He sensed a change in Catherine’s mood.
She leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “Let’s go to the playroom.”
He was less keen on Catherine’s new proposal. She got to her feet and tugged him forward by his leash. He followed on hands and knees, devotedly close to her heels, eyes raised no higher than where her leggings stopped just short of her ankles.
If the Club’s main room was a place for relaxation and a drink, the playroom was where darker fantasies could be played out. Catherine rarely used it. She was content for men to cower at her feet, humiliated and demeaned. She rarely felt the need to inflict physical pain. But sometimes, she thought, it may be necessary — or fun.
Sam was dry-mouthed. He found the discomforts of the playroom hard to endure. The bondage and beatings he could take but other things, well, they were harder.
His nervousness was made worse by the care with which she strapped him to the bondage frame against the long wall of the room. He stared at her hands as she fastened the buckles. Her finger nails were long and brightly varnished, Sam found it hard to see how she managed to do anything without breaking them. His response was conflicted; comforted by the fact that she knew what she was doing but disturbed by the effectiveness of the restraints she had applied.
“Now let’s play the interrogation game, guaillou,” Catherine said scraping her finger nails across his naked chest. “Do you like role playing? I will be vicious MCF officer and you will be arrested subversive. How about that?”
Sam’s squeak of concern made Catherine think that for him this was more than a role play. It felt like there was some guilt behind his reaction. Guilt that might make it worth someone taking a look at Inky Skin; guilt that might be worth keeping an eye on his tracking data.
Chapter 16: Hotel Barnard
Norm’s hotel was one of those nondescript terraced houses of which the capital has so many. Not far from the King’s Road, it had been a fashionable place in the 1960’s; the haunt of photographers, minor pop stars, fashion models that might almost make it and criminals that almost certainly did. Now it was run down and tired which was just how Norm was feeling.
The woman on the check in-desk acted like she had never seen an Irish passport before. “Where’s your ident card?” she’d asked.
“We don’t have them in Eire,” Norm responded, showing her his passport. She’d looked back barely believing him. “It’s only your English men that need them.”
“Don’t get clever with me.” She slapped a key down on the desk. “Have a nice stay, Mr O’Neill. Oh, and I have a message for you.” She passed across a small envelope.
Norm wondered whether all British women had got more aggressive over the time he’d been away. It certainly seemed that way. The good-hearted camaraderie of the bar in the Pride of Eirean seemed a way more attractive option than here.
Norm made his way upstairs. A swarthy man with a care-worn expression was pushing a cleaning cart along the corridor. “209?” Norm asked.
“End of the corridor on the right,” the cleaner said, looking startled to have been spoken too.
It was a small room looking out from the back of the hotel. There wasn’t much of a view unless you were a student of dustbins and fire escape stairways. The décor was tired and the towels in the bathroom thin but it was reasonably clean and not too far from the centre of London. Best of all it was nondescript and unlikely to attract anyone’s attention. It would do for the couple of nights that Norm was expecting to stay.
He opened the envelope that the woman at check-in had given him. “267 Vauxhall Bridge Road” was all it said. Norm looked at his watch. It was seven in the evening. He didn’t want to risk being picked up for breaking the curfew. It was probably best to leave it until tomorrow.
He thought about getting some food but decided trying to find a restaurant that allowed unaccompanied males was probably too much of a challenge. He called out on the room’s phone for a pizza. He browsed channels on the TV. The programmes looked duller than those he had become used to in Ireland and there were way too many with politician’s talking for Norm’s taste. Dissatisfied, he flicked the TV off.
He pulled out the pamphlet he had got from the airport. It didn’t look like there were any significant changes to the male control regulations since he had left. The curfew was still in place — although it ran between nine o’clock in the evening and five in the morning now. Not heading out for a meal or going to number 267 had been a good call. He remembered enough about the enthusiasm the MCF had for enforcing the curfew in his home town. He certainly didn’t want to try ignoring it in central London where there would be a whole lot more of them about.
According to the pamphlet, the street signs for “women only” pedestrian areas and those that permitted accompanied males were still the same. Bus services and train services still ran with segregated accommodation and in some cases with women only services. The general advice that “many public buildings, shops and businesses operate their own policies in respect of serving or admitting men” told of how commercial interests had quickly cottoned on to the main opportunity and recognised that the ones with the economic power in society now were the women.
So, thought Norm, the message is, if you’re a man, you can’t or shouldn’t have. Better still don’t even think about it.
Someone had left the previous day’s newspaper in the room. Norm picked it up and looked through it. There seemed to be a lot about the latest government appointments, whose star was in the ascendant and whose in decline. Needless to say there were no well-endowed young ladies of the type whose pictures graced the magazines he’d been smuggling across the border into Ulster. One article caught his eye. “The Fordswell Bombing, One Year On” the headline read. It summed up the trial and conviction of David Anders and the others but was sceptical as to whether they were the only ones involved. He’d known David. They used to meet in the village pub sometimes. The article couldn’t really make up its mind whether David had been a dupe of the security services and the whole thing had been a put up job designed to flush out potential dissidents or that there had been some other shadowy group responsible that the government was covering up for reasons of its own. One thing it did seem sure of was that someone was hiding something. Norm felt a simpler answer was most likely to be the truth. David must have got into a right state to try something like that. He felt sorry for the man.
Norm’s pizza arrived, courtesy of a disgruntled delivery driver, an hour later. The beer was warm and the pizza was almost cold. It didn’t make for a great evening. He spent most of it imagining what he could be doing with the woman in the trench coat that he’d met in the Pig’s Tale bar eighteen months ago. Mainly, it involved things that he hadn’t been able to indulge in since before New Order came to power and certainly nothing that his girlfriend, Beth, would have gone along with.