by Greg James
Chapter Three
John spent a day and a night in the University College Hospital by Euston station before they let him out. The world felt too bright and fragile as he travelled home by taxi. It dropped him off on his doorstep, and he let himself into the ground floor flat. It was quiet, which was good. His flatmates could be very noisy: doors slamming, raised voices, music pounding, footsteps going back and forth. He didn’t see much of them, and they didn’t see much of him. They all had their own contracts with the landlord, and direct debit took care of the rest. London was a city where one could be alone, even while being surrounded by many – something that could be both a good and bad thing. Tonight, it was the former. John wanted to rest and be alone. He’d been signed off for two weeks. The doctors said he’d been lucky to get away with concussion from a fall like that. He came to the door of his room. There was no post resting against it. When there was, it was usually American Express or other junk he didn’t need. Nothing to feed the bin with today, he thought, as he entered and turned on the light.
His room contained an armchair, a few sets of bookshelves, a bed, a small table, and an office chair he’d put together by himself. No carpet softened the bare boards. No desk either. He needed a desk. His possessions cluttered the bookshelves and the two cupboards built into the far wall, separated by a mantelpiece and a fireplace. It wasn’t much to show for thirty-five years, he thought. Maybe it was the knock on the head, but he felt like he was seeing himself, his life, for the first time, and a single word crept from his lips, “Pathetic.”
You could’ve done so much better, John.
“Shut up, Mum.”
He sat down in the armchair and massaged his temples roughly, more to bring out the pain than to suppress it. He looked around, got up, and pulled open the curtains. Electric light reflected off the window’s glass, making him squint. A day and a night in hospital had made the room stale. It needed airing. He opened the window and looked outside.
She was standing in the backyard, a pale thing with dark hair falling over her shoulders. John thumbed his eyes and breathed hard through his nose. She was still there when he looked a second time.
“Hiya,” she said.
“Hello,” John replied, unsure what to say next. “Who’re you?”
“Daria.”
“What’re you doing in our backyard?”
She could have climbed in, he guessed. She was barefoot and dressed in what looked like a hospital shift, which had holes torn in it. Marks on her legs and arms could’ve been either dirt or bruises.
“I don’t remember,” she said. “I came here, somehow.”
Maybe she was stoned, he thought, and might need an ambulance.
He watched a shiver pass through her.
“Hold on,” John said. “I’ll let you in.”
The back door was in the kitchen, and its wood had warped from the November chill. It took a good few tries to open it once it was unlocked, but it did open eventually.
“Come in,” John said. “Come on. You’ll catch your death out there. I’ll do you a tea.”
“You sound like someone’s mum,” she said, her lips touched by blue.
“Only my own,” he replied, knowing he shouldn’t have been looking at her lips so closely.
“Could’ve been mine as well,” she said.
She was shivering still under the shift, and he shouldn’t have been looking at her nipples showing through the thin material, thin as muslin. She couldn’t be wearing much else underneath, he thought, if anything. It was leaving little to the imagination.
“One sec,” he said. “I’ll get you one of my jumpers.”
John came back with a cashmere jumper he’d bought from Marks and Spencer. It was one of the finest things he owned. He’d bought it with a fifty quid voucher he’d won from the work lottery pool.
“Here you go,” he said and watched as she tugged it on.
“Ta. That’s much better.”
“What was your name again?”
“Daria.”
“Right, yeah, you said before. I should’ve remembered. Sorry, mind like a sieve.”
“You couldn’t do me that brew, could you?”
“Sure, no probs. What were you doing out there?” He didn’t ask whether she was on something; it felt rude.
“I’m not sure what I was doing out there,” she said. “I don’t remember much. My name, and that’s pretty much it.”
“Some people’ve got less than that,” John replied, passing her a mug of tea.
The way she looked at him and looked around the kitchen as she sipped her tea, made him think she was short-sighted; there was a sense of distance in her stare.
“Ah. Good brew,” she said, cupping her hands around the mug and swallowing the rest in one go. “ Proper good brew. Thanks. I didn’t realise how cold I was.”
She smiled at him, and he smiled back. John made some more tea, and they went back to his room, where they sat and they talked. He’d forgotten about calling an ambulance.
He looked at her, looked away, looked down, and then looked at her again. “So you’re not from around here, then?”
“Yeah no. I’m from the Dingle. Bit further down the road from here.”
“I thought you sounded like you were from up north.”
“I am. Dingle’s in Liverpool.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. You going back up there, then?” John was surprised by the sad note in his voice.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “Not sure. Just think I’m staying here for a bit. Something I’ve gotta do.”
“What’s that?”
She shrugged again. “Dunno. It might come back to me in the morning.”
John had another question he wanted to ask, but her eyelashes flickered and it was gone.
“You all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine. No, I’m good,” he said, nodding, having not much more to say.
Daria sipped her tea.
John liked her, but memories ran through him like old, cut wires, holding his tongue and making him still. Go away, Mum.
