The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (3 page)

Betty sat apprehensively and waited. She expected anything. A gorilla to be led in weari
ng handcuffs, a black goat to be tethered to the chair with stiletto feet. The delay was unnerving. She had the feeling the house was ruminating on a story by Poe.

When the door opened, Leanda entered with another woman, tall, dark haired and dressed in
a tight leather skirt. Both women appeared to be wearing an identical red lipstick. The other woman, who Leanda introduced as Nicole, was carrying an entomologist's container, and after removing the lens that capped the red shoe on display, she tapped a number of spiders inside, and resealed the lens. Betty assumed the spiders were left to eventually suffocate, if they didn't tear each other apart, leg by leg.

Betty had the sensation she was observing people who lived in a parallel dimension. No con
cession was made to her being there. The two women busied themselves in rituals. Nicole picked up the red suede shoe, and carried the exhibit out of the room. Even in Betty's profession she had never observed so provocatively unrehearsed a walk. Nicole's natural movements involved a belly dancer's distribution of weight from the hips. Her spike heels emphasised the slow rotation of her bottom.

Betty was told to come and meet the dinner guests. She was conducted out of the room by a midget who appeared from behind Leanda. A diminutive oriental, dressed in a black jumpsuit with sparkling rhinestone buttons, he trotted along at the height of Leanda's hip, carrying a large book under one arm, and a small bell in the other hand. His manners were ceremonious. He was like a priest about to officiate over a ritual.

Betty was conducted through two ante-chambers. A monkey in a red conical hat was perched on one of the bookshelves, chattering excitedly to itself.

She was shown into a dining hall. Black candles were burning in human skulls, and a bronze cupid placed central to the
table, was holding a lit torch. Even Betty's experience of visiting simulated gothic penthouses, and executive torture cells, didn't lessen the impact of surprise. There were three guests seated at table. Nicole who was at the head, and on opposite sides two men, one of whom had flawless emerald eyes, which could have been coloured lenses, and who wore a white suit, and the other who was busy contemplating the cranial fissures of the skull placed in front of him.

There were no acknowledgements or introductions, just a formal disquieting silence. Betty was placed opposite Leanda, and the midget served a marginally chilled Brouilly, its tang sitting on the tongue like an autumn leaf. Betty noticed that a pair of black gloves had been arranged beside each plate, as though in preparation for a rite. A monkey ran into the hall and out again, pursued by the midget. Betty waited for the extraordinary to happen. It wouldn't have surprised her if she was to be the main course, wrapped in gold foil, and made to lie on a giant serving plate. She could imagine such perversity. There was no end to sexual preferences. She had licked chocolate mousse off managerial cocks, and savoured caviar on a swollen vagina. Edibles were one fetish, and there were a million others. It was the serene detachment unnerved her. The people appeared to be spectators of an invisible film, and little connected to any form of shared reality. There wasn't any point in starting a conversation, and Betty wished she was back on the street in her precinct. At least there was an external world to which she could relate in the familiar streets that she had made her own. Here she was displaced and disorientated. She wondered if the two male guests were automatons, and if at some point the women would consult their artificial intelligence. Betty hardly touched her starter, a particularly fine
consommé perles de Nizzan
. Her adrenalin was fired, and she found it difficult to eat. Not that she had any reason to be self-conscious. No-one made any reference to the food or each other. If a coffin had been brought to the table, the wreaths spilling whitely across the dark wood, she knew it wouldn't have drawn any comment.

The midget assiduously poured wine. There was a pause between courses, before Betty and the other guests were advised to put on the black silk gloves beside their plate. Leanda and Nicole accomplished this with finesse, the two male guests and Betty
achieving it by slower degrees. The gloves were fitted to the elbow, and ruched across the fingers. A wine was poured, before the midget, commanding silence by the smallness of his body in proportion to the book, began to ask for absolute concentration prior to reading a prayer written by the Marquis de Sade. The voice that issued was an unwavering baritone.

‘Lord of the penis spiced to please the tongue

and testicles like full chestnuts, well hung,

accept my litany that I may know

the ways in that I should and shouldn't know.

Accept the provocation of a bum

d
ivided neatly like a purple plum.

And may I stand at dawn like someone who

identifies with those whipped black and blue.'

The midget closed the book, and placed it on a purple cushion. Now that the rite had been performed, the silence seemed even more oppressive. Betty waited for the main course to be brought in, conscious all the time of the contrast between the guests who appeared outwardly to be refined aesthetes, and the apparent debasement intended by the prayer, and the erotic accoutrement attached to everything at table. The cultivation of the weird seemed less an affectation as a gloss on some deeper aberration. Betty sniffed a rat in their motives. She was increasingly anxious to break the silence. And now the midget had reappeared with a silver serving dish. He carried it, eyes focused on the lid, his manner one of having been assigned a hieratic task.

And in keeping with the unorthodoxy of the occasion, Betty heard Marc Almond's buried vocals accompany the midget's serving. She had heard this song
The Slave
played in select clubs. It concerned a man who relates his experiences in a Byzantine harem. Naked, kept in a cage, his overriding desire is to become a real woman. The impassioned emotions communicating through the lyric seemed in keeping with the place, but in contrast to the imperturbable cool of the guests.

After removing the lid, the midget stood back and contemplated the chef's preoccupation with aesthetic detail. The meat or fish, and Betty suspected it would be the latter, was
wrapped in gold foil with tiny black crosses standing along its length like hatpins. The artefact might have been something belonging to post-modernist art. A way of spelling out gothic to a race of computer buffs.

