Apparel E-Book

Arthur Mauritz

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Apparel is a book of secrets: the innermost thoughts, fantasies and desires that no human being should know about another and that we often don't know about ourselves. Enter into the lives of a small group of people. Follow and learn about them over the course of a week. Observe their every movement, word and thought as they lie, cheat and even kill. They are unwittingly becoming connected to each other, until the time when all stories end: with the ending of life. As a consequence of a previous crime, an affluent man is soon to be murdered. A husband and wife both harbour secrets, one of them intent on revelation. A young man questions his sexuality. A group of friends are ignorant of the role that one of them has played in a man's death. An innovative and erotic postmodern novel which explores the inner recesses of the human psyche.

Leseprobe

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

Apparel

Arthur Mauritz was born in Bristol in 1989. In the past two decades he has played rugby for a local team, lead guitar in a local thrash-metal band and studied at university, all without leaving the confines of what he regards as the world’s greatest city. During this time, he has worked as a shoe salesman, a pint-puller and a kitchen porter, pursuing his hobbies of writing, rugby and music as much as he can while meeting the demands of a full-time job.

Apparel is his first novel.

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Contents

Title

Story

Copyright

A cigarette. That’s what he wants. Light-ignite and all the world is a safer place. He drags a deep lungful and immediately feels safer, his growing rage calming by the second, by each inhalation, each taste of the grey smoky goodness, until it is diminished before taking any real shape. Cheap suit and cheaper sunglasses protect him from being known as the cheap person that he is not. Clothes, to him, look the same, and he is not mug enough to spend more than the minimum for any look. Especially one which every mid-class consumerist licker aims for and, guess what, achieves.

His cigarettes, however, aren’t cheap. Each packet of twenty costs more than his trousers, and three packs cost the same as his suit jacket. But here, you see, is where taste really speaks and money has value. That gimp over there with the suit and that old bastard by the coffee shop’s shitty cheap plastic chairs: they both look identical, regardless whether their clothes cost the same or less or whatever. These little babies, three-and-a-quarter-inch wonders, taste magnificently different to the cheap versions and the pea soup that they emit. By comparison, these are positively healthy from the internal angle. They actually are healthy for the mental mechanisms, Exhibit A testament to this.

And whilst he thinks this, he scuffs his right shoe on the upturned cover of a drain.

Time after work is always the wind down, the time to try and exorcise those whiny voices from the stuck record of the quotidian. Whoever coined the daily grind was a knowing so-and-so, probably a worker in a sweat-shop factory or something; every day in his job he has to listen to the same stylised nattering of the never content, the bodies who want everything with a golden spoon and are unwilling to do anything at all about it.

Scuffed shoe being led towards home, he stops by a newsagent’s to pick up the evening and what he calls the next day’s medicine.

Honestly, life wouldn’t be worth living without smokes.

The man behind the counter is like all newsagents. He has a fixed smile betrayed by vacant eyes, although the retention of furtive observation, borderline paranoia, is still there. Like all of them. The man is also forty-something, pot-belly drooping ever so slightly over his too-tight belt, and balding with hair like a monk. Like all of them. This one, though, has less balding hair and looks a little too uncannily like Cadfael, and with a murmured thanks and a last, semi-reluctant glance, he gets back on the path.

Shit. Another cigarette will be perfect.

A habit, whoever they are say. Like chewing gum but without the chewing. Hell, they used to chew tobacco for sake of habit. Smoking is a lesser evil than the disgusting chewing gum habit anyway. Look at the bloody streets and those ink-black tar stains that are actually spat out gobbets of hygiene-unfriendly gum. He never tosses his butts on the road or the pavement, simply blowing a smoke ring or two into the carbon-starved air. Well. Maybe he does every now and again, but the point’s the point.

Oh wait, the air is full of it. Overload. Stop. Or raise the tax rather than ban the little terrors. Taxes will save the ozone, the atmosphere, the stratosphere, the troposphere and the sphere of the planet itself. It’s a spherical problem of spherical proportions, after all.

Fuck it. He doesn’t even drive. Hardly ever.

His clip-clop of highly polished hand-made shoes makes a pretty percussive sound, evenly paced and repeated at perfect intervals. He is quite tall and whilst not big, lacks any impression of skinny weakness or frailty. He is not that old, either, but does not look young.

Walking is enjoyable, good for the legs, the heart, the lungs and the brain, if not for the feet. Those poor little feet of his, actually size eleven, had a blister the other week. A squishy padded plaster sorted that out pretty swiftly. He looks after his feet. Pumice, talc, wash three times daily. These fuckers hold you up for a modern average of seventy-odd years: look after them.

The walk from work is always the most enjoyable, as his back is turned towards the ominous fifties architecture of his workplace. He leaves the whiners, the naggers and those voices behind, still whining and nagging at shadows, probably. Or standing in the mirror and endlessly doing it, stopping maybe to escape into their selected soap operas and mind-numbing television, before standing back in front of their reflection and resuming their monotonous tirade. Moan for the sake of moaning, pessimism for the sake of pessimism, age for the sake of age.

Smoke because it relieves you. Smoke because it stops you from doing all of those things that you despise so much in others. Smoke because it’s good for you.

