Eighty Days Yellow (7 page)

‘It’ll take your mind off it. I’m paying. I have an outfit for you. And this place is different. You’ll love it.’

A few hours later, I was standing aboard a large boat moored on the Thames that doubled as a fetish-themed nightclub once a month over the autumn.

‘What exactly does that mean, “fetish”?’ I asked Charlotte nervously.

‘Oh, nothing really,’ she said. ‘The people just wear fewer clothes, but like they mean it. And they’re friendlier.’

She grinned and told me to relax in a manner that suggested I do exactly the opposite.

I was now dressed in a pale-blue boned corset, frilly knickers and stockings with a blue seam running down the back of my legs from thigh to ankle to meet a pair of silver heels. Charlotte had teased my hair into a thick mass of curls, doubling the already large volume of my red locks, and had then balanced a top hat on my crown at a jaunty angle. She had lined my eyelids carefully with liquid eyeliner, thick and dark, painted my lips a vivid, glossy red and stuck a little silver glitter to my cheeks with Vaseline. The corset was a couple of inches too big and had to be cinched all the way in to tighten round my waist, and the shoes were a touch small, making it difficult to walk, but the effect overall, I hoped, was pleasing.

‘Wow,’ said Charlotte, looking me up and down once she’d finished decking me out in all her finery. ‘You look hot.’

I moved awkwardly over to her mirror. Damn, my feet were going to hurt by the end of the night. The shoes were pinching already.

I was pleased to see that I couldn’t disagree with Charlotte’s description, though I wouldn’t say so aloud, obeying the presumed rules of behaviour and putting on a show of modesty. The girl in the mirror didn’t really look like me. More like a rebellious older sister in a burlesque costume. The corset, though loose-fitting, forced me to stand straighter, and though I was inwardly nervous about leaving the apartment like this, in my new skin, I guessed I would look confident, my shoulders back and throat bared, like a dancer.

Charlotte had stripped off completely in front of me and rubbed her body with lube, before asking for my help to shimmy into a tiny bright-yellow rubber dress with two red lightning bolts running up either side of her waist. The dress was cut low at the front, so that nearly all of her plump breasts and a tantalising hint of her nipples were visible, pressed tightly against the scooped neck. The lube was cinnamon-flavoured, and for a moment I had been tempted to give her a lick. I noticed that she didn’t wear any knickers, although the dress barely covered her arse.

Charlotte was brazen, that was for sure, but I admired her confidence and, after a day spent in her company, was beginning to get used to it. She was one of the few people I knew who did exactly what she liked without giving a damn what anyone else thought.

In my too-small five-inch heels and Charlotte in her enormous red platforms, we’d had to cling on to each other’s arms, giggling, as we tentatively scooted down the steep metal ramp and onto the boat.

‘Don’t worry,’ Charlotte said, ‘you’ll be on your back before you know it.’

Would I?!

We arrived at about midnight and the club was in full swing. I was a little self-conscious about removing my jacket and joining the party with more than my usual amount of flesh on public display, but Charlotte insisted that I would fit right in. We presented our tickets in exchange for a stamp on the wrist at the front desk, checked in our coats and then teetered up the stairs, through the double doors and into the main bar.

My senses were assaulted immediately. Everywhere men and women were dressed in eye-popping outfits. Latex abounded, but also vintage-style lingerie, top hats and tail coats, military uniforms, even a man wearing just a cock-ring, his flaccid penis bouncing happily as he walked. A short woman wearing a voluminous skirt and nothing else, her full breasts hanging freely, walked through the crowd holding a lead with a very thin, tall man attached to the other end, his back and shoulders hunched heavily so that she could pull him along without straining. He reminded me of Mr van der Vliet.

Alone on one of the couches sat a petite man, or possibly an androgynous woman, wearing a full rubber body suit and face mask. Charlotte hadn’t been entirely right about the fetish crowd wearing fewer clothes. Of course, many of them were wearing next to nothing, and wearing it well, but a large number wore elaborate costumes that covered every inch of flesh, yet still managed to look sexual. Cheap fancy dress and street clothes were both banned, a finer detail that elevated almost all of the boat’s occupants from tacky to theatrical.

