Excerpts from the thought diary of Lena Smith, 2004 It was a dream come true for me.
To be a concert pianist, and play at Carnegie Hall.
When the day arrived, I couldn’t believe it was really happening. Or that I deserved such an amazing honour. And admittedly, I did have to pay for the hall myself. But it was by no means a vanity concert. I was a brilliant pianist by this point, and I’d earned the right to be there, for my first major public recital.
I didn’t sleep at all the night before. I woke early, hungry but unable to eat. I slept in the afternoon, showered, changed, arrived two hours early at the Hall. It was a Friday. I wore black. No, blue. A figure-hugging outfit. Arms bare. No jewellery. My hair was – up? Down? Must have been up. It was hot. I sweated under my armpits, I had to rinse myself with cotton pads in the loo. And I – no, no, that wasn’t then. That was another time. No matter. It was a cold night, in fact. I wore a dress with sleeves. But it was blue. Definitely. Blue.
The press clamoured to interview me beforehand, but I refused all offers. I stayed in my dressing room and focused my chi. I watched an episode of an American comedy on my PDV. Then when I felt ready, I began the long walk from dressing room to stage. Then across the stage to the grand piano. To the piano stool. Then I sat. Then a casual glance at the audience – which almost unnerved me. But I kept my composure. The crowd was hushed. The lights burned my skin. I looked at the keys. Blanked my mind. A cough shattered the calm. I ignored it. Composed myself. Then I began to play…
And in the millimillimillisecond between my hands getting the signal from my brain and the first note of music, I thought to myself: Not bad, Lena. Not at all bad. For someone who had always been tone-deaf, and hopeless at music.
It used to piss me off, to be honest,. At school, I could get As in all my subjects, my creative writing was fine, I was shit at gym but that didn’t matter. But I always loved the idea of being a great musician, and yet it never happened for me. I failed Grade 1 clarinet, and then failed Grade 1 flute, and finally failed Grade 1 cello, having failed to master how to pick up a bow. I was clumsy, that was the problem, and uncoordinated, and I couldn’t remember melodies, and I had difficulty telling one note from another. At a school concert I was in the chorus of our production of Les Miserables, and was told to mime because my singing was sapping the resolve and eroding the pitch of the angry mob.
But years later, after the success of my second book, I was looking for new challenges. So I decided that for my third book, The Many Talents of You, God, I would explore the whole area of teaching and instinct. And so as my research project I applied myself to the mastery of a whole series of athletic activities like tennis, tae kwon do, and sharp-shooting. And, for good measure, I decided to be a concert pianist too.
The research period took far longer than I expected – nearly four decades in fact – but I was rich by then and I was mainly doing this for my own satisfaction. And, through the application of science, and a steadily growing insight into the power of relaxation techniques, I managed to train my body to be “instinctive’. I learned how to move without thinking about it; learned to step outside of my body and let the body itself control me. And, because my fitness level never declined, I was able to make slow, steady progress towards excellence in all those related spheres. By the time I was sixty, I was a black belt fourth dan in tae kwon do and judo. By the time I was seventy, I was as good a tennis player as a gifted individual would be at the age of fifteen. Almost, but not quite, good enough to play at Wimbledon.
In music, too, I trained myself to achieve that instinctive, visceral grasp of musicality which is possessed by ten-year-old musical prodigies. And what I proved through all this hard work is that what the naturally gifted have as their birthright, the rest of us can learn. It just takes time, and practice, and a body that doesn’t decay with age but instead grows sharper, and stronger, and fitter.
I played six hours a day some days. I sang along with my own music, badly at first, then rather well. I learned to count with my pulse. I learned to immerse myself, surrender myself. And, though my focus was on the classic repertoire, I practised jazz and blues and boogie-woogie and rock. I learned to be funky, I learned how to swing. And my musical memory became phenomenal; I knew literally thousands of pieces by heart.
And all the while, for the best part of forty years, I applied myself religiously to the task of general self-improvement. I embarked on a year-long Grand Tour of the entire world. I spent two years in Florence, a year in South America. I studied art and architecture, local customs, I made friends, I took lovers. I became fluent in seven languages.
During these years, I often spent two hours a day in the gym, but religiously observed a schedule of rest days to prevent overtraining. I had my knees replaced. I had my hip replaced. I had a hysterectomy to remove a fast-growing cancer, and had my womb replaced with a bioplastic alternative. I pioneered skin-replacement implants, and shed my entire skin like a snake and lived for three months in intensive care looking like a cadaver. But the skin grew back, as youthful as a twenty-year-old’s.
I had the most joyful time imaginable. And yet, for all this, despite experiencing statistically more moments of pleasure than any other person so far in the history of humanity, there were times when I became bored. And, indeed, on the brink of clinical depression.
Why? Because I was lonely, I suppose. And envious. Every time I met a young man or young woman I yearned to have what they took for granted; sheer, naive ignorance of the nasty, spiteful awfulness of life. I yearned to be natural, unselfconscious, at peace with the world and myself. And I was convinced, too, that other people found me boring. Even though I was, by now, beautiful and gifted, I still looked at myself in the mirror and saw that strange shadowy creature: “It’s Only Me”.
It’s Only
Me.
How could this be! Why wasn’t I happy?
I was haunted by a fear of death and, absurdly, its aftermath. My fear was: when I do, eventually, die, how will I be remembered? And how soon would I be forgotten? I hugged to myself the idea that those closest to me would never get over my death, and would live barren empty lives from that point on. But I knew, in reality, that my passing would be greeted with a wave of relief, even from those who loved me. Thank heavens she’s dead, my friends would all think, and I’m still alive.
So I resolved not to die. Just to spite those fuckers. I continued to keep fit, and I continued my rejuvenation treatments. I wasn’t, of course, the only person to be embarking on a systematic course of anti-ageing therapy. All over the world, people were getting older, and looking younger. The film star Sheryl Martinez was, at seventy-four, relaunching her career as a singer. Over several decades, her reedy voice had, with the help of surgery, evolved into a sexy husky growl, which she had modified with extensive training into one of the all-time-great soul voices. And she was hot, the poster girl for the over-seventies rejuves.
And…
I play the first chord. The music ripples through the hall. Joy suffuses my being as the piano reveals its soul and I play, and I play, and I play, and…
And then there was the Billionaires’ Club – a group of 490 men and women who had devoted themselves to anti-ageing with all the resources at their disposal. These middle-aged obsessives had become playboys and playgirls, with perfect physiques, whose sex lives were the subject of relentless tabloid gossip, and…
All too soon, the first piece, a playful scherzo, comes to an end. The hall explodes with applause. I bask in it for a moment. Then my hands hover over the keys again, and…
And there was Andrei Makov.
Andrei was a triple Gold Medal winner at the 2032 Olympics in Seoul. He was nineteen years old, and he broke the world record in three separate events – the 400 metres, the 800 metres and the triathlon. Andrei’s achievement was formidable, the result of ten years of intensive training. With his tall, gangly frame and his intense Russian stare, he became an international teen idol, as well as going down in sporting history as one of the all-time greats.
Andrei’s most remarkable achievement was to challenge the African domination of running events, which over the years had seen the African runners seize medal after medal after medal. These athletes, mainly from Kenya, were gifted with bodies that defied all previous standards of human performance.
Then along came Andrei… who left the poor Kenyan runners literally gasping in his wake. Andrei’s approach was inner-focused, based on an explicitly Zen training method that liberated chi while also scientifically analysing and improving length of stride, oxygen intake, and all the other controllable aspects of the human performance.
And when he ran, he seemed more than human.
In 2044, Makov won five more Olympic gold medals – for the 400 metres, the triathlon, the pentathlon, freestyle swimming, and weightlifting. Never before has a single athlete dominated such a vast range of events. Makov was bulkier now, but still had that lean and dangerous look. His physical strength came not from a ripped physique, but from relaxed muscle fibres of vast tensile strength. Makov had studied pilates, he was a black belt seventh dan in goju ryu karate, and he was also a keen undersea diver. His versatility was matched only by his sang froid. Everything he did, he did effortlessly. At the age of thirty-five he took up tennis for the first time. At the age of thirty-six, he won the tennis Grand Slam, defeating the number 1, 2 and 3 seeds in humiliating straight sets. At the age of thirty-nine, he won the Tour de France and, at his own insistence, was drug-tested before and after and shown to be totally clean.
But at the age of forty, Andrei developed a brain tumour. Over the space of three excruciating years, he dipped in and out of madness, as he intensively studied the nature of his disease and the possible remedies. Andrei refused to take chemotherapy and radiotherapy, because he felt they interfered with his perception of his own chi. Instead he used complementary medicine to control the growth of the tumour. And Andrei then volunteered himself as a guinea pig for a radical new therapy which used a viral agent to mutate the tumour. The tumour would not be excised from his brain; it would be transformed, it would become part of his brain.
The technique was successful; the tumour went into recession, and became a benign “spare brain” which, as an unexpected side-effect, activated the rejuvenation mechanisms in Andrei’s body. And so, without any radiation treatment or injections or gene therapy, Andrei’s body began its journey to eternal youth. The viral agent had the further effect of clarifying and cleaning the neural pathways, almost like a defragmenting and disk-cleaning program. After the treatment, Andrei’s memory was crystal-sharp, and his ability to manipulate numbers mentally was astounding.
