Eighty Days White

by Vina Jackson

  ‘Lily.’ Grayson’s tone was softer and he laid a hand gently on my elbow to pull me away from the crowd.

  Luba was grinning from ear to ear. Her beauty took on a mischievous quality when she smiled and distracted me momentarily from my rage. Under other circumstances, I would have liked to get to know her better, and find out more about how she came to be in the underwater pool at the ball. Water suited her. She reminded me of a mermaid.

  I turned my attention back to Grayson.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry you’re upset. But that was the risk that you took when you agreed to this project.’

  ‘You didn’t show me these photos. You showed me the others. You knew. You lied, or near enough.’

  ‘Can you not see the beauty in them? What I was trying to achieve? That’s you, Lily. The perfect domme.’

  His voice took on a far-away quality and I knew that in his mind he was travelling to that mental place where his ideas came from. Already thinking of the next project, the next picture, in which the model would be another pawn in his game.

  ‘It’s not me,’ I replied, in small voice.

  Deep down, though, I knew that it was me. The body didn’t lie. It might have been me through Grayson’s eyes, manipulated by his editing and composition skills and the mood of the narrative that he had put together, but it was still me. Lily the domme. But this version of me was just the domme part without the Lily. I had lost myself in the ritual, forgotten to keep looking for the intimacy that I longed for. The sex and everything associated with it had just become mindless.

  I turned around and walked away. There was no point arguing with him. It was like asking a river not to flow. Grayson was as much a product of his desires as the rest of us were, and his selfishness and artistry were a part of him. She was right. That was the risk that I had taken by posing for his project.

  The cool night air hit me in a rush. Lights from all directions glinted on the water, usually a sight that I would take pleasure in but tonight I just wanted to stamp my heavy boots on the concrete footpath as loudly as I could and I was in no mood for admiring the scenery.

  It was still early in the evening. The actual exhibition itself began in a few hours. Grayson had opened the event early to provide a selection of guests with a special preview of the photographs. Some of the pictures had ‘sold’ tags on them already, I recalled. I wondered if anyone would buy mine. If I would be memorialised like that for eternity on a stranger’s living-room wall. Or, maybe worse, if no one would want my photograph and it would be packed away at the end and stored in Grayson’s studio, gathering dust like a bad memory.

  A busker dressed all in black cut a lonely figure despite the milling crowds on the South Bank. He seemed a step apart from the world around him so I stopped to listen for a few moments and tossed him a couple of coins, then cursed when I reached an independent coffee shop and realised that I’d given the guitar player the last of my change. I had my credit card, enough money on my Oyster card to get home and that was it. Sometimes karma was a bitch.

  I called Neil, but his phone went straight to voicemail. He was out tonight, I remembered, at some kind of fancy PR shindig. It was at the Oxo Tower nearby and he’d suggested that we might be able to meet up afterwards if I ended up being out that late. Gatecrashing his event wouldn’t be possible in my denim mini skirt and Doc Martens. Luba or She or just about anyone at the exhibition dressed in all their finery would have no problem sweet-talking the bouncers, but I looked far too ordinary for that. Too ordinary for Neil. How the tables had turned.

  Finally I decided to give up and head for home. A hot bath and good night’s sleep would cure what ailed me. I had nearly reached the tube when I noticed the travel shop. It was the only retail store that was open and I felt a pang of sympathy for the staff working within before my eyes landed on the posters of exotic locations stuck to the windows and it occurred to me that perhaps what I needed was a change.

  Liana had moved to Amsterdam and that had worked out for her. Maybe I could do the same thing. Start somewhere fresh. Build a new life.

  The doorbell jingled as I pushed it open. Behind the counter sat a bored-looking man in his early twenties with a mop of ginger hair and the beginnings of a thin moustache. His complexion clashed terribly with the store’s bright-red colour scheme. Alongside him was a plump, cheerful middle-aged woman whose eyes lit up when I walked in. Perhaps it had been a slow day. Her nametag read ‘Sue’. She looked altogether too eager to deal with in my current state of mind so I stood in front of the redhead and waited for him to look up.