‘What are you drinking, honey?’ asked Charlotte, taking my attention away from the crowd. I tried with all my might not to stare at anyone, but I felt as though I had been dropped into an adults-only movie set, or had stumbled through a corridor into a parallel universe where everyone was like Charlotte and didn’t give a damn about what the rest of the world thought of them.

She’d been right at least about my outfit. Not only did I fit right in, but I was one of the more modestly attired revellers in attendance. They probably thought I was downright demure. This thought relaxed me. Normally, in any group of friends or social gathering, I worried I was the weird one, with my relaxed attitude to sex and relationships. No one had ever labelled me demure.

‘Just water for me, thanks,’ I replied.

I didn’t want to take advantage of her generosity, and I wanted to absorb all this with a clear head, so I wouldn’t wake up in the morning thinking it was just a dream.

Charlotte shrugged and returned a few minutes later with our drinks in hand.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you round.’

She took me by the hand and led me through another set of double doors, this pair leading to the uncovered prow of the ship, where a handful of smokers and men dressed in thick, hot-looking military jackets were standing, either smoking or cooling down, or both. The women, who were generally wearing far fewer clothes, were huddled around the two gas heaters standing in the middle of the space. Two of them wore latex skirts with the backsides cut out and their pale buttocks shone under the gas light like low-hanging twin moons.

I walked over to the side and stood still for a moment, holding Charlotte’s hand and staring at the Thames stretched out into the night like a long, black ribbon, nestling gently between the two halves of the city. The water looked thick and viscous, and made a soft slapping sound as it lapped at the base of the boat. Waterloo Bridge joined the two sides behind us, Blackfriars Bridge in front, the lights on Tower Bridge barely visible in the foreground, like a dark promise of things to come.

I felt Charlotte shiver.

‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘It’s cold out here.’

We walked back through the double doors and into the main bar, and then through another set of doors and onto the dance floor. I watched, open-mouthed, as a dark-haired, beautiful, vampy-looking woman covered herself with gasoline and then blew fire into the air over her head, while grinding round a pole to the sound of a heavy rock song. She reeked of sex. In the company of Charlotte, and in the presence of so many others who seemed unashamed of their bodies and proud, even, of their sexuality, I felt, for the first time in my life, as if I might not be a freak. Or at least, that if I was a freak, I had company.

A tall man standing at the edge of the dance floor caught my eye. He was wearing a pair of tight, bright-blue sequinned leggings, long riding boots, a red and gold military jacket and a matching hat. He held a riding crop in one hand and a drink in the other, and was chatting happily to a gothic-looking girl wearing latex hot pants. She had long, black hair with a single white lock at the front. The man’s leggings barely concealed a large bulge at the crotch, and I stopped still for a moment, mesmerised. I thought I’d seen a similar pair of leggings in the window of a women’s fashion store, but on him the effect was decidedly masculine.

Charlotte tugged my hand. ‘Later,’ she whispered into my ear, eyeing the man with the leggings. ‘The show’s on. That means it’ll be quiet downstairs.’

She led me through a small, red velvet-curtained corridor, then into another, smaller bar, filled with similarly clad partygoers, and then down a flight of steps.

‘This is the dungeon,’ she said.

The room didn’t look how I expected a ‘dungeon’ to look, although I really had no concept of how a modern-day dungeon would look or even that such a thing existed. I stopped in my tracks and looked around, soaking it all up, in case I never saw anything like it again.

The décor was just like the bar above, only with a few extra pieces of strange-looking furniture. There was a large, padded red cross in the shape of an X rather than a crucifix. A woman, naked, was leaning against it with her legs and arms spread, while another woman beat her with an instrument that Charlotte called a ‘flogger’. I couldn’t see the handle, as it was covered firmly by the woman’s hand, but instead of one single strand, like a whip, it had several pieces of soft-looking leather attached. The woman doing the flogging took turns at whipping then stroking the other woman’s arse with the palm of her hand, and sometimes running the strands of leather softly over her body. The woman on the receiving end moaned with pleasure and twitched unintentionally throughout, and the woman flogging her often bent forward and whispered what I imagined were sweet nothings into her ear. She was smiling, laughing and leaning her body towards her partner on the cross. They were surrounded by a small group of interested onlookers, but appeared to be in a world of their own, almost as if an invisible screen stood between them and the people watching.

