Autumn Read online

  I missed the woody, masculine smell of him that was never cologne or soap or hair gel, just Dominik. I missed the way that one corner of his mouth always lifted slightly higher than the other when he smiled. I missed the arrow that his hip bones made, pointing to his groin, and the way that he complained about his ‘middle age spread’ which left me with barely even an inch of fat to grab from his perpetually flat stomach. I missed the light dusting of hair on his chest and I missed lying half on top of him on the couch and running my fingers through it on the rare nights that we watched television together, catching up on past episodes of endless series or DVDs or just the world news.

  I even missed the things he did that annoyed me. His occasional snore. The way he hung used towels from the bathroom doorknob instead of the rail so they were sure to always fall on the floor. How he refused to eat grapes unless they were seedless. His habit of following me around the house, switching off the lights that I had left on and tutting even though I knew all too well how much he was blissfully indifferent to environmental issues or money matters. The endless spoonfuls of sugar that he stirred into his coffee. The look on his face when I teased him about how much I wanted a cat, knowing how much he hated even the thought of us owning a pet.

  Most of all though, I missed the familiar hard warmth of his body in the bed next to me when I awoke each morning and evoked all the ways he would make love to me and how I had opened myself to him and his desires like no other man before him. Nor could I imagine making love to any other man after him, though God knows I was aroused enough and had known many before we had finally come together after the heartbreak of our initial on and off relationship.

  My grief took the form of desire, and my desire for Dominik was an ever-present longing. A white heat that filled every fibre of my being until I felt as though it might consume me like a flame that would keep on burning, ceaselessly.

  Every day now, I relived waking up with him for the last time. Sometimes I imagined our last morning exactly as it was. Other times I pictured how it would have been if I had known it was the last time I would wake up with him. All the things that I would say. How I would tell him that I loved him and that he meant everything to me, and how I wouldn’t care if he teased me for being soppy. Oh, how I longed for him to tease me. I imagined turning towards him as soon as I felt his hand caress my hair and how I would touch him back. I thought about how I would press my lips against his skin and trail a path of kisses down to his groin. How I would take his cock in my mouth and worship him. Run the blade of my tongue up his shaft and over and around every groove and crevice until I tasted him on my tongue.

  When I lay awake at night restless and unable to sleep I would summon him to my mind. The precise firmness of his touch, the press of his lips against mine. The way that he would act playful and provocative until I was ready to erupt and then pull away and laugh as though watching my rising desperation was the funniest thing in the world. I could even recall the way the pads of his fingertips felt trailing over my skin. The pattern of his fingerprints was etched into my memory like a map of pathways that I roamed like a lost soul in my dreams. I knew every single groove, every valley, every dip and every curve in his flesh. The broken byways of his lifeline.

  Sometimes I felt as though I didn’t exist at all any longer. I never had. I had been nothing before Dominik. The lodestone that had ever so briefly kept me grounded was gone. And the emptiness had returned.

  2

  Dance Macabre

  Thinking of Dominik occupied the jagged jigsaw of my dreams and the deserts of my days.

  At night, I wore my grief like a shroud. As if I had been enveloped by a heavy cloak and the tighter I wrapped myself in it, the closer I felt to him.

  During my waking moments though, I got on with the business of death.

  The funeral came and went, and my sister Fran and old friend Chris stayed for a short time, though they were no longer dating. I had never managed to quite put aside the feeling that neither of them had ever really completely understood or approved of the relationship between Dominik and me. So despite the fact that my heart felt as though it had been roughly torn into pieces, I somehow managed to locate the kink equipment that Dominik kept secreted away in various parts of the house, to make sure that neither of them accidentally stumbled upon a length of bondage rope or a flogger.

  There wasn’t much of it. He had never really been one for all the trappings of kink. Handcuffs and paddles were not Dominik’s style. It was our natures that had each warred and surrendered to the other in the bedroom, and we had never needed any implements for that. He had collected a few things, either out of curiosity, a desire to treat, tease or torment me, or simply to sample new sensations, particularly when it was all so new to me and like a kid in a candy shop, I had wanted to try everything from candle wax to electro torture.

  When my guests arrived I had hastily stuffed all of the things that I didn’t want prying eyes to see into the deep, solid and lockable drawers in the low cabinet that functioned as a side table by our front door and then hidden the key. Then, until they had left again, I had behaved how I thought I ought to behave. How they expected me to behave.

  With my face frozen into the rictus of a grieving widow I lay on the couch and let them bring me mugs of hot tea and answer the doorbell and call our utility providers and the car insurance company, pretending to be me and changing all of the accounts into my name.

  Amending the insurance turned out to be impossible. ‘We need to speak to the policy holder,’ I overheard a loud, singsong voice saying at the other end of the line. ‘You don’t understand,’ Fran hissed back. ‘He’s dead.’

  Letters addressed to Dominik continued to slip through the mail slot and land on the floor by the door just as gently as all the others, no matter how heavily the shock of seeing his name in print weighed on my heart. The paperwork of death was seemingly endless, and of all the banal ways that a person could linger on, junk mail and electricity bills were the worst.

