Autumn

by Vina Jackson

  I turned and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Me too,’ I replied, breaking away. ‘But we should head back.’

  ‘Yes, we should,’ she said. ‘We’re leaving tonight. There’ll be a car coming in about an hour. That’s why I came to get you.’

  I didn’t bother asking where we would be heading to next. She had already made it clear that our ultimate destination was to be a surprise, and letting Lauralynn boss me around made life a lot easier. Since Dominik had died so many decisions had been required of me, and there had been too much to organise. Having all of that taken away was a relief.

  The journey began by car. An initial long, winding drive through brightly lit, busy streets and then morphing into darkness as we left the city behind us. Hours later we arrived at a ferry terminal, and travelled in a glass-encased cabin across the water to what I guessed was a small island. I was unable to even see a station sign pinpointing our location as another sleek vehicle pulled up immediately as we arrived, my bags were efficiently collected and stowed into the boot and the driver directed me to the back seat, shut the door and whisked us away. Lauralynn sat in the front seat and some papers exchanged hands. Passports? Money? I wondered, but could not make out their whispered conversation. Viggo sat next to me, apparently entirely nonplussed. He nodded off immediately and slept for the duration of the short journey, just his gentle snore and the heat emanating from his body the only signs of his existence.

  From a white-painted, dilapidated pier we were lowered into a dinghy, no larger than the sort my father and I had fished from on occasional weekends spent by the sea near Te Aroha. Large enough for six people to sit, balanced precariously, but no more. I could understand now why Lauralynn had insisted I leave my suitcases at home. With just the three of us, and our bags, plus our so far unnamed companion who had helped us in and was busy furiously pulling the cord to start an engine which had seen far better days, we had precious little room to stretch out.

  Once we had set off, the captain of our small ship grunted a brief greeting. His name was Tony, and unexpectedly, his accent was English. Essex, I guessed. I didn’t ask him what he was doing sailing this tiny boat in a remote part of Brazil. Tony passed each of us a cold can of beer from an ice bucket, and a bag of salted peanuts. The bright white of his board shorts shone in the moonlight but his face was hidden by shadow and his tendency to avoid eye contact and stare either at the motor or at the floor of the boat. I could make out a thick jaw, and full mouth decorated with a thin black moustache, like a pirate version of Rhett Butler. His hands were unusually large and rough. He looked up, caught me staring at him and smiled widely, exposing a set of well-kept, white teeth. I turned away. Settling in for the ride, I imitated Viggo, and kicked my sandals off, then lay back on one of the metal benches that lined each side of the craft, propping my head up on my backpack. He was resting his head on Lauralynn’s lap, who was running her hands through his hair.

  We were silent, besides the noise of the motor and the sound of the sea against the boat. Initially, there was just the gentle lapping of choppy waves against the prow, but the further we travelled from land the more we picked up speed and the larger the waves became until we were crashing against the ocean and our captain signalled that I should shift from the side to the back of the boat to avoid being drenched by spray. The water was warm, and when I ran my tongue over my lips I was surprised to note that the droplets of water that had rained against my face were not salty, but sweet. I looked up, as if to find an answer to this unusual circumstance in the heavens, and saw that the sky was teeming with stars, so many that the horizon resembled a sheet of glittering sequins, enough to clothe an entire troupe of dancers at the Moulin Rouge and more to spare. As I stared in wonder, they appeared to shimmer and shift into an array of patterns, and none that I recalled from any of the basic astronomy that I could remember from high school science classes. I swore I saw the shape of a woman slowly twisting her hips and raising her arms overhead like a ballerina in a music box, but when I blinked, and looked again, this odd celestial configuration had disappeared and in its place, the sky now looked perfectly normal, if still festooned with glimmering stars.

  I turned to Lauralynn and opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again, as words to explain what I thought I had briefly glimpsed escaped me, and besides which, she was gazing overboard into the water. The angle of the back of her head was fixed, as if she was looking at something in particular rather than staring into space, so I shifted my position and glanced in the same direction. The sea was aglow with a myriad of brightly coloured, luminous banks of fish, as if the stars that adorned the heavens had now fallen into the sea. They were either close to the surface, or an indeterminable distance below very clear water. The light they cast lit up the water beneath us, casting an eerie shimmer onto the waves that made it seem as if we were in fact floating through the air above the surface of the water rather than directly upon it.

