by Vina Jackson
The auditions began.
The first raft of parts filled quickly. A casting director accustomed to working with Antony had narrowed the choices down. Some actors matched the written roles with uncanny accuracy and the moment they began speaking their lines, the character instantly came to life as we sat on the other side of the table watching them as they sort of pulled an invisible switch and moved into the dimension of the words. Other postulants initially seemed quite unlike the characters at any rate in physical appearance but the moment they opened their mouths, they inhabited the part to a tee and you had to abandon every single preconception you harboured. Others were just wrong, and you knew it right away: the face, the posture, the voice didn’t click, even though they were clearly talented.
But a vital role was proving increasingly elusive to fill.
Christiansen.
The young woman who would eventually give her name to the Bailly violin, the lost soul whose life would prove the most affected by the instrument’s existence. Who would indeed have her soul stolen by the violin.
No one was right.
She had to be neither ingénue or worldly, old or young, a fragile spirit or a survivor. She had to be all those and more.
The actresses paraded in front of us. Some were well-known, even to me, award-winners on the stage or the small screen, while others were beginners. They came in and read for us, voices subtle and hardy, seductive and matter of fact, sexually attractive and ice maidens, some even wanted to demonstrate they could play the violin. In deference to my presence, Antony would indicate to them that, at this stage, it was not necessary to demonstrate their instrument-playing skills, knowing they would inevitably pale in comparison and sparing me the embarrassment to have to sit in judgment.
It was the final piece of the jigsaw and, still, it refused to fall into place.
Even though he never did so in my presence, I knew Antony had begun drinking again when I wasn’t present. I was beginning to know him well enough. He was becoming more short-tempered, bristling at my suggestions and, sometimes, ignorance of the world of the theatre. I tried to ignore this.
Behind his back, I rang Lauralynn and enquired whether she might possibly be aware of any actress with a modicum of musical talent. My thought was that maybe we could manage with a true musician with a smattering of possible acting experience, instead of vice versa. She had no suggestions to offer.
Time was running out.
Alissa returned from her regional tour. Antony must have mentioned to her the difficulty we were having in filling the Christiansen part.
She volunteered herself. Asked him to set up a formal audition the following day.
When I learned about this, I was fuming inside.
No way she could play the part. Absolutely none. She was totally wrong.
Wrong curves, wrong face, wrong temperament (and did I know of her temperament from our erstwhile trio … ).
I asked Antony to cancel the audition.
She had played minor parts in some of his earlier projects, he revealed, and was surprisingly versatile. Maybe we should give her a chance? Just because she’d fucked him a few times, fucked us, would not influence his decision, he promised me. There was no harm in listening to her, watching her take on the role, was there? She might actually surprise us.
I reluctantly caved in.
8
The Space Between the Notes
I woke up early morning and Antony’s top floor apartment was heavy with uncommon silence. With not even a hint of sound winding its way through the bay windows from the outside, neither distant traffic nor the eerie sound of the river sleeping below as it wrapped the Isle of Dogs in its blanket of peace or even faint dawn birdsong stirrings.
I had decided to stay the night.
Antony’s arm was slumped against my back, the mere trace of his fingers grazing my skin. The warmth radiating between our bodies was both a comfort and an involuntary provocation. On one hand, I wanted to feel the lightness of his touch and revel in it, relishing the gossamer breath of his casual sensuality while on the other something inside me longed for his touch to become heavier, sexual. A need, a want.
I lay still alongside him and considered the prospect of waking him for sex; nestling into Antony closer, and rousing him into that half asleep, half awake state where he would likely quickly develop a morning erection, and we could spoon-fuck sideways before breakfast.
But he looked so peaceful that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I shifted slightly onto my side and turned towards him. My hand found its way to the curve where his waist met his hip, just before the onset of his buttocks. He stirred slightly at my touch, but didn’t wake. His mouth, half-pressed into the pillow, hung slightly open and his face was relaxed. He had not shaved for nearly two months now, and the groomed stubble that he had previously sported now had a decidedly beard-like appearance. It suited him. The dark border around his mouth made his lips look even redder than they usually did. His facial hair was unexpectedly velvety to the touch and I enjoyed the half soft, half prickly feeling of it beneath my fingers when I took his chin in my hands and kissed him.
We had only just managed to restore a kind of equilibrium between us; an unspoken collaboration of desires expressed and needs met or suffered. Our personal demons were alarmingly alike in many respects, though manifested in different forms. Work quelled whatever beast it was that drove him, for the most part. Sex fed mine. So together we worked, and fucked.
It wasn’t always enough though. For him or for me. There were times when he remained awake for strings of days and nights surrounded by a sea of looseleaf papers and jotting notes that I knew he would not be able to decipher when the tide turned and he came back into his normal self again, gaunt and weary, the circles under his eyes like smudges of coal. When I knew just to leave him and hope that in the midst of his fugue he would somewhere get some rest and food or at least leave the drinks cabinet well enough alone.
