This Other Eden Page 5

  Even in repose her natural instinct to adopt the position of a centrefold had not deserted her. She lay on her back, slightly propped up against a few silk pillows, one arm thrust gently behind her neck, supporting her head, the other soft against her belly. A knee was slightly raised, exposing a firm, flawless thigh, whilst the other leg stretched long across the floor, culminating in a ballet dancer’s point, the delicate toes so close to Max’s head that it might easily have been the foot rather than the carpet which he had found in his mouth that morning.

  What a magnificent creature she was! Mother Nature and plastic surgeon working together in perfect harmony! Her breasts stood out firm and separate against her taut body. Despite their generous size and obvious weight, they still pointed defiantly heavenwards, as if invisible threads tethered her nipples to the ceiling. The woman’s crotch had been waxed by a fanatic. It was virtually bald. Smooth and shiny as a car bonnet, almost as if it had been laminated. There was one tiny fringe of pale soft hair hovering above the cleft. This was a vagina with a mohican.

  Max felt depressed. How had he ever allowed his life to arrive at a point where such a gorgeous woman could be a problem to him? Yet she was a problem. The problem being that Max was married. Very publicly and very recently married to a fellow movie star. Max was a man of certain principles. He valued his honour. Certainly he fought and he drank, that was fine, what he did not do was publicly humiliate his wife.

  Irresponsible use of drugs.

  Fidelity, or at least a decent pretence at such, was a major pose on the coast, it had been for years. The place was stuffed with mega-stars assuring journos that they had found true bliss in marriage and that their hell-raising days were over.

  AIDS was still around. There was still no cure and no vaccine, no vaccine available to the public, that is. It had, in fact, been possible to immunise people against the disease for many years but the drug had been suppressed. The reason for this being that the vast chemical conglomerate that had isolated the vaccine had found to their dismay that it was extremely easy to copy and reproduce, a simple compound, made from the cheapest and most basic ingredients. Ingredients that a child could reconstruct from a junior chemistry kit and a bag of household groceries. The conglomerate concerned realised that, were they to market their new drug, its secret would instantly be wrested from it. That done, in defiance of copyright, the recipe would be published in every scabrous, alternative publication in the world. Faced with this wholly unacceptable prospect, the vast chemical conglomerate had taken the only course open to it. This was, after all, business. There was no point in them developing a drug from which it was impossible to profit. They had therefore decided to withhold the drug until such time as their chemists had been able to develop a sufficiently complex molecular disguise for it. They would secrete their simple little miracle drug deep within some intricate atomic structure that was fantastically difficult to break down, and near impossible to reproduce. This way their patent would be protected and a reasonable price could be charged.

  Expensive bodywork.

  Max looked at the slumbering woman. How the hell had this happened? How had he ended up crashed out on a carpet with a naked woman? He wasn’t even the sleep around type. What Max liked to do was get off his face, act like a rich asshole and fall over. Certainly he liked to flirt, but screwing around was stupid. Getting caught was stupider. Could he get away with this? Not easily, he thought, and certainly not cheaply. The woman stretched out before him had not spent the countless dollars she clearly had spent getting a body like that in order to hand it out gratis. That body was a career move.

  It was too perfect, too calculated, not one centimetre of it had been left to chance. This was a body that would almost certainly be featuring in next year’s Coscars (Cosmetic Surgery Awards). Max searched in vain for signs of human frailty. Just one dimple of cellulite on the extraordinary limb stretched out before him might have given him hope that here was a straight-shooter. A woman who would wake up and say, ‘Wow! That was fun and so unlike me, now you go back to your life and I’ll go back to mine.’ But there were no dimples of cellulite, not the tiniest stretch mark, hair or crease to suggest that this was a real human being.

  The leg pointing at Max seemed to be singling him out, accusing him. ‘There’s the jerk,’ its stern posture seemed to say. ‘There’s the guy I’m going to be talking about on every chat show for the next ten years. The asshole who’s going to make me a celebrity.’

