Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (42 page)

He should make for
video hub room
right away, but
top spot
is a thing. Online, the scuttlebutt says Sean Perce basically lives in this eagle’s nest, suspended over 404 City’s atrium. From this panopticon he trolls his minions and follows the stats and images that rotate about his perch, on the inner screens.

How awesome would it be to grab a look. Leo checks the top right corner of the inner screen, where a metre-high clock tick-tocks. It reads:

Awesome: is time.

He uses his magic card to swipe the
top spot
door. A huff of air farts out: the top of the atrium is hotter than the room he’s in. He steps out onto a gantry and his sense of scale contracts and expands. He’s a seabird roosting on a cliff-face of sheer impossibility. He reaches behind him, finds a rung and takes a sweaty hold.

The gantry skirts the full perimeter of the atrium, under the lip of the flickering ticker screens. The only protection here for high-walking maintenance men is one flimsy rail and a clip-wire for a safety harness. Leo has no harness to clip. He’s pasted to the wall, neck bent under the overhang created by the screen. At his feet is a rackety aluminium lattice; it’s all there is between him and a glassy gravity well that runs straight down so steep and square it can’t be real. Badly rendered polygons from a cheap-ass gamestage, all the way down to the basement levels.

He looks Leo ahead instead – and sees a flash of himself, naked, gigantic and fringed by text. Shaky news footage, taking up a section of the opposite screen. It cuts to Bethany Lehrer, panicked and retreating on the stage; and to Sean Perce, chickening it to his limo. He can’t see it all. The images are cropped by an impossibility: an office room, hovering in mid-air, fifty metres above the ground.

It has to be supported – perhaps by girders hidden in the shiver of metal that links it to the west wall – but it’s awesome the games it makes with Leo’s eyes. Its glass walls are patterned with chaotic strips of black, making it hard to see inside the box. Leo cranes his head and spies the spider, Perce, perched casual against a desk, shirtsleeves rolled like he’s ready for a fight. He works his arms to punch his muted words, with more energy than Leo would use to lift a Coke machine. Leo is cowled in the dark like Batman. No way Perce can see him from inside the halogen brightness of his Top Spot.

Then Leo sees: power, corruption and lies. The copper from before, the tall one whose gun Leo and Dani stole, is sitting in one of Perce’s easy chairs. He listens and nods. There’s a big square plaster on the side of his shaved head: it’s for certain the same cop who fell on the basement floor at the hotel. Parliamentary Branch? Corporate Asslick Branch. Late Capitalism Branch.

The cop stands and shakes hands with Perce. Everything Leo ever believed about the world is proved with a rugged clasp of palms.

Perce turns, still speaking, and walks to the glass. His eyes close on Leo as if he’d always known he was there. He nods. By the time he speaks again the policeman is already in motion, racing for the bridge to the west wall, eyes locked on Leo like a heat-seeking missile.

Leo turns and fumbles with the door-handle, all vertigo gone.

¶riotbaby

RIOT TIP: Teargas. Rinse your mouth without swallowing. Blow your nose, cough and spit. RESIST THE URGE TO RUB YOUR EYES.

Seventeen

At some point doors slick open and Dani falls into the room.

This is something she’s only seen in films set in New York: the lift door opens right into Sam’s sitting room. Or is it a studio? Some word that means open plan with frosted brick and heavy timber. Open kitchen to the left, low bed up a step to the right. She giggles like a mentalist. Sam lets her mischief run ahead into the room. He places keys and wallet on a table by the elevator-slash-front-door. Dani drops her backpack. Careful: remember what’s in it.

‘Why does your flat look like my office?’ she says.

There’s some connecting formula here. Sam laughs from behind her. Maybe she did a joke. He heads for the kitchen zone while Dani has a blank.

Then she’s cross-legged on the floor, checking out a server cabinet. Fat guts of Cat 4 cable spill across the floor. A network station of awesome power – no reason why this shouldn’t be here. Everything tonight is potent and natural.

