Eighty Days Red (14 page)

We spent the next few days in a flurry of rehearsals, going through all the old numbers that we used to play together and rejigging some of their other songs where the violin suited. It took a bit of fiddling around, to give me enough time on stage without drowning out the sound, and the dynamics on stage were slightly odd with four musicians rather than three. Previously, Chris had been the focus with Ted alongside, and Ella of course at the back with drums. I was a bit like the third wheel, most of the time, and the sound didn’t always blend properly.

After our fourth successive night of rehearsals, we were back in Chris’s flat, feeling inexplicably morose.
Fran was in the kitchen, cooking pizza. She’d been at it for hours, making the dough and the tomato paste base from scratch. The flat was full of the smell of yeast from the bread dough and garlic from the marinara. Chris was sitting opposite me on the round wooden table next to the open-plan kitchen, with his shoulders hunched, flipping a screw-top beer cap repeatedly through his thumb and forefinger. I was watching him and waiting patiently, leaning my elbows on the table and resting my chin in my hands.
‘There’s something missing,’ he said, softly, almost to himself.
I waited for him to continue.
‘The sound is … not quite right. Unbalanced.’
‘If it’s not right, it’s OK, Chris. It’s not too late to bow out, just go with the three of you. I won’t be offended, truly.’
There was a part of me that slightly resented being swept along by Viggo and Susan. A rock phase had seemed like a rebellion, a grand idea for a change and a rest when it was my idea. Now that it had become someone else’s, I was feeling a little forlorn about being uprooted and sent off travelling again, as much as I was looking forward to the prospect of spending more time with Chris.
‘No, it’s not you. The violin is great. I just have the feeling that we need something more.’
‘More cowbell?’ Fran piped up from the kitchen.
He laughed and glanced over at her fondly.
‘That’s not a bad idea, you know,’ he mused, balancing the beer cap on one finger, deep in thought. ‘All this time, we’ve been thinking we need less, but maybe we need more.’
‘More? More what? Where would we get the musicians from?’
‘We need another layer of sound. But at this short notice it would have to be people who already play together.’
He was still talking to himself, staring deep into space, not even bothering to flick the stubborn curls away from his forehead.
A nugget of an idea began to take root in my brain.
Before I could nurture the idea into thought and speech, Fran appeared in front of us bearing a steaming platter of doughballs, each with a smattering of crispy parmesan on top and a slightly charred basil leaf. She had arranged them into a pyramid.
‘Wow,’ Chris said, ‘that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.’
I held back a snicker. Fran still seemed unaware of the effect she had on him. I’d known Chris for a few years, and never seen him behave like this over anyone. He’d started ironing his Tshirts, even for a night in, despite the fact that Fran was one of the scruffiest dressers I knew, her clothes rarely making it onto a hanger, let alone an ironing board.
‘What you need,’ she replied, ignoring his compliment, ‘is a trumpet or three.’
‘I might be able to help with that,’ I added. I still kept in touch with Marija and her husband Baldo, the flatmates I had lived with in New York before moving in with Dominik. Marija played flute in the orchestra, but she had trained on the trumpet, and was almost as good as Baldo on his; certainly good enough for our needs. They might not be able to get the time off, or get over here quick enough, but I knew they’d been bored since Simón left and had been replaced by an apparently much duller conductor, so a stint in a rock band might appeal.
Viggo agreed to the addition of a brass section, and Susan pulled some strings to extract Marija and Baldo from their commitments in New York.
‘You need one more,’ she said to me the next day, ‘so I’m sending Alex as well.’
Alex was the sax player who Marija had once tried to set me up with, on a date which had ended with me going home with an insurance broker who lived on the Upper East side in a posh apartment that smelled of salmon. Dominik had found the whole thing amusing, and Alex had been, fortunately, not too offended, as he’d managed to pick up another girl at the bar whilst I was on the balcony flirting with Derek.
The three of them would fly straight into Paris. They’d have just enough time to recover from jetlag, and we’d have a day or so to cram in rehearsals before the opening show, booked at La Cigale on the Boulevard Rochechouart. I’d been to Paris once, about four years earlier, but had little time for sightseeing – even so, I had fond but vague memories of the place. We were staying in a part of town that I hadn’t visited. Fran, in her new role as road manager had arranged all the accommodation.