His suit jacket is a deep, full navy blue, with darker blue buttons and only one pocket on the right. It is always open and today reveals a summer’s day sky-blue shirt, slightly darker blue shirt buttons, top button not fastened to reveal the bottom of his neck, the ridge of collar bones meeting. His hair is cut with a short, clipped back and sides and a thicker crop on the top, quiffed at the front toward the right. His shoes are black leather, and one of them is scuffed from recent contact with a drain cover. He polishes these every day, in the morning, before work. He does not work weekends.

The path seems empty of people today, which is strange because the sun’s out, and that usually guarantees the hermits coming out. Where are the legs today, too? The heat always brings out those long-legged creatures who know what denim hot-pants do for their figures. They know what they do to appraising eyes and the male blood, too. Crafty, cunning, long-legged creatures. People fascinate themselves with the shit churned out in galleries these days. Childish nothings slapped on paper, not even canvas, and labelled modern for all the modern suckers. He knows art, and art is easily found in the female form. Someone had once told him that they’d had an eye for art, and if that was what they’d had then praise be to God that he doesn’t.

What he does have, at this precise moment, is a sense of warmth and happiness. Tuesdays are always the worst days and God be thanked again that it is over. Monday mornings are easy to wake into, the exploits of the weekend infectious enough to last until midday, making the earlier rise painless and bearable. Come Tuesday, the realisation of four more early rises and no real allowance to debauch the evenings away settles in and holds its ground, dissipating only on Friday when, undoubtedly in a shroud of smoke, fifty-six hours is granted him until the next Monday. Hangovers always add to the easy transition back into the work cycle, the delicious irony of working whilst intoxicated to the point of illness bringing comfort. At least until midday, that is when he feels nauseous. That’s not to say that he always drinks heavily on a Sunday, but sometimes he does, depending on the offers and wildlife of the night. Never liked the term nightlife.

He lives about half an hour’s walk from work, apparently one-point-eight-seven miles, and he likes to walk no faster than average, enjoying the great outdoors and its urban sightseeing opportunities, most of which seem conspicuously absent today. He does own a car, but feeding petrol to its engine doesn’t have the same allure as feeding a pint of cold lager down his throat. Funny thing on the radio the other day: petrol per pint is a helluva lot cheaper than lager per pint, even if bought from an award-winningly cheap, interchangeable supermarket that will undercut every other award-winningly cheap, interchangeable supermarket. It’s not a bad motor, either. Sports car with electronic convertible roof in a mean shade of dark green and alloy wheels and a nought-to-sixty in less than five seconds. Purrs like a beast, too. The car is really for other purposes. He doesn’t do the shopping in it or drive it on holiday or much at all really. It’s a passenger vehicle only, for all intents and purposes and realities.

Like most days, he thinks about his Walkman. It’s the third one that he’s bought from the internet in the last decade, but his tapes have never needed replacing. It is like the world has really developed some sort of technophile virus, where every new model has to be worth more than its predecessor and all old models, whether two months or two days old, must be discarded as trash. One hundred pounds off bargain for the new Model XVI Technocrap, although machines that once did this thirty years ago and are unsung and oh so cheap on the miracle internet (credit where due) get forgotten. They do the same job. He thinks about why he doesn’t bring his Walkman to work, but the reasons to leave it at home are far outweighing the reasons to wear it on his person and listen to it. Currently, it’s twenty-one reasons to seven, a perfect 3:1 ratio. If it ever becomes 2:1, he promises himself often, he will bring it once a week. The principal, top of the food-chain reasons, consist of two points. The first is that hearing is a large part of alertness and awareness and he has seen things that, whilst being funny, could be embarrassing if it had been or was to be him. A dumb old woman had once been walking down the road with her nose buried in a book when her left elbow knocked into a lamppost and she was floored, sprawled on the pavement. He had put on his concerned face and swallowed his laughter as she cried and asked for an ambulance. It broke the predicted torpor of the evening ahead. He had sat in the back of the ambulance and walked with her into hospital, leaving when she was due a cast for what the paramedics assumed to be a fracture of some sort. He can’t remember if they had said hip or arm. Whilst not actually because of music (same thing, he tells himself), the other four definitely were. All incidents involved dullard-unfortunates listening to some probably and ridiculously expensive gadget and then getting, in order of most recent viewing, run over and splayed across the road in an admittedly sickening display of hit-and-run, knocked from a bike (the car was loud, so God knows how loud the music was), shouted at aggressively from across a road and then punched from behind (an aggressive shout is a pretty good warning. If you hear it), and walking out into a road with a car turning into it. That last one pissed him off and still pisses him off the most. After the car stopped, the walking idiot nonchalantly put out his hand as if to ward the car away, and with no change of pace continued to reach the pavement across the road. That prick deserved to be road kill, and seeing him get away unscathed had annoyed and annoys him still. After ringing for an ambulance, Samaritan that he is, he had found out (and this no longer than half-a-year earlier) that the hit-and-run woman was dead, which just doesn’t seem fair. The second reason: if electronics are worn on the person then they can be broken or stolen. He imagines some gangster wannabe with a three-inch blade demanding his Model XVI Technocrap, only to find out that it’s an antique and stabbing him anyway for his troubles. Yep. He’ll definitely keep leaving it at home for the foreseeable.

