Being a Girl

by Chloë Thurlow

  When Binky had tired of her routine she dropped into Van Van’s waiting arms and he carried her to the side of the arena where birds of every hue were preening and flapping as they opened their bodies to the men in suits who had slipped from their suits to connect one to the other in a continuous circle of sexual congress, cocks in bottoms with mouths on the next cock connected to the open legs of the next exotic bird, one after the other like a tableau on an erotic temple and I remembered the frescos from the walls of the Ellora caves. As my sister in her beautiful mask joined the orgy I realised she had found herself. This was what she wanted, an eternal circle of sex with her the centre of attention. The circle extended around the curve of the arena and into dark passageways that I would have enjoyed exploring, but Tyler Copic led me and the actresses away from the display towards an arched door in the opposite direction.

  Four doormen were guarding the archway. One of them swung the door open and, as we made our way in darkness down a curling flight of steps, I was conscious of the beat of my heart and the sound of my heels echoing over the stone walls. In my mind I could see flying, spiralling birds in a gilded cage, and I thought I would remember what I had seen that day for the rest of my life and for the rest of my life I would be drawn back again and again to the Garden of Eden.

  We reached another door and entered a cavern where the silence was so severe you could feel it on your skin. Around the walls, below the curve of the vaulted ceiling, was an elongated wine rack that stretched into the distance, thousands, tens of thousands of bottles of wine layered in dust and ancient cobwebs. Facing the wine rack were barrels, taller than a man, with small cups suspended from taps and, as we passed, each cup like the basket below a hot air balloon would faintly quiver.

  ‘Shoes,’ Tyler said softly, and I slipped them off.

  We were far below the streets of Cannes. It was cold and a shiver ran through me as we made our way through the ranks of wine. We reached an arched niche where we sat before a glass table on leather sofas, Amélie and Greta on one, Tyler and me on the other. Tyler was quiet for a long time. He just sat gazing along the length of the dimly lit cellar, at the barrels and bottles.

  ‘The wine sleeps like children and no one knows its dreams.’

  His voice was soft. I had to lean closer to hear him. He ran his hands through his silver hair.

  ‘Ten years ago I stood with the world at my feet on the summit of Mount Everest,’ he said. ‘I have tasted the meat of an albino elephant and eaten the brains of a Himalayan monkey. They say the creature’s brains will awaken your dreams.’ He showed his empty palms. ‘Like Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman, we find the footprints, never the myth.’

  He paused and turned the silver ring he was wearing around his finger.

  ‘Did you know Spanish fly is actually the dried body of the Cantharidin, a green beetle, not a fly at all? In Gujarat, ground rhinoceros horn is a speciality. An aphrodisiac?’ He shook his head. ‘Just another story. They should leave the horns where they are, where they belong, on the rhinos. Once we kill all the animals, as we surely will, we will be humans without humanity. It is the animals, the fish and the birds that remind us we are human.’

  He gazed off again into the distance.

  ‘Amélie, the ’47 Saint-Emilion,’ he then said and she slipped off obediently along the line of waiting bottles.

  ‘I have trained ten thousand girls,’ he continued. ‘I have turned girls into stars and turned them into black holes, empty spaces. I have seen the Aurora Borealis, the sun setting on Kuta Beach. I have rattled the keys to paradise and when you see the flying birds in the Garden of Eden life is almost bearable.’

  Our eyes met. Had he read my thoughts? Had he planted his thoughts in my mind?

  He looked back at the sleeping wine and a feeling of melancholy in that hushed silent place touched me like a cold hand. I glanced at Greta. She was sitting with one leg over the arm of the sofa, the pads of two fingers teasing the rings in her labia. Her chalk-white face was untouched by emotion and I coveted her poise, her acquiescence, the silver charms like silver fish in the pink pool of her open body. My tranquillity was disturbed by the Himalayan monkey, the hunted rhinoceros, but as Greta May smiled the melancholy lifted and I understood that like her my role was not to fret on matters over which I had no control. I had been made the way I am for another purpose. If Tyler Copic was the high priest of cinema it followed that I, as the naked girl in Cheats, was an acolyte, a disciple, an extra in this new world religion.