All I had to do was pack, and attend the photo shoot that Susan was so keen on. It was too late to get any extra posters out, but she planned to send some of the pics to the reviewers and music mags, to at least keep any rumours at bay that I had lost the plot or gone off the rails, and instead push my career change as a temporary new direction. She thought the rock persona might add a bit of sex appeal that could help my classical records sell. Susan had always been enthusiastic on promoting my sex appeal, and she was very happy with my suggestion of photographer, Jack Grayson, who it turned out had a background in fashion and was behind a few risqué celebrity shoots. He had also had a fine art nude exhibit at a gallery in London, which had become notorious when the police had appeared, following complaints from some puritanical member of the public.
Out of curiosity, I’d looked the images up. They were all tasteful, I thought, though didn’t doubt that more conservative folk might find them shocking. One which particularly caught my eye featured a woman bending over alongside a pile of books, with a perfect strawberry peeking out from her arsehole. Another woman sat behind her, presumably responsible for the insertion of the strawberry. I was dying to ask Jack, or Grayson, as it seemed he was more commonly called, how he got the strawberry to stay there, but that seemed a conversation more appropriate for another time, perhaps over a beer.

Grayson lived and worked in an old school conversion, not far from the bedsit in Whitechapel, where I’d lived when I first met Dominik. He offered me a coffee when I arrived, and I drank it overlooking his balcony, a view of a graveyard and an seventeenth-century church. The presence of death and religion lent a sombre tone to his otherwise girly decor. The interior was fitted out in shades of cream, with a variety of ornate chairs dotted around and tall vases filled with flowers.

The room he used as his main studio was filled with lights, backdrops, and bits of equipment that I couldn’t identify, with large dishes and flat silver plates for catching the light.
Jack looked almost like a different person out of his latex. He was dressed in a pair of jeans and a white and black Religion T-shirt with a picture of a nude woman on the front, resting in a shopping trolley. His assistant, Jess, was laying out her make-up and hair products on the kitchen table, just about enough to fill a pharmacy I reckoned, and certainly enough to fill up her suitcase, which I’d seen her struggling up the stairs with as I came in.
I had never actually had a photo shoot before, at least, not officially. A few men who I had dated had taken pictures of me in the buff. Fortunately, either they hadn’t tried to send them to the papers once I’d found fame as a solo artist, or the papers hadn’t been interested. The picture that I’d showed to Simón, which had then been made into flyers for my first New York concert, had been one of those. I’d had a brief fling with an Australian photographer who had taken a couple of shots of me naked, playing my violin or holding it in front of me, over my breasts. But I’d never tried to pose under studio lighting in formal circumstances like this.
Grayson had sent me an email to confirm everything beforehand. It was clearly one that he sent to all of his clients, advising the address, directions and what to bring with me. He’d also asked me to specify what level of photography that I was comfortable with. Clothed, lingerie, or nude. His email said that he preferred to be clear up front, rather than risk making a model feel uncomfortable by asking on the day, or have someone do something on the spur of the moment that they might regret later.
I wouldn’t be able to bring a friend to the shoot with me, as this might be distracting and affect my posing, but his female make-up artist would be on site at all times, so that I would feel comfortable. He clearly wasn’t a creep then, or one of the ‘guys with cameras’ I’d heard about who apparently invited girls over for spurious photo shoots when they really just wanted to watch them undress. I was paying for the shoot for personal use, and Susan had told me in no uncertain terms that I shouldn’t sign a model release form if asked, so the photographer wouldn’t be able to sell the pictures on without my express consent.
I replied with an outline of the sorts of shots we were looking for, and added that I was entirely comfortable with nudity. Susan had suggested it should all be kept within the bounds of good taste, and only the more innocuous images would be used as part of the promotion.
‘Did you bring any outfits with you?’ he asked, taking my empty coffee cup out of my hands and placing it into the sink.
‘A few,’ I replied, digging around in the oversized bag I’d brought along with everything packed into it. I had a mixture of my clothes and Fran’s, most of which were a size too small but would do the job in a pinch. A pair of wet-look leggings, a leather jacket, a couple of dresses, Fran’s thigh-high boots and the shoes that I had splashed out on as a reward after my first tour had been a success: a pair of black Louboutins covered in silver studs. None of it was really my style. I looked at the laid out clothes and thought ‘dominatrix’ not ‘rock chick’, but Grayson seemed happy enough with my haul.
‘And you wanted to do some semi-nude shots too, just with the violin?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. I’d already started thinking about the prospect of stripping off, and my voice came out in an excited squeak. Nerves, I told myself, though there was a hint of exhibitionism, which had long been buried, rising to the surface. There had been times when I had stripped off in public, and enjoyed the process, but each occasion had been the result of an instruction, either from Dominik or from Victor, the dominant man that I’d fallen in with in New York.