  Lauralynn turned back to face me, holding her hand aloft which she had evidently been trailing over the side. She grinned. Her fingers were covered with an unearthly sheen, as if she had dipped them in neon paint.

  ‘What is this place?’ I asked her.

  ‘This is nothing,’ she replied. ‘You just wait until we arrive.’ She bore an expression of insufferable smugness, until Tony, stationed at the helm, turned and scolded her in words that I did not understand, but presumed related to her leaning over the edge and risking tipping all of us into the ocean. Lauralynn snapped back at him and he responded by turning away from her and opening another can of beer, then passing an additional can just to me.

  ‘I didn’t know you spoke Portuguese,’ I said to her, enjoying the refreshing taste of the cold lager but knowing that I would likely regret it later, and wondering if it might be better to stay sober, so I could be sure of what I had and hadn’t seen.

  ‘I don’t,’ Lauralynn replied. She did not elaborate any further and I did not question her. They both spoke English, and I was irritated by the linguistic exclusion, but not bothered enough to complain about it. Perhaps it was just the alcohol seeping into my bloodstream but I felt cloaked in a strong sense of peacefulness for the first time in as long as I could remember and I did not want to risk losing even a single moment of simple happiness for the sake of an explanation. It didn’t matter, really, where we were going or why. For now, Lauralynn was my closest friend in the world, and I trusted her without doubt.

  Buoyed by my good mood, and resolved to simply relax and enjoy whatever events were in store, I drifted into a kind of waking slumber until the engine died, and a change in the size and direction of the waves indicated that we were approaching land.

  ‘You’re swimming from here,’ Tony advised me, indicating that I should jump over the side. I heard two loud splashes; Viggo and Lauralynn had both already disrobed and jumped in. There were other bodies in the water swimming towards us, perhaps to attend to our bags, or offering help to moor the boat. In any case, I did as instructed and pulled the light cotton dress that I was wearing over my head. I hesitated briefly but then also discarded my bra and knickers. What did it matter if one more man, who I was unlikely to ever set eyes on again saw me naked? A quick glance in his direction confirmed that he had already turned back to the motor, anyway.

  The water was cooler than I expected, and felt thicker than it ought to; more viscous, like milk. It was invigorating, and I emerged from my dive feeling far more vibrant than I ought to considering that I hadn’t slept in – how long? It occurred to me that I had no idea what time it was or how long we had been travelling. I wasn’t even sure if we were still in the same time zone.

  My feet connected with the sand and I rose and scanned the shoreline for Viggo and Lauralynn, but they were nowhere to be seen.

  That was when I heard the music.

  At first, I thought that my ears were deceiving me. That the sound was no song, but the ste
ady lapping of the waves, the wind whistling through trees, or even a set of bamboo chimes that might be hanging in a nearby guesthouse doorway. But it was unmistakable. Not one violin, but many.

  The sound was so rich and thick it felt primal, like a cord connecting to something deep in my chest and pulling me relentlessly forward. I could not make out the melody precisely, but I was able to identify chords from the music I loved most, layered on top of one another. A truly eerie greeting, a fanfare of sorts. There was ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, and there, the beginning of the Spring movement from Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’. A hint of Debussy, a smidgeon of Grieg, a touch of Shearwater and Arcade Fire and a teasing soupçon of Stravinsky. It was as if an unseen Pied Piper was playing just for me.

  There was nothing else for it, I still couldn’t see Lauralynn or Viggo, so I followed the music. Even if I hadn’t mentally decided that was the best thing to do, my feet would have carried me in that direction anyway.

