The Exchange
The Exchange
Carrie Williams
Photographer Rachel and Parisian exotic dancer Rochelle live miles apart in London and Paris. Yet when they agree to swap apartments for six months, both find the excitement of discovering a new city full of surprises.You’ve been seduced by ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series, now prepare to devour ‘The Exchange’.Photographer Rachel is bored in London, whilst over in Paris exotic dancer Rochelle is also weary of her life and unfulfilling relationship with fashion model Konrad. So when they decide to swap lives for six months, anything could happen.On arrival in Paris, Rachel visits Rochelle’s strip club and feels the lure of exhibitionism for the first time. Whilst also succumbing to more than a passing interest in the gorgeous Konrad.Rochelle, meanwhile, falls in with a rich London crowd. For a while a string of random adventures fills the void left by dancing. But enlightenment ultimately comes to Rochelle as she discovers that performing for an audience of one can be just as daring as dancing to a crowd.But when six months is up, what will Rachel and Rochelle leave behind …
The Exchange
Carrie Williams
(http://bit.ly/KqDOG3)
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ue4b86046-296a-530d-a3a1-cc7a3be341bc)
Prologue (#ube2bf19b-19c0-526e-bedf-19bc896e1320)
Chapter 1: Rachel (#u3a0d57ce-a229-57b3-9e23-f9c95f3161ad)
Chapter 2: Rochelle (#u2ec76ebf-65d7-580a-8753-f67467a5e562)
Chapter 3: Rachel (#u2af1570e-7008-53fc-84e3-fc58855cfcc1)
Chapter 4: Rochelle (#u2f6c6a04-d817-5e3d-85fb-05b048b713c8)
Chapter 5: Rachel (#u62a6b1b1-34d5-5e87-9ac4-90154d8b6cda)
Chapter 6: Rochelle (#u8c73ffb0-a0b6-5945-a375-e8f7020a98a0)
Chapter 7: Rachel (#ue4fc17ca-ff59-5472-92ab-a9fd15b51225)
Chapter 8: Rochelle (#u696f5505-c319-5f40-978a-487fc8781938)
Chapter 9: Rachel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10: Rochelle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11: Rachel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12: Rochelle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13: Rachel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14: Rochelle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15: Rachel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16: Rochelle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17: Rachel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18: Rochelle (#litres_trial_promo)
More from Mischief (#litres_trial_promo)
About Mischief (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
In clothes, he looks almost demure. It’s his boyish face, unlined, seemingly open and frank, of a beauty so pure it takes your breath away. He’s looking towards me, or rather towards my lens, and I feel lucky to have such a prize specimen posing for me. I’ve always liked to take edgy shots, pictures of outsiders, the unconventional or even the scarred. I used to think beauty was boring. Not any more.
He’s holding the camera’s gaze, and not for the first time I feel forgotten, superfluous. Professionals such as him often seem to forget the presence of the photographer. It’s as if they’re making love to the camera itself, the way some of them come on to it. As if they want to fuck it. Not for nothing, I sometimes think, are big long lenses described as phallic.
I don’t know what to make of it all. Demureness meets wantonness in one package. It’s disorienting. I feel as if the ground is falling away from under my feet. I feel as if I’m not in control, and a photographer needs to be in control, or the whole thing falls apart. I’m not the kind to leave things to chance and serendipity.
He’s not dressed in designer clothes. This is not that kind of shoot. Today he’s not a fashion model but just a regular guy in jeans and a striped granddad shirt, a regular guy who just happens to be drop-dead gorgeous. Beneath his arms I can even see traces of sweat, blooming like flowers on the fabric. There’s something about that – slight grubbiness teamed with physical perfection – that drives me mad. Teamed with a hint of stubble, it’s leaving me dry-mouthed.
I swallow almost painfully. ‘If you could just …’ I manage. ‘Just, er, turn so you’re positioned a bit more side-on to me. That’s right, yes. And then … I don’t know, maybe if you could undo the top button of your shirt you’d look a bit more relaxed, more natural. That’s right. Great. Hold it right there.’
I look back through the lens, watch as he undoes a second button on his own initiative, sending me a questioning look. I nod, hold one thumb up.
‘That’s great,’ I say.
‘I brought a different shirt,’ he says, ‘if this one’s not right.’
I shake my head. I really couldn’t care less about your clothes, I think. I want to see you naked.
As if he’s reading my mind, he lifts his shirt up and over his head. He grins at me and my pussy throbs so hard I feel like I’m going to explode.
Chapter 1: Rachel
We met on Facebook – where else? She came up as ‘Someone You Might Know’ and, though she wasn’t, she looked interesting. So I clicked on her name and added her to my Friends list. There was also the fact that her name was a little bit similar to mine: Rochelle Renaud, Rachel Reynolds. Not that it means anything, of course, but sometimes seemingly random things can have huge repercussions.
When I say interesting, I mean that she looked very different to me, or to any of my friends. The acquaintance we had in common, leading Facebook to suggest her to me, was a runner at an agency called Twist, specialising in offbeat, ‘characterful’ models. I still don’t know how he actually knew Rochelle. But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that she piqued my curiosity, with her froth of blonde curls, her red sequin top and her mismatching pink feather boa, slung around her frail neck like the serpent from the garden of paradise.
She accepted my Friend request, but for a while that was it. We didn’t exchange any notes or leave any messages on each other’s wall. Then one day I did get a note from her, short and to-the-point.
‘Hey Rachel. It seems you are a photographer. What kind of images do you make?’
I emailed back, told her a little about my work, directing her to a few websites where it was displayed. Then, on a whim, I told her that if I ever came to Paris, perhaps I could photograph her? I didn’t say that I was captivated by her vulnerable beauty, the fragile edge to her. By then I’d browsed some of the photos of her in her Facebook albums and found her gorgeous but somehow damaged-looking, with eyes like shattered glass. Sometimes you look at a photo and you are desperate to know more about the person within it. Perhaps that’s what makes a successful photographic portrait. And so it was with Rochelle. I was curious to know more.
She emailed back to say that she didn’t think she’d be around for long, that she was talking about quitting Paris. She didn’t say why, but there was a glamorous world-weariness to her tone that made me quite envy her her wanderlust, however unfocused. Perhaps just to try to look as cool as her, I told her I had itchy feet too.
She live-messaged back: ‘What do you think about coming to Paris? And me to London? A swap?’
I sat back in my seat. It was radical, something that would never have occurred to me.
‘How long?’ I typed back after a few minutes.
‘I’m not sure. Six months? Longer?’
This time I messaged straight back, before the rational, practical side of me could kick back in. ‘Six months sounds good to me. I’d love to get to know Paris properly.’
‘And me London. So when shall we start?’
I was loving this. Rochelle was as impulsive as she looked. She clearly had a screw loose, but I liked that kind of madcap decision-making. It was so alien to me. And it was kind of refreshing to be steered by someone else, to be borne along on a tide of spontaneity.
I started to type that it couldn’t be for a good couple of months, because of this, that and the other. And then I erased it all and just wrote: ‘I’m ready when you are.’ None of my upcoming projects, I told myself, were time-sensitive. And if I needed to hop back to London, the trip was fast and easy.
‘Great,’ Rochelle fired back. ‘I’ll hand in my notice at the cabaret tonight. I can’t wait.’
‘You work at a cabaret?’
‘I didn’t tell you? I work as an exotic dancer.’
I wondered about that for a minute. Did she mean ethnically inspired stuff such as whirling or belly dancing, or was it a euphemism for erotic dancing? Was Rochelle in essence a stripper? I looked again at her picture, thought of her jaded tone. Was that what she was sick of: of showing herself for money? It seemed a legitimate thing to want to run away from – the kind of thing you fell into and then spent ages trying to dig your way out of. I doubted it was ever a career choice.
When I didn’t answer, she messaged again: ‘I live in Pigalle, by the way, close-by where I work. I hope that won’t put you off.’
That confirmed it: Pigalle, I knew, was famous for its sex shops and peep shows, for the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère. To whatever degree Rochelle took off her clothes, her dancing was primarily erotic rather than exotic.
But I wasn’t put off, not by Rochelle’s trade or by her neighbourhood. I knew that’s what she was warning me about – the insalubriousness and potential danger of Pigalle itself, especially as a place for a girl living by herself. But I was used to looking after number one. One of my self-chosen assignments during my photography MA was a series of images of teenage drug addicts around King’s Cross, which involved lots of time spent wandering around the station and its murky environs, lots of approaching people who’d fallen foul of substances that made them unstable and desperate. As a project, it was hugely successful and even influential – it was subsequently published in The Big Issue.
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that Pigalle was calling to me. Perhaps that was the reason for my recent restlessness – perhaps I was done with London, for the time being, just as I was done with Kyle. I was newly single after calling a halt to my three-year relationship with the latter, but perhaps it was more than a change of boyfriend I needed. Perhaps it was a new home.
‘Not at all,’ I typed back. ‘I’m fascinated by Pigalle. Shall we aim for a week today?’
Chapter 2: Rochelle
I didn’t realise how bad things had become, until I started chatting to Rachel. The very fact I was on Facebook at all shows how bored I was, without being aware of it. I’ve no explanation for it, other than that it was one of those ditchwater-grey afternoons when the rain seems like it will never stop falling out of the sky, and I was killing time until another shift.
I was sitting around in my dressing gown, curlers in my hair, getting ready to apply some new fake nails. As I often did before work, I started to feel a sort of unfocused, languorous horniness. You’d think you’d get over it – all that nakedness, all that naughtiness, night after night. And of course it’s not as if it’s not seedy and cheap and demeaning, at least some of the time.
It wasn’t even about the guys – I’ve never met a man in the club I actually fancy. If it’s anything, it’s about being surrounded by semi-naked girls all night. Not all of them are beautiful, although I know we all have different definitions and expectations of ‘beauty’. But there’s a camaraderie we’ve got going there. Some of us have known each other for years, and we are close – mentally, physically. That, for me, is horny. A lovely topless girl leaning over me, her hand on my shoulder, to adjust my hair just before I go on stage – that sends a thrill through me. With many of these girls, I get what the punters can never have – intimacy.
And often, as I’m getting ready for the evening, making myself as gorgeous as I can be, I think of all this feminine softness – mine and that of my colleagues – and my fingers slip down into my panties and I start rubbing at the wet little bead of my clit. As I do, I picture myself on stage, gyrating to the music, blinded by the strobes. I can’t see the faces of those looking at me, but just knowing that I am looked at – looked at but untouchable – turns me on.
This was one of those days. With one hand on my breast, tracing the soft cherry-pink outline of my nipple, I kept my thumb on my clit and slid two fingers inside myself. It felt so fucking good, I gasped out loud. I never, I thought bitterly, felt this good with Konrad, and that was so bloody frustrating. To have a boyfriend who looked so hot he brought other women out in palpitations but who couldn’t lead me to orgasm made me want to scream.
As my fingers moved in and out, I sped up, pushed deeper, arching my back to meet my own embrace. It was the ultimate irony for someone whose job was to please others – that, so far, at least, I was the one who could give myself the greatest joy.
I moaned and juddered as waves of pleasure started to break over me and a white light of pure joy went on in my head. For a moment I gave myself over to the almost unbearable pleasure that assailed me, and then I threw back my head and let my climax ebb gorgeously away like trails of smoke carried away by a soft, warm wind. Already, I felt nostalgia for my spent libido.
***
I’ve always been interested in photography, which is how come I asked Rachel about her work, after I’d got dressed and was having a last coffee and cigarette before leaving for work. That would have probably been that, only the next day I looked up the websites she mentioned to me and was sucked in by some of her images. They showed a side of London – of England – that has always fascinated me. Of course, Pigalle, where I lived, is an underbelly, a shithole, in so many respects. But much of this is on the surface. What Rachel’s images somehow managed to suggest was what lies beneath the surface of the people she photographs on the street, in the middle of their business. Outwardly respectable though many of them appear, she always manages to suggest something sinister or off-kilter beneath the skin. And to those who are sleazy, unfortunate, deprived, she gives a noble dignity, something transcendent.
As with most things in life, one thing eventually led to another, and after a few more chats with Rachel I suggested we swap lives for a while. I’m not sure that I really meant it – it was more of a challenge, one to which I never imagined she’d rise. Like I said, I was bored. I do random things when I’m bored – things that surprise even me when they come out of my mouth. But looking back, I realise that the thought of spending another night at the club, then going out drinking with Konrad and his gang of fellow models, with all the preening and posing and air-kissing and back-stabbing, made me feel queasy. Without knowing it, I’d come to the end of the line when it came to Paris and what it represented for me.
Rachel surprised me by accepting, with few questions. I think she even surprised herself. But then sometimes you meet people when they’re right on the edge and, without knowing it, ready to leap – all they need is a little push in the right direction. I did that to her, it seems, and I did it to myself. I gave myself the little push I needed so much.
I like to be controversial. Perhaps that’s why I’ve ended up doing the work I do. I was a fighter as a child – I rubbed my parents and my siblings up so badly that eventually, when I was eighteen, they packed me off to do my A-levels at a boarding school in the UK – one deep in the countryside in Hampshire, where my mother’s best friend from university headed up the French department. But the strictness of that god-awful place only hardened my resolve to be free. After a couple of months of terrible behaviour, I finally managed to get myself expelled and then headed back to France – not home, to my parents, but to a squat in a Hausmannian building on the edge of the Parc Monceau in Paris. Lack of any education at the tender age of eighteen had me doing all kinds of jobs – supermarket cashier, cinema usherette, chambermaid, nanny. I hated them all, although for a while I found the voyeuristic aspect of the chambermaid’s job rather titillating.
Gradually I ended up dancing in Pigalle – friends who had gone down that route said it was easy money, and when I gave it a go it was immediately apparent that I had a talent for it. And there were things, as I said, that I did love about it: the female camaraderie, the knowledge of one’s inherent power over other people. But it was very definitely love-hate, and the hate grew inside me without me really knowing, like a strange, secret plant, feeding off me before I really knew of its existence.
And then suddenly it was in full flower, and I needed to hack it down before it took me over.
Chapter 3: Rachel
It was the first day of the rest of my life. Just as it was for everyone else on the planet. It’s a cliché. But whereas most people would be doing pretty much what they did the day before, and the day before that, and all the days before that – the past receding away from them like a play of infinite mirrors at a fairground – I was starting anew. I couldn’t have been more excited.
It was hard to work out how I got so stuck in a rut. At eighteen I had felt on the threshold of something, of everything. Life was unfurling for me like a flower its petals. There was nothing I couldn’t do, nothing I couldn’t reach for, if I really wanted it. Everything was fresh and exciting and rampant with possibility.
Four years down the line, my art-school friends had begun to bore me, my art-school boyfriend – now dumped – totally bored me, and even my art, I sometimes thought, had lost its way, its oomph. Everything had wilted, somehow. I felt like an elephant encased in its tough, hard skin, inured to everything, impervious. The new stuff – bars, photography shows, people – seemed like pale versions of the old, and the old stuff was gone.
But as I stepped out of the Eurostar at the Gare du Nord, my belly warm with croissants and good coffee from the train buffet, I felt it again – that stab of excitement that I hadn’t experienced in so long, like a wash of pure alcohol through my veins.
I decided to walk to Rochelle’s studio apartment on the rue Chaptal. It was only about fifteen minutes away and, despite the length of my stay, I’d brought little luggage – just my camera and lenses, plus a medium-sized rucksack with some essential clothes. I figured I could wash them often, and buy some cheap stuff if they didn’t suffice. The stroll would give me the chance to acclimatise myself to Paris as well as get my bearings in my new neighbourhood.
I walked along rue de Mauberge and then rue Condorcet, looking up at the apartment buildings with their wrought-iron decorative balconies, noting the smart vintage clothes and accessories shops and the children’s outfitters. It was the kind of bohemian you pay a lot for. When the street feeds into rue Victor Massé, it becomes even more classically ‘Parisian’, with pretty stonework on its 18
- and 19
-century buildings, lots of unpretentious bread and cheese and wine shops and untouristy bistros, some music shops and several two-star hotels.
At number thirty-seven I stopped and looked up at the fourth floor, to pay homage to the painter and sculptor Edgar Degas. Or rather to the photographer Edgar Degas – the man famous for his artistic glimpses of ballerinas and washerwomen and folk in cafés in Montmartre also created some little-known, highly ambiguous photographic images that make their sitters look phantom-like, supernatural, unreal. Impressionistic photographs, almost, from the artist who disdained the label Impressionism.
On this street, too – I knew because I’d been reading up on the area in the week since Rochelle and I had set up our ‘life-swap’ – has stood the legendary café Le Chat Noir, in its second incarnation. This was a place that became so wildly popular for its bohemian and rowdy poetry readings, music-hall sketches and satire that it spawned cabaret all over Europe. At the end of the street, I turned and hazarded a short detour to Place Pigalle itself, the epicentre of the area’s strip clubs, sex shops and erotic cabarets, dubbed Pig Alley by the US soldiers who came here during the Second World War. Just up the road, on the boulevard de Clichy, was the legendary Moulin Rouge itself, as well as the Museum of Eroticism.
I stood still for a moment and let it all wash over me: the sights, sounds, smells. It was as seedy as I imagined but exciting too, holding a strange allure, a promise of adventure. Some parts of Paris, in spite of their beauty, or perhaps because of it, can seem pickled in aspic, museum pieces. Pigalle was very definitely alive. I resolved to take a stroll up here later, take a few shots as the natural light died and the neon hoardings fizzled into life. For now, it was time to find Rochelle’s apartment, kick off my shoes and take a nap.
***
I dozed briefly; though I had been up at the crack of dawn for one of the cheapest pre-rush-hour Eurostars, and though I was awake until the small hours packing and checking and fretting, I was just too excited to be in Paris to be able to catch up on my lost sleep.
I stood up, went to the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face, then padded around the flat, getting a feel for my new home – and for its usual inhabitant. It wasn’t really a flat, in fact – it was a studio, with a big old-fashioned wrought-iron bed plumped right in the centre, away from any wall. It reminded me of a bed on stage, for some reason. On each side of it were shop mannequins, both naked but draped at their neck and wrists with accessories that must have belonged to Rochelle – colourful scarves, furry stoles, berets and other hats, acrylic bangles and endlessly long strings of necklaces in jewel-bright hues. Around the bed, on the floor, were teetering stacks of glossy mags and books. Closer inspection of the latter revealed everything from correspondence between Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller to art books on the likes of Gustav Klimt, Hans Bellmer and the female Surrealists. I was interested to note among them several photography books: Lee Miller, Francesca Woodman, Bill Brandt.
Looking around the mess of Rochelle’s room I was a little taken aback, and I found myself wondering, for the first time, if I’d done a really stupid thing. I knew next to nothing about Rochelle and her life, and now here I was surrounded by all her junk, by her bohemian squalor, and I asked myself if I was going to be able to do this.
As I pondered, I kept circling this magpie’s nest of a room. It wasn’t dirty, but otherwise it was about as far from my own flat as it could possibly be. Two wardrobes on either side of the room bulged with shimmering, spangled fabrics, while cacti and other pot plants covered just about every free surface. Peeking into the tiny bathroom, I was unsurprised to find it almost bursting with cosmetic products. I didn’t have the heart to inspect the tiny kitchenette.
Suddenly I was reminded of a similar room – the apartment of Jane Fonda’s character, Bree Daniels, in Klute. The latter had always been one of my favourite films – for the incredible performances, of course, but also for the theme of voyeurism. For a photographer like me, there’s a kind of guilty pleasure in seeing films or reading novels about people being watched, followed. It makes us feel better, I guess, about our own dubious proclivities.
Bree’s room, too, looks like a stage set, in many ways. It’s also a retreat – but a retreat that ultimately becomes a prison. I looked around, thoughts racing. In the movie, Bree is a prostitute. Rochelle wasn’t a prostitute, but she did work in the sex industry. Did she sleep with some of the men for whom she danced? And if so, did she bring them here? Was this her she-wolf’s lair? Or was it a place to which she escaped, in which she could be herself again? It had all the trappings of a retreat, but the centre-stage bed made me wonder.
I’ll have a tidy-up, I told myself. I’m here for six months, and I can’t live like this. I’ll put the books on any shelf space I can find, or else in a corner. I’ll drag the bed over to the wall, and I’ll clear some space on the table in front of the largest window, from which I can spy on goings-on in the street below while I’m working. Hell, I might even take some pictures of it. After all, I needed a reason to be in Paris, a reason to call this city and this apartment, for a while at least, home.
Chapter 4: Rochelle
I stepped off the Eurostar into the most beautiful station I’d ever seen – Paris stations can be beautiful, but always in an old-fashioned way. St Pancras is so different, with lots of metal and glass as well as the older Victorian parts. It reminded me of a modern cathedral.
