Eighty Days Yellow Page 5

  ‘Summer . . .’ He’d run after me and grabbed my arm as I stepped through the door, spinning me round to face him. ‘I’ll call you, OK?’ he’d said.

  ‘Fine.’ I’d walked away without turning, imagining that he was watching my back disappear down the stairs. I heard the door click on the lock just as I turned the corner to the next flight of steps, out of his sight.

  He’d called me regularly since then, at first every night and then dying away to twice or thrice weekly as I ignored all of his messages. Twice he’d called me at 3 a.m., drunk, and left slurred messages on my voicemail.

  ‘I miss you, babe.’

  He had never called me ‘babe’ – in fact, he professed to hate the word – and I began to wonder whether I had ever really known him at all.

  For certain, I wouldn’t be calling Darren now, though I knew that he would jump at the chance to buy me a new violin. He had hated my old one, thought it looked shoddy and was not suitable for a classical violinist. He also hated my busking, considered it beneath me, though I knew that for the most part he worried about my safety. Rightly, he would say now.

  I stood at the crossroads outside the station, traffic racing by and pedestrians jostling in all directions, and considered what to do. I hadn’t really made many friends in London, other than the couples with whom Darren and I had spent time, going to various dinner parties and gallery openings, and pleasant though they were, they were all his friends, rather than mine. Even if I had wanted to contact any of them, I didn’t have their phone numbers. Darren had organised all our socialising, I just tagged along. I took my phone out of my pocket and scrolled through the numbers in my address book. I considered calling Chris. He was a musician, he’d understand, and he’d be angry if he discovered later I hadn’t called him, but I couldn’t face sympathy, or pity. Either emotion might break me, and then I’d be useless and unable to fix anything.

  Charlotte. From the strip club.

  I hadn’t seen her for a year and hadn’t heard from her during that time other than a few Facebook posts, but I was confident that if nothing else, Charlotte would cheer me up, and take my mind off the violin catastrophe.

  I pressed ‘call’.

  The phone rang. A man’s voice answered, sultry, sleepy, as if he’d just been woken up in a very pleasant way.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  I struggled to hear over the rush of traffic. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I think I have the wrong number. I’m looking for Charlotte.’

  ‘Oh, she’s here,’ said the man. ‘She’s just a bit busy at the moment.’

  ‘Can I speak to her? Can you tell her Summer is on the phone?’

  ‘Ah . . . Summer, Charlotte would be happy to speak to you, I’m sure, but her mouth is full.’

  I heard giggling and a scuffle, and then Charlotte’s voice on the phone.

  ‘Summer, darling!’ she said. ‘It’s been for ever!’

  More scuffling, and then a soft moan through the receiver.

  ‘Charlotte? Are you still there?’

  Another moan. More scuffling.

  ‘Hang on, hang on,’ she said, ‘give me a minute.’ The muffled sound of a hand over the receiver and, in the background, a man’s deep, throaty chuckle. ‘Stop it,’ she said in a whisper. ‘Summer’s a friend.’ Then she was back. ‘Sorry about that, darl,’ she said. ‘Jasper was just trying to distract me. How are you, honey? It’s been too long.’

  I imagined the two of them in bed together and felt a pang of envy. Charlotte was the only girl I’d ever met whose sexual capacity seemed to rival mine, and she was so open about it, something I had never been. There was a ready aliveness to her. She had the energy of the air after a tropical storm, all damp heat and ripe lushness.

  I remembered when we had gone vibrator shopping in Soho a few hours before she’d interviewed at the strip club near Chancery Lane. I had felt a little embarrassed and stood at her side uneasily, watching her confidently pick up dildos of all shapes and sizes, and rub them against the soft skin of her inner wrist to check their sensation.

  She had even approached the bored-looking man at the counter and asked for batteries, slipping the AAs inside the base of two similar but slightly different Rabbits with a practised wrist. One of them had a flat nose, and the other was split at the end into a sort of prong, designed to encircle the user’s clit as it buzzed. She ran one pulsating toy up her arm gently, then the other before turning to the man standing behind the counter.