‘We’ll start with the clothed shots first, to get you warmed up.’
His manner was friendly, but so professional it verged on cold, as if he’d spent his working life making a very deliberate effort to not be flirtatious, even by accident. I felt odd taking my bag of clothes into the bathroom to change, since the mirror was in the living room near where the make-up artist had set up, and they were both going to see me naked later anyway.
So I changed in front of them, first pulling my blouse over my head and then slipping my skirt off and kicking them both away as if I did this sort of thing every day, producing a stream of small talk as I did so to try to appear relaxed. Neither of them were paying any attention to me at all, but I still felt awkward.
I put on the wet-look leggings, studded Louboutins and leather jacket over a black bra to start. Fran and I had had a sort of dress rehearsal with the outfits and decided that this was the most rock star in style.
The make-up and hair took about an hour, and by the end of it, I barely recognised myself. My eyes were smouldering, coated in thick black eyeliner, grey shadow and fake eyelashes so long that when I opened my eyes the lashes tickled my eyebrows. Jess had slicked my hair into a high quiff, and had highlighted the contours of my face with various pots of powder so that my cheekbones stood out like a cat’s. Combined with the leggings and the jacket, I looked like a bit of a tough bitch really, a femme fatale. Not the kind of girl that you would introduce to your mother.
‘Arch your back a little more. That’s it.’
I’d been slow to catch on to the posing at first, and Grayson, at first endlessly patient, had eventually given up and arranged my limbs for me. As he did so, I felt that familiar slow burn, just an inkling of a thought, recognition of the way that he was taking control of my body which fanned the flame of a flickering idea until it became a fully blown fantasy. Before I knew it, I was responding to his instructions in the same way that I had responded to Dominik’s. Old habits die hard.
He paused for a moment, flicking back through the shots onscreen to check his work, as I struggled to keep my legs still and my back arched at exactly the same angle so he wouldn’t need to readjust the lighting.
‘Try it with the bra off,’ he said. ‘The bra breaks up the line of your skin, I think.’
‘Oh, sure,’ I replied casually, struggling to unclip the hook at the back without moving too far out of the position that he’d spent so long manoeuvring me into.
I did my best to hide my reaction, not wanting to make the photographer feel uncomfortable, but by the time that we got to the nude shots, my nipples were erect, and my panties were wet.
‘No,’ he said, as I started to kick off my Louboutins, ‘leave the shoes on.’
Dominik had said exactly the same thing to me once, when I had performed for him nude in the crypt, with Lauralynn playing the cello, blindfolded behind me. The memory sent another sharp pang of desire throbbing through me, though it wasn’t directed at Grayson. He just happened to be here, caught in the shadow of my peculiar sexual quirks and the memory of a failed previous relationship.
I swallowed hard, tried to concentrate on the task at hand, or at least to will my nipples into submission. I couldn’t even pretend that I was cold, as he had the heating up high and his flat was toasty. It didn’t help that he was really quite attractive, both in and out of his fetish gear. He was tall and lean, with friendly, grey-blue eyes that smiled when he talked, and he had a way of holding the camera that made it seem as though it was an extension of his body, in the same way that I felt when I held a violin. His posture, the way that he moved, seemed so much in control of each detail of the shoot.
He’d set up a dark backdrop, and put a black sheet down on the floor. I was surrounded by lights which he was adjusting so that half of my body would be in shadow, to produce a mysterious, artful rather than pornographic effect. Each time the flash went off, a bright white light glared, not enough to blind me, but enough to concentrate the feeling that I was being watched, on display, the object of a voyeur; even if that voyeur’s purpose was professional rather than sexual, it still had the same effect on me. I was glad that Grayson’s focus was fixed entirely on getting the picture and that in the scheme of things, I was as much an object to be posed and lit in the right way as the violin. I just hoped he didn’t notice that my thighs were beginning to get slippery when he enlarged the pictures for retouching.
Every now and again, Jess would pop into the room to offer us another cup of tea, brush some more powder on my face or fix a stray lock of hair into place. Her touch was feather light, and she’d clearly seen enough naked women in her life to not give my body a second glance. I’d always concentrated on seeing the good in myself, and did my utmost to avoid reading diet magazines or mulling on any perceived flaws, but I still wondered what the other women were like that he usually photographed. I felt a little like I had when Dominik had commanded me to dance after Luba’s incredible performance in New Orleans. Very much like an amateur, playing at something that wasn’t really me. I was a musician, not a model.
