Trade (A Novelette)

Trade

  Lochlan Bloom

  Copyright 2013 Radial Books

  Lochlan Bloom has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN-13: 978-1484186398

  ISBN-10: 1484186397

  A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library

  Crunkl

  Go in bold they said, throw in some sex, that will catch their attention. Great advice that was! It’s that sort of thinking that led to all this shit, that led to all this relentless hustling. Back then, there were none of the constant fast-field transactions or this multi-billion dollar market. It was only a simple mobile app.

  We can claim we didn’t know but, ha, Goering probably said the same - “Ich wusste nichts über Auschwitz” - look what happened to him. It was never just an app, it was always something more. Throw in some sex - what good was that ever going to do? Nothing is ever just as it appears because everything we create is a representation of us, as human beings, when you boil it down.

  So, where to begin this little story? Back at the start? As a boy? Childhood traumas? Of course not. Ok where? London? It was the trip to London I guess. When I first met Chet Bull, that’s where the seeds of this horrible business were first sown. But you need a little context no doubt, so maybe I should go a little further back, to Germany. Yes, the end of the German summer let us start there.

  I was working at a tech startup in Berlin - you know the sort of place, bean bags, foosball, and kooky shit on the wall. I worked in communications and there was plenty of money sloshing about. The CEO was this young guy called Svil Thorgeston, a Swede. He had managed to hoodwink a bunch of Angel investors to dump some Series A funding into his idea for a mobile app. They’re all so canny those Swedes, he’d convinced the investors to part with a cool €500,000 to build a photo-sharing network, as if there weren’t enough of those floating around.

  Now €500,000 is nothing compared with what the guys in Silicon Valley were raising, they’d easily see $5mil or $10mil Series A without breaking a sweat, in fact anything less than $1mil was seen as a non-starter over there, but in Europe the market was less mature. In any case 500k was more than enough; there were only ten of us to begin with at Crunkl, which meant there was plenty of coke and stripper money. This was what we jokingly named the office expenses fund but I should point out that we never actually bought strippers - Svil being very Nordic and pro-equal rights.

  The app was called Crunkl, as stupid a name as any that was doing the rounds then, thoroughly meaningless and inoffensive, perfect for a social photo sharing site. Now my job basically consisted of pestering people, either by phone or email, until they wrote an article about our website. My work was, essentially, a series of dull, repetitive actions but the atmosphere in the Crunkl office made it seem like I might actually be contributing to something.

  My title was “Communications Designer”. It was easy stuff, everyone wanted to write about cool startups out of Berlin, there was a buzz about the place, everybody who wrote about our start up, or Berlin in general, mentioned it. The place had an energy to it, they would say, a real buzz, there was a lot of potential and talent in Berlin. Everyone agreed.

  Svil called me into his office one day.

  ‘I need to borrow you to talk strategy.’

  I had been there about eighteen months at that point and he always spoke in that chummy way, like we had known each other since we were kids, his attention totally focused on me. I must confess it really did make me warm to him as a human being, they are canny the Swedes, they learn little tricks that the rest of us are too lazy to bother with.

  ‘Sure, what do you need?’ I ventured. Something about Svil made me want to be a better person.

  ‘I’ve just been speaking to the guys in engineering.’ He always called the web developers “engineering” – something about how their work was integral to the whole operation and we were “engineering” a new web. To everyone else outside it was just confusing as it suggested our company built bridges or underground systems. ‘They’re really excited about the new feature set.’

  ‘It’s exciting stuff.’ I tried a smile.

  ‘We need to make sure everyone knows about it.’ I could see Svil’s head was swimming. ‘This is über-cool, we’re talking New York Times.’

  ‘They’re very picky.’ I felt I had to rein back Svil’s enthusiasm before I was faced with an impossible task. ‘When is it launching?’

  ‘Soon, man, very soon, believe me this will change everything.’

  We didn’t have a clue back then. The feature set Svil showed me that afternoon was designed to make it easier for people to categorize and share pictures of their pets. I mean, how did we ever think there was a market in that? Why would anyone give a fuck about a picture of somebody else’s pet? I didn’t know what to say so I nodded my head in what I hoped looked like sage agreement.

