From Tallulah Thursday

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‘’I am the great God, the self-created’’

(From the Pyramid texts Amun Re)

 

           Part One

London Now

Chelsea Kings Road

Chapter 1

Jean –Jacques

He sips his coffee slowly, it burns the back of his throat but in a good way, flushing away the vodka and the tell-tale cigarette taste of last night’s party. Mostly he is waiting for a glimpse of her, she comes here every morning at about this time and sits at the corner table with her back to him looking out over the Duke of York Square at the commuter crowd and the Chelsea girls sublimely purring their way to work on those long legs of theirs that only Chelsea girls seem to have. He first noticed her about a week ago, a drift of musky perfume wafted across the crowded café and hit his nose as he’d been queuing up for his espresso and he’d turned his head, and  craned his neck to see where the delicious odour originated from.Then there she was and even her silhouette intrigued him, her back was turned away from him her long dark hair pinned up loosely in a bun, her side profile sharp and elegant. He clocked immediately the high cheekbones that were so sharp you could cut yourself on them, oriental or even Icelandic perhaps. Once on a stag night in Reykjavik he had fallen in love with an Icelandic girl, but that was back then and this is now. She has a slim toned body and the proverbial huge pair of dark sunglasses clasped around her small face almost like a bandage. He hasn’t seen her eyes, not yet at any rate and she could be anywhere between thirty and fifty, he isn’t very good with guessing the age of women. But he doesn’t care, that first look was enough and he was hooked.She is simply the most divine and mysterious creature that he has come across in a long time. Definitely something other worldly and exotic about her, and yet there is a poignant fragility and delicacy in her small sharp little hands grasping the coffee cup as if her life depended on it.  He feels a part of him blossom and open out as if he wants to reach over and protect her, ridiculous really but that is how she affects him. For the first time in his life the hairs stand up on the back of his neck it is a weird and uncomfortable sensation and he has the strangest of feelings that he recognises her from somewhere deep down in his memory of the past.Yes, he gets the strongest of feelings that he must know her already: but of course he doesn’t, how can he? He wonders momentarily if she is a movie star that he should know the name of, she has that kind of charisma about her, that definite quality of being in the world without being part of it. No one has ever made him think these things before, at least not a woman; he usually confines his ‘romantic’ thoughts to how and when he is next going to get laid. Afterwards it is how to make a quick getaway from the bedroom without leaving any of himself behind. Somehow with these girls nowadays when you are done you are done, and you just have to get the hell out of there. But something about this woman is different, it isn’t pure lust that he is feeling , it is something else, something unusual for him, and he doesn’t want to put a name to it, he doesn’t want to call it interest and desire , but maybe he might have to.Jean –Jacques is tired of London high life, tired of all the silly little girls that he meets in their designer clothes, with their tantrums and dramas. He wants an affair with someone who has really lived, and not just existed in the bubble of their Daddy’s trust fund.  At twenty five he is tall dark and handsome, clever and immensely rich, from his father’s side, the family own one of the major cosmetic companies in the world. The Trammel range, unequalled in size and scope except perhaps by Max Factor and over the years in his---‘’In house training’ ----He has butted up against some of the most beautiful women in the world and of course he has had his fair share of them too, in the biblical sense of the word.  The boss’s son always gets what he wants almost immediately, no questions asked. But now he is tired of it all, he had woken up last Thursday morning looking for an adventure. So after showering in his state of the art wet room and carefully patting the accoutrements of his after shave regime onto his expensive face he had walked out into the spring sunshine and sauntered into the local coffee shop near his designer flat overlooking Sloane Square. There he had found her, like a gift glowing in the pale sunshine which flecked red and gold streaks in her luxuriant dark hair.She looked like an Egyptian statue, a Queen from some lost civilisation, but here he is waxing too lyrical, her outer beauty just fits with his inner vision of what a woman should be, exotic, slightly aloof, definitely incorruptible by the luxuriant pleasures he is most used to. But then again he is sounding too romantic, idiotic really his friends would never stop teasing him if they knew what he was thinking and he has to stop himself. Suffice it to say that something in him is completely sure that there is an extraordinary destiny waiting for him with someone and this woman might just fit the bill.All his life he has been told that he is talented and unusual, and so he has come to believe the parental hype, bought into their vision of their handsome clever son. His friends sometimes call him ‘’spoilt’’ but he just sees it as his right, to pick and choose, to mix big business with pleasure when and wherever he can find it. Yet at the back of his brain is the fairy tale marriage his mother used to tell him about when she read him his bedtime story. On those rare occasions when his mother was actually there of course and climbed up onto his comfy bed beside him so that he was enveloped in her perfume and the soft touch of her warm skin.  