Charlotte stood behind the glass display counter as the erotic fantasies rolled through her head. Spring was coming and wedding rings were the hot ticket item at McKenna’s Jewellers. The diamond rings sparkled on black velvet mats in the display windows, as she arranged the tiny price tags. A man in his early 30s smiled at her through the window and looked at one of the more expensive rings: an 18-carot diamond set in a small cluster of emeralds. An unusual piece. Her favourite. She smiled back and noticed a bulge in his groin. Her pulse raced and she attached the last tag but not before the man moved between her thighs and she raked her nails along his back.

Her girlfriends talked over each other at Friday night drinks. They brayed about their jobs, who was up who and what they were doing for their holidays. Kylie said Jeremy, a digital media manager in his late 20s, had finally found her clitoris after three years of marriage. Everyone laughed. Was it on Google Maps? More laughter. Sky returned from the bar armed with drinks and said Jimbo, her boyfriend of two years blindfolded her the other night during sex, and she had an orgasm like a supernova. She pictured a young Brad Pitt on top of her, rather than an overweight KPMG accountant with Gynecomastia. Is there a crème for that? More laugher. Charlotte wanted to know if any of her friends fantasised about having sex with an older brother but she remained stumm. She crossed her legs and quietly sipped her Pinot Grigio.

Charlotte was 22 and lived with her mother. She’d worked at McKenna’s since leaving school. One of her arty friends, who was always putting her down, said she looked like the girl from Amélie. Charlotte looked up Audrey Tautou and saw no resemblance at all. In a world where people wore their sexual identities like armbands, Charlotte lived a life of quiet heterosexuality. Too quiet. It would be easier if she were a lesbian or transitioning. She’d have profile, currency and cachet. The issue was the ongoing thrust of sexual fantasies rising through her subconscious with a burning Bible in one hand and a sacrificial knife stabbing social norms in the other.

She didn’t interpret the fantasies as a psychological problem. Her older sister, Harriet, consulted psychologists on the shallowest of pretexts. She had the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders catalogued in her head. Yet her sister, a self-centred and gossipy shrew, who treated Charlotte like dog shit, was a relatively normal young woman who gravitated to victimhood. After gouging Harriet’s bank account with exorbitant fees, the shrinks provided her with a raft of comforting labels to describe a condition which didn’t exist. Charlotte wasn’t going down that path.

After thumbing through glossy women’s magazines and a consultation with Doctor Google, she concluded her revelries were not only normal, but tame. An unreliable Cosmopolitan survey stated seven per cent of women fantasised about having sex with their father. Electra was alive and well. Five per cent thought nothing of being peed on and vice a versa. Three per cent had recurring fantasies about entertaining the family dog. Charlotte could never look a their ageing border collie, Max, the same way again. The projections were natural and the product of the female imagination feasting on the profane and taboo. One Boomer feminist said female sexuality was a drunken Maenad satisfying herself then killing the man after consummation. Fair enough. Charlotte was paid $120.00 a week less than Roger, a pimply twerp, who did exactly the same work she did but in slow motion.

It was a Tuesday like any other but more so, when the man on the other side of the window, entered the shop. He was tall. Wide shoulders. Maybe a swimmer. He’d cut himself shaving. She pictured herself licking the wound and pulled herself together. Up close there was a touch of George Clooney about him, painted by Picasso.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning. I saw you the other day”

“Yes, that was me. Always busy, busy, busy”. Shut up Charlotte. You’re an idiot, she thought.

“I saw a diamond ring with emeralds around it. May I have a look at it?”

“It’s a gorgeous piece”

She unlocked the sliding glass window and plucked the ring off the black velvet pad and placed it in front of him.

“For the girlfriend or wife?”

“Neither. Mum lost her engagement ring some months ago and as Dad passed away last year, I thought I’d replace it for her. A little surprise”

God and all the saints in heaven, Charlotte thought. Do they make them like this any more? As he stared at the ring, she looked at his fingers. Long and supple. Not too thick. Clean nails. That’s important. He smelt good too. Freshly scrubbed. A hint of mint in the shampoo. His hands were tied to the bed as she rode him cowgirl style, selfish in her needs. He looked up at her helplessly. She was in control. What she wanted, she took. Those big brown eyes. He was flexing deep inside her. It wouldn’t be long now.

“I’ll take it”

“I’m so glad. Your mother is in for a big surprise”

She placed the ring in a small velvet-lined black box and wrapped it in velvet-textured crepe paper. He paid with American Express.

He looked at the polished jarrah floor, pocketed the ring, said thanks and walked to the door before turning back.

“I’m sorry. This is terribly forward but would you like to go out for a drink with me this Friday night? You seem very nice”

Should she play hard to get and knock him back? But then he’d have no reason to come back in to the shop, unless he wanted to buy another ring but why would he do that? If she seemed too eager, that made her appear desperate. There was always one’s dignity to consider.

