Eighty Days Red

by Vina Jackson

  My suitcase was only half full, and I hadn’t even started on the boxes, when I heard the squeak of the front door. It took me a few moments to pull myself up, because I was curled on the floor, wasting time with nostalgia, handling each last thing before I folded it away, and smiling at all the associated memories I had carried with me from one country to another.

  Chris and Fran had arrived home, and not noticed that I had let myself into the house with the key he’d given me when I first moved in. I hadn’t returned it, as I still officially lived here, though I had, until recently, spent almost every night at Viggo’s.

  From my seat on the floor facing into the hallway by the door, I had a perfect view of the pair of them, embracing tightly and kissing as though the world was about to end.

  I blinked but when I opened my eyes again, they were still there, only now Chris was running his hand up the leg of my sister’s shorts and she had her arms over her head, trying and failing to wrestle her way out of her tight T-shirt.

  I coughed loudly, alerting them to my presence before I saw anything more that I really didn’t want to see. Chris leaped in fright and swung around, searching for an intruder.

  ‘I’m in here,’ I called out.

  ‘Jeezus, Summer, don’t you ever knock?’

  ‘Knock? I was here first! Don’t you ever check your messages?’

  ‘I’ve been … distracted,’ he said with a self-conscious smile.

  ‘I can see that.’

  Fran was as red as a beetroot. She was normally totally dismissive of her passing flings, and I’d never known her to be embarrassed at being caught out. That morning with Dagur, the drummer, she’d shrugged it off unashamedly in front of a much bigger audience.

  This must be serious.

  ‘You two are … getting along well.’

  Fran stepped forward to where Chris was standing, in the doorway of the bedroom that she and I had been sharing together, and took his hand.

  ‘We’re dating,’ she said. ‘I mean, officially.’

  Chris grinned from ear to ear. ‘Your sister is my girlfriend.’

  I threw a sock at him. He caught it easily with his spare hand, and continued to smile smugly.

  ‘So that’s why it seemed so tidy in here. I wondered why your stuff wasn’t spread all over the place like usual, Fran. You’ve just moved it all into his room. And here I was thinking that you’d turned over a new leaf.’

  ‘Maybe I have,’ she replied. ‘Just not in the direction that you were expecting.’

  I smiled. I was happy for her. And for Chris. In fact, they made a nice couple, even if I had gritted my teeth at the thought of my best friend dating my sister.

  Lauralynn had returned all excited from an overnight session booking at a studio in West London.

  ‘You won’t guess who it was for,’ she’d said to Dominik, after hanging up her leather jacket, setting down her heavy cello case in her room and rushing into the kitchen that had, by default, become their communal space.

  ‘Let me hazard a guess. The late Herbert Von Karajan is recording a symphonic suite inspired by the Rolling Stones’ drug songs and required a lengthy psychedelic cello solo as its highlight.’

  ‘Actually, that’s not far off …’ Lauralynn said.

  ‘And he’s come all the way to Shepherd’s Bush from wherever he’s been biding his time for over thirty years to do the deed …’ Dominik continued.

  ‘Stop being facetious. No, the booking was with Viggo Franck and The Holy Criminals. They’re recording new songs and needed a cello descant on one of the tracks. Their producer even tells me if the song makes it onto the album, I’ll be given a credit.’

  Dominik had a wry smile. ‘That’s just wonderful,’ he said. ‘I’m happy for you.’

  ‘Mind you, I still haven’t met the famous Viggo Franck. He wasn’t at the sessions. Just his people. I played to the accompaniment of his backing tapes.’

  Lauralynn gave her friend a closer look. He looked different, cheerful but slightly absent.

  They hadn’t seen much of each other during the previous weeks since she’d returned from America. Either he’d been busy upstairs at his computer, presumably writing, or he’d been furtively slipping out of the house at odd times like a conspirator, avoiding her company and deflecting her questions. Lauralynn had been working nights for several days and she assumed his own nights were busy with Summer. She’d seen Summer’s shoes and things hanging about the house in odd places.

