Eighty Days Red (18 page)

Twenty minutes later, we pulled up into a side street, dark and quiet aside from the red sign advertising the club and the two security guys standing out front, eyeing up the couples arriving one after the other.

We were greeted warmly by the blonde girl on the door, who took the cover charge. She looked us up and down, examining our state of dress, and Lauralynn said a few words to her in German. The girl waved us on.

The entryway was decorated entirely in red, seemingly the universal colour of sex. There was a glass case on the right, displaying a couple of porno DVDs and a purple latex bolero with a white frill for sale. A poster advertised a special night coming up, ‘Fuck party’.

Lauralynn was sitting down on a red, velvet-covered bench that lined one wall, pulling off her high heels and then shimmying down her skinny jeans.
‘Lauralynn,’ I hissed at her.
‘It’s OK,’ she replied. ‘It’s meant to be fetish wear but they’re pretty casual about the dress code. They’ll let us through in our underwear. You can get changed here.’
She had pulled off her T-shirt, and was slipping back into her high heels, wearing nothing else besides a black thong.
‘I really don’t feel like this sort of party.’
The last thing I wanted to do was have sex, or watch people having sex. Or dance, for that matter, and dance naked least of all. If Lauralynn had wanted to purposefully engineer a way to make me feel more depressed, she couldn’t have done much better than this. Maybe she would let me lie down in the cloakroom and curl up in the foetal position while she partied on without me.
‘Trust me,’ she said, ‘and take off your clothes.’
She had an authoritative way of speaking that brooked no argument, even if I had been in the sort of mood to put up a fight. The domme in her talking, I suppose, and dommes, in my experience, are even harder to say no to than their male equivalents.
I slipped out of my dress, a muted leopard-print shift, revealing a pair of long boots, black underwear and my black underbust corset, the one that Dominik had bought me, which had followed me halfway around the world and held more memories, both painful and pleasant, than I cared to remember.
Lauralynn took my hand and led me up the red carpeted steps to the bar. She handed me a shot of tequila, without asking me what I wanted to drink.
‘Get this down you,’ she said. ‘It’ll take the edge off.’
I didn’t bother with the lemon and salt, just threw the shot back in one and pushed the glass back onto the counter. I stared around the room to see what she was planning on getting me into tonight, all in the name of cheering me up.
Alongside the bar was a dance floor, which was still fairly quiet although it was quite late.
‘The girl on the door said it doesn’t really get going until two, when they open the upstairs area,’ Lauralynn said. She had finished her shot, and was licking the remaining salt and sugar off her fingers. A couple of guys were staring at us hungrily, the usual handful of single men, most of them in uniforms of black shirt and trousers, that occupied these sorts of places, apparently in every country in the world. At least so far they were looking at us from a safe distance.
Lauralynn followed my gaze and nervous expression as I automatically shuffled in closer to her, feeling very aware of my naked breasts and fighting the desire to wrap my arms around my chest and hide them, which would only draw more attention.
‘Ignore them,’ she said glancing at the lone men disdainfully, as if they weren’t worth more attention than something unpleasant she had discovered on the soles of her shoes. ‘Let’s look around.’
We entered a room on the right. It was dark, so dark that I could barely make out a couple of bodies curled up on a bed in the corner of the room. The people sitting on top appeared to be just cuddling, but I couldn’t be sure, and averted my eyes hurriedly. I was in no mood for voyeurism tonight. It took me a minute to work out that the glowing artwork on the walls represented genitalia, both the male and female variety. Near the entrance was a large glow-inthe-dark vagina sculpture which stuck out of the wall in brightly coloured 3D. A large green ring was attached to the sculpture’s clitoris. On other walls, similar sculptures showed a large phallus and animated men and women in various stages of copulation.
There was a small St Andrew’s cross, and a spanking bench, both pushed out of the way. In the next room, a sex swing, and another couple of beds. These ones contained more couples, but my eyes still hadn’t quite adjusted and I just caught glimpses, a breast here, a red high-heeled shoe there, a woman moaning with pleasure surrounded by a ring of single men watching her.
Lauralynn was looking around with an interested gaze, drinking it all in.
I couldn’t stand to watch.
‘I have to get out of here,’ I said to her, pushing my way through to the exit, back onto the dance floor. A porno film was playing on a loop. The first thing I noticed was that all the women had pubic hair, and none of them were blond. The cultural language of sex.