His briefcase is a gift from an old girlfriend and it was given to him about seven years ago to mark something that he cannot remember. One of those silly anniversary things that girls make up at different supposed stages of a relationship. Oh look, it’s our one month anniversary or oh whatdyaknow, it’s our seventy-fifth day of us. He supposes it is kind of cute in a teenaged American stereotypical kind of way, just like the word cute itself. The briefcase is brown leather, real ass-hide of cow and fastened with burnished gold-coloured metal. It is heavy and looks expensive and, knowing what she was like, probably is expensive. She did not last long: they never do. Wonders what anniversary she celebrated with the gift. The weight is pleasant in his hands and makes his arm ache slightly after ten minutes or so. He changes it back to his left hand, the one where it was when he departed the workplace. He is left handed and can carry it for longer in his left than in his right. He will make the rest of the trip home with it in his left.

He comes to a park and at the gate, a panting fat man runs across the path and he finds it comical and bizarre and ridiculous, unable to prevent grinning at the red face and

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The smug bastard with his smug suit and handbag. Might as well have laughed at him with that face. He resolves to speed his pace. Don’t stop now. It bloody hurts and it’s bloody warm. If he keeps at this pace he will cut handbag man off at the other gate.

The expensive running trainers have saved him from blisters, but the purplish mottling of his arms and forehead have not been saved from the strength of the sun.

Oh god. Have a breather after the gate. Knock into the bastard.

He looks to his right to gauge the timings of creating a coincidence, slows and breathes deeply, a squeezing feeling affecting the right side of his stomach. Twenty more seconds, probably. Thinks it’s funny to laugh at the fat man, does he? At least he doesn’t carry a bloody woman’s bag with him to work.

He slows to the pace of a walk, maintaining the jogging motion, and accelerates five yards from the gate as the man in the suit closes it behind him.

Perfect. He knocks against the man’s shoulder, mutters Dick, and continues with a slow jog to move away, regarding the stumbled man with satisfaction.

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The fat prick. The stupid fat waddling prick. Is his brain so filled with fat that he can’t see where he’s going? If he sees him again he’ll skin the fat little pig. He is shaking in the adrenal grasp of anger, deliberating whether he will run back through the park or around the park or shout at the man.

He watches the man jog away and removes his cigarettes from his pocket and opens the lid of the carton and pulls out a cigarette and ignites it with his lighter, taking a long and steady drag. If he ever sees that fat prick again, he’ll follow him home and slice the prick open.

He shakes his head and the small cloud of smoke clears his thoughts. A consciously constructed image of roasting the man on a spit causes him to laugh once in the form of a long sigh and he walks away from the park.

His house looms not far up the road, a terraced leviathan built just after the war, and he is looking forward to having a smoke in the garden with his latest book. The house is high-ceilinged and three-bedroomed, although initially it had five. One bedroom now hosts a library with a baby-grand piano and the other keeps his collection of vintage guitars. He likes the shabby exterior of the building, stained by age and dirtied a greyer shade of the pale grey it once had been. No decorative ivy or plant creeps upwards across the walls, and the paint on his door is peeled and the number six of his house number is slightly askew. Number one burglar deterrent: poverty. The idiots that broadcast their wealth are asking to be burgled, whilst other idiots invite the burglars in with an evident lack of security. A happy medium is needed. This is what he has. His garage faces the lane at the back of his house and again does not seem to offer much to the thief’s eyes. His gardens are kept neat but not adorned with statues or water features or any pretentious ornamentation: a nice border of various plants for the front and a set of plastic chairs and table for the back. The reclining wooden sun-lounger is the most lavish item on show in either garden, and his shed has no windows.

He walks up to the front door and with keys already in his hand, places the briefcase on the cheap, coarse welcome mat. Obvious signs to protect the house. No wealth here. With his left hand turning the key in the lock and the right pushing forward, he is not met by the yelping of an excited dog, or the enquiry of a husband or wife. Instead he is met by the smell of lavender. It is faint and caresses the nostrils perfectly. It is not excessive and pungent like the perfume of some men and women. It is also not too faint. It is just noticeable and slightly accentuated by the smells of the outside. He bends down and slips his shoes off. He doesn’t notice the scuff on the right shoe. He then places them inside on the cashmere rug underneath the hallway heater. His suit jacket is hung on the stand by the rug.

His carpets are underlayed and thick, spongy on the feet. These are the third carpets he has had laid in the last six years. Comfort of the feet, he knows, is very important.

He is quite hungry. It’s a good feeling, hunger. If you eat without feeling hungry then you aren’t going to enjoy the eating and the tastes so much. He makes a sandwich of cheese, pesto, smoked ham and real butter on granary bread and picks up the book that he has been reading.

After getting his book he opens the kitchen door, picks up his plate and puts them both onto the plastic table next to his sun-lounger before he sits on it. An oyster shell has the black stains of an ashtray on its white underside. He rests the plate on his lap and holds his book one-handed, the right, whilst holding a sandwich in his left. The sandwich is nice, and he focuses mainly on eating rather than reading. The book is at the top of the bestsellers and even people who don’t read are reading it. He reads a lot. He has got to page one hundred and twenty nine, and the main character is a woman who is on the trail of a mystery perpetrator or killer or loved one or someone else intriguing. She is well-developed and full of nuances and mannerisms that make a character believable and he likes her, which he knows is the point. Every ten pages or so there’s a turning into the unexpected or the incredible, the author’s skill as not just a character writer evident as each abrupt turn leads into an exciting new find. Only, he knows that she is dead and is seeking peace of phantasmal mind or spirit or whatever it is they have, so the end won’t be new or unexpected. As with all books that become sensations, mouths give away the story. It’s kind of like that film where the kid sees dead people, only more adult and not horrific. Everyone had known about the end of that before watching, but it didn’t really ruin the experience. He supposes it’s literary art, but he enjoys it anyway.

