Eighty Days Yellow Page 2

  Mr van der Vliet treated me as if I were an instrument rather than a person. He moved my arms into position or laid a hand on my back to straighten my spine as if I were made of wood not flesh. He seemed completely unconscious of his touch, as though I were an extension of his own body. He was never anything other than completely chaste, but despite that, and his age and slightly acrid smell and bony face, I began to feel something for him. He was unusually tall, taller than my father, perhaps about six foot six, and he towered over me. Even grown to full height, I was only five five. At thirteen years of age, my head barely reached his chest.

  I began to look forward to our lessons together for reasons beyond the pleasure of perfecting my own playing. Occasionally I affected an ill-considered note or an awkward movement of my wrist in the hope that he would touch my hand to correct me.

  ‘Summer,’ he said to me softly one day, ‘if you continue to do that, I will teach you no longer.’

  I never played a bum note again.

  Until that night, a few hours before Darren and I fought over The Four Seasons.

  I’d been at a bar in Camden Town, playing a free set with a minor would-be blues rock group, when suddenly my fingers had frozen and I’d missed a note. None of the band members had noticed, and aside from a few hard-core fans who were there for Chris, the lead singer and guitarist, most of the audience was ignoring us. It was a Wednesday-night gig, and the midweek crowd was even tougher than the Saturday-night drunks, as aside from the die-hard fans, the punters were just at the bar for a quiet beer and a chat, inattentive to the music. Chris had told me not to worry about it.

  He played viola as well as guitar, though he had largely given up the first instrument in an attempt to create a more commercial appeal with the second. We were both string musicians at heart and had developed a bit of a bond because of it.

  ‘It happens to all of us, sweetheart,’ he’d said.

  But it didn’t happen to me. I was mortified.

  I’d left the band without having a drink with them afterwards and caught the train to Darren’s flat in Ealing, letting myself in with the spare key. I had mixed his flight times up, thinking he’d arrive later in the morning having taken the red eye and gone straight to the office without dropping by home first, giving me a chance to sleep in a comfortable bed the whole night and listen to some tunes. Another of my reasons for continuing to date him was the quality of the sound system in his flat, and because he had enough floor space to lie on. He was one of the few people I knew who still had a proper stereo, including a CD player, and there wasn’t enough space in my flat to lie on the floor, unless I put my head in the kitchen cupboard.

  After a few hours of Vivaldi on repeat, I concluded that this relationship, while mostly pleasant, was strangling my creative drive. Six months of moderate art, moderate music, moderate barbecues with other moderate couples and moderate lovemaking had left me pulling at the chain I’d allowed to grow round my own neck, a noose of my own making.

  I had to find a way out of it.

  Darren was usually a light sleeper, but he regularly took Nytol to help him avoid jet lag after his flights back from Los Angeles. I could see the packet glinting in his otherwise empty wastepaper basket. Even at 4 a.m. he had dutifully disposed of the rubbish rather than let an empty wrapper rest on his bedside cabinet until morning.

  The Vivaldi CD sat face down next to his lamp. For Darren, leaving a CD out of the case was the ultimate expression of protest. Despite the Nytol, I was surprised he’d been able to sleep at all, with it lying beside him, getting scratched.

  I slipped out of bed before dawn, having had one or two hours of sleep at best, and left him a note on the kitchen bench. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘for the noise. Sleep well. I’ll call you, etc.’

  I took the Central line tube into the West End with no real idea of which direction I was headed. My flat was permanently messy, and I didn’t like to practise there too often as the walls were thin and I worried that the tenants in the rooms next door would eventually tire of the noise, pleasant though I hoped it was. My arms ached to play, if for no other reason than to wear out the emotions that had built up over the previous night.

  The tube was packed by the time I’d reached Shepherd’s Bush. I’d chosen to stand at the end of the carriage, leaning against one of the cushioned seats by the door as it was easier than sitting with my violin case between my legs. Now I was crushed in a throng of sweaty office workers, more cramming in at each stop, each face more miserable than the last.

