As I wriggled the target must have been all the more enticing and the sheikh let go with another lightning flash crosswise over my burning backside, that fifth lash so close to the last one it felt as if I were being cleaved in two by some supernatural force, the waves of pain touching every area of my body. The heat was intense, suffocating. I felt as if I were wet clay shaped by the sheikh on the potter’s wheel and plunged into a furnace.
All the air in my lungs gathered in a burst of energy as the whip’s moist tentacle embraced my flesh and I released a cry of such overpowering force, the people on the coast must have heard this primal scream and thought the day of judgment had arrived, that the earth itself was about to explode. My strength had gone. My arms were weak and shaking. My flesh was sopping. My nipples were as hard as rocks. A great fist was clenching my entrails. I summoned one last gasp of breath and whispered.
Whip me. Whip me. Whip me.
The sheikh unleashed the sixth long caress a fraction above my pussy and my clitoris emerged erect from below its hiding place like an antenna beaming my desire.
Samir dropped the whip and bent to lick my wounded bottom, the healing saliva as he eased his tongue across the welts drawing out the sting. My pussy oozed and the tip of his tongue carried the sticky sap from the pink lips of my vagina to the winking black eye of my bottom. My hips and thighs clenched in hunger and fear. He had fucked me and fucked me and fucked me, three times or four times or five times a day, but my anus remained a mystery I wanted to share. I had saved myself for my sheikh. I wanted him in my pussy and my mouth and I wanted to feel his fierce cock drilling into the heart of my being, into that part of me where no man had been before.
I had fallen back on to the mattress after the sixth strike from the braided bullwhip, but I wedged my knees under me, stretched my arms and pushed back, wriggling, grinding my butt, drawing his meaty tongue into the gaping black hole of my deepest yearnings.
There is a little muscle at the entrance of your backside designed for pushing downwards. By careful, and I suspected practised manipulation, the sheikh quickly taught that muscle to work in reverse, to draw his tongue inwards and upwards where it reached nerve endings that had lain dormant and now vibrated with life. The pain from the lash had gone, evaporated. I was all want and need and desire.
He spread my knees, opening me further as you open a folding ladder to give it balance, and must in a few moments have rid himself from the burden of his embroidered shirt and baggy trousers. Once more he licked and kissed the red stripes he had painted across the mounds of my bottom and returned his clever tongue to the squelching walls of my ass, a skeleton key picking the lock of my secrets.
In and out. In and out.
Holding my cheeks. Making me wet. Slurping and sucking. The sheikh was slow, restrained, patient. A connoisseur with a fine brandy. A horse whisperer with a neglected pony. I wanted his cock in my mouth and I wanted his cock buried in my backside.
I was born to be doing what I was doing, to be there at that moment with an unknown man in an unknown place on all fours having my bottom lashed and kissed, my anus moistened and reamed. My breasts hung like pendulums marking time as Samir pushed his face into the spread cheeks of my bottom, his fine tongue carving a path into the scented canal of my virgin anus. I was swaying back and forth, moving with the rhythm of the sea, the motion of the universe, the sheikh holding my thighs, his fingers finding their way into the pungent fruit of my sopping vagina to graze the flaming nib of my clitoris. I sighed with relief. I panted for air. I pushed back harder and when his tongue left my drenched ass the pain of parting was delectable because my hunger would soon be satisfied.
Samir’s cock pushed at my bottom as a hand pushes as an open door, with pressure, not force. There was a momentary pain, as there’s pain when your hymen snaps, but then I heard a faint pop like a bursting bubble as the head slipped into that tight little hole. I was holding my breath, arms tense, my tummy sucked in. I pushed back and he pushed forward, his cock slicked with slimy discharge slipping in and out, deeper and deeper, and I let out the air I was holding in a long and grateful sigh.
I was proud to have saved my treasure for Samir. It didn’t matter that the beachcomber had pissed on me and the other man had made me cry out for more as I lay across the side of the dinghy. All that mattered was that unique and special moment as my lover’s cock rooted itself deeply and totally in the fertile soil of my grinding ass.
