Eighty Days Amber (19 page)

The presence of pseudo animals in a sex show gave a somewhat bestial slant to the proceedings, and curious to see more, I dressed hurriedly, wriggling out of my modest jeans and T-shirt, slipping into the white gown, dabbing a little powder to take the shine from my skin and glancing in the mirror for one final hair check before racing through another corridor to the backstage area where I could hide behind a curtain to watch the first acts.

The stage was decked out like the interior of a jungle. Even the air felt humid, as though we were trapped in one of Amsterdam’s greenhouses. The wooden floor was surrounded by a dearth of ferns and tropical flowers in pots in vivid hues of red, purple and orange. Even the sound system had not escaped the jungle theme, as the tweeting of birds and the rush of flowing water permeated gently through the speakers between the acts. The menagerie of animals had settled themselves in to various corners and, rather than dancing, they were behaving as animals would, slinking around trees, nibbling on ferns, staring at the dancers with wide eyes and occasional roars and jumping back when the ringmaster cracked her whip.

The opening act was a contortionist, so flexible that she made my bones ache. The next, a femme fatale in a black silk dressing gown who danced with a gun and ended with a shot into the audience. She was almost making love to the barrel and so passionate was her embrace of the cold metal that I could see myself again in Chey’s living room swaying and gliding across his wooden floors with the Sieg Sauer before taking out the television.
Not that it matters, as we never watched it much, did we?

Chey’s words rang in my ears. His letter was tucked into my tote bag and all I wanted at that moment was to be back in bed pressing the sheets of paper to my chest, or better still, lying alongside him, telling him that I was sorry, that I loved him, that we should be together. Tears leaked down my cheeks and dripped onto my gown, sticking the thin fabric to my skin.

I watched the next dancer begin her routine through a watery blur. She was dressed as a unicorn, complete with a slender flashing horn fixed to her head and a sequined harness that glittered as she moved. Her steps were so naturally equine that she made the hooves and harness that Chey had bought for me to wear and which I had been barely able to walk in, let alone dance in seem like a poor parody of an eroticism that was so animal to its core I wasn’t sure where the human ended and the creature began.

My eyes were focused on the girl doing her thing but my heart and soul were back in Chey’s study remembering how it had felt to lean back against him as he pressed his cock into my arsehole so deeply that eventually I had collapsed onto the floor and he had laid alongside me stroking me back to life.

When she removed her shimmering tight shorts and crop top to reveal a tiny pair of sequined pants that revealed neither breasts nor the demarcation of a vagina or the bulge of a penis but rather a slim and completely flat chest bordered by the straps of the harness it seemed as though she was birthing from a chrysalis rather than taking her clothes off. I had the sense that I was witnessing a creature reveal her natural form rather than a person remove her clothes.

I was accustomed to being the most daring, original and
exotic act on the bill. Up to this point, the Network shows that I had completed were one-offs, just me and my partner performing a single set. This was the first occasion where I was just a part of a line-up. And the girls who I had danced with at The Place, Sweet Lola’s, The Grand, or any of the other establishments that I performed in, had simply been strippers of one persuasion or another and varied only in their beauty and ability to shimmy and contort themselves with varying degrees of skill and elegance around a steel pole.

The acts on stage tonight were of a different sort altogether, and for the first time I realised that I was not the only erotic dancer on the planet who could do more than just take off her clothes. I felt like an amateur.

The first notes of Debussy’s ‘La Mer’ penetrated the sound system. I pushed myself to my feet and through sheer force of will moved onto the stage and began to dance. This would be the last time, I told myself. As soon as I was back at the hotel I would call Madame Denoux and tender my resignation. This would be it.

To compound my misery, I had discovered at the last minute that my regular partner had fallen ill and I had to dance with a replacement, a man whom I had not previously trained with and whom I had no experience dancing or coupling with before. He was tall and thick-bodied with a hard look painted across his face. Maybe he was just as nervous as I was and that was what made the angle of his jaw so tight and his expression so fierce.

When we danced he moved a half-beat behind the music and we were never quite in unison and lacked elegance as we went through the motions for what felt like an eternity.

