Being a Girl

by Chloë Thurlow

  The girls were saying things in Arabic, their voices like ripples in a pool, and I watched the old woman crossing the tent to the iron pot bubbling on the stove. She gripped the handle in the folds of her skirt, and returned, placing the pot on the floor beside the divan. The mixture had the yeasty smell of pitta. As if some message passed between the women, their grip on me grew tighter, their weight leaning into my shoulders, my legs parted, held still, my white skin patterned with their dark hands.

  The old woman grinned as she stirred the mixture. I watched, terrified, as she ladled the stuff from the boiling pot to my pubic bone, the burning as it touched my skin like the touch of fire, the kiss of the devil. It was a pain beyond pain. My body shook and grew wet with fear. My scream was so shrill it was hard to believe the sound had came from my throat. I wriggled, but the hands holding me were strong, they were women who milked goats and carried pails of water in the desert, women who worked like men. The old woman was going back for more, digging the spoon in the pot, spreading the paste over the delicate lips of my sex. Tears fell from my eyes. But the pain was less intense. My senses were numb. Sweat glossed my skin and with my sobs I rocked uncontrollably.

  The old woman’s tattoos turned her face into a mask as she smoothed the mixture into the crack of my bottom. The young girl seemed fearful, the lamp swaying in her trembling hand, the shadows dancing just as I had danced in the firelight. The others watched as if it were a rite of passage. Still I had no notion of what they were doing to me. Or why. But the pain was passing and it didn’t matter. The holiday with David was a luke-warm bath, not fiery and steaming like the poultice setting as solid as a chastity belt between my legs.

  I had agreed to Omar’s challenge knowing how it was going to turn out. I had once watched David play blackjack in the casino in Cannes and no matter how much he won he always lost. I had been waiting it seemed with a sense of destiny for the pattern to recur once we had arrived in Morocco.

  There was pressure again on my arms and legs. The old woman started picking at the poultice. She teased back the edge across the top of my pubic bone until she had a ridge wide enough to grip in her fingers. She looked into my eyes and I looked at her fading tattoos as in one swift movement she snatched off the compress, the stubborn tufts of hair ripping out and again I screamed in agony.

  ‘Cluck. Cluck. Cluck,’ she said, tapping my thigh.

  Struggle was pointless. I opened my legs wider, proffering myself, pushing up my bottom, and the old woman picked away at the dried mess, pulling out the last strands of hair as she did so. My pubic mount was bare. I was as smooth as an egg, ripe as fruit. A virgin. My vagina stung but the old woman produced some talcum that eased the pain as she upended the tin and let it snow between my legs. She dusted away the powder and the young girl with the lamp leaned forward to admire her handiwork.

  The woman with the ringing bangles prised the lid from a pot containing a buttery ointment with a harsh, faintly rancid fragrance and all the dark hands dipped in at the same time, scooping out the stuff, spreading it over my skin, my arms and legs, my breasts and tummy, between my thighs. They turned me over, massaged my back, rubbing in the cream, their busy fingers strangely hypnotic. I wriggled like a fish.

  The hands of the women grew still. My skin was coated, every plane and angle, every crack and crevice smooth and oiled. I sat on the edge of the divan and the young girl leaned forward, the lamp lighting my features, her own face illuminated with anticipation and curiosity. I was being prepared like a bride, I realised. The girl had this to come. I was the echo resonating her future.

  The older woman pushed her to one side and opened an earthenware pot that she stood beside me on the divan. The pot contained kohl, black and shiny, which she dug out with a long fingernail. I leaned back. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, and they smarted with tears as the woman sprinkled the coal dust below the lids. The tears spread the kohl around the eyes, the mixture making them shine, even in the dark. Women have always suffered for their beauty, high shoes, bustles and girdles, bare legs on cold days. From another jar, the old woman produced a dry hard pellet of rouge which she warmed between her palms, rubbing it until it was soft before applying it to my nipples.

