Exhibit (3 page)

I melt into the sofa and sip at my wine. One glass turns into half a bottle, and suddenly I'm drunk and locked into a conversation with someone I've never met before who I think works with Vicki. He's pretty intense, and as soon as I can, I look for an excuse to get away from him. Vicki reads the situation well, sees I'm stuck and pulls me away. We go outside to smoke, a rare treat I allow myself when I've lost the willpower to resist any longer, and while we are stood there chatting, a man dressed as Santa Claus comes over and coaxes us into giving money to a children's charity. Vicki puts a couple of dollars into his bucket and asks for a kiss. I do the same so I don't look cheap, but tell him he can give the kiss to Vicki, which he does.

Vicki smiles at me.

“Thanks for coming”, she says.

“What else was I going to do?” I say, and we both laugh.

“Bitch.”

“Happy birthday”, I say and rub Vicki's shoulder. “It's good to see you.”

“So, how's the love life then? Chris not doing it for you?”

It takes me a moment to work out who she’s talking about.

“Fucking hell, him? No. He's a bit intense isn't he?”

Vicki taps her forehead.

“I think he's got some issues he's working through. You might have something in common.”

“Touché”, I say and punch her on the shoulder.

The cigarette tastes as foul as I always remember them being. I don't even know why I bother smoking sometimes, I enjoy it much less than the wanting to do it. I take one more drag, just to be absolutely sure, and then stub the rest of it out against the ash-tray.

I stick close to Vicki when we head back inside, just in case Chris is waiting for me to rejoin him. Thankfully he’s already moved onto someone else anyway, his new victim trying her best not to look like she’s trying to escape from a weirdos grasp.

This is it then. Another Christmas eve, another fucking year.

I’m drunk, I’ve already lost my willpower and smoked a cigarette, there are cheesy Christmas songs playing on the jukebox, Vicki’s friends are all mental, and I can’t see any good reason not to throw myself into it completely until I either do something stupid and remember it, or do something stupid and black out. It feels like one of those nights. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen anyway?

A
ces is pumping when I get there. A thousand dollar minimum spend, members only speakeasy style, slide door entry basement bar, where the girls come free with each table. This is a good enough place as any to start.

“Here he is”, Mark says, and reaches a hand up for me to slap. Carter has his face over the table, a rolled up one dollar bill in his hand, hoovering up a line of white. I told you he lacked style. I push him along the low back leather sofa and sit down.

“You in?”

“Later”, I tell him, and he passes the note to the girl to his right, who looks like she's been hitting it hard already. Sunken cheekbones and the kind of body that can only be maintained by sucking pureed food through a straw is not my kind of thing.

“Nice suit”, Jack quips, a girl either side of him. In here, he can pretend, but everyone knows he can't take them home. Here the trophies can be looked at, but when you leave they go right back in the cabinet. I open my blazer to show him the lining on the inside of the jacket, sharp enough to put holes in his retinas. It probably cost more than his last holiday.

“Carter just bought a Ferrari”, Mark says.

“No shit”, I say. “About time you got rid of the Porsche.”

Carter has cocaine in his moustache and his eyes look like they are having trouble focussing.

“It's fucking fast”, he says. “I nearly killed myself this afternoon.”

One of the girls pours me a drink. She must be almost six foot tall with tits that look like mini footballs. She sees me looking at them and smiles. Great tits, awful teeth.

“Are they real?” I ask.

Sandy comes over. He's a friend of Carter's from another firm. Hand shakes get passed around and he crouches in the space between the two sofas to engage us. His suit looks shop bought even though it probably wasn’t, and his shoes are from last season, worn too much at the edges. It’s a sign of a bad year and a small bonus.

“You guys want to see something fucked up?” he says, excitement gripping the curves of his cheeks and turning them red. “Like horror movie fucked up.”

Jack looks at Carter, and Carter looks at me.

“Where?” I say.

Sandy raises his eyebrows. “Come and have a look”, he says, pulling himself upright.

There are rooms at Aces, fucking tunnels actually, like a labyrinth that runs under the building. A secret system. You have enough money you can do whatever the fuck you like here, even to the trophy girls. Like I say, as long as you put them back on the shelf when you’re done. Intact, in one piece.