When he finally penetrated me in accordance to the
established scenario of the show I felt dirty and used. And never had I been so glad to hear the final notes that signalled the end of my set.

I felt sickened by what I had just done, not only tonight but for all the previous months now. On the way back to the hotel on Leidseplein where I had been booked into, I couldn’t help playing the event over and over in my mind.

I should have taken a cab back and the thoughts would have lingered less, but I knew I needed a shot of fresh air to cleanse my mind before I reached the room and had the opportunity to jump under the shower and wash the infamy away.

It was three in the morning and the city was sleeping. There was just the gentle shimmer of the still water on the Singel in the moonlight and the irregular cobblestones of the canal walk, rare lights emerging from the curtainless windows of old buildings. Passing the dark windows of the neighbouring Athenaeum Bookshop and American Book Center on Spui, I took a detour and made my way to the Dam where just a few stragglers and drunk survivors of unknown festivities staggered by. Then, still in a daze, I took Kalverstraat, a pale ghost amongst its flickering neons, and then yet another canal, which l followed all the way to Leidseplein.

By the time I reached my bedroom, I was exhausted. But also angry at myself. For picking this life, for leaving Chey, for not having the strength to return to him now. The dancing made me feel dirty now, in a way it hadn’t before.

I switched on the shower, threw off my clothes and, eyes closed, stepped into the water, turning the heat up until it shocked me back into reality. I stood motionless, letting the
water pound against my skin, allowing the steam to envelop me.

By the time I exited the shower cubicle, my body was coloured scarlet red, from the heat and the steam. But my mind still felt dirty. And some of the words in Chey’s letter came rushing back to my mind, perverse, beautiful, dirty but so unlike the experience I had just participated in. The contrast was enlightening.

Dawn was peering through the bedroom window, a tentative grey light spreading its day blanket over the Amsterdam roofs I had a generous view of from my top-floor suite.

I lay on the bed, swaddled in thick, damp, white towels but sleep wouldn’t come.

Within an hour, rumours of life were creeping up from the street below and I slipped on a sweatshirt and an old pair of jeans and trainers and took the lift down to the lobby. There was nobody in reception, just the sounds of someone vacuuming the back office. I walked out. There was an autumnal chill in the air.

Ten minutes away, some of the floating stalls at the open-air flower market were opening, deliveries being unpacked, displays watered and arranged. The orgy of colour illuminated the grey morning as flowers, bulbs, plants, seeds, accessories and souvenirs were spread out. A young woman with a teardrop tattoo below her left eye and punk-like attire was putting out baskets of cannabis starter kits across the front of the stall’s display. Her dyed black hair was cut in an asymmetric bob and I noticed she had identical trainers to mine.

Moving along the quay my gaze was assaulted by the sunshine colours of all the tulips littering each and every
stand. It was a flower we seldom had occasion to see back in Donetsk or even St Petersburg. I loved the clean shape of tulips, the serene uniformity of their curves. I somehow found them peaceful. Even though none of the stalls were yet open, I convinced one of the assistants to sell me a large bunch of tulips in a variety of colours, and also treated myself to an immense bouquet of other flowers, roses crowded with lilies, sunflowers and gardenias. I ambled back to the hotel with my armful of flowers, attracting curious stares in the now busier lobby where tourists were trouping in single file from the lifts to the breakfast room.

In the bedroom again, I stripped, and assembled the flowers across the white, crisp bedsheets, orchestrating a deluge of wild vegetation all along the bed’s perimeter. I lay down at their centre, my own pale, bare skin now set off by a glowing halo of colours.

It felt like madness. It was madness.

I took a deep breath and extended my hand to the drawer of the bedside cabinet on my right, taking out the small green velvet bag in which I kept my thirteen amber pieces. I scattered them across my skin where most settled in unsteady equilibrium while others slid down into the graveyard of flowers surrounding me. The largest piece, an almost transparent block of amber, watery-like in appearance but uncloudy, naturally shaped like a heart without the intervention of human hands, sat, ready to fall sideways if I moved, halfway below the fall of my breasts and my navel. I took it between my fingers, brought it to my mouth and rolled it around my tongue. Now lubricated I pulled it out and carefully inserted it into my sex, gasping as its unyielding hardness passed my lips.

