Eighty Days White

by Vina Jackson

  Dagur winked at me.

  No doubt I was wide-eyed.

  ‘Why don’t you join us, Lily?’

  At least he remembered my name.

  I stood there rooted to the spot.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said calmly.

  I wasn’t jealous. Neither was I possessive of Dagur. He was a musician and women threw themselves at the likes of him and others in the band. We’d never sworn each other any form of exclusivity. We were fuck buddies, and until now, that had proven enough for me. I’d even been involved in a threesome with him and Grayson, so the thought of a sexual variation on it even had its attractions, but I was not in any mood to compete with another girl. I would just be a third wheel. And I wanted to be in charge.

  I walked out and left them to it, knowing all too well this was the last I would ever see of Dagur.

  9

  The Music of Bodies

  I’d been asked to deliver an assortment of replacement violin strings and return a bow we’d repaired to a rehearsal studio in the bowels of the Barbican complex. It was mid-afternoon, so there was no need for me to return to the West End and the store.

  I crossed the Thames on the Millennium Bridge, feeling its vibrations sway gently beneath my steps, and was soon facing the squat façade of the Tate Modern, watching the pale autumn sun briefly eclipsed as it journeyed across the museum’s central tower. It was getting late in the day and there was a nip in the air. Under my green parka I had on a short denim skirt and a thin pair of tights, and I missed the warmth of the jeans I normally wore for work as well as leisure.

  Grayson was previewing his new exhibition of photographs of nudes and musicians in a private show at a fashionable gallery close to the Oxo Tower in Southwark and I had been sent an invitation. A few nights ago at the club, reminding me of the date, She had hinted that some of the pics Grayson had taken of me had made the cut and were being included in the show. Which left me a trifle nervous, as I well remembered the circumstances that had given birth to the snaps in question. I also knew that he had later organised a successful session with Lauralynn, to which she had brought her cello. I was unaware of who else might also have been involved.

  I hadn’t seen much of Grayson since, and never without She on his arms. I didn’t think he was avoiding me; he was probably just too busy seeking out extra subjects for his photos, in addition to his regular sought-after fashion work.

  The walk along the South Bank between the Globe Theatre and the National Festival Hall was one of my favourite London itineraries, and I was in no hurry to reach my destination, ambling along with the lazy river to my right, along paths and short tunnels, the city skyline unfurling like a slow tapestry on the farthest side of the Thames. As a result, I arrived long after the party had begun. The exhibition space was on the top floor of a tall building and as I emerged from the lift, the main room was already a throng of sharply dressed people, the insistent beat of electronic music punctuating the rumours of swirling conversations against the backdrop of clinking glasses.

  There had been a cloakroom downstairs and I’d left my parka and tote bag, but already realised that even with my skirt on, I was distinctly underdressed – most of the women present were wearing couture, outperforming each other in elegance and expensive fabrics and teetering on exquisitely high if impractical heels. With my Doc Martens I felt like the hired help, were the waiters in attendance not all male and black-and-white uniformed like butlers.

  Picking up a glass of champagne or prosecco from one of the circulating trays, I planted myself in a corner of the gallery’s main hall and looked around the room.

  Grayson and She were in a group at the far end, he in designer jeans, a flouncy white shirt unbuttoned at the chest, and a sand-coloured suit jacket. A broad smile played across his face, and his hair was rakishly slicked back. She stood by his side in a form-hugging fire-red latex outfit that seemed to have been poured over her opulent figure, matching her lipstick and boots. In one hand she held her glass aloft, while in the other she gripped a leash which led, as my gaze descended, to a male slave positioned on all fours like a dog on the gallery’s stone floor, his head pointed downwards.

  I recognised the middle-aged man from the club where I had often seen him at She’s feet, begging to be punished and abused. He was naked but for a ridiculously minute posing pouch inadequately holding his genitals. It was so small one of his testicles was pouring out of the pouch, making his plight even more absurd. The string of the thin silk pouch cut sharply across his butt crack. His arse cheeks still displayed red lines from a recent whipping.

  Occasionally She would shake her cigarette ash across his bare back and a thin smile would cross his satisfied lips. I had once seen him feeding from a dog bowl under She’s instructions. I was just surprised that he had agreed to be displayed so humiliatingly in such a public space, unlike the club where the audience was somewhat more selective and accustomed to such activities.

  I was about to cross the room to go and greet Grayson and She when I saw them being joined by a group of three. I recognised all of them.

  In the centre, as if formally escorted by the two women accompanying him and hanging on to his arms, was Viggo Franck, the notorious lead singer for Dagur’s band, the Holy Criminals. We’d been briefly introduced on a few occasions when I had still been an item with Dagur, but we’d never truly spoken. His reputation as a provocative ladies’ man was widespread and he was fodder for the popular press with his pranks and dalliances. At least, like me, he’d not dressed specially for tonight, his long, spidery legs in the skinniest of clumsily patched-up jeans, laced-up black leather boots, studded cowboy belt and a loose washed-out T-shirt.

