Sex type thing

I am, I am, I am, I said I wanna get next to you
I said I wanna get close to you
You wouldn’t want me have to hurt you too, hurt you too...
- Stone Temple Pilots, 1992

Months ago at Phil’s place, I’d told Lena that to tell the end-of-Gasket story properly, she had to address the issue of McCarthy going rogue, and just as destructively, going Chastity. Fair enough, I’d said it as much to wind her up and probably to test the depths of her residual feelings for him than out of any basis in fact, though there was a certain pachyderm-in-the-localised-confined-space element to it all. Seemed she’d finally taken it to heart. Judging by the number of off-topic, warm-and-fuzzy questions Lena was asking, either she was making a fairly woolly attempt to soften Chastity up, or she was gathering puff-piece biographical material for a chapter on her in the book she wasn’t writing about Sam.

What it did was underline how much time played tricks, or probably more accurately, how fucking piss-addled I’d been in those dying days. Piss-addled and blinded by hate. I’d hated Chastity. Not rationally. Just as a symbol of everything shit that had become of McCarthy and of all of us. Still did, which was the surprise. Went beyond the smug sense of this-woman-is-a-skanky-ho which I remembered from Back In The Day and had been expecting to bring along to this afternoon’s picnic. These days, five or six years abstracted from the events and having spent a fair amount of the intervening time in the room of mirrors having a good hard look at myself, I’d become a lot more proficient in pulling apart my own motivations and understanding why I felt certain things about certain shit – stuff I maybe wouldn’t have admitted to myself at the time. I resented Chastity not just as a totem of what we’d become, I resented her for replacing Lena, for having no moral compass worth the name, for her unshatterable arrogance and ignorance, and let’s face it, for being a fucking thermonuclear hot twenty-something blonde who refused to sleep with me. Even when I’d asked so nicely. Yeah I didn’t tell you about that did I? Me at my charming best, drunk and belligerant at some post-gig Bacchanalian fest of excess. Pre-Rachel, I’d add. Never found out if, having shot me down in flames, she’d enlightened McCarthy about the incident. Probably. We weren’t getting on at the time, he’d have just chalked it up on his Big Board Of Shit He Hated Me For.

Yeah, so I hated Chastity, then as now. Hated her blindly enough to have missed the odd critical point about her. Like, point one, the fact she hadn’t been twenty-something when she was fucking McCarthy. And point two, she hadn’t been fucking McCarthy.

OK, point one. She couldn’t have been twenty-something when she was fucking-or-giving-the-impression-thereof McCarthy, unless that something was nine-and-a-bit. Quite a bit, considering she was now thirty-five, if my maths was right. Unfuckenlikely as that seemed considering my brain was splitting apart under the strain of simple arithmetic at this point in the hangover remediation process.

“I’m an Aries,” she’d said, “born in the year of the Tiger. I don’t accept being fucked with.”

My trusty Jesus Phone reckoned the Year of the Tiger was 1974. Or 1986, which would have made her about 17 when she was being squired around by McCarthy; which one could also file under ‘Unfuckenlikely’. Aries was March-ish (?) so she probably wasn’t quite 35 yet, but it was still a surprise to realise the venal little tramp was older than either McCarthy or me. Always had been too, by some strange quirk of the space-time continuum and general relativity. She carried her years well – though the teeth and hair and probably most of the face weren’t OEM fitment. I wondered if she even needed an American passport to get through Customs, she could just smile and they’d know she was a fucking Seppo because of the shininess of her teeth.

Chastity (just couldn’t get used to the idea of calling her Ms Stratford or Kathryn or whatever, so I chose not to) was giving us her astrological history by way of explaining why she’d come to flip off her oppressive Mormon familial handlers – not to mention a step-brother or two with un-Christian intentions – and ran away to join the circus. Or some form of performing troupe, at least; a touring brigade of erotic dancers who happened to be touring through town. That, in a roundabout way, took her to southern California and the ‘other’ Silicon Valley – where the silicon tends to be found in the performers rather than in circuitboards – and eventually, as the months endured, a career performing sexual acts on herself and other like-minded young women, or as like-minded as the appearance fee was likely to make them.