  Don’t get me wrong. I loved my job, working with Svil was amazing, we did very little that we didn’t want to do, but there was a limit to how enthusiastic I could get about functionality in a photo-sharing app.

  Personally I struggled to get excited about all this ‘buzz’, but then I am a great pretender. I’m sure nobody in those days could have suspected how utterly it bored me. We would organize massive ‘Art’ parties in warehouses to promote the launch of a new feature, for weeks people would be talking about the preparation. Drugs fuelled everything, we would have ‘business meetings’ in gallery spaces that had been converted from Soviet era factories, people would fly in from San Francisco for investment talks or conferences, drink a lot of beer and leave. Everyone talked about changing the world, technology was going to save us all. We would enslave the machines to build a better humanity, one photo sharing app at a time.

  Svil talked on about people I should contact and what our media strategy should be. That’s how I first heard about Sympatico. I clearly remember Svil telling me about the startup, he was crouched on one of the monster beanbags, obviously uncomfortable, lolling on the floor but unwilling to break his image as the cool boss and sit at the table next to me like a straight. I admired him for that; he was willing to sacrifice his comfort for his own mental image of style, that takes something.

  Sympatico was a startup from London, an online dating portal. Rather than having users sign up and create a profile, they integrated with existing social networks to find your best match. It was nothing special really, a couple of algorithms and a lot of design time. They had been puttling along for the first few months, getting a bit of press here and there until they got some c-list celebrity using the site and then their stats had gone through the roof. They were getting a few million hits a month which was pretty good going considering they’d only launched eight months previously.

  Anyway our new features would be an easy sell to them, all I had to do was make a trip to London and meet their CEO, Chet Bull. Svil would sort out all the technical details and tele-conference before I went, I just had to show up and press the flesh for two days and we were assured a slot in all the right London blogs.

  I liked these little trips and took them pretty frequently; it gave me a chance to relax. A lot of people complain about business travel, shuttling from faceless hotel room to faceless office or conference centre.

  ‘It’s draining,’ they say. ‘Non-stop.’
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  They will then go on to explain, in detail, the far flung locations they have been forced to visit in the name of work.

  ‘I can’t wait to have some time at home,’ they sigh.

  Well I never understood all that. For me, a little trip like this provided a fun diversion, checking into a hotel I always felt at ease, safe. The more non-descript or identikit the hotel the better. The Ibis chain was particularly good for this. All the rooms looked the same. They were completely soulless, but clean and inexpensive.

  Perhaps it was a tight streak, from growing up in Scotland, but I was always quite conscious of the price when checking into hotels. If it was a high end chain like the Hilton I felt a little out of place, nervous. That was before I had so much money. In the Ibis I felt justified, but in those fancier hotels I worried at the cost. Was I a ‘good value’ employee?

  Don’t get me wrong, Svil never checked these sort of things or asked for any kind of justification from us. Remember we were a startup, we didn’t make any money, we just frittered away the big pot of cash that had already been invested in Crunkl, in the hope that we would one day scale out. Still, I wasn’t the only one who related my self-worth to my take home pay.

  It may have been less obvious in those days but everybody, if they thought about it, attached a market value to their time. The value of a person’s time is the basis of a market economy after all. Generally speaking, the time of a barrister is worth a lot more than, say, a Burger King assistant.

  What worried me, at least at some sub-conscious level, was the niggling feeling that someone might ‘find out’. There might be some celestial claw-back mechanism, an equation, whereby expenditure on employee X was normalized? Could somebody, somewhere, look into my behaviour and work out what I was ‘worth’?

  But this is getting ahead of myself, at that point all I knew was that I was going to London for a few days and on balance I was pretty pleased about this diversion. True, I had to leave Lis but we had a very easy relationship. She was my girlfriend back then. You probably know her more intimately now, you probably know her as LisbetA, but back then she was just Lis, an ordinary girl. We had been dating for eight months or so.

