Bright Young Things (6 page)

She’s pissed enough to sound bold.

‘Another two hundred,’ she says. ‘Cash.’

David points at the lift. ‘Let’s go, then.’

They don’t speak all the way up to the room. Emily’s wondering if David is a psychopath. Do new-age book reps have it in them to bludgeon someone to death? She thinks not. Anyway, she reminds herself, any one of the men she’s slept with in the past could have been a psycho. The only difference between them and David is that he’s paying for it. She’s been alone, naked, in strange places with thirty other men before. Why should this one be any different?

The hotel room is big and comfortably furnished. Emily walks over to the bed and slips off her high heels. Her feet immediately feel better and she starts to relax. She notices how drunk she really is. And although she hasn’t realised before, she’s also dead tired. Will he expect her to leave afterwards? Or will she be able to crash out in this big, comfortable bed?

‘Drink?’ offers David, opening the mini bar.

‘Vodka. Thanks.’

He passes Emily a small bottle of vodka.

‘Orange, Coke or tonic?’ he asks, scanning the bar for a mixer.

‘Coke, thanks.’

He passes her a can of Coke and a glass. He selects a small bottle of Scotch and drinks it straight from the bottle. He’s shaking a bit, like he’s nervous.

‘Do you want to take a shower?’ asks Emily, remembering some dialogue from an episode of
The Bill
she saw last week.

‘No,’ says David. ‘Do you?’

She shrugs. ‘Not really.’

‘Good.’

He sits next to her on the bed, and starts rubbing her leg with his hand. His breathing is heavy, his eyes fixed on the wall in front of them. Emily sips her drink and lights a cigarette. She offers one to David and he takes it. She wonders what should happen next, whether things will happen naturally, or whether she’ll have to initiate the actual sex. For a moment she considers – with some hope – the possibility that he’s one of those ‘talkers’ you hear about who don’t actually want penetrative sex.

Then he takes his hand off her leg.

‘Strip,’ he says.

‘Sorry?’

He blushes. ‘Can you take your clothes off, please?’

Emily stands up nervously. She pulls off her stockings one by one, trying to make each movement fluid and seductive. David stares. She can’t tell whether he’s impressed or not. When the stockings are off, she removes her knickers, and dangles them from one finger momentarily, before dropping them on the floor. She almost laughs, imagining what she’ll tell Lucy. The funny thing is, she’s almost getting into this. She’s tried to have dirty sex with boyfriends in the past, done the whole stripping thing for some of them. But at the end of the day it’s always just your boyfriend sitting there. This time it’s for real. If only David was a bit less of a dickhead, this could be a total turn-on.

Emily peels her dress over her head, and there she is, naked. She hasn’t noticed before, but David’s got his cock out. It’s small and stubby, not very erect. He’s pulling at it distractedly. Not wanking, maybe just trying to get himself aroused. Surely he would be aroused by now, though? She’s just stripped for him, for God’s sake. Maybe he’s a New Man.

He puts out his cigarette. ‘Come here,’ he says.

Afterwards he cries, and Emily just sits there smoking, sore and slightly hypnotised. The whole thing has taken just under three hours. He hasn’t asked for anything kinky. He hasn’t even asked for a blow job. All he has done is push his little cock into her, relentlessly, for almost three hours, like some kind of sewing machine. For the first hour Emily did all the things that usually work: moaning, thrusting, that pelvic floor muscle thing. For the second hour she planned an exhibition. For the last (and it was like being rubbed with sandpaper) she recited William Blake’s ‘London’ in her head, over and over again.

So now he’s crying. Why the hell is he crying? She’s the one who should be crying, for God’s sake. But she’s actually too tired to care. When she asks if she can stay for the night, David accepts, and then clings to her all night. All in all, Emily isn’t a very good prostitute. She’s kissed, she’s stayed the night and she didn’t even insist on a condom.
The Bill
hadn’t prepared her for all these details.

