by Eden Night
Sunday afternoon slides by in rain and grey light: in silence and in beauty. The real world is knocking on the door. Tomorrow the alarm will go off, and the routine will begin. I will go to work and dream of this place until the clock hits the hour and I can come back.
"What are you thinking?" he asks, handing me a cup of fresh coffee from the stove pot. He has sweetened it with honey and cream.
I look out of the small, dirty window onto a grey sky and sigh. "I'm thinking I don't want to wake up, because waking is death and dreaming is life."
He chuckles and bends down to kiss me, slipping his hand under the silk of my pyjamas. It travels over my shoulder and down onto my breast. His lips brush my ear and I think that he will lead me to bed but he doesn't and I'm left suspended by desire. I read. Alexander sits at the kitchen table on the MacBook with his headphones in. Hours pass.
At eight. o. clock, he tells me to dress as we are going out for dinner. I'd been thinking about bed and the six-thirty morning alarm call. There isn't time for protest as he's already left the room and the shower is running. I break the spine of his book purely out of rebellion and leave it on the sofa.
Deciding what to wear isn't a challenge; I have a choice of two dresses (not including the Marie Antoinette number) and one pair of evening shoes. Back at my flat the process would have involved at least an hour rummaging through mountains of cheaply produced, high-fashion decisions. I would have choice of colour, of cut, of connotation. Here, I have the choice between a black lace long-sleeved number, and a deep red velvet shift dress. Technically, I have more choice about which underwear set to choose and all at once the decision seems too complex. I squeeze past Alexander who is standing over the sink applying shaving foam with a badger brush. I slip off my pyjamas and flick on the shower. I catch him stealing glimpses of me in the mirror and I smile. I wonder if thinks about loving me.
"Would you mind putting my clothes out for me?" I ask.
"What do you want to wear?"
"You choose," I say shrugging as I step into the shower.
I see how his eyebrow rises with an element of curious satisfaction.
There are still residual effects from the Molly, and the sensations of the shower are so overwhelming that before I know what is happening I'm crying. When I ask myself why, I don't have an answer, just a sudden and profound feeling of loss.
Suddenly, I remember that tomorrow is my birthday. I am going to be twenty-two. Alexander has no idea.
I walk into the bedroom to see him putting the final touches to his dress in front of the mirror. He looks impeccable – as always. Paul Smith navy pin-stripped suit, thin navy tie, white Oxford herringbone shirt. On the bed he has lain out the red velvet dress and the pink Agent Provocateur box containing the satin corset set; knowing how almost every other set with its lace would show under the smooth velvet. Alexander understands the importance of details.
He puts on his watch and shakes out his sleeve.
"Is that okay?" he asks.
"Perfect." And of course it is. "Where are we going for dinner?"
"I've booked us in at Exhibit." He says this like it should be explanation enough but I still have no idea where we are going. He registers my look. "You'll like it. It's... relevant."
"What type of food does it serve?"
He grins. "Wait and see!" He sparkles with playfulness and it is these mercurial moods that fascinate me about him.
It's raining but it barely needs noting. We've got to thinking that it might never be anything other than raining. This is the backdrop to our new apocalypse. We've heard rumours that outside the Capital the rest of the country is drowning.
The red illuminated double-decker whirs by, kicking a splash of water onto the pavement, narrowly missing my seamed stockings. We see it pull up at our bus stop and judging by the amount of people herding on, we make a run for it; Alexander bangs on the door as it closes. The driver looks pissed but then Alexander flashes him his Emperor-smile. We swipe our Oyster cards and head along the bus. There are no seats left, so we are left swinging from the poles breathless and giggling as the driver weaves in and out of the traffic, slamming on his brakes with the pure purpose, I'm sure, of trying to fell us over. Our giddiness attracts glances from some of the other passengers but they neither disapprove nor approve.
"Where’s our stop?" I ask.