Except why is there a violin case, leaning against the sound system? Sam watches impassive from the kitchen island, stirring a glass jug, as Dani touches the curvy black case. It’s new, high end. Not for the first time she doubts Sam’s easy surface. This isn’t some childhood relic of grade exams, preserved for show.

He’s here with a glass. Dani takes it and draws a deep slug. Gin and ancient herbs. The glass licks its lips as she lowers it, and Sam smiles. She’s accepted his gift, stepped inside his palace. Now she’s his. Or maybe he Rohypnoled her.

‘Come and sit.’

He walks to a quadrilateral of sofas with bandy metal legs.

She’s in a curl with him on this one sofa, telling of the brutal week when all the people she is were in a head-on crash. To hear her, it might have happened years ago.

‘All those different me’s, out in the real. All that? Me.’ Sam strokes her hair. ‘Now I’m getting panic attacks, at being everything outside. I mean – for a while I forget, then they come back. It’s like having my insides eaten out by dogs. They’re fucking –’

She gestures. Time slides back into a familiar groove.

‘This afternoon,’ she says, ‘with Bethany, it was like I was watching myself doing every single thing. And all I saw was this – blank. And I kept thinking – I don’t even know what it’s like to have me in the room. What’s that even like?’

The one light, a glowing cube down low at the corner of the sofa, strobes gently but insistently. Sam is around her.

‘Like, like you: you’re lovely. No I mean it, you are. And it sort of, it fills the room. Me, I feel like I’m sometimes –’

Sam’s mouth is over hers and it’s hot and tight.

‘
I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.
’

Who the fuck spoke?

Sam twists to find the source, sits up. Rubs his face into awareness. Dani shifts. There’s a Sam-shaped dent in her tits. His taste in her mouth: plum, hibiscus – something. He looks dangerous. She touches his arm.

‘Sam? What was that?’

For a moment it seems too intimate to last. Then he laughs.

‘Oh. Huh.’

He pulls his phone from behind a cushion. He shows it to her then speaks into it.

‘Suck my dick.’

‘
I
’
m sorry, I didn
’
t get that.
’

She catches on and crawls across him to get to the mic.

‘Hairy gonads!’

‘
I
’
m sorry, I didn
’
t get that.
’

‘Anal warts!’

‘
I
’
m sorry, I didn
’
t get that.
’

Their first in-joke. They overplay it.

Naked on the pallet Dani curls away from Sam. He stretches out, eyes to the ceiling. He wants her to believe he’s cool about this, or not that, but that he’s capable of more. His diaphragm flutters, calling bullshit on his calm. The clock’s hands trace big arcs of time above their heads. Dani shivers as the night air cools her sweat. She talks and talks. All the imaginary times she’s fucked this man – so different from the abortive grapple they just unwound from. Her fantasy Sam was too real to survive reality. That lank Adonis from an island beach was neater than the actual Sam.

Anyway, at what point did she set herself up as Sam’s little virgin? She hunts for words to cover the static, keeps straying into confession; wishes she could shut up.

‘You think I’m cold,’ she says.

‘I don’t.’

She waits but apparently that’s all. Words keep marching out of her face.

He eases his leg between the rear of her calves and looks down her back. All he wants is to touch her soft arse. He’s not listening to her. He gazes down the soft comma of her body, watching her cheeks go taut and loose. In general he only fucks skinny girls; but now all he wants is to slip the pads of his fingers down the small of her back and trace an opening between those cheeks. He’s hard again.

‘I mean,’ she’s saying, ‘when things work we don’t know where it comes from. There’s something automatic. I don’t care how smart you are. You don’t know what the fuck’s going on any more than I do.’

‘It’s true. I know nothing,’ Sam says to her crack.

‘No, I mean it.’

His fingers make patterns along her spine.

‘You shouldn’t be hard on yourself,’ he says. ‘You’re more special than you give yourself credit.’