The sight would have shocked me if I had seen it in a photograph, or read a salaciously worded description of it in a newspaper. I’d heard of this sort of thing, of course, but filed such activities away in my head, in the same place that I put stories of people rushing to hospital after an unfortunate accident with a hamster and a vacuum-cleaner pipe – I supposed some people might get into it, but I thought it was mostly either an urban legend or the prevail of the very strange. The people involved here all looked quite nice and normal, though they were kitted out in the same dramatic costumes that filled the rest of the boat. I moved in a bit closer to get a better look.

Yes, the person on the whipping end was definitely having a good time. I would have given a limb, right then, to know how that felt. And the beating itself, the rise and fall of the flogger, looked precise, rhythmic, expertly orchestrated. The whole thing was rather beautiful.

Charlotte, noting my interest, approached a man who was standing near the cross and tapped him on the shoulder, then beckoned to me.

‘Mark,’ she said to him, ‘this is Summer. It’s her first time here.’

Mark looked me up and down, though in an appreciative rather than predatory way.

‘Nice corset!’ he said, kissing me on both cheeks, European style. He was on the short side, a little fat and balding, but he had a friendly face and an attractive gleam in his eyes. He wore heavy flat boots and a rubber apron and vest. The apron had several pockets, which held a number of different implements, each, at first glance, similar to the flogger that was in use on the cross.

‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘Do you come here often?’

‘Not nearly as often as I’d like,’ he replied, laughing as I blushed.

‘Mark is the dungeon master,’ Charlotte inserted.

‘Basically,’ he said, ‘I make sure everything is OK down here and no one’s being a dickhead.’

I nodded and shifted from one foot to the other. Despite being taller than me, Charlotte was a shoe size smaller and my feet were really beginning to hurt.

I looked around for an empty chair, but didn’t see anything, aside from a metal frame with a padded flat section at roughly waist height that I suspected wasn’t a seat.

‘Am I allowed to sit on that?’ I asked, motioning towards the frame.

‘Not really,’ said Charlotte. ‘You’re not supposed to sit on the equipment. Someone might want to use it.’ Then her face lit up. ‘Oooh!’ she said, giving me a wicked grin and nudging Mark in the ribs. ‘You could give her a spanking, Mark. Then she could rest her feet.’

Mark looked at me. ‘I’d be delighted,’ he said, ‘if the lady would like that.’

‘Oh, no . . . Thanks, but I’m not sure.’

Mark politely replied, ‘No problem,’ in the same breath that Charlotte insisted, ‘Go on – what are you afraid of? He’s an expert. Just try it.’

I glanced over again at the woman on the cross, who now appeared to be in a state of ecstasy, unconcerned what sort of spectacle she provided to onlookers.

I wished I was like that, I thought, so brave and uncaring. If I had given less of a damn about the opinions of others, I’d probably never have ended up spending more than one night with Darren.

‘I’ll be right here with you,’ added Charlotte, no doubt watching my resolve falter. ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’

What the hell. Nobody here would think any less of me and I’d get to lie down for a bit, and besides that, I was curious. If it was all bad, this many people wouldn’t be doing it.

‘OK,’ I said, mustering a smile. ‘I’ll try it.’

Charlotte wriggled with delight.

‘Which instrument would you prefer?’ Mark asked, waving his hand in front of the tools held in his apron.

I followed his hand as it waved. Though he wasn’t a tall man, he had big, sturdy hands. They looked tough, the kind of hands that were engaged in some sort of physical work throughout the day, not hovering over a computer, typing and getting flabby.

Charlotte watched the line of my gaze with interest. ‘I think she’s the bare-handed sort, you know,’ she said.

I nodded.

Charlotte took my hand again and led me over to the bench.

Mark gently turned me away from Charlotte to face him. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’m going to start very, very gentle. If you’re uncomfortable at any time, just put your hand up into the air and I’ll stop straight away. Charlotte is going to stay right there next to you. Do you understand?’