  Max never understood why he got married. His wife Krystal, herself a huge star, was no clearer about her own motives. It was almost as if they’d been forced into it to feed the Max and Krystal industry that had grown up around them. Like a king, Max lived in a world where everything he did was deemed to be important. If he got drunk it was important. If he hit a journalist it was important. His notorious decision to have a penis reduction (‘I owe it to the women I sleep with’) had made the cover of Premiere and the number one news item on MTV. This, despite the fact that MTV now had a core audience in its fifties, twice Max’s age.

  The problem was that, like most kings, Max began to believe that what he did was important. There are few Canutes in the entertainment industry, people with the strength of character to turn their face against the tide of popular obsession and say, ‘I am not even one millionth as interesting a person as I’m cracked up to be’. Certainly, Max could not resist the endless seduction of self-importance. It was a short step from throwing up on request to getting married on request.

  Since then, both Krystal and he had assured the world that they had been tamed by love and that their hell-raising days were over. But they weren’t. Krystal had continued to paint the town at night and have her body reconstructed in the morning, while Max had kept right on drinking, punching people, getting punched and waking up face-down, not knowing where he was. Now it seemed he’d got sufficiently off his head to make a real idiot of himself. Max did not love Krystal but he had no desire to insult and embarrass her on the front page of the National Enquirer.

  The woman stirred.

  ‘Max, I want a divorce,’ she said.

  Max was surprised. He squinted his aching eyes to focus.

  ‘Krystal?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ she replied.

  Max fell silent. He felt ashamed. It was all very well being a complete screw-up, but not recognising your own wife was just gross. Certainly she had had a number of faces since he married her, but a husband is supposed to keep track of these things.

  ‘I want a divorce, Max. Last night at Simone’s we got treated like yesterday’s news. I felt like an old married lady. Well I’m not an old lady, I’m just twenty-four and I want a divorce.’

  ‘OK,’ said Max.

  ‘Don’t you have anything else to say?’ Krystal asked.

  ‘Well…’ Max thought for a moment. This was his wife and yet he scarcely knew her. This beautiful woman was a stranger to him. The aimlessness of his existence swept over him. For a moment he saw himself clearly and he saw nothing, for there was nothing to see. His whole life was a pointless charade. Fortunately, for Max introspection was a passing thing.

  ‘Any chance of a final jump?’ he said.

  Krystal never could resist a bit of romance.

  ‘Oh, go on then.’

  Max crawled forward across the carpet and up along Krystal’s astonishing body.

  ‘I don’t think my breath’s too sweet,’ he confessed. ‘You didn’t see anyone taking a leak in my mouth last night, did you?’

  Krystal always had her disinfectant at hand. She sprayed Max’s mouth and then her own, for she had dined on pepper vodka and garlic corn chips the previous evening. Stretching across to her handbag she produced an altogether more formidable looking aerosol.

  ‘OK. Stand up and drop them,’ she said. ‘You may be my husband but I don’t know where you’ve been.’

  ‘I don’t think I can stand up, Krystal. Going anything higher than carpet before I’ve had some cof
fee gives me vertigo.’

  ‘Stand up and show, Max, or you can whistle for a wriggle,’ said Krystal, who had very strict views when it came to sexual hygiene. Max knew that nothing blew a screw quicker than resisting the precautions, so he staggered to his feet and dropped his jeans. Krystal sprayed his crotch, coating his dick in spermicidal stretch laminate.

  ‘The spray-on condom has to be the greatest invention since inflatable handguns,’ said Krystal as she blew on it to help it dry.

  ‘I like this bit,’ said Max. ‘I hope you have some solvent, though.’

  Max spoke from painful experience. The spray-on condom was a triumph of synthetic fibre engineering. It could be applied to a flaccid member and would then stretch and move like a second skin. Obviously, with a conventional condom there is a teat on the end which provides somewhere for the ejaculation to go. With spray-on jobs the laminate simply stretched to accommodate whatever was necessary. It would stretch, but it would not break, ever. This was fine for the containment of a bit of sexual effluvia, but less convenient if you needed a wee and you had no solvent. Max, like most men, had experienced the pain and embarrassment of driving to the chemist with a big balloon of piss hanging off the end of his dong.

