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‘You still sound stressed, Serena. What’s happened to that feisty mare with the tangled hair?’
Tears are welling up, obscuring my view of the river and the London Eye opposite. Goddammit. How does he do that? Takes what I’m feeling, reads it even through the phone, processes it, susses it, even makes it rhyme?
‘If I start telling you what’s dead and buried, I would never stop.’
‘I’m a good listener.’
‘One day, Gustav.’
‘Fine. So. You’ve looked at the figures? Crystal held the fort while you were out and she’s shifted nearly half the pieces now. Your amazing delivery the other night has tapped into some kind of underground zeitgeist. I thought I had my finger on the pulse when it came to trends, no matter how off the wall, but the response to your masochist voyeur motif has hit the mainstream!’
‘I don’t know how to thank you.’
There’s a silence at the other end of the phone. Rain is starting to hurl itself against the window.
‘You can thank me by meeting me in half an hour,’ Gustav answers at last. ‘Indulge me by letting me show you something that will extricate you from all those memories once and for all.’
‘In that case I’ll bring my bags. They’re right here. I’m coming to you tonight.’
‘Leave everything at the gallery. I’ll send Dickson for them.’ I hear a quiet hiss of satisfaction at the other end of the phone. ‘This will blow your mind. But if I’m wrong, you can walk out of my life with your head held high.’
He’s waiting for me at an anonymous-looking house in Baker Street which has seen better days. Rain stains run green and brown down the facade, over the peeling plaster and cracked woodwork. It’s almost opposite where Sherlock Holmes fictionally lived, in fact, and not far from the weirdness of Madame Tussauds. So much effort put into recreating the make-believe.
He is walking towards me. We are both holding umbrellas. As he sees me he picks up his pace, and I pick up mine. I can practically hear the swelling of violins in the backing track. He’s wearing the red scarf again but the vampire-slayer’s black coat has been replaced by a cool rain jacket. Underneath that he’s wearing another business suit, black, almost funereal.
But despite the formal garb it’s his face that catches me unawares. He looks happy. Slightly unshaven, with that rough, gypsy look that makes me want to touch his face. The cold air and the rain seems to have washed life into him. His eyes under the shade of the umbrella are bright and lively, and when he sees me it’s as if someone has switched on a light behind them. He starts to smile. Really smile. As if he’s about to burst into laughter.
I smile back uncertainly. We’re still separated by a few yards. I look down at myself. Have I spilt something onto my jeans? Is my jacket buttoned unevenly?
‘You look even more beautiful than when I last saw you. That sea air has blown roses into your cheeks.’
‘It’s the only good thing about that place.’
‘You’re where you belong now.’ He lifts my hand and runs his lips slowly and sensuously across the back of it. It’s that mouth I want to conquer. The softness of his mouth in that world-weary face has become my secret challenge. Soon I’m going to make him kiss me properly. French tongues. Everything. But for now he closes his eyes in rapture at the smell of my skin. Then, still slowly as if he’s waking from a sleep, he opens his eyes, produces the silver chain, and locks it onto my bracelet.
Seeing him hook me up like that has become so matter of fact now. But the instant I’m chained to him, I’m anchored. He’s strong, but so am I.
He pushes open the shabby front door and leads me inside. The house is a museum. The musty, waxy smell tells me it’s not lived in. The walls are all panelled in dark wood. The floors are polished dark boards, as are the stairs and even the ceilings. It’s like being boxed up in an antique crate.
Our footsteps echo in the silence as we turn left through a set of huge double doors and enter a long ballroom.
‘Christ, this is like the Tardis!’ I exclaim, whirling round in a circle. The silver chain winds itself around me and I have to twirl anti-clockwise to unwind it. ‘It looked like a kind of slum from the outside.’
‘The wonders of Georgian architecture. City architecture in general, actually. Everything built to maximise the use of the space, and yet deceptive. Go up higher, if you’re in the new world. Dig deeper, stretch backwards, if you’re in the old country.’
He unwinds his scarf as he waits in the doorway of the ballroom. His handsome face, settling into calm as he’s revealed to me properly once more. The knot at his throat is a peacock blue with a feathery design fading down the tie.
