Eighty Days Red

by Vina Jackson

  I slipped off the stool and hurried outside, catching the call just before it went to voicemail.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Summer, where the hell are you and what are you doing there?’

  It was Susan.

  ‘I’m still in London. Just taking a break.’

  ‘So I thought, until I heard on the grapevine that your impromptu rock performances in London and Brighton have been attracting rave reviews. The press have got wind of it and there’s a piece coming up in a tabloid about your supposed rock rebellion. Classical darling goes wild and all that …’

  ‘I was just playing with a friend.’

  ‘Well, I need to spin these things, unless you want to be labelled a classical musician who is having a career melt-down.’

  ‘My violin was stolen,’ I said, in a small voice, close to tears.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. But surely you have enough in royalties to buy a new one? I can probably arrange a sponsor if you’ve spent all your money on shoes.’

  ‘It’s not the same for classical music. I just can’t face going back on stage without the Bailly.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t need to be a classical stage. What about this band you’re playing with?’

  ‘Groucho Nights. They opened for Viggo Franck and The Holy Criminals … You’ve probably heard of him? He’s helping them to organise a European tour soon.’

  ‘Of course I know him. According to the tabloids he’s sleeping with half the world’s celebrities. Fine. You can play with them. Just for God’s sake don’t get your picture taken falling out of a bar with Viggo Franck, at least before I get started promoting your move to rock stardom. In fact … are you still in touch with that photographer who did your photo for the New York show?’

  It was more than two years since Simón had run the poster of me naked from the neck down, my modesty covered by my violin, which had made my first concert a sell-out. Susan had a good memory.

  ‘No … he moved back to Australia, I think.’ I remembered the photographer who had taken my picture at Torture Garden with Fran and Chris a few weeks earlier. He would at least be discreet. ‘I might know someone else though.’

  ‘Good. That’s settled then. I’m ringing Franck’s manager now. Leave all the arrangements to me. If you want to be a rock star too, it has to be done right.’

  She had hung up before I’d had a chance to protest.

  I sat back down again next to Fran, feeling slightly dazed. Maybe it was lucky I hadn’t found a flat of my own after all, as it looked like I’d be going back on the road.

  ‘Well then? What’s the story?’ Fran asked, looking at me quizzically.

  ‘My agent – she wants me to go on tour with Chris and the band.’

  ‘Well that’s a great idea! Chris would love you to play with him. He talks about it all the time. He gets on with Ted and Ella, of course, but you’re his best friend, Sum … you should definitely think about it.’

  ‘Think about it? I don’t think it’s really up to me. My agent is already calling his people, and Susan could badger just about anyone into anything. But it might be too late, they’re leaving in a few days. They’d have to do last-minute announcements, arrange the gear for me and the promo … all kinds of things.’

  ‘It’s not like they’re the Rolling Stones. It’s a few venues in Europe, sure, but not the end of the world. I’m sure they can shuffle something around, and if Viggo tells them to, they won’t have a choice.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘I’ll be at a bit of a loose end though, without the two of you here. I wonder what Chris will do with the flat.’

  ‘You could always come. I’ll need a road manager, and so do Groucho Nights, as far as I know. We could get you on the payroll. And you could see a bit of Europe. And keep me company. You’re trained in this sort of stuff, you’ve worked in banking. You could do it.’

  Fran’s face lit up as if I’d handed her a winning lottery ticket, and she yelped loud enough to make the waitress jump.

  ‘Oh my God I’d love to!’

  ‘Calm down … sometimes I’d swear that you’re twenty-one. And none of this is confirmed yet. For a start, I don’t even have an instrument.’

  ‘Oh God, that’s right. It hasn’t turned up yet then? And what’s this business about not telling the police?’

  ‘Viggo is worried about having his road crew investigated. He doesn’t want to lose his people, if they get the hump for being accused of theft. And it would badly affect his insurance premiums. He’d rather pay me the violin’s full value instead.’

