Mistress of Night and Dawn (13 page)

It couldn’t have happened then. It was impossible.

Because she knew for certain the flaming heart had not been there after Bristol: she remembered how, the following day back at home, she had examined her body in every single detail, as if trying to check if she was still the same person now she had been fully penetrated by a man, almost wishing to look different. And then, once in Oakland on the previous days when she had showered and routinely shaved her pubic hair with care and precision to ensure that she did not cut herself there had been nothing to see. No heart. How could it appear out of nowhere?

For a moment Aurelia felt short of breath.

How could a tattoo just appear on her body? She was far more open minded than Siv when it came to matters of tarot-readers, fortune-tellers and the existence of ghosts and guardian angels, and she often dreamed there was magic in this world she was living in. But not this sort.

She looked down again at her pubis and its now faintly illustrated landscape.

The red of the heart was almost scarlet, but its fierce shade was in perfect harmony with the pallor of her skin. The combination was like strawberries and cream, fire and ice. A tell-tale miniature heart, exquisitely chiselled across her skin. Again she touched it. It was painless, as if it wasn’t there.

Aurelia sighed. Nothing made sense.

She ran back to her bedroom, and snuggled between the sheets and the quilt, as if seeking refuge, her mind pouring over every single possibility, however fantastical it might be, until the sheer process of thinking in circles, in a maddening loop, exhausted her and she fell asleep for a few hours, comforted by the warmth and softness of the bed.

It was almost midday when she woke up. Her initial reaction was to pull the covers away and quickly look at the red heart.

She felt faint: it was no longer there. The area of skin where she had witnessed it was now pure as snow, the customary porcelain white of her body.

Aurelia knew she wasn’t crazy. It had been there. It hadn’t been a dream.

And now it was gone.

A wind of panic swept over her. And with it, the faint smell of fruit in the room. Like a leitmotiv evoking the man in Bristol and the taste of his lips.

She resisted the impulse for a few minutes but the smell, the taste persisted, somewhere at the back of her brain rather than on her lips, and she allowed her hand to move down and willed her fingers to begin caressing her again.

After she came, her mind shattered anew by the unholy strength of the sensation, she couldn’t help looking down at the bottom half of her body again.

The blazing heart had reappeared.

In response to her lust.

Aurelia spent the rest of the early afternoon curled up in bed waiting for Siv to return home. As crazy as she knew the whole story would sound, she had to tell someone.

Every one of her senses strained to hear Siv’s familiar footfall and the tinkle of the bell that rang when the front door opened or closed to alert anyone in the cottage to a visitor.

Her eyes kept darting to her bedside clock, but it seemed that the more often she checked how many minutes or hours had passed since her last glance, the slower that time travelled. It had been hours now. Surely Siv couldn’t still be collecting her audition forms? Perhaps she had decided to catch the tourist boat to Alcatraz as she had talked about doing.

Every few minutes Aurelia would lift the covers and examine herself again. The tattoo had now disappeared and her skin had resumed its usual appearance. Through a process of elimination she was now certain that the tattoo appeared when she orgasmed. But it was not as simple as that. After she had come and noticed the tattoo for the second time she had tried again, but this time her thoughts and actions were perfunctory. She deliberately cleared her mind of the stranger, switched on her iPad and searched for the most banal pornographic clip that she could find and then touched herself in a manner that she knew would fulfil her most basic needs quickly and efficiently but nothing more.

The tattoo did not appear.

She tried once more. This time she deliberately summoned every memory she had of that night. His scent. His touch. The roughness of the stones beneath her fingertips when her hands had accidentally grazed the floor, seeking the satisfaction of their mutual passion and uncaring of physical discomfort. She touched herself the way his hands had roamed across her skin and allowed her mind to travel back to that room. Her fantasy was so lifelike it felt almost real, as though he were there in her room in leafy Oakland, or a shade of him at least. With one hand under the covers engaged in seeking pleasure, her other hand lifted without thinking, searching for the contours of his cheek, his hair, his jaw, but she reached nothing but air.

