Eighty Days Yellow (3 page)

We pulled into Bond Street station and a petite blonde, her face fixed with grim determination, prepared to wedge herself in.

Fleeting thought – would the train jerk again as it left the station?

It did.

Muscle Man stumbled against me, and feeling daring, I squeezed my thighs together and felt his body stiffen. The blonde began to spread herself out a bit, poking the construction worker in the back with her elbow as she reached into her hefty handbag for a book. He shuffled closer to me to give her more room, or perhaps he was simply enjoying the nearness of our bodies.

I squeezed my thighs harder.

The train jolted again.

He relaxed.

Now his body was pressed firmly against mine, and emboldened by our seemingly coincidental proximity, I leaned back just a fraction, pushing my pelvis off the seat so that the button on his jeans pressed against the inside of my leg.

He moved his hand from the rail overhead to rest on the wall just above my shoulder so that we were nearly embracing. I imagined I heard his breath catch in his throat and his heart quicken, though any noise he might have made was drowned by the sound of the train rushing through the tunnel.

My heart was racing and I felt a sudden twinge of fear, thinking that I had gone too far. What would I do if he spoke to me? Or kissed me? I wondered how his tongue would feel in my mouth, if he was a good kisser, if he was the kind of man who would flick his tongue in and out horribly, like a lizard, or if he was the sort who would pull my hair back and kiss me slowly, like he meant it.

I felt a hot dampness spreading between my legs and realised with a mixture of embarrassment and pleasure that my underwear was wet. I was relieved that I had resisted my defiant urge to go commando that morning and instead found a spare pair of knickers at Darren’s to put on.

Muscle Man was turning his face towards me now, trying to catch my gaze, and I kept my eyes lowered and my face straight, as if the press of his body against mine was nothing untoward and this was the way that I always travelled on my daily commute.

Fearing what might happen if I stood trapped between the carriage wall and this man any longer, I ducked under his arm and got off the train at Chancery Lane without looking back. I wondered, briefly, if he might follow me. I was wearing a dress; Chancery Lane was a quiet station; after our exchange on the train, he might suggest all manner of anonymous dirty deeds. But the train was gone and my muscled man with it.

I had meant to turn left out of the station and head to the French restaurant on the corner that made the best eggs Benedict I’d had since I left New Zealand. The first time I ate there, I told the chef that he made the most delicious breakfast in London, and he had replied, ‘I know.’ I can understand why the British don’t like the French – they’re a cocky bunch, but I like that about them, and I went back to the same restaurant for eggs Benedict as often as I could.

Now, though, too flustered to remember the way, instead of turning left I turned right. The French place didn’t open until nine anyway. I could find a quiet spot in Grey’s Inn Gardens, perhaps play a little before heading back to the restaurant.

Halfway down the street, searching for the unsignposted lane that led to the gardens, I realised that I was standing outside a strip club that I had visited only a few weeks after I first arrived in the UK. I had visited the club with a friend, a girl with whom I had worked briefly while travelling through Australia’s Northern Territory and bumped into again at a youth hostel nearby on my first night in London. She’d heard that dancing was the easiest way to make money here. You spent a couple of months or so at the sleazier joints and then you could get a job at one of the posh bars in Mayfair where celebrities and footballers would stuff wads of fake money down your G-string as if it were confetti.

Charlotte had taken me along to check the place out and see if she could pick up some work. To my disappointment, the man who had met us at the red-carpeted reception area didn’t lead us into a room full of scantily clad ladies getting their groove on, but instead took us into his office, through another door off to the side.

He asked Charlotte to outline her previous experience – of which she had none, unless you counted dancing on tables at nightclubs. Next he looked her up and down in the way that a jockey might assess a horse at auction.

Then he eyed me up from head to toe.

‘Do you want a job too, love?’

‘No, thanks,’ I replied. ‘Got one already. I’m just her chaperone.’

‘It’s no touching. We throw them out straight away if they try anything,’ he added hopefully.

I shook my head.

