on the phone – having tried prostitute and been directed to a Jay-store
research paper on aitcheyevee transmission rates amongst
preoperative transsexual sex workers in Manila – had his grandson
been looking through his eyes as he hungrily examined the
caramelised flesh I’d no real appetite for? And was this why Ben had
been ringing so obsessively this morning – not taking REJECT CALL
for the unambiguity it so clearly was? Being held by them … the door
to Five-Twenty whooshes shut and Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager
cups Busner’s elbow in his obliging hand, then they stump
along the corridor. Last night, when Nikki left, did she still feel …
held by me? Did she still feel the pressure of his fingers deep inside
her … my breath on her belly? Some newly shined shyster must’ve
only this moment taken the lift, for in the lobby the brushes still
whirr … buffing nothing. How many minutes and hours had they
spent together in Ben’s bedroom, watching the little circlets whirl
into and out of being? An ouroboros that fed on its own inanition as
it ate its own … inexistent tail. Buffing and buffing and buffering,
until: This much I can download. – Nikki – who was café-au-lait, not
caramelised –frothing in the bowl of blue easy chair by the off-white
drapes, her legs tucked up and chuckling, Yeah, I got this job, right,
and the agency, right, they’re none too sussed ‘bout security, right,
send you wherever, whenever … meant to check out the client – check
his landline’s registered, or his mobile – izzooeesezzeeizz …
‘course they don’t bother … Mostly don’t matter, but this old
feller – must’ve been married or summat like that, right, gives a
false whatsit, right, then ‘e only goes and dies on me, don’t ‘e – no,
really – right on top of me, right on the bloody job! Nikki,
who wore a tight black dress with a plunging neckline made of
some stretchy material … a sling for her breasts to swing in … had
seemed amused, but Zack – who’d been sitting on the bed, sipping
from one of the glasses of wine he’d poured out, was suitably
shocked: Oh, you poor girl – that must’ve been terribly upsetting –.
– It bloody well were … She’d run on: ‘is place were right up on
Saddleworth Moor, so off the beaten track, sat-nav couldn’t find it.
It were winter, too. He were a sweet old feller, but he moost’ve adder
art condition or summat like that, ’cause I saw him, right, take the
little blue pill … Then we were gassin’ fer a bit – like uz, now – and
joost gettin’ started on the main business, right, when ‘is face goes
all blue an’ ‘e sorta flops right across me, right, stone-bloody-dead
… Zack had petted and stroked the idea of Nikki before
he encountered the gigglingly winsome reality. Once the correct
euphemism had occurred to him … That’s what she did – escorted me
from Romilly Street to her bedsitting room, a simple search yielded
scores of escort agencies with names such as Red Orchid Girls and
Chelsea Courtesans. He’d pressed a phone number on the screen
and within seconds was talking to a woman who sounded the hardbitten
part – he’d pictured coral lips, and a lacquered tongue which
poked and prodded him through all the options. So he’d sat,
employing capacitive touch to examine the photographs and vital
statistics of young women he lacked the capacity to … truly touch.
When he’d made his choice, hung up and was sitting there waiting,
he’d wondered at his own weirdness and … audacity. Then he’d
gone to the bathroom and checked the plastic bag in which he kept
a few essentials – wallet, reading spectacles, change of underwear,
medication, but … why did I bother? He’d voided his own little blue
pills into some other toilet bowl ages ago – while the preposterous
priapism he’d experienced during his affair with Athena had
long since withered on the vine. Had he been testing or taunting
himself? Perhaps it was his own deeply penetrating sadness that
had persuaded him he might be able to brandish a puissant pork
sword rather than a sad little cocktail sausage. None of this carry-on
to one of the Shaiva Tantra schools, which view sexual activity
as part of … the liberation process. At least, Zack had said, he
died in a state of happy anticipation. Whereupon Nikki chuckled,
What about you, Zack, are you in a state of happy anticipation?
When he’d swung open the door of Room Five-Twenty and seen
her standing there in the corridor, with its sickly stink of air-freshener,
he’d been nauseated – his pulse drumming in his ears
dum-bumma-dum-dum, dum-bumma-dum-dum, dum-bumma-dum-dum!
Love is in the air! Daaa-da-d’daaa-daaa! Love is in the
air … But Nikki had immediately taken control of the situation:
stretching up on tippy-toes, pecking him on the cheek – and then,
when he stepped aside, swishing slinkily past him. Why had he
done it? Why’d he ordered up a thinking, breathing, feeling human
creature … as if she were a pizza? To settle the matter of his unreasonable
and – following contemporary usage – unsustainable lust?
