Chapter 1

Ich komme, ich komme, grünende Brüder...

“I am coming, I am coming,” I sing, as my soft arms extend heavenwards – curling, flexing, fashioning out of my imagination leaves, vines, boughs of ash and laurel – as I embrace the gift of mother-goddess to water-nymph. Below me, strings churn and gambol, myriad-divided, like the viridescent light which shines dappled through my branches. Sinewy lines of unseen woodwind twist and twine upwards. “I am coming, my verdant brothers. Sweetly rises in me the sap of the earth.” Süß durchströmt mich der Erde Saft...

Violins shimmer, clarionet triplets caress my supple bark, a single hautboy ascends plaintively from earth to orb, eliciting my delicate echo, which soars where my soul has always been destined to fly. Violoncello flageolets bear me skywards, hovering between F-sharp major and a dissonant dominant seventh. “Gather my branches ... accept me as a sign of eternal love...” Nehmt mich als Zeichen einziger Liebe... I sing, as my pentatonic ostinato fades into eternity. I am she who has been transformed.

But the audience never understand eternity. They want it to end too soon, to catch their trains home to the grime and squalor of their paltry lives. And they want to applaud, as if by some pathetic act of adulation they can sit in judgment on perfection. “Brava! Bravissima!” come the cries, the bouquets, the ovations. I smile sweetly, and bow dutifully. But I know that true joy lies beyond, for, like Gaia and Zeus, Ovid and Euripides, Gregor and Strauss, I too have touched eternity.

Lucy’s eyes are full of tears as she enters my dressing-room and embraces me. “Oh my god, Daph, that was wonderful!” She checks around her, before kissing me delicately on the lips, so as not to swallow too much makeup. “I love you, baby,” she smiles with shining eyes as she pulls back to gaze through mine into the beyond which still flickers, not quite extinguished, within.

“Let me get all this shit off my face, Luce,” I say, “and then you can give me a proper kiss, hey?” She grins mischievously, her short blond bob dancing as she nods. She is beautiful as sunrise, and my heart leaps to watch her.

Thirty minutes later, my dressing-room door is locked, and we lie naked on my couch caressing each other’s breasts. Hers are full and round and luscious, like ripe peaches; mine are small, like the budding leaves which graced my costume less than an hour ago. She kisses mine, taking little nibbles which send shivers through my body. Gently I hum Strauss’s final ecstasy-perfect F-sharp ostinato, as her lips explore my whole body from branch to root, sucking, nibbling, licking, caressing.

By the time she begins to taste my fertility, my cunt is moist as rich soil, damp as leaves in warm drizzle. Her tongue probes lovingly into my soft dark matting to find my clit, then glides slowly down my gently parting lips to my perineum. I moan and whimper uncontrollably, the last vestiges of Strauss’s divinely crafted phrasing swept away by Lucy’s earthy, raw talent. My clit swells and emerges from its sheath, glowing, pulsating, inviting; she responds, wrapping her lips around it, gently squeezing, stroking, pressing against it with the flat of her tongue. Soon I come, my cunt spasming into her mouth, as I squirt gently onto her lips.

“Oh yeah! She is vat you call a messy soprano!” Lucy giggles, in her best Borge voice. One of my pubic hairs clings to her lower lip, and wiggles as she speaks.

I laugh heartily. I’ve heard the joke many times before; but laughing is good when you’ve just come.

There is a knock at the door. “Oh fuck,” I mutter to myself. But I call out: “Who is it?”

“Apollon,” comes the leading tenor’s voice from behind the door.

“Can it wait till later?” I call out, grimacing to Lucy, then sticking my middle finger up towards the door and mouthing, “fucking dickhead”.

“All right. Ah will come back lateur,” comes Apollon’s voice, in his ridiculous French accent.

Lucy giggles again. “The tenor enters in single file,” she quips.

“Yeah, and always with his cock in the vanguard,” I add cynically. Apollon can sing, but that is the sum total of his qualities. “Dickhead,” I repeat, before lying down over Lucy, tasting my cunt on her pale face, and feeling my tit-buds bury themselves into her luscious boobs.

Lucy loves eating me out, but has never liked receiving that way. No, it’s not just that I’m no good at it. Lucy likes to joke about how someone as orally talented as me “just can’t eat pussy right”, but even she admits that no one has ever been able to get her off orally. She just prefers the feel of cunt on cunt.

