Eighty Days White (7 page)

‘Oh God,’ I moaned as I felt my muscles spasm and I convulsed against him and then collapsed, limp into his arms.

‘Good girl,’ he whispered.

He was still fully dressed. His stubble scratched my cheek lightly as he bent his head to kiss me again.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘how many more times can you do that for me before I have to catch a plane?’

That day he introduced me to more sexual positions than I knew existed, let alone had considered before. My favourites were the variations in which I could see him and watch the range of expressions that raced across his face as he truly let himself go.

Most of the time he hung onto an element of reserve, a persona of either careless nonchalance or all-knowing Lothario who was utterly certain of his ability to bring me to orgasm. But when he was deep inside me and on the verge of his own release, there was something animal about him, as if the real Leonard was straining on a leash and he would show me flashes of feeling so intense that I trembled.

And I decided to set about finding a way to get him to let go.

‘My darling girl, you don’t know what you’re doing,’ he said as I pushed him down onto the bed and then rode him, holding his wrists down over his head.

When he said that, I just pushed down harder, even though I knew that the grip of my small hands was pitiful against his strong arms. It gave me a thrill to turn the tables and be the one on top for a change.

The hotel hadn’t allowed him to check out in the late evening, so he had another night booked and paid for, and
instead of commuting back to my own lonely bed in Dalston after Leonard showered and packed his bag hurriedly, I stretched out like a starfish and wallowed in the lingering damp patches and the scents of our lovemaking. The scent of him and me, together.

‘Oh, Lily,’ he said as he kissed me goodbye. ‘What am I going to do with you?’

Of course it felt good being with Leonard.

But it also felt wrong in a thousand ways.

On the one hand, I now knew what it was to be with a man and not with a boy. There was nothing tentative about his lovemaking, or callow, or inexperienced. His gestures were determined, his appreciation of the moment intense and patient, and I found myself at ease with him like I had never felt with anyone else before. I would have expected no less from a man who was more than double my age.

But, on the other hand, I also knew he was not the sort of man I could take home to my parents or openly advertise to friends and acquaintances as my new boyfriend without attracting much in the way of disapproval. Not that I had any intention of parading him around. I enjoyed the clandestine nature of our relationship. I liked having a secret lover.

By common agreement, we would meet in hotel bars, none of which were in geographical proximity to our places of work. Sometimes we would go to his empty office where we would feverishly fuck on the carpet behind locked doors, while on other occasions we would take shelter in a hotel room close to one of the airports if he was flying out on
business the next day. My flat-share was out of bounds. I never saw his house in Blackheath, and neither of us ever suggested it as a venue for our dates. It was as if our relationship was in a vacuum and it suited us both. It never occurred to me that he might be embarrassed to be seen with me, my teardrop, piercings and all-black wardrobe.

Because of the frequency of his trips abroad, he often arranged for me to join him in Paris, Amsterdam or Barcelona on a Friday night after his business had been completed and we would spend the weekend together before returning to London on the final Sunday-night flight.

This proved problematic and I found myself quite unpopular with the other assistants at the music shop in Denmark Street when I frequently elected to forego work on a Saturday under the pretext of family circumstances. I think Jonno guessed a man of some sort must be involved – he invariably signed me off on the rotas with a knowing wink.

The folk at the fetish club and the imperious She seemed less concerned, as they had a bevy of part-time helpers at their beck and call. In any case, I was careful to make myself available on any weekend when Leonard was not on the tail end of a business trip, as I would then spend most evenings with him during the actual week in London.

‘You’re never home, or answer your phone, these days,’ Neil remarked one day, a month or so after I’d first got together with Leonard, as we sat indifferently nibbling at sandwiches at the nearby Pret A Manger, nursing our coffees alongside.

‘Just busy, you know.’

‘Busy doing what?’ he queried.

‘I’ve met someone,’ I revealed.

The look on his face betrayed his disappointment. He had repeatedly tried to convince me, since he had also moved up to London, that we should go out on a date, but I had insisted it would be better to just remain good friends.