A friend in Paris told me that the champagne bar in the station is good, but it was early still, and anyway I’d promised myself I’d be a good girl for once. This was a fresh start for me, a chance to make a break from the Rochelle who ran herself ragged around Pigalle, always getting tangled up in new adventures in spite of her best intentions.
And in any case, Rachel’s friend Kyle was meeting me off the train. I didn’t really want that – I wasn’t a child, after all. But Rachel insisted. She kept telling me how easy it was to get lost and taken advantage of.
I saw someone waving at me and headed over. No doubt Rachel had shown Kyle my picture on Facebook, and in fact I thought I recognised him too – he was probably on her Friends list as well. I waved back, tentatively, and he strode over.
‘Rochelle?’ he hazarded, and when I nodded he reached out and we shook hands. ‘Welcome to London,’ he added, and as he spoke I noticed his eyes flicker up and down me – not in a wolfish manner, but perhaps with a flicker of amusement in their brown depths. Judging by his own conservative appearance – brown cord blazer over a navy V-neck, jeans – he probably didn’t know anybody quite like me.
Not that I’d made any special effort for this journey – as with just about everyone, it’s important for me to be comfortable when I’m travelling. But I do have my own unique style – a bit Gwen Stefani in the ‘It’s My Life’ video, a bit early Courtney Love … A mash-up of vintage pieces and costume jewellery with silk baby-doll dresses, fake fur, underwear as outerwear. Flapper-girl hair, cherry-red lips, spider lashes. I don’t do dressing-down. I stand out from the crowd. Maybe that’s why I’m so good at getting myself into trouble.
‘Thanks.’ I looked at Kyle expectantly, wondering exactly who he was to Rachel, that he would do her bidding like this – escorting a stranger across London.
He smiled. ‘Let me take your bags,’ he said. ‘You seem to have brought plenty of things.’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t travel light,’ I said, and I wondered why I had brought so much stuff with me. It’s not as if I was planning to party the way I did in Paris – quite the opposite. Although I wanted to explore London, part of me wanted a rest from the kind of lifestyle I had been leading in Pigalle. For anyone else, a couple of pairs of jeans and some sweaters would have sufficed. But I’d have felt lost without my disguises. For that, it occurred to me for the first time, is what they were. Even when I wasn’t dancing, I was playing a part.
Kyle led me out of the station, seemingly choosing the routes where there were the least people. Outside, he had us join the back of a queue for taxis.
‘This is on me,’ he said, and when I started to protest, he held up one hand. ‘There’s no finer introduction to London,’ he said. ‘Besides, it’s not very far.’
The line disappeared quickly and we climbed into a black cab.
***
Rachel lived in Bayswater; that much I already knew. Until this point, though, I’d never been to that part of London.
Her flat was on the top floor of a creamy white building with views over the treetops of Hyde Park. In direct contrast to mine, it turned out to be rather spartan, the only ‘decoration’ being some of Rachel’s own photos in dark-wood frames. Otherwise, there were a few pieces of utilitarian furniture and a kitchen with the basics but nothing more. Above her desk, a few shelves held some photography manuals and a few art books. I browsed the spines: Richard Billingham, Nana Goldin, Tierney Gearon. I took a few down and wasn’t surprised by what I found inside, given what I knew of Rachel’s own work: rather grim social realism, with occasional flashes of transcendence. Outsiders, the neglected, the marginal. A kind of subversive beauty found in squalor or deprivation or disarray.
Rachel and I were very different, that was clear. But it wasn’t a bad thing. I wanted a change of scene, and I had very definitely got myself one of those. This elegant tree-lined street leading up to the vast green space of Hyde Park couldn’t be more different from rue Chaptal in the Pigalle, while the flat – though not at all to my taste – brought welcome relief from all my baggage. Because that’s what much of it was, at my place – props, in both senses of the word. Artefacts to create an illusion of life, and things to shore me up. But shore me up against what?
I’d never really asked myself the question, but as I did I realised just how lonely I had been in Paris, despite all the people crowding in on me, crushing me.
***
Kyle sat with me for a while, as if he had picked up on my unease at being alone. That was the thing about me – externally, I was strong and outgoing, brash even. To many, I was loud and even obnoxious.
But of course it was a classic attention-seeking thing. Inside I was weak, and I needed other people to build me up into something coherent and ongoing. Leaving Paris was yet another attempt to get away from myself, but now that I’d fled, what was I going to do? What new me was to emerge? Or would the old one linger on, like a skin that I couldn’t quite shed?
Kyle seemed very nice, and from his conversation I suspected that he and Rachel had been together and that he was still smarting from the break-up. He was a musician, it seemed – a violinist in an orchestra – and while often he was away touring, at that time his schedule was relaxed. He said he’d take me round all the sights, and when I didn’t enthuse, he looked a bit hurt.
‘OK,’ I said, as brightly as I could manage. ‘But I need a few days to settle in. I – I need to think a few things through.’
Kyle frowned at me. ‘Are you OK?’ he said. ‘Are you homesick?’
I waved a hand airily. ‘It’s not that …’ I tailed off. ‘I mean – well, no, it’s not homesickness. It’s just … well, it’s just that I don’t really know what I’m doing here.’
‘But Rachel said it was you who suggested …’
‘I did. But I don’t really know why.’
Kyle smiled. ‘Impulsiveness,’ he said. ‘I like that.’ He studied his fine, long fingers. ‘It’s something I don’t have enough of.’
‘Oh?’ I cocked my head to one side.
‘In the orchestra my nickname is “Mr Unspontaneity”.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I have to weigh everything up from every angle before I can make a decision or commit to something. It’s like – it’s like a disease.’
I looked at him, intrigued. ‘I couldn’t be more different,’ I said, wondering what it was like to be so configured. ‘I guess at least you don’t get yourself into trouble that way.’
Now it was Kyle’s turn to look intrigued. ‘Trouble? What kind of trouble?’
‘Oh … you know.’ I shook my head, try to laugh it off. ‘Just stuff.’
He stared at me. ‘What do you do, in Paris?’ he said.
I hesitated. ‘Didn’t Rachel tell you?’
He shook his head.
‘I’m an exotic dancer,’ I said.
He stared harder. ‘A … An exotic … You mean a stripper?’ he managed at last.
I shrugged. ‘There’s a lot more to it than that.’
‘But you – you take your clothes off for men.’
I nodded. ‘Mainly for men, yes.’
For a moment he sat there, looking intently at the tips of his brown brogues. I looked away too, out of the window towards the treetops of Hyde Park, fluttering in the breeze.
When I looked back, he’s was staring at me again. ‘I’ve never met a … an exotic dancer’, he said.
‘Then you’ve not lived,’ I countered quickly.
A half-smile flitted around his lips. ‘Clearly,’ he said, and his eyes held mine. He’s was good-looking, I thought, and yet not at all my type. As I stared back, my mind turned to Konrad and I wondered what he was doing. It was earlyish, still – he was probably in bed after another night at Queen with his model pack of pretty boys, some of them gay, some of them straight, and some of them swinging both ways. That was unless he had a job, of course. But he seemed to have taken a bit of a step back from modelling over the previous few months. He loved the lifestyle but not the discipline, and for the moment he had amassed enough money not to have to worry about going for jobs. He wasn’t the kind of guy to worry about the future.
Kyle was still looking at me, and in his eyes I saw the first fire of obsession. I knew it so well – I know the effect I have on guys. And for Kyle I must have been like a creature from another planet – unattainable, and thereby exquisitely fascinating. He’d torture himself about me, he’d wank with images of me in his head, all the while knowing that we were about as far apart as it’s possible to be.
As if he had access to my thoughts, he stood up. He was still looking at me, but suddenly his eyes were far away.
‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘But just give me a call when you’re ready for me to show you around.’
I nodded and smiled, and I saw him out, wondering if he’d ever be back, in spite of his offer. He was interested in me, but he knew it was an unhealthy interest. He was terrified of me too. He’d never met anyone like me before and he was afraid.
I headed for the bathroom, where I stood in front of the mirror, eyes appraising, trying to imagine what it must be like to see me for the first time, to try to get to know me.
You’re trouble, I said under my breath. And then again, with relish: Trrrrouble.
Chapter 5: Rachel
I was crouched on the bathroom sink when the intercom beeped and I nearly fell off backwards. Only the thought of my expensive camera lying in pieces on the bathroom floor kept me from plummeting to the floor.
I climbed up here when I realised that the bathroom window of Rochelle’s apartment has one of those classic Rear Window vistas into a courtyard surrounded by people’s windows. Since then, I’ve been mesmerised by the glimpses of life in this Parisian apartment block that I can get from this vantage point. In the last half-hour alone, I’ve witnessed – and photographed – a gay guy shaving in a wash of sunlight while his much younger lover talks earnestly at his reflection in the mirror, and in another window an elderly lady feeding her dog expensive-looking chocolates as she talked on the phone in an agitated, distracted manner.
I didn’t photograph – but I did watch – as a pretty young girl with shiny golden hair came into her apartment with a boy of around the same age. They were in their late teens, I’d say; probably, from their attire, students. At first their body language was stilted, self-conscious – it was clear that the boy hadn’t been to the girl’s apartment before and that they were finding it hard to relax in each other’s company. It was clear, even from a distance, that they had the massive hots for each other. Normally I might have taken a few snaps, but for once I was too caught up in their ‘dance of love’ to think to do so.
It was like watching some pre-ordained ritual, some choreographed display. The couple knew all the moves but couldn’t skip any – they were in thrall to convention and to the idea of what they expected of each other. It would have been so much easier to just grab each other, as they so obviously wanted to do, but that would have taken some of the fun out of it. For a while, it was all about the anticipation, about the deferral.
They shared a pot of tea, the sunlight filtering in and over her patchwork bedspread. She was in an armchair beside the bed, he was on the bed itself – but on the very edge. He seemed to be trying to lighten the atmosphere with jokes; through the open windows I could hear the tinkle of her slightly over-eager laughter. Her honeyed tresses, pulled up at the nape to reveal a slender brown neck and delicately freckled shoulder, glinted in the sunshine. Her teeth flashed when she laughed, mouth open.
The boy watched her closely, awaiting his moment, anxious not to blow it. I found myself becoming wet, and where I was kneeling, one leg either side of the sink on the wooden surround, I slipped my hand into my knickers and rubbed at myself, softly to begin with and then more vigorously as my excitement mounted. I put my camera on the windowsill and clutched the wall for safety, not wanting to get down and lose myself in my pleasure, causing me to miss theirs. For their pleasure and mine was inextricably bound together. I hadn’t felt this horny in ages.
As if my act had unleashed something in them – as if it had changed something in the very air itself – the girl, suddenly decisive, brave, wanton, stood up and stepped towards the boy. For a moment he looked almost frightened. And then, as the girl placed one hand on his cheek, he smiled and relaxed into her seduction.
Pulling her skirt up around her hips and pushing the boy back onto the bed, she placed herself astride him. Astride the sink, I let my eyelids flutter closed for a moment, imagining it was me atop this handsome boy with his closely cropped blond hair. I didn’t miss Kyle, and I hadn’t thought I was missing sex. But it had been two months, and in all that time I hadn’t even wanked. This was long overdue.
Opening my eyes again, I stared as the girl circled her hips over his. The boy’s head was thrown back – he was enraptured, bewitched. Women’s power over men, I thought, is unbounded. Get them to this point and they will do anything – anything. It was almost frightening to have this power. I thought again of Rochelle, like a spider catching men in the web I imagined her to weave nightly out of her sex magic.
The girl started to fiddle with the flies of the boy’s jeans. Finally getting him unzipped, she released his cock like a caged animal and grasping it in her fist began to move her hand up and down it, slowly at first but gradually building up a more dynamic rhythm.
I started to lose control. Wishing I knew where Rochelle kept her vibrators – she must have one, I reasoned – I massaged the hot nub of my clit while looking around me for something to go inside. My fingers wouldn’t do. I wanted a cock, a big, hard cock. On the window I spotted a plastic shampoo bottle that looked as if it would do the trick. I grabbed it, ran it under the hot tap for a few moments, and then eased it inside myself. A moan of pleasure escaped me. I gritted my teeth at the almost unbearable ecstasy that began to flood my veins. Climax wasn’t far away, but I wanted to ride it with this couple, not before them. I wanted to be part of their union, even if from afar.
Again, as if there was something in the air or as if he heard the whisper of my thoughts, the boy, losing control, grabbed the gusset of the girl’s knickers and pulled them roughly aside to reveal the golden fluff of her public mound. Even from where I knelt, I could see the glisten of it. My knees started to quiver. I couldn’t hold off much longer. I tried to slow down the pumping of the bottle inside me but it was as if a force greater than myself had taken possession of me. Lips parted, I moaned and moaned.
‘Fuck … Fucking hell … Oh FUCK FUCK FUCK!’
Taking hold of his cock, the boy rammed himself inside the girl, who jerked backwards, puppet-like, at the force of his intrusion, eyes wide as if in shock and awe. Then she fell back over him, strands of hair sneaking loose from where it was tied and falling about her shoulders like a golden rain.
Backwards and forwards, gyrating round and round, she rode him. His hands, on her hips, pulled her tight to him. On the sink unit, I rocked backwards and forwards to meet the bottle as I thrust it into me, the fingers of my other hand pressed tightly against my clit. I glanced down every now and then, delighted by – fascinated by – my own pleasure, but then I looked quickly back up, not wanting to miss them coming.
And then suddenly they did, at the same time, or almost. She threw her torso and head back and began wailing like a she-wolf, and that must have unclenched his pleasure, for all at once he started bucking on the bed, hands still clutching her hips as he came with full force.
As he did so, his head also thrown back, chin tilted up towards the ceiling, his eyes opened wide and met mine across the courtyard, through our respective open windows. And by now, I was coming too, mouth wide open, breath fast and frantic. From where he lay, he wouldn’t be able to see what my hands were doing, but it must have been pretty clear that I was getting off on what they were doing to each other.
But it was too late – I was lost to the orgasm flooding me, unable to shrink back from the window much as I wanted to. And so our eyes stayed locked on each other, and I got my wish – to be part of their union – after all.
***
Hopping down from the sink, I sought out a clean flannel and gave myself a quick soapy wash. Then I stood up, straightened my clothes, and risked a peep out the window in the direction of the couple’s flat.
The girl was kneeling on the bed now, in the window, looking out. From across the courtyard I heard snatches of her words:
‘Weird … Could have sworn … Didn’t you hear anything?’
Christ, I thought. Did I really make that much noise? I felt my cheeks burn red. This wasn’t like me at all. I didn’t know what had come over me.
I’ve always had voyeurism in me, and it was obviously a factor in my ‘choice’ of profession, although sometimes I do wonder if I ever had any say whatsoever in my career. Neither of my parents had any photographic skills or interests, but from very early childhood I was obsessed with cameras and making images. Even when I wasn’t taking photographs, I was creating albums or cutting images out of magazines and making collages. In early teenagerhood, I graduated to buying up faded old photographs I found in charity shops, and going to photography exhibitions. It became inevitable that that would be my choice of degree
But I never thought my voyeurism would bring me to this – to watching other people fuck and getting so bloody turned on by it that I have to give myself a good seeing to. I’ve never done anything like this before, but now I wonder if this isn’t the natural outcome of my tendencies. Has my photography always been about spying on people? And hasn’t it always been about my being on the sidelines of life, looking at it but not daring to get involved – a way of keeping my distance?
In an effort to halt my thoughts and the self-doubt they engendered, I climbed back onto the sink and reached for my camera. I was just looking out of the window again, noticing that the boy and girl had disappeared but that the elderly lady and her pampered pooch were back, and thinking they would make a good shot, when the intercom went.
Climbing down, feeling sheepish, I went to the door and pressed the button.
‘Hello?’ I said, and then: ‘Bonjour?’
‘Hi,’ said a deep male voice in English, with a heavy French accent, and for a moment my heart thudded. It was the boy from across the courtyard, come to bawl me out for spying on him and his new girlfriend. But then:
‘We’re friends of Rochelle’s. We thought you might be lonely. We’d like to show you around town.’
I paused for a moment, and then I took a deep breath and spoke into the intercom:
‘Come up,’ I said.
Chapter 6: Rochelle
Kyle did come back, though I didn’t phone, and when he did, I was glad. It was hard, not knowing anyone, but I didn’t dare go out alone, for fear of myself and getting into scrapes. It was the story of my life, but this was a new start for me and I was determined not to blow it.
I kicked my heels around Rachel’s flat, looking at her books, mucking around on my laptop, chatting to a few friends back in Paris on Skype, trying not to sound as lost as I felt. I went out, of course, but not far – for brief strolls in Hyde Park, to a bookshop in Notting Hill, and – one day – through Portobello Market. There, trinkets and baubles glittered on stalls, winking at me lasciviously, as if they knew me, knew my lack of willpower. I bought a vintage purple paste ring that was going for a song, but I resisted the rest – the silk slips, the feather boas, the aubergine ruched-velvet elbow-length gloves. I had enough, I kept telling myself. Why gorge myself on stimulation, and why fill Rachel’s apartment with more stuff? Why not try and just be? Only then might I find myself.
I was beginning to get bored, and that’s when Kyle called – as if hearing my unconscious call. He said he was still at a loose end, that a mini-tour had been cancelled after a soprano had fallen ill. He said he was missing Rachel, and that it’d be a real pleasure to show me around.
When he picked me up, he suggested – given my lack of knowledge of London – that we get tickets for one of those hop-on hop-off sightseeing buses. It would give me some sense of where things were in relation to one another, he said – something one remained remarkably ignorant about if one travelled about by Tube, as most people did. And getting one’s bearings, he said, was crucial.
I agreed – it was a sunny day and it sounded like fun to sit on the open-air top deck and see the sights with minimal effort, especially since he’d offered to pay for the tickets. We could get off, Kyle reminded me, if I wanted to see anything in greater depth.
We climbed aboard and headed upstairs, his hand at my elbow. I admit I wasn’t wearing the most sensible shoes. In fact, I don’t have any sensible shoes, period. But his gesture seemed a little over-intimate. I remembered his face of a few days before, when he’d suddenly seemed to take interest in me, a girl so ostensibly different from him she could have been from another planet. I wondered if I’d done the right thing in accepting his invitation.
We sat down, and the bus rumbled along the Bayswater Road towards Oxford Street. It looped around Marble Arch and began to go down Park Lane. I clutched at the side of the bus, staring at the luxury car showrooms but mostly at the hotels. The Dorchester, The Metropolitan, The Four Seasons – all were places of almost mythical significance for me. Within them, I thought to myself, deals were made, marriages began and ended, affairs were committed, and a thousand debaucheries took place. Night after night after night, the beautiful, the bold and sometimes the damned come to this stretch of road to play out their dramas against a background of wealth and glamour. But it was an allure that had a seedy side to it, something grubby, and that was what made it fascinating to me. The rich, I knew from experience, were dirty bastards too – in fact, they could be the dirtiest bastards of all.
Kyle’s hand on my shoulder startled me from my reverie. He was gesturing over to a pair of elaborate stainless steel and bronze gates giving access into Hyde Park.
‘… the Queen Elizabeth Gate,’ he was saying, ‘built in honour of the Queen Mother.’ He gestured in front of him. ‘And now we’re coming up to the Wellington Arch, which was …’
His words – together with those of the live onboard commentary – faded in the buzz of traffic as I turned back to ogle the hotels. I wanted to be inside them, not sitting next to this well-intentioned but ultimately rather dull violinist, listening to him crap on about London’s history. Who really cared about that? What I wanted to know was what was going on in those hotel rooms and bars, and what exactly I was missing out on.
As we halted at the bottom of Park Lane, waiting for a break in the traffic before continuing our tour, I looked at Kyle a bit sheepishly. I hoped he didn’t think I was rude. I was grateful that he was making time to take me in hand like this, whatever his motive. And perhaps I was just being vain and presumptuous, thinking that he was at all interested in me.
I smiled at him. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Were you and Rachel an item?’
He blinked at me, surprised more, I imagine, by my directness than by the question itself.
‘We were.’ He stared off into the distance, seemingly unwilling to divulge any more. I didn’t push it, but after a few minutes he spoke again.
‘We were together for a few years,’ he said. ‘I did think it would be for good. But then suddenly it was over – pffff’ – he mimicked the action of someone extinguishing a candle with both hands – ‘and she didn’t want to know any more.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That must have been hard. Was it long ago, that you split up?’
He shook his head. ‘Only a couple of months. And we stayed friends – still saw quite a lot of each other. So I was kind of living in hope that she was just going through a weird phase – that before long we’d get back together. But then suddenly, this … this exchange or whatever you want to call it.’
For a moment he looked at me almost reproachfully, as if it were all my fault. I shook my head, about to tell him that I didn’t force Rachel into this lifeswap, when he spoke again.
‘What about you?’ he said.
‘Me?’
