Perpetuas Revenge

He walked out of the cemetery gates blinded by an accusing sun. Its harsh glare seemed to persecute him. The only woman in his life who was worthy of his love and respect, and now she was gone. If ever he had been lonely for a woman before it was a feeling he could always counter, but in his current state it was a deep trench of emptiness and loss.

He would never have thought to reach out to anyone for support in the past but he decided to contact a woman who had pursued him several years ago. She had written him love letters, erotic stories, sent him photos and made concerted attempts to engage him in some kind of romantic relationship from a distant country. He largely ignored her, and after a year of his infrequent and patronising responses he heard no more from her.

All he had was a post office box and some old phone numbers and attempts to contact her by email had failed. He knew her line of work and figured he could track her down. He had two weeks holiday so on a whim he booked a flight to Sydney, Australia. He arrived to find a gorgeous harbour city with generous parklands of elephantine fig trees and rolling lawns. The public spaces were relaxed and in shops people spoke quietly, if at all. On first impression they were an odd, blank folk who seemed to be hiding from each other.

He went to some music venues and asked around about the woman. In no time at all he met a former colleague who told him that she had been very active in her work since returning from overseas. The colleague also said that he hadn't seen her for quite some time and wondered what had happened to her. He supplied the number of a close friend and suggested he contact her for more information.

The woman he spoke to said that her friend was a recluse, not professionally active due to an extreme negative reaction to what she described as "an unacceptable mediocrity" around her, and was last known to be woodshedding a project involving string harmonics. Apparently she was working on a recording of multi layered harmonics of the six string electric bass and the double bass. It was unknown how she was earning a living because she had sworn off teaching or doing any gigs. Bob told the woman he had been romantically involved with her friend and that he wanted to reconcile aspects of this with her. The woman looked at him with some suspicion, and then said,

"She was deeply affected that you wouldn't return her love," ventured her friend.

"Couldn't, not wouldn't," Bob replied.

"Whatever," the woman said curtly, and handed him her friend's address and walked off without another word.

Of course there was no one home, that day, that night, or any other morning or evening when he visited the old house where she was supposed to live. He couldn't stalk the street as he was a tourist without a car, so periodically he would try the house and then walk down to the local shops and use his laptop in a café.

Eventually he left a note in her letterbox to arrange a meeting. When the arranged day and time arrived he was a half an hour late due to getting lost on the Sydney rail network. She wasn't at the café, if she'd ever been there, so he walked up to her house. He had just turned the corner to her street when he saw some activity at the house. A late model black BMW was parked in the driveway, numberplate "JL", and he barely recognised her getting into the passenger side as her hair was now a rich auburn and she was dressed immaculately in a cherry pink suit and high heels. He called out to her but she appeared not to hear. The car drove by brusquely. He waved at the smoky tinted windows but there was no response.

He returned to the café feeling dejected and, bored out of his mind, started trawling his favourite websites -- the porn parade type. He found the Chicks Over Fifty site and enjoyed seeing the graphic photos of grey haired duchesses taking in seven and eight inches of hardness from behind. At the side of the screen he noticed a link to a website called Just Lust, a brothel that specialised in escorts over fifty years old, and double clicked on it.

"Fulfilling that special niche where gentlemen appreciate experience that comes packaged in a mature woman. Private and discreet."

He had never been to a brothel in his life and although he felt wretchedly lonely for a woman he had never had to pay for sex and wasn't about to now. The ad showed full body shots of the women without their faces. He scrolled through the photos of Kim Kum Asian Spice, Jewels of Julie, Theresa's Tease, and one Perpetua's Revenge, a name about which he pondered. The photo showed the torso of woman who had beauty spots near her navel, rounded breasts, and smooth relaxed hips. He felt his member rousing in his shorts and thought he'd better keep moving, so he paid the bill and headed back to the woman's street and left another note in the letterbox to explain his non-appearance at the cafe.