  Greta continued to smile, she continued subliminally to nurse the rings in her exposed cleft, and I admired her equanimity, her complete acceptance of everything. It had seemed an odd coincidence that, like me, Greta May had been a pupil at Saint Sebastian’s, but in that quiet place, on that black sofa with Tyler Copic, nothing seemed strange and everything was magically real.

  He put his hand on my leg, just above my knee.

  ‘Every night when I sleep I am robbed of the opportunity to travel to faraway places, to have an adventure, to be someone else or something else. I come here to listen to the wine dreaming and believe that one day I, too, will be visited by dreams.’ Tyler paused and looked at me once more. ‘For a man for whom no pleasure is denied there is only the subconscious. He who sleeps without dreaming, for all that he has in the waking world, he is a man deprived of one third of his life.’

  Amélie returned with the wine opened and four crystal glasses on a tray. She placed the tray on the table, filled the glasses equally and sat again beside Greta.

  ‘The secret of wine is patience,’ said Tyler. ‘The wine has waited for us. Now we shall wait for the wine. Let it breathe.’

  We waited. The minutes passed. Tyler then came to his feet and offered me his hand. I stood. So did the girls. He turned me around to lower the zip on my dress. He turned me back to face him and peeled the gold silk from my body as if it were a cover over an oil painting. As I stepped from the material, the last traces of melancholia drifted away and a wave of contentment passed through me. I was in my natural state. A fragile smile flickered in Tyler’s eyes. He appreciated my full breasts that defied gravity, firm and erect, my pert nipples, dewy-pink like rosebuds. My hips were miniature boomerangs that inscribed arcs like bookends edging the plain of my tummy and my dark pubic hair was a verdant mat smelly, I’m sure, with the carnal thoughts in my mind.

  Tyler held my shoulders. He turned me into profile. He turned me again and, like a man reading Braille, ran the tips of his fingers over the curvature of my bottom. The fine lines crossing my flesh were only visible in moonlight, but as a man who surely knew how to administer those subtle scars he must have sensed their presence. As if by a force of will, the cheeks of my bottom parted and his hand slipped in the slot, sliding through the curve and into my wet pussy. I was dripping, dripping, on the verge of rapture, and his finger caressing the star of my clitoris was racing me all too quickly to climax. As the air caught in my throat and my heart swelled in my chest, he stopped and stroked my bottom until the sensation passed.

  I know, I know I have said it before, but I adore being a girl and nothing at that moment would have given me more pleasure than for Tyler to have bent me over the sofa and tanned my bottom until it was the same shade of red as the wine standing on the glass table. I knew, too, even as the thought was running through my mind, that for a man like Tyler it is the anticipation of pleasure more than pleasure that he seeks. He took his hand away and Greta licked the juice from his fingertips. Tyler was staring into her eyes and the ellipse of her raised eyebrows as she sucked his fingers gave her the look of a Japanese Geisha and I suppose that was her role.

  Amélie passed each of us a crystal glass. As we touched the rims the sound resonated like a high-pitched bell over the ceiling.

  ‘Shush,’ Tyler said, ‘the wine is sleeping,’ and we smiled.

  We slowly drank the Saint-Emilion. I know nothing about wine except the delight it stirs on my taste buds, but I cannot imagine
a vintage with greater depth, more sensitivity. As the dreamy liquid coursed through my body, I got a sense of the rolling hills of Bordeaux, sunlight on vineyards, the rich harvest of 1947. I sipped my wine until it had gone and the teardrop that remained in the well of the glass was too deep for me to reach with my tongue but I tried anyway. Tyler saw me.

  ‘Shall we open another bottle?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘One dream is enough.’

  ‘To begin with,’ he said.

  The girls replaced their empty glasses on the table and we watched them strip from their costumes, first Amélie, then Greta. It was like a performance, and although Tyler had been everywhere and tasted every fruit, I was sure this show he would always enjoy. Greta slid the strap from the buckle holding Amélie’s harness, Amélie pirouetted on her toes and her costume stripped away from her body in a continuous ribbon of black leather. She did the same for Greta and as Greta turned in a circle I could see a shiny scar at the pit of her back.

