My advice to the traveller
considering a visit to Bratislava is, don’t. Go to Vienna instead, it’s
less than an hour away and it’s, you know, interesting. Not that
Bratislava doesn’t have its charms; it has an historic town centre and
cobbled streets and buildings with plaques on. The trouble is, it
doesn’t have any identity of its own. Up until 1992 it was (variously)
part of Upper Carpathia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia, a
Nazi puppet state, the Soviet Empire and the Scottish Football League.
Even the plaques to famous people say things like “Mozart performed
here (when he was six)”; “Liszt lived here (between the ages of seven
and nine)”; and “Casanova called Bratislava ‘the most beautiful city in
Europe’ (before buggering off to Budapest)”. Nobody comes from
Bratislava (and that’s the new game to replace ‘name five famous
Belgians’ – ‘name five famous Slovaks’, I bet you can’t) and nobody
stays there long.
We stayed three days in a rather splendid
hotel that used to be a department store and is entered through a very
plush arcade filled with Valentino, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Armani. We
even had our own balcony looking down one of the smartest shopping
streets in Bratislava (including a jewellery shop called ‘Spleen’ which
I failed to persuade D to buy me anything from as he pointed out, quite
rightly, that I didn’t want the jewellery, I just wanted a carrier bag
with ‘Spleen’ written on it).
We were both a bit jumpy by the
time we stood on our balcony. While the holiday was ostensibly to have
a proper conversation, we’d both been too busy to set any ground rules
or think about what we wanted to achieve, and it isn’t always easy to
just turn to someone and say, “So, about the rest of our lives, then…”
We hadn’t even talked about sleeping arrangements. I’d gone ahead and
booked a double room and then wondered afterwards if that was presuming
too much. On the flight out, for the whole two hours I’d been intensely
aware of D’s leg pressing against mine and the heat of his body. It’s
funny, but most of the time you never notice a thing like that, and
then suddenly one day you can’t think about anything else. I’d shut my
eyes and pretended to be asleep but really I’d been thinking about his
whole body pressing against mine as he lay on top of me and by the time
we got to the hotel I would have really welcomed a nice comfortable
little shag.
But instead we awkwardly fumbled our way past being
in a room with a double bed in it and went out for a walk instead. We
did all the important ‘just arrived on holiday’ things like finding the
bar that’s going to turn into your local and a shop that sells milk
(always travel in Europe with your own mini-kettle, a universal adaptor
and cheap Woolworth’s mugs that you can leave behind; being abroad is
no reason not to have tea). The bar was hidden away in a courtyard and
we only found it because I misread a sign for the Ladies. It was dark
and vaulted like a crypt with comfortable sofas in alcoves and a laid
back atmosphere that extended to the barman actually being asleep. We
drank local red wine for £1 a glass – demonstrating to our own
satisfaction that the guide book was right to suggest the local white
is better – and ate ‘pickled camembert-style cheese’ which was
delicious. Sounds like the perfect atmosphere for having that little
chat, doesn’t it? Well no, we buried our noses in the guide book and
planned what we were going to do tomorrow instead.
By bedtime,
and after blowing a monstrous £30 a head in one of Bratislava’s most
expensive restaurants (actually, this is Bratislava’s strongest
recommendation, you’ll struggle to spend much more than £100 in the
whole holiday) we were genuinely too tired to do anything but go to
sleep.
We really tried our hardest with the sight-seeing the
next day. We saw the castle (partially inaccessible due to
scaffolding); the Town Hall (courtyard only, remainder closed for
renovations); The Primate’s Palace, scene of the signing of the Treaty
of Austerlitz in Europe’s least interesting Hall of Mirrors, though the
rest of this building was rather beautiful and we amused ourselves
choosing which room would be our bedroom and which one we’d
knock-through to make a big dining-kitchen. We went to the Slovak
National Gallery and saw Europe’s largest collection of third-rate
paintings by nobody you’ve ever heard of. Usually I choose a painting
to steal in the event of a fire alarm, but it was all terrible. Curious
to note though, that having spent the bulk of the twentieth century
culturally cut off from Western Europe, they’d developed a nice line in
knock-offs. Across a room you’d spot something, squint at it, think “Is
that a Picasso/Matisse/Duffy?” only to get there and find it was a
pastiche apparently painted by a competent 10-year-old.
There
was one nice piece which was a corridor lined from floor to ceiling
with books. There was a narrow walkway with mirrors on the floor to
either side and more mirrors on the ceiling and end walls, creating the
optical effect of walking along a precarious gang plank across a
bottomless book-lined pit. This was good fun and genuinely unsettling
to do and for some reason it put me in mind of the Jewish memorial in
Berlin by Rachel Whiteread (I think) which is a cast of the inside of a
library, each book representing the learning lost with the
extermination of the Jews. I don’t think this is at all what I was
supposed to think of, but it’s nice to have some memorial of the Jews
as they’d bulldozed the old Synagogue in 1960 to make way for an
arterial road.
