The Saturday Circuit

Chalk dust turns to a kind of film on my fingertips. The powder collects in the creases, a pale, soft grit that I catch myself rubbing into my thumbpad as I speak. Friday, last bell drawing close, the heat inside the classroom flattening the light. I watch them--their faces, some greased with boredom, others tilted down as if their pens are pulling them under. Donne's flea, the little bastard, leaps again across the centuries, trying to pass for something more than it is. I lean on that. Let it be too on the nose. Let them squirm. Teaching feels like that sometimes, a cracked game of charades with God in the wings, miming obscenities.

"See," I say, "this flea--he's trying to cheat the whole order of things. He wants her body without the bother of sin." I draw a little insect on the board, three legs, two wings. It looks like a deformed pear. They do not laugh.

By evening I'm in the city's underbelly, where sweat doesn't dry and the air presses in around the collarbone. Club Velvet. Even the name throbs. The door down a graffiti-choked stairwell, one of those places that smells like mildew and cleanser, like something trying not to rot. My cotton blouse lies limp on the floor of my apartment. I've traded up--or down, depending--for black mesh that slices the skin into little grids. I want to disappear and be seen all at once. I want not to be myself, which is maybe all the same.

Marla's at the bar, arms inked like something ancient and nautical. She pours with her whole body--shoulders rolling, hips braced. Her face gleams under the red lights, the shadows casting her mouth down at the corners even when she's smiling.

"Teacher's here," she says, every time. And every time I half-forget I never told her. Some things don't need to be said. They stick to you like scent--chalk dust, maybe.

Tonight something's different. The sound pulses harder, like a basement furnace shaking loose. New DJ, Marla said. From Berlin. That feels meaningful, though I can't say why. The bass is so low I feel it in the arches of my feet, up through my sternum. The crowd flows like meat being stirred. Wet shoulders, slick faces, mouths slackened open to let in air and more.

She moves through it--the woman. Cropped hair like silver wire. Neck corded like a boxer's. She dances with her entire spine, as if the song is being poured in at the base and flushed out through her fingertips. It's not pretty.

She catches me watching, and her smile's not cruel but not kind either. It's the smile you give a storm when it pauses over your roof. My mouth goes dry. Something old, older than language, twitches beneath my ribs.

And then: I feel the tile first--its chill, its stubbornness. It's what she presses me against, one arm across my sternum like a brace, the other slipping lower. No names. There's never time for that. The music seeps through the bathroom wall in its dull, merciless pulse, and each note lands in my cunt like a knuckle on a drum.

She doesn't speak. Just breathes--a shallow rhythm, mouth near my ear. Her fingers--those bitten nails, the little scars like punctuation marks down her knuckles--slide in like they've always belonged. I part easily. It's not want. It's awareness.

When I come, it's with a gasp I can't quite believe is mine. She bites my neck, hard, her teeth leaving a shape that blooms like a new country.

Monday morning I hide it under a smear of pharmacy shop concealer, the stuff that always dries a touch too yellow. But I keep touching it. Through the thin cotton of my blouse, I press down. I like the ache. It sharpens me. Reminds me that the woman is real, that I didn't dream her into the Saturday darkness with all the other things I don't say aloud.

The students are slow this week. Year 11, thick with hormones and disinterest. We're crawling through Jekyll and Hyde. The monster and the man. The man and the monster. I don't tell them what I think--that the line isn't between good and evil, but between names and silence. I don't tell them that some parts of us only survive in the dark.

On Saturdays, she's there. Always. Hair like steel wool, eyes blown wide. We fuck like soldiers between skirmishes--quick, brutal, necessary. Toilets, alleys, once against the side of the DJ booth while the crowd screamed for more. Still no names. Still no story.

Then one week she brings them. Three women, all built like bad ideas. They watch me with mouths half-parted, and I feel something inside me lift its head. We climb a stairwell that smells of rust and old books to a warehouse that hums like it remembers machines. Ink stains the walls. Leather softens the corners. They undress me like they've done it before.

The redhead twists my nipples until the world tightens to a point. The tall one opens me with fingers too deft to be untrained. The quiet one waits until I think she won't touch me at all, then descends with a hunger that feels like rape.

They pass me back and forth--greedy and cruel and reverent. Each one takes what she needs. Each one gives something I didn't know I wanted. A new tongue. A new god.

Later, walking home just before dawn, my thighs bruised, my throat raw from trying not to cry, I wonder if this is what the first humans felt, curled in caves, before language made liars of us all.

Dawn catches me on Holloway Road, pavement slick with last night's rain and a scatter of takeaway wrappers half-dissolved by foot traffic. My thighs tremble with each step, the muscles tender and stuttering, as if my body's trying to learn itself again. Beneath the mesh of my skirt, bruises bloom--violet, plum, the yellow-green of old moss. A garden, I think, but one rooted in pain. A brutal, blossoming thing.