  ‘Can I help?’ he asked, in a tone that made it obvious he would rather not.

  ‘I’m thinking of going somewhere.’

  ‘I guessed that much,’ he retorted with a heavy hint of sarcasm. ‘What sort of somewhere?’

  ‘As far away from London as possible.’

  He pepped up after that. My obvious gloom had struck a chord.

  ‘America?’ he suggested.

  ‘Too many Americans,’ I replied unthinkingly, a defensive form of wit getting the better of me.

  He nodded sympathetically.

  ‘Australia?’ he asked.

  The glossy gleam of the red earth on the brochure he pushed in front of me was almost the same colour as his hair.

  ‘Too many beaches,’ I replied. I wasn’t sure I could cope with all those svelte bikini-clad surfers. It would be like living in a Cola commercial. I wanted something rougher.

  ‘I want to go somewhere that other people don’t,’ I said.

  ‘You should go to Darwin,’ he said sagely. ‘It’s the arse end of the world. I went there for a training course once. It’s full of people trying to get away from something. And the army barracks. Strange place. It looks a bit like this, though,’ he added, stabbing a rough, bitten-down nail at the bright-blue sky on the brochure. It was a funny shade of blue. Much more vivid than any horizon I had ever seen in England. That made my mind up.

  ‘How much is the ticket?’

  ‘Single or return?’

  ‘Single,’ I said firmly.

  ‘We have a sale on,’ he replied. ‘That’s why we’re open late. But there’s only a short window for the cheap flights.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘You’ll have to travel next week.’

  I felt just like I had when I told Jonah to go ahead with the teardrop tattoo. An overwhelming sense of rightness. As though this had been preordained and I’d spent my life swimming towards this moment, travelling down the sea of life on an inexorable current from which there was never any escape. You could fight the tide, but it would find a way to pull you along anyway.

  The ticket was pricey, and as I punched in my credit card details and completed all of the paperwork the realisation of what I was about to do hit me in the gut. What would my parents say? Liana? Neil?

  Perhaps I could slip away without telling a soul and call them when I arrived.

  My last week in England passed by without any fanfare or dramatics. I dropped into the music store and the club to hand in my resignation and took particular satisfaction in the look on She’s face as I told her that I wouldn’t be returning.

  I saved Neil ’til last. I couldn’t face telling him over the phone, so instead we arranged to have lunch. My treat this time, I said, and I chose a little place in Chinatown that did great dim sum and wouldn’t eat through too much of my savings. The nest egg I’d managed to save up still looked healthy enough to get me through a couple of months if I lived frugally, but I’d need to find work shortly after I arrived in Australia.

  Ten minutes had gone by since our appointed meeting time and he still hadn’t arrived. I frowned. Neil was usually so punctual you could set the clock by him. My phone burst into life. I was still using the Jace Everett ring tone that Liana had saved on the handset as a joke. ‘I wanna do bad things to you,’ it warbled.

  ‘Lily,’ Neil said breathlessly, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve been called into a
client meeting. No way out of it. For this new deal we’re tying up … Can I have a rain check? I’ll take you some place nice to make up for it.’

  ‘Sure. No problem.’ I tried to hide the disappointment in my voice. He was just a friend after all, I chided, and I’d be back to visit.

  ‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing. I’ll tell you another time.’

  ‘Rain check. Next week. I’m looking forward to it.’

  And with that he was gone.

  I sipped green tea and endured the curious glances of the waitresses for another hour as I gathered my thoughts and then I went home and packed. My flight left the next day.

  I’d send Neil a postcard when I arrived.

  The end of the year was fast approaching as I settled down in Darwin. I’d found a job in a local music store, which sold mostly CDs and second-hand vinyl and attracted an interesting crowd. I’d been taken on for the busy pre-Christmas period as an additional pair of hands, but another staffer had left to get married ahead of the festivities and I’d been offered the position full-time and gladly accepted. Most of the money that I’d saved had been spent on travel and subsistence since I had left England, and it was good to be able to rely on a regular, if modest, income.