  ‘Too bad, someone stole it. If someone doesn’t like being investigated, maybe that’s your guy.’

  ‘But I don’t care about the money. Just the violin. It was a gift.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Chris told me about that guy.’

  Fran cocked an eyebrow suspiciously.

  ‘You two talk a lot. I’m not sure if I approve.’

  ‘Does he know that it’s been stolen?’

  ‘Dominik? Yeah. Oddly, I ran into him in Brighton. He was there, noticed the flyers for our concert, came in to say hello. He’s seeing someone else now. But he did mention something about the violin. Said it had a strange history. He’s doing some research on it for a novel. I asked him to let me know if he heard anything, but it’s a bit of a long shot.’

  ‘Call him.’

  ‘What? Now?’

  ‘Now. Find out if he knows anything. I know you and telephones, you’ll never do it if I don’t make you. And don’t try to pretend you deleted his number.’

  ‘Fine.’

  I picked up the phone again, this time in a bit of a huff, and, hoping the conversation would be short, I didn’t bother to leave my chair.

  His number rang out.

  ‘Voicemail,’ I said, with a hint of triumph.

  ‘Well, leave him a message then.’

  ‘Hi … it’s me. Summer.’ I kicked myself for first assuming he would immediately know the sound of my voice, and then for assuming that he wouldn’t, and leaving my name. There was an uncomfortable pause as I gathered my wits again and continued. ‘Just wanted to check in, about the violin. Call me.’ I hit the end call button.

  ‘Wow, that was smooth.’

  ‘Shut it.’

  By the time that we got back to the flat, Chris had already heard the news, and he was jubilant. It seemed neither Susan nor Viggo had wasted any time pulling strings to make it happen. By early afternoon, they’d updated most of the venues and started working on new promo material. I was officially going on the road with Groucho Nights as a featured guest star.

  We spent the next few days in a flurry of rehearsals, going through all the old numbers that we used to play together and rejigging some of their other songs where the violin suited. It took a bit of fiddling around, to give me enough time on stage without drowning out the sound, and the dynamics on stage were slightly odd with four musicians rather than three. Previously, Chris had been the focus with Ted alongside, and Ella of course at the back with drums. I was a bit like the third wheel, most of the time, and the sound didn’t always blend properly.

  After our fourth successive night of rehearsals, we were back in Chris’s flat, feeling inexplicably morose.

  Fran was in the kitchen, cooking pizza. She’d been at it for hours, making the dough and the tomato paste base from scratch. The flat was full of the smell of yeast from the bread dough and garlic from the marinara. Chris was sitting opposite me on the round wooden table next to the open-plan kitchen, with his shoulders hunched, flipping a screw-top beer cap repeatedly through his thumb and forefinger. I was watching him and waiting patiently, leaning my elbows on the table and resting my chin in my hands.

  ‘There’s something missing,’ he said, softly, almost to himself.

  I waited for him to continue.

  ‘The sound is … not quite right. Unbalanced.’

  ‘If it’s not right, it’s OK, Chris. It’s not too late to b
ow out, just go with the three of you. I won’t be offended, truly.’

  There was a part of me that slightly resented being swept along by Viggo and Susan. A rock phase had seemed like a rebellion, a grand idea for a change and a rest when it was my idea. Now that it had become someone else’s, I was feeling a little forlorn about being uprooted and sent off travelling again, as much as I was looking forward to the prospect of spending more time with Chris.

  ‘No, it’s not you. The violin is great. I just have the feeling that we need something more.’

  ‘More cowbell?’ Fran piped up from the kitchen.

  He laughed and glanced over at her fondly.

  ‘That’s not a bad idea, you know,’ he mused, balancing the beer cap on one finger, deep in thought. ‘All this time, we’ve been thinking we need less, but maybe we need more.’

  ‘More? More what? Where would we get the musicians from?’

  ‘We need another layer of sound. But at this short notice it would have to be people who already play together.’