The dwarf unwrapped the foil as though he was
unbandaging a mummy. The music cut out, and Betty was again made conscious of the programmed stylisation that informed each act in this house. The main dish had been cooked in a wine sauce, a lid as yet, no-one commented on its possible identity. Betty noticed that the man wearing emerald lenses had a clip-on fax attached to his lapel. The other man wore a black wool suit, and a blue oxford button-down open at the neck.

‘Did
I tell you,' he said to Nicole, 'that my mother is in a cryogenic unit? She wants to be around when neuroscientists re-plug consciousness into the mains. She read up on the subject extensively and decided on cold storage. She said that they'll all have it. Jane Fonda, Raquel Welch, Joan Collins, Madonna. She's even asked that her wardrobe and jewellery are kept on hold. Sometimes I wonder what century she'll come out in.'

'Probably the next one,' Leanda took up. 'Towards the middle to end. Cellular degeneracy will become treatable. A whole synergistic cocktail of drugs will prevent our extinction.'

Betty fidgeted. The man with the emerald lenses began talking about virtual reality. Computer images generated by stereoscopic liquid crystal screens would become the new way of entering alternative dimensions. 'It would be just like wearing a pair of heavy sunglasses,' he was saying. He was explaining how the digitised input could lead to bizarre forms of auto-eroticism. The software man who wanted to have cunnilingus with Marilyn Monroe would develop a full-body suit which conveys sensation by pressure pads. In his high-tech wetsuit, and computer-accessed to the star, the sexual rite would begin. Object gadgetry like inflatable dolls, would disappear overnight.

The midget instructed the guests to remove their black gloves, and Betty followed the unspoken protocol of placing these wide of her plate, on the understanding that they would be used again later. She became aware that additional company had entered the room. Two masked women, both with the same poppy coloured hennaed hair were standing one
on either side of the doorway. Betty guessed from their petite height that they were Japanese. They were dressed in black sequined leotards with seamed fishnet tights. They appeared to be observing a ritual, and before the midget served individual portions of the main dish, one of them took up a book and began reading. 'All mysteries are translated into images. Imagination means reinventing the world. There was once a penis fish, it was purple with black fins and a single blue eye. It was kept in the emperor's private aquarium, and was said to have originated from his brother who underwent a sex change. To stimulate his sexual appetite, the emperor would watch the missile-shaped fish propel itself round the large spheroid aquarium. One night in a perverse mood of sexual hunger, he ordered the fish to be caught and prepared for his dinner. He was convinced of its aphrodisiacal properties, and consequently had selected his ideal sexual partners for after dinner entertainment. The bed already had the curtains drawn to conceal those members of his private harem who were waiting for him. The emperor ate the penis fish, and experienced the rush of sexual energy he had anticipated. But as he got up from his chair and headed towards the bedroom, he felt his vision restricted. He was seeing through one monofocused eye, without side vision. His hands instinctively went up to his face. He still had hands, but the shape of his face was veined and tubular. He directed himself towards the mirror, and to his terror discovered that his body from the head down to his groin was one extended penis. He still had arms and legs for mobility, but otherwise he was totally changed. When his bodyguards found him, he asked to be placed in the aquarium, and there over a matter of months his arms and legs were transformed into fins. He became what he should never have eaten.'

The girl stopped reading, knelt down at the other's feet, kissed her on each pointed boot, before the two of them retreated.

By now the guests were served, and dinner began. Betty had imagined the dish would turn out to be poached turbot or trout
à la hollandaise
, but the delicate pink flesh laid on a base of vine leaves eluded sense detection. Boneless, and marginally sinewy, the taste imparted by the texture was salty — a sort of seafood conundrum — Betty couldn't quite get it, and pursued her serving more out of curiosity than relish for the food. Conversation was intermittently spaced between periods of eating. Betty had known so many weirdos, and their inventory of fetishes was inexhaustible. She had once been paid to spoon-feed a woman pistachio sorbet while she adopted a crucifixional pose, wrists and feet bound to an ebony cross by red silk cord. And there was the man who insisted on being placed in an open coffin underneath the dining room table, and in that position he liked to be fed the heads of red carnations which had been dipped in tiger's urine, procured at great expense from a zoo keeper. Betty had known them all, and her assignment at the château seemed like still another commission to entertain the terminally bored. She had a client, a man who liked to be whipped by strings of pearls, who insisted on reading out passages from Huysmans'
A Rebours
as he underwent correction. Betty was acquainted with all the memorable passages from that source book of decadence. She had been introduced to a world of perverse exoticism and role acting — her penthouse clients still resisting being desktopped into computer sex, and able by money to purchase their extreme needs. There was one man who liked to be brought off simply by the friction of her false eyelashes on his cock. The method was an agonizingly slow one, but earned her the notes she always insisted the client place in her shoes, subtly transferring the act of debasement to the punter.

Betty kept trying to imagine what demands would be placed on her here at the château. Would the two men share her, or would they pair off together leaving her to the two women? She imagined Nicole strapping on a mamba and entering her while she made love to Leanda. The food was ceasing to interest her, despite the studious manner in which the others were assessing its merits. A roast peacock stuffed with truffles and served on bread canapes followed, but Betty was bored. The conversation went wide of her. She would like to have earned her money quickly, and been driven back into town. It was too quiet for her. The midget came back in, his coat sparkling where it caught the light. He made a round of the table, and poured the wine.