  ‘Is there something I should know?’ Lauralynn asked. ‘You’ve not been very communicative of late, you know?’

  ‘Well …’ He hesitated. ‘There’s been a lot happening.’

  ‘Summer?’

  ‘Yes. To cut a long story short, we’ve been seeing each other a lot. We’re going to give it another go, I think.’

  Lauralynn beamed. ‘Splendid.’

  ‘We’ve finally reached a decision. I’m hoping she’ll be moving in later. With her stuff. I’m keeping my fingers crossed things will work out this time. We’re both nervous, of course, but we managed to find her violin, so I reckon it’s a good omen.’

  ‘Fantastic. You deserve each other, I’ve known it all along. And …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’d been thinking of moving on for some time, Dominik. You and me, we’re good mates, but it was never an ideal situation, was it?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘So all this is timely. As I’m sure you don’t want to have me around once Summer moves in, do you?’

  ‘It would be awkward,’ he agreed. ‘Do you have anywhere to go?’ he asked, concerned. ‘I’d feel awful putting you out on the streets.’

  ‘Hmmm …’ Lauralynn’s eyes sparkled with more mischief than usual.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I think I have somewhere to go.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘Someone who was at the studio. The session actually ended quite early, we’d got things down after just a couple of takes. A friend of the band, she’d come along thinking Viggo was working at the studio last night, but it turned out he was at meetings with his record company. We got talking. I spent the night with her.’

  Lauralynn even blushed slightly. Her overnight stand must have made quite an impression, Dominik thought.

  ‘My turn to be happy for you,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ she giggled like a teenage girl. ‘I know it’s just one night but I think she’s rather special. You know how it goes, sometimes it takes just one glance.’

  ‘Or more,’ Dominik remarked.

  ‘Much, much more,’ Lauralynn agreed. ‘She’s staying at Viggo Franck’s big place in Belsize Park, says there are a lot of spare rooms and that he wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘You mean the Russian woman?’ Dominik said, a curious feeling sweeping over him, as if lots of different pieces of the puzzle were finally clicking into place.

  ‘Yes, Luba. The one you were going to introduce me to, remember?’

  ‘Ah, yes, the one and only Luba.’

  ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’

  ‘Oh yes, she is,’ he agreed. ‘Most definitely.’

  Summer had an appointment in town that morning with Susan, who had called a meeting to further discuss Summer’s plans to reintegrate herself into the classical world with a return to her sources, and the added possibility of releasing a live album which had been recorded with Groucho Nights on their European tour in Sarajevo. She didn’t expect to be free until mid to late afternoon, at which stage she was planning to gather the rest of the belongings she’d kept at Chris’s Camden Town flat and come along to Dominik’s.

  Dominik offered to drive Lauralynn and her stuff down the road to Viggo’s. As he rang the bell at the mansion’s door, he couldn’t help remembering how just under a week before he had used the clandestinely copied keys to make his way in. He had since returned those keys to Viggo.

  It was Luba who opened the door for them.

  She rushed ahea
d to give Lauralynn a lengthy hug and affectionately kissed Dominik on both cheeks and welcomed them in.

  Considering all the sexual combinations they had been in or witnessed the other in, Dominik was surprised how damn normal it all felt. Like a story winding down to its natural conclusion. A story possibly dictated from afar by the supposed curse of the Angelique, he smiled to himself.

  ‘Viggo’s around somewhere. He will probably come down later,’ Luba declared.

  Looking at the two women together, Dominik was struck by their similarities. He had not seen it before. Both tall and blonde and built like Amazons. Luba was less voluptuous but, a consequence of her dancer’s training no doubt, stood straighter, holding her breasts high and with pride, while Lauralynn’s stance was looser and more casual, her strong swimmer’s shoulders anchoring her frame and her curves.

  They visibly suited each other.

  Ah, to be a fly on that bedroom wall, Dominik thought.

