Back to FLAT EARTH

Celibate, Good Times, Come On
16.1

The boycott was decided upon a few days in advance. Under the circumstances an actual boycott probably wasn't necessary, but Helena Downwright had always been a great believer in pre-emptive strikes. If they were going to fire you, you quit. If your boyfriend was going off you, you dumped him. If Lance was about to ask you a question, you assumed it would be of a lewd and/or offensive nature, and slapped him.

And if Valentine's Day was looming on the horizon, your sort-of boyfriend was busy battling the undead five hundred miles away and the only other men in your life consisted of a vampire, a mild-mannered geek and the man whose picture featured in the dictionary next to the word "indecent", you took action early and boycotted the whole damn holiday. In fact, given her recent encounters with the opposite sex she was beginning to doubt the prudence of pursuing any form of love life at all. After standing up her first date in two years, briefly rekindling her relationship with a man to whom a crossbow was a thoughtful and practical birthday present, and getting just drunk enough on New Year's Eve to start finding her broke student flatmate vaguely attractive, she'd decided it might be best to go back to celibacy for a while.

So when she was roused from her bed at seven o'clock on the morning of Saturday the 14th to find a delivery girl on the doorstep holding a small bouquet of flowers and asking for Helena Downwright, she knew things were off to a flying start.

The flowers had obviously been through a lot to get to her. The paper they were wrapped in was torn and stained with some dark red substance, as was the card which read:

To Helena
From Rip
(ps: Sorry about the blood)

Well, at least he'd made the effort. And the blood hardly came as a shock - her last birthday present from Rip had been a necklace which arrived with an actual bloodied fang jammed in the top of the lid. The guy just couldn't seperate his work from his personal life.

She put the flowers in water (lacking a vase, she settled for a beer mug) and was about to return to bed when the doorbell rang again. She opened the door on the largest arrangement of flowers she'd ever seen, with another delivery guy buried somewhere behind them. Struggling under the weight of the flowers (and holding her breath lest the fragrance render her unconscious) she read the card:

CAPTAIN'S LOG
Stardate 14/02/04

My heart beats like a warp core
As I admire you by long-range sensor

My starship is adrift without you
My lonely soul is lost in the Delta Quadrant

My logic is uncertain
Where my feelings for you are concerned

My heart is an away team
Requesting permission to beam up
To the USS Helena

~ Devon (out)


Helena almost smiled in spite of herself. It had been a while since she'd had a love letter, breathy phone call or any noticeable surveillance from Devon. She'd almost started to worry about him. Normally she would have sent the flowers straight back or thrown them out, but he'd obviously spent a lot of money and it was Valentine's Day, so she decided to give him the benefit of the doubt just this once. Dragging out the biggest cooking pot she could find, she spent five minutes filling it with water before dumping the giant bouquet into it and staggering back to bed.

She awoke an hour later to the sound of cartoons and the smell of burnt bacon. Apparently the lads were up. Eventually deciding that if she had to smell Eddie's culinary efforts then she might as well try to eat some, she went out to the living room to find her flatmates parked on the sofa with the TV on and a plate of charred pork products in front of them. Slipping into the gap between them, Helena munched her way through a couple of pieces of incinerated pig-flesh while watching two small men with big hairdos playing cards on TV. She was actually beginning to enjoy Saturday mornings around here.

When the spell was temporarily broken by a commercial, Helena seized the opportunity to pop her question. "So - what shall we do tonight?"

After all, there was no point boycotting Valentine's if she was just going to be sitting around the house watching the obligatory Hugh Grant movie on TV - she'd probably have ended up doing that anyway. What she needed was a proper girl's night out (the better to thumb her nose at Cupid and all his evil works) but with girls in short supply she'd decided to settle for a platonic night on the town with a couple of dateless males. And no males she knew were more dateless than...

"Sorry," chorused Eddie and Lance. "Got a date."



