Eighty Days Amber (Eight Days)

by Jackson, Vina

  Again I began with Debussy. It was my lifeline, the piece of music that put me at ease in preparation for another unknown fuck.

  For this set I had selected a Gregorian chant. The music was not remotely Peruvian, but the heavy, sombre tone suited the ritualistic intention of the show to follow and I found the choir of monastic voices trilling in deep melancholic cadence both soothing and seductive.

  My Inca Priest, unlike the music, hailed from South America and he was dark haired, muscled, well hung and as beautiful as my previous partner, though he did not move me to arousal in the same way, and I was glad that on this occasion I had thought to pre-lubricate my entrance to facilitate the passage of what I knew would be another over-sized penis, as being hung like a horse was apparently one of the prerequisites for male members of the Network.

  He had a large and ornate cross emblem tattooed on his chest. The cross lay inside a pair of wings like the spine of a bird. It was a half Christian and half pagan motif, which lent another note of mysticism to the show. The Network’s assessors had chosen my partners well.

  The dance culminated in sex as they all did, but on this occasion I had added an extra element of shock value which I had not described on my check sheet so that it would be as much of a surprise to the two madames as it would to my eventual real-life audience.

  When the moment came and the Inca Priest pierced the small bag that I had inserted deep into my pussy and the fake theatrical blood ran down my legs in a parody of Virgin sacrifice, the onlookers’ hiss was audible even over the throb of the loudspeakers.

  They remained wordless, but I retained no small thrill of satisfaction at having elicited some sort of response from my two seemingly emotionless spectators.

  The surprise was all mine when I met the partner in my third and final act, the Ballet School Instructor, and discovered that though identified in the catalogue as male, he had not been born a man in the anatomical sense.

  He was tall and slender, his alabaster skin contrasting vividly with his dark, short haircut – a crop that accentuated the delicate line of his jaw and high, cat-like cheekbones. He had eyebrows as fine as a moth’s wings and a feminine curve to his chest suggesting the presence of breasts, however slight they might be. He wore flesh-coloured tights that did not in any way conceal the obvious bulge beneath them, but it wasn’t until he pulled down the stockinged fabric to reveal a harness and a dildo that I realised I was about to be impaled by a strap-on for the first time.

  The experience of penetration was not diminished in any way by the knowledge that the instrument responsible was faux rather than flesh, and again I was impressed by the perceptive examiners who had reviewed the brief description of my proposed act and read into it the mixture of severity and femininity that encapsulated the Russian ballet instructors who had so affected my training.

  ‘You did well,’ said Assessor A, or Assessor B, with the barest hint of a smile on her lips when my third act had reached its finale.

  And so, with the selection and training rigmarole complete, the next step on my journey began.

  I packed my bag again.

  Packing and unpacking had become such a regular occurrence in my life that I no longer allowed myself to become attached to the cities or the houses that I lived in or the friends or lovers that I gathered in each. I’d been born under a fickle star, and I supposed that moving from place to place was a part of my make-up as much as my flat chest and long, curly blonde hair. There was no point in becoming sentimental about it. Each new adventure was one of life’s seasons, ever changing. I may as well shake my fist at the rain or grow tired of the sun shining for all the good that it would do me to complain about going on the road again.

  The Network folk had somehow managed to obtain a convincing set of fake documents for me. With my spurious paperwork I was now able to travel and work around the world to my heart’s content, and I began to see myself as more than a dancer. I was a nymph, a creature of the night, a woman of fire, a living promise of sex. Sometimes I wondered whether I was even real, or just the product of someone else’s dream. A teenage boy’s fantasy gone wild.

  My dreams of fancy were abruptly shattered when Madame Denoux confirmed my first booking, in London. Someone there had booked the Ballet Instructor scenario. My departure from New Orleans was not to be in the direction of Paris, Milan, or any of the other glamorous cities that in my mind were places of intrigue and mystique. I knew London was a grey place, but I firmly intended to bring some colour to the place.

  6

  Dancing Alone

  It was raining when I flew into Heathrow.