  Not that long after I moved to Berlin we met at a mutual friend’s party. It was one of those achingly trendy affairs on the east side of the city, a bunch of rich kids slumming it out in the sticks. They had probably spent more doing up the squat than the building was worth. We hung close to each other, neither of us knowing many of the other guests. We left the party with a drunken kiss at and she invited me back to her place.

  I can’t even remember if we had sex then or not. I presume we did. That’s generally what happened if you kissed a girl drunkenly at a party and then went back to hers, but my recollection is hazy. Certainly we shagged pretty frequently after that but, on that first night, I can’t remember for sure. Maybe there’s something wrong with my memory, I tend to remember pointless things – the corner of a plastic shop hoarding on Oxford St that was slightly cracked, the way a rock near Loch Duntelchaig looked covered in moss, a pine needle I trod on near Chambéry - information that isn’t going to be worth anything to anyone, and yet I have trouble recalling the first time I had sex with Lis.

  ‘I’ve got to go to London’ I said. We were having a coffee near Winterfeldplatz.

  ‘That’s cool.’ she was genuinely excited for me. ‘Will you have time to do any shopping?’

  ‘Yeah… I don’t know yet,’

  I didn’t want to spend all my time in London with a shopping list for hair products and table mats. We lived near each other but had not taken the leap to move in together. It had just kind of worked out like that. Her flatmate was a friend from her time studying a Masters in Salamanca and I had signed a lease on a small one bedroom place.

  We both knew we would get a nice place together at some point and add the sort of touches that you never bother with in a rented place. It didn’t seem like a big thing, we got on, we quickly got used to each other’s company, we had plenty of time.

  ‘I’ll probably be pretty busy,’ I lied.

  ‘Are you staying with friends when you get there?’

  I had never lived in London but Lis often assumed I had. I eventually found out that it was because her ex, Steven who was also British, had lived somewhere in Kensal Rise. I tried not to let her mix-up get to me. She did genuinely seem to confuse the two of us on this issue, so I felt that making a deal out of it would be looking for an argument where there wasn’t any need of one.

  Nonetheless it irked me, not least because Lis’s knowledge of the UK was otherwise encyclopaedic. Her English was flawless and when we talked I often forgot she was speaking a second language. She knew Geordie slang I’d never heard of and referenced kids TV programmes, like Rainbow, that I’m sure never even aired in Germany.

  She could easily correct me on points of grammar and once, I remember, we argued all the way back from Szczecin about the correct spelling of the word ‘assent’. Both our phones had died so we had to wait till we got back to Berlin to look it up. At which point, regretfully, I had to concede that she was right.

  ‘No. I’m staying at the Ibis, in Shoreditch’ I said. In fact the Ibis was closer to Whitechapel but Shoreditch was the trendy area. It sounded better if you said Shoreditch.

  Oh, Ok,’ she said, touching my arm, perhaps because she had just remembered that it was not me who had lived in London. ‘Will you be gone long?’

  ‘No, a few days, no more than that. The deal’s all been decided already, I’ve just got to meet this guy from a startup over there.’

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ she smiled and a fleeting hunger passed through her eyes as she squeezed my arm again. I knew what this meant. It meant sex. I smiled back in what I hoped was an equally salubrious manner.

  I guess I should explain a bit more about Lis and our sexual relations, as you no doubt feel it is relevant to this little story. We had what I would call a pretty healthy sex life, fairly frequent, energetic, perhaps a little dull. We both enjoyed sex. I would say we were fairly adventurous though we had never gotten into anything kinky, like whips and chains or BDS&M stuff. We tried various positions and I knew that Lis had a vibrator, although she never used it in front of me.

  All in all, I felt we were pretty normal. We had both watched our share of porn and would laugh about hardcore stuff like schizer movies. We were happy with each other. I think. We both had busy jobs so sex was very much a recreational activity, something we enjoyed but not something we pretended we were professional at.

  I guess, if I am being honest, I had an inkling that Lis wanted sex more frequently than I did. It’s obvious, I suppose, that two people won’t always want sex at the same time. There will always be one half of a partnership that is more eager.

