Eighty Days White

by Vina Jackson

  Liana came at last, her final scream the loudest of them all, and as she did so I felt a rush inside me so strong that I thought I might pass out if I didn’t come to my own climax. I wanted Nick to abandon her and touch me instead, to bring me to the same strange sort of pleasure that he had brought her, but my mouth felt as though it was made of concrete and my limbs were wooden, unmovable.

  He pulled the gloves from his hands with a snap, tossed them away and took Liana into his arms, cradling her against him the way that a parent comforts a sick child. She nestled into his chest in a fetal position as he stroked her hair and her face with a gentleness so absolute that I felt as though I had dreamed the roughness of his earlier behaviour.

  They lay there for a long time, and I continued to rest in the bean bag and watch. The intimacy between them was somehow more intense than the sex had been, and after a while I began to feel that my presence was inappropriate. What, I worried, if the spell that seemed to have been cast over the two of them wore off and they saw my voyeurism as unwelcome and unwanted? That I was some kind of pervert? My guilt was ridiculous under the circumstances, I knew, but it was enough to rouse me from my stupor and to my feet.

  I glanced at the clock. Hours had passed, though after we smoked the joint each minute had felt timeless. It was close to dawn.

  Liana was still curled up in Nick’s arms and they were now lying down on the floor with their eyes closed and their heads resting on the cushions that had earlier supported Liana’s knees.

  I took a blanket that was lying across the back of the sofa and carefully spread it over their bodies. Neither of them stirred.

  Then I collected my purse and fled.

  I didn’t see Liana for ten whole days following that evening. She didn’t come back to our flat for the duration, presumably staying with Nick, or maybe she had decided, after all, to pay her parents a visit.

  Neither of us tried to contact the other on our phones. Possibly for the same reason: shame at what she had got herself involved in on her part, and a similar reluctance on mine to discuss what I had witnessed and my reactions to it.

  I slept most of the next day and never left my room, subsisting on an old tin of biscuits and water from the sink tap, tossing and turning in my bed, clearing the wine and smoke from my system, and trying to rid myself of the images of Liana and Nick and the look on her face as he pleasured her.

  I was already trying to formulate what I might say to her next time we saw each other, but none of it made sense and I changed my mind every quarter of an hour or so. Maybe I should just be silent. Pretend I hadn’t been there, seen nothing.

  I didn’t answer the occasional knocks on my door until late afternoon when Neil finally called out my name.

  I moaned in response, threw off the covers and tiptoed over to open the door, still in my underwear.

  Neil’s first reaction was wide-eyed at seeing me so scantily dressed, but that was nothing like the look on his face when he looked up and caught sight of my teardrop tattoo.

  I had carefully removed the dressing as soon as I got home, and washed away the mess that had gathered there. It was still red, but the teardrop was clearly visible beneath the light layer of the antiseptic cream that I had dabbed over it as per Jonah’s instructions.

  Neil opened his mouth wide and just held it there for an eternity as I yawned and stretched in front of him, as if he couldn’t call up the right words from his subconscious.

  I smiled and mimicked the open O of his fish face. ‘Anything you want to say?’ I asked him.

  He closed is mouth and finally began to express himself.

  ‘What the … ?’ was all he managed, though his eyes were drawn to the mark on my face, transfixed by it.

  ‘It’s a tattoo, Neil. That’s all it is.’

  He peered, scrunched his face.

  ‘Is it real? Or just temporary?’ he asked me.

  ‘It’s real. Not a fake. Very real.’

  If he’d asked me why, I think I would have just sent him packing, but he didn’t. Although I was sure he would do at some later stage.

  ‘When?’ He was visibly attempting to figure out how it could have happened to me since he’d left us at the Komedia bar late the previous afternoon.

  ‘Yesterday, not long after you went home,’ I informed him calmly. ‘Liana also had one done. On her ankle.’

  ‘Her ankle?’ The idea of a teardrop on Liana’s ankle must have puzzled him.