After a day he had still not received a call from her so he thought he had better work a little harder in hunting this woman down. He hadn't expected an object so elusive, he had come all this way, and at this rate he was going to be returning home without ever speaking with her. He Googled her name and came up with links to her academic thesis and old threads on electric bass forums regarding string harmonics. A surprising hit came up on the subject of field recordings of birdsong being used to make soundscapes and the link was to a community radio station. It was a long shot but he took down the phone number.

As it happened it was a local radio station broadcasting from the very suburb he was in. He could walk there. An overstuffed noticeboard displayed the programme schedules: Smooth Jazz for Drivetime, Tenors of our Time, they had it all covered, including the experimental music show: "Perpetua" which was described as

"exploring the textures of the dark hours with original soundscapes"

And it was hosted by none other than Madame Perpetua herself.

He lay on his hotel bed at midnight all churned up from the Jack Daniels and his fractured state of loss and confusion and tuned into 97.5 FM. Her voice was unmistakeable: clear and precise, economic in phrasing, and sweet in tone, if a shade dark. Over the course of an hour she played two tracks: one from The Necks, and a soundscape of her own making. It was some of the weirdest construction of sounds he'd ever heard. He could barely keep listening for its intensity. It was layered sound "parcels" which were made from spliced fragments of birdsong that were being used as musical notes and then woven into elaborate rhythmic structures. It was very rich but strange. He rang up the station as soon as she had programmed the next item.

"It's Bob."

"I went to the café," she answered with a neutral tone, and it was hard to gauge her mood.

"Can we talk?" he offered.

"Ring the bell five times at about lunchtime tomorrow," she said and then hung up abruptly.

After all his efforts to find her and here he was now standing outside her door and his heart was pounding. He rang the doorbell five times. At least a minute had passed before he heard any footfalls down the hall. She answered the door in her pyjamas and her hair was tousled as if she had just risen. She smiled at him and leaned forward and kissed him on his right cheek. She was very talkative, and spoke quickly with the words sometimes runningintoeachother. She shared the house with two others who were at work. Her room was a large dining room off the wide hallway. Inside a cacophony of cables and equipment dominated the room and tucked into a corner was an unmade single bed. He really wanted to kiss her and give her his big warm embrace but she talked frenetically about the sound projects she was working on.

She described how she had made numerous field recordings when she was overseas and played him a charming Jamaican folk song with the refrain: "Brown Girl in the Ring", and asked him if he remembered her playing it to him the afternoon she recorded it off the pier in Ocho Rios. He didn't and it seemed to disappoint her a little. On a small mp3 recorder she had also collected strange clusters of frequencies that had occurred naturally in the environment. There was a very strange combination of sounds taken from a toy shop in Chinatown, San Francisco of a huqin busker. She had collected all manner of material: king salmon jockeying for position in an Alaskan river, squirrels, jangling horse carriages, a steam train, noisy flocks of gobsmacked tourists at the sight of a grizzly bear, a Canadian baseball match, a Garifuna percussion troupe, Honduran marimba, the bizarre tongue spoken in the Dutch Antilles called Papiamento, and so on. She had software on her computer which could sculpt a note of any length, articulation, or dynamic from the raw material. Then she would put the "notes" together using Cuban and Bulgarian dance rhythms. It was quite weird and he thought that she may be just a little mad.

"Did you miss me?" he finally interjected with some impatience.

"This is what I've been up to," she digressed, and walked over to the double bass resting in the corner. She played a long solo. It began with the bow singing long, plaintive, serpentine phrases from the harmonic minor scale that reached to the higher registers. It snaked its way in a steady 7/4 melodic line and then picked up to a sprightly 6/8 dance. Then she plucked out a hypnotic ostinato phrase in 5/4 which made him feel relaxed and more than just a little horny. It moved into a fast odd meter dance and then she tapped on the body of the bass a Bulgarian 11/8 dance figure and then, without dropping a single quaver, picked up the line on the G string with lots of ghosted notes and it worked its way up and down the G string become more and more frenetic until it gave way in a release of the open G. She played through chords and double stops with a gentle strumming. The piece ended with some bluesy Charles Mingus like phrases.

