by Vina Jackson
The heart was visible again. Sharp. Carved into her flesh. Its thin, imperceptible tendrils extending out, alive. And the more she peered down at the impossible tattoo, the more she pictured herself in a stone hall, bound hands and feet and at the mercy of a whip, a paddle, hands, men, a man, her man. The stranger. The taste of pomegranate filled her mouth, half sweet, half bitter.
This is not me, she thought, seized by an overwhelming sense of panic. But the images in her mind refused to retreat, and as the heart pumped with frantic abandon, she came. Just standing there. Not even touching herself.
Aurelia knocked on Siv’s door the following morning, hoping to find her friend back to her normal chatty, openhearted self, but the room was empty and the bed had not been slept in.
Her initial reaction was one of both disapproval and envy. Tinged with apprehension. And sadness.
Was this what they had come to? Could Siv really have met a new man and plan to spend the night with him and not even mention it? And was it a new man? Aurelia remembered the way that Siv had responded to Walter. The look that had passed over Siv’s face when she had watched him moulding the clay body of the dancer that he was sculpting, or the desire that Siv had expressed to be one of his marionettes.
A pang of guilt struck her as she recalled how disapproving and suspicious she had been of her friend’s attraction to the sculptor. Her disapproval had simply been a way of masking the confusion she felt about her own cravings, she knew that now, but she couldn’t take it back.
Aurelia tried to push her worry and hurt away. After all, it was Siv’s life, she told herself, and there was no need for her to be censorious and not allow her friend to enjoy life to the fullest as long as she didn’t get hurt. Hadn’t that been the idea behind coming to the USA and the once fabled streets of San Francisco?
As she set to ticking off the daily chores at the cottage and covering for her friend, she attempted to phone Siv on successive occasions but her calls were never answered. The following day, when Siv had still not reappeared, she slipped into her bedroom again to check her belongings. All Siv’s clothes were still there and nothing appeared to be missing, although she did come upon Siv’s phone charger in a drawer, which might explain why she was not responding.
Edyta commented on Siv’s absence when Aurelia went to her to pay their rent and willingly covered her friend’s share.
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ the gaunt ballet teacher said, a twinkle of light in her eyes accompanying the ironic turn of her thin lips. ‘She must have a reason . . .’ And she nodded approvingly.
Aurelia wanted to tell her that Siv was probably involved with a blind, older man, but felt it would be betraying Siv to reveal her secret.
A week went by and Siv had still not given any sign of life and Aurelia became more concerned. She Googled Walter but could find no trace of him or any mention of a sculptor famous for working blind on the web. She visited the venue where the exhibition had been held, only to be politely informed at the door that the ‘party’ had been a private hire and they were not allowed to reveal the name of the client.
Yes, the thin-lipped, bespectacled receptionist told her, other similar events might occur in the future and some of the same guests or event staff might be present, but this could not be guaranteed, nor any calendar of private events be released.
Dreading a telephone call from Siv’s family and the prospect of having to lie to them about her whereabouts, Aurelia was wavering as to whether she should get in touch with the local police when, in uncanny response to her concern, she received an email out of the blue. It was from Siv.
i’m ok. i’m happy. don’t worry for me. one day you’ll understand. love ya.
Her family never called, so Aurelia assumed Siv had also made contact with them along similar lines.
Although the news provided some relief, it also made her feel angry. Siv had let her down. Been incredibly selfish, she reckoned.
Why couldn’t she have come to the Oakland cottage to explain herself, pick up her belongings before shacking up with Walter or whoever she had now taken a shine to? It was so damn inconsiderate. Not the sort of thing real friends should do.
Meanwhile, to compound her foul mood, she had received a letter from the lawyer, Gwillam Irving, ambiguously asking after her and reminding her of her obligations to the trust fund. Did he know that Aurelia had still not taken a single step towards enrolling at Berkeley as she had agreed to? In addition, every attempt since Siv’s fugue to make the heart reappear, by touching herself or evoking the Bristol stranger’s touch in her jumbled mind, had failed abysmally.