So, why porn?

“Instead of fucking flower arranging, you mean?” Chastity offered with a snide smirk. She’d always known she was different to other girls, she said. Always felt sexual. Never quite understood the artificially high price other girls put on their sexuality. Hearing this I remembered talking with Lauren once where she’d said similar stuff – the difference being Lauren had (eventually) gone back to uni to research the socio-cultural basis of it all, ended up being a fairly respected writer and commentator on female sexuality, in between writing dirty books for nice-but-secretly-dirty-girls to entertain themselves with (in fact, dirty books had paid for her postgrad study.) Chastity didn’t seem to care remotely about the psychomechanics behind it; just that it gave her a competitive advantage – not just over other girls, but over boys. From the first boy to give her fifty cents to lift her skirt and show him her panties after Sunday school, to the sweating, nervous punters at Sexpo lining up to pay cash for a photo opp with their favourite service representative from their personal Spank Bank. Men who only understood women if they were on all fours on screen, offering themselves to being exploited and degraded. While in the process being exploited and degraded themselves, of course.

So what made a nice Mormon girl run away and join the circus? “Money, baby. The money was gooood. Always likely to be, long as there’s desperate fuckin’ losers with their cock in one hand and their cash in the other…”

Or their credit card details. At the peak of her career Chastity had her own website as a contract girl with apparently-very-high-profile (or so Phil tells me *cough*) gloss-porn outfit Twisty’s, raking coin out of that aforementioned client base. Yet now, no more. Why no more? Sure she was mid-thirties now, but presumably there was still a market for lesbian MILF porn, I thought. Not being an expert, of course.

“It’s not some new-found moral outrage on my part, if that’s what you’re looking for,” she began sarcastically. “I did what I did, I’d do it again. But the industry’s changed. From here to San Bernadino, all you see are hundreds of fucking little fame-whore fuck-sponges, all wanna be Jenna Jameson.” Chastity stared derisively into the lens of the webcam, which was a little unexpected - Skype seemed to be all about not-quite-making-eye-contact given the offset of the other peeps' image and the location of the camera, but being an actress, she knew where her camera was. “Noone can be Jenna Jameson any more. Not when there’s a hundred more of them willing to do the most extreme shit imaginable just to get on the first step of the ladder.” An ironic half-laugh, just an intake of breath. “I got to choose what I did and didn’t do on camera. Image rights, artistic veto. That ain’t happening in 2009.”

“Yes, I’m sure there was a time was when porn was a noble, classy occupation…”

Ahh, knew Lena couldn’t keep that bottled. I knew her too well. She resented not many things more than women who priced their sexuality much, much cheaper than herself, mainly because of the difficulties it put her into in the dating market – with the obvious, though always-denied, subtext re McCarthy trading her in for Chastity. Ironically, that meant she and Chastity were on the same side of the fence on this one, in a weird kind of way…

“See… from what I’ve heard, I’d expect that from you.” A look that could curdle glass. “Matches all I’ve heard about you over the years. That Lena, man, she’s all about the moral high ground. Except when it comes to the ethics of her own fucking job…”

Wahey! Gloves were off. Wish I’d brought popcorn. Or biersticks.

“By which, you mean what, exactly?”

Deffo biersticks.

Chastity laughed. “Have you ever broken a big story that hasn’t involved someone you were fucking, chica?” She pronounced it Leena. I knew she’d hate that. “Just askin’.”

Lena exhaled. Keep it professional, girl. “I’m not going to sit here and be lectured on sexual ethics by a woman who used to fuck garden vegetables for a living. If you’re done, shall we continue the interview?”

“Sure,” Chastity replied, with the hint of a smile. I got the impression she was enjoying this. More than Lena was, anyway. Most judges would have scored Chastity as winning that round on points.

“So, regarding those desperate fucking losers of which you speak…”

“Like your ex-boyfriend?”

“I had meant the client base you seem to respect so much, but why not, let’s have that discussion now shall we?”

