Picture the scene if you will. The CID room of a Central London police station. I could make it one in West London of course, but let’s not clutter things and make mess in our own backyard eh ? Hark at me, still referring to it as ‘ours’ ! Anyway, the lead woodentop (since detectives don’t wear helmets, I must be ascribing the man’s blockishness of pate), pitches a thin sheath of papers down on to the desk. They fan out compactly, but as they are inverted to all the other detectives seated around the table, the burden they bear is not immediately, well, detectable. Head flatfoot inclines over with all the grace of an orang-utan, arms boring down into the desk, bracketing the flimsy, flabelliform lots. He splays his fingers across the topsheet like rivets, before executing a revolution, as if grinding a lemon against a conical reamer. The printed human pulp now faces the other officers. Silently inveigling towards adoption. Listlessly, each dabs a finger to pinion a sheet, before edging it back towards the purview of their jaded pupils. A languid tilt of each head to adjust to the angle of presentation of the image. “Snatch ... or snatch ?” intones the senior man mirthlessly.
Now their attention is pricked, even that of the female officers, though their dander is ruffled in a diametrically different manner from that of their male brethren. “Do we have a kidnapping on our hands ... or is this one for Vice ?” Accordingly every sheet stands erect, both edges firmly pincered between the finger and thumb of each rozzer’s hands. Scant breath escapes their pursed mouths, as they surmise what is before them. Enthralled. A young woman is bound to a chair, looking plaintively into the camera’s eye. (An unobtrusive little nod in the direction of my own perdurable condition). Crowning the image, the throat-clearing protocols and threads by way of e-mail introduction. At the foot is simply announced a name _______. We’ll get to that. All in good time.
Scan around the room, as the top ranker trots outs the horns of the case’s dilemma to the gathered ensemble. “We haven’t had any ransom demands as such ...” The female officers uniformly bristle in their chairs (they have had to play the game to get this far, and know they are not permitted responses that significantly deviate from those of their male peers). “That could mean they don’t really know who they’ve got...” For their part, the men are engaged in all types of displaced acting out. Mark how one winds an elastic band innumerable times around his middle finger until the bloodflow is staunched. A second repeatedly stabs his pen into a styrofoam cup, until he has shivered it irreducibly from its receptive function. Another syncopates his plastic stirrer against exposed teeth, with increasingly climactic rhythm. One further has unravelled a paper clip and digs it harder into the quick of his thumb, even though the grimey parings of self he was rootling, have long since been excised. “Or that they know precisely who she is and money isn’t the issue. Maybe it’s a vendetta ...” Somehow, instinctively, per their cocksureity, their infallible dowsing rods, they know they will be spared this case. That if indeed any crime has been committed, if she is indubitably a victim, it will fall under the aegis of a nominated dedicated department, “The Dirty Squad”. They are off the hook, even as they mount her upon one. How do they know ? “Bit bloody mild for Vice ain’t it ? She’s still got all her clothes on !” chimes their spokesman in unspoken accord with them all.
Good, I appear to be on my game. The spell I cast is working. That which conjures a flat, two dimensional being into full life. One that for all its current state of rolled recumbency, can perpendicularise all sorts of diverse strata. One that in its fixed flushness, can inflame a cataract of chromatic reactions upon living flesh. A fibre optical illusion. Captured in the moment, she herself is unable to transcend anything much. But boy can she catalyse things for others. Not that I am concerned a wink, as to a thumbnail sketch that she has a drug habit. Or a bastard child to support, or whether she is perpetrating the abuse she suffered as a child, or how she might bear the mark of witnessing her parent’s primal scene. (How pleasingly male of me). She may even be dead for all I know, but then I have preserved her posterity to speak for that of my own. I have merely summoned her to a version of the life, in which she had already offered up a malleable template of herself. Threaded an additional G-string to her pelvic bow. For unlike the arch flatfoots, I know precisely where she hails from. Thumbnailing a lift in my direction, I scooped her up off a private dirt track upon the information superhighway and set her down in the flourescent strip glare of the cosmopolis. Entirely to do my bidding. Thus had I entered Damon’s realm, back to his very own gateway to the medulla of adult being. Weakness.