  To his left, the tall blonde with curls falling to her shoulders was dressed all in white and even in the artificial light of the gallery it was evident she wore nothing beneath, her long limbs outlined clearly. The gown was simplicity itself, although I knew it must have cost a lot, reminding me of a tailored Roman toga, cinched by a gold belt, with all its subtleties mindfully engineered – the way it fell across her body and flared out as it married the very shape of her slim body.

  The moment I saw her face, though, I knew she was also the nude dancer I had seen at the country mansion whose underwater performance and ecstatic look had just taken my breath away. Seeing her accompany Viggo Franck was not a surprise. She would, of course, be the sort of ethereal beauty he would easily attract, although my first impression was that she was so much more charismatic than him. Maybe it was his shaggy, high-brushed hair that prevented me from taking Viggo seriously and made me think of a spoilt, mischievous brat?

  The other woman, however, I knew not only from the many photos I’d seen in the press, but also, I realised in a flash of recognition from that brief glimpse all those months ago busking on the underground. It was Summer Zahova, the famous classical violinist. That red hair was unmistakable. I also remembered Grayson mentioning how much he wanted to contact her to see if she would participate in his project. Maybe she had.

  She was wearing a simple green silk dress that reached down to her knees and, one of her professional trademarks, a corset as outerwear, bound tight around her thin waist almost in a parody of bondage. The expression on her face was distant, as if she had something important on her mind and was not quite physically in the gallery right now, sharing herself with another person or event.

  How typical of Viggo to attend the showing with two such striking women.

  I froze. No way was I going to join them.

  I exchanged my empty glass for a full one and resolved to go and take a close look at the actual photographs making up Grayson’s exhibition. This was, after all, what I had come here to see, as I had no truck with the superficial social niceties of the occasion.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Lauralynn arriving. Even later than me, but quite unconcerned. The way she manoeuvred her way past a crowd of shorter people made her appear more Amazonian than she actually was,
sporty, relaxed, clad in tight black leather, predatory in the best possible way. She saw me and waved from afar, indicating with a gesture of the hand that we’d meet up later in the evening.

  The large prints were distributed across the long, white gallery walls with geometric precision, each image carefully brought into focus by an individual spotlight, aligned like soldiers on parade. On the floor I noted a red line, punctuated by decals of small arrows piercing a cupid-shaped set of lips, indicating how the spectator – the voyeur? – should view the exhibition, to properly appreciate the sequence of photographs and the increasing boldness of the successive images on display.

  It was as if Grayson, or whoever had hung the prints, wanted to tell us a story.

  I stepped forward, obediently following the scar-red road, knowing the scenario was about to become more interesting.

  The first photo was of one man giving another a blow-job. A flute lay abandoned near the feet of the man on his knees. A symbolic phallus, cast aside? Perhaps I was reading too much into it. I studied the picture closely, looking for some sign of airbrushing on the model’s back. Dagur had posed for some of these pictures, I was sure of it, and I knew that he had male lovers. The thought made me shiver with a brief pang of arousal. On the night of our threesome, Grayson and Dagur had both concentrated entirely on me, but at the time I had wished that I could watch them spend some time with each other.

  Two women embracing in the next shot did little to banish the image of Grayson’s long cock inside Dagur’s mouth. I admired the beauty of the feminine form and wasn’t averse to the idea of having sex with a woman, but in reality I was almost exclusively attracted to men and I had to make an effort to focus on the pictures in front of me instead of the homoerotic fantasy that had begun playing out in my mind.

  Some of the images were shockingly explicit, yet no one in the crowd milling around me seemed in the least bit perturbed. Perhaps the audience had been selected from a known group who were comfortable with full-frontal nudity, which would explain why none of them had so far raised so much as an eyebrow at the sight of She’s nearnude slave cowering on all fours.

  A picture of a woman with a recorder inserted inside her opening caught my attention. She was sitting on a glass coffee table with her legs spread wide, using the instrument like a dildo. Her back was arched provocatively and her long, dark hair hung like silk around her shoulders. Her face was out of shot and her long neck bared, inviting the viewer to lean in and kiss her.

  Grayson had taken a similar image of me. It had been one of the most explicit pictures in our photo session and one that I was particularly proud of. I was so aroused by the time that he had suggested it that I hadn’t been horrified at the idea. I’d wanted something inside me so badly that I had immediately agreed when the idea came to him. And I knew it was a shot of me that he could have used, because my face hadn’t been in focus.

  But he hadn’t used it. He’d chosen this woman instead, and he’d modelled her pose on mine. Or perhaps he’d modelled my pose on hers, and it hadn’t been a burst of inspiration that had suddenly popped into his head when I was naked in front of him but a ruse that he used on every aroused woman who posed for him just for the pleasure of watching them stimulating themselves in front of his lens. Maybe he’d thought my legs were too scrawny and he preferred the shapeliness of her smooth, plump thighs.

  Grayson was an artist, not a creep. I knew that instinctively but I was still pissed off. He was a selfish artist. He didn’t care about his subjects; he cared only about what he captured on film. He kidnapped moments as if he owned them. I threw him an angry glance across the room, but my eyes boring into the back of his head were entirely ineffective. He was facing away from me, chatting up Luba, the blonde Russian ballet dancer, no doubt bringing all his charms to the fore in the hope that she would agree to pose for him too. With her unusual beauty and dancer’s movement, even a blind fool would be able to see that she was a photographer’s wet dream.

