The Sexopaths (33 page)

Adam nods sympathetically. 
He’d tried in vain to decipher the curious staccato syntax of an interpreter
during one of the morning’s Chinese presentations.  The hieroglyphic
slides were equally impenetrable, and only the occasional image or video
offered any relief.  Monique says:

‘I think I shall go up to the
room to rest for a while.  Have a bath.  Do you mind?’

‘Of course not – just don’t
fall asleep else you’ll be awake all night.’

‘What time is it in the UK?’

Adam consults his watch, frowning
as he stumbles over the subtraction.

‘About seven, I think.  We’d
just be waking up.’

‘Then I shouldn’t feel like
sleep, should I?’ says Monique brightly.

‘It’s never stopped you yet.’

She smiles, leans in for a kiss
and then gives him a light push on the breastbone.  She says:

‘You fan club awaits.’

‘Thanks – I’ll see you
later at the room.’

‘Three-nine-three!’

‘Spooky.’

– the next
morning –

Adam opens his eyes.  For a moment
he thinks he’s at home and wonders what day it is.  Then he sees the
willow-pattern-style painting on the wall beyond the foot of the bed and
remembers he’s in China.  There’s a dazzling brightness; the curtains are
open and when he sits up he can see the top of the twin-towers of the
university.  The entire sky from horizon to zenith is a uniform white that
doesn’t look like either cloud or mist.  Smog?  A great flock of
crows swirls across this backcloth, tumbling black shapes that appear to have rained
from the heavens.  The room is silent now but the electronic ping of
something – the doorbell? – has woken him.  There’s no sign of
Monique.  Maybe she’s been down to breakfast and has forgotten her
keycard?  Naked he pads to the door and peers through the spy-hole. 
The corridor has the distorted look of a vacant goldfish bowl, bereft of fish
or human.  Cautiously he opens the door to check if something’s been left
outside, but there’s nothing.  He closes it and heads towards the bathroom. 
Then he notices Monique’s handset charging on the unit beneath the
willow-pattern artwork.  Beside it on a hotel notepad is a penned message:
‘Gone with Lifen to tour factory.  Did not want to wake you, sleepy
head! –  il y a des croissants!!  Will call soon.  Love
you.  MX.’
  He rubs his eyes.  How will she call if
she’s left her phone?  The LED on the tv reads ten seventeen – minus
eight means two seventeen a.m. at home; no wonder he feels queer.  He
recalls coming back to the room after the conference had finished; Monique was
sound asleep – so deeply that he was unable to rouse her; he’d intended
for them to join some of the other speakers for a drink; he wonders how long
Lifen had waited, thinking they might reappear.  But he must have dropped
off himself.  Did he wake in the night and undress?  And how long has
he slept?  It must be more than twelve hours.  He looks at the beds
– they each have a double set apart from one another by the width of a
narrow nightstand – Monique’s white duvet lies in a heap on the floor,
along with two of her pillows and a large towel, and he can see the cord of her
bathrobe trailing out from the ensuite.  He’s always intrigued that, for
one so persistently tidy at home, she trashes hotel rooms with a certain
careless abandon.  Then he spots the breakfast tray on a low table beyond
her bed, below the window.  There are two silvered domes and a collection
of matching jugs, flasks and cutlery.  He pokes and clangs about and
discovers the wherewithal for a tepid coffee, eats a couple of chewy croissants
thinking he ought to be absolutely starving; indeed they both missed having any
dinner last night.  He wonders where he’s left his conference file –
Lifen’s business card will be inside it, and perhaps Monique has assumed he’ll
get in touch via her mobile should the need arise.  Wiping butter from his
fingers with a napkin he rounds the bed to check in the wardrobe – as he
does so, close at hand there’s a repeat of the electronic ping: of course, it’s
a message coming in on Monique’s handset – the email alert.  He
picks it up and taps at the touchpad: it’s just a junk e-shot, selling
wrinkle-free promises… but beneath… he sees the name Lucien Décure… he taps
again, smoothes his fingers across the screen… words appear, enlarging and
shrinking rebelliously beneath his ineffective touch, swimming wildly before
his eyes, blurred and confused and all mixed up with his suddenly racing heart
and the rising tide of nausea from his midriff…

‘… a difficult decision….
sorry to miss you… am sorry we met in these circumstances and in our personal
circumstances…’