‘Anyone special in your life?’ he prodded, and I couldn’t swear to it but it seemed to me he blushed.
I looked away too, more for his sake than mine. ‘I have a boyfriend, yes,’ I responded at length.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Konrad,' I replied, adding in explanation, ‘He’s half German. A model.’
Kyle turned back to me, and his next question startled me with its vulnerability.
‘Is he very handsome?’ he said, and though I nodded, what I really wanted to do was to grab his hand and say, But so are you, Kyle. In many ways you’re much more handsome than that pretty-boy preener.
But as soon as the instinctive movement made itself known to my brain, I almost recoiled in horror. Handsome Kyle might be, but he was not my type. For all his good looks, he was a square.
I forced a smile, gesturing in front of me. ‘Nice house,’ I said, and Kyle laughed politely as the bus pulled up in front of Buckingham Palace for photo opportunities.
***
Kyle was well aware that I didn’t know a soul in London, and so I found myself without a ready excuse when he invited me, at the end of our bus tour, for dinner at his flat in Hampstead a couple of evenings later. A couple of friends were going to be there, he said – an opera singer and a dancer at Sadler’s Wells. They were intrigued about me, he said.
I raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t believe that he had told them what I did for a living, and I wanted to ask him what they did know about me. I wasn’t going to pretend to be something I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to be an object of prurient scrutiny either. I kept quiet, however, deciding to play it by ear.
And after a couple more days of loafing around the flat and aimless walks in Hyde Park, resisting the call of Park Lane, I felt glad of the offer of company and was actually looking forward to the dinner party. I was also, in a contained way, looking forward to seeing Kyle again. I didn’t know anybody who moved in high cultural circles, like he did, and I found myself interested in him. What would his flat be like? What were his friends like? What was his background, and how had he arrived where he had?
I had long been fascinated by other people’s career paths, never having had one of my own. Life, I often felt, was just something that happened to me, without my really thinking or planning. It had always been this way, and until recently it had never occurred to me to be any other way. But looking at Kyle I felt the strength of having a trajectory, a calling. Kyle, it seemed, knew where he was going. His plans weren’t failsafe, of course – hence his crumbling when Rachel dumped him. But in general he seemed like someone with an overview, a direction in life. He certainly wasn’t the kind of person who would suddenly find himself in a strange city, knowing no one, going half out of their mind with boredom and longing to stir something up, no matter what.
I dressed demurely, for me – there was very little that could be described as toned-down in my wardrobe, but with an uncharacteristically minimal use of accessories and good underwear I found that my black-lace pencil dress didn’t look too sluttish. I went relatively easy on the make-up too. It wasn’t that I was trying not to be me, but I was trying to think about context: a dinner party with a classical music crowd in Hampstead required a little restraint, in some respects.
I arrived on time too, which was virtually unheard of: in Paris, my lateness was a standing joke with Konrad, friends, and the other girls at the club, many of whom found themselves covering for me when I rolled in half an hour after a shift had started. I didn’t mean it to happen, but as Konrad often pointed out, I had trouble ‘getting my shit together’. Not that he could talk, but that was another story. Wherever I seemed to go, chaos inevitably followed, and that went for my time-keeping too.
Kyle answered the door, dressed in snug navy chinos and a well-pressed white shirt. I smiled indulgently, and at once felt like a wife must do who makes the same old excuses for her husband all her life. He was a boring dresser, but underneath it he was a lovely guy. And perhaps I was using his clothes to judge him unfairly and quite wrongly.
I thought of Rachel. Rachel knew what Kyle was like in bed. Not that I could ask her. I hadn’t even met her – I knew her even less than I knew Kyle. Our conversations, via Facebook, had been relatively brief, lacking in intimacies.
We’d had no contact since taking over residence in each other’s home, in each other’s life, though of course the opportunity was there. I wondered if that was because Rachel had just breezed into my life, found her feet without hesitation. Here I was, stumbling around, while she just got on with it.
I wondered what she was doing right now, and whether she’d be jealous that I was at Kyle’s house. Presumably she wouldn’t, given that she was the one who had split up with him. But then people still get possessive about their exes, sometimes, even when it was them who called it off. I also thought, for the first time, about my flat and about how Rachel must be coping with it in all its disarray and dishevelment. Of course, I’d tidied up and cleaned it before leaving. But someone like Rachel would find it very difficult to cope with all that stuff, of that I had no doubt. I thought I might Facebook her the next day, find out how she was in general and let her know that I didn’t mind if she wanted to box some stuff up just to get it out of her sight and make the place her own a little more. I didn’t want her feeling as out of place as I did.
Kyle was just showing me into his kitchen, which smelt of tomatoes and basil and fresh pasta, when the doorbell rang.
‘That’ll be Morg and Tats,’ he said and, telling me to take a seat, he headed back towards the front door.
I felt too uncomfortable to sit down, so I wafted self-consciously around the kitchen, stirring the bubbling pasta sauce, sniffing the mozzarella that lay neatly sliced on the chopping board like a row of creamy white coins.
Then they were there, in the doorway, and Kyle was doing the introductions.
‘Rochelle – Morgan and Tatiana,’ he said, gesturing back and forth between us.
Tatiana stepped forward into the room, one hand extended. My first impression was of a glacial blonde, perfectly groomed, probably swimming in money, with a chip of ice where her heart should be. Of course, it’s ridiculous to make judgements like that about people, but I’m just relating my first impressions. Tatiana had an uptight little smile on her scarlet lips and the aloof air of someone who thinks they’re on a completely different level to you. Which she undoubtedly was. But that’s not the point.
Morgan followed in her wake, a hand hovering in the small of her back. His hair was greying but expensively styled, and a deep, rich, designer cologne matched his navy linen suit, unruffled. His manner, like Tatiana’s, was only superficially warm.
I looked at Kyle. Already I wished I hadn’t accepted this invitation. These people thought I was a piece of shit and could barely hide their feelings. What was Kyle doing even inviting me here? I was not part of this world, and trying to bring me into it – even out of kindness – was a huge error of judgement on his part.
Kyle moved his head slightly from side to side, as if discouraging me from bailing out. His eyes urged patience and calm. I forced a smile.
‘So nice to meet you,’ I said. Then looking at Tatiana, I added, ‘Kyle tells me you are a ballerina.’
She smiled haughtily, inclined her head slightly in confirmation.
I looked to Kyle for help, but he was already pulling back the chairs, gesturing to us all to take our seats, then proffering bottles of wine.
‘Red or white?’ he asked us all as we sat down. ‘We’re keeping it simple tonight: buffalo mozzarella and roasted artichokes, then pasta with a chilli tomato sauce. And lastly my famous home-made chocolate mousse.’
As he began plating up the starters, Kyle continued to chat, probably aware that I was out of my depth. Not that I couldn’t talk to these people, of course – it wasn’t as if I was shy or lacking in chutzpah. But their froideur had raised my hackles: why, I thought, should I do all the running where they were intent on showing me that I was uninteresting to them?
The talk, through much of the meal, was of the classical music and dance worlds, and of mutual friends of the three of them. It was mind-numbingly boring and I didn’t listen to much of it. I wasn’t inclined to intervene and set the conversation on a more interesting course either. Instead, I drank a little too quickly and I gradually zoned out, thinking instead of what might be happening at the club that night. I didn’t miss it, exactly, but I missed the camaraderie with the other girls, the sense of community. For the first time in my life, it occurred to me, I had belonged somewhere. And then I had thrown it all away, in favour of … this.
I was startled out of my musings by Tatiana’s hand on my arm. It felt cold and clammy, even intrusive. I instinctively flinched.
All eyes, I realised, were on me, and it became obvious that someone had just asked me a question that I hadn’t heard.
‘I’m sorry,’ I managed at last. ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’
‘Tatiana was just asking about your line of work,’ said Kyle, and in his eyes I saw a little warning. I didn’t know what he’d already told them about me, but I was guessing that the word ‘stripper’ hadn’t come into the conversation.
My smile was so fake it made my cheeks ache. ‘I’m a dancer, too,’ I said, looking at Tatiana.
She raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow. ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Where do you dance?’
‘I’m – I’m freelance,’ I said. ‘At different venues in Paris. Modern dance.’
It wasn’t like me to lie. It wasn’t even as if I was ashamed of what I did. But I suddenly felt protective of Kyle, protective of whatever lies he might have told them. Above all, I guess, I didn’t want to embarrass him.
I felt a foot on mine under the table and, assuming it was his way of thanking me for my discretion, flashed him a smile across the table.
He smiled back, and in his eyes I thought I saw, once more, something deeper than kindness or casual friendship – something ardent and even a little greedy. Did he want me, or was it the drink talking – in him, in me, or in both of us?
I stood up and made my way to the toilet. After peeing, I splashed my face with cold water. I had drunk too much, and if I didn’t sober up I risked saying something I might regret. Though my instinct was to protect Kyle, Morgan and Tatiana’s coolness and evident disapproval of me might ignite my temper if I didn’t pay attention.
Smoothing my hair back and my dress down, I stepped out of the toilet. Morgan was leaning against the opposite wall, one leg crossed over the other, arms folded. A curious half-smile flickered around his lips. I smiled back.
‘All yours,’ I said.
He stepped towards me. ‘All mine?’ he said, and his smile grew more wolfish. I realised then that it must have been Morgan’s, not Kyle’s, foot under the table, telling me something quite different.
I took a step backward but he continued to approach, and with one arm outstretched, he put a hand on my hip.
I looked towards the dining room. I could hear the low rumble of conversation, interrupted by the odd tinkle of Tatiana’s glassy laugh. From this angle, we couldn’t be seen.
But what was Tatiana to Morgan, anyway? I’d assumed they were a couple, but nothing in their manner or in anything they had said since arriving confirmed that. Perhaps, I thought, they were just friends.
I looked into Morgan’s eyes, combatively, as if to tell him to take his hands off me. But as he did, I felt that old surge of excitement as I realised the power that I had over someone. Morgan had kept it well hidden beneath a veneer of indifference during the meal, but now his eyes smouldered with desire. He wanted me so badly, it hurt. And nothing turned me on so much as when I knew that someone wanted me so much, they’d do almost anything.
Not that I was into humiliating people. But if someone was into abasing themselves in their desire for me, I wouldn’t necessarily stop them – especially if I had a drink or two inside me.
I stepped back into the toilet, yanking Morgan with me.
‘You want me?’ I breathed in his ear as he pulled the door closed behind him.
He moaned with desire. I could feel the hard bulge of him in his linen trousers as we crushed together in the small space. It would be so easy just to take him out and slide his pulsating cock inside me and let him fuck me hard and fast against the wall. Then to take our places back at the dinner table as if nothing had happened, the only things that might arouse suspicion the post-orgasmic glow of our cheeks.
But even knowing that to draw things out would risk alerting Tatiana and Kyle to what was going on, I couldn’t help but lead Morgan on. He couldn’t have me that easily, I told myself, as I inhaled his expensive cologne. It smelled of power and influence, and that confirmed my need to show him who held the reins right now.
I cupped his cock and balls in my hand through his trousers, squeezed them firmly. ‘But what’s in it for me?’ I purred. ‘What can you give me?’
His eyes caught fire. Here, they said, is a challenge. Here is a woman who knows her power. Clasping his hands to the sides of my thighs, he slid down to his knees, pressing his face into my mound through my clothes.
‘I can smell you,’ he groaned. ‘Even through all this. Fucking hell, you turn me on, you horny bitch. What it is with you French chicks?’
‘Oh, so you like French pussy?’ I chuckled. I started to inch up my dress with one hand. ‘Want to see more?’
I saw one of his hands fall to his crotch and release his cock. He started pumping away with one hand, unable to control himself, as his other hand snaked between my legs. Pulling the crotch of my panties to one side, he slid two fingers between my lips and found me dripping wet.
‘Arrrrgh,’ he let out. ‘I can’t …’
I grabbed his arm so he couldn’t jerk himself off any more. He was going to come too soon, and I didn’t want that. I pulled his head towards me, thrust my pussy at him. He dived right in, tongue lapping at my juices like a cat slurping cream.
I was splayed back against the wall, the skirt of my dress bunched up around my waist. As Morgan’s tongue moved expertly over me, flickering in and out of my hole, I lowered one hand and fingered my clit. It didn’t take much – at once I felt my core deliquesce as my climax mounted, inexorably as a tide.
As he felt it approach, Morgan tried to pull away, keen, no doubt, to enter me with his yearning cock. But I was intent on denying him. No one – no one – had me this easily. I pressed his head more firmly against me and came violently, with his tongue still inside me.
Then, perfunctorily, I pulled my panties up and my dress down, smoothed my hair and left the toilet. My crotch was sodden, and my cheeks probably glowed, but otherwise I didn’t think Kyle and Tatiana would be alerted to what had just happened, especially if – as I expected he would – Morgan stayed in the toilet for a while. I figured he’d be wanking himself off now, in a bit of a daze, wondering what had hit him.
I’d seen men like Morgan before, men with money and influence who get their head turned by a bit of rough. They think they’re going to get an easy, dirty shag – and often they probably do. But not with me. I got my pleasure, while denying him what he really wanted. He’d had to make do with a sad wank against a toilet wall.
I sat down unobtrusively, not exactly avoiding the others’ gazes but hoping they’d continue their thread of conversation while I regained my composure. It worked, and for a moment or two I was just able to breathe and let it all wash over me. Part of me was unsettled – like I said, I was always getting into scrapes, yet when I’d accepted this dinner invitation, I certainly hadn’t expected to have a fellow guest – possibly the partner of another guest – go down on me in the loo. But I was exhilarated too. I’ve always got off on the seedy and the illicit.
Morgan finally took his place back at the table, and though I thought I saw questioning glances exchanged between him and Kyle, and then him and Tatiana, nothing was said.
We ate our dessert and moved onto Kyle’s big cream sofas for coffee. I was keeping my head down even more now, afraid not only of Tatiana but of Kyle. Whether he was attracted to me or not, it was certainly not the done thing to fuck another dinner guest in the middle of the party. I was certain he wouldn’t want to know me any more.
Then it was time to say our goodbyes. Tatiana and Morgan got up as one, and I was overcome with curiosity as to the nature of their relationship.
‘Do you guys have far to go?’ I said. ‘Where do you live?’
‘Not so far,’ said Morgan, and for the first since since I’d orgasmed with his tongue inside me, our eyes met. I felt a little dizzy, not out of lust for him but at the pressure, I suppose, that had built up over the course of the evening.
‘We have a house in Belsize Park,’ added Tatiana, her eyes lingering on mine. I may have been paranoid, but there seemed to be something knowing, something mocking, in them.
As they waited for their taxi to arrive, we gathered in the doorway for the obligatory air-kissing.
‘By the way,’ said Tatiana, turning back to me as their car drew up along the pavement, ‘do you have a card? As we’re in the same line of work …’
I shook my head.
‘Here,’ said Kyle, handing me a piece of paper and a pen. ‘Write it down. It is all about contacts, you know? Tatiana might be able to introduce you to some interesting people.’
The last thing I need right now is interesting people, I thought to myself, but I scribbled down my mobile number and email address anyway, and handed them to Tatiana.
‘Great,’ she said, flashing me a smile, and suddenly it seemed that she too was interested in me. I wondered what had changed, for her, all of a sudden.
She and Morgan descended the stone stairs down to the pavement. As the taxi driver opened the back door for them, they turned towards us to wave goodbye. As they did so, I saw Tatiana bring one of Morgan’s hands to her face, sniff at it. They exchanged a look, then, and a thrill rippled through me: Morgan’s fingers, I thought, must still bear the scent of me.
They looked back towards us. ‘Thanks again, Kyle,’ said Tatiana, but her eyes were not on him. She was staring at me.
‘Lovely to meet you, Rochelle,’ she said. She waved the piece of paper with my details on.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ she called, and in the chill night air her laughter rang out like broken glass.
***
When they’d gone, Kyle and I sat down to finish up the coffee. I knew I should go easy on the caffeine, but I was already resigned to not sleeping that night. I was just too wound up. I wondered what I was going to do when I left here. I couldn’t imagine going back to Rachel’s flat. I’d climb the walls.
I looked at Kyle, wishing I fancied him, wishing I went for the sensible options. It had always been like this, since I was a teenager and felt the first inklings of desire. I’d only ever wanted the bad boys or girls, the dangerous ones who would lead me into darkness. Anybody clean-cut, polite and kind was an immediate turn-off. And if they wanted me, that was a turn-off too, unless – as with Morgan – I’d seen an opportunity to use them for my own ends. I could do that with Kyle, of course, but I didn’t want to. Kyle wasn’t playing the kind of power games with me that Morgan had wanted to. Kyle wasn’t a taker.
What I really wanted now, if only I’d acknowledge it to myself, was to fall into bed with Kyle for a good, long, sexless, matey cuddle. I never did that with anyone these days, and suddenly I regretted it – and pined for it. For so long it had all been about the sex and desire. Even with the girls at the club, for many of whom I felt genuine affection, and who I believed felt affection for me, there was a frisson. After all, we shared a dressing room, saw each other naked night after night. And familiarity couldn’t take away from the eroticism of my colleagues’ lovely bodies. I admit that I often thought of some my colleagues’ beautiful tits and pussies as I wanked myself to sleep at dawn.
We sat together for a long time, much of it in a companionable silence. Kyle obviously didn’t suspect that anything had gone on between me and Morgan, despite his and Tatiana’s weird behaviour as they climbed into the taxi. In some ways, I thought, he must be a true innocent. They’d been so blatant, even I was shocked. But then of course I knew what was going on in their heads. Kyle didn’t.
‘So,’ I said finally, stretching. ‘I’d best make a move, I guess.’
Kyle turned to me. ‘You don’t have to,’ he said.
‘Do you have a spare bed?'
He placed one hand on mine. ‘No,’ he said.
For a moment the thought played around my head: What the hell? We could fuck, and nothing need come of it. Just a friendly fuck, and then never again. It might not be the best fuck of my life, but it would stop me wandering about the streets, meeting the wrong kinds of people, getting into trouble.
But then I looked into his eyes, and I knew that he was a gentle, sensitive soul – the very antithesis of Morgan – and that it would be very wrong of me to hurt him.
I shook my head gently. ‘I like you too much,’ I said softly, pulling his head to my shoulder. There was something childlike about him, something that needed protection. But I was the last person to be able to protect anyone.
For a while we just sat there, unmoving, and then Kyle stood up and went over to the window.
‘I wonder,’ he said, looking out into the blackness, ‘what Rachel’s doing now.’
Chapter 7: Rachel
When I opened the door to Rochelle’s friends, I didn’t know that I was opening the door to another world – a world that would change my life forever.
There were six of them, all but one of them guys, all of them gorgeous. The guys, it turned out, were fashion models. I’d never even met a model before – my photos are always of real people – so I immediately felt out of my depth.
The leader of the pack, it was clear from the outset, was Konrad, a too-cool-for-school half-German guy of about twenty-five, with cat-like green eyes that twinkled behind a curtain of chestnut hair and the squarest jaw I’d ever seen. I surmised pretty quickly that he was Rochelle’s boyfriend from the way he took ownership of the flat, lounging around on her – my! – bed, rifling through a drawer for something he said he’d left behind.
I was feeling a bit crowded in by all these strangers taking over my new space. They all seemed a bit manic too, and I wondered if they were on something. At any rate, I was glad when they suggested going out for a drink nearby. I’d been cooped up in the apartment for too long anyway – spying on other people, mainly. It wasn’t healthy.
We didn’t go far – just around the corner to the rue de Navarin. One of their friends, explained Konrad in excellent English, was the mixologist in the bar of the Hôtel Amour, and they often drank there.
I hadn’t heard of the ‘Love Hotel’, but Konrad quickly filled me in. It had opened a few years before, he said, in a former brothel – and you could still rent rooms for a few hours in the afternoon if you wished.
I didn’t know what to expect, but once inside, I discovered that the vibe was minimalism meets kitsch rather than seedy bordello. We sat out in the courtyard with its bright chairs, little metal tables and abundant foliage, and Konrad ordered us all caipirinhas. It was starting to grow chilly, but heaters kept us toasty.
The one girl in the party sat next to me, blowing smoke out into the air, seemingly oblivious to me, lost in her own thoughts. She was exotic-looking – possibly North African by origin, I thought, or with one North African parent. She had somewhat melancholic dark eyes and lustrous black hair.
I listened to the guys chat away in French and studied Konrad from a distance. There was something fascinating about his rampant self-confidence. Having little myself, and having been surrounded by people much like me, I was intrigued by those who had it in abundance. Of course, being model-level gorgeous must help one’s self-esteem.
‘So,’ the girl said suddenly, finally coming to life. ‘How are you enjoying life in Paris?’
I paused. ‘It’s too early to tell. I’ve only been here a couple of days. And this is the first time I’ve properly been out.’
She exhaled more cigarette smoke. ‘You’re a photographer, right?’
