The Three R's Pt. 02

She looked down at him staring at the leopard-head tattoo on his shoulder. It was an intricate piece of work but there was one thing odd. Catherine was used to spotting patterns in data, seeing the out of place, the inconsistent. There was something odd about the tattoo. Just behind the creature's ear, the pattern of spots seemed less well defined than elsewhere. She bent forward. Sam continued to address his tongue to her feet but Catherine was tracing lines across his back. The slow gentle scratch of her finger nails made him wince in nervous anticipation of something painful. Beneath the detail of the leopard head she could make out three letters that had been almost entirely obliterated by the later design. They were the same three letters she had seen on the graffiti, "E.C.R."

What did it mean, she wondered? Why had this stupid guaillou had it put on his back? And why had he had it covered up again? "I like your leopard," she said. "Nice tattoo. Where did you get it done?"

"Inky Skin. Near Victoria Station." Sam responded, pleased that she had been impressed by it. He went back to kissing he feet and sucking at her toes. She seemed to enjoy his attentions which encouraged him to try harder. The happier she was, the better chance he would have of being asked for again, the more he would earn and the happier Natalie and the club would be that clients kept on coming.

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.

These days, he was pretty sure none of it would be considered appropriate behaviour under New Order's respect agenda. Still, they couldn't actually stop you thinking about it. Not yet, at any rate.

Chapter 17: Data Call

Catherine shared her thoughts on Sam's tattoo with Aileen McConaghy. "You said you were interested in anything on the 'ECR' graffiti. I found an ECR tattoo on an unsponsored male. He works as one of the toys at the Regina Club, if you know it." Aileen nodded. She wasn't in London often but she had visited the club on her last trip. "The tattoo had been covered up quite recently. I believe the cover up was done in Victoria. I have some tracking data that puts the male back in Victoria on a regular basis and also in the same location, down on the Isle of Dogs, as a person of interest from the Fitzroy Square rally, though not at the same time."

"That's helpful. We've had a little extra intelligence on 'ECR'. It seems like it's not really a group identity or anything like that. It's just a gratuitous insult: End Cunt Rule."

"Charming. And so subtle. Everything's about sex organs for them, isn't it? They're so used to being led by their cocks that if a woman is issuing orders they must be coming from their cunt. Do they really think that's going to upset us? And why do they seem to hate cunts so much? I thought they were supposed to like them. I know that mine's quite nice. In fact, pretty much all the ones I've encountered have been great."

"Just because you're not offended, Catherine, doesn't mean it's not worrying. It's the sort of stupid slogan that can get men thinking they've got something to line up behind. And it's only a short step from there to them starting up campaigning for the right to make prick sex acceptable again or something equally stupid."

"So we're still interested in finding out more? I can pass on the addresses to MCF Liaison; maybe they can have a root around."

"I'm not sure if that's a good idea yet," Aileen responded cagily. "Let's save their size nines for later. If you can keep up the location tracking on your illustrated man and any other related targets we'll see where that gets us."

Catherine nodded. She understood Aileen's point of view and respected her judgement. Once the MCF got involved they would lose all control and she could sense that Aileen felt that there was more to this than a bit of spray painting.

"And, if you discover anything else on your trips to the Regina, that would be a bonus. I'd rather not see it charged to your expenses, though -- however good the insights are." Aileen smiled. Catherine knew she was only half joking.

While Sam Danubo was being discussed by Catherine and Aileen, he was sitting in his cage at the Regina. It was the start of the evening shift and it was quiet in the club. There were five of them on standby in the cages. Only two had been asked for so far. It was all rather theatrical, Sam thought. The cages weren't really needed, although Natalie had told him they used them so that they would be sure to able to find a "toy" when they needed one. "Besides," she had said, "they help you get into the right frame of mind ready for when a client comes along." Sam though they were more for the benefit of the punters when they came to look backstage.

'The right frame of mind' -- Sam wondered what Natalie would think if she knew he and his friends were very much opposed to the New Order view of the right frame of mind. He'd had a tattoo done of the three letters 'ECR' as an expression of defiance but then one of the group had pointed out it wasn't too smart to be advertising his allegiance. That was when he had got the leopard's head done at Inky Skin to cover it up.

The leopard's head had turned out to be a great idea. It did the cover-up job it was supposed to and attracted attention. There had been a couple of clients at the club that had been really impressed by it, and it was always good to be noticed, even if it had been expensive and taken quite a few sessions. If customer's were asking for him, there was a greater chance that the club would keep him on. Without a sponsorship placement he needed to have the paid work, and in this job that meant he had to spend his evenings crouched naked in the steel cage.

Even so, that was at odds with how he felt about the government. He quite enjoyed the fetish play but having it institutionalised, set down in the laws of the country was another matter. He had always been attracted by the BDSM scene. Perhaps it was the fetish aesthetic, perhaps he had a streak of sexual submissiveness, but that didn't mean he felt men had no rights. He objected to the way that New Order had hijacked his fetishes as a tool of social engineering, using the male sexual response to create a situation where women could demonise and subjugate them. That was what had led to his involvement in anti-government protests.

