Mirrorman Page 11

  On the portable TV a lean young man, long dark hair trailing over the collar of his dazzling white suit, was darting along a line of people in the studio. He thrust the mike at a fat teenage girl who was awash with tears because she felt unattractive and boys didn’t want to date her. The dross they filled the airwaves with, Cawdor thought sadly. Sarah had half-turned to watch it as she refilled his mug from the thermos jug.

  ‘Daniella’s hooked on TV trash, is she?’ Cawdor remarked with a sardonic grin. ‘Welcome to the club.’

  ‘What?’ Sarah wrinkled her nose. ‘No, I don’t go for this stuff! Stupid show for even stupider people.’

  ‘Careful, it’s like junk food. You might get a taste for it, honey.’ The hot coffee was like balm to his rasping throat. That must have been a lulu of a dream if he’d been shouting himself hoarse in his sleep. But then Sarah would have nudged him awake; she always did when he snored after too much late-night fraternisation with Jameson’s Irish Whiskey.

  She put on her glasses to read the letter she had opened and looked at him reprovingly over the tortoiseshell rims. ‘And, by the way, I promised Daniella we’d go see her in the play, all right? It’s very short, about thirty minutes. You might even enjoy it.’

  Cawdor held up his hand. ‘OK, OK. Anything for a quiet life.’

  Theatre-going wasn’t his favourite recreation. Of the arts, he preferred classical music, and even a Broadway show, to heavy drama. He had once sat through a four-hour performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, receiving sharp digs in the ribs from Sarah to stop him dropping off.

  ‘Well, if it’s only one act,’ Cawdor conceded generously. ‘And parents should take an interest in what their kids are doing, support them.’

  ‘You’ve been at the Doctor Spock again. I warned you about that.’

  Seated across from him, Sarah cradled a coffee cup, taking little sips. The sunlight streaming in from the window behind her made a halo of her silvery-blonde hair, which was uncombed and still a bit tangled from slumber. Without the benefit of mascara and pencil-liner, her eyelashes and eyebrows were like filaments of gossamer. She looked wonderfully, nakedly, innocent. At this moment, sitting peacefully and domestically facing each other, Cawdor felt incredibly fortunate to love and be loved by this woman.

  Sarah pushed her glasses more firmly on to her nose and read the letter. She sighed and made a clucking sound with her tongue.

  ‘What is it?’

  Sarah held out the letter. ‘It’s from Bill Benedict. Wanna read it?’

  ‘Not particularly.’ Cawdor looked at his watch, checked it against the wall clock, and took a gulp of coffee. ‘Better get moving.’

  ‘He’s got a nerve. Listen to this – he says the programme’s been taken by another six stations, which makes thirty-seven in all, but my fee stays the same.’ She tossed the letter aside. ‘What a skinflint that guy is. He’d take the gold fillings out of his grandmother’s mouth.’

  ‘What if she had false teeth?’

  ‘He’d take them instead.’

  ‘Does it really bother you, not getting paid more?’ Cawdor asked, thinking he ought to show at least a token interest. Bill Benedict was the owner of WCTC New Brunswick, the radio station that broadcast Sarah’s latenight phone-in programme, Take Five. ‘I thought you did it because you liked doing it.’

  ‘Yeah, that too,’ Sarah agreed, ‘but I object when my efforts are taken for granted. My fee should be adjusted pro rata to the audience share. That’s only fair.’ She bit into the slice of toast, leaving smears of butter at the sides of her mouth. Cawdor rose and leant over to kiss her. His tongue flicked out and licked away the butter. Sarah munched on through a big grin.

  He went out waggling his fingers; and she waggled back, still grinning as she turned to watch the TV.

  Today was beautifully sunny with clear blue skies. Total contrast to a week ago, Cawdor thought, remembering the spectacular thunderstorm raging over the towers and canyons of Manhattan.

  Phyllis was there to greet him, as ever, with her dimpled smile and fluttering sidelong glance, the coffee percolating on the hotplate behind her desk. She brought him in a cup, set it down, and waited in front of his desk, briskly rubbing her chubby little hands in keen anticipation of anything, any small service, she might be called upon to provide. Later he’d have some letters to dictate, Cawdor told her, but there was nothing he needed right this minute, thanks very much.