  Ar first, I only wore the bracelet with its tiny padlock charm that he had hidden at the bandstand when I was alone, though most nights I slept with it clutched in my hand. I wasn’t ashamed of what it represented, or of publicly marking myself as Dominik’s submissive. It just felt too personal and too perfect to share, or to sully with the ordinariness of everyday life.

  In time, as soon as all my friends, family and various well-wishers gradually disappeared, I got up off the couch and drowned myself in activity.

  The public Summer and the private Summer. It came so naturally to me, the dichotomy of my two sides. And the contrast made me realise how terribly lonely I had become without Dominik. He had been the only person I had fully shown my whole self to, complete with all of my flaws, strange yearnings, and mixed-up emotions.

  For the first time since the day of his death, I walked in to his study and contemplated the darkness of his computer screen, the uneven piles of papers, reference books and folders laid out across the desk. Noticed the faint red light on the face of his music player; it had been on all this time and I’d forgotten to switch it off.

  There had been a request from his editor to ascertain how far Dominik had made progress with his new book. He’d always made it a rule not to discuss works in progress and I had no idea if the novel had gone as far as a first draft even.

  I tried to make sense of which layer of print-outs actually formed part of this project I knew nothing about and distinguish between random notes, past drafts of academic lectures, household bills, statements and handwritten jottings, but it was useless.

  Instead, I waved the mouse, watched the screen jump to life and ordered a house moving kit from Argos to be delivered that afternoon. Dominik would have railed against my impulsiveness, spending money on an expensive courier service when I could easily have waited a few days for free standard delivery. But right then, I couldn’t face leaving the house.<
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  The blue-uniformed delivery driver arrived two hours later, dwarfed by the large cardboard box he was carrying that contained a further nine boxes, packing tape and a marker pen set. I signed for the items wordlessly, shut the door and began fitting the boxes together and disposing of the remnants of Dominik’s life.

  My memories of Dominik were like pearls clutched tightly in my fists. I knew that the more time passed by, the more they would turn to smoke, blur at the edges and begin to drift away. But, right then, I was not particularly sentimental about his possessions. The whole house could have burned to the ground for all I could have cared. All of it was nothing without him.

  I began with the easy stuff. The dress shoes and ties and cuff links, the things that he didn’t wear unless an occasion demanded it so they didn’t seem a part of him. In fact, I could imagine him grinning as he saw the evidence of business conferences, networking events and the odd acquaintance’s wedding vanishing into the anonymous depths of brown cardboard containers and sealed with duct tape.

  My flurry of activity came to an abrupt halt though, once I had rid the cupboards of meaningless items and came to the things that actually meant something to him, or that he used day-to-day. The things that still held his scent. Warm and masculine and comforting. He had worn so much black. Black jeans, black smart trousers, black cashmere sweaters, black scarves, black leather gloves. Dominik’s living clothes were clothes for a corpse and so I left them in his wardrobe.

  I moved to the items on our hallway shelves, planning to rearrange his books and put at least some of them into storage. He was a collector, and by the end, the sheer number of volumes that he had accrued had become quite unmanageable. We had even discussed building a loft to accommodate his ever-growing collection, since it was a hobby that I knew he would never abandon, and so much a part of him that I couldn’t bring myself to try to change it, even if that had been possible (and I had always known that it hadn’t).

  I opened a volume at random, held it to my face and inhaled deeply. The peculiar smell of old books hit me like a punch to the gut. It was the very same scent that had assaulted my senses the first time that I had ever come to this house, and it reminded me so much of Dominik that if I closed my eyes and kept breathing in, his ghost appeared alongside me in such vivid, three-dimensional detail that he might have been really there.

  One by one I pulled them out and tossed them from the shelves; pulp fiction thrillers and novels of the weird, cheap paperback detective stories and penny dreadfuls often with busty blondes on the covers and slogans like ‘he took one look, and vowed to possess her’. There were heavy, gilt-edged, hardbacked literary tomes, thick fantasy novels, glossy photography collections and an uncommonly large section of books featuring antique maps, lightweight and loose-leafed poetry magazines and ponderous biographies of writers, explorers and musicians. One by one they fell to the floor with a thud or a flutter until I was surrounded, and then I dropped to my knees with them, curled up into a ball and began to sob.

  ‘Who were you, Dominik?’ I wanted to scream. Aside from the occasional magazine or thriller hurriedly purchased to pass time spent on aeroplanes and in airport lounges or hotel rooms when I was travelling, I barely ever read. Why had he surrounded himself with all of these other imaginary worlds? I knew that he kept them in some kind of order. But I had no idea what it was. Suddenly it seemed like the most important thing in the world, the way that he had kept his books. Why had I never asked him?

  They were the first real tears that I had shed since his death, and they came thick and fast until I had no more tears to cry. Wrung out and exhausted, I laid my head down, pressed my cheek against the pages of a paperback, and drifted into a fitful slumber.