We scissor our legs together, our clits mutually flip-flopping, out vulvas flaring, our juices flowing and mingling, and Lucy starts to talk. I can always tell when she is feeling good, because her speech starts to get filthy, just as mine launches into moans, groans and song. “Oh yeah, Daph, rub that cunt of yours against me, baby. Let me feel that swollen clit of yours against mine. Oh yeah, baby, kiss my pussy hard with those fucking cunt-lips, let your cunt drool all over mine. Fuck me with that big clit of yours.”

“Hey, baby, you want me to get my strap?” I suggest.

“Got your feeldoe?” she asks, breathless.

“Yeah, hang about,” I say, as I retrieve our favourite toy from my bag. It’s a tough one to control, and works my kegels no end, but Lucy loves being filled up, and I’ll do anything to make her happy.

“Oh yeah, that’s so good, baby, fuck me with that cock of yours!” squeals Lucy as the dildo slides easily into her wet cunt. We grind back and forth against each other, the shaft of the dildo hard against her clit, the bulb-end gripped tight in my pussy. “Fuck me, darling,” she pants. “Fill up my hot cunt with that cock! Make me come, baby! Oh yeah, fucccckkkk!” she hisses through her climax.

As Lucy’s orgasm subsides and we both come down from our ecstasy, kissing and stroking each other’s sweaty bodies, she says to me, “I love it when I can feel your girlcock in me. It’s so good getting fucked by you.”

“Sounds like you’d rather have a man than me!” I laugh.

“No way!” she corrects me. “Been there, done that. Love the cocks, but you can keep the rest. No, a girl with a cock: that’s the best...”

“So ... do you wish I had a real cock?” I ask. She looks at me quizzically. “In your fantasies, I mean,” I clarify.

“That’s be weird: a girl with a cock. Is there an opera about it? Ligeti, maybe?” We guffaw uproariously.

“Don’t they study that stuff in your Institute?” I tease. She looks at me, scoffing.

“No, seriously,” I continue, “if I had a real cock, and you could taste it warm and throbbing in your mouth, and you could feel it stiff and pulsating as I fuck you ... and then maybe if it could come ... Hey, where would you want me to come?”

“Actually, that’s one thing I do miss about men: when you feel their cock jerking and spraying as they come in your cunt. And then it’s all squidgy and gloopy inside, and you can grind your clit against their cock as it softens ... and, if you’re lucky, you can squeeze one more orgasm out, and as your cunt spasms you can feel it all squishing around – oh my fucking God...!” Lucy grinds harder against me with reawakened lust, her eyes glazing over briefly – before correcting herself: “Hey, fuck, girl, what are you trying to do? Turn me straight?”

“Well,” I laugh, “if you at your fucking Institute for Sexual Medicine ever find a way of giving me a cock of my own, I’ll take it. Then I can fuck you with it every day for the rest of your life! You and me fucking, together, forever, till death do us part...”

“You’re on!” laughs Lucy.

Half an hour later, Lucy is on her way home, I have showered the last vestiges of girl-slime off my body, and I am lying on my couch resting before the evening performance. There is a knock at the door.

“Fuck,” I think. But I say: “Come in.” It is Apollon.

“Apollon, what can I do for you?”

“Ah, tu es très belle, Daphné,” he warbles, his eyes ogling my dressing-gown-clad body.

“Et vous êtes très gentil, Apollon,” I reply, with an attempt at courtesy. “What can I do for you?”

“Was zat your geurlfriend?” asks the tenor with a smirk, as he sits down, uninvited, on the end of my couch.

“Lucy? Yes, it was,” I say, unremarkably.

“You were ‘aving feun togezzer?” asks Apollon.

My hackles rise. “Apollon, what we were doing together is none of your business. Is that all you came to say?” I stand up, moving to open the door for him.

“Ah sink zat a beautifeull geurl like you shouldn’t be feucking ozzeur geurls. You should ‘ave a man to take care of you.”

“Apollon, get the fuck out of here now,” I say, using my considerable vocal resonance to hammer the point home.

“Ah bet you really want a cock inside you,” says Apollon with persistence. He stands up too, grabbing and pulling me close, rubbing his crotch against mine. I can feel his erection, small but stiff, rubbing against me through my dressing gown.