Certainly, but the prompt had been utterly prosaic, namely … my
pass-code for the stupid phone – this much I do remember: it was the year
commercial television started up … A whiter-than-white year –
skins, underclothes, women’s reputations unless they wanted to end
up kicking on the end of a rope! The television cameras of the era
softened the Great Evangeliser – his hair was suety, his complexion
floury, his accents … rose and rose: The wa-arp and we-eft of this
gre-at na-ation is fra-aying! For social action to wo-ork it must be
a-cc-o-m-pan-ied by spi-ri-tu-al re-vi-val! Indeed. – Hunched over
the phone’s tiny screen, Zack had marvelled … for the umpteenth
time at its painful clarity: the digital cameras of today hardened
everything, mineralised it all: hair, skin, inexpressibly affecting
dimples alike. He’d scrolled down, read the fuck FAQs and so
had the readies – ten new machine-ironed twenties – ready, and
was prepared himself: showered, shaved and his remaining teeth
brushed … the EssArr way. The procuress’s cellophane accents still
crackled in Busner’s hot head. He’d asked if Nikki – Age twenty-seven,
Five-foot-two, Size Six, Bust thirty-eight Dee natural,
Nationality British Asian – was the chatty sort, and she’d crinkled,
Ha, ha, ha! Nikki, love? It’s hind legs and donkeys with that
one – you won’t get ‘er to shut ‘er mouth ‘less you put summat
else innit. Not that she isn’t demure, Nikki – she’s ever so demure,
ever so respectful of the older gentleman … and his needs … On
she’d gone, perfectly illustrating the very characteristic she sought
to describe – while the older gentleman took flight in a Vickers
Viscount and jetted back to an era not so much innocent as
grotesquely gauche. Maurice was no prude, and, toilet w
alls being
available to all, Zack, aged eighteen, had been acquainted with the
biological facts – but the etiquette, the form – this was hardly something
you could … Ask Pickles about. It didn’t matter, though,
because what’s-her-face with the what-not had been quite devoid
of the social graces: I’m not your Locarno sweet ‘eart, love … Love!
Love! Money may make the world go round, but love makes it
go … back and forth, so driving the flywheel which goes round and
round, again annagain, so generating the business, love? cycle.
Months later, in one of his first anatomy classes at Heriot-Watt,
Zack had had an odd revelation: she hadn’t put him inside of her at
all, only gripped his membrum virile tightly in the runnel of her
crotch – which was fair enough, given he’d shot off in seconds –
Spunknik! Despairing, all lust instantaneously exchanged for shame
and depression, his fingers had read the pimples in the dip of her
spine … signifying nothing, while the bedstead went on creaking
and his nostrils filled with the smell of … coal gas and TeeSeePee.
Looking fondly upon little Nikki, coddled in the easy chair, hair
that nameless – and now doubtless long dead – other’s dermis that’d
returned to him … growing, spreading, a sickening and doughy
tegument, sealing off Nikki’s mouth, her eyes and nostrils …
semolina – rice pudding, which, if he felt it beneath his fingers – let
alone his lips – would make him screamandscreamandscream until he
was indeed sick. Skin, which is … the state we’re in. It covered Zack
then – covers Busner now, as he and Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager
board the lift, and, together with a freshly shaven trio
of middle-level executives, go slippin’, tumblin’, fumblin’ and sinkin’
down to the lobby. Busner peers at his shining brogues and has no
memory of buffing them. In there – in the woolly sweaty darkness
toenails are growing, which is something they do … when you’re
dead. Not skin, though – skin only grows when you’re alive, grows
and then dies, so that at any given point you’re walking around with
life-and-death slippin’ and fumblin’ each other. Ach! Skin! It touches
everything – and worse still touches itself! Hangnails hook into
hickeys – pimples popper-into the pits of their predecessors, until
the entire flexible territory self-surveys itself into existence: a map of
the territory … made of the territory itself! Not that Busner has ever
had any problem distinguishing the workaday tarpaulin from the
silkily seductive stuff – a duffer at dissection he may’ve been, yet,
during his time as a houseman, he’d needed no anatomical knowledge
for lumbar punctures, blood-sampling, dilation-and-curettage
and other fiendishly delicate procedures. Zack had had … the feel for
it, and, despite a career hardly typified by the laying on of hands,
after last night Busner realises … I still do! Because this much I do
remember … Nikki prattling on about the dead punter as she’d
sipped her Chardonnay: It were right heavy, right – no question, but
better it ‘appen to uz than one of them uther numpties, right … on
account of the training, right … Which had naturally solicited an
enquiry as to what this training – which had so prepared her
for having old men die on top of her during coitus – might be?