When I was about nine I came home with some gigantic feathers I’d found arranged in a circle in the middle of a campsite along the cliffs. It was winter, so the campsite was vacant. I thought the feathers were so pretty, the shimmering green and blue with the huge eye in the middle. I stuck them with Sellotape into a fan but when she saw them she screamed that I was a wicked girl who’d brought the evil eye into the house.
I start to walk down the middle of the polished floor. This room is also panelled, but the panels are hung with oversized black and white photographs in very contemporary plain frames. The far end of the room, which should traditionally accommodate a fireplace or an ancestral portrait, is filled entirely by an enormous flat screen.
‘What you’re going to see here should appeal to your voyeuristic tendencies, Serena. And your secret taste for punishment. In fact, I’m banking on these images really liberating your mind.’
I plant my hands on my hips. ‘You really think you know me, don’t you?’
He bats his hand lightly as if I’m a moth. ‘Half the glitterati of London reckon they know you, signorina. That’s why certain erotica collectors have been sniffing round while you’ve been out of town.’
‘Collectors? Cool.’
‘Did you know that Ian Fleming allegedly possessed a collection of flagellation erotica? It was his wife Ann who was into it, apparently. She wrote him letters, begging for it. I long for you to whip me. Imagine the scandal of that. In the fifties and sixties. Whipping each other to a frenzy in their Jamaican paradise.’ He runs his hand along the wall, rubbing dusty plaster between his fingers. ‘So you see, punishment isn’t only the stuff of dungeons and fetish clubs. Even the smarter echelons are into it.’
I pretend to look through a magnifying glass. ‘Imagine. The collected work of Serena Folkes coming to light in centuries to come, unearthed in dusty antique shops and little galleries in the back streets of London or New York.’
‘Or Venice itself. You didn’t hold back, that’s why they’re eager to snap you up. You’re out there now and every bit as daring as I suspected.’ His face is wide with laughter, that pebbly rumble from the base of his throat as he unwinds his scarf. ‘Hey. Don’t look so appalled. Everyone has a dark side.’
‘And you want to explore mine?’
‘I want you to explore yours. It’s time to place yourself inside the action for a change, with the aid of some wizardry. See if you want to participate, as well as watch.’ He still sounds so relaxed, his scarf dangling round his neck, his coat open as he leans in the doorway. ‘You’ll see what I mean.’
The photographs show men and women dressed in marionette costumes dancing, feasting, or sleeping. Arms are raised in Bacchanalian delight, bodies are prostrate on sumptuous beds, or resting in poses too awkward for real sleep.
The composition is more stylised than my photographs. More technically adept, too, using studio lighting and exaggerated colour stains.
As I get to the furthest series I see that some subjects are not resting at all. They are being driven from sleep as an orgy is depicted, step by step. It starts with a couple, just like the figures in the lupanare frescoes, half-clothed. They are laying each other down on a big bed in a room styled like a Titian painting, with draped curtains, bowls of fruit, slave girls whispering in the corner.
Soon it’s the people I’m concentrating on, not the composition. In the next picture the couple are kissing messily, pulling at each other’s remaining garments, and in the next the woman is on her back and the man is pushing himself between her legs while other people gather round to watch, including the slave girls.
A familiar heat starts to trickle through my body. The same sensation assailed me in the convent. My eyes travel over the faces, the mouths, the hands, the naked bodies. I remember the nuns drifting round their cells, the shock of the first slap of knotted leather on their downy skin. But this is different, because the people in these pictures are acting, directed by the quiet eye behind the camera.
‘Those nuns were alive and breathing, right in front of you. That’s why you were turned on watching them.’ His voice is soft, and caressing. I can hear it, but I’m barely listening. ‘Let’s see how these images affect you. They’re more extreme, more adult, an even stronger story. This isn’t a private dance, as you so aptly put it. The action involves more than one person.’
‘No technological tricks here that I can see. Just very effective crowd control,’ I sniff. ‘But what’s troubling you?’
I catch him glancing warily at the photographs.
‘The trick is in the way this exhibition forces a response from the viewer. Just go with it. Take no notice. A goose just walked over my grave, that’s all. This is about you, not me.’ He holds up his finger as I try to protest. ‘We’re taking you way out of your comfort zone.’