She resolved to do something about it.
Aurelia knew it was irrational, dangerous even. But she had come to the conclusion that she had to find out whether the heart would come to the surface again if she made love with another man. It was as if the invisible tattoo had created a hole inside her, a vortex that was sucking all her thoughts into it, and she was desperate for answers.
Even though she looked older than her age, she knew that American barmen and staff were still likely to ask for some form of ID, so a bar was out of the question. Where to go?
Prompted by the letter from Irving, Irving & Irving, she had finally resolved to visit the campus at Berkeley and investigate the earliest possible opportunity to enrol for the courses she had planned while still back in Leigh-on-Sea. She deliberately chose to wear her shortest skirt – a tweedy patterned thing that reached barely halfway down to her knees, showing off her long legs – along with the tightest of crewneck white T-shirts and Siv’s black leather jacket, which had been left behind by her friend. Not a studious out-fit by a long stretch of the imagination, nor one that left much to the same imagination in revealing her tall, slim body.
Aurelia had never gone out of her way to attract the gaze of men, and felt very self-conscious dressing in this manner. She picked up the thick folder of variously sized forms at the admissions office, and wandered across the main campus, failing to attract undue attention amongst the milling crowds of equally tall, blond but suspiciously tanned girls already present. Chilled by the breeze that wrapped itself around her bare legs, setting off goose pimples, she found refuge in the library.
The tall-ceilinged reading room was all burnished wood panelling and long benches. Aurelia gathered a pile of books, found a seat by one of the vast bay windows and gazed out at the ever-fluttering leaves on the branches of the trees surrounding the building. She hadn’t planned to actually study, but just picked up various volumes at random, mostly novels she had heard about but never got round to reading. Perhaps if she leafed through a few pages she might find herself hooked and spend a few peaceful hours in the warmth with her mind at peace.
She arranged a tall pile of books in front of her – a wall to block out the distracting view from the windows – and was left with a single book. A novel by Haruki Murakami. She’d never read anything by the Japanese author, but what she had heard had somehow attracted her: a heady cocktail of twisted love stories, cats and jazz, she’d heard some commentator on a late-night TV programme describe them. And the covers in England looked cool. This edition was a hardcover and didn’t have a dust jacket, though.
Aurelia was twenty pages or so in when she felt a curious itch spread across the back of her neck, as if she was being watched. The last time the sensation had been so acute had been when she had run for the train in London, she remembered. She was about to turn her head and check out the room when she heard a voice from the other side of the reading bench, behind the small wall of books she had built to ensure her privacy and a lack of distractions. She experienced a brief sense of disorientation, like being observed, hemmed in from two separate directions. Out of instinct, her nostrils flared, in an attempt to recognise a familiar fragrance. Pomegranate? But there was nothing there to smell. But, for no reason, her lips felt wet. She licked them.
‘Good book, eh?’
She moved her pile by a few inches to see who her interlo
cutor was.
It was a young man in his mid-twenties. He had light-brown hair which fell down over his forehead in a fringe. He wore dark horn-rimmed glasses, and Aurelia couldn’t help noticing how his ears stuck out from the darker arrows of luxuriant sideburns that stopped halfway down the line of his jaw. Faint freckles dotted the bridge of his nose and the upper half of his cheeks, below a set of sharp cheekbones that any girl would have been jealous of.
The moment Aurelia set her eyes on him, she was reminded of the mental picture she’d formed the first time she’d read Mark Twain as an assigned book in school. The young man was the living image of an older Tom Sawyer. She couldn’t help herself from smiling.
‘I’m only a few chapters into it,’ she said.
‘Wow. You’re English!’ he exclaimed, his open mouth showing off a vista of whiter-than-white teeth.
Aurelia chuckled. ‘Is it that obvious?’
His smile grew even wider, his eyes lighting up.
‘It’s a great book,’ he continued. ‘I envy you reading it for the first time.’