Nikki had preened a little: I’m a social worker, right – qualified as a
psychiatric one, right, but mostly I take agency jobs dealing wi’
normal clients – not that they’re that bloody normal! Zack’s relief
had been pathetic: no longer was this a sordid meeting between
a damaged young woman and a much older and abusive man –
instead they’d been engaged in a case conference, albeit a highly
unorthodox one. It’d all vomited forth: how he’d been sick with
anxiety – the concierge might’ve seen her entering the lift, or,
when the Madame had called to verify that a Doctor Bisner was
registered, the receptionist might’ve realised … what was going
on. Since he was now retired, there was no reputational damage to
consider – but there were his family’s feelings, and his own, admittedly
ridiculous, spiritual pride: such antics hardly suggested the
renunciation of all worldly pursuits required of a Sannyasin …
While he’d been speaking, Zack had noticed Nikki’s face growing
darker – far from his revelation summoning up an enthusiastic
cross-cultural dialogue, she’d exploded: You’ve a fookin’ nerve,
Doctor Boosner – y’think I want folk knowing I’m on t’bloody
game? What about my career, my family – I’ve a fiancé, y’know! Yet
as soon as these thunder-clouds had gathered, they dispersed:
I don’t mean t’be skrikin’, but if you think you’re the only wun ‘ere
wi’ a reputation to protect … well, give yer ‘ead a fookin’ wobble!
He’d fallen from the bed to the maroon carpet, then set off knobbling
towards her. This much he remembers: the bird’s wing of her slight
shoulder in his hand – somehow they’d ended up kissing, but this
had been no sensitive survey of tongues mutually undertaken. He
remembers now – remembered then, too – the first French kisses
of his life, tongue-feeling-tongue-feeling-tongue, such that … we
became one – and such a one! Our flexible members ever shaping and
reshaping their own mutual awareness – a good analogy, he thinks
… for consciousness itself. But after a little dabbling they’d broken:
Yer ‘eart’s not really innit, is it, love? She curled back into the chair’s
concavity, smoothing her skirts, while he’d sat back on his heels,
watching the old man, with wild white hair sprouting from his
scalp, sitting back on his heels, his belly bulging as he’d squatted
out there, five storeys up … in the glassy darkness. He’d heard then –
hears again now – the farty rasp of a saxophone, the circus-top
jiggy-jiggy of a hack band. He’d seen then – sees again now – the
unfunny little man’s festination as he chases after the scantily clad
dollybirds … King Leer! But with no kingdom any longer to rule
over with his surreally melting sceptre. No, he’d conceded, I’m
afraid neither my heart nor the rest of me is, ah, in it. So, he’d
decanted another little bottle of Chardonnay into their glasses, sat
back and listened to her tale. Nikki’s real name was Niraga: Which
is a bit ironical, right, ’cause it means without passion … Then had
come a lament for her parents: her father, laid off from the mills in
the eighties, had picked up only odd jobs ever since – odd jobs and
odder pills, as he’d passed all the required tests, and had eventually
gained a full-time position as a clinical depressive. As for Niraga’s
mother, a bartered bride from Uttar Pradesh – she’d never learnt
English, too fearful of those … alien tongues – she lived out her
days in a grim little house on a great big estate … out Wythenshawe
way. As for Niraga’s brothers, all four of them had fled – South to
university, then on into the professions. When you hear their voices
on the phone, she’d told him, you can’t even tell they’re Asian …
Niraga had a loft apartment in the Northern Quarter, all paid
for … cash on the bloody nail by her earnings from alternate shifts as
sex- and social-worker. As she’d spoken, Zack had become aware
of an insistent itchiness – not, for once, his own flaky old coat
but her … fresh lick of it. Niraga wriggled prettily in her chair, her
hands ceaselessly mobile as they’d fluttered up towards the labial
folds of the fake O’Keefe, then down to her lap. Have you … ?
he’d at last ventured … I mean, I don’t mean to … pry, but is there
something troubling you? She’d guffawed – a wholesome, hearty
laugh: I’ll say! Me fanny’s on fookin’ fire – might be a rash or mebbe
cystitis coming on … Occupational hazard, right – did some
creamin’ ‘fore I coom out, but it’s still fookin’ burning … s’pose I
shouldn’t’ve, but she gets right bollocky, right, if you turn
down a job … While she’d been speaking Zack had made gentle
soothing noises, expressive, he’d felt, of paternal concern – then
he’d stammered: It m-must b-be awful – having to do this …
this – he’d gestured wildly with his phone – sort of thing. I mean,
it must be bad enough coping with it psychologically, without
physical problems as –. Fook you! she’d bellowed, I tellya, right,
when I get fed up wi’ me own old folks – who’re on me bloody case
night and day – and fed up with me normal-type clients, right …
well, it’s you lot who keeps me fookin’ sane. You lot who actually gi’
me a little tee-elsie … Tee-elsie, eh – a shocking abbreviation that
Busner remembers only too well falling from the mean mouths of
EssArrEnns on ward rounds – hatchet-faced women who wouldn’t
know what tenderness was … if you beat it into them with a
meat-tenderiser. He imagines that nowadays any reference to tee-elsee
would soon enough be followed by its sinister conspecific,
dee-ennarr … It could’ve been this chilly intimation that provoked
his crazy proposal: Um, you wouldn’t like me to … um … take a
look? I mean … he’d cantered on whinnying … I realise it’s pretty