Eighty Days Yellow by Vina Jackson Read Free Book Online

had then heavily fallen and it seemed her violin was now a total write-off.
    Dominik hurriedly read through the short piece twice, rushing to the end. The woman’s name was Summer. Summer Zahova. Despite the Eastern European surname, she appeared to be from New Zealand.
    It must be her.
    Tottenham Court Road, violin . . . who else could it be?
    She was unlikely to go busking if she was presently without an instrument in working order, so the chances of meeting her again, let alone listening to her play, had now evaporated into thin air.
    Dominik sat back, unwittingly crumpling the newspaper in his fist and throwing it to the ground in anger.
    He did have a name though: Summer.
    He collected his thoughts, remembered how, some years before, he had gently stalked an ex-lover across the Internet, if only to find out what had become of her and how her life after him was proceeding. Unilateral stalking as it turned out to be, as she remained quite unaware of his discreet surveillance.
    Moving to his study, he booted up his computer and Googled the young musician’s name. There were very few hits, but it did indicate she was on Facebook.
    The photo on her Facebook page was artless and at least a few years old, but he recognised her in an instant. Maybe it had been taken in New Zealand, which led him to speculate how long she might have been in London, in England.
    At rest and not pursed in the throes of playing her violin, her mouth stood lipsticked brilliant red, and Dominik couldn’t help speculate how it would feel having his erection enveloped by the fiery lusciousness of those lips.
    Summer Zahova’s page was in part privacy-protected and he was unable to take a peek at her wall or even a list of her friends, and the personal details were somewhat sparse beyond her name, town of origin and London as place of residence, plus a declared interest in both men and women, as well as a list of classical composers and some pop among her likes. No mention of books or movies; clearly she was not someone who spent much time on Facebook.
    But he had an ‘in’.
    Later that evening, having weighed up a multitude of pros and cons, Dominik returned to the deafening silence of his laptop screen, logged on to Facebook and created a new account under a pretend name, albeit with a minimum of personal details that made Summer’s page chatty in comparison. He hesitated over his choice of photo, considered downloading an image of someone wearing an elaborate Venice Carnival mask, but eventually left his picture blank. It would have been a tad melodramatic. The text alone was sufficiently intriguing and enigmatic, he felt.
    Now, as his new persona, he typed out a message for Summer:
    Dear Summer Zahova,
    I was most sorry to hear of your ordeal. I am a great admirer of your musicianship, and to ensure you are able to continue your practice, I am willing to gift you with a new violin.
    Are you willing to accept my challenge and my terms?
    He left the message deliberately unsigned and clicked on ‘send’.

3
    A Girl and Her Arse
    I stared at the broken remains of my violin with a strange sense of detachment.
    Without the instrument in my hands, I felt as though I wasn’t really present, as if I had watched the whole scene unfold from above. Disassociation, my high-school guidance counsellor had named it, when I tried to explain the way that I felt when I wasn’t holding a violin. I preferred to think of my peculiar mental flights both into and out of music as a type of magic, though I imagined that my talent for disappearing into melody was really just a heightened awareness in one part of my brain, resulting from a very focused sort of desire.
    I might have wept if I’d been the weeping sort. It wasn’t that I didn’t get upset about things, just that I have a different way of dealing with emotion, my feelings seeping through my body and usually leaking out through either my bow or some other physical expression, such as angry, emotional