“The one where I explain how I taught him how to fuck?” Yup, she was enjoying this. I could see Lena trying to keep herself on message. She knew she was being baited. Straight bat, straight elbow, head over the ball.

“How fucking charitable of you,” Lena muttered sarcastically. “Everyone has a calling, I’m glad you found yours. Fucking pop singers to get your photo in gossip mags.”

Yeah, like Polish-Italian chicks have much of a forward defence.

“You wanna know somethin’?” Chastity retorted. “I never let him fuck me. The. Whole. Time.”

Lena actually laughed. “So what, you played chess? Had long debates on classical art and literature? Because you were soooo on the same intellectual plane as him, weren’t you sweetie?” Lena shook her head. Get back on message girl, this isn’t getting us anywhere, went my internal monologue and probably hers as well. “Hell of a way to have a meaningful relationship. Particularly one worth blackmailing his family over…”

“We didn’t have a relationship,” Chastity retorted, angrily, suddenly. “We had an arrangement. We both knew what it was. He fucked it up, he paid for it.”

That… felt like an overshare. Looked like one, too, judging by the slightly self-conscious way Chastity drew on her ciggie. Real anger. Sudden loss of control. Lena considered her next question carefully. Wasn’t quite blood in the water, but that, all of a sudden, looked like a bit of a flail.

“This arrangement you speak of… what did that entail?”

“What the fuck do you think it ‘entailed’? Drugs and girls. He had what I needed, I gave him what he wanted. He liked to watch, and I got paid to be watched for a living anyway.”

“He paid you to have sex with women he picked up on the scene. Paid in contra, in lines, but paid nonetheless.”

A pause. “All sex is prostitution,” she retorted. Ah, so she was a philosopher after all. “Whether you’re putting on a show for a little bit of sugar, or you’re letting him fuck you because you think he loves you.” Not even pretending to disguise who that was aimed at. “Giving up your soul as well as your body… you tell me who the whore is.”

“The one who trades sex for drugs, technically, would be the whore. Actually I believe they call that being a crack-whore.”

“I never let him fuck me.”

“You seriously expect me to believe that?”

“I don’t give a fuck what you believe. Only doing girls on camera… that wasn’t a fucking career choice. I don’t like guys. Never have. Not attracted to them, don’t let them fuck me, on-screen or off. Could have made a fuckload more money if I had. You don’t think I had asshole producers in my ear every fucking week about how I needed to stop being a fucking pretender, just get over myself, make some fucking money?”

A tumbler of something materialized to wash down the bitterness. She grimaced. If she WAS in WA, for whatever reason I hoped Lena would get around to asking, it was still mid-morning. Rock and roll.

“That was the deal we had. He got me what I needed, and he got what he needed out of them afterwards. And it worked. Till he decided that wasn’t good enough, and decided to take something he didn’t have rights to.”

It was hard to make it out on Skype – grainy, shuddery, pixellated Skype – but the slender fingers that held that glowing Marlboro were trembling. And I’d have sworn her eyes were reddening. Me, I felt sick, but I’d been tasting sick in the back of my throat ever since the morning’s flight. I just really, really didn’t want this conversation to go where I was now pretty sure it was going to go.

“After all that shit with Priddle blew up – fucking asshole turns up in a stolen cop car shot up like Escobar’s fucking holiday pinata, you start thinking lay low, yeah? – he went off and stayed in some old lighthouse keeper’s cottage on the coast to get his shit together. Which was All. Over. The. Fucking. Place. He was sick and fucked up and using heaps of shit. I was fighting with my studio anyways, they wanted to rip up my contract because I’d been away from the States too long, I was just fucking over it. I just hired a car on someone’s credit card and disappeared for a while. Figured out what I wanted to do. Which was get the fuck away from Sam and Priddle and all the rest of that shit once and for all.

“A few days later he phoned me up, sounding more together, said he wanted to see me. I wasn’t gonna go, but he insisted. He sounded better. So I went, just to end it.”

That taste of sick was intensifying.

