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Lights strobe in neon flashes, so that the figures on the dance-floor appear to move in slow motion. The music takes my puff-clock cares and gently blows them away. We came to the club from the gallery in several taxis, ordered by Daniel, all of which he filled with attractive twentysomething females. We moved in a group at first, conscious of his power, like dancing girls undulating around a king. Then I drifted away. The pleasure of dancing is transcendent, as though I’ve been released from the machine of my body. All the best experiences – dancing, music, art – negate the body, even while they stem from it. Beyond my happiness, there still lingers an unease that is vague but more permanent than my immediate cares and concerns – a sense of something being wrong. But I’m used to that being the backdrop to my life. That is life.
The guy with the duck reappears, tunnelling through the dancers, his feathered friend in the crook of his arm. God knows how he managed to talk his way past the bouncers. He whispers once more that his name is Jaime and that he knows that my name is Rachel and that he really, really needs to speak to me.
Outside, we stand in an alleyway fogged with cigarette smoke. He keeps trying to tell me that we’re in a book. As chat-up 124lines go, it’s certainly zany, but also cheesy as fuck: I’m waiting for him to add that it’s a romance novel. Then I see the intensity in his eyes and I fear that his eccentricity, so endearing in the gallery, speaks to something more dangerous. I recognise it and sympathise with it, but its familiarity also repulses me. Undeterred, he carries on, telling me about Victorian England and someone called Gwent, and I smile politely, nodding all the while, thinking, Why do I attract these types? It’s followed by a more superficial thought: It’s a shame too, when he’s so good-looking. Then he tells me about Fate again. Fate: the word snags me with a feeling of unease.
I ask him to describe how on earth we got here.
‘You don’t remember that kind of moment,’ he replies scornfully, his voice rising. ‘The same way that nobody remembers the split second when warmth and darkness give way to the shock of air and screaming and a surgeon in your face. You only ever remember some time later, lying in a nursery, watching the swirl of a mobile.’ He says the word ‘fate’ once more and suddenly there’s a prickle in my throat. I swallow it down.
‘I get what you’re trying to say,’ I reply, waving my cigarette around idiotically. ‘Life is all about narratives, right? We edit our pasts.’
‘It’s not a metaphor. I saved you, remember? You were in a carriage, being taken away to an asylum, and I saved you.’
‘What about your duck?’ I ask. ‘Does he think he’s in a book too?’
‘Oh God – I knew I shouldn’t have brought the bloody duck! I’m just duck-sitting, that’s all. Look, I know the duck really isn’t helping here, but just hear me out—’
‘Actually, if it wasn’t for the duck, I think I might have scarpered a long time ago.’ I bend down to ruffle the duck’s head with 125the tip of my finger. Then Daniel comes out and asks if Jaime is bothering me. It’s easier to say yes, and soon the bouncers are dragging away both the protesting man and his duck.
Daniel’s Deansgate flat must have cost him at least several million. Peering through the green lattice of his houseplants, I eye up Manchester’s sprawl with affection. I might have been born in Camden, but I’m a Northerner in my soul. His living room is busy with fancy sofas, black lamps and bubble-wrapped pieces of art. Daniel offers me a tab with a smiley face on it. I only pretend to take it: the night already feels as though someone has slipped something into my drink, and adding another drug into the mix might break me. Daniel invites two of us – me and a girl with honey hair (am I girl A or girl B, target or back-up plan?) – to look at his study, which he says contains all sorts of gems for a forthcoming exhibition on Victorian erotica at the Lowry. The other girls sprawl across the sofas; two of them start kissing, willingly becoming an exhibit. Daniel smirks at them, then turns his back.
He points to the Bouguereau hanging on the wall and says, ‘Do you remember John Berger’s essay, Ways of Seeing? Berger said that the female nude was never a woman truly naked, but a woman lined up for the male gaze. A passive woman with an active male protagonist looking at her.’