  As it had been raining when I left Seattle, and for almost every day of the eight weeks that I had spent there completing the recruitment process with the Pleasure Network.

  The similarity in weather conditions between the two cities brought me a small degree of comfort.

  I peered out of the tiny window from the comfort of my plush armchair in first class at the city of London flying up to greet us through a layer of fine mist. It was hard to tell from such a height, of course, but the buildings seemed lower and less uniform than those in New York. The city was split in two by the long silver thread of the Thames River that wound through it. I could make out just one of the landmarks that I was expecting to see: the London Eye glowing whitely in the centre and adding a touch of frivolity to an otherwise sombre tone, an addition that I had always thought odd. Why would a serious town have a piece of architecture that would be better suited to a fun fair or Coney Island as one of its major sights? Such a thing would never happen in St Petersburg.

  ‘Your first visit to London?’ asked the woman sitting next to me in a clipped voice that could have hailed from anywhere. She was wearing a cream silk blouse buttoned almost up to the neck and on her feet, neatly crossed at the ankles, a pair of tan loafers. Her scent carried a definite note of tobacco, and lemon zest.

  ‘Yes. I haven’t had the chance to travel much through Europe.’

  ‘You will enjoy it,’ she replied authoritatively, as if I hadn’t any choice in the matter.

  She was reading a small book bound in soft black nappa leather with a duck-egg blue satin ribbon bookmark attached to the spine. The type of book that begs to be picked up and stroked. She leaned back and closed her eyes as we dropped through the sky and the plane began to judder as the pilot prepared for landing. I craned forward to read the title: Scarlett’s Allsorts, printed in brass letters in an old-fashioned font. The woman woke again, and began to read. I caught just half a line over her shoulder: My body felt like it was singing. I smiled.

  The line set a dozen half-baked thoughts and images freewheeling through my brain, like a flock of birds headed skyward, upset by the arrival of a stone flung into their midst. What did the woman look like naked? I wondered. What type of lingerie did she wear? Not girlish, I considered. Nor old-fashioned. Plain, classic, well made and unfussy in black, cream or beige, perhaps slightly high cut in the knickers.

  She stood up and stretched to reach her bag stored in the overhead locker. It was square, plain black with a solid zipper, almost a briefcase. She slipped the book into the side pocket. Her trousers were tailored and sat at her waist, emphasising the straightness of her figure, which lacked almost any sign of feminine curve besides the bulge of her breasts. Her hair was silvery grey and cut into a sharp bob. She flicked the stray locks on each side behind her ears impatiently, displaying the roundness of her lobes, each one sporting a small pearl stud. I guessed that she was in her forties, though she might have been fifty. It was so hard to tell.

  ‘Is this yours?’ she asked, holding my black tote. I nodded as she passed it down to me.

  I slipped into the aisle behind her, where I stood admiring the length of her legs and tight shape of her backside until the flight attendant announced that we were free to disembark and the short line of people ahead of us began to move.

  We were the only women in first class. All the other passengers were
men, most of them squat, pallid and uninteresting. They regularly threw both of us curious glances that I ignored, but at least none of them gave me a business card and suggested that we ‘come to an arrangement’ as the strange man in the seersucker jacket and knotted brown tie who accompanied me on the flight from New Orleans to Seattle had.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Volk,’ said the air hostess in a nasal twang that I barely comprehended as I squeezed past her to exit the plane and took my first steps into Britain, barely a step or two behind my silver-haired companion.

  Tomorrow night’s set would be a breeze. I was booked to perform the Ballet Instructor, and the length of his tightly harnessed hard silicone dildo was bound to slip right in if my current mood was anything to go by. I felt slightly lightheaded watching the pair of loafers ahead of me walking up the ramp towards Passport Control in quick, sharp steps. She wasn’t wearing socks, and the flash of her bare ankle was enough to make my pussy throb.

