We snoozed Maysoon and I, we slept and awoke drowsy. We kissed and caressed each other’s crevices and curves. I treasured the shiny dome of her shaved mount with its delicately etched spider and she admired the golden fleece of my lush curly pubes. I wanted to be the dancing girl and she wanted to be me, and we lost ourselves in each other during those endless afternoons when the heavens above the tower roof were like the open mouth of a furnace and I thought the day would last for ever. It was August, the hottest month. The sun rose over the desert like a shooting star, burnt the paint from doors and the glaze from china pots before vanishing exhausted in a black cloak of impenetrable darkness.
When Samir took me into town, Maysoon would be left behind. I wasn’t sure why, and I had no idea what she did when neither the sheikh nor I were there to acknowledge that wanton sensuality that must have emerged the moment the girl stepped from childhood.
Maysoon remained a child in many ways and in many ways she was a wise and worldly woman. She taught me to dance, how to roll my belly and my bottom; she showed me that just by going up alternatively on your toes on one foot and then the other, your hips shimmy, your shoulders turn and your whole body gyrates without effort. We danced naked until we fell laughing on the feather mattress and Maysoon taught me other things, things I would never have imagined or dreamed of, and I wondered how she knew those things; whether someone had taught her or she knew because she was born knowing as great poets and pianists are born with the gift waiting to be uncovered and explored.
Under the vibrating tips of Maysoon’s skilful fingers she tickled and teased my throbbing clitoris until from the spread arch of my legs I released a jet of spray that gushed out like an exploding fountain a metre or more into the air. She bathed in the fine haze. She spread the fragrant liquid over her breasts, she licked my sopping crack and the feeling of release would grab me once more.
Closing my eyes, I emptied my mind of all thought. Maysoon tapped and rubbed the mystery button until my stomach clenched. My body shook and trembled. I gasped for breath and screamed in ecstasy as the second squirt emerged like mist from an atomiser; the scent of sex, pure, unadulterated, divine. We changed positions. She spread out like a starfish on the feather bed. I caressed her erect and eager clit and watched in awe, my mouth open, as this beautiful creature ejaculated like a boy, her sap thick and luscious, her perfume feral and mesmerising. If Darwin was right and we evolved through the millennia, or if there is a Creator with a grand plan, either way we must possess these powers and potentials for a reason and the only reason is that they are there like the five senses to be used.
Unlike the other women, Maysoon did not cook or toil, nor carry water to the stone shower where we washed away the sweat and smelly damp juices that coated our flesh. As we stood shaking off the drips, the yellow parakeets that built nests below the ramparts squawked and danced from foot to foot as they observed our display, dancing girls and dancing birds, a recurring pattern that appeared to show a heavenly hand. We dried in an instant, and returned to the tower to make ourselves sticky again. It is a wondrous thing that five minutes from orgasm and I was aroused, ready to squeeze out another.
I adored being a girl. Boys shoot their load and fall asleep. They awaken flaccid and you get jaw ache making them hard again. Girls can go on without end. We are comfortable lying on our backs, down on our knees, suspended from ropes, naked when others are dressed. We have round meaty bottoms designed for spanking, thrashing, whipping, kissing, licking. We want to feel men pushing up against us. If men think about sex three hundred times a day, girls think about sex three thousand times a day. I remember reading about a girl who had coupled with more than two hundred men in one day for a documentary and others were trying to beat her record. Men think they are the hunters, we the prey, and it is woman’s best kept secret that in the land of sexuality men are blind while we can see across the galaxy.
Now that Maysoon had shown me how to squirt out lush bursts of girlie essence, I wanted to do it again and again; shoot my dew higher and higher until we coated the inside of the dome that topped the tower. Maysoon was a creature intended for one thing only and it came as a revelation for me to discover that I was the same.