"On the Strand. It's a short walk from there." He salutes me with the umbrella that I hadn't realised he'd brought with him. I reach out my hand and take his fingers in mine, loosely entwining them in a bid to hold his hand, but they are reluctant prisoners and he moves his hand to his inside pocket and checks his phone. This rejection stabs like a small pin in my consciousness and I look up at him. My face must convey the wound because he winces a reassuring smile that tells me that, “we don't do holding hands”.
The bus stops before I have time to consider all the terrible things attached to this lack of intimacy; of the damage and hopelessness that it promises.
We dance across puddles, his arm locked in mine as he holds the umbrella. We head down a side alley, past some wretch who has made camp in one of the retail doorways. He is mostly hidden in a pile of rags and cardboard. I squirm with the thought that my underwear alone is the month rental price of a room; my dress, a whole months average salary, my perfume, a weeks worth of family shopping, the meal we are about to consume enough to...
I'm distracted by the giant fibreglass Zebra head protruding from the wall and I guess that this is our destination. We stop outside the black painted Georgian frontage. The name 'Exhibit' has been painted in gold flowing letters across the signboard. A bell tinkles over the door, and a waitress pulls back the heavy velvet door curtains.
A glimmering chandelier hangs low over the reception table, sending out prisms of light. Underneath it, two entwined stuffed swans wear golden crowns and swim on waters made from blue hyacinths. It is hard not to gawp; the whole restaurant is full of taxidermy, and flowers, and crystal.
I wonder if there is a secret guide book to this London; the London that hides behind the Gap stores, the Pret a Manger sandwich bars and the glass corporate temples. It's as if a ribbon of timeless decadence runs playfully through the alleyways and under the railways, down the stairways and behind the shop fronts. It's intoxicating; it's a drug all of its own.
The maître de comes forward and holds out his gloved hands to remove our coats before handing us a plastic tablet printed with our cloakroom number.
"Mr and Mrs Hughes?" The reception asks and Alexander nods his head, gifting her his smile. I play the sound of Mrs Hughes over in my head on loop. The girl next to her glances down at the reservation book and invites us through the dining room to a small table in the back corner. As the waitress prepares me for dinner, it gives me the opportunity to study the innards of the glass dome that decorates our table. It contains three tiny humming birds, skilfully arranged around a wire and wax tropical flower. The candlelight reflects off the green and blue feathers giving the impression of petrol. I look intensely into their glass eyes and see nothing but death.
Two glasses of champagne arrive and Alexander hands me the menu.
"So what do you think, darling? I thought we'd better put some research into this whole taxidermy thing before our lesson on Wednesday."
I clear my voice and nod. "Well it's certainly different. Have you been here before?"
He nods his head but doesn't elucidate. I stop myself thinking about whom he has brought here before; the poisonous thought that maybe this is just another scene in his well-rehearsed play flutters in my thoughts but I do not let it fully form. Instead, I focus on the menu and laugh at the collection of dishes; crocodile wrapped in vine leaves, honey poached plums and pickled Samphire, Zebra Jerky and Serengetti mix, Marinated Kangaroo skewers with candied beetroot & guindilla salad, and so on until the menu begins to read like a perverted guide to the London Zoo animal houses. Twice in my dating history I had been taken to London Zoo. Both time
s my date had thought himself very avant-garde: at the time I guess I had thought so too. The danger of tasting divinity is that it makes you feel newly made. There is nothing of value from the time before.
We eat, we drink, we talk, we laugh, we flirt - I take another step into love. At half past eleven we ask the waitress to organise a cab to take us home.
Alexander pours shots of almond liquor over ice. I light the candles. We sit on the Chesterfield and I do not think of work, or clients, or projects - or of the confrontation I had with the new intern, Marcia that will need sorting out tomorrow. I am soft with alcohol, with love, with desire.
