So I used Sensei Eddy’s palm strike. I hit Andrei on his naked chest with astonishing power and speed. At first, he barely realised what I had done. But then a look of pale horror came into his face as it dawned on him something was terribly wrong. His heart had stopped, he was dying.
I struck him again, the heart restarted, and then I clambered aboard his penis and we fucked. We continued to fuck, standing upright, for almost forty-five minutes. Andrei’s powerful legs kept me propped upright, I felt as if I was in clouds floating high in the air as he fucked me. The escalating orgasms began to blur into each other.
“Wow,” he said, some time later.
The next day, we flew to New York and went to galleries and Broadway and ate bagels named after famous Jewish comedians. We walked through Time Square, we flew in a ’copter around the Statue of Liberty, and we yawned our way through a musical version of the Bush Presidencies. Then we went back to our hotel and I took my clothes off and danced naked and touched myself and licked and sucked my fingers and when none of that worked I hit him in the chest until he died then I hit him again and we made mad passionate love until the morning.
The next day, same story. We bathed together in our de luxe hotel suite, we turned the whirlpool bath on, we splashed and made a mess. Then we ran into the bedroom and I killed him and brought him back to life and we had sex.
And I realised, with a profound dismay, that our sex would always be this way. Andrei suffered from a severe form of impotence, entirely psychological, but impervious to therapy. The first time he must have been using barrowloads of stimulants, Viagra probably. And even then, it was touch and go. The second time was Andrei unassisted, and it just didn’t work.
But now Andrei had finally found a way of achieving erection without taking drugs. And there was no going back.
This appalled me. Rough sex is one thing. But this was like a nightmare version of a sex life. What if I actually did kill him? What if I weakened his heart and he suffered a massive cardiac arrest, because of my elaborate foreplay?
This wasn’t what I signed up for. Love, yes, romance, yes, sex, yes. Daily acts of murder? No. A thousand times no.
And yet I was devoted to Andrei. He had a presence that eclipsed all others. When we were together, clothed, he was my god. So I made no complaint. And thus I embraced a life that involved frequent, frantic, amazing, exhilarating, incredibly dangerous sex.
Before long, Sex and Death defined our relationship; it made me the master, the bringer of death, the restorer of life. And it made Andrei obsessed and besotted with me; he virtually worshipped me.
We bought a house in London. I learned to garden. I decorated with my usual style and panache. And we built a gym, where Andrei could work out. We had dinner parties, and we invited artists and politicians and athletes to talk and mingle and we created a wonderful charmed world. I loved it all. And I loved the person that I was then. I was warm, witty, inspired, intensely civilised. I was never shy at parties. I was adorable, a pleasure to be with.
But to please Andrei sexually, I had to become a different self. He didn’t want nice, he wanted snarling. He started asking me to dress up, in the most cliched ways imaginable. I wore leather basques and high heels in private, crotchless panties in public. I had my clit pierced. I became his murderous bitch from Hell and he loved me for it. That was the trade, the deal, and I did the deal and never let him down.
But it’s not what I wanted. I wanted warm, safe, comfy. I had to settle for… dangerous.
We travelled the world. We made love in Venice, in Paris, we fucked outdoors, we booked expensive hotel rooms and spent days at a time enjoying ourselves in dank and endless sensuality.
And I felt, with a certainty that was like shackles around my heart, that I was always going to be obliged to play a role for Andrei. I couldn’t just be. I couldn’t ever slob around in jeans or a tracksuit. Or be cranky, or irrational, or annoying. Or in any way betray that air of “mystery” he found so beguiling. I always had to project a certain image – exotic, exciting, seductive. A whore in the bedroom; a femme fatale in the kitchen.
And so, even when we had lunch in the local cafe, I wore my boldest, most beautiful dresses. If we went to dinner parties, I placed expensive diamonds around my neck, and then I flirted with his friends and talked dirty to them in front of him. To keep my body worthy of his awe, I worked out in the gym until the sweat poured from my face and torso. To prove my commitment and fearlessness, I trained with him in his karate dojo, and I punched the makiwari until my knuckles were like white coins. I sucked his soft cock every morning, and three times a week we did our Sex and Death game then afterwards drank champagne until we vomited.
In pursuit of his pleasure, I drove myself mercilessly, I permitted myself barely any relaxation. I never read books, my musical tastes narrowed, I lost touch with all my own friends. I mixed, instead, in Andrei’s world. I was his concubine, his sex slave, his ever-seductive shadow self. But I was never just, as I yearned to be, his pal.
In some ways, I can see now, all this role playing gave me power over Andrei. He was besotted with me, he would happily have killed for me. But instead of manipulating him, and stealing his money, and breaking his heart, as any sensible woman would have done, I was obsessed with being everything for him.
So, bit by bit, I moulded myself to make him happy. I studied my own character flaws and eradicated them. I became attuned to his every mood. For an amazing run of several years, I never ever got on my man’s nerves.
I stopped laughing that silly laugh that I knew he found irritating.
I ate croissants for breakfast because he did, though I preferred toast.
I let him watch me piss and shit on the toilet.
I mocked him when he was being pompous, because he saw himself as the kind of man who didn’t mind being teased. But I never corrected him when he made arrogant and half-baked statements about politics or science.
If it was late at night, or we were lost somewhere, I pretended to be tired and frightened and vulnerable, so that he could be the calm and comforting one.
I never expressed my opinions when he liked a film and I didn’t. I just smiled, and let him explain to me why it was so marvellous. Since he was a connoisseur of Far Eastern martial arts films and car-chase movies, this took considerable self-control on my part.
I never challenged his judgements about other people, which were often shallow and naive.
I let him beat me at Scrabble, though his vocabulary was pitifully small.
I encouraged him to admire other women and openly swapped notes with him about other women’s breasts or tums or legs. I offered to have lesbian sex in front of him, though I never did. And I pretended to fly into terrible rages whenever I thought he was becoming overly fond of another attractive woman. That really turned him on.
Andrei was a great man in many ways, and he used his fame and wealth in the service of the greater good of mankind. He was a pioneer of educational reform, he raised money for charity, and he was a personal mentor to thousands of disadvantaged children. Most people considered him to be a marvellous, mysterious individual. For me, though, he was an open book, a puppet dancing on my strings. I knew his every weakness and desire, and I pandered to him totally.
Looking back, I am ashamed of myself.
Then I became pregnant. It was a shock. But I said nothing to him. I just nursed my embryo, and dreamed of baby milk and poo and squawling baby nights and all the terror and the joy and pain and perfection of it. And the more I thought about it all, the more my dreams crumbled.
For I knew Andrei wouldn’t want the baby. That wasn’t part of the package. He wanted a lover who would worship and exalt him; not a mother, a fat-bellied weeping woman obsessed with cots and baby books.
But how could I really know that? Without asking Andrei? Without giving him a chance to make his own mind up? That’s the question I feel you asking. So yes, maybe I misjudged Andrei, maybe I took too much on myself. Maybe I denied him the one thing in the world he would have treasured most.
But no. I’m sure of it. I knew my Andrei. He would not want a child. So I had my embryo removed and placed in an artificial womb at eight weeks. The womb was then frozen and placed in store.
One hundred years later, I unfroze the embryo, and Peter was born.
Andrei never saw his child.
He died long before Peter was born.
I went to visit Andrei in hospital just once. He had succumbed to a particularly virulent strain of cancer that ate up his organs and his nervous system and turned him into a gnawed skeleton while he was still alive.
