The Sexopaths (19 page)

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘Toil and trouble.’  She
gulps theatrically on her wine.  ‘I don’t know.  But you should be
careful.  She likes to get her own way.’

‘I can’t just become her
slave.  What if I simply don’t reply?  Go under the radar. 
Change my mobile number.’

‘It might work… it might
not.  You can’t stop her contacting your wife… your work.’

Would Xara resort to
blackmail?  Is Jasmin-Sharon playing the emissary?  He says:

‘Do you think she knows who I
am?’

‘She’ll know enough.’

‘Please don’t take offence… but
have you said anything to her – since the weekend?’

She makes him wait through
another slowly considered sip of wine before she replies.  He wonders if
that’s to give her time to compose a diplomatic answer.  Eventually she
says:

‘I don’t really speak much to
her.  Like I said – we’re finished as a couple.’

‘But you still have some
contacts, being… co-workers?’

‘It’s worth my while.’

‘Why do you think she chose me?’

He detects a languid sizing up of
his masculinity.  Then her reply disappoints. 
     ‘Maybe you did something to especially piss her off.’

‘But how?  I hadn’t seen
her… ’

‘You don’t have to lie to me,
babes.’

He eschews the opportunity to
reorient her opinion – there’s no need: she navigates without moral
compass in her chosen field.  He says:

‘But it’s crazy.  Like
something you’d read in a cheap novel.  No one would believe it if the
story came out.’  Monique excepted.

‘Every man’s dream come true, I’d
have thought.  Stuff even punters can’t buy.’

Adam nods, shrugs, sighs. 
He can’t argue with her logic.  ‘I know, I know… but I can’t help
wondering why me?’

‘You’re top of her list?’ 
She sounds disinterested, the suggestion is hollow.

‘What – her
hit
list?’

‘I mean her mobile
contacts.  Who comes up first on your phone?’

‘Alcoholics Anonymous.’

‘So you get the idea.’  She
retrieves the active phone from her bag and shows him the display.  ‘Look
– you haven’t seen this, right?’  She clicks on contacts and he
reads names:
Ben old nice… Ben young CIM… Colin rich A…

She removes the phone before he
can see too much, drops it back into the bag.  She says:

‘Where would you be?’

‘You’ve sidetracked me into
thinking
what
would I be!’

‘Don’t get above your
station.’  She sounds like she’s teasing.

He smiles.  ‘Look – I
know what you’re saying.  All my life – school, college, work,
courses, you name it – who gets to go first?  Who’s the guinea
pig?  Muggins here.’

So unless Xara happens to have an
Aaron among her followers, his is probably the name she sees first every time
she searches her contacts.  Adam the one.  But still why?

‘I shouldn’t worry about it,
babes, let it run its course.’

It’s easy for her to say that, he
thinks, no dangling sword of Damocles, or at least not one held by so
apparently fine a hair.  He stretches back, tips his head against the
cushioned wall as if to check for the blade.  Should he just relax as she
suggests?  Give fate its head.  He ponders the names theory again,
then starts thinking about the girls on the website: alphabetical precedence is
certainly an advantage sought by some – a preponderance of names begins
with A, indeed there are Aaliyahs and Aanyas with double-As to make doubly
sure, outsmarting the massed pseudonymous ranks of the Abbeys, Abbies, Abbis
and Abis, pipping them to pole position.  He feels strangely warmed that
Xara needs no such artificial enhancement.  He says:

‘What made you choose Jasmin?’

There’s a hint of a smile. 
She swirls the wine in her tumbler, stirs up a memory.  ‘When I went for
my first job as a dancer.  The guy who took me on said I’d need a
stage-name.  I had to get changed in the toilets – there was this
spray, jasmine-scented.  It sounded exotic.’

‘It’s a good choice.  Nice
fragrance… nice name – you don’t feel daft actually calling someone by
it.  It’s not so easy to strike up a conversation with a girl called
Barbie
or
Electra
… you know?’

Jasmin-Sharon doesn’t answer. 
He’s perplexed by her general indifference: that she has not been more
inquisitive.  How had he felt, for instance, when – with surely some
devilment – she casually name-dropped Xara?  What are his thoughts
on the new ménage-a-trois that includes Monique?  She hasn’t even asked
him how he got himself on Xara’s contact list in the first place.