  Occasionally it was me who was horny - the only thing I could think of to rip Lis’s clothes off and spread the lips of her pussy - but more often than not it was Lis that wanted to fuck. Put it this way, I can’t remember Lis ever complaining when I seized her and slid her pants off, but on some occasions a contrary part of me would resist, would want to punish her in some obscure way.

  She was almost shy in those days; certainly she never just came out and said she wanted sex.

  ‘I’m feeling tired,’ she might say at ten o’clock. ‘Why don’t we go to bed?’

  I knew this was a signal. Her face gleamed with conspiratorial energy. It was plainly a cue to go and fuck. It was not that I was tired or didn’t want sex, but somehow this imagined pressure would rankle me. Make me want to rebuke her.

  ‘I just want to watch the end of this programme,’ I’d say, keeping my eyes fixed on the television.

  ‘Oh ok,’ I’d sense her hesitation, her disappointment, out of the corner of my eye and this just provoked me more.

  ‘You go on to bed if you want.’

  ‘No,’ she would snuggle closer to me, ‘I prefer to stay here with you.’

  I wou
ld sip my drink in silence.

  What gave me this perverse streak I don’t know, as I say I enjoyed sex, but I would sometimes feel it was something I was expected to do, a chore rather than a reward.

  That’s not to say I didn’t think about it. I was fairly predictable in my fantasies, I imagine. On my lunch break or in an idle moment at work I would often fantasize about a wet pussy or a pert pair of tits. In a general way sex was a constant, background noise, something always there, half-realised, a split-second from turning into a full thought.

  Men, apparently, think about sex every six seconds but that’s a lot of rubbish. Thoughts and impressions swirl around your head all day long but that’s not the same as thinking about something. If, when you arrive at lunch, you realise that you’ve been vaguely hungry for the last hour that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve been thinking about food.

  There were a few hot girls at work and if, for example, Sandra bent over to plug in a USB then I would get an eyeful, along with every other male in the office, but it was a momentary sort of thing. By the time she stood up I would be thinking about the email I was in the middle of sending or the new ad campaign. I guess, as with physical prowess, sustaining a prolonged sexual fantasy is a struggle for some men, yet another pointer that the human race is heading into an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

  Anyway, the sun was getting low in Winterfeldplatz, it was late September and we had only braved the outdoor seats so we could smoke.

  ‘I’ll miss you too,’ I said, placing my hand on top of hers, around my forearm. ‘It’s only a few days.’

  ‘I’ll have to keep myself company,’ she said, insinuating some secret pleasure, ‘Send me some photos.’

  London

  London is a jungle.

  A cold grey jungle.

  It had snowed unusually early and when I arrived the city was a dull, overcast ball of slush. I met Chet Bull in Sympatico’s Old St office. It was on the top floor of an ugly concrete tower. Despite the evident expense lavished on the furnishings the place felt decrepit. Chet himself was sharply dressed and clean shaven but beyond that it was hard to describe his appearance. Something about him deflected your attention. He was energetic but his personality was hard to nail down, as if he moulded himself around you, chameleon –like, changing himself to suit your responses.

  ‘Very promising,’ he said, his eye darting across the projections on the screen. ‘Once the dev guys get stuck into this… we’re talking rapid scale out.’

  I tried to look keen.

  ‘We’re expecting a Series B you know. Hong Kong’s on-board. That’s where the money is now. China. That’s the future.’

  He straightened up from the screen and took a step towards me, making a gesture with his left hand that I didn’t quite understand.

  ‘What do you think about the future?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know really,’ I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. ‘We just, you know, it’s all about getting a quality product out.’ I smiled weakly hoping this was what he was after.

  He stopped and looked me up and down as if considering something.

  ‘The deals all set. Svil and I, we thrashed things out,’ He looked at me strangely. ‘You don’t need to sell me...’ again he waved his left hand.

  ‘Oh no, I… I just meant, you know, we’re right behind this.’

  Again that strange look.

  ‘Why don’t we take a wander?’ He put his hand on the crook of my elbow.

  ‘You don’t want to look at the projections?’ I pointed at the screen, quite aware that we had barely skimmed the surface of the material I had prepared.