‘I am.’ I patted my camera bag on the table in front of me. ‘What about you?’ I said.
‘I dance,’ she said. ‘With Rochelle. My name’s Lisette.’
‘Oh, you’re …’
‘A stripper?’ She let out a slightly bitter laugh.
‘I’m sorry – I wasn’t going to say …’
‘It doesn’t matter. Although it’s a bit more than that. And a bit less.’ She looked at me closely. ‘Have you ever watched a show?’
‘I don’t think so. I … Well, no, I haven’t.’
‘Then you should. How about coming to the club tomorrow night? You can meet some of the girls first. And then maybe you can come out for a drink with us afterwards. I’m dancing tomorrow, so you can see my new routine. I’ve been working really hard on it.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’d like that.’ It was the truth, but only in part. The other half of me feared going to the club. Despite the things I’d photographed, I’d led a very sheltered life when it came to this kind of thing. If I felt out of my depth here in this bar, with this crowd, then that would go double for the club.
On the other hand, the idea did excite me. I imagined myself floating around, invisible, photographing the faces of the punters as they stared, rapt, at the stage. Photographing the girls, backstage, as they got ready for their nightly display. I would be a ghostly, unseen presence, an invisible eye.
This would be fertile ground for my art if I could find some way of working it to my advantage. But I wouldn’t know what I could get away with until I got there and sussed out the mood. Neither the dancers nor the clientele might accept the intrusion.
The courtyard was getting more crowded, noisier. Chic people were fluttering into it like exotic butterflies; DJ beats were floating out from inside the bar itself. Konrad ordered a few bottles of champagne, raising a glass in my direction.
‘To our new friend, Rachel,’ he said, ‘and her new life in Paris.’
I raised a glass back at him and smiled shyly as he winked at me. He was beyond gorgeous, in a different realm to me, but I couldn’t help but react to his beauty. It was like a drug. Rochelle must be very lovely herself, I thought, to have such an amazing boyfriend.
Of course, I’d seen her pictures on Facebook, and there were several framed photos of her around the apartment, but she looked different in all of them, so it was impossible to fix on any one idea of what she looked like. It’s the same with everyone, of course – but somehow with Rochelle it seemed exaggerated. She came across as a kind of playful, wilful child who raided her mother’s dressing-up box and created a whole array of different selves according to her mood. I wondered if this was the attraction for Konrad.
As I watched him, I thought about all the incredible-looking women he must come into contact with daily. I’d already learnt, from snippets of conversation, that he’d done catwalk shows for Armani and Dries Van Noten. Female models must have been falling over themselves to snag him, but instead he went for a lowly dancer. Rochelle must be one very hot chick to net Konrad.
I started thinking about the couple I’d watched earlier, and substituting myself and Konrad in their place, I found myself feeling uncharacteristically horny again. This wasn’t like me, to dwell on sex, and I wondered if there was such a thing as the Pigalle effect, whereby living amidst all this sin and debauchery got one’s sap rising. Or perhaps, I thought, living in Rochelle’s apartment was ‘infecting’ me with her spirit.
I drank, and then I drank more. This, too, wasn’t like me. I’d always been very controlling – afraid of letting myself go, I suppose. But the champagne tasted clean and sharp and I liked the bubbly feeling it unleashed in my brain. I liked the way it loosened my tongue and the laughter that bubbled up inside of me, as if from nowhere. Joining in the conversation, I started to feel part of Rochelle’s gang, and that feeling surprised and pleased me.
More people joined us, and some of the originals faded away. There was a constant ebb and flow of beautiful people around our table, and as the night wore on and stars flickered into life above us, I lost track of who was who. All that mattered was Konrad, at the centre of it all, the brightest star of all. Whenever he glanced at me, I felt as if I’d been bathed in a golden radiance, blessed by warmth and light. If he spoke to me, I felt flattered, even honoured.
I’d no idea what time it was, but suddenly Konrad stood up, a fresh bottle of champagne in each hand, and announced that we were headed upstairs. His friend, the receptionist, had let him know that one of the guestrooms was free and that we could party there, if we wished.
Some of the group took the winding staircase, others – myself and Konrad included – took the tiny lift. As it clanked up through the building, I tried to contain myself. Konrad’s thigh was against mine, and in the small space I could smell him – coffee and spice melded in an intoxicating mix.
We stepped out of the lift and into a dark corridor. Konrad led the way as the others joined us from the staircase. Unlocking one of the doors, he gestured for us to go inside.
I literally gasped when I saw the room. It wasn’t that it was luxurious, but it was outré. The walls, ceiling and floor were all painted black, and the wide bed, simply dressed with white linen, was mounted on a low platform. The ceiling was hung with dozens of mirror-balls, while opposite the foot of the bed was a free-standing clawfoot bathtub.
The others – eight of them in total – were taking being here a lot more casually, so I guessed they might have come before. Or perhaps they were just too damn cool to express anything. Sitting down on the bed itself or on the edge of the platform, they held out their glasses as Konrad went around topping them up.
As he got to me, he looked into my eyes and the alcohol made me feel brazen enough to hold his gaze.
‘Enjoying yourself, Rachel?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘Very much so,’ I said, wishing I had the guts to kiss him, just like that.
A knock on the door drew him away from me. It was his friend the receptionist bringing him a CD system with some speakers. Thanking her, he turned back into the room and busied himself setting it up. Then he flipped through the folder of discs she had given him, selected one and slipped it into the machine.
‘Colette Secret Island,’ he said when he turned round, to no one in particular. ‘“No One Belongs Here More Than You”.’
Turning back to the room, he started dancing, languidly to start with, as befitted the slow build-up of the tune.
I watched, awed, as he moved, panther-like. Nobody else was even looking at him – they must have seen all this before, I reasoned.
Seeing me watching him, Konrad held out one hand. Like a rabbit caught in headlights, I let him take hold of me and pull me towards him. Trying not to let my drunkenness show, I started to move in time with the music, slowly and sensuously. Konrad’s eyes were on mine. I felt giddy, a little sick, but I didn’t want to break away and ruin this moment. Unlikely as it seemed, I thought that he may even fancy me too.
Then the song began to fade out, and Konrad took hold of my elbow and steered me to the side of the room, where he refilled my glass again. I was beginning to realise I’d be ill if I drank any more, but I accepted the glass and together we stood in the window, looking down into the street below.
‘I think you’ll be happy here, Rachel,’ he said, and I wondered what he knew of me – or what he thought he knew of me. It was true that I hadn’t been happy in London, of late. But was that so very obvious? Konrad and I had only known each other for a couple of hours, and to me he was a complete mystery. What, in turn, could he surmise of me? Did my discontent show through?
Before I had a chance to answer, two of the other models came into our orbit and began to chat to us. Then Konrad drifted away, gesturing to someone across the room. The next time I looked, through increasingly blurred vision, he was dancing again, shirtless this time. I nearly swooned to see him like that, and I felt a violent stab of lust in my belly and between my legs. I’d never known naked desire like this, and I was afraid of it. Especially when I stood no chance with someone like Konrad.
I swallowed back my bitterness with another gulp of champagne and looked back out of the window. People came over and I wound in and out of conversations haphazardly. I tried not to look for or at Konrad.
I had just started wobbling on my feet and decided I ought to head back to Rochelle’s apartment when I noticed that someone had filled the bathtub with water and bubbles. Some of the others had got naked and a couple were climbing in. As they sat down, their friends passed them their champagne flutes. The lights were dim; the music had become languorous once more. Across the room I noticed Konrad, still shirtless, watching me, a smile flitting about his lips. I looked away, this time incapable of returning his gaze.
It was all getting too much for me now – not just Konrad but the whole situation. But at the same time my professional instincts took over and I found myself seeking out my camera where I’d left it in a corner of the room. Pulling the strap over my head, I walked back towards the bath, holding my camera up to my face, toying with the lens. A couple of the others looked at me, but nobody seemed surprised or shocked, or showed any objections to being photographed. I clicked away rapidly, eager to catch the moment before it all evaporated into the night like smoke. I knew from experience never to hesitate.
I took hundreds of shots of the bodies cavorting in the bath, of others dancing, and of those just draped across the bed like giant cats, drinking and chatting. Then all of a sudden I was done. I just needed to get home and pass into oblivion for the night.
Grabbing my camera bag, I turned towards the door. Konrad stood in front of me, chest bare, top button of his fly undone, so that a small furring of hair was visible where his six-pack belly tapered away down to his crotch.
He struck a pose. I laughed, uncertainly, and began to snap away again.
Chapter 8: Rochelle
Thank God for Kyle. He saved me from myself, albeit without really knowing it. After making that pass at me, he withdrew to his room, but sensing that I was reluctant to leave despite turning him down, he came back with a pillow and a blanket.
‘Why don’t you spare yourself a cab fare and sleep here?’ he said, gesturing towards one his capacious cream sofas. They looked comfier than your average single bed. Compared with the prospect of wandering the streets, they looked like heaven.
I nodded, taking the pillow and blanket and holding them to me, instantly feeling comforted. ‘I don’t suppose you have a spare …’
‘In the bathroom cabinet, under the sink,’ he said, smiling a little sadly. I wondered if he’d stocked up on an extra toothbrush that very morning, anticipating conquest. But I looked at him and there was something so little boy lost about him that I couldn’t believe he was certain of anything, not least seducing a woman.
‘Goodnight,’ he said softly, then he turned and padded off to his room. I placed the pillow at one end of the sofa and spread out the blanket. It was soft as cashmere, though I couldn’t find a label to confirm that it was. I bunched it up and held it to me, curling myself around its bulk foetus-style. I felt looked after, and I knew it would take only a few steps towards Kyle’s room and an apologetic smile for this feeling to expand and take me over. What was stopping me from doing that? Why did I only ever choose the things that hurt me?
For a moment my instinct was to get up, run to the front door and hurry away into the night. But I forced myself to stay where I was. I didn’t even get up to brush my teeth, though I knew I’d regret it the next morning. Instead I just lay back on the sofa and peeled off my dress and stockings until I was down to my underwear, a Playboy bunny-style bikini bra and matching panties. Then I reached for my bag on the floor beside and the glass of water I’d drawn from the tap a few moments before, and I gulped down a couple of sleeping pills, grateful for anything that would get me through the night.
***
When I woke up in the morning, I found myself in a pool of sunlight, having forgotten to close the curtains. Kyle, on the opposite sofa, was staring at me, not in a lecherous way, but with a kind of sadness.
I sat up abruptly when I saw him. The blanket slid from me, revealing my underwear. I looked down, and one of my nipples was peeking brazenly from my bra.
‘Oh god,’ I said, pushing it back up while trying to grab the blanket from the floor. ‘Sorry, Kyle.’
I was used to showing myself off, so why was I shy like this in front of Kyle?
Kyle shrugged, standing up and heading for the kitchen. ‘Coffee?’ he said.
‘I’d love one.’
As he busied himself with his Gaggia, I grabbed my clothes and dressed hurriedly. My clothes weren’t exactly daytime attire, but I was used to people looking at me in the street, to standing out from the crowd.
Where yesterday I had dreaded going back to Rachel’s, now I was desperate to be back there, alone, showering and changing and reflecting on the events of the night. Tatiana’s parting words, in particular, left me uneasy, and I wished I hadn’t given her my contact details. But as I slipped my shoes on and took the mug of coffee that Kyle held out to me, I told myself that she almost certainly wouldn’t call. Whatever strange games she and Morgan had invented to get through an evening with their kind but staid friend Kyle would quickly be forgotten. I was sure they had bigger fish to fry.
I finished my coffee, gave Kyle a friendly kiss on the cheek, and asked him to call me sometime. As I headed off towards the Tube, I wondered if he ever would.
***
Thanks to the sleeping tablets and Kyle’s loan of his sofa, I felt relatively well rested and positive the next day. Back at Rachel’s flat with a takeout mocha and a muffin in front of me on the breakfast bar, I began to make plans for my time in London. It wasn’t enough, I reasoned, to run away from one’s issues, however cloudy they were. Indeed, perhaps the cloudier they were, the more likely they were to follow you. Sitting around without any real aims or ambitions only risked pushing me towards the kind of distractions I wanted to break away from.
I needed to do a course, I decided. I wasn’t sure exactly what, but I needed to find something to take me out of both myself and my comfort zone. Though I was a risk taker in many respects, I’d been very reliant, it struck me, on my immediate environment and the people in it. Though Pigalle was risqué and perhaps even off limits to certain people, to me it represented security – the security of being surrounded by like-minded people, of not being judged or rejected. But perhaps that in itself demonstrated – ironically – a conservative craving for the known and the reassuring.
I thought about songwriting. My guitar-playing was rusty – I hadn’t picked up an instrument in years. I’d had talent, but I’d been lazy, and I’d let life get in the way. I’d once written poetry too. I’d never done anything with any of it, but now it struck me that I could combine the two and perhaps create something meaningful.
Picking up the phone, I made an appointment to look around the London Songwriting School, and then I called Kyle and left a message asking if he knew anyone who could lend me a guitar for a while. I was going to need to buy one, if I did carry on with this. In fact, I was going to need to get some work to fund all of this. But job and course combined would hopefully keep me out of mischief.
Inspired, I sat in front of my laptop, clicked on Spotify and played the Florence and the Machine song ‘What the Water Gave Me’. I loved Florence Welch – her eccentricity and whole aesthetic, her complex multi-layered sound. This song, I knew, was named after the Symbolism-rich Frida Kahlo painting but was actually about Virginia Woolf’s suicide. It was Gothic at heart and yet dancey. I stood up, started to wig out, letting myself go to the crash of cymbals, the fine interplay of the guitar and the harp, to Florence’s ecstatic lyrics. If I could create something like this, I thought, I might be happy.
The phone rang and I leapt towards it, thinking it was Kyle.
‘Hi!’ I shouted into the receiver. ‘I’ll just turn the music down.’
I closed my laptop and grabbed the phone again. ‘Sorry about that,’ I said.
‘No problem,’ came a voice I didn’t recognise, a female voice.
‘Rachel?’ I said. I didn’t know anyone else who might call me here.
‘Forgotten me already?’ continued the voice, all honeyed on the surface but with something darker, I felt, beneath it. I frowned.
‘Tatiana,’ went the voice. ‘From last night?’
‘Oh hi,’ I said, wondering if my voice came across to her as guarded as it did to my own ears. What the fuck do you want? is what really wanted to come out of my mouth.
‘Hi,’ she said, and this time there really was something quite sinister to her tone, which appeared to be mocking mine. ‘Listen, I was serious about helping you out while you’re here. Want to meet up for lunch? A friend’s just cancelled on me, so I’m at a loose end. It’s on me, of course.’
‘Thanks, but I should have explained that I’m not really planning to do any dancing while I’m here,’ I said. ‘I’m … I’m having a break.’
‘Oh? Then why not come out anyway, be one of the ladies who lunch?’
‘I’m afraid I’m a bit busy today. I’m actually … well, I’m researching a course I may apply for, and also I need to get a job to pay for it.’
‘What kind of a job? Maybe I can help. I’m very well connected.’
‘I haven’t really thought about it. I guess just waitressing, or maybe I’ll find something in a vintage clothes shop.’
Tatiana tsked. ‘Slave labour,’ she said. ‘You’ll get a pittance. I’m sure you can do better than that.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘my best friend is Lulu Hammonds – her name may be familiar to you.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, her husband was a very well-known actor. Died twenty years ago.’
‘Right.’
‘Well, Lulu now owns a vintage boutique in Holland Park. It’s not so far from where you live, but it’s ultra upmarket – we’re talking antiques, really, rather than the kind of vintage you’ll find in Camden and god knows where else. I know she was looking for someone only last week, to take over for a few months while she goes on a buying spree in the States. And I know she’ll pay you much more than the kind of places you were thinking of. Her shop has real cachet – all the celebs go there, the hip ones. Kate and Sadie and even Stella sometimes. But it’s bohemian too –I can just see you there.’
I had to admit, it sounded a lot more tempting than the local Starbucks. Of course, I knew I could easily find a dancing job in one of the Soho clubs, and earn a very good wage once tips were factored in. But that was all part of the life I was trying to leave behind, if only temporarily. I enjoyed performing in many respects, but there were equally aspects that I wasn’t so happy about. This was my chance to find out what I wanted.
‘OK,’ I said, trying not to sound reluctant. I was interested in the job, but I wasn’t so thrilled that it would mean meeting up with Tatiana. I was uncomfortable with the thought of what I’d done with her boyfriend at Kyle’s the night before, of course, but I was also mistrustful of Tatiana herself. There was something calculating about her – more than a suggestion of ulterior motives to her apparent kindness.
‘Great,’ she said faux brightly. ‘What we could do is meet for lunch in Holland Park, and then drop by the boutique and see if Lulu is free for a chat? Or I might actually give her a call now, to check she hasn’t already got anyone and to let her know we’ll be calling in.’
‘Sounds good to me. Just let me know where and when.’
‘Well, how about Julie’s, at 1 p.m?’
‘Fine, I’ll see you there,’ I said, opening my laptop to find out the street name.
‘See you there,’ came Tatiana’s voice, and again it struck me that the honey of her tone masked something infinitely less sweet.
I was just about to put the phone down when she spoke again. ‘Oh Rochelle,’ she said, as if it were an afterthought. ‘Do make sure to dress up in your finest, won’t you?’
‘Sure,’ I said, but as I replaced the receiver I was already grimacing, wondering if I was doing the right thing.
***
I walked down to Holland Park, through the hipster throng of Notting Hill Gate itself. I was still getting my bearings, and in such fine weather, it was pleasant to take my time, to breathe in the spring air and ogle the buildings, which got increasingly impressive the further I descended the hill towards Holland Park. On either side of me rose white-fronted mansions bedecked by wrought-iron latticework, and fronted by immaculate gardens. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how much they may cost, or who might earn the kind of money to buy and then maintain them.
I came to the street I needed, took a right off the main drag. Julie’s appeared on my left and I approached the front door a little self-consciously. I had dressed up, but not because Tatiana had virtually ordered me to. The truth was, I loved it, and I knew also that I would feel crappy if this shop she talked about was brimming with gorgeous antique clothing and accessories. There’s nothing worse than shopping somewhere lovely and then catching sight of yourself in a mirror and realising you’re looking daggy.
I’ve never been a jeans and a sweater type of person. From the earliest age I would sneak upstairs to raid my glamorous maternal grandmother’s wardrobe, to slip on her oversize shoes encrusted with diamanté, to swathe myself in her real-fur stoles. Then I’d sit down in front of her three-mirrored dressing table and dab at my face with her powder-puff before coating my mouth with a slick layer of her lipstick. This was the ’70s, and the colour I remember applying most often was a vibrant orange. I never did my eyes, but I’d dab at her little pots of navy and silver shadows with my fingers and rub them over the backs of my hands to test out the effects.
That carried on, but while I still love dressing up, I’m not swimming in money, and I party too hard, and sometimes I realise the effect I achieve is more Courtney Love on a bad day than offbeat starlet. Today, however, I was Courtney in Versace: a bit ruffled, but sexily so. I’d teased out my ringlets a bit, and my nude-beige dress, knee-length and covered with appliqué white, pink and scarlet flowers, was actually quite downplayed. My lipstick and eye make-up were correspondingly muted.
As I walked in, Tatiana gestured from a table. I had to admit it, she looked good, her platinum-blonde hair offset against an expensive white trouser suit. Silver bangles and a heart pendant at her throat twinkled unobtrusively.
‘Rochelle,’ she said, standing up and walking around the table to kiss me on both cheeks. Her hands clasped my shoulders firmly, in a gesture I felt was a little territorial. I wriggled free, sat down. She did so too. I busied myself opening and scanning the menu; I knew it was rude, but suddenly I wasn’t in the mood for this. Whatever this may be. And of course I felt pretty shifty about what had happened with Morgan.
‘It’s great to see you again,’ she said, leaning across the table and thus forcing me to look up and meet her gaze. ‘What an unexpected pleasure that it be so soon. I’m almost glad my friend cancelled now. Old friends are great, but it’s always nice to make new ones – to extend one’s circle. Don’t you think?’
On her breath I caught a whiff of wine, and looking down I saw that she had almost downed a large glassful while waiting for me. It wasn’t for me to judge, but I did find that noteworthy given that we’d all been drinking the night before – and also given that I hadn’t arrived late, for once in my life.