  ‘A different one,’ I helped him out. ‘She wanted a butterfly.’

  ‘Oh.’ He swallowed hard, his eyes still captivated by the teardrop on my face.

  ‘It’s … curious,’ he said. ‘Actually, it suits you, in a strange way. So black, and your skin so pale.’

  ‘Really?’

  The fact that he seemed to like my changed appearance threw me – I hadn’t expected it from him.

  ‘It doesn’t make me look like a clown, or like Alice Cooper, does it?’ I had a moment of doubt as I asked him this.

  His gaze was unwavering.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Neil stated. ‘He just had black circles around his eyes, and thin lines, not a teardrop. And, of course, it was just make-up. Nothing permanent.’

  ‘I never thought you’d know about Alice Cooper,’ I said.

  ‘I met him once,’ he revealed to my surprise. ‘My dad played with him at a charity golf tournament. It’s his major passion.’

  I laughed out loud. This was getting too ridiculous for words. Finally his eyes abandoned mine and strayed further afield over to my undressed body. I realised with a jolt that my knickers were rather transparent and that I hadn’t showered when I’d got home in the early hours of the morning. But I didn’t feel threatened, or aroused; Neil was safe. He held no sexual charge for me.

  ‘You really like it?’

  ‘I think so, it does look pretty, striking, although …’

  ‘Although what?’

  ‘It’s just that teardrop tattoos have a story behind them, haven’t they?’ he said hesitantly.

  ‘What sort of story?’

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t know. I thought it was one of those things that everyone knew.’

  ‘What?’ I asked him again, impatiently.

  ‘People get them in jail when they’ve killed someone.’

  ‘Oh shit!’ I cried.

  Neil went pale, mistaking my frenzied laughter for anger.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘maybe I’ve fucked up, but it’s too late now and I haven’t been to jail and I haven’t killed anyone. Yet. Now piss off and let me put some clothes on.’

  Neil retreated back past the door and I was left with my thoughts.

  It had been a mad, spur-of-the-moment decision, I knew, and now I was stuck with it.

  I was the girl with the teardrop tattoo, and my life would never be the same again.

  2

  Bright Lights, Big City

  The bed was too narrow and, as he shifted aside to lean over and extend an arm to the floor to reach his trousers, the quilt was pulled aside, uncovering me. The coldness of the morning interrupted my daydreaming. I was taken aback by how hairy the top of his shoulders looked.

  What was his name again?

  Peter? Mark? For the life of me, I couldn’t remember. It had been a commonplace name. Even the sex had been unmemorable, and I recalled how, after he’d fallen asleep shortly after lifting himself away from me following his rapid climax, I had to reach for some much-needed relief using my own fingers.

  David.

  That was it.

  ‘Cigarette?’ He offered me one as he lit up his own.

  ‘No thanks.’

  We’d been flirting on and off for a few weeks at the pub in Cambridge Circus we both regularly visited, and yesterday evening I had given in almost out of lassitude and followed him home to his shared flat in Hackney. Maybe his lukewarm performance had been a direct response to my own evident lack of enthusiasm.

  Had I even been attracted
to him? Living in London often made me do irrational things, and this was just the last in a series of minor mistakes I’d been involved in. After fumbling kisses in the dark once we’d got past the front door and undressing each other, I’d quickly realised David was hoping to fuck me bareback and I’d loudly stood my ground and insisted he use a condom. The fool didn’t even have any in the flat or his room. Fortunately, I still had one secreted away at the bottom of my bag. The fact that a woman would think of carrying protection somehow excited his fancy and he was rock hard in a moment. Not for long, though.

  As he puffed away on his cigarette with a smug look on his face, ignoring me altogether, I decided it was time to draw a line under the mediocrity of the whole thing. I rose from the bed in silence, bending over to pick up my scattered items of clothing, and quickly dressed.

  ‘Don’t you want to take a shower, have breakfast together?’ David suggested.

  ‘Not really.’