Sandy leads the way.

“The boss has got her on a retainer”, he says while we walk. “A Christmas fucking special for the office.”

Carter puts his hand on Sandy's shoulder and whispers something in his ear. A moment later he slides a bag of something into his coat pocket, turns around and glances at me.

We go through a curtained door, guarded by two bouncers that leads into a corridor. From there, we pass a number of rooms until we stop at ours, number six. Sandy has the key.

“Are you boys fucking ready for this?”

We go in.

She must be no more than twenty, tied to a chair, with legs open and a ball gag in her mouth, trapped completely in a cube of glass. Nothing too unusual for Aces.

“What do you think?” Sandy says. He stands there a moment staring at her, hands in his pockets, chubby face carved into a smile. “She’ll do, won’t she? Not the best I’ve seen, but tidy. Definitely tidy enough. Fuck.”

On the table to the side he racks up four lines, more interested now in the cocaine than the life sized, real life toy.

“Fuck”, Jack says, moving in front of her to get a better look and titling his head like a confused dog when every other action escapes him. “Go on.”

Carter walks around her, arms crossed, as though she were some kind of modern art exhibit without a soul. Dehumanized enough to not be noticeable in her original form. “Huh”, he says when he’s come full circle. “How long has she been like that?”

“Can she move?” Jack asks. I see him eager to test her restraints, to play with her, but not sure quite how. “Not that she would want to, but can she?”

He goes to the glass to get as close as he can, kneels down in front of it. “Fucking hell”, he says. “You can almost see-.”

All of a sudden, an almighty squirt of ejaculate hits the glass in front of Jack's eyes, scaring the shit out of him. Carter buckles over laughing.

“Fuck”, Jack says. “That's insane.”

“She's wired up”, Sandy says, without even needing to look up. “Push the button, see what it does.”

I get closer to the glass and look at her soulless eyes. She's got her legs wide and hung in stirrups like she's about to give birth, electrodes placed around her clit and underneath her tits, and something vibrating inside her ass-hole. She's pretty. Good tits, nice legs, nice eyes too. I'd fuck her, but I wouldn't pay for her.

“Bain?”' Sandy holds out the $50 bill he has already made good use of.

“I've got my own”, I say, and take a silver tube out of my inner pocket, the top edge of which is engraved with my initials.

“When the man's got money”, Carter says and smiles.

I lean over the line and Sandy rubs my shoulders.

“This is grade A shit”, Carter says. “98% pure, Columbian, straight off the ship and $250 a gram.”

“It's shit”, I say, tapping the tube out on the table.

Jack's busy pressing the button on the side of the glass. He's worked out it controls whatever huge toy she’s got inserted into her ass, and each time he gives the button a whack, the intensity goes up. She looks like she's about to squirt at him again and Jack can’t wait for it.

“How much did this cost?” Jack calls over, his eyes never once moving from her pussy hole.

“You pay on the way out”, Sandy jokes.

“Asshole”, Jack says. “You got some of that for me then?”

“You got your own snorting tube?” Carter asks.

Jack takes out his wallet, pulls a twenty out and bends his head over the table. I go back to the glass.

“Congratulations”, Sandy says, standing alongside me.

The girl looks at us both with wide, expectant eyes, closes them sharply and comes hard again. A dribble of ejaculate melts into the chair between her legs, and for a moment I can't tell whether she's in pleasure or pain.

“What are you going to spend it on?” Sandy asks.

Carter comes to stand the other side of me. All three of us watch the girl. She doesn’t take her eyes off me. “You could have anything that you want.”

“I can have that anyway”, I say.

I turn away. I’ve seen enough of this bullshit soullessness for the time being. There was more life in the lights of a badly rendered Christmas sleigh hanging like a crashed kite from the edge of a no name electrical shop on the edge of Broad than this sorry excuse for an art exhibition. These people may have money, they don’t have class.

“Come on, let's go get a drink.”

“Jack?” Carter calls.

“I'm gonna stick around for a bit, you know, get acquainted with the mechanical love box here, I'll catch you up.”

“Don't press that button too much and don’t forget to clean the glass if you end up spunking on it”, Sandy says.