  We had arrived at a bay, shaped like a crescent moon and surrounded by mountains. A bed of golden sand led up to a tropical jungle. Verdant, lush. A full moon shone like a spotlight over the island. The vegetation was almost lime green with a ghostly white hue, like row upon row of tropical Christmas trees. At any moment I expected to see Titania or Puck stumble out of the shadows and carry me away. My feet were now bare, but the ground was not uncomfortable to walk on. As I began to pick my way through the gnarled tangle of tree roots that lined the beach’s edge I fervently hoped that any snakes, insects or other dangerous creatures were safe in their nests, far into the forest and not sneakily lying in wait for me.

  On I walked, aware that I was now entirely alone and vulnerable, naked and without even my instrument to hide behind as I had previously done in similar circumstances. I was not afraid. The island was cocooning me in a strange sense of blissful calm and relaxation, as if the whole place was a living creature and I was held safely within its core, like an infant bound tightly in a papoose.

  A breeze brushed against my skin, thick, heavy, soft, the island’s air currents massaging my flesh, carrying me along. Tendrils of gentle wind, like fingers, slid over my shoulders and caressed the curve of my breasts until I felt my nipples inevitably harden despite the humid temperature. Invisible hands crept further down the length of my body until they reached the tender skin of my thighs.

  The response that this eminently strange sensation elicited in me was akin not to a sudden electrical spark, but rather the very gradual heating of a pot from cold to hot. Eventually the fire of arousal rising from deep within me caused me to stop dead and find my balance by resting one hand against an overhead branch.

  ‘Lauralynn, Viggo?’ I called out. There was no response. My words floated from my mouth like notes of a song and joined the chorus of strings that lullabied through the trees and continued to draw me deeper into the undergrowth.

  It was not a tree branch, I realised, as I touched the low hanging coil, but rather a vine. The outer skin was vivid green and as smooth as a clean-shaven cheek. It was wonderfully cool and refreshing, and left the parts of me that made contact with it tingling. I dipped the end of my tongue against the plant and found that it tasted of peppermint. The music was louder here, I noticed, and more insistent. I stepped closer to the green coil and found another, and then a further length, each apparently longer and thicker than the last and equally as smooth.

  No longer in motion, the air’s caresses against my skin had stopped, but in its place, the tendrils that now surrounded me began to move.

  At first, they simply swayed, seemingly pushed here and there by the wind, and as I allowed my weight to sink against them the plant held me until even my feet were lifted off the ground, and it seemed as though I was lying in a hammock. My whole body rubbed against the vine’s strange peppermint fragrance and buzzed, as if its skin contained some kind of drug that was seeping through my epidermis into my bloodstream.

  I closed my eyes, and as the rocking motion became more insistent, so too did the string lullaby that still reached my ears. I couldn’t tell whether it was the plant’s coils caressing me or the chords of all the tunes that had for almost my entire life fuelled my being, but something was connecting with my flesh that was at once totally impossible and yet seemed completely natural, normal, inevitable. I relaxed more, my mind entering the hypnotic state that I usually reached only when Dominik had found the perfect balance between pain and pleasure and then pushed me over the edge of it, beyond what I thought I could handle, or when I played so furiously that I lost myself entirely in the movement of my bow.

  A soft moan escaped my lips. And on the music played, each note seeming ever closer to my ears and producing a new wave of pleasure inside me, each melody finding its way from my brain to my body until my flesh felt electric with desire.

  I felt a gentle pressure as each of my ankles and wrists was encircled and my arms and thighs were spread apart as far as they could comfortably stretch. The refreshing coolness that had at first just soothed my skin now completely flooded my veins and I felt at once terribly alive but also thoroughly cleansed, as if I had bathed in the rivers of a baptism. And still the vine crept across and around me, trapping me in its spider web of coils.

  With my eyes closed and my mind so relaxed, I could no longer discern one physical sensation from another. There was just the ever-present coolness that kept flowing through my body and more and more smooth caresses that felt something like an unending orchestra of hands and tongues playing across my flesh, stroking, licking and massaging every part of me from my cunt to my fingertips.