With his sandwiches eaten he lights a cigarette and the smoke coats the greenness of the pesto and the peppery cheese that was stronger than expected. He really can’t remember what eating must have been like as a kid, a time when he didn’t smoke after eating. This is not to say that he eats and smokes all of the time (for instance, the impossibility due to work), but the simple pleasure and accentuation of the tastes through the smoke is just better. As he smokes and savours the mélange of tastes, he resumes reading, intently now. The woman (dead and ghostly, by all accounts but he doesn’t know that) has just found a letter written to an ex-boyfriend of hers in another man’s apartment that she’s broken into and has just realised that it’s in her own handwriting. Genius. He reads for an hour, forty-three pages, and from reluctance to finish too soon, puts the book down and closes his eyes with the sun baking him nicely from a late June angle, high up in the perfect, blue sky, all cotton-wool clouds having retreated for the night. His garden faces exactly south, a conscious factor for determining his residence. The north wind hits the front of the house with its cold hatred and the sun rises and sets on the garden, not that it’s been windy for a while. It isn’t too late yet – still another couple of hours of sun if he wants it.

His mind is filled with the dead protagonist from his book. She is Hungarian and calls herself Urs, although the smart writer dips into parts where Orsolya is goading her, playing on the language incompetence of a lot of readers. It’s written from her perspective and he thinks that she has lost some or most of her memory through death so cannot remember her ethnic roots. It’s smart, either way, and while the prose is quite complicated at times, he can see the easy appeal to the non-frequent reader. She’s not really described in the book, though, which annoys him a little. Then again, it adds to the realism that when you follow a person through a book they don’t say hi, I’m five-ten, dark brown hair down to my collarbone with elliptical eyes made-up with thin black eyeliner and I have a slim physique, size eight, thirty-four B breasts and bony hips. There’s also a mole on my left forearm that I’ve had since I can remember so perhaps it’s a birthmark. My lips are peach-coloured gloss and my thin face has angular cheekbones that are not unlike a classic catwalk model’s. I have pierced ears and wear fake pearls in both. That’s how he pictures her, with the glasses, of course. They have been a problem to Urs from page one as she can never seem to find them and her cases are always empty. Now where was that going to turn?

Pencil skirts and white blouses with thick rimmed glasses and contours of beautiful curves and hair pulled into a tight and shiny ponytail and his thoughts become erotic. He wonders if he’s going to masturbate tonight but it really is too hot. He opens his lids and unbuttons his shirt and takes it off. He has a toned stomach, a six pack, not overly muscled but visible. His chest is hairless thanks to his genetic make-up and only a faint trail of hair leads up to his belly-button. His thoughts linger on official looking women in their late twenties, blouses showing cleavage and smiles promising a whole series of nocturnal explorations.

The sun is still raining down on him when he starts to feel sticky and decides that a shower is in order. Usually, he does a small routine of press-ups and crunches, sit-ups being bad for the back. He owns some free weights and would do fifteen-kilogram repetitions to keep a decent strength and shape to his arms. A range of leg stretches are usually carried out. This evening, he doesn’t feel like it. He is not tired but his bed has a certain appeal tonight, the appeal of comfort and unwinding. Instead of working out, he has a cigarette, one from his new packet. The face of the newsagent smiles his dead smile at him momentarily before it evaporates with the first exhalation of smoke. Cigarette between lips, never between teeth, he walks up the straight stairs to the main bathroom, undoing his belt and carrying his shirt. Without much care, he drops all of his clothes on the tiled floor of the bathroom and drops his butt in the toilet, urinating on it and making it sail languidly around the bowl.

He showers, enjoying the feel of the soap on his skin. The soap is such a quality that it acts like a moisturiser, penetrating the stratum corneum. He knows this because the girl at the counter became his epidermal teacher for twenty minutes and because he loves skin. The girl who was extolling the wonders of the dead seas and the phospholipid-friendly natural components within her soaps had lovely skin, mahoganied until nearly black, a cross between a Mediterranean maiden and a Caribbean queen. The feel of someone else’s skin is also incomparable. There is so much character within the body’s largest organ, so much to be explored in the nocturnal rites between man and man, man and woman, and woman and woman. The expanse of the erogenous is an often guarded secret, locked behind an invisible and unreasonably enforced chastity. The sin should not be the sexual but the bringing to the grave of an unexplored body, for after all, an unexplored body is an unknown body. He turns the shower off, opens the sliding shower door and steps dripping onto the towels placed on the tiles of the bathroom floor. Without drying or allowing himself to drip most of the water onto the towels, he walks into his bedroom.

