Eighty Days White (10 page)

So, in a sense, he had planned our coming apart from the moment we had first met, in order to spare me future pain. It only made me love him even more as all this became clear.

Time and time again, I felt like dialling his number, but never did because of the unexplainable fear that he might be doing so at the very same moment and that our calls would cross each other, cancel themselves out. My whole body rebelled against this necessary separation.

After work at the instrument store, I often walked further
afield and silently haunted the bars we had frequented in the hope of catching a glimpse of him there, with a terrible anguish in the pit of my stomach that I would eventually come across him, in quiet conversation with another girl of my age, which would have marked him out as a proper bastard and manipulator. Or maybe I was hoping I would, because such a discovery would then mute the pain that was eating away at me. In any case, there was no sign of him. Had I known where he lived, I would have willingly, and with no fear of embarrassment, camped outside his Blackheath residence until I caught sight of him. I was in turmoil, emotions fighting emotions, feeling hollow and lost.

With bad timing, there was no work at the fetish club for a few weeks while the premises were being redecorated, so all my evenings were free and business at the store was slow, so I had all the time in the world to spend with my contaminated thoughts, allowing every tiny epiphany I had shared with Leonard to simmer away: the way his fingers had drawn a lingering trail of saliva across the flowers of my tattoo as he solemnly traced them that time he had undressed me in a hotel room that looked over the Heathrow approach road and we then fucked to the rhythm of the passing cars roaring by on the motorway right below; the tremulous, warm ripple of his breath as his mouth approached my nipples; the pressure of his fingers holding my arse cheeks apart as he rode me from behind; the worlds of silence that often peppered our conversations. It was like a dam of memories bursting, and what had once been intensely pleasurable was now metamorphosing, one steady step at a time, into pain when I evoked it.

I finally got through to Liana. She was still living in
Brighton, but was now no longer involved with Nick and she hinted that she had moved on to another relationship, although she was somewhat secretive about it. She had found a job working for a local firm of lawyers and, having discovered, as I had, that English Lit degrees were thirteen to the dozen and no great help in finding employment, was contemplating some additional legal studies. I really felt I needed to talk to someone, and Liana had once been my closest confidante. We agreed I’d take the train down to the coast the next Saturday morning.

There was a steady drizzle colouring the day grey as I stepped off the train and left the station. Liana had moved into a bedsit in Hove and had explained how to reach it by public transport, but I elected to take a cab. The travelling with Leonard had given me a taste for creature comforts.

Seeing Liana was a shock. Her once lustrous brown hair was bedraggled, as if she had not combed it for days, and her features sunk. We shared a similar pale complexion, but today she looked like a Halloween rag doll.

‘Going through a bit of a bad patch,’ she said, noting the look of dismay on my face.

‘Damn,’ I said. ‘And there I was hoping coming to see you would bring me some cheer.’

‘Join the happy-go-lucky club,’ she remarked as we walked upstairs to the kitchen for an injection of caffeine.

‘A man?’ she enquired.

‘How did you guess?’

‘You know me, I’m psychic.’ She attempted a feeble smile.

My heart sank. Exchanging bad-luck stories was not my idea of a comforting weekend with a mate.

As it turned out, our stories were quite different. I was no longer with Leonard, while Liana was still navigating the ragged edges of an on–off relationship with a man who, it appeared, was also older than her. I was too vulnerable to admit to her how much older than me Leonard had been, and she was similarly non-specific, although I guessed her guy was in his early forties. That was about the only thing in common with our stories.

If I had thought my own tale of woe was special, I was unprepared for hers.

‘He’s a dom,’ Liana said.

I knew it.

‘A good one?’ I asked.

‘In some ways.’

She explained to me a little of the dynamic that she shared with her dom, whose name she refused even to mention. Perhaps she thought that I would report him to the police. As she told me more, I thought that I probably would report him to the police, but I’d rather skin him alive myself first.

‘I thought Nick was a dom too?’ I said, puzzled. ‘Your dom.’

Liana sighed.