I had discovered that in the frenzy of climax, at that moment of rapture, your soul leaves your body and you become one with the universe. It is the satori awakening that Zen monks try to reach; a glimpse of enlightenment, the sound of one hand clapping. In India, devotees through the centuries have been attempting to formulate the sexual act in the study of tantra, in the creation of the Kama Sutra. But I had a feeling that the uncontrollable joy of perfect sex arose not through study and mysticism, but from the breaking of taboos, the crossing of boundaries and frontiers, through transgression, multiple partners, submissiveness and discipline; through a life dedicated to living in the present where the pursuit of orgasm takes precedence over all, over love and loyalty, even over life itself. Could any death be better than one that takes you as you body erupts in spasm and your voice joins the song of the universe?
It became for me more a change than a pleasure to dress in my one suit of clothes and join the men when they drove into town. Now that I knew those myriad colours and costumes, now that I had savoured the exotic smells and seen the women carrying fish in wide baskets, the street stalls laden with Kalashnikovs, the dancing monkey, it was merely repetition and I yearned to get back to the tower, strip off my disguise and dress in the costume of nudity. As the beachcomber had shown me the moment I met him, a naked girl is inviting sex, and that’s all I wanted, the opportunity to draw the sheikh into my body and search for the holy grail of the ultimate orgasm.
From out of the dust the town came into view, domes and battlements rising over the flat roofs, the white towers of minarets, swaying palms vibrant with raucous green birds. People washed themselves around hand pumps in the street; men built boats with hand tools; the money changers stood outside the bank with money to buy and sell and I wondered what went on inside the bank, whether the only function the building served was to supply shade for the money changers standing below the awning outside.
My feet burned black as I trudged through the dust and dung a few paces behind Samir. Mo and Azar were at my side, smoking, armed to the teeth. Umah followed carrying a leather satchel with separate compartments joined by a wide strap. Samir purchased sacks of rice, rolls of cloth, the herbs and spices that didn’t grow on the oasis edging the fort and which gave the food we ate at night flavours and tastes that touched my senses like an opiate, an aphrodisiac that set fire to my imagination. The vegetables were pulled from the thin soil the same day, the chickens roamed at will through the courtyard not knowing the knife was always close behind, the fish came straight out of the sea and the occasional sheep was slaughtered just hours before the fires were lit. We only ate once a day, at sunset, and I always filled my plate. I had grown adept at eating with the fingers of my right hand and had learned in this land without lavatory paper that washing my bottom with my left leaves you feeling cleaner.
Azar shouldered the heavy sacks. Umah tucked the spices into the satchel and I gazed at Samir as he bargained with the traders, the brightly-coloured notes exchanging hands with the speed of the myna birds spiralling through the date palms. Azar, Mo and Umah seldom spoke but would on occasions burst into smiles for reasons I never understood. It was written in their faces that they were satisfied with their lives and content to be in each other’s company. They seemed to understand the universe and their place in it. They were not striving to be something else or someone else; to be all they can be. They already were and, knowing it, I came to see, is the recipe for happiness.
Umah had grown more confident now more time had elapsed since we had left the boat. He had started to gaze upon me with mooning eyes, but my indiscretion had been as innocent as it was impetuous, and to replicate the act would be premeditated. We grow through change, we die in repetition. The echo is already dead. Lizards climbed the tower wall
s and as I watched them navigate the phallic white curves of the dome I recalled some words from William Blake – the man who never changes his opinion is like standing water and grows reptiles of the mind. I was a lizard, a chameleon, a girl of many colours. I could do and be anything and didn’t know that time like sand in the hour glass was gathering speed, that the only permanence is change, and the idyll will always come to an end.
We met Africans in Hanif’s warehouse, men with young sons, pregnant women, families who came from somewhere and wanted to be somewhere else. They wept and argued and paid over vast sums of money that Samir folded into a stained leather pouch and slid inside his white djellaba. At any price the people wanted to reach Europe and no sum would have persuaded me to do anything but stay.
I met an Indian man who had crossed the continent from Kenya and was now making the journey to join his brother in Spain. He was an engineer, he said, with five children and a wife to care for at home in Mombassa.
‘There is no work now,’ he said, ‘how can I feed my family?’