‘Do I know him?’ he asked.

‘No.’ And I left it at that.

How could I tell a boy of barely twenty-one who innocently yearned after me that I was sleeping with a man who was old enough to be his father, or even mine. That I enjoyed the age difference between us. That our gap in years made me feel feminine and desirable in a way that I never felt dating people my own age. That I had grown used to Leonard’s worldliness and the comparative coarseness of his skin and the way the wrinkles around his eyes when he laughed or smiled made me feel joyful. The way we could both sustain lengthy silences when we were together or, alternately, talk for hours about everything and nothing and he could sit calmly, watching me and listening to me talk about my past life, and appear genuinely fascinated by the humdrum of my day-to-day existence. I knew such revelations would only hurt Neil further, so I kept them to myself.

The conversation with Neil quickly petered out after that and, anyway, we both had to go back to work, me to Denmark Street and him to Chancery Lane where he was doing an internship with a big PR firm.

A DHL van was parked outside the shop and a large delivery was taking place when I got back.

Heavy boxes were being passed from hand to hand in a
steady relay as some of the other staff carried the new consignment of guitars from the US factory down to the shop’s basement. I joined the fray, although I heard the familiar message signal on the phone buried deep at the bottom of my jeans pocket. It was a quarter of an hour later when I had the chance to read it.

Leonard. This time it would be Paris. The reference code for the electronic ticket for Eurostar was attached and the name and address of the hotel we would be staying at. He’d been in Greece and Turkey all week, but had arranged a stop-over in the French capital on the way back to spend the time with me. I’d been hoping he might fly me to Istanbul, but I reckoned Paris was as good as the Grand Bazaar.

I made a quick call to the club and managed to swap the coming Saturday for a couple of weekday nights.

Later that afternoon, as I was daydreaming of Paris and what sharing it with Leonard would be like, three men walked into the store. They were speaking to each other in a language I couldn’t recognise – but then, I didn’t know or speak any foreign languages.

Two of the men were thin and tall like beanpoles, while the third was of medium height, a bit stocky, built like a swimmer with powerful shoulders. They all seemed to be wearing our regulation customer outer wear: black leather jackets, T-shirts and jeans. The swarthier one addressed me, fortunately in English.

‘My friends here would like to have a look at the Gibsons you might have in stock.’ His accent had something of the Scandinavian about it, harmonious but guttural.

‘New instruments or second-hand ones?’ I asked.

‘Both,’ he confirmed after conferring with his friends.

And, seeing me intrigued by the language they were speaking in, he said, ‘They’re from Iceland.’

‘Ah,’ I remarked, my curiosity satisfied.

‘Me too,’ he went on. ‘But I left the island ages ago. Been in England nearly ten years now.’

I nodded.

‘I’m with another band now, but I used to play with these two back home when we were younger. I’m Dagur Sigur-darsson. But you can just call me Dagur.’ He extended his hand and we shook a hello.

‘Lily.’

He had a lovely smile, with pearl-white teeth.

I busied myself with his friends while Dagur wandered around the shop examining our varied stock. One of the Icelandic musicians took an immediate liking to a Dobro and asked me to take it down from the far wall. I’d connected the instrument to a practice amplifier we kept permanently plugged in for tests and demonstrations, and a ripple of melodious notes tinged with country-and-western rhythms rang out through the store.

Ever since I’d been working at the music store I knew there was no need for any kind of salesmanship or words of encouragement. Musicians know their own mind and personal opinions wouldn’t be taken into account. At any rate, the guitar player quickly agreed to acquire the instrument and gave me his credit card while I passed the heavy Dobro to Jonno to reunite it with its case and pack it.

I handed over the till and credit-card receipts to the buyer whom Dagur had rejoined.

‘Anything I might interest you in?’ I brazenly asked Dagur, feeling as if I were on a roll.

‘I’m a drummer,’ he pointed out.

