Senta Holland - Out of the Shadows

Table of Contents

Title Page Out of the Shadows and Into the Darkness A Wild Journey to the Edge of the World You Knew in Seven Bedrooms Senta Holland

Chapter 1: Kings and Queens above the Night

Chapter 2: Tiger Island

Chapter 3: The Secret Mango Alley

Chapter 4: The Darkened Room

Chapter 5: The Tear Stained Balcony

Chapter 6: The Frozen Tea Room

Chapter 7: The White Bed

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Kings and queens above the night

Bones. Bones, thousands of bones that people shrunk to, over the centuries. Bones so old that they told a different history from the official one taught in schools. Bones softened into dust and bones hardened into stone. Bones sealed into hundreds of urns.

I saw them, huge deep ochre and dark yellow bulging urns covering the bones, from high up in the new hotel where I stood, naked, my body pressed into the window.

My Nai pushed me into the glass as if he wanted to force me through and I would fall and be spewed into the swimming pool. Falling, I would spread out my mantle of ash and rain onto the city and join the ancient kings. My body was pale against the dark sky, soft urn for my living bones. I felt his body against mine, skin warmed in the sun, radiating back into the night like the strong red stone.

Urns sat in gardens, in streets, next to kitchens and bedrooms. Urns like towers, urns inside towers, urns that were towers.

I felt the full force of his body, his thin hard legs digging into my softer thighs, and I could hardly breathe, he gave me no space for my lungs to expand, pushed in, in, in, against the glass, I remembered I had read somewhere that glass was really a liquid, so maybe I could be pushed through, in an eternity, or at least in as long as it took for the bones of a king to fall out of changed history.

When we turned back into the room he lingered and stroked the outer skin of the thick glass.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Breast prints.’

There they were: two oily lilies.

He took them up in the swirls of his fingertips and ate the traces.

The biggest sexual organ is the internet

At first it frightened me, I knew the names and the sites that I wanted to look at but I didn’t.

And if they came up, by mistake, or by misdirection, as such sites do, even for those who really don’t want to find them, I tried not to see them but I did see them. Oh yes.

I felt the keys under my fingers, soft fingers whose touch conveys so much information. Writing on the keyboard is so sensual. I can write with both my hands, my arms, my shoulders, my whole body.

I used to play the piano, I could slide into the keys and make them respond but my piano playing was never on the same level as my playing of the internet.

I remember the first time I had access to the web at home. It was a glorious morning.

Until then I had to go to the internet café and there I wrote some fervent letters to my lovers, but of course I was well protected from the sites that drew me magically and darkly (except in California where you could access alternative lifestyle sites from the public library).

Maybe it was a good thing that the internet at home came to me late in life because by the time I had the courage to go and look, and the means to follow it up, other women had entered those landscapes of my desire before me and had made them less hostile to us.

One dark and crisp December night, one of the twelve nights of Christmas in fact, I finally entered one of the dating sites. It was just as well it was on the internet and not in real life because I was so scared that I would never ever have made it past the threshold of a club where others could have seen me.

But I had my familiar keys, and my muscle memory, and so I entered at my own pace. I dawdled a long time in the lobby, but then, I looked. I looked at some profiles, and I read what the men there were saying, what they had typed into their own keyboards, stroking them with the unique whirls of their own fingertips.

What touched me and surprised me most was that here, they showed themselves, in a way in which many men never did on the outside, not even in the most intimate encounters.

Strangely enough I found a great lover within the first few days. My kind of lover. I think of him as my gateway to the life that led me here, here in the tower above the city of kings, here to the core of my dream, and its long, slow, painful and jubilant transformation into my life.

Deeper into the night

So we are here. Really here for the second time. It’s more than a one off. He really wants to be with me another time.

The dark city, rich red bricks ripped open, walls gaping with fragmented brick dancers, bulging with the dead so that the towers crumbled, slipped into night. Urns lit up as the city was darkened down.

I wasn’t so sure yesterday, when I rang his number and heard his uncertain reply to my nervous intimacies. I was lying on my hotel bed, a delicious soreness wrapped around my ass and hips. I didn’t know the place where I was but I had been caught with a hook of hope. A tender red mark ran around my wrist, like an exotic bracelet.

With great fear of heartbreak I made my fingers press into the very foreign phone. And speak, immediately speak so that I couldn’t hear him say nothing.

But he did, anyway.

I was hanging at the end of the rope, and then he caught me again.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘I am here,’ I said. ‘I am Senta?’

Senta in veils

I am Senta. This is not the name I was given, it is the name I chose when I chose this life.

I chose to live this life, but I did not choose the dream underneath. The dream has been with me since before I can remember. It has brought me here, and here is the beginning of this story.

This story is a journey without a map. There are no official signposts, no patterns to follow.

On the contrary, it is a path that almost everyone I knew would have warned me against, or tried to keep me away from, a dangerous deviation from the common path. If they had known I was taking it.

They didn’t know, because I spent most of my life guarding my dream in the secrecy of my mind. I lived a life behind a shimmering veil of silence.

I had good reason for such secrecy. But I had also good reason for coming out of the shadows: I was driven by my dream.

Books have been written about people like me. Most of them were written by those who warn against and disapprove and condemn.

Some of them were written by people like me, a few even by women like me. But they don’t tell my story.

I am Senta. I believe there are many like me, but as yet there are no books that tell our tale, and there is no big narrative to celebrate the mystery of our lives.

So there was no map, and I didn’t know where to go. The only thing I knew was that I shouldn’t be going there at all.

I found a way. This is the map I created, and wrote down for myself.

It’s not a straightforward path, and it may not lead where you think or even hope it will lead. Coming out of the shadows and following the dream does not lead to automatic happiness. Is it worth it even if conventional (or even unconventional) happiness is not possible? Or not possible for me?

I don’t know.

It’s not the kind of story where you know.

Midnight high over the city of urns

‘I want to fuck your breasts, your beautiful –’ he stopped as soon as he heard himself, as if he mustn’t declare his passion for me. Not even at a moment like this, when he was doing things no one should see and no one did see except me (Ah! But maybe that was the reason?) and although he wasn’t holding himself back in other ways. He grabbed my breasts hard and forced his penis in between them. He pushed my own hands away. He drove himself in slow and hard, pressed my breasts so close together that only sweat could run between them. I felt him move inside the closeness. My breasts, compressed from all sides, hardened up under his grip. They hurt where his fingers dug deep. I imagined round red grooves all around the breasts like wounded pearls.