Eighty Days White

by Vina Jackson

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She sounded unsure of herself, a tone that was at odds with her confident demeanour. ‘This guy I’m seeing … And I’m not usually even that into men. I don’t know what’s come over me. Love, eh?’ she added. ‘You can’t count on it for much, but you can count on it to take you by surprise.’

  I almost refused the ride home when I realised that it was going to be on the back of a motorcycle. A sleek black machine that promised danger at every turn. But it was either that or wait for She and Grayson, and I couldn’t face talking to either of them until I had spoken to Neil. So I pulled on the helmet that Lauralynn gave me and hoisted myself up behind her. She’d lent me her jeans, too, for extra protection against the cold while she straddled the bike completely nude from the waist down, wearing just a biker jacket and her knee-high red boots.

  Dressed like that we were begging to be pulled over, but we made it back all the way to Dalston without any problems. Lauralynn even stopped at a service station to fill up with gas and seemed to take particular delight in the look on the late-night attendant’s face as he tried to work out whether her blue pants were painted on or not.

  It was close to dawn by the time we pulled up outside my flat. The mode of travel had prevented us from talking at all so I’d spent the whole journey with thoughts of Neil running through my head and tears streaming down my face.

  Lauralynn gave me her number as I thanked her for the lift.

  ‘Drop me a line sometime,’ she said in a thick American accent. ‘Really. You look like you could do with someone to talk to.’

  I was only capable of nodding by that stage and a few meagre words of gratitude.

  Another day passed, and night had fallen again by the time I woke up.

  Neil hadn’t called. He didn’t pick up when I phoned so I left him a message: ‘We need to talk. Whatever you thought that was with the guy at the ball, it wasn’t that. Just call me, OK?’

  I didn’t even know what it was that had happened that night. Or what Neil thought about it.

  But he did call back, only minutes after I had ended the message on his voicemail. And we arranged to meet.

  ‘That first time, the other week, with the photographer, it felt like a game,’ Neil said. ‘It was fun, playful … and special. It was you and me.’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’ I asked him. ‘The feel of the flogger?’

  He nodded.

  We were in the dark and smoky bowels of a shady Soho drinking club, just off Shaftesbury Avenue, that he had become a member of since receiving another promotion to executive level. I would never have pegged Neil as the sort of guy who would join a club, let alone one where tobacco fumes hung down from the low ceiling like a semi-permanent curtain of nicotine. Leonard and I had sometimes taken drinks in slightly more fashionable clubs in the area, but this place, which didn’t even have a name over its door, just a grimy buzzer, felt as if it had stepped straight out of the 1950s up to and including the permanent five o’clock shadows and the total indifference of the two bartenders. But it felt cozy, intimate, the sort of place where secrets could be kept and revealed.

  Neil was proving full of surprises.

  He looked up at me.

  ‘I did, Lily,’ he stated. He held my gaze. ‘A lot. You know I’ve always been so fond of you. Lusted after you. Even thought I was a little bit in love with you.’

  I made a gesture to silence him, but he resolutely continued.

  ‘Please, allow me to speak.’

  I lowered my hand.

  ‘Every time I saw you with another guy, I felt like death warmed over, jealous, bitterly envious and I began to think you were out of my league, that you would always see me as just a friend or a brother, not a man and a potential lover.’

  Again I wanted to say something, but the forlorn look on his face suggested it would be best for me to remain silent for now.

  ‘Surely you realised, if only from the way I hung around you and Liana, always there, at your beck and call, like some harmless pet,’ he continued.

  ‘I thought it was Liana you were pursuing,’ I said. I was lying. I had always been aware of Neil’s interest in me. It had been obvious from the moment we’d been introduced.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘But you can’t regulate the rules of attraction any more than you can fight the tide,’ Neil said. ‘And I kept harbouring some hope against hope that one day you would tire of the others, no longer be so influenced by Liana’s wildness and come to appreciate my ordinariness. You were the first person from uni I re-established contact with when I came to work in London. No one else really mattered.’