‘Why?’ Aurelia asked.
‘Oh, I don’t want to spoil it for you. You must read it to the end to find out.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘My name’s Huck,’ he said.
Aurelia burst out with irrepressible laughter.
‘Not Huck Sawyer?’
‘No. Name’s Huck Johnson . . .’
She introduced herself.
He was from the Midwest and it was his second year at Berkeley, where he was studying for a Masters in anthropology. His parents were doctors. The thick volumes on his side of the reading table were all text books, but he loved modern fiction, he told her. Was even working on a novel of his own, he confessed. Had dreams of becoming a writer one day.
‘I’d love to read it,’ Aurelia politely suggested.
‘It’s anything but ready.’ He lowered his eyes, as if embarrassed. ‘So what brings you here?’ he asked, less than artfully moving the conversation on.
Half an hour later, Huck suggested they might have a coffee. There was a decent cafeteria in the basement of the library, it seemed. Aurelia accepted.
When he rose from the bench she noted with surprise that he happened to be surprisingly tall, towering half a head over her at well over six feet and more. For a while now she’d had a nagging feeling that she didn’t even know how tall the man in the Bristol chapel had been. The sudden thought caused a knot to form in her stomach, eating at her insides.
Over terrible coffee and half-decent cupcakes and cookies, she forced herself to speculate what Huck body’s looked like under his baggy lumberjack shirt and formless slacks. He looked younger than he was, which failed to turn her on. But she’d noted the gentle signs of desire in his eyes when he had looked lingeringly at her after she had risen from the library bench, her long, bare legs an unavoidable focus point, and how, even now, in the cafeteria, sitting side by side, his glance would unavoidably move to her uncovered thighs on occasion.
From time to time she allowed her tight tweed skirt to ride up to mid-thigh, maybe inadvertently allowing him a furtive glimpse of her white cotton knickers before she pulled the skirt down again. It felt like a game, and he was the perfect subject, and while the old Aurelia would have been downright dismissive at the way she was pulling his strings, the new post-crazy-heart Aurelia knew exactly what she was doing and was beginning to relish her new-found power. Were all men so easy to manipulate?
Huck was crashing on a friend’s couch near the Haight, waiting for a share in a house closer to the campus to become available and there was no way that Aurelia’s room above the ballet school basement could be used, so they agreed to split the cost of a motel room.
The young man’s decrepit Japanese compact was a mess of crumpled, unwashed clothes he had been meaning to get to a laundry for ages, discarded sweet wrappers, old magazines and newspapers and empty coffee cups. He hurriedly cleared the front seat for Aurelia and she fitted her long frame into the narrow space and they roared off in search of the motel he claimed to remember. Aurelia wondered how many times he had been there with other girls. She quickly felt nauseous and rolled her window down as the car’s petrol fumes assaulted her.
The drive was a silent one as she reflected on the turn of events and how she had ended up suggesting they sleep together. She knew unsentimentally that the young American was just a means to an end and felt unsure whether she liked herself for being so calculating and selfish.
Curtains drawn and a weak lamplight casting an eerie glow on the room’s interior, Aurelia undressed as soon as they parted from their initial kiss. Huck just stood there, with eyes wide open, watching her, unable to believe his luck, as she stepped out of the short tweed skirt, her tall frame and endless legs bathed in a flickering orange glow.
‘Wow!’ he said. ‘Are all you English gals so forward?’
Aurelia laughed. ‘I have to go to the bathroom. Get your stuff off and see you in bed,’ she demanded, stepping past the thin door that led to the sink where she felt a compulsion to brush her teeth and hoped the motel room provided a complimentary toothbrush. It didn’t. She vigorously rubbed her wet fingers against her teeth and hunted for a mint in her bag. She slipped off her underwear and watched the deformed image of her naked body in the cracked mirror. She couldn’t help glancing down, searching for the scarlet heart. Not that she was expecting to see it. Yet.