Eddie climbed out of the shower, dried off, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, combed it a different way, thought better of it, combed it back again, brushed his teeth again, took some mouthwash, made the mistake of swallowing it, waited until his eyes stopped watering, shaved, checked his nostrils for errant hairs and/or nose goblins, checked his teeth, slapped on too much aftershave, and finally decided he'd done all he could.

He wasn't very good on dates, blind dates especially.

Worrying about his hair one last time, he opened the door to find Helena waiting outside in a skirt and halter top, her makeup bag in hand.

"Going out?" Eddie asked.

"Yes," Helena replied, with great determination.

Eddie frowned. "With a guy?"

"By myself."

Eddie tried not to look too sympathetic, and failed.

"Oh, shut up," Helena growled, pushing him out of the way and firmly closing the bathroom door behind her.

Eddie returned to his bedroom, where his clothes for the evening were laid out on the bed. In light of the fact that he would be spending the evening with a charming companion of the female persuasion, he'd decided to betray his principles by wearing a shirt that not only buttoned up, but also tucked in. The jeans and basketball shoes didn't exactly complement the shirt, but he had to work with what he had.

He finally arrived in the living room to see Lance waiting in his best suit. The Versace that Layla had bought him had failed to survive Lance's bout with hymeneptocanthropy a few months ago, so he'd gone back to the crime against good tailoring that he'd adopted from his father. He was on a high enough salary these days to be able to splash out on a new suit, but Lance considered such frivolities as personal grooming to be a waste of hard-earned beer money. "Ready to go?" he beamed.

"Uh... I guess so," Eddie replied. "So, um - where did you say you met these girls?"

"At work."

"And what are their names again?"

"Tasha and Gabrielle."

Eddie nodded. "And which one am I going out with?"

"You know," Lance murmured, rubbing his chin. "I honestly don't recall. Tell you what - when we meet them, just assume a neutral position and see which one introduces herself first."

Eddie shook his head. It was occurring to him, and not for the first time, that his romantic history might have been more of a success story if he hadn't taken Lance's dating advice all through high school.

A car honked at the gate. "Taxi's here," Lance observed. "Let's go."

"I think that's mine," Helena corrected him, bustling through the living room and grabbing her bag on the way past.

"You're not taking your car?" Eddie asked.

"No, I may not be in a fit state to drive later," she smiled, already halfway out the door. "Don't wait up."

They watched her stride down the path towards the waiting taxi, like a gladiator going into battle. "Who's she going out with?" Lance inquired.

"Nobody," Eddie replied.

"Oh come on, you can tell me..."

"No, literally," Eddie insisted. "Nobody."

Lance winced. "Oh dear. Well," he brightened up, "as long as she's not using her car..." He turned and started towards Helena's room.

Eddie hurried after him. "What are you doing?"

"It's alright," Lance assured him. "She keeps a spare set of keys tucked into a pair of socks in her bottom drawer."

"How do you know?"

"Devon told me."

Eddie's jaw dropped. "What? How does he know?!"

"Good question," Lance replied, his hand resting on Helena's door handle. "But if Helena ever finds any tiny electronic devices scattered inconspicuously around her bedroom, I know nothing about it."

And with that he turned the handle and ducked inside, leaving Eddie to fish out his cellphone and very pointedly dial Devon's number.



Kostas pulled out from the curb, failing to siganl or check his blind spot, and ignored the sound of screeching tires and crashing metal behind him as he looked at his passenger in the rearview mirror. "Going out to dinner, yes?"

"No," the passenger replied. " I thought I'd go to a club."

"Ah," Kostas nodded. "Meeting date at club."

Helena gave him a look which indicated that the possibilty of a tip might be contingent on his ability to mind his own business. "No, I don't have a date."

Kostas' hand instantly flew to the glovebox and produced a slip of paper, which he handed back over the seat. "You want to go here? Is downtown. Nice club, very clean. Lots of nice men go here."

Helena declined to accept the flyer, but leaned foward to examine it. It invited her to frequent an establishment called the Abyss, ostensibly the place where a person might have occasion to "get it on".