Central to attention in the bedroom is the bed. It is pretentious. Everyone who enters the room is struck by the size and the nature of it. It looks as if it should be in a royal residence, all four posters with billowing curtains bound in the middles of each post and splayed at the tops. Golden tassels keep them bound. Equally regal is their colour. They are burgundy. He is not too keen on the bed but knows the value of impression. The bed has yet to fail to impress. He considers jumping straight under the duvet and sleeping, but instead walks to the en suite and picks up his toothbrush, no gimmicky electro-crap toothbrush, and puts a perfectly round, pea-sized amount of toothpaste on it. He brushes for a minute and a half and gargles the minty foam that he produces before spitting the last into the basin. Now, with the good intention of reading a dozen more pages of the book, he does get into bed and enjoys lying in comfort. It is before the postmeridian nine o’clock. Before an hour of shifting shapes and comfortable positions and considering the death of the fat man in the park, he is asleep. He dreams of many things.

And he wakes to the undeniable conscious comfort that tries not to let him leave. He denies its hold on him. The alarm clock is programmed to sound at seven from Monday to Friday but he rarely needs to hear it, waking like clockwork five minutes before. It is six fifty-three. His fingers on each hand are locked with each other and he pushes up and out, making his body rigid by pointing his toes down and stretching them as far from his hands as possible. He tenses as many muscles as he can and then allows them to relax, aiding his circulation and waking his body up. The ridge on the bottom of his left foot starts to cramp and he welcomes full consciousness, even as his penis limps, and he quickly gets out of bed to place the cramping foot flat on the carpet, leaning forward to exercise the stiffness of the tendon or muscle and get rid of the pain.

For whatever activity and exercise that he carries out, he does not sweat. For this reason he does not shower again in the morning, but simply washes his feet and removes the crusts from his eyes with warm water and snorts salt to clear his sinuses, spitting some that enters the back of his mouth. He always feels like a Country and Western singer when he does this. His mouth tasting of brine throughout his dress routine, he walks down the stairs with slippered feet and without a tie and, in the kitchen again, the epicentre of the domestic world, he pours a cup of water into the kettle and flicks the switch. Tea won the war, lifting morale and warming up spirits and bodies, and each day in workdom is a miniature war against the pricks who can’t do their jobs properly, and they far outnumber those who can. The start of every day requires a cup of tea. A splash of milk and a levelled spoon of Acacia honey makes it perfect.

He quickly wipes a drip of honey from the worktop with a dampened sponge and rinses the spoon. He unlocks the backdoor and puts the sponge on the plastic table, in the shade at the moment but soon to be in the early-morning sun. The morning is blue, hazy white clouds straddling it and warning of the heat to come. The only way to improve a morning like this is with a smoke. Tea, sun and smoke: can there be a more perfect way to start anything? His cigarettes are in the house and his still-slippered feet do not worry him. His patio is swept and hosed once a week and his house is cleaned meticulously twice a week. Good agency, too.

The decision to eat first solves the dilemma, cereals being drowned in full-fat milk and the leftovers poured down the sink. He never has sugar on cereal. The blue and white china bowl is placed in the sink. The dessert of a cigarette is tucked between his lips and his lungs gratefully welcome the smoke. He walks back to the garden and sits for a second, one hand, the left, curled with a warming palm around the cup as the right forks the cigarette. The red-embered stump meets the oyster’s old home and with a sigh of spoilt bliss he stands and makes his way into the kitchen to lock the door and kick his slippers off and head upstairs for some socks.

The socks that he chooses are cotton, fifteen pounds for a pair, but look no different to any other socks that have ever existed. As a matter of fact they look less than plain, but whereas a suit or trousers can wear quite well, socks become more hole than fabric and you get what you pay for. There are no holes in these socks and they can stretch past the middle of the calf, which he makes them do. Never forget the importance of feet. They carry every burden that hits the soul and the body, all the way to the grave.

In the main bathroom he gargles mouthwash and rinses before brushing his teeth. He quickly moisturises his face with a cream from the exotic Caribbean-Mediterranean, rubbing the excess into the backs of his wrists. He is ready for the day ahead and will last the pressures of a scrutinising world without combustion. Today sees him in silver-grey trousers with a pale pink shirt. He wears this and a pair of marigolds and polishes his shoes in a mechanised manner. The yellow gloves have only the faintest sign of polish having hit them. He notices the scuffed leather of the right shoe and thinks shit, he’ll have to buy a new pair at the end of the month. The polish masks most of the creases and covers every dulling patch of leather, which he buffers to a waxy shine. The scratched surface of the leather is obvious to his scrutiny. The gloves, brushes and polish are placed in the box and put in the cupboard under the stairs. He picks up his briefcase, untouched since being dropped yesterday. He puts on a purple tie with thin, diagonal yellow stripes, bought four-for-ten pounds at a local credit-crunch busting mini-version of an award-winningly cheap, interchangeable supermarket. He puts on yesterday’s suit jacket and without double-locking, starts the walk to work. It is seven-thirty.

