Eighty Days Yellow (4 page)

His mobile vibrated and beeped, shuffling crablike over the smooth surface of his desk. He picked it up. A message flashed.

‘Care to meet? C.’

Dominik sighed. Should he? Shouldn’t he?

His affair with Claudia had been going on for a year, and he wasn’t certain how he felt about it, about her, any more. Technically speaking, he was in the clear, as it had begun after she had completed her classes with him. By just a few days, mind. So the ethics were OK, but he was no longer sure if he wanted the relationship to continue.

He decided not to respond right now. Time for reflection. He took his black scuffed leather jacket from the wall hook, gathered his books and lecture files into his canvas tote bag and made his way onto the street. Zipped up against the chilly wind racing up from the river, he made his way towards the Tube. It was already getting dark outside, the dull metal-grey shade of London autumn. The crowds felt menacing as the rush hour descended swiftly, streams of commuters hurrying in both directions, brushing against him anonymously in their slipstream. Usually by now, he’d be out of the centre of town. It was a bit like seeing another side of the city, an uncommon dimension in which the robotic world of work was in the ascendant, heavy, leaden, out of place. Dominik casually picked up the free evening paper he was handed and entered the station.

Claudia was German, not a true redhead, and a wonderful fuck. Her body often smelled of cocoa oil because of the fragrant cream she regularly used to condition her skin. After a whole night in bed with her, Dominik normally ended up with a faint headache from the prevalent odour. Not that they often spent whole nights together. They made love, chatted perfunctorily and parted until the next time. It was that sort of affair. No strings, no questions, nothing exclusive about it. Fulfilling mutual needs, almost hygienic in virtues. It was a relationship he had somehow drifted into; no doubt she had provided signs, a green light of some sort in the early days, and he was aware he hadn’t consciously taken the first steps. The way things sometimes happen.

The train came to a halt as he daydreamed on. This was where he had to change onto the Northern line, through a further labyrinth of corridors. He hated the tube, but loyalty to his earlier, less affluent years deterred him most days from taking taxis when travelling to the college and back. He’d bring his car, and damn the congestion charge, were it not for the lack of parking facilities at the institution and in the nearby area, together with the regular infuriating traffic bottlenecks down the Finchley Road.

The familiar smells of rush hour – sweat, resignation and depression – casually kept on assaulting his senses as he journeyed towards the escalator, and the faint sound of music reached his ears.

The barista had brought them their coffees outside. Dominik’s usual double espresso and some more sophisticated cappuccino variation with pseudo-Italian add-ons for Claudia. She’d lit a cigarette after he’d offered no objection to it, although he didn’t smoke.

‘So were you satisfied with the course?’ he’d asked her.

‘Absolutely,’ she confirmed.

‘So what are you planning to do now? Staying in London, more studies?’

‘Probably.’ She had green eyes, and her dark-red hair was piled up in a chignon, if that was what it was still called these days. A thin fringe swept across her forehead. ‘I’d like to do a doctorate, but I don’t think I’m quite ready for it yet. Maybe I’ll do some teaching somewhere. German. Quite a few people have asked me.’

‘Not literature?’ Dominik enquired.

‘I don’t think so,’ Claudia answered.

‘A pity.’

‘Why?’ she queried, flashing him a quizzical smile.

‘I think you’d be quite good at it.’

‘You think so?’

‘I do.’

‘It’s kind of you to say so.’

Dominik took a sip of his coffee. It was hot, strong and sweet. He’d put four sugar cubes in and stirred them into oblivion, erasing all the original bitterness.

‘Not at all.’

‘I thought your lectures were great,’ she added, lowering her eyes and almost fluttering her lashes, but he wasn’t sure if she actually had because of the moist penumbra of the cafe. Maybe he had imagined it.

‘You always had great questions to ask, demonstrated you had a good understanding of the subject.’

‘You have a strong passion . . . for books,’ she pointed out quickly.

‘I’d hope so,’ Dominik said.

She looked up again and he noticed that her neck was flushed all the way down to her rather spectacular cleavage, where a white push-up bra exposed the smooth, shiny upper orbs of her constrained breasts. She always wore tight white shirts, cinched at the waist, emphasising her opulence.

