Mistress of Night and Dawn (18 page)

Half a dozen silver rings were threaded through each of their outer labia and clipped onto the ribbons at their thighs, pulling their sex lips wide apart so that the women’s arousal was obvious and dampened the ribbon that was bound tightly between each of their legs. A thick knot was tied into place tightly over their clitorises and from it another long, thin satin ribbon was attached, matching a similar long length that was bound to larger rings that decorated each of their nipples.

The threads looped across the room to a platform in the centre that was situated above the women but was clearly visible to the audience and on top of the platform stood a man who held each of the lengths of ribbon in his hands.

Walter.

He was now entirely naked besides a purple pouch, which might have looked ridiculous were it not for the natural aura of dignity that was evident in his bearing.

‘It’s him again,’ Siv whispered excitedly in Aurelia’s ear. ‘Doesn’t he look quite extraordinary?’

‘But he’s blind,’ Aurelia responded, as if the knowledge of his infirmity made the whole scene impossible, even though she had already witnessed him creating the likeness of a model that he couldn’t possibly see.

‘I know,’ Siv sort of sighed.

Onlookers in various states of dress and undress surrounded the strange web, waiting for something to happen.

Aurelia stood alongside Siv from their vantage point near the front of the crowd and stared as the scene in front of her unfolded. It was only good manners that prevented her from covering her mouth in shock. Were these women prisoners? Marionettes? She was no prude and certainly saw nothing wrong with nudity in general or in art. The fact that the other models she had seen so far had been naked had not shocked her particularly. But there was something specific about the sight of women who had their heads covered but their private parts spread open that seemed nuder than nude. She knew this was a performance, and the women were clearly complicit. She could not quite put her finger on what it was that made her feel at once so uncomfortable and yet on the other hand so captivated. Her heart was racing in her chest, an undercurrent of excitement pulsing through her body.

Music began to play. It was classical, a genre that Aurelia never listened to by choice, but only occasionally overheard when John played his collection of records on full blast as he read or did the hoovering upstairs.

‘Strauss,’ Siv whispered in her ear. ‘“The Dance of the Seven Veils”.’ Siv was a punk chick at heart, but her ballet training had given her some exposure to classical music.

As the music came to life, so did the dancers. They each moved in time to the music in perfect synchronicity, though it quickly became apparent that they were not the ones leading the dance. Walter, who oversaw them all behind his personal walls of darkness, was tugging on the threads that were bound to their piercings just as the conductor of an orchestra would change the rhythm of a piece by virtue of his movements behind the rostrum. Each pull on a ribbon signified a new instruction and in response the women would spin, twirl or spread their legs apart in a perfect airborne split that displayed their private parts – naked besides the thin satin harnesses that rubbed between their legs – to all those who watched.

Sometimes Walter would pull fiercely on a ribbon that was attached to a nipple and cause a dancer to arch her back in pain but just as swiftly he would release the piercing and tug the thread that corresponded to the knot that stimulated the dancer’s clitoris. Though the faces of the women were partially obscured, it seemed to Aurelia that she could follow their expressions of pain or of pleasure as they responded to the pressure that was applied to the point of each piercing. Their desires and emotions were visible through their bodies in the tautness of their muscles or the way in which they either resisted against or surrendered to the pull of the ropes that bound them.

His eyes were closed throughout most of the performance as if he was reading the dancers’ responses purely through the tug and release of the ribbons. Which Aurelia knew he was. And he was not intent on wholly delivering pain.

Siv pinched Aurelia’s arm.

‘Look,’ she hissed, ‘he’s making them come.’

Aurelia turned her gaze from Walter back to the women who surrounded him. Siv was right. Their movements still matched the beat of the music, but they were no longer dancing the same steps. It was as if the sculptor was playing a different tune on each of their bodies, providing each woman with precisely the right combination of pleasure and pain that would take her to the edge of ecstasy and keep her there until the moment that he applied the final stroke of pressure and she spasmed in obvious orgasm. The woman closest to them was so wet that glistening droplets ran down the inside of her thigh and left a dark mark on the length of purple ribbon that decorated her leg.