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Carrie Williams
Photographer Rachel and Parisian exotic dancer Rochelle live miles apart in London and Paris. Yet when they agree to swap apartments for six months, both find the excitement of discovering a new city full of surprises.You’ve been seduced by ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series, now prepare to devour ‘The Exchange’.Photographer Rachel is bored in London, whilst over in Paris exotic dancer Rochelle is also weary of her life and unfulfilling relationship with fashion model Konrad. So when they decide to swap lives for six months, anything could happen.On arrival in Paris, Rachel visits Rochelle’s strip club and feels the lure of exhibitionism for the first time. Whilst also succumbing to more than a passing interest in the gorgeous Konrad.Rochelle, meanwhile, falls in with a rich London crowd. For a while a string of random adventures fills the void left by dancing. But enlightenment ultimately comes to Rochelle as she discovers that performing for an audience of one can be just as daring as dancing to a crowd.But when six months is up, what will Rachel and Rochelle leave behind …
The Exchange
Carrie Williams
(http://bit.ly/KqDOG3)
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ue4b86046-296a-530d-a3a1-cc7a3be341bc)
Prologue (#ube2bf19b-19c0-526e-bedf-19bc896e1320)
Chapter 1: Rachel (#u3a0d57ce-a229-57b3-9e23-f9c95f3161ad)
Chapter 2: Rochelle (#u2ec76ebf-65d7-580a-8753-f67467a5e562)
Chapter 3: Rachel (#u2af1570e-7008-53fc-84e3-fc58855cfcc1)
Chapter 4: Rochelle (#u2f6c6a04-d817-5e3d-85fb-05b048b713c8)
Chapter 5: Rachel (#u62a6b1b1-34d5-5e87-9ac4-90154d8b6cda)
Chapter 6: Rochelle (#u8c73ffb0-a0b6-5945-a375-e8f7020a98a0)
Chapter 7: Rachel (#ue4fc17ca-ff59-5472-92ab-a9fd15b51225)
Chapter 8: Rochelle (#u696f5505-c319-5f40-978a-487fc8781938)
Chapter 9: Rachel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10: Rochelle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11: Rachel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12: Rochelle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13: Rachel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14: Rochelle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15: Rachel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16: Rochelle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17: Rachel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18: Rochelle (#litres_trial_promo)
More from Mischief (#litres_trial_promo)
About Mischief (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
In clothes, he looks almost demure. It’s his boyish face, unlined, seemingly open and frank, of a beauty so pure it takes your breath away. He’s looking towards me, or rather towards my lens, and I feel lucky to have such a prize specimen posing for me. I’ve always liked to take edgy shots, pictures of outsiders, the unconventional or even the scarred. I used to think beauty was boring. Not any more.
He’s holding the camera’s gaze, and not for the first time I feel forgotten, superfluous. Professionals such as him often seem to forget the presence of the photographer. It’s as if they’re making love to the camera itself, the way some of them come on to it. As if they want to fuck it. Not for nothing, I sometimes think, are big long lenses described as phallic.
I don’t know what to make of it all. Demureness meets wantonness in one package. It’s disorienting. I feel as if the ground is falling away from under my feet. I feel as if I’m not in control, and a photographer needs to be in control, or the whole thing falls apart. I’m not the kind to leave things to chance and serendipity.
He’s not dressed in designer clothes. This is not that kind of shoot. Today he’s not a fashion model but just a regular guy in jeans and a striped granddad shirt, a regular guy who just happens to be drop-dead gorgeous. Beneath his arms I can even see traces of sweat, blooming like flowers on the fabric. There’s something about that – slight grubbiness teamed with physical perfection – that drives me mad. Teamed with a hint of stubble, it’s leaving me dry-mouthed.
I swallow almost painfully. ‘If you could just …’ I manage. ‘Just, er, turn so you’re positioned a bit more side-on to me. That’s right, yes. And then … I don’t know, maybe if you could undo the top button of your shirt you’d look a bit more relaxed, more natural. That’s right. Great. Hold it right there.’
I look back through the lens, watch as he undoes a second button on his own initiative, sending me a questioning look. I nod, hold one thumb up.
‘That’s great,’ I say.
‘I brought a different shirt,’ he says, ‘if this one’s not right.’
I shake my head. I really couldn’t care less about your clothes, I think. I want to see you naked.
As if he’s reading my mind, he lifts his shirt up and over his head. He grins at me and my pussy throbs so hard I feel like I’m going to explode.
Chapter 1: Rachel
We met on Facebook – where else? She came up as ‘Someone You Might Know’ and, though she wasn’t, she looked interesting. So I clicked on her name and added her to my Friends list. There was also the fact that her name was a little bit similar to mine: Rochelle Renaud, Rachel Reynolds. Not that it means anything, of course, but sometimes seemingly random things can have huge repercussions.
When I say interesting, I mean that she looked very different to me, or to any of my friends. The acquaintance we had in common, leading Facebook to suggest her to me, was a runner at an agency called Twist, specialising in offbeat, ‘characterful’ models. I still don’t know how he actually knew Rochelle. But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that she piqued my curiosity, with her froth of blonde curls, her red sequin top and her mismatching pink feather boa, slung around her frail neck like the serpent from the garden of paradise.
She accepted my Friend request, but for a while that was it. We didn’t exchange any notes or leave any messages on each other’s wall. Then one day I did get a note from her, short and to-the-point.
‘Hey Rachel. It seems you are a photographer. What kind of images do you make?’
I emailed back, told her a little about my work, directing her to a few websites where it was displayed. Then, on a whim, I told her that if I ever came to Paris, perhaps I could photograph her? I didn’t say that I was captivated by her vulnerable beauty, the fragile edge to her. By then I’d browsed some of the photos of her in her Facebook albums and found her gorgeous but somehow damaged-looking, with eyes like shattered glass. Sometimes you look at a photo and you are desperate to know more about the person within it. Perhaps that’s what makes a successful photographic portrait. And so it was with Rochelle. I was curious to know more.
She emailed back to say that she didn’t think she’d be around for long, that she was talking about quitting Paris. She didn’t say why, but there was a glamorous world-weariness to her tone that made me quite envy her her wanderlust, however unfocused. Perhaps just to try to look as cool as her, I told her I had itchy feet too.
She live-messaged back: ‘What do you think about coming to Paris? And me to London? A swap?’
I sat back in my seat. It was radical, something that would never have occurred to me.
‘How long?’ I typed back after a few minutes.
‘I’m not sure. Six months? Longer?’
This time I messaged straight back, before the rational, practical side of me could kick back in. ‘Six months sounds good to me. I’d love to get to know Paris properly.’
‘And me London. So when shall we start?’
I was loving this. Rochelle was as impulsive as she looked. She clearly had a screw loose, but I liked that kind of madcap decision-making. It was so alien to me. And it was kind of refreshing to be steered by someone else, to be borne along on a tide of spontaneity.
I started to type that it couldn’t be for a good couple of months, because of this, that and the other. And then I erased it all and just wrote: ‘I’m ready when you are.’ None of my upcoming projects, I told myself, were time-sensitive. And if I needed to hop back to London, the trip was fast and easy.
‘Great,’ Rochelle fired back. ‘I’ll hand in my notice at the cabaret tonight. I can’t wait.’
‘You work at a cabaret?’
‘I didn’t tell you? I work as an exotic dancer.’
I wondered about that for a minute. Did she mean ethnically inspired stuff such as whirling or belly dancing, or was it a euphemism for erotic dancing? Was Rochelle in essence a stripper? I looked again at her picture, thought of her jaded tone. Was that what she was sick of: of showing herself for money? It seemed a legitimate thing to want to run away from – the kind of thing you fell into and then spent ages trying to dig your way out of. I doubted it was ever a career choice.
When I didn’t answer, she messaged again: ‘I live in Pigalle, by the way, close-by where I work. I hope that won’t put you off.’
That confirmed it: Pigalle, I knew, was famous for its sex shops and peep shows, for the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère. To whatever degree Rochelle took off her clothes, her dancing was primarily erotic rather than exotic.
But I wasn’t put off, not by Rochelle’s trade or by her neighbourhood. I knew that’s what she was warning me about – the insalubriousness and potential danger of Pigalle itself, especially as a place for a girl living by herself. But I was used to looking after number one. One of my self-chosen assignments during my photography MA was a series of images of teenage drug addicts around King’s Cross, which involved lots of time spent wandering around the station and its murky environs, lots of approaching people who’d fallen foul of substances that made them unstable and desperate. As a project, it was hugely successful and even influential – it was subsequently published in The Big Issue.
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that Pigalle was calling to me. Perhaps that was the reason for my recent restlessness – perhaps I was done with London, for the time being, just as I was done with Kyle. I was newly single after calling a halt to my three-year relationship with the latter, but perhaps it was more than a change of boyfriend I needed. Perhaps it was a new home.
‘Not at all,’ I typed back. ‘I’m fascinated by Pigalle. Shall we aim for a week today?’
Chapter 2: Rochelle
I didn’t realise how bad things had become, until I started chatting to Rachel. The very fact I was on Facebook at all shows how bored I was, without being aware of it. I’ve no explanation for it, other than that it was one of those ditchwater-grey afternoons when the rain seems like it will never stop falling out of the sky, and I was killing time until another shift.
I was sitting around in my dressing gown, curlers in my hair, getting ready to apply some new fake nails. As I often did before work, I started to feel a sort of unfocused, languorous horniness. You’d think you’d get over it – all that nakedness, all that naughtiness, night after night. And of course it’s not as if it’s not seedy and cheap and demeaning, at least some of the time.
It wasn’t even about the guys – I’ve never met a man in the club I actually fancy. If it’s anything, it’s about being surrounded by semi-naked girls all night. Not all of them are beautiful, although I know we all have different definitions and expectations of ‘beauty’. But there’s a camaraderie we’ve got going there. Some of us have known each other for years, and we are close – mentally, physically. That, for me, is horny. A lovely topless girl leaning over me, her hand on my shoulder, to adjust my hair just before I go on stage – that sends a thrill through me. With many of these girls, I get what the punters can never have – intimacy.
And often, as I’m getting ready for the evening, making myself as gorgeous as I can be, I think of all this feminine softness – mine and that of my colleagues – and my fingers slip down into my panties and I start rubbing at the wet little bead of my clit. As I do, I picture myself on stage, gyrating to the music, blinded by the strobes. I can’t see the faces of those looking at me, but just knowing that I am looked at – looked at but untouchable – turns me on.
This was one of those days. With one hand on my breast, tracing the soft cherry-pink outline of my nipple, I kept my thumb on my clit and slid two fingers inside myself. It felt so fucking good, I gasped out loud. I never, I thought bitterly, felt this good with Konrad, and that was so bloody frustrating. To have a boyfriend who looked so hot he brought other women out in palpitations but who couldn’t lead me to orgasm made me want to scream.
As my fingers moved in and out, I sped up, pushed deeper, arching my back to meet my own embrace. It was the ultimate irony for someone whose job was to please others – that, so far, at least, I was the one who could give myself the greatest joy.
I moaned and juddered as waves of pleasure started to break over me and a white light of pure joy went on in my head. For a moment I gave myself over to the almost unbearable pleasure that assailed me, and then I threw back my head and let my climax ebb gorgeously away like trails of smoke carried away by a soft, warm wind. Already, I felt nostalgia for my spent libido.
***
I’ve always been interested in photography, which is how come I asked Rachel about her work, after I’d got dressed and was having a last coffee and cigarette before leaving for work. That would have probably been that, only the next day I looked up the websites she mentioned to me and was sucked in by some of her images. They showed a side of London – of England – that has always fascinated me. Of course, Pigalle, where I lived, is an underbelly, a shithole, in so many respects. But much of this is on the surface. What Rachel’s images somehow managed to suggest was what lies beneath the surface of the people she photographs on the street, in the middle of their business. Outwardly respectable though many of them appear, she always manages to suggest something sinister or off-kilter beneath the skin. And to those who are sleazy, unfortunate, deprived, she gives a noble dignity, something transcendent.
As with most things in life, one thing eventually led to another, and after a few more chats with Rachel I suggested we swap lives for a while. I’m not sure that I really meant it – it was more of a challenge, one to which I never imagined she’d rise. Like I said, I was bored. I do random things when I’m bored – things that surprise even me when they come out of my mouth. But looking back, I realise that the thought of spending another night at the club, then going out drinking with Konrad and his gang of fellow models, with all the preening and posing and air-kissing and back-stabbing, made me feel queasy. Without knowing it, I’d come to the end of the line when it came to Paris and what it represented for me.
Rachel surprised me by accepting, with few questions. I think she even surprised herself. But then sometimes you meet people when they’re right on the edge and, without knowing it, ready to leap – all they need is a little push in the right direction. I did that to her, it seems, and I did it to myself. I gave myself the little push I needed so much.
I like to be controversial. Perhaps that’s why I’ve ended up doing the work I do. I was a fighter as a child – I rubbed my parents and my siblings up so badly that eventually, when I was eighteen, they packed me off to do my A-levels at a boarding school in the UK – one deep in the countryside in Hampshire, where my mother’s best friend from university headed up the French department. But the strictness of that god-awful place only hardened my resolve to be free. After a couple of months of terrible behaviour, I finally managed to get myself expelled and then headed back to France – not home, to my parents, but to a squat in a Hausmannian building on the edge of the Parc Monceau in Paris. Lack of any education at the tender age of eighteen had me doing all kinds of jobs – supermarket cashier, cinema usherette, chambermaid, nanny. I hated them all, although for a while I found the voyeuristic aspect of the chambermaid’s job rather titillating.
Gradually I ended up dancing in Pigalle – friends who had gone down that route said it was easy money, and when I gave it a go it was immediately apparent that I had a talent for it. And there were things, as I said, that I did love about it: the female camaraderie, the knowledge of one’s inherent power over other people. But it was very definitely love-hate, and the hate grew inside me without me really knowing, like a strange, secret plant, feeding off me before I really knew of its existence.
And then suddenly it was in full flower, and I needed to hack it down before it took me over.
Chapter 3: Rachel
It was the first day of the rest of my life. Just as it was for everyone else on the planet. It’s a cliché. But whereas most people would be doing pretty much what they did the day before, and the day before that, and all the days before that – the past receding away from them like a play of infinite mirrors at a fairground – I was starting anew. I couldn’t have been more excited.
It was hard to work out how I got so stuck in a rut. At eighteen I had felt on the threshold of something, of everything. Life was unfurling for me like a flower its petals. There was nothing I couldn’t do, nothing I couldn’t reach for, if I really wanted it. Everything was fresh and exciting and rampant with possibility.
Four years down the line, my art-school friends had begun to bore me, my art-school boyfriend – now dumped – totally bored me, and even my art, I sometimes thought, had lost its way, its oomph. Everything had wilted, somehow. I felt like an elephant encased in its tough, hard skin, inured to everything, impervious. The new stuff – bars, photography shows, people – seemed like pale versions of the old, and the old stuff was gone.
But as I stepped out of the Eurostar at the Gare du Nord, my belly warm with croissants and good coffee from the train buffet, I felt it again – that stab of excitement that I hadn’t experienced in so long, like a wash of pure alcohol through my veins.
I decided to walk to Rochelle’s studio apartment on the rue Chaptal. It was only about fifteen minutes away and, despite the length of my stay, I’d brought little luggage – just my camera and lenses, plus a medium-sized rucksack with some essential clothes. I figured I could wash them often, and buy some cheap stuff if they didn’t suffice. The stroll would give me the chance to acclimatise myself to Paris as well as get my bearings in my new neighbourhood.
I walked along rue de Mauberge and then rue Condorcet, looking up at the apartment buildings with their wrought-iron decorative balconies, noting the smart vintage clothes and accessories shops and the children’s outfitters. It was the kind of bohemian you pay a lot for. When the street feeds into rue Victor Massé, it becomes even more classically ‘Parisian’, with pretty stonework on its 18
- and 19
-century buildings, lots of unpretentious bread and cheese and wine shops and untouristy bistros, some music shops and several two-star hotels.
At number thirty-seven I stopped and looked up at the fourth floor, to pay homage to the painter and sculptor Edgar Degas. Or rather to the photographer Edgar Degas – the man famous for his artistic glimpses of ballerinas and washerwomen and folk in cafés in Montmartre also created some little-known, highly ambiguous photographic images that make their sitters look phantom-like, supernatural, unreal. Impressionistic photographs, almost, from the artist who disdained the label Impressionism.
On this street, too – I knew because I’d been reading up on the area in the week since Rochelle and I had set up our ‘life-swap’ – has stood the legendary café Le Chat Noir, in its second incarnation. This was a place that became so wildly popular for its bohemian and rowdy poetry readings, music-hall sketches and satire that it spawned cabaret all over Europe. At the end of the street, I turned and hazarded a short detour to Place Pigalle itself, the epicentre of the area’s strip clubs, sex shops and erotic cabarets, dubbed Pig Alley by the US soldiers who came here during the Second World War. Just up the road, on the boulevard de Clichy, was the legendary Moulin Rouge itself, as well as the Museum of Eroticism.
I stood still for a moment and let it all wash over me: the sights, sounds, smells. It was as seedy as I imagined but exciting too, holding a strange allure, a promise of adventure. Some parts of Paris, in spite of their beauty, or perhaps because of it, can seem pickled in aspic, museum pieces. Pigalle was very definitely alive. I resolved to take a stroll up here later, take a few shots as the natural light died and the neon hoardings fizzled into life. For now, it was time to find Rochelle’s apartment, kick off my shoes and take a nap.
***
I dozed briefly; though I had been up at the crack of dawn for one of the cheapest pre-rush-hour Eurostars, and though I was awake until the small hours packing and checking and fretting, I was just too excited to be in Paris to be able to catch up on my lost sleep.
I stood up, went to the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face, then padded around the flat, getting a feel for my new home – and for its usual inhabitant. It wasn’t really a flat, in fact – it was a studio, with a big old-fashioned wrought-iron bed plumped right in the centre, away from any wall. It reminded me of a bed on stage, for some reason. On each side of it were shop mannequins, both naked but draped at their neck and wrists with accessories that must have belonged to Rochelle – colourful scarves, furry stoles, berets and other hats, acrylic bangles and endlessly long strings of necklaces in jewel-bright hues. Around the bed, on the floor, were teetering stacks of glossy mags and books. Closer inspection of the latter revealed everything from correspondence between Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller to art books on the likes of Gustav Klimt, Hans Bellmer and the female Surrealists. I was interested to note among them several photography books: Lee Miller, Francesca Woodman, Bill Brandt.
Looking around the mess of Rochelle’s room I was a little taken aback, and I found myself wondering, for the first time, if I’d done a really stupid thing. I knew next to nothing about Rochelle and her life, and now here I was surrounded by all her junk, by her bohemian squalor, and I asked myself if I was going to be able to do this.
As I pondered, I kept circling this magpie’s nest of a room. It wasn’t dirty, but otherwise it was about as far from my own flat as it could possibly be. Two wardrobes on either side of the room bulged with shimmering, spangled fabrics, while cacti and other pot plants covered just about every free surface. Peeking into the tiny bathroom, I was unsurprised to find it almost bursting with cosmetic products. I didn’t have the heart to inspect the tiny kitchenette.
Suddenly I was reminded of a similar room – the apartment of Jane Fonda’s character, Bree Daniels, in Klute. The latter had always been one of my favourite films – for the incredible performances, of course, but also for the theme of voyeurism. For a photographer like me, there’s a kind of guilty pleasure in seeing films or reading novels about people being watched, followed. It makes us feel better, I guess, about our own dubious proclivities.
Bree’s room, too, looks like a stage set, in many ways. It’s also a retreat – but a retreat that ultimately becomes a prison. I looked around, thoughts racing. In the movie, Bree is a prostitute. Rochelle wasn’t a prostitute, but she did work in the sex industry. Did she sleep with some of the men for whom she danced? And if so, did she bring them here? Was this her she-wolf’s lair? Or was it a place to which she escaped, in which she could be herself again? It had all the trappings of a retreat, but the centre-stage bed made me wonder.
I’ll have a tidy-up, I told myself. I’m here for six months, and I can’t live like this. I’ll put the books on any shelf space I can find, or else in a corner. I’ll drag the bed over to the wall, and I’ll clear some space on the table in front of the largest window, from which I can spy on goings-on in the street below while I’m working. Hell, I might even take some pictures of it. After all, I needed a reason to be in Paris, a reason to call this city and this apartment, for a while at least, home.
Chapter 4: Rochelle
I stepped off the Eurostar into the most beautiful station I’d ever seen – Paris stations can be beautiful, but always in an old-fashioned way. St Pancras is so different, with lots of metal and glass as well as the older Victorian parts. It reminded me of a modern cathedral.
A friend in Paris told me that the champagne bar in the station is good, but it was early still, and anyway I’d promised myself I’d be a good girl for once. This was a fresh start for me, a chance to make a break from the Rochelle who ran herself ragged around Pigalle, always getting tangled up in new adventures in spite of her best intentions.
And in any case, Rachel’s friend Kyle was meeting me off the train. I didn’t really want that – I wasn’t a child, after all. But Rachel insisted. She kept telling me how easy it was to get lost and taken advantage of.