  ‘No need for that,’ I thought he winked at me.

  The area around Old St was referred to as up and coming. As far as I could gather that simply meant overpriced, optimistically overpriced, with the hope that one day that unrealistic, inflated price would become the normal price and business and property owners would make a nice profit. Everyone in London has an underlying interest in profits.

  Chet took me down in the lift to the underground car park.

  ‘I bought the Corvette as a present for myself,’ he said, evidently pleased with the purchase. ‘After I sold my first business, you know, I thought I had all the money I would ever need. I thought I would never work again.’

  He looked at me and grinned.

  ‘I took some time off, maybe too much time, travelling, backpacking…’ He looked pensive. ‘I was a little wild then, you know. Until that point I’d worked every hour I could get and then suddenly…nothing.’

  ‘Anyway, I had been travelling around Tanzania. I don’t know if you’ve been there, but it is really a beautiful country, beautiful, beautiful people, you can buy everything you want there for $100 a day. Honestly no more than $100 will get anything you want - a meal, a blow job, two girls, two boys, two girls and two boys - everything that you can imagine is available there, and cheap.

  I had no intentions of going back to the States. I had millions in the bank at that point but I barely touched it, didn’t need to. Then, I arrived in Johannesburg and one day this magnificent Corvette passes me in the street and right there, on the pavement, I had a revelation, a what do you call it …an epiphany and decided I wanted one. I had been living on next to nothing for so long, partying, travelling. It took me a long time to convince the bank clerks to authorize the transaction.’

  We had reached the bay where his car was parked. It looked ludicrously out of place, a gross American concoction, huge and gleaming. The outer edge of the chassis was a good 10 centimetres wider than the parking space. The battered Nissan Micra in the space next to his looked like a toy car in comparison.

  ‘As soon as I got behind the wheel I realized something: There is no other force on earth as powerful as Money.’

  I looked at him quizzically, searching for some sign of irony. He appeared to be entirely serious.

  He put the key into the driver’s door and stopped, speaking to me across the roof of the car.

  ‘I left Johannesburg a week later and flew to New York. I started my next business the week after that. There was no point in staying in Africa. It was all a waste of time I realized, the travelling. New experiences are great, it’s true, but what use are they? There are no indigenous people in this world. There is no such thing as free choice, every person, every action is shaped by Money.’

  We roared along the street, the engine thundering even in first gear as we crawled around Silicon Roundabout.

  ‘If I really wanted to be alive,’ Chet continued, ‘I decided I had to go to the source. Only money can shift whole populations, destroy mountains. Nothing else comes close, nothing moves the imagination in the same way. This city is where it springs; where it comes out of the ground.’

  He pointed out buildings and landmarks that belonged, or had belonged, to wealthy individuals. I couldn’t really hear much of what he said.

  ‘I had the Corvette shipped after me and the shipping cost as much as the car itself. There is no sense in being on the edge of life after all.’

  I sensed that he wasn’t expecting an answer so I just laughed in agreement. I hoped my tone left enough room for interpretation should it transpire that he was, after all, playing some dry joke.

  ‘I’ve never been back to Africa since.’

  We arrived at a preposterous hotel somewhere behind Kings Cross.

  ‘They sent me a bill for one point two million yesterday, and that’s just for the windows.’

  It dawned on me that this was his hotel. He had talked about investing in hotels earlier in the day.

  ‘Expensive windows.’

  ‘The cheapest we could get away with.’

  We walked up to the reception area. A triple height roof covered half of the expansive floor. A bar, café and dining area all merged together seamlessly. I had to admit the architects or interior designers or whoever was responsible for the layout had been extremely skilful in creating mood.


  It was hard to tell if it was the lighting or the subtle changes in the flooring and décor but each section felt quite distinct. There were no walls but the bar area was dim and snug while the café was light and breezy. None of it felt in any way personal but there was no denying that it was stunningly well designed.

  ‘I’ve always loved hotels,’ he said. I got the impression he wanted to share something with me. I wasn’t sure if he was doing this consciously to charm me. ‘They are so ultimately anonymous, don’t you agree?’