And there were mornings like this one where I woke with a desperate longing inside that was part irritation and part ache, like an itch that couldn’t be scratched, a burr that could not be removed. Moments when all I wanted was to be flipped over and fucked. Filled. The more forcefully, the better.
For both Antony and I, the beast that drove us and brought most of the good into our lives – the sensuality that expressed itself however unwillingly through my music, his playwriting and directing – was the thing that harmed us too. And I knew that we shared a similar risk-loving, adrenaline-seeking nature. That desire to walk straight to the edge of everything and live precariously balanced on a precipice.
Nothing scared me more than feeling as though I was getting comfortable.
But I had learned over the past months that there was nothing really that would ever completely sate the emptiness I sometimes felt inside of me. I could distract myself, leave it behind for a time, but it would never really go away. I began to think of it as my shadow.
I had now found ways to manage it though, without resorting to roaming the streets at night half naked and half hoping for a pick-up like the man from the Kentish Town sauna. The card that he had given me had long ago been screwed up and tossed in the trash. At least, I presumed it had. I hadn’t actually come across it since I had moved out of the house in Hampstead where it had sat for so many weeks on the side table, jolting memories that were probably better left forgotten, each time I strode down the stairs and caught sight of it. Maybe Lauralynn had thrown it away, and done me an involuntary favour by banishing temptation.
Instead, I had developed the habit of turning my mind back to my time on the island, and I did so now. With not a sound or soul stirring in the apartment to bring me back to reality and with Antony’s out breath creating a gentle breeze on my cheek it was so wonderfully easy to let my mind wander.
I closed my eyes and imagi
ned that I was caught up in the web of vines again, their smooth lengths like the touch of cool limbs pressing against my skin. The scent of peppermint filled my nostrils and played against my tongue. Was it a scent? Or just the notion of cleansing? I wasn’t certain. But in my daydream, it didn’t matter.
Music lullabied through the trees. I tried to follow it but could not move, held tightly as I was by the plant’s coils that bound me. Unable to go after the source of sound I brought the notes towards me by concentrating every fibre of my being on each layer of the island’s symphony, examining each note’s place in the choir as if I was panning for gold. It was like unravelling a tapestry, one stitch at a time.
I could no longer feel the cotton sheet beneath me, nor the light duvet cover that was pulled up to my waist. My focus was now so captured by the waking dream that I had created I may as well have been there in the jungle, a captive to my imagination. I ran my hands over my belly and up to my breasts. My skin tingled. Unbidden, my limbs began to twitch and my hips to grind.
Then I felt a hand covering one of my own, still resting on my breast, and give a gentle squeeze. Antony’s lips pressed lightly against mine. I opened my eyes. He was still visibly half asleep and had missed most of my mouth with his kiss, which fell half on my mouth and half on my cheek and jaw.
‘Summer …’ he whispered. His eyes were closed. He tugged my wrists, endeavouring to pull my body onto his.
I rolled on top of him. His cock was still half soft, but growing. I shifted my weight so that my groin covered his and began to rub against him, encouraging his hard-on to grow harder. He nuzzled his face into my neck.
‘You were twitching in your sleep,’ he muttered.
‘I had a strange dream,’ I replied.
‘Grinding your hips,’ he continued. ‘Sex dreams, I reckon. You should have woken me earlier. I’d have been happy to oblige.’
He sounded amused.
‘I didn’t wake you,’ I protested. I had been very careful not to.
He chuckled. I pressed my mouth against his to shut him up.
His cock hardened, and I took hold of the base of his shaft and guided him inside me.
‘Oh,’ I moaned, closing my eyes as I slid down onto his dick. I was already wet.
It was like what they said about heroin. The first high was the best. There wasn’t another sensation on earth that felt as good as the moment that Antony’s cock first breached my entrance.
I pushed down hard, so that I could feel him deeper inside me.
He placed his hands on my hips and rocked me back and forth.
Antony and I rarely fucked like this, me riding him. Usually he was on top of me, or we were side by side, or in a doggy style position. I looked down at him, appreciating this new vantage point. His eyes were closed and the expression on his face was close to pain. He was groaning, trying to hold himself back from coming inside me. The muscles in his shoulders and arms were tensed and highlighted the dips and curves of his upper body. The hollow of his clavicle. The sinews that ran like taut ropes beneath his skin. The vulnerability of his bare throat.
I cupped my hand around the lower part of his neck and squeezed. His eyes snapped open and he smiled. I squeezed harder, and he moved his hand to cover mine and pressed down, encouraging me to squeeze even harder.
The groan that now escaped his lips was a sound that I knew well. One of surrender. Release. He could not hold back any longer and I drove my hips down against him in one final deep thrust and tightened my grip on his throat and he came inside me and then his whole body relaxed, like a wind-up toy that has suddenly come to a halt.
I felt an overwhelming rush of affection for Antony in that moment. With his body now totally limp beneath me, he looked so soft, almost child-like in expression. I leaned down, covering his torso with mine, and buried my face into the gap between his cheek and his shoulder.