In the morning David mumbles something about the hotel bill already being covered by his credit card, and then leaves. Emily dozes until about ten and then sits up in bed and orders breakfast and a newspaper. The curtains are already open. (Did he do that? How quaint.) The sun is intense, falling on her face as she lights a cigarette and reviews her night. On the bedside table is the money. She counts it and finds two hundred and ten pounds. A tip. How generous. But her bravado is melting away in the sunlight. Somehow, what she’s done doesn’t seem so funny any more.

Her stomach churns. What the hell is she doing here? With no friends to laugh with and no irony to find, the situation just seems tragic. She was a child, then an art student, and now she’s a hooker. All in the space of what seems like five minutes. Emily tries to find the rewind button, but she can’t. The one thing she forgot last night was that the difference between just having sex and charging for it is that charging for it makes you a prostitute.

Of course, last night it was a laugh being an escort. Emily’s always been the rebellious one (ask anyone at college) and the thought that someone at the party might find out . . . It had been kind of thrilling. But now? How can she defend what she’s done? She fucked a stranger for two hundred quid. She thinks back to the last thing she bought for that amount. A pair of
sunglasses
. Jesus. She’s fucked a man for a pair of sunglasses. No heroin habit, no kids, no debts. Those are reasons to become a prostitute. But for a pair of sunglasses?

Emily needs a holiday. She wants to go far away for a very long time.

Breakfast arrives in about fifteen minutes. Emily discards it, gagging on the smell of hotel bacon and eggs, suddenly not hungry. She pours a cup of coffee and opens the
Guardian Weekend
. Reading some news (well, Julie Burchill, the Style section and Dulcie Domum) puts her experience in perspective a little. In fact, with the smallest of smiles on her face, Emily realises she’s learnt something from the experience. It’s time to find a real job.

Paul’s been on the Internet for seventy-two hours and is beginning to develop eye strain. He’s already fucked up the company that fired him, what . . . seventy-four hours ago? Yeah. Wednesday morning, that was when he cleared his desk. He’s already undone the whole accounts system, changed everyone’s passwords and deleted 16,000 e-mails from the company’s server. That took up the first twenty-four hours. Since then he’s been planning something big.

In the gaps (waiting for text to load, waiting to crack a password, whatever), he’s gone for twenty-three pisses, had five pizzas delivered, had Internet sex with a girl called Vicky, and thought a lot about the number 23. It’s no accident that he’s been for twenty-three pisses. No accident that he’s had five pizzas. Two plus three equals five. Two and three. Always the number 23. Rebecca was twenty-three.

Rebecca, in an indirect way, was the one who got Paul fired. Her and Daniel, of course. Paul’s never met Rebecca, but he tried to help her, once. It was one Friday in May when she rang up the support line and got Paul.

‘My e-mail’s fucked,’ she said.

He cleared his throat. ‘And?’

‘And can you fix it?’

Her voice was little-girl-on-speed.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘None of my messages are coming through. Well, I mean, I’ve had no messages for about three days now but that’s just not right. My, uh, friend Dan always e-mails me like twenty times a day, so I thought there must be something wrong at your end.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘Hello? Techno boy? I haven’t got any e-mails. I was expecting e-mails. Something’s fucked.’

‘Good logic,’ says Paul.

‘And you are technical support, right?’

‘I am.’

‘Are you trying to stall me?’

Paul laughed then. ‘Yeah. Probably. What’s your login name?’

He wasn’t trying to chat her up; his motives were higher than sex. He was just trying to keep her on the line for as long as possible, because that cost the company money.

She paused. ‘Um . . .’

‘Take your time.’

‘It’s, um . . . this is really embarrassing.’

‘We have all the time in the—’

‘
Wetpussy
.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You heard.’

‘Wetpussy?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Can you spell that?’

‘Of course I can spell it.’

‘No, I mean can you spell it out?’

‘Why?’

‘
Why
?’

