Eighty Days Red

by Vina Jackson

  I had hoped to be the first to arrive, so I would have a chance to disappear into the bathroom and dry off a bit, or at least fix my hair which was matted to my shoulders, but Dominik was already waiting for me in the corner under the stairs, in exactly the same place that we had sat on our first date. He’d already ordered. One of the waiters was on his way over with a tray that held an espresso for him, a flat white for me, and a bowl full of sugar.

  I slipped into the seat opposite him, my wet thighs slick against the hard wood of the chair.

  ‘Forget your umbrella?’ he said with a teasing smile.

  ‘No, I got wet on purpose,’ I snapped.

  I flushed as soon as I said it, unsure what made me bite at him like that when I had come with the intention of making it clear that I wanted to be with him. I’d meant it as a joke, but the words came out harder than I intended. I was full of nerves, and the desire to stop talking and touch him.

  He stared at me, his eyes glittering with something unspoken. Lust, perhaps. I could feel my nipples hardening under the wet fabric of my top and I couldn’t blame the cold. It was humid, though perhaps it was Dominik’s presence that made me feel hot.

  I shivered, in spite of the warmth.

  ‘Go and dry yourself off,’ he said. ‘You’ll catch a cold. We’ve got a lot to talk about, so you may as well be comfortable.’

  I wondered, with a pang, why he hadn’t invited me to his home in Hampstead. I would have gone, gladly, and we could have both stayed warm and dry in his bed. Perhaps inviting me to meet him outside the house was a sign that he didn’t want the complication, that after he’d recovered the Bailly for me, we’d just be friends and nothing more.

  A part of me hoped that he might not find the violin right away, so that I would have more excuses to see him again. Another part of me wanted my instrument back, desperately, so that the feeling of it in my hands and the sound of it flowing through me would remind me of him, always.

  I took my clothes off in the bathroom and held them under the air dryer, standing near the mirror with just my bra and knickers on. I kept hoping that he’d come in, but he didn’t. Cubicle sex wasn’t Dominik’s style. He would have thought it ungentlemanly, perhaps, or proletarian, taken the same view that he did of belly button rings, artless tattoos and lovemaking in the back seats of taxis.

  He’d ordered a second round of coffees by the time that I returned, dry, as the first cup had gone cold while I was in the bathroom.

  ‘Summer—’ he started.

  ‘Before I forget,’ I interrupted, ‘here are the keys. And the notes that you asked for.’ He’d been about to say something about us, I was sure, but the pained look on his face made me think that it wasn’t good news and I couldn’t bear to let him finish his sentence if it was to tell me that he didn’t care for me in that way.

  ‘I’m sorry about Viggo,’ he said. ‘I know you … care for him.’

  I shrugged, again aware that I wasn’t behaving in the way that I had meant to, but unsure how to communicate the way that I felt. I needed the Bailly in my hands so that I could show him, make him hear, make him see all the things that I wanted to say to him. Without it I was mute, the song in my heart locked up in the vice-like grip of my mind.

  Then I frowned, screwing up my forehead in an effort to try harder, and not leave this meeting with the sinking sensation that I’d done the wrong thing again.

  ‘I do care for him. But it’s not like that. And if he has my violin … well … I don’t owe him anything.’

  The expression on Dominik’s face was inscrutable. I met his eyes but saw no reaction, followed the curve of his jaw down to his mouth. He was silent, so I continued – anything to avoid an awkward pause between us.

  ‘I love the Bailly. Truly. But it’s not worth the risk … You don’t have to do this.’

  My voice broke as I said the last words, and I hung on Dominik’s every movement, to see if he had sensed what I meant, if he knew that I wouldn’t lose him for anything. I was terrified that he might be caught and arrested, that Viggo might take his revenge, somehow. But Dominik ignored my protests and changed the subject, back to his research. Perhaps that was all I meant to him after all; a way to write novels, something to hang his focus on, because he didn’t have any better ideas.