That had been the beginning of his need for women and he loved his mother of course he did but he was too often relegated to the company of one of the many nannies who came and went.Their average working life in the household usually spanned out as no longer than a few months, something always happened to them, whether they were too pretty and his father would have a clandestine affair as all French men did of a certain age, an affair that was inevitably discovered. Or they were too efficient and tiresome and his mother got rid of them saying that they depressed her and gave the house a bad atmosphere. Poor girls they couldn’t win really but he supposed that they got paid handsomely for their troubles.That is until of course he was old enough to be seduced by one of the prettier ones when he was fifteen, then he likes to think that they stayed longer because of his prowess in the bedroom. He smiles remembering the thrill of those stolen nights where one Swedish girl after another accepted him between their sheets in the dead of night and right under his parents’ nose. Trouble was if his parents had woken up they probably wouldn’t have cared much, they would just have seen it as a bonus in his education.His mother and father being French minor aristocracy with a hint of Jewish ancestry had a bewildering range of double standards for their lives. It was ok for him to be a philanderer as long as he knew that one day he would have to buckle down and marry for the dynasty so to speak. That’s why he has run away to London; at least here he has a dangerous kind of freedom where pretty much anything goes, and no one to fuss and watch over him asking him if he has eaten enough as his mother  always does when he is at home in Paris.He watches as the intriguing woman finishes her coffee, and he begins to notice little inconsequential things about her that please him. He notices the length of her dark eyelashes peeping from above the sunglasses as she hooks them further down her nose to glance at her mobile phone and then gets up to leave looking quickly around her. He notices a faint fuzz of peach like hair on the skin of her cheek as it catches the light, and most of all he looks longingly at the long shapely curve of her legs in her dark stockings.  She looks directly at him and momentarily pauses, a faint playful smile playing over her full lips. Lips that are painted with a vibrant shade of blood red lipstick that he immediately wants to kiss, but more than that he wants to see it smeared across her palest of skins. He wants to draw patterns on her body with it; yes he wants to watch her pink tongue protrude from those white teeth as she pants away from him.  But all this is in his head and he is instantly getting a painful erection which just won’t do: and it is nine am and she has absolutely no idea of his existence that much is plain.She gives a small toss of her head like an impatient pony, very girlish and looking at her she could be twenty or even a teenager. The woman is timeless and he feels like he has walked into a Rider Haggard novel, that ‘’She’ is the one that he has been waiting for. She reminds him of one of the Goddesses of the silent screen, Louise Brooks or Clara Bow, but mostly she reminds him of the lost Egyptian Queen Nefertiti the most beautiful and mysterious woman the world has ever known.He has seen the famous statue of the bust of the Queen in the Museum in Berlin; Jean – Jacques, a gauche fourteen year old had been forced to wander around the city alone for the day while his father attended one of his endless business meetings.  At the time he hadn’t thought much about it, but now the way this woman carries herself, the angle of the long curved elegance of her neck reminds him of the lovely statue and if he thinks about it she has a definite regal quality in her stance, all this reminds him of the image. She exudes sensuality, but in a totally uncaring way. Not at all like the usual self-conscious women that he sees walking the streets of Chelsea.----If he only knew who she is! -----She turns abruptly and walks away from him, her small firm body enveloped in her tight skinny jeans and soft cashmere jumper, and in leaving the café she takes the morning light with her. Immediately a big black cloud covers the Square and it begins to rain. Mentally he sees her in furs and high heels, in black stockings and in silk lingerie with nothing but pearls swinging from her long pale neck. The door flashes open and shut, she is a shadow past the window, she is the fantasy of his morning glory, she is his bedtime obsession, she is his early morning lady, and he’ll have to wait a full twenty four hours to pluck up the courage to find out who she is.Tomorrow morning he will pluck up enough courage to buy her a coffee and maybe even ask her out to dinner. He is never usually this tardive in getting what he wants but he is so fed up with the quick fix of this instant gratification generation that he lives in that this time he is prepared to wait a little to get what he has been dreaming about every night for the past week. All his dreams have produced so far are a stonking uncomfortable erection every morning as he wakes up, his heart beating as she disappears away from him around a corner of his dreams.He has plenty of girls he can fuck anytime he wants to but this time he wants something more than just sex and he is determined to have her as his lover whatever he has to do to clinch the deal. He thinks of everything in business terms nowadays, his French romantic heritage seems to have completely deserted him and he feels stale and unloved and slightly sorry for himself.With a long sigh he irritably pockets his IPhone which is beeping with messages from the office; his father is in Switzerland this week talking to the chemists about a new form of stem cell eye cream made from the umbilical cords of a certain rare kind of mountain sheep. The whole thing sounds disgusting, but he is busy on the PR side of things and doesn’t have to delve too deeply into the questionable ethics of trying to keep women young. No all he has to do is arrange the advertising budget and if that means that he can saunter into the film shoots and maybe select the odd model or two on the casting couch all well and good, but even that doesn’t quicken his appetite today.Quickly he shrugs on his jacket and heads for the door just in time to see her turning the corner of the Square and disappearing up the Kings Road in the direction of Habitat. She hails a taxi, climbs into it and he has the fleeting impression of a pair of upwardly curved dark brown eyes looking inquisitively at him as the cab drives away.---- A pair of brown eyes so dark they could be black, regarding him from a face which is a blur in the back of the taxi.----That decides him, dark brown slanted eyes are his favourite and Jean- Jacques isn’t a Frenchman for nothing. He can charm the knickers of most of SW1 if he is in the mood, and he is definitely in the mood to give it a go. Tomorrow he’ll buy her a coffee, tomorrow he will break the spell and find out who she is. Tomorrow his life will begin.

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