"Would you like to watch something?" Alexander asks, pulling the MacBook onto his lap and flipping it open. I nod, curious to know what it is that he should want to bring into this moment. The sounds of moaning and pleasure are the first things I translate, then the images on the screen. I realise that Alexander filmed us last night – with Celia. I should be appalled. I should be ashamed, but it's all far too sublime: it's like watching fallen angels fuck. We are young and we are free, and we are screwing the world. I am captivated. We are a mixture of white cottons, and masks, of black lace and bones. We are a mound of undulating flesh and eyes and hands and mouths.
"So?" he asks. I glance at him quickly, unwilling to take my eyes from the animated Titian in front of me.
My voice is surprisingly hard to bring forward, I have to think about breathing. "Did you get Celia's number?" I ask.
Instantly he’s over me, his hands running over my thigh, his lips pressed hard to my mouth, bruising my lips until they are plump, like ripened cherries. I inhale the scent of his skin, the smell of his cologne and my head swims. His fingers graze the lace of my stockings and tease the silk edges of my knickers. All evening, my body has been waiting for his arrival. His fingers are urgent and quickly become slick. He slips them in and I push myself against them hungrily, wanting more, desiring more. His knuckles pound against my sex and waves of pleasure mount. Just as I’m about to go over the precipice, he stops. The loss is almost painful. He grabs my hair, pulling my head back, exposing my neck. His breath is hot. His hand folds around my throat, pushing my chin up until all I can see are the candlelight dancing across the ceiling. With his hand clasped, I think how easily he could close his fist and how the darkness would come for me. I wonder if he is thinking of killing me. I twist my head, testing his intentions. He tightens his grip and I gasp.
“Don’t move,” he whispers. “Do you trust me?”
My immediate response is, ‘No’ but I lie. The word, “Yes” comes out tight and hardly formed.
“With your life?” His grip tightens slightly. A tear seeps from my eye; its trail is cold and betrays the powerful cocktail of desire and fear coursing through my blood.
Before I can respond, his fingers are moving back and forwards over my swollen bud; he is rocking me towards oblivion. I can barely breathe. I am a rising phoenix full of light and fire, heading towards the dark. His grip tightens. My head swims, and the sensations of falling collide with the sensations of rising, and the world explodes in a shower of light and shade until all that is left is – nothing.
I stir in the grey dawn. I am still on the sofa, and dressed except for my underwear. With an unusual sense of tenderness, Alexander has thought to cover me with a blanket. Memories of the previous evening are misty, but there are painful remains and I fear having to confront my reflection in the mirror. I stand, adjusting my limbs and bones, checking the extent of the damage. It is not as bad as I first feared. I pad, bare foot to the door of our bedroom and I watch Alexander sleeping. My fingers trace the bruises on my neck and my head cannot equate them with the nephilim creature laid out on the bed. I tiptoe past the bed and head towards the shower room. It does not matter if I wake him; the alarm will go off soon anyway.
I avoid the mirror.
The shower is hot and needles the skin pleasurably. Memories of last night swim back and ripple through my stomach and into my thighs. My hand presses against the cold ceramic tiles and my muscles contort until I’m gasping for breath and fighting off the unexpected orgasm ripping through my body. I feel a sense of ugly betrayal as my body responds hungrily to the rough and dangerous treatment Alexander has inflicted on me.
I flick the shower off and wait for it to pass. My face is contorted with shame and confusion and I’m swallowing down the screams that want to surge from my mouth. I pad the tiles with my clenched fist. I think about leaving him. Walking out. It would be easy. Like severing…
“Good morning, Charlotte,” he says from the door. “Is everything okay?”
Hurriedly, I flick the shower back on, hoping that it will disguise the state I am in. I turn to look at him through the glass and I know that I cannot leave him because I have never loved as much as I love Alexander Bloom.
Chapter Two: Reality
The first challenge of the day had been drowning out the monumental hangover with a serious amount of Starbucks coffee. The counter girl had smiled sympathetically when I asked for a triple shot. It's not how I choose to normally have my coffee, preferring it mostly drowned in milk and sugar.