  We sat in the cafe for another hour, but I still didn’t say any of the things that I had meant to say, or dreamed of saying. Dominik didn’t say anything about the two of us at all. Whether he had wanted to and couldn’t get the words out, or just didn’t have anything to say, I wasn’t sure. Maybe he raced home afterwards and wrote it all down, more emotional fuel for his new hero and heroine, whoever they were. Did all writers cannibalise their own lives?

  We had confirmed the sequence of events down to each single detail, by the end of it.

  I would lure Viggo out of the house at an agreed time and Dominik would break in and somehow work out the code to the vault. This was my sticking point: I was convinced that within seconds he would set the whole mansion screaming and a SWAT team would arrive and carry him away, but he was certain that the code would be something obvious, like Viggo’s birthday, or one-two-three-four. He had a low opinion of rock singers’ imaginations.

  Our plan confirmed, he put the copies of Viggo’s house keys into the pocket of his jeans, folded my map up and slipped it inside his jacket, and walked me to the train station at Tower Hill. He kissed me on the forehead goodbye, and I resisted the urge to tangle my hands in his hair, and pull his mouth down to meet mine.

  It was just a few days until the planned breakin, and I spent them trying desperately not to think about it. I went out regularly, to remove myself and my odd behaviour from sight so Viggo and Luba wouldn’t notice my discomfort. I caught the train from Belsize Park to the East End, my old hunting ground, and watched films at RichMix Cinema. I went to concerts in the bar beneath the theatre to listen to musicians I’d never heard of, sitting at the back with a glass of wine, letting the music fill my mind and wash all my other thoughts away. I regularly asked Fran to join me, but she always dropped out with one pretext or another. I wondered if she was spending time with Chris.

  The minutes passed like a tide, unstoppably ticking away, until finally it was the afternoon that we’d planned the breakin to take place. I was tasked with keeping Viggo and Luba occupied, away from the mansion, until Dominik rang me with the all-clear and let me know that he’d departed the house and it was safe to return – whether or not he had found the Bailly and retrieved it.

  ‘You all right, babe?’ Viggo asked as we were getting ready to go out. I was struggling to run a comb through my tangled hair, more impatiently than usual. ‘Nervous?’

  ‘Petrified.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure it will be fine,’ he soothed, taking the comb from me. ‘Sit down,’ he said, sinking onto the edge of the bed and pointing to the space in front of him. I lowered myself onto the floor, relaxing against his calves and letting him take over the untangling of my knotted locks, as if I was a child. The sensation was pleasant, and at least this way I didn’t have to face him. ‘I’m sure you’ll be amazing.’

  He stroked the hair back from my face tenderly and I sank into his caress, utterly torn about the whole thing. I felt like Judas, plotting to betray him, though that notion was ridiculous considering the circumstances. If he did have the Bailly, and I was certain that he did, then I ought to be in a mad, hateful fury with him. He just wasn’t the sort of person that it was possible to hate. Viggo was eccentric and wild but there was not a malicious bone in his body. He was like a spoilt child who was so used to getting everything he wanted that he didn’t take any care to think about the consequences of grabbing whatever appealed to him. I found it hard to hate someone for their nature, and hypocritical, as I was all too aware of my own imperfections.

  Luba appeared from the shower in a cloud of steam, naked and still dripping wet. It was her habit to drip-dry rather than use a towel. She liked the feeling
of wetness, which was why she spent so much time in the basement pool, frolicking in the water like a mermaid.

  She crouched down and pressed her lips against mine, running her tongue lightly between my teeth and my top lip. I sighed with pleasure and began to kiss her back.

  Dominik had, after all, said that I should take special care to behave as I normally would, and Luba’s kisses were intoxicating. Sometimes I wondered if she was even human, or perhaps some sort of witch that Viggo employed to help him steal the stuff he wanted.

  Viggo, Luba and I were on our way to the preview of Grayson’s photo exhibition. It was the first time that we’d been out in public as a triad, but I had decided to risk Susan’s fury, if we were papped together, against the benefit of getting them both out of the house for several hours.

