Being a Girl

by Chloë Thurlow

  ‘Look, now, mon, we have a dark one and a light one.’ He leaned back and shook his head. ‘Same height, too.’

  ‘That’s useful,’ said Byron, nodding with approval as he glanced up at the beams on the ceiling.

  Later I would know what they were talking about. The damp on my back formed a bead of sweat that ran down my spine. The fire roared. My breasts were full and heavy, my breath threading the silence like a needle passing through silk. I glanced down: my pink nipples had turned dark like ripe plums and hummed as if with a charge of electricity. I was wet and tremulous, the Laird’s soft voice like a prayer when he spoke.

  ‘Slip those trousers off like a good girl, now. Just like your wee friend.’

  I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to, but Binky was standing there in nothing but her knickers and I rationalised that it was only fair. I looked up into the Laird’s eyes and got the odd sensation that I was about to sit on a mat at the top of the helter-skelter, and once I pushed off I would slide into oblivion.

  ‘No,’ I said, softly, without conviction.

  ‘I don’t want to fight you, lassie. Be a good girl and do as you’re told.’

  Contents

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. The Casting

  2. Men in Kilts

  3. Primal Urge

  4. Cheats

  5. Erotique Diabolique

  6. The Garden of Eden

  7. The Prize

  Copyright

  About the Book

  I had known the moment I had seen the maid’s uniform in the cupboard that the time would come when I took it off for Dr Goetz and, now that I had done so, I felt a sense of liberation, a sense that I had obeyed my own instincts. I had not taken the uniform off for him. I had taken it off for me. With the right words, the right conditions, girls want to obey. And those men who understand that can take girls with the right attitude to the extremes of their true potential.

  I looked back at Dr Goetz and our eyes met.

  Late for a vital interview on a sweltering day, casting agent Jean-Luc Cartier pours Milly some water and holds the glass to her lips. When the water soaks her blouse he instructs her to take it off. Milly is embarrassed but curious. As Milly strips off her clothes, more than her shapely body is uncovered – her deepest nature is revealed.

  Jean-Luc puts her over his knee and Milly’s virgin orgasm awakens her to the mysteries of discipline, beginning an erotic journey from convent school to a black magic coven in the heart of Cambridge academia, to the secret world of fetishism and bondage on the dark side of the movie camera.

  Being a Girl

  Chloë Thurlow

  For Dave

  Master and so much more

  1

  The Casting

  I HATE MY step-sister. I really do. I could have killed her when I put my name down for a summer job at a casting agent’s and then found her name written in her big rounded letters on the list. The interview happened to fall on the same day as I was sitting my History A level, and that was just typical. I was confident that I’d done well in Italian and Theatre Studies, but I needed a good mark in History to be assured of my place at Cambridge.

  Things always work out for Binky and it’s just not fair. She’s a year younger than me and had suddenly shot up with long perfect legs that she was showing off like an absolute tart in a little pink suit, a white, high-necked top with a gold cross on a fine chain, everything demure and charming, and so much bare flesh streaming out from below her skirt. Her interview was at 2.00 and I watched her leave school, a Burberry bag swinging from her shoulder and her long silky legs like scissors striding down the drive towards the West Gate. She turned with a little skip and a feeling of doom touched me as she vanished from view.

  With her delicate features and deep-green eyes, Binky had only recently become aware of the effect she had – on men, on the nuns, on the world – and was making up for lost time. Her name when we were small had been shortened from Roberta to Berta and familiarised to Binky. Everyone, just everyone, adored my little sister. But then, they didn’t know her.

  The placement was supposed to be for someone in the upper sixth and Binky, in the lower sixth, wasn’t weighed down with ghastly A levels. Our only rival was Virginia Ward, a really nice girl who thought her red-framed glasses were cool and still didn’t have anything to put in her white cotton bra. Virginia was the sort of girl you did prep with and avoided on Saturdays when we were allowed to go into town.

  Once Binky had disappeared through the school gate, I went back to my last-minute revision, memorising dates, names, battles. It seemed as if all of life was one big battle and Binky was ahead in the charge. I read one last time through my notes on the English victory over the French at Agincourt and raced upstairs to the exam room where four other girls were already at their desks, crisscrossing their legs and sweeping the hair from their eyes. We exchanged nods and good lucks and I realised I was going to miss Saint Sebastian’s. The convent had been my home for the last five years and I didn’t think I was ready for the real world, we had in truth been so coddled and protected.

  Once the exam started, I pushed Binky from my mind, and just concentrated. I can do that, really focus on one thing and put everything into it. The afternoon was warm. My underarms were damp and you could smell the tension in the air with five girls sweating over their papers.

  The moment the exam was over, I blew kisses to the others and ran. We had started twenty minutes late and I bolted down the drive, along the busy high street and down into the tube without even combing my hair. The convent is at the furthest point on the Piccadilly Line and it was already rush hour by the time I squeezed into the packed carriage. The Underground smelled like a charity shop and I always had the feeling that someone was pressing against me rather harder than they should have been.