Stricken by these sickening
phrases, infirmity grips his legs and he sinks down onto the end of Monique’s
bed.  Staring fearfully at the handset he tries to make out what Lucien is
saying to his wife,
his
wife.  Now he inadvertently increases the
text size and gigantic pixelated obscenities scream out from the tiny
screen.  After a few moments he gets it working, squeezing his forefinger
and thumb across the surface.  He scrolls up and down and realises the
section of the message he’s been reading is not in fact
to
Monique, but
from
her – to Lucien.  It begins ‘
Hey Lucien…’
  (a phrase
that jars – why not ‘Hi’ like she says to him?) and ends: 
‘…arrived
safely, thank you… see you soon… Monique XXX.’
   Adam bites his
lower lip until it hurts.  Three kisses.  In its minutiae her
language is alien to him.  He’s trembling, the handset shakes; he fights
to calm himself, to think: the electronic bleep that woke him some minutes ago
must have indicated an incoming reply – but at what early small hour,
local time?  It would have been after three a.m. in France.  He
pictures Lucien, late back from Brussels or maybe from a Parisien club (or
date?), returning in the early hours to Adam’s imagined eighth arrondissement
pied-a-terre, chic, minimalistic, where he now reclines amidst a static haze of
cigarette smoke, one languid eye upon a late-night porn channel, the other
overseeing his casual sex, the messaging of females of his current
acquaintance.  Now Adam scrolls down to the foot of the thread.  It
begins with a message from Lucien:

‘Hey – the Board is
pretty dull without you.  Hope you make it to China okay.  See
you.  Let me know.’

Now the crows squawk confusion as
they flutter about Adam’s head.  Which is it: let me know if you ‘make it
to China okay’… or ‘see you’ (soon), let me know’?  If he calculates
correctly, the European Board meeting that Monique had opted to miss would have
taken place while they slept last night.  He guesses Lucien probably
emailed after the meeting.  Monique must have replied this morning while
he was sleeping.  Hardly daring to look, but knowing he has to, he scrolls
up.  What does Monique mean
‘in our personal circumstances’
? 
What is she doing having this kind of conversation with someone she has
insisted is no more than a colleague?  Is he reading between the twisted
lines of an affair?  And again it strikes him as strange – two
people who could be liaising in French doing so instead in English.  What
does that tell him?  Is it Monique’s choice, or does Lucien just prefer
the graphic freedom and ambiguity it affords?  Now he reaches Lucien’s
reply – the one that woke him –
‘We have good party. I can be in
London?  Lucien.  XXX.’
  Now the Frenchman reciprocates
Monique’s three kisses.  And what does
‘good party’
mean?  Is
it a coded euphemism for Monique’s consumption?  And what inference should
he draw into the tense – or lack of?  Is it party past, or party
future? – a party to mark some event at the Board meeting… or a private party
in London with Monique as sole guest?

Adam gets up and slides
unsteadily to the window.  His eyes follow the ant-like columns of
students below, orderly regiments advancing across life’s educational
battlefield, but his mind sees only Monique, a chaise longue, a fervent
embrace, mouths affixed, moans thus nasal and suffocating, outerwear pushed
aside, underwear pulled asunder – the urgency too great – the
shadowy monochrome world of the French movie.  Afterwards her briefs
sticky, oozing, damp.

He rests against the cool glass,
rotates his forehead to ease the hurt; how can she be so outwardly normal
towards him – loving, caring, affectionate, admiring – and yet
pursue in parallel some other allegiance?  He agonises – has Jasmin-Sharon
been the salve poured upon her conscience, the special treat for him, the naïve
reward of illicit sex for his unwitting compliance with her own
infidelity?  Could that be the idea Monique has fashioned, convincing
herself such a tit for tat is permissible, equitable, guilt assuaging?  He
groans out loud – but why would she do such a dumb thing as leave her
handset on display – surely she has learnt that lesson by now –
indeed he suspects she’s deleted messages since the incident of the midnight
text… and now they’ve moved to email.  He wonders, perhaps the battery was
on its last legs, then maybe Lifen called up from the lobby and so she just
forgot it in her hurry to leave?  Or is  she willing him to discover
the exchange? – guessing he’ll check her messages while she is gone
– creating a breathing space between the revelation and the inevitable
interrogation that will follow – choosing a place five thousand miles
from home – safely away from Camille and the domesticities that may pluck
against her heartstrings?