I did briefly consider selling my body for cash, though, aside from the risks involved, I would have preferred prostitution. It seemed more honest to me somehow. I found stripping a little contrived. Why go that far and not commit to the full deal? In any event, I decided I needed my nights free for gigs, and I needed a job that left me with plenty of energy to practise.

Charlotte lasted about a month at the club in Holborn before she was sacked when one of the other girls reported her for leaving the premises with two customers.

A young couple. Innocent-looking as you like, Charlotte said. They’d come in late on a Friday night, the chap pleased as punch and his girlfriend excited and skittish, as if she’d never seen another woman’s body in her life. The boyfriend had offered to pay for a dance, and his girlfriend had surveyed the room and picked Charlotte. Perhaps because she hadn’t bought any proper stripper outfits yet, or had fake nails done like the other girls. It was Charlotte’s point of difference. She was the only stripper who didn’t look like a stripper.

The woman had become obviously aroused within seconds. Her boyfriend was blushing bright red. Charlotte enjoyed subverting the innocent, and she was flattered by their response to the movements of her body.

She leaned forward, filling the small space that was left between them.

‘Want to come back to mine?’ she’d whispered into both their ears.

After a little more blushing, they’d agreed and they’d all bundled into the back of a black cab and driven to her flat in Vauxhall. Charlotte’s suggestion they go to theirs instead had been summarily turned down.

Her flatmate’s face was a picture, she said, when he’d opened her bedroom door in the morning, without knocking, to bring her a cup of tea, and found her in bed with not just one stranger but two.

I didn’t hear from Charlotte often now. London had a way of swallowing people up, and keeping in touch had never been a strong point of mine. I remembered the club, though.

The strip joint was not, as you might expect, down a darkened alleyway, but rather right off the main street, between a Pret a Manger and a sports retailer. There was an Italian restaurant a few doors further down that I’d been to on a date once, made memorable when I accidentally set the menu on fire by holding it open over the candle in the centre of the table.

The doorway was slightly recessed, and the sign above was not lit up in neon, but nonetheless if you looked at the place directly, from the blacked-out glass and the seedy-sounding name – Sweethearts – there was no mistaking it for anything other than a strip club.

Struck by a sudden burst of curiosity, I tucked my arm tightly over my violin case, stepped forward and pushed the door.

It was locked. Shut. Perhaps unsurprisingly at eight-thirty on a Thursday morning, they weren’t open. I pushed against the door again, hoping it would give.

Nothing.

Two men in a white van slowed as they drove by and wound down their window.

‘Come back at lunchtime, love,’ one of them shouted. The expression on his face was of sympathy rather than attraction. In my black dress, still wearing last night’s thick rock-chick make-up, I probably looked like a desperate girl looking for a job. So what if I was?

I was hungry now and my mouth was dry. My arms were beginning to ache. I was hugging my violin case tightly to my side, which I had a habit of doing when I was upset or stressed. I didn’t have the heart to go into the French restaurant unshowered and dressed in yesterday’s clothes. I didn’t want the chef to think me uncouth.

I took the tube back to Whitechapel, walked to my flat, stripped out of the dress and curled up on my bed. My alarm was set for 3 p.m., so I could go back underground and busk for the afternoon commuters.

Even on my worst days, the days when my fingers felt as clumsy as a fist full of sausages and my mind felt like it was full of glue, I still found a way to play somewhere, even if it was in a park with pigeons for an audience. It wasn’t so much that I was ambitious, or working towards a career in music, though of course I had dreams of being spotted and signed, of playing at the Lincoln Center or the Royal Festival Hall. I just couldn’t help it.

I woke up at three feeling rested and a great deal more positive. I’m an optimist by nature. It takes a degree of madness, a very positive attitude or a bit of both to lead a person round the other side of the world with nothing but a suitcase, an empty bank account and a dream to keep them going. My poor moods never lasted long.