  There was a private viewing a few hours prior to the exhibition opening to the public. It would be full of collectors, models and voyeurs. Luba would blend seamlessly into the slew of attractive women that I expected to be present, Viggo was a well-known art collector, and I had been shot by Grayson, so I felt that attending together would not attract undue attention as it would if we had gone out to a restaurant and asked for a table for three.

  In fact, the prospect of using it as a way to lure Viggo out of the mansion was the reason why I had agreed to appear in the exhibition in the first place.

  When Grayson had phoned me while I was in Berlin, visiting the Flohmarkt in Mauerpark with Lauralynn, it was to ask about the photos.

  I’d been initially flattered, when he’d told me that shooting me with the violin had inspired him to do a further series of nudes involving fine-art models posing as musicians with their instruments – an exploration of sexuality and music. But flattery had turned to fear when he’d asked for my permission to include a good number of the more explicit pictures he’d taken of me in his exhibition.

  At first, despite Lauralynn’s encouragement, I’d said no. He assured me he would crop them in such a way that I would not be recognisable, even excluding my red hair from the final prints, and I knew he’d set the lighting up so that my face only ever appeared in shadow anyway. But I’d felt it risky, considering the sort of audience I played to for my classical gigs. I knew that sex sells, and it had worked for me, but the line between what most people found sexy and what they found offensive was a thin one, and Grayson’s photographs would probably cross it.

  When I realised that taking Viggo and Luba along to the private view would be the perfect decoy for Dominik’s breakin, I changed my mind, called Grayson back and gave him the goahead to use some of the photographs.

  There was also a part of me that thrilled at the thought of a room full of people staring at full-size pictures of me without any clothes on. It wasn’t vanity, but a sort of backwards voyeurism. It gave me the same sense of fearful excitement that I felt when I had played nude for Dominik at his recitals or had stripped naked at private parties.

  Grayson was dressed in jeans, a flouncy designer shirt and a soft, sand-coloured suit jacket. His hair was slicked back and to the side in his familiar way. He greeted me with a kiss on each cheek. There was the faintest surge of chemistry between us, but his eyes were friendly and slightly distant in the way of a work colleague or a polite acquaintance.

  He caught sight of Luba with particular interest, but was most likely sizing up her potential as a model. She was beautiful, of course, but it was her expressive face and graceful movements, the years as a dancer that had given her the ability to hold poses, and the way that her skin seemed to glow almost unnaturally in the light, that made her a potential photographer’s dream.

  Viggo was already off, seeking out the pictures, hoping to quickly identify and reserve the prints that he wanted to add to his collection, if any.

  I left Luba and Grayson to their introduction, and threaded my way through the crowd to check out the show. We were on the penultimate top floor of an office tower in Southwark, close to the Tate Modern. I’d once been to a sex party in a penthouse hotel suite nearby, in the days when Dominik and I had not long met and he’d encouraged me to continue my sexual explorations. The view through the thick glass that broke up the walls where the photographs hung was not dissimilar to the vision of London that I’d had on that night whilst staring out the hotel room window, soaking up the enthusiastic sounds of coupling behind me.

  The lights on the London Eye glimmered to my left, turning and blinking in their almost imperceptible motion. The water of the Thames shone like onyx, a black arrow dividing the city into binaries, north and south, day and night, vanilla and kinky, sub and dom … Summer and Dominik, maybe, if tonight went well. He and the Bailly had become bound together in my mind so that I couldn’t imagine having one without the other, and I felt the sort of certainty that belongs to illogical premonitions; if tonight brought my Bailly back, then it would bring Dominik with it.

  ‘Too afraid to look at your pictures, darling?’ said a gravelly voice behind me. Viggo had appeared as suddenly as a shadow. The tone of his voice was hypnotic in my ear, and I leaned back against him without even thinking about it, relaxing languidly into his words like a snake responds to its charmer.