  My anger dulled only slightly when I finally discovered the pictures of me and realised that he’d included my shots further down the line, closer to the end of the narrative. I still wasn’t sure what that meant. I wasn’t sure what any of it meant, but the order seemed to signal a significance of some kind. My pictures were in the final part of the series, mixed in with images of another woman with a violin. I suspected that the other model was Summer Zahova, but as all of them were headless, I couldn’t be certain.

  The initial shot in the final series of photographs was in black and white, just a woman’s back framed from the curve of the neck down to the rise of her buttocks. Immaculate white skin against an ebony black background. Simple, unadorned. It could have been anyone. It was followed by another image, where just a violin stood against a similarly dark wall. The third image was of the same violin, but this time it was in glorious colour, the burnished orange and brown shades of the instrument like an explosion, every single feature of the antique wood as if under a microscope, revealing the richness of its texture. The fourth image as I walked along, jostling other spectators to get a full view, was of the same woman’s back, in an identical position but this time no longer in black and white but with sharp flesh tones that made you want to touch it.

  My picture was next. Despite all the build-up and expectation of what was coming next, I was taken aback when I saw myself in print. The shot was one I hadn’t seen before. Grayson had gone through the images with me on his computer screen, and offered to delete any that I wasn’t happy with. He hadn’t specifically told me that he had shown me all the pictures he’d taken, but he had certainly given me that impression. Evidently he had kept a few aside for his own personal – now public – collection and having given my verbal permission for the shoot and never signing any paperwork, I had no course for complaint, whether I liked the finished product or not.

  The shot had been taken from below. At the time I had been leaning over him with my cunt directly over his face, growling angrily, dominating him and he had been begging for more. She had walked in just a few seconds later and interrupted us.

  Every muscle in my body was tensed, flexed. I looked like Leroy had when he had circled Liana in Amsterdam. As though I was about to pounce. My stance was in total contradiction to the body of the violinist in the images that surrounded mine. She was so relaxed in her repose, inviting the voyeur’s gaze, displaying herself wantonly to the camera’s eye. I was rebelling against the lens. With my legs up to the ceiling and my cunt lips open like a maw waiting to swallow up the nearest man and my body curved forward and limbs stretched out I looked like I was about to bite the photographer’s head off, though it was impossible to tell for sure as I was only pictured from the neck down and angled in such a way that my orchid tattoo could not be seen.

  So was the other model, I noted, who I was now certain was Summer. She had disappeared from the exhibition soon after it had opened so I didn’t have the chance to study her for long, but I could see that the woman in the pictures had the same unusual sharp curve in her waist. And, of course, the violin was an obvious clue, and the fact that I knew how Grayson had seen her as the prize in his little project. I could see why now. She embodied everything that he had been trying to capture.

  I was close to running from the room, but gulped down a deep breath and forced myself to continue. Right at that moment, out of the blue, I longed for Neil. Someone to lean on, someone who would soothe my anger and upset and fight my corner whether it was reasonable or not. Liana’s presence would have helped, but she’d admire my nudity and brush off my emotion and try to get me to laugh along with her to cheer me up. Neil would defend my honour to the end, and that was what I wanted. Submissive or not, he would walk right up to Grayson and punch him in the nose if I asked him to.

  The next shot of me was a variation on the first, only this one was even more aggressive. My arms and hands were reaching forward towards the camera in a violent gesture. I had been just about to wrap them around Grays
on’s throat, and it showed. From the angle he’d been shooting, my limbs were elongated so I looked a little like a deadly spider, all arms and legs and anger.

  Summer’s final shot showed her in almost the opposite stance with her body curved inwards and her violin held aloft over her pussy as though she was about to bring it down like a weapon against her own sex, not the camera or the viewer.

  I took a step back and looked again.

  Then I realised what Grayson had done, the story that he was telling with our bodies. Sex and music, sure, particularly with the first series. But Summer Zahova and I, we were domination and submission. Sex embodied. Without emotion, without intimacy. Faceless. Mindless. Meaningless. All the things that I didn’t want to be.

  The fury swept through me like a wave. It started as a small flame in my belly and then the flame became a seething cauldron as I walked right up to She and Grayson and hissed at them.

  ‘Gray,’ I said snarkily. It was She’s nickname for him and the first time I’d referred to him that way. My tone made it clear that I wasn’t using the sobriquet as a term of endearment.

  They were both deep in conversation with Luba. Grayson turned to me and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Yes?’ he queried.

  ‘This is not what I expected. It’s not what I wanted. Take the pictures down.’

  I straightened my spine and rose to my full height. High heels or not, I refused to bow down to either of them.

  She laughed at me.

  ‘You should have thought of that, dear, before you took your clothes off in front of the camera. The lens doesn’t lie, you know.’ She inclined her head towards the prints. ‘That’s who you are, whether you like it or not. It’s not as though you’ve been misrepresented.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck who you think I am,’ I replied. ‘I don’t like it.’