Eighty Days Amber (18 page)
Authors: Vina Jackson
Your hand holding mine in the auditorium and then in the cab going back
Watching you eat, watching you laugh
You singing old Russian lullabies when you don’t think anyone is listening
The way you walk, so gracefully, gliding and sexy
The way you would say ‘I want you inside me
’
The way you would say my name
The peacefulness of your sleep
The way you rode me on the beach the first time we made love
You cuddling against me for warmth between cold covers
The book I was hoping I could write about you, if I only knew how to write
The way your body sprawls across the bed
The velvet feel of your mouth around my cock
Our silences
The delicacy of your small breasts and the colour of your nipples
Your natural pallor
The blonde down in the small of your back
The beauty of us together
The time you cried on the phone because you missed me
Entering you, penetrating you and every time it feeling like the first time, again and again
The look in your eyes when we were having sex
The sheen of sweat on your white skin
Your legs, long and endless
Your Eastern soul
Your emotions
The delighted look on your face when I managed to surprise you
The way your eyes shone with each new gift of amber
How we could argue about the Clash and talk together of books and films, music and life
The way it felt then, like we would never tire of each other and always have something to say
Crossing Washington Square and seeing the dogs, children and squirrels
Walking down Broadway
Sleeping in the same bed as you and staying silent in the morning and watching you wake
Introducing you to Veselka, that Ukrainian restaurant on 2nd Avenue, and seeing you licking your lips in anticipation
Being so proud of being seen with you, with no guilt or doubt
Becoming a better person by being with you
The hope that we could have a future
The terrible dream of having a child together
You not talking to me, sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, childish, selfish, but still irresistible, that time we had our first row
You allowing me to tie your hands together
Your surprise text messages
The dark, untidy forest of your pubes and then your dazzling smoothness, a contrast in worlds
The way you would orchestrate my movements when I went down on you
The view of your most private openings when you got down on your knees and allowed me to take you from behind
My penis moving in and out of you
The way you’d examine my body, parts and whole, perfecting your sexual education
Walking down unknown streets
Searching for restaurants to eat in
Your tongue against my balls
Playfully fighting in bed until I inadvertently hurt your neck
Your tongue against my tongue
Sitting in bars and terraces together, sipping drinks and coffees
Watching you in the shower
Taking you in the shower
The white towels draped across your body after your shower
The single beauty spot on your arse
The sadness in your eyes when you talk of your father and mother
You once going pantieless for me
The way you made my heart sing
How you revived my life after years of sorrow
Your prejudices, your tastes, your likes and dislikes
Your jokes
The fact that you understood me
Walking up the steps in Central Park together
Helping you locate a CD of Russian songs you remembered from your childhood
Exploring New York together
Standing still together at Ground Zero
Your quiet energy and your intense Russian personality Your quiet moan when you come and the way it lights up the emerald darkness of your eyes
You stripping for me in the corridor
Your playfulness
Fucking on floors and sofas when we couldn’t make it to the bed
Being a couple, an ‘us
’
Watching a World Cup match on the big screen at the Red Lion, surrounded by noisy German fans
Fingering you on the highway when we drove to the Hamptons
Your white skirt
Your flimsy bathing costume top which hid nothing
You undoing my trousers in the silence of the High Line as night fell
Your style
Your exuberant love of life
Your moods
Your defensiveness
Our telepathy
Your dreams, whether wonderful or misplaced
Your wantonness
The vagueness of your ambitions
Your deep love of sex
The honesty of your intimacy
Your body
Your soul
Your uniqueness
Your need
The gentle way you so often said that things or people were ‘nice’ or ‘beautiful’ or ‘interesting’ even without knowing them truly
Your generosity of character and soul
Your intellectual interests and how much they paralleled mine
The fact that we were so good together, we were ‘one’, we were happy
You
Nowhere in the letter did Chey beg me to return or ask for an answer. He even forgot to sign the letter.
Chey
.
Chey’s letter released a torrent of memories, each of them sweeter and more painful than the last.
A barrage of images and remembrances flooded my mind, as if our relationship could be broken down piecemeal, the moments lining up one after another to break my heart.
The sound of his laugh. The way that he said
Luba
, always extending the
u
sound, as though he was caressing my name with his tongue. His habit of hanging his shirts over chairs when he removed them so that all the furniture in the apartment carried his scent. The way he spread his butter two inches thick. His passion for music. His passion for me. The firmness of his hands and the softness of his lips.
I carried the letter with me everywhere and read it over and over again until I feared that I would wear the ink off the pages. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had. I knew the words by heart.
