The wedding picture-II
He did not like who he became in his new clothes. They were less like him than the Hilfigers. He looked like a minder though he was still a foot-soldier. He found himself demanding more from his clients. Keeping more off the top.
He needed it. They had taken to eating cakes with their coffee, each cake a month's wages rather than a week's.
She said she preferred the new look. But then he was someone different with her than he'd been before. He talked.
She called him Tommy, after the outfit he'd worn when she first led the way into the coffee shop. He hadn't had a name since his father had been killed. In The Home they gave him a number. As a lawman, too. A barcode tattooed across his wrist, then lasered away. Now he was his thumbprint, retinal scan, DNA. The system knew him and clicked him through to permitted areas, to the penthouse floor when he was summoned.
"You will not fuck her."
He had never even fantasised such a thing. In the locker-room a single ribald entendre had tailed off into an apology when he had stared the joker down.
He had clicked her lovers through. Handsome, anonymous faces. Unchanging, serial, allowed, disallowed. If he ever thought about them and her it had been as a sort of sexless sex, leaving her still inviolate, virginal, spiritually intacta.
The Boss's words shocked him. The prohibition was admission of a possibility that had been so impossible until now it had not even been forbidden. Now it was like juices flooding his mouth outside a sweetshop window when a kid. Sweets he would never have the money to enjoy. The stuff of dreams.
So he began to dream about her.
And his dreams became flesh. Under the severely cut dress breasts, thighs, buttocks walking away after that dismissive chaste kiss, occasionally nipples winking in and out under the silk.
Of course he would not. Could not. But what if.
She took to driving with him to shops, restaurants. She would vanish and reappear, twirling, her feet bare.
"What do you think?"
And carrying the packages back to the limo, clothes she never again wore, her display a reverse strip-tease, who she could become. Only for him. If only for a moment.
She said to call her Eve. Did not say that was her name. If, unlike him, she had one. He wondered if she was cultivating a tree in her Eden, bearing a single, forbidden fruit.
By forbidding him, The Boss had indicated a Pandora's box, not yet opened. He could hear its interior, like honey bees buzzing.
She said little. "Tell me about the hood," she might say. He dredged up memories, long forgotten.
She tempted him to drive through them, places the limo was programmed to avoid, despite its armour-plating.
"How wonderful," she said, "to be up on the roof, lying naked in the sun."
"That's just a song," he said. But he could not explain about the stink from the stench-pipe, the biting flies, the no-go graffiti demarcating where and nowhere. She only knew smells of Chanel, Dior, artificially floral. The one time they had driven out to the country she had wrinkled her nose, sneezed. The open spaces made him uneasy. He was glad to be back among buildings.
"She is to marry."
Of course.
It would not be one of the facelessly handsome. A corporate merger. Damaged goods would sour the deal. He drove her to the clinic, a brass plate on an automatic gate.
She shuddered when she rejoined him behind the armour glass plate between them and the driver. "Ugly."
He tried not to imagine the stirrups, the speculum, the latex fingers. Probing. Damaging her innocence.
"They should use MRI," he said.
"It is the church," she said. "They do not trust technology. Daddy too."
She had never spoken of The Boss so intimately till then. Doing so now made him also somehow part of the family. Another link, like the hitherto unconsidered prohibition.
"You will need clothes for the wedding."
Oh no. He was just getting used to the Brooks Brothers suit, the Gucci shoes, the Turnbull & Asser shirt and tie.
He'd seen society weddings on the box. The shade-eyed minders morning-suited, muttering into their Bluetooths. He could not play that role.
"You may not refuse."
"You must come," she said. "I'll
need you there."
So once again the tailor's measure, the inside leg, the quick slashing chalk, the big tacked stitches, the tightness under the arms, at the crotch.
He had an image of the groom, though he had never clicked him through. He drove them together sometimes, though then he sat upfront, with the driver. He looked to see some happiness on their faces.
In vain.
When he shopped with her without the groom, now, she was if anything more provocative, more borderline between the compulsory and the forbidden. Linking her arm through his, almost dancing him through the swish of automatic doors. Twirling.
He drew the line at lingerie departments, and she danced away from him, laughing. Her breasts more real to him after, though actually he could see no discernible difference.
He tried to imagine them that first night together but he could not. For all her Barbie-doll prettiness she was real flesh. Though he could not detect it under the Chanel, there would be the perfume of sweat, feminine juices. Her groom-to-be was a shop-window dummy, a front for corporate ambition. He was too clean-shaven, talcummed. Probably shaved his pubis.
"You can go with her if you wish. She has asked that."
Become her minder? And his? Manage their diaries? Diary?
He shook his head.