  Images began to burst forth in my mind. Memories that matched each individual touch against my skin. Unable to identify what was actually happening in the present, I sought explanations in the past. There, that stroke, Dominik’s index finger, trailing up my wrist and reaching my elbow, teasing me, knowing that soon he would reach my breasts and then begin to torture each of my nipples in that way that I so loved. Pulling, twisting, squeezing, turning each of them so hard that he would make me cry out.

  A firm lick against my clitoris, that was the touch of an unnamed woman, one of the sparse handful that I had been with over the years. Then a too hard thrust, that belonged to an anonymous man, one of many who I had met in casual circumstances, his face now a blur but the peculiar size and shape of his cock and how it felt inside me remained unforgettable. I recognised a playful nibble on my earlobe that might have been Viggo, or even Lauralynn. A sudden, knowing, prying tongue against my arsehole that could only be Dominik, again. He who had known me so well and always pressed the right buttons.

  Pictures continued to burst forth before my eyes like a cinemascope procession of sex, my memories and my fantasies all playing in time with the music that grew ever louder until my whole mind was overtaken with no room for anything besides sex and song. The visions were so life-like, so real that I wasn’t sure whether my eyes were still closed or if I had opened them and these events were occurring all around me in the jungle.

  The dreams grew darker at times. Not just the good experiences, but also the banal and the bad. There were the men from the sauna, and the terrible thrusting of the bearded man’s too-long cock against my cervix. The pointed-tongue kisses of Victor, an acquaintance of Dominik’s who I had known long ago and who had been the wrong sort of dominant. He had been a small, mean man, and at the time I was naïve and too consumed by lust and manipulated by the spell of his power to see the harm that he was doing me, until it was almost too late.

  I saw the long, lean limbs of my old friend Charlotte, her tanned legs wrapped around Jasper, the man she had hired on a whim who had gone on to become her long-term lover. My swimming coach, who had witnessed me masturbating in the changing rooms. The way that his breath had smelled of old cigarettes when he had kissed me. I felt the soft, tender hands of Simon, the South American conductor who had been wonderfully kind and was terribly handsome
but in the long run too gentle for me.

  Every sexual thought and experience gone by flashed into my mind’s eye like a video in fast forward and I not only felt the physical sensations over but I saw it all from afar, a bird’s eye view, the expressions on the faces of all those that I had fucked and who had fucked me.

  In the remembering there was a kind of forgetting. A realisation that all of it had been and was now past. That the more I tried to hold the pain at bay by pushing it out of reach, the heavier it became. The pleasures that I had enjoyed carried their own thorns, by virtue of them having been and gone, but I saw that I could let the memories stay with me, and not suffer any harm.

  Dominik’s lips pressed against mine in a final kiss and I did not try to pull away, to avoid the suffering that such a remembrance would bring, nor did I try to hold him fast as I so desperately wanted to. I just kissed the phantom Dominik back, until he was gone, and replaced by a whole new set of visions, these my sexual fantasies or perhaps future experiences, as yet unrealised.

  I saw a group of long-haired women in a tangled circle, each with their head between another’s legs as they writhed in unison. Another group; three men taking turns to lap at the cunt and arse of a woman who was standing up but so overcome by pleasure that her body was beginning to fail her and she eventually fell to the ground. A lone man with a cock as thick and large and heavy as any I had ever seen masturbating over the bare breasts of a young woman who knelt in front of him, until he exploded and white, hot juice flooded over her chest. He fell to his knees and sucked it up as it ran from her pink, hard nipples.

  In another corner of my mind, or my peripheral vision, two men, each with close-cropped beards were passionately kissing. Their mouths remained locked in perpetual motion and they each had a hand on the other’s cock, pulling and tugging in perfect rhythm as their tongues continued to dance. A young woman with flowing white-blonde hair stood fully nude, hand in hand with a red-haired man. He was staring at her, and she was staring at all of the events occurring around her, and me, with just the hint of a smile on her shocking crimson lips. She was covered in tattoos. Watching the crowd of people engaged in pleasure, listening to their moans of lust, witnessing a barrage of bodies in all shapes and sizes and ages each bringing to another simple joy and hedonistic release in wild and unashamed abandon.