Again she came with her thoughts full of him and her body wracked by contractions so fierce she shook the bed. Aurelia lay still, basking in the aftershocks as she waited for the final waves of lust to crash over her and subside.

Then she remembered the tattoo. Tore off the covers. Again it was there, more vivid than ever before.

She carefully arranged her limbs into the least pornographic pose that she could manage and took a picture of the tattoo on her phone with the lens zoomed in for modesty’s sake, so only a patch of her skin that might have been anywhere on her body and the red heart with its fiery tendrils were visible in the snapshot.

Then she watched it fade. First each of the vine-like coils that snaked out like the rays of a miniature sun receded, and then the heart itself gradually turned paler until it was gone altogether. It was like watching a flower close its petals in fast forward motion.

Despite her fear and confusion at the sheer madness of it all and what it might mean, Aurelia could not suppress a brief smile of satisfaction.

He had left a mark on her after all, and not just on her mind and soul.

The front door bell tolling Siv’s arrival pulled Aurelia out of her reverie. Though she had spent all afternoon clock-watching and waiting for her return, now that her friend was back Aurelia realised that she still didn’t have the faintest clue how she would even begin to explain what had happened.

Aurelia waited for Siv to burst into her bedroom and regale her with all her news of the day, but Siv wandered straight by without so much as a tap on her bedroom door to see if she was in.

Aurelia threw back the covers with a disgruntled huff and followed the sound of Siv’s footsteps into the kitchen, where she found Siv standing in front of the open fridge door and drinking milk straight from the carton.

‘We all have to use that, you know,’ Aurelia complained.

Siv pulled the carton away from her lips and wiped the milk moustache from her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘Wow, someone got out of the wrong side of the bed today,’ Siv replied, purposefully taking another long glug straight from the carton as if to confirm that the rules of ordinary behaviour did not apply to her and she did not care who knew it.

‘Actually,’ Aurelia said, ‘I got a tattoo.’ She was tired of her friend acting as though she was the only rebel in the world.

Siv choked and milk sprayed from her mouth and nose onto the floor. Her eyes streamed.

‘That’ll teach you,’ Aurelia added smugly as Siv continued to cough and struggled to catch her breath. Aurelia relented, stepped closer and gently patted her back. ‘Water?’ she asked.

‘No, no, it’s okay. You were joking, right? About the tattoo? Good one . . .’

Aurelia remained silent.

‘Fuck, you weren’t joking! When? How? And I thought that my day was going to surprise you . . .’

Aurelia opened her mouth like a fish and then closed it again when the words didn’t come.

‘It’s a bit of a long story. And I think you’re going to want to sit down to hear it,’ she finally said. ‘Shall we go out for a drink?’

It wasn’t until they arrived at the bar on the corner Broadway and West Grand that they remembered neither of them were old enough to drink in America. Had they thought of it in advance, they would have bothered to put on make-up and more fashionable clothes and tried to pass for twenty-one, but Siv was wearing her usual uniform of short shorts over tights and Aurelia had slipped into a pair of jeans and ballet pumps and simply pulled her long hair into a ponytail. If anything they probably looked younger than their nineteen years, so they had opted for a nearby diner instead.

‘Damn puritans,’ Siv grumbled, as an exuberant and in Aurelia’s opinion, overly cheerful, waitress returned to their table with two malted milkshakes and a bowl of French fries slathered with so much bubbling hot cheese that the dish resembled some kind of alien life form that might leap from the plate and wobble across the table towards them at any moment.

Siv tentatively extracted one of the fries from beneath its gluey yellow topping and popped it into her mouth.

‘Not bad,’ she announced. She picked up the ketchup bottle with both hands and squeezed a tsunami of tomato sauce over the top. Aurelia, who preferred her chips served in paper, with vinegar, by the seaside, ignored the bowl and sipped at her drink. It was cool and creamy, and in her opinion, far tastier than beer anyway.

They had slid into the same side of one of the red vinyl-covered booth seats so that they could talk in low voices without fearing that their conversation would be overheard by the other diners.

‘Well then,’ Siv announced. ‘Show it to me.’

Aurelia removed her phone and pulled up the picture that she had taken a few hours earlier.