  ‘I’m flattered.’

  ‘Do you remember the day in Brighton after you got the tattoo and showed it to me?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I was shocked, but at the same time, I loved it. I thought it was downright beautiful, unconventional and daring, of course, but it just fitted in so exquisitely with your personality, that innate talent you have for surprising people, friends. It almost felt inevitable that you would have that tattoo on your face. As if everything in your life had been leading up to it. It had been preordained.’

  ‘Perhaps it had,’ I opined.

  ‘I sometimes thought about you at night in my bedroom at the flat, knowing you were just a few walls away, and the focus of my imagination was never on any anything else but always the teardrop, Lily.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Anyway, it was always you and that day we had the session with your photographer, Grayson, it was as if you opened the door to a whole other world.’

  I wondered briefly whether Neil was evoking the intimacy we had shared being positioned nude and in explicit poses or the fact I had quickly taken control once Grayson had suggested that I domme him and found him surprisingly willing to bend to my compulsions and desires.

  ‘It was a photography session, Neil. Play-acting for the camera. You mustn’t read too much into it.’ As the words came out of my mouth I wanted to take them back. I hadn’t been play-acting. It had been much more than that for me.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You can’t imagine how many days and nights I had dreamed of experiencing something like that with you. It was a constant preoccupation, ever since I heard about that club that you worked at and found out what happened there. I’m not stupid, Lily, I can use the Internet. I always wondered if you were like that, more than just a door girl, but I never knew for sure until you whipped me. Being with you was an ambition that dominated my waking days throughout my three years in Brighton. Or should I say my nights? Trying to visualise it, how it would feel, how it would happen, how you would feel, but never in a month of Sundays could I have guessed it would take the turn it did.’

  ‘You mean me … taking over?’ I ventured, aware we were beginning to tread on awkward ground.

  ‘Not just that …’ He hesitated.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s … the way I … reacted to it.’ He was stumbling over words, straining to say the right thing as if it was a matter of life and death.

  ‘It made you feel uncomfortable?’ I queried.

  ‘That’s just it,’ he replied. ‘It didn’t. It felt as if you were the one controlling me, using me, toying with me and my body. My mind, too. And the more it went on, the more I sort of wanted you to go further. It was over so quickly, though, when Grayson had the shots he wanted. I wanted it to go on and on but I couldn’t tell you. I was too afraid that you didn’t feel the same way. And this had never happened when I’d been with girls before, not, I hasten to say, that there were that many before you. From the moment you took your first strike and your voice sort of went hoarse and you began to command me, it awakened something inside me. As if it had always been present but carefully hidden away. It confused me. Because I didn’t expect to react in that way. It’s difficult to explain. It seemed as if our roles had been reversed and, after the initial moment of shock, I wanted more, mentally
accepted it felt right. I felt divided, bathing in the glow of lust requited while also yearning to be controlled, lose all control.’

  I sighed. Had I been right to unveil my base nature to someone who had once been a friend? Open Pandora’s Box?

  ‘At the ball,’ Neil continued, ‘I saw you playing with others, it was as if you shone. And in the pit of my stomach I was aching to become one of those men who were just bound and waiting for your touch, and had you noticed me, I would have fallen straight to my knees and volunteered to become your slave, your dog, and accept any treatment, however degrading and humiliating, if only to become part of your life, Lily. I wanted to be owned by you, even if part of me rebelled against the very idea.

  ‘But then I saw you kiss him. The other man. And that was something that you never gave me and I couldn’t watch. That’s why I ran away at the ball, Lily. I felt as if I no longer knew myself. Didn’t know whether I wanted you to beat me or to make love to me. I didn’t know what I wanted. I don’t know what I want. It’s scary.’

  He looked away, a genuine sense of confusion colouring his features. I could see how torn he was between his feelings for me and the submissive instincts I had somehow unveiled. It seemed I had inadvertently opened a door and he was increasingly uncertain whether he actually wanted to close it.