I blushed, though of course I had no way of knowing what instrument he played. The store did not stock percussion. In the world of music, that was a specialist area which other stores catered for.

He theatrically blew me a kiss as he walked out of the door.

‘You didn’t know who he was, did you?’ Jonno said to me. He was smirking from ear to ear.

‘The drummer? Should I?’

‘He’s from the Holy Criminals.’

‘Viggo Franck’s band?’

‘Yeah. That one. Not really my thing, but most girls go crazy for them.’

Not having gone crazy for them seemed to have raised me in Jonno’s estimation.

I shrugged, playing up my nonchalance to impress him, though secretly I was chuffed to have sold a guitar to a bona fide rock star, or his friends at least.

But the thrill of Dagur passed quickly, and I returned to my thoughts of Paris. And Leonard.

A full day of work on my feet in the music shop had left me worn out, so by the time I arrived for my shift at the fetish club I was frazzled, light-headed and jittery from consuming too many energy drinks to push myself through.

I tried not to double up as it was just too exhausting, but I’d had to make some sacrifices in order to keep my dates with Leonard as well as keep my employers happy, and one of those sacrifices was losing sleep having to work for whole days and nights on the hop. I’d started in Denmark Street at
ten a.m. and wouldn’t be home from the fetish club until six a.m. the following morning.

The underground club felt surreal at the best of times, but tonight it was practically a dream world. Thursday nights were always quieter than Saturdays and so we tended to get more of the couples who came out purely to make use of the equipment and the anonymity that the club provided. The thud of floggers and the crack of whips on bare skin and the resulting screams really had a way of travelling, so I could easily understand why people came to the club rather than risk waking the neighbours with their unusual nocturnal practices.

Periodically one of the other club workers would take over on the counter to give me a chance to go to the toilet or take a cigarette break if I wished, though I didn’t smoke. Invariably I spent these snatches of time in the play areas, observing the interactions between the club’s guests.

Somehow I could never quite get used to the sight of women being tied up and effectively beaten. Often I thought of Nick and Liana together on the night that I’d accidentally witnessed. Even though I’d been aroused during certain moments, the thought of my friend in pain, particularly at the hand of a man, horrified me. I knew that each interaction was negotiated in painstaking detail and over the course of an entire relationship and that often it was the person on the receiving end of a paddle who had pleaded to be treated that way. There were plenty of dominants who got a release of sorts from having a partner at their beck and call, but also many who inflicted more pain because they were asked to and enjoyed the enthusiastic response of their submissive.

Richard was the club’s only male Dungeon Master, whose job it was to give advice and keep an eye on the patrons and make sure that newcomers were following the rules. He had tried to explain the intricacies of the dynamic between doms and subs to me, and all the variations that I found so fascinating.

‘You don’t need to understand it,’ he said that night, as he watched me watching a man caning a woman’s arse so hard that she jumped and cried out in pain with each strike. ‘So long as you respect everyone’s right to do what they please with their own body.’

‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘Each to their own. I know that. I just don’t see what they get out of it.’

‘Have you ever had your hair pulled? Or someone slap your butt?’

I mentally ran through my limited catalogue of sexual memories. So many were blurred by the passing of time and often the presence of alcohol. I remembered vaguely that a guy at a house party in my second year of uni had tugged at my hair as he kissed me and had nipped at my lower lip and then slid his hands under my skirt and smacked my arse. We were in the kitchen at the time and he’d been leaning against the refrigerator when I approached to get another bottle of beer and he’d taken me into his arms. When he had pulled on my pony tail and bit my lip, I’d just presumed that he was unskilled and clumsy, but slapping my bum had been the final straw. I’d been thoroughly insulted and had pushed him off and walked away. Who did he think he was? Someone starring in a rap video? Liana had chortled heartily when I’d told her.

‘You need to lighten up,’ she’d said. ‘Objectification can be hot.’

I’d been shocked at the time, but hadn’t given it much thought since. Liana was always trying to get a reaction from me anyway.