  I’d been in London for a little while, living the independent life I’d so long dreamed of. And I wasn’t any happier. Following my graduation from Sussex University, I’d decided to stay down by the coast for the summer rather than returning home. The fact that Liana had also opted to remain in Brighton had been a strong factor.

  Neil had disappeared home and was sensibly spending a few months away from distractions to concentrate on his graduate job applications. He’d even found a friend to fill his space for a few months, a computer engineering student who spent all of his time online gaming and rarely left his bedroom.

  To my surprise, my parents hadn’t raised any objections to my ongoing absence and volunteered to provide me with a small allowance for a further six months while I found my feet. I imagined they had grown used to living on their own by now after my three years away and felt no urgency at the prospect of having a now-tattooed daughter back in the family fold.

  However, Liana and Nick had now been dating for well over a year and, at the end of the summer, Liana decided to move in with him. I could no longer afford to stay in the flat we had shared for what now felt like an eternity and I just didn’t have either the energy or the willpower to begin the endless round of interviews for prospective new tenants to share the premises and make ends meet, in all likelihood first- or second-year students who would prove as gormless as I had been at that age and no company at all.

  So I ended up moving to London. My time to try the bright lights and the big city. A distant second cousin had initially allowed me to crash on her sofa in Mill Hill, but the suburb’s distance from the heart of town was too much of a strain on my finances and my sense of adventure, and after I’d found a part-time waitressing job I managed a flat-share in Dalston.

  With my literature degree, I’d been hopeful of finding work in maybe a bookshop, but it seemed I was one of a thousand applicants for every vacancy and no doubt my pesky facial tattoo was no help.

  The real problem was that I now realised I didn’t know what I truly wanted from life. I had never been particularly ambitious or assertive. Love hadn’t crossed my path yet and I was beginning to believe that, even if it did, I would not be capable of recognising it. The real thing. Men I dated were a disappointment, intimacy such a fleeting sensation and all too often a let-down. Welcome to the real world, Lily!

  I kept in touch with Liana, we visited one another when we could and spoke regularly on the phone, but I had begun to sense the darker side of her personality, which I had observed during the course of her and Nick’s initial encounter, was gradually coming to the fore. From a distance I observed with unease as new acquaintances introduced her to a curious new world, involving BDSM and somewhat more clandestine activities she was wary of sharing with me.

  On one of her visits to the capital, she did allow me to tag along with her and her companion for the evening, an older guy with a creepy taste for leather. I accompanied them to an underground club opposite the old Smithfield Market where it seemed almost anything went.

  Liana hadn’t revealed the dress code to me until we arrived and she removed her coat. She wore a lace bodysuit that was totally sheer with no underwear beneath it. Her nipples pointed through the fabric so obviously that the girl on the door, who seemed to know her well, suggested that Liana could double as a coat rack. She accessorised with black gloves and a bowtie around her neck in a strange fabric I had never seen before, but which many of the other party-goers were wearing.

  Latex, Liana explained, and I saw much more of it when curiosity got the better of me and I followed her and her leather-clad friend through to the bar. A bevy of fierce-looking women on the dance floor were dressed in the same stuff.

  I soon forgot the latex when I set eyes on the men these women were with. One had a guy attached to a leash, cowering at her feet like a dog. Another man was standing next to them waiting to be served at the bar. He was wearing just a rubber G-string with a pink pouch at the front that covered his genitals. One of the women asked him why he was taking so long to fetch their drinks, and I watched in horror as she raised something she was holding in her hand and brought it slapping down against his buttock to hurry him along.

  ‘What the fuck is this place, Liana?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll like it,’ she replied. ‘Trust me.’

  As the evening progressed, I witnessed stranger and stranger behaviour. Liana spent most of the evening on the dance floor, leaving me to creep across to the area that she called the dungeon for a better look. There I saw men and women bent over all kinds of furniture in various states of nudity, each of them with a partner who seemed to be torturing them in one way or another. A man in a leather kilt was repeatedly bringing his hand down on a woman’s buttocks and she was moaning loud enough to raise the roof.

