The men unloaded the sacks we had brought with us from the island. They contained the shells the beachcomber had fondly displayed in the fish shed on the island. I had no idea why they had brought them, why conch shells from the Canary Islands would be any different or have greater value than the shells that must surely lie along the shore beyond town. That was the extent our cargo. Three sacks of shells. And me.
Samir stepped ashore. He looked away as I jumped down behind him and didn’t take my hand. He looked back, hooked the turban across my face, and his malleable expression seemed to set and harden.
Mo leapt down to the jetty and went to make sure the man securing the rope from the prow to one of the palms was doing a good job. Umah lashed the boat to the boat on our left before joining us, and when Azar appeared he was carrying two guns of the sort I had seen on television; AK-47 rifles, as far as I knew. I physically felt my heart skip a beat as he tossed one to Mohammed and jumped ashore with the other over his shoulder.
The man who had tied up the boat sidled up looking suitably deferential. The sheikh produced a big, soft leather wallet, pulled out a note and the man slipped away tucking the money in his blue tunic. I had no idea if this were a gift, a tip, baksheesh, or a landing fee. For all I knew, the man could have been a customs official or an immigration officer.
On the journey, Samir had shown me where we were going on a chart, his finger running down the coast of Africa, El Andaluz, Maroc, Mauritania, our destination, a land where I new no one and nothing, although I liked the roll of the vowels – Mauritania, a word and a sound that summoned up a world of intrigue, mystery and danger. The sun above baked my skull. I was paperless and penniless amongst men with deadly weapons, and as we set off along the swaying jetty I recalled Chekhov’s law: the gun revealed in the drama goes off before the story ends.
Seven
Caravanserai
THE MOMENT WE LEFT the jetty the heat hit me like a hammer striking a gong. It felt as if I had walked into an oven, a furnace, into the heart of the sun. It had been July when I was in La Gomera. By now it was surely August, the hottest month, the light piercing the thin air making it hard to breathe. The sky was a turquoise mirror without cloud, the shimmer along the shoreline creating the impression of movement where there was none. We were in the grips of stillness, of calm, of stasis, a time between times.
I used to have a pair of sunglasses and missed them now. My skin ran in rivers of sweat. Even with the assortment of new aromas wafting from town, I could smell my own smell, the scent of a woman for whom sex has become her reason to get out of bed and to make her way back to bed as soon as possible. I was both ashamed of this new me and proud of this new me. We carry contradictory feelings and emotions. I adored being naked and I was pleased concealing the secret in my new clothes.
Umah was just behind me, a sack over his shoulder. As I glanced back, he lowered his gaze. He was afraid and I took from his fear an unexpected sense of contentment. It occurred to me that my pleasure counted more to me than the boy’s anxiety, that the self-centred nature of forbidden sex makes it all the more potent, that betrayal and duplicity were merely ingredients for more and better orgasms.
I remembered a girl I had known at school telling me that when she first went up to Cambridge, her tutor was so angry at the poor quality of her first essay, he made her bend over his desk and slapped her bottom with the manuscript. She had been shocked and humiliated. It had bought tears to her eyes. She considered going to the authorities to complain, but decided wisely to sleep on it. By the time she awoke the following morning, she just found it old-fashioned and amusing.
She redid the essay, her tutor said he was satisfied, and she felt a twinge of disappointment that their meeting was brief and formal. She deliberately made a mess of her next assignment and, when she went to see her tutor, instead of wearing jeans, as she had the first time, she wore a short flared skirt. There was a complicity, a bond, an understanding. She bent over the desk, he lowered her knickers and used the flat of his hand to spank her. The game went on for the next three years, her tutor guided her education, she left Cambridge with a first and was now working at Conservative Party Central Office.
I had not believed the story when she told me, but I believed it now. I had been a prude, a tease, a quasi-virgin. Just as a yawn makes you yawn and a burst of laughter makes you smile, thinking about my old schoolfriend with the unknown man beating her backside sent a shiver down my spine and put an involuntary wiggle in the cheeks of my bottom.