I saw someone waving at me and headed over. No doubt Rachel had shown Kyle my picture on Facebook, and in fact I thought I recognised him too – he was probably on her Friends list as well. I waved back, tentatively, and he strode over.
‘Rochelle?’ he hazarded, and when I nodded he reached out and we shook hands. ‘Welcome to London,’ he added, and as he spoke I noticed his eyes flicker up and down me – not in a wolfish manner, but perhaps with a flicker of amusement in their brown depths. Judging by his own conservative appearance – brown cord blazer over a navy V-neck, jeans – he probably didn’t know anybody quite like me.
Not that I’d made any special effort for this journey – as with just about everyone, it’s important for me to be comfortable when I’m travelling. But I do have my own unique style – a bit Gwen Stefani in the ‘It’s My Life’ video, a bit early Courtney Love … A mash-up of vintage pieces and costume jewellery with silk baby-doll dresses, fake fur, underwear as outerwear. Flapper-girl hair, cherry-red lips, spider lashes. I don’t do dressing-down. I stand out from the crowd. Maybe that’s why I’m so good at getting myself into trouble.
‘Thanks.’ I looked at Kyle expectantly, wondering exactly who he was to Rachel, that he would do her bidding like this – escorting a stranger across London.
He smiled. ‘Let me take your bags,’ he said. ‘You seem to have brought plenty of things.’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t travel light,’ I said, and I wondered why I had brought so much stuff with me. It’s not as if I was planning to party the way I did in Paris – quite the opposite. Although I wanted to explore London, part of me wanted a rest from the kind of lifestyle I had been leading in Pigalle. For anyone else, a couple of pairs of jeans and some sweaters would have sufficed. But I’d have felt lost without my disguises. For that, it occurred to me for the first time, is what they were. Even when I wasn’t dancing, I was playing a part.
Kyle led me out of the station, seemingly choosing the routes where there were the least people. Outside, he had us join the back of a queue for taxis.
‘This is on me,’ he said, and when I started to protest, he held up one hand. ‘There’s no finer introduction to London,’ he said. ‘Besides, it’s not very far.’
The line disappeared quickly and we climbed into a black cab.
***
Rachel lived in Bayswater; that much I already knew. Until this point, though, I’d never been to that part of London.
Her flat was on the top floor of a creamy white building with views over the treetops of Hyde Park. In direct contrast to mine, it turned out to be rather spartan, the only ‘decoration’ being some of Rachel’s own photos in dark-wood frames. Otherwise, there were a few pieces of utilitarian furniture and a kitchen with the basics but nothing more. Above her desk, a few shelves held some photography manuals and a few art books. I browsed the spines: Richard Billingham, Nana Goldin, Tierney Gearon. I took a few down and wasn’t surprised by what I found inside, given what I knew of Rachel’s own work: rather grim social realism, with occasional flashes of transcendence. Outsiders, the neglected, the marginal. A kind of subversive beauty found in squalor or deprivation or disarray.
Rachel and I were very different, that was clear. But it wasn’t a bad thing. I wanted a change of scene, and I had very definitely got myself one of those. This elegant tree-lined street leading up to the vast green space of Hyde Park couldn’t be more different from rue Chaptal in the Pigalle, while the flat – though not at all to my taste – brought welcome relief from all my baggage. Because that’s what much of it was, at my place – props, in both senses of the word. Artefacts to create an illusion of life, and things to shore me up. But shore me up against what?
I’d never really asked myself the question, but as I did I realised just how lonely I had been in Paris, despite all the people crowding in on me, crushing me.
***
Kyle sat with me for a while, as if he had picked up on my unease at being alone. That was the thing about me – externally, I was strong and outgoing, brash even. To many, I was loud and even obnoxious.
But of course it was a classic attention-seeking thing. Inside I was weak, and I needed other people to build me up into something coherent and ongoing. Leaving Paris was yet another attempt to get away from myself, but now that I’d fled, what was I going to do? What new me was to emerge? Or would the old one linger on, like a skin that I couldn’t quite shed?
Kyle seemed very nice, and from his conversation I suspected that he and Rachel had been together and that he was still smarting from the break-up. He was a musician, it seemed – a violinist in an orchestra – and while often he was away touring, at that time his schedule was relaxed. He said he’d take me round all the sights, and when I didn’t enthuse, he looked a bit hurt.
‘OK,’ I said, as brightly as I could manage. ‘But I need a few days to settle in. I – I need to think a few things through.’
Kyle frowned at me. ‘Are you OK?’ he said. ‘Are you homesick?’
I waved a hand airily. ‘It’s not that …’ I tailed off. ‘I mean – well, no, it’s not homesickness. It’s just … well, it’s just that I don’t really know what I’m doing here.’
‘But Rachel said it was you who suggested …’
‘I did. But I don’t really know why.’
Kyle smiled. ‘Impulsiveness,’ he said. ‘I like that.’ He studied his fine, long fingers. ‘It’s something I don’t have enough of.’
‘Oh?’ I cocked my head to one side.
‘In the orchestra my nickname is “Mr Unspontaneity”.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I have to weigh everything up from every angle before I can make a decision or commit to something. It’s like – it’s like a disease.’
I looked at him, intrigued. ‘I couldn’t be more different,’ I said, wondering what it was like to be so configured. ‘I guess at least you don’t get yourself into trouble that way.’
Now it was Kyle’s turn to look intrigued. ‘Trouble? What kind of trouble?’
‘Oh … you know.’ I shook my head, try to laugh it off. ‘Just stuff.’
He stared at me. ‘What do you do, in Paris?’ he said.
I hesitated. ‘Didn’t Rachel tell you?’
He shook his head.
‘I’m an exotic dancer,’ I said.
He stared harder. ‘A … An exotic … You mean a stripper?’ he managed at last.
I shrugged. ‘There’s a lot more to it than that.’
‘But you – you take your clothes off for men.’
I nodded. ‘Mainly for men, yes.’
For a moment he sat there, looking intently at the tips of his brown brogues. I looked away too, out of the window towards the treetops of Hyde Park, fluttering in the breeze.
When I looked back, he’s was staring at me again. ‘I’ve never met a … an exotic dancer’, he said.
‘Then you’ve not lived,’ I countered quickly.
A half-smile flitted around his lips. ‘Clearly,’ he said, and his eyes held mine. He’s was good-looking, I thought, and yet not at all my type. As I stared back, my mind turned to Konrad and I wondered what he was doing. It was earlyish, still – he was probably in bed after another night at Queen with his model pack of pretty boys, some of them gay, some of them straight, and some of them swinging both ways. That was unless he had a job, of course. But he seemed to have taken a bit of a step back from modelling over the previous few months. He loved the lifestyle but not the discipline, and for the moment he had amassed enough money not to have to worry about going for jobs. He wasn’t the kind of guy to worry about the future.
Kyle was still looking at me, and in his eyes I saw the first fire of obsession. I knew it so well – I know the effect I have on guys. And for Kyle I must have been like a creature from another planet – unattainable, and thereby exquisitely fascinating. He’d torture himself about me, he’d wank with images of me in his head, all the while knowing that we were about as far apart as it’s possible to be.
As if he had access to my thoughts, he stood up. He was still looking at me, but suddenly his eyes were far away.
‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘But just give me a call when you’re ready for me to show you around.’
I nodded and smiled, and I saw him out, wondering if he’d ever be back, in spite of his offer. He was interested in me, but he knew it was an unhealthy interest. He was terrified of me too. He’d never met anyone like me before and he was afraid.
I headed for the bathroom, where I stood in front of the mirror, eyes appraising, trying to imagine what it must be like to see me for the first time, to try to get to know me.
You’re trouble, I said under my breath. And then again, with relish: Trrrrouble.
Chapter 5: Rachel
I was crouched on the bathroom sink when the intercom beeped and I nearly fell off backwards. Only the thought of my expensive camera lying in pieces on the bathroom floor kept me from plummeting to the floor.
I climbed up here when I realised that the bathroom window of Rochelle’s apartment has one of those classic Rear Window vistas into a courtyard surrounded by people’s windows. Since then, I’ve been mesmerised by the glimpses of life in this Parisian apartment block that I can get from this vantage point. In the last half-hour alone, I’ve witnessed – and photographed – a gay guy shaving in a wash of sunlight while his much younger lover talks earnestly at his reflection in the mirror, and in another window an elderly lady feeding her dog expensive-looking chocolates as she talked on the phone in an agitated, distracted manner.
I didn’t photograph – but I did watch – as a pretty young girl with shiny golden hair came into her apartment with a boy of around the same age. They were in their late teens, I’d say; probably, from their attire, students. At first their body language was stilted, self-conscious – it was clear that the boy hadn’t been to the girl’s apartment before and that they were finding it hard to relax in each other’s company. It was clear, even from a distance, that they had the massive hots for each other. Normally I might have taken a few snaps, but for once I was too caught up in their ‘dance of love’ to think to do so.
It was like watching some pre-ordained ritual, some choreographed display. The couple knew all the moves but couldn’t skip any – they were in thrall to convention and to the idea of what they expected of each other. It would have been so much easier to just grab each other, as they so obviously wanted to do, but that would have taken some of the fun out of it. For a while, it was all about the anticipation, about the deferral.
They shared a pot of tea, the sunlight filtering in and over her patchwork bedspread. She was in an armchair beside the bed, he was on the bed itself – but on the very edge. He seemed to be trying to lighten the atmosphere with jokes; through the open windows I could hear the tinkle of her slightly over-eager laughter. Her honeyed tresses, pulled up at the nape to reveal a slender brown neck and delicately freckled shoulder, glinted in the sunshine. Her teeth flashed when she laughed, mouth open.
The boy watched her closely, awaiting his moment, anxious not to blow it. I found myself becoming wet, and where I was kneeling, one leg either side of the sink on the wooden surround, I slipped my hand into my knickers and rubbed at myself, softly to begin with and then more vigorously as my excitement mounted. I put my camera on the windowsill and clutched the wall for safety, not wanting to get down and lose myself in my pleasure, causing me to miss theirs. For their pleasure and mine was inextricably bound together. I hadn’t felt this horny in ages.
As if my act had unleashed something in them – as if it had changed something in the very air itself – the girl, suddenly decisive, brave, wanton, stood up and stepped towards the boy. For a moment he looked almost frightened. And then, as the girl placed one hand on his cheek, he smiled and relaxed into her seduction.
Pulling her skirt up around her hips and pushing the boy back onto the bed, she placed herself astride him. Astride the sink, I let my eyelids flutter closed for a moment, imagining it was me atop this handsome boy with his closely cropped blond hair. I didn’t miss Kyle, and I hadn’t thought I was missing sex. But it had been two months, and in all that time I hadn’t even wanked. This was long overdue.
Opening my eyes again, I stared as the girl circled her hips over his. The boy’s head was thrown back – he was enraptured, bewitched. Women’s power over men, I thought, is unbounded. Get them to this point and they will do anything – anything. It was almost frightening to have this power. I thought again of Rochelle, like a spider catching men in the web I imagined her to weave nightly out of her sex magic.
The girl started to fiddle with the flies of the boy’s jeans. Finally getting him unzipped, she released his cock like a caged animal and grasping it in her fist began to move her hand up and down it, slowly at first but gradually building up a more dynamic rhythm.
I started to lose control. Wishing I knew where Rochelle kept her vibrators – she must have one, I reasoned – I massaged the hot nub of my clit while looking around me for something to go inside. My fingers wouldn’t do. I wanted a cock, a big, hard cock. On the window I spotted a plastic shampoo bottle that looked as if it would do the trick. I grabbed it, ran it under the hot tap for a few moments, and then eased it inside myself. A moan of pleasure escaped me. I gritted my teeth at the almost unbearable ecstasy that began to flood my veins. Climax wasn’t far away, but I wanted to ride it with this couple, not before them. I wanted to be part of their union, even if from afar.
Again, as if there was something in the air or as if he heard the whisper of my thoughts, the boy, losing control, grabbed the gusset of the girl’s knickers and pulled them roughly aside to reveal the golden fluff of her public mound. Even from where I knelt, I could see the glisten of it. My knees started to quiver. I couldn’t hold off much longer. I tried to slow down the pumping of the bottle inside me but it was as if a force greater than myself had taken possession of me. Lips parted, I moaned and moaned.
‘Fuck … Fucking hell … Oh FUCK FUCK FUCK!’
Taking hold of his cock, the boy rammed himself inside the girl, who jerked backwards, puppet-like, at the force of his intrusion, eyes wide as if in shock and awe. Then she fell back over him, strands of hair sneaking loose from where it was tied and falling about her shoulders like a golden rain.
Backwards and forwards, gyrating round and round, she rode him. His hands, on her hips, pulled her tight to him. On the sink unit, I rocked backwards and forwards to meet the bottle as I thrust it into me, the fingers of my other hand pressed tightly against my clit. I glanced down every now and then, delighted by – fascinated by – my own pleasure, but then I looked quickly back up, not wanting to miss them coming.
And then suddenly they did, at the same time, or almost. She threw her torso and head back and began wailing like a she-wolf, and that must have unclenched his pleasure, for all at once he started bucking on the bed, hands still clutching her hips as he came with full force.
As he did so, his head also thrown back, chin tilted up towards the ceiling, his eyes opened wide and met mine across the courtyard, through our respective open windows. And by now, I was coming too, mouth wide open, breath fast and frantic. From where he lay, he wouldn’t be able to see what my hands were doing, but it must have been pretty clear that I was getting off on what they were doing to each other.
But it was too late – I was lost to the orgasm flooding me, unable to shrink back from the window much as I wanted to. And so our eyes stayed locked on each other, and I got my wish – to be part of their union – after all.
***
Hopping down from the sink, I sought out a clean flannel and gave myself a quick soapy wash. Then I stood up, straightened my clothes, and risked a peep out the window in the direction of the couple’s flat.
The girl was kneeling on the bed now, in the window, looking out. From across the courtyard I heard snatches of her words:
‘Weird … Could have sworn … Didn’t you hear anything?’
Christ, I thought. Did I really make that much noise? I felt my cheeks burn red. This wasn’t like me at all. I didn’t know what had come over me.
I’ve always had voyeurism in me, and it was obviously a factor in my ‘choice’ of profession, although sometimes I do wonder if I ever had any say whatsoever in my career. Neither of my parents had any photographic skills or interests, but from very early childhood I was obsessed with cameras and making images. Even when I wasn’t taking photographs, I was creating albums or cutting images out of magazines and making collages. In early teenagerhood, I graduated to buying up faded old photographs I found in charity shops, and going to photography exhibitions. It became inevitable that that would be my choice of degree
But I never thought my voyeurism would bring me to this – to watching other people fuck and getting so bloody turned on by it that I have to give myself a good seeing to. I’ve never done anything like this before, but now I wonder if this isn’t the natural outcome of my tendencies. Has my photography always been about spying on people? And hasn’t it always been about my being on the sidelines of life, looking at it but not daring to get involved – a way of keeping my distance?
In an effort to halt my thoughts and the self-doubt they engendered, I climbed back onto the sink and reached for my camera. I was just looking out of the window again, noticing that the boy and girl had disappeared but that the elderly lady and her pampered pooch were back, and thinking they would make a good shot, when the intercom went.
Climbing down, feeling sheepish, I went to the door and pressed the button.
‘Hello?’ I said, and then: ‘Bonjour?’
‘Hi,’ said a deep male voice in English, with a heavy French accent, and for a moment my heart thudded. It was the boy from across the courtyard, come to bawl me out for spying on him and his new girlfriend. But then:
‘We’re friends of Rochelle’s. We thought you might be lonely. We’d like to show you around town.’
I paused for a moment, and then I took a deep breath and spoke into the intercom:
‘Come up,’ I said.
Chapter 6: Rochelle
Kyle did come back, though I didn’t phone, and when he did, I was glad. It was hard, not knowing anyone, but I didn’t dare go out alone, for fear of myself and getting into scrapes. It was the story of my life, but this was a new start for me and I was determined not to blow it.
I kicked my heels around Rachel’s flat, looking at her books, mucking around on my laptop, chatting to a few friends back in Paris on Skype, trying not to sound as lost as I felt. I went out, of course, but not far – for brief strolls in Hyde Park, to a bookshop in Notting Hill, and – one day – through Portobello Market. There, trinkets and baubles glittered on stalls, winking at me lasciviously, as if they knew me, knew my lack of willpower. I bought a vintage purple paste ring that was going for a song, but I resisted the rest – the silk slips, the feather boas, the aubergine ruched-velvet elbow-length gloves. I had enough, I kept telling myself. Why gorge myself on stimulation, and why fill Rachel’s apartment with more stuff? Why not try and just be? Only then might I find myself.
I was beginning to get bored, and that’s when Kyle called – as if hearing my unconscious call. He said he was still at a loose end, that a mini-tour had been cancelled after a soprano had fallen ill. He said he was missing Rachel, and that it’d be a real pleasure to show me around.
When he picked me up, he suggested – given my lack of knowledge of London – that we get tickets for one of those hop-on hop-off sightseeing buses. It would give me some sense of where things were in relation to one another, he said – something one remained remarkably ignorant about if one travelled about by Tube, as most people did. And getting one’s bearings, he said, was crucial.
I agreed – it was a sunny day and it sounded like fun to sit on the open-air top deck and see the sights with minimal effort, especially since he’d offered to pay for the tickets. We could get off, Kyle reminded me, if I wanted to see anything in greater depth.
We climbed aboard and headed upstairs, his hand at my elbow. I admit I wasn’t wearing the most sensible shoes. In fact, I don’t have any sensible shoes, period. But his gesture seemed a little over-intimate. I remembered his face of a few days before, when he’d suddenly seemed to take interest in me, a girl so ostensibly different from him she could have been from another planet. I wondered if I’d done the right thing in accepting his invitation.
We sat down, and the bus rumbled along the Bayswater Road towards Oxford Street. It looped around Marble Arch and began to go down Park Lane. I clutched at the side of the bus, staring at the luxury car showrooms but mostly at the hotels. The Dorchester, The Metropolitan, The Four Seasons – all were places of almost mythical significance for me. Within them, I thought to myself, deals were made, marriages began and ended, affairs were committed, and a thousand debaucheries took place. Night after night after night, the beautiful, the bold and sometimes the damned come to this stretch of road to play out their dramas against a background of wealth and glamour. But it was an allure that had a seedy side to it, something grubby, and that was what made it fascinating to me. The rich, I knew from experience, were dirty bastards too – in fact, they could be the dirtiest bastards of all.
Kyle’s hand on my shoulder startled me from my reverie. He was gesturing over to a pair of elaborate stainless steel and bronze gates giving access into Hyde Park.
‘… the Queen Elizabeth Gate,’ he was saying, ‘built in honour of the Queen Mother.’ He gestured in front of him. ‘And now we’re coming up to the Wellington Arch, which was …’
His words – together with those of the live onboard commentary – faded in the buzz of traffic as I turned back to ogle the hotels. I wanted to be inside them, not sitting next to this well-intentioned but ultimately rather dull violinist, listening to him crap on about London’s history. Who really cared about that? What I wanted to know was what was going on in those hotel rooms and bars, and what exactly I was missing out on.
As we halted at the bottom of Park Lane, waiting for a break in the traffic before continuing our tour, I looked at Kyle a bit sheepishly. I hoped he didn’t think I was rude. I was grateful that he was making time to take me in hand like this, whatever his motive. And perhaps I was just being vain and presumptuous, thinking that he was at all interested in me.
I smiled at him. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Were you and Rachel an item?’
He blinked at me, surprised more, I imagine, by my directness than by the question itself.
‘We were.’ He stared off into the distance, seemingly unwilling to divulge any more. I didn’t push it, but after a few minutes he spoke again.
‘We were together for a few years,’ he said. ‘I did think it would be for good. But then suddenly it was over – pffff’ – he mimicked the action of someone extinguishing a candle with both hands – ‘and she didn’t want to know any more.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That must have been hard. Was it long ago, that you split up?’
He shook his head. ‘Only a couple of months. And we stayed friends – still saw quite a lot of each other. So I was kind of living in hope that she was just going through a weird phase – that before long we’d get back together. But then suddenly, this … this exchange or whatever you want to call it.’
For a moment he looked at me almost reproachfully, as if it were all my fault. I shook my head, about to tell him that I didn’t force Rachel into this lifeswap, when he spoke again.
‘What about you?’ he said.
‘Me?’
‘Anyone special in your life?’ he prodded, and I couldn’t swear to it but it seemed to me he blushed.
I looked away too, more for his sake than mine. ‘I have a boyfriend, yes,’ I responded at length.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Konrad,' I replied, adding in explanation, ‘He’s half German. A model.’
Kyle turned back to me, and his next question startled me with its vulnerability.
‘Is he very handsome?’ he said, and though I nodded, what I really wanted to do was to grab his hand and say, But so are you, Kyle. In many ways you’re much more handsome than that pretty-boy preener.
