Being a Girl

by Chloë Thurlow

  ‘Amazing!’ I said.

  And it was. Just think, little Camilla Petacci from Saint Sebastian’s was going to do it, or at least pretend to do it, with Roddy Wise. The Roddy Wise. A real celeb. I couldn’t wait to tell Binky.

  David rushed off and made coffee and we sat in the kitchen under a neon light, our heads pressed together as we read through the rest of the script.

  ‘Okay,’ said David, ‘after he’s found the tattoo on his chest . . .’

  RICKY hears music playing. He tightens a towel around his waist and when he goes into the living room, he finds both AMANDAs. They are dressed alike, very butch in tank tops and camouflage trousers. OLDER AMANDA holds a CD.

  AMANDA: Is the flamenco yours or mine?

  RICKY: What have you done to me?

  AMANDA: I think you bought it for me?

  RICKY: What have you done?

  YOUNG

  AMANDA: Leave it. We’ll get another one.

  AMANDA glances back at YOUNG AMANDA. They are in love. She puts the CD in one of the two piles she is making. RICKY notices gaps in the bookshelves, paintings missing from the walls.

  RICKY: Why, Amanda, why?

  AMANDA: You know why.

  RICKY: I don’t.

  AMANDA: Yes you do.

  RICKY: Why this?

  He indicates the tattoo. The towel around his waist nearly falls and he has to grab it tight.

  YOUNG

  AMANDA: That was my idea.

  RICKY: You, you fucking set me up. You fucking bitch. You fucking slag.

  YOUNG

  AMANDA: (to AMANDA) You see?

  There is a box beside the door containing books and picture frames. YOUNG AMANDA scoops the box under her arm.

  YOUNG

  AMANDA: I’ll wait in the car, Sweets.

  RICKY: Sweets!

  AMANDA: You can keep the flamenco. I always hated it.

  AMANDA finishes sorting the CDs and places one of the piles in a bag. The flamenco she puts in its case and throws to RICKY. As he catches it the towel drops to the floor.

  Camera rises to RICKY’S chest and closes on the word CHEAT.

  ‘Fade to black,’ David said.

  ‘It’s so good.’

  ‘It can be, it can be now,’ he added.

  In his eyes as he stared at me across the table was trust and uncertainty, a bit like a puppy dog and, although I’d always suspected, I now knew for sure that with boys you have to let them believe they have the best ideas, pretend they know all the answers, ask subtle questions that make subtle suggestions, mould them like wet clay on a potter’s wheel until they are ready for the oven. I gave him my big schoolgirl smile and we went back to the bedroom with the sweet musty smell of sperm in the air and the navy-blue sheets stained in patterns like an archipelago of islands on a dark sea, the red moon motionless on the ceiling.

  I lay on my back with the pillow under my bottom. Like a thirsty creature at a salt lick, David spent hours drinking from my pussy and the thing about sex is it’s a drug. The more you have the more you want. The more you need. Like a drug, or so I’m told, except for a sip of wine and the occasional flute of shampoo, it’s not something I really know anything about, but apparently, like a drug, when you’re high on sex you have more energy. You see things differently. Colours are brighter. Jokes are funnier. Life is glorious. Look at the girl walking dreamily down the street, wide-eyed, tossing her mane, taking long slow strides, and you know she’s fresh from carnal knowledge, her face radiant with promise, and a little anxious, too. Anxious for the next time.

  We drifted into a lazy sleep curled in each other’s arms like baby birds in a nest and I awoke in the triangle of dusty light that angled through a gap in the curtains. It was the first time I had spent the night with somebody and it was sort of weird waking up with a man in a strange bed.

  Part III

  Of course, I had to shave off my pubic hair and it’s not as easy as you might think. It’s easy enough with a lady razor removing the furry coating over the Mount of Venus (such a silly term!) but then you have to use the nail scissors to snip off the stray curly hairs around your labia (another silly word!) and it takes like forever.

  I did wonder if I should ask Mummy for some advice. She was actually quite pleased that I’d found a job. I was being paid £200 for four days (that’s how much Mummy pays for her knickers), but it was a low-budget short and the point was for the actors to be seen, the crew to hone their skills, as David put it, and the director to show everyone how clever he is.

  When I’d finished shaving, I stood in front of the mirror and admired my shiny mount. I looked like a little girl, like a child again, although not really. I adored being a girl but I was a woman. I was fully grown, fully grown and at my very best. My breasts since going to Scotland had swelled up to a sensual C cup 36 and I had been so busy with rehearsals, my waist had shrunk to 24 inches. I measured myself three times a day.

  Binky was positively green, not about my figure, she knew she was cute, but about everything else, my chance to prance around naked on a movie set, a real live director my boyfriend, sort of, and Roddy Wise’s name listed on my mobile phone. Binky spent her days reading books by Michel Houellebecq and sunbathing in the garden.

  On the only occasion when I had time to join her she said I had tabloid tits just perfect for builders to ogle but hardly refined. ‘I expect I’ll be seeing you on Page 3 next,’ she said.

  ‘That’s a thought,’ I replied.

  She lay there looking sad, running her small hands over her narrow hips. Binky was feeling sorry for herself. She had sacked the mechanic. The Polish gardener really did prefer older women, and one night when Binky went back to some grotty flat in Camden with a boy she’d met in a pub playing pool, his three mates appeared out of the woodwork for a gang bang and then they all pissed over her.

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Like really embarrassing in the taxi coming home,’ she replied.

  ‘I mean, you know, when it’s happening. When the boys were pissing on you?’

  ‘You are such a pervert, Milly, I’m sure you’ll find out.’

  ‘I can’t wait . . .’

  Binky is such an attention seeker, I wasn’t entirely sure whether she was telling the truth about her ordeal but, before I could stop her, she rolled back on her shoulders, whipped down her bikini bottoms as she rolled forward and straddled me in one amazingly gymnastic movement. She had been dying to get revenge for the smacking I’d given her and, as she shuffled forwards along my trunk, a golden stream of Binky pee rained over my tummy, between my breasts, over my chin, my face and into my mouth that had dropped open in shock. She jiggled her thighs up and down, shaking out the last little drop, and as I sat forward I caught a glimpse of the Polish gardener watching us through the greenhouse windows.

  ‘Roberta, you’ve been sussed,’ I said. ‘He’s watching.’

  ‘He’s always watching. I saw him taking notes once.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s writing a book.’

  ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover redubbed,’ she said and when I laughed, Binky looked happy for the first time in weeks. That’s all it takes. Revenge!

  I wriggled away from her knees and raced off to the bathroom. I was already late and in the movies everyone makes a point of being punctual, even the stars.

  We had three days for rehearsals and, naturally, Roddy Wise was perfectly content to spend hours pretending to have sex with a girl of eighteen lying on top of him. ‘It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it,’ he kept saying. We kept our clothes on during rehearsals and would take them off when it came to filming. Roddy was on a strict diet and every spare second he did press-ups, building himself up for his nude scene.

  I think Stephanie Jones, Older Amanda, was quite jealous. Her part was a lot smaller than mine for one thing and, for another, it wasn’t really sexy. ‘I mean, there’s nothing for me to get my tongue round,’ she said to me one day while we were out with the cos
tume director, a girl a bit older than me named Maja, very serious, tall and totally gorgeous. There was money in the budget for me to buy the red underwear and I was standing in Harvey Nichols with the curtain open for Maja and Stephanie to see.

  ‘That looks very nice,’ said Maja in her lispy European way.

  ‘Very,’ said Stephanie despondently.

  Stephanie Jones was a star, I mean, she’d made loads of movies and was always on TV. She was a household name. And she wasn’t happy. I told David that night that her part had to be built up or he was going to lose her. The problem for David was that now we had made all the changes, the film would run for about 9 minutes and 15 seconds, it’s all very precise, and once the credits were added, it would bring it to about 9 minutes and 45 seconds: the ideal length for a 10-minute short film.

  ‘Why do they have to be ten minutes?’ I asked. It seemed silly to me.

  ‘That’s the preferred length at festivals,’ he replied.

  ‘So you have about fifteen seconds to play with?’

  ‘Mmm,’ he mumbled.

  He was running his tongue around my aureolae, sucking and slurping. He adored my breasts and I adored his big tongue. He gripped my nipple in his teeth and pulled it out as he raised his head. ‘Maybe twenty,’ he said, and as he spoke with his mouth closed it sounded like baby benty.

  As I stroked his hair I pushed his head down over the grille of my rib cage to the pearly plain of my shaved pussy. He got the message, kissed and licked his way across my soft skin and my legs parted like a bridge opening to allow a tall ship to pass. He peeled back the outer lips of my vulva with his cupped hands and the tip of his tongue nudged its way under the gossamer cowling of pink flesh to the little nubble of my clitoris. I let out a long sigh and pushed my bottom up from the mattress.

  Welcoming David’s tongue inside me was like welcoming an old friend back from a long journey overseas, making me wet, searching for new nerve endings to arouse and stimulate. After working together all day we spent our nights in his four-poster, but it was sort of strange that after that first night when I had encouraged him to beat me with his belt, we had got into a routine of what I believe they call vanilla sex, all pleasure without the scorching spice of a little pain.

  David liked to come in my mouth and then watch as I gulped down his sperm. His cock would slowly shrink and I would keep sucking until it slowly hardened again. Then he liked me flat on my back in the missionary position, legs up, shoulders flat, and I imagined this was what it must be like for old married couples and I was glad I was eighteen and everything was still new and exciting. I had a feeling that if I kept searching, kept experimenting, there was out there in the world the ultimate pleasure, the ultimate climax, a magical fusion of bodies and souls that would bear you as if on a flying carpet to a place beyond the daily concerns of making films and going to university and trying to make Mother happy.

  His tongue was moving like a piston, in and out, a little twist one way, a little twirl the other, polishing my clit like it was a brass handle on a door. I was an IED, an improvised explosive device, the mounting spasms warning of an impending detonation and I wriggled away from his tongue to save it till later, sacrificing pleasure with the expectation of greater pleasure, something I’m sure Sister Theresa at school once said, although not in exactly the same context.

  David looked disappointed for a second and I kissed him. We kissed like people in the movies. We were in the movies. All sloshing and slurping like we were devouring ripe mangoes, the juice running from our mouths. Except for kissing girls, I had never really kissed a boy until I met David and wanted to make the most of it. I paused for breath and ran my tongue down his neck.

  There is a point where vampires bite their victims and he adored it when I nibbled at that magical spot. Perhaps that’s where he kept his clitoris? David threw back his head and it was so tempting to really sink my teeth into his flesh. His skin tasted of ice cream. I wanted to eat him. I licked his shoulder blades, I chewed his nipple. It was pink like a girl’s and I sucked and bit that little rosebud until it popped up, first one then the other, and an eccentric thought entered my head: I would just love to have seen David made-up as a girl. Shave his legs, cut his hair in the same gamine way as Daddy’s girlfriend, dress him in a long evening gown and pointy shoes. I’m sure he’d enjoy being a girl.

  There was a small indentation in his chest which was sweet and I kissed it, and fine fur, soft as baby’s hair, running in a slowly widening line down from his belly button to the thick downy cushion of pubes. I pulled at the hair with my teeth and he winced with pleasure. His cock was huge now like . . . like Goliath. David and Goliath, I thought, and in one movement I swivelled across his thighs, took the giant down my throat and lowered my wet pussy over his mouth, plugging us together like two halves of a Chinese puzzle. We were locked in, my old friends yin and yang, rocking backwards and forwards and I thought I should get hold of a copy of the Kama Sutra because apparently there are hundreds of positions and this one was merely 69. In fact, 69 looked like yin and yang, I realised and, if I ever had a real tattoo, that’s what I’d have, somewhere discreet, the pit of my back between the two dimples David so adored.

  The spasms started almost immediately but I was learning one of life’s most important lessons: self-control. I held back selflessly and waited, and I waited, and I waited, until David’s body grew tense with the pressure and, as he let go, jamming Goliath down to my tonsils, a hammer striking a bell, I pushed up into his tongue and our bodies went electric as they exploded in one universal orgasm. His come filled my throat and I nearly gagged, but I didn’t. I swallowed it down, savouring the flavour, and kept pumping out little sprays of girlie juice that David lapped up greedily like a thirsty man sucking dew from a flower in the desert.

  Is there anything better than sex? I don’t think so. It is what we are here for, what we are designed for. Yes, of course, I wanted to go to Cambridge and get a First and work in the media and be awfully clever, write books on the history of art and say catty things on Radio 4. You can’t spend your whole life in bed, I suppose, but it seems like everything we do is just filling in the time between love and lovers, between sex and anticipating more sex, between getting up from bed and going back to bed. My body was coated in perspiration and the smell of our bodily fluids was like a narcotic filling the air and making me want more.

  David lay back with his eyes closed and his mouth open, spent and satisfied, the lion in his own jungle. I was lying flat on my stomach and tickled his nose with my tongue.

  ‘Twenty seconds?’ I said.

  ‘Aghhhhhhh!’

  ‘Amanda is a lesbian,’ I continued, ‘and Older Amanda is, well, sort of learning the ropes . . .’

  I spoke pensively. He opened his eyes slowly. He was nodding his head up and down, but then his brow creased with the same two creases it always did when he was thinking about his film.

  ‘She’ll never agree,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘She’s a family actress. She’s always on the box. She’s married as well.’ He paused and sat up. ‘What about you, Milly, would you, you know . . . ?’

  ‘For the film I would.’

  David and I seemed to have a different view on sex. To me, it is the most natural thing in the world, like breathing, or eating. Every stranger I passed in the street made me wonder what it would be like to have his cock up inside me or her pussy clamped to my mouth. Would the man who looked a bit like David not make love like David? I am sure the tall slender girl with flashing eyes who studied me on the 22 bus this morning would adore being tied to my bed. Now Binky had peed over me I could imagine peeing over the girl on the bus. Every stranger is a potential lover, an echo of other lovers that awakens memories of past pleasures and anticipates the pleasure to come.

  His eyes were wide now. The creases on his brow had gone. I was still lying on my tummy, my head twisted at an odd angle. He stroked my back, inserted his fingertips
into the two dimples just above my bottom as if he were pressing the buttons on a lift. ‘Going up,’ I said, and in turn I drew my knees up and presented the round orbs of my perfect posterior for his careful consideration.

  ‘Your bottom is so, so . . .’

  ‘Spankable?’ I said.

  He paused like a man at the end of a diving board. He took a breath. His arm went up, drawn by a magnetic force, and like the diver launching himself into the pool his hand came down, a cymbal ringing out melodically against my yielding skin. I breathed a long slow sigh of relief. I wriggled as if to say more, not that my bum needed to ask. The sound of one hand clapping a bottom creates an instant retort, an echo that can only be answered by another clap. Zen monks have spent aeons pondering the sound of one hand clapping and surely the mystery isn’t as profound as they imagine. Get a life. Get a girlfriend!

  David drew himself up on to his knees to make himself more comfortable and brought his hand down again. ‘Two,’ I said, and he was just getting warmed up. I heard David spit into his palm and number three had a different tone, a different texture, more a slap than a smack.

  ‘Three,’ I said, and a frisson of warmth ran up my spine and down my thighs like code, messages of old memories and new feelings flashing through my nervous system.

  ‘Four,’ I counted in a steady voice.

  I squirmed and writhed, I wriggled and pressed my head into the pillow. And again. ‘Five.’ A full, lovely hard smack, the sound like wet fish dropped in the fryer, sizzling, sparkling. I had tried the belt, but preferred the intimacy of a hand, it’s familiar, human, and it occurred to me that the further you went along the road of discipline the more the beatings may thrill but the more they may do lasting damage. I wasn’t into that. It was getting oily and girlie that I liked. I couldn’t imagine a hand smacking your backside would ever be more than a passing moment of tenderness on the way to ecstasy. Being smacked was like being a virgin. It’s painful opening the doors of perception but once inside the magic garden an endless array of gifts were there for you to explore.