Eighty Days Amber (16 page)

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.

I leaned over the rail and waited. I was unsure whether or not I could take it but I was willing to try. I saw no reason not to.

She put her hand on the bump of my lower spine, shifting me into the right position. Her hand drifted between my legs, testing my wetness. Whatever she found, it was not what she was looking for. She shuffled in her bag again and I heard a click of a lid flipping open and then
flinched as the lubricant, thick, cold and viscous, was applied to my pussy.

The first stroke did not split me in two as I had feared but filled me to the brim. Her cock was an imprint that travelled all the way from my cunt to my heart to my brain. It made me feel whole, at home in myself. I pushed back against her and heard her grunt. She pushed against me, and we continued in a tug of push and pull until she began to tire, and leaned forward against my back, holding me in an embrace as she rubbed her finger over my clitoris until I came.

We stood there a while longer staring out over the city. Pedestrians wandered the streets below and occasionally looked up at us. Whether they could see two naked women looking back down at them from fourteen storeys above was unclear.

When I woke in the morning she was gone. The only reminder of the night before was the scent of smoke and lemon that still lingered, and the pile of crisp bills that she had left on the glass coffee table beneath an empty pack of her French cigarettes.

One hundred pounds in total. Not even enough for an hour with the cheapest run-of-the-mill hooker. I couldn’t decide what offended me most, that she had opted to pay me, or that she had paid so little.

I didn’t trust so easily after that. I continued to meet men and women and to fuck them, but I was no longer free with my affections, my mind or my soul. I kept a little part of myself hidden and I threw away the key.

My emotional detachment may not have improved my dancing but it made it bearable. I came to believe that I
wasn’t fucking at all. I was merely an actress, a purveyor of fantasies, an illusionist selling a dream.

We were not selling sex. That was the job of whore houses and strip joints. The Network’s shows were part fantasy and part irony, a visual affirmation that lovemaking was merely an extension of life and not something to be hidden behind closed doors, sneered at or giggled over. Madame Denoux’s vision was a dance in which the two partners would join in the most intimate of ways, without drawing any particular attention to the fact. The crescendo, the penetration, would be simply another step in the rhythm of life.

I continued to refuse to meet my partners, Tango, Inca Priest and Ballet Instructor, outside of our set. The only news I had of them in between shows were the regular updates from the Network to confirm matters of scheduling and the health of the members and exchange the certificates that we were all required to complete monthly.

These elements, off stage, added a hint of sterility and matter-of-fact business to the proceedings, but when the music switched on and my partner appeared from the darkness and into the stage light I forgot the organisational and biological necessities and revelled in the response of the audience and the feeling of a bare cock thrusting inside me, a stranger’s cock, and the knowledge that we had never engaged in a single conversation besides the most fundamental, the one that occurred between our bodies.

It felt risky and dangerous and endlessly arousing, and cemented my idea that I had become some kind of ethereal sexual being, only half human, the rest a mixture of pheromones and desire, a walking receptacle for lust.

However, off stage was a different matter altogether. I
continued to pick up men and sometimes women and sometimes those who did not identify entirely with either sex but something different again. They were the ones that I was most at home with, the gender benders, the queers and the trans men and women who fucked like anatomy was irrelevant and didn’t seem to feel as though their entire being was defined by their genitals.

Most of the time, though, my conquests and the feelings that they inspired within me were unremarkable. I bedded a new person in each city. I collected people as though they were souvenirs, to replace the museums and art galleries that I never visited.

Florence was the only one that I remembered by name. The others I remembered by the music that inevitably reverberated through every room that we returned to, a symphony of tunes designed to relax, stimulate, or simply hide the inevitable noises of lovemaking, the squeaking of hotel-room beds and the slapping of body parts joining in energetic fervour.

In Prague, I met a black girl who penetrated me with a strap-on against a wall in the dark shadows of a club whilst The Cure’s ‘Lullaby’ reverberated through the speakers and the other punters continued to drink beer and eat crisps and stare at each other with glazed expressions completely unaware of what was taking place in the corner of the room where two women who appeared to be engaged in conversation where in fact engaged in passionate lovemaking behind the feeble barrier of a bar stool.