Tags: expats | fiction | sexpats | travel fiction

Alistair Paine had been on a plane from Budapest to London when he met Budapest’s self-professed ‘King of the Three Way’, a pornographer named Raymond Fletcher...

“How fabulous”, laughed Raymond, as he calmly collected his pile of exposed flesh. Alistair regained himself and took a long, appraising look at the exotic creature that would be his travelling companion for the next eight hours. He wore a giraffe patterned pair of Versace trousers with a paisley shirt and a powder blue, silver studded, dress cotton jean jacket. Tinted sunglasses concealed mooncalf brown eyes. In point of fact, Raymond’s eyes were permanently hidden behind shades of various hue, today they were aqua blue, tomorrow magenta? Easy peasy Lemon squeezy?

“Now we just zip that up… stuff it in here…” Raymond was narrating his movements as he placed his bag in the overhead compartment. Alistair Paine wondered whether to tell the hoary old joke about an airline passenger who masturbates over a girly magazine gatefold and then says to his fellow passenger, ‘Mind if I smoke?’ He thought better of it. Again, why should he feel embarrassed? “Raymond Fletcher”, said the man in the giraffe-patterned pants, extending a bejewelled hand with long manicured nails. “I expect you’re wondering about the smut?”

“Reasonable supposition”, replied Alistair, who had regained his cool sufficiently to affect worldly nonchalance. The explanation came, and it was nothing if not loquacious. To summarise: Raymond Fletcher was firstly a photographer who had first gone to Eastern Europe in ‘92, “on a shoot for Cosmo”. While in Budapest his agent had contacted him and said that Penthouse needed someone on the ground in Budapest to shoot an up and coming Hungarian porn star, (the photo- ­­grapher assigned the job having just died of a drug overdose). Porn became a staple of his work, “much more lucrative than fashion photography darling, and certainly not as pretentious. I mean, that’s real work, especially for the guys, having to get it up and keep it up”.

Trouble with the Inland Revenue in the UK saw him relocate permanently to Budapest a few years later, by which time Raymond Fletcher had discovered the internet, and how to really make money from smut.

“There might seem to you, my dear, to be an inexhaustible supply of this terrible shit, but trust me, there’s an inexhaustible demand. I’m looking for new girls all the time. And no, before you ask, I am not in the least bit aroused by the stuff I shoot. It might as well be farming implements for all it does for me. Besides, my own machinery stop­ped func­tioning as it should a few years ago, and dear God, what a relief. My former wife – I married her for her Green card – said it must be all the drugs I used to take when I was younger. If that’s the case, I wish I had taken more drugs, earlier, and saved myself an awful lot of bother”.

Statements like this came as naturally to Raymond Fletcher as passing wind comes to a heavy cider drinker. Not long after declaring his impotence Raymond was announcing his intentions to father a son, “and if it’s a boy I hope he’ll be gay, and talented.” A girl? “Well, stupid, street- smart, vain, shallow and beautiful, I suppose. But the trouble is finding the right mate. And you know, I want to have children when I’m still an age to enjoy them”.

‘Dear God’, Alistair thought, though he was determined not to appear shocked by anything his travelling companion said. As Fletcher talked, he studied him more closely. As he expostulated he waved his hand around as if smoking an ‘air cigarette’, and indeed once on terra firma he smoked continuously. It occurred to Alistair that there were actually very few people you could, in real life, describe as ‘reptilian’. That was a term for Bond villains, not real people; or so he had thought, until meeting Raymond Fletch­er. There were odd times when the very temperature seemed to drop in the man’s presence…

Fletcher’s sallow skin was adorned by a treasure chest’s worth of solid silver rings, bracelets and necklaces. Over a period of twenty or more years, he had trained himself to conceal his teeth when he smiled, and to cover them with his hand, when he laughed his hoot-hoot-hoot of a laugh. When these ruses failed, a glimpse of his dental ranks was alarming. The inside of his mouth was that of a medieval peasant. His teeth were yellowing stumps in a black morass. Raymond Fletcher had been visiting ‘one of his girls’, he said, one of his former models who was working the strip clubs of Canada’s West Coast.

He planned to spend a few days in London “treating my body like a theme park”, and then on to Florence, Italy, “to commit a murder”. This not only got Alistair’s attention, but that of the passengers seated fore and aft.

“Sweet pea, I’m joking. I’m actually just going back to Budapest to finish work on a new website, ‘threeway dot com’. But I do think it must be wonderful to actually, you know, murder someone.

And Italy, as Ms Highsmith and others knew only too well, provides such a wonderful backdrop for a civilised murder. Alright, you’re in London for a day or two, that’ll do.

Take a walk among its throbbing humanity, and imagine yourself choos­­ing someone at random from the crowds in Leicester Square or Convent Garden. Some pissed-up city type weaving home after curry and pints perhaps. Imagine following them to their door, and slitting their throat. It’s a thrilling notion isn’t it?” (And Alistair Paine silently admitted to himself that it was).

“For connoisseurs of life such as we, who have tried every high, drugs, sex, what you will, and now find them all shallow, murder is the last great adventure”.

By this point, Fletcher had talked almost without interruption for three hours and the effort, plainly, had exhausted him. He had worked hard to build to this crescendo and tem­porarily a spent force, he ab­ruptly fell asleep.

Much to the Alistair Paine’s sur­prise, the slumbering Raymond Flet­ch­er snored to beat the band.