the two of us (closed for collette23)

[patrick1]

'Jon, if you're ready to join us?'

'Sure, sure.'

He should be catching up on the iPress account like he's pretending to do. Or responding to that phone call by going to the meeting. Not loitering in a virtual world with an imaginary Nathan for the woman to arrive on the imaginary train north to become his imaginary slave.

Jon never usually indulges himself at work with what Nathan writes. There's always too much real dull boring work stuff to do - designers to pacify, coders to mollify, clients to pacify - for him to be able to relax into the world of the erotic and forbidden.

But today is Auditors Day, when the numbers people call him in and he pretends to understand what the fuck they're talking about, and so he's allowing himself to relax. Seemingly busy at his Blackberry, he glances across through the open plan to where they're already bent over their laptops, the accountant, Rosemary the auditor, their assistants. Smart cookie, that woman: brisk, friendly, keeps the company's numbers man from getting bogged down in the minutiae he loves.

Watching her walk up the platform towards him, yet not seeing him, Nathan could already imagine his future slave naked, in chains...

Stop it man. Nothing to do with a might-as-well-be-sexless woman like Rosemary. Go and see the auditors. The square on the balance sheet is equal to the sum of income and expenditure on the other two sides. None of those Nathan fantasies now. Blah di blah.

+

He's holding his own. 'So you're saying that we need to depreciate the building as an asset over a longer period so that the tax allowances will be...?'

Rosemary smiles, as if to say, yes he's got it. She seems oddly female to him, today. Maybe he shouldn't let himself get a little aroused before meetings. Usually she just seems like one of the lads – the lads in their thirties and forties, not sure where to place her in the age spectrum – but generally she just gets on with things and they close up their laptops at five and have a drink and maybe a meal afterwards, a few of them, scrupulously paying their own bills, but...

But today she has breasts. A simple white blouse, not that the breasts are prominent or anything, Jon just feels something different about her. He could reach across the table and touch them. Not that he would. He's a model of decorum.

Maybe it's her hair, auburn, is it more auburn than it was last year when she was here? Maybe it's her make-up, just a touch of pale pink lipstick, a little something on the eyes, does she always wear it? Has he never noticed before? Or maybe it's her demeanour, that she's somehow more, more, more what?

'If you come round to me, Jon,' Rosemary is saying, 'I'll show you on the spreadsheet...'

He pulls up a chair beside her. The others in the room seem somehow unimportant. She has a scent today he doesn't remember from before. She points to figures on the screen and her fingernails are silver, her fingers delicate, no ring on her left hand. Nathan could already imagine his future slave naked, in chains...

The room lurches momentarily. Nathan's words don't belong here, Jon's never heard them in this room before, like this, in the midst of a work meeting. The room levels off. He clears his throat.

'Thanks, Rosemary,' he says even though she isn't done. He has to get away from her, back to his side of the table, back to being the affable man in charge. He smiles. 'That - that's all clear now. So...what's next on the agenda?'

 

[patrick1]

What can be making her put her hand to her throat like that?

Or is it a gesture she's always making, that he's only just started noticing?

Hell, it's like being a teenager again, seeing Shirley Stockwell The Boring Chess Genius that day without her spectacles, in an off-the-shoulder dress, realizing what he'd been missing for two-and-a-half years in the same classroom.

Stop gawping, man, you're fifty-something not fifteen-and-some. 'Just got a couple of things to catch up on, why don't I meet up with you all in the bar?'

'Pint of Stella?' asks Ralph.

'Yeh...no...why don't I share a bottle of dry white with you tonight, Rosemary?'

==

What impulse made him say that?

Of course, he had nothing to catch up on, he ignores a minor flood of work e-mails and goes to check if Nathan's imaginary slave has responded yet to his narrative.

Too soon. What's so wrong with real life, anyway? - Even if there is something disconcerting about Rosemary turning into a woman all of a sudden like Shirley Stockwell.

==

And soon he's drunk an awful lot of wine on an empty stomach, laughed at some YouTube videos they've played each other on their phones – maybe it's the company of accountants, maybe 'Sing along with John Maynard Keynes' really is that funny...

And it's during that one, or mayybe the Hayek/Keynes rap, that he finds his arm unexpectedly around Rosemary so they can both easily watch the one phone together, her suit jacket is off and beneath the pristine blouse she has flesh, he has felt it, and liked the touch of it, never understood the world's passion for skinny women...