‘That was the problem. I thought so too. But I didn’t really understand myself either then, it was all so new …’

‘So Nick’s not a dom? What about all the rope and stuff?’

I remembered that crazy night when we had ourselves tattooed and her encounter with Nick and what I had been a witness to. How she had been tied up and used so roughly and the ecstatic look that had spread across her features as Nick had
enjoyed her response, and how I had briefly realised this was the real Liana I was seeing in action, a stranger whose deep-seated desires and motivations were so different to mine.

Although we still remained in touch, our visits and then our phone calls had gradually became fewer and fewer and I realised that we had slowly begun to drift apart after that night. Even if my education in the avenues of sexual tastes had broadened since then, we’d never quite managed to patch things up between us – perhaps because we had never talked about it.

It was complicated, but then as I’d grown and had a serious relationship of my own, I’d come to realise that few things are straightforward.

‘Yes,’ Liana continued to explain. ‘Nick liked rope. He’s an artist. He thought rope was pretty. But that was about it.’

‘It looked pretty intense to me.’

‘Yeah, but you were high, Lily, and had never seen anything like it before. It really wasn’t that big a deal.’

‘So you’re into other stuff besides rope? And Nick isn’t? That’s why you broke up?’

‘I guess that’s the short version.’

‘We have all day. Why don’t you tell me the long version?’ I slipped out of my chair and flicked the kettle on again.

‘Nick didn’t enjoy hurting me. Or even just making me uncomfortable. He’s really quite a softie.’

‘You wanted him to hurt you?’

‘I am submissive after all. You may as well get used to it.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m not judging you. Just trying to understand.’

‘I’m not really into pain per se. But I am into power play. The D/s dynamic.’

I nodded, encouraging her to continue. I’d seen people playing at the clubs, but hadn’t actually got to know any couples intimately so wasn’t totally familiar with the mindset behind the sex.

‘It’s in the trust bond between two people, you see. The spanking, flogging, all of that is just how it manifests itself physically … but all kinds of other things can be involved. Throat fucking, fire play, hot wax, needles, electro torture …’

A wicked smile crossed her face when she saw me wince. The old Liana that I knew was hidden away in there somewhere beneath her glum exterior. She still loved to shock.

‘That all sounds painful.’

‘Nah. Not when you do it right. A good dom warms their sub up first, so by the time you get to the harder stuff it’s not bad, or painful, unless you want it to be. You should give it a go sometime. You do work in a fetish club after all.’

‘It’s not really my thing.’

‘You never know until you try. And some things aren’t what they seem. Fire, for instance, feels like a warm hug. And wax is quite cosy, so long as you use the right candles so it’s not too hot.’

‘Hmm.’ I wasn’t convinced. ‘But what do you get out of it? Just the sensation alone?’

‘Not exactly. There’s something almost spiritual in it. When you find the right person, and you really let yourself go, it brings on a sort of trance. And it’s so freeing, to leave all the responsibility in someone else’s hands, to be allowed to be so totally uninhibited like that. To enjoy things that
people say shouldn’t be enjoyed. To play with danger. You must have seen it at the club. Don’t you ever let yourself go?’

I shook my head.

‘Then you haven’t lived. When he pulls my hair, spits in my face, it takes every thought out of my head. Every worry. It’s like I’ve been peeled back and he has my soul sitting in his palm, like a butterfly. As if he’s really seeing me. Not all the bullshit that I’ve built up over the years. The fake confidence and the bravado. It’s like he’s seeing the real me. And then the aftercare, when I’m totally broken down and he pulls me into his lap and cradles me like a child …’

The hot tea burned my throat when I took too big a gulp. Liana was waxing lyrical and now had a slightly dreamy expression on her face. As much as I was glad that she felt able to confide in me about all of this, it creeped me out a little. Kinky people could be very intense sometimes.

‘What’s gone wrong, then? If it’s so great, why the long face?’

‘It worked with Nick and I for a while. I think I was born submissive. I’ve always been this way. And he was the first to bring it out of me. Initially it was great, and I loved it. But after a while I started to want more. Things that he couldn’t give me.’

‘He didn’t like the harder stuff? Couldn’t he just do it anyway, for you?’