He waves me on along the sequence. I decide not to query the peculiar way he slips into ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. The scenes progress into a no-holds-barred orgy, beautifully composed and patently not simulated. This is sex by numbers. The hands, fingers, mouths, are everywhere. The women are open, the men are erect, they’re all gymnastic in their positions, beautiful in their physiques. It’s art, but it’s unadulterated sex, too.
‘It’s artificial,’ I remark dismissively. ‘No comparison with the insouciance of my nuns.’
But the display is starting to work on me just as he said it would. The frisson of menace in the room accentuates the chill running through my own limbs. I come to a halt in front of one woman, her face contorted with abandon as she’s groped and penetrated by two men. Not so artificial now. She could be one of those female saints in the Venetian convent’s cloisters, in the throes of religious fervour. The same excited fervour invading me now.
‘The next room will show you the punishment I was talking about. Flagellation brought graphically to life.’
I realise my hand is up as if to stop traffic. For once I want to shake Gustav off, be totally alone. I stumble to the end and turn right, and here is another, smaller room with another huge television screen dominating the far end. This is switched on and is showing an interior of some kind. Just an empty bed, in an empty room. I suppose anything passes for modern art.
The photographs continue to gallop round the room. Here is the same couple as in the last room, but the woman is on all fours now. She is wearing an ordinary-looking dress, but nothing else in the picture is remotely ordinary. For a start her hands are tied to the bed post. Her flowery dress is flipped up over her backside so that it is bare. The man is standing behind her, fully clothed, resting one hand on her rump. His other hand is holding a long thin switch. I’m willing him to get started.
‘Did you ever try it? The whipping? Did you ever use that whip you nicked from the convent?’
Gustav is just behind me.
‘How did you know about that?’
‘I had a suspicion during your presentation. But I’m not entirely a mind-reader. We’ve been through your belongings at your cousin’s flat and in the gallery. Yes, I know that’s intrusive but I have to know everything about you, Serena. So. Did you use the whip?’
‘Once or twice. But since I was called home from Venice it’s never come out of the rucksack. At least, not until you rifled through my stuff.’
‘You can get down off your high horse, Serena. No harm done. Now, take a look at this.’
He waves a remote control at the television screen showing the empty room. A woman, a different woman from those in the photographs, walks calmly to the bed. It is the same bed as in the photographs. It’s all repetitive, a repetitive loop of perversion. I’m beginning to feel horribly claustrophobic. This gloomy house is hemming me in. The people in these photographs look hemmed in too. Cajoled. Diminished. But I am beginning to understand why they are feverishly delirious to be so.
The woman in the film takes up a pose on all fours, and spreads her knees. Then she looks directly at the camera.
Her jet-black hair is pinned up in its usual severe knot. She’s wearing a high-necked white blouse and even a string of pearls round her neck. She grips the edges of the bed with long claw-like fingers, and lifts her bottom.
‘My God, Gustav!’ I gasp, turning to him. ‘What’s Crystal doing at an orgy?’
‘We employed her to take part. This house, this exhibition belongs to me. I used to live here in the bad old days.’ He keeps his eyes on Crystal as she starts to move. ‘She used to be a model, and small-time actress. But most of all she was a muse for the guy who took these films and stills. And no, it wasn’t me doing the filming. I was – otherwise engaged. See? Even though she’s living another life now, in here she’s immortal. Looped over and over for anyone who pays to watch. She’s a permanent installation.’
‘I’ll never look at her the same way again.’ My hands are over my mouth to smother a mad giggle. ‘She was at my opening party, serving drinks, selling my work. She’s still hiring herself out for this kind of thing?’
‘No. She’s my sales director now. Turned over a new leaf. We all have. But she’ll be glad to know this film has opened your eyes.’ He is very close behind me now, his fingers tangling in my hair. ‘Shame, though. She would have been perfect in the role. She’s so nearly nailed the Mother Superior vibe, wouldn’t you agree?’
I giggle again. ‘I could have lent her my whip.’
‘You’re getting it, my little ankle biter.’ His hands are on my shoulders now, massaging them slightly. ‘But I’d rather see you wielding the whip. No, don’t deny it. I’m just drawing all the venom to the surface. Admit it. You skulked about in that convent because you wanted to get caught.’