  This thought did in fact chime with my own thinking on hotels but coming out of his lips it sounded perverse.

  ‘There is nothing personal in a hotel, beyond perhaps the room number. People can forget all the little edges that make everyday life difficult. In my hotels people can relax knowing every experience has already been analysed and priced.’

  We were on the twelfth floor. Chet was showing me an architectural quirk, an exposed heating pipe that ran across the passageway unsupported. It had apparently cost an extra hundred thousand pounds.

  He stopped where the corridor narrowed before a small balcony.

  ‘I hope you’re not taking me seriously.’ He smiled.

  I had little doubt that he was entirely serious. Chet clearly seemed to be trying to impress me. I wondered if he could be planning on hitting on me. Was already hitting on me?

  ‘You’ve done a great job with this place,’ I said.

  It was hard to be sure what age he was. Initially I had taken him to be ten or fifteen years older than me but now I suspected he may be older still. I looked more closely at his face. I wondered if he had had Botox.

  ‘Let’s get a drink.’

  I didn’t say anything but followed him down to the bar. They treated us like royalty. The bar manager fawned over us both. He insisted on demonstrating his mixology skills by preparing extravagant cocktails.

  I started to wonder what strings Chet pulled behind the scenes. There was something intoxicating about the power that he seemed to wield. A thick cold fog had built up outside the giant double glazed walls and somehow that seemed to exaggerate the enormity of the city.

  I had been to London fairly frequently but had never quite got my head around the place. It was a difficult creature, unbroken, wild. There were always more parts, and layers of pretence. The expensive parts, on the slide, trying to show they still had money when they didn’t; the poor areas, thriving on ill-gotten gains, trying to hide the money they were making from prying eyes.

  Several of Chet’s business associates came passed the bar. Mainly they said no more than a few words and disappeared into the bowels of the hotel. They all resembled Chet in their smooth faced, easy going appearance. Everything sculpted, prepared and styled to look expensive and simple.

  One associate, Darven, arrived and took a seat. He seemed to know Chet well. I guessed he was in his sixties but it was next to impossible to say for sure. His face was entirely unnatural, the work of some highly paid surgeon, his clothes spotless and trendy. He wore blue trainers.

  He was telling a story about an incident at some place called Sunset’s, several days previously.

  ‘Thankfully he changed his mind when he saw the money.’

  ‘It would cost you less if you listened to Trainer.’

  ‘You make me out to be such a terrible person. In front of your friend as well. As if I would plan something like that. The poor boy was getting paid to do a job. You’ve been at Sunset’s, you know how it can get out of control. It’s a shame. He looked sweet. Anyway, my insurance paid for him to go to the most expensive hospital he’s ever going to visit. Not to mention the dentist…his teeth are the envy of all the other boys now.’

  Chet smiled and shot me a conspiratorial look.

  ‘Apart from the ones that are missing.’

  ‘Oh you exaggerate. I am not Dorian Gray darling.’

  Darven stopped and regarded me for a moment and squeezed Chet’s shoulder.

  ‘Who is your friend? Are you not going to introduce us?’

  ‘He’s Scottish,’ Chet said looking directly at me. ‘From Berlin.’

  ‘Oh Scottish, from Berlin, how wonderful,’ the old man turned to me and I had a sudden sense of revulsion. I could only imagine what he had done to the “poor boy”. ‘You will come with us to Sunset’s won’t you?’ he leered.

  ‘No, I’m not sure, I have a lot of work to do,’ the cocktails were starting to work on me.

  I tried to picture my father, before he had died, could he have been about the same age as this guy. There was not one fibre of similarity between the two. My father wheezing greyly in his dirty duffel coat, visiting the hospital, the nurses patronizing him, the way they spoke to my sister in that dull patient tone, the greyness that day in the crematorium, the greyness of his house as we cleared it out, there was nothing to hang on to. I felt profoundly disrespectful sitting there sipping expensive cocktails with these two aging millionaires.

  The car pounded along the dark streets of North London, everything flew off the ground, whirling about me, vomited up into the air, flung passed us with violence. I was wedged in the back, forgotten, the Corvette wasn’t designed to have passengers in the rear seats, to have any more than two. Chet drove illegally but without the slightest error. He had a precision that I couldn’t put my finger on.