The DJ was playing dance music, and bright lights drifted through the room. The people on the dance floor were lost in the music, and seemed immune to the sex around them. A woman dressed like Lauralynn, in just a thong, was dancing with her partner who was similarly clad in just his underwear. Other than their states of mutual undress, they could have been any middleaged couple dancing at a wedding. At least, thank heaven for small mercies, I hadn’t seen any flaccid cocks bouncing, or men stroking themselves yet.
Lauralynn took my hand again, and swept me along, past the bar, to a pair of velvet curtains that signalled the entrance to another room at the back.
I grumbled in protest again, but she didn’t even turn, never mind stop and listen.
‘Here we are,’ she said, as we stepped through and turned to the right. ‘This is what I brought you for. Nothing like a bath to improve one’s state of mind.’
We were standing alongside a jacuzzi, as yet unoccupied. Fresh, fluffy white towels were piled alongside, and a sign pointed to a large shower room around the corner, requesting that patrons rinse off first before taking a turn in the pool. Lauralynn had already shimmied out of her thong, taken a towel, and turned the water on. I hurried after her, to avoid standing next to the hot tub for more than a few moments alone, in case one of the stray single men took my solitary presence as an invitation.
I tried not to stare at the rivulets of water that raced over the curves of Lauralynn’s body.
I’d previously seen her in her orchestral black and whites, signature skinny jeans and then a latex catsuit so tight it could have been painted on. Naked, she was all that the catsuit had promised, tall and curvaceous with legs that went on for miles. It was her manner that truly turned her into a bona fide sex bomb, the message in her eyes that invited attention but assured the onlooker that they would never be in with a chance. It was no wonder that men wanted to worship her. It wasn’t just that she wouldn’t give them a second look under any other circumstances, but also something in her nature that made me want to throw myself at her feet in return for half a smile. There was something queenly about her.
I joined her in the stream of the shower, washing away the sorrows of the last day and night under the flow of hot water.
We stepped into the jacuzzi together, and sat still, soaking, for another hour, barely exchanging a word. If anyone endeavoured to join us, then Lauralynn sent them on their way again with one cold look.
I was utterly relaxed, and close to sound asleep by the time she began to unfurl herself from her position in the tub and dried off.
Sounds emanating from neighbouring alcoves and rooms near the shower room suggested that the party was now in full swing. I hadn’t become any more interested in joining the fray, but was no longer disturbed by the soft moans of pleasure and occasional grunt.
It was 3 a.m. by the time we flagged a taxi to get home again. The bars down Oranienstraße were still open and filled with people. Even IchOrya, the coffee shop that I’d spent most of the day in yesterday, still had its lights on, and a couple of people sitting out front smoking cigarettes. Berlin was truly the city that never slept.
I buzzed us into the hotel. We were all on the same floor, our rooms joined by the empty corridor. The others were either still out or sound asleep, probably the former, as we had all become virtually nocturnal, resting during the day, performing and partying at night.
Lauralynn stripped straight off again, and I did the same. We’d already spent half the evening with our clothes off in each other’s company and I was too tired to think about finding the pyjamas that I carried in my suitcase in case of platonic company.
It was lunchtime by the time either of us stirred. I woke up to find myself curled into Lauralynn’s arms, my cheek resting on her breasts and the sweet smell of her shampoo filling my nostrils. It was a distinctly comfortable place to be, and for a moment I thought I might understand how it might feel to be a man, waking up alongside a woman. She was taller than me, and in the position of the person giving comfort, so in that respect it was not so different, but she was much softer and the scent of her body had a different sort of musk to it.
She ran her fingers through my hair when she woke, as though we were lovers, and held me closer to her. I wondered for a moment what it would be like to kiss her, but even if I had had the confidence, it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. I couldn’t hit on one of Dominik’s friends, or lovers, or whatever she was to him, even if he and I were still technically free from any formal commitment to each other.
‘I think I might die without caffeine,’ she said.
A girl after my own heart.