The signal was unmistakeable. This was why she had suggested they meet for a drink. It had nothing to do with academic pursuits any longer. This was now obvious.

Dominik held his breath for an instant as he considered the situation. Damn, she was attractive, and – a glancing thought – it had been a couple of decades since he had bedded a German woman, at which time he had just been in his teens and Christel had been over ten years older, a generational gap then to his ignorant perception. He had since enjoyed so many female nationalities in an unformed quest into the geography of pleasure. Why not?

He moved a hand slowly across the wooden texture of the tabletop and grazed her extended fingers. Long, sharp nails painted scarlet, two heavy rings, one with a small diamond.

She looked down at her hand, answering his unformulated enquiry.

‘Been engaged for a year. He’s back home. Visits every few months. I’m no longer sure if it’s really serious, though. Just if you were wondering.’

Dominik was enjoying the way her German accent was modulating her words.

‘I see.’ Her palms were unseasonably warm.

‘You wear no rings?’ she asked.

‘I don’t,’ Dominik said.

One hour later, they were in her bedroom in Shoreditch, the sound of Hoxton nightclub clients crowding onto the outside pavement in loud conversation percolating through her open window.

‘Let me,’ he said.

They’d kissed. Her breath a cocktail of cigarette, cappuccino, lust and heat rising from her stomach. Her breath halting as his hands wandered across her waist and his chest pressed against hers, the hard tips of her breasts squeezing into him, betraying her arousal. Her breath exhaling across the drawn skin of his neck as he delicately burrowed his tongue in the hollow of her left ear, in turn nibbling her lobe and then licking her depth to immediate effect as she tensed with pleasure and expectation. Claudia closed her eyes.

He began to undo the buttons of her white shirt as she held her breath in. The thin material was stretched so tight he wondered how she could breathe. Button after button released the softness of her skin, and with each successive loosening the shirt flapped aside with liberated abandon. There was something spectacularly joyful about her breasts. Steep hills he could bury himself in, although in normal sexual circumstances he usually went for less expansive examples of opulence. Claudia was a big girl, from her personality, her natural exuberance, to every single curve of her body.

Her hand lingered across the front of his now strained trousers. He took a step back, in no hurry to be released.

Dominik extended a hand towards Claudia, threaded a couple of fingers through her fire-coloured hair, met the soft resistance of dozens of hairpins holding the delicately shaped construction in place. Sighed. Began to extract each hairpin in slow, deliberate motion, freeing whole strands at a time, watching them detach themselves from the mass and flop down to her shoulders, settling calmly across the taut, thin straps of her bra.

These were the moments he lived for. The quiet before the storm. The ritual of unveiling. Knowing the point of no return had been reached, breached, and the fuck was now inevitable. Dominik wanted to savour every single moment, slow them down to a crawl, imprint every memory on his grey cells, brand-new visions coursing from fingertip and throughout his body, along the hardening shaft of his erection, all the way to his brain, bypassing the visual nerve in the process so that they were encrypted in a most particular manner and rendered unforgettable and immortal. The stuff of memories he could spend his whole life feasting on.

He drew a deep breath, caught the faint, unfamiliar whiff of cocoa oil.

‘What’s your perfume?’ he asked, intrigued by the uncommon fragrance.

‘Oh, that,’ Claudia said with an enticing smile. ‘It’s not a perfume, just the cream I massage into my skin every morning. Keeps my body soft. You don’t like it?’

‘It’s unusual, I must admit,’ he replied, then reflected, ‘It’s you.’

He would quickly get used to it. Strange how every woman had a distinctive smell, a signature, a delicate sensory equilibrium of natural scent, artificial perfumes and oils, sweet and sour.

Claudia unhooked her bra and her breasts fell out, surprisingly high and firm. Dominik’s hands journeyed down to her hard dark-brown nipples. One day in the future, he would enjoy clamping them with her hairpins and get hard watching the pain and pleasure it caused fly across her watery eyes.

‘Often, during your lectures, I would catch you looking straight at me, you know,’ she remarked.

‘Did I?’

‘Oh, yes, you did,’ she smiled.

‘If you say so,’ he added, in a mischievous tone.