  I was still wearing my long, black velvet dress from the gig the night before, along with a pair of cherry-red patent leather Dr Martens. I played in heels for classical gigs, but preferred to wear the boots home as I felt they added a threatening swagger to my walk as I made my way through East London late at night. I stood straight, with my chin high, imagining that, dressed as I was, most of the carriage, or at least those who could see me among the crowd, suspected I was on my way home from a one-night stand.

  Fuck them. I wished I had been on my way home from a one-night stand. With Darren travelling so much and me playing as many gigs as I could get, we hadn’t had sex in nearly a month. When we did, I rarely came, and only as the result of a hurried, embarrassed shuffling, me desperately trying to reach orgasm while worrying that my self-pleasuring after sex would make him feel inadequate. I still did it, even though I suspected that it did make him feel inadequate, because it was that or spend the next twenty-four hours pent up and miserable.

  A construction worker got on at Marble Arch. By now the end of the carriage was completely rammed, and the other passengers scowled as he tried to squeeze into a small gap by the door in front of me. He was tall, with thick, muscled limbs, and he had to crouch a little so that the doors could shut behind him.

  ‘Move down, please,’ a passenger called out in a polite, though strained, voice.

  Nobody moved.

  Ever well mannered, I shifted my violin case to create a space, leaving my body unencumbered and directly facing the muscled man.

  The train set off with a start, throwing the passengers off balance. He jolted forward and I straightened my back to keep myself steady. For a moment I felt his torso squeeze against me. He was wearing a long-sleeved cotton shirt, a safety vest and stone-washed denim jeans. He wasn’t fat, but he was stocky, like a rugby player in the off-season, and crunched up in the carriage with his arm stretched out to hold the overhead rail, everything he was wearing looked slightly too small for him.

  I closed my eyes and imagined what he might look like beneath his jeans. I hadn’t had a chance to check below the belt as he’d got on, but the hand holding the rail overhead was large and thick, so I figured that the same was true of the bulge in his denims.

  We pulled into Bond Street station and a petite blonde, her face fixed with grim determination, prepared to wedge herself in.

  Fleeting thought – would the train jerk again as it left the station?

  It did.

  Muscle Man stumbled against me, and feeling daring, I squeezed my thighs together and felt his body stiffen. The blonde began to spread herself out a bit, poking the construction worker in the back with her elbow as she reached into her hefty handbag for a book. He shuffled closer to me to give her more room, or perhaps he was simply enjoying the nearness of our bodies.

  I squeezed my thighs harder.

  The train jolted again.

  He relaxed.

  Now his body was pressed firmly against mine, and emboldened by our seemingly coincidental proximity, I leaned back just a fraction, pushing my pelvis off the seat so that the button on his jeans pressed against the inside of my leg.

  He moved his hand from the rail overhead to rest on the wall just above my shoulder so that we were nearly embracing. I imagined I heard his breath catch in his throat and his heart quicken, though any noise he might have made was drowned by the sound of the train rushing through the tunnel.

  My heart was racing and I fe
lt a sudden twinge of fear, thinking that I had gone too far. What would I do if he spoke to me? Or kissed me? I wondered how his tongue would feel in my mouth, if he was a good kisser, if he was the kind of man who would flick his tongue in and out horribly, like a lizard, or if he was the sort who would pull my hair back and kiss me slowly, like he meant it.

  I felt a hot dampness spreading between my legs and realised with a mixture of embarrassment and pleasure that my underwear was wet. I was relieved that I had resisted my defiant urge to go commando that morning and instead found a spare pair of knickers at Darren’s to put on.

  Muscle Man was turning his face towards me now, trying to catch my gaze, and I kept my eyes lowered and my face straight, as if the press of his body against mine was nothing untoward and this was the way that I always travelled on my daily commute.