  Today I was travelling with a German passport. It would be the first of many times that I would pass through customs with false papers. The man who checked the photo page and scanned it through the machine asked few questions and barely glanced at my picture before waving me through. He had a pock-marked face and a thick, square-cut jaw like a superhero who had fallen on hard times.

  The grey-haired woman was waiting for me by the baggage carousel.

  ‘Are you a woman of the people, Miss Volk?’ she asked.

  Volk was a Russian variant of the nickname vovk, meaning ‘wolf’, but could be mistaken for the Germanic meaning of the word, ‘folk’ or ‘common people’. Perhaps she was German.

  ‘I would say that I’m more of an acquired taste. Not for everyone . . .’

  ‘Like all the best things in life. And you like books? It is not considered polite to read over shoulders, you know.’

  Was she hitting on me or berating me? Women had flirted with me in California, but not like this. The Californian girls had trailed manicured fingernails around the rims of their champagne glasses or giggled in throaty echoes through lipsticked mouths, and never actually verbalised the questions that hung between us, kiss me, touch me, come home with me, buy me a drink. Not this frank, ironic tone and straight-backed posture that seemed to be leading directly towards something that I was not yet aware of.

  ‘It looked like a good book,’ I replied.

  ‘Would you like to read it to me after dinner?’

  A smile played across her lips. She knew what my answer would be before I replied. It was inevitable. Another twist on the river of life and I could already feel the current rising and pushing me inexorably along in the direction of her hotel room. Though in the end, it was mine that we returned to.

  We had agreed to eat at Lena, an Italian restaurant in Shoreditch, having exchanged numbers and disappeared back to our respective accommodations to check in, drop off our baggage and shower.

  She still carried her almost-briefcase but had changed into a pair of tight leather leggings and another buttoned-up blouse that hung untucked over her hips. It was short sleeved and displayed the muscles on her arms. Her legs were encased in a pair of scuffed-leather riding boots with silver buckles on the heels.

  She had an old-fashioned name, Florence, though she said that I could call her Flo. I could not adjust to the shorter version, and continued with the longer.

  Florence smoked French cigarettes. One before the entrée, and another after the main course.

  ‘A palate cleanser,’ she called it, before stepping outside and disappearing into the shadows so that all I could see of her through the window of the brightly lit restaurant was a single ember glowing red hot in the night.

  We shared a lemon ricotta tart with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream, a white ball flecked black with the seeds of the vanilla pod. She ordered coffee spiked with almond liqueur.

  She tasted just as I noticed she had smelled when I sat alongside her on the aeroplane. Of lemon and cigarettes, and something else that I couldn’t place. I ran my tongue over hers and held her saliva in my mouth for a moment to decipher the peculiar combination that made up her kiss, in the same way that I would consider the particular fusion of flavours in a glass of wine.

  Florence was German. She worked as a chemist and academic and was visiting London to give a series of lectures on the advances in anti-malarial drugs. She didn’t ask me what I did for a living, or why a woman with a Russian accent was travelling on a German passport and did not speak a word of Deutsch besides Guten Tag and Tschuss!

  We were both in flat heels and it was still early, so we caught the underground from Old Street station to London Bridge and bought a bottle of wine and a packet of ginger biscuits from a corner store at the station. That was the other thing she tasted of, I realised, when she pushed me up against the barrier that separated the Thames path from the river and kissed me again. She caught me unexpectedly, causing the plastic bag in my hand to swing out and the wine bottle in it to clang loudly against the metal railing.

  It began to rain again, light drips that misted wetly onto our faces and wrung the curls from my hair. She took my hand and we ran back up to the road and caught a black cab to my hotel on the South Bank, close to Waterloo station and the Royal Festival Hall.

  I had a penthouse suite in the Park Plaza. The London Eye seemed almost close enough to touch from the balcony that surrounded the room, and from this distance I understood what the Londoners saw in it. There was a certain light-hearted grandeur and synchronicity in the slowly turning wheel, and a beauty in the bright lights that shone from each capsule like a series of fireflies trapped under glass and set into perpetual motion.