  He was still talking to himself, staring deep into space, not even bothering to flick the stubborn curls away from his forehead.

  A nugget of an idea began to take root in my brain.

  Before I could nurture the idea into thought and speech, Fran appeared in front of us bearing a steaming platter of doughballs, each with a smattering of crispy parmesan on top and a slightly charred basil leaf. She had arranged them into a pyramid.

  ‘Wow,’ Chris said, ‘that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.’

  I held back a snicker. Fran still seemed unaware of the effect she had on him. I’d known Chris for a few years, and never seen him behave like this over anyone. He’d started ironing his Tshirts, even for a night in, despite the fact that Fran was one of the scruffiest dressers I knew, her clothes rarely making it onto a hanger, let alone an ironing board.

  ‘What you need,’ she replied, ignoring his compliment, ‘is a trumpet or three.’

  ‘I might be able to help with that,’ I added. I still kept in touch with Marija and her husband Baldo, the flatmates I had lived with in New York before moving in with Dominik. Marija played flute in the orchestra, but she had trained on the trumpet, and was almost as good as Baldo on his; certainly good enough for our needs. They might not be able to get the time off, or get over here quick enough, but I knew they’d been bored since Simón left and had been replaced by an apparently much duller conductor, so a stint in a rock band might appeal.

  Viggo agreed to the addition of a brass section, and Susan pulled some strings to extract Marija and Baldo from their commitments in New York.

  ‘You need one more,’ she said to me the next day, ‘so I’m sending Alex as well.’

  Alex was the sax player who Marija had once tried to set me up with, on a date which had ended with me going home with an insurance broker who lived on the Upper East side in a posh apartment that smelled of salmon. Dominik had found the whole thing amusing, and Alex had been, fortunately, not too offended, as he’d managed to pick up another girl at the bar whilst I was on the balcony flirting with Derek.

  The three of them would fly straight into Paris. They’d have just enough time to recover from jetlag, and we’d have a day or so to cram in rehearsals before the opening show, booked at La Cigale on the Boulevard Rochechouart. I’d been to Paris once, about four years earlier, but had little time for sightseeing – even so, I had fond but vague memories of the place. We were staying in a part of town that I hadn’t visited. Fran, in her new role as road manager had arranged all the accommodation.

  All I had to do was pack, and attend the photo shoot that Susan was so keen on. It was too late to get any extra posters out, but she planned to send some of the pics to the reviewers and music mags, to at least keep any rumours at bay that I had lost the plot or gone off the rails, and instead push my career change as a temporary new direction. She thought the rock persona might add a bit of sex appeal that could help my classical records sell. Susan had always been enthusiastic on promoting my sex appeal, and she was very happy with my suggestion of photographer, Jack Grayson, who it turned out had a background in fashion and was behind a few risqué celebrity shoots. He had also had a fine art nude exhibit at a gallery in London, which had become notorious when the police had appeared, following complaints from some puritanical member of the public.

  Out of curiosity, I’d looked the images up. They were all tasteful, I thought, though didn’t doubt that more conservative folk might find them shocking. One which particularly caught my eye featured a woman bending over alongside a pile of books, with a perfect strawberry peeking out from her arsehole. Another woman sat behind her, presumably responsible for the insertion of the strawberry. I was dying to ask Jack, or Grayson, as it seemed he was more commonly called, how he got the strawberry to stay there, but that seemed a conversation more appropriate for another time, perhaps over a beer.

  Grayson lived and worked in an old school conversion, not far from the bedsit in Whitechapel, where I’d lived when I first met Dominik. He offered me a coffee when I arrived, and I drank it overlooking his balcony, a view of a graveyard and an seventeenth-century church. The presence of death and religion lent a sombre tone to his otherwise girly decor. The interior was fitted out in shades of cream, with a variety of ornate chairs dotted around and tall vases filled with flowers.

  The room he used as his main studio was filled with lights, backdrops, and bits of equipment that I couldn’t identify, with large dishes and flat silver plates for catching the light.

