by SR Jones
Chapter Eight
Bohdan
She walks out of the dressing room, and I take her in. She’s so slim the way she always was, but now there’s strength there too. I’ve been reading about ballet dancers. They have incredible core strength, and it takes much training for them to be able to stand en pointe. What Dasha does is an art form, but it’s also physically demanding.
I respect that. I push my body to the limit too. I have a trainer who works with me in Moscow, and most of the stuff I do is based in martial arts, with a mix of interval training and strength training. I also swim regularly and run. I’m not big the way Konstantin is big, but I still weigh around two hundred and twenty pounds, and it’s all muscle. I don’t do it for vanity. The reason I train so hard is so I won’t ever again be that young, skinny, pretty boy whose father let men paw at him.
Absentmindedly, I touch my new nose and smile.
Following Dasha, we walk down the hallway. She flashes smiles at a few people, but she doesn’t stop to chat. As we near some double doors, a male dancer steps back and indicates for Dasha to go through. She smiles at him.
“Thanks, Rafe, but I’m going to practice in the auditorium today. I want to start to get down some stage placings.”
“Okay,” he says with a grin and opens the doors. I glance in and see a room with wooden floors, bars around the edge, and mirrored walls.
“That’s the main practice room,” Dasha says to me.
She leads me in silence down the hallway, turns left, and goes into a darkened corridor before climbing some stairs to a small area beyond which is a curtain. “Okay, we’ll go onto the stage, and you can then climb down, sit in the chairs, and wait for me. You’ll probably find this boring,” she says. “I hope you have a book or a game on your phone.”
I stop her by touching her upper arm. It’s the lightest touch, but she flinches as if I’ve jabbed her with a hot poker. “I never found watching you dance boring, Dasha. Anything but.”
Even as a child, I found her entrancing to watch. Ballet per se doesn’t interest me, but Dasha dancing is a different thing. She always comes alive when she moves, and I used to love that.
We head onto the stage, and she grabs a stereo, one of those portable ones that looks old like it’s from the nineties or something. She puts a CD in it and must see my puzzled expression. “I have the music on my phone, but I don’t have any pockets, and I tried wearing one of those arm band things that hold your phone, but the arms are so important in this piece that I can’t bear anything on mine. It disrupts my flow.”
“Ah, I understand. I’ll, erm, go sit there then, yes?” I indicate the seats in front of the stage.
“Yes and, Bohdan.”
“Yeah?”
“Read a book or play a game, okay? This will be boring.”
She’s not wrong. She starts and stops the music over and over again, making tiny adjustments to her movement, or to where she’s standing. I’m not sure if this is normal ballet stuff, or Dasha stuff. I get the feeling she’s super controlled and somewhat obsessive.
Where did the Dasha who ran through the woods screaming with glee go?
Then again, did I ever really know her anyway?
I finger the scars on my upper thigh. The ones put there because of what she did to me, and I swallow down the intense emotions. I want to save her, but I also want to make her pay. Do I only want to make her mine so I can tear her down?
When I think of her as a child, and when I saw her laid in that pile of garbage, I’m sure I only want to help her. As I watch her intense perfectionism, however, and her perfect body, I get those other feelings back. The darker ones.
She’s perfect. I’m marked.
She went away, but I had to run away.
Betrayal. It’s the worst thing someone can do to us. Especially those we least expect it from.
I need to stop these dark thoughts, so I take out my phone.
I’m scrolling on my phone, mostly reading the headlines of a world going to shit, when I realize the music is no longer stopping and starting. It’s been playing continuously for some time. I glance up and lose all interest in my phone.
Dasha is moving to the music, and it’s spellbinding. Her body flows, bends, turns, and twists, and she’s sublime.
The way she moves. My God. It’s not human; it’s above human, like an angel in human form. She raises her arms, goes onto her toes, and pirouettes. Then she leaps and turns, and leaps again, then more of the on-the-toes stuff, and that looks like it must hurt. Her arms are so elegant, as she swoops down arms bent, her body bowing like a sapling in the breeze.
The music builds, and her movements become more energetic. I can’t look away. I feel as if I’m on that stage moving with her. Looking at her face, I’m close enough to see emotion there. She’s feeling this as well as dancing it. Then the music ends, and she stops.
She’s covered in a sheen of sweat, and her chest rises and falls as she breathes rapidly.
Slowly, I raise my hands, and I clap.
The sound is loud in the empty auditorium and she looks at me, her eyes wide, as she tries to regain control of her breathing. A door opens at the far end of the auditorium and a figure saunters in.
Jasper.
He strolls over to me. He’s holding a newspaper, and is that a pipe? Who smokes a pipe these days?
It isn’t lit as I can’t smell any smoke coming from it.
With a sigh, he sits by me and smiles up at the stage, where Dasha is now gathering her things, using a towel to wipe herself down.
“Isn’t she spectacular?” he asks me conversationally. “I first noticed her in London when she was part of the chorus, and something about her stood out. Do you know what it was?”
I shake my head, not wanting to talk to this fucker.
“Emotion. Dasha feels everything. She feels the story, the music, the tragedy. It flows through her like a live current, and it transforms the way she dances. Now, most dancers do feel it. Of course,” he says with a dip of his head. “But Dasha feels it in an extraordinary way. It’s about the only time she feels anything you see.”
I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to say to that, so I say nothing.
“Well, that and when she’s fucking.”
His words jar me. What game is he playing here? They don’t fuck. Not so far as I’ve seen. He has no interest in her and spends his time with other women. From the digging Damen has done into his past, this thing with the blondes has been going on for a long time. Why would he tell me this? Does he sense something between us?
I need to be careful. If Jasper thinks there’s feelings between myself and Dasha, I have no doubt he’ll get rid of me, and that just won’t do.
I might not know if I love her or hate her. I might not understand what I’m doing here, or what I want from her. Hell, I don’t know what I want from myself half the time. One thing I do understand, however, is that she is on some fundamental level mine. My bright jewel. And no one gets to do the things this fucker is doing to Dasha to something that is mine.
I turn to Jasper and smile at him. I try to infuse it with some warmth, but all I am thinking about is the ways I’m going to make him bleed.
“With all due respect, unless it’s relevant to me protecting her, the less I know about your wife the better. We are trained never to get close, not emotionally. Never get attached. It can affect your judgment, you see.”
“Of course. I don’t see how you’d get attached to her, though.” He points to Dasha on the stage. “She’s nothing but a blank slate. What she can do up there is magic, but I believe the only reason she can pull such magic is because fundamentally, deep down, there’s something essential missing within her. Something that fills most of us with warmth, life, desires, needs, and wants. Dasha doesn’t have that. She only wants to dance. Have you ever seen the film The Red Shoes?”
I shake my head.
“You ought to watch it.” He purses his lips and puts the
pipe between them as if it’s lit.
God, he’s such a pretentious fool.
“I do believe that story could have been written about Dasha. Of course, the film isn’t quite as dark as the fairy tale it is based on. There, the ballerina loses her feet.”
I immediately flash to the memory of him threatening Dasha with taking a hammer to her feet, and I clench my fists at my sides.
“Of course,” he continues, oblivious to my blinding rage. “Swan Lake is an apt role for her. Dasha is like the lead; light on the outside, but so very dark on the inside. Duplicitous, a liar, a betrayer.”
He looks at me, and I can’t breathe. Does he know? He can’t surely. Damen covered my tracks so well.
“Then again, aren’t most women?” he sneers. “They flatter and flirt and preen, but they’re all moral voids. The reason the greatest art, discoveries, and wonders of humanity are all created by men are because women, at their very core, are empty.”
He stands then, folds his paper, slots it under his arm, and walks slowly out of the theater.
If he’d stayed, I could have reeled off a whole host of women who have made amazing contributions to society, to art, to technology, and medicine. Jasper, it seems, is nothing but an old-fashioned misogynist with some very dubious ideas, with a deep streak of sadism at his core.
Soon, he’s going to find out what it’s like when the shoe is on the other foot.
Soon, he’s going to find out what it’s like when you’re the one in pain.
I’m going to make him suffer so beautifully.
Chapter Nine
Bohdan
Aged thirteen.
“You little fuck,” my father yells, white spittle coating his thin lips.
He hates me. I think he hates me because I’m not his.
I can’t be. No one in his family looks any different to him. Beady eyes, thin lips, a weak jaw, and all of them under five-feet-eight.
I’m already five-feet-eight, and twice as clever as him, and I’m just a kid. I’ve got blond hair, after a summer in the sun, blue eyes, and my teacher told me yesterday I had a face Michelangelo would like to sculpt. I looked him up, and he’s pretty cool.
My mom is a beauty, but she’s dark haired with deep brown eyes. She wanted to be someone. This is something my mother tells me often. She laments how she could have been famous, or at least wealthy, if her parents hadn’t made her marry my father when she was only eighteen. It was arranged. A bargain between two old families in this poverty riddled, endless suburb we live in.
I hate it here.
Living here is like something out of a zombie film some days. I love zombie films, but sometimes my friends and I joke that we watch them for light relief. We watch them to see how the better half lives, jokes Abram when we watch the zombies eating the poor unsuspecting victims.
My father shouts some more, and I try to tune him out. I wish I were bigger, heavier. I might have grown in height, but I’m still skinny, and my father is a squat, solid man. It means he can still beat me. One day, though, one day I will be bigger and stronger than him, and then I’ll make him bleed.
He runs out of steam and shakes his head at me in disgust before heading into our tiny kitchen area, probably to get some vodka.
I walk to the window and stare out. The winter trees, stripped of their leaves, rise like toothpicks amongst the giant concrete teeth of the housing blocks. Nothing but concrete as far as the eye can see.
Still, it’s better up here than it is down there.
Down there is dangerous. Wild.
People half out of their minds on drugs or drink, or both, stagger around like lost souls.
What must it be like to be one of the moneyed set who live in the middle of the beautiful parts of the old city? To go to fancy restaurants and have a beautiful woman on your arm. I wish I had money and power. Maybe this work I’m doing for Roman, my uncle, will give me enough cash to get out of here.