Thought patterns resume their daily musings and motions, starting with the bespectacled brunette receptionist, hair pulled tight in a bun this morning. Maybe he should have gone out last night, or at least masturbated. He hadn’t bothered to check his emails. The thought-shift leads him to his brother in Australia, openly homosexual in a gladiatorial way, although intolerance levels these days can’t possibly give him reason to be as antihomophobic as he is. Time appears soon after, tumbling along the domino trail of thought. It has been two years since he has seen his brother and he works out the equivalent of his life for which this accounts and places it in a ratio and forecasts when he will see him next and realises that time, for its never-constant, eternally altered speed, really does separate much more than it unites. This in turn makes him recognise his loss and that he wants to see his brother, his only brother. He is not sad. There is a sense of regret. They had been close as children. Children. The beautiful bane of a parent’s life. The fat prick isn’t here. Maybe he’ll waddle around the park again later.

Closer to the newsagent’s than the park, a woman is walking towards him. She has dyed-blonde hair that is arched around her face, too short to touch her shoulders. She has large breasts that move with an upwards bounce with each brisk, wedge-heeled step that she takes. Not that he notices her shoes. Good morning, this is better.

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Well it is to be expected, for after all, she is Davina Devereux, perfect double-D, just like her boobs which she hasn’t failed to notice him looking at, the sneaky, rather sexy, perv. Looking at him as she passes, she can smell a soft purple scent and notices that he is quite tall and a bit more handsome than she had first thought. They pass and she smiles back a mirror of his smile, slightly too assured and appraising in the same curve of the lips, cheeks and eyebrows.

She can hear his footsteps over her wedges, even though her steps are nearly two for everyone of his. Davina had found out, in her mid-teens, that small steps make her breasts move, but that was when she had had tiny little bumps, more nipple than boob, and nearly a decade before her father had relented and bought her the augmentation that she had wanted. It wasn’t even because of bullying or because she thought they would make her look better; it was because she knew that men thought they made her look better.

She is on the way to the gym to keep her size six upper and size eight lower exact. She had been a size four before and had been proud of the way that she could lose weight from every part of her body but from her breasts. She knows now though, that men like contours not just on the front of a woman, but on her backside and hips too.

The gym is a small, privately owned members only, the current vogue, where rates are regarded by the average buff worker-outer as being high. She likes this though, as the clientele are generally more moneyed, more classy and more depressed with their wives of silvered years. She refuses to have the personal trainer, solely for the reason that his nineteen-year-old crush cannot be more evident and the juvenility possessing him also has control of his eyes, eyes that could not meet her eyes or stare at her boobs. Those kind of eyes are the worst. His fumbled attempts to be casual when showing her how to use each machine and their operating procedures had actually been quite cute, but cute isn’t what she likes.

The walk is slow for the amount of steps that it takes her to get through the revolving doors of the gym, but she has all the time of anyone on the allowance that grants her nearly anything she could really want. She is not dressed expensively for all that money, wearing a zipped-up tracksuit jacket and a vest top beneath, with jogging bottoms and white trainers.

There is no need for her to talk to the receptionist as her plastic card speaks the admission codes and informs the system who she is and more importantly that she is a member.

At first, machines are overlooked for a range of rubber hand-weights. She picks up two kilogram blue hand-weights and extends her arms into an arabesque-standing shape, lowering them to her sides after five seconds in the air. Her arms are not overly muscly: small and taut yet definitely not weak for a woman who weighs just over eight stone. Next up is a series of bicep curls that sees her arms bent at a right-angle to her abdominals, elbows digging in, and then lifted up against her shoulders. She takes about ten minutes on this and then heads to the treadmills. Idiots running on pavements are more than just idiots for damaging their knees against the hard surface of concrete, they are idiots because they don’t realise, or worse don’t care, how they appear when exhausted, sweaty and flushed. The grimaces of displeasure and apparent pain on the majority of their faces, coupled with rasping or heavy panting, is nearly comical.

She runs at her usual twelve kilometres-per-hour for a time just shy of twenty minutes, slowing down a fraction before registering a round four kilometres. She has been to France on dozens of occasions and to most other countries of Europe at least once, but cannot remember the conversion scale into miles.

She turns the machine off by touching a monitor on the right-hand side and her walk slows to a stop. As she turns around, a familiar looking man in his early fifties is starting to programme his machine.

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It is her and he has an excuse. She probably does it every time, a force of habit.

Four kays is the perfect amount. I don’t tend to do much more but I’m not as young as you. It wasn’t the best ever thing and he hoped he didn’t daddify it, but the phatics are in place. He thinks he needs to ask a question though and is lumbered with yet more of the nothing-talk. Workout before work?

She is bloody hot, with absolutely sensational tits and a slim but damned curvy rump. She can’t be more than thirty, either, and her blonde hair makes her look really slutty.

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Davina looks over his body in his loose grey shorts and a-little-too-smart-for-the-gym white polo. I’m not working today, on holiday. Keeping up routine is all. Have some of that. A little hook for him to ask a question and no impression as to move. He has most of his hair and it’s only faintly grey in places. His arms look quite strong, but his chest is big. Her eyes stay on his face.

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She doesn’t look away from him, with her blonde-framed face and that pinky gloss on her lips. The only thing missing to make her look like a real slut was the mole somewhere on her cheek or lip that they all used to have, those pin-ups of his teenaged years. How pervert can he play this? He knows that his licence to be lecherous is fully owned now he is over fifty and he can get away with quite a lot, as long as he utters the immortal line or uses the laugh. And it seems your routine is doing you fine, even on holiday. A little pat of an actually non-existent belly and the laugh. Perfectly pitched. This thing just gets bigger and bigger when I’m not working.