I, who can barely conceive what it is I am supposed to be feeling while fucking a full-bodied human, now had to dive headlong into the relationship with an unleavened form. If I am going to make this stratagem work, I had to think and feel like a male. A world of smoke and mirrors in this most restricted of gentleman’s clubs. We were all of us, convened here in this set-up voluntarily or otherwise, having to determine our own distinct points of view. Take the sex actress for example, she whom I wrung out from an extensive combing of cyberspace. Mark the counterfeit deceit in her eyes, masking the blankness beyond. That for all her purported terror, her consent has in every likelihood been purchased. (The click thumbnail they never offer you, the real ‘money shot’, that of the actress opening out her palm to receive the three hundred nicker or whatever fee has been agreed). Her feigned fear is to be projected at the lens and through that to the beholder without. Rather than for the immediate pleasure of any of the convocation on location at the shoot. How do I know her fear isn’t genuine ? Because I scrolled through her portfolio. The rest of the picture narrative centring round her plight. In later stills, her gaze is directed for the onlooker to whom she pitches her attention rather than the photographer. And least of all for the man with his cock inside her. She is remotely fucking the subscriber, even as the blow-up male doll lubricates and works her beneath the lens’ unblinking reptilian eye. It’s taken as a high value in our society to put yourself in the position of somebody else. To see through their eyes and conceptualise accordingly. But I don’t think this is quite what the ethical philosphers had in mind.
And hovering over all the players in this disconnectivity play, Damon nods approvingly. Everybody’s eyes are aligned elsewhere, not in the moment at all. Projecting ahead. Trying to see into muddied pools which admit no light. Hoping, yearning for an outcome. No one in this covin actually feels anyone else’s flesh. None is able to discern a sense of themselves through another. Still, the stud doesn’t care that no one will be gawping at his image. He’s still getting paid beer money and he gets to have sex with a hot babe to boot. That’s one moiety of what was necessary to project myself into. That which represents the four dicks responding in shrunken miniature to her portrayal in a London CID room.
But one loftier, (let’s call him Will shall we ?) among them perceives divergently. He has not assailed his intactness with the mundane digital objects to hand in the office. Assuming Will is not gay, (how opaquely he would have had to have veiled it within those prying surroundings for so long), his lack of immediate impulse conspicuously accords him fuller consideration of the image afore him. He can read how she feels. The terror manifest in her eyes. This situation is unequivocal. He wants to protect her. To save her. To untie her shackles and have her flop free into his outstretched arms. More fool him and his vainglory. Not a jot of tension ripples through the fabric of his hard wearing, wool blend suit, purchased at M&S. The pelt of the suburban zealot. For Will loves his job, worships minutiae, dotes on technology, cherishes his spouse, is a cater pillar of his local community, and clearly oblivious to the protracted, seeping soul death all this portends. The type of man who’d turn up at the metroland wife-swap party, having locked his keys in the car. The type of man who has an innings rather than a life and is terminally run out, trying to sneak a single, one short of his sclerotic fifty. Let’s help Will fulfil his destiny shall we ?
He barely conceals his crusading passion, behind the sober presentation of risk assessment, time management and resource projections. The imprisoned maiden’s imploring eyes catch his, every time he looks down at the desk to catch his breath. So he eschews caesura, thus quickening the delivery of his presentation. A verbal strangury which betrays gouts of Will’s ardour after all. His male peers view him as an intractable prick anyway and are careless as to whether he should be availed the opportunity of hanging himself. But he has managed to impel the female DC’s, to pipe up with their cut and blow-dried opinions.