He wasn’t meeting her eyes, and he knew that was a bad thing. It said the wrong thing about him, and he wanted to say something right, but he couldn’t help hiding inside himself. It’d gotten him this far in life, after all.
John finished his tea, put his mug down, brushed his hands on his knees, and made to get up. She put her empty mug down, reached out her hands and touched his. He looked at her, thinking her eyes were those of someone waiting to say goodbye.
“It’s cold out,” she said. “I don’t have to go. I can stay for a bit.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
He smiled back at her, letting his fingers intertwine with hers. Her skin felt strangely cool, the texture akin to a waxy dough, yet John felt something quickening inside. His own skin became warm in contrast to hers as she led his hand to her breast and let him cup it. The stiffness of her skin and the firmness in her flesh made him feel as if he were handling something, rather than someone, but feeling soon overcame thought as he stripped away the veil of her shift and began to tease her nipples with his fingertips, and later, his tongue.
Her body, to him, was a rare, foreign landscape to be explored, and he did so with lips, fingers, and tongue as much as with his eyes. The lined plains of her palms. The soft valleys formed by the soles of her feet. The dark falls of her hair. The curved hollows of her ears, and the tender, sloping hills of her breasts. When he pushed his weeping hardness into her, moving until he found the way that she liked it, he couldn’t stop the tears that fell from his eyes.
They held each other, John and Daria, in the shallow space of a shared London bedroom. She said barely a word the whole time. Her eyes watched him from a distance. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure if she was breathing. She was there, but only as an absence. It was strange, but John did
n’t mind much.
Afterwards, he lay awake, watching her sleep without growing tired. She was the first girl to sleep in his bed, and the first girl he’d slept with. Mum had gone away, and now he had Daria. If she stayed, maybe he could keep Mum away forever.
But in the morning, John awoke from a sleep he didn’t remember falling into, looked at the bed and saw a dark, wet patch where she had been and the torn, white cloth of her shift which, as he reached for it, came apart at his touch.
Chapter Four
Two weeks later, John was back at work. The post room was as quiet as ever. Conversations happened around him in murmurs as he went from floor to floor, collecting and depositing letters and parcels in the wire pigeonholes. He caught the occasional word of thanks, here and there, and the odd, glancing eye from this or that person; otherwise, he had little or nothing to do with his colleagues. He’d been working at the Engineering Institute for five years, and he knew his job better than he knew any of the people he shared the building with. Such was the modern world: a place for everyone, and everyone in their place.
He liked working alone in the post room, where he could be alone with his thoughts. They were companions he could trust, and he could tell the people out there at their desks, in their pod-like cubicles, weren’t interested in talking to him. He was beneath them. He was like the photocopiers, computers, and toilets –facilities only noticed when something went wrong and an inconvenience was caused. That being said, he did still like the job. He was able to be alone in the office with his pigeonholes and franking machines, with no-one looking over his shoulder or checking up on him. He was trusted enough to get on with things. Few jobs left in the world enabled one to be alone with one’s own thoughts from nine to five.
Each day after the night with Daria, he went through the repetitious everyday motions: e-mail, telephone call, tea break, file the morning post, lunch break, file the afternoon post, send the evening post, and, as each day passed, he found himself forgetting her more and more. He remembered watching her shift come apart at the seams when he touched it, disappearing like the last traces of a stray thought. Is that what she could have been, some remnant of a fantasy he’d dreamt up?
He could ask no-one about what’d happened; he knew it would sound very strange. They would say he should’ve called the police, rather than take a woman he didn’t know into his home, especially in London. You never knew with people. You just never knew. That’s what Mum used to say. You had to keep yourself to yourself, stay apart, and then you’d not get hurt. It was common sense, and it was why he knew his job better than he knew the people.
There was no-one he could ask, he thought, as he picked the next letter out of the pile on his desk. It was addressed to him. John’s brow furrowed at the sight. His name and the Engineering Institute’s address were crudely hand-written on the sepia envelope. He wasn’t expecting post from anyone, and he always gave people – the few people he did know as friends – his home address. Better safe than sorry. You don’t want your personal business falling into someone else’s hands.
Curious, he opened the envelope and unfolded the piece of paper inside. It was a flyer printed in black-and-white, and there was a name at the top.
Daria Lee.
She was performing as part of a burlesque show in Soho, at Madame Jo’s.
John felt a smile shaping itself, and he wasn’t sure what to do. She must’ve remembered and sent this to him. This must be the thing she was here in London to do. It made sense, didn’t it?
On his lunchbreak, John bought a ticket for the performance with his credit card. After work, he took the tube there from St. James’s Park rather than Westminster station. He hadn’t been back to Westminster station after what happened there.
Madame Jo’s was heaving with people, clustered around the doors, around the bar, around the small, round tables by the stage. The stage itself was low enough that performers could step down and mingle with the crowd – if they chose to take the performance to the people, to dirty the dividing lines between dreams and reality. John made his way through the crush, shouting an apology whenever it felt like he’d stepped on someone’s foot.