“Fuck off.”

“Oh, and there are cameras, so don’t do anything you can’t pay to hide.”

Sandy points to the darkened corners of the room with his glass, just to shit Jack up.

“Carter?”

“Keep it, knock yourself out. Bain's right, it is shit.”

Back in the bar some more of Sandy's badly dressed, shoe-scuffed, ticket stubs have joined us. They all want a piece of me, fighting over each other to find out my secret, take a look at the card for Kings, scrape off what little they can. When I pull it out they're pretty much wanking me off to touch it. I let the light catch the gold tint inside the platinum for a while before relining my wallet with it. They queue up to buy me drinks, as though some of what I’ve got is going to eventually rub off on them.

I accept, graciously, and get the Polish girl, maybe the Russian girl, to pour me a drink - Vodka and ice - and then settle back into the sofa.

“I heard there's something big going on at Duke's tonight. Everybody that’s anybody big is going to be over there.”

“Not me”, I say.

Mark comes back from a private booth dance, and I can smell the pussy on him like cologne.

“I think I've fallen in love”, he says. “Natasha. She's fucking insane, my cock's going to fall off.”

The girls do the cycle around us like automatons going through the motions. Like fucking parasites feeding in a symbiotic relationship. This place is pretty soulless when you dig deep into it. Dead eyed woman dancing for money and men with too much of it chasing them around. Mind and body separated, both in a completely different place from one another. I come here because the vodka's good and the girls are pretty, and all this is like theatre to me. Fuck, I come here because everyone here wants to be me, and nobody else seems to get it.

“You want a dance?”

“Sure”, I say. What the fuck. Show me what you do to a clutch of other people on a daily basis. It’s like me saying, “do you want to watch me sell?”

She dances and rubs herself against my cock. It feels good and before too long I'm semi erect. Friction isn’t the same as feeling.

“You want a private dance?” she asks, her voice spritely but layered by boredom, clear enough I could pick it out if I wanted to, like fallen autumn leaves in a swimming pool.

“I do”, Carter says and holds up two hundred dollar bills like monopoly money. I can see her eyes light up at the thought of her student loan being repaid before she’s sixty.

She darts a look back to me just to see if it's ok. “You can both come if you want?”

“Go on”, I say and watch her for a while as she leads Carter off to another one of the underground rooms.

Jack comes back a few moments later, slumps into one of the armchairs and pours himself a drink from the bottle on the table. “I was in there for fifteen minutes and she came three fucking times, right against the glass”, he says, like he's seen a ghost. ”I thought it was going to break at one point. Fucking amazing.”

I feel like needling him just because I’m bored. “What are you going to spend your bonus on, Jack?”

“Fuck you, Bain.”

“You know I'll pay more tax this year than money you earned?”

He sticks his middle finger up at me.

“Come on, man, I'm joking”, I say. “Here.” I dig into my pocket and throw him over a baggy filled with the best coke he’ll ever have. “A Christmas present.”

He opens the baggy suspiciously, licks the tip of his little finger and dips it inside to taste.

“Fuck me”, he says, his eyes lighting up bigger than I’ve ever seen them. Big enough for those bags to disappear briefly.

“Don't say I don't do anything for you.”

“Fuck me, thanks, Bain”, he says, genuinely moved, his face melting into a smile.

I order another round of drinks, and pay for new girls to come over and dance for us. We get two on our table who perform a relatively clean lesbian show with medium sized dildos, fucking each other until they both fake come and decide they’ve done enough. Mark pays $2000 to lick coke off each of their assholes, and another $50 to blow a line back up them.

“Where are we going next?” Carter says, his arm around my neck.

“I'm fucking staying here”, Jack says from behind the bare ass of a nineteen year old girl.

“I'm going to Kings”, I say.

“Come on buddy, you leaving us already?” Mark asks, trying to guilt trip me into staying. It isn’t going to work. I’ve already given them enough of my time, and I’ve been ready to move on for a while.

“Fuck him”, Sandy says, half-joking.

I laugh. “You know, I've only got one card. I've got to see what it's like.”

“Kings sounds like the kind of place you go into on a Friday night, and don't come out of until Monday morning”, Carter says.