  I had begun sleeping in different rooms of the house, or wherever I happened to be when I drifted off. Only ever once in Dominik’s study, on the bed that he had lifted me onto the first time that we made love here, after I had performed for him, nude and alone in the isolated crypt where he had been so aroused by my music that he had first taken me against a stone wall before taking me home. My memories of his study had always been an equal measure of lust and homeliness. It wasn’t just the room that we had first really made love in, it was the room that I most associated with Dominik, the room where he spent so many late and lonely nights typing the words that meant so much to him, the room that I instinctively felt was so much his territory. But now it was also the room in which he had died and I could not bear to be in it. The rest of the house just felt empty without him. But his study felt more than empty. It felt as though he had left a black hole behind him, a vast cavern of absence so great that if I stood near it too long I might be sucked inside.

  My dreams were infrequent but acute in their pain. I wanted to say that I slept like the dead, but, even within the solitude of my own mind, that expression now made me wince. I slept as though stupefied, far more hours than any normal human needed and that despite all the coffee I drank and without any help from whale noises, pan pipes or narcotic sleeping aids. When I did dream, my dreams were either violent or fantastical, but always, I dreamed of Dominik. Of his hands around my throat as he rode me hard, or around my wrists as he pinned me down. Even the way that, in the depths of our hardest lovemaking sessions he would sometimes make me gag or spit in my face as I kneeled in front of him and tried my damnedest to swallow him right to the base of his cock. During the day, I recalled his gentle affection, the warmth of his body as we lay together and spooned, or the way that his hand fitted into mine as we walked. But at night, it was inevitably Dominik’s dark side that fuelled my imagination, emphasising how much that part of him had proven indispensable to me.

  I was roused by a faint noise outside. It was both cold and dark, as I had fallen asleep with the lighting and heating switched off. I opened the front door and peered out. The brisk, late evening air cut against my tear-stained, swollen face, as refreshing as a splash of cold water. A large wicker basket with tea towels draped over the top of the handle lay on the doorstep. Gingerly, I lifted back the cover. It contained muffins, and a still-warm bread and butter pudding. ‘Thank god it’s not a baby,’ I thought to myself, almost sniggering, as I lifted the basket and carried it into the kitchen, picking my way carefully over the books I had earlier scattered. I put the glass dish with the pudding in it on the bench next to the sink, where it would sit until the custard congealed and the crusts began to wilt and wither away from the dish, and then went back to the hall and returned all of the books to the shelves.

  Immediately after Dominik’s death I had been overwhelmed by flowers and cards, hot soup and casseroles with caramel-coloured breadcrumb crusts that Chris and my sister had either eaten, thrown away or neatly separated into single portions, labelled and placed into the freezer, where they still sat uneaten. Now the gifts were fewer and further between, but they still arrived, and I just left them in the kitchen, sometimes nibbling on the crusts of muffins or edges of biscuits as I drank another cup of coffee.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate these small gestures of kindness. I knew that people were trying to show that they cared. They didn’t know what to say to me, so instead they baked. But I could barely taste food in those first few weeks and I certainly couldn’t be bothered to chew it. Mouthfuls of anything solid just lodged in my throat. I lived off caffeine and bags of sweets. I wasn’t trying to starve myself. Food just didn’t seem important. The effort of lifting my hand to my mouth was too much trouble.

  Physical hunger came in fits and starts, like my bursts of cleaning. One morning I had spied a bag of bagels in the pantry, the sort that Dominik and I often ate on the weekend smeared with cream cheese and sometimes a little jam. They were stale, but not mouldy. There was still a pot of Philadelphia, unopened and just within its use by date hiding at the back of the fridge. I toasted a bagel, spread it thick with cheese, and gulped it down so quickly I barely tasted anything and burned my tongue on the ho
t crust and dough. I fixed another and ate that too. Then I opened the cupboard door and grabbed all the spreads that I could find. Dominik’s favourite brand of plum jam, my jar of chocolate spread, the peanut butter. I didn’t bother to toast the next. Just tore off hunks of bagel that I then dunked into a jar of something and pushed into my mouth. I did the same with the next, and the next, until suddenly I realised that I was standing in front of the toaster with an empty bag clutched in one hand, and one remaining bite of bread in the other. My tongue felt dry and my stomach distended. I threw the last chunk into the bin, rinsed my mouth and lay down on the couch with my arms wrapped around my belly until I fell asleep. When I woke, I was still full, and the day was gone. I pushed myself up, climbed the stairs to the bedroom, crawled on top of the bed and promptly fell asleep again.

  Weeks passed like this. I knew that I was a wreck, inside and out. I didn’t care. I only fully dressed when I went out, which wasn’t often, and even then I just pulled on whatever clothing was nearest, tucked my hair into a tangled bun and didn’t bother with make-up. Around the house I wore an old robe or a T-shirt and underwear, whatever was handy.