But never mind all this historical irony,
you’re thinking. She’s been banging on for ages and she hasn’t even got
to the bit with the shoes yet. D bought the shoes on the way back to
the hotel. To get to the lift up to our room, we had to walk into the
arcade and past Armani. As we walked past, D pointed to the shoes on a
display shelf. “I’m going to buy you those shoes.”
“You can’t, they’re Armani, they’ll cost a fortune. Besides…why?”
“Because I want to fuck you completely naked except for them.”
By
this time he had the shop door open. The shop girl looked up and stared
at us. I froze to the spot and D grabbed my arm and propelled me into
the shop where I stood blushing furiously and looking at the floor.
D plonked himself down in an Italian leather chair as though he owned the place. “We’d like those shoes in a five, please.”
My
embarrassment didn’t subside any as the shop girl crouched at my feet,
stripping off my smelly old Converse sneakers and pink stripy socks and
sliding my feet into the shoes. They’re the glossy blood red of Chinese
lacquer, a colour that says ‘not bought in just any shop’. They have a
peep toe, a one-inch platform and long, elegant heels with metal tips
that rang against the terrazzo floor. D motioned to me to walk up and
down, turning and parading past him again and again as he watched. The
girl brought some other shoes and he waved her away. “We’ll take them.
No, she’ll wear them.”
In the lift, clutching the Armani bag
with my socks and sneakers in it, my legs trembled. D, standing
slightly behind me, hooked a finger round a stray lock of hair, tucking
it behind my ear. I jumped as his finger brushed my skin.
Up
in the room, naked now except for the beautiful shoes, I paraded again
for D, bending at his instructions, my legs parted and straight, my
hands sliding over my calves to grip my ankles. Straightening up again,
smoothing my hands over the swell of my buttocks then across my belly
and up to cup my breasts, pinching my nipples between my finger and
thumb. I lay on my belly across the width of the bed while D knelt up
on its side. Behind me, a floor to ceiling mirror reflected the curve
of my arse and the hollows of my parted thighs as I reached behind my
back to grip hold of the heels of my shoes, my back arched. I kissed
the tip of D’s cock as it bobbed in front of my face, sucking it gently
and gazing up at him as he cupped my face in both hands.
I
pressed my nose against his balls and flickered the tip of my tongue
against that sensitive little piece of skin down there. D groaned and
pressed his cock into my mouth, my cheek bulging as he fucked it in and
out. He wound his fingers into my hair, clasping them together and
pressing my face down on his cock until I gagged, wriggling back
abruptly, letting go of my heels, coughing and drooling.
D
watched me recover and then said, “You let go of your heels.” Suddenly
remembering, I snatched for them again but he shook his head. “Too
late, Lu.”
Kneeling up on all fours now, facing the mirror, my
tits swaying as D knelt up behind me, I watched him in the mirror as he
ran his hand up the back of my thigh, smacked it sharply, ran his hand
up the inside of my thigh, smacked my cunt, smoothed his hand across my
arse, smacked it quickly, one, two, three times. He watched my face in
the mirror, watching my reactions as he smacked, now harder, now
gentler, suddenly quickly then making me wait. My head began to throb
as it went on and on, the burning slowly building in my flesh until it
was red and angry. D turned me, kneeling on the edge of the bed, to
look at my reflected bum, my thighs slick with juice.
“What do you say, Lucy?”
I rubbed my bum and said petulantly, “I thought you said you were going to fuck me?”
D
laughed. “No, that’s not what you say” but he rolled me onto my back
and slid his cock into my sloppy cunt, his weight pressing me to the
bed just as I’d wanted it to on the plane. It was a long, slow,
grinding fuck, D’s fingertips digging into my buttocks, occasionally
scraping across my skin as I gasped and nipped his bottom lip between
my teeth, my arms and legs wrapped tightly round him.
The next
day he made me wear the shoes again. “Even for sight-seeing? On
cobbles?” Clomping about in fuck-me shoes is fun for a while but by
mid-afternoon my feet were on fire. We sat in the main square, having
stumbled across a music festival, and watched families in lederhosen
and dirndl skirts play hurdy gurdies and pipes that looked like
didgeridoos but sounded like flutes. D held my feet in his lap, rubbing
them and saying “It’s actually raining now, can we go please Lucy?” at
fifteen second intervals. I was quite enjoying watching some blonde
Nordic teenage boys sing while accompanying themselves by hitting bits
of wood with hammers, so I ignored him. As we sat there, a couple
crossing he square suddenly stopped and began to kiss – a real
limbs-entwined, face-sucking snog – ignoring the people around them,
who in turn took no notice but just parted around them. D nodded in
their direction. “That’s us.”