  Christmas Eve had been spent, of all places, on the beach with the guys I had befriended from the store and their crowd. It felt odd celebrating in the sand, wearing only a bikini, knowing almost everyone I knew back in Europe was sheltering in the cold and crowding around log fires. A warm Christmas, albeit in the wet season, just didn’t feel right to a cold-weather Northern hemisphere girl like me and this disquieting feeling unsettled me. Maybe it was the permanent smell of eucalyptus like a chemical trigger affecting my senses.

  I woke up late with a bad hangover on Christmas Day and the untidy sight of my small room conjured up a deep well of depression and self-pity. I had no plans for the day, or what was left of it, and most places I reckoned would be closed, so I couldn’t even avail myself of the comforting darkness of a cinema or the air-conditioned busyness of the local mall and its brightly lit windows.

  I sighed theatrically, as much for the mirror facing me on the bathroom wall as for the invisible spectators of my pretend road to Calvary.

  Maybe later I would phone my parents, who had both proven totally unsurprised by my sudden move to the other side of the world, although I seemed to recall them mentioning some time back that they had plans for the holiday season so might not be home, even after factoring in the time difference. I sent Liana a text message with the usual banalities for this time of year, and then, as an afterthought, sent an almost identical one to Neil, who had never even responded after I’d left the UK. I guessed he’d taken my departure as a personal affront, and I thought it best to leave him simmering.

  Surprisingly he responded within the hour, even though it must be night-time back where he was. Maybe he had forgiven me by now.

  Miss you. Hope you’re having a lovely time. N

  Was he partying? With someone? Or was he alone like me?

  I realised he was one of the few friends I still had left and I missed him too in a strange way. It would have been nice to talk, exchange gossip or news.

  I had deleted the numbers of Dagur, Grayson and She from my contacts list some weeks back, so they were out of reach, but I didn’t regret that particular decision. Leonard was still listed; that was one step too far for me to take. Sometimes you live with hope against hope, even though everything around you tells you just shouldn’t.

  Had I ever spent Christmas alone before? No, and it felt awful. And then I knew that in seven days’ time, it would be New Year’s Eve and I would have to confront my loneliness all over again. Memories of the riotous times we had all spent in Brighton when we had been students came swirling back to the surface of my mind, and I couldn’t help but smile. The silliness, the companionship, the sense of belonging. All things I had lost.

  I forced myself to get out of bed and shower, then had an improvised breakfast of milk and cereals, but still the bleak rest of the day lay ahead of me.

  I plugged in my laptop, and walked over to the trunk in which I kept a messy assortment of books, old magazines and my DVDs. Half of the movies I had accumulated, mostly unwanted duplicates the store was ready to dispose of, were no longer in their cases, the discs scattered haphazardly along the bottom of the trunk. I picked up a handful at random, wondering whether I was in the right mood for a comedy or an action flick. Romances were certainly off the menu.

  Carrying the DVDs and the laptop to the bed, I closed the room’s curtains to cut off the daylight and tucked myself into bed. The patterns of the screensaver danced in the artificial penumbra I had created. I moved my finger over the pad and the screen came to life, its tidy line of icons like a bedrock frieze.

  I was about to insert one of the DVDs when my attention was caught by the blue Skype icon. I clicked on it and scrolled through the directory. There were only half a dozen, mostly family and someone I didn’t even recognize. And Leonard.

  A symbol indicated he was online right now.

  My heart jumped.

  I called him.

  The screen flickered and his face appeared.

  ‘Hello, Lily.’

  He seemed tired, his eyes imbued with sadness. Behind him, a bookshelf stood in half darkness. There was a terrible bleakness about the surroundings and his ghostlike features at their centre.