How could he have not? She had always worn the shortest of skirts and invariably sat in the first row of the amphitheatre, crossing and uncrossing her stockinged legs in gay and distractful abandon, calmly observing his roving gaze with an enigmatic smile drawn across her full lips.

‘Let’s see you, then,’ Dominik said.

He watched her as she unzipped the Burberry-patterned skirt, allowing it to drop to the floor and stepping out of it, still wearing her knee-high brown leather boots. She had strong thighs, but her tall frame was in unison, and as she stood still, topless, her breasts at full imperious mast, clad only in her straight-waisted black knickers, matching hold-up stockings and well-polished boots, there was a warlike Amazonian demeanour about her. Fierce but pliant. Aggressive but ready to bend. They locked gazes.

‘You,’ she ordered.

Dominik unbuttoned his shirt, let it drift to the carpeted floor, as she watched attentively.

A complicit smile breezed across Claudia’s lips, as Dominik remained impassive, his eyes urging her silently to keep on undressing.

Claudia bent over, unzipped the boots and kicked them both off in rapid succession. She rolled down the thin nylon stockings until they were bunched up round her ankles, then pulled them off. She was about to slip out of her knickers when Dominik raised his hand.

‘Wait,’ he said. She interrupted her motion.

He walked over to Claudia, moved behind her back and kneeled down as he stuck a finger inside the undergarment’s tight elastic, admiring the solidity and round perfection of her arse cheeks from his new perspective, the scattered moles dotted here and there across the panorama of her bare back. He pulled in a downwards motion, revealing the white landscape of her hard buttocks. He nudged her calf and she stepped out of the knickers, which he bunched up in his fist and threw across the room.

He rose from his knees, stood behind her. She was totally naked now.

‘Turn round,’ Dominik said.

She was fully shaven, unusually plump, her opening cleanly delineated, a straight geometric line of opposing thin ridges of flesh.

He extended a finger towards her crotch. Felt the heat radiating outwards. Insolently slipped a finger inside her. She was very wet.

He looked up into her eyes, seeking the hunger.

‘Fuck me,’ Claudia said.

‘I thought you’d never ask.’

The strains of a familiar melody reached him faintly as he allowed himself to march down the corridor that led to the Northern line platform, escorted by the rush-hour crowds like a prisoner under close guard.

The sounds of a violin piercing the muted evening rumour of all the travellers filtered its way towards him, louder with every step forward, then a moment of recognition when Dominik realised someone in the distance was playing the second section of Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
, albeit just the lead violin part without the bustling business of the whole orchestra counterpointing the concerto. But the tone was so sharp it didn’t require the support of an orchestra. He hastened his pace, music flowing by his attentive ears.

At the crossroads of four tunnels, in a larger open space, where a parallel set of elevators both swallowed streams of commuters and disgorged a set of counterparts into the depths of the transport system, stood a young woman playing her instrument with her eyes closed. Her flame hair cascaded across her shoulders, halo-like, electric.

Dominik came to an uncomfortable halt, blocking other travellers until he stepped back into a corner where he wasn’t interrupting the rush-hour flow, and took a close look at the musician. No, she wasn’t plugged in. The richness of the sound was solely due to the area’s acoustics and the vigorous glissando of her bow against the strings.

Damn, she is good, Dominik reflected.

It had been a long time since he’d listened closely to anything classical. When he had been a kid, his mother had arranged for him to enjoy a season ticket for a series of concerts held on successive Saturday mornings at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, where his father had set up business and the family lived for a whole decade. Over six months, usually using the morning concerts as a rehearsal of sorts for the actual performances held in the evening for a proper adult audience, the orchestra and guest soloists afforded a wonderful introduction to the world and repertoire of classical music. Dominik had found it fascinating, and thereafter had spent most of his meagre pocket money on acquiring records – those were still the years of glorious vinyl: Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov, Berlioz and Prokofiev leading his personal pantheon – much to the bemusement of his father. It would be more than a decade later before he graduated to rock music when Bob Dylan went electric and Dominik also began to wear his hair a touch longer in response, always having been on the late side to ride musical and sociological trends. Still to this day he would invariably play classical music on the radio in his car when driving. It made for serenity, cleared the mind, banished the all-too-numerous calls of road rage that his impatience often summoned.