‘I told you, I was locked in.’ My voice squeaks with embarrassment. He has me round the throat now.
‘You wanted the sisters to catch you and drag you down to the chapel to do penance in front of the entire congregation.’
I move away, afraid he’ll discover how wet I’m getting. All fight drains out of me. I remember the sensations flowing like warm water as I hid in the shadows watching Sister Perpetua.
‘All these sticky, wicked layers. So rewarding peeling them away.’ He keeps his thoughtful distance. ‘So you’re ready to see Crystal’s punishment?’
The answering jolt and thrill on my own skin is the same reaction as when I watched the nun’s whip first biting into her soft white flesh.
‘The further I travelled, the more I witnessed, the more I wanted to join in.’
‘And that’s why you’re not taking pictures of flowers and kittens for a living. You’re a gorgeous, inquisitive woman who’s been starved all her life but what you’ve seen through your camera lens, look what it’s done. It’s made you blossom. You’re ready to ripen, my exotic flower.’
His face has gone pale, his eyes dark and distant as if he’s peering at a mirage. Soon I’ll understand, but not yet.
‘Exotic flowers don’t grow in rural Devon.’ I try a shy smile. Take a risk. ‘But maybe they can be cultivated in central London?’
‘Those monsters did a number on you and I intend to repair the damage.’ The cloud clears from his face. ‘Let’s hope this next scene will be your catharsis.’
Crystal continues looking into the camera, her face white as a mask, her eyes black holes. Only her red mouth, with its strange little smile and snaky tongue, shows any kind of animation.
Someone else steps into the shot. Dressed entirely in black leather, including a cat mask. Dominatrix gear, black leather, studded collar. The figure is holding a thin black switch, like a riding crop, with a bunch of fine leather tassels dangling off it. I glance at Gustav. He is watching the video intently.
The rooms seems to shrink, the pictures and walls and ceiling sliding inwards as if to crush me, then spinning nauseatingly. I sway, nothing to grab on to. This isn’t art as I think of art. This isn’t soft-focus nuns in Gothic candlelit shadows, about to purge their sins on their own virginal skin. This is starkly lit domination.
Gustav wavers in front of me like a flame. He even splits in two for a second. I am afraid I’m going to faint. What’s the matter with me? It’s only a dirty home video masquerading as indie film. A bit of kinky behaviour, fetish dress, all up there on screen. Readers’ wives, but more skilfully stage-managed, more convincingly acted. If I look closely, surely I’ll see the joins.
Crystal spreads her arms and legs in a star shape. Sweat trickles down my back, in my hair, my armpits as I regain some focus. The black-clad creature plants its high-heeled boots on either side of Crystal and yanks her milkmaid skirt up to reveal her white bottom. Crystal is wearing no knickers, just black stockings. Her bottom and thighs glow in the dead lighting of the interior. Then the creature lifts its arm. No-one is uttering a sound. All I can hear is the sliced air as the leather-clad creature brandishes the whip so clearly that it practically lifts the hair from my forehead in its breeze.
There’s a swish like a wasp’s wing as the whip is brought down on Crystal’s buttocks. The stroke rings out like a cruel gunshot and I run my fingers quickly over my own bottom. Her skin quivers under the blow as I gasp out loud. She is so skinny. She jerks involuntarily, showing a quick flash between her thighs, and I see her fingers clawing at the bed cover. My own fingers dig into my backside, try to quell the dirty excitement growing in me. But still she makes no sound.
‘Don’t you move, Crystal, or you get double.’
The dominatrix’s voice hisses out of the film. Fills the room like the humming of a bees’ nest. She leans down and strokes Crystal’s butt cheek, where a livid red stripe has come up. I stroke my own bottom to soothe the imaginary pain. And still Crystal lies there as if she is in a trance. Remember, she’s an actress. Or she’s been doped. The dominatrix is stroking her on the one hand as if she is preparing a rare steak, but on the other she steps back and swipes the whip down a second time, squarely on the second cheek.
I squeeze my legs together as the dampness pricks up in excited response. On the screen Crystal flicks her head as her bottom jerks up again involuntarily. Again the frail flesh quivers under the blow, and again there is a tantalising glimpse of her sex as she bounces off the floor. My own is tightening frantically in response.