When the express train reached Brussels for the changeover I was moody and impatient, bored of staring out at the interminable green fields flying by outside the window. I couldn’t face another minute sitting cramped and still, so skipped the half-hourly connection and walked briskly into the town centre where I wondered why the silly bronze statue of the small chubby boy pissing was so famous. I
threw a coin into the water anyway. God knows, I could use some good luck, I thought. Then I picked up a box of the most expensive chocolates that I could find in the nearest tourist shop, filled with caramel, hazelnuts, pistachios and nougat and nestling prettily in a white box tied with a purple ribbon. I returned to the station, settled into a window seat on the next train and shoved the sweets into my mouth one after the other until I felt sick as a thin man in a chequered shirt with a button-down collar stared at me. When I noticed him gazing I ate them two at a time until he looked away.
I was tired of airports, tired of travelling and suddenly uncertain about life altogether. I had chosen to travel by train from Montpellier to Amsterdam just to avoid getting on another damn plane.
By the time I arrived I had virtually decided to hand my notice in to the Network and give up dancing for ever, or at least the kind of dancing that culminated in a public sex show.
The way that Chey had described what we had together was so personal, so private. Reading through the memories of our relationship described in such vivid detail made the contrast between making love and fucking seem like a chasm. An unbridgeable divide.
I had been fooling myself. There was no way for two people who hadn’t even properly met to mimic the emotion of coupling on stage. Even in its barest form what I was doing could be nothing more than a poor imitation. And I did not believe that the audience appreciated the skill involved. They did not see the complicated steps and turns. My perfectly executed
entrechat
and
bourrée
went unnoticed. The punters paid a lot of money but they were just there for
the fuck, for the cock and the pussy. They were no different from the drunks at Barry’s or the stoners who hung around the run-down bars in California. All that separated the exclusive clientele from the riffraff was the size of their wallets.
But I considered myself a professional and despite my misgivings, pulling out of the show was not an option. Tickets had no doubt been booked ages in advance and the discreet venue arranged. Some of those in the audience would have travelled to Amsterdam especially to watch me perform. The Inca Priest, my partner for this act, had a schedule to stick to and money to make just as I did. Whether rain, shine, good mood or bad, even when I was on my period, I still danced. Reliability was a matter of personal pride.
Tonight, at least, we would not be the only show on. We were performing as part of a series of perversions. It was an Amsterdam weekend celebrating the erotic and the exotic and we were just one of the acts on the bill, though as ever advertised to only a select few.
We were performing in the basement of an exclusive art gallery in Jordaan, right in the middle of a gentrified residential area where all the inhabitants were likely at home behind the customary curtainless Amsterdam windows and blissfully unaware of the ‘private exhibition’ being held just a few doors down.
From the outside, the building appeared to be closed, but the door swung inwards when I pushed it and inside a small handwritten sign painted in deep red letters bore the word
Expositie
and an arrow that pointed to a flight of stone steps leading downwards.
The corridor at the bottom of the steps was whitewashed
and bare. A tall blond man wearing a tuxedo stood outside at the end, blocking another doorway. I showed him the card that identified me as a bona fide Network dancer, and he pointed the way further down the hall to the dressing room, which proved to be an old storage cupboard that had been temporarily converted. I would be paid a princely sum for tonight, but you wouldn’t know it from the less than salubrious quarters provided to the performers.
A troupe of dancers were packed into the small room. Each of them naked, and painted like an animal. There was a zebra – black and white from her head to her toes – a giraffe, a panther and a lion. The zebra was wearing headphones and practising her dance steps. Her footwork was not classical in style but something more foreign to me, a kind of tribal belly dancing. The music flowed through her body in waves as she swayed and gyrated to an invisible beat.
Leading them all was a beautiful dark-haired woman dressed in a ringmaster’s costume complete with leather whip and a pair of glittering red stilettos. She wore a curling false moustache, neatly waxed at the ends.
I nodded a polite hello and stacked my tote bag on top of a stack of paint tins in the corner alongside a pile of coats and feather boas strewn haphazardly in a kaleidoscope of colour.
There was a crack as loud as a gunshot behind me and I turned in time to see the ringmaster shooing her menagerie out of the door. She turned and winked at me, an action that took some effort due to the length and weight of her false eyelashes, which were red tipped at the ends and added a menacing arachnid quality to her appearance. The animals filed along ahead of her. They moved as if they were truly
inhuman, their bodies swaying like Saharan beasts taking a leisurely trot to the nearest waterhole.