But as soon as the instinctive movement made itself known to my brain, I almost recoiled in horror. Handsome Kyle might be, but he was not my type. For all his good looks, he was a square.
I forced a smile, gesturing in front of me. ‘Nice house,’ I said, and Kyle laughed politely as the bus pulled up in front of Buckingham Palace for photo opportunities.
***
Kyle was well aware that I didn’t know a soul in London, and so I found myself without a ready excuse when he invited me, at the end of our bus tour, for dinner at his flat in Hampstead a couple of evenings later. A couple of friends were going to be there, he said – an opera singer and a dancer at Sadler’s Wells. They were intrigued about me, he said.
I raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t believe that he had told them what I did for a living, and I wanted to ask him what they did know about me. I wasn’t going to pretend to be something I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to be an object of prurient scrutiny either. I kept quiet, however, deciding to play it by ear.
And after a couple more days of loafing around the flat and aimless walks in Hyde Park, resisting the call of Park Lane, I felt glad of the offer of company and was actually looking forward to the dinner party. I was also, in a contained way, looking forward to seeing Kyle again. I didn’t know anybody who moved in high cultural circles, like he did, and I found myself interested in him. What would his flat be like? What were his friends like? What was his background, and how had he arrived where he had?
I had long been fascinated by other people’s career paths, never having had one of my own. Life, I often felt, was just something that happened to me, without my really thinking or planning. It had always been this way, and until recently it had never occurred to me to be any other way. But looking at Kyle I felt the strength of having a trajectory, a calling. Kyle, it seemed, knew where he was going. His plans weren’t failsafe, of course – hence his crumbling when Rachel dumped him. But in general he seemed like someone with an overview, a direction in life. He certainly wasn’t the kind of person who would suddenly find himself in a strange city, knowing no one, going half out of their mind with boredom and longing to stir something up, no matter what.
I dressed demurely, for me – there was very little that could be described as toned-down in my wardrobe, but with an uncharacteristically minimal use of accessories and good underwear I found that my black-lace pencil dress didn’t look too sluttish. I went relatively easy on the make-up too. It wasn’t that I was trying not to be me, but I was trying to think about context: a dinner party with a classical music crowd in Hampstead required a little restraint, in some respects.
I arrived on time too, which was virtually unheard of: in Paris, my lateness was a standing joke with Konrad, friends, and the other girls at the club, many of whom found themselves covering for me when I rolled in half an hour after a shift had started. I didn’t mean it to happen, but as Konrad often pointed out, I had trouble ‘getting my shit together’. Not that he could talk, but that was another story. Wherever I seemed to go, chaos inevitably followed, and that went for my time-keeping too.
Kyle answered the door, dressed in snug navy chinos and a well-pressed white shirt. I smiled indulgently, and at once felt like a wife must do who makes the same old excuses for her husband all her life. He was a boring dresser, but underneath it he was a lovely guy. And perhaps I was using his clothes to judge him unfairly and quite wrongly.
I thought of Rachel. Rachel knew what Kyle was like in bed. Not that I could ask her. I hadn’t even met her – I knew her even less than I knew Kyle. Our conversations, via Facebook, had been relatively brief, lacking in intimacies.
We’d had no contact since taking over residence in each other’s home, in each other’s life, though of course the opportunity was there. I wondered if that was because Rachel had just breezed into my life, found her feet without hesitation. Here I was, stumbling around, while she just got on with it.
I wondered what she was doing right now, and whether she’d be jealous that I was at Kyle’s house. Presumably she wouldn’t, given that she was the one who had split up with him. But then people still get possessive about their exes, sometimes, even when it was them who called it off. I also thought, for the first time, about my flat and about how Rachel must be coping with it in all its disarray and dishevelment. Of course, I’d tidied up and cleaned it before leaving. But someone like Rachel would find it very difficult to cope with all that stuff, of that I had no doubt. I thought I might Facebook her the next day, find out how she was in general and let her know that I didn’t mind if she wanted to box some stuff up just to get it out of her sight and make the place her own a little more. I didn’t want her feeling as out of place as I did.
Kyle was just showing me into his kitchen, which smelt of tomatoes and basil and fresh pasta, when the doorbell rang.
‘That’ll be Morg and Tats,’ he said and, telling me to take a seat, he headed back towards the front door.
I felt too uncomfortable to sit down, so I wafted self-consciously around the kitchen, stirring the bubbling pasta sauce, sniffing the mozzarella that lay neatly sliced on the chopping board like a row of creamy white coins.
Then they were there, in the doorway, and Kyle was doing the introductions.
‘Rochelle – Morgan and Tatiana,’ he said, gesturing back and forth between us.
Tatiana stepped forward into the room, one hand extended. My first impression was of a glacial blonde, perfectly groomed, probably swimming in money, with a chip of ice where her heart should be. Of course, it’s ridiculous to make judgements like that about people, but I’m just relating my first impressions. Tatiana had an uptight little smile on her scarlet lips and the aloof air of someone who thinks they’re on a completely different level to you. Which she undoubtedly was. But that’s not the point.
Morgan followed in her wake, a hand hovering in the small of her back. His hair was greying but expensively styled, and a deep, rich, designer cologne matched his navy linen suit, unruffled. His manner, like Tatiana’s, was only superficially warm.
I looked at Kyle. Already I wished I hadn’t accepted this invitation. These people thought I was a piece of shit and could barely hide their feelings. What was Kyle doing even inviting me here? I was not part of this world, and trying to bring me into it – even out of kindness – was a huge error of judgement on his part.
Kyle moved his head slightly from side to side, as if discouraging me from bailing out. His eyes urged patience and calm. I forced a smile.
‘So nice to meet you,’ I said. Then looking at Tatiana, I added, ‘Kyle tells me you are a ballerina.’
She smiled haughtily, inclined her head slightly in confirmation.
I looked to Kyle for help, but he was already pulling back the chairs, gesturing to us all to take our seats, then proffering bottles of wine.
‘Red or white?’ he asked us all as we sat down. ‘We’re keeping it simple tonight: buffalo mozzarella and roasted artichokes, then pasta with a chilli tomato sauce. And lastly my famous home-made chocolate mousse.’
As he began plating up the starters, Kyle continued to chat, probably aware that I was out of my depth. Not that I couldn’t talk to these people, of course – it wasn’t as if I was shy or lacking in chutzpah. But their froideur had raised my hackles: why, I thought, should I do all the running where they were intent on showing me that I was uninteresting to them?
The talk, through much of the meal, was of the classical music and dance worlds, and of mutual friends of the three of them. It was mind-numbingly boring and I didn’t listen to much of it. I wasn’t inclined to intervene and set the conversation on a more interesting course either. Instead, I drank a little too quickly and I gradually zoned out, thinking instead of what might be happening at the club that night. I didn’t miss it, exactly, but I missed the camaraderie with the other girls, the sense of community. For the first time in my life, it occurred to me, I had belonged somewhere. And then I had thrown it all away, in favour of … this.
I was startled out of my musings by Tatiana’s hand on my arm. It felt cold and clammy, even intrusive. I instinctively flinched.
All eyes, I realised, were on me, and it became obvious that someone had just asked me a question that I hadn’t heard.
‘I’m sorry,’ I managed at last. ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’
‘Tatiana was just asking about your line of work,’ said Kyle, and in his eyes I saw a little warning. I didn’t know what he’d already told them about me, but I was guessing that the word ‘stripper’ hadn’t come into the conversation.
My smile was so fake it made my cheeks ache. ‘I’m a dancer, too,’ I said, looking at Tatiana.
She raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow. ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Where do you dance?’
‘I’m – I’m freelance,’ I said. ‘At different venues in Paris. Modern dance.’
It wasn’t like me to lie. It wasn’t even as if I was ashamed of what I did. But I suddenly felt protective of Kyle, protective of whatever lies he might have told them. Above all, I guess, I didn’t want to embarrass him.
I felt a foot on mine under the table and, assuming it was his way of thanking me for my discretion, flashed him a smile across the table.
He smiled back, and in his eyes I thought I saw, once more, something deeper than kindness or casual friendship – something ardent and even a little greedy. Did he want me, or was it the drink talking – in him, in me, or in both of us?
I stood up and made my way to the toilet. After peeing, I splashed my face with cold water. I had drunk too much, and if I didn’t sober up I risked saying something I might regret. Though my instinct was to protect Kyle, Morgan and Tatiana’s coolness and evident disapproval of me might ignite my temper if I didn’t pay attention.
Smoothing my hair back and my dress down, I stepped out of the toilet. Morgan was leaning against the opposite wall, one leg crossed over the other, arms folded. A curious half-smile flickered around his lips. I smiled back.
‘All yours,’ I said.
He stepped towards me. ‘All mine?’ he said, and his smile grew more wolfish. I realised then that it must have been Morgan’s, not Kyle’s, foot under the table, telling me something quite different.
I took a step backward but he continued to approach, and with one arm outstretched, he put a hand on my hip.
I looked towards the dining room. I could hear the low rumble of conversation, interrupted by the odd tinkle of Tatiana’s glassy laugh. From this angle, we couldn’t be seen.
But what was Tatiana to Morgan, anyway? I’d assumed they were a couple, but nothing in their manner or in anything they had said since arriving confirmed that. Perhaps, I thought, they were just friends.
I looked into Morgan’s eyes, combatively, as if to tell him to take his hands off me. But as he did, I felt that old surge of excitement as I realised the power that I had over someone. Morgan had kept it well hidden beneath a veneer of indifference during the meal, but now his eyes smouldered with desire. He wanted me so badly, it hurt. And nothing turned me on so much as when I knew that someone wanted me so much, they’d do almost anything.
Not that I was into humiliating people. But if someone was into abasing themselves in their desire for me, I wouldn’t necessarily stop them – especially if I had a drink or two inside me.
I stepped back into the toilet, yanking Morgan with me.
‘You want me?’ I breathed in his ear as he pulled the door closed behind him.
He moaned with desire. I could feel the hard bulge of him in his linen trousers as we crushed together in the small space. It would be so easy just to take him out and slide his pulsating cock inside me and let him fuck me hard and fast against the wall. Then to take our places back at the dinner table as if nothing had happened, the only things that might arouse suspicion the post-orgasmic glow of our cheeks.
But even knowing that to draw things out would risk alerting Tatiana and Kyle to what was going on, I couldn’t help but lead Morgan on. He couldn’t have me that easily, I told myself, as I inhaled his expensive cologne. It smelled of power and influence, and that confirmed my need to show him who held the reins right now.
I cupped his cock and balls in my hand through his trousers, squeezed them firmly. ‘But what’s in it for me?’ I purred. ‘What can you give me?’
His eyes caught fire. Here, they said, is a challenge. Here is a woman who knows her power. Clasping his hands to the sides of my thighs, he slid down to his knees, pressing his face into my mound through my clothes.
‘I can smell you,’ he groaned. ‘Even through all this. Fucking hell, you turn me on, you horny bitch. What it is with you French chicks?’
‘Oh, so you like French pussy?’ I chuckled. I started to inch up my dress with one hand. ‘Want to see more?’
I saw one of his hands fall to his crotch and release his cock. He started pumping away with one hand, unable to control himself, as his other hand snaked between my legs. Pulling the crotch of my panties to one side, he slid two fingers between my lips and found me dripping wet.
‘Arrrrgh,’ he let out. ‘I can’t …’
I grabbed his arm so he couldn’t jerk himself off any more. He was going to come too soon, and I didn’t want that. I pulled his head towards me, thrust my pussy at him. He dived right in, tongue lapping at my juices like a cat slurping cream.
I was splayed back against the wall, the skirt of my dress bunched up around my waist. As Morgan’s tongue moved expertly over me, flickering in and out of my hole, I lowered one hand and fingered my clit. It didn’t take much – at once I felt my core deliquesce as my climax mounted, inexorably as a tide.
As he felt it approach, Morgan tried to pull away, keen, no doubt, to enter me with his yearning cock. But I was intent on denying him. No one – no one – had me this easily. I pressed his head more firmly against me and came violently, with his tongue still inside me.
Then, perfunctorily, I pulled my panties up and my dress down, smoothed my hair and left the toilet. My crotch was sodden, and my cheeks probably glowed, but otherwise I didn’t think Kyle and Tatiana would be alerted to what had just happened, especially if – as I expected he would – Morgan stayed in the toilet for a while. I figured he’d be wanking himself off now, in a bit of a daze, wondering what had hit him.
I’d seen men like Morgan before, men with money and influence who get their head turned by a bit of rough. They think they’re going to get an easy, dirty shag – and often they probably do. But not with me. I got my pleasure, while denying him what he really wanted. He’d had to make do with a sad wank against a toilet wall.
I sat down unobtrusively, not exactly avoiding the others’ gazes but hoping they’d continue their thread of conversation while I regained my composure. It worked, and for a moment or two I was just able to breathe and let it all wash over me. Part of me was unsettled – like I said, I was always getting into scrapes, yet when I’d accepted this dinner invitation, I certainly hadn’t expected to have a fellow guest – possibly the partner of another guest – go down on me in the loo. But I was exhilarated too. I’ve always got off on the seedy and the illicit.
Morgan finally took his place back at the table, and though I thought I saw questioning glances exchanged between him and Kyle, and then him and Tatiana, nothing was said.
We ate our dessert and moved onto Kyle’s big cream sofas for coffee. I was keeping my head down even more now, afraid not only of Tatiana but of Kyle. Whether he was attracted to me or not, it was certainly not the done thing to fuck another dinner guest in the middle of the party. I was certain he wouldn’t want to know me any more.
Then it was time to say our goodbyes. Tatiana and Morgan got up as one, and I was overcome with curiosity as to the nature of their relationship.
‘Do you guys have far to go?’ I said. ‘Where do you live?’
‘Not so far,’ said Morgan, and for the first since since I’d orgasmed with his tongue inside me, our eyes met. I felt a little dizzy, not out of lust for him but at the pressure, I suppose, that had built up over the course of the evening.
‘We have a house in Belsize Park,’ added Tatiana, her eyes lingering on mine. I may have been paranoid, but there seemed to be something knowing, something mocking, in them.
As they waited for their taxi to arrive, we gathered in the doorway for the obligatory air-kissing.
‘By the way,’ said Tatiana, turning back to me as their car drew up along the pavement, ‘do you have a card? As we’re in the same line of work …’
I shook my head.
‘Here,’ said Kyle, handing me a piece of paper and a pen. ‘Write it down. It is all about contacts, you know? Tatiana might be able to introduce you to some interesting people.’
The last thing I need right now is interesting people, I thought to myself, but I scribbled down my mobile number and email address anyway, and handed them to Tatiana.
‘Great,’ she said, flashing me a smile, and suddenly it seemed that she too was interested in me. I wondered what had changed, for her, all of a sudden.
She and Morgan descended the stone stairs down to the pavement. As the taxi driver opened the back door for them, they turned towards us to wave goodbye. As they did so, I saw Tatiana bring one of Morgan’s hands to her face, sniff at it. They exchanged a look, then, and a thrill rippled through me: Morgan’s fingers, I thought, must still bear the scent of me.
They looked back towards us. ‘Thanks again, Kyle,’ said Tatiana, but her eyes were not on him. She was staring at me.
‘Lovely to meet you, Rochelle,’ she said. She waved the piece of paper with my details on.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ she called, and in the chill night air her laughter rang out like broken glass.
***
When they’d gone, Kyle and I sat down to finish up the coffee. I knew I should go easy on the caffeine, but I was already resigned to not sleeping that night. I was just too wound up. I wondered what I was going to do when I left here. I couldn’t imagine going back to Rachel’s flat. I’d climb the walls.
I looked at Kyle, wishing I fancied him, wishing I went for the sensible options. It had always been like this, since I was a teenager and felt the first inklings of desire. I’d only ever wanted the bad boys or girls, the dangerous ones who would lead me into darkness. Anybody clean-cut, polite and kind was an immediate turn-off. And if they wanted me, that was a turn-off too, unless – as with Morgan – I’d seen an opportunity to use them for my own ends. I could do that with Kyle, of course, but I didn’t want to. Kyle wasn’t playing the kind of power games with me that Morgan had wanted to. Kyle wasn’t a taker.
What I really wanted now, if only I’d acknowledge it to myself, was to fall into bed with Kyle for a good, long, sexless, matey cuddle. I never did that with anyone these days, and suddenly I regretted it – and pined for it. For so long it had all been about the sex and desire. Even with the girls at the club, for many of whom I felt genuine affection, and who I believed felt affection for me, there was a frisson. After all, we shared a dressing room, saw each other naked night after night. And familiarity couldn’t take away from the eroticism of my colleagues’ lovely bodies. I admit that I often thought of some my colleagues’ beautiful tits and pussies as I wanked myself to sleep at dawn.
We sat together for a long time, much of it in a companionable silence. Kyle obviously didn’t suspect that anything had gone on between me and Morgan, despite his and Tatiana’s weird behaviour as they climbed into the taxi. In some ways, I thought, he must be a true innocent. They’d been so blatant, even I was shocked. But then of course I knew what was going on in their heads. Kyle didn’t.
‘So,’ I said finally, stretching. ‘I’d best make a move, I guess.’
Kyle turned to me. ‘You don’t have to,’ he said.
‘Do you have a spare bed?'
He placed one hand on mine. ‘No,’ he said.
For a moment the thought played around my head: What the hell? We could fuck, and nothing need come of it. Just a friendly fuck, and then never again. It might not be the best fuck of my life, but it would stop me wandering about the streets, meeting the wrong kinds of people, getting into trouble.
But then I looked into his eyes, and I knew that he was a gentle, sensitive soul – the very antithesis of Morgan – and that it would be very wrong of me to hurt him.
I shook my head gently. ‘I like you too much,’ I said softly, pulling his head to my shoulder. There was something childlike about him, something that needed protection. But I was the last person to be able to protect anyone.
For a while we just sat there, unmoving, and then Kyle stood up and went over to the window.
‘I wonder,’ he said, looking out into the blackness, ‘what Rachel’s doing now.’
Chapter 7: Rachel
When I opened the door to Rochelle’s friends, I didn’t know that I was opening the door to another world – a world that would change my life forever.
There were six of them, all but one of them guys, all of them gorgeous. The guys, it turned out, were fashion models. I’d never even met a model before – my photos are always of real people – so I immediately felt out of my depth.
The leader of the pack, it was clear from the outset, was Konrad, a too-cool-for-school half-German guy of about twenty-five, with cat-like green eyes that twinkled behind a curtain of chestnut hair and the squarest jaw I’d ever seen. I surmised pretty quickly that he was Rochelle’s boyfriend from the way he took ownership of the flat, lounging around on her – my! – bed, rifling through a drawer for something he said he’d left behind.
I was feeling a bit crowded in by all these strangers taking over my new space. They all seemed a bit manic too, and I wondered if they were on something. At any rate, I was glad when they suggested going out for a drink nearby. I’d been cooped up in the apartment for too long anyway – spying on other people, mainly. It wasn’t healthy.
We didn’t go far – just around the corner to the rue de Navarin. One of their friends, explained Konrad in excellent English, was the mixologist in the bar of the Hôtel Amour, and they often drank there.
I hadn’t heard of the ‘Love Hotel’, but Konrad quickly filled me in. It had opened a few years before, he said, in a former brothel – and you could still rent rooms for a few hours in the afternoon if you wished.
I didn’t know what to expect, but once inside, I discovered that the vibe was minimalism meets kitsch rather than seedy bordello. We sat out in the courtyard with its bright chairs, little metal tables and abundant foliage, and Konrad ordered us all caipirinhas. It was starting to grow chilly, but heaters kept us toasty.
The one girl in the party sat next to me, blowing smoke out into the air, seemingly oblivious to me, lost in her own thoughts. She was exotic-looking – possibly North African by origin, I thought, or with one North African parent. She had somewhat melancholic dark eyes and lustrous black hair.
I listened to the guys chat away in French and studied Konrad from a distance. There was something fascinating about his rampant self-confidence. Having little myself, and having been surrounded by people much like me, I was intrigued by those who had it in abundance. Of course, being model-level gorgeous must help one’s self-esteem.
‘So,’ the girl said suddenly, finally coming to life. ‘How are you enjoying life in Paris?’
I paused. ‘It’s too early to tell. I’ve only been here a couple of days. And this is the first time I’ve properly been out.’
She exhaled more cigarette smoke. ‘You’re a photographer, right?’
‘I am.’ I patted my camera bag on the table in front of me. ‘What about you?’ I said.
‘I dance,’ she said. ‘With Rochelle. My name’s Lisette.’
‘Oh, you’re …’
‘A stripper?’ She let out a slightly bitter laugh.
‘I’m sorry – I wasn’t going to say …’
‘It doesn’t matter. Although it’s a bit more than that. And a bit less.’ She looked at me closely. ‘Have you ever watched a show?’
‘I don’t think so. I … Well, no, I haven’t.’