"Don't decide now. Plenty of time."
She behaved as if it were already decided. Now, they shopped for furniture. Art galleries. Kitchen equipment he knew she would never use. A circular king-size, gadget-controlled.
He wondered why the groom did not come on these expeditions. But did not ask. She made it seem such a question would be an irrelevance.
They – she and him – were the couple. The Boss still picked up the tab. Would do so in future, he imagined.
Locker-room said the marriage was buying in nanotechnology, the groom the junior partner in the deal. A new apartment was being grown for them tectonically on the penthouse floor. He would join her there. But he would still need to be clicked through.
He applied for a transfer. Denied.
"This job is not about feelings," said The Boss. "Feelings will let you down.
"So you have bonded. That's good. You can keep an eye on my investment.
"And don't look at me like that."
He had learned what The Boss was reminding him of, back in the hood. And it had lost him his lawman's shield. Knowing that, why had he been picked up, dusted down, dressed in Hilfiger, set on this course that could have only one end?
He wasn't jealous of the groom. He even felt a little bit sorry for the poor bastard. Under those shellac nails would be claws, he knew. She was her father's daughter, after all. Though she had never unsheathed them to him.
He imagined them raking down his cheek. Tried to think what would provoke such an attack.
Failed.
Probably she didn't care enough. Unless he refused to follow her into this loveless marriage.
But what then did he know of marriage? His old man had beat up on his mother. Then afterwards he'd hear them grunting and groaning in the alcove above the big old stove. He'd sworn to kill him one day when he was big enough. Instead of which the old man had died in a hail of bullets, her too, in a supermarket hold-up, not even on duty, so there was no fancy funeral, bullets fired over the coffin, no pension. Just The Home, for him and his rat of a brother. Who he put away for ten to life, to die in the joint, stabbed with a sharpened screwdriver in the woodworking class.
He had an image of what a marriage should be, and it was a feeling in his gut. Like how she danced away gaily looking at brassieres. Which she didn't hardly need. Or perhaps they were so skilfully made they looked like nothing at all.
What did he know? The whores he went to all had silicone implants, their tits impossibly huge and elevated like hot-air balloons. But he'd stopped visiting the cat-house after that first coffee-house drink.
"You seem to have gone off sex." The Boss knew, of course, everything he did. Or did not do.
"You could have entry now to a higher-class establishment." Pushed a neat little, business-like business card across the desk. "Check it out."
An instruction. Not an invitation.
So he went. They were very skilful. High class indeed. His suit was steamed and pressed for him when he was done, his Gucci's polished to the sort of high gloss workers of a certain age preferred. He scuffed them up as he walked back, dismissing the limo. He showered as hot as he could stand as soon as he reached his pad, though he'd been soaped and sponged all over after.
Because he'd been soaped and sponged all over after.
He felt uncomfortable next time in the coffee house. But her natural innocence soon dispelled his discomfort. And he never went back to the high-class brothel. Even though the madam had said the tab was covered. And always would be.
Because she said that.
He was finding it hard to pay for coffee now, spending so much time with her, others taking over his clients. So not much top to cream off.
"You're on salary now. I don't want you on the streets. It endangers her. Run a tab. It will be debited from your salary so don't get proud."
He felt as if he was being enclosed in a warm cocoon he didn't know how to get out of. A job for life, they had told him when they picked him up on Skid Row, and they meant it. You couldn't resign.
He didn't know if he would, even if he could. He didn't want to be her minder. But how else could he protect her?
From what? From the shop-window dummy? Herself?
Although he'd refused, he realised he would accept it. No one else seemed ever to have doubted it.
Jammy bastard, was the locker-room verdict.
The tectonics were done, and she took him up and showed him his rooms, his own kitchen and shower, bedroom, even a living room.
No furniture, apart from the hob, washing machine and fridge-freezer, the wall plasma in the living room.
"I thought we could choose the rest together." Her eyes wide, guileless, laughing, knowing he knew the game she was playing. Powerless to do anything but play along.
He had minimalist tastes. She did not interfere, except to buy him a big, disturbing abstract for the wall over the single bed.
"Get to be a tight fit if you're entertaining a guest," she said. "Or – "
"Or?" He couldn't resist rising to the bait. But she was already leaving the gallery. Ahead of him, which was contraindicated by his training. She was a very valuable property, especially now. Not everyone was happy about this marriage. There had been other shop-window dummies before this one.
He moved into the apartment before the wedding.
And placed at the bedside a photo of her he'd dumped from the CCTV footage. Blurry, but he didn't mind that.
How he thought of her, when he closed his eyes that night. Imprecise. Uncertain. Dangerous.
Like her dancing eyes.