  Fearing what might happen if I stood trapped between the carriage wall and this man any longer, I ducked under his arm and got off the train at Chancery Lane without looking back. I wondered, briefly, if he might follow me. I was wearing a dress; Chancery Lane was a quiet station; after our exchange on the train, he might suggest all manner of anonymous dirty deeds. But the train was gone and my muscled man with it.

  I had meant to turn left out of the station and head to the French restaurant on the corner that made the best eggs Benedict I’d had since I left New Zealand. The first time I ate there, I told the chef that he made the most delicious breakfast in London, and he had replied, ‘I know.’ I can understand why the British don’t like the French – they’re a cocky bunch, but I like that about them, and I went back to the same restaurant for eggs Benedict as often as I could.

  Now, though, too flustered to remember the way, instead of turning left I turned right. The French place didn’t open until nine anyway. I could find a quiet spot in Grey’s Inn Gardens, perhaps play a little before heading back to the restaurant.

  Halfway down the street, searching for the unsignposted lane that led to the gardens, I realised that I was standing outside a strip club that I had visited only a few weeks after I first arrived in the UK. I had visited the club with a friend, a girl with whom I had worked briefly while travelling through Australia’s Northern Territory and bumped into again at a youth hostel nearby on my first night in London. She’d heard that dancing was the easiest way to make money here. You spent a couple of months or so at the sleazier joints and then you could get a job at one of the posh bars in Mayfair where celebrities and footballers would stuff wads of fake money down your G-string as if it were confetti.

  Charlotte had taken me along to check the place out and see if she could pick up some work. To my disappointment, the man who had met us at the red-carpeted reception area didn’t lead us into a room full of scantily clad ladies getting their groove on, but instead took us into his office, through another door off to the side.

  He asked Charlotte to outline her previous experience – of which she had none, unless you counted dancing on tables at nightclubs. Next he looked her up and down in the way that a jockey might assess a horse at auction.

  Then he eyed me up from head to toe.

  ‘Do you want a job too, love?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I replied. ‘Got one already. I’m just her chaperone.’

  ‘It’s no touching. We throw them out straight away if they try anything,’ he added hopefully.

  I shook my head.

  I did briefly consider selling my body for cash, though, aside from the risks involved, I would have preferred prostitution. It seemed more honest to me somehow. I found stripping a little contrived. Why go that far and not commit to the full deal? In any event, I decided I needed my nights free for gigs, and I needed a job that left me with plenty of energy to practise.

  Charlotte lasted about a month at the club in Holborn before she was sacked when one of the other girls reported her for leaving the premises with two customers.

  A young couple. Innocent-looking as you like, Charlotte said. They’d come in late on a Friday night, the chap pleased as punch and his girlfriend excited and skittish, as if she’d never seen another woman’s body in her life. The boyfriend had offered to pay for a dance, and his girlfriend had surveyed the room and picked Charlotte. Perhaps because she hadn’t bought any proper stripper outfits yet, or had fake nails done like the other girls. It was Charlotte’s point of difference. She was the only stripper who didn’t look like a stripper.

  The woman had become obviously aroused within seconds. Her boyfriend was blushing bright red. Charlotte enjoyed subverting the innocent, and she was flattered by their response to the movements of her body.

  She leaned forward, filling the small space that was left between them.

  ‘Want to come back to mine?’ she’d whispered into both their ears.

  After a little more blushing, they’d agreed and they’d all bundled into the back of a black cab and driven to her flat in Vauxhall. Charlotte’s suggestion they go to theirs instead had been summarily turned down.

  Her flatmate’s face was a picture, she said, when he’d opened her bedroom door in the morning, without knocking, to bring her a cup of tea, and found her in bed with not just one stranger but two.

  I didn’t hear from Charlotte often now. London had a way of swallowing people up, and keeping in touch had never been a strong point of mine. I remembered the club, though.

  The strip joint was not, as you might expect, down a darkened alleyway, but rather right off the main street, between a Pret a Manger and a sports retailer. There was an Italian restaurant a few doors further down that I’d been to on a date once, made memorable when I accidentally set the menu on fire by holding it open over the candle in the centre of the table.