  I could tell we had got out of the wholesome neighbourhoods, we stopped, Darven spoke to someone, he returned after a long time, they laughed in the front seats. We took the Westway to Kensington, a fancy bar, champagne arrived, and girls. Darven enjoyed talking to the girls, he spoke earnestly, I was drunk I remember thinking, drunk and spinning.

  The girls racked up lines of coke, then more lines, then MDMA, I swallowed a pill. Everything tasted bitter but I was excited, I felt a tingling just above my crotch, as if my balls were being drawn up inside my belly. I talked to a girl and then we were kissing, she was gorgeous, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, I didn’t get her name.

  She was gone, we were back on the road, we had ditched the Corvette somewhere, we were in a taxi, I struggled to remember if I had done something in the toilets with the girl, Chet smiled and laughed and slapped me on the back.

  ‘Plenty where we’re going,’ he said. ‘Plenty.’ I felt sick with the motion of the taxi. Did he mean plenty of girls or something else?

  We arrived in a dark place. The taxi bumped on uneven, gravelly ground. Large floodlights. Warehouses. A panic rose in the back of my neck. What were they planning to do to me out here? What the hell was I doing with them? Who, after all, were they? I didn’t know them. They talked but I couldn’t understand a word. Everything was muffled and distorted.

  ‘Crpwa ruddem eggttt Mishazzo,’ Darven spat out, looking at me with a terrifying glare.

  They laughed some more.

  ‘Yggetee poi sugur,’ sniffed Chet. His face came close to mine, melting.

  We had stopped, it was dark outside. A warehouse.

  This was it. They would do it here.

  I was out of the taxi. The cold air shook me. They started speaking normally again.

  ‘You were out of it,’ Chet smiled, half supporting me with his arm, ‘back there in the taxi. Fresh air will do you good. We’ll get another line inside.’

  ‘Inside?’ I was confused. It appeared they were not going to kill me.

  ‘Sunset’s,’ Darven beamed, motioning towards the warehouse.

  We stumbled a short distance to a small door cut in the corrugated exterior wall. I heard a distant beat, a drum beat tugging far away, the Drum Taps of Sorgie. It revitalized me. We were at Sunset’s evidently.

  We entered curtains. Thick, layer after layer. My heart grew excited in that giant house of curtains, pulled in deeper by the steady drumming. Darven slipped me another pill. It was warm and sumptuous. Inside there was no dirt or discomfort. The mud and gravel and security cameras and wasteland and perimeter fences and disorder and cold and confusion and inadequacy and pe
rsistence and everything outside faded away.

  There were boys and there were girls. They laughed with each other. They played tricks on each other. Filthy tricks. Filthy but innocent. I watched. My cock was hard, I realized. A girl had her hand on it and then her mouth. I was a rock.

  I turned her over, she squealed, a look of sham pain on her face, I did not care. I entered her from behind, we were an engine, oiled. I forced my finger into her mouth and she sucked on it. She had my cock in her mouth and I kept it there until she gagged. It was not enough, she wanted more. Insatiable, she splayed herself. I was dragged away.

  We moved in a sea. Hours must have passed. Others came. We joined together. They sucked and pulled at me, heightening my pleasure. I became filled with a power. I was invincible. I think I slept and woke. There was no time, there was only the sea. I came. And then again. And then I couldn’t come any more but I carried on. I couldn’t remember. I forgot.

  Eventually it was later. They were gone. The light was drab and the drums had turned to a drone. Darven stood there in the dirty warehouse.

  ‘It’s time to go,’ he said gently. Beside him stood a young girl, a swelling bruise spreading from her cheek down her neck.

  ‘To go?’ I asked confused.

  ‘Yes we’ve been here too long,’ Darven looked worried, his face ashen in the weak light of the place. ‘We need to leave.’

  ‘How long?’ I couldn’t get my head to work.

  ‘It’s Tuesday,’ he said hurriedly.

  They took me to a taxi.