  He and Lauralynn pulled her two heavy Samsonite cases in, and Dominik returned to the BMW’s open boot to carry in a couple of large cardboard boxes, in which Lauralynn had hastily thrown her books and general bric-a-brac.

  A surprisingly domesticated Luba offered them both coffee and cupcakes, but Dominik sensed he was fast becoming the third wheel of the carriage and the two women were evidently waiting for him to make his excuses and leave them to their own devices. He was about to bid them farewell when Viggo walked into the room. Skinny trousers as tight as ever, as if he had just spent a fortifying half-hour under the shower or in a steam room in order to tighten them even further across his sylph-like form. His T-shirt had seen better days, and was as full of artful holes as a slice of European cheese.

  ‘Hi, mate,’ he greeted Dominik in his customary casual tone.

  Then turned his attention to the new arrival.

  ‘This is Lauralynn,’ Luba introduced her.

  The rock musician stared at the statuesque blonde, his eyes darting busily between her and Luba.

  ‘Welcome, darling. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  ‘You mean the cello track I recorded for your new song?’ Lauralynn asked. ‘Oh yes,’ Viggo grinned. ‘That too …’

  Amused by Viggo’s early predatory intentions, Luba took Lauralynn by the hand and led her towards the hallway and in the direction of the house’s upper floors.

  ‘I’ll show you the room we’re giving you, come,’ Luba said.

  Lauralynn waved at Dominik.

  Viggo’s eyes followed the two women’s silhouettes as they stepped away. His little boy smile was on full display.

  ‘She’s a good friend,’ Dominik pointed out. ‘She’s nice. But, one word of warning …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘She’s not much into men.’

  Viggo’s smile grew even broader.

  ‘Never say never, mate.’

  I began to panic when the furniture arrived.

  It was the first time in my life that I’d ever had anything of my own that felt so permanent. I’d bought a large wardrobe, a set of drawers and a full-length mirror online from a shop in

  East Sussex that made furniture from recycled timber, all of it solid, nothing flatpack. Neil, the shop’s manager who had sold it to me, had taken great pains to stress that it was made to last, all of which increased my panic at being now trapped in Dominik’s house with no option to make a quick getaway, suitcase in hand, as I had the last time things hadn’t worked out between us.

  The wardrobe took four men to lift it up the narrow stairs to the bedroom, and as I watched them straining precariously to heft the thing along all I could think was how I would ever manage to move out again. I calmed myself down by remembering that it was just furniture, and I could always take an axe to it if worst came to worst and carry it back down the stairs again in pieces.

  The thought made me immediately guilty, and I was extra nice to Dominik for the rest of the week. I wasn’t the only one suffering from the change to our circumstance, and he was coping remarkably well, barely raising an eyebrow as I slipped piles of teenage vampire fiction onto his shelves alongside his first editions. He firmly drew the line at acquiring a cat, but agreed to consider a goldfish, if I promised to look after it.

  New York had been different. I had known from the outset that living together would be temporary, because Dominik was renting just for a few months to fulfil his scholarship obligations. I’d thought of the loft much as I would consider a hotel, which had perhaps been part of the problem.

  Even when I moved in with Simón, though we were together for two years, I hadn’t made any changes to the place, bar shifting my clothes into one half of his enormous built-in closet and putting my toiletries in the bathroom. I hadn’t added so much as a photoframe to his apartment, and I had always thought of it as his apartment, never ours.

  My newly found domestic status was highlighted when I received an email from my old friend Charlotte, the girl I had been close to when I first met Dominik and who had introduced me to the London fetish scene. I hadn’t seen or heard from her in more than two years, not since I had left London the first time in such a rush and moved to New York.

  She had seen a review of the Groucho Nights gig at La Cigale and wrote that hearing about me again, after all this time, had prompted her to get in touch. She was now living in Paris, and had married Jasper – the male escort she had been casually seeing when I knew her in London – after falling pregnant with their first child who was now eighteen months old. A second had followed only a year later.