But the idea of being stuck in a situation that I was not in control of, out of my depth, watched, at the mercy of another’s commands – all of these things just intensified my arousal.
We did a few shots standing, with me delicately positioning the violin and my hands and arms in ways that would cover all of the bits that couldn’t be printed in a mainstream magazine, and then a couple of me sitting, with my legs spread and the body of the violin sitting between my thighs, and my head either resting on the neck of the instrument looking soulfully into the distance or staring provocatively at the camera. I remembered, at last, what the Australian photographer that I had dated briefly had said to me about posing – that I should try to imagine feeling whatever emotion I was trying to portray, and ideally make the camera part of it. So, he’d said, to look sexy, imagine the camera lens is a phallus, or whatever else it is that works for you.
I tried this, turning all of my focus and frustration and aiming it directly at Grayson’s long lens, as he snapped away.
‘Woah,’ he said after a few shots. ‘That’s great but I’m not sure if you’re going to be able to use these, depending on what sort of magazine you’re planning to send them to, of course … maybe you could try closing your legs a little bit?’
‘Actually, I wouldn’t mind having some more … personal shots. Just for me.’ I felt my face flush a brilliant scarlet. ‘If that’s outside your remit for today I don’t mind paying extra for them. If you don’t mention it to my agent.’
‘So they weren’t joking about your rock rebellion, then, huh?’ he chuckled. ‘I’m happy to do whatever you’re comfortable with, and don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.’
From that point onward, I became more and more daring, and more and more turned on.
‘Pose like you’re making love to the violin,’ he said, ‘instead of the camera.’
I switched my focus, so that rather than seeing his lens as the object of my sexual attention I imagined my violin not as a phallus but as a memory holder, the core of all the experiences which had, perhaps, not made me the way that I was but which had formed the stepping stones of the path that I’d chosen to travel down. Memories of Dominik were the first to come rushing back, and the most powerful, and almost all of them were associated with music, with the Bailly. That violin was gone, but the memories still belonged to me. Playing for Dominik on the bandstand on Hampstead Heath, in the crypt, in the apartment in New York, waiting for him to come home to find me nude with my violin in hand. It had been my symbolic message to him that a part of me was his.
‘These are amazing,’ Grayson said at the end, when he quickly ran through the shots he’d downloaded onto his big computer screen. ‘I’ll make the colours punchier, get rid of the noise, cut out the odd distraction in the background, all that kind of thing, but other than that there’s very little retouching. I like them raw, like this.’
‘Yes. They’re beautiful. Thank you.’ I felt a strange sense of gratitude to the photographer for managing to catch something so personal in an image. The expressions on my face were the thing that got me, that made me gasp, when the shots appeared onscreen. The look in my eyes was pure sex, but not in a tawdry, porn-star way. I looked like a siren, as if my whole being had been cast in pheromones instead of atoms. And I really did look as though I was making love to my violin.
He promised to email me all of the files, so that I could select the ones that I liked best for retouching, and I thanked him again and managed to get dressed, with fumbling fingers and my heart racing. I’d forgotten my embarrassment over being the only naked person in the room in front of the photographer and the make-up artist. I just wanted to hurry home, to find some space alone to ponder the thoughts and memories that seemed to have taken permanent root in my head.
Knowing that if I headed either to Chris and Fran’s or to Viggo’s I would have company, I took a detour into the park outside Grayson’s house, by the cemetery. I sat down on one of the park benches and stared at the old stones that formed the foundations of the church which towered into the sky. Churches usually give me the creeps, but this one didn’t. The stones were a pale grey, almost white, and not crumbling or covered in moss. On closer inspection, the building had a lightness about it, a grandeur that was uplifting rather than eerie.
I found the entrance and went inside. The main door was locked but I was able to get into a large, circular room, made from the same pale stones that reached into the sky, several storeys over my head. I leaned against one wall, enjoying the coolness of its touch, and gradually slipped down to a crouch.
I wanted Dominik desperately. Not just to fuck, for once in my life. I wanted to talk to him, to feel him fold me into his arms, to lay my head on his shoulder and run my hand over his chest. I just wanted to be with him.
He was with Lauralynn though, and it was too late for regrets. I had made my bed, and now I was sleeping in it.
But I could at least hear the sound of his voice, and maybe find a way to get my Bailly back, the instrument that still somehow connected me to him.
I pulled my phone out of my bag.