I do not try to remonstrate any further. With as much force as I can muster, I jerk my right knee upwards, hard into his crotch. Pleasingly, I feel it pummel into that sensitive space between his balls. He howls, clutching his crotch with both hands. “Putain de salope!” he bellows, as he retreats through the door, which I slam in his face.

I scrabble for my phone, tears streaming down my cheeks. “Luce, baby, I’m sorry, have you caught your train yet? Something awful has happened. Please, come back, I need you ... What? No, I’ll explain when you get here ... Oh, thank you, baby. Okay, I’ll wait for you at the Artists’ Entrance ... Ten minutes? ... Oh, thank you, baby, I love you.”

Ten minutes later, and I am standing, my nerves shattered, my eyes red, searching up and down Floral Street for Lucy. It is a warm summer’s evening, and the London crowds course and flow up and down the pavement. A black cab pulls up on the opposite side of the road, and I see Lucy get out and start to pay the driver.

“Luce!” I call.

“Daphné... “ I hear a low voice behind me. I don’t need to turn to know who it is: I’d recognise that filthy accent anywhere, and I feel his hot breath on the back of my neck. In panic I run, stepping off the pavement into the street. As I do, I hear a car screech around the corner off Bow Street. In a split second, stretched in my consciousness into a lifetime, I see the vehicle hurtling towards me, the eyes of the driver wide open in horror; I hear Lucy screaming from the other side of the street, and Apollon shouting “Non!” behind me.

It all seems to happen very slowly...

And then, everything is black. And I am not there anymore.

“She’s waking up, Doctor.” A voice echoed, disembodied, on the edge of Daphne’s consciousness.

Daphne opened her eyes, to see, as if through a blur, two women looking down at her. “Where am I?” she asked.

“The Institute for Sexual Medicine,” replied one of the women. Daphne blinked, and the woman came into focus: large, dark-skinned, with frizzy black hair, wide hips, and huge breasts bulging behind her white lab coat.

Daphne started. “Is Lucy here?” she asked, urgently.

“Lucy...” the woman replied, hesitantly. “No, I’m sorry, she isn’t here.” She smiled down at Daphne with an air of almost maternal delight.

“But she works here, doesn’t she – Lucy Kuiper? She was there when I had my accident: she was just over the road.”

“Yes, she was,” replied the other woman, approaching closer. She was smaller, thin and very pale-skinned, her light blue hair tied back in a simple ponytail. She appeared to have pointy ears, like an elf. Daphne did a double-take, shutting her eyes and re-opening them again. But the ears remained pointy, and seemed to be waving slowly back and forth.

“Where is she now? Please call her. She works here, you know.”

“She did,” said the larger woman, cautiously.

“But not any longer? What do you mean? How long have I been unconscious?” Daphne tried to get up, but realised that she couldn’t move, or feel anything in her lower half.

“Daphne, please try to stay calm,” said the dark-skinned woman with a soft reassuring voice. She smiled again, making dimples in her chubby cheeks. “You have been asleep a very long time.”

“What do you mean? How long?”

There was a pause. “Two hundred and sixteen years.”

Daphne laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s impossible.”

“It was impossible, Daphne. When you had your accident, the only option was cryogenic suspension. That is what Lucy, as your next of kin, chose for you.”

“And Lucy’s...”

“Long gone, Daphne. I’m so sorry. But we can send you back to her.”

“What do you mean, ‘send me back’? How the fuck? What are you talking about?”

“We now have the technology to turn time back for you, Daphne – if you consent, that is – to give you a second chance.”

“Well, I don’t want to stay here,” said Daphne, panicking. “I want to go home.” Suddenly, the sheer horror of what had happened hit home, and Daphne howled in pain and anger, thrashing against the bed with her arms. “No! no! no!” she screamed. “This is all wrong! I want to go home!” She tried again to get up, but her lower half did not respond: she could not feel it there at all. “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I move?” she pleaded, desperately.

“Daphne,” said the woman, “when you had your accident, you were badly hurt. Your lower half was crushed between the car and the wall of the Opera House. Your pelvis was destroyed, and all the internal organs in your lower half. You were on what used to be called ‘life support’ for a long time – thanks to Lucy’s intervention. And then we – my predecessors, that is – had to rebuild you. And for that purpose, we followed the instructions Lucy left for us. Before we remove the anaesthetic on your lower half, it is important that you hear what those instructions were. May we play them to you?”