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Looks fine to me. And smiles. She has seen him a few times before and sees through his veneer. He is one of those people who likes to learn a little bit about their probably perceived prey before initiating the interaction. She has caught a few of his downward glances and knows he would like to fuck her. No part of the opening was spontaneous but it had sounded so. Just to flummox him, she adds And don’t you know it, followed by a very girlish giggle, sweet-coating and hiding a sexual minx beneath it. Davina lets her eyes work their way to his stomach and flicker across the area where his cock must be, none too slowly. She faces him again. Well. See you later.

He says goodbye and see you next time and she turns and leaves and can near enough feel his eyes trying to sodomise her as she overtly wiggles her way to the entrance/exit. The summer’s light breeze is warmer than the air-conditioned gym and she immediately sweats, tiny beads lining her brow and armpits dampening. She doesn’t really know why but she likes to sweat, feels cleaner for it, and even looks good. She doesn’t take off her tracksuit jacket to cool down.

Having walked the fifteen minutes that it takes, she has not brought a bag and heads back to her apartment to play some music. She usually has her music-player with her, but ever since her bag was stolen at a bus stop she refuses to take it out in public. She also now refuses to use public transport, opting instead to use the incredibly swift to arrive and incredibly slow to transport taxi service. Thanks father. Even though she knows the gym does not admit that ilk, she leaves it at the apartment. She realises that she could actually have brought it with her today, but habit hasn’t allowed her to until now, too late.

The man in the gym is on Davina’s mind. She has never liked boys or men her own age, since growing up as a sexually-charged teenager to the present day. She has always found the slightly greying hair and the partially residualised strength found in the matured body as being a turn on. Cocks were always cocks, the bigger the better, but the way that they were used by men who had children and wives and not necessarily plenty of use, just happens to be better. Davina has a few theories pertaining to the causes of this irrefutable truth. Her first is that the mechanised sex with a partner of duration, let’s say five or more years, cannot arouse the same libidinous desires or lust that it would when newly committed with a foreign body, a new land to explore, taste, savour and use to a mutually abusive eroticism. Time has control of sex as it has control of everything. Stagnation is always a by-product. Her second is that children are a dampener. Whereas a man can still have sex with his wife and enjoy it enough to ejaculate and plaster a genuine enough smile of (no, not animalistic greed for another go) gratitude, a child dampens the simple want for sex. The reason for this is simple enough: guilt. Some odd notion has been spread that sex sullies and damages, and that it is dirty, which in an equally odd paradox. It makes the children themselves see it as dirty for a good few years. It’s not everyone’s belief, but Freud has some interesting ideas about this himself. The last of her many-times-over thought-out reasons is ridiculous, but she likes it enough to try and believe it. She thinks that an older cock has a better taste than a younger one, and jokingly likens it to wine. The more aged and vintage it is, the better it tastes and more exquisite it is. At least until it gets too old and tastes like piss. Wine from experience, cock from conjecture.

She imagines him in the gym the next time, starting some more small talk and heading to the changing rooms and showers at the same time. There are two blocks of showers, male on the right at the bottom of the corridor past reception and female to the left. Once through the gendered doors, however, they are split into around twenty individual cubicles. He follows her down the corridor of her imaginative fantasy and walks in immediately behind her, pulling his polo off and pushing her into a cubicle. The rest is a mental montage of various positions and fellatio and rough kissing, no one image or chronology of events settling in her thoughts. She laughs inwardly that her shower had better be a cold one. She wonders whether she will masturbate when she gets in, but decides not to.

She moves past an old lady who pushes a wheeled hand-trolley in front of her, as if to cast aside anything in her way. Her hair is tobacco-smoke-stained sepia, a filthy habit and one that is not doing the old lady any good. Davina does realise the irony in her suddenly guilty face, stopping her thoughts in case they are less than hidden. The old lady’s head is tilted at a near ninety degree angle facing the pavement and she does not seem to notice being passed.

The apartment blocks are in view and the electronic security gate can be seen along with the porter’s shed of a day-office. He’s never in it, instead coming when his buzzer goes off and a resident needs letting in because they are too drunk to remember their code. She has lived here for four months and has never forgotten her code, not even on the several occasions when she would have struggled to tell you her name. She does like to drink.

At the gate, she keys in 5 5 5 1 2 and the whirr precedes a click and the door swings inwards. The pink-orange of the apartments’ walls are on her left, leading to a double-doored access hall. There are no stairwells inside the building that grant tenants passage to their homes. Electricity and laziness have taken over. This suits her just fine. Don’t get her wrong; even though she might be athletic and fit enough, stairs and five flights don’t much appeal to her.

Every part of the building is spotless. The ground floor’s entrance halls are washed daily, buffered and shined, business folk’s scuffed-leather polish removed when still removable and if found at a time when firmly set, ways are found to remove it still. The carpeted corridors that lead into the separate apartments are crimson and extensively vacuumed, also daily. A person is employed within the private cleaning company assigned to the building solely to wipe down the walls. There is CCTV in evident abundance, openly hiding in the corners of walls. Every door has the same silver numbering and spyhole, with a dull red-painted door.