This will prove sufficient to carry the discussion with the Senior Peeler, who has tired of the whole business by now anyway and just wants to withdraw for a coffee and statistics morning. He assigns Sir Will the two female DC’s, to assist him on his chivalrous way. Yet two female squires attending upon an older man ? No wonder they say that the Age of Chivalry has prolapsed. As will my mark hellbent on this chimerical chase. This Will O’ the Wisp. Will, bearing the twisted straw wisp of a flambeau. Burning a torch for my figment, looking to shine it in all the unlit places thrown up by my nightmarish mind. Incapable of distingushing between glad eye and bad eye (and eye for an eye). So denatured as to conflate lasciviousness with terror. But then, which of us can effortlessly delineate between the two ? So addled are our sensibilities. The phosphorescence that the yokels of yore mistook for the wisp, was in fact the action of combusting marsh gas, itself the product of decaying organic matter. What better metaphor for all of us in this putrefying world ? A guiding principle, both elusive and delusional at the same time. And here I am setting it in motion. Putting the meat on the bones if you will. Wasting police time ? Let’s hope for that and more, after all they heaped upon me. Let’s hope this apparently noble paladin is driven to the point of breakdown, as I was back home. Let’s hope he is indeed married and his unending and unrealizable quest for this fata morgana, leads to dereliction and virtual infidelity.
Time to let you into the secrets of my pixelated pixie sorcery. First the nuts and bolts of the image. It had to be untraceable, which suggested something reaped from an abundant stockpile. Something say, snaffled from the fecundity of the worldwide web. She must emerge from such a seine perfect in every detail. I could not afford to photoshop her and telltale her imposture. Next, I was forensically savvy enough to know that the candidate I cast my lot for, must bear no giveaways in the margins. No webmaster addresses, manufacturer’s names or serial numbers on the film or print stock. I needed an image that had been properly cropped. Ha ha ha.
Which ingredients were appropriate for my arresting siren ? What characteristics did I need to conscript in order to fabulate a believable, thumbnail biting drama ? I have her bound and trussed in seeming pain, in order to suckle me breath. For that seems the way of the world. As adumbrated by Damon and his kindred. As writ large on a whiteboard for me, by my blackheaded instructors out here. Andromeda was being held hostage, obviously, so some indication of involuntary binding seemed consonant. Thus I skeleton keyed ‘Restraint’ into Google. Pretty hastily I introjected the word ‘Mild’ as a modifier of the instrumental torture I was served up with. Metal was replaced by nap, but some of it was far too fluffy and frilly to be germane. Also, clearly she ought to be clothed and not in Anne Summers’ garb either, or that too would have just given the game away from the outset. That one sine qua non helped me eliminate the bulk of what I found on even the most genteel of bondage sites. I was getting nowhere, slowly. This flesh was all too blatant. I needed something with more tease. That entailed tramlined, stereotypical thinking. Time to draw deep, in a superficial sort of way. Thinking out of the box in order for Will to step into it.
I'm after a small-sided spectacle. And there it lay staring at me all the time. At my elbow, in a muted form, as a pencil lead is to a diamond. Yes, my multi, non-dimensional, fetter-folded centre of attention, ought to wear totemic glasses. To conduct me back into the spirit I’m after. And my nearsighted sap into hell. For is there not something terribly mousy and staid about specs ? A concomitant bashfulness emanating from being framed and magnified. A frosted repression and semipellucid reserve. A secret life vitreously suggested and occluded. Any natural vitality emptied and delustred. Hence the unswerving obeisance of our sex before contact lenses. Yet between you and me, any fantasy element would be to imagine what it would like to make love with a reduced focal plane. Maybe I’d have to trust to my fingers for tracing the indistinct features of my lover. Like a blind woman making love (as against the blind paramours who make love to me, both those swains that keep their eyes steadfastly shut during the bout and those gallants just too witless to be deemed anything other than sightless). But this isn’t about my fantasy. It’s about Will’s.
Glasses reside there, along with flowing hair being confined in a bun, or stapled down by a stringent regime of grips, barrettes and (anti-) slides. But in the hands of men, both are wreathed into images of laying bare. A striptease. The unleashing of the hair and a smooth, unveiling of an uninterrupted plane of facial flesh. An unclogging of the carnal dam. Believe me I know, for vaulted by my spectacular insight, I’ve sifted through hundreds of websites of sexualised ‘secretaries’, such as “Who’s The Boss? dot com”. So many for so long in fact, that I may well require opthalmic prescription myself. My pretty little vision shall indeed sport goggles. After all, boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses. Unless they are bound, helplessly tethered. Nighttime Kavos' duck shoot stands copious testament to that.