After half an hour or so, Paul had solved Rebecca’s problem. Stuck in the company’s cache were the missing e-mails, about twenty-three of them, all from this guy Daniel.
What are you wearing right now?
the first one said. Then:
Where are you?
Then:
Maybe you’re out. I’m just going to keep sending these. Hope you’re not ignoring me. I’d really like to see you naked right now.

These were interesting enough for Paul to want to look at Rebecca’s entire e-mail history, which he did, forwarding all those to or from Daniel to his home e-mail address. And from then on, he decided to become their God. His target list (other people had ‘to do’ lists) had a new objective. Before, it had said:
Waste time. Cost the company money. Give free stuff to customers.
Now there was a new item on the list:
Make Rebecca fall in love with Daniel
. It was like a random act of kindness. And random acts were dada. This was definitely dada. And that was cool.

For the first few weeks Paul just observed. He set up his work system to forward all Rebecca’s e-mails to his home, so he could study her in comfort. She and Daniel were both actors. She had just graduated from Dartington, and Daniel was in the middle of his training at RADA. They had met at a mutual friend’s party and swapped e-mail addresses, but hadn’t met since. It was obvious to Paul that they were in love, but with Dan’s playful sexual aggression, and Rebecca’s playful teasing/frigidity, they were getting nowhere. Paul’s input was clearly going to be needed here.

Inspired by kiddie divorce films (the ones where the parents get back together after the cute kid and the blossoming next door neighbour trick them into it), Paul started adding and subtracting from the e-mails. At first he just added the odd word here and there. But before too long, he was composing whole messages all by himself.

So one night, Rebecca never got the e-mail that asked what she was wearing; instead she got a message of love. And Daniel finally got what he wanted: an incredibly pornographic description of what Rebecca was wearing – or rather, what Paul imagined she was wearing. His instinct had been right. In response to Rebecca’s titillating honesty, Dan sent her a genuine message of love; and in response to his message of love, Rebecca really did send him something dirty – a detailed description of when and how she would give him a blow job. They arranged to meet the following week.

Daniel eventually proposed to Rebecca in an e-mail. She said yes. Paul had stopped tampering by this point, but he was still observing, of course. Unfortunately, they’d worked out that someone had been tampering (which made them kind of grateful, but also pissed off about their lack of privacy), and had contacted the ISP. After an investigation, Paul was found out. It wasn’t just the cupid stuff either. Paul’s boss discovered that everyone with the same initials as Paul were not paying for their e-mail accounts; that all elderly users were actually being paid by the company each time they sent an e-mail; that the local cat home was entirely run from anonymous company donations, and that although Paul could have increased his salary by any amount he chose, all he’d taken for himself was software and unlimited e-mail accounts.

It was a shit job anyway, Paul reasons. And when he’s eighty, he’ll be more proud of what he did for Rebecca and Dan than of some stupid job. But all this has unsettled him. He was stimulated by what he did. The customers were his friends. In this new, empty world, he has no friends, not real ones.

He rubs his eyes and stares into the screen. His community is right here, in this box, talking on the Pavement chat room, or posting on alt.hackers.malicious. Paul hasn’t had real sex for six years. He has a girlfriend, but he’s never met her. She wants to meet, but Paul hasn’t got time. His project needs a lot more work.

His new project is his only passion. It’s a virus, of course, planned for release exactly twenty-three days after the Millennium. That’s the random element; it can’t be on 1 January 2000, because he doesn’t want to be upstaged by that stupid bug. He wants the world to settle down and get back to normal before MoneyBaby (the name of his virus) hits. Of course, there’s nothing evil about Paul’s virus, his hero being the infamous
rtm:
Robert Tappan Morris, the inventor of the first computer virus, or
worm
, as people called it then. Paul’s virus is good. Well, it’ll make some teenagers rich anyway. Paul’s virus will infect banks and give them such a fever they won’t even realise that they’re giving out money to seemingly random suburban teenagers. Paul didn’t want to make the teenagers totally random, preferring to choose those who seemed interesting or needy or clever. They have to be clever, because the sooner they tell someone what’s happened, the less damage the virus will be able to do.