  Before I could look closer, Greta showed me the silver disc that turned in the ring she had been wearing at her throat. On it were little ticks and scores like hieroglyphics.

  ‘Blow,’ she said, and when I did so the spinning symbols spelled the name Tyler Copic.

  Greta turned so that I could see her back. So did Amélie. Each had the identical scar immediately above the crack in their bottoms.

  ‘You can touch,’ said Greta.

  The scar consisted of the letters TC.

  I looked at Tyler. He was holding his wine glass and I could clearly see on the dull silver ring he was wearing his initials in reverse.

  I touched the scar on Greta’s back. It was smooth and must have been scalded into her skin with the ring heated until it was white hot. It was hard to imagine what agony it must have been, but pain passes, it is the sister of pleasure, and as the girls turned back to face me I wasn’t surprised to see how inordinately proud they were with these tokens of belonging.

  We stood there quietly, the silence in some way drawing us closer. Tyler had said little about himself. He had asked nothing about me. But as a man who had seen everything, he must have perceived in the erotic outtakes from David’s film something in me that could reach its full potential were the ring that he wore to sign a contract on my flesh. Was it chance that his limousine should have pulled up at the moment when Binky and I were approaching the Garden of Eden? Perhaps so, and perhaps there is no such thing as chance, that each coincidence, each random encounter has been plotted by the stars and destiny is how we respond to that coincidence, that arbitrary encounter.

  I glanced at Greta, at Amélie, two naked girls with finely drawn features on painted faces, and it occurred to me that for Tyler Copic, a man for whom no pleasure is denied, a man who can make the dreams of others come true, the one true pleasure he had was to have complete power over girls who are young and malleable and at their very best, the moment when they are in full control of their own power. Power meeting power is the unstoppable force of the film world. Tyler’s brand on Greta and Amélie was an outward sign of who he was, of what he could do. Greta and Amélie were girls who knew what they wanted. They wanted careers. Now, they belonged to Tyler Copic. One day they would be stars. They would leave him, perhaps, find other men to serve, but the brand on their bodies would remain, a reminder that wherever they went and whatever they did, he would always be their master.

  ‘Come,’ he said, still whispering. ‘We have one more surprise for Milly.’

  Tyler ducked out of the niche and we followed him to another door in the opposite direction to which we had come. The door was made of dark wood and studded in black iron rivets. Tyler turned the round handle and motioned for me to lead the way. We left the crypt of dreaming wine and, as I made my way down a spiral of stone stairs, I imagined I was a reproduction from Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. We had analysed the painting in art class, a small canvas depicting successive movements of a single body, and though I had looked at the print on countless occasions only now, naked on a spiral staircase, did I recognise that just as art does not depend on an established set of rules, nor does life. I understood, too, that my lack of desire to be famous, to be a star in the movie firmament, gave me an unfettered sense of freedom. I was a Duchamp ready-made, a functional object with a fresh aesthetic.

  I wasn’t cold now. There was a smile touching the corners of my lips. My breasts moved just slightly with my movement and I could see in my mind’s eye facets of my naked form in constantly moving shadows. I enjoyed that sense of the scene before me appearing and disappearing with each curve on the spiral. The staircase ended in another domed arena where, at the centre, there was a circular pool with water shivering on the surface like molten gold. The pool was shallow and around the perimeter, sloping up from the edge, was a bench two metres wide covered in what appeared to be fur the same lustrous colour as Binky’s blonde hair.

  Both in the pool and stretched around the circular bench were naked girls, girls swimming, making love, in twos and threes. I could smell the pungent scent of desire. I could hear the irrepressible gasp of girls in ecstasy. In Dante’s inferno the denizens descend into deeper layers of hell. In the Garden of Eden, I had a sense of entering paradise.