  ‘Which one do you think would be better?’ she asked him.

  He stared at her as if she were an alien, arrived in his store from another planet. I felt the earth move beneath my feet and hoped it was the ground about to swallow me up.

  ‘I. Don’t. Know,’ he said, pausing between each word in case she didn’t understand.

  ‘Why not?’ she replied, not at all dissuaded by his surly tone. ‘You work here.’

  ‘I don’t have a vagina.’

  Charlotte pulled out her credit card and bought both, figuring that she would soon earn enough money stripping to pay the bill.

  We left the store and she stopped abruptly outside one of those spaceship-like public toilets, the sort that open with a push button at the side, and that I suspected were not often used for their true purpose.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she said, stepping inside and pushing the door-lock button before I had a chance to respond.

  I stood outside, blushing furiously as I imagined her standing in the cubicle with her knickers rolled down to her knees, pushing a vibrator first inside her and then running the tip round her clitoris.

  She was out of the toilet, smiling, within five minutes.

  ‘The flat one’s better,’ she remarked. ‘Want a go? I bought cleaner and wipes. And lube.’

  ‘No, I’m good, thanks,’ I replied, wondering what the people on the street would think if they could overhear our exchange. To my surprise, thinking of Charlotte masturbating in the toilet had turned me on. I wouldn’t tell her, but lubricant would certainly not have been necessary.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she said breezily, popping the vibrators into her handbag.

  Despite the broken violin in my case, and the ache in my heart when I thought of it, imagining Charlotte most likely naked at the other end of the telephone, her long, tanned legs spread out carelessly on the bed beneath the watchful gaze of Jasper, aroused me.

  ‘I’m good,’ I said falsely, and then told her what had happened in the station.

  ‘Oh my God! You poor thing. Come over. I’ll throw Jasper out of bed for you.’

  She texted me the address and within the hour I was curled up on a swing seat in the living room of her apartment in Notting Hill, sipping a double espresso from a delicate porcelain cup and saucer set. Charlotte’s fortunes had definitely been on the up since I saw her last.

  ‘Dancing is going well, then?’ I asked her as I surveyed the spacious interior, polished wooden floors and large flat-screen television on the wall.

  ‘God, no,’ she said, flicking off the coffee machine. ‘That was awful. I didn’t make any money, and I got sacked again.’

  She wrapped a finger round the handle of her own small mug and walked over to the sofa. I suspected that her now very long and dead-straight brown hair might be the result of extensions, but I was pleased to see that she still didn’t have fake nails. Charlotte was no shrinking violet, but she had class.

  ‘I’ve been playing online poker,’ she said, nodding towards the desk and large Mac in the corner of the room. ‘Made a fortune.’

  A door opened down the hall and steam drifted out, presumably from the bathroom. A languid smile spread across Charlotte’s face as she watched my head turn in response to the sound.

  ‘Jasper,’ she said. ‘He’s in the shower.’

  ‘Have you been seeing each other long?’

  ‘Long enough,’ she replied with a grin as he sauntered into the living room.

  He was one of the most hands
ome men I’d ever set eyes on. Thick, dark hair, still wet from the shower, lean thighs wrapped in loose-cut denim jeans, a short-sleeved casual shirt, all the buttons open to reveal sculpted abdominals and a fine trail of hair running down to his groin. He stood silently near the kitchen, towel-drying his hair with one hand, as if waiting for something.

  ‘I’ll just see the lovely boy out,’ Charlotte said to me with a wink, and pushed herself up off the couch.

  I watched as she took out a wad of banknotes from an envelope resting on her bookshelf and pressed the bundle into his hand. He folded the wad over and slid it discreetly into the back pocket of his jeans without counting.

  ‘Thank you,’ Jasper said to her. ‘It’s truly been a pleasure.’

  ‘The pleasure is all mine,’ she replied, opening the front door and kissing him gently on both cheeks on the way out.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to say that,’ she said to me, dropping down onto the sofa again.

  ‘Is he an . . .?’