The thing that had finally got him on the side of the protestors was the government campaign promoting the work of the Male Control Force with its subtly fetishised imagery of MCF officers subduing offenders. The photographs had emphasised the women's strength; taught muscles evident beneath tight uniforms. The subjugated men had seemed to be in a state of ecstasy comparable to martyrs in renaissance paintings. That had been the last straw for Sam. He resented images that he found erotic being used to promote the regime.

It had made him decided to take a stand against the exploitation and that was what had encouraged him to get the 'ECR' tattoo. Someone at the tattoo parlour had suggested it, telling him what it meant. Then there had been the missions to vandalise government posters and daubing 'ECR' graffiti on the local DOSA office. Of course, he knew it didn't achieve much except to remind the government that not everyone agreed with what they were doing, but it felt like he was doing something.

It was after that someone had suggested that he might learn things of value at the Club, and that it might be an idea to cover up his ECR tattoo. He'd been happy to pass on odd bits of information he picked up. They'd had an MCF officer in and she had been talking about the way they were going to use the detention centres to get better control of dissidents. Then there had been a couple of government staff in laughing about the plans they had for new regulations. The government had been annoyed when news of that leaked out before they were ready. His contacts, on the other hand, had been very pleased at the embarrassment it caused.

Sam was worried about some of the protestors though. He was in favour of prick sex being allowed, but the way some of them talked it sounded like they wanted to make it compulsory and that sounded like a rapist's charter to him. There had even been talk about trying to disrupt DOSA services by attacking their offices. Sam didn't like the sound of that. He really didn't want to get involved in anything that might lead to violence.

Chapter 18: 267 Vauxhall Bridge Road

The road from the river up towards Victoria Station was, like so many major London streets, set up for women-only pedestrians on one side and mixed sex pedestrian traffic on the other. They were all right. It was the ones that didn't allow men at all that caused problems. It seemed to Norm as though there were many more "women only" streets than since the last time he'd been into town and he'd had to take some longer than planned diversions to get to his destination. Number 267 was a tattoo parlour. The shop front painted in bright red and black appeared, from the various promotional photographs in the window to cater purely for women. In the window, dramatic Maori designs tempted the adventurous, delicate floral ones appealed to those a little less extrovert. On the door, signs showed both men and women were welcomed. Inky Skin, the shop called itself. Norm went inside.

"Can I help you?" a middle-aged woman with a face that looked like she had a fondness for sucking lemons asked from behind the counter. Her expression made Norm think she hoped vehemently that the answer to her question was 'no'. "I've got no men's appointments today."

"That's OK, I'm due to make a delivery."

"Can you hang on a moment." She turned to a girl with short, dark, shaggy hair who was sitting in the reception area. "Jinx is ready for you now in Room 3."

Norm found himself speculating about what sort of design the girl might be looking for. She didn't look like the hearts and flowers type. He looked down at the table where she had been sitting. She had been browsing through a pattern book. It was open to show various versions of the New Order logo. That seemed to indicate any aspirations he had were likely to be a waste of time, Norm told himself.

"Thanks," the girl said. She threw an old canvas knapsack over her shoulder and followed the receptionist's pointing finger into a corridor that led towards the back of the shop.

With the girl gone, Norm tried again. "I'm looking for Gerry."

"Uhuh," the woman seemed unwilling to help unless it was absolutely unavoidable.

"I need to give him something. Personally. Is he here?"

"Maybe. Who are you?"

"Danny sent me."

"Curious name, Danny Sentme."

"Yeah, that's what all the girls say. Is he here or not?"

"I'll have a look. Oh, and by the way, we don't use 'girls' these days. Don't they give you an approved vocabulary book with your airline ticket these days?"

"No ma'am." Norm didn't bother to disguise his sarcasm.

The woman buzzed through on an intercom. There was a short exchange. "Seems like Jinx wants to see you in room 3 as well. He's a busy boy today."

Norm followed the same routes as the girl with the knapsack. When he got into room three he found a well equipped tattoo parlour. The girl with the knapsack was on a couch while a white coated ginger-haired man was working with ink and needles on her right shoulder.

Two other men were in the room. "I've got something for Gerry," Norm said. "From Danny."

"That'll be me. You don't need to worry about these," he nodded at the others in the room, "they're on-side. Jack here is a new boy but trying hard, Jinx works here and helps out when he can. And the young lady is..."

"Daisy," Jack interjected. "She's with me."

"His and hers tattoos?" Norm was surprised by something that sounded so traditional. "An old fashioned relationship?"

"Don't be too sure," called the girl on the couch, with a smile.

Gerry was keen to pull things back to the business in hand. "Let's have a look at what you've got."

Norm put his bag up on a desk and opened it. Five thick bundles of plastic cards sat inside. Gerry peeled one off from the bundle and looked at it closely. He got another similar card out of his wallet and compared the two.

"Not bad. I think we can cause quite a bit of mischief with these."

"They're electrically good too. They'll return a valid but unrecognisable ident when it's read. Should just look like there's an error on the database or something. You can prise the film cover off and put in a photo or actually just print on the face. Most times no one looks closely at them by all accounts."

"I don't think you'd say that if you lived here," Gerry responded. "But I think they'll be all right."