‘Remind you of anything, Serena? These sounds? That white skin, scored across with punishment?’
As a third stroke comes down and the thwack resounds round the panelled room we’re standing in, I could swear that instead of moaning or cringing in fear, Crystal actually lifts her bottom, as if inviting the stroke instead of recoiling from it. She moves slightly from side to side, kneeling up to lift her bottom higher into the air. As I glimpse the softness tucked between her legs, the quick slash of bright red as she wiggles her bottom, a spike of desire flashes through me and at last I recognise it for what it is. Clear, urgent, sexual desire.
I was aroused when I watched little Perpetua and her secret sisters. But this is like a hand reaching inside and physically shaking me. It’s not Crystal I want, surely?
The dominatrix creature kicks at the back of Crystal’s knees, so that she rises higher, thrusting her bottom, decorated now with three pink stripes, into the air. The dominatrix places the whip on the crack and for a moment I freeze. Is she going to shove the whip in there? Hasn’t Crystal suffered enough? My own body clenches tighter still. I’m so close to feeling it for myself. I wriggle restlessly as the whip strokes Crystal’s bottom almost tenderly. Yes, it would be tender as well as cruel. Sweet, as well as sour.
I wish I could see the dominatrix’s face. Who is she?
The whip is in the air, swiping down once more onto the butt cheek. I sway along with the teasing of the whip. Four pink stripes on her bottom and now an audible groan escapes from Crystal, but she’s unashamedly showing her pleasure now. She’s fidgeting from side to side like a mare scratching herself on a fence. The blows have raised her beaten flesh into weals. One hand has come up brazenly between her legs and she is touching herself, just as I’m desperate to do, she’s moaning as she waits for her mistress to strike her, her fingers sweeping up and down, her face tilted heavenwards as she sways, one long white finger going up inside, pushing in.
I can feel heat on my bottom, the thrust of the finger’s invasion. It will hurt, I know it, but although I can feel the fear I want to be in the film now. I want to be in there with these people, I want to push Crystal aside, take my place in front of the mistress, feel those blows on my own soft skin and the heat and pain they will conjure up.
Her black eyes blaze and I read clearly what’s going on behind them. She isn’t cowed, or humiliated. Or if she is, she’s loving the belittling. Being paid to reveal it. She’s euphoric. She’s loving those red, sore stripes on her. This is more than a job to her. They’re battle scars. They’ve brought her to life.
My mouth drops open as she tips her head back, her eyes and mouth alight with pleasure. She lifts her bottom for more. I push mine back against the wall. It’s like a foreign language being translated for me. It’s all so clear now. It’s not Crystal I want. I want to be playing her part.
Suddenly the picture freezes.
‘Have you seen enough, Serena?’
For the first time since we met I’ve forgotten about Gustav. I can see my face superimposed onto Crystal’s. She was tense and stiff when she lay down on that bed. Now she’s liberated. Crazy Crystal. Surrendered Serena. No illusion. That was real. Every blow, every flinch and tremor felt real to me.
I press my hand against the frozen image on the screen. ‘I could quite happily go right back to the beginning and see it all again. But then I might never leave! So no. Let’s get out of here.’
I saw the nuns doing it, and now I’ve seen Crystal submitting to it. I won’t be still, won’t rest, until I’ve tried this for myself, and surely that’s why Gustav brought me here today? To show me these films, these scenes, these people writhing with pleasure. To tease me, then invite me to try it. My own photographs, the little nuns hanging brazenly in the other gallery, have told him I have this twisted urge to watch and then to be tried and punished. He understood it before I’d even admitted it to myself. But I’m ready for it now. In fact, I’m practically ready to come. Euphoria rushes through me, heats my body, lifts my feet. I want to run as fast as I can. Jump as high as I can. I have to get him home, persuade him to do all those things to me.
Gustav has done what he set out to do. He’s shown me what I need, what I want him to do next.
I jerk the silver chain tight, lead him quickly through the dark, panelled rooms. The twisting, groaning, gyrating bodies will continue silently writhing inside their fantasies, imprisoned joyously inside those frames forever.
