Fractured Crystal: Sapphires and Submission (12 page)

Kris had stopped being surprised at her premeditated actions now. It was hard to explain, but she simply didn’t feel scared any more. A line had been crossed
—
a line that should never have been crossed
—
but she understood perhaps what had happened. She had poured fuel onto Daniel’s stifled conflagration, yes: this was not blaming herself
—
no, she had no intention of being a victim, but it was the realisation by a woman who so often acted according to necessity that desire, when finally given free reign, could be a dangerous thing.

She looked down at her left hand, lifting it from the book and rotating it in the air before her eyes like a foreign object. That was how it often felt to her, her drawing hand. Something alien, a body attached to her own, something with which she struggled and that refused to accept her will, no matter how hard she tried to control it. Sinister, literally. The hand of the devil refusing obedience, demanding rebellion. Like so many artists, she had followed the easy get-out that she had to wait for inspiration to strike, but Daniel was right about one thing: she needed discipline to let her desire flow freely. Necessity was not the enemy of desire, but its absolute condition.

Well, if he could see into her soul, then she would show him that she could see into his. Sitting down at the table, she dropped the book of verse by her side while placing her car keys on the wooden surface before picking up one of her charcoals that, she noted, Daniel had left so conveniently to hand. This, she knew, was not a mistake: after only a few days in Comrie, she realised that everything meticulously had its place.

Her first attempts to sketch were a failure. Her hand simply refused to obey. She tore out the pages and threw them to one side. Usually, this would be an admission of abjection, an excuse not to go on. But not today. Today she was not weak, like she usually was, but strong.

The breakthrough came when the birdman transformed into a more swanlike form, his head curving round towards the woman in his wings, those wings themselves ending in Ernst like preternatural fingers. And it was another Ernst painting that filled her imagination as she forced her left hand to work,
The Robing of the Bride
, a virgin in luxuriant, red-feathered robe, her round young belly pointed forward, pudenda covered and threatened by the rapacious spear of another bird man. He visits me every day, she thought to herself, recalling long lost words. He presented me with a heart in a cage, two petals three leaves, a flower and a young girl.

No need for symbolism in her own sketches. The thickening black lines of grit on white curled into a phallus of more Picasso
-
esque proportions, Minotaur mixed with the bird superior, a huge erection threatening and enticing the Leda caught up in her birdman’s wings. Her sex was hungry for its own ravager, but it was also strong enough
—
plenty strong
—
to devour the fragile spear that rose from the birdman’s loins. With a few careful, delicate flicks of her wrist, she threw down her own spears across the birdman’s face, marking him with precious scars.

So lost was she in her vision, she did not even notice how, at last, her left hand had become one with her. It was enough, rather, to draw.

This was how Daniel found her. She did not even hear him enter. As such, he was able to stand there for a few moments in complete silence, watching her sketch image after image of the birdman and his bride, a strange conflict of emotion in him as his eyes flickered between her intense expression, the curve of her pale neck and the way her hand moved effortlessly across the paper.

At last her conscious mind deigned to acknowledge him. As she looked up, she could not resist a smile
—
a knowing, utterly fearless smile, a little contemptuous even. Here, that smile seemed to say. I know who you are, with all your secrets. I’m not scared of you
anymore
. She said nothing.

“I thought you would be gone.”

She looked at her keys on the table. “I did consider it. It would probably be the most sensible thing to do, wouldn’t it.”

He nodded but didn’t reply.

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Towards the hills. I walked for a while. It’s what I often do.”

“How romantic.” Even he could not ignore the sarcasm in her voice, and for a second his jaws clenched, one of his scars rippling.

“May I?” he asked, extending his arm towards the pad she held on her lap.

“Of course.” She passed it towards him, watching him intently with her blue eyes.

Neither of them spoke for a while until, at last, he said: “You capture me better than any photograph.”

She nodded. “I thought so too.” As though in surprise, she lifted up her left hand and stared at it, the finger tips blackened from the charcoal. “I thought I’d lost it, but evidently not. It looks as though I finally managed some mastery over this wayward bastard.”

Daniel’s own hands fell to his side, still clutching the images of the birdman. He turned to the window and looked out. “Mastery, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it. We meet another, in ourselves our outside the self, and we know it will be a fight till the death unless one submits. The master wants the slave to acknowledge, and the slave will be saved from death.”

“What a sweet worldview you have,” Kris observed ironically.

This made Daniel laugh, despite himself. “And of course, it never works. The master really wants to be acknowledged by an equal, and when the slave understands she can control the work of the master, then she is no longer a slave.”

“Is that what the world comes to for you?” Kris was genuinely curious for a moment. “Masters and slaves?”

“I... I thought so. But I’m not so sure.” He looked back at her. “I fucked up, didn’t I. Too much, too fast.” He shrugged. “It’s been a long time. Too long, really...”

Realising this was going to be the nearest she would receive to an apology, Kris simply nodded. She was quiet for a moment and then said: “She
was
your wife, wasn’t she.” It was a statement rather than a question.

It was Daniel’s turn to nod.

“What happened to her?”

“She died.”

“I’m sorry.” Kris paused. “How did it happen?”

“I would rather not say.” Daniel slowly turned and placed the drawings on the table, before lowering himself to the sofa across from Kris. His face was implacable, but she understood that this was to prevent a display of grief rather than to impose any control on her.

“How long were you married?”

“Ten years, nearly. I’m sorry. I’
ld prefer not to speak about it at all.”

“Of course.”