"No thanks," she smiled politely. "I'm not after a man, anyway."

Kostas opened his mouth to reply.

"And before you tell me nice girls go there too," Helena warned, "I'm not in the market for a liason of a romantic or physical nature with a person of either persuasion or orientation. From here on in, consider me officially celibate."

Kostas raised a hand. "Is cool," he smiled. "Religion you choose is your business. So which club we going to?"



The head bouncer at Les Belles Personnes was having a typically hectic evening, made all the more hectic by the fact that even the beautiful people of Sundry City got lonely on Valentine's Day, and several hundred of them had decided to alleviate their loneliness by heading straight to the club in search of other beautiful people to have sex with. The bouncer predicted a morning filled with guilt, embarrassment and somewhat-less-than-beautiful people undertaking the Walk of Shame, but for now his main concern was screening the queue at the door and keeping them out of the toilet cubicles. The headset in his ear was squawking, requesting that he send someone to deal with an altercation in the Garden Bar out back. Apparently a fashion model and a budding actress had realised they were wearing the same kind of implants, and violence was brewing.

Motioning to one of his subordinates to grab the net launcher and get back there, he turned to face the next hopeful punter in line. "Hi," she smiled brightly, and then - apparently realising this was not the attitude being adopted by the other people in the queue - immediately dropped the smile and said, "I mean... whatever."

The bouncer looked her up and down, thoroughly scanning her with BouncerVision to see if she met the proper criteria for entry. She was attractive, stylish, fairly well dressed, over the legal drinking age and apparently sober. All in all, he would have been happy to let her in if not for the fact that her lipstick was completely the wrong shade, and the heels on her shoes were half an inch under the regulation length. As for the size and configuration of her handbag - well, he didn't even want to get into that.

"Sorry," he rumbled, waving her aside and motioning the next group forward.

The girl looked stunned. "You're not letting me in?"

"Very observant," the bouncer replied.

"Well, you've let me in before," she protested.

"Uh-huh," the bouncer smiled.

"You did. About six months ago," the girl insisted. "Only, you... er, threw me out again. But that was only because of the two guys I was with."

The bouncer looked over the top of his sunglasses. "So, to sum up - you got off with two guys in the club, we kicked you out, and now you expect to ever get in again?"

"I didn't get off with anybody!" she snapped, visibly apalled. "Especially not those two!"

The bouncer wasn't listening. His headset had fired up again, and the guy he'd sent to the Garden Bar was requesting backup and, if possible, a water cannon. Waving to his remaining staff to get in there, he was mildly annoyed to see the girl still standing there when he turned around. "Look, sweetheart - this is a class establishment we're running here." He pulled back the velvet rope to admit a group of four young women wearing three square feet of clothing between them. "We try to maintain a certain level of taste and decorum, and we expect our clientele to do the same."

The girl's eyes narrowed. "What are you saying?"

The bouncer began lose his cool. "I'll tell you what I'm saying!" And he did.

And two seconds later, he wished he hadn't.



Eddie sat jittering on his stool, one eye on the door and the other on the couple at the next table. He was watching the door because he was waiting for Tasha and/or Gabrielle to show up, and he was watching the couple because they'd seen him walk into the bar with Lance and, by their expressions, he was vaguely concerned they might have the wrong idea.

Lance finally returned with four beers, set them out on the table and sat down.

"So what time are they getting here?" Eddie asked.

"Who?" Lance asked, his face already wrapped around his beer glass.

"Our dates."

"Oh, they're not coming here," Lance told him. "I just thought we'd stop in here and compose ourselves before we go and meet them." He drained his beer.

Eddie looked down. "So why four beers?"

"Efficiency," Lance replied, picking up another one. "Drink up, dude."



"You know," Kostas announced, changing gears as he swerved haphazardly though traffic, "best way to get into club is with money, or with sweet talk. Kicking bouncer in nuts, not so good."

"He had it coming," Helena pointed out.