His judgement, however, was all too fallible. Andrei retired from athletics and went into business. He lost millions in the course of fifteen years, after being cheated by a series of sophisticated advisers, all of them advocating arcane mathematical approaches to investing. He fell in love with a glamorous actress, who cuckolded him and then did a kiss and tell. He fell in love with an attractive nuclear scientist, who drove him to the brink of violence with her paranoid jealousies. And he fell in love with two sisters, who wrote a book about him mocking his every word and deed. And, finally, a tabloid spy succeeded in filming him having sex with two hookers in St Petersburg, one of whom was only fifteen; and the resulting scandal shattered his reputation in his home country.
Andrei became addicted to alcohol, heroin, cocaine and chocolate. His body weight ballooned. He became a parody figure.
But at the age of fifty, Andrei went into training again, determined to halt the decline. He attempted to win a place at the forthcoming Olympics, but failed to make the grade in any of the qualifying events. Andrei was still a strong, fit man. But he was no longer the fastest sprinter in the world, or the best swimmer, or the strongest weightlifter. He was, of course, over the hill. His friends advised him to try the marathon, traditionally the event in which older athletes can still credibly compete.
And so Andrei spent five years training for the marathon; and then he ran five marathons in five days, following in the footsteps of the ageing heart-diseased Ranulph Fiennes, who achieved a similar feat in the late twentieth century. The difference is that Fiennes’s triumph was to actually complete all his events, at painstakingly slow speed. But Andrei ran and won all five marathons, at a terrifying pace. And, after breaking the world marathon records five times in a row, he finished each race with a sprint of legendary and astonishing swiftness.
On the basis of this triumph, though now in his mid-fifties, Andrei won a chance to compete in the Olympics again, despite attempts to have him banned on the grounds that his spontaneous rejuvenation contravened the rules about drug-taking for athletes. At the 2064 Olympics he set a new world record for the 400 metre sprint. He outclassed runners who were decades younger than him.
And in so doing, he challenged once and for all the dominant Western myth: the myth of decline. In Eastern culture, the prevailing myth was the opposite; it was of the aged sensei who was faster, stronger and more skilful than his younger acolytes. But we in the West have always swallowed the dream of gilded youth; and consequently, we made a world fit for the young to squander.
Andrei’s triumph broke all those rules, and shattered for ever the old paradigms. Suddenly, age became a state to which people should aspire, rather than a fate to be dreaded. Andrei was a hero who changed the world.
And then one night he went to see a pianist play at Carnegie Hall…
… and here I am again, on stage, playing the piano in front of my adoring public.
My next piece was a zest-filled Brahms waltz, which went well. Then I segued into a delightful jazz improvisation based on a Dizzy Gillespie riff. My heart sang with joy; I felt superhuman.
But slowly, my ease and fluency deserted me. I froze with fear at the beginning of the first movement of the Beethoven Piano Concerto. At one point, I stopped entirely. The audience was hushed. Sweat beaded my brow and a tiny drop fell and splashed a piano key.
Then I continued, and the audience sighed, and were with me. If I’d planned it, I couldn’t have managed more adroitly. I’d won their hearts! I’d played the underdog card!
But my exultation slowly faded. As the evening continued, I felt the shuffle of feet, the exaggerated coughs, as sympathy ebbed away at the sheer… awful… fucking… mediocrity of my piano playing. I’d got away with so much with my flashy, entertaining introductory pieces. But now that I was playing the Beethoven, it became evident that my legato was stiff, my articulation uneven, and my crescendi and diminuendi too consciously “worked at”. I had flash, and flair, but I was slowly and cruelly revealed as a pub pianist with aspirations.
Naturally, after the event, I blamed the orchestra. The piano. My nerves. But in my heart of hearts, I knew that for all my ability and mastered technique, I didn’t care enough – about the music, about the audience, about what my fingers were doing. So there is, after all, a mystery X element – commitment, soul, passion – call it what you will. After decades of practice, I could play the piano; the piano would never play me.
But enough self-laceration. The point is: it doesn’t matter that I gave a mediocre piano recital at the Carnegie Hall. It matters that I did it at all. I had mocked the capricious God who endows some with great talents for music or sport, and endows others like me with fuck-all. So I laughed off the bad reviews, the book sales went through the roof, and I was the success of the season.
And so after the first flush of embarrassment, I felt triumphant, and vindicated.
And of course, I also that night met Andrei, who I had idolised from afar for many years. There was nearly a ten-year age gap between us – I was eighty-one, he was seventy-three. But he looked, frankly, older than me. He had a blaze of silver hair which he proudly refused to darken. There were deep laughter lines around his eyes, and his skin was thick and weathered. But these outward signs of ageing merely enhanced his extraordinary air of energy and fitness. He walked like proud air, his movements were effortless. And he saw everything. Without visibly flicking his eyes, he could see every person in a crowded room and remember their appearance and the colours they were wearing and have some notion of what relationship there was between people standing near each other – friend, lover, relative, business acquaintance, whatever it might be.
I, by contrast, was still pretty clumsy. I used to break things a lot. And I was amazingly unobservant. I could be standing next to someone at a party for ten minutes or more and not be aware they were there.
And even now, though my memory for detail is astonishingly acute, I am still capable of forgetting fundamental facts. For instance, I had a sister who died in her mid-forties. Recently I found a photograph of her and couldn’t remember who it was. (Luckily, I’d written her name and family relationship on the back.) It’s not bad memory per se; it’s just, well, to be honest, I never really liked her much. And I rarely noticed what she was doing, or saying. So my memory bank deprioritised her into oblivion.
But I do vividly remember that first time I met Andrei. I staggered off the stage, went to my dressing room. Sank three glasses of vintage champagne, surrounded by my team, fighting off nausea at the memory of my many mistakes of mood and tone. Then my assistant told me there was a man waiting to see me – and it was Andrei Makov. My heart took a little leap. I agreed to see him. A few minutes there was a tap on the door and he entered.
And I remember that when Andrei entered, everyone else seemed to be slouching or deformed. He wore a black dress suit. And I wore blue. Definitely. Blue. And he walked his way slowly towards me, shaking hands with my friends, my business manager, my musical assistant. It was like a sea parting, as this charismatic presence moved closer and closer. Then he took me by the hand, kissed it, and murmured, “So what else can you do?”
At that moment, my purpose, my reason for living, sprang back into vivid relief. I smiled, like a tiger awoken by the rustle of a deer grazing.
“We shall see,” I told him. Then he walked around until he was standing behind me, wrapped his arms under my breasts and lifted me in the air.
I flopped. I let my body weight ebb away into his arms. My legs dangled, my head was loose. All the tension oozed out of me. Then he put me back on my feet. I felt ten times better.
“That was good.”
“I’m sorry… that was, impertinent. You looked tense.”
“I was tense.”
“I have no manners. When I met the Pope, I told him he had bad posture.”
“He has severe arthritis, in fact.”
“So I was later told. Imagine my chagrin.”
“I’m imagining.”
“Forgive me, good to meet you all.”
With a sense of shock, I realised he was addressing his comment at everyone else in the room. This was his graceful apology for hogging me. But in truth, I had “lost” everyone else present. For about three or four seconds, Andrei was the only person there for me.
“We were planning to go for a meal…” I said tentatively.
“Ah.” He looked slightly shy.
“You could join us?”
“I’d like that. Where are you going?”
“Where are we going?” I addressed my question to Philip, my business manager.
“We’ve booked a table at Smollensky’s.”
“Somewhere that’s not Smollensky’s, then,” I said to Andrei. He got it, though not everyone else did. He smiled.
“The Caterpillar Club,” he said to me, very quietly. And left.
Yeah, but what time? And do I change? I was wearing my best piano concert gown. But was that de trop for an “in” place like the Caterpillar Club? Or was it just trop enough?
I left the dress on. I was there at 9 o’clock, at the Caterpillar Club. It was crowded, noisy, everyone was so young. They were all annoying me. Andrei was waiting. He had ordered champagne.
“ Salut,”
“ Salut.”
We drank.
“I read your book,” he told me. But I was very distracted. I could feel my heart beating. This ought to have been an erotic thing, but instead it was annoying. I heard… boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom. It meant I couldn’t hear him, and I couldn’t take in a word he was saying.
Then my enhanced peripheral hearing kicked in. I could hear a couple at the back of the restaurant:
“It’s good to talk about these things.”
“It’s stifling. I feel stifled.”
“You need to know what makes me happy!”
“I know too much about what makes you happy. I need to be, you know, spontaneous.”
“It’s not like I’m giving you a schedule. There’s space for you to be spontaneous.”
“How spontaneous? Five minutes of…”
I finally managed to tune it out. Andrei was talking to me. I sifted through my short-term memory banks and picked out a few phrases: “… feel completely ignorant. I didn’t listen to any classical music until I was in my sixties. Does that make me a philistine?”
“No that doesn’t make you a philistine,” I said and he nodded, reassured. And I felt a surge of pleasure; I guessed right about what he’d been saying.
Then I got bolder. “Shall we order?” I said.
“We already have,” he told me. There was a wary tone in his voice.
“Yeah, yeah, of course.” I smiled crazily, sifted my memory banks. I remembered a blonde girl, with a sulky face, I was asking her for lamb cutlets. Was that here, or somewhere else? I glanced around, saw a blonde waitress, sulky face. I felt triumphant. I was on top of this. (This kind of muddlement happens a lot to me. Is it some weird mental glitch? Or am I just too good for this world?)
“I’m a bit tense,” I told him. “Tension does things to me. It makes me tune out.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Forget it.”
I looked at him. There was such a patient air to him. He seemed to really want to hear what I had to say.
“Do you want to know what was the worst thing I ever did?” I asked him.
“Go ahead, tell me.” And so I told him the story of the gang boss and how we “virtually” raped his daughter.
I explained: “The Georgian mob finally killed Valentin in a restaurant in St Petersburg. They pumped a hundred explosive air pellets into his body and walked away. He was still alive. He thought he’d miraculously survived, he picked himself up and walked out. Witnesses say he actually thought he was Rasputin reincarnated. Then he got in his car and the bullets all exploded. All over the upholstery. Like a whale swallowing a depth charge, then burping. No one else was hurt, but there was body fat and hair and blood sprayed everywhere. Fat schmuck. But after what he did to his daughter, it was just deserts. We never proved it, but we think he used to sodomise her with a fire iron. You know, one of those things you used to prod coals on a coal fire? Not a hot one, nothing as truly vicious as that. It was just something that he had to hand, maybe a family heirloom. But we found traces of Victorian cast metal in her anus when we did our medical. That was the clue. Boy, that was a motivator! So anyway, that was how we killed Fat Grigori. Am I talking too much?”
Belatedly, it dawned on me that Andrei was staring at me like a goldfish whose fishtank has just vanished. I mentally rehearsed everything I had just said, and wondered if it showed me in a bad light.
“You, um. Aarrgh,” he said.
“I’ve just appalled you, haven’t I? You are literally, physically disgusted at me.” A familiar sense of defeat washed over me; nice one, Lena.
“No, no, no, not at all. I’m just… taken aback. I’m trying to recall similar anecdotes I can tell you. Like the time in Rome, when I broke my training schedule, snuck out of the hotel in the middle of the night, and ate a burger. A McDonald’s burger no less!”
He’s being self-deprecating, I realised. A good response would be a gentle, but approving laugh. I laughed, gently and approvingly.
“I’m such a nobody,” Andrei told me now. “I’ve done nothing.”
“You’ve done great things!” I protested. “You’ve won medals, broken records, founded schools, worked for charity. You’re an icon.”
“Yeah but I’ve never, you know. Bust balls. Or killed people.”
“I’ve never killed anyone,” I laughed at him.
“Yes, but you’ve manipulated circumstances so that they were killed.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve done that. Like the Turkish drug dealer who we poisoned with impotence-inducing drugs. He blew his brains out in his garage. That was a particularly effective gambit.”
“You are so fucking…” He searched for the world.
“Evil?”
“Steeped in life. Dangerous.” His eyes twinkled. “Sexy.”
It’s a fantasy moment. Because for me, none of these things are true. In my heart of hearts, I am still a mousy academic who becomes paralysed with shyness at parties and is terrified that life is passing her by. But, objectively speaking, I can see he has a point. I have, in my time, kicked some serious ass.
“Let’s eat.” The meal had arrived. Damn, it wasn’t lamb, I’d ordered fish. But I’d been looking forward to lamb for the last twenty minutes.
Andrei’s meal arrived. It was lamb.
“I don’t want fish any more, I want your lamb,” I told him, with unpardonable rudeness. But he swapped plates without a second thought, as if we were long-established lovers. A few seconds later, I asked, “How’s the fish?”
“Dry. Musty. Inedible,” he told me. “How’s the lamb?”
“It’s, ah. Sublime.”
I grinned sheepishly, feeling myself go red and hot with embarrassment. But he found it funny. Then he laughed, and admitted, “Actually the fish is very nice.”
“Let’s order some more wine,” I said.
“I get hangovers.”
“Take these.” I gave him some pills. I swallowed one myself. “It’s okay, they’re enhancing catalytic compounds, they’re not drugs. Your body will eat its own hangover.”
Andrei clicked a finger. The waiter turned and looked. Andrei pointed at the bottle. The waiter hurried off. Andrei took a sip of wine.
“I shouldn’t drink too much though.”
“Why not?”
“Well.” And now he’s blushing.
“Ah. You’re counting your chickens aren’t you?”
“Chickens?” His English idiom didn’t stretch to this one. I tried it in Russian: Are you hoping to fuck me?
Of course.
Good. Don’t worry, I have ways of dealing with flaccidity.
“Your Russian is very good,” he told me, approvingly.
“I’m told it’s a little archaic. Too much Dostoevsky.”
“He’s a writer, isn’t he?”
“I can see there’s a lot I have to teach you.”
That night we made love for the first time.
In fact he had drunk rather too much, so it was a slow start. And there were problems later on too. But that made it more fun for me.
His body was like granite, I savoured every muscle, the tautness, the power. I knew that his hands were impossibly strong. And, eventually, he rose to the occasion. I achieved six orgasms before he lost his focus and went limp again.
And I couldn’t believe my luck. I was dating the sexiest boy in the class.
But what could he possibly see in me?
I called it Sex and Death.
I learned the technique from a karate sensei in Camberwell, London. In his legendary dojo in a former marble factory off the Walworth Road, Sensei Eddy taught generations of South London kids his own brand of Eastern mysticism blended with East End savvy. Sensei Eddy came from a family of notorious armed robbers and spent five years in prison for a botched blagging that he committed as a very young man. But since going straight, Eddy had become a committed karateka, a vegetarian, an ascetic, and one of the greatest students in the West of mind/body control.
I’ve seen Eddy break a breezeblock with his head. I’ve seen him pluck a fly out of the air and release it from his other hand. He was nearly sixty when he became my karate master, and even without the benefit of age therapy he had the physique of a twenty-year-old. He was fast, he was strong, he was totally focused.
And he taught me the way to stop a man’s heart. It’s done with a single palm strike to the sternum, delivered with speed and lightness. It’s not intended as a killing technique, it’s an aid to meditation. Eddy did it to me – he struck me in my chest, my heart stopped and for ten exquisitely long seconds I felt myself die. My inner self seemed to be floating outside my fleshly body. The blood in my head roared like a waterfall. Then Eddy struck me again, and the heart restarted.
It’s a dangerous stunt to try on a woman with a history of heart attacks. But Eddy had a touching faith in his own powers, and in my natural resilience. And in the course of our training sessions he had encountered in me a strange stubbornness, a resistance to the idea of liberating my chi and entering a meditative state. So Eddy used this way to teach me the true transient nature of existence.
The second time I had sex with Andrei, despite my very best efforts, he proved to be totally impotent. I was astonished, and amused. But then I was horrified, as I saw a look of dismay and self-hate spread across his face. I realised then – this was a common occurrence for him.
I said the usual things about it not mattering, though my loins were burning with desire. He pleasured me in other ways, sipping and sucking as though I were a precious brandy, then fingertipping me to orgasm. But after it was over I felt his body and soul slump beside me.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I said to him.
“Yeah, that’ll really help.”
“So, um. This isn’t the first time, is it?”
“It’s a recurring issue.”
“Let’s try again.”
“I’m content. Honestly. I don’t need it.”
“Of course not.”
“Women don’t need to come every time. Why should men?”
“Exactly my thought.”
“It’s nice, just lying here.”
I bit his nipple then I scratched his chest. A trail of blood lay pooled on his hairy skin.
“That got your attention.”
Andrei sat up, scowling. At heart he was an old-fashioned man. I saw a trace of almost-rage in his eyes, his shoulders stiffened, a gulf started to open up between us. I could tell he was preparing to storm off.
So I stood up and posed naked for him.
He grinned. I clowned about, sashaying around, swinging my hips. I put the hotel TV on, and a wall filled with images of scantily clad singers dancing to an R amp; B rhythm. I danced to it too, exaggerating, messing about. He was erect now. I beckoned and he stood up.
“Dance for me,” I said, and he liked that idea and he laughed. He danced, awkwardly, without much sense of rhythm, with his cock swinging like an elephant’s trunk. I became more provocative in my dance. I started touching myself. He liked that too.
“Put it in your mouth,” he said eagerly, and that made me angry. This was my party, my game. And I could smell the fear on him. He was afraid of failing again, so he wanted to wank in my mouth while he was still in with a chance.
So I used Sensei Eddy’s palm strike. I hit Andrei on his naked chest with astonishing power and speed. At first, he barely realised what I had done. But then a look of pale horror came into his face as it dawned on him something was terribly wrong. His heart had stopped, he was dying.
I struck him again, the heart restarted, and then I clambered aboard his penis and we fucked. We continued to fuck, standing upright, for almost forty-five minutes. Andrei’s powerful legs kept me propped upright, I felt as if I was in clouds floating high in the air as he fucked me. The escalating orgasms began to blur into each other.
“Wow,” he said, some time later.
The next day, we flew to New York and went to galleries and Broadway and ate bagels named after famous Jewish comedians. We walked through Time Square, we flew in a ’copter around the Statue of Liberty, and we yawned our way through a musical version of the Bush Presidencies. Then we went back to our hotel and I took my clothes off and danced naked and touched myself and licked and sucked my fingers and when none of that worked I hit him in the chest until he died then I hit him again and we made mad passionate love until the morning.
The next day, same story. We bathed together in our de luxe hotel suite, we turned the whirlpool bath on, we splashed and made a mess. Then we ran into the bedroom and I killed him and brought him back to life and we had sex.
And I realised, with a profound dismay, that our sex would always be this way. Andrei suffered from a severe form of impotence, entirely psychological, but impervious to therapy. The first time he must have been using barrowloads of stimulants, Viagra probably. And even then, it was touch and go. The second time was Andrei unassisted, and it just didn’t work.
But now Andrei had finally found a way of achieving erection without taking drugs. And there was no going back.
This appalled me. Rough sex is one thing. But this was like a nightmare version of a sex life. What if I actually did kill him? What if I weakened his heart and he suffered a massive cardiac arrest, because of my elaborate foreplay?
This wasn’t what I signed up for. Love, yes, romance, yes, sex, yes. Daily acts of murder? No. A thousand times no.
And yet I was devoted to Andrei. He had a presence that eclipsed all others. When we were together, clothed, he was my god. So I made no complaint. And thus I embraced a life that involved frequent, frantic, amazing, exhilarating, incredibly dangerous sex.
Before long, Sex and Death defined our relationship; it made me the master, the bringer of death, the restorer of life. And it made Andrei obsessed and besotted with me; he virtually worshipped me.
We bought a house in London. I learned to garden. I decorated with my usual style and panache. And we built a gym, where Andrei could work out. We had dinner parties, and we invited artists and politicians and athletes to talk and mingle and we created a wonderful charmed world. I loved it all. And I loved the person that I was then. I was warm, witty, inspired, intensely civilised. I was never shy at parties. I was adorable, a pleasure to be with.
But to please Andrei sexually, I had to become a different self. He didn’t want nice, he wanted snarling. He started asking me to dress up, in the most cliched ways imaginable. I wore leather basques and high heels in private, crotchless panties in public. I had my clit pierced. I became his murderous bitch from Hell and he loved me for it. That was the trade, the deal, and I did the deal and never let him down.
But it’s not what I wanted. I wanted warm, safe, comfy. I had to settle for… dangerous.
We travelled the world. We made love in Venice, in Paris, we fucked outdoors, we booked expensive hotel rooms and spent days at a time enjoying ourselves in dank and endless sensuality.
And I felt, with a certainty that was like shackles around my heart, that I was always going to be obliged to play a role for Andrei. I couldn’t just be. I couldn’t ever slob around in jeans or a tracksuit. Or be cranky, or irrational, or annoying. Or in any way betray that air of “mystery” he found so beguiling. I always had to project a certain image – exotic, exciting, seductive. A whore in the bedroom; a femme fatale in the kitchen.
And so, even when we had lunch in the local cafe, I wore my boldest, most beautiful dresses. If we went to dinner parties, I placed expensive diamonds around my neck, and then I flirted with his friends and talked dirty to them in front of him. To keep my body worthy of his awe, I worked out in the gym until the sweat poured from my face and torso. To prove my commitment and fearlessness, I trained with him in his karate dojo, and I punched the makiwari until my knuckles were like white coins. I sucked his soft cock every morning, and three times a week we did our Sex and Death game then afterwards drank champagne until we vomited.
In pursuit of his pleasure, I drove myself mercilessly, I permitted myself barely any relaxation. I never read books, my musical tastes narrowed, I lost touch with all my own friends. I mixed, instead, in Andrei’s world. I was his concubine, his sex slave, his ever-seductive shadow self. But I was never just, as I yearned to be, his pal.
In some ways, I can see now, all this role playing gave me power over Andrei. He was besotted with me, he would happily have killed for me. But instead of manipulating him, and stealing his money, and breaking his heart, as any sensible woman would have done, I was obsessed with being everything for him.
So, bit by bit, I moulded myself to make him happy. I studied my own character flaws and eradicated them. I became attuned to his every mood. For an amazing run of several years, I never ever got on my man’s nerves.
I stopped laughing that silly laugh that I knew he found irritating.
I ate croissants for breakfast because he did, though I preferred toast.
I let him watch me piss and shit on the toilet.
I mocked him when he was being pompous, because he saw himself as the kind of man who didn’t mind being teased. But I never corrected him when he made arrogant and half-baked statements about politics or science.
If it was late at night, or we were lost somewhere, I pretended to be tired and frightened and vulnerable, so that he could be the calm and comforting one.
I never expressed my opinions when he liked a film and I didn’t. I just smiled, and let him explain to me why it was so marvellous. Since he was a connoisseur of Far Eastern martial arts films and car-chase movies, this took considerable self-control on my part.
I never challenged his judgements about other people, which were often shallow and naive.
I let him beat me at Scrabble, though his vocabulary was pitifully small.
I encouraged him to admire other women and openly swapped notes with him about other women’s breasts or tums or legs. I offered to have lesbian sex in front of him, though I never did. And I pretended to fly into terrible rages whenever I thought he was becoming overly fond of another attractive woman. That really turned him on.
Andrei was a great man in many ways, and he used his fame and wealth in the service of the greater good of mankind. He was a pioneer of educational reform, he raised money for charity, and he was a personal mentor to thousands of disadvantaged children. Most people considered him to be a marvellous, mysterious individual. For me, though, he was an open book, a puppet dancing on my strings. I knew his every weakness and desire, and I pandered to him totally.
Looking back, I am ashamed of myself.
Then I became pregnant. It was a shock. But I said nothing to him. I just nursed my embryo, and dreamed of baby milk and poo and squawling baby nights and all the terror and the joy and pain and perfection of it. And the more I thought about it all, the more my dreams crumbled.
For I knew Andrei wouldn’t want the baby. That wasn’t part of the package. He wanted a lover who would worship and exalt him; not a mother, a fat-bellied weeping woman obsessed with cots and baby books.
But how could I really know that? Without asking Andrei? Without giving him a chance to make his own mind up? That’s the question I feel you asking. So yes, maybe I misjudged Andrei, maybe I took too much on myself. Maybe I denied him the one thing in the world he would have treasured most.
But no. I’m sure of it. I knew my Andrei. He would not want a child. So I had my embryo removed and placed in an artificial womb at eight weeks. The womb was then frozen and placed in store.
One hundred years later, I unfroze the embryo, and Peter was born.
Andrei never saw his child.
He died long before Peter was born.
I went to visit Andrei in hospital just once. He had succumbed to a particularly virulent strain of cancer that ate up his organs and his nervous system and turned him into a gnawed skeleton while he was still alive.
We had been separated for nearly thirty years by this point, we were just distant acquaintances. And when we were together, he had come to bitterly resent my success as a public speaker and celebrity. He was jealous of my books, and he resented the fact that I had written about his own achievements as conscience of the world. He felt, I supposed, that I was stealing his soul.
He was a sour, begrudging man, and our breakup had been an ugly and painful affair. Twice Andrei had tried to sue me for a share of my earnings as a writer and academic. He told friends that I had undermined him and belittled him. He spread the rumour that I was a poisonous Machiavellian sociopath, and a promiscuous sex addict with a drug problem.
This is the kind of thing you can expect, when you choose to stop flattering a man.
But why did I stop flattering him? When did it all go wrong for us? Perhaps it was just a gradual thing, a drip at a time eroding the cliff until one day the whole cliff falls down.
Or perhaps…
Yes. That may be it.
I do recall one particular occasion. It’s coming back now.
Ah, yes…
It was the day when Andrei won the Nobel Peace Prize, for his work with the poor and dispossessed. He seemed taller that day, his face was flushed, he had the air of a god who had just received his invitation to Olympus. And I kissed him and congratulated him, and felt a pang of jealousy, and he felt that pang and interpreted it as pettiness.
“Of course I’m glad for you. I’m very glad,” I told him, soothingly.
He glared and glowered at me. What I said wasn’t enough. My words lacked awe. My play-acting was off.
That night we had sex without the Death, and Andrei was impotent for the first time in ten years. I was gentle with him and played with him in my mouth but nothing happened. I laughed and said it didn’t matter, but it did.
So he went to the toilet and he had a loud piss. Then he came back in, cock still damp, and asked me to carry on. But I got offended. I refused to use my mouth again, until he cleaned his cock properly. So he went back and cleaned it properly, but when he returned to the bedroom I was pretending to be asleep. I could hear him, standing there, breathing heavily, watching me pretend to be asleep, wondering if he should pretend to believe that I wasn’t pretending. I wondered if he was touching himself. I felt a shudder of contempt for him. What kind of man was he, if he couldn’t sustain his desire in the presence of a woman as attractive as me?
In the morning, Andrei was all smiles. He made me pancakes. I gave him oral sex at the breakfast table, still with the taste of lemon juice in my mouth. But suddenly, I felt a wave of nausea, and I spat his juices on to the kitchen floor.
And he slapped me.
I should have shouted. I should have reproached him. I should, and possibly could, have beaten the living fucking daylights out of him. But instead, I accepted the slap without a murmur. I think I even smiled. And Andrei visibly relaxed. A glow came upon him. He was himself again.
And that’s how it began, and how it continued. From that moment on, our love was doomed. Because every day, he slapped me. Just once, never more. But it always happened, and I always accepted it without complaint. He never beat me, or seriously hurt me. The slaps were nothing compared with the genuine pain I experienced at sparring sessions in the dojo. But they served a function. They reminded Andrei of the source of his manliness – his power over Woman, his contempt for Woman.
We sold our house. We moved to a villa on Lake Como. We were both fluent in Italian. We started to dabble in Italian politics. Andrei decided to become a sculptor, and bought a ton of marble from Carrera, which he hacked and hacked away at until it was a mass of boulders stained red with the blood of his finger nicks. So he sold the marble, and bought a power boat. I loved to swim in the lake, as he roared the boat around me in large circles, smashing my body with the waves.
In the evenings we’d sit on the terrace. He’d nuzzle me, caress my breasts, rub my hand against his soft cock. We often made love on that terrace, basking in the smell of olives and the taste of red wine. I would turn and face him, my head tilted back, the infinite stars above me. And I would stand there, wait for him, letting his ardour grow as his eyes drank in my body. It always took a while, like a tank filling up. But eventually Andrei would become erect beneath his trousers.
And then he would slap me. Not straight away. He often made me wait, five minutes or more. The shock of it was like plunging into an ice-cold lake after a sauna. It was a blow that jolted every atom of my being – yet it caused no lasting hurt. No bruises or marks.
But for all that, it was a slap. Not a caress. Not a kiss. A physical blow.
And after the slap, we would both take our clothes off and make love on the wooden table. Our cries cut the night. The locals would smile and laugh when they saw us, they knew us as the couple who fucked all night. We inspired, I like to think, a number of marriages.
And we were content, for a while. We no longer played the Sex and Death game. And as long as Andrei had slapped me at some point in the day, he was fine. His impotence didn’t return. And he was good-humoured too, always laughing and joking. He was genuinely, engagingly, adorable.
I dreamed that one day he would slap me and I would gouge out his eye and eat it.
But that never happened. And I never even, to be truthful, asked him to stop.
And after a while, I realised that he was slapping me because he thought that I wanted it.
And after a longer while, I realised that I did want it. I was locked in some crazy masochistic cycle. The slapping was Andrei’s sin, it was an unforgivable and callous act of brutality and bullying. But the slapping was my sin too. I wanted to be disciplined, to be tamed, because in my heart I saw myself as a beast.
For I am a beast. A whore, a nothing, a worthless piece of… I deserve everything I get! I am a… a…
What am I? What really am I?
I find this hard to write about, to think about, to talk about. It’s so not me. Not everything I stand for. Everything I am. It’s a jarring anomaly in my character arc. Me? Battered? A victim? Please!
But the slapping, I must tell the truth here, continued for several years. Morning, slap, noon, slap, night, slap. I never called the police, I never told my friends. I didn’t, to be honest, regard it as strange. It just felt like another kind of normal. Was he hurting me? No. Was I afraid? No? Did I consent?
Did I consent?
Yes, of course I did. Yes. So I can’t blame him. I blame myself.
Yet you see, though I may have said a few moments ago that this was the thing that doomed our love – yet perhaps I’m wrong. For in many ways, this whole period was the best of our relationship. We were the perfect couple. I was happy. Relaxed. Fulfilled. We were funny, witty, we had great times, we talked about life and literature and politics, or at least he did, and I listened. And I couldn’t have been more happy – except for the fact that, once a day,
Slap.
So what’s so wrong with that? What No. Stop. It was wrong. Do you think I’m a moral imbecile? I know it was wrong. And eventually, I stood up to him, and I told him, I told him No, that never happened. I’d like to think that one day I woke up and realised that I was acting like a fool, that I did not deserve this treatment.
But it didn’t happen that way. No moral stand. No defiance. Instead, gradually, love corroded. How? Why? Why then, not earlier? I simply do not know.
All I know is that the time came when I found myself waking up each day with a taste like ash in my mouth. Everything was right; then nothing was right. I was happy; then I was not.
On the lake one day, while swimming, I was engulfed in a storm. Lightning ripped the sky and water poured down on me as I swam. Then a rainbow sprang through the air and spanned the gap between the mountains.
It was the most extraordinary moment of natural beauty I had ever experienced. I was cocooned in water, my face crushed by pouring rain, as the heavens themselves erupted in colour. It should have been the purest epiphany.
And yet I felt nothing. Just ash. And drabness.
Day followed day. Night followed night. My body trudged through it all. I had lost my ability to feel emotion. I concealed this skilfully, but Andrei could tell something was wrong. I stopped flattering him around about then I suppose. Or was it sooner? I have no record of it in my RAMs, which I appear to have a wiped, in a fit of dark depression. And I cannot, I literally cannot remember when the death-of-love took place. Or how many months went by with me inhabiting this grey non-life.
Then one day I found myself in London, in Brown’s Hotel. I have no recollection of how I got there. But I stayed. I threw away my mobile phone because it had Andrei’s number in it. I rented a flat for myself. I made no attempt to tell him where I was. Four weeks later he tracked me down, and asked me, pleadingly, if I was having an affair. I mocked him, taunted him. He stormed off, ranting, and I crowed at my triumph.
Then… I do not know. The missing months of my life. All RAM erased, no memories left.
Then my memories begin again, a few months later. I was living in a flat in Peckham. I was overweight, my hair had gone totally grey. The flat was bleak and the wallpaper was peeling. Maggots crawled in the sink, among the remains of an abandoned apple. And I realised I was missing Andrei badly. I ached for him with such intensity, it felt like I would die.
So I went back to him in the villa on Lake Como, apologetically, desperately, tail between my legs. But by then he’d changed the locks. He’d burned all my clothes on a bonfire. And he already had a new girlfriend, who was wearing my jewellery. And I was consumed with jealousy so strong it made my jaw ache.
I tried to hit him in fact, but he was too fast, too strong. Damn him. I left, weeping. The girlfriend looked scared.
Now, when I look back, I realise I was right to leave him. It was the beginning of my beginning. At the time, though, I cursed myself and hated myself. How could I have given up the love of my life? What kind of woman was I?
And I decided, in my blackest moment, I would never forgive myself. I flew to Australia. I became an actress, and failed in that career. I drank, I took drugs, I crashed two cars, I had a nervous breakdown. I wasted many many years. And I didn’t see Andrei again until he was almost a skeleton.
But I dreamed of him constantly. And I missed the slaps. I found myself yearning for them. I sometimes stared at myself in the mirror, stroking my cheek, imagining the slap. I went to the karate dojo and sparred and deliberately dropped my guard so that I would be punched or kicked in the face. Just to feel that joyous shock once again!
With time, the slap-yearning faded. I internalised my insanity. But it’s still there. I don’t need a therapist to tell me that my desire for Sex and Death and my longing for a strong man to strike me are signs of an dangerously unstable psychology. I know I am, deep down, all wrong. I just hide the signs.
I’m.
All.
Wrong.
Life begins at a hundred and forty…
… that’s what I always say.
After I broke up with Andrei, and after the drink and drugs years, I decided it was time to settle down, behave more sensibly. So I sobered up, detoxed, and forgave myself. I bought a whole new wardrobe, having decided to dress older. And I dyed my hair an attractive grey.
Then I went to university and did a BA in Maths, followed by a BA in History. I started a PhD in Marine Biology but abandoned it. Then I travelled a bit more. Then I became a schoolteacher for two decades, at a series of independent secondary schools in the UK. I taught history, and politics, and organised all the school trips. It was, in its own way, exhilarating and challenging. Then it got boring, the staffroom in-fighting started to piss me off, so I quit.
And I was old now, very old indeed. One hundred and forty-three years old. But though I now favoured a slightly mature-woman look, my joints were as supple as ever. I could run a mile in four and a half minutes. I could bench-press those two big weights, whatever they are, the biggest ones. I could swim for an hour. I could sleep with two different men on the same night, and satisfy both. Though that happened quite rarely and gave me little pleasure. I could read very small print without reading glasses. And I had surgically implanted memory chips to help me keep track of all my experiences.
I was no longer unique, or even unusual, however. This was a boom period in physical and mental rejuvenation. The cost was falling year by year; even middle-class people could now aspire to live for ever. Admittedly, I was among the oldest of the rejuves, but who’s counting?
But we rejuves were a revelation even to ourselves. We would snowboard, break limbs, and have them healed within months. We were optimistic, cheerful, and always willing to believe the best of others. We went for walks at night; we chatted to rebellious teens; we believed profoundly in giving criminals a second chance. The young were a bitter, listless generation, unable to outdo their elders in the most basic things. The old had no cellulite, no wrinkles, no saggy boobs, no creaky joints. The old were the new young; the young were simply callow.
Which serves those cocky bastards right…
After I gave up teaching, I spent about twenty years enjoying myself, in moderation. Then my conscience kicked in and I got a job working for Save the Children, for about nine years. Then I applied for a job as chief executive of a new charity called African Aid, and I got it. And after a few years of that, I got broody and I went to the baby bank and asked for my baby back. Peter was unfrozen and then born. I became a mother.
So there I was – with a baby, and a job, and a conscience, all at the same time. I was a devoted mum; and I was also Chief Executive of a major charity. Humanitarian. Liberal. Idealist. Workaholic-with-child.
My home was in Johannesburg. But I had offices around the world, so I had two live-in nannies to help me look after Peter. I breast-fed for a while, but got tired of leaking milk in meetings. So I paid the nannies to take lactating tablets and provide a regular supply of breast milk. I hated the idea of giving my baby formula milk, I always felt the natural way was so much better. I took great joy in passing Peter from one nanny to another, and I loved the smell and the look of these women’s ripe breasts as they suckled my child.
I was fascinated at all that screaming business. One minute, my Peter was a little bundle of joy, so cute you wanted to lick him all over. Then something would be wrong, he’d be hungry or cold or hot or consumed with angst or whatever it is that troubles babies so, and he’d swell and turn red and bawl and bawl. A breast was usually the solution. But sometimes the crying continued and continued, and I marvelled that a single small human being could contain so much unfocused rage.
I think having a baby was a humbling experience for me. It made me a much richer, more grounded person. I would recommend it to anyone. Even if it’s only for a couple of years, it’ll really change your life. Trust me.
But I regret, really, the fact that I was working for African Aid at the time I had Peter. It was bad planning really. There have been so many periods in my life when I had time on my hands, and I would amble through the day, taking breakfast at noon and watching daytime TV until it was time for the first drink of the day. If I’d had my baby during one of those periods, we could have had so much fun with each other. We could have gone to the park, rolled on the floor together, played with choo-choo trains, maybe even gone to mother-and-baby movie shows. All those sharing moments. How I wish I’d had them.
But in this period, I was a driven woman. I felt a genuine idealistic passion for my work, and I was convinced that I was going to make the world a better place. And my love for Peter turned in on itself and transformed into an unshakeable desire to make the world fit for a new generation. I wanted to end poverty and infant mortality and corruption. I wanted to redeem Africa. I was, I’m not afraid to say it, an idealist. But because of my ideals, my hours with Peter were sadly truncated.
I travelled a lot, across Africa, to America, and over Europe. So weeks would go by without me seeing my child. And I worked long hours at the office, and slept no more than three or four hours a night. But when I was most ready to play – usually at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. – Peter would all too often be fast asleep. And I would have to gently shake him awake, so I could cradle him, and place his toys in front of him.
I was taking nildormer tables of course to help me reduce my sleeping hours. The pills had the effect of keeping me on a constant adrenalin high. I had big plans, and broad objectives. I had the ability to keep dates and priorities in my head, and unripple complex strategies as if I was opening a spreadsheet. My attention to detail was legendary.
And I built a team of acolytes who were devoted to my passions, and subordinated their entire lives to my dreams. Amy, John, Michael and Hui, these were my core team members. Amy was from Dorking, with raven-black hair, and a nose that could easily, in my view, have been corrected with cosmetic surgery though she seemed to like it the way it was. When I first got the job, she was a visibly bored and underfulfilled secretary. But I promoted her to be my assistant and she blossomed, and became my brilliant right-hand woman.
John was black, South African born, a lawyer by training, and spoke in a babble of energy that made him hard to understand. But he was always worth listening to, and had a wonderful sense of humour and always laughed at my jokes. John was an orphan, both his parents murdered in a Nairobi carjacking, and he had a sad soul.
Michael (London born, black) and Hui (New York Chinese) were the fact-finders. Fast talking, fast thinking, astonishingly astute. He was broad-shouldered and intense, she was funny and witty and had heartbreaker eyes. Michael and Hui were very tactile, very horny, very much in love. Then Hui spoiled it by having an affair with a journalist on the local paper, which she then told Michael about, in graphic detail. I don’t know why the hell she did that – was she afraid of being happy? Would it really have been so hard to keep her affair a secret? But anyway, they broke up, bitterly – but carried on working together.
What a team they were.
And I took pride in how well I led them. I was authoritative, inspired, never at a loss, fearsome and demanding, but secretly full of love for “my” people. They were my everything, really – I was all work and no play. A total workaholic, with sensible shoes and a “don’t flirt with me” attitude. Sometimes my staff liked to speculate about what kind of sex life I might have had as a young woman; not much was the consensus. I would cheerfully eavesdrop all this with my enhanced hearing, and smile to myself. If only they knew…
Our job was to coordinate the global initiative to redress decades of political and economic chaos in Africa. We ran research projects, we funded irrigation schemes, we turned deserts into farms, and turned badly run farms into finely honed money-making machines. It was the most important job in the world; we were saving an entire continent.
And it was, and is, the greatest of all Earth’s continents. For me, Africa is Eden. It is pure wilderness; its animals and its indigenous people seem to me to evoke the beginning of time. My heart was captured by the place, and all it symbolised.
I remember the first time I went on safari, when I was in my late nineties. We drove out into the savannah, the sun beat down on us, and my skin prickled with excitement. I was with a party of Americans, our guide was a white Kenyan who was tall, square-jawed, and came from military stock. And the aim of the safari was to “shoot” – i.e. take digital photographs of – as many lions and leopards and cheetahs as we could find. This was a cut-price Big Game Camera Safari, and my fellow holidaymakers were a nightmare. They whinged, they whined, they believed in a vengeful God with a soft spot for Midwesterners, and they had canteens full of Coca-Cola instead of water. And eventually, I lost patience with them all, and wandered off by myself. I found a waterhole where an impala was drinking its fill. I walked up close, then closer still. For some reason the animal wasn’t in any way afraid of me. I was close enough to see the veins in its eyes, and smell its fur. So I hunkered down beside it and drank from the same watering hole, cupping the water in my hands and slurping it.
“Fucking idiot!” screamed my guide from behind me, and the impala ran off. I got up slowly, carefully, as the guide berated me with language that would make a docker blush for having gone off unaccompanied. I said nothing, I just walked back with him to the jeep. He continued to berate me during the whole journey home. Some of his comments were fair, but some were cruel, and undeserved, and patronising, and sexist, and just plain rude. I was tempted to karate-strike the bastard, but I refrained. And to be honest, I wasn’t much bothered by what he said. I was lost in that moment – me, hunkered down, drinking next to the impala, at one with the animal kingdom.
Then I flew home and sued the travel company for sexual harassment, winning back the entire cost of my trip. I had, of course, taken a tape recording of the abuse meted out to me, which made for entertaining listening. But though I took my revenge, I took little pleasure in it. I preferred to think back and savour the memory; a moment of total peace. Drinking at the watering hole.
And so, many years later, I still felt Africa was in my blood. It was my adoptive country. And besides, I needed a cause, a mission. Palestine was at peace now. Iraq was a capitalist beacon state. Northern Ireland had a stunningly popular government ruled by a coalition of Catholics, Protestants and Muslims. Africa was the last of the great causes.
And I was the last of the great idealists. Or so I felt. And in pursuit of my dream to save a continent, I was ruthless, determined and guileful. I blackmailed, bribed, told lies, and shamed people into helping me. I was by now a great amateur psychologist, and knew a million devious ways to make my requests and needs the first priority in the hearts and minds of those in power. And for many years, I was convinced I was doing something marvellous. I honestly thought that we were really making a difference.
But slowly, the truth dawned: the work we did was largely futile. Our “new communities” were glorified refugee camps, and had the pernicious side effect of making native Africans dependent on Western i.e. white largesse. Our grand economic schemes kept foundering because of the appalling corruption of everyone, high and low, important and inconsequential. And appalling illnesses continued to sweep away entire generations – as HIV/AIDS was cured, it was replaced with contagious osteoporosis, and that in turn was replaced by the deadliest disease of all, the Immuno-Suppressant Plague that killed literally tens upon tens of millions of Africans in the most appalling manner possible.
And so for a while, I became bitter and frustrated. I surrendered to the belief that the entire continent was doomed, cursed by God.
But then I thought a little harder. I began to ask myself some fundamental questions. Such as, why are things so very bad here? And how come everyone is corrupt? And why the hell, in an era where the majority of people are much healthier than ever before, is this one continent literally plagued? Because, bizarrely, the Immuno-Suppressant Plague killed only black Africans living in Africa below the age of eighteen. How weird was that?
So I researched more widely. I read novels and newspapers. I listened to pop records. I quizzed my staff when they were off duty, and drunk. I began going into bars, picking up men, flirting with them, and then asking them about politics. I got groped, a lot, and several times got myself in very delicate and dangerous situations. And I started to get a whiff of something very, very bad indeed.
I started going to the hospitals, talking to the Plague victims. One time I spent a week with a fourteen-year-old girl called Annie who had the Plague. I watched as she literally lost all her skin. It fell off her in thick sheets. This was the way the disease worked – it made the body’s skin allergic to the body’s flesh. Then later I sang her lullabies, and told her stories in her native dialect. I drifted off to sleep for a while, and when I woke, I stared with horror. A fly was crawling over her skinless face, its tiny wretched feet touching her exposed blood vessels and ligaments. I was too frightened to swat it, in case I hurt the child; so I had to watch until it crawled, finally, on to the pillow. Then I crushed it in my hand.
For twelve long hours I watched her die, and blessed her soul as it parted from her body. And I thought; this cannot be natural.
So I analysed her blood works, carefully read the toxicology reports, and surfed websites on my laptop. And after months of intensive private research, I was sure of my ground. Finally, I knew the truth.
The IS Plague was not in fact a natural mutation, it was lab-generated. Furthermore, it was patented. I hacked into an entire directory in the US Patents website where under the innocuous title New Millennial Infective Agents I found patents for genetic creations which included the Plague and a wide variety of biological weapons sufficient to end all life on Earth.
The patents were made out to a wide variety of companies – RGM, Intolam, Ryacino, Cortexo – but further web investigation revealed that all these companies were satellite companies of one big US biochemical company, Future Dreams.
And this uber-company turned out to be the sole manufacturer and copyright owner of the drugs which were halting the spread of the IS Plague. The girl lying on the bed, groaning and wailing in despair, was hooked up to a drip feeding her morphine and immuno-boosters made and sold by Future Dreams. Her antibody-stimulating medication was a product of Future Dreams ingenuity. My charity was spending massively in attempts to alleviate the plague – in Europe alone, we raised €9 billion to “save Africa from this deadly scourge”. This money didn’t go to Africans to spend or eat, it wasn’t used to buy land or equipment, it was spent on expensive medication to save African children from a disease bioengineered and patented by the same company that made the medicines we bought at such vast expense.
Was this, I wondered, some strange mischance? A weird coincidence?
Or was it entirely deliberate? Would an American corporation blight and poison an entire continent in order to boost profits by then selling palliatives and antidotes? Poison the patient, then charge the patient for the taxi which takes them to hospital…
I went to a bar to let these findings seep in. I spent several hours talking to a barfly, and a female barkeep. And finally, feeling drunk and sorry for myself, I floated my paranoid theory about the American drugs companies – that they had deliberately infected Africa with the Plague. The barkeep, Emilia, laughed. The barfly, Prakash, looked sad. Both agreed it was possible. Maybe, just possible.
We had another drink.
And another drink.
And after a while, and after a lot of digressive rambling anecdotes, they admitted that what I had said was true. And everyone knew that it was true… The poisoned knew they were being poisoned. But they understood also that if they complained, no one would listen.
Africa was dying. A hundred thousand children a week were shedding their skins. Ninety per cent died; the rest were hospitalised for life. The antidotes and vaccines were now being distributed, at vast expense; but the wastage of life was appalling. Soon, Africa would have lost a large part of a whole generation of children. It was becoming a continent of ageing men and women who worked three or four or five jobs a week to buy the drugs to lessen the pain of their dying infants and teenagers. The rumours about what was happening were widespread, though entirely underground. And as a result, cynicism was universal. Despair, alcoholism and drug abuse were the national status quo.
But no one hated the American companies. No one tried to stop what was happening. An entire continent cheerfully accepted its doom. Life was regarded as a sick punishment dreamed up by a hate-filled God.
My African girl died in the hospital in blinding agony, and was never ever granted an insight into what life could really be like. She missed fun, life, love, babies, everything.
I got angry. I went home and raged to Peter’s nannies. And I drifted off to sleep with Peter cradled next to me, lulled by the sound of the nanny sleeping in the neighbouring bed (conveniently placed for her nightly feeds.) And as I tried to sleep, I wept, and my tears woke my baby. And he cried. And I suckled him with my dry breasts, first one, then the other, neither yielding milk, until his crying became too intense, and the nanny gently prised him off me.
Then the next morning, as I was brushing my hair, I felt a hot flush on my cheek. A handful of hair came away in my hands. My cheeks were burning now, and so I looked at myself in the mirror. I was clinically livid, a red swelling balloon. As I watched, my forehead rippled, I was seized by a terrible terrible itch. When I gently touched my face with the tip of my finger, the entire top layer of face skin peeled away in a single piece. I could see my veins now, my skinless face was a red raw horror, my eyeballs throbbed huge.
I managed to call the hospital before the flesh peeled off my fingers too. An ambulance arrived, two hours later, and I was helped stumbling into the back. The skin of my fingertips was left behind on the door of the ambulance. A tube was inserted in my throat, and for a moment I felt my tongue was going to fall off.
The ride was bumpy, and terrifying. I was choking, forced to breathe through a tube. I was convinced I was dying. I couldn’t believe my bad luck. After cheating death once, I had run out of credit and I was going to die in appalling agony.
At the hospital, I was put in a sealed oxygen tent, to keep out contamination from the outside world. The rest of my skin peeled off me in thick sheets, apart from a few patches on my back and the inside of my arms. Doctors came by, stared in at me in horror, then left muttering. I was alone with my thoughts. And I realised what was happening.
They had got to me. They must have been alerted to my investigation, probably through a routine check of web users, and my name must have been flagged as a threat to their security. The journey from regarding me as a potential distant threat to deciding to eliminate me with biotoxins was staggeringly brief.
And now I was dying of the dreaded Immuno-Suppressant Plague. It went against the epidemiology of the disease, which was normally both race- and age-specific, usually targeting black children between eight and sixteen. But this mutant version of the plague was now going to kill me, soon, and horribly.
How did they poison me? A dart fired into my flesh as I walked down the street? A contaminant placed in my air conditioning? I worried away at this as the doctors went to work. They expected me to suffer massive and irretrievable heart failure, because of the enormous extra pressure being put on my system by the trauma of auto-flaying. That was the commonest cause of death in such cases.
But my new heart was sound as a bell. I lived through the night, though no one thought I would. Then the doctors were convinced I would die of infections, because of my non-existent immunity – the major effect of this Syndrome. And in fact I contracted eleven different infections; seven of them were hospital superbugs which were passed on by a sloppy nurse who handled the oxygen tent on the inside before assembling it. Any one of these infections could have been fatal. I survived them all.
By this time every last piece of my skin had gone. I felt raw and boiled and the movement of air on my skin was like sandpaper. But I dug deep into my reserves of rage and determination. After a week I had survived pneumonia and TB. My liver failed but I made them transplant a new one. No one expected me to live through the operation but I did. I was clinically dead for about a minute at one point, but my heart pounded back to life of its own accord. Slowly, against all the odds, I pulled through.
After a few weeks’ recuperation, with no further side effects, the doctors began to accept that a miracle had taken place.
Then, at my insistence, an experimental polythene spray-on seal was used to coat my entire skinless body, to isolate my flesh from outside contaminants – a thin and invisible plastic coating over my ligaments and nerves.
With this in place, I started to exercise, to prevent my joints seizing up and becoming paralysed. I used a slow t’ai chi workout to keep my body limber. It was, I know, a frightening sight, this slow-moving Zen-imbued flayed corpse doing her daily kata. But I kept to my routine religiously.
My team came to see me, and recoiled, but I beckoned them back and made them listen to my rasping demands.
A few days after that, I was able to use a voice-activated computer to send my emails. My paperwork was projected on a screen. I started working again, running African Aid, while also researching my enemies on Google. And I began plotting my revenge.
After two weeks I discharged myself and went back to the office. I was able to wear a coverall over my polythene-sealed body. I wore a brightly coloured Venetian carnival mask to hide the horror that was my face. My team were stunned, and unable to speak when I arrived. So I threw them a bag of doughnuts and bitched about how many episodes I’d watched of a dumb sitcom called It’s a Dog’s life on Mars, about a robot dog travelling through ancient Martian civilisations.
Then I started to make my plan come to life. I had written twenty pages of detailed notes and flowcharts to map out my strategy. It required precision, and sublime boldness.
In the dead of night, nourished by pizza and french fries and Coke from a vending machine next to my desk, with only a computer and a fiendishly cunning brain as my weapons, I declared war on the entire military-pharmaceutical complex of the USA.
First, I accessed the President of the United States’ private and personal email account. And I sent an email to him explaining in lucid, persuasive terms that I had invented a virus which would make people 5 per cent less intelligent. I threatened to unleash the virus on American soil unless I received a billion dollars in cash. I sent him comprehensive research findings to prove I could do what I said. And I offered him a sample of the virus as evidence.
The email wasn’t signed by me of course, nor could it be traced to any computer I had ever owned or operated. Instead, the email was directly trackable back to the university of Michigan, and was signed by the Nobel Prize-winning academic John A. Foley.
The FBI of course checked it out and quickly discovered that the email was a hoax. Foley was exonerated of any responsibility for these threatening and inane ravings, which were based of course on totally spurious science. Apologies were made. And the identity of the mystery emailer went down in the FBI files as an unsolved mystery.
But the FBI’s security check was thorough and comprehensive, and it meant that Foley was now on their database, and was hence routinely subjected to security and psychological profiling.
I then made use of a state-of-the-art firewall cracking “n” hacking software system created by one of our Jo’Burg startup computer companies. With the aid of this powerful tool, I was able to hack into the FBI case files, and access their most heavily classified files. And as a result, I was able to read the newly compiled FBI dossier on Foley – which revealed that he had close associations with a group of businessmen and businesswomen called the Ludds, who specialised in low-tech investment portfolios and had a history of bank frauds. Foley had been receiving six-figure payments from the Ludds for many years. His academic objectivity was totally compromised; he had sold his soul many years before to Big Business.
Foley was also chief scientific adviser and boffin to Future Dreams, the manufacturers of the Plague. (This I already knew of course – it was the reason I had targeted him.) Foley’s reputation as a scientist and idealist was a sham; he was in this for the money.
Armed with the information from my FBI database computer hacking, I compiled a list of every board member of Future Dreams and the Ludds. And I emailed every one of them to say that they had been infected by a fast-developing cancer which would sap their personality in slow stages. The first symptom would be depression, sleepless nights, and an unbearable itching sensation.
Then I cashed in some major endowments and hired an international hitman to murder John A. Foley and make it look like suicide.
