Eighty Days White (26 page)

A picture of a woman with a recorder inserted inside her opening caught my attention. She was sitting on a glass coffee table with her legs spread wide, using the instrument like a dildo. Her back was arched provocatively and her long, dark hair hung like silk around her shoulders. Her face was out of shot and her long neck bared, inviting the viewer to lean in and kiss her.

Grayson had taken a similar image of me. It had been one of the most explicit pictures in our photo session and one that I was particularly proud of. I was so aroused by the time that he had suggested it that I hadn’t been horrified at the idea. I’d wanted something inside me so badly that I had immediately agreed when the idea came to him. And I knew it was a shot of me that he could have used, because my face hadn’t been in focus.

But he hadn’t used it. He’d chosen this woman instead, and he’d modelled her pose on mine. Or perhaps he’d modelled my pose on hers, and it hadn’t been a burst of inspiration that had suddenly popped into his head when I was naked in front of him but a ruse that he used on every aroused woman who posed for him just for the pleasure of watching them stimulating themselves in front of his lens. Maybe he’d thought my legs were too scrawny and he preferred the shapeliness of her smooth, plump thighs.

Grayson was an artist, not a creep. I knew that instinctively but I was still pissed off. He was a selfish artist. He
didn’t care about his subjects; he cared only about what he captured on film. He kidnapped moments as if he owned them. I threw him an angry glance across the room, but my eyes boring into the back of his head were entirely ineffective. He was facing away from me, chatting up Luba, the blonde Russian ballet dancer, no doubt bringing all his charms to the fore in the hope that she would agree to pose for him too. With her unusual beauty and dancer’s movement, even a blind fool would be able to see that she was a photographer’s wet dream.

My anger dulled only slightly when I finally discovered the pictures of me and realised that he’d included my shots further down the line, closer to the end of the narrative. I still wasn’t sure what that meant. I wasn’t sure what any of it meant, but the order seemed to signal a significance of some kind. My pictures were in the final part of the series, mixed in with images of another woman with a violin. I suspected that the other model was Summer Zahova, but as all of them were headless, I couldn’t be certain.

The initial shot in the final series of photographs was in black and white, just a woman’s back framed from the curve of the neck down to the rise of her buttocks. Immaculate white skin against an ebony black background. Simple, unadorned. It could have been anyone. It was followed by another image, where just a violin stood against a similarly dark wall. The third image was of the same violin, but this time it was in glorious colour, the burnished orange and brown shades of the instrument like an explosion, every single feature of the antique wood as if under a microscope, revealing the richness of its texture. The fourth image as I walked along, jostling other spectators to get a full view,
was of the same woman’s back, in an identical position but this time no longer in black and white but with sharp flesh tones that made you want to touch it.

My picture was next. Despite all the build-up and expectation of what was coming next, I was taken aback when I saw myself in print. The shot was one I hadn’t seen before. Grayson had gone through the images with me on his computer screen, and offered to delete any that I wasn’t happy with. He hadn’t specifically told me that he had shown me all the pictures he’d taken, but he had certainly given me that impression. Evidently he had kept a few aside for his own personal – now public – collection and having given my verbal permission for the shoot and never signing any paperwork, I had no course for complaint, whether I liked the finished product or not.

The shot had been taken from below. At the time I had been leaning over him with my cunt directly over his face, growling angrily, dominating him and he had been begging for more. She had walked in just a few seconds later and interrupted us.

Every muscle in my body was tensed, flexed. I looked like Leroy had when he had circled Liana in Amsterdam. As though I was about to pounce. My stance was in total contradiction to the body of the violinist in the images that surrounded mine. She was so relaxed in her repose, inviting the voyeur’s gaze, displaying herself wantonly to the camera’s eye. I was rebelling against the lens. With my legs up to the ceiling and my cunt lips open like a maw waiting to swallow up the nearest man and my body curved forward and limbs stretched out I looked like I was about to bite the photographer’s head off, though it was impossible to tell for
sure as I was only pictured from the neck down and angled in such a way that my orchid tattoo could not be seen.

So was the other model, I noted, who I was now certain was Summer. She had disappeared from the exhibition soon after it had opened so I didn’t have the chance to study her for long, but I could see that the woman in the pictures had the same unusual sharp curve in her waist. And, of course, the violin was an obvious clue, and the fact that I knew how Grayson had seen her as the prize in his little project. I could see why now. She embodied everything that he had been trying to capture.

I was close to running from the room, but gulped down a deep breath and forced myself to continue. Right at that moment, out of the blue, I longed for Neil. Someone to lean on, someone who would soothe my anger and upset and fight my corner whether it was reasonable or not. Liana’s presence would have helped, but she’d admire my nudity and brush off my emotion and try to get me to laugh along with her to cheer me up. Neil would defend my honour to the end, and that was what I wanted. Submissive or not, he would walk right up to Grayson and punch him in the nose if I asked him to.

The next shot of me was a variation on the first, only this one was even more aggressive. My arms and hands were reaching forward towards the camera in a violent gesture. I had been just about to wrap them around Grayson’s throat, and it showed. From the angle he’d been shooting, my limbs were elongated so I looked a little like a deadly spider, all arms and legs and anger.

Summer’s final shot showed her in almost the opposite stance with her body curved inwards and her violin held
aloft over her pussy as though she was about to bring it down like a weapon against her own sex, not the camera or the viewer.

I took a step back and looked again.

Then I realised what Grayson had done, the story that he was telling with our bodies. Sex and music, sure, particularly with the first series. But Summer Zahova and I, we were domination and submission. Sex embodied. Without emotion, without intimacy. Faceless. Mindless. Meaningless. All the things that I didn’t want to be.

The fury swept through me like a wave. It started as a small flame in my belly and then the flame became a seething cauldron as I walked right up to She and Grayson and hissed at them.

‘Gray,’ I said snarkily. It was She’s nickname for him and the first time I’d referred to him that way. My tone made it clear that I wasn’t using the sobriquet as a term of endearment.

They were both deep in conversation with Luba. Grayson turned to me and raised an eyebrow.

‘Yes?’ he queried.

‘This is not what I expected. It’s not what I wanted. Take the pictures down.’

I straightened my spine and rose to my full height. High heels or not, I refused to bow down to either of them.

She laughed at me.

‘You should have thought of that, dear, before you took your clothes off in front of the camera. The lens doesn’t lie, you know.’ She inclined her head towards the prints. ‘That’s who you are, whether you like it or not. It’s not as though you’ve been misrepresented.’

‘I don’t give a fuck who you think I am,’ I replied. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘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?’