  ‘What do you want me say?’

  I was angry at Neil now. And at myself.

  Leonard.

  Dagur.

  Grayson.

  She.

  Why had life become so complicated?

  8

  Walking on the Wild Side

  Life goes on.

  I was beginning to understand my nature better, but I knew I still had much to learn.

  She’s lessons in life, the way she uncannily homed in on those desires that lay at the core of me, a budding friendship with the lovely Lauralynn, my increasingly rare nights with Dagur when he was in town and not on the road with Viggo and the band, the awkward attentions of Neil, the ambiguous nature of my dealings with Grayson and the still sharp, painful memories of Leonard all buzzed around inside my mind until things made neither head nor tail.

  I felt I was no longer the same girl who had come to London straight from university, but I was still not the finished article. I was a work in progress, struggling with a welter of contradictions. As a teenager, I had of course dreamed of a happy ever after, even if deep down I already guessed it was either an illusion or anything but the panacea commonly advertised in countless movies, books and songs. But still it remained like a ghost at the back of my mind, nagging away.

  On one hand, I was joyful that my sexuality now had meaning and focus, but on the other I still yearned for a form of intimacy that I hadn’t managed to find. Yet.

  Under She and Lauralynn’s careful tutelage, I became even more involved at the club, no longer hovering full of curiosity and concern or practising my rope-tying skills on chair legs or my whip-cracking talents on thin air. I became actively involved as a domme, yet during the day I worked at the music store. Living a double life still came so naturally.

  I hadn’t heard from Liana for months and felt guilty about it. We had once been so close and maybe the knowledge I had acquired of her submissive nature was coloured by the fact that I hadn’t quite reconciled myself to the way that I treated the male subs I would punish and play with in the evenings.

  In my more private interactions, I played only with subs that I had some sort of personal connection with. Although it wasn’t love, far from it, I gained some satisfaction from the knowledge that I was giving them pleasure and that outweighed the idea that I was being cruel. But working at the club I was required to occasionally beat slaves that I didn’t know well or didn’t particularly like and sometimes I despised them for their weakness and servility, and I knew that I was treating them more harshly because of it. They loved my cruelty, but I couldn’t forgive myself for abusing a person out of anger or spite instead of mutual pleasure. This dark shadow inside me – wanting to forget all the logic about what was right and what was wrong and behave like an animal – persisted. I recognised the same chord in Liana, but she had accepted it within herself and I hadn’t.

  Over the course of a week, I tried to call Liana a few times, but she never picked up. I left a couple of messages. Remembering what we had spoken about the last time we had talked in earnest, I was worried about her.

  But then life took over, and I briefly, if shamefully, put her out of my mind. Maybe she was the one who wished to steer clear of me.

  It was a few weeks before she made contact.

  ‘Hi, slut!’

  I was in Denmark Street on a quiet day in the shop and had only sold a few sets of guitar strings all morning.

  The sparkle in her voice told me immediately that the Liana of old had returned.

  ‘Liana!’ I was so loud that Jonno turned quizzically towards me, with an expression of disapproval that made him look like an irascible librarian.

  ‘It’s been ages, I know,’ she apologised.

  ‘No matter. You’ve called me back, that’s the main thing.’

  ‘There’s been a lot happening,’ she said.

  ‘Talk to me.’ I was so chuffed to hear her again.

  ‘Well … I’ve moved to Amsterdam,’ she announced triumphantly.

  This left me speechless.

  ‘Really?’ I finally managed to say. ‘Tell me all about it.’

