Eighty Days Yellow (29 page)

I was losing control.

Without Dominik to anchor me, I was a sailboat with no engine now, drifting in the high, unexplored seas, at the mercy of wind and storms. On the prayer of a song, and not one I could play on my violin.

We had a guest conductor from Venezuela in town for a season of post-romantic works by Russian composers and he was driving us hard. Our initial sound was not to his liking. He wanted more verve and colour in our playing. The string section was affected the most. The predominantly male brass section appeared to be adept at switching their emphasis, but us string creatures found it more awkward, accustomed as we were to a more discreet angle of attack on the music. Many of us also had Eastern European roots and old habits die hard when it comes to adding a touch of added bravura to pieces we already knew so well.

That afternoon’s rehearsal had been a ragged affair and Simón, the conductor, had been quite critical of our efforts. By the end of the double session, our nerves had been frayed.

As I walked up West Broadway on my way home, my phone buzzed. It was Chris. He was passing through Manhattan. The band had been booked on a short East Coast tour of minor rock clubs and he was on his way to Boston. It seemed he had attempted to ring me the day before to invite me to join the guest list for a gig on Bleecker Street, but I remembered that I had left my mobile phone uncharged or switched off for several days, absorbed as I was by the Venezuelan’s rehearsals and Victor’s demands.

‘We missed you,’ Chris said after we had exchanged warm greetings.

‘I’m sure you didn’t,’ I replied. I’d never even played on all the songs when the band performed. A fiddle adds a particular sound to a rock band and if overused, provides too much of a country touch.

‘We did,’ Chris replied. ‘You as both a person and a musician.’

‘Ah, flattery will get you everywhere.’

He was only in the city for an evening. We agreed to meet as soon as I’d had the opportunity to shower and change following today’s nervous exertions.

We both had a taste for Japanese food. Raw. Sometimes I judge people on their taste in food, and I seldom approve of those who profess to dislike raw fish or tartare-style dishes, or oysters. Culinary cowards, I felt.

The sushi bar was a small place on Thompson Street where you seldom found more than a handful of customers, as most of their business was takeaway. Consequently, the underemployed sushi chef was generous with the size of his portions.

‘So how’s the classical world?’ Chris asked as we sipped our first sake of the night.

‘Keeping me on my toes, that’s for sure. The conductor we’re working with right now is a bit of a tyrant. Very demanding and temperamental.’

‘Haven’t I always told you that us rock ’n’ rollers are a much more civilised bunch than your classical old fogeys?’

‘You have, you have, Chris.’ Every time we spoke almost. The shared joke had long become something of a cliché, but I tried to raise a smile.

‘You look tired, Summer.’

‘I am.’

‘Is everything all right?’ he asked, with a look of concern.

‘Just tiredness. Busy with the music. Not sleeping too well,’ I confessed.

‘Is that all?’

‘Should there be? Do I have black bags under my eyes?’

Chris smiled. My old sparring partner, one I was unable to lie to.

‘You know what I mean. So . . . have you been up to . . . mischief? I know you, Summer.’

I speared a slice of yellowtail tuna with my chopsticks.

Chris knew most of what had happened in London, with Dominik. Well, maybe not all the specific details: a girl has her pride. He was certainly aware that coming to New York at such short notice had been a way of escaping.

‘Don’t tell me he’s followed you here? Surely not.’ He dipped his California roll into the wasabi-infused cup of soya sauce.

‘No,’ I said, ‘not him.’ Then, overcoming my reluctance to reveal my true feelings, ‘If only it was him.’

‘What do you mean, Summer?’

‘There is another man I’ve come across. Similar . . . but I think worse. It’s not easy to explain.’

‘What is about you that attracts the bastards, Summer? I never thought you were a sucker for punishment.’

I remained silent.

‘Look, I know Darren was a bit of prick, but the guys you now appear to be strangely attracted to are a dangerous lot.’

‘They are,’ I confirmed.

‘So why do you do it?’ Once again he was on the way to losing his temper with me. Why did this happen every time we met up now?