“…He ended it, all right. He hit me as I came through the door,” she said, touching her fingertips to her temple. “Dragged me into the basement by my wrists, down the stairs, kicking and screaming. Locked the door. Tied me to the hot water pipes…”

No further words were forthcoming, from her or from anyone else. Seemed Priddle wasn’t the only one with a thing for taking what wasn’t his to take. Jesus, fuck, no. You didn’t. You cunt, Sam. You cunt. And all I could think was: whatever you do, don’t throw up, or she’ll hear, and she’ll know you’re here.

“I’m sorry,” Lena began, and the reason why was obvious for anyone not in the crash position trying not to lose their lunch: furious, ashamed tears rolling down Chastity’s face. “I don’t need to hear about…”

“Yes you fucking do,” came the response, so angry and forceful that the sound distorted on the audio. “You need to know what kind of fucking asshole your long lost loverboy fucking boyfriend was. You need to know just what he did to me.” Voice cracking. “The hours he kept me there. Getting off on me screaming and crying and begging him to stop. Getting off on telling me I’d never see daylight again. That sound like your sweet little innocent boy, Lena? The one you’re still so fucking hung up on you can’t fucking let this shit go?”

We’d well and truly overstepped the mark of what was professional investigative journalism and what was stabbing someone’s open wounds with a sharp shitty stick, I thought. Because I could buy it. His head was in a fucking twisted mess by then. You could imagine, just from those vids of what they got up to, him finally snapping and getting some sort of sick revenge on the girl who’d spent most of her life teasing boys with her body for money. Turned my stomach, it did. Particularly after all his bestie Priddle had put Rachel and me through – and this was after that had happened. Quite the fucking inspiration.

Lena hadn’t joined the same dots, not outwardly; she was playing the detached, sceptical journo.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“What the fuck? Same fucking reason Rachel didn’t. You don’t have a fucking clue, do you? How many rape cases get resolved through the courts? Less than one fucking percent? Why the fuck would I want to go through that?”

“I could see how your chosen career would have counted against you,” Lena said. I suppose she thought she was trying to be supportive.The look she was getting in return was pure evil.

“You know, you’d have made a brilliant attorney, Lena. You think like them. With no fucking morals or humanity whatsoever.”

“It wasn’t me who did this to you, Ms Stratford,” Lena said calmly. My read of Lena’s face was she doubted anyone had. Or didn’t want to believe it, in any case.

Chastity made an effort to gather herself together, choking down on her anger. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry this is how you find out what sort of asshole he was. He meant something to you. He must have, or we wouldn’t be having this fucking conversation.”

“So rather than involve the police, you resolved the situation… financially?”

The inference was, she’d been paid off. The inference being she was a whore, all over again. The inference didn’t sit well with Chastity, but that was because it was factual. “He disappeared soon after. I heard from someone, a mutual friend, that he was in New Zealand. By the time I tracked him down, he’d fucking killed himself, and the Fyfes had covered it up. As you know.”

“So you…”

Chastity knew what we wanted to ask. She wasn’t proud, but she wasn’t backing down. She’d gone into action-heroine mode; she was going to take out as many of us as she could on her way out.

“So I threatened to go to the papers about his death and what he’d done to me.”

“His word against yours, though?”

She laughed bitterly. “That fucking camera of his…”

By now I was watching from between my fingers, like a horror film. This was turning out like a very wrong version of a Mia Lauren plotline - I was just glad Don Richardson hadn’t sent me that part of McCarthy’s video collection. This is fucking sordid, isn’t it? This is what happens when you give average blokes all the fame and sex and drugs and adulation you can. They turn into absolute cunts. Whether they’re football players or rock musos, the line between normal bloke and absolute cunt is frighteningly narrow. Probably because normal blokes are pretty much cunts to start with, as you’ll know if you’ve spent any time in male-only company. I don’t really need to say that I was feeling much more part of the problem than the solution, after what I’d done that morning.

“…Anyway, as you now know, we came to an arrangement. The difference being with the Fyfes, they honour theirs.”