  Tyler Copic left us and climbed the stairs to the gallery above the pool. I noticed the bearded man, the Oscar winner, at a table with two other men and Tyler went to join them. I glanced from table to table and, as I did so, Greta told me who they were. I didn’t know all their faces, but I knew their names. They were the producers, agents, screenwriters, the directors, famous actors, the men in suits. I remember David telling me the first filmmaker was Georges Méliès, a Frenchman. The movie business began here, in France, in Cannes, and those men on the gallery were the chosen few who made the films that guided our lives and shaped our thoughts. There were no women on the gallery, no men in the pool, just a sea of beautiful girls all perfectly formed and full of grace, sculptures come to life from a pagan temple. The gilded roof of the dome warmed the light into a golden glow that gleamed like oil on their naked flesh and seemed to give those girls an inner radiance.

  As we moved towards the pool, I noticed that each girl stood very straight when she walked and when she swam in the golden water her long limbs made barely a ripple. I saw when their eyes met mine that their gaze was clear, sharp, unclouded by doubt, and what was most striking was the sense of abandon, the shameless lack of inhibitions, the way that one girl would sink her tongue into the intimate parts of another, take her to orgasm, and move on to the next. There were girls who were well known, actresses and models from the pages of magazines, the girls I had seen walking among the arches above us, but here beside the pool they were starkly, nakedly themselves. There were no divisions, there was no sense of competition, just an inexorable desire for pleasure.

  Greta took my hand. We slipped into the pool. It was shallow at the edge and, as I waded towards the centre, brushing shoulders with all those divine beings, my feet were nursed in fur, a moving carpet like reeds on the bed of a lake, an immense pelt from a woolly mammoth. The water was smooth like an unguent and, as I began to swim, I savoured the syrupy tang of girls, their slippery essence softening the water and igniting my senses. Greta followed and, as I climbed from the pool, we slipped down together on the yellow fur, two sacred creatures discovering the universe.

  We kissed. Her lips were full and the white chalk on her face had vanished in the oily balm of the pool. I licked her cheeks, the hollow of her throat, I slipped her breasts into my mouth, first one then the other, biting down on the crimson buds until she squealed with delight. Her breasts were small and muscular, her ribcage well defined, her stomach concave as she lay with her legs stretched out on the bench. Her pussy was open. The silver rings were slicked in juice. I caressed them with my tongue and pulled them with my teeth. As I did so, Greta May writhed under me, shivering with satisfaction. I swivelled round. I sank my tongue deep inside her creamy wet c
left and, at the same time, I felt Greta’s tongue reach into the core of my body. We were joined. Two convent girls from Saint Sebastian’s.

  While I was sliding my tongue around Greta’s bejewelled lips, a tongue pressed into my bottom and though I thought it was probably Amélie who had joined us, I wasn’t certain and that sense of not knowing was all the more exhilarating. Greta began to climax below me, she raised her bottom from the furry bench and as she exploded in orgasm, I did too, and we rolled over in a mass of arms and legs. It wasn’t Amélie who had joined us. It was the girl with an aviary of birds illustrating her flesh. She lowered her sex over my waiting mouth while Greta opened my knees and pushed her tongue back inside my pussy. I felt complete, joyful. There is something reassuring about the feel of the whip and the cane, but for heavenly bliss there is nothing like the taste of girls.

  I swam in the pool. I kissed girls as they floated towards me. We climbed out of the creamy water and probed each other’s secret places. In this hall of paradise I would be presented with every manner of indulgence and realised that however far I was taken I was sure I would go further. I was grateful to Tyler Copic for having shown me the world of film the camera never sees, but my destiny was not to wear his brand. I was, I realised, not born for fame but for the anonymous realms of unknown pleasure.

  7

  The Prize

  DAVID WAS IMPRESSED and a little resentful that I had made the acquaintance of Tyler Copic and Van Van de Vere. There are no secrets in the film industry except, perhaps, the golden pool below the Garden of Eden. David had been given a grant by the Film Council to develop a feature; there are blind babies and homeless people on the streets of Kensington, but filmmakers have to be supported, too, and using the Film Council award prudently, David asked me to go with him to Agadir for a week so I could add my input to the script. I was down from Cambridge and June was the perfect time to add a new layer to my Cannes suntan.