Which makes him, surprised at thinking such thoughts about Rosemary the auditor, makes him realize it must be time for dinner across the road, even though there's wine left in the bottle.

Gosh: a little shaky for a moment when they stand.

There's still the tail-end of rush hour traffic between them and Silvio's finest Italian made-on-the-premises pasta, 'Come on guys!'

'Jon!' someone shouts.

Hell, this isn't a one-way street this is -

Oblivion.

 

[patrick1]

A woman is speaking in a friendly, slightly patronising way, saying his full first name, 'Jonathan, can you hear me Jonathan, stay with us, Jonathan...?'

Sometimes the world is just tiring beyond belief.

So he dives back down into deep yet surprisingly welcoming black black water, there are surprising glimpses of a woman's skin that keep morphing into the sand of a beach, ah Scarborough, 'Jonathan...'

+

Mum. Not Mum, some nurse. Befuddled.

Ralph from the office. Boring old fart, pretending to be a gagged bird, something about a video.

'Heard from Rosemary,' Ralph is saying, 'got your Blackberry...'

It's because Mum insisted on using his full name, Jonathan. And then a nurse or a paramedic or someone was using his full name. Piecing things together.

But who was the nude woman in the water? Fleshy, she was, he reached out for her and she turned into sand...

'Sure you'll be all right in two flicks of a monkey's tail...'

Is that what Ralph really said?

There's terrible coughing, and a throbbing pain in his ankle, and the indignity of a commode beside the bed.

I was in an accident, don't think about it, go back to the nude woman in the water, eyes closed, who is she...is that a chain on her ankle...?

'Twenty-three,' she's saying, 'Two, three...'

+

'Rosemary! How lovely of you to come. I gather I'm going to be discharged any moment now. Are you all right...?'

 

[patrick1]

Her busy hands. What small hands she has, with small pointed fingers. In his own hand, tingling along his nerves, he feels the surprise of her hand on his.

And then her hand goes to her throat, and she seems to want to disguise that, and puts her hand in her pocket.

Is there something about his concussion that's making everything seem a little hallucinatory? The hacking cough of the man behind the curtains in the bed across the way. Rosemary's fretfulness. Him counting the tiles on the ceiling before she came. Stopping at 23.

He suddenly realises it's a continuum from yesterday, this feeling – not the blow on the head at all. Yesterday he felt stirred by Rosemary in a way he hasn't before, somehow she's passed across into some different kind of...friend? Person? Woman?

She's smiling at him benevolently; expectantly. He wants to reach for her hand but doesn't. What – what should he be answering? Ah yes:

'Fibonnaci? I suppose. Prime anyway. Some writer had a thing about 23, didn't they? That it meant something. I suppose you can make any number mean something if you try hard enough can't you?'

His own hands, holding the Blackberry she brought. She's been nosey and looked at his email or something, that's why she's feeling jumpy.

Perhaps she's seen something sexy. Oh God, was some of Nathan's writing in the email?

He offers her some of his surplus grapes, to cover his own confusion now. She must have read something. Something rude. About the woman he's never seen whom Nathan imagines as a slave. Never seen, but he feels he knows the woman. Nathan has had her describe herself: small hands and feet, calves that show off high heels...

Lying in the bed, he's never looked at Rosemary's feet this close before. Hm, hers are small too, like the fantasy-woman. He smiles. Rosemary's one of those sensible people, probably never shared a rude fantasy in her life, she'll have a man in a cardigan at home somewhere. Or a woman maybe: it would be hard to tell from her day-to-day behaviour, which way she'd fall. He's never even asked. About her home life. Has Ralph cracked the occasional joke? And got no information?

Has she been speaking to him? He's been lost in day-dreaming. The blow on the head, he can blame. 'It's very kind of you to come in Rosemary. Surely it's Saturday? I daresay there's someone waiting at home for you. Really, I'll be ok now...'

 

[patrick1]

He knows it will be one of those jokes that sounds better inside his head than out in the world, but they've been waiting for the consultant to sign him out of here forever now and he hears the inner giggle so he just can't help saying it. 'The road of excess,' he says.

'What?' asks Rosemary.

'Your trainer, Blake. Does he say the road of excess leads to the palace of fitness?'