I grinned and gazed back at Umah, flashing my eye-lashes. He had no way of knowing that keeping the secret was just as important to me as it was to him; that just as it had been surprising to him that I had allowed his erection to pierce the sacred halls of my vagina, it had been surprising to me, too; an instinct, the pull of gravity, the memory of our coupling, dewing the parted lips of my sex as I wriggled my way through the dusty streets, the scent of my discharge rising to my nostrils sweet as an English rose.
Yes, I had become obsessed, a flower opening in the garden of earthly pleasure, the whip, the cane, a hand striking the mounds of my backside. I breathed sharply through my teeth as a thread of moisture trickled down my thigh. I wasn’t wearing knickers and vowed never to wear them again. The future was uncertain, the future always is, but whatever happened to me, I was glad to have escaped London and to be exactly where I was at that moment.
With the exception of that old schoolfriend working for the Conservatives, if most of my other friends could have seen me now they would have called me cheap, fallen, a concubine. They wouldn’t have understood; just as I didn’t understand the spanking tendencies at the best university in the world. We use just a third of our brains, a third of our body’s potential; I was finding my hidden depths, hidden fantasies. I was playing catch up with the unknown and hidden me.
Behind my veil I was smiling. I was also thankful that my arms and legs were covered and the white folds of the turban shielded my skull from the teeth of the sun. The spider gripping the front of my hijab glittered as if with inner life, the pearl in its claws a moon reflecting the sun’s light. I kept looking down at the brooch as you look into the eyes of your lover, or your image in a shop window, the fleeting inspection to make sure you are there, that you are real, a peep for veracity, not vanity.
As we left the coast and made our way into the warren of sand-coloured shops, I was overcome by a feeling of belonging, that I was part of the tribe, a part of something, but the sense of individuality that had evolved in me on the boat had gone and I would have to find a new self, a new role, a new way, I suspected, of pleasing Samir.
Only a few minutes had passed since we disembarked, but Samir on land seemed different from Samir at sea; more aloof, taller, if that were possible. He strode ahead in leather shoes, the laces untied, shoulders back, his crisp white djellaba swaying in such a way that people approaching stepped aside for him to pass. There was a class system defined by the clothes you wore and I wondered how I, a fake in sheikh’s clothing, fitted into the construction. I had grown used to being naked, now I would have to learn to travel in clothes and in disguise.
Like the sailors, I was barefoot. My toes burned in the dust and I soon gave up trying to pick my way through the red gouts of beetel, chewed up and spat out; the steaming remains of dung dropped by donkeys and gathered for fuel; the random piles of waste where dogs scavenged and chickens pecked.
Cicadas sang from the trees like clicking castanets. At a crossroads with a water trough in a small dusty square, green-feathered birds sat in lines in the shade below the fronds of tall palms. It was too hot to fly. Even the flies were idle. There were scores of donkeys pulling carts with two wheels, handcarts made of wood, bicycles, camels that lumbered along like prehistoric creatures oblivious to the Toyota pickups and the occasional rush of a black-windowed limousine hurtling through winding streets just wide enough to take them.
Men baked samosas on braziers, the spicy tang clinging t
o the air; they sold newspapers, packets of Kleenex, single cigarettes, fizzy drinks in buckets of ice, CDs. A wailing lament grated from two small speakers balanced on a barrel where a rat chewed at the electric cord, the owner of the machine lazily brushing the rat away, the rat returning again to sharpen its teeth. I watched the rat and I watched the man. They had the same patience and composure, and I imagined this game they were playing had, like a myth, been going on through eternity.
