Moral Zero Read Free Page B

you care?
    Uh, yes.
    It’s Michelle.
    Nice to meet you. Um. I guess he really shot himself in the foot talking to you. Mr White managed a smile that he couldn’t make appear comfortable. He was acutely aware of his sweating forehead.
    Who, Kidd? How’d you mean?
    You know him?
    Yeah.
    How?
    We fucked a few days ago.
    Oh. Oh. I see. Mr White tried to take this on board.
    That girl he was talking about who talked abou t her tits, that was my sister.
    Oh. I’m, uh, I’m sorry.
    Why?
    I don’t know, Mr White said, and realised that he didn’t know much.
    I might see h im later. I dunno Lisa’s plans.
    Mmhmm. I’ll be going now.
    Bye.
    Mr White rushed off to the toilet to be sick again. It wasn’t related to the conversation, but nevertheless he had felt the familiar urge creeping up on him. The moment he gave it his attention it surged upwards, giving him only seconds to spare.
    Red found him a short while later. Aloha amigo, he said, looking down on him crouched all meek and drooling into the toilet.
    Hello.
    You want me to take you home?
    Yes . . . please.
    Red got him up and draped his arm over his shoulders. He walked him out the bar, pausing a second to tell Lisa and Michelle to wait for him. He’d be about ten minutes, he said. He wasn’t staying far away, he said. They’d better not cut without him. They promised him they wouldn’t.
    Red stumbled Mr White back to the hotel, the two of them nearly falling through the room door. Red was laughing. With substantial effort, he got Mr White up from the floor and took him to the bed where he let him fall like some dead thing onto the blankets.
    Red.
    Yeah man?
    Thank you.
    No worries hombre. I gotta get back, leave those honeys too long and they’ll stop ripenin and turn sour. I’ll catch you up tomorrow, yeah?
    Okay.
    Red pulled his shoes off and tussled his feet. He left and the door clicked closed quietly behind him.
     
    HOTEL
     
    It was later and Mr White was feeling better. There was still a sickness nestling within him, but it was the sort, quality and quantity, that could be utilised, that rather than debilitating oneself could be instead engaged to serve the machinery of lust. That is, the screwed up trash-lust of the brain, the fuckery, the taboo. It was not a romantic feeling. But it had its time and it certainly had its place.
    Red had booked, under the glaring eye of the old woman, a separate room for himself. Muttering and shaking his head about the stupidity in booking just the one, looking at the girl hovering behind him, wondering out loud what he was thinking, if he’d thought at all. He’d taken her up and into the room adjoining the original, crashing and banging and hijinking about and waking Mr White up from a drunken doze into a world without light.
    Mr White was awake and he was intoxicated and roused by the noises from next door and he felt keenly the pangs of sickness coupled, entwined like lovers with the stomach-ache pangs of lust. Mr White had his eye right up against the peephole between the rooms. Kidd Red knew he'd be looking, and Mr White knew he knew. This was reason enough for that extra flush of shame that coated his countenance like a blanket of red sweat.
    The room was a porthole to his vision, a window into another world. It felt unreal, like a movie, or rather a movie set he was intruding upon. He felt that familiar trembling sense of terror in lust: a lust to the cinema, a lust to the forbidden. He wasn't supposed to be there; it was invasive, secret, and he was privy to the secret. Special. Undercover. Private detective into the underbelly of life. He was an agent of this portal, and he had super-powers, going through locked doors and solid walls to see behind the curtain, to see what was hid away from prying eyes. The horrid secrets. And then, this time, the discovery, the knowledge of his heavy-breathing presence by a prime participant, if not both of them – unuttered, but hanging there in the air as though some