/choreographer is Helene Ritenour. In ’41 she had a curbside altercation with a heavy goods vehicle. Surgeons in São Paulo rebuilt her. Nanotech CNS upgrades saved her from spending the rest of her life in a wheelchair.”
I nodded. “And some.” Helene was—and still is—a good dancer.
I thought about it.
Forty-one. In ’42, Helene and Danseuses went on TV. “Quick work. Programme money?” I knew rushing the São Paulo technique cost a great deal.
“We look after our own,” Catharine replied. “So does Havers. Doesn’t she?”
The jack behind my arse itched.
We catch a train to Nice. It was twinned with Cape Town, once. It boasts a sand beach (imported) and no public telephones.
We eat at Le Safari. Angèle is pissed off and she won’t tell me why. I’d show her the town, God knows I have sufficient plastic in my wallet, but hers is righteous anger, not to be bought off. She’s sitting with her back to the window. Her face is in shadow. I can’t see her eyes.
We haven’t been together long. Catherine gave her to me—a contact and Woman Friday—not two months back. I find it hard to predict her moods.
Maybe it was Catharine’s idea she sleeps with me; maybe she’s got tired of playing the whore. It’s not a thought I want to go to bed with so I try to get her talking.
Like an idiot I mention the Programme.
She screws up her face like she’s swallowed something fatty. “I’ve no time for that,” she snaps. “It’s just play to them. Can’t you just see them wanking off to the press reports after each sadistic little outing?”
“They’re pointing up the language of repression,” I say, wondering all the while at my own arrogance. Angèle doesn’t know these kinds of words. She’s an Arab street kid who was kicked once too often to stay lying down, not a semiotics graduate. “They’re targeting metagrammatic nodes in the cultural matrix—”