Something in me feels scraped clean. Broken. Peeled. Like I've walked backward through time and found the bone beneath the posture, the heat beneath the words. Something older than consent. Older than prayer.

On Monday the headteacher catches me by the staffroom sink, kettle steaming like a friendly ghost beside us. "You've really found your calling," he says, and smiles like that's something good. His collar is misbuttoned, and the freckle just beneath his left eye twitches when he blinks. I nod. I tell him thank you.

Inside, though, I'm thinking of a hand pressing at the base of my throat, choking, reminding. Of a voice--a growl--saying *you can take more*. Of that moment when your mouth opens and no sound comes out because it's all going to the core, to the scream you've trained yourself not to let loose because it would shake too much loose.

Marla starts slipping things into my palm. Little notes, hand-scribbled in lipstick pink or biro blue. *Thursday. Brick Lane. Ask for Lou.* Or *Chelsea. Codeword: MERCY.* Phone numbers. Arrows pointing sideways in lipstick on the napkin. I keep them all, press them into a drawer between student essays and post-it pads. I go. To all of them. Let these women have their take. What I have--them, her--is eating me alive in the best way. Like acid, like fire. Like truth.

Then Thursday comes, and with it the fluorescent chill of parent-teacher night. The gym floor's been waxed but still smells like sweat and rubber soles. Chairs have been arranged in staccato pairs. Every conversation feels suspended, like breath held underwater.

I'm halfway through discussing comma splices when I see her.

Blazer. Silk blouse. Hair still platinum, though smoothed into something almost tame. She carries a folder like it's part of her body. Her voice is level. "Hi," she says. "I'm here about Hannah. Sarah." Just that. Her name. Ordinary and absurd in its smallness.

We talk. About Donne. About her daughter's grasp of enjambment and conceit. "She loved *The Flea*," Sarah says, smiling like nothing's changed, like she didn't have me bent double in an alley two Saturdays ago while her friends held my wrists.

I nod, professional. Inside I'm a howl wrapped in tweed.

Behind her, in the black glass of the window, I catch our reflection. Two women seated in calm symmetry, hands folded neatly, brows knit in academic concern. But there's a shadow in it. A palimpsest. Her mouth still wet with me. My pulse still caught in the curve of her fingers.

For a second we hold it--two selves, one moment, the animal and the mask. Then I clear my throat and ask if Hannah has been reading outside the curriculum.

Sarah smiles. "She's always had a thing for the older texts." And I can't help it--my thighs twitch.

That Saturday, the night did not clang with bass or stink of bleach and beer. No queue of bodies at the Velvet door, no red stamp bleeding on her wrist. Instead, Sarah took me home. Not mine--hers. A flat too tidy to be permanent, as if she was either always leaving or never quite settled.

We didn't rush. The urgency had softened into something else--something still feral, but unstartled now. Her body in the light was not a shrine, not a battlefield, not a metaphor. Just a body. Lived-in. Written-on. The twin scars at her hips, low and mean. A tattoo near her navel, faded, indecipherable. The faint laddering of her skin across her belly. Flesh that had borne weight. Stretched. Returned.

I touched everything with my tongue. Mapped her like a land rediscovered. Her scent was different in lamplight--less musk, more skin. No perfume. No mask. When she came, she didn't bite. Just looked at me, wide-eyed and bare.

Afterwards, she sat by the window in an oversized shirt that wasn't mine. Smoke curled from her mouth like a sermon. She didn't offer me one.

"We all contain multitudes," she said, like a line she'd practiced or perhaps just carried too long.

And something inside me opened--not cracked, but yielded. I thought of myself in slices: the teacher with coffee breath and red pens, the girl in mesh and boots who mouthed strangers like psalms, the woman who wept quietly sometimes after orgasms without knowing why. None of it untrue. None of it unclean. A spiral, not a staircase.

After that, I kept going to Club Velvet. Kept letting the dark do its work on me. But now it wasn't escape. It was ritual. Not secrecy, but ceremony. The bodies pressed against mine, the mouths that found me in corners, these weren't erasures. They were invocations. I was learning how to keep all the versions of me lit at once.

In class, on a Friday, I told my Year 9s about Darwin. About the beaks of finches and the swell of time so vast it dwarfed kings. A girl with plaits and bitten fingernails raised her hand.

"Are we still evolving?" she asked.

And I thought of Saturday nights. Of Sarah. Of alleyways and laughter, of the things we do to feel known. Of every bruise kissed into bloom, every stranger who made me feel momentarily less alone. I thought of firelight and hips rolling in rhythm older than speech.

"Yes," I said. "We never stopped."

That night, I dreamed of water. A slick creature dragging itself onto land, blinking salt from its eyes. Of bones reshaping. Of hands learning the heft of tools. Of women circling a flame, their laughter echoing off stone. I woke slick between my thighs, my heart pulsing like a drum. And I lay there, hand pressed low on my belly, whispering thanks to every animal I'd ever been.