And that’s it. That’s the full
extent of our conversation about our relationship. Maybe that’s all
there is to it; a shared hunger. Unimpressed with this, I made him give
me a piggy-back ride to the hotel.
Over dinner, sitting in the
window of a restaurant a few doors down from the hotel and watching
people pass by as we listened to Now That’s What I Call Music 1983 on a
permanent loop, I had another go at a conversation.
“So what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. Is this Kajagoogoo? Do about what?”
“No, it’s Haircut 100. About us.”
“What about us? Oh, I love this, it’s Dexy’s Midnight Runners. That first LP was so good but then after that…”
“Are you still my boyfriend?”
“Yes
of course I am. I would certainly hope you’d only let your boyfriend do
to you the things I did to you today, and frankly Lucy, I think that’s
where you’ve been going wrong.”
“I don’t like being on my own
rattling round that big flat. And I won’t be able to afford it now
because I’m going to be out of work.”
“Even with the writing you couldn’t afford it. And why would you be out of work?”
“Um,
I don’t know, maybe because I slept with my boss then didn’t mention to
him I was going on holiday with my ex boyfriend to get back together
with him.”
“Well if he holds a silly thing like that against you…”
I
lost my temper and went marching unsteadily into the street. D raced
out after me. Waiters clustered at the window – this is the most
exciting thing to happen in Bratislava since 1848.
Oh, I
completely forgot to tell you about the tanks. My drama will have to
wait for a moment – imagine us standing in the street having a fag
while we wait for the story to start up again.
On Monday we
turned a corner and ran into a line of tanks, which seemed to suggest
that either the Russians were back or it was some sort of military
anniversary. Fortunately, soldiers were handing our leaflets, something
they never do at home, and it turns out to be a military parade in
commemoration of Slovak independence. If you were paying attention at
the start, you’ll remember this didn’t happen until 1992. 1848 is the
anniversary of the Slovaks first articulating a desire for
independence. Nobody took any notice and so a few years later they came
back and demanded, if not independence then at least some form of
regional autonomy. The rest of Europe put its fingers in its ears and
went “La la la, we can’t hear you”. This went on for the next 150
years, with Slovakia occasionally demanding ever-more modest forms of
recognition and the powers of Europe saying, “Did you hear squeaking?
Have we got mice?”
We quite fancied watching tanks roll past so
we stood in the crowd and waited. Nothing happened. Then someone made a
speech in Slovak which sounded like it was almost certainly a prelude
to the parade starting. Nothing happened. Some generals with enormous,
braided hats and electric blue uniforms began to look at their watches
and chat among themselves. Someone made another speech. Some soldiers
in historic costume with ostrich feathers in their hats began to fidget
and slouch. A limo pulled up but nobody got out. After about 40 minutes
of this we got bored and walked down towards the tanks to a place where
we could cross the road. Suddenly, D handed me a carrier bag so I now
had one in each hand, took out his camera phone and hissed, “Quick, Lu,
run down towards the tanks.” With carrier bags outstretched like flags,
I danced for a moment in front of the tank while D took my picture, the
soldier sitting on the tank laughed and red-faced officials ran towards
us as we legged it up a side street. Finally we leant against a wall,
panting and laughing as we looked at the pictures, which are, let’s be
honest, in enormously poor taste.
Now, back to our domestic dispute, already in progress.
D
stood a few feet away from me with his hands in his pockets. “Look,
I’ll be back in January, look for a smaller flat until then so you
aren’t so worried about earning extra money and when I’m back we’ll
make a proper plan.”
Damn him for being sensible. I nodded and
came back into the restaurant to a round of applause from the waiters,
who had really become swept up in the drama of our dinner.
I had
one last go at drama. Wrapped in a hotel bathrobe, I went out onto the
balcony and climbed onto the balustrade, able to see from one end of
the town to the other. D came out to see what I was doing and I held
out my hand to him. “Shall we jump?” He hesitated for a second then
leapt up beside me, making me squeal as he wobbled. We held hands and
then he suddenly withdrew his and said, “Wait a minute.”
“What is it?”
“Well,
it’s sentimental of me, but I always promised myself that if I died in
a suicide pact with a girl in an obscure European capital, she would at
least be completely naked when they found our bodies.”
“I’m not taking my robe off, it’s far too cold.”
“Oh well, never mind. Cup of tea?”
“OK, you make it.”