  At least I didn’t have to change, although by the time I reached Leicester Square, I was totally stressed and had decided if Binky got the job with the casting agent I would never speak to her again. Never. This was going to be my job and I would do everything I could to get it.

  At least the lavatories at Leicester Square were clean. I pulled the band from my ponytail and brushed my hair as best I could with my fingers. That’s another bone of contention, actually: Binky’s yellow locks fall from a neat centre parting to her shoulders, glossy and perfect, and it’s true what they say, men do prefer blondes. We have by coincidence the same green eyes, but like my father, an Italian, I am dark and provocative; at least, that’s what matron says, while my step-sister is fair like her English mother. Binky didn’t have my figure, but she had those long legs revealed halfway up her thighs, while my plaid kilt fell to the prescribed two inches below the knee. Like so uncool. It wasn’t fair and I hiked the skirt up at the waistband and hid the folds of material by pulling out my blouse. Now, I just looked scruffy. I sighed despondently as I took off my socks and hid them in my backpack.

  The agency was in one of those little passageways running into Chinatown. I had printed out a map on the web. It was easy to find, although I was so late when I finally got there, the thought crossed my mind that it was more than likely that everyone had left for the day. Binky had got the job and I was going to have to kill her when I got home. I gloomily pressed the buzzer and let out a sigh of relief when a deep voice came on the entry-phone. I was in luck.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Camilla Petacci,’ I said and the door clicked open.

  Inside the building it was dark and, as I climbed the stairs, I don’t know what came over me, but I did something utterly mad. It was just silly really, immature, on the spur of the moment, but had consequences that I would ponder long into the future. I was hot in m
y blazer. The bag of books weighed a ton. Perspiration was trickling between my shoulder blades and, without thinking, I opened the top button on my blouse. Finally, I could breathe.

  As I made my way up the second flight of stairs, as if there were some mathematical prerogative in this, some hidden equation, I undid the next button. My heart was pounding and the soft creamy mounds of my breasts were rising and falling as I caught my breath and tapped on the door.

  ‘Come in.’ The voice was muffled and seemed far away.

  I entered and found Jean-Luc Cartier facing away from me glancing through a pile of photographs. I waited and he slowly turned in his swivel chair, looking me up and down, as I suppose an employer would, and I felt foolish in my school uniform, my blouse stupidly half undone, the backpack like some terrible punishment on my shoulders. I felt like the wanderer in Pilgrim’s Progress.

  ‘I’m so sorry to be late . . .’

  ‘I was just leaving . . .’

  ‘I had an exam . . .’

  I’d blown it.

  He glanced at his watch, then at a sheet on his desk. ‘It was your sister I saw, the same name, of course.’

  ‘Roberta.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Binky,’ he said, and smiled as if from a pleasant memory. I was livid.

  I smiled back through gritted teeth. It was even hotter in the office than it had been on the stairway. I felt another bead of sweat run down my back. Jean-Luc Cartier was fresh in a white shirt and jeans, a heavy watch that he moved around his wrist as he stood and sort of circled me. He wore a look I took for disappointment as he gazed at my school uniform, the bunched-up material around my middle, the backpack with a heart drawn in red felt tip. How pathetic.

  As I glanced down at my throbbing chest I realised another button had popped open by itself. I did consider doing the buttons up again, but that would only have drawn attention to my breasts and Mr Cartier seemed to have been reading my mind anyway, and was now focusing the full weight of his gaze down my front.

  ‘You know all about computers, that sort of thing?’ he asked, addressing my breasts.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I got an A in IT . . .’

  ‘Très bien.’ He smiled and I pressed my fingernails into the palm of my hand. An A in IT. What an idiot.

  He looked up from my breasts into my eyes and I blushed under his gaze. I felt hot. Baking hot. My throat was dry. I was so nervous when he reached forward and brushed a lock of hair away from my eye I just didn’t know what to do. It was just a gesture, but I had never met this man before and it seemed too weird, too intimate.

  ‘You finish school soon?’ he then asked.

  ‘Yes, in a couple of weeks. I’ve applied to Cambridge,’ I said, immediately regretting it.

  ‘Cambridge?’ he repeated.

  ‘To read the history of art and theatre.’

  He glanced around at the portraits decorating his office. ‘You are an actress?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, well, you know, yes, sort of. I would like to act, but I want to get a good education.’

  ‘Just in case?’

  I nodded and felt foolish. He was looking me up and down as if I were there for a casting.

  ‘It needs a strong sense of discipline to be an actress,’ he then said.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Do you have that discipline, Camilla?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Très bien,’ he said again. ‘Come, we should see the nerve centre,’ he added and pointed to the corner. ‘You can leave your bag.’

  I shrugged it off my shoulders. I was going to do up my blouse but, before I could, he stretched his hand out to me. I wavered for a second and when I took it he squeezed really quite hard and led me down a narrow flight of stairs with wooden rails on each side, the space between them so narrow we were pressed together like two people descending on the escalator to the Underground.

  We entered a room with four big flat screens pulsing a pale-blue light along one wall and a row of tall filing cabinets opposite. He clicked a loose mouse and brought up the face of a famous actor I’d seen on TV many times but whose name at that instant escaped me. Was he doing this to impress? I wasn’t sure. I was just hot and tense. I was in a world that fascinated and frightened me at the same time.