  They dressed me in silver bracelets and anklets with discs that shivered when they moved like the wind through sand. It was what a bride wears on her wedding night in the desert. I was ready. Almost ready. The old woman threaded leather thongs through the clasps on the bracelets and led me out from the tent to where Omar stood as if he had been waiting, the same look in his dark eyes as he had worn earlier that evening when he approached David in the bar.

  Had it been an hour ago? Two hours ago? I looked up at the stars.

  I wasn’t sure why I felt more naked with my pussy shorn. I noticed David in the distance, smoking, staring at me as if at a stranger. A camel had been hobbled behind the fire. The dogs tethered beyond the camel were howling at the moon. Two of the men led me from the tent and the silver discs rattled on my wrists and ankles.

  The women followed and sat beside the fire. They watched impassively as the men coaxed me to lie face down across the body of the camel. With the leather thongs in the bracelets they lashed me to the beast, my left wrist to the beaded necklace around the animal’s throat, the right to the harness over its tail. I didn’t struggle. I was bound by fate. The camel stared at me briefly before laying its head back again in the sand. Its stomach throbbed as it drew breath, bobbing me up and down with the movement.

  The men were no longer silent. Their words I did not understand but it sounded like pub chatter, odd phrases ending in laughter. They moved closer and I tried to see myself as they saw me: a skinny girl tied in this bizarre way, my arms stretched out, my head over the camel’s hump, my bottom pushed up and out, moving with the beat of my own breath.

  Hands stroked my skin. Were they his hands? I had no way of knowing. My legs were pulled further apart and in one awkward movement a man still clothed spread himself across me, his cock driving through the swollen lips of my vagina, and as he pumped into me the pressure made the camel push back. I was trapped between opposing forces. I closed my eyes. I thought of nothing, nothing but the movement, and in a few seconds hot sperm was shooting up inside me, and the man pushed himself away.

  There was a froth of noise. Laughter. The man seemed to have done well and another hurried forward. The camel groaned under his weight. His cock slipped inside me, greased by the semen from the first man, and the camel pushed back, rocking him to orgasm. I was an object to be used in any way and there was some small satisfaction in my humiliation.

  One of the boys stepped around the camel. A dewdrop glistened on the end of his penis, sparkling in the firelight. I licked it off with the tip of my tongue and took the shaft into my mouth. His body trembled, his knees shook, and his thrusts grew faster until he came, emptying himself copiously into my throat.

  Another man was stretching apart the cheeks of my bottom. Something slippery and cold filled my crack and a finger teased its way inside my anus. I gritted my teeth. The finger became two fingers, widening the hole, and he gasped with pleasure as his cock split me in two. The pain was insufferable, but I had learned over the knee of more than one man that pain passes and turns to pleasure.

  When he had finished his turn, filling my bottom with hot sperm, another took his place. There was a murmur of satisfaction when a sticky cock pushed between my teeth and I gathered by the faintly soiled taste that it was the same man who had just buggered me. The thought was passing, ephemeral. I wrapped his penis in my tongue and nursed it back to strength until with what I was sure was pride, he leaked another speck of sap into the back of my throat.

  As he moved away, the one in my backside touched orgasm and I felt the drool squelching warmly out of me as another man took his place. The men sweated and dribbled across my back. The stench of the camel tainted my perspiration with a lusty, lurid smell and my skin was hot and chafed where I was pushed and bounce
d against its vibrating body.

  Another man used my mouth, vacating his bitter load over the walls of my throat. As he moved away I saw a shadow across the desert. I thought for a moment it was David, wandering off in shame, but the man was taller. As he drew closer, I realised it was Omar. He was carrying a bowl which he placed at his feet and the sound of the dogs lapping up water was an echo of the man thrusting frantically between my sopping legs.