Siv squinted at the screen. ‘Nice,’ she observed uncertainly. ‘But where is it?’ she asked, pointing at the unidentifiable patch of bare skin that surrounded the tattoo. ‘Is that your boob? Or somewhere else that you can’t show me in here?’ She winked mischievously at her friend.

The questions continued to stream out and Aurelia was unable to answer most of them. She couldn’t suppress a blush when it came to the topic of making the tattoo appear.

Siv’s reaction was both joyful and resentful. On one hand she was delighted that her best friend had finally found pleasure with a man, although on the other she was more than a touch annoyed that she had not been informed of the momentous event when it happened. But it was nothing like her curiosity at the seemingly ensuing consequences.

‘So, it’s only when you come hard? Or only when you think of this mystery guy? Or both?’ Siv questioned. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she added, when Aurelia’s cheeks turned as red as the diner’s vinyl seat covers. ‘We all do it. I just didn’t realise you did it so often.’ Siv raised her eyebrows and snickered. ‘You always surprise me, Aurelia, it’s one of the reasons that I like you so much.’

‘I’m not sure exactly how it works,’ Aurelia replied. ‘I only just discovered it today. But it’s always when I think of him that my orgasm is more . . . intense. So it’s impossible to say for sure.’

‘And you didn’t see him? That night at the chapel? Not even a flash of his face? Did he leave a note?’

‘It was so dark. And we were mostly lying down.’

Siv snickered again. ‘Not just lying down, I’ll bet . . .’ she teased.

‘I mean, I’m not even sure how tall he was. Taller than me, I think. Definitely not fat. But I don’t know the colour of his hair or eyes or anything. Only that he tastes of pomegranate. And it’s not like a cologne or perfume. More like the flavour of his skin, and his lips . . .’ She trailed away with a dreamy expression on her face.

‘You do realise that this makes absolutely no sense at all,’ Siv replied. ‘If I didn’t know you so well, I’d think you had finally cracked. Do you think he could have put something in your drink?’

‘No,’ Aurelia insisted. ‘He’s not like that. I know it.’

‘You don’t know him at all, really.’

‘Even so. We drank all the same thing. Everyone did. And if that were true, it still doesn’t explain how this mark appears and disappears. No drug causes that.’

‘Invisible ink that reacts to your body temperature?’ Siv hazarded a guess.

‘No such thing,’ Aurelia ruled.

They each continued to think aloud, batting ideas back and forth until they had exhausted every possibility both plausible and implausible, eventually shifting effortlessly into a comfortable silence, the mark of a true and easy friendship. The fries on the table had long turned cold and Aurelia was now onto her second milkshake as Siv’s mouth had been occupied by doing most of the talking.

Aurelia broke the silence. ‘Sorry,’ she said at last. ‘I didn’t ask you how it went at the circus school. Did you get your forms? Why did it take so long? Where have you been all day?’

‘Well,’ Siv announced proudly. ‘I’ve got a job.’

‘What? How? Doing what? Does your visa even allow you to work?’

Siv took another loud slurp of her shake.

‘It’s cash in hand. I’ll be working as a nude model.’

Aurelia coughed and snorted her mouthful of malt.

Siv’s eyes narrowed. ‘That right there is karma, my friend. Teach you for laughing at me earlier. And my announcement is a lot less shocking than yours, I’m sure you’ll admit.’

‘Less shocking than mine?’ Aurelia hissed. ‘I didn’t choose the tattoo. It just arrived. What do you mean a nude model? Tell me you’re not doing porn.’

Aurelia remembered the film clips that she had viewed earlier that day to aid her arousal and the way the women had been so completely on display with nothing at all left to the imagination. She winced. Surely her friend would not want to be a part of that?

‘No, no. Not that I haven’t considered it, I’ll admit, but I know it’s too risky to be onscreen. Future career prospects, parents and all that. I’ll show you the ad.’

She reached into the pocket of her jeans shorts and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. It was from one of those fliers that appear on lamp posts with tentacle-like tear-off slips hanging from the bottom with the advertiser’s number. The advertisement had been handwritten in a deliberately artful font, almost calligraphic in style. It read: