She got up abruptly. He sat staring straight ahead, out of the windows of the bar to the street outside.

‘You fucking left me, Carla. Don’t try and turn it around.’

She gave him a bright, brittle smile. ‘You’re not listening to me, Chris. I’m leaving you. I’ll need a couple of weeks to get my stuff out of the house—‘

‘And where are you going to go?’ It came out ugly.

‘I’m going to stay with,’ she laughed a little. ‘Not that it’s anything to do with you any more. I’m going to stay in Tromso for a while. Until I can get the divorce sorted out. I’m assuming you aren’t going to contest it, you’ll probably be happier than I am to get free. Give you plenty of room for your new penthouse playmate, whoever she is.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘Oh, please. I’m not stupid, Chris. I saw the way the people at the desk looked at me when I asked for you. I hear the way they react when I try to call you. I’m not the only woman you’ve got coming here. I just hope whoever it is is worth what you’re paying.’

He shrugged. ‘Think what you like. Better yet, check the credit-card accounts. Spot all the charges to escort agencies I must be making. You never did have a very high opinion of me, did you?’

She shook her head, drew a hard breath that had tears in it. ‘You don’t know how wrong you are about that, Chris. You’ll never fucking know.’

‘Yeah. Whatever.’

She turned to go. Paused and turned back.

‘Oh, yeah. You’d better come out and collect the Saab. Some time soon. I haven’t touched it, but I’m not sure how long I can stand it sitting there in the drive while I know you’re here fucking some moan-on-demand tit-job. My maturity’s wearing pretty fucking thin.’

She walked away from him.

Chapter Forty-One

Liz Linshaw came over the following evening, and walked bang into the aftermath. Chris was moody and snappish, and when they got into bed he needed a hand-crank start. They fucked, but it wasn’t much fun. He went through the motions, wrestling irritably over choices and changes of posture, and only finally managed to lose himself in the pay-channel perfection of her body as he came. Scant seconds later, he hit the real world like concrete from fifty floors up. No post-coital warmth, no chuckling or smoothing of sweat-soaked skin. There was a raw hollow behind his eyes and in his chest.

They unplugged and lay apart.

‘Thanks,’ she said, staring at the ceiling.

‘Sorry.’ He rolled towards the juncture of her thighs. ‘Come here.’

She pushed his head away. ‘Forget it, Chris. Just tell me what’s wrong.’

‘You don’t want to hear it.’

‘Yes I do.’

He rolled onto his back again. He blew imaginary cigarette smoke at the ceiling. ‘Carla came to see me,’ he said finally.

‘Great.’ she sat up against the headboard, arms folded under her breasts. ‘Fucking great. You seeing her again?’

‘Told you you didn’t want to hear it.’

She looked down at him, angry. ‘You’re wrong. I do want to hear it, I want to hear all about it. Every fucking detail. You’re what I do in the evenings now, Chris. Anything that’s going to ruin it this badly, you better believe I want to hear about it. Are you seeing her again?’

‘Doubt it.’

He recounted the conversation in the bar, almost word for word. When he came to Carla’s parting line, she grimaced.

‘Nice.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris stared off into a corner of the room. ‘Used to scare me sometimes, how she could get inside my head like that. Just read stuff out of me like I was a screen.’

Liz Linshaw’s gaze twitched around. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I mean, the way she knew that—‘

‘That’s what I am in your head? A moan-on-demand tit-job? Well, thanks a fucking lot, Chris. Thank you very much.’

‘Liz, I’m not. That’s not what I meant. It’s.’ He groped after some explanation of what he meant, the way she seemed to form an integrated part of the smooth-lined hotel-suite reality he was living. ‘Christ, you’re beautiful, that’s what I was trying to say, too beautiful to be real, it seems like. Okay? And that must have been what she picked up on in my head. I mean, look, she was right about the tit-job, wasn’t she.’