‘Then you should. How about coming to the club tomorrow night? You can meet some of the girls first. And then maybe you can come out for a drink with us afterwards. I’m dancing tomorrow, so you can see my new routine. I’ve been working really hard on it.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’d like that.’ It was the truth, but only in part. The other half of me feared going to the club. Despite the things I’d photographed, I’d led a very sheltered life when it came to this kind of thing. If I felt out of my depth here in this bar, with this crowd, then that would go double for the club.
On the other hand, the idea did excite me. I imagined myself floating around, invisible, photographing the faces of the punters as they stared, rapt, at the stage. Photographing the girls, backstage, as they got ready for their nightly display. I would be a ghostly, unseen presence, an invisible eye.
This would be fertile ground for my art if I could find some way of working it to my advantage. But I wouldn’t know what I could get away with until I got there and sussed out the mood. Neither the dancers nor the clientele might accept the intrusion.
The courtyard was getting more crowded, noisier. Chic people were fluttering into it like exotic butterflies; DJ beats were floating out from inside the bar itself. Konrad ordered a few bottles of champagne, raising a glass in my direction.
‘To our new friend, Rachel,’ he said, ‘and her new life in Paris.’
I raised a glass back at him and smiled shyly as he winked at me. He was beyond gorgeous, in a different realm to me, but I couldn’t help but react to his beauty. It was like a drug. Rochelle must be very lovely herself, I thought, to have such an amazing boyfriend.
Of course, I’d seen her pictures on Facebook, and there were several framed photos of her around the apartment, but she looked different in all of them, so it was impossible to fix on any one idea of what she looked like. It’s the same with everyone, of course – but somehow with Rochelle it seemed exaggerated. She came across as a kind of playful, wilful child who raided her mother’s dressing-up box and created a whole array of different selves according to her mood. I wondered if this was the attraction for Konrad.
As I watched him, I thought about all the incredible-looking women he must come into contact with daily. I’d already learnt, from snippets of conversation, that he’d done catwalk shows for Armani and Dries Van Noten. Female models must have been falling over themselves to snag him, but instead he went for a lowly dancer. Rochelle must be one very hot chick to net Konrad.
I started thinking about the couple I’d watched earlier, and substituting myself and Konrad in their place, I found myself feeling uncharacteristically horny again. This wasn’t like me, to dwell on sex, and I wondered if there was such a thing as the Pigalle effect, whereby living amidst all this sin and debauchery got one’s sap rising. Or perhaps, I thought, living in Rochelle’s apartment was ‘infecting’ me with her spirit.
I drank, and then I drank more. This, too, wasn’t like me. I’d always been very controlling – afraid of letting myself go, I suppose. But the champagne tasted clean and sharp and I liked the bubbly feeling it unleashed in my brain. I liked the way it loosened my tongue and the laughter that bubbled up inside of me, as if from nowhere. Joining in the conversation, I started to feel part of Rochelle’s gang, and that feeling surprised and pleased me.
More people joined us, and some of the originals faded away. There was a constant ebb and flow of beautiful people around our table, and as the night wore on and stars flickered into life above us, I lost track of who was who. All that mattered was Konrad, at the centre of it all, the brightest star of all. Whenever he glanced at me, I felt as if I’d been bathed in a golden radiance, blessed by warmth and light. If he spoke to me, I felt flattered, even honoured.
I’d no idea what time it was, but suddenly Konrad stood up, a fresh bottle of champagne in each hand, and announced that we were headed upstairs. His friend, the receptionist, had let him know that one of the guestrooms was free and that we could party there, if we wished.
Some of the group took the winding staircase, others – myself and Konrad included – took the tiny lift. As it clanked up through the building, I tried to contain myself. Konrad’s thigh was against mine, and in the small space I could smell him – coffee and spice melded in an intoxicating mix.
We stepped out of the lift and into a dark corridor. Konrad led the way as the others joined us from the staircase. Unlocking one of the doors, he gestured for us to go inside.
I literally gasped when I saw the room. It wasn’t that it was luxurious, but it was outré. The walls, ceiling and floor were all painted black, and the wide bed, simply dressed with white linen, was mounted on a low platform. The ceiling was hung with dozens of mirror-balls, while opposite the foot of the bed was a free-standing clawfoot bathtub.
The others – eight of them in total – were taking being here a lot more casually, so I guessed they might have come before. Or perhaps they were just too damn cool to express anything. Sitting down on the bed itself or on the edge of the platform, they held out their glasses as Konrad went around topping them up.
As he got to me, he looked into my eyes and the alcohol made me feel brazen enough to hold his gaze.
‘Enjoying yourself, Rachel?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘Very much so,’ I said, wishing I had the guts to kiss him, just like that.
A knock on the door drew him away from me. It was his friend the receptionist bringing him a CD system with some speakers. Thanking her, he turned back into the room and busied himself setting it up. Then he flipped through the folder of discs she had given him, selected one and slipped it into the machine.
‘Colette Secret Island,’ he said when he turned round, to no one in particular. ‘“No One Belongs Here More Than You”.’
Turning back to the room, he started dancing, languidly to start with, as befitted the slow build-up of the tune.
I watched, awed, as he moved, panther-like. Nobody else was even looking at him – they must have seen all this before, I reasoned.
Seeing me watching him, Konrad held out one hand. Like a rabbit caught in headlights, I let him take hold of me and pull me towards him. Trying not to let my drunkenness show, I started to move in time with the music, slowly and sensuously. Konrad’s eyes were on mine. I felt giddy, a little sick, but I didn’t want to break away and ruin this moment. Unlikely as it seemed, I thought that he may even fancy me too.
Then the song began to fade out, and Konrad took hold of my elbow and steered me to the side of the room, where he refilled my glass again. I was beginning to realise I’d be ill if I drank any more, but I accepted the glass and together we stood in the window, looking down into the street below.
‘I think you’ll be happy here, Rachel,’ he said, and I wondered what he knew of me – or what he thought he knew of me. It was true that I hadn’t been happy in London, of late. But was that so very obvious? Konrad and I had only known each other for a couple of hours, and to me he was a complete mystery. What, in turn, could he surmise of me? Did my discontent show through?
Before I had a chance to answer, two of the other models came into our orbit and began to chat to us. Then Konrad drifted away, gesturing to someone across the room. The next time I looked, through increasingly blurred vision, he was dancing again, shirtless this time. I nearly swooned to see him like that, and I felt a violent stab of lust in my belly and between my legs. I’d never known naked desire like this, and I was afraid of it. Especially when I stood no chance with someone like Konrad.
I swallowed back my bitterness with another gulp of champagne and looked back out of the window. People came over and I wound in and out of conversations haphazardly. I tried not to look for or at Konrad.
I had just started wobbling on my feet and decided I ought to head back to Rochelle’s apartment when I noticed that someone had filled the bathtub with water and bubbles. Some of the others had got naked and a couple were climbing in. As they sat down, their friends passed them their champagne flutes. The lights were dim; the music had become languorous once more. Across the room I noticed Konrad, still shirtless, watching me, a smile flitting about his lips. I looked away, this time incapable of returning his gaze.
It was all getting too much for me now – not just Konrad but the whole situation. But at the same time my professional instincts took over and I found myself seeking out my camera where I’d left it in a corner of the room. Pulling the strap over my head, I walked back towards the bath, holding my camera up to my face, toying with the lens. A couple of the others looked at me, but nobody seemed surprised or shocked, or showed any objections to being photographed. I clicked away rapidly, eager to catch the moment before it all evaporated into the night like smoke. I knew from experience never to hesitate.
I took hundreds of shots of the bodies cavorting in the bath, of others dancing, and of those just draped across the bed like giant cats, drinking and chatting. Then all of a sudden I was done. I just needed to get home and pass into oblivion for the night.
Grabbing my camera bag, I turned towards the door. Konrad stood in front of me, chest bare, top button of his fly undone, so that a small furring of hair was visible where his six-pack belly tapered away down to his crotch.
He struck a pose. I laughed, uncertainly, and began to snap away again.
Chapter 8: Rochelle
Thank God for Kyle. He saved me from myself, albeit without really knowing it. After making that pass at me, he withdrew to his room, but sensing that I was reluctant to leave despite turning him down, he came back with a pillow and a blanket.
‘Why don’t you spare yourself a cab fare and sleep here?’ he said, gesturing towards one his capacious cream sofas. They looked comfier than your average single bed. Compared with the prospect of wandering the streets, they looked like heaven.
I nodded, taking the pillow and blanket and holding them to me, instantly feeling comforted. ‘I don’t suppose you have a spare …’
‘In the bathroom cabinet, under the sink,’ he said, smiling a little sadly. I wondered if he’d stocked up on an extra toothbrush that very morning, anticipating conquest. But I looked at him and there was something so little boy lost about him that I couldn’t believe he was certain of anything, not least seducing a woman.
‘Goodnight,’ he said softly, then he turned and padded off to his room. I placed the pillow at one end of the sofa and spread out the blanket. It was soft as cashmere, though I couldn’t find a label to confirm that it was. I bunched it up and held it to me, curling myself around its bulk foetus-style. I felt looked after, and I knew it would take only a few steps towards Kyle’s room and an apologetic smile for this feeling to expand and take me over. What was stopping me from doing that? Why did I only ever choose the things that hurt me?
For a moment my instinct was to get up, run to the front door and hurry away into the night. But I forced myself to stay where I was. I didn’t even get up to brush my teeth, though I knew I’d regret it the next morning. Instead I just lay back on the sofa and peeled off my dress and stockings until I was down to my underwear, a Playboy bunny-style bikini bra and matching panties. Then I reached for my bag on the floor beside and the glass of water I’d drawn from the tap a few moments before, and I gulped down a couple of sleeping pills, grateful for anything that would get me through the night.
***
When I woke up in the morning, I found myself in a pool of sunlight, having forgotten to close the curtains. Kyle, on the opposite sofa, was staring at me, not in a lecherous way, but with a kind of sadness.
I sat up abruptly when I saw him. The blanket slid from me, revealing my underwear. I looked down, and one of my nipples was peeking brazenly from my bra.
‘Oh god,’ I said, pushing it back up while trying to grab the blanket from the floor. ‘Sorry, Kyle.’
I was used to showing myself off, so why was I shy like this in front of Kyle?
Kyle shrugged, standing up and heading for the kitchen. ‘Coffee?’ he said.
‘I’d love one.’
As he busied himself with his Gaggia, I grabbed my clothes and dressed hurriedly. My clothes weren’t exactly daytime attire, but I was used to people looking at me in the street, to standing out from the crowd.
Where yesterday I had dreaded going back to Rachel’s, now I was desperate to be back there, alone, showering and changing and reflecting on the events of the night. Tatiana’s parting words, in particular, left me uneasy, and I wished I hadn’t given her my contact details. But as I slipped my shoes on and took the mug of coffee that Kyle held out to me, I told myself that she almost certainly wouldn’t call. Whatever strange games she and Morgan had invented to get through an evening with their kind but staid friend Kyle would quickly be forgotten. I was sure they had bigger fish to fry.
I finished my coffee, gave Kyle a friendly kiss on the cheek, and asked him to call me sometime. As I headed off towards the Tube, I wondered if he ever would.
***
Thanks to the sleeping tablets and Kyle’s loan of his sofa, I felt relatively well rested and positive the next day. Back at Rachel’s flat with a takeout mocha and a muffin in front of me on the breakfast bar, I began to make plans for my time in London. It wasn’t enough, I reasoned, to run away from one’s issues, however cloudy they were. Indeed, perhaps the cloudier they were, the more likely they were to follow you. Sitting around without any real aims or ambitions only risked pushing me towards the kind of distractions I wanted to break away from.
I needed to do a course, I decided. I wasn’t sure exactly what, but I needed to find something to take me out of both myself and my comfort zone. Though I was a risk taker in many respects, I’d been very reliant, it struck me, on my immediate environment and the people in it. Though Pigalle was risqué and perhaps even off limits to certain people, to me it represented security – the security of being surrounded by like-minded people, of not being judged or rejected. But perhaps that in itself demonstrated – ironically – a conservative craving for the known and the reassuring.
I thought about songwriting. My guitar-playing was rusty – I hadn’t picked up an instrument in years. I’d had talent, but I’d been lazy, and I’d let life get in the way. I’d once written poetry too. I’d never done anything with any of it, but now it struck me that I could combine the two and perhaps create something meaningful.
Picking up the phone, I made an appointment to look around the London Songwriting School, and then I called Kyle and left a message asking if he knew anyone who could lend me a guitar for a while. I was going to need to buy one, if I did carry on with this. In fact, I was going to need to get some work to fund all of this. But job and course combined would hopefully keep me out of mischief.
Inspired, I sat in front of my laptop, clicked on Spotify and played the Florence and the Machine song ‘What the Water Gave Me’. I loved Florence Welch – her eccentricity and whole aesthetic, her complex multi-layered sound. This song, I knew, was named after the Symbolism-rich Frida Kahlo painting but was actually about Virginia Woolf’s suicide. It was Gothic at heart and yet dancey. I stood up, started to wig out, letting myself go to the crash of cymbals, the fine interplay of the guitar and the harp, to Florence’s ecstatic lyrics. If I could create something like this, I thought, I might be happy.
The phone rang and I leapt towards it, thinking it was Kyle.
‘Hi!’ I shouted into the receiver. ‘I’ll just turn the music down.’
I closed my laptop and grabbed the phone again. ‘Sorry about that,’ I said.
‘No problem,’ came a voice I didn’t recognise, a female voice.
‘Rachel?’ I said. I didn’t know anyone else who might call me here.
‘Forgotten me already?’ continued the voice, all honeyed on the surface but with something darker, I felt, beneath it. I frowned.
‘Tatiana,’ went the voice. ‘From last night?’
‘Oh hi,’ I said, wondering if my voice came across to her as guarded as it did to my own ears. What the fuck do you want? is what really wanted to come out of my mouth.
‘Hi,’ she said, and this time there really was something quite sinister to her tone, which appeared to be mocking mine. ‘Listen, I was serious about helping you out while you’re here. Want to meet up for lunch? A friend’s just cancelled on me, so I’m at a loose end. It’s on me, of course.’
‘Thanks, but I should have explained that I’m not really planning to do any dancing while I’m here,’ I said. ‘I’m … I’m having a break.’
‘Oh? Then why not come out anyway, be one of the ladies who lunch?’
‘I’m afraid I’m a bit busy today. I’m actually … well, I’m researching a course I may apply for, and also I need to get a job to pay for it.’
‘What kind of a job? Maybe I can help. I’m very well connected.’
‘I haven’t really thought about it. I guess just waitressing, or maybe I’ll find something in a vintage clothes shop.’
Tatiana tsked. ‘Slave labour,’ she said. ‘You’ll get a pittance. I’m sure you can do better than that.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘my best friend is Lulu Hammonds – her name may be familiar to you.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, her husband was a very well-known actor. Died twenty years ago.’
‘Right.’
‘Well, Lulu now owns a vintage boutique in Holland Park. It’s not so far from where you live, but it’s ultra upmarket – we’re talking antiques, really, rather than the kind of vintage you’ll find in Camden and god knows where else. I know she was looking for someone only last week, to take over for a few months while she goes on a buying spree in the States. And I know she’ll pay you much more than the kind of places you were thinking of. Her shop has real cachet – all the celebs go there, the hip ones. Kate and Sadie and even Stella sometimes. But it’s bohemian too –I can just see you there.’
I had to admit, it sounded a lot more tempting than the local Starbucks. Of course, I knew I could easily find a dancing job in one of the Soho clubs, and earn a very good wage once tips were factored in. But that was all part of the life I was trying to leave behind, if only temporarily. I enjoyed performing in many respects, but there were equally aspects that I wasn’t so happy about. This was my chance to find out what I wanted.
‘OK,’ I said, trying not to sound reluctant. I was interested in the job, but I wasn’t so thrilled that it would mean meeting up with Tatiana. I was uncomfortable with the thought of what I’d done with her boyfriend at Kyle’s the night before, of course, but I was also mistrustful of Tatiana herself. There was something calculating about her – more than a suggestion of ulterior motives to her apparent kindness.
‘Great,’ she said faux brightly. ‘What we could do is meet for lunch in Holland Park, and then drop by the boutique and see if Lulu is free for a chat? Or I might actually give her a call now, to check she hasn’t already got anyone and to let her know we’ll be calling in.’
‘Sounds good to me. Just let me know where and when.’
‘Well, how about Julie’s, at 1 p.m?’
‘Fine, I’ll see you there,’ I said, opening my laptop to find out the street name.
‘See you there,’ came Tatiana’s voice, and again it struck me that the honey of her tone masked something infinitely less sweet.
I was just about to put the phone down when she spoke again. ‘Oh Rochelle,’ she said, as if it were an afterthought. ‘Do make sure to dress up in your finest, won’t you?’
‘Sure,’ I said, but as I replaced the receiver I was already grimacing, wondering if I was doing the right thing.
***
I walked down to Holland Park, through the hipster throng of Notting Hill Gate itself. I was still getting my bearings, and in such fine weather, it was pleasant to take my time, to breathe in the spring air and ogle the buildings, which got increasingly impressive the further I descended the hill towards Holland Park. On either side of me rose white-fronted mansions bedecked by wrought-iron latticework, and fronted by immaculate gardens. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how much they may cost, or who might earn the kind of money to buy and then maintain them.
I came to the street I needed, took a right off the main drag. Julie’s appeared on my left and I approached the front door a little self-consciously. I had dressed up, but not because Tatiana had virtually ordered me to. The truth was, I loved it, and I knew also that I would feel crappy if this shop she talked about was brimming with gorgeous antique clothing and accessories. There’s nothing worse than shopping somewhere lovely and then catching sight of yourself in a mirror and realising you’re looking daggy.
I’ve never been a jeans and a sweater type of person. From the earliest age I would sneak upstairs to raid my glamorous maternal grandmother’s wardrobe, to slip on her oversize shoes encrusted with diamanté, to swathe myself in her real-fur stoles. Then I’d sit down in front of her three-mirrored dressing table and dab at my face with her powder-puff before coating my mouth with a slick layer of her lipstick. This was the ’70s, and the colour I remember applying most often was a vibrant orange. I never did my eyes, but I’d dab at her little pots of navy and silver shadows with my fingers and rub them over the backs of my hands to test out the effects.
That carried on, but while I still love dressing up, I’m not swimming in money, and I party too hard, and sometimes I realise the effect I achieve is more Courtney Love on a bad day than offbeat starlet. Today, however, I was Courtney in Versace: a bit ruffled, but sexily so. I’d teased out my ringlets a bit, and my nude-beige dress, knee-length and covered with appliqué white, pink and scarlet flowers, was actually quite downplayed. My lipstick and eye make-up were correspondingly muted.
As I walked in, Tatiana gestured from a table. I had to admit it, she looked good, her platinum-blonde hair offset against an expensive white trouser suit. Silver bangles and a heart pendant at her throat twinkled unobtrusively.
‘Rochelle,’ she said, standing up and walking around the table to kiss me on both cheeks. Her hands clasped my shoulders firmly, in a gesture I felt was a little territorial. I wriggled free, sat down. She did so too. I busied myself opening and scanning the menu; I knew it was rude, but suddenly I wasn’t in the mood for this. Whatever this may be. And of course I felt pretty shifty about what had happened with Morgan.
‘It’s great to see you again,’ she said, leaning across the table and thus forcing me to look up and meet her gaze. ‘What an unexpected pleasure that it be so soon. I’m almost glad my friend cancelled now. Old friends are great, but it’s always nice to make new ones – to extend one’s circle. Don’t you think?’
On her breath I caught a whiff of wine, and looking down I saw that she had almost downed a large glassful while waiting for me. It wasn’t for me to judge, but I did find that noteworthy given that we’d all been drinking the night before – and also given that I hadn’t arrived late, for once in my life.
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Carrie Williams
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 19.09.2024
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О книге: Photographer Rachel and Parisian exotic dancer Rochelle live miles apart in London and Paris. Yet when they agree to swap apartments for six months, both find the excitement of discovering a new city full of surprises.You’ve been seduced by ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series, now prepare to devour ‘The Exchange’.Photographer Rachel is bored in London, whilst over in Paris exotic dancer Rochelle is also weary of her life and unfulfilling relationship with fashion model Konrad. So when they decide to swap lives for six months, anything could happen.On arrival in Paris, Rachel visits Rochelle’s strip club and feels the lure of exhibitionism for the first time. Whilst also succumbing to more than a passing interest in the gorgeous Konrad.Rochelle, meanwhile, falls in with a rich London crowd. For a while a string of random adventures fills the void left by dancing. But enlightenment ultimately comes to Rochelle as she discovers that performing for an audience of one can be just as daring as dancing to a crowd.But when six months is up, what will Rachel and Rochelle leave behind …