Something missing had been found. I was complete. The walls of your back passage are hung with elusive pleasure points. The walls are soft elastic that stretch to take your man. It is where he wants to be, and it was where I wanted Samir, me on my hands and knees, my mouth wide, gasping for air, his cock a battering ram beating at the castle keep. I bucked like a donkey. I howled like a wolf. I wriggled like a fish. I was feverish, hysterical. I cried in satisfaction. I was finally fulfilled. If I had a dream, this was my dream, to be there in that place where time had stopped, where the past and future had dissolved into an all-embracing present.
While I screamed with pleasure when we made love, the sheikh had always been hushed and it was a joy to hear the beat of his breath and the cry of his song as his body stiffened and he burst in a screaming climax. I felt the hot gush of his sperm wash through my insides and I sang out too in a roaring orgasm that stole the last of my strength and we tumbled like an octopus in a mass of swirling arms and legs.
The sheikh lay on his back sweating, exhausted, delirious, eyes shiny, his chest vibrating as if the tic on his neck had infected the rest of his body. I smoothed the hair from his brow. When I kissed his lips his tongue that had been buried in my backside wriggled into my mouth and I tasted my own obscure fragrance. My hand had drifted as if with its own will to hold his softening cock and in my warm palm it began to harden.
From the moment I had opened the chest and gazed at the whip coiled in the bottom drawer, I had wanted him in my mouth. I ran my kisses from his lips over his chin, his throat, across his smooth chest and down to his cock in its nest of silky hair. I licked it like a kid with a lolly, lick, lick, lick, my slobber making it pop up rigidly as if asking for more. I straddled him like a pony and slipped the shaft back where it belonged. It was my cock. It was on loan to the sheikh. I needed it back. It had been deep in my ass and now I needed to ride the beast to a second orgasm.
He arched his back, he thrust his pelvis and the little sheikh grew harder as it slipped and slithered up my oily pussy, the juice and jism pouring out of me in a deluge. I was gasping. He was gasping. I was coming. He was coming. The boat rocked. The light filtered through the portholes. My thighs clenched. My stomach clenched. The walls of my vagina clenched. As the sheikh tensed and unburdened himself of his load, I came in a rolling, rumbling orgasm that made me feel as if my whole body had turned into a throbbing greedy clitoris.
We collapsed, curled together and slept like two spoiled babies.
There is a dream that comes to me sometimes and I dreamed that dream of a summer afternoon long ago when I was three or perhaps four and Daddy had put a paddling pool in the garden. I was wearing a costume with red and blue sailing boats. When I made it wet, it felt so uncomfortable I took it off. I ran naked over the grass, a little chubby thing feeling alive, unchained, full of joy. Mummy caught me and wrapped me in a towel. She didn’t say anything but, as she rubbed me dry, the look in her eyes made me feel that in stepping out of my clothes I was a naughty girl and all through my life I had been in some way trying to get back to that garden in summer where I had for just a moment felt completely free, completely myself. When the dream came to me, I awoke feeling sad. The moment of greatest joy carries at its core the seeds of gloom, the greater the joy the harder it will be to find that joy again.
I awoke suddenly and through the porthole saw a shooting star fade as it crossed the sky. I slid from the mattress to gaze out at the night, the dream swimming back into my mind. My backside was stinging and, as I stood there holding the s
cored flesh in my palms, the sheikh woke and joined me, his naked body bending to my shape like a piece from a puzzle in the place where it is meant to be. We stood there in the star shine, two ghosts in the moon’s milky glow.
He lay back on the bed, his penis against his thigh, Michelangelo’s David in the thin light. When I knelt to take him into my mouth, a pull of sadness tugged at my heart. In this life we had created, founded in the present, the past didn’t matter, but the future was drawing closer as the boat journeyed south.
After great passion, when your energy has been consumed making love, when you make love unhurriedly once more there is a sense of pure giving, of togetherness. You are no longer trying to reach for the stars, your desire and ego dissolve and all you want from this rejoining is to give pleasure without any thought of taking pleasure. It is, I imagine, how old married couples join, with familiarity and love, the long memory of countless orgasms carried like an echo from the past into the present.
We made love slowly, softly. My vagina wept. Tears fell from my eyes and he kissed those tears away as they rolled down my cheeks. He stroked my hair.
‘Habibi. Habibi. Habibi,’ he whispered.
Baby. Baby. Baby.
Time was stitching a shroud around me. I was trying to mine every grain of happiness from every passing moment because the passing moment like that moment long ago in the garden would never be repeated. On this boat without haste or clocks I imagined a giant hourglass with sand slipping relentlessly from top to bottom, and felt that night the rush of the sand going faster.
Six
Mauritania
IT CAME AS NO surprise next morning when I found the lateen sail hurrying us along in a stiff breeze and the boat coated in sand. I watched Samir running his fingertips through the fine red dusting on the side rail. He was gazing out at the coastline, unchanging, veiled in mist. He turned, smiling.
‘Sahara,’ he said in that tone people have when they speak of home.
I touched the St Christopher at my throat. The journey was coming to an end and another was about to begin.
Mohammed in his loincloth, eyes closed, was bowing in prayer, his words a chant, rhythmic and familiar, though I had no idea what they meant. When Samir called, Umah leaned out of the wheelhouse and listened like a nervous bird as the sheikh rattled out his orders.
I followed Samir back to the cabin. Beside the chest where the whip lay coiled was a trunk with a curved lid that Samir threw open. He tossed out pieces of clothing I had never seen him wear, cotton shirts, pantaloons, robes, a scarlet kaftan, cloth for turbans, decorative belts, a brooch with a spider like the pendant he wore, the golden-limbed creature holding a pearl in its claws. He held up different garments to see how they would look on me, rejecting one thing after the other before shouting again for Umah.
The boy appeared in a moment, hurrying down the three narrow steps with a pair of shears, a pincushion, white thread on a spool, a needle gripped in his lips. The sheikh gestured dismissively, flicking his fingers as if to remind us that we each had our place in the great scheme of things, and his wasn’t dressing a woman. He pulled the door shut as he left the cabin, the drapes danced in the rush of air, then stilled as if fatigued by the clammy heat.
It was the first time I had been alone with the boy. He said something, the words spilling out, meaningful to him, meaningless to me, and his fingers trembled as he unsnapped the fold in the sarong.
He had seen me naked many times, every day, but gazed at me now as if he had never seen me before, as if he had never seen a woman before. The look in his eyes wasn’t so much lust as surprise, and I wondered if he didn’t so much desire me, as desire to be me, to share the cabin with the sheikh, and for all I knew perhaps he had.
‘Kanga no,’ he said, as if he felt the need for explanation.
Kanga was one of the words I had learned. My sole piece of clothing was the blue length of cloth, but when the woman had given me this gift on the beach it had been a sarong and so it remained in my mind.
Umah circled me as you might a sculpture and, just as we are tempted to touch the carved marble figure in a museum, he ran his fingers over the six red welts carved into my backside. They were a badge of honour, not shame, and I wore them with pride. They defined my position. What the boy didn’t know was that I had offered myself up to be whipped. I had learned that my capacity for pleasure reached the heights of ecstasy through pain, and was about to learn that in ecstasy’s foothills there was pleasure too in treachery.
The inspection complete, Umah tutted and fussed as he went through the scattering of clothing around the cabin, folding some pieces and putting them back in the trunk, putting others to one side to reconsider. He finally settled on a white hijab that he held up for me to try on. The tunic was open down the front and had long ties that passed through slits on the opposite seams before circling my waist and tying in a knot. The hijab was three-quarter length and embroidered from neck to hem in dark green, the colour of my eyes.
‘As-salaam,’ he said; that’s OK, that’s fine.
‘Shukra,’ I replied; thank you.