I shook my head and looked suitably forlorn. It was so long since I had last heard English spoken the language seemed strange to me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said in a whisper.
It felt as if my words might shatter the fantasy and I would suddenly wake in my bed in Fulham with, with … that boy in girl’s clothing, that mirage in my shoes and make-up. Like the future, the past had become abstract, an unreal place I no longer believed in. There was just this moment.
The engineer looked into my green eyes, at the blonde ringlets escaping from my turban.
‘You are leaving here with us?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘This is where I belong.’
I didn’t know it then, but this was to be the last time I went into town. We drank mint tea with Hanif and after, while Azar went to get the truck, I followed Samir to the goldsmith’s shop, a small, stone-walled building lit by the brilliant light emanating from the kiln. The goldsmith had the long white beard of a prophet and looked as if he might have been casting gold in those ancient moulds for a thousand years, although the metal shutter that rolled down over the door and the thick bars on the narrow window belonged to modern times. There was just enough space inside the shop for the low table that contained a set of brass scales with weights in pounds and ounces. It was on this ancient device that the goldsmith weighed the grit and dust and fragmented nuggets brought out of the desert by speculators dreaming of the riches of paradise.
The goldsmith took the wad of money Samir gave him, licked his scarred fingers and counted the bills, wahid, ithnan, thalatha, arba’a, khamsa – one, two, three, four, five, his voice a chant that made me feel giddy in the fierce heat thrown out by the kiln. On and on, a teacher instructing the art of pronunciation. When he reached the required sum, he pushed the rest of the bundle back across the counter to Samir. The sheikh didn’t check. He had the careless manner of people who have always had money and had no need to treat those grubby bills with special respect.
Under the counter there was an iron safe. The goldsmith produced a key from within the folds of his cloak and, when he swung back the door, a brilliant yellow glow filled the room. He produced two one pound ingots that he gave to Samir and Samir held them out for me to take a closer look.
‘Gold,’ he said. ‘Is beautiful.’
‘It is beautiful. And you are beautiful,’ I replied.
He pointed at himself. ‘Me, me beautiful.’ Then he pointed at me. ‘Chengi, he beautiful.’
‘She.’
‘He beautiful,’ he said again. He pushed the gold ingots at me. ‘You, you take. You want?’
I pulled away. ‘No, no,’ I said, and I meant it.
He knew that. We had little language and few secrets. I smiled. I was his mother and his child. He was my father and my little boy. When we were alone, joined as one, I was Samir and Samir was me, my flesh his flesh. It was, I thought, how love should be. That love is sex in all its colours and uncountable variations.
Azar appeared in the shop and placed the ingots in a bag. The sheikh and the goldsmith touched foreheads and chests, and I was relieved to journey back to the fort where I felt safe and at home. We bathed in the stone bath, Maysoon joined us and the world was back in balance; a boy and two girls in a round tower with twelve windows. And I wondered that day as we made love with Samir if he knew the things Maysoon had taught me. Or was that our secret, the secret life of girls?
The following day, the sheikh and the other men left without a word, and I forgot my place, my role, that I was merely a woman who waited as women always wait. The days went by, two, three four, five. I felt bereft, Maysoon’s tongue small compensation for the long hours of loneliness that stole upon me. I felt abandoned, an outsider, my doubts changing to fear when at dawn one morning I awoke to find the women of the house making their way into the tower with numerous pots and bowls. Maysoon led the way, chatting and giggly, the women smiling, the bells about their ankles ringing out like funeral bells before they bury the dead. They stopped and there was silence.
Amatullah, Mo’s wife, carried an iron pot, her hands protected by cloths. She placed it down carefully on the mattress where I had been sleeping. She raised the lid and inside was a bubbling substance like the restorative goo I had seen applied to the wounded camel in the caravanserai. She removed the scarf from her head, rolled up her sleeves and stared down at me, her eyes dancing, the wrinkles growing deeper on her brow. I looked at Maysoon. The girl gave a little wave. My mouth was dry.