“Friday night would be fine. I finish at six o’clock. Maybe you would like to meet me here.”

A smile opened like a zipper across his tanned face with an expensive gold crown squatting on one of his molars. American Express, gold teeth and he loves his mother.

“See you then,” he said and walked slowly, purposely, out of the shop.

Charlotte turned her attention to polishing the gold rings and sliding them slowly up and down the ivory display obelisks. While she wasn’t putting all of her eggs in one basket, her eggs were happy. Then it hit her. She didn’t know his name.

xxxxxxx

Charlotte was named after one of the Bronte sisters and was bought up in a house full of books and music. While none of this was wasted on her – she knew who Brahms was and could quote short passages of Dickens – the most interesting aspects of the life of the mind was sex. As befitting an all girls’ school private education, she maintained an aloofness, which made her peers – boys especially – think she was stuck up. This was far from the truth. The ice queen mask served only to attract the jocks who wanted to brag about taking her virginity, which she lost one night in the back seat of a Morris Minor to a young pimply chinned chess champion from Blackfriars, who looked like Roger.

She mused while cleaning the display cabinets on the afternoon of the date, that there were significant and intractable problems with wanting the tall man with the broad swimmer’s shoulders, to rip her clothes off, tie her to the bed and make her call him ‘daddy’. While she wasn’t in the vanguard of the MeToo# movement, she agreed with the general thrust of their arguments. Men could be violent sexual perpetrators, preying on girls and women.

Something troubled her. These men – and a handful of women – whether by calculation or weakness, were sick fucks. They should be hung drawn and quartered on social media and in the courts. But while serving customers or judging the quality of the faces in the street, her mind was alive to the possibility of anal sex, of being pleased by two men at the same time, of being spanked and sitting on the face of the tall man, the Cubist George Clooney with the wide swimmer’s shoulders. Only a thin veneer of morality and conscience separated her from Myra Hindley. The snakes of sexual imagination were alive in her mind and at times, it was difficult to get them back in to their wicker basket.

She went to a Catholic school and could still recite large chunks of the litany. It was difficult to take the precepts of the Church seriously since for 60 years, its priests had gone on a sexual feeding frenzy on young boys, which would have made Caligula proud. Nonetheless, according to the semen stained laws of Rome, if an impure thought enters the mind which tempts one to lust and that lust is conquered – for some reason she pictured St George slaying the Dragon – one is saved. If though, a young woman working in a jewellers shop in the high street, chose not to dismiss that thought, but allowed herself to be repeatedly consumed by lustful fantasies, then she was done like a dog’s dinner. Abandon all hope.

Secular times were changing. A new orthodoxy was on the loose. Like a maelstrom it drew young well-educated women in from the trendy suburbs, and through a magical symbiosis of feminist theory and post modernist thought, created a new and radical philosophy which said all white people were born racially prejudiced and men were violent, raping bastards who needed to be re-educated. Seriously re-educated. Contact sports at school should be banned, history would need to be rewritten and in the worst cases, chemical castration used to eliminate the male sex drive. Charlotte had suffered at the hands of men. The unwanted attention, the suggestive, sleazy comments, the hands wandering over her bum on the train. Just the other day she took her Fiat in for a service and there were still pictures of nude women hung above the work benches. There was a long way to go.

It struck her as she ate her lunch surrounded by seagulls on a park bench, that while men certainly needed to come out of their caves, they shared something with women – or at least her. In the dark reaches of the brain, far from the light of learning and enlightenment, danced demons, naked, hungry and wanting. She thought, sipping a diet Coke, that these demons were very old and they danced for prehistoric peoples as well as for modern men and women, no matter how sophisticated the latter thought they were. These creatures were not cowed by progress, book learning or technology. They laughed at the strictures of the Madam Defarges of the world and giggled at Harriet’s psychiatrists and psychologists. They stood proud and tall in the forests of the night and nothing could make them go.

She locked the door of the jewellers and there he was, right on time, looking smart, casual and with good leather boots. You can tell a lot about a man by the shoes he wears. They walked around the corner to The Amalfi where one drink turned in to three. Mark. His name was Mark and he lived alone in the hills. No one knew where he lived. He cherished his privacy. His parents were dead. Didn’t he say his his mother was still alive? That’s why he bought the ring. Maybe she misheard. He made his money buying and selling companies in his 20s and didn’t need to work. He spent one day a week serving food at a soup kitchen for homeless people and sat on boards including Animal Welfare Forever Homes. As an only child, he played by himself a lot. A dreamer.