By the time she walked back into the unheated bedroom, shivering slightly, Huck had switched the light off and was sheltering between the covers. Aurelia lifted them and joined him. His body was blissfully warm and he was already hard, his cock jutting sideways against her hip as she settled on her back, her eyes reading patterns of grey in the pocked ceiling of the room. He shifted slightly, moving to kiss her again, adjusting his position alongside her, as if embarrassed that his penis was brushing against her.
His breath tasted of stale cigarette smoke. Aurelia took a deep breath; only one man so far had conjured the sweet aroma of fruit.
Mid-kiss, she parted her knees, allowing Huck to move himself between her legs. He clumsily positioned himself, still wary of closing the distance between their bodies. Aurelia found his cock and gripped it between her fingers. Even though it was quite rigid, it was also surprisingly soft and velvety to the touch. And hot.
Just like the stranger’s had been.
Did all men feel the same? Would it be so simple to drive the stranger from her mind? Her brain went into overdrive, processing the sensation and corresponding thoughts. His kisses became more halting. He moaned as her fingers travelled down his stem and her nails grazed his balls. Aurelia buckled invitingly and Huck collapsed onto her.
‘Fuck me. Now,’ she whispered in the young man’s ear.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked, as if hesitant to go all the way so soon.
Aurelia’s lips broke away from his. ‘Yes,’ she groaned.
Still not letting go of his cock, she firmly guided it towards her. She knew she was extremely wet. He was about to breach her when she pulled back, and moved away from him on the bed.
‘Do you have a condom?’ she asked him breathlessly, red-faced with both desire and annoyance at having so easily forgotten such a basic precaution. Something her godparents and teachers had drummed into her until it felt like a broken record. Although she recalled, with a sudden spasm of panic, that the Bristol stranger had not actually appeared to have used protection from the few details she could now clearly remember. Since she had neither given birth nor experienced any health problems since then, she thought it was safe to say she’d got away with it.
Huck leaned over his side of the bed and fished inside the pocket of the slacks he had tidily folded onto a nearby chair and pulled out a blue-ish wrapper.
As he tore it open with his teeth, his lower body and aroused penis still coyly obscured from her view by the sheets, Aurelia felt a pang of regret at the way this was all turning out wrong: no magic,
no romance, just the ordinariness of sex. His cock might feel the same in her hand as the stranger’s had, but nothing else did.
Now sheathed, Huck resumed his previous position between her thighs – Aurelia had not moved an inch – dispensing a tender smile by way of excuse in her direction as he entered her, his wet lips nibbling affectionately at her ear.
After a moment’s pause, he began to move inside her. Aurelia lowered her guard and gave in to that exquisite feeling of being filled, even though it felt so different this time, mechanical, and that tingling, indefinable buzz, was not being allowed to rise through her veins.
Huck was whispering terms of endearment, but Aurelia ignored them, concentrating on stirring up forgotten sensations, returning them to life, but she couldn’t prevent herself from being distracted by the tobacco on his breath, the sweat on his back, the way his fringe of hair flopped against her cheek, the monotonous in and out movements of his body against and inside her.
It seemed to go on for ever.
Huck must have noticed her lack of enthusiasm. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘It’s okay,’ Aurelia said.
‘Sure?’ His thrusts slowed.
A flash of images rushed like wildfire in front of her eyes.
‘Harder,’ she said.
‘How?’
She threw her arms to the side. ‘Hold down my wrists, you can be rougher if you want,’ she suggested, memories of the events she had witnessed at the exhibition flooding back.
He gripped her, but there was no conviction in his movements. She was about to ask him to spank her, hurt her even, but hesitated, shocked by the cravings washing over her. She attempted to blank both the invasive memories and the sordid environment of the cheap motel room.
She looked up at Huck and their eyes met.
‘It’s not working,’ Aurelia said, detaching herself from him and rushing to dress.
‘What did I do wrong?’ Huck asked, fumbling for his own clothes, his arousal quickly abating.
‘Nothing.’
‘What did you mean by “harder”?’ he begged her to explain.