He felt saddened by it, by her remoteness, by his pain of loss, and he shed a quiet tear. She noticed but responded by offering to get him a coffee. While she was gone he tried to work out what was going on. To him her life seemed extremely disorganised. If the room and her appearance and demeanour were anything to go by it was a mess, yet she was producing something extraordinary, if eccentric. He looked around the room for clues. A large walnut wardrobe was in one corner. He quietly opened it and saw hanging inside more than a dozen glamorous outfits, a tight black cutaway dark brown leathercatsuit, laced bodiced corsets, a red leather halter neck minidress, high heel boots, stilettos, fringed belts, and a box overflowing with scanty lingerie with price tags on them.

There was a bikini made entirely from torquoise peacock feathers. There were French style knickers made out of small pearls and light pink silk. There was a pair of panties made out of hot pink soft goosedown. He came across a silver G string with diamante studs spelling "Just Lust". His heart missed a beat. Then he heard her approach the bedroom and he quietly closed the wardrobe.

"What are you doing?" he asked impertinently.

"How do you mean?" she asked.

"What are you doing for a living?" he demanded.

"I'm stringing together a living, I'm doing okay," she answered, but soon she was talking about submitting her CDs to an agent in Europe, where sound designers are making musicians redundant in the creative audio arts industry.

"Who is Perpetua?" he interrupted.

"She's a figment," she answered.

"Of your revenge?" he pulled out mercilessly. She laughed, but there was little humour in it.

"Revenge is both a creative and destructive act," she said finally. "So you don't approve, well, I think I can live with that." She began moving around the room re-organising wires and cables and continued talking quickly around him.

"I started out making designs for novelty underwear, you know, knickers and bras made from fig leaves, or from fresh flowers, fringed corsets in the saloon girl style, bras made entirely of feathers, stuff like that. Then I got on to making this line of edible lingerie. It was hit, no-one else had done it before! Bras made out of hazelnut wafers, paired with dark chocolate panties. When Beyonce was in town she placed some advance orders for her and her all-female band. They ordered the tropical fruits line, you know, a bikini made from fresh strawberries, couriered to the aftershow party in an esky pack ... oh, and the lusty muscatel grape knickers. Baby, yes, please! She invited me to the party where I was hit upon severally by the trumpet player, percussionist and keyboards player.

"That was a turning point in the business because after that the word got around and it took off among young wealthy brides who bought them for their wedding night. I never had to advertise and they were ready to pay big bucks for them. I made a packet and bought all this audio equipment.

"So the project was going along great guns, and then at a wedding of a pair of Sydney CIB detectives the guests drank the bar dry, and there was a big stink over the mess they made of the premises, with guests throwing up everywhere, and there were official complaints and someone mentions the edible underwear of the bride, and so the lingerie ends up taking the rap for all their hard liquor excesses. They blamed it on salmonella poisoning from the beef jerky garter! You know, only a cop would place a custom order for a carnivorous piece of lingerie. The Health Department declared the business a public risk and shut me down. About a month later one of the wedding guests contacted me. She was a brothel keeper and asked me to make some custom designs for an establishment that specialised in Women Of A Certain Age."

He had a hard on now but she was not giving him anything back. She went over to her computer and opened up a folder entitled "Voice Files January to March 08". They were numerically listed but she went straight to one and double clicked on it and turned up the volume on the speaker. He could hear panting and heavy breathing and soft wordless sounds. It sounded like a couple having sex. She had her back to him and her head bowed down as if in deep concentration so he couldn't see her face.

"I love (long pause) you." He heard a man's voice and recognised it as himself. It was a recording from when they were making love in his officer's cabin several years ago.

"What did you just say to me?" said the woman.

"I said, "I love kissing you"". He answered.

She said, "I love your kisses too."

"What are you doing?" he said quietly.

"It's my latest project. The porn performance artist, Linda Sprinkle, has commissioned a sound design for her retrospective exhibition to open in New York in 2010. I've got hours of this erotic material. By the time I've finished with this triple cream audio experience the sound design world just might have a coronary."

"Please," he said simply, but she was apologising about having to cut their meeting short due to an appointment. It was Friday afternoon.

"Are you going to work?" he asked.

"Yes, my one and only job of the week that pays all the bills and rent."