  One after the other, after buggering me, the men found pleasure using my tongue to make them clean. I was growing sore, but there was no pain and oddly no shame, no regret. I had saved David from dishonour and my being used in this way I realised again had always been in the dark heart of my own subconscious. Tyler Copic had offered me his seal, his promise of success. Omar had offered nothing and as I lay there tethered in the desert I imagined he could take me to places outside my experience, outside my imagination.

  The camel turned from time to time, stared at me with bored glossy eyes, and gnashed its teeth as its head returned to the sand. Its sloping stomach held me perfectly, displaying my rounded bottom, my shaved pussy pushed through my thighs, the discs murmuring about my wrists and feet. I tried to glance back, but I couldn’t see the women, and I tried to keep count of the number of times I had been pierced, the number of times those men had left their sticky mess slurping through my crack. It was just a number. It made no difference to anything. I wasn’t aroused or stimulated, or even afraid. I was a backgammon board and they were dice running over the surface.

  My three openings were used repeatedly. Suddenly they stopped. I pulled my head back to look up at the stars. It must be midnight, I was thinking, it is over. I heard the men shuffle back. There was silence except for the sound of muffled footsteps. It was Omar. He stood in front of me and removed what I realised was a whip from the harness around the camel’s neck. The whip had a short handle and dozens of long thongs that ended in tiny knots.

  He glanced at his watch, glanced into my eyes, and moved back around the camel. I was spread white as snow in the desert night, the marks of the pentangle vivid in the moonlight. The sound of the whip as it came down on my bare flesh was like the sound of thunder on a still day. I screamed, my voice rippling and resonating across the desert.

  The camel rolled unsteadily, tossing me about like a ship at sea. Before I could catch my breath, the whip came down again, the knots on the thongs like darts piercing my skin. The pain was excruciating but the bite of the whip through some strange alchemy turned into something I could never have imagined or expected. It felt as if a velvet fist was gripping my intestines. My stomach vibrated with contractions. I pushed up my bottom involuntarily to meet the third strike of the whip and, as those leather thongs met my soft flesh, my body erupted, not in agony but in shocking, unadulterated ecstasy, my orgasm exploding from me in undulating spasms as endless as the waves on the desert sand.

  My body was wet, ripe, aching, oozing with my own juice, slimy with sperm. The camel rocked as if waiting for more. But it was midnight. It was over. The bindings holding my wrists were released. I came shakily, proudly to my feet. Omar gave instructions to the old woman and, when she returned from the tent with a white sheet, he wrapped me tenderly before carrying me like a bride in his arms. He placed me in the back of his car. David sat beside him in the front and in silence we drove back to Agadir, the cool wind blowing through the open window.

  There were single beds in our bungalow and I sensed as I lay wrapped in the white sheet that David wanted to crawl in beside me. I slept like a child dreaming the dreams of the wine sleeping below the streets of Cannes and the salt sea healed the wheals from Omar’s whip as I slipped at sunrise into the waves.

  Like a shimmering fish I slid back into the silver dress. David kept looking at me as if I were an invalid requiring help. He needed reassurance. A taxi arrived and the driver loaded our suitcases filled with souvenirs in the back. The road uncurled into the heat and dust of Agadir. I could smell sugared almonds. Omar’s black car was parked outside the same eating house where the men played backgammon. I tapped the driver on the shoulder.

  ‘Stop,’ I said. He did so without question.

  David touched my hand as I opened the door. ‘I don’t understand,’ he whispered.

  ‘Nor do I,’ I told him.

  I stepped out of the car and closed the door behind me.

  ‘What about . . .’ he paused. ‘What about your things?’

  ‘I won’t be needing them.’

  ‘What about me?’

  I didn’t know what to say, and didn’t say anything.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9780753524749

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  This book is a work of fiction.

  In real life, make sure you practise safe, sane and

  consensual sex.

  First published in 2007 by

  Nexus

  Thames Wharf Studios

  Rainville Rd

  London W6 9HA

  Copyright © Chloë Thurlow 2007

  The right of Chloë Thurlow to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9780352341396

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.