  Krystal drew Max down on top of her. They embraced and she kissed him long and hard. In a town where good kissing was the norm, Krystal was a star. It was said that if you had had a cosmetic lift you should not kiss Krystal for at least six months, because she would suck your face right off. This rumour began when Krystal was just sixteen. She had been a child star and, having been through sex, drugs, college and fully diagnosed media dependency, she had married an ageing star, a man with the career of a seventy-year-old and the face of a thirty-five-year-old. At least, he had the face of a thirty-five-year-old until his wedding night with young Krystal. Loud screams were heard from their hotel suite in Aspen, Colorado. A paramedic Cosmetic Surgical Rapid Response unit was scrambled from Cedars Hospital LA, and the ageing star was not seen in public for four months.

  ‘Ate the old boy’s face right off,’ the gossips assured each other.

  ‘I heard they had to cut his teeth out of the back of her throat. That little girl nearly choked on her old man’s dentures.’

  Krystal was now giving Max the benefit of her plunger-like skills, but despite administering a kiss that could have unblocked a drain, she could feel that the fire was not getting lit.

  ‘I’m not stretching your laminate, am I, honey?’ she inquired gently.

  ‘It isn’t you, Krystal, it’s just early, you know? I had a gutful of booze last night and. .

  ‘Hangover hanging over, is it?’ she said. ‘Let me show you something I had fitted last week.’

  Krystal rose to her feet and glided across the room. It was a walk that had made a hundred million Virtual Reality helmets steam. Crossing to her dressing-table and perching herself gently against it, she looked down at the prostrate Max.

  ‘Like what you see?’ she inquired, and Max would have had to have been made out of granite to demur. What’s more, it would have had to have been granite which was probably gay, anyway. Krystal was an extraordinary vision of market research generated design perfection. She looked as if a Japanese porn artist had just created her from computer graphics. Certainly it was a little soulless, but as her body sculptor often said, Krystal, there are tits men, and there are ass men, the only soul men I ever knew were musicians’.

  ‘You think this is good, huh?’ Krystal pouted. ‘Watch.’

  She took up a thin tube that was attached to a little cylinder in her vanity case. Max watched in astonishment as she removed what he had imagined was a tiny mole deep within her cleavage. She attached the tube to the spot where the mole had been, there was a hiss and Krystal’s already generous bosom began to expand. Max gaped, he had never seen anything like it. Krystal laughed at his confusion.

  ‘Neat, huh? It cost an awful lot,’ she said. ‘Great for the career, though, so it should pay for itself. You see, now I can do big girl parts and little girl parts. Versatility is so important for a serious actress, don’t you think? I’ve had the skin elasticated so it won’t stretch either, and they go down after a couple of hours. You like?’

  Well, as it happened, Max wasn’t particularly into big ones, but it seemed churlish to say so when a woman had just gone to the trouble of inflating her body for his benefit. Besides, Max’s libido was finally beginning to struggle through the fog of stale booze and old smokes that had so far kept it down and Krystal was a woman who would look good in any proportions. He definitely wanted to get horizontal with her. The problem was getting the message through downstairs.

  Max had had trouble with hard-ons for years. It was that age-old problem, erection awareness. The minute he started thinking about them, boof! they were gone. It was not a physical thing, it was purely mental. As every man knows, the penis is a paranoid portion. If it knows you’re worrying about it, it heads south. Fortunately there is a solution. It is a matter of getting one’s mind off the subject. Max’s method was to indulge in a discreet fantasy, in order to transport his libido away from the current pressurised circumstance. However, Krystal would not have felt put out had she been a party to Max’s secret thoughts for it was not other women of whom he thought, but of himself. Not sexually, but professionally. Max was an actor and the most exciting thing in the world to him was just how bloody good he was. He thought of the triumphs, the tears, the quirky little workshop productions he still got involved in because, despite being a megastar, he was first and foremost an artist. He thought about how great he looked warming up in leg warmers and an old torn T-shirt … and there it was, a great big proud upstander, all present, correct and ready for action.