  Below a row of tensor lights at the centre of the room was a square glass table that for some reason made me think of Alice when she found the golden key that would take her to Wonderland.

  ‘This is where we lay out the goods for the directors,’ he said, and turned to the banks of filing cabinets. ‘Most people are on file, but more are going straight to computer now.’

  The room was stifling. The computers hummed and Jean-Luc Cartier’s voice with its faintly accented English made me feel drowsy. I had worked so hard on the exams I was exhausted. My stomach was squeezed against the waistband of my skirt, my blouse was sticking to my back, and my breasts were rising and falling immodestly with each breath I took. Everything was tight, constricted. I was bursting from my clothes, as matron had said, but it was so close to the end of term it would have been a waste to buy a new uniform.

  Mr Cartier didn’t say anything but he must have known I was hot and filled a big glass of water from one of those plastic fountains, the bubbles making vulgar noises as they exploded on the surface. I guzzled the water down so quickly, it splashed on my blouse, and I felt like a complete idiot as I handed back the glass. He wedged it under the tap.

  ‘Take off your jacket,’ he said.

  It was like an order and I obeyed without thinking, hanging it on the back of the chair where the actor was still staring from the computer screen with a faintly mocking expression.

  Mr Cartier approached with the glass refilled, but instead of giving it to me, he held it to my mouth and I was so thirsty I opened my lips. He stared at me and I watched his eyes as he tilted the glass, the water gushing out, drenching my school blouse and running down my front. He kept tipping the glass until all the water had gone and it seemed like a game but he wasn’t smiling. This was a new sort of game and I didn’t know the rules. I was panting for breath, hot still, and he was standing so close, a wave of panic coloured my neck and cheeks.

  Now he spoke in the same soft hypnotic way, kindly, with force, pointing with a sort of impatience at the wet blouse.

  ‘You should take it off,’ he said.

  We were silent. I swallowed. I couldn’t understand what he meant. Had I misheard?

  ‘What . . .’

  ‘It’s wet, Camilla,’ he added. ‘Slip it off.’

  ‘But Mr Cartier . . .’

  But what? I didn’t know. I didn’t have the right words. I could smell sweat under my arms, a feeling of fear, even excitement, like I was in a horror film.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ I finally managed.

  ‘You can’t?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘If things are going to run properly it’s important to follow instructions. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  ‘I thought you had a sense of discipline . . .’ he said, pausing, and I wondered if he was trying to remember my name.

  ‘Milly,’ I said.

  ‘Then don’t let me have to tell you again, Milly.’

  Now he waited, staring at me, at my breasts rising and falling, and I don’t know if it had been the tone of his voice or some furtive yearning inside me but I wanted to prove that I would do as I was told if I got the job, that even if Binky had long gymnast legs my breasts in their white cotton bra were as pretty as two little flowers. Actually, quite big flowers.

  He sighed as he glanced at his watch and, while I was daydreaming about Binky’s legs skipping along the drive at Saint Sebastian’s, my fingers were nervously doing my thinking for me, releasing the last few buttons on my blouse until it was completely open down the front. The blouse was soaking wet, so it did make sense. Sort of. That’s what I was telling myself, anyway.

  ‘Come along,’ he s
aid.

  I shuffled the sleeves down my arms and clutched the material to my chest. He turned his watch around his wrist and then held out his hand, motioning with his fingers. The actor with no name was staring across the room, daring me, and I gave Mr Cartier the ball of damp material.

  He shook out the creases, straightened the sleeves and placed it neatly over another chair. He hadn’t looked at me at all, but glanced back with an irritated expression.

  ‘Come along, Milly, and that please.’

  He was pointing at my bra. I sort of shrugged and tried a smile. It was ridiculous.

  ‘Oh, but I can’t.’

  ‘There is no such thing as can’t. Not in my language.’

  He held out his hand but I remained defiant. ‘Mr Cartier, I’m not going to.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Well, I’m just not.’

  ‘Milly, what did I tell you about obeying? Are you going to obey?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  He pointed at my blouse. ‘You have done very well. Now, off please.’

  I felt a tremor run through me. Nothing like this had happened before. It was embarrassing, humiliating, but sort of exciting. He was testing me and I suppose I was testing myself. I was Alice falling, falling, falling down the rabbit hole.

  He glanced at his watch and shook his head. I’d blown it. My little sister was going to get the job. She’d be strutting around with the soap stars showing off her long legs. I sniffed back a tear. I didn’t mind taking off my blouse. It was hot, and I was rather proud of my breasts if the truth be told. It seemed sort of logical, natural. My blouse was wet and, anyway, breasts are everywhere, in every magazine, in the daily newspapers, on every ad in the tube; starlets and weather girls. Breasts were in – or, out rather. They were public property, but no one except the girls at school had ever seen my breasts completely uncovered. Another bead of perspiration slipped down my back, the horror and the shame and the thrill of standing there hot and breathless was just too much to bear.