When each of the women had come, they resumed their initial position of stillness like wind-up toys that had finally wound down and then together they were slowly lowered until their feet reached the floor and they fell into the waiting arms of the exhibition’s assistants who unlocked the chains that bound their wrists to the trapeze bar but left the hoods fastened over their heads. They were led away, presumably to a dressing room, but seemed to be in such a trance-like state that they were unable to move of their own accord. A tuxedoed attendant walked over and led Walter off.

Aurelia was captivated and horrified in equal measure. Every conscious thought in her body told her that this was the work of madness. This wasn’t art; it was abuse. She looked around the audience. Almost without exception those watching looked aroused, excited or bored. None seemed shocked. After a round of applause, some of it enthusiastic and some of it obligatory, the circle of onlookers that had gathered around the scene broke away and began to chatter amongst themselves.

Siv had fallen silent. Aurelia wondered how this spectacle had affected her friend. Surely she would now not want to pursue Walter any longer.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked Siv.

Siv shrugged, feigning nonchalance, but the hand that she rapidly brushed through her already messy hair and the urgency that filled her movements betrayed her.

‘I wish it could have been me. Up there. I really do,’ Siv confessed in a dejected tone.

Stunned by Siv’s admission, for a moment Aurelia tried to imagine herself in her friend’s place. How would she feel if she were hanging up there like that with the stranger on the platform above, sensing even the tiniest change in her flow of arousal, orchestrating her every move like a puppet master? She closed her eyes. That one thought was like throwing gasoline onto the spark of excitement that had been brewing inside her ever since they arrived. It was as if an ember inside her had burst into flame and a shock of arousal burned through her body like a wildfire. Fuck! She was going to come in front of Siv, in her see-through dress in front of all these people with the vision of Walter and his marionettes still sharp in her mind’s eye. She fought the sensation. Not here. Not now, not like this.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Aurelia whispered. Her head was spinning and she needed some fresh air to make sense of it all. She didn’t want to know what was behind any of the other open doors or what was creating the strange cracks and thuds that emanated from the other rooms through the corridors. But was that because she feared that what she saw might disgust her, or because she feared that what she saw might turn her on?

Nothing made sense any more.

After that day, Aurelia often tried to raise the topic of the exhibition, Walter, his strange marionettes and the way that Siv had responded to the whole thing, but her friend would simply shrug her shoulders and change the subject or hurry away and busy herself with some other task.

Soon Aurelia began to feel as if a wall had been somehow erected between the two of them. On the surface they remained friends as they always had been, but the invisible glacier that protected Siv’s unspoken emotions about the sculptor and the reactions that his performance had elicited proved impossible to penetrate.

A month passed.

Aurelia began to wonder if she should have enrolled in college, rather than taking a year off. Siv was now so often out of the house and busy, attending to mysterious errands that she supposedly ran for Edyta but never discussed, her waking life so full of sundry activities, while she lingered back in Oakland, sitting in her room alone most of the day, with just the sound of the dancing routines and hushed conversations, instructions and occasional laughter rising towards her through the floorboards from Edyta’s basement studio below.

It was as if her mind had been parked on a sidetrack and left to its own devices. Idle, and prone to thoughts she would rather repress. The mysterious trust fund and its benefactor; blurry, imagined memories of her parents assembled from the few facts she had been provided with and a half-dozen fading photographs of them, like total strangers; the deep impact of the scenes she had witnessed at the exhibition; bittersweet evocations of the man she had coupled with in the Bristol chapel, the taste of his kiss, the softness of his lips, the welcome hardness of his cock and, crowning everything, a strange sense of despondency and confusion.

She should be exploring. She and Siv had talked about hiring a car and driving off to Los Angeles to discover the sunnier side of the Californian mirage, maybe heading for the desert and investigating Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, the Hoover Dam and so many places she had once dreamed of. But they had discovered their age precluded them from renting a vehicle in the USA despite the fact they both had driving licences.