One lift at each access point remains permanently on the ground floor, returning there after depositing its contents, and the other does the same but returns to the uppermost floor, the seventh. The only thing lacking is a porter, resplendent with the typical red and gold attired bellhop uniform and bell-boy hat and white gloves. If she pesters her father enough she can probably get one, but then she might have to live in a hotel. New faces might be fun, she reasons. The doors are open as usual and she walks in, presses the circle with 5 on it and looks at herself in the mirrored rear of the carriage. She is never unhappy with the way she looks and knows that this is because she is so many things: sultry is one, with the poutable expression never far away; pretty is another, the youthful hue and largish eyes currently a permanent feature; slutty comes easy with the large breasts and peroxide blond hair; sexy is, she supposes, the term that encompasses all of her aspects.

What is funny to her is that she can also quite easily pull off intellectual, bookish, superior, timid and a lot more of the not-so-stereotypical. Her days at Trinity were well spent and her father’s money has not been wasted.

Out of the lift and in her apartment, she is in the mood for music.

The music system that she walks over to is of good quality. Music is important to her: classical overtures, simple grunge bridges, smoothly erratic percussion, varieties of voices, digitalised synthesisers, chicken-picked strings and tribal chants and… Limited only by time and perhaps its metaphorical counterpart, money, music is endless and eternally changing. Davina has no genre restrictions or dislike for a certain labelled form of aural art, even, somehow, avoiding the natural prejudice for the pop machine and its churned-out mechanicals. Her, an Oxbridge graduate, too.

She chooses now a little-known-outside-of-Ireland Irish singer, an angel by all accounts with a delicate voice that brings every word of one of her songs to life. She is also not sucked in to the necessity of liking all songs on an album or by a certain artist. Of the eleven tracks on the CD now being played, she likes one, enjoys two more and is completely indifferent to the lack of creativity, difference and poetry found in the others. It is the first three tracks on the disc and this is fortunate, because it gives her the twenty minutes that she needs to sift through her messages on FAFAF.com.

The song starts with the plucked strings from a violin before a melancholic, elongated note is played on a cello. Her voice is the next to be added, soft and high but full of power in an understated way. The whole song, rather ingenuously, crescendos until the end, with drums and cymbals and piano added to the earlier three instruments. The song is not a sad song, but an ominity is felt throughout, a sense of warning and danger coupled with the innocence of a delicate voice, a voice which finishes as the strongest of the combined sounds. She has just logged into her FAFAF.com account at the end of the song.

The next song doesn’t change throughout its seven minutes duration and goes largely unconsidered as she reads the thirty-three messages on her account. Two are from what the website nominates as friends and the others by strangers. Some of these arouse her interests, largely through difference to the usual garbage she has to read and one through a clear indication of something intellectual on the other side of the cybersphere. Telling the reality behind the cyberface is not difficult at all, and only once has she been caught out. The content of messages is also informative of character. The ones who pour the real sleaze into their words are nearly always introverted fantasists. They rarely have the libertine abandon and casual nature needed to perform the intrigues in their minds. The shy and coy messages are as they seem, the most genuine of them all and without much doubt posted by teenagers, virgins and social outcasts. Messages that contained uncommon words or ones that are long (by letter, not syllable: variety has four) are often lacking real intelligence and thus are dumb, whereas the perfect and consistent use of text talk hints at a smart person. The use of basic language with perfect punctuation is when there is a real feel for a smart person. Davina’s own style was inconsistent text talk with an exaggerated amount of xs and emoticons added to suggest girlishness. She replies in this manner to three of the messages, logs off, and heads to the shower.

In the bathroom she takes off all of her clothes, including the trainers that she did not remove and never does remove on entering the apartment, stands in front of the full-length, wall-mounted mirror and raises her arms directly above her to inspect her armpits, before turning her back to the mirror and continuing the inspection from her neck to her ankles. Lastly she faces the mirror, cups her breasts, pouts, bends slightly forwards from her back, legs kept straight, and then walks behind the curtain. Curtain drawn, she lets the water hit her immediately, gaining a gasp-shriek of shock as the cold water responds to her glowing and warm skin. Her gasp soon turns to a soothing sigh as it heats.

She lathers a shower gel over her whole body and firmly pushes her fingers against the top of her vagina, kneading her clitoris. She enjoys herself but stops after only two minutes and resumes the removal of the gel. Next she squeezes an almost run-out tube of peroxide-friendly shampoo into her left hand and works this through her hair. She scratches her scalp as she does so with fingers going rapidly in opposite directions to one another, before allowing the water to rinse most of it away. She finishes this ritual by pulling her hair into ropes and squeezing out as much of the absorbed water as she can. Her hands then create a warmth of friction by rubbing her hair between the folds of a cream towel that she proceeds to make into a turban, before wrapping another towel around her body, just above her breasts and all the way to her ankles.

In the living room again and the song that’s being played sounds different for a second and then resumes its familiarity. Another uninteresting song. She presses a button on the stereo and skips to track ten and takes off her towels, leaving them in a pile on the settee. She lightly stretches her legs, extending her left to the side whilst keeping her right knee bent and facing forwards. This is repeated with the right before she rests her body weight on the backs of her forearms and lifts herself on her toes, tensing her abdominal muscles deliberately and feeling them strain after ninety seconds. She turns on her back and tucks her chin up against her knees for twenty seconds and extends, lightly panting, pushing her head against the floor with a sigh.