We dressed quickly, eager to find fresh air and food. I hadn’t eaten much of the takeaway food and Lauralynn had an appetite like a furnace that constantly needed stoking.
I stopped en route to listen to a busker playing Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m on Fire’, batting away Lauralynn’s protests that she would pass out any minute if she didn’t get breakfast in a hurry. I was always sentimental about buskers, remembering when I had been one of them, and dropped a five-euro note in his case in exchange for a CD in a sleeve with a cover that looked halfway between homemade and professional. It read: ‘Kaurna Cronin, Feathers’. I smiled at the artist, who doffed his trilby to me as Lauralynn hopped impatiently from one foot to another.
‘Can’t you flirt after I’ve been fed?’ she asked grumpily, as I tucked the CD into my bag.
We had coffee, and a plate of bread, sliced meat and cheese at Matilda’s. Chris and Fran were already there, but just finishing off their meal, with plans to root around in the record store next door. We were booked again that evening in the same venue, so just had the afternoon and early evening to kill.
Fran sized up Lauralynn, and stared at me with a raised eyebrow. ‘Sleep well?’
I introduced her, as an old friend of a friend. Soon Fran and Chris were off again, with promises to see us later in the day.
‘Your sister?’ Lauralynn asked.
‘Yes.’
‘You look alike. Different, but still the same underneath. She has the same spark in her eye.’
‘Don’t you start. Chris is obviously after her and one friend messing with my sister is about all I can stand.’
We ordered another round of coffees and sat outside the cafe for a while on the pink blankets that lined the wooden bench seats, looking out at the street and watching the people go by.
Lauralynn was easy company. She didn’t seem to require any input from me, and was content to just sit still by my side. Being alongside her was soothing, and gave me a sense of hope. She wasn’t the sort to be anything other than deadpan honest, no matter how much it might hurt me, so if she thought that Dominik and I stood a chance, then we did.
Eventually, she broke the silence.
‘Let’s go exploring.’
‘Sure,’ I shrugged. We were leaving Berlin in a couple of days, and despite my best intentions, I’d spent more time sleeping than looking around. The rest of the tour was just single nights here and there, and no further breaks until we got back to London.
We rented bicycles and cycled over to the Flohmarkt in Mauerpark. It was packed with people. Half the population of Berlin seemed to be there, rooting around the stalls for knickknacks, vintage clothing and second-hand furniture. I spotted a pair of zebra-print ankle boots in a size too small for me, and acquired them for Fran.
We bought two plastic cups of fresh orange juice and picked our way through the crowds to the park opposite the market. It was a fairly barren place compared with some of the other green places that I had seen in the city, just straggly grass and few trees, but it was also full of people, stretched out on the grass or sitting and watching a group of musicians at one end, who were singing into a karaoke machine.
My phone rang again. I answered it hurriedly, realising just as I pressed the answer button that I didn’t recognise the number. This time, it wasn’t Dominik.
‘Hi, Summer. It’s Grayson. I have something to ask you about your photographs …’

10
Private Dancer

The one night in Paris with Summer had been too short. They hadn’t even found the time to really speak about the loss of the violin, about the true reasons they had come apart in New York. He knew that neither of them had any wish to start apportioning blame; it was clear to him now that they had both been equally at fault. Because of what they were, the dark things that made them tick. If that underground river on which their lives floated had not existed and carried them along with its flow, they would probably not even have met, so there was no point debating the minutiae. They were what they were: supremely imperfect and unlikely to change. It was just a question now of living with the past and hoping they could find some sort of compromise with the cravings, appetites and emotional demands of their respective characters.

There was a message from Lauralynn on the answer machine, informing him that she was hoping to be back in London by the end of the week. Her reunion with her brother had been a qualified success, some bonds had been re-established, and his wounds were not serious enough to have a lasting effect. She was looking forward to being back. As much as he enjoyed her conviviality, Dominik was now somewhat unsure, in view of the reunion with Summer, whether it would be advisable for them to keep on living under the same roof. He was aware that Summer and Lauralynn had once spent some time together but didn’t know how close they might have become. It was just another added layer of complication.