He released the ties and went to get the pincushion. I raised my arms like a Christian on the Cross, and as he pinned the first seam, his hands fluttered like the wings of a bird over my sides. His cheeks brushed my breasts and I felt their warmth. The boy was burning. I could hear the stroke of the waves lashing the hull of the boat. The cabin was an oven. My breath quickened. My nipples grew hard and my spine quivered like the string on a bow after the arrow has taken flight, its journey unfolding on the flow of the air and the mystery of its own sense of purpose. Zen archers hit their targets by closing their eyes. The lids dropped over my eyes and it felt as if my body didn’t belong to me but belonged to some force inside me, a girl with merely a vague resemblance to me; a simulacrum.
You are what you think and being touched by a man, any man, made me think of only one thing. I tried to refocus and ran the words I knew in Arabic through my head.
Ruz – rice.
Samak – fish.
Mahia – water.
Shi – tea.
Insh’allah – if Gods wills it; it’s in the lap of the Gods; so it goes. It was the word that defined me. Insh’allah.
The men said as salamu alaykum, which seemed to mean hello or peace be with you. Samir called me habibi, his baby, his sweetheart. The crewmen called me Chengi, which I thought meant girl, and I responded automatically when the word left their lips. Without my red passport for reference I was beginning to forget my name and it seemed so unimportant.
The boat rolled on the tide. I thought I heard a seagull which meant land was close by. Was I embarrassed standing there with my nipples bristling and my pussy damp? Was I embarrassed swimming naked in the sea with Samir. Or coming up on deck after long afternoons screaming in elation?
Such concepts and uncertainties had disappeared from my mind. On the boat there was no space for shame, for reflection, for privacy. I was a fugitive from the past. The future like the African coast was veiled in its secrets. There was just that second, fleeting, fragile, one puff and it’s gone. We are different people at different times. The face we wear for our mother is not the face we show the girls at school, your boyfriend, the shop assistant when we try on a new pair of shoes. All things are in flux.
At sunset, the sky splashed in red and pink, I would wear the sarong as we sat with the sailors to eat, this ritual having no meaning; the rituals we cling to most fervently are constantly shaking loose from their roots: heredity, significance. But I enjoyed the concept of dressing, the formality. During the day such thoughts never entered my mind; dressed, undressed, spotless or grubby, hair combed or uncombed, they were considerations left behind on the beach in La Gomera.
I had always had confidence in my body and on the boat beneath the hot sun on the sea to nowhere that confidence had become a new, primeval sort of poise. I was grounded. Renewed. Like a photographer making adjustments to the lens on a camer
a, we are constantly changing focus, light, distance, becoming and discarding, learning and forgetting. I was lean, lithe, healthy. I was someone else. I adored being filled by my lover. I enjoyed being naked. We discover the depths of our humanity when we let go of reality and enter the realm of the senses.
The boat to me was like the sea to the fish, I was on it and of it; I had disconnected and become reconnected. People live their lives without ever knowing who they really are, what they really want, what they can do and achieve, or not do and not want to achieve. It was a relief to leave all that behind and be me, Chengi, the girl with one driving passion that I sensed might be my one fatal flaw; the two like yin and yang, each swirled together, complimentary and opposites, the seed of one sewn in the heart of the other, mutually dependent like mothers and sons, like fathers and daughters.
I was reminded for some reason of the tale of the injured snake. Walking home from the fields one early evening, a man took pity on the snake, took it home and nursed it back to life. The snake grew strong again and one day, it sank its fangs into the man’s neck. The man asks in his dying breath: but why after I have cared for you did you do that? Because I’m a snake, said the snake. There is a similar story about a frog carrying an injured scorpion across a pond only to be repaid by the scorpion’s sting. The scorpion explains to the frog that the deed is merely his nature. I prefer the snake’s story. He doesn’t attack the man merely because it is his nature, he does so with a hunger for betrayal.
Umah had finished the seams on the hijab and was pinning the shoulders from behind. My back was wet. I could smell nervous sweat and didn’t know if it belonged to me or to him. I could feel his erection through the thin fabric and wasn’t sure if I were pushing gently back into him or if he were pushing gently into me. Rocking with the roll of the boat, the rhythm of the tides, the drum of the big diesel engines.
Was I ashamed that my body reacted so intensely to a man other that the sheikh?
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