‘You know I’m not into drugs. Well, the common ones. Maybe this is a bit like a drug. I get a kick out of it. As if I’m putting my hand into the flames and seeing how far I can go, juggling the line between pain and pleasure. But you know, it’s not all bad, Chris . . . though I know it must seem that way to you. Different strokes for different folks. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.’

‘Hmm . . . I’m not sure it’s really for me. You’re crazy, girl.’

‘I sure am, Chris, but you know me, you have to take the good with the bad, no?’

‘But are you happy?’ he finally asked, as the Oriental waitress began to clear our plates and bowls, and set down the complimentary pineapple squares.

Again I declined to answer, but I fear the look in my eyes betrayed me.

We moved on to a nearby bar and shared a round of beers before we both parted on an uncertain note.

‘Keep in touch,’ Chris said. ‘You know the number. Whenever you feel like it. Or if there is a problem. We return to England at the end of next week, but I’ll always be there for you, Summer, believe it.’

It was night-time. Greenwich Village was alive with electricity, and music flooded the narrow streets with melodies unknown and a touch of cacophony. The sounds of the big city.

I needed to sleep badly.

The Prokofiev performance at one of Manhattan’s more classy venues was a triumph. Everything had come together with perfection, justifying all the agony of the rehearsals and the frayed tempers on both sides of the rostrum. My own few solo measures in the second movement flowed like a dream come true, and I was even gifted by a wink of approval by Simón, the young maestro, as we all took our final bow.

My mood deflated soon after when I found Victor waiting for me at the stage door.

‘What took you so long? The concert ended over an hour ago,’ he remarked.

‘We had a little celebration,’ I said. ‘It went surprisingly well. Not at all what we’d expected,’ I pointed out.

Victor frowned.

He gestured for me to walk with him as we took Third Avenue, heading north. Maybe because I was wearing heels, Victor suddenly appeared to be smaller in height than I’d previously thought.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked him. I was still feeling a little giddy, a combination of the celebratory glasses of vermouth and the natural high the semi-perfect performance had triggered in me.

‘Don’t you worry,’ Victor said brusquely.

What had he in mind? I was still wearing my black velvet performance dress and normal day-to-day underwear. Not even stockings, just tights, or hose, as they called it here. And a thin cardigan top I’d picked up the day before at Anna Taylor Loft. Dominik’s corset, which Victor often insisted I wear for our scenes, was safely tucked away in a drawer by my bed.

Maybe it would just be a social occasion.

Knowing Victor, though, I doubted it.

‘You have lipstick in your handbag?’ Victor asked as we continued moving up Third.

‘Yes.’ I always did. Girls will be girls.

Then the fleeting memory of a more recent episode involving lipstick flashed through my mind. And I knew. It must have been Victor who had been my secret audience that evening in Dominik’s loft, who had seen me adorned like the Whore of Babylon, as Dominik had described me.

The venue was a large chain hotel in the Gramercy Park area. Its top floor reached to the sky, with neon lights blazing above its canopy and a forest of small, square doll’s house windows piercing the night. It looked to me like a daunting fortress. A fortress, or a dungeon? Oh dear, what a one-track mind I was developing.

The night porter doffed his hat at us as we made our way into the lobby and advanced towards the bank of elevators. We took the one on the left, which rose all the way to the penthouse. This was not accessible to the general public and required a key, which Victor pulled out of his pocket and slipped into the lock by the penthouse-floor button.

We rode up in strained silence.

The elevator doors opened directly onto a large, empty foyer with nothing more than a sizeable leather bench, where earlier arrivals had draped their coats and bags. I slipped off my knitted top and, reluctantly, set down my violin case. We stepped out of the foyer into an immense room bordered with bay windows through which you could see half of Manhattan and its dazzling horizon of night lights. Guests were milling around, glasses in hand. In a far corner of the circular room was a small elevated area, like a stage, and to its left a set of doors connecting, no doubt, with the rest of the suite.

I was about to step over to the small bar where a variety of bottles, glasses and ice decanters stood, but Victor warned me off.

‘You mustn’t drink tonight, Summer. I want you at your best,’ he said.