John found an empty table by the stage and sat down. He didn’t like crowds at the best of times. Years of travelling on London buses and tubes made him eager to seek out seats and spaces as far away from other people as possible. Here, though, there was nowhere to go. The crowd had to be endured. Madame Jo’s was becoming ripe, its air tasting of sweat.
John couldn’t hear any women’s voices among the masculine shouts and whistles. He looked over his shoulder but couldn’t make much out in the dimly lit interior. It all felt so small and tight. He wiped moisture from his brow, hoping it would be over soon so he could go outside and breathe some cooler, if not cleaner, air. He would have to wait, though. He needed to see her. He needed to know she was here, that she was real.
The stage had a plain black backdrop with Daria Lee embossed on it in luminescent ruby-red characters. The design and pattern of the words suggested blood. Stage-lights flickered on, then off, and then the music began.
Madame Jo’s ambient lighting came up with a crimson tinge. A woman’s voice, singing in a light, alliterative drone crept out into the air, and Daria Lee took the stage. She moved with confidence, veils of red and black wound about her arms, legs, abdomen and chest. Rings on her fingers and toes caught the light as she began to move. She shook out her long hair, until it appeared to be dancing like the coiling bodies of black snakes. Her bare feet repeated simple movements on the stage, her arms and hips mimicking the serpentine motion of her hair. The red lights deepened, taking on the intensity of flowing blood. Her fingers unfastened one of the veils over her breasts, and she tore it away, discarding and tossing it into the close shadows with an intuitive flick of the wrist. Another veil kept her breasts hidden, which prompted more shouts from the audience. John could feel the restless bodies of men around him, pushing closer to the stage, wanting to see more. Another veil, unwound from an arm, was thrown, and a hand from the watchers around him reached up and snatched it away – a predator coming to the surface to feed.
Light flashed in John’s eyes as Daria held out two knives, one in each hand. She made them dance with the flow of the singing voice and then severed one, two, three more veils from her body. They slid away, as if she were shedding layers of exquisite snakeskin, until only two remained, covering her breasts and pubis.
She turned her back on the audience, and when she spun about, the knives were gone, replaced by a pair of red-feathered fans. She moved them across her body in teasing rhythms that allowed glimpses of her bare flesh and the remaining veils. The song was becoming quieter, reduced to a husky, sensual whisper. John felt a shift in the crowd around him. They were sensing the end, feeling their way towards the climax. They pressed in around him, chafing his body with theirs. He didn’t like it. John could feel their clothes on his skin, taste their bad breath, and he caught a hint of a pungent odour that he couldn’t place.
In one smooth movement, Daria swept the fans away behind her back, where they disappeared into the blackness of the curtain. She brought her hands forward, and the last two veils came undone and fell away as the singer’s voice died, and the lights lost their red hue and went out. All was blackness in a moment.
Bodies pushed and shoved around John. Voices muttered and whispered. In that moment, he thought of the man on the platform and wondered if these bodies were bodies and if these voices truly came from speaking mouths.
Then there was light again, blinding and white, illuminating Daria Lee. She was nude, tied to a plain wooden chair by an intricate pattern of hemp rope. It encircled her throat with an inverted noose, and crossed over and then under her breasts before parting across her midriff to secure her wrists and ankles behind the chair. She was blindfolded with crimson silk and gagged by a red ball held in place by leather straps, in contrast to the stark light and colourless bonds. This time, there was no
music, and the audience were expectantly silent. Daria made a show of struggling so it became clear she could not escape. A child emerged from behind the curtain. He couldn’t have been more than six years old. His round face was flushed in the light, and his eyes appeared moist. He licked his lips. In one small hand, he held a knife. John shifted uncomfortably as the boy circled Daria. He didn’t want to see this.
Occasional whispers disturbed the room. The only clear sounds were those from the stage: the light tap of the child’s shoes, and Daria’s muted struggles in the chair. It’s a performance, remember that, it’s only an act. The child was touching her with the knife. The edge of it was tracing raw lines on her bare skin. The lighting was increasing in intensity, becoming as painful as the act taking place on the stage.
John looked away, trying to clear his eyes.
The keen edge of the knife parted flesh. The sound of it travelled clearly across the room. John looked back. The little boy had cut her along the arm, neatly avoiding the ropes. There was no blood. Nothing ran from the wound’s mouth. How could that be?
He watched the act continue; the child circling a bound Daria, continuing to make cuts here and cuts there. He had a look on his face that no child should have as he went about his work. The look was too knowing, too adult, and far too lost within itself. John wanted to look away again, but he didn’t.
He couldn’t .
He had to see the act through to the end. As her flesh was cut away, some hung, some fell bloodless to the stage, and strange, aching sounds escaped from Daria’s gagged mouth. John remembered how her shift had come apart at his touch the morning after. So many holes, so many screams.
The child was cutting away meat from her right thigh when she let out a cry more pained and forlorn than all the ones that had gone before. The child stopped and pressed the knife against her throat, letting it gnaw at her skin; still no blood fell, but John could see how deep the edge was going.