We dozed off again like that, sandwiched together in an awkward embrace, the sound and rhythm of our breath moving in and out of our bodies in sync, the morning chorus of couples.
At my specific request, Alissa’s audition did not take place at Antony’s apartment in the large room I had come to accept as our own work space. His nearby bedroom had proven a natural destination when the mood overwhelmed us or we needed to depressurise. I argued we had to remain detached and fair in assessing Alissa’s suitability for the role and that some of our mutual past activities elsewhere in the penthouse would inevitably impair our judgment if we stayed in place. We arranged to meet in Soho, in the basement of a music club Antony had sometimes used in the past. Having picked up the key in the café next door as had been arranged, we arrived a half hour early and walked down the wooden stairs by the light of a single, unprotected electric bulb. The smells of the previous night’s gig still lingered in the air, stale beer fumes blending in with the clammy heat of bodies packed in close proximity to each other and the ghosts of abandoned notes and melodies hanging from the low ceiling like high-flying condensation.
We shifted some of the tables and chairs and cleared an area at the centre of the floor, so that Antony and I sat on one side of the table, on which he had placed a small tape recorder and a similarly-sized digital camera. Alissa would read facing us. It took us a while to puzzle out the room’s lighting and we directed a discrete spot on her appointed seat. There was no actual stage.
‘I’m so excited,’ she said, arriving breathless down the narrow stairs into the club, holding a large canvas bag overflowing at the brim. My stomach clenched when I noticed a violin case’s recognisable shape sticking out from her bag. Surely not? I’d never heard her mentioning she could play the instrument.
She was wearing a spotless cream suede trenchcoat that fell down to her ankles. When she shed it, Alissa revealed herself. She was sporting the shortest black leather skirt I had seen in ages, with only the miracle of its stretch fabric concealing her crotch or, when she turned to hang her coat up, the half moon of her buttocks. The white cotton shirt she had anything but casually slipped on was tapered and clung to her curves with transparent provocation. It was evident she was not wearing a bra. A thin red belt circled her midriff, tight as a corset, emphasising the sharp contrast between the opulence of her top and marbled thighs and the wasp-like delicacy of her waist. A proper miniature sex bomb.
She beamed at us.
‘I’m so glad you’re giving me a chance,’ she said. ‘I’ve researched the part,’ she added. ‘Even found another book by the guy who wrote this one …’
My heart missed a beat.
Dominik’s first novel had transparently been based on me and only he and I had known what was real or fiction in the narrative and specific scenes.
‘It has this great scene where the violin player plays nude,’ she continued. ‘Wow, I found that pretty inspiring!’
I was frozen to the spot. Antony’s focus had purely been about the violin novel, and I didn’t know if he had ever come across Dominik’s debut book and realised my involuntary but intimate involvement with it. Although he knew, of course, that I had been close to Dominik. I looked round at him. His features were impassive.
She continued speaking throughout. ‘It made me think about the relationship between the violin and the women who played it, how sensual it can be,’ she said. ‘And …’
‘Can you actually play the instrument?’ I interrupted her, with a barely concealed note of aggression. I would have bet anything she had rehearsed her audition back at her place, standing naked in front of a mirror, holding the violin, her hard and heavy tits bouncing up and down. It was farcical.
‘No, but I brought this one along. Just a prop, I know. But it’ll keep me grounded.’
I glanced at it as she opened the case and pulled the violin out. It was a cheap Japanese mass-produced instrument, of the sort beginners learned their craft on.
‘Enough of this method acti
ng crap,’ Antony complained. ‘Let’s get down to it. Alissa, you know the monologue in Act Two. That’s what I want to hear. Then, we’ll segue into the scene between Edwina and James from Act Three; I’ll read his lines, OK?’
It was just an audition and I would not be involved musically. Just a spectator.
I thought Alissa would sit down and go through her lines, but she chose to remain standing, cleverly using her body language to enhance the words and the emotions in a way I found somewhat manipulative. Antony, watching her, remained stone-faced.
She was good, I had to admit.
She demonstrated a mastery of the technical elements of acting, affecting a faint German accent to evoke the character’s origins but without making her a caricature and displaying a fluent ease when moving through a whole range of emotions. Never too quiet or loud, controlling the flow of the words with quiet authority, her body stance veering between elegance and studied disarray as the violin’s influence began to weave its curse, spider-like, around Edwina Christiansen’s mind. I had initially thought Alissa would use her sexuality, flash us or something outrageous, flaunt her rather considerable assets in an effort to impress, but she quickly managed to make us forget her actual appearance and gradually began to inhabit the repressed but seething thoughts of the character, disappearing behind the words. Her only affectation was to occasionally wrap a silk scarf, a bunch of which she had extracted from her bag, around her head or neck to indicate a switch of emphasis in the text or her interpretation.
She was a natural born performer, I had to concede. Like me, albeit from a different perspective.
There was no transition or pause for breath and she switched into confrontational mode for the scene with James with Antony reading his own lines quite dispassionately, acting as a mere foil.