Eighty Days Red by Vina Jackson Read Free Book Online

hanging on to.
    He switched the computer to sleep mode, consigning his half-written page to the multicoloured galactic explosion of his screensaver, and rose before stepping away from the desk.
    Glancing at the window, he saw today’s weather was grey but clear, with no signs of imminent rain, and opted for a walk outside to clear his mind.
The Heath was an obvious destination.
It was already mid-morning and joggers were by now thin on the ground, heavily outnumbered by childcarers with prams and buggies, trailing noisy charges, and pensioners ambling idly by the ponds, watching the ducks, feeding them in spite of the warnings not to do so. Past the second pond which expanded into a bathing area, Dominik took the first path and wandered in a daydream towards the narrow bridge connecting this part with wilder areas of the Heath.
This was what he loved so much about London; the infinity of places where within a few minutes’ walk from a main road in almost all areas you could find yourself deep in a landscape of trees, sky shielded from view, a comforting jungle of greenery and nature. There was something almost clandestine about it that appealed deeply to him, a sense of privacy and isolation at the heart of the urban jungle. A place for secrets.
Dominik took a different direction, instinctively opting for the comfort of a winding, barely delineated dirt avenue where a thick canopy of trees blanked out the sky. A jogger came running towards him and he shifted aside to give her right of way on the narrow path. She briefly nodded in acknowledgment. It was a young woman in black leggings, wearing an incongruous pair of emerald-coloured satin shorts and a heavy dark-green sweatshirt. Her dirty-blond hair was held tight together by an elastic band and her ponytail bobbed up and down in her wake, accompanying in delightful synchronicity the rhythmic movement of her breasts despite the obvious constriction of her crop top. As she passed him, Dominik heard a thin melody straining through her headphones before fading as she continued her run away from him.
For some inexplicable reason, he wanted to know what she had been listening to. It felt important.
He stopped and sat for a moment on a felled tree trunk, allowing the fleeting memory of the young woman’s breasts and the indolent rhythm of their movement to linger a while.
Had she been a nurse from the nearby Royal Free Hospital, a student maybe, a housewife, a banker, a shop or an office girl? The possibilities were endless, as a thousand fantasies raced across his imagination. ‘Stop’, ‘Undress’, ‘Reveal yourself to me’ … Not just having her undress, but getting her somehow to unveil what was beneath her skin, what went on in her mind … As he had once attempted with Summer. All so irrational. He quickly banished the thoughts from his mind.
He shrugged, rose and moved on. But the thoughts of Summer lingered. Her wariness the first time they’d met. His proposal, the private concert she had played here, just for him. The fire and passion that consumed her when she held her violin, saturating the Heath with her music.
The bandstand. He wanted to find the bandstand again. The place where Summer had played, a deeply ingrained image he just couldn’t keep out of his mind. The landscape, the colours of the grass and the sky above, and the look of her face as she lost herself in the music.
Summer playing on the bandstand: his lost masterpiece.
Dominik made his way through the wood, saw a faint dash of unnatural colour in the distance. Movements. Figures beyond the thinning wall of trees. Stepping gingerly forward, taking care not to get his clothes caught in the outlying bushes, he emerged into a clearing. Children running around, bikes racing across a set of paths, the bandstand in the distance.
As he walked up the small hill that led to the concrete and iron edifice, he caught the initial drops of rain as the skies opened with a vengeance. Under the bandstand’s