Being a Girl

by Chloë Thurlow

  The cane came down again and again. I was sure I would be marked forever and I didn’t care. I just wanted it to be over. Two. Three. Four. Each worse than the one before, the doctor picking his spot and finding unmarked flesh to brand, lines of fire crossing lines of fire. It was nearly over. I had done it. I would take the beating as the girl in the cave in India must surely have done more than two thousand years ago, like the girl in the amateur photograph. We were sisters in an eternal tradition. It was something to be proud of and, with that thought floating into my mind, the fifth strike of the cane didn’t seem quite so painful.

  In spite of my resolve, I had been wriggling non-stop and determined to remain still, to take the twelfth stroke of the cane with dignity. My body was ablaze with new feelings, new sensations, and it was with complete horror and even embarrassment that as the cane crossed my flesh one last time I felt a contraction inside my sodden pussy and sighed silently through a long smouldering climax. How? Why? It was something to ponder later and now I hung there suspended from the bough of a tree feeling deeply debauched and deeply satisfied.

  I used what strength I had left to stretch up, my feet left the ground, and I swung backwards and forwards, the movement of air cooling my poor little bum, my scored thighs, my burning pussy. When I opened my eyes, the two academics in their short trousers were studying me with what I thought was awe and respect. Could they have done what I had done? I didn’t think so.

  ‘Take her down, Andy, I won’t be a moment,’ Dr Goetz said and went hurrying back across the garden to the house.

  Dr Martin untied the rope from the tree and I came slowly back down to earth. He freed my bonds, released the gag, and I collapsed in his arms. I was trembling, aftershocks of my orgasm clenching my insides. Dr Martin carried me back to the shade below the green canopy and, at that moment, Dr Goetz reappeared with a tub of ointment. He sat in his chair.

  ‘Here, Andy, over my knee.’

  Dr Martin did as he was instructed. He lowered me to my feet and bent me over Dr Goetz’s knee. I thought I was going to be spanked and was too weak to argue. I was wrong. The doctor removed the top from the tub he had brought from the house and I flinched as he soothed ointment into my fiery cheeks.

  ‘Witch hazel,’ he said. ‘It will smart for a moment, then the pain fades.’

  He was right. After the initial moment, the sting went away and I felt a wave of pleasure course through my body. The sun was slipping towards the horizon, scoring orange stripes on the pale blue dome of the sky, and I remained stretched over the doctor’s lap as he spread the ointment over the orange stripes on the dome of my bottom. I was a well-beaten and satisfied girl at one with the universe.

  It was almost dark and getting chilly when I came to my feet. Dr Martin had thoughtfully gone to get a towel and I enclosed myself in its folds.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and walked slowly back into the house.

  I thought about taking a shower, but the witch hazel was so soothing I decided to stay sticky. I lay on my tummy on the unmade bed and called David. I told him what had happened that day in the garden and, the moment I had finished telling him my tale, he asked me to tell him again.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘When people tell their stories they always remember more details the second time,’ he replied. ‘It’s a writer’s trick.’

  I could hear his breath race.

  ‘David, are you masturbating?’

  ‘Are you joking? Of course I am.’

  ‘Slowly, slowly,’ I said. As my fingers slipped up inside my wet parts I understood the pleasures of phone sex for the first time.

  Over the coming weeks I watched the grass grow greener as it slowly knitted together and, like the lawn, the welts on my bottom slowly healed. The caning had left me poised, calm and focused. My gaze was clearer, my mind sharper. I could remember every detail in the books I was reading for my course and my essay on the role of castratos in Renaissance opera received an appraisal from Dr Goetz that made my tutor so proud he sent me a dozen roses that I stood on the shelf below the window in my room. I had never received roses from anyone before.

  I joined the philosophical society and met up with several Old Bashers at Tamara Tucker’s gunpowder, treason and plot party. As a good Catholic girl, Tamara found it fwightfully wisqué burning Guy Fawkes on a pyre of packing crates. The garden was filled with rowing blues and rugger toffs, young men with floppy hair and girls who reminded me of Mummy in their designer shoes and Tiffany bracelets. Fairy lights like falling snow glimmered in the trees and the retro band playing music by The Who kept conversation at a minimum.

  I drank too much champagne and went home with a scrum half named Guy or Oliver or James, something historic. In the hall outside his room, he pulled off my clothes in the way you might toss items in a laundry basket, dropped his trousers and hoisted me like a trophy on to his erection. As my feet left the ground his firework exploded and he was too inebriated to be embarrassed. I got a taxi home.

  The petals fell from the roses. The days were growing shorter. I went Christmas shopping between lectures and was packing to go home for the holidays when Dr Goetz invited me to join the coven in the country to celebrate the winter solstice. It would mean delaying my return to London, but activities surrounding Luther Goetz were likely to be educational and would almost certainly be more interesting than the student parties punctuating the days.

  The doctor drove an old maroon Bentley and I enjoyed sinking into the wrinkled leather seat at his side. We collected Professor Martin and one of the wan women, who appeared dressed from head to toe in black with a black veil and whose name as if by some literary convention was Dr White.

  We sat in silence, mesmerised by the lap of the tyres on the road. The buildings thinned and disappeared, the country lanes became narrow, the headlights making amber haloes on the hedgerows. Tall trees with bare branches patterned the sky and in the crepuscular light it felt as if we were moving through a dark tunnel of time. After this, the shortest day, the days would grow longer, the cycle would continue. I felt connected to that cycle, a tiny dot in the portrait of time.

  We passed through high gates set in thick privet. The track descended into a valley and in a cleft between the hills stood a Gothic mansion with towers and turrets, arched windows and gargoyles leaping from the corners of the roof. Dr White led me to my room and stood on the threshold gripping my arms with trembling hands and staring into my eyes as if I was about to go into hospital for an operation.

  ‘I love the full moon, don’t you?’ she gushed, but didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You’ll find your costume on the bed,’ she added and glided along the corridor on feet dancing to music only she could hear. Academics are by nature weird and the women are the worst.

  A nun’s habit lay on the eiderdown. Black candles lent the room an eerie glow and adorning the red flock wallpaper were prints of prehistoric creatures in repeating patterns that reminded me of Escher, but the drawings were peculiarly unsettling and androgynous, lizards eating little girls who are defecating little boys who in turn are eating lizards. They were signed Pandora and I imagined that the room with its blood-red ceiling and red carpet was the very box from which sprang all manner of depravity.

  The black habit was made of the same fabric as the maid’s uniform. As I peeled off my clothes to try it on, a slice of moonlight entered the glass doors like an ethereal hand that beckoned me to the stone balcony outside. I thrust back the doors and, protected by the birds of prey guarding the balustrade, I stood in the lunar glow breathing the intoxicating air of the solstice.

  It was December 21st but I didn’t feel cold. My flesh was feverish. A ray of milky light entered the top of my head and shot through my body. My bottom was tingling with pins and needles. I ran my fingertips over the fine lines left from the caning. I looked back over my shoulder and, in the reflection of the glass windows, I could see a pattern scorched into my skin. Like moonlight on moving water, like a photograph emerging in a
developing tray, the pattern took the shape of a pentangle, the silver scars, invisible by day, illuminated by the ghostly light of the moon. I was branded by the moon. People through time have worshipped the sun but I from that day on would always belong to the moon.

  I left the doors open and went to dress in the nun’s habit, the garment making me feel both religious and sacrilegious, each containing a shade of the other, needing the other. I was tingling and moist, my thighs prickling. The white cap covered my head, framing my face, and the habit clung to my full breasts. I looked sexual, predatory, and it occurred to me as I gazed into the bevelled mirror that nuns must know the effect they have.

  There was a knock on the door. I turned and Dr White entered, costumed now as a Druid in white. She led me through the labyrinth of stone corridors that were rather similar to those in the dream I’d had that night when I drank too much Peralada cava, the night of the soirée.

  We arrived at a hall where the rest of the group were similarly dressed, some with their hoods in place, their eyes like black holes as they followed my entrance. The sky was lit by a sprinkling of early stars and all eyes flickered frequently towards the moon as it climbed through the heavens beyond the high arched windows.

  A bent waiter with a club foot was passing flutes of fizzing cava and laid out on a table was a selection of food, all in black and white: little rings of goat’s cheese dotted with caviar, quails’ eggs in black pepper, black olives, black rice with slivers of cuttlefish, aphrodisiac selections from Gala Dali’s surrealist cookbook, said Dr White, although my tummy was too tense for anything except champagne.

  My tutor approached across the room wearing his hood, but he was taller than everyone else and I knew it was him by his sloping, slightly diffident walk. The moment he joined me, one of the ghostly figures peering from the window called, ‘It’s time,’ and everyone hurried to deposit their plates back on the table. Professor Martin took my elbow and guided me towards the door and outside, on the stone flagging, we formed two ranks. I was positioned immediately behind the first two and we set off in a snaking file towards a low, perfectly round hill we approached up a stone path. The Druids chanted as they went.

  Waiting at the top of the hill was a man I assumed was Dr Goetz, dressed in black, his face hidden in a hangman’s hood. Beside him stood Alba Iliescu, wearing devil’s horns that extended from her headdress and a black cape that swirled around her body in the evening breeze. A pentangle of white stones was laid out on the top of the hill and I noticed three wooden stakes were set in an isosceles triangle within the pattern.

  Heaven In Is It As Earth On . . .

  I tried to make sense of the words but my attention was fixed on Dr Iliescu. She removed her cape and stood there naked except for the devil mask, her white breasts gleaming, her hand supporting the huge penis strapped about her. She appeared to be masturbating, stroking the phallus like a man, but this I realised was an optical illusion: she was wearing the double-headed penis from Dr Goetz’s study and was driving the concealed half of the phallus up inside her. The chanters were still chanting . . .

  Done Be Will Thy Come Kingdom Thy . . .

  I noticed Dr Iliescu’s chin go back, her mouth fell open and she let go of the rhinoceros horn to stop herself climaxing. At that moment, the full moon reached its apogee and became a ball of white fire over the horizon.

  The black-clad Druid bent forward and lifted the hem of my nun’s habit. He ripped it along the seam, tearing it from me like he was skinning the forbidden fruit. I was wearing pink panties which he cleaved apart, one side, then the other. He turned me round and the chanters chanted even louder as they gazed upon the pentangle gleaming upon the moon of my white bottom.

  Name Thy Be Hallowed Heaven In Art Who Father Our . . .

  The man in black looked up at the sky, then urged me to enter the stone pentangle. I was made to lie down. My arms were lashed to the stake above my head and my legs were spread out, my ankles tied to the two remaining stakes.

  The chanters were chanting, but all I could focus on was Alba Iliescu lowering herself between my spread thighs, her lips slightly parted, her eyes gleaming like two black stars, like portals into another dimension, the devil horns piercing the moon above.

  Alba Iliescu held herself steady with one hand and, with the other, guided the snake head between the lips of my vagina. A flood of warm juices swept through me and the beast throbbed with life as Alba drove the phallus in and out, in and out. There was a gush of wind which could have been a collective sigh, or a collective orgasm. The worshippers murmured their mantra, their voices growing in volume as Alba drove the rhinoceros horn deeper into my secluded places. I screamed, I screamed in pain and pleasure and knew that these two sensations were one and the same, that one doesn’t exist without the other, that I must pursue both to be everything I could be.

  A little pebble from a dam broke loose inside me. Liquids seeped through the gap, the gush became a tide, a torrent, a flood, and it was biblical lying there in the lunar light climaxing with Alba coming in a deluge. Her Dracula blood was boiling and she was shrieking like a werewolf.

  When she caught her breath, she started again, slowly now, the twin snakes greased by our girlie jism. The Druids began a different chant, just softly, and she continued rocking back and forth, each seesaw of the phallus filling me and filling her, and the harder she thrust into me, the more the snake wound its way up inside her. Her eyes sparkled like moonstones above me and as she sank her teeth into my exposed throat I erupted in a second vast and gratifying climax.

  The chanting came to an abrupt stop and Dr Iliescu drew back, easing the snake from me. She stood over me, masturbating again, very slowly, and in the background the Druids started removing their robes. They tossed them to one side and moved around me in a circle, the men gripping their cocks and masturbating, the women squeezing their nipples and thrusting back their heads. They moved closer and closer and, one after the other, the men released their orgasms and spurts of spunk like gleaming ectoplasm coated my face and breasts, the hollow of my tummy, and I remembered that day when Dr Goetz had said they all wanted me to do my best, and I was doing my best, and it was a relief to know that at Cambridge I would get the best education in the world.

  6

  The Garden of Eden

  AROUND THE CORNER from the Majestic on La Croisette in Cannes is a club called the Garden of Eden. Outside, along the edge of the pavement, a blue velvet rope hangs from chromium posts. Gorillas in dinner suits guard the entrance and, behind the rope, hundreds of wannabes stand night after night hoping to be admitted, the intense young men lugging bags full of film scripts, the girls close to naked and some terribly young. ‘Sluts in training,’ Binky remarked as we turned the corner and saw the usual line up.

  We had left David in the bar at the Majestic surrounded by admirers and journalists. Cheats didn’t win best short film at Cannes, but being nominated is recognition in itself and David was being hyped as ‘on the way’, an auteur with a personal signature. He was 24 and awfully handsome, all the more so with the new confidence gained from his film. Other writers were now giving him feature projects to read and, with Hermann Mann his tutor, he had abandoned his own bag of scripts and acquired a Hugo Boss black linen suit.

  When you imagine the Cannes Film Festival, the first thing that comes to mind are the stars in starry glitter walking the red carpet to premières, the phallic lenses of the paparazzi, the ravenous eyes of the watching crowd. Of course, that’s all very important, glamour sells, but beyond the bright lights in smoky screening rooms, Cannes is a casino, a thieves’ market where fortunes are made and more often lost. A Korean who has had good sales at home will sell his feature at Cannes to small-time distributors who put on subtitles or dub the voice track before seeking a release in their own country. Big studio films get automatic distribution, but indie movies have to fight for screens in the marketplace.

  It is at Cannes where miracles happen and dreams break on t
he rocks of cold hard reality. Cinema Paradiso, a nice little film hardly seen in Italy, was discovered in some dive miles from the palm-lined promenades, repackaged and screened all over the world. In counterbalance, there’s a forest of film scripts that remain unread, a million miles of unseen film that will remain unseen, and the movie business is all so nebulous that when I’m grown up I shall probably go into something secure like the art world or politics.

  I was surprised to learn that more than half the business done at Cannes is in the porn market, erotica, hard core, snuff flicks from Brazil, bestiality from beastly places. Glamour sells, but porno seems to sell even more and, while I had been freeing my mind of unyielding opinions at uni, David had been sitting in the editing suite with Sacha Vance cutting the twenty steamy minutes of Stephanie Jones tonguing my shorn pussy into a five-minute short that he screened to distributors, not to get a release – Stephanie would have sued to be sure – but to show he had more than one string to his bow. David Trevellick would do anything to make a feature and, while I wasn’t entirely sure that such overt ambition was an attractive quality, what I did know was that successful artists, successful people, are sure of their goal and follow its trajectory until they get there. They don’t have a bow with many strings but an arrow they fire into the heart of their vision.

  At least David had paid my expenses to attend the festival. As Binky had a gap in her exam schedule, she came, too. Except for Christmas, we had spent little time together, although I had kept up a constant email appraisal of her revision. She had, as I expected, applied to King’s College and, when I told Dr Goetz, he stroked his beard in the reflective way that showed his mind like a search engine was scanning the spiralling helixes of probability and chance.

  ‘Does she have the right attitude for King’s?’ he enquired.

  ‘If you mean does she enjoy being spanked, the answer is yes,’ I replied, and he promised to have a word in the right ear.