Then, at random I took another, smaller piece of amber
and placed it inside my mouth where it nestled in the hollow of my cheek.

I was erasing the Inca Priest, the dance, the meaningless sex masquerading as art.

Now I was filled.

By Amber.

By Chey.

And sleep finally came.

I was woken from deep slumber in mid-afternoon. The sounds of Leidseplein were now loud and cheerful, rising all the way up to my window and, when I peered through the curtains, a cold sun was casting its light on the city.

As I came to my senses, I realised it was my phone ringing that had shaken me out of my deep lassitude.

I fumbled for it, spat out the amber piece sitting in my mouth over the flower-laden bed. The other one, I realised, as a pang of fuzzy pleasure shot through my insides all the way to my brain, was still lodged inside my cunt.

‘Hello?’

‘Luba, you left me a message. What is the matter?’

It was Madame Denoux. It must be morning in New Orleans.

I composed myself as I felt the anger stream back.

‘I’m done with it,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I mean it. I’m in a mind to give up the whole dancing thing, Madame,’ I continued. ‘I enjoyed it before. But now it makes me feel terrible.’

‘You just have to be more dispassionate about it all, Luba,’ Madame Denoux said.

‘Dispassionate!’ I shouted. ‘That’s not what I signed up for . . .’

I brushed some of the flowers surrounding me from the bed and they fell to the carpeted floor, scattering in improbable patterns. My finger swept slowly across the smooth ridges of one of the amber pieces lying there, and it felt comforting and peaceful.

‘You are so talented and beautiful, my dear Luba. This is just a blip. You cannot give up your dancing. Everyone is talking about you as your reputation spreads. It took me years to get where you are already, you know.’

But I’d made up my mind.

‘I want out,’ I said.

‘Surely not?’

‘I do.’

‘Please reconsider.’ Madame’s voice was pleading now.

‘No.’ I was adamant.

‘So what will you do?’

‘Maybe just normal dancing, I don’t know.’

‘The rewards will not be so significant, you realise that?’

‘I do. But I’ve saved a lot already. Maybe I’ll take a long vacation. Then I’ll see.’

I could almost hear her thinking.

‘Yes, that’s good. An extended break. Excellent idea. Refresh your mind and body, Luba. And then we will talk again, no?’

She explained how taking a break from performing would make my absence felt even more, increasing the demand for my unique services, increasing the price. She suggested that together, she and I could arrange it so that my appearances would become even more exclusive, rare even. That I would only perform at times and in places of
my own choosing from here onwards. Madame Denoux begged me to consider this possibility once I had completed my sabbatical. Would I?

I reluctantly agreed.

After the previous night, I wasn’t sure that I would ever dance again, but I also knew that I would never get any satisfaction from anything else. I had come to enjoy the travel, the lack of earthly ties. I would find a way to recover from this and I would find it soon. I had nothing else in life.

Maybe even one day I would come across Chey. Somewhere exotic, somewhere new. Both outlaws, adventurers.

I had answered his letter. My words had been feeble and tentative, but I had tried, in my own way, to forgive him for what he was or might turn out to be. I’d left the door open. Confessed to the pain that being parted from him had caused in my soul. But the letter had, after passing from post to post, been returned. He was no longer living in Gansevoort Street and had left no forwarding address.

Right now, my future was a blank space. I could do whatever I wanted to do.

Today, I decided I would visit Amsterdam’s museums. I’d never had the opportunity to do so before. My hotel room on Leidseplein was available for two more nights and had been paid for in advance. Tomorrow I might call on a travel agent and exchange my return ticket to New Orleans for a flight to somewhere else. Maybe the Caribbean again. But Barbados or Jamaica this time. Become an explorer. Meet people. Have adventures.

I was hungry. I washed my face and teeth, dressed. A simple spring cotton dress with discreet polka dots reaching to just below my knees, which left my shoulders bare.
Found a thin cashmere jumper in my luggage and put on flat ballet shoes and strolled out.