A Traitor to Memory

Number Thirty-two was the house she wanted, and Eugenie saw that it would be far up the street, on the other side. She walked up the pavement for twenty-five yards. At that hour the houses she passed were mostly unlit, and if she hadn't been nervous enough about the coming interview, her state of anxiety was heightened by the darkness and by what her active imagination was telling her could be hidden there. So she decided to be careful, as a woman alone in a city on a rainy night in late autumn ought to be careful. She ventured off the pavement and proceeded on her way in the middle of the road, where she would have advance warning should anyone want to attack her.

She thought it unlikely. It was a decent neighbourhood. Still, she knew the value of caution, so she was grateful when the lights swept over her, telling her that a vehicle had turned into the street behind her. It was coming along slowly, the way she herself had come and doing what she herself had been doing, looking for that most precious of London commodities: a place to park. She turned, stepped back against the nearest vehicle, and waited for the car to pass her. But as she did so, it pulled to one side and blinked its lights, telling her that the way was hers.

Ah, she'd been mistaken, she thought, resettling her umbrella against her shoulder and going on her way. The car wasn't waiting for a parking space at all, but rather for someone to come out of the house in front of which it sat. She gave a quick glance over her shoulder when she reached this conclusion, and as if the unknown driver was reading her thoughts, the car's horn beeped once abruptly, like a parent who'd come calling for an unresponsive child.

Eugenie continued walking. She counted the house numbers as she passed. She saw Number Ten and Number Twelve. She'd gone barely six houses from her own car when the steady light behind her shifted, then went out altogether.

Odd, she thought. You can't just park in the street like that. And thinking this, she began to turn. Which was, as it happened, not the worst of her mistakes.

Bright lights blazed on. She was instantly blinded. Blinded, she froze as the hunted often do.

An engine roared and tyres wailed against the roadway.

When she was hit, her body flew up, her arms flung wide, and her picture frame shot up like a rocket into the cold night air.

2





J. W. PITCHLEY, AKA TongueMan, had experienced an excellent evening. He'd broken Rule One—never suggest meeting anyone with whom one has engaged in cybersex—but it had all worked out, proving to him yet again that his instincts for picking fruit past its prime but all the juicier for having hung disregarded on the tree so long were as finely honed as a surgical tool.

Humility and honesty forced him to admit that it hadn't been that much of a risk, however. Any woman who called herself CreamPants was as good as advertising what she wanted, and if he'd had any doubts about that, five meetings on-line that had had him coming into his Calvin Klein jockeys without the slightest handshake of the organ on his part should have set his mind at rest. Unlike his four other current cyberlovers—whose spelling skill was, alas, often as limited as their imaginations—CreamPants had a capacity for fantasy that cooked his brain and a natural ability to express that fantasy that stiffened his cock like a divining rod the moment she logged on the net.

Creamy here, she would write. R U rdy 4 it, Tongue?

Oh my. Oh yes. He always was.

So he'd taken the metaphorical plunge himself this time instead of waiting for his cyberspondent to do so. This was wildly out of character for him. Usually, he played along cooperatively, always there at the other end of on-line encounters when one of his lovers wanted action but never venturing into the arena of embodiment unless or until his partner suggested it. Following this pattern, he'd successfully transformed exactly twenty-seven Super Highway encounters into twenty-seven intensely satisfying trysts at the Comfort Inn on Cromwell Road—a wise and cautious distance from his own neighbourhood and night-clerked by an Asian gentleman whose memory for faces took a far back seat to his abiding passion for videos of old BBC costume dramas. Thus, only once had he found himself the victim of a practical cyberjoke, agreeing to meet a lover called DoMeHard and discovering two spotty-faced twelve-year-olds dressed like the Kray brothers waiting for him instead. No matter, though. He'd sorted them out quick enough and he was fairly certain they'd not be trying that little caper on-line again.

But CreamPants had got to him. R U rdy 4 it? She had him wondering almost from the first if she could do in person what she could do with words.

That was always the question, wasn't it? And anticipating, fantasising, and securing the answer were part of the fun.

He'd worked very hard to bring CreamPants round to suggesting that they meet. He climbed to new and dizzying heights of descriptive licentiousness with the woman. To develop more ideas in the carnal vein, he'd spent six hours over a fortnight browsing through the paraphernalia of pleasure in those windowless shops in Brewer Street. And when he finally found himself spending his daily commute into the City wrapped up in lustful visions of their sated bodies inextricably twined on the hideously hued counterpane of a Comfort Inn bed—this, instead of reading the Financial Times, that daily staple of his career—he knew that he had to take action.

So Want it 4 real? he'd finally written to her. R U rdy 4 a rsk?