  I’d caught the train from Schiphol airport and twenty minutes later it drew up at Centraal Station. It was a grey day, a thin drizzle falling like thin mist, ripples flowing across the ever-present canals crisscrossing the city centre. It was only my second visit to the Dutch capital and my initial impression as I walked out into the open space beyond the station’s vast portico, past the file of waiting cabs and a mess of noisy construction work, was of a savanna of bicycles, twisting and turning in every possible direction, skipping between tramlines, crisscrossing roads with both serenity and alacrity. I hadn’t been on a bike since I was fourteen, but Liana had told me she would put a spare one at my disposal when I visited. The first time I had been here, Leonard had been waiting for me at the airport and had whisked me straight into town by cab and we hadn’t ventured further east than the Dam Square where he was staying at the opulent and old-world Krasnapolsky Hotel.

  I had a simple map that Liana had emailed me before I left London explaining how best I could reach the house where she was staying. It wouldn’t take me more than twenty to thirty minutes to walk to her place and all I was carrying was a rucksack with some spare clothes. I pulled up my hood and unfolded the sheet of paper with Liana’s directions, trying to shield it from the rain.

  It was just a question of locating the right canal and then a group of parallel bridges, although I’d never been very good at reading maps at the best of times.

  As I wandered along the cobbled paths by the canals, I was struck by the reassuring quietness of the city which settled all around you from the moment you moved off any of the few main roads. This was so unlike London’s frantic rhythm, pedestrians ambling with no sense of urgency, windows with no curtains at eye-level everywhere I walked, as if there was no need for privacy. A city with no secrets. Yes, I thought, this was the sort of place I could find it easy to live in, and felt unsurprised that Liana, with whom I had so much in common, should have come here.

  She’d mentioned that she would be working until mid-afternoon at the flower market, a temporary job but one she enjoyed, and had made arrangements for me to pick up the key to her flat from a downstairs neighbour, so I wasn’t in any rush.

  I stopped for a coffee in a small bar whose stone steps led partly underground to a vaulted area full of comforting warmth and a seductive blend of smells, in which sweet alcohol, cinnamon and a faint trace of tobacco lingered. I felt sleepy and fully relaxed.

  The building where Liana lived was a tall three-storeyed one carved out of ancient stone, squat and imposing. From the outside
, as I looked up, the windows on every floor seemed huge. Liana’s flat was situated at the top, and could be reached through a steep, circular wooden staircase.

  The old woman who lived on the ground floor and appeared to be the building’s owner, looked and dressed like a stereotypical granny. She flashed me a twinkly smile when she opened the door and complimented me on my appearance, mentioning that I looked just like Liana’s sister. Liana didn’t have a sister. We were both only children. But this was not the first time such a remark had been made, despite the differences in our appearances.

  Once inside, I dropped my rucksack to the parquet floor and slipped out of my lightweight coat, rivulets of rain still dripping off it as I searched for a cupboard or convenient recess where I could hang it up.

  It was a large, airy room, with wide, high windows through which the outside light bathed the flat in a warm glow. I looked out and gazed at the peaceful flow of the small canal and the orderly lines of bicycles parked alongside it. Beyond the roofs of the buildings on the other side of the canal, I could see the broken crest of a line of trees where Oosterpark lay.

  I found somewhere to sit, a small, narrow sofa covered by a lemon-yellow patchwork spread, and lost myself in contemplation. The silence was eerie. Normally, in any city, there would always be a distinct rumour of noises, voices, traffic in the distance, but here the afternoon was altogether cleansed of sounds. At first, it was an unsettling feeling but soon, as I relaxed, I allowed the peacefulness of the mood to flow over me until I was almost dozing. I was just content to sit there, vaguely daydreaming, staring at the room’s walls or the fading light outside through the windows, purposefully keeping my mind empty of any significant thoughts. Normally, I would have been on my feet, seeking something to do, aching for a coffee or something to read or an excuse to stay active. I was shaken out of my torpor by the buzz of my mobile phone.

  It was a text from Liana: she was on her way home and would be with me soon.

  ‘So what happened?’ I finally asked. We’d greeted each other affectionately and then strolled down to a neighbouring cafe where everyone seemed to know her. She was wearing a shapeless grey cardigan at least one size too large, a pair of denim shorts over her black tights and a pair of ankle-high boots.