I was about to protest – since when did he think I was some sort of lush? – but just then a stranger in a dinner suit that made him look more like a waiter than a man of the world approached us and heartily shook Victor’s hand.

The guy brazenly looked me up and down, and, royally ignoring my presence, turned to Victor and commented, ‘Very nice, my dear Victor. Very nice indeed. A particularly striking slave.’

My first instinct was to kick him in the shins, but I held back. Is this how Victor had presented me?

I was not and would never be a slave. I was me, Summer Zahova, and I was an individual with a mind of my own, a submissive, not a slave. I had no issue with the concept. I knew that other men and women desired to give themselves away completely like that, but it just wasn’t me.

Victor smiled at the other man, evidently self-satisfied. The bastard. He patted my rear with awful condescension. ‘Isn’t she? Isn’t she just?’

Both ignored me as if I wasn’t there any longer, just a part of the furniture.

‘She will fetch a good price,’ one of them said, but my head was already on fire and I was unable to make out who had said this.

I felt Victor’s hand grip my wrist. The mist cleared in my mind and I faced him.

‘You will do as you are told, Summer. Do you understand? I know that inside you are conflicted about all of this, and I quite understand. However, I also know that you are at war with your own nature, and a moment will arise when you come to terms with it. The craving you have to be exposed, to be publically whored, it’s part of you. It’s the real you. It brings you to life, allows you to experience sensations you have never experienced before. The resistance you feel is just old-fashioned social mores, education. You were born to serve. And that’s when you are at your most beautiful. All I want is to bring out that beauty, see you flower, see you assume your condition.’

What Victor said was profoundly disturbing, but there were kernels of truth I recognised. In moments of excess my body betrayed me. The drug of submission beckoned and it was as if the real Summer appeared, wanton, brazen, unashamed, a side of me that I enjoyed but feared, scared that it would one day lead me too far, that the pull of danger would be stronger than my need for safety. The animalistic side of me sought out this sexual oblivion, while the rational half questioned my motives. They often say that most men are guided by their cocks; in my case I was guided by the hunger in my cunt, but paradoxically that hunger also resided in my mind. It’s not that I needed a man, or particular men, to own me, use me; it was this yearning for something else, for the zone of nirvana that I reached in those moments of senseless sex and even degradation or humiliation, and which made me feel more alive than at any other time. Perhaps I should have taken up rock-climbing.

I was aware of my contradictions, accepted them, but acceptance didn’t make finding the right path any easier.

As my mind unfogged, there was a hush in the room, unspoken words indicating that the time had come.

Victor on one side and the tuxedoed stranger on the other, I was led to the small elevated stage at the other end of the room, where I was swiftly stripped naked. I remember thinking how inelegant I must look while they rolled down my unappealing tights, but it all happened so fast, too fast for me to protest.

The stranger, who was the master of ceremonies for this curious evening, waved his arms with a flourish and announced, ‘This is Slave Summer, the property of Master Victor. I’m sure you will agree she is a splendid specimen. Pale skin –’ he pointed at me – ‘and a most exquisitely rounded ass.’ He indicated for me to turn and display my rear to the onlookers. Deep breaths were drawn. I already had new admirers.

A tap on my shoulder indicated I should turn round again to face the small crowd. They were mostly men, I realised, but there were also women in fancy evening wear dotted here and there. All appeared normal; there were clearly no other slaves serving tonight.

The circus master’s hand passed across my left breast and raised it a little, showing it off, displaying its shape. ‘Petite, but in her own way voluptuous,’ he indicated, his fingers moving further down and demonstrating how my thin waistline accentuated the curves of my breasts and arse.

‘A wonderfully old-fashioned – or should I say classical? – body.’

I gulped.

He saved my blushes by not moving on to my once again impeccably shaved pussy and describing it to the audience. They could see it anyway, and complimentary words would have made no difference in the present circumstances.

‘A wonderful specimen, and our compliments to Master Victor, who once again provides us with a perfect and highly individual body. I am informed that she has not yet been properly broken, which should add to the appeal.’

Broken? Fuck, what was he on about?