A long line of single-decker
buses, white adorned with citrus-green graphics, has moved to fill the road in
front of the pillared fencing of the university campus – he’s reminded of
Monique’s comment about threes… but in China it seems they come by the dozen. 
He watches, drills his fingers into his temples, rubbing in circles as if to
erase the unwelcome itinerant scrawls from the canvas of his mind.  Then
he breaks away determinedly and locates Lifen’s card.  Using the hotel
telephone, he taps out her number, his heart pushing up into his throat like a
live creature that he’s swallowed and now it’s trying to find an escape
route.  Little warning voices tell him to cut off the call, but Lifen
answers:

‘Hello… Adam?’  Evidently
she has the hotel number stored in her phone memory.

‘Lifen – is Monique there?’

There’s an intake of
breath.  He’s omitted any greeting and left no room for her to
reciprocate.  He’s vaguely aware his brusqueness will offend, but through
Lifen wants to convey his ire.  She composes herself:

‘One moment please.’

‘Adam – are you
okay?’  Monique.  Her tone tells Adam she knows something is awry.

‘I’m not okay.’

‘What is wrong – are you
feeling ill?’

‘I am feeling a bit sick, now you
mention it.  I’ve just read these emails between you and Lucien.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘About your relationship –
‘circumstances’ as you put it – about meeting up… what’s going on
Monique?’  A telltale octave tries to break through as he fights the
tremor in his voice.

‘Adam – there is
nothing.  I don’t know what you mean.’

‘It seems clear enough to me.’

‘Look – you are making
something out of nothing.  Don’t be ridiculous.’

He can’t believe she’s said it:
‘Don’t
be ridiculous.’
  Not so long ago she’d read it out from a magazine:
it’s what your partner says when you accuse them of having an affair, and they
are.  Ridiculously, he finds he’s arguing with himself that such a thing
can’t always be true; surely it is a perfectly natural thing to say, innocent
as much as guilty?  He remains silent, the conflicting arguments –
the email, her denial – wrestling in live and mortal combat inside his
head.  At present they threaten to cancel one another out, leaving him in
a bewildered limbo.  The hiatus forces Monique to speak:

‘Adam – we shall soon be
finished – in less than half an hour.  I can’t talk from here
– there are other people nearby waiting for me to continue.  We
shall speak when I get back.  Okay?’

‘Fine.’

‘Adam – I must go.’ 
She adds, whispering: ‘I love you, my darling.’

‘… love you.’

He falls down on her bed and
stares unseeing at the pale ceiling.  The words – or rather the
word,
love
– hovers in his mind’s eye like the sun’s image burned
upon his retina when accidentally viewed; offset from centre, each time he
tries to look at it, it dances away, elusive and unreal.  Whatever she
might say, these feelings of despair tell him how much he loves her… if that
need to possess, to be secure, to be sure,
is
love.  He recalls
Xara’s treatise; certainty is her maxim, control.  Whereas Monique…? 
Is she free of such terrors; shimmering, diaphanous, able to slip her bonds and
cross into those tempting places, drawn by forces that beguile and bewitch, and
persuade one’s normal sensibilities that it is acceptable to see the world a
different way?  No wracking transition from Jeckyll to Hyde and back
again… instead taking unseen duplicity in her stride?  Right now, she
says, there’s nothing afoot… while he at the other end of the phone reads her
words – an intimate ‘Hey’, three kisses when he gets one – talk of
relationships, of meeting up – are they not proof of her deception? 
Or, at the very least, self-deception – he supposes that’s what he
wishes, hopes for; the lesser evil.  Not the planning that takes nerve and
cunning, the brazen excuses delivered with the cold calculating expertise of
the psychopath, but a childish innocence that cannot distinguish between right
and wrong, that puts gratification before loyalty, pleasure before pain.

He sighs and shifts onto his
stomach, presses his face into the pillow, smells her scent.  Does it
matter which it is?  Nothing can change the conversation he has
witnessed.  Monique seems to be saying to Lucien she wishes she could be
with him, but her personal circumstances prevent it.  And now the proposal
that they meet up in London – not even shielded beneath the cloak of
respectability provided by the European Board.