  With a pert nod of her tight curls, streaked blonde at the tips, Phyllis dimpled a smile and bounced out.

  It was nearly lunchtime when Don Carlson tapped on the door and popped his head in. ‘Spare a minute?’

  ‘Sure.’ Cawdor pushed the swivel chair away from the VDU and got to his feet, arching his back. ‘Going crosseyed anyway, staring at that screen. Think I might need an eye test.’

  Cawdor’s fellow senior partner at UltraCast International was tall and rangy with thinning sandy hair brushed forward in an attempt to hide the prematurely balding truth. While Cawdor was the engineering brains behind the outfit, Don was the front man who spent much of his time selling their design service to corporate clients right across the States. They had formed the partnership eleven years ago, and it had proved the perfect match: Don’s confident boardroom technique and easy social banter allied to Cawdor’s flair for innovative ideas and new techniques in architecture and construction.

  ‘You got a vacation coming up, right?’ Don tilted his head in that quizzical way he had. ‘How soon?’

  ‘Uh, let me see. About four, five weeks away.’

  ‘Hey, that’s OK then.’ Don was suddenly animated. ‘Hows about a trip to Albuquerque? We need to get somebody down there within a couple of weeks – not a problem exactly, just to iron out a few teething troubles.’

  Cawdor rubbed his jaw. ‘I’m not too familiar with that project. Conference centre, isn’t it? The Grace Corporation?’

  ‘Grace MediaCorp. Auditorium with TV facility. Thing is, Jeff, it’s technical, otherwise I’d handle it myself. I mean, I know I’m better looking and have nicer manners than you, but I’d just stand around being decorative and charming, with a dumb look on my chops.’ Don gave an exaggerated shrug of appeal. ‘Take a couple of days perhaps, three at most. Listen to their gripes, if any, baffle ’em with science, the usual bullshit. You’ll run rings around ’em.’ He raised his sandy eyebrows in another appeal, more hopeful this time.

  ‘I could make it a full week,’ Cawdor suggested with a grin. ‘I’ve never been to New Mexico, could spend some time sightseeing, start my tan off before I go on vacation…’

  ‘Hey, let’s not go overboard,’ Don said, raising both hands. He was jesting, but not totally. ‘Can do?’

  Cawdor nodded. ‘I’ll need to bone up on the technical spec first though, so’s I don’t look a complete asshole.’

  ‘Great.’

  Mission accomplished, Don Carlson departed, leaving Cawdor with the rueful feeling that somehow or other he’d just been bamboozled by an expert.

  Soon after lunch the technical spec landed on his desk. It comprised two loose-leaf binders, each three inches thick.

  Cawdor heaved a sigh, draped his jacket over the back of the swivel chair and sat down at the CAD keyboard. Even though all blueprints were generated by Computer-Aided Design, and could be called up by any workstation in the office, the reams of technical data were in the form of hard copy, which was still the most convenient way for easy access and cross-referencing.

  The design brief was for an auditorium seating 5,000 people, with a large stage area which also doubled as a television studio for live transmission and recorded programmes. This complex infrastructure of fighting and sound systems, control booths, the maze of air-conditioning plant, plus a host of backup services, was housed within a pyramid, and here, Cawdor realised, was the nub of the problem. How to support all this – and a large public space – inside such a structure was a difficult engineering task. Probably what t
he people at Grace MediaCorp were most concerned about. He decided to give the mainframe number-cruncher another crack at the stress factors and load parameters – just to make sure the math came out right and he didn’t make a complete babbling idiot of himself when they tossed a fizzing bomb into his lap.

  The brief didn’t specify the type of TV programmes the company produced; not that it mattered. But that was one helluva size – 5,000 – for a studio audience, wasn’t it? Rock concerts, maybe, or Las Vegas-style spectaculars. Or even, he thought with a shudder, one of those damn confessional shows you couldn’t escape from nowadays: partners and lovers revealing their most intimate thoughts and shameful secrets on prime-time TV. He speculated idly for a moment about why they chose to put themselves through such an ordeal. Of course, to them it wasn’t an ordeal. That was the point: they found it quite easy – hell, compulsive – to blurt out loud to 50,000,000 people what they found impossible to whisper behind drawn shades to their nearest and dearest.