  Jack looked almost like a different person out of his latex. He was dressed in a pair of jeans and a white and black Religion T-shirt with a picture of a nude woman on the front, resting in a shopping trolley. His assistant, Jess, was laying out her make-up and hair products on the kitchen table, just about enough to fill a pharmacy I reckoned, and certainly enough to fill up her suitcase, which I’d seen her struggling up the stairs with as I came in.

  I had never actually had a photo shoot before, at least, not officially. A few men who I had dated had taken pictures of me in the buff. Fortunately, either they hadn’t tried to send them to the papers once I’d found fame as a solo artist, or the papers hadn’t been interested. The picture that I’d showed to Simón, which had then been made into flyers for my first New York concert, had been one of those. I’d had a brief fling with an Australian photographer who had taken a couple of shots of me naked, playing my violin or holding it in front of me, over my breasts. But I’d never tried to pose under studio lighting in formal circumstances like this.

  Grayson had sent me an email to confirm everything beforehand. It was clearly one that he sent to all of his clients, advising the address, directions and what to bring with me. He’d also asked me to specify what level of photography that I was comfortable with. Clothed, lingerie, or nude. His email said that he preferred to be clear up front, rather than risk making a model feel uncomfortable by asking on the day, or have someone do something on the spur of the moment that they might regret later.

  I wouldn’t be able to bring a friend to the shoot with me, as this might be distracting and affect my posing, but his female make-up artist would be on site at all times, so that I would feel comfortable. He clearly wasn’t a creep then, or one of the ‘guys with cameras’ I’d heard about who apparently invited girls over for spurious photo shoots when they really just wanted to watch them undress. I was paying for the shoot for personal use, and Susan had told me in no uncertain terms that I shouldn’t sign a model release form if asked, so the photographer wouldn’t be able to sell the pictures on without my express consent.

  I replied with an outline of the sorts of shots we were looking for, and added that I was entirely comfortable with nudity. Susan had suggested it should all be kept within the bounds of good taste, and only the more innocuous images would be used as part of the promotion.

  ‘Did you bring any outfits with you?’ he asked, taking my empty coffee cup
out of my hands and placing it into the sink.

  ‘A few,’ I replied, digging around in the oversized bag I’d brought along with everything packed into it. I had a mixture of my clothes and Fran’s, most of which were a size too small but would do the job in a pinch. A pair of wet-look leggings, a leather jacket, a couple of dresses, Fran’s thigh-high boots and the shoes that I had splashed out on as a reward after my first tour had been a success: a pair of black Louboutins covered in silver studs. None of it was really my style. I looked at the laid out clothes and thought ‘dominatrix’ not ‘rock chick’, but Grayson seemed happy enough with my haul.

  ‘And you wanted to do some semi-nude shots too, just with the violin?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. I’d already started thinking about the prospect of stripping off, and my voice came out in an excited squeak. Nerves, I told myself, though there was a hint of exhibitionism, which had long been buried, rising to the surface. There had been times when I had stripped off in public, and enjoyed the process, but each occasion had been the result of an instruction, either from Dominik or from Victor, the dominant man that I’d fallen in with in New York.

  ‘We’ll start with the clothed shots first, to get you warmed up.’

  His manner was friendly, but so professional it verged on cold, as if he’d spent his working life making a very deliberate effort to not be flirtatious, even by accident. I felt odd taking my bag of clothes into the bathroom to change, since the mirror was in the living room near where the make-up artist had set up, and they were both going to see me naked later anyway.

  So I changed in front of them, first pulling my blouse over my head and then slipping my skirt off and kicking them both away as if I did this sort of thing every day, producing a stream of small talk as I did so to try to appear relaxed. Neither of them were paying any attention to me at all, but I still felt awkward.

  I put on the wet-look leggings, studded Louboutins and leather jacket over a black bra to start. Fran and I had had a sort of dress rehearsal with the outfits and decided that this was the most rock star in style.