Eighty Days Yellow Read online

  Dominik stood there for five whole minutes, time suspended, ignoring the continuous stream of commuters as they rushed by on their way to anonymous lives and activities, watching the violin player with rapt attention as she ran through the intricate Vivaldi melodies with gusto and a total lack of interest in her surroundings and involuntary audience or the frayed velvet lining of her violin case, on the ground by her feet, where coins were slowly accumulating, although no passer-by made any further contribution while Dominik was present and all ears and fascination.

  Not once did she open her eyes, lost in a trance, her mind engulfed in the world of the music, flying on the wings of song.

  In turn, Dominik closed his eyes too, unconsciously seeking to join her in this other world of her making, where the melody erased all forms of reality. But again and again he would open them, hungry to see the way her body moved in imperceptible inch-like movements, every sinew in her unseen muscles reaching for the ecstasy of otherness. Fuck, he’d die to know what the young woman was feeling right now, mentally, physically.

  She was fast reaching the end of the ‘Winter’ allegro. Dominik pulled his wallet out of the left inside pocket of his leather jacket and hunted for a note. He’d been to a cash machine earlier in the day on his way to the university. He briefly hesitated between a twenty and a fifty, looked up at the young red-haired woman and followed the nascent wave of movement coursing through her whole body as her wrist launched the bow at an odd angle towards the instrument’s strings once again. The silk of her blouse was stretched to breaking point for an instant and pulled tight against the black bra that she wore visibly underneath it.

  Dominik felt a tightening in his groin and he couldn’t blame it on the music. He took the fifty-pound note and quickly deposited it in the violin case, rapidly shuffling it under a layer of coins so as not to attract the attention of venal passers-by, all this unnoticed by the young woman who was now living within the music.

  He walked away just as the music came to a halt with a flourish and the normal sounds of the tube took over again and the hurried commuters kept streaming on by in all directions.

  Later, back home, he lay on the couch, listening to a recording he’d found somewhere on his shelves of the Vivaldi concertos, a CD he hadn’t taken out of its case for years. He couldn’t even recall buying it; maybe it had come free with a magazine.

  He recalled the young woman’s closed eyes (what colour could they have been?) as she lost herself in the music, the turn of her booted ankle, wondered what she might smell of. His mind raced on, evoking Claudia’s cunt, its depth, his fingers exploring her, his cock pounding against her, the time she had asked him to fist her and how he had fitted so snugly and wetly inside her, and the sound of her moans, the scream on the tip of her tongue, and the way her nails had embedded themselves in one savage thrust into the sensitive skin of his back. Catching his breath, he decided that the next time he fucked Claudia, he would play that music. Indeed. But in his mind it wasn’t Claudia he was fucking.

  He wasn’t lecturing the following day; his timetable had been arranged so that all his courses were compacted into two days of the week only. Nevertheless, he impulsively walked out of the house when the rush hour came and travelled to Tottenham Court Road station. He wanted to see the young musician again. Maybe find out what colour her eyes were. Discover what other pieces of music she had in her repertoire. Whether she would dress differently, depending on day or choice of music.

  However, she wasn’t there. Just a guy with long, greasy hair standing in her spot, swaggering with attitude, playing ‘Wonderwall’ badly and then inflicting an even more sloppy version of the Police’s ‘Roxanne’ on the impervious commuters.

  Dominik swore under his breath.

  For the following five evenings he returned to the station. In hope.

  Only to come across a succession of buskers playing Dylan and the Eagles with varying shades of success, or singing operatic tunes to pre-taped orchestral accompaniments. No violin player. He knew buskers had appointed locations and hours, but he had no way of finding out what her schedule was. For all he knew, she could have been a totally unregulated performer and unlikely to make a further appearance there.

  Finally, he called Claudia over.

  It felt like a revenge fuck, as if he had to punish her for not being another, imperiously positioning her on all fours and taking her more roughly than he was in the habit of doing. She said nothing, but he knew it was not to her taste. Holding her arms across her back, brutally gripping her wrists and forcing himself inside her as far as he could reach, ignoring the dryness, basking in the burning fire of her innards as he kept on pumping with metronomic precision, perversely watching her arse yielding under the intense pressure he was applying below, a pornographic vision he shamelessly wallowed in. Had he been gifted with a third hand, he would have cruelly pulled her hair back at the same time. Why did he get so angry at times? Claudia had done nothing wrong.

  Maybe he was getting tired of her and it was time to move on. To whom?

  ‘Do you enjoy hurting me?’ she later asked him as they sipped drinks in bed, exhausted, sweaty, troubled.

  ‘Sometimes I do,’ Dominik answered.

  ‘You know that I don’t mind, don’t you?’ Claudia said.

  He sighed. ‘I know. Maybe that’s why I do it. But does that mean you like it?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  The customary post-coital silence that often divided them returned and they drifted into sleep. She left fairly early in the morning, leaving an apologetic note about an interview of some sort, just a strand of her red hair on the pillow to remind Dominik she had spent the night.