  Florence poured the wine, and handed me a ginger biscuit. She hoisted herself up onto the flat top of the balustrade that bordered the balcony protecting the room’s inhabitants from plunging to their deaths whilst looking out at the view. She had her back to thin air and a fourteen-storey drop.

  ‘Come down,’ I laughed. ‘Imagine the mess that the street cleaners will have to clear up in the morning if you fall. They might charge a fee back to the room.’

  ‘I’ll make sure you get your money’s worth,’ she replied. She had opened her legs wide apart and the tight trousers clung to the delineation of her pussy in pornographic style. I could see the slight bulge of her mound and the soft lines of her labia. I had been mistaken about her underwear. She wasn’t wearing any at all.

  ‘I doubt you will manage that from there,’ I teased her.

  ‘You promised to read to me,’ she replied.

  ‘I didn’t promise anything. You asked me to. There is a difference.’

  There was a challenge in my words, but she didn’t rise to it as I had expected. Instead, her expression softened.

  ‘Will you read to me?’ she asked, almost plaintively.

  ‘Yes.’

  I took her hand and led her back into the room. She pulled the leather-bound book from the pocket of her bag, handed it to me and lay down on the bed. She was still fully dressed, and wearing her long leather boots. I lay down alongside her.

  The soft leather cover felt like skin in my hands. I flicked the ribbon back from its place where it marked the first page of a story, Shoe Shine at Liverpool Street Station.

  I rolled each word in my mouth as I read aloud to catch the feel of the syllables, some quick, some slow, some soft, some low, others harsh, some breathless. Florence closed her eyes as I read. She wasn’t wearing any mascara but her eyelashes were so dark they might have been dyed. They were too thick and black for her face and bordered her eyes like bruises, as if something heavy weighed down on her in the night, waiting for her to awaken.

  When I had finished, her eyelids fluttered open again, and she rolled over onto her side and stroked her fingers over my lips. I opened my mouth and sucked one of them in. She ran her hand down under the waistband of her trousers and then returned her fingers to my mouth, stopping a centimetre or so away, as if she knew that I was a visitor to a new
and foreign land and she was offering me a taste of some local delicacy. I propped my head up to reach, and drank it in.

  It was the first time that I had tasted a woman, besides checking the flavour of my own secretions both out of curiosity and to reassure myself when I experienced a shameful sort of fear when Chey went down on me and I had worried so much that the experience would be unpleasant for him although he had laughed at my discomfort and insisted that the opposite was true.

  Florence tasted like a sweet kind of nothing. Her scent was a little musky. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

  My introduction to the taste of women, like so many other things, turned out to be inconsequential. I was ambivalent. Again, I wondered what all the fuss was about.

  Her lips on mine, though, were a joyful press of softness meeting softness and her hands, once they found their way beneath my clothes, were slow and skilful, and all the warm heat of her body against mine made my skin tingle and my clit swell. We were a tangle of limbs together, searching, stroking, pinching, caressing. She held her breath when I popped the buttons open on her blouse and unhooked the back of her bra, releasing her breasts, and moaned when I circled her nipple with my tongue.

  I discovered when I removed her bra that she had only one breast. The other had been removed, and in its place lay a slight swell of flesh with a line running across where the nipple would be. The scar was a silvery furrow that ran in a horizontal curve across her skin like an uncrossed crucifix. She exhaled when I bent my head and licked the length of it lightly from one side to the other.

  ‘Let’s go outside again,’ she said, suddenly. ‘I need the fresh air.’

  We were both a little drunk, on the wine, on each other. If I kissed her once more I thought that I might be intoxicated enough to climb over the barrier and leap off the side and feel the wind under my arms carrying me down to the ground.

  Florence picked up her bag on the way to the glass sliding door and wrestled from it the largest strap-on cock that I had ever seen. It was twice the girth of the Ballet Instructor’s and an inch or two longer. She buckled it on over her hips and followed me through the door. It bounced as she walked, heavy with promise. She was naked, and the nipple on her single breast poked out like a berry lonesome on its own island.