Being a Girl

by Chloë Thurlow

  He was sitting in the shade of a green canopy writing with a fountain pen and looked at me for a long time without saying anything.

  ‘It’s broken,’ I said finally.

  ‘So I see.’

  He screwed the top back on his pen. My heart was pounding. It was the first days of October, the Indian summer had lasted and the sun was so hot I was running with sweat inside the maid’s dress.

  ‘A civilised house runs on discipline, don’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Goetz.’

  ‘The canes on the wall like the books on the shelf are not merely for decoration. A good cane, like a good Stradivarius, needs to be played,’ he said, and a shudder ran through me.

  I was afraid of what he might do, afraid but excited, an adventurer at the beginning of a journey. Studying can become awfully tedious. You have to get out of yourself sometimes. Dr Goetz was drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair, weighing me up.

  ‘Perhaps later, my dear,’ he finally said, and I felt oddly disappointed as he stood and pointed at the bare patches of grass below the trees. ‘The ground has been prepared,’ he added. ‘What I would like you to do is lay the turfs, lay them as close together as you can, then we’ll give them a thorough dousing.’

  ‘Yes, of course, Dr Goetz,’ I gushed.

  I gave a little curtsy before turning and making my way towards the stacks of turfs.

  ‘Milly,’ he called, and I stopped. ‘You’re not thinking of gardening in that nice clean uniform, are you?’

  My heart started pounding even more. I stood there, frozen like a rabbit in the headlights of his marble eyes.

  ‘Come along then, girl. Put the uniform over the back of the chair here.’

  ‘But, doctor . . .’

  ‘Do it now, Milly.’

  There was something in his voice that made me want to obey. I was dripping inside the black dress and the very notion of taking it off was oddly appealing. I slowly approached the vacant chair and he made a twirling motion with his fingers. I turned and, as he pulled the tails of the white bow on the back of the apron, I had the sense that I was a gift being unwrapped.

  I bent my arms up my back to lower the zip and placed the dress on the chair. I removed the little maid’s hat and stopped for a moment. His eyes were on me, willing me to continue and, when I unsnapped my bra, releasing my breasts, my nipples seemed to grow pinker and sparkled in the autumn sunlight. I lowered the frilly knickers. I was wearing cotton briefs under all those frills and when I stood straight with the briefs still in place, Dr Goetz made a stern downward motion with his forefinger.

  ‘Everything?’ I asked.

  ‘Everything,’ he replied.

  I bit my lip. We looked at each other and his marble eyes glowed.

  I tucked my thumbs in the elastic and paused like Cæsar on the banks of the Rubicon. I ran my knickers down my legs, and as I stepped away from them they could have been a white rose blooming on the grass. I went to pick them up, but the doctor’s hand was quicker and he scooped the damp triangle of cotton into his palm.

  ‘There, now, isn’t that better?’ he asked and as he ran my knickers under his nose I was back with the clan of the Black Watch in bonny Scotland. Why do they do that? Men are just too weird!

  I stepped out of my heels and wandered back across the garden, the dry grass tickling my toes, my breasts bobbing and swaying with the centrifugal force of my steady gait, my bottom like two moons, my pubic hair cropped like a boy’s haircut. 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. We are programmed 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.

  ‘One at a time, Milly, otherwise they break.’

  ‘Yes, Dr Goetz.’

  I could barely reach the top of the pile of turfs and as soon as I lowered the first one I was sprayed with a shower of dust that went into my eyes and mouth and up my nose. I sneezed.

  ‘Bless you,’ he said, and sat back to watch, his bare legs crossed, his hands folded in his lap.

  I carried the roll of earth across the garden and set it down in the turned soil below the trees. As I went down on my hands and knees to push the turf in place, I was aware that in that position my breasts hung heavily below me like swollen udders. My bottom would be gaping open in such a way that it would give Dr Goetz a bird’s eye view of my most intimate places as well as recreating another of the sepia prints on the study wall, a girl on all fours, her back bowed in a downward arc, her face turned to the camera with the bewildered but contented look of a gazelle coming across a vacant salt lick.