  I was relieved that I had the pictures as an excuse for my shaky hands, sweaty palms and the steady thrum of my heart. There was still no word from Dominik, and waiting for the message that I was expecting at any moment, to tell me that all had gone as planned, had sent me into a flurry of nerves.

  I made a gesture in agreement, halfway between a shrug and an attempt to hide myself away by hunching further into my shoulders like a turtle recedes into its shell, feigning more discomfort than I felt at the surrounding display of my nudity.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve bought them all. Come and see.’

  The photographs were placed in a line around the room, with an arrow indicating where the viewer should begin, so that the images formed a narrative from beginning to end.

  Grayson had photographed both men and women, some of them dressed, and some of them nude. Some were allegedly bona fide musicians, or at least appeared to be, judging by the way that they sat and interacted with the instruments in the shot. I didn’t recognise any of them, unclothed or clothed.

  The first picture showed a handsome blond man wearing a suit, playing saxophone, his tie loosened and shirt buttons partly undone. He looked utterly lost in the music, eyes closed, head back, swinging his instrument high. Another man, nude, kneeled at his feet, apparently engaged in giving the saxophonist a blow job, although neither cock nor mouth was in shot. A flute held the focus of the picture, a sliver of silver lying along the floor, near his knees.

  The next was a photograph of two woman embracing, one sitting on a chair and the other straddling her waist, their flesh melded so close together that the curve of their touching breasts was barely visible. One was playing a trumpet and the other was staring into the distance, her hands tangled in her partner’s hair.

  We passed photograph after photograph, some of them merely beautiful, others shocking. Viggo paused for a long time in front of each of a series of pictures that displayed beautiful women making love to their instruments: flutes, bows and even a clarinet held inside their vaginas. In each case, the model’s face and eyes were the focal point of the picture, their expressions varying between lust and an uncommon spirituality. In another, a woman rested on all fours, her full, bare breasts hanging down, her face completely relaxed, as expressionless as a piece of furniture, as a man, fully dressed, beat her back with drumsticks.

  The pictures of me were grouped together at the end, and they all had small white tags on the bottom reading ‘sold’. Viggo was true to his word, he had bought the lot. They were different from the other photos, as I was the only model who had requested anonymity, so just my body was displayed, without my face. Because of my request that he exclude my recognisable red hair, he hadn’t been able to include even a hint of my jaw or lips in shot, so I was completely headless i
n all of them.

  Grayson had still managed to capture a sense of sexuality in the pose of my body, the way that my hands were draped possessively around the neck of the violin, the way that I held the curves of the instrument close to my skin.

  In the most striking image, I was sitting down, leaning back slightly with my legs splayed wide apart and the violin held just above my sex, as if I had given birth to my instrument. My arms were dead straight and my fingers tightly entwined in a vice-like grip, as if I was brandishing a weapon, but it was unclear whether I was preparing to bring the violin down to injure myself, or if I was holding it up like a shield. In another, I was lying on my side, spooning the violin like I might caress a lover. My body was completely relaxed, apart from my feet which were pointed like a ballerina’s, as if, though reclined, I was ready to take flight at any moment.

  I had expected to find viewing the gallery in the presence of others a turn-on. No one knew who I was, didn’t realise that I was standing amongst them like any ordinary person as they stared at the most intimate parts of me. But instead I found it alarming. Without a head I was reduced to existing as a body, sex and nothing else, no mind or heart, and I realised why Grayson had selected these pictures to be viewed last in the exhibition. They were the most shocking, although they didn’t show any kind of penetration or sexual activity as most of the others did. They were the only pictures without eyes, without expression, without love, affection or human connection.

  I began to shiver as a wave of unhappiness surged through me.

  Viggo turned me around to face him.

  ‘Hey, what’s upset you, sweetheart?’

  I couldn’t answer him, as I didn’t have an answer, and even if I did I doubted that I would be

  able to articulate it between silent sobs.

  ‘Shhh …’ he said, wrapping me up in his arms. ‘Let’s find somewhere to sit and you can tell