  A month went by, during which Dominik no longer played any classical CDs when he was home alone. It just didn’t feel right. The end of term was soon approaching and he felt the urge to go travelling again. Amsterdam? Venice? Another continent altogether? Seattle? New Orleans? Somehow all these destinations he had once freely indulged in no longer held the same attraction. It was a most unsettling feeling and one he had seldom experienced before.

  Claudia was back in Hanover spending a few weeks with her family and he just hadn’t the energy to seek someone else out for fun and pleasure, and there was no one from his past he felt any inclination to spend time with again. Neither was this a time for friends or relatives. There were days when he even came to the conclusion that his powers of seduction might have abandoned him for parts unknown.

  On the way to a film screening at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank, he picked up a free newspaper from a vendor lurking outside the station entrance at Waterloo and casually stuffed the folded freesheet into his tote bag and then forgot all about it until mid-afternoon the following day.

  Halfway through the paper, Dominik came across a brief item of local news that hadn’t made that morning’s Guardian, in a section called ‘News From the Underground’, which more usually related tales of weird lost and found objects or silly stories of pets and commuter rage.

  A violin-playing busker had been inadvertently caught in an affray the previous day while performing at Tottenham Court Road station, it appeared. A group of regional drunken soccer fans passing through on their way to a match at Wembley had become involved in a large fight in which London transport officers had been obliged to forcibly intervene, and although not directly involved, she had been severely jostled in the process and dropped her instrument, on which one of the guys had then heavily fallen and it seemed her violin was now a total write-off.

  Dominik hurriedly read through the short piece twice, rushing to the end. The woman’s name was Summer. Summer Zahova. Despite the Eastern European surname, she appeared to be from New Zealand.

  It must be her.

  Tottenham Court Road, violin . . . who else could it be?

  She was unlikely to go busking if she was presently without an instrument in working order, so the chances of meeting her again, let alone listening to
her play, had now evaporated into thin air.

  Dominik sat back, unwittingly crumpling the newspaper in his fist and throwing it to the ground in anger.

  He did have a name though: Summer.

  He collected his thoughts, remembered how, some years before, he had gently stalked an ex-lover across the Internet, if only to find out what had become of her and how her life after him was proceeding. Unilateral stalking as it turned out to be, as she remained quite unaware of his discreet surveillance.

  Moving to his study, he booted up his computer and Googled the young musician’s name. There were very few hits, but it did indicate she was on Facebook.

  The photo on her Facebook page was artless and at least a few years old, but he recognised her in an instant. Maybe it had been taken in New Zealand, which led him to speculate how long she might have been in London, in England.

  At rest and not pursed in the throes of playing her violin, her mouth stood lipsticked brilliant red, and Dominik couldn’t help speculate how it would feel having his erection enveloped by the fiery lusciousness of those lips.

  Summer Zahova’s page was in part privacy-protected and he was unable to take a peek at her wall or even a list of her friends, and the personal details were somewhat sparse beyond her name, town of origin and London as place of residence, plus a declared interest in both men and women, as well as a list of classical composers and some pop among her likes. No mention of books or movies; clearly she was not someone who spent much time on Facebook.

  But he had an ‘in’.

  Later that evening, having weighed up a multitude of pros and cons, Dominik returned to the deafening silence of his laptop screen, logged on to Facebook and created a new account under a pretend name, albeit with a minimum of personal details that made Summer’s page chatty in comparison. He hesitated over his choice of photo, considered downloading an image of someone wearing an elaborate Venice Carnival mask, but eventually left his picture blank. It would have been a tad melodramatic. The text alone was sufficiently intriguing and enigmatic, he felt.

  Now, as his new persona, he typed out a message for Summer:

  Dear Summer Zahova,

  I was most sorry to hear of your ordeal. I am a great admirer of your musicianship, and to ensure you are able to continue your practice, I am willing to gift you with a new violin.

  Are you willing to accept my challenge and my terms?

  He left the message deliberately unsigned and clicked on ‘send’.

  3

  A Girl and Her Arse

  I stared at the broken remains of my violin with a strange sense of detachment.

  Without the instrument in my hands, I felt as though I wasn’t really present, as if I had watched the whole scene unfold from above. Disassociation, my high-school guidance counsellor had named it, when I tried to explain the way that I felt when I wasn’t holding a violin. I preferred to think of my peculiar mental flights both into and out of music as a type of magic, though I imagined that my talent for disappearing into melody was really just a heightened awareness in one part of my brain, resulting from a very focused sort of desire.

  I might have wept if I’d been the weeping sort. It wasn’t that I didn’t get upset about things, just that I have a different way of dealing with emotion, my feelings seeping through my body and usually leaking out through either my bow or some other physical expression, such as angry, emotional sex or swimming furious lengths up and down one of London’s outdoor swimming pools.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ slurred one of the drunks, stumbling close to me, his alcohol-soaked breath hot on my face.

  There was a football match somewhere in town today, and two groups of fans in their regulation team kit, each supporting opposing teams, had clashed in the station on their way to the match. The ruckus had broken out a few feet from where I was playing. As usual, I was so wrapped up in my music I didn’t hear whatever remark one side had made to the other in order to light the fuse. I didn’t even notice the fighting until I felt a beefy body knock into me, slamming my violin against the wall and overturning my case, coins flying all over like marbles in a school playground.