With much economy of language she had given him all the pieces he needed to know. He knew where she was going. He wanted to ask her not to leave but he could hardly expect to turn up after three years of unreturned emails and make a case for propriety or concern for her. He let her go.

Things had not turned out well. He was due to fly back to Missouri in two days time and he was, if it was possible, in a worse state emotionally than when he arrived two weeks ago. She was available to meet with him, and was friendly, but she had erected a subterfuge, a wall of sound if you like, between herself and him and their history.

He spent his Friday night drinking heavily with a couple of knockabout blokes he met at the local pub. They were funny in that understated Australian way that he didn't understand at first but now found enjoyable. It helped enormously being drunk with them to enjoy their humour. They called him Bobbo and said he was "a dead ringer for our mate Gibbo" who usually dropped into the pub on a Friday night after his "weekly service at Just Rust", as they called it. They spent a lot of time joking about Just Rust as an Auto Repair and Used Car Yard, banging around endlessly with jokes about lube jobs, manual crankshafts, rubber seals, grease monkeys, oiled bearings, timing belts, slinky chassis and so on.

"But don't mention it to Gibbo when he comes in, mate, he's sensitive about it. He thinks this whore is his private mistress, you know, exclusively for his own use. And she's workin' at a cathouse. She calls herself Peppy, or Pepsi, or Poppy or somethin'. Don't say nothin' to him, 'cause it'll cut him up for sure. It's his big night of the week seein' this chick." Bob felt himself start when one of the blokes called out across the room suddenly.

"Hey Gibbo, mate, come over and meet your long lost twin brother." He turned around and saw a big burly guy approaching with a huge smile on his face. He would have been over six feet tall and about 160 kilos of soft white mass. He wore rimless glasses to help his small, quick dark blue eyes.

"My mother never mentioned it," he said with a hearty laugh and held his hand out in a friendly gesture. Bob felt like hitting him. He shook his hand instead and retreated behind his private wall and watched this impersonator, this pretender, this imposter, positively twinkling with post-coital energy.

"How was your night, Gibbo?" asked one of the blokes, with a wink.

"Nice, very nice. What're you drinkin?" and he shouted everyone beers. He was a big shot real estate agent who did monster deals with developers and local councillors. He drove the latest gold Merc, owned a big harbourfront home nearby which he lived in alone. He had never been married and his social life amounted to a few drinks at the local pub and occasional activities at his rugby club. He had lived in the area all his life, and worked his way up from office boy at a local real estate agent to manager, began taking risks in the 1980s when he was in his twenties, struck it big with some suburban estate developments, and then bought up several real estate agencies in the area and established a franchise network. He was a workaholic who was loaded up with more assets and cash than he knew what to do with. Such as paying for sex with the woman Bob had flown 10,000 miles to visit.

The next morning Bob extended the return date on his flight. There was a part of him that realised he had no business in this woman's life anymore but he felt compelled to upset her situation because it bothered him greatly, because he thought she deserved more. He visited her again and she received him in her customary friendly but remote fashion, so he kept himself at an equal distance. He mentioned nothing about knowing about the client who was his look-alike who was underwriting her livelihood. When she went out to the kitchen to make coffee he opened up the wardrobe and searched for the silver G-string with the JustLust logo studded in diamantes and hid it in his jacket. He heard her coming down the hall and quickly whisked the closest piece of paper at hand into his back pocket. It was a handwritten sheet of catalogued items.

Several days later he bought an expensive card and wrapping paper and, after some practice forging her handwriting, came up with a passable imitation that read:

"Looking forward to this Friday. On your verandah. I have a surprise for you. P"

For good measure he included in the package the sparkling G-string, and sent it off to Barry Gibson's harbour mansion.

On the Friday night he made his way up the carpeted stairs of Just Lust Gentlemen's Club, as it coyly referred to itself, and hoped to pass himself off as Barry Gibson, real estate tycoon. He hoped they wouldn't look too closely at his casual clothes, his steel rimmed glasses, his complicated brown eyes, or notice his fake Australian accent if the Madame of the house happened to receive him.