The boat was a time machine that had taken me back to some slower, simpler, hotter age, to Babel, perhaps. The people wandering by, mostly men, spoke in a polyglot of tongues and revealed their clans in the patterns of their djellabas and turbans: Berbers in brown stripes, Tauregs in blue, black Arabs in cloaks and white gowns with headdresses pinned with gemstones. I saw a man wearing a red fez with dancing tassels and yellow slippers with upturned toes; a man playing a tambourine while a sad-faced monkey danced a jig. Shoeshine boys sat in the dust with brushes and bottles of polish, and men in dhotis, doubles of Mahatma Ghandi, sweated and wheezed as they pushed by with handcarts laden with sacks of grain, cages with raucous chickens, logs from invisible trees. Only the assault rifles and the whiff of diesel reminded me that in this multi-ethnic, multi-cultural mix we were in the present, that the Tower of Babel had spread across the entire planet.
The women in the streets were equally diverse, unveiled in bright dresses, in kufis, mud-cloth and rags. Some wore yashmaks, headscarfs, black burkhas that engulfed their bodies and hid their eyes behind a mesh. It was illogical to me that in the blaze of the sun black was the colour chosen for those women, they must have been suffocating inside those pleated tents, each step in the 45 degree heat an unrelenting chastisement. Better stripping off the carapace and baring your ass for the whip, the cane, the horny hand. I found the black burkhas self-important, a subtle form of superiority, the sign of a link to some higher authority when in truth there was none.
I enjoyed watching the black women gliding by with baskets of fish balanced on their heads, the baskets buzzing with flies, the women moving like boats, like dancers, their bodies swaying, each foot gripping the ground beneath them as if magnets were joining and releasing. They wore thick-lipped smiles and long kaftans with intricate blue tattoos decorating their faces and hands.
The town was like a giant souk without pattern or order, everyone joined by business and barter, the maze curving off in every direction like spokes on a crooked wheel. Sheets strung across the lanes created islands of shade and made each turning appear intriguing and ominous. The buildings were squat and solid with thick walls and small windows, mostly barred but without glass. Outside the occasional café, usually on a corner, the façades there decorated with flat-roofed arcades, the only place where there was relief from the heat. It was here below the arches at zinc-topped tables where men drank shi and mint tea. In the shadows, hookahs bubbled over bowls of hot coals, the smell hypnotic, and I breathed deeply each time we passed.
It was a new challenge leaving the boat, but our pleasures need constant change; paradise must tire given time. I had been reckless allowing Umah access to the sheikh’s concubine, but I seemed to thrive on fear, the thrill of having a secret; even secrets shared are better than being an open book with no secrets at all.
I wasn’t sure why I had been dressed in the clothes I was wearing, not that there had been anything else on the boat, and the way the soft fabrics had been taken in by Umah didn’t conceal but betrayed my feminine curves and features. Perhaps it was all a game, Samir’s sense of humour, and I strode along imitating his distinctive walk finding new pleasure in the variety of sounds and smells, the new sights meeting my green eyes that peeked out between the gap in my turban and the strip of material covering my mouth.
Men stopped to greet Samir.
Salaam. Salaam.
They moved their fingers to touch their brows and hearts before bowing and, when they touched palms, it was with a gracefulness that made shaking hands appear brutal and competitive. I remembered the story of Salahaddin meeting Richard the Lionheart during the Crusades. The two great warriors compared their causes and compared their weapons. King Richard used his broadsword to demonstrate the power of the Cross by cutting clean through a block of wood. Salahaddin described the subtlety of his faith by tossing a silk kerchief in the air. He held out his curved rapier and the blade cut through the fine material. Richard the Lionheart was an open book. Salahaddin had a secret that vanished with his passing.
An Arab in a brown tunic with a red-and-white checked keffiyeh and a gun over his shoulder stopped our party as we entered an arcade. He salaamed and Samir stood legs apart, hands on hips like a pantomime sheikh while the Arab rattled out his story, gesticulating, shrugging, and finally calling into the depths of the arcade.
Four black Africans, three men and a pregnant woman, emerged from the shadows with cases and bursting shoulder bags. Samir studied them for a moment, nodded thoughtfully before speaking, and when the Arab translated, the Africans smiled with relief. They were boat people, new immigrants, and Samir’s nod of approval meant that he would be sailing north to the Canaries again soon; it had to be soon or the woman would have her baby in Mauritania, not Spain.
