Players at the Game of People by John Brunner Read Free Book Online

now."

"Explain." He had let his hand wander from her hair to her nape; in a

little while it would travel to her shoulders. Then he would lift her

into his lap like a tired child, and explore the rest of her body. The

rhythm he was employing was designedly hypnotic; every now and again he

checked it for frequency against her pulse, which he felt on the side

of her neck. It was slowing in a reassuring manner. There was going to

be no trouble with this one. None at all.

"Mum was a call girl," Gorse said sleepily. "She never said so straight

out, but that's the only way she could possibly have met people like the

ones she knows: MPs, company directors, television executives, artists,

actors, poets . . . And she was only taking after Granny, same as me. I'm

not supposed to know about it, but Granny was on the streets. Had to be.

Granddad was captured in the war and died in a prison camp, and she had

five children to look after. They were taken into care eventually and

Mummy doesn't know what became of her brother and sisters. All split

up. Scattered. Then Gran died and something happened to the records --

I think a bomb or something fell on the place where they were stored and

they all got burnt. She advertised a few times but nothing happened . . ."

This was of no particular interest. Godwin steered her back to the main

line.

Having led a colorful life, her mother was persuaded by a literary friend

to try her hand at writing. Scornful at first, because she was effectively

uneducated, she finally yielded, and her stories and her books of memoirs

-- suitably censored -- proved financially successful. More and more she

cared about her writing; less and less she had time for her daughter. She

sent her to that expensive boarding school for, she claimed, the child's

own benefit.

"Hers!" Gorse said contemptuously. "Meant she could go gallivanting off

to Hollywood and places and make lots of money and screw lots of handsome

young men!"

Hollywood in fact was where she was at present, and had been for two

months on a scriptwriting assignment. She had left at the end of the

Easter holidays, even though this summer term her daughter was due to

face entrance exams for university.

But there was something Gorse wasn't admitting. Being left wholly on her

own to confront the stress of those exams was less than an adequate excuse

for doing what she'd done. He coaxed her up on his lap and fondled her

breasts, letting her murmur secretly against his ear as the warm breezes

wafted off a nonexistent ocean and the music sank to a level as faint

as its own echoes.

Oh. Acid. He might have guessed.

When she was fourteen, some spoiled upper-class bitch in the top form,

thinking to show off as "clever" and "sophisticated," brought back a few

tabs of LSD and gave them to those of the junior girls she had a crush

on, or vice versa. Gorse had begged one and been given it.

Which through a long and tortuous chain of associated self-justifications

purported to explain why, immediately before her exams, she had run off

to London determined to see some "real life" and wound up being given

a room in a house chiefly occupied by prostitutes under the direction

of a pimp with family connections or at any rate contacts in the Global

Hotel. He had advanced her what felt like an awful lot of money -- to

someone confined for three-quarters of the year in a boarding school,

a thousand pounds must still sound like a small fortune -- and made

it very clear that he expected repayment in full, and shortly. That

was not all he had given her, moreover. Modeling herself, consciously

or unconsciously, on the girl who had brought acid to school, she had

accepted several offers of this and that and the other, not only from

him but also from other girls in the house.

All very typical. Godwin repressed the urge to yawn and turned her around

on his lap so he could caress her clitoris. He made her come almost at

once, and while