"All bouncers got it coming," Kostas shrugged. "So where to now?"

"Anywhere but the Abyss?" Helena smiled.

Kostas thought it over. "I know good place."

As it turned out Kostas knew several places, although "good" was not a word that sprang instantly to mind. There was the sports bar on Detour Road where the men were wallowing in various stages of inebriation and the only other women were wearing hot pants and serving drinks. Then the backstreet club that turned out to be essentially one big mosh pit. And the karaoke bar in Narrow Way where, according to rumour, a young woman could have a delightful evening before waking up on a boat to Thailand.

"No good?" Kostas asked, as they tore away from the karaoke bar just in time to avoid several disgruntled Yakuza running out into the street.

"No good at all," Helena told him. "God, this kind of stuff happens to me every time I go out. Isn't there one place in this stupid city where I can just hang out and have a good time without any mention of dating, sex or white slavery?"

Kostas thought for a very long time. "Well... one place, maybe..."

Helena looked at her watch. She was struggling with the urge to go home and call it quits, but it was still only eight-thirty. Terminally ill though her social life might be, she still couldn't bring herself to pull the plug just yet. "Alright," she sighed. "But the first guy who dribbles on me is getting arrested."

"Not a problem," Kostas smiled. "Guaranteed."

Ten minutes later, the cab pulled up at another club. Kostas pulled into the parking lot, saying they knew him here and he could get her in for free. As they approached the door, Helena looked up at the sign.

"The Abyss?" she snapped. "I told you I didn't want to come here!"

"Is fine," Kostas smiled, as they walked unchallenged past the bouncers. "Is not what you think."

"What do you mean, it's not what I...?"

Helena's voice trailed off as they went though the reception area and into the club itself. And suddenly, she understood.



Meanwhile, Helena's car was scraping the curb twenty blocks away as Lance - whose driver's licence was several stages past "disqualified" - made a less-than-triumphant attempt at parallel parking.

"Right," he said, as they got out of the car. "They said they'd be here at around half-eight, which means they'll probably show up at quarter to ten. So we'll just hang out here and play it cool until they get here."

Eddie looked around. They'd parked next to a row of warehouses on the waterfront. "Here?"

"Yeah," Lance nodded, pointing to the nearest building. "Warehouse 23. Tasha told me it's like an underground club that only the really happening people know about." After a spot of reflection he added, "I knew about it already, of course..."

"Of course," Eddie frowned, looking up at the warehouse. "Awful quiet for a club, though..."

"Well, there you are then," Lance beamed, approaching the doors. "That's how exclusive it is, you see. After you."



Helena finished her second cocktail and ordered a third, then returned to her sparkling conversation with the two men at the bar beside her. She wasn't worried about drinking too much, deciding she was probably quite safe. A moment later she cancelled the drink as one of the men asked her if she wanted to get up for a dance. She happily did so, secure in the knowledge that when he said "dance" he actually meant "dance", and that was all there was to it. He was a much better dancer than she was, but she was having too much fun to care.

She was glad she'd trusted Kostas, even if it was against her better judgement. The Abyss had proven to be full of "nice men", just as he'd said it would be, but none of them had designs on Helena. One or two of them seemed to have intentions towards Kostas, though.

On the other hand, he wasn't exactly dissuading them.



"Well," Eddie declared. "This does look pretty exclusive."

"Uh... yeah..." Lance murmured, looking around.

"So exclusive that even the staff can't get in, by the looks of it," Eddie went on.

Warehouse 23 was empty, and not just of people. The cement floor was completely bare apart from dust and the odd bit of litter. It was, by all appearances, a big empty warehouse.

"Maybe she said Warehouse 24," Lance wondered.

Eddie was beginning to form a suspicion or two. Lance wasn't the most popular man at his office, and the other staff had been known to conspire against him on more than one occasion, usually stopping just short of the kind of pranks that might result in death, injury or legal action. Frankly, Eddie was beginning to wonder if they'd been had. "You did say you work with these girls, right?"