Has experience trained her that
punters dislike the third degree, and so by force of habit she keeps her
questions reined in?  Or is she just fatigued after a busy night between
the sheets?  Thus far her only animated moments have been in response to
his revelation about his status and his suggestion that they could challenge
Xara with their knowledge.

‘What’s Xara’s real name? 
It’s not something really obvious like Sara, is it?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine,
babes.’

‘And you probably wouldn’t tell
me.’

She smiles, shakes her
head.  He offers the wine and she takes a refill, between them they finish
the bottle.  He says:

‘Are you okay for time?’

‘I’m free.  My phones are
off.’

Not strictly true, he
thinks.  He says:

‘I wanted to say – thanks
for the other night.  That was pretty hot.  Monique seemed to like
it.’

She lets out a half-suppressed
laugh, as though he has intentionally understated by some implausibly wide
margin.  And she obviously refers to Monique.  She says:

‘You must have your hands full…
keeping her satisfied… French blood and all that.’

At first he takes it as a
reference to
their
love life, but the incoming memory of last night’s
text explodes this cosy image, its exploded fragments revealing glimpses only
of Monique in hedonistic flight.  Mentally he recoils, wishing to
retaliate, to return fire; though not against Jasmin-Sharon, more the invasion
from across the Channel of his territory.  But the only ammunition he has
to hand is tit-for-tat.  Isn’t he the one lying right now beside a call
girl in a cheap motel, the one embroiled in some depraved conspiracy? 
He’s no ‘regular guy’… he’s edgy, mean, cool.  But he hears himself say:

‘You two seem to have hit it
off.’

‘She’s a lovely person, your
wife.  She’s really understanding.’

Adam notices she doesn’t use
Monique’s name, as if she already has some intimate ground to protect, keeping
him at bay with a polite but firm ring-fence of formality.  He tries again
to draw her out.

‘I think she quite fancies you.’

Jasmin-Sharon wriggles and lowers
herself, as if into a more comfortable position.  She reaches for her
cigarettes and lights one up.  Then she says:

‘Well, I’m always available for
bookings.’

Is she brazenly suggesting she’ll
see Monique solo?  Then again, why not?  Here she is now, alone with
him, no questions asked.  As he ponders this prospect, unprompted she
offers him the cigarette.  He takes it and inhales, holding in the smoke for
maximum newly discovered effect.

‘Cool.’

He can’t mean what he’s
implying?  His aim surely must be to terminate their little mystery tour
at the earliest opportunity.  In his judgement Jasmin-Sharon is
hitch-hiking on the road to nowhere; but with Monique as her companion who
knows what might befall them.  With him in tow – one careless slip
and the precipice beckons.  But his heart makes a sudden thump, a
rabbit-sentry warning its harem.  As the fast-acting nicotine invades his
nerve endings, he says:

‘Why do you tie your hair like
that, pulled round to one side?’

‘So the punter gets a clear view
when I’m giving him oral.’

‘Oh… right.’

‘Do you want to do some coke?’

***

Adam watches gripped in equal
part by dread and fascination as Monique, having imbibed more than is prudent,
rather than depart on schedule accepts instead the invitation
pour un petit
digestif
.  She barely seems to notice the supporting arm about her
midriff, its fingertips caressing higher than is absolutely necessary. 
Once inside the palatial suite, she subsides into the broad settee, her hemline
rucking carelessly up her thighs, her breasts pushing against the sheer fabric
of her bra, her nipples pressing points of interest through the fine silk of
her dress.  Now she tumbles forwards from the waist and meets her
reflection in the bespoiled glass surface of the coffee table.  Now she
drops to her knees, turns and bows her head a second time.

‘No!’

Adam speaks aloud to break the
spell, and shakes his head into the wind, as if bidding the elements to cast
this invasive imagery from his mind.  He steps up his pace, but the
hallucinations persist, and trail him like a recalcitrant beggar.  He
reconsiders the wisdom of eschewing the cab that would have delivered him to
the office ahead of his thoughts.  Yet he knows he needed this time and
space.

