It was a cold night, and the rain still spat occasional drizzle. I shivered, but only because I was cold.
“Those cages you mentioned,” he said. “By the driveway. I haven’t thought of them in fifty years. When we were bad he’d lock us up in them. We must have been bad a great deal, eh? Very naughty, naughty boys.”
He was looking up and down the Tottenham Court Road, as if he were looking for something. Then he said, “Douglas killed himself, of course. Ten years ago. When I was still in the bin. So my memory’s not as good. Not as good as it was. But that was Jamie all right, to the life. He’d never let us forget that he was the oldest. And you know, we weren’t ever allowed in the playhouse. Father didn’t build it for us.” His voice quavered, and for a moment I could imagine this pale old man as a boy again. “Father had his own games.”
And then he waved his arm and called “Taxi!” and a taxi pulled over to the kerb. “Brown’s Hotel,” said the man, and he got in. He did not say goodnight to any of us. He pulled shut the door of the cab.
And in the closing of the cab door I could hear too many other doors closing; doors in the past, which are gone now, and cannot be reopened.
PAT CADIGAN IS A two-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the author of fifteen books. Her fiction is included in many anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horrorand The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series, TheMammoth Booh of Vampire Stories by Women, Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Booh of Horror, The New English Library Book of Internet Stories, The Ex Files: New Stories About Old Flames, Disco 2000, Dying For It: Erotic Tales of Unearthly Love and A Whisper of Blood, and her short stories have been collected in Patterns.
Born in Schenectady, New York, and formerly a resident of Kansas, she now lives and works in North London.
“‘It Was the Heat’ was the first thing I wrote as a full-time professional writer,” Cadigan explains. “It was also my love letter to the city of New Orleans, which is one of the most gorgeous and inspiringly decadent (or decadendy inspiring) places I’ve ever visited.
“While almost all the locations are real, nothing like the events in the story ever happened to me in New Orleans; not even something as stultifyingly commonplace as a trashy fling in a cheap hotel room. However, on a wander through the French Quarter, it’s easy to imagine all kinds of things. And a little jambalaya helps to stir things up even more. Personally, I recommend it.”
IT WAS THE HEAT, the incredible heat that never lets up, never eases, never once gives you a break. Sweat till you die; bake till you drop; fry, broil, burn, baby, burn. How’d you like to live in a fever and never feel cool, never, never, never.
Women think they want men like that. They think they want someone to put the devil in their Miss Jones. Some of them even lie awake at night, alone, or next to a silent lump of husband or boyfriend or friendly stranger, thinking, Let me be completely consumed with fire. In the name of love.
Sure.
Right feeling, wrong name. Try again. And the thing is, they do. They try and try and try, and if they’re very, very unlucky, they find one of them.
I thought I had him right where I wanted him – between my legs. Listen, I didn’t always talk this way. That wasn’t me you saw storming the battlements during the Sexual Revolution. My ambition was liberated but I didn’t lose my head, or give it. It wasn’t me saying, Let them eat pie. Once I had a sense of propriety but I lost it with my inhibitions.
You think these things happen only in soap operas – the respectable, thirty-five-year-old wife and working mother goes away on a business trip with a suitcase full of navy blue suits and classy blouses with the bow at the neck and a briefcase crammed with paperwork. Product management is not a pretty sight. Sensible black pumps are a must for the run on the fast track and if your ambition is sufficiently liberated, black pumps can keep pace with perforated wing-tips, even outrun them.
But men know the secret. Especially businessmen. This is why management conferences are sometimes held in a place like New Orleans instead of the professional canyons of New York City or Chicago. Men know the secret and now I do, too. But I didn’t then, when I arrived in New Orleans with my luggage and my paperwork and my inhibitions, to be installed in the Bourbon Orleans Hotel in the French Quarter.
The room had all the charm of home – more, since I wouldn’t be cleaning it up. I hung the suits in the bathroom, ran the shower, called home, already feeling guilty. Yes, boys, Mommy’s at the hotel now and she has a long meeting to go to, let me talk to Daddy. Yes, dear, I’m fine. It was a long ride from the airport, good thing the corporation’s paying for this. The hotel is very nice, good thing the corporation’s paying for this, too. Yes, there’s a pool but I doubt I’ll have time to use it and anyway, I didn’t bring a suit. Not that kind of suit. This isn’t a pleasure trip, you know, I’m not on vacation. No. Yes. No. Kiss the boys for me. I love you, too.
If you want to be as conspicuous as possible, be a woman walking almost late into a meeting room full of men who are all gunning to be CEOs. Pick out the two or three other female faces and nod to them even though they’re complete strangers, and find a seat near them. Listen to the man at the front of the room say, Now that we’re all here, we can begin and know that every man is thinking that means you. Imagine what they are thinking, imagine what they are whispering to each other. Imagine that they know you can’t concentrate on the opening presentation because your mind is on your husband and children back home instead of the business at hand when the real reason you can’t concentrate is because you’re imagining they must all be thinking your mind is on your husband and children back home instead of the business at hand.
Do you know what they’re thinking about, really? They’re thinking about the French Quarter. Those who have been there before are thinking about jazz and booze in go-cups and bars where the women are totally nude, totally, and those who haven’t been there before are wondering if everything’s as wild as they say.
Finally the presentation ended and the discussion period following the presentation ended (the women had nothing to discuss so as not to be perceived as the ones delaying the after-hours jaunt into the French Quarter). Tomorrow, nine o’clock in the Hyatt, second floor meeting room. Don’t let’s be too hung over to make it, boys, ha, ha. Oh, and girls, too, of course, ha, ha.
The things you hear when you don’t have a crossbow.
Demure, I took a cab back to the Bourbon Orleans, intending to leave a wake-up call for 6:30, ignoring the streets already filling up. In early May, with Mardi Gras already a dim memory? Was there a big convention in town this week, I asked the cab driver.
No, ma’am, he told me (his accent- Creole or Cajun? I don’t know – made it more like ma’ahm.) De Quarter always be jumpin’, and de weather be so lovely.
This was lovely? I was soaked through my drip-dry white blouse and the suitcoat would start to smell if I didn’t take it off soon. My crisp, boardroom coiffure had gone limp and trickles of sweat were tracking leisurely along my scalp. Product management was meant to live in air conditioning (we call it climate control, as though we really could, but there is no controlling this climate).
At the last corner before the hotel, I saw him standing at the curb. Tightjeans, red shirt knotted above the navel to show off the washboard stomach. Definitely not executive material; executives are required to be doughy in that area and the area to the south of that was never delineated quite so definitely as it was in this man’s jeans.