Now she couldn’t summon the interest in even thinking of alternative ways of travelling. She was becoming lazy, indifferent. And she felt resentful at the way Siv had managed to busy herself so quickly and adapt to their new environment.

She missed their shared silences and the closeness that had often been unexpressed but still present between them until the day of the exhibition.

Nights were exhausting, full of conflicting dreams and stray thoughts, and by the time she woke Aurelia invariably felt she needed a half-day at least to overcome the sheer tiredness that had spread throughout her body, the tightness in her muscles and limbs, the crab-like apathy gripping her mind.

Part of her knew there was a whole world out there waiting for her, almost expecting her, but right now she was held back. By fear of the truth, personal demons?

All too often she would pull up the hem of her nightdress and peer down at her midriff, the pale white plain broken by the delicate, narrow crevice of her cunt, searching in vain for the coloured heart. She would hope against hope for its return but it remained invisible, defying her by its absence, sowing seeds of confusion, almost suggesting it had never been there and her mind was unhinged. She would repeatedly touch herself, dip inside the moistness of her opening, play with herself in an attempt to revive the fire, but it was always in vain. Sometimes she thought she felt a buzz, experienced the feather breath of an itch in the precise area where the heart and its thin tendrils had once appeared, but when she looked the skin was uninterrupted, at peace, unmarked, and the feeling was like an echo, an emptiness where once there was a fullness.

And then at unwanted moments, in the kitchen emptying the dishwasher or catching up with overdue ironing, her thoughts would return to the exhibition. The image of a flat hand making fierce contact with a white arse, and the pink, spreading stain occasioned by the impact calmly flowing like water across the landscape of soft flesh would scratch away at the scab of her perceptions and that buzz would begin to resonate and Aurelia would abandon herself to its approaches in the hope of resurrecting the flaming heart.

She had never given any thought to spanking or being tied up before that fateful evening a month ago. In fact, the prospect of welcoming minor pain was anything but attractive to her senses and even felt a tad ridiculous at first sight. And then she would remember all the other episodes she had watched with rapt eyes, the sight of the veiled woman and the way that Walter had so authoritatively controlled the movements of their bodies. How on edge she had been, curious, then piqued, then deeply disturbed.

Aurelia closed her eyes. Evoked the hard pad of the stranger’s fingers in the darkness of the Bristol chapel and how he had so decisively seized the pliant flesh of her buttocks as he buried himself inside her. Or the way he had at some stage in the whirlpool of emotions in which she had been drowning, taken hold of her wrists to hold her in place while he thrust inside her and she had welcomed his authority, his dominance. Would it have felt the same if he had bound her wrists with a length of white rope? Her feet? Immobilised her?

She shuddered.

Was this what her soul yearned for? Surely not. But the more the images she had stored away at the back of her mind kept returning behind the screen of her eyes, the more she felt that secret vibration playing with her nerve endings, insidiously toying with her, flirting with taboos she never knew she had kept hidden.

Yet again, her legs opened wide and she allowed her hand to burrow under the covers. The strains of the ‘Nutcracker Suite’ wafted through the floor from the basement studio below. It was morning, a junior class, all the little toddlers in pink tutus and displaying gap-filled smiles.

Before reaching the lips of her sex her finger lingered over the skin where the heart sometimes resided and glided across its silkiness. Out of nowhere, heat seized her heart and rushed down to her midriff like a train out of control. Aurelia gasped. She hurriedly pulled her arm out from between the covers. Jumped out of bed and headed for the bathroom. She was on fire, needed a cool shower to calm down, push her senses into retreat. Throwing off her flimsy nightgown, she turned on the water and caught a glimpse of herself in the tall mirror.

The heart was visible again. Sharp. Carved into her flesh. Its thin, imperceptible tendrils extending out, alive. And the more she peered down at the impossible tattoo, the more she pictured herself in a stone hall, bound hands and feet and at the mercy of a whip, a paddle, hands, men, a man, her man. The stranger. The taste of pomegranate filled her mouth, half sweet, half bitter.