Eighty Days Amber (13 page)

But the thought of going with the man and the girl sent a slow thrill up my spine.

His fierceness. Her pliability. The vision of the two of them madly embracing. The way that they each might taste.

My heart tripped wildly as I imagined the possibilities en route to the safety of the dressing room, which would now be bereft of all its inhabitants, the other dancers having evacuated down streets or into homes in pursuit of either quietude or celebration before New Year’s Eve began in earnest.

I returned to my seat at the mirror to wipe my skin and relax my mind, seeing little point in speculating on the habits of my mystery admirers. If they had requested a more intimate set, I would soon be advised of the fact, and as Madame Denoux strictly forbade any kind of sexual contact between punters and dancers, then fantasising about more than a lap dance with the intriguing couple could only lead to frustration.

Empty of its usual hum of activity, the room appeared to be holding its breath, lonely until the next evening’s girls arrived and with them a steady hubbub of gossip flying from mouth to mouth, flimsy costumes rustling, jewellery rattling, cosmetic purses snapping open and shut.

The rare quiet suited me and was one reason that I always volunteered for the later shifts.

I wore minimal make-up, but always completed a cleansing routine before changing into the most casual of outfits for my journey home. It was my way of shifting from my working persona into what I felt was my regular self. The more I grew to love dancing, the more the two blurred, until I wasn’t sure where the day-time Luba ended and the night-time Luba began, a fact that made my little ritual seem all the more important.

Dabbing at my face with a cotton pad did not provide the distraction that I had hoped for. The storm of fantasies and memories continued, an endless procession of images dancing across my mind.

First, Chey and I, entwined in every possible position under the sun, then the girl with her hair like fire and the man who lit her fuse, their bodies twisting, turning, fucking so violently that it was hard to tell whether they were
completing each other or destroying each other or perhaps both at the same time.

I had felt that way once.

The heat between Chey and I had never cooled, probably because we hadn’t spent enough time together to grow tired of each other.

Those early days and nights spent in his apartment on Gansevoort Street or in the resort in the Dominican Republic had been like a marathon of ceaseless fucking. We’d left the bedroom only when we absolutely had to eat or bathe and such bodily functions could be put off no longer.

Even then I had sat through meals knickerless or wearing whatever device Chey had purchased for the occasion, an exquisite glass anal plug or a remote-controlled dildo that buzzed inside me each time he pushed the button that he kept in his pocket.

I had been certain that we’d be thrown out of a bar in La Caleta when he had insisted on sitting alongside me in the booth seat where we perched drinking cocktails with pink umbrellas and his arm appeared to be merely draped over my shoulder but in fact was stretched all the way down my back with his fingers inserted deep inside the rosebud of my arsehole as the other tourists sat around us remaining totally unawares.

I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. It was Madame Denoux again, still wearing the long blood-red gown and mask. The velvet fabric of her dress blended so well into the décor of The Place that she was able to appear out of nowhere like a ghost, as if she was not the owner of the establishment but rather a part of the walls. Even at home she retained an air of mystery and a hint of
the macabre that made me worry that if I stayed in this business long enough I would become like her and be unable to separate one self from the other.

She looked extraordinarily pleased with herself. I had learned to judge her moods beneath her costume and even the thoughts that flitted through that unusual mind of hers by the peculiar way that she tensed or relaxed her body.

Dancing had made me more in tune with not just my own physicality but others’ too. The cause of Madame’s good mood was undoubtedly the couple and I imagined the large sum that she had managed to extract from them for services presumably yet to be rendered. But she had not asked if I would agree to a private dance and did not seem to be on the verge of verbalising a question.

No. She was holding onto another secret, and whatever it was, I resolved to find out.

The only weak spot I had found in the impenetrable armour of Madame Denoux’s discretion was her pride. She liked to brag of her triumphs.

‘A very striking girl,’ I said to her, stoking the furnace of her ego. ‘Fascinating.’

‘Don’t try to be subtle, Luba. It doesn’t suit you.’

‘I am merely curious. Human nature, no?’

‘Well, if you are prepared to be patient then you will see,’ she replied smugly. She had given me the option of an early dance so that I could go out and ring in the New Year, but I declined. I was not superstitious, and the passing of one moment to the next meant little to me.

I paused, knowing that she would fill the space of my silence if I waited long enough.

Eventually, she continued. ‘I was certain that he was going to ask to buy some of your time, you know. But all he
wanted was to see his own girl dance. Strange. Just when you think you have the men folk all figured out, they continue to surprise you.’

I was vaguely hurt that he hadn’t asked for my company. He was so clearly entirely wrapped up in her. But I was intrigued by his request to have her dance instead. In public. Nude. I remembered Chey’s reaction when he first discovered that I was working. His shock and anger.

What sort of man, I wondered, would actually pay for his woman to undress in front of an audience?

The sort of man that I would like to get to know, I decided.

‘So they will return, tomorrow? And she will dance?’

‘Yes. At two a.m. on New Year’s Day.’

‘The dance of a new beginning, or an ending?’ I mused aloud, fascinated by the psychology of the two strangers who were now embedded in my thoughts.

‘You can be so melodramatic sometimes, my dear . . . it’s a habit that leads to ruin. Curiosity killed the cat, you know.’

I briefly wondered whether or not the redhead would go through with it. But I knew instinctively that she had already made up her mind, as I had the first time, long before I stepped out onto the stage. The challenge and the possible humiliation were all part of the thrill.

I abandoned my cleansing routine, packed up my few belongings quickly and headed for home. It was close to 4 a.m., that muted time of the morning when the air feels thin and the atmosphere stretched, as if readying itself for the birth of the sun.

Most of the rest of the day was spent in glorious respite.
Napping in bed or sitting in the chair by the window, immersed in my book.

But I was again unable to sleep, and as the afternoon bled into evening, I grew restless, abandoned the worn paperback and returned to work.

I was not well accustomed to being idle, and since I had a few hours to kill, resolved to spend them planning costumes from the wall-to-wall racks of outfits that Madame Denoux had collected over the years, and rehearsing a new routine. It would be the first dance in which I had seriously embraced a prop. I planned to dress as a dove, and perform in a gilded cage suspended from the ceiling, before breaking free from the restriction of the bars and pirouetting as if in mid-flight, attached to an invisible harness. I was rather proud of the choreography which I had devised in one of the many sleepless nights that had me turning in bed feverish with nightmares or awake and plotting something, anything to take my mind away from Chey.

Time drifted by. Voluntarily trapped in my bird’s cage in the dressing room I felt as though I was part of another world, a hazy world where my mind inhabited the space between sleeping and waking, dancing and stillness and my memories were just a jumble of images that could have filled the Kama Sutra. I barely noticed the muted sounds of fireworks in the distance and the cheering that filled the bar as the act that Madame had planned for the big finale reached its crescendo and the New Year officially arrived.

The girl’s voice disturbed me from my daydreams.

‘I prefer to dance naked,’ she said, visibly straightening her back in an attempt to add height and authority to her posture.

Madame was trying to get her into one of her elaborate
costumes, but the girl wanted to appear fully nude from the outset. It appeared that the redhead considered herself a cut above stripping.

She would dance naked, but she wouldn’t take her clothes off for anyone.

I wondered again what sort of relationship it was that she shared with the man who had arranged for her to dance for him. Her pride and his apparent desire to own her seemed a strange combination.

She might have won round one, but she had underestimated Madame Denoux, who was as stubborn as a bull and would never allow a dancer to take the upper hand. Without so much as a blink, she had produced the box, inlaid with velvet, that I had seen sitting alongside the costume jewellery and even considered making use of myself, but never had, fearing it too daring, even for The Place.

‘You will wear these. Your benefactor prefers it.’

From my refuge in the corner of the dressing room where, I knew, she could not see my face, I watched with bated breath as Madame Denoux supervised the redhead’s preparations. I saw how she flinched when Madame clipped on the body jewellery contained within the wooden box – the rings to her nipples, the thin metal chains to her labia – and, finally, decisively, as she inserted the butt plug. As Madame led her to the empty stage, I left the dressing room and tiptoed on bare feet through narrow corridors towards the back of the performance room where I stood in the deepest pit of darkness. I was beginning to tire. It had been a long night, and my limbs were growing stiff from spending too long in the cage, but this was something I dearly wanted to watch.

I could see the strong shoulders of the young woman’s companion silhouetted against the muted light of the stage as he sat towards the front, and regretted I was unable to conceal myself in the stage wings and observe both his reactions as well as her dancing.

The heavy velvet curtain slid open.

Her face displayed a mixture of fear and pride as the strong glare of the spotlight erupted, highlighting her loneliness on the desert island of the stage.

The fierce red fire of her pubic hair was like a target to which my eyes were drawn.

She stood hesitantly for a second or more until the sound system came to life and a look of panic spread across her pale face, as she realised she was still immobile.

The music the young woman with the red hair had elected to dance to was classical. I’d heard it a thousand times over but at first I couldn’t place it until, out of the blue, my memory focused and I pictured the record sleeve housing its vinyl version back in the rehearsal rooms at the ballet classes in St Petersburg. A pastoral image, medieval-looking, probably from the Dutch school, with peasants toiling in a field and plump-thighed nymphs gallivanting on the edge of a forest. Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
. We’d never danced to it as it had never been part of any repertoire.

It was not music to dance to.

I wondered why our guest performer had chosen it. Perhaps the man she was with had chosen it for her.

Her first movements were tentative. Nudity came easy to her and she stood straight, firm-backed, almost defiant, confident in the power of her body, but there was an initial clumsiness in the way her arms moved, just out of sync with her legs, her pelvis swaying softly to the melody. There was
no doubt she was musical, but it seemed she had no dance training to fall back on as she tried with all the dignity she could muster to follow the sounds and combine elegance and eroticism while controlling the plug that filled her remorselessly and limited her motions as she clinched her arse cheeks to hold it in, not that she needed to as those implements have a talent for staying put.

Of course, we had actually never been subjected to anal plugs in our ballet training, but there had been one particular instructor, a thin, malevolent pony-tailed woman who worked us to the bone, who had often ordered us to imagine we were thus encumbered. We had all blushed deeply, but the concept had stayed with many of us, a perfect vade mecum when it came to maintaining one’s posture with a touch of grace.

She began to relax, her movements loosening as she abandoned herself, and her body, to the flow of the music and the moment.

Her face was a whirlpool of emotions as she grew into the performance, moving from her initial apprehension to resigned acceptance and then fully assuming the dictates of her lust, as the juices inside no doubt began to flow and irrigated her soul and the deep well of her desires. Each gesture became softer, less edgy, gliding on the borders of obscenity and beauty as she kept her eyes fixed on the man in the audience she was exhibiting herself to, more than nude and exotically adorned, undressing the very core of her heart to him as an offering, a sacrifice.

I recognised all those stages. I experienced them when I danced. Pretending it was for Chey.

Opening myself.

The temptation was too great. I furtively stepped past the
bar, keeping myself bathed in darkness, and adopted a new position where I could finally observe the man – Madame Denoux had let slip his name was Dominik – as he watched the red-haired girl dance and succumb to the giddiness of her most secret emotions.

He was hypnotised by the spectacle of her dance, his mouth half open, his breath on hold, his handsome features etched with cruelty and yearning, as much a slave to her as he was controlling her.

I knew that look.

I briefly closed my eyes and pictured Chey’s face when he used to ride me, the elegant sway of his torso, the sharp angle of his hard cock, the faint aroma of his breath and his heat.

And I understood that every time I performed on stage, ever since I had fired that gun and fled from the harbour of his arms, I was calling for him to take me, fill me, spread me open until I gaped and the increasingly pornographic way I deported myself on all those stages was just a desperate cry out, a substitute for the sex that defined me, that made me whole.