‘How do you mean? Oh.’

His first two fingers are doing the thing.

‘I’m not trying to shut you up.’

‘No, it’s fine. I like to talk while – hmm.’

‘You like that?’

‘. . .’

Her spinal cord judders. She bites her lower lip, her whole body focused on the fingers working down between her buttocks. He nuzzles up to her and kisses between her shoulder blades, works his spare arm under and around, pulling her in. She has nice, unassuming little breasts. She wriggles into place. They fit together well.

His two fingers part as they reach her arsehole. A tip touches. Muscles recoil like sea-life into its shell. She gives off heat and pushes at him as he slips the finger in. She gasps. He’s never done this before: always shy of filth. As he works another in, he reaches the other hand around to grasp her breast. She’s struggling to turn and face him. Her head snakes around to bite his ear. It terriers onto the lobe. Deadlock. She won’t unclench her teeth and he won’t move his fingers.

She gives first. His stinging earlobe slips from her mouth. He shakes his head and moves on top, his cock painfully hard. He turns her over, fingers inside to the middle joint. She glares up at him, a flush running across her chest like brushfire. As her pelvis flattens against the mattress he twists his fingers in her tightness. She takes a sharp breath and folds her leg so he can unloop his arm. He looks down on her compact body. When he first undressed her he couldn’t get past the puppy-flesh, would not get fully hard. Now she inflames him. The bright purple song of her birthmark, its bottom tip kissing her collarbone. He plays it with his tongue.

She grabs his cock and grapples it down, twisting it hard. He cries,
ah-ha-ha
and he’s laughing, at how completely she’s surprised him. He hopes she heard him give in. She flattens her other hand against his chest. The eggshell smoothness of his face turns to raw red as it crosses the ridges of his ribcage. His cock is slim and knotted.

Fuck the foreplay. All the fists she’s made of her own pleasure in her creaking swivel chair. Fake, fake. This is real, she thinks; but he thinks, this isn’t real.

Both of them are hungry and racing for the prize. She scrapes her palm across his thistle-down head then pulls back and slaps his face. His shocked expression cracks her up. He rears back, his fingers popping out of her, too fast. She punches him in the chest: hard. He grapples at her fist but she shakes it free and gives his cock a squeeze with her other hand: no you don’t. He glares at her in actual fury. Ah, so it was in there somewhere. She punches him again, one, two, on his tight pectoral. It flares red. Before his face can settle she moves him down and eases him in: Christ, she’s like water. She racks and he gasps. She slaps him and grabs his jawbone, squashing up his pretty face. Grabs his arse and forces him in.

Something just unlocked. He lets her handle him like a mechanical toy. She rucks him into her with both hands.

She doesn’t make it: but it’s close. He starts to buckle and lets it out with a low moan. She roars and keeps working him into her but he’s slipping away.

She lets him ease out. They look at each other for the longest time. Whose move?

‘Well,’ he says, ‘second time’s the charm.’

She laughs and slaps his shoulder.

‘Fucking teenager.’

But her grin says she’s lying. She strokes his cheek with the backs of her fingers.

‘Sorry, I guess.’

He means it.

‘No, no.’

‘That was – surprising for me.’

That sheepish grin: the boy Sam.

‘Me too. Sure.’

He slips back around her. She shifts and realises she’s oozing like mad. Ah, fuck it: it’s his side of the bed. Presumably.

Sam isn’t one of those guys who flop into sleep as soon as they come. He’s jazzed up, legs a-jangle. He sits up and fumbles on the top of a low bookcase that serves as a bedside table.

‘Are you checking your phone, you dick?’

‘I thought I heard a text.’

‘Fucking PR. I beat you till you come and you only care about your phone.’

He checks the phone, doesn’t comment, places it back on the nightstand.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That was – I liked it. I don’t – weird.’

‘That’s the thing about you. So articulate.’

They lie there a while. Cars sooth past the window. Her head is sharp and clear.