“They’re good people,” Lena offered.

An ironic sneer. “You think so? Is that why you’ve reduced Anne to tears twice over this?” Chastity flicked her ash contemptuously away. Cigarettes were an awesome prop. “That’s the only reason I agreed to do this. To stop you persecuting them. They’re good people, they don’t deserve you trying to dig up shit on them. Fuck, to think they’d always seen you as their future fucking sister in law…” That came served more than a little bitter around the edges, a girl who knew her place.

“They must be good people,” Lena reasoned, weighting her words carefully. “They’ve certainly looked after you.”

A sarcastic snort. “Yeah, they’re good people. Just happened to have a complete asshole of a brother.”

The agreement itself, of course, was covered by confidentiality and non-disclosure provisions – which, I wondered afterwards, had probably been broken by us discussing it, but it became pretty clear the chances of this story ever reaching the public were extremely low. By the way Lena dissolved into tears the moment Chastity had disappeared off her laptop screen. Just buried her head in her hands and sobbed and sobbed. This story wasn’t going to press. There was no way she could write it.

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

No reaction to that.

“It’s not your fault,” I repeated. “He and the plot fucked off in separate directions long before you and he did, you know that. You KNOW that.”

“He tried getting rough with me once,” she admitted, sniffling. “Late on. Final days. I thought he was joking, but he suddenly seemed serious. Started hurting me, saying all kinds of horrible shit. I slapped him and kneed him in the balls. It was one of the last times we ever fucked, or got close enough to.” Lena was taller than Chastity, stronger too. Made a difference, possibly.

She looked up at me. I was standing, hands in pockets, presumably looking as grim as I felt.

“What are you thinking?” she wanted to know.

“I’m thinking I threw the wrong cunt down the stairs,” I replied.

So, after that, busting out the happy-smiley shit for Channel V at Fox Studios was quite the struggle. That’s what we paid wee Marty for, though. The camera loved him. As did the squealy girlies. I just concentrated on looking professionally seedy. I’m a rock star dammit, I’m supposed to look like a surly nonchalant bastard. Got me through, though. Dinner was at Rockpool – Marty’s ‘real’ birthday do, as in the one that Maddy had organised. Family and close friends only. No idea how we’d been invited. Food was excellent though. Or so I’m told. I fell asleep in my chair before the main, and someone – apparently Jeff – had taken me back to the hotel and put me to bed. Not really brotherly concern on his part, he’d also felt about as welcome at the event as a fart in a spacesuit and was looking for an excuse to GTFO, and a brother snoring in his entrée was as good as any. Still, it was the most civil he’d been since the BDO tour had started, so that was a positive. About the only positive I was able to pull out of today. Particularly since I thrashed awake at 3am like John Hurt birthing an alien, and was still staring at the sprinkler in the ceiling come sunrise.

I was going to have to go through detox again. It was a slow, seeping realisation, that depressed the living hell out of me. It wasn’t the drinking, though I could do with doing less of that. It was just… I couldn’t be a normal, responsible, grown-up male. I’d had something pretty awesome with Beth. No idea what it was, or where it was going, but you don’t need me to tell you that a girl who likes you enough to share all her most intimate secrets and fantasies with you, just because she can and because she wants to, is a girl you probably should have taken better care of. But no. Given opportunity, I’d strayed. Because given opportunity, I would always stray. I always had. I probably would have strayed the night before (the night before, for fuck’s sake! What the fuck was wrong with me?) with Lauren, if she’d let me.

Maybe it was a subconscious acknowledgement that Beth was going to leave me one day, and I hated that – hated being left, hated not leaving relationships on my terms, no matter how deep or how shallow my investment in them. Or maybe it was just an acknowledgement of the fact Annalise was smoking fucking hot and I was still a functional male. I shouldn’t be overanalysing this, I thought. As I entered my third glorious hour of overanalysis. Dawn came, my brain was in ruins, and yet I still had only one concrete conclusion I’d been able to take out of the past 12 hours. I’d thrown the wrong cunt down the stairs.