  ‘Escort?’ she finished for me. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But surely you could . . .?’

  ‘Pick anyone up?’ she finished again. ‘Probably. But I like paying for it. Puts the shoe on the other foot, if you know what I mean, and then I don’t need to worry about all the other bullshit.’

  I could certainly see the appeal. At that moment, or indeed at almost any other moment, I would have killed for a guilt-free, complication-free, painless fuck.

  ‘Do you have any plans tonight?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head.

  ‘Good. I’m taking you out.’

  I protested that I wasn’t in the mood and didn’t have any suitable clothes to wear or any money. Besides which, I hate nightclubs, full of young girls batting their fake lashes for a free drink and seedy men trying to cop a feel.

  ‘It’ll take your mind off it. I’m paying. I have an outfit for you. And this place is different. You’ll love it.’

  A few hours later, I was standing aboard a large boat moored on the Thames that doubled as a fetish-themed nightclub once a month over the autumn.

  ‘What exactly does that mean, “fetish”?’ I asked Charlotte nervously.

  ‘Oh, nothing really,’ she said. ‘The people just wear fewer clothes, but like they mean it. And they’re friendlier.’

  She grinned and told me to relax in a manner that suggested I do exactly the opposite.

  I was now dressed in a pale-blue boned corset, frilly knickers and stockings with a blue seam running down the back of my legs from thigh to ankle to meet a pair of silver heels. Charlotte had teased my hair into a thick mass of curls, doubling the already large volume of my red locks, and had then balanced a top hat on my crown at a jaunty angle. She had lined my eyelids carefully with liquid eyeliner, thick and dark, painted my lips a vivid, glossy red and stuck a little silver glitter to my cheeks with Vaseline. The corset was a couple of inches too big and had to be cinched all the way in to tighten round my waist, and the shoes were a touch small, making it difficult to walk, but the effect overall, I hoped, was pleasing.

  ‘Wow,’ said Charlotte, looking me up and down once she’d finished decking me out in all her finery. ‘You look hot.’

  I moved awkwardly over to her mirror. Damn, my feet were going to hurt by the end of the night. The shoes were pinching already.

  I was pleased to see that I couldn’t disagree with Charlotte’s description, though I wouldn’t say so aloud, obeying the presumed rules of behaviour and putting on a show of modesty. The girl in the mirror didn’t really look like me. More like a rebellious older sister in a burlesque costume. The corset, though loose-fitting, forced me to stand straighter, and though I was inwardly nervous about leaving the apartment like this, in my new skin, I guessed I would look confident, my shoulders back and throat bared, like a dancer.

  Charlotte had stripped off completely in front of me and rubbed her body with lube, before asking for my help to shimmy into a tiny bright-yellow rubber dress with two red lightning bolts running up either side of her waist. The dress was cut low at the front, so that nearly all of her plump breasts and a tantalising hint of her nipples were visible, pressed tightly against the scooped neck. The lube was cinnamon-flavoured, and for a moment I had been tempted to give her a lick. I noticed that she didn’t wear any knickers, although the dress barely covered her arse.

  Charlotte was brazen, that was for sure, but I admired her confidence and, after a day spent in her company, was beginning to get used to it. She was one of the few people I knew who did exactly what she liked without giving a damn what anyone else thought.

  In my too-small five-inch heels and Charlotte in her enormous red platforms, we’d had to cling on to each other’s arms, giggling, as we tentatively scooted down the steep metal ramp and onto the boat.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Charlotte said, ‘you’ll be on your back before you know it.’

  Would I?!

  We arrived at about midnight and the club was in full swing. I was a little self-conscious about removing my jacket and joining the party with more than my usual amount of flesh on public display, but Charlotte insisted that I would fit right in. We presented our tickets in exchange for a stamp on the wrist at the front desk, checked in our coats and then teetered up the stairs, through the double doors and into the main bar.

