HottTotts

Late afternoons were the best time for doing these things at Crake’s place. Nobody interrupted them. Crake’s mother was out a lot, or in a hurry; she worked as a diagnostician at the hospital complex. She was an intense, square-jawed, dark-haired woman with not much of a chest. On the rare occasions when Jimmy had been there at the same time as Crake’s mother, she hadn’t said much. She’d dug around in the kitchen cupboards for something that would pass as a snack for “you boys,” as she called the two of them. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of her preparations – the dumping of stale crackers onto a plate, the sawing up of chewy orange-and-white-marbled hunks of cheesefood – and stand stock-still, as if she could see someone else in the room. Jimmy had the impression she couldn’t remember his name; not only that, she couldn’t remember Crake’s name either. Sometimes she would ask Crake if his room was tidy, though she never went in there herself.

“She believes in respecting a child’s privacy,” said Crake, straight-faced.

“I bet it’s your mouldy socks,” said Jimmy. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten these little socks.” He’d recently discovered the joys of quotation.

“For that we’ve got room spray,” said Crake.

As for Uncle Pete, he was rarely home before seven. HelthWyzer was expanding like helium, and therefore he had a lot of new responsibilities. He wasn’t Crake’s real uncle, he was just Crake’s mother’s second husband. He’d taken on that status when Crake had been twelve, a couple of years too old for the “uncle” tag to have been viewed by him as anything but totally rancid. Yet Crake had accepted the status quo, or so it appeared. He’d smile, he’d say Sure, Uncle Pete and That’s right, Uncle Pete when the man was around, even though Jimmy knew Crake disliked him.

One afternoon in – what? March, it must have been, because it was already hot as hell outside – the two of them were watching porn in Crake’s room. Already it felt like old time’s sake, already it felt like nostalgia – something they were too grown-up for, like middle-aged guys cruising the pleebland teeny clubs. Still, they dutifully lit up a joint, hacked into Uncle Pete’s digital charge card via a new labyrinth, and started surfing. They checked into Tart of the Day, which featured elaborate confectionery in the usual orifices, then went to Superswallowers; then to a Russian site that employed ex-acrobats, ballerinas, and contortionists.

“Whoever said a guy can’t suck his own?” was Crake’s comment. The high-wire act with the six flaming torches was pretty good, but they’d seen things like that before.

Then they went to HottTotts, a global sex-trotting site. “The next best thing to being there,” was how it was advertised. It claimed to show real sex tourists, filmed while doing things they’d be put in jail for back in their home countries. Their faces weren’t visible, their names weren’t used, but the possibilities for blackmail, Snowman realizes now, must have been extensive. The locations were supposed to be countries where life was cheap and kids were plentiful, and where you could buy anything you wanted.

This was how the two of them first saw Oryx. She was only about eight, or she looked eight. They could never find out for certain how old she’d been then. Her name wasn’t Oryx, she didn’t have a name. She was just another little girl on a porno site.

None of those little girls had ever seemed real to Jimmy – they’d always struck him as digital clones – but for some reason Oryx was three-dimensional from the start. She was small-boned and exquisite, and naked like the rest of them, with nothing on her but a garland of flowers and a pink hair ribbon, frequent props on the sex-kiddie sites. She was on her knees, with another little girl on either side of her, positioned in front of the standard gargantuan Gulliver-in-Lilliput male torso – a life-sized man shipwrecked on an island of delicious midgets, or stolen away and entranced, forced to experience agonizing pleasures by a trio of soulless pixies. The guy’s distinguishing features were concealed – bag with eyeholes over the head, surgical tape over the tattoos and scars: few of these types wanted to be spotted by the folks back home, though the possibility of detection must have been part of the thrill.

The act involved whipped cream and a lot of licking. The effect was both innocent and obscene: the three of them were going over the guy with their kittenish tongues and their tiny fingers, giving him a thorough workout to the sound of moans and giggles. The giggles must have been recorded, because they weren’t coming from the three girls: they all looked frightened, and one of them was crying.

Jimmy knew the drill. They were supposed to look like that, he thought; if they stopped the action, a walking stick would come in from offside and prod them. This was a feature of the site. There were at least three layers of contradictory make-believe, one on top of the other. I want to, I want to not, I want to.

Oryx paused in her activities. She smiled a hard little smile that made her appear much older, and wiped the whipped cream from her mouth. Then she looked over her shoulder and right into the eyes of the viewer – right into Jimmy’s eyes, into the secret person inside him. I see you, that look said. I see you watching. I know you. I know what you want.

Crake pushed the reverse, then the freeze, then the download. Every so often he froze frames; by now he had a small archive of them. Sometimes he’d print them out and give a copy to Jimmy. It could be dangerous – it could leave a footprint for anyone who might manage to trace a way through the labyrinth – but Crake did it anyway. So now he saved that one moment, the moment when Oryx looked.

Jimmy felt burned by this look – eaten into, as if by acid. She’d been so contemptuous of him. The joint he’d been smoking must have had nothing in it but lawn mowings: if it had been stronger he might have been able to bypass guilt. But for the first time he’d felt that what they’d been doing was wrong. Before, it had always been entertainment, or else far beyond his control, but now he felt culpable. At the same time he felt hooked through the gills: if he’d been offered instant teleportation to wherever Oryx was he’d have taken it, no question. He’d have begged to go there. It was all too complicated.

“This a keeper?” Crake said. “You want it?”

“Yeah,” said Jimmy. He could barely get the word out. He hoped he sounded normal.

So Crake had printed it, the picture of Oryx looking, and Snowman had saved it and saved it. He’d shown it to Oryx many years later.

“I don’t think this is me,” was what she’d said at first.

“It has to be!” said Jimmy. “Look! It’s your eyes!”

“A lot of girls have eyes,” she said. “A lot of girls did these things. Very many.” Then, seeing his disappointment, she said, “It might be me. Maybe it is. Would that make you happy, Jimmy?”

“No,” said Jimmy. Was that a lie?

“Why did you keep it?”

“What were you thinking?” Snowman said instead of answering.

Another woman in her place would have crumpled up the picture, cried, denounced him as a criminal, told him he understood nothing about her life, made a general scene. Instead she smoothed out the paper, running her fingers gently over the soft, scornful child’s face that had – surely – once been hers.

“You think I was thinking?” she said. “Oh Jimmy! You always think everyone is thinking. Maybe I wasn’t thinking anything.”

“I know you were,” he said.

“You want me to pretend? You want me to make something up?”

“No. Just tell me.”

“Why?”

Jimmy had to think about that. He remembered himself watching. How could he have done that to her? And yet it hadn’t hurt her, had it? “Because I need you to.” Not much of a reason, but it was all he could come up with.

She sighed. “I was thinking,” she said, tracing a little circle on his skin with her fingernail, “that if I ever got the chance, it would not be me down on my knees.”

“It would be someone else?” said Jimmy. “Who? What someone?”

“You want to know everything,” said Oryx.