There had been delays on the Northern line, making me late for the Monday morning meeting. Fortunately, I wasn't the only one affected. I fell into the awkwardly designed office chair, almost tipping over my paper cup and tried to make camp as inconspicuously as possible - which wasn't possible in the slightest. Lucy, our line-manager tutted at me and shook her head before turning to her manager, David, (who sat at the head of the oval table) and rolling her eyes. I didn't need to be psychic to know that there would be a passive aggressive e-mail full of over-used exclamation marks in my in-box later.
The shiny new intern sat in an aura of smugness that would have suffocated newly born kittens. I forced myself to listen to the drivel coming out of David's mouth. It was mainly a monotonous list of tasks and inadequacies, before finally he found some modulation of voice in the hope of motivating us towards heading out there and proving to the Chinese office that London wasn't full of complete "Muppets!" Internally I sighed. If David was in this ball-breaking mood then it meant that Lucy would skip the breaking and go straight to the biting off.
If you’d asked me what I did, I wouldn't have really been able to tell you. It mainly involved talking on the phone, wooing rich company owning clients in order to get them to invest their financial portfolios with Frederick Moore PLC. (The Blue-chip financial house that took me on after gaining my University Degree in Drama – Thank goodness for the subsid business modules.) The best way to describe it would be glorified sales; only I've never been a great a saleswoman. Apparently, according to Lucy, this was my USP (Unique Success Point.) I continually failed to realise how, "…totally charming and disarming" my complete lack of sales skills were to fat, balding, geriatric capitalists. Sometimes Lucy talked about me as if I was one of her working girls and my work more akin to a sex-chat service; several times she tried to get me to invite a client out for lunch in a bid to seal the deal; only I wasn’t entirely sure to what lengths she expected me to go in order to secure those multi-million pounds investments. I couldn’t completely trust that she hadn’t put me on some kind of promise. I swear her red-lipsticked mouth had an autonomy of its own that didn’t ever feel the need to communicate with her conscience – if she had a conscience.
Lucy talked a lot of shit that I'm not even sure she really believed. At least I hope she didn’t for the sake of her soul. The meeting ended and I missed the conclusion - it was probably something along the lines of "Try harder, score faster, team!" One of David's particularly annoying phrases. I packed up my things, took a swig of my coffee and winced against the bitterness before re-camping to my workstation. I slouched down low enough in my chair so that I could block out the sight of Marcia, the intern. I couldn’t actually define what it was that sprang my venom with that girl, but it might have been her hyper energy that caused her to constantly smile and widen her eyes like a
crazed bull-frog looking for a shag, or it could have been that I could hear her constantly giggling on the phone with clients like some giddy cheerleader, or that I had to watch her flirt with every man, woman and mirror in the office - or maybe it was that everyone just thought she was so “great!”
I sighed heavily and thought about doing a bit of retail therapy online before facing my e-mails, one of which was bound to be from Lucy. I scanned the first page of ASOS, but soon realised my newfound heart is not in it. I clicked off the page and started to flit around the web, looking for sites that sold silk gowns, lace underskirts and boned bodices. Someone walked behind me and my heart skipped a beat, instinctively my fingers clicked down my screen; it wasn’t because I was surfing the web when I should be working (everybody did that - mostly when talking to clients) but it's more because of what I'm looking at.
I clicked onto my client list and picked up the phone. I needed to return a missed call to Chuck Harrington, my Texan oil-king and see if he wanted to move his portfolio to a "new exciting share related investment."
He greeted me with, "Hey, Charlie, my favourite money gal!" (I had never invited him to bastardise my name.)
I rolled my eyes and wondered if the man was as much of a cliché as he sounded.
"When you gonna get around to making this a face to face business agreement, Charlie – you sure as hell sound a lot more interesting than my finance boys.”