But as they wait, smiling at each other between silences, he wishes he hadn't summoned up the ghost of William Blake, even in jest. Rosemary is reading a magazine someone's left behind and Jon's pretending to work on a sudoku in the paper. When has he ever followed the road of excess? If only he had. He who desires but not acts breeds pestilence. Sooner murder an infant in his cradle than nurse unacted desires.

'Thanks,' says Jon impulsively, out of nowhere, remembering her embarrassment at her own offer to help him, putting his hand on Rosemary's. 'Thanks for...'

And of course that's the moment the doctor comes, with a thin entourage of acolytes it being Saturday, and there's a lot of palaver about pain-killers, exercises and appointments. So he's almost forgotten about quoting Blake's proverbs of Hell, when they're in her car, him perched on her back-seat giving directions to his terraced house, and he's saying, 'This is really very kind of you...'

And she, glancing at him in the rear-view mirror, suddenly quotes Blake back at him: 'The most sublime act is to set another before you.'

+​

Rosemary in his house is like Rosemary at work: no nonsense, efficient, helpful. He is going to have to hop up and down the stairs, and abandon the attic for now – she's brought down his computer (careful, my darkest dreams are in there) – and she has esconced herself in the spare room, with something downstairs bubbling slowly in the oven.

He sits on his bed, looking through his emails on his laptop. What was it Rosemary saw, on his Blackberry yesterday? It seemed from her blushes that she recognized the numbers 2 and 3, the suffix to the pseudonym Nathan's 'slave' uses online. It could have been anything, he had the whole story open for some foolish reason, he dashed from a fantasy to the meeting, that must have been why, oh God.

Perhaps it's all that's happened to him in the last 24 hours – the powerlessness over events – but when he closes his eyes he realizes – that he wants to cry – and yet that he feels – yes – aroused...

He thinks of where the story between Nathan and 'Collette23' remains suspended. She is Nathan's naked slave. He has washed her. She kneels naked before him while he cooks for her.

Oh my goodness. He opens his eyes quickly. Behind his eyelids the woman – unimaginably, and yet he imagined it – she had Rosemary's face...

 

[patrick1]

The meal Rosemary cooks is delicious. The conversation is amiable – this and that on the news, this and that foible of the people they both know.

Jon's foot throbs, but he has promised himself no more pain-killers for another hour.

He drinks his first glass of wine too quickly instead, and has the unexpected desire to reach across the table, inside Rosemary's sweater, and fondle her breast.

He's mixing drink and the prescribed drugs, and there hasn't been a woman in his house for so long, just being kind, just being solicitous...

There are many explanations for impulses.

Jon is a good, gentle, kindly man. He would never reach across the kitchen table and fondle a woman's breast.

Now, if Nathan were in his place...

Jon has been lying on his bed this afternoon, his foot throbbing with pain, thinking about Nathan. Nathan wouldn't even have the woman sit at the table, he would have her kneeling, naked not clothed, begging not an equal...

And Jon chews the last morsel of salmon, and says, 'Lovely dinner, this is so kind of you.'

Damn it. He pours himself a second glass, and heaves his leg up on to the spare chair, waving away Rosemary's offer of help.

'They say,' there's something he wants to begin but he doesn't quite know what it is, 'don't they say everyone has a twin? There was a theory anyway. I certainly have. In my imagination. A man quite unlike me and yet...' You've glimpsed something of what he thinks about, on my little electronic machine. 'Do you, Rosemary? Do you have an imaginary twin?'

 

[patrick1]

The thin aperture. She has opened a door.

'I wonder. Perhaps...'

And then he pushes the dangerous thoughts away, chitter chatter chitter chatter, the meal was delightful, the flavour was of a certain quality resembling whaddyacallit, oh this and that, this and that, bla di bla, how life can go on and on and on without ever getting to the point -

We will die, and never have got to the point.

'Please,' he says, hobbling determinedly to his feet. 'While I wash the pots, go and get your laptop. Please.' Against her kind offers to do everything.

While she is gone, he opens the door to the cellar. Leaving it just ajar.

His Blackberry is ready and waiting.

He washes, washes, washes the pots.

When she returns, he smiles. 'Please, Rosemary,' he says, 'if I have misunderstood something, forgive me, I hope we can go back to...'