Liz cupped her breasts at him. The anger on her face robbed it of sexuality. ‘You got a problem with these? Funny, because you didn’t seem to earlier when your face was fucking buried between them. You know, Chris, this is me. I’m here for real, all of me. I’m not trying to sell myself to you as some piece of fucking merchandise.’

‘No?’ A little of his own anger was starting to seep back through the emptiness under his ribs. ‘So why send me the edited highlights of your porn career? Good old airbrushed girl-on-girl action? You wouldn’t call that merchandising the goods?’

She stared at him. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘Oh, come on Liz. You’re trying to tell me you didn’t do porn?’

‘No, I did.’ Something in her face had changed. ‘Back when it was the best way I knew to make money. I just want to know how come you never told me you’d been jerking off to it.’

‘Liz, you fucking sent it to me.’

‘No, Chris. I didn’t.’

‘You’re saying you didn’t mail me a videoclip of you and some blonde bimbette on a, like, an exercise rack or something. You never sent that?’

She sighed and sank back against the headboard. Her gaze rolled out to the middle distance. She seemed to curl into herself.

‘Donna’s Dominion,’ she muttered.

‘Sorry?’

‘Donna’s Dominion. That’s what it was called, that particular piece of classy erotic art. I was Donna Dread, gym training world dominatrix.’ She smiled without much mirth. ‘Pretty infantile stuff, huh?’

Chris gestured uncomfortably. He was pretty sure he was blushing. Liz Linshaw nodded.

‘Got you hard, though. Right?’

‘Uh.’ He looked away.

She sighed again. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. Stuff’s made to get you hard. As a male, you’d be practically dysfunctional if it didn’t. Youthful tits are supposed to turn you on, and there you’ve got four of them on screen, all rubbing up against each other, and all blown up to hyper-real proportions. You might as well get embarrassed about four lines of uncut NAME powder keeping you awake all night. It’s just another drug, Chris. Refined, maxed-up, bang-on-the-nail sex-chemistry trigger dust.’ Another weary smile. ‘So you liked me, huh?’

He cleared his throat. ‘You, uh, were you really into, you know?’

‘Girls?’ She shrugged. ‘Not really, no. I mean, get someone licking your clit for you, that’s not unpleasant, whatever sex the person doing it is. Once you get used to the six or seven people watching you off camera, that is. And you’d be surprised how quickly you do get used to that. But no, I was never a try-out lesbian, not even a try-out bi. It’s pure theatre, Chris. Just a job. Oh, yeah, and if you stick to girl-on-girl, your health insurance premiums go way down. Less risk, less general wear and tear on the works.’

‘Why did you, I mean, how did you get into it?’

This time her smile seemed genuine. Her posture unwound. She shook her head, reached over the edge of the bed for her bag, and started going through it. ‘Well I wasn’t kidnapped into it by white slavers, if that’s what you mean.’

She found a bent and crumpled ready-rolled spliff, a lighter. Sat back against the headboard again and lit up. She coughed and waved little eddies in the sudden cloud of smoke.

‘You want some of this? No? Sure?’ She pulled down a lungful of smoke, held it for a moment and let go. She looked critically at the embered end of the spliff. ‘Thing is, you listen to some twisted evangelical fuck like Simeon Sands, you’d believe we are all sex slaves by any other name, kidnapped, trapped by drugs, victims of our own unclean, incest-aroused lust - I think guys like Sands like that one especially, you hear the way they trot it out. One hand on the pulpit, one hand below, eh.’ She grinned crookedly. ‘But it just ain’t so, Chris. I mean, it isn’t this other thing the industry wants to sell you either. You know, we’re all dripping wet sluts, just can’t wait to get our orifices stuffed. Forget that. You want clinical and jaded, go watch a porno shoot. It’s work, Chris, pure and simple. More or less professional, depending on who you’re working for, better or worse paid ditto. But no one ever put me under pressure to do stuff I wasn’t happy with, and no one tried to stop me when I quit.’