We’re so poor that we’ve never been into the city proper to see the beautiful buildings. That’s how little money we have. It’s probably only forty minutes away, and I’ve never seen it.
Instead, this is my grand view. The endless, snow swept, concrete jungle stretching for miles.
“You better not be making a mess,” my father shouts mystifyingly.
I’m looking out the fucking window, the idiot.
Then he bellows some more, and I shake my head. “You’re angry at me because your wife cuckolded you,” I mutter. I learned that word yesterday in literature studies.
The truly sad thing about my dad is that he actually loves my mother, and she loathes him in return. He daren’t beat her, so he beats me. He only does it when she’s out, and he always denies it, or makes up an excuse how it’s not as bad as it looks.
One of these days, I’ll pulverize him. I loathe him too. The same way Mother does. I’m not too keen on her either. I’m never having kids. I don’t want to fuck them up the way my parents have me. I’d never do that to an innocent life. Some days, a lot of days, I’d rather have not been born than put up with their endless shit.
The door to our flat opens, and a flurry of male voices fill the dank space of our kitchen. Shit. This means only one thing. My mom is out for the night, at her friends, and Dad is having a poker game.
I hate them. I hate what happens during them.
I slam my door shut, put the dresser against it, and curl up on the bed.
For three hours, I lie there listening to the men’s voices get more raucous as they drink, and gamble and fall out. Then I hear it.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The tread is heavy and slow. That means it’s him.
The door to my room opens a touch but stops when the dresser gets in its way.
“Ah, don’t be like this, Bohdan. Your dad said you might need some help with your homework.”
That’s not what he’s here for.
My dad doesn’t care if his friend tries to molest me every week. My dad doesn’t care that his friend would rape me, if he had half the chance. I’ve had to grow up super-fast since Dad came home. This is all so wrong, but I don’t know how to stop it. I could tell a teacher, but then what would happen? I’d probably be taken away and put into care. It’s happened to two kids from our class this year alone, and one of them still comes to school, and she’s so sad now. The other one went away. I don’t want to leave my friends and everything I know.
My dad lets it happen because his friend lets him off some of his gambling debts if he gets to help me with my homework.
The dresser moves as the door pushes open. My heart is beating too fast. So far, I’ve managed to stop from this going too far. I’ve managed to cajole and threaten and plead until this dirty piece of shit leaves me alone, but I know one day my luck will run out.
He’s not the first, either. Another friend of Dad’s a couple years back used to come and sit and talk to me and stroke my thigh. One day he kissed me. It was so fucking odd. He put his stinky lips on mine and just … breathed. I pushed him hard, and he had the decency to look ashamed. He apologized and left, and he never came back. I still feel the shame of the many times he sat next to me stroking my thigh through my jeans.
I know what that fucker did when he got home. Now, I have to deal with this other rat bastard.
Today might just be the day this latest perv tries to push his luck, judging from the hungry expression on Mr. Yahntov’s bloated face as he shoves his way into the room. “Ah there you are, boy. You struggling with your homework?”
I don’t have any books out. This man is so stupid, he can’t even come up with a convincing lie for being in my room.
He sits next to me and puts his hand on my thigh. I brush it off with a laugh, but he puts it right back. I get off the bed and walk to the window. Staring out of my prison at the wasteland beyond, I want to cry. This life is nothing but sorrow and dirt and grinding boredom.
I want to live a life like I see on the TV shows. The s
ort of life they live in America. Better yet, I want to go somewhere warm. It’s always so cold here for much of the year. It’s a bone-aching cold that settles deep in your soul making it so you think you’ll never feel warm again.
Thick arms come around my waist, and I freeze. Last week, he touched me at my crotch. His fat fingers brushing the denim there. Then he left. This week, I’m scared he’ll try to do more. I should hit him, but then what would happen? He might hit me back. My father might join in.
“Have you ever had anyone kiss you?” Breath brushes past my ear, and it makes me gag as the stench of sour vodka hits me.
“Don’t be this way, Bohdan. I could make you feel good. You’re a beautiful boy.”
“What the hell is going on here?”
My father’s voice at the door has Mr. Yahntov dropping his hands like I’m made of fire.
“Nothing. I’m helping the boy with his homework. You said I could.” Mr. Yahntov sounds confused. I’m confused too. I thought my father didn’t care. Did he really believe I was being helped with my homework all this time? I tried to tell him, and he brushed my concerns off. Okay, I didn’t tell him explicitly because I didn’t have the words, but he must have known what I was attempting to say. Why care now?
It all becomes apparent at my father’s next words.
“This is a terrible thing I’m seeing. You’re touching my son inappropriately.” Father crosses himself dramatically. “What would your wife say? What will the priest say? Everyone will know. This is a terrible scandal for you.”
“No, no. We were just looking at the view, right, Bohdan?” Mr. Yahntov makes a plea for my help. He must be stupid if he thinks I’m helping him.
“You must pay for this,” my father says.
Mr. Yahntov’s face hardens. “I have been paying, for weeks. You’ve been let off much debt and for what? What did I get? Nothing but this kid whining and squirming and being anything but cooperative.”