With this conceptual breakthrough, appending another modulator into my revving search engine, the proxy fetch plopped into my lap far more rapidly. So all that finally remained was the name. That rock upon which I first found myself Dashed. The cockspur on which my own quiddity was snagged and unravelled. For per the bare bones, as laid out of my initial drafted communication, the sole thing my benighted one will be in possession of, other than her shackles, is a name. Her knight errant will therefore proceed to assemble lists. To track them down and then with a tight, apologetic shake of the head, strike them out. I am obliged to make it a name within probability. One which will have some, but not manifold bearers. And then I hit on the fiendish maggot of giving her a soubriquet, a mutation of her christened name. The rozzers would be armed with official records, but would be stymied by a lack of formal correspondence. Actually, this is all cock and bull. I had the name all along and only well after I sent the e-ransom did I cotton on to this soubriquet element. I dubbed her Billie (nee Billy/ Hilary/Wilemina?) Rubin. In honour of bilirubin, a particular bile pigment which when broken down in the intestine, helps lend shit its colour. Uroborus and urobilinogen. What goes around comes around. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In sickness and in health. If I have choreographed this veiled dance accurately, take it as a renewal of my marriage vows. Damon I pledge you my troth, with the head of thine enemy on a salver.
Billie Rubin was a name I’d come across in a medical book. Or rather I should say a book Theo came across. A closed book actually since one particularly quiet day in the library, I had undertaken a prolonged fingertip search in his arse. He was only letting me panhandle in the vain hope of negotiating reciprocal mining rights at my open seam, but he was shit out of luck as the Yanks are fond of saying. Some minor panning of my love handles was all I would endorse. Anyway, I was quizzically struck while prospecting the mineral source of his cloaca, and challenged him as to assuage my curiosity. He dug out the relevant volume and I leafed through it, remembering not to moisten my fingers, treating the enchiridon with more respect than I did Theo, as I demanded he lick his fingers and moisten me elsewhere. I merely relate all this as context to how I christened my bastard offspring Billie Rubin and ordained her unwittingly into the High Church of Revenge.
Thus was Billie, stinking and ichorous, forcibly delivered into this world kicking and screaming soundlessly in two-dimensions. Clamped at the end of a pair of forceps (forensic tweezers ?). With a peg over my own nose at this mephitic output of my mind. Then I mused further on it. Had I indeed gone too far ? Who could be unfortunate enough to bear this appellation in real life? Excepting sniggeringly proctologist parents, who are aberrant by definition of their calling, no one would know what kind of unwholesome auspiciousness they were conferring upon their offspring. Or what if they had formally pronounced her Hilary or Wilemina ? That indeed she had proceeded to reconfigure herself as Billie, in full, delicious ignorance. Aw to hell with it, the name stays ! I stabbed send and delivered my radioactive payload from afar.
I have been deleted from not history, not herstory, but my story. Bowdlerised according to the regnant morality. Is that why no one has raised a hue and cry ? There one day, I was no longer padding about Dun Roman, yet no one bats an eyebrow ? What about when the Fuzz next stomp up to the front door, did they not notice that Damon’s right-hand harridan was not next to him screeching blue murder through the letter box at their navels ? Or did they just put it down to staff turnover ? I didn’t expect any of the gung holsters to dare query Damon’s altered domestic arrangements, but what of their consorts back home on the pillow when I failed to show for a show, or host a celebratory party ? What about the few friends I had from BD, before the Damon era ? I thought they cared about me. Well, I suppose they did in reality. Cared enough to advise me not to comport with the devil. Grim faced when I ignored their counsel, but they maintained their position. Only broken-hearted when I left them far behind in my new social whirl of vetted friends. Do they really credit that I have since ceased to exist ? They knew my soul was in hell a long time ago. I have just tumbled to that fact. So that’s another thing we have in common Billie my dear. Our present Tartarean dispositions. To go with our state of bondage, within chiffon chains of our own election. But unlike me, you will be paid off and released, at my spectral hand. I have engendered a police search to come looking for you.
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