I have a wardrobe full of different outfits for busking, most of them garnered from markets and from eBay, because I don’t have a lot of cash. I rarely wear jeans, as, with a waist much smaller, proportionately, than my hips, I find trying on trousers tedious, and I wear skirts and dresses nearly every day. I have a couple of pairs of denim cut-off shorts for cowboy days, when I play country tunes, but today, I felt, was a Vivaldi day, and Vivaldi requires a more classical look. The black velvet dress would have been my first choice, but it was crumpled in a heap on the floor where I had ditched it earlier that morning and needed to go back to the dry cleaner’s. Instead, I selected a black, knee-length skirt with a slight fishtail and a cream silk blouse with a delicate lace collar that I had bought from a vintage store, the same place I got the dress. I wore opaque tights and a pair of lace-up ankle boots with a low heel. The full effect, I hoped, was a little demure, gothic Victorian, the sort of look that I loved and Darren hated; he thought that vintage was a style for wannabe hipsters who didn’t wash.

By the time I had reached Tottenham Court Road, the station where I had an agreed busking spot, the commuter crowd had just begun to pick up. I settled myself in the area against the wall at the bottom of the first set of escalators. I had read a study in a magazine that said that people were most likely to give money to buskers if they’d had a few minutes to make up their mind to tip. So it was handy that I was situated where commuters could see me as they rolled down the escalator and have a chance to fish out their wallets before they walked by. I wasn’t immediately in their way either, which seemed to work for Londoners; they liked to feel as though they’d made a choice to step to one side and drop money in my case.

I knew that I ought to make eye contact and smile my thanks at the people who left coins, but I was so lost in my music I often forgot. When I was playing Vivaldi, there was no chance that I would connect with anyone. If the fire alarm had gone off in the station, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. I put the violin to my chin and within minutes the commuters disappeared. Tottenham Court Road disappeared. It was just me and Vivaldi on repeat.

I played until my arms began to ache and my stomach began to gnaw, both sure signs that it was later than I had planned to stay. I was home by ten.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I counted up my earnings and discovered a crisp red bill tucked neatly inside a small tear in the velvet lining.

Someone had tipped me fifty pounds.

2

A Man and His Desires

The tides of coincidence move in curious ways. Sometimes he felt as if his whole life had flown by like a river, its zigzagging course all too often dictated by random events or people, and he had never been truly in control, had just drifted from childhood, teenage years and early struggles onwards to the quiet waters of middle age, like a drunken embarkation on foreign seas. But then again, wasn’t everyone in the same boat? Maybe he had merely proven to be a better navigator, and the storms hadn’t been too fierce along the way.

Today’s lecture had overrun: too many questions from his students interrupting the flow. Not that that presented him with a problem. The more they enquired, queried, the better. It meant they were attentive, interested in the subject. Which was not always the case. This academic year’s was a good intake. Just the right proportion of foreign students and home-based ones to make for a challenging mix, which in turn kept him alert and on his toes. Unlike so many other professors, he varied his courses a lot, if only to sidestep the traps of boredom and repetition. This semester his comparative literature seminars were exploring the recurrence of suicide and the death element in writers of the 1930s and 1940s, examining the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald in America, the often erroneously labelled fascist writer Drieu La Rochelle in France and the Italian author Cesare Pavese. Not a particularly cheerful subject, but it seemed to be hitting a nerve of some sort with much of his audience, especially the women. Blame Sylvia Plath, he reckoned. As long as it didn’t drive too many of them in the direction of their gas cooker in emulation, he smiled inside.

He didn’t need the job. He had come into money some ten years ago, after his father had passed away and left him a tidy sum. He had never expected this to happen. Theirs had seldom been a particularly easy relationship, and he had long assumed his siblings, with whom he had neither regular contact nor much in common, would inherit the lot. It had been a pleasant surprise. Another of those unseen crossroads on the road of life.

Following the lecture, he’d met with a couple of students in his office, arranging future tutorials and answering questions, and had found himself short of time. He had originally planned to see a new movie at the Curzon West End, a late-afternoon performance, but this was no longer possible. Not to worry – he could catch it at the weekend.