The Unbreakable Trilogy. Primula Bond

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      CHAPTER SEVEN

      The girl solemnly lowers her face into the man’s groin. I stand and watch her. I’m leaning against a warm, cracked wall. All I can see of the man are thick, muscular brown legs, hands pushing the girl’s head brutally into him. All I can see now of her is the tension in her hunched shoulders as she grasps the stone seat he’s sprawled on, her knuckles white, her knees on the stone floor and spread apart to take the strain, her toes curling into the cracks of the paved floor.

      I feel dust come off the wall as I try to move away. There’s a metallic rattle and my short progress is stopped. I’m chained. There are terracotta smears on my arms and hands, on my bare legs. I’m naked apart from a scrap of faded, torn cloth wound under my arms and again round my waist. My hair is coiled up on top of my head, and every part of me is dripping with sweat.

      It’s so hot.

      In this low ceilinged, claustrophobic room the shade is impenetrable and black. The top half of the man is hidden in shadow. But it still feels like an oven in here. I glance outside. I make no effort to get out because I know I’m in a kind of prison. The sky was its usual bowl of bright blue when I walked here through the city earlier, but now, through one small window, I see that it’s turned a dull, angry yellow, hanging low over Pompeii and scratched across with grey smoke. The ground is shaking and simmering as if we’ve all been set upon a stove. The air is choking hot. Hotter than I’ve ever known it.

      A pair of hands grabs my wrist. I have a thick metal cuff on both wrists, joined by a stubby chain, and the person unhooks me from the wall and leads me by this chain out of this little chamber and into another one even darker than the first. I am pushed onto my knees just like the other girl. They scrape painfully on the stone floor. That was blood mixed with the terracotta dust on my skin.

      As I fall against the ledge which acts as a bed, the whole world seems to shake. I’m sure I can hear people running and shouting outside.

      But I can’t move. I’m chained up again. Big, rough hands are on my bottom, fanning over it, wrenching the cheeks open. There could be more than two people in here with me, that’s normal business, but I can see nothing and no-one because it’s pitch dark in here.

      I can only hear a kind of grunting, smell musky sweat, I can only see a strip of daylight on the floor, and as someone bends me further forwards and pushes something between my butt cheeks, nudging into the reluctant tightness of my bottom, it’s a finger, no, two fingers, something else thick and hard, I stretch out to scrape at the strip of daylight and all at once it is gone and in its place the chamber is full as the yellow sky crashes right in along with grey clouds and choking piles of dry dust.

      The pillows are pressing down on my head as I clutch at fragments of the nightmare. I fling them off me and thank goodness I’m not in the dark chamber of a brothel at the foot of Vesuvius but in a quiet attic in the middle of London. Far from the world being hot and yellow and about to erupt, it looks cold and grey out there and only good for staying warm in bed.

      In the morning light this room seems bigger than it looked last night. I am dazzled by all the whiteness, the light flooding in framed by three arched windows. Hanging on the door of the wardrobe is a pale blue jersey dress I didn’t notice before and a brand new pair of shiny brown boots. My caramel tweed jacket is arranged over the dress, the blue check picked out perfectly by the dress. I wash quickly in the little white bathroom and get dressed.

      There is a romantic-looking balcony outside the window and although it’s windy and cold out there I step outside to blow the cobwebs away.

      Down below my window is the quiet square, and there’s the sad statue on its plinth, poised for flight and gazing straight at me which is strange, because the other night he was positioned facing down the hill. Parked outside the house is a huge silver Audi four-by-four with a chauffeur standing beside it, built like a tank and uniformed to the hilt. The chauffeur glances up at me and taps his watch.

      The exhibition is complete and ready for tonight’s private view. The gallery looks superb. Better than any graduate show could ever hope to look. Slick, sophisticated, sorted. In the space of a few days my best images have been printed, blown up, framed and hung. The huge space at the top of the Levi Building is filled by my work. My work! I wish my dear old tutor was here to see this.

      There are acres of whitewashed wall with meaningful clusters of mostly black and white photographs grouped according to theme or place. I have spent the day standing on a chair in the middle of the huge empty space of the gallery like Boadicea directing a small army of workers to group the pictures into themes.

      Now each picture is labelled with the legend I had carefully stored on my camera and thought I’d lost. My name and the title of the collection – Halloween – are all signed in cool, lower-case font and they’re the first things you see when you come out of the lift.

      I’ve been home to the flat and chosen a long red sheath dress of Polly’s to wear for the private view. It’s pretty daring and vampish, a halter neck slashed between my breasts to the navel, then draped across the hips in the style of a Grecian goddess.

      Gustav has been absent all day, but the instruction he’s given the tall spiky lady from downstairs, whose name I now know is Crystal and who told me earlier that my jacket and dress and boots СКАЧАТЬ