  ‘I …’ I swallowed hard. ‘I just wanted to wish you a happy Christmas.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, my love,’ Leonard said.

  ‘I still miss you, you know.’

  ‘Me too, Lily, but we’ve discussed this before and—’

  I raised my hand, sensing his irritation, forcefully interrupting his words. It had been a forlorn hope calling him the way I had. We gazed at each other silently, both deep in thoughts. It was strange seeing his familiar face on a screen, the skin I knew so well now a pale accumulation of pixels. Leonard appeared a little older now, as if the passage of time since he last touched me and my lips had surveyed the private landscape of his body, had accelerated in the absence of me. More likely it was the distancing effect that this mode of communication imposed on us. And as that thought occurred to me, I also felt a tsunami-sized sense of both relief and tenderness for him, and began to understand his renunciation of me better. He was the one who was sacrificing himself for me. Not the other way round. The storm clouds surrounding my heart lifted.

  I was about to break the news that I was now in Australia when Leonard began speaking again.

  ‘You haven’t changed a single bit,’ he said. ‘You are so lovely.’

  ‘Why, thank you.’

  On impulse I lifted the top of the thin nightgown I was wearing and showed him my breasts.

  On the other side of the world, Leonard smiled.

  ‘They haven’t changed either,’ he remarked. ‘As scrumptious as ever.’

  ‘Well,’ I pointed out, ‘I might be young, as you so often remind me, but I’m not likely to grow into a large cup size. This is what I am.’

  ‘You always had that mischievous streak, didn’t you?’

  I nodded.

  I wished him a merry Christmas one more time and closed the connection.

  I knew I would never see Leonard again. He had set me free. Once and for all.

  As ever, the heavens opened at four-thirty and the heavy rain pelted down, cleansing the air and the town. By evening, the skies were clear again. I was told the wet season usually lasted all the way to May.

  It was New Year’s Eve. I’d tried to hook up with some of my co-workers, but all had family obligations. It would be another evening spent on my own.

  As I reflected on the past year and its varied adventures and sorrows, as well as occasional joys, I found myself drawn to the sea front after an aimless walk through the Smith Street Mall where most of the stores were closing early.

  T
here was a bar by the beach that also served as a restaurant in the evenings which I was quite fond of, simple and uncluttered and with friendly staff who were not too inquisitive. I’d grown to enjoy parking myself in small bars and observing others, trying to guess their occupations, their past, their personal stories. I had once done the same at the fetish club in London before She had got me more involved in the action, and imagined elaborate stories, some the size of novels, about the visitors to whose special tastes we catered. There was no harm in speculating and it kept me entertained.

  Here the visitors to the bar were, of course, less colourful: transient hippies whose contrived appearances all seemed to originate from the same mould; older locals who gave the impression they hadn’t left Australia’s Northern Territory in their whole lifetime, wedded to the land and sea like burnished icons; restless youth dressing the way they thought hipsters did in the distant big cities and mostly getting it wrong and advertising their blissful ignorance.

  But, for me, every single one had a story to tell. Maybe one day I would try to write about them.

  Lily the writer.

  It had a nice sound to it.

  The nice thing about this place, the terrace with its ring of palm trees and thick white sun umbrellas looking over the vivid blue of the ocean, was that no one minded if you sat, either at the bar or in a quiet corner, sipping your beer and making it last for hours. Today, they were busier, the staff preparing the tables, juggling with large white plates, distributing glasses and cutlery and chintzy little pots in which candles were being inserted. New Year’s Eve must be one of their best nights of the year for business, I guessed.

  The evening’s first diners were beginning to arrive and, in the small alcove where I had taken refuge, I called for another beer and asked for the snacks menu. I was in no mood for a full meal. The bar offered a mix of wraps and sandwiches.

  I watched as the place filled up. Terry, the young waitress who had been looking after me, came to the end of her shift and was replaced by Stellios, an elderly waiter with a pronounced Greek accent who’d been working here for over twenty years he’d once proudly informed me with fatherly concern.