‘We tried that for a while. Didn’t really work though. There’s a difference between someone using you because they really want to and because they know you want them to. It switched everything around. I felt like I was topping from the bottom all the time. And I knew he wasn’t really
into it. So then we agreed that I could play with other people. Just to get that release.’

‘And he got jealous?’

She stirred another teaspoon of sugar into her tea. I’d watched her dissolve five spoonfuls in her mug so far, and she was mainlining gingernuts one after the other. Liana was on a sugar binge.

‘Not exactly. It’s not uncommon to have more than one play partner. I’d go to the clubs and whatnot regularly, and be flogged by the Dungeon Master, or people we knew who were into it. It was a release for them, and for me. Nick wasn’t jealous. But as I stopped seeing him as my dom, my feelings changed. Then we started to bicker. And then I met someone else.’

‘The guy that you’re seeing now?’

‘No, one of his friends, actually. We only saw each other a few times. But just clicked instantly. Have you ever had that with someone? That immediate connection? Like love at first sight, but not love.’

I thought of Leonard and the way it had felt as though we’d known each other for ever as soon as we met. The way that he’d known exactly how to touch me, without any instruction.

‘Yes. I know what you mean.’

‘His name was Alice.’

‘Funny name for a guy,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ she laughed. ‘That was how we got talking, actually, because he reminded me of you. I know how you still love Alice Cooper, even if you tried to pretend not to … He spelled it differently. American. A-L-Y-S-S. But
I called him Alice. We had some amazing sessions together. So intense. Perfect, you know …’

She was getting that far-away look in her eyes again. Sub-space, I had heard it called in the club, when people went into a trance while they were really being flogged or tied up. Liana hadn’t had a tendency to space out before. I wondered if unleashing her submissive side had made her more dreamy in general.

‘But Alyss moved away,’ she continued. ‘Back to America. He was only in the UK for a few weeks on holiday. These sorts of relationships get so intense so quickly. Because of the level of trust and the communication involved. It’s like you have a bond that no one else can really understand or appreciate. Like you’re alone together on your own island.’

Again I thought of Leonard, and how the privacy that we both imposed on our relationship because of the age difference made us closer. Because we were sharing a secret.

‘Makes sense.’ I nodded.

‘Alyss encouraged me to move on. Find a new play partner. And I did. And I was trying to get over him so I jumped into it a bit quicker than I should have. Played hard. Pretended I could handle things that I couldn’t really. I wanted to be the tough girl, the strong one. To be invincible. So I couldn’t be hurt again. And I met the guy I’m seeing now who likes to play hard but sometimes too hard. And he won’t stop. And now he wants to control everything, and I don’t like it, but I can’t seem to get out of it, and I don’t know what to do.’

‘Oh, honey,’ I said, jumping up and putting my arm around her as tears began to leak down her face and she
briskly brushed them away. ‘You’ve always been strong. You don’t need to prove yourself to anyone.’

She buried her head in my shoulder and sobbed.

In contrast, the story of my encounter with Leonard and its commonplace outcome paled. I had meant to tell Liana everything, but in the end I just said I’d broken up with someone. My misery seemed pathetic next to hers.

We spent most of the weekend drowning our sorrows, hopping between familiar haunts from our student years and window shopping, sneering at clothes we could neither afford nor would ever wear, and the women crowding the Brighton streets who could. Not that our superiority over them was any consolation to our rumpled distress.

On a drunken impulse, shortly before I was due to catch my mid-afternoon train back to London on Sunday, we agreed to cut each other’s hair. I trimmed Liana’s to pageboy effect and she savaged mine until I had a boyish bob that barely reached my shoulders. Gazing at myself in the spotty mirror of her bathroom afterwards I barely recognised myself.

‘Not too short?’ Liana asked me.

‘It’ll grow back,’ I said. ‘You?’

She brushed her hands through her scalp.

‘Either he’ll kill me or he’ll find a way to punish me for doing it,’ she said. ‘He always says he loves my long hair and I’m not to touch it.’

Her face had gone deathly pale.