  The doorway was slightly recessed, and the sign above was not lit up in neon, but nonetheless if you looked at the place directly, from the blacked-out glass and the seedy-sounding name – Sweethearts – there was no mistaking it for anything other than a strip club.

  Struck by a sudden burst of curiosity, I tucked my arm tightly over my violin case, stepped forward and pushed the door.

  It was locked. Shut. Perhaps unsurprisingly at eight-thirty on a Thursday morning, they weren’t open. I pushed against the door again, hoping it would give.

  Nothing.

  Two men in a white van slowed as they drove by and wound down their window.

  ‘Come back at lunchtime, love,’ one of them shouted. The expression on his face was of sympathy rather than attraction. In my black dress, still wearing last night’s thick rock-chick make-up, I probably looked like a desperate girl looking for a job. So what if I was?

  I was hungry now and my mouth was dry. My arms were beginning to ache. I was hugging my violin case tightly to my side, which I had a habit of doing when I was upset or stressed. I didn’t have the heart to go into the French restaurant unshowered and dressed in yesterday’s clothes. I didn’t want the chef to think me uncouth.

  I took the tube back to Whitechapel, walked to my flat, stripped out of the dress and curled up on my bed. My alarm was set for 3 p.m., so I could go back underground and busk for the afternoon commuters.

  Even on my worst days, the days when my fingers felt as clumsy as a fist full of sausages and my mind felt like it was full of glue, I still found a way to play somewhere, even if it was in a park with pigeons for an audience. It wasn’t so much that I was ambitious, or working towards a career in music, though of course I had dreams of being spotted and signed, of playing at the Lincoln Center or the Royal Festival Hall. I just couldn’t help it.

  I woke up at three feeling rested and a great deal more positive. I’m an optimist by nature. It takes a degree of madness, a very positive attitude or a bit of both to lead a person round the other side of the world with nothing but a suitcase, an empty bank account and a dream to keep them going. My poor moods never lasted long.

  I have a wardrobe full of different outfits for busking, most of them garnered from markets and from eBay, because I don’t have
a lot of cash. I rarely wear jeans, as, with a waist much smaller, proportionately, than my hips, I find trying on trousers tedious, and I wear skirts and dresses nearly every day. I have a couple of pairs of denim cut-off shorts for cowboy days, when I play country tunes, but today, I felt, was a Vivaldi day, and Vivaldi requires a more classical look. The black velvet dress would have been my first choice, but it was crumpled in a heap on the floor where I had ditched it earlier that morning and needed to go back to the dry cleaner’s. Instead, I selected a black, knee-length skirt with a slight fishtail and a cream silk blouse with a delicate lace collar that I had bought from a vintage store, the same place I got the dress. I wore opaque tights and a pair of lace-up ankle boots with a low heel. The full effect, I hoped, was a little demure, gothic Victorian, the sort of look that I loved and Darren hated; he thought that vintage was a style for wannabe hipsters who didn’t wash.

  By the time I had reached Tottenham Court Road, the station where I had an agreed busking spot, the commuter crowd had just begun to pick up. I settled myself in the area against the wall at the bottom of the first set of escalators. I had read a study in a magazine that said that people were most likely to give money to buskers if they’d had a few minutes to make up their mind to tip. So it was handy that I was situated where commuters could see me as they rolled down the escalator and have a chance to fish out their wallets before they walked by. I wasn’t immediately in their way either, which seemed to work for Londoners; they liked to feel as though they’d made a choice to step to one side and drop money in my case.

  I knew that I ought to make eye contact and smile my thanks at the people who left coins, but I was so lost in my music I often forgot. When I was playing Vivaldi, there was no chance that I would connect with anyone. If the fire alarm had gone off in the station, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. I put the violin to my chin and within minutes the commuters disappeared. Tottenham Court Road disappeared. It was just me and Vivaldi on repeat.