  Krystal was pleased. As far as she was concerned, her inflatable tits had worked their magic.

  ‘So you do like,’ she purred, giving them a jiggle.

  ‘Sure I like, Krystal,’ Max said. ‘Just so long as they don’t go pop and you end up being blown all round the room like a balloon.’

  Raunchy sex scene.

  Max had already dropped his jeans and underpants in order to receive the laminate. Now he kicked off his mocassins, advanced across the room and stood before her, smouldering for a moment. Without taking his eyes off hers, he pulled off his T-shirt to reveal the taut, tanned torso beneath. He was naked, and looking great.

  Apart from his socks.

  Socks are terrible things. There is no way you can take them off in a sexually charged manner. Shoes, you can kick .

  T-shirts, you can pull … underwear you can drop … But socks, you have to hop around on one leg, tugging at. A few years previously, someone had attempted to market socks that dissolved under the heat of passion, but since the temperature of most people’s feet drops by about forty degrees the moment they get into bed with anyone, the idea was a flop.

  Having disposed of his socks as quickly as possible, Max gathered Krystal up in his arms and carried her to the bed. Max was a small man, but he was strong and wiry, and at just twenty-six the booze and smokes had yet to reduce his strength. They fell upon the bed together with the usual, slightly ungainly thud and tangle of arms and legs that traditionally accompanies this move. They both laughed a little, as if to acknowledge the moment, then they clinched into an embrace.

  It is an irony which only movie stars can truly appreciate that sex is not like in the movies. Here were two international icons of popular entertainment, who had delivered more sensational sauce in their time than Mr Heinz and yet, when it came to actually having it off for real, they were as dodgy as anybody else.

  ‘Your arm’s on my hair,’ Krystal said gently. ‘It’s pulling my hair.’

  Max whispered an apology and shifted, making them both yelp loudly because their skin had got stuck together and it hurt when Max moved his arm. Returning to the business at hand, Max placed his mouth gently on Krystal’s and began to tease her tongue with his. Moments later, like all couples, they had to stop
for a moment to fish the hair out of their mouths.

  In all the countless shows that Max had starred in, movies, Virtual Reality Reactive Scenarios, Direct Input home entertainments, all the times he had been called upon to plant huge lippy kisses on flaxen-haired beauties, never once had he fished a hair out of his mouth.

  He and Krystal returned to their embrace. There was another yelp.

  ‘Do you think perhaps you could take your watch off?’ Krystal inquired. ‘It’s in danger of amputating one of my buttocks.’

  Max’s watch was a fully-equipped home entertainment centre with a library of ballgame mini-vids and a six-pack of Dehydrated Budweiser. He took it off.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Krystal.

  ‘No, I should have remembered,’ said Max, smiling his sweetest smile.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Krystal said, ‘what’s happened to your mouth?… Oh no, hang on, it’s just my lipstick.’

  On-screen, of course, Krystal spent almost entire shows with her gums round some guy’s plums and still had impeccable lip-gloss when she came up for air. Off-screen, however, like any other woman she could smudge it eating a banana.

  Slowly the romance returned and the two lovers began to work their bodies against each other until Krystal opened her thighs and allowed Max to slip between them.

  ‘For old times’ sake, huh?’ she whispered.

  Max could not actually recall any old times but he was happy to believe there had been some, and with one smooth, gentle motion, he entered her.

  Except of course he didn’t. That was what he did in the movies. In the movies, one lover can gently enter another without so much as a guiding hand; without even breaking the embrace, they just slide in. This is, of course, virtually impossible. For a penis to simply glide into a vagina, whilst the lovers involved continue a passionate embrace, would actually require a funnel. In real life, people have to probe a bit.