  My senses were assaulted immediately. Everywhere men and women were dressed in eye-popping outfits. Latex abounded, but also vintage-style lingerie, top hats and tail coats, military uniforms, even a man wearing just a cock-ring, his flaccid penis bouncing happily as he walked. A short woman wearing a voluminous skirt and nothing else, her full breasts hanging freely, walked through the crowd holding a lead with a very thin, tall man attached to the other end, his back and shoulders hunched heavily so that she could pull him along without straining. He reminded me of Mr van der Vliet.

  Alone on one of the couches sat a petite man, or possibly an androgynous woman, wearing a full rubber body suit and face mask. Charlotte hadn’t been entirely right about the fetish crowd wearing fewer clothes. Of course, many of them were wearing next to nothing, and wearing it well, but a large number wore elaborate costumes that covered every inch of flesh, yet still managed to look sexual. Cheap fancy dress and street clothes were both banned, a finer detail that elevated almost all of the boat’s occupants from tacky to theatrical.

  ‘What are you drinking, honey?’ asked Charlotte, taking my attention away from the crowd. I tried with all my might not to stare at anyone, but I felt as though I had been dropped into an adults-only movie set, or had stumbled through a corridor into a parallel universe where everyone was like Charlotte and didn’t give a damn about what the rest of the world thought of them.

  She’d been right at least about my outfit. Not only did I fit right in, but I was one of the more modestly attired revellers in attendance. They probably thought I was downright demure. This thought relaxed me. Normally, in any group of friends or social gathering, I worried I was the weird one, with my relaxed attitude to sex and relationships. No one had ever labelled me demure.

  ‘Just water for me, thanks,’ I replied.

  I didn’t want to take advantage of her generosity, and I wanted to absorb all this with a clear head, so I wouldn’t wake up in the morning thinking it was just a dream.

  Charlotte shrugged and returned a few minutes later with our drinks in hand.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you round.’

  She took me by the hand and led me through another set of double doors, this pair leading to the uncovered prow of the ship, where a handful of smokers and men dressed in thick, hot-looking military jackets were standing, either smoking or cooling down, or both. The women, who were generally wearing far fewer clothes, were huddled around the two gas heaters standing in the middle of the space. Two of them wore latex skirts with the backsides cut out and their pale buttocks shone under the gas light like low-hanging twin moons.

  I w
alked over to the side and stood still for a moment, holding Charlotte’s hand and staring at the Thames stretched out into the night like a long, black ribbon, nestling gently between the two halves of the city. The water looked thick and viscous, and made a soft slapping sound as it lapped at the base of the boat. Waterloo Bridge joined the two sides behind us, Blackfriars Bridge in front, the lights on Tower Bridge barely visible in the foreground, like a dark promise of things to come.

  I felt Charlotte shiver.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘It’s cold out here.’

  We walked back through the double doors and into the main bar, and then through another set of doors and onto the dance floor. I watched, open-mouthed, as a dark-haired, beautiful, vampy-looking woman covered herself with gasoline and then blew fire into the air over her head, while grinding round a pole to the sound of a heavy rock song. She reeked of sex. In the company of Charlotte, and in the presence of so many others who seemed unashamed of their bodies and proud, even, of their sexuality, I felt, for the first time in my life, as if I might not be a freak. Or at least, that if I was a freak, I had company.

  A tall man standing at the edge of the dance floor caught my eye. He was wearing a pair of tight, bright-blue sequinned leggings, long riding boots, a red and gold military jacket and a matching hat. He held a riding crop in one hand and a drink in the other, and was chatting happily to a gothic-looking girl wearing latex hot pants. She had long, black hair with a single white lock at the front. The man’s leggings barely concealed a large bulge at the crotch, and I stopped still for a moment, mesmerised. I thought I’d seen a similar pair of leggings in the window of a women’s fashion store, but on him the effect was decidedly masculine.

  Charlotte tugged my hand. ‘Later,’ she whispered into my ear, eyeing the man with the leggings. ‘The show’s on. That means it’ll be quiet downstairs.’

  She led me through a small, red velvet-curtained corridor, then into another, smaller bar, filled with similarly clad partygoers, and then down a flight of steps.

  ‘This is the dungeon,’ she said.