And he picks up his Blackberry.

There is no going back to anywhere if he begins to write on the machine.

He finds the address for Collette23. He begins to write on the machine.

Take off your clothes now. All of them. Just hurl them aside. Then prostrate yourself, wherever you are. Nathan waits for you in the cellar.

 

[patrick1]

Her nipples. He could have managed it all if it weren't for -

Typical man. Blame it all on her tits. Says his angry ex in his ear.

There is a moment ( seeing her nipples out of the corner of his eye, unable to stop seeing her nipples dammit). He could deny -

How could he?

Je suis comme je suis. Je suis fait comme ca.

Babble foolishly but sound intelligent. It's been his method in life, in bureaucracy and love, try it now, 'I love stories of espionage. Do you? Our man in Havana. Or those le Carre things. Those tales where people pretend to be someone else and yet truly they're -'

Truly I'm. You're.

He is lost. His mouth is a fish's, opening and closing without apparent purpose. Merely to breathe. Truly I'm. I cannot speak the unspeakable. I see you are looking at me expecting me to speak but what shall I say? Truly I'm. Cannot be said.

 

[patrick1]

He wants her. Oh, Jon wants her.

But Nathan wants her too.

Jon hears the imagined swish of a cane through the air. He hears her fine voice reduced to begging and screaming. He tries to speak:

'Ro -'

Is she even Rosemary any longer?

'Collette,' he says at last. 'Hurl them aside, that's what Nathan said. Didn't he? He hates to be contradicted in the slightest way.'

Her breast. He wants to, no he doesn't want to torture her breast like Nathan, no, he wants only to cup it in his hand and caress it - doesn't he?

'Be careful. You can still go back, Collette. In the cellar he will be ruthless. Utterly ruthless. There's still time to go back to – to – to Rosemary.'

Oh but is there any going back now, we will never be the same again to each other and oh, it's true, I would love to see your body, if only for a few moments....I would love to see what Nathan does to you...

 

[patrick1]

He crouches beside her.

There is an animal in him.

No – no – it's in the cellar. The animal.

He must get there, to help her. To feel the animal at work.

'Listen.'

The clock ticks.

'He is difficult. Nathan.'

He likes her shoulders. He strokes them. And then, down over her ribs to the small of her back. And then, her buttocks.

'He requires utter obedience. He will test you.'

The backs of her thighs. Her calves. Up to her back again. She is Nathan's. He feels jealous of the cruel bastard. He must get down there, and watch what the torturer does to her.

'Collette. Once you go through the door you will not even be that. You will be whatever he chooses to call you.'

Slowly. Slowly. Crouching, he can't stop touching her with his fingertips. The backs of her arms. Her sides. Her back again.

'He will be arbitrary. Terribly arbitrary. Listen to the clock. You will need to know – believe me, you will need to know – how long it takes a minute to elapse. Here, make this last ten seconds, and say it six times, chant it to yourself, while you can still see a clock:

Cum.
Obey.
Lust.
Learn.
Entreat.
Train yourself.
Torture is
Ecstasy...'

He is up, and, gone.

Through the cellar door.

She hears him hobbling down the steps.

Is it her imagination, fixated on the clock, that it's precisely 23 seconds after the door shuts when she hears another, sterner voice from below say, 'Collette!'

 

[patrick1]

The wheelchair creaks out of the shadows. He's naked, in the chair, looking at her intently. He stops, just outside the square.

He has the hurt ankle of Jon, the smile of Jon. But the look in his eyes is of someone else.

'I'm not going to explain myself. I'm going to experiment with you. Here's the first whip.' It's in his right hand: a short-handled leather whip, of a light brown, with multiple strands, some of the strands with knots in them. She makes a sound:

'Quiet, Twenty-three.' He flicks the whip against the ground. 'Only speak when spoken to down here. Nathan's rules. In a moment, when I flick the whip again, a period of twenty-three minutes will begin. During those twenty-three minutes, you'll crouch within the square, not kneeling, squatting, your fingers interlocked on your head. When you think twenty-three minutes is over you'll say to me, 23 minutes Sir. For every second you're wrong, there'll be a punishment. If you fall over or stand up, I'll start whipping you and you'll have to work out how to stop me.'

There's no pause. No opportunity for questions. He smiles.

He flicks the whip.