  Cawdor couldn’t figure it. Unless this public act of revelation and contrition, it occurred to him, had taken the place of religious confession; perhaps that was the reason.

  But then it was not much different from what Sarah did on her radio phone-in spot for WCTC New Brunswick. Callers rang in with all kinds of personal and emotional problems, some of them harrowing, many of an explicit sexual nature. They needed to talk them out, unburden themselves, and it seemed that the warm, friendly yet disembodied voice of someone with a degree in psychology and behavioural social science provided the ideal conduit. But Sarah was always very cautious about making her advice too specific. Advising a battered wife to seek professional help was one thing. Telling her to take the kids and leave the brutal sonofabitch was verging dangerously near a law suit, or, even more directly, a drunken irate husband hammering on the door of the radio station and threatening to tear the head off that feminist ball-breaking bitch who was destroying his marriage.

  And it was true that Sarah had received a few scary phone calls from the bulging-eyed pointy-head brigade who wrote anonymous letters in jagged green capitals. Thus far, thank God, none of these cranks had managed to get within arm’s reach.

  Bang on the dot, 3:15, Phyllis brought in his coffee. Never a minute early, or a minute late. Black, one spoonful of sugar, already stirred. She placed it by the keyboard.

  ‘You seem… I think the word is “fraught”.’ She regarded him with a tiny frown, head on one side, like a reproving mother hen.

  ‘You got it in one, Phyl,’ Cawdor said, knowing this would please her, and it did. She blushed with delight. It was cruel, leading her on like this, but he meant no harm. Anyway, she seemed to enjoy it.

  ‘Anything for me?’ Phyllis asked. ‘Any letters?’

  On her large bosom was a silver pin he hadn’t noticed before, in the shape of a butterfly, or was it the outline of a bow tie? Hard to tell.

  ‘How’s the Donleavy report coming along?’ Cawdor took a sip. ‘You get those photo references from Research?’

  ‘I checked and they didn’t have them. So I called the Engineers and Mechanics’ Library in Rockerfeller Center. They had!’ Phyllis beamed at him, and he was tempted to pat her on the head. ‘They promised faithfully to fax them by noon tomorrow. Don’t worry, I’m on the case.’

  She bounced off, winking from the door as she went out.

  Dumpy, dependable Phyllis. In some ways, he supposed, she was quite attractive. If you went for the fuller figure. Certainly, if large breasts and a big behind turned you on, Phyllis was the woman with all the equipment. Those demure, cuddly types with the dimples were probably seething with passion, could smother a man with an abundance of soft white flesh. And, to be honest, there had been times when he had been tempted – or at least the glimmering of temptation had flitted through his mind. She had a habit, for instance, when she brought his letters in to be signed, of standing beside his chair and leaning over the desk, balancing on one leg while the other curled up coquettishly so that her tight skirt was hitched up over her solid thighs. While Cawdor tried to concentrate on reading through the letters and signing them, he was very much aware of the opportunity for his hand to stray downward and touch the inside of her calf. From there it was a logical, and entirely natural, progression – without either of them acknowledging it was happening – for his hand to slide upward until it was trapped in the heat and smoothness of her bare inner thighs, because, as he well knew, Phyllis preferred stockings and suspenders to pantihose. As she leant further over the desk, sorting the letters to be signed, and while still maintaining her poise as the brisk, efficient secretary, Phyllis would shift her weight in order to part her thighs and permit access for his fingers to delve even higher. Had anyone entered the office unexpectedly they wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary. A secretary standing by her boss’s chair as he signed his letters. A misleading impression, this normal, everyday business scene, because by then he would have edged aside the damp narrow strip of material and inserted three fingers inside her. Phyllis would be leaning right over, her round belly resting on the desk, legs straddled wide, capacious rear end thrust out as he worked at her. By now of course her cheeks would be flushed, her breathing coming in fast and shallow gasps, her huge wobbling breasts straining the buttons of her blouse as she moved back and forth in response to the fingers sliding with silky smoothness in and out of her. His fingers, almost his entire hand, would be immersed as she opened up wetly and slackly to him, yet he would pay no attention to any of this, cursorily skimming through the typed letters, signing his name, moving the sheet of paper aside, skimming through the next letter as Phyllis jerked and moaned beside him.