‘Bouguereau was a Victorian painter … It wasn’t a great time for women,’ I say, wishing my voice wouldn’t slur so. ‘In The Descent of Man, Darwin said that the “intuitive powers” he found in women were characteristic of “the lower races and therefore a lower state of civilisation”. The bastard.’ 126
The girl with the honey-coloured hair stares up at a Bronzino print: Cupid cupping Venus’s breast.
‘Me, I love women,’ says Daniel. ‘I love to surround myself with them.’ He seems to presume that his natty tie and Hugo Boss suits divide him from the men in frock coats and waistcoats of 1861. ‘Come.’ He puts his hands on my shoulders and guides me towards a humped shape. When he pushes me down, beneath a black cloth, I try to resist, but he shushes me and promises that I will love this. ‘It’s a mutoscope,’ he explains.
I stare through the lens at the circle of film projected on to the screen. A caption: The Mouse in the House. It runs in sepia, its images jumpy, as if the film itself is winking lasciviously at its subject matter. Two women, frightened of a mouse, jump on to a table and raise their skirts. It was considered terribly risqué back in 1900, Daniel informs me. Then, a series of images: a topless woman draped over a chaise longue, her fingers entwined in pearls; two maids lifting their frilly white dresses to show off their bums. The women are plump, their skin as soft as ripe fruit, and there is a bashful innocence to their poses that today’s porn stars have given up trying to imitate. I am embarrassed to feel a pulse between my legs, but the shame is also part of the pleasure. And then I see – me. Or rather, the Rachel of 1861, right there in the kaleidoscope of sexuality. I’m posing with a peacock feather, my governess’s dress slung on to the chair behind me, and I can hear Mr Carmichael’s voice cajoling me to lower the feather just a little more, just a little more, his excitement measured out in inches. The picture clicks. I am replaced by a topless woman in a tatty mermaid’s costume.
I stand up, reeling. I would have hit the floor if Daniel hadn’t steadied me. In moon-eyed shock, I look him up and down 127as though searching for the pencil sketches beneath his suit. You’re not real, I mutter.
‘What the hell is the matter with you tonight?’ Daniel hisses. He instructs the other girl to take me to the bathroom, but I tell her that I need a taxi. She escorts me down herself. Now that I am no longer her rival, she is ready to be kind. In the lift, she keeps giggling and posing in the mirror, twisting sheaves of hair across her lip in false moustaches.
‘Are you one of us?’ I ask her. ‘Are you one of Gwent’s refugees?’
She lifts an eyebrow and applies some cerise lipstick.
His flat is next to the Hilton; I head to the taxi rank outside it. My lips recite an address on autopilot. I slip in, slam the door and panic again: How the hell am I going to afford a taxi all the way to Chorlton? Digging around in my handbag, I locate my purse. There’s a rainbow of credit cards in the wallet section. I pull out a spray of notes, and a draught blows them over the seat and floor. The driver glances at me in his rear-view mirror as I scramble about, collecting them.
I close my eyes, rest my head against the seat. Beneath the disorientation is a relief, of sorts. I’m glad I’m in Gwent’s story, rather than the 2019 I left behind. But I’m not sure who the Rachel Levy of this world is meant to be. I feel as though my body is a sketch, and I need to block in the colours. I’m too close to being myself again. That moment when I entered Fate’s world was euphoric. The Rachel that Fate superimposed on me put her hands around my neck and suffocated me. I was able to lie in the back of her consciousness in a blissful coma, in 128a forgotten room with no visitors. She dictated my script; and the strictness of the society around us dictated our actions.
I pull my mobile out of my bag and check the contacts folder. It’s empty. I look out into the night and wonder after Jaime: he must be cursing me.
‘Here,’ the cab driver says.
I have a feeling he’s said that to me several times and is losing patience. I get out of the cab and notice, through the smear of his window, how tired he looks. He’s probably keen to get home to his family and a warm bed. I give him a ten-pound tip and his face lights up. The act feels like an anchor; I want my new self to be kind.
I stand in the cold night, looking up at my new home. It’s a big Victorian house, with a flaky face and black beams like shaggy eyebrows arched over its porch. Inside, tatty carpeting on the stairs leads me to the second floor and my flat, number 27.