Okay, okay, let’s pause a moment! I know that last bit looks bad. Extremely bad, really – almost enough to turn me from hero to villain in your eyes. And, I must concede, it’s an approach that did give me a few qualms. But I reassured myself with the thought that I was engaged in an all-out war with a ruthless opponent. Millions had died in Africa because of this lab-created Plague; I considered that what these bastards had done was an act of genocide. So I would argue that in such a case, murder doesn’t constitute a crime – it’s merely the appropriate tool for the job.
You see? Are you persuaded? Hero not villain! Trust me on this.
The process of hiring a “hitman” was surprisingly easy. I didn’t use any of the gangsters who were so easy to find in the bars near my office. I needed a premier service, which I got by Googling a series of nested encrypted sites. This took me to some truly evil cyberplaces: sites for paedophiles, bestiality chat lines, S amp; M photo galleries. I discovered that if I paid enough money, I could hire someone to be eaten by me. Or, if I preferred, to eat me. Neither option appealed…
Instead, I opted for what I hoped was a simple murder-for-cash transaction. I met a man in a bar who took money from me and vanished, and I waited a week. Then the same man came back to get the details of the job. I provided dossiers and key information.
Then I sat back and waited. Eventually, I got a video bulletin on my phone from my news service saying that Foley had been shot to death by a burglar, together with his wife and two children. The burglar had escaped, and there were no clues about his or her identity. It was a flawless “hit”.
I had killed a man.
It felt good.
I had also been responsible for the death of his innocent wife and children. This, after a moment’s reflection, left me feeling stunned, and appalled. What had I become? Was I a monster? A psychopath? Or was I no worse than a politician, who declares a war then has to live with the collateral damage?
The sleepless nights continued. But the guilt refused to curdle and eat me up; I decided I could live with it. Sometimes, you have to do wrong, in order to do right.
But then one evening, as I sat in my office, my phone beeped, and I picked up a text asking me to meet a man in a bar. A code word was used; and I realised that this was the assassination service. Money was mentioned… a million dollars, twice as much as the original fee.
I was terrified now. This was clearly blackmail. It was obvious I was in out of my depth. But I had no one to turn to, no one who could help me. So I dressed myself in an all-over body-armour suit – thin enough that it didn’t show any bulges when I wore my suit over it. I took a knife and a gun, sprayed myself with perfume to hide the “I’m about to shit myself” smell of fear that clung in my nostrils, then I went to see my hitman-turned-extortionist.
We met in the Shona Bar. He drank orange juice. He kept the glass far from me, so I couldn’t poison it. It was a public place, so I couldn’t threaten him with the gun. And I guessed, from his stance and aura of “don’t fuck with me-ness”, that in any hand-to-hand combat situation, I would die instantly.
The hitman’s name was George. He apologised for pestering me. He apologised also for the deaths of the wife and kids. They weren’t meant to be there; it was “just one of those things”. And George then explained that the extra money was a one-off payment to cover unexpected expenses. It wasn’t in fact, as I might have thought, blackmail, it wasn’t a try-on. After today I would never see him again.
It fucking well was blackmail of course, but there was nothing I could do about it. So I gave him the money and never saw him again.
However, the money was a stash left over from my crime-fighting days. Provided George touched it within twenty-four hours of our meeting, it would release a slow-acting serum into his system that would induce paranoia. I hoped that he would hoard it, and not spend it freely. But I was confident he would count it. They always count the money. Sometimes, I dream of George sinking into a paranoiac slump, racked with fear and unable to cope.
That’ll teach him for trying to fuck with me.
The murder of Foley was just another chess move; I had no intention of killing my enemies one by one. My methods were far more guileful. I sent more emails out to the Ludds and the Future Dreams board members citing more details of the personality-sapping cancer, and further suggesting that Foley hadn’t been killed by a burglar at all – he’d gone mad, killed his family, then himself, and the authorities were covering it up.
And then I began leaking stories to the financial press about the precarious state of Future Dreams finances, pointing out that a cheap antidote to the IS Plague would soon be available, patented by African scientists, blah de blah, blah de blah, the upshot being, this would cut profits, since Future Dreams relied heavily on its trade of selling palliatives for plagues it had bioengineered.
This leak was repeated verbatim in one of the financial papers. It took some hours before it was spotted that the journalist had inadvertently slandered Future Dreams by accusing them of bioengineering plagues for profit.
Fearful of a possible damaging legal case, the paper took pre-emptive protective measures. In other words, it authorised an in-depth investigation of Future Dreams, and in particular into the claim that it was bioengineering plagues. Rather to their own astonishment, they quickly found a massive and compelling amount of evidence in support of their original unchecked story. And the scandal broke.
And once a scandal breaks, in today’s media universe, it really breaks. Journalists were camped out on the lawns of the accused men and women. Pundits held forth on breakfast TV. Topical sitcoms included jokes mocking Future Dreams. It was a media blitz.
After a few days of this Jeffray Colt, the deputy marketing manager of Future Dreams, committed suicide. His wife explained that he sank into a terrible depression after the death of John A. Foley, and had suffered appalling bouts of itching that had caused him to rub his skin raw. There was in fact no physical cause for this; the itching was brought about purely by the power of my suggestion.
The next day, Dan Mathers, the head of research and development at Future Dreams, blew himself up in his own laboratory. A day after that, three researchers in the Future Dreams lab drove a car off the Grand Canyon. Journalists besieged the house of Future Dreams CEO Mark Malone, clamouring to hear his response to this spate of deaths. He denied everything, but that night he was admitted to hospital after an overdose, and suffered irreversible brain damage. Three board directors shot each other in a drunken suicide pact. Then Molton Hatcher, leader of the Ludds, confessed to a twenty-year-old bank fraud and hanged himself in his prison cell. Three of his associates hanged themselves in the back room of their local church, though one survived, and died later in hospital after eating his own tongue.
After a week, twenty-four guilty men and women were dead, all by their own hand.
And so, primed by my evil mind-fuck emails about the personality-corroding cancer, and fuelled by the press frenzy and the constant TV and newspaper exposes, the suicides became epidemic, as I knew they would. It’s a principle of people-manipulation psychology that high-status individuals under intense stress are highly susceptible to dreams, delusions and paranoias. These men had engineered a plague to decimate Africa; my revenge was to use a metaphorical psychological “plague” to fuck them up in the head.
It worked. And it was the best kind of justice; only the guilty were driven by their guilt to kill themselves. The innocent were spared. What could be fairer?
Future Dreams survived; before long the cover-ups began, the fix was in. But we stopped getting new incidents of the IS Plague in Africa. And African leaders, stung by the untrue report in the Western press that their own scientists had patented an antidote to the plague, commissioned their university’s brightest scientist to patent an antidote to something. This resulted, five years later, in a virus that combated the symptoms of and essentially eradicated, MS, ME and diabetes. The resulting profits made Africa rich, and eventually led to a state of affairs where the African Community of Nations was a net lender of money to Western countries, rather than continuing to be a net borrower.
The political consequences of these deftly planted psych bombs never cease to astound me. I have performed, in my time, marvels that have changed the history of the world. But no one knows of course. That’s my curse; to never get the credit.
On this occasion, however, I did not care.
It was four years before a team of scientists managed to graft on my new skin. I went for improved breast implants at the same time, and insisted on tiny laughter lines around my eyes, to alleviate the otherwise overwhelming effect of pure, perfect, glowing young skin.
On the day my graft took, I booked myself into the Bridal Suite of a 5-star hotel, got drunk on champagne, then lay naked on the bed and stared and stared at myself in the ceiling mirror. I didn’t masturbate, I didn’t sleep. I just spent the night admiring myself. A day before, I had been a flayed monster with bulging eyes who was unable to touch anyone, and whose appearance sent children screaming away.
Now I was beautiful. But psychologically maimed. To this day, there are times when I cannot bear to touch anyone. Even now, I become hysterical if I see someone peel the skin off a chicken; and blisters and skin abrasions cause me to have panic attacks.
But I internalise all these phobias and fears. I try not to dwell. I self-therapise.
Secretly, though, I consider myself to be a monster, a horror – a flayed beast. Nothing will ever persuade me otherwise. But I have an inner cesspool, where all my bad thoughts and fears go. There dwells the monster. There my hate broods and simmers.
And there too my guilt lives. My guilt at having a child born in an artificial womb without a father to a mother who was nearly two centuries old. My guilt about never being there, never suckling my baby, hardly ever changing his shitty nappies, rarely rocking him to sleep. Peter was “born” when I was just a few years into my job at African Aid. He was only four when I was flayed and hospitalised; and in the years that followed I was consumed with hate and rarely even spoke to my growing child.
When Peter was eight, I got my skin back, and became a promiscuous alcoholic with a phobia about touching people. I had screaming rages a lot in those days, and if truth be told, I have memories of smacking Peter and telling him cruel stories to hurt and wound him. Those were my mad years. I can make excuses, but I cannot turn back the clock.
Peter became a wild teenager. I forgave him everything. He was my baby, my boy. I lavished him with love. I paid his bills. I bailed him out of trouble. I forgave him, again and again, for all his misdeeds. I did my best by him.
So, am I really to blame? Is it really all my fault that my oh so beautiful baby turned into the most evil human being who has ever lived?