  Jasper was one of the few men I’d known who could satisfy Charlotte’s voracious sexual appetite. But it seemed their casual affair had run to something deeper and Jasper had apparently given up escorting and was now at home looking after the kids and studying psychology, while she worked in the finance department at the British embassy.

  I wrote back to tell her that I was now together again with Dominik, and Charlotte and I became engaged in a back and forth, discussing the whys and wherefores of relationships, and what it was like to settle down when you never planned to. For as long as I had known her, Charlotte had been resolutely single, even preferring to engage the services of a man of the night rather than pick someone up at a bar for a short-term fling. She had said at the time that she found it easier, and more honest, and that falling for Jasper, the escort who had become her regular paramour, had just been a happy accident.

  ‘Love,’ wrote Charlotte, ‘creeps up on you when you least expect it.’

  The Parisians, though, were much more open than the British about their erotic natures, and while outwardly maintaining a veneer of respectability, Charlotte and Jasper did occasionally book a babysitter and visit Les Chandelles, or Cap d’Agde, the notorious nudist beach.

  ‘Full of swingers. You’d hate it. Stick with Torture Garden,’ she replied, when I asked her what it was like.

  I couldn’t imagine coaxing Dominik into a military uniform or a latex outfit, though I thrilled at the thought of seeing him clad in riding boots and wielding a crop. He had never been one for the trappings of fetish, and preferred to live out his fantasies with the weight of his touch and words alone. Anything else would be a conversation for another time, but I doubted that it would ever include specialist bed linen or any sort of handcuffs, either of the fluffy pink or the thick leather variety.

  We had made one addition to our toy box. Viggo had sent us a housewarming present. A Hitachi magic wand. Dominik had pulled it out of the box and held it up with a perplexed expression, and I had gladly given him a demonstration of how it worked.

  Simón had also heard, through Susan, that Dominik and I were back together, and he had called me, out of the blue. It had always amused Simón that I hated telephone conversations, so when we were dating he’d made a point of always calling me, never texting or emailing, even if it was something banal, to check what time I’d be home for dinner, or to ask if I could pick up some milk at the local Korean convenience store.r />
  I picked up the call before I’d had time to think about it, presuming that it would be Susan, calling to check how I was getting on in the studio. Viggo was helping me set up my own recording space for the New Zealand album. I’d been down there every day, rehearsing with the Bailly, getting back into the rhythm of classical music again after my rock hiatus. I’d found it impossible with other violins, but Dominik’s gift suited me so well it was almost as though the instrument sang as soon as I touched it.

  ‘Hey, you,’ Simón said, when I answered. It was the way that he always greeted me, two words that had been a sort of code between us, an entire conversation that meant ‘Hello, how are you, I’m home’, and a dozen other things in between.

  ‘Simón?’

  ‘You haven’t forgotten me, then?’

  ‘How are you?’ I asked. ‘You’re back in New York now? With the orchestra?’

  ‘Almost. Just passing through. I’m moving back to Venezuela though, for good.’

  ‘Conducting in Caracas?’

  ‘Not even that. A government job, believe it or not. Minister for Culture.’

  ‘Wow! Congratulations. So you get to go to lots of bull-riding events officially?’ ‘Every week. And get fat on coconut and caramel-flavoured desserts.’

  ‘Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.’

  ‘You should come and visit sometime. And Dominik,’ he added quickly. ‘Susan told me that you had got back together. And I’ve been keeping up with all your musical adventures, of course.’

  ‘It’s been a bit of a wild ride.’

  ‘It would make a good book.’

  I smiled at the coincidence. ‘Dominik’s writing one. Not about me this time, he’s promised. But about the Bailly.’

  ‘I figured he would be. So he gives you the music, and you supply him with the words.’

  ‘I’d never thought of it like that, but I suppose so.’

  ‘I always knew you were made for each other. We never stood a chance.’

  He said the words with warmth and humour, and I laughed. Simón had a habit of being right. It was one of the reasons why we’d broken up.