  Of course, I should have started laying the turfs in such a way that I was facing the doctor, but it was obvious to start at the furthest point and, now that I’d started, like skydiving from an aeroplane, I was freefalling through the void and could do nothing but imagine wings were sprouting from my shoulder blades. I was free, naked. I was flying. I moved into profile knowing that, in this position, on all fours, shoulders higher than the curve of the bottom, a girl looks her very best, a healthy young animal, natural, earthy, deeply erotic, yet deeply feminine.

  I went back for another turf, and another. The sun grew hotter and sticky rivulets of dirt ran between my breasts, over my tummy, into the crack of my bottom, the earth turning to mud as it touched my skin. I recalled reading that Einstein got more pleasure making his own bookshelf than penning his theory E = mc2 and I was conscious of the same satisfaction, the patchwork of grass growing as my wet body became an atlas of oozing slime.

  Dr Goetz watched me as he spoke on his mobile, and I tried to see myself as he was seeing me, a bare grubby girl with breasts slicked in mud from where I supported the turfs, my knees pitted. I felt natural, primeval, the narcissism of my nakedness before the eyes of the doctor sending shivers of inexplicable pleasure up my spine. That shivery feeling reminded me of the way Dr Iliescu had played me like a musical instrument, and I remembered Professor Martin following her into the night as if lured by a spell.

  The moment Professor Martin popped into my brain, his head popped around the French doors. He gave me a wave, then sat beside Dr Goetz.

  I am not sure why I was embarrassed, but my cheeks turned to fire and I was aware of my breasts jiggling as I bounded back to the stack of turfs. Dr Goetz with his beard shaped like pubic hair was a paradigm of the perverse, but my tutor was really rather boyish with his long nose and big teeth, and it was only at that precise second that I knew why my tutor had sent me to Dr Goetz in the first place.

  The two academics in their Sunday shorts and sandals sat in the shade watching me move across the garden as if they were spectators at a cricket match on a village green. The sun grew bigger and hotter. The piles of turfs slowly went down and, by the time I had set the last one in place, I was no longer a nude girl. I was an earth maiden, a fertility symbol, something primitive and wanton, every orifice filled, every crease and crack slippery with perspiration. I felt like a healthy little animal, my limbs tired, my heart beating evenly in my chest, my breasts standing out as proud as the prows on a pair of pirate ships.

  Dr Goetz came closer to look. ‘Well done, Milly, that’s a lovely job,’ he said and patted my bottom in the friendly way you might pat a pony. I felt awfully proud for some silly reason.

  The doctor went and found a flat sheet of board from the garden shed and my tutor helped him place it over the newly laid grass. They walked up and down, settling the turfs in.

  ‘Nice job,’ said Professor Martin. ‘It’s very dry, though.’

  ‘It just needs a good wetting, Andy,’ he replied. ‘Go and get the hose, my dear,’ he added, turning to me.

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bsp; The hose was attached to a spool on the side of the shed. It needed all my strength to unwind the green snake across the garden. I turned on the tap and the men sat back below the canopy mopping their brows with white handkerchiefs while I gave the grass a good dousing. When that was done, I tried to wash the earth off my body, holding the hose in one hand, but it required two hands to do a decent job. I needed to stand under the spray and spent ages trying to hook the hose over the overhanging bough of a tree, throwing it up again and again, the water swishing backwards and forwards like rain on a car windscreen, the men observing my clownish performance like children at the circus. Finally, the hose hooked and I wriggled and squirmed under the cold water. I got most of the mud off, but it was really caked on in some places and wouldn’t budge.

  ‘Here, let me give you a hand,’ Professor Martin said, approaching and pulling the hose down from the tree.

  He held his thumb over the nozzle and I danced around under the spray.

  ‘That’s never going to do it, Andy,’ said Dr Goetz. ‘I’ll get the bucket.’

  The doctor collected the bucket from the shed and placed it in the middle of the patio tiles. Professor Martin filled it, and I stood there submissively as he washed me down with a big yellow sponge, first my back, under my arms, deep in the creases of my bottom and down my legs. I lifted one leg at a time, he cleaned between my toes, and I rinsed my feet in the bucket, which he emptied and refilled with clean water.

  He hosed down the parts he had cleaned, wrung out the sponge several times and I turned round. He dipped into the wells below my collar bones, discreetly lifted my breasts to wash underneath, then spent ages down on his haunches scrubbing my pitted knees, his long nose so close to my wet pussy it was in danger of slipping inside. He sluiced the dirt from my pubic hair and ran his fingers between the open lips of my vagina. As my tutor, his role was to cleanse my mind of preconceived ideas, although I must say he did a good job running the sponge through the lips of my vagina to cleanse away any lingering motes of earth.

  He revolved the head of the hose against my labia, giving everything a good rinse. My lips puckered open, sucking at the tube so that a fountain of water gushed up inside me, teasing every fold and nerve ending. I wasn’t conscious that I was lowering myself over the tip of the hose, but I did so, and my tutor responded to my movement, easing it up and down, up and down, soaking his leather sandals. My eyelids closed. My bottom contracted, the breath caught in my throat, and then I gasped, my wet orgasm exploding like a champagne cork, warm juices flooding my thighs, and I was aware that the hose was like the tail attached to the girl in the photograph by Man Ray, that everything was elaborately connected, an erotic puzzle still taking shape.

  Dr Goetz emerged from the house with a length of white rope and two canes.

  ‘Would you believe it, this girl broke one of the antique frames,’ he said, addressing Dr Martin. He looked at me, standing there dripping wet in the autumn sunshine. ‘Do you remember what I told you, Milly? Like a sailing ship, a good house is driven by the winds of discipline.’

  He coiled the rope efficiently around my wrists as he was speaking and I found myself being led docilely back to the same overhanging bough where I had hooked the hose. Dr Goetz tossed the end of the rope over the branch in one throw, looped the end through the knots about my wrists and hauled my arms up above my head. He secured the end of the rope around the trunk of the tree. Stretched up on my toes, wet and naked, I was a ripe shapely girl of eighteen who had known the first moment I had seen the whips and canes and crops on the wall that one day I would taste them upon my flesh. What man could resist striping my backside with a cane? What girl could resist such flattering attention?

  ‘Six each, I think, Andy,’ Dr Goetz said thoughtfully, and my gasp was so loud he seemed suddenly surprised that naked girls made noises and caned girls were likely to give full throat to their gratification.

  He hurried back into the house and returned with a leather gag containing a ball about the size of a golf ball attached at the centre and straps that he buckled at the back of my head. ‘We don’t want the neighbours to hear, now do we, they’ll only complain that they weren’t invited.’

  He stood back and glanced around the garden, at the new turfs glistening with beads of water, the turned flowerbeds waiting to be replanted, the sky as blue as a robin’s egg. My tutor came and stood beside Dr Goetz and they studied me as if I were an exhibit in a gallery, my breasts, my well-defined rib cage, the sensuous turn of my hip bones, the isosceles triangle of my pubic hair. I felt like a work of art, a new sculpture released from an ancient mould. I was connected to a primordial tradition that went back to the beginning of time. The two academics with their bare legs and me, naked, hanging from a tree, my toes just touching the ground, was an exact representation of the cave drawing in India, a tableau vivant carefully replicated by some Victorian clergyman.

  Dr Goetz ran his hand down my back and over the curve of my bottom. ‘I told you about my research into the frescos at the Ellora caves,’ he said and Dr Martin leaned forward with interest. ‘The intriguing thing is, Andy, the girl in the photograph is identical to the girl painted on the cave wall. And our Milly is a mirror image of them both, the full breasts, the slender waist, the shapely hips, her mica-dark eyes and long tresses.’

  ‘An Indian deity, quite astonishing.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Dr Goetz. ‘It conforms to my theory, as I told Milly, man’s idea of beauty, the shape and form, and man’s aspiration to beat the object of his desire, has remained unchanged throughout time. It is, if you like, the very definition of reincarnation.’

  I would like to have joined in the discussion, but I couldn’t speak through the gag, and it was a shame because I had a lot to say on the matter. I had spent some time contemplating why men wanted to beat girls and had come to the conclusion that it was because they wanted to own them and, while we practised obedience and thrived on discipline, while we relished being objects of desire, objects so desirable men were moved to chastise that object in the most agonising fashion, they could never truly possess the object. Land and gold, yes. The souls of girls never.

  The poet Sappho wrote that what is beautiful is good, and Schiller said physical beauty is a sign of interior beauty, a spiritual and a moral beauty. The nuns at Saint Sebastian’s had the same view, or at least it always seemed to be the pretty girls who were made team captains and prefects.

  I had never really thought of myself as being beautiful, that was Binky’s domain. But I had blossomed under Jean-Luc Cartier’s hand and my being there that day in the garden, bound and naked, was a sign of my inner purity, my earnest struggle to be true to myself, a stepping stone on the path of my destiny. Freedom is being yourself, knowing yourself. That moment when Jean-Luc held a glass of water to my mouth and the water gushed over my front was a Zen awakening, and I had relived it in my imagination many times since. I had never been caned before. I knew it would hurt, it would hurt a lot, and I knew, too, that I could mutate the pain into pleasure. I sucked on the rubber ball and it was soothing.

  ‘After you,’ Dr Goetz said.

  My tutor stood back on the wet grass, took a practice swing with the cane and brought the beast down on my proffered bottom. I bit down hard on the ball and a tear squeezed from my eye. Sweat gushed from my armpits. My shoulder blades cracked. My knees trembled and my backside burned like the fires of Valhalla as the flames whipped up my spine and down the backs of my legs.

  The way my hands were suspended, my toes were scarcely touching the ground and, as I wriggled, my body turned and surely looked more appealing, my dancing thighs inviting attention and that’s where the second stripe came, across the soft flesh below the pouting lip of my bottom. I screamed in silence, sucked the rubber ball and pirouetted on the tips of my toes.

  ‘I don’t recall ever seeing anything quite so lovely,’ I heard Dr Goetz say, but the words faded at the sound of the cane slashing the air and printing a third s
tripe across my inflamed posterior, the line slicing the first two and scorching shiny stars of tenderness where they crossed.

  My whole body was on fire, my pink nipples tingling, my shoulders taut, the provocative globes of my rump like red-hot coals.

  ‘Three,’ the doctor said, and I really didn’t think I would make twelve.

  I noticed Dr Martin change position. The fourth crack of the cane was another diagonal, scoring my bottom from the top of my left cheek to the place where my right cheek curves into my thigh. I wriggled as if to escape the blows knowing that my wriggling bottom would be all the more enticing, and knowing that there was no escape. I had without protest allowed myself to be tethered to a tree. I had imagined it the very moment I gazed down at the photograph of the girl in the cave painting in India. I had willed it. I was in a position of total servitude, total surrender, and with that thought the pain was more tolerable. My tutor took up his position once again, and once again the cane seared my moist folds of flesh. One more, I thought, one more and we are halfway. Sweat glistened from my body and, as the cane came down, I was aware of the sweet musky smell of my own arousal.

  ‘Very nice, Andy,’ said Dr Goetz.

  I opened my eyes and my gaze met the cool marble stare of Luther Goetz.

  ‘This is going to hurt, Milly,’ he said. ‘Your tutor is a new convert to our calling, but I am experienced in the art.’

  He stood back and gave several practice swings. I heard the thin cane cut the still air and the sound was like cotton being ripped asunder, like an axe splitting wood, like the sigh of the sky at night. I closed my eyes and tried to remain still. I would absorb the pain. I had done it before. But the pain when it came was like no pain I had ever experienced, like nothing I could imagine. The cane burst upon my bottom like an explosion, like the invasion of a foreign army. Tears pressed from my tightly closed eyelids. Sweat ran down my back and dried the instant it reached the furnace of my burning bottom.