  It was a little like watching a horror film. I saw things that I didn’t want to see, yet I couldn’t bring myself to look away. There was some part of me that felt an odd kind of connection with the people in the dungeon. What I witnessed didn’t arouse me exactly, but it spiked my interest, and to Liana’s amusement I asked her if she’d like to go back again the following weekend and then the one after that.

  I was weirdly fascinated by the assorted goings-on in the club, which ranged from the bizarre to the hardcore. I had no desire to participate and preferred to indulge the voyeur in me, remaining on the perimeter of the activities, which helped me get noticed by one of the organisers. A couple of weeks later, I was offered a part-time job with the club, attending to the cloakroom and other minor chores two or three nights a week.

  ‘You look as if you’re observing everything and making careful mental notes,’ she had said to me. ‘That’s good. We might need a chronicler one day.’

  She was an imposing woman, dressed on that initial evening in a red latex cat suit, her dark-brown hair floating all the way down her back and gliding against the shiny surface of her costume. She was all curves, her strong legs delineated by the costume and emphasised by her impossibly high heels. She appeared to be acting as the mistress of ceremony for tonight’s entertainment, mingling with the crowds, encouraging, suggesting, prodding, her voice hoarse and confidential, soothing one moment and harsh the next as she ordered the men and women in attendance around as if they were her own personal puppets. Everyone referred to her as ‘She’, and it felt almost dangerous to even enquire as to her real name.

  I was stunned and in awe of her worldliness and acquiesced immediately when she offered me the job.

  ‘You’ll have to wear something else, though,’ she pointed out. I didn’t have any of the fetish-themed clothing that the club preferred everyone to don, so I usually borrowed a simple black dress from Liana.

  ‘I don’t think I own anything appropriate,’ I remarked with regret.

  ‘Not to worry,’ she replied, looking me up and down as if taking my modest measurements. ‘I think we can conjure something up that will suit you. Your skin is so pale, and I love the way you wear your hair.’

  I was one of the few girls
I knew who still sported the hair they were born with. Jet black, it reached right down to the small of my back as I hadn’t had it cut since I’d reached my teens.

  By then, I’d found a day job assisting at the counter at a music shop in Denmark Street, London’s old Tin Pan Alley, just off Charing Cross Road. Music had always been one of my passions, maybe even my only passion. I’d had ten years or so of cello lessons and had even taught myself to play the guitar, although for some reason I’d not picked up an instrument since I’d left home. The store sold and hired instruments and also stocked sheet music.

  With my job there and the part-time hours at the fetish club, I was financially secure for the first time in my adult life, not that I had expensive tastes or a costly way of life. I didn’t begrudge the lack of free time, finding both activities enjoyable and a welcome contrast to one another. It was like living in two different worlds and it made life interesting.

  London was a forest of possibilities and I wanted to sample every single one of them. I wanted loud music and white lights, to be alone in a crowd and be a part of an unthinking multitude, to have picnics in Regent’s Park or Hyde Park or Hackney Downs, wander for hours on end down Brick Lane or the warrens of the Camden Town markets, carouse in Hoxton and meditate in the early morning on the slopes of Primrose Hill, shop for exotic vegetables in Brixton market, halal meat in Southall or kosher patisseries in Golders Green.

  But, first of all, I treated myself to another, larger tattoo across my right shoulder: a multicoloured landscape of wild orchids. And I got my ears pierced and adorned by a welter of small, thin steel rings. Some days I would add a fake nose ring to compound my overall goth look, alongside a darker shade of crimson for my lipstick.

  Lily of London was born in earnest.

  Little did I know how violins would make a mess of all my carefully improvised plans.

  I had been working at the shop in Denmark Street for almost three months when, shortly after we’d opened at ten in the morning, this serious-looking and rather handsome – if curiously detached – middle-aged guy walked in and enquired about violin rentals.