Both of them sat there in silence for a while. It was Daniel who finally spoke.

“Do you want to go?”

By way of reply, she picked up her keys and handed them to him. “You can put those up by the hook again. I’ll take them if I need them, but for the moment I think I’d prefer to stay here and draw. It’s been a long time, a very long time.”

“For the two of us, I think.”

This statement made her look up at him somewhat sharply. “Do I look that much like her?” she asked.

He nodded in reply.

“And... do I fuck like her?”

This made him smile. “No, not much.”

“Is it... better?”

“It’s... different. I’m different. I’m sorry. Better to be honest, don’t you think?”

“Of course.” Kris paused. “How is it different?” she asked after a while.

It took him a while to respond. “Before... before I would not have needed to dominate so much, so completely. But, now I do. It doesn’t work, otherwise.”

“What doesn’t work?”

“Sex. Life. Everything. If I can dominate, then death will have no dominion, as they say.”

Kris settled back into the chair. “Jesus,” she breathed under her breath. “You are fucked up. And I thought I was in a bad way. Scratch that. I
am
in a bad way.” She watched him carefully, intrigued.

“Did you ever... you know? Did you ever have anal sex with her?”

He smiled but did not reply, instead commenting: “I’m sorry. I didn’t realise it was your first time. I wouldn’t have been so rough.”

Kris laughed. “Oh, honey, I’m not as innocent as you think but... really, I need to be in the mood and you... you took me by surprise back there.” She bit her lip, watching him carefully, and at one point scratched her nose, leaving a smudge of black carbon on her skin. “You’re... you’re a very big guy, you know. I’m just not sure I’m ready for that. Not yet.”

He looked back at her now, his eyes shining with a different light now. “So you’ll stay?” he asked.

Kris watched him carefully
for a few moments
before speaking. “Yes,” she said at last. “I’ll stay. Heck, we’ve only got a few days together before I have to go. But there need to be a couple of rule changes. You... you plug into something inside me, and I’m not talking about that amazing thing you’ve got between your legs. You do something to me, and mostly I like it. Shit, until today I liked everything you did
—
and I want more, much more. But before you try something new, you need my
explicit
agreement: none of this safe word bullshit. Do I make myself clear?”

He smiled. “Yes, perfectly.”

“Oh, and come to think of it, I’d prefer to have my phone back. Yes, I know that I can’t pick up a signal here, and I get the thing about the keys
—
it helps that I know where they are. But with my phone... you can be just a little too controlling at times. It’ll just make me feel better knowing it’s to hand, that’s all.”

“Of course.” Daniel himself looked more relaxed now as he leaned back into his seat. As she stared at him, something occurred to her.

“The other day you let slip that you paid a lot to keep yourself free from distractions. How much of this place do you own?”

He laughed, then shrugged. “Normally I would prefer not to tell but, what the hell. You know the mountain to the west? About ten miles away? You can see it from the bedroom.”

She nodded.

“Well, I own that. Actually, most of the land beyond that to the sea, and from Comrie to the main road.”

Kris was a little shocked but not as much as she would have expected when first she came to Comrie. “Who the hell are you, Daniel Logan?” she asked quietly.

By way of response, he stood up and extended his hand towards her. “Would you like to come to bed and find out?”

With a crooked smile, she shook her head. “Actually,” she told him, “I’d prefer to stay here and draw a while. Don’t worry: it’s nothing personal. It’s just been so long since I’ve felt like doing it... the sensation is kind of pleasant. Also,” here she grimaced slightly. “To tell you the truth, I’m pretty sore down there. I don’t think I’ve shagged like that since I was a teenager, and you can have too much of a good thing, you know.”

To show that this was less a rejection, more a renegotiation, she took hold of the fingers of his hand and placed them to her face, enjoying the warmth of his skin against her cheek. Before he left her, she kissed the tips of his fingers and watched him go, only then turning back to a new sheet of white paper and taking up the dark, charcoal stick in her nimble hand.

Once more Kris was outside the croft, raising the long-handled axe and balancing it behind her head before letting it fall onto the piece of wood that she had carefully placed on the block before her.

The process was laborious and long-winded, and Daniel could have completed the required amount to fire up the range in less than half an hour whereas she, nearly an hour later, was by nowhere near ready. Today, however, this was not the point. Rather she enjoyed the feeling of lifting up the axe, feeling gravity tug against her as she placed it on the window ledge, the sensation of fulfilment when she managed to hit the wood before her (by no means a guaranteed fact) and, usually after considerable tugging and banging with the axe buried in the softer material, finally split it into pieces more suitable for burning. After so long performing this task, she was aware of muscles in her arms, shoulder and back that she had not known the existence of before that day, and the whole feeling was one of immense pleasure.

Before her, in the distance, she could see the mountain. Daniel’s mountain. She couldn’t remember its real name, but that didn’t matter. From what he had told her, pretty much as far as she could see (before the Highlands themselves in the far off distance) belonged to him. Of course, it was always possible that he was a fantasist, but the casual way in which he had shared this piece of knowledge led her to suspect that he was telling the truth.

That fact was itself rather exciting to her. She had never owned any property, never really owned much of substance beyond her rather worn Toyota
—
though that itself looked in better shape (though less suited to this landscape) than Daniel’s Land Rover. What excited her was less the prospect that she could share in such possession (yet it would have been a lie to deny that at some level deep down inside her, this fantasy was certainly taking shape) as the simple notion that she was intimately involved with a real landowner, some eccentric who clearly had a deeper past than her own.