One of the other women held my shoulders and Maysoon took my hand. I could have fought them off but I had come to believe in fate, that we are guided by the wind and stars, que será será. Amatullah stirred the scalding liquid with a wooden spoon before taking a dollop of the mixture and spreading it over the bouncy blonde curls of my pubic hair.
A scream left my throat. I thought I was going to die. I gasped in pain. All the breath left my body. Amatullah shook her head and tutted. She looked angry now as she scooped out a second spoonful. She pressed her free hand into the hollow of my stomach and, as she forced the white stuff into the entrance of my vagina, it hit me that I was going to be circumcised, that once my senses were numbed by this vile concoction, Amatullah would take a knife to my vagina. The young men were away and the old men who hated me were now in charge. I was a stranger, a foreigner, an interloper. I was being punished. I was going to be robbed of my clitoris, my femininity, my secret joy of squirting girl juice into the atmosphere.
I looked up at Maysoon.
‘Is OK,’ she said, about all she could say in English, and she traced her finger down over the blue line that ran from below her bottom lip and down into her lush cleavage.
Tears were falling from my eyes, but my fear disappeared as quickly as it had emerged. I felt ashamed. I wasn’t going to be robbed of my sexuality. I was being invited into the clan. I was one of them and I realised that that was what I wanted to be. That if Samir was going to leave me waiting while he went about his business, I needed to be united to the tribe, a member of his harem. I had been sad and now I felt joyful.
Amatullah continued, spreading the mixture as you would smooth dough into a cake tray, coating the area from just below my waist, across my pubic mount and into the crack of my bottom. While the poultice set, she ran her fingertips over my limbs and her look seemed to say that she was impressed not to find any other superfluous hair.
The woman holding my shoulder, Yasmeen, a timid soul with a squint in her eyes, released her grip and turned to pick up the brass bowl on the floor behind her. Her fingers, I noticed, were stained the same shade of blue as the liquid the bowl contained. I didn’t work in the house. Like Maysoon, my one task was to please the master, but I recalled Yasmeen grinding petals and roots in a mortise and pestle. I remembered the words she used: indigo and saffron. She had made a dye from the plants that grew along the banks of the muddy stream beside the fort.
Amatulla
h carefully soaped and sponged the lower half of my face, over my chin and down between my breasts. With all this fuss being made over me, my nipples popped out, eager for attention, and Amatullah paused in her ministrations to give them a good hard tweak. I yelped. The women laughed and I laughed with them. They were unaffected. They had a naturalness I envied and tried to emulate. They had their role, their tasks. They cooked. They cleaned. Yasmeen collected herbs and spices. Maysoon and I provided the release from tension a house full of women always stirs.
This is the life inside a harem and the mere sound of the word was poetry that resonated musically in my mind. I was a slave girl, a concubine. I had no responsibilities except to please my master. Like Maysoon, I was an object of desire, and the awareness that I was valued in this house without mirrors had freed me of the vanity being desirable inspires.
Not every woman is a courtesan, but it is the logical corollary of being a woman, of painting your face, of dressing to reveal your breasts, your spine, your legs, your shape. Unless you are determined to remain a virgin, it is only a question of the circumstances or the price under which you agree to strip off your clothes and spread your legs. The female in the animal kingdom lets off an odour to attract the male just as we apply scent as an erotic signal. The consorts of the rich men I have met, the wives of peers and ambassadors, the rock chicks and footballer’s girlfriends, ornament their ears, throats and fingers with precious stones, they hobble their feet in Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo. Their underwear is skimpy, silky, soft, designed not for wearing but taking off. Was the decoration of a blue tattoo really any different?
The poultice had hardened. Amatullah picked at the top edge and, when she pulled it back, I yelped again, louder than ever. I’d suffered unnecessary hair waxings before, but they were nothing compared with this. My golden fleece was no more, every curl that decorated my mount had gone in one foul swoop. It felt as if I were on fire. And if that wasn’t enough, while Yasmeen and another girl held my legs as if I were about to have a baby, Amatullah jabbed around my vagina with a pair of tweezers snapping out any stray hairs left behind.
Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) Page 16