She told him her story in precis. It was difficult knitting the fabric of her life together because no one had asked her before. He looked fixedly at her while she spoke, which was unnerving until she realised he was actually listening to her, taking it in, thinking about what she said. They ordered two bowls of spaghetti carbonara and a bottle of light red wine. Charlotte wasn’t much of a drinker. The alcohol made her light headed. She chugged down the water.

Mark paid for the bill even though she wanted to split it. He said keep it and pay next time. So they’d be a next time. Then she was sitting in the passenger seat of a luxury car, speeding up the highway, the yellow cat’s eyes on the posts winking by, through a long tunnel with purple neon lights and then down in to a deep valley and along a narrow track, barely wide enough for the car.

“I always have to watch the duco,” he said and smiled at her.

“Where are we?”

“We’re home”

He opened the car door for her, took her elbow and guided her through the front door and on to a cream leather lounge. It was an old blue stone house which he’d extended and renovated. It was immaculate. House and Garden. He fixed her a Bloody Mary which she didn’t want, took her hand and gave her a tour. There was something queer about the place. For all of its beauty, something else crept through, an austerity like the pictures she’d seen of Hitler’s hide away at Berchtesgaden. All it needed a was German Shepherd. She sipped her cocktail and felt faint. She had to lie down.

When she awoke her wrists were locked by handcuffs to the uprights of an old wrought iron King sized bed. She was naked. Her legs were tied apart with thin, white nylon cord. He was on top of her, inside her, kissing her neck. George Clooney had disappeared, replaced by a demented animal who without tenderness, was using all of his might to drive her in to the mattress. He told her she was a good girl and if she did as she was told, everything would be alright.

“What the fuck are you doing,” she screamed. “Get the fuck off me right now!”

“You’re daddy’s little girl. We’re all alone, miles from anywhere. No one knows you’re here”

This was not how she pictured the night ending. Maybe they’d go to bed together and have breakfast in the morning but not this. Fear rose in her throat and she screamed, which excited him more and he bit her nipples. He would be finished soon and the terror would end or would it? He could keep her here for days, maybe weeks. She had to get out of these handcuffs. Nothing else mattered. He placed his hands around her neck but before he could choke her, he came and collapsed on top of her, gasping for breath. He rolled on his side. No condom. Fucking bastard.

“Was that as good for you as it was for me?”

She pictured running a rusty razor across his scrotum and letting his testicles fall to the floor.

“It was different, I’ll give you that,” she said. “But so far as fantasies go, it was pretty run of the mill. I have one which will blow your balls off – if you’re man enough”

“Do tell”

“Undo the cuffs and I’ll show you”

She could tell this wasn’t in his script. The script called for her to be the frightened victim. To plead for mercy. He undid the handcuffs and she untied her feet. She wore her smug confidence face which didn’t come naturally but she’d seen movie stars use it. It said, ‘I’ve got a secret and if you want to know it, you’ll have to play ball’.

“This calls for a little role reversal. You’re in to that aren’t you?”

“So you’ll be mother?”

“If you behave”

She handcuffed his wrists to the iron uprights and spread his legs and tied his ankles to the corner posts. She went to the bathroom and cleaned herself. In the bottom drawer she pulled out a roll of gaffer tape.

“Hey, I want Mummy!”

“Mummy’s coming,” then hissed to herself, “don’t fucking worry about that”

Charlotte cut a six inch strip and pasted it over his mouth. She dressed and watched him for a moment as confusion ran over his face, then rummaged in the side drawer of his bedside table. A well-thumbed notebook contained the names and dates of women he’d bought to the house and the assaults he’d conducted on them. Against each name was a small cross in red ink. These women and girls had lay where she lay. Endured what she endured and maybe worse. He was angry now and thrashing about the bed. His penis flaccid and shrivelled.

“I’m afraid Mark, if that is your real name, this is where we part company”

His face contorted in fear and whatever bullshit he had fed her about his family, she now knew the truth. No one knew where he lived. No one would come looking for him. No anxious secretary, friend or relative would call. He was on his own handcuffed to a bed at the bottom of a valley in Berchtesgaden. The sheets would be covered in his excrement as he saw the sun rise and fall. He would run through elaborate plans of escape but the handcuffs were tungsten steel and the iron frame was made by experts. He was a prisoner on his own six metre square of fantasy island.

It was a long walk to the train station at 3.00am. She’d cut through the forest, take the side roads and wait for the 6.00am train at Belham. She’d be just another commuter. She stopped, turned around and walked to the refrigerator, took out half a roast chicken and walked in to Mark’s room. A look of relief fell across his face. She’d come back. All was forgiven. She left the chicken by the bedside table, made sure she had all of her possessions, turned out the light and walked out the front door. A light fog surrounded the house. Charlotte looked up at the dark room where Mark lay and raised her middle finger. It was a long walk but not as long as memory.