"No," Lance corrected him. "I said I met them at work."

Eddie paused. Perhaps it had been the prospect of a hot date with a beautiful woman, maybe he was too trusting, or perhaps he'd just gotten careless. But somehow, he'd forgotten the golden rule when dealing with Lance - get the full story before committing to anything. Dishonest though he was, Lance made it a point of loyalty not to lie to his friends. Instead he merely omitted certain relevant details until it was too late to turn back. It was like sharing a house with a beer-drinking djinn.

Deciding it was time to get to the bottom of the tale, Eddie asked, "So do they actually work at Monopocorp?"

"No. Well, not that I know of..."

"So what were they doing there?"

"Oh, they weren't there," Lance explained. "I was there. At my desk. But I was on my lunch break..."

Somewher in Eddie's head, a light flicked on. A flashing red one, as it happened.

"Oh my god," he gasped. "You met them on the internet..."

"But from a very reputable site!" Lance insisted. "One of the most respectable dating sites in the country!"

"Which," Eddie hissed, "one?"

"Uh... 'young Russian honeys dot com'...?"

Eddie wasn't sure whether to slap Lance or himself.

"Yes, yes, I know," Lance sighed, raising his hands. "You can't trust anything on the net. So maybe they won't actually be honeys..."

"Gee, you think?" Eddie muttered, one hand over his eyes.

"And maybe they won't be that young..."

"AND MAYBE THEY'RE NOT EVEN RUSSIAN..."

Eddie and Lance stared at each other for a long time, both fully aware that the voice had come from above them, but neither one willing to look up. Finally, on an unspoken count of three, they did so.

The spider hung from the rafters above on a silken thread the thickness of a man's arm, her huge mandibles working hungrily as she regarded the pair with eight gleaming eyes the size of beach balls. Her massive hairy body swung heavily on the strand as she slowly descended towards them. The ceiling above her was covered with huge, glistening cobwebs, and several huddled, mummified shapes hung amongst the rafters.

"FOOLISH HUMANS!" she hissed. "ONCE AGAIN THE LURE OF EAST EUROPEAN SUPERMODELS OF LOW MORAL CHARACTER HAS DRAWN TWO TASTY MORSELS INTO MY CLUTCHES! AND THEY SAID THAT WEB DESIGN CORRESPONDENCE COURSE WAS A WASTE OF MONEY! MWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAA!!!"

Eddie shrugged. "You know, I actually expected a lot worse..."



It was well past midnight when Helena got home. She climbed out of the second taxi (Kostas had bid her farewell at the club, having made a new friend) and walked a tad unsteadily up the front path, rummaging for her keys. She stopped halfway to the door as another car puttered to a halt on the curb.

She stared at the vehicle in disbelief. It was hers. The rear window was broken, the rear bumper hanging off, and the paintwork was heavily scratched. Something that looked like taffy was clinging to the doors and hubcaps.

The driver's door popped open, and Eddie staggered out. He was battered and bruised, his clothes torn, and he had the same goo sticking to his hair and collar. Pulling open the rear passenger door, he dragged out something that looked like a Egyptian mummy. Hoisting it over his shoulder, he kicked the door closed and started up the path.

"Eddie?" Helena gasped, walking towards him. "What happened? What the hell are you doing with my...?"

Her voice faltered as she saw the "mummy" up close. It was Lance, coated from head to toe in the stringy, web-like muck, his eyes wide open and staring at nothing.

"Don't worry, he's just paralysed," Eddie muttered wearily. "He'll be fine in the morning, no I don't want to talk about it, sorry about your car, goodnight." He dropped her sticky keys into her hand and staggered inside.

Helena was still staring at the car when Devon emerged from the house, carrying a toolbelt and a bulging backpack, and told her she looked very pretty tonight before hurrying away towards the nearest bus stop.

She finally shook her head and made her way inside, wondering why she'd ever felt the need to further complicate her life with a boyfriend.



HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY


Back to FLAT EARTH