This morning, waking, the bed
felt like an abandoned ship after a storm-tossed night.  Monique’s vacant
form was cold, her scattered pillows crushed by fitful dreams.  Camille
was sitting patiently amidst the debris, flicking through the pages of the book
she’d brought for him to read.  Thus the next hour saw him stumbling
through the morning routine, culminating in Camille’s eventual delivery to
nursery school, and his late arrival for a research debrief in the soulless
outlying suburb that is Edinburgh’s oxymoronic business park.  Afterward,
he’d abandoned his car and boarded the commuter train to Haymarket, just a
minute’s walk from the motel where he’d arranged to meet Jasmin-Sharon.

His hopes that this showdown
would shed light on Xara’s mischief had risen as he’d waited, rehearsing his
soon-to-be abandoned opening line; his visitor’s candid introduction had seen
to that.  However, on the face of it Jasmin-Sharon appears little the
wiser than he.  True, she has provided additional insight into Xara’s
character (consistent with her earlier account), but if she knows what her
erstwhile girlfriend is really up to, she isn’t telling.  Nonetheless, the
encounter was preoccupying, to say the least, and hence it is only now that
last night’s disturbing message finds the opportunity to slip through the
palings that divide his unruly subconscious from his neatly manicured rational
thoughts.

As he reaches Princes Street the
clouds are gathering, coming up behind him from the west, a daily gift from
Glasgow, blackening the castle rock.  He’s unnerved, sailing out from the
improbable safe haven of Jasmin-Sharon’s company, by how much the little text
has assumed storm proportions, sliding swift and silent across the calm waters,
unfolding its true proportions, looming, ominous, no longer held back by the
high pressure of his immediate commitments.  His office is up to his
right, a crow’s nest high on The Mound, but he diverts left in the direction of
Monique’s company HQ, into the New Town, via Frederick to George Street where
he prefers the coffee bars. 

Americano and table procured, he
retrieves from his wallet the note he’d made last night: the French telephone
number from which the text had been despatched.  He presses the mini
Post-it
^â
onto the screen of his tablet,
then Googles Monique’s name, adding
AMIE
, the acronym for the European
Board:
Agences Marketing Intégrées de l’Europe
.  To his surprise,
there’s a photograph of her he has not seen.  Its branded backcloth
matches that of the other representatives’ pictures.  There’s her usual
engaging smile – too engaging – and too much cleavage.  He
doesn’t recognise either the jewellery or the top that she’s wearing, small irregularities
that reinforce his sense of being distanced from this semi-private members’
club.

But Monique is not his direct
line of enquiry.  He navigates efficiently away, first from her entry and
then site itself, following a hyperlink that transports him from Brussels to
Paris, and the CEO of a pre-eminent French advertising conglomerate. 
Fellow of this Royal Society and that Chartered Institute, writer, journalist
and lecturer in marketing, and – of course – sitting President of
AMIE; Lucien Décure.  The face matches that on the AMIE website.  The
contact number matches that on the
Post-it
^â
.

Adam stares intently at his
adversary’s image – it’s a more relaxed shot than the head-and-shoulders
portrait on the AMIE site, capturing Lucien in a thoughtful moment, behind a
broad desk in a trendy, airy office with modern art adorning the walls. 
His flowing locks are longer than Adam remembers, his Romanesque nose less
prominent.  The eyes, focused upon some distant profundity (Adam guesses a
point on the wall opposite where the photographer had told him to look), are
however the same bright penetrating blue that he recalls from their meeting in
Mykonos.  Adam had tried half-heartedly to convince himself that this guy
was odd-looking, a little portly, past his prime – but he knows he’s wrong. 
Narcissistic, maybe, but rugged, silent, powerful… it’s an irresistible
combination.  No need even to add the knee-trembling French intonation.

Does Monique hanker after this
romantic caricature?  Is there some innate desire, some pull of provenance? 
That, he could understand, rationalise: it’s not the person, but the
ideal.  But what if it is more base still – the raw thrill of the
chase, the capture, the conquest?  And is Lucien’s appeal enhanced by the
likelihood that Simone has already succumbed to his charms; now he turns his
subtle attentions upon her?

Adam drops his tablet into his
shoulder-bag and presses the lid onto his coffee.  Right now there’s
nothing to do, but doing nothing is not an option.  Braving the weather is
a start.  At first on George Street he moves with the prevailing squall,
but as he turns right into Hanover the rain seems to come at him from all
directions.  He pulls up his collar and ducks into the worst of it,
picturing himself as a Clueso-like cartoon character, his animated thoughts
spinning in a conical vortex that hovers above his head.