  She would come explosively, knuckles white as she gripped the front edge of the desk, bucking frantically with her gigantic rear end as she sought to quicken the pace and bring that sweet searing pain to the very edge of the precipice until she was over it, over it and beyond, a hot flushing wave of pleasure washing over her and through her like a blood-heat tropical deluge so that she felt drenched inside and out.

  The white knuckles on the edge of the keyboard were his own, Cawdor saw, staring at them with shock and amazement. He looked down at the hard bulge in his trousers. Incredible –

  He was having a masturbatory fantasy about Phyllis Keets!

  Never before, never once, had he entertained such thoughts about her. She didn’t appeal to him in that way. Or maybe she did and he didn’t know it: the state of his arousal gave he to his denial. He had damn well near climaxed, right then and there, sitting at the computer.

  Cawdor swung round in the swivel chair and got to his feet, embarrassed by the hard shape pushing out the front of his trousers even though he was alone in the office; in truth he was embarrassing himself He was convinced that the next time he came face to face with Phyllis he would blush for shame. The image of her lying gasping and jerking across his desk was so vividly erotic that it would hover in the air between them like a hologram, a kind of ghostly shadow play forever repeating itself

  Even more bizarre – why such an idea had entered his mind at all. It was like an alien thought. As if somebody other than Jeff Cawdor had planted the fantasy there. And goddamnit, he’d gone right along with it, lived through every moment, and enjoyed it too – his erection proved that even while his conscience backed away and held up its hands in horror.

  The mind in the skull was easily tricked, but the cock had a mind of its own.

  2

  This was one of Sarah’s evenings at WCTC New Brunswick, and she had already left for the radio station to prepare her broadcast. A note on the kitchen counter told him that Daniella had a rehearsal at school for her one-act play and would be home about seven-thirty. She would hitch a ride with Sandy, a schoolfriend helping out backstage who lived three streets away, and whose mother would pick the girls up.

  Cawdor took a Michelob from the fridge, unbolted The French doors, and stood on the patio drinking, letting the quiet sounds o
f the peaceful evening soothe him.

  It had been a late spring, with unseasonal frosts, and the shrubs and trees and Sarah’s carefully tended flowerbeds were two or three weeks from achieving their mid-May glory. The lawns, which were his job, needed cutting.

  Inside the house the phone rang, and he was so jittery he spilt beer down his chin and on to his shirt. But jittery about what? Nothing he could put his finger on; he just had this obscure feeling of unease deep within, a weird sense of… displacement. Cursing his clumsiness, he mopped up with his handkerchief, then stepped back into the kitchen and unhooked the portable from its wall cradle.

  A familiar, slightly nasal voice squawked a cheery greeting.

  ‘Hi, Jeff! It’s Gil. Thought you wasn’t home. Weren’t takin’ a shower or somethin’, was you? Did I disturb ya?’

  For a man with a doctorate in particle physics – and a research fellow at Columbia University to boot – Gil Gribble had the quaint grammar and twanging delivery of a New York cab driver. Or how New York cab drivers used to sound before the East Europeans and Asiatics took over.

  ‘Hi, Gil, good to hear from you. I was out in the garden, relaxing with a beer. Pleasant evening here. Everything OK with you?’

  ‘Sure, hunky-dory!’ Everything Gil Gribble said seemed to be punctuated with exclamation marks. And he was the only person Cawdor knew who stuck to outmoded expressions like ‘Hunky-dory’. ‘How’s Sarah and the sprog?’

  ‘They’re both fine.’ The ‘sprog’ – a word Cawdor had heard no one but Gil ever use – was Daniella. ‘They’re both out at the minute. It’s Sarah’s agony-aunt spot on New Brunswick.’

  ‘Right, yeah. I don’t think we can catch that in New York, can we?’

  ‘It’s syndicated,’ Cawdor told him. ‘Not sure about Manhattan, but over thirty local stations carry it. They play the old Dave Brubeck number as intro music.’