  Tottenham Court Road station is always busy and well staffed. A pair of portly London transport officers pulled the brawling fans apart and threatened to call the police. The fire soon went out of the men, who disappeared like rats into the bowels of the station, racing up escalators and Tube tunnels, perhaps realising they’d be late for their match, or possibly arrested, if they lingered any longer.

  I sank down against the wall where I’d earlier been playing ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ and held the two broken pieces of my violin to my chest as if I was nursing a child. It wasn’t an expensive violin, but it had a beautiful tone and I would miss it. My father had picked it out from a second-hand store in Te Aroha and given it to me for Christmas five years ago. I prefer second-hand violins, and my father always had an ear for them, an ability to survey a pile of junk and pick out the instrument that still had some use in it. He made a habit of buying my instruments, in the way that my mother and my sister bought clothes and books they thought I might like, and each one was perfect. I liked to imagine who had played it before me, the way that they had held it, the number of warm hands it had passed through, each owner leaving a little bit of their own story, some love and some loss and some madness, in the body of the instrument, emotions that I could coax out through the strings.

  This violin had travelled across New Zealand, and then across the world with me. It was on its last legs, granted; I’d had to patch it up with tape in two places where it had been knocked about on the long journey to London the previous year, but the sound was still true, and it felt just right in my arms. Finding a replacement would be a nightmare. Though Darren had nagged, I’d never got round to having it insured. I couldn’t afford a new instrument of any quality, or even an old instrument of any quality. Scouring the markets for a bargain could take weeks, and I couldn’t bring myself to buy a violin on eBay without feeling it in my hands and hearing the tone.

  I felt like a tramp walking around the station, picking up the coins that had scattered all over, my mangled violin in hand. One of the London transport officers asked for my details, to make a report, and he was obviously annoyed that I could provide him with so little information about the actual event.

  ‘No great talent for observation, eh?’ he sneered.

  ‘No,’ I replied, staring at his plump hands as he flicked through his notepad. Each of his fingers was pale and squat, like something that you might be disappointed to find on a plate at a party, attached to a cocktail stick. He had the hands of a person who didn’t play a musical instrument, or interrupt fights very often.

  In truth, I hate soccer, though I wouldn’t admit as much to anyone English. Football players, as a general rule, are too pretty for my liking. At least during rugby games, I could forget the sport and concentrate on the thick, muscled thighs of the forwards, their tiny shorts riding up and threatening to expose beautifully firm buttocks. I don’t play any organised sport myself, preferring the more singular pursuits of swimming and running, and weight training alone at the gym, to keep my arms in shape for long stretches of instrument-holding.

  Finally I managed to collect all of my takings, bundle the broken pieces of the violin into the case and escape the watchful glare of the London transport officers.

  I hadn’t gathered more than ten pounds in coins from the passing commuters before the louts had broken my violin. It had been a month since the mysterious passer-by had dropped the fifty into my case. I still had the note, tucked safely inside my underwear drawer, although God knows how desperately I needed to spend it. I had increased my hours at the restaurant I worked at part-time, but hadn’t had a paid gig for a few weeks, and despite subsisting on cafe food and Pot Noodles, I’d had to dip into my savings to cover last month’s rent.

  I had seen Darren only once since we fought over the Vivaldi record, and I’d explained to him, badly
probably, that things weren’t working out for me and I needed a break from our relationship to concentrate on my music.

  ‘You’re breaking up with me to be with a violin?’

  Darren had looked incredulous. He was well-off, good-looking and of baby-making age; no one had ever broken up with him.

  ‘Just taking a break.’

  I’d stared at the gleaming leg of one of his stainless-steel designer bar stools. I couldn’t look him in the eye.

  ‘No one just takes a break, Summer. Are you seeing someone else? Chris? From the band?’

  He’d taken one of my hands in his. ‘God, your palms are cold,’ he’d said.

  I’d looked down at my fingers. My hands have always been my favourite part of me. My fingers are pale, long and very slender, piano-playing hands, as my mother says.

  I’d felt a sudden rush of affection for Darren and turned to him, running my hand through his thick hair, tugging a little on his locks.

  ‘Ow,’ he’d said, ‘don’t do that.’

  He’d leaned forward and kissed me. His lips were dry, his touch tentative. He made no move to pull me towards him. His mouth tasted like tea. I’d immediately felt ill.

  I’d pushed him away and stood up, preparing to pick up my violin case and my bag with some spare underwear, a toothbrush, the few things that I kept in a drawer at his flat.

  ‘What, you’re turning down sex?’ Darren had sneered.

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ I’d said.

  ‘So, for the first time in her life, Miss Summer Zahova has a headache.’

  He was standing now and placing his hands on his hips, like a mother berating a petulant child.

  I’d picked up my bag and my case, turned on my heel and left. I was wearing his least favourite ensemble: red Converse ankle boots, denim shorts over opaque stockings and a skull T-shirt, and as I’d pushed open his front door, I’d felt more like myself than I had in months, as if a weight had lifted from my shoulders.