Would he take me with him?
Was I part of the crew?
Perhaps I should have spent more time learning how to trim the sail and grease the engine. I had devoted my days to the marvel of multiple orgasms, to the vain delights of nudity, to the obscure charms of the whip, in my growing cravings and masochism. I had found my role and couldn’t bare the thought of Samir leaving me. I wanted to touch him now, touch his cheek, his arm, his long marble cock, see him smile that smile when he left his load in my ass, my vagina, my mouth, over my face, my breasts, my belly. I wanted to be oiled with his seed, savour his taste on my tongue. I wanted to feel the warmth of his flesh, but in the crowded maze of the souk men did not greet or see or acknowledge women, not even a white girl dressed as a boy smelling ripe with lust.
My heart was beating faster in my chest as we moved further along the arcade. We turned into a doorway with a carpet hanging on the wall outside and entered a warehouse containing rolled carpets and stacks of boxes bound in tape with Chinese characters on the sides.
Samir and a young man wearing blue jeans, a tee-shirt and Nike trainers greeted each other by slapping hands above their heads like two rappers, like basketball players. They were the same age, the same caste, I imagined, and the stern expression Samir had been wearing dissolved into the sort of smile I had only a moment before been summoning to my memory; that smile that gripped his lips when we lay together in the cabin on long afternoons of frantic love, those times when I was sure he was truly, unequivocally himself.
The crewmen unburdened themselves of the three sacks they had carried from the boat. Hanif, the man in jeans, unloaded the shells and studied each one. They were similar yet unique, like fingerprints. I was sure I recognised the conch the beachcomber had been carrying when he found me, a naked Venus emerging from a shell on the beach, from a beach of shells. I had been sleeping and during my slumber the portals in my brain like the windows of an Advent calendar had opened or closed or changed or something. Within moments, the beachcomber had tied my hands and spanked my ass. I let him. I liked it. No wonder I had let Umah fuck me without a second thought.
I was making up for lost time. All those lost orgasms. All those men who had slipped by like ships in the night. It’s easy to lose yourself, that inner thing that’s you and become a puzzle of pieces put together by the hands of others, a vector of their opinions, a cut-out from a magazine. Boarding school, uni, a job in publishing arranged by Daddy. I had done nothing, achieved nothing. Doors had always been opened for me and on the long swim from La Gomera those doors closed and others swung open. I had learned in biology about left-brain, right-brain activity, and recalled that the two different hemispheres are responsible for different modes of thinking. The left brain is logical, sequential, analytical
, objective. The right brain is random, intuitive, subjective, capable of being a complete and utter slut.
I watched as Hanif traced his fingers over the bulbous lip of the conch, it was pink and shiny as if wet. His fingers slipped into the mouth of the shell and his gaze strayed to my face. I unhooked the tail of the turban and turned to Samir, who seemed to approve of this game of eyes. I belonged to him. He was showing me off.
Like the conch, I was a rare object. We had made the same journey. Now we would part, move like the wind further and further from where we came from, seashells in the desert as precious as water, shade, white girls from the north. Like the shell, I was a commodity, I could be bought and sold, as could everyone and everything, but it was different here in this land of barter and trade. These people made their wealth by what they did, what they made with their hands, what they exchanged and transported, while we had found ways of making money from moving money, from debt, from celebrity biographies with the lies I composed for the back cover. I had felt in London shallow and cheap, a cipher. Barefoot with a wet pussy among strange men in the middle of nowhere, I really did feel that I was me, that I had crossed the Rubicon from my left brain to the right.
We moved to the corner where divans and low tables had been set up on a platform of some ten or twelve carpets below the sails of a wooden fan that revolved lethargically above our heads. This, I assumed was the office, the place where Hanif made his deals and did his business. A servant brought tea in a silver pot with a curving spout that stood on a tray with glasses and a bowl with cubes of sugar. There were some hard biscuits that could break your teeth, which I ate out of politeness, and the men avoided.
Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) Page 12
