‘That’s not true,’ I said.
But it was true. That’s what Melissa had advised me to do, flaunt myself, and I didn’t need to be told twice.
Was I so obvious?
That’s what Sister Benedict was always saying, and I was growing tired of her creeping into my mind, now, of all times. She was like an avenging angel, like the ghost of conscience past. We are taught in schools like mine that we can have it all, be it all, that we can go anywhere, do anything. But it’s not true. There’s a glass ceiling an inch above girls’ heads. If we try to rise up through the ceiling, we come crashing back down again, and it occurred to me that perhaps it’s best not to try to break the glass, but to follow our instincts and find a way like Alice to pass through the glass. That’s where I had gone so dreadfully wrong.
‘I didn’t tell Simon I worked at the casino, though,’ I now said.
‘So, he checked you out. That’s how business works,’ Sandy enlightened me, knitting the fingers of his hands together. ‘Knowledge is power.’
I shook my head. It still didn’t make sense.
‘He probably got that Indian fella to follow you.’
‘Mr Singh?’
‘Yeah, that’s the one. There’s a lot more to Mr Singh than meets the eye,’ he remarked. ‘But then, that’s true of all of us.’
He gazed down at my pert nipples. They were throbbing and erect like two missiles pointing at him. I had a terrible temptation to touch myself, an anxiety to be touched, and had to fight the impulse.
‘So,’ Sandy continued, ‘once Simon knew you were parading around in a casino with hardly a stitch on, he gave me a call.’
‘So it wasn’t just chance that I met you?’ I said.
‘Almost nothing is chance, and nothing that succeeds is left to chance,’ he said philosophically, and I stood there, naked except for the straps about my neck, ankles and wrists, trying to work out what he meant. A smile puckered the corners of his lips. ‘I like a flutter and I like the fillies,’ he added. ‘All in all, it worked out all right.’
‘All right for you,’ I said hopelessly.
‘And you, as well.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Isn’t it?’ he said. He glanced about the long baronial hall. ‘Did you ever imagine you’d come to a place like this?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Not without any clothes on.’
‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said coldly, and I felt even more confused.
The thing is, I didn’t object to being unclothed, not really. When Sandy had taught me his so-called system I had sat happily naked on the hotel bed, my pussy leaking discharge into my pubic hair, the warm animal smell rising to my nostrils and making me feel quite giddy. I’d just been done anally for the first time and I wasn’t feeling ashamed or horrified. I was buzzing, glowing, vibrant. My karma had been reset. I had become in that instant a different person.
My eyes dropped and I looked down at myself. My breasts were full to bursting, pushing out with primal eagerness. My ribcage was well defined like a suit of armour, my tummy concave between my extruding hipbones, the butterflies flapping their wings again. I was looking better than I had ever looked before, like the models posing on the pages of Nuts, like the pierced and tattooed girls on the porn sites we had bookmarked on the computer at school, Bangbus and Far East Media, astonishing scenes of girls climbing into vans with strangers, stripping off for a few dollars and offering up their pussies to the camera. Oral sex, anal sex – it seemed like the girls wandering the streets of America would do anything to be on camera.
Even more enthralling was watching the girls lining up at Far East Media to have their bottoms spanked by callused hands, with hairbrushes and leather belts. I watched those scenes and must admit I was curious to know how it felt to be spanked and never imagined I was so soon to find out.
Visiting those websites was an obsession throughout the sixth form and continued to be so even after the nuns discovered the history function on Vista and made the offence of entering those sites punishable by death – or, worse, being sent down. The girls of the upper sixth had become addicted to internet porn and paraded naked in the dorm after lights out, walking on the balls of their feet, pulling in their waists, pushing out their breasts. Girls adore their own breasts. We want them to be seen and admired.
We were sheathed by day in calf-length tartan skirts, blouses with high collars buttoned to the throat, wool blazers with a badge showing Saint Sebastian pinned through with Roman arrows. At night, with the milky glow of the moon slipping through the leaded windows, we shed these uniforms, tossed off our long nightdresses and enjoyed our primordial nudity – me more than most, I’m sure, the cold Kent air making the invisible hairs on my arms and legs bristle. My pubic hair fleecy and damp with arousal, I’d crawl under someone’s sheets and in the pale-green light of an Apple Mac defy the rules and watch scenes from Bangbus and Far East Media depicting girls in acts of fellatio and cunnilingus.
Once entering these sites was prohibited, girls who had never logged on to them before began to do so. It is the human predicament. We are drawn to the illegal, the illicit, the hidden, the unknown. After seven years behind the walls of a convent, girls want to shake off their old identity and reinvent themselves. We want to take off our dull sexless uniforms and run into the future, preferably naked.
Sandy Cunningham must have read my mind because, as I looked up, he took a grip on my belt with one hand and, with the other, slipped a finger between my legs, ran it in a sawing motion through the lips of my vagina, and held his hand up like a piece of incriminating evidence, his finger slicked with juice and shiny in the shadowy light.
My mouth fell open. I was so embarrassed and watched speechless as he rubbed the gummy excretion between his thumb and finger before tasting my essence on his tongue.
‘You’re ripe and ready, girl,’ he said. ‘Simon knew that the moment he laid eyes on you.’
I was mortified. I had allowed this man to take me in all my openings, but the way he was treating me at that moment was insensitive and humiliating. I had assumed as I watched the other girls that I was ready to go through with whatever was demanded of me. Now, I was beginning to wonder. So far I had merely been a voyeur. I still didn’t know if I could actually perform erotic acts with strangers watched by other strangers. I felt bitter, used, at a loss.
‘Yes, but your system doesn’t work,’ I said with irritation.
He just smiled. ‘It’s all down to the law of averages. It’s bloody hard to lose five times in a row. I win all the time.’
‘I didn’t …’
‘I’ll tell you why, Magdalena. If you try too hard, if you want to win too much, the law of averages will be out to get you.’
‘That’s not true …’
‘What you put out into the universe comes back tenfold. If you’re greedy, you get nothing. If you’re grateful, if you’re submissive to the law, it makes sure you come out all right.’
I shook my head. ‘That’s just silly,’ I said. ‘You set me up.’
‘You set yourself up.’
‘Oh, no, I didn’t.’
‘Oh, yes, you did.’
He was grinning. I burned pink with shame. I was standing there naked, breasts full as two ripe melons, pubic hair smelling of my own seepage, and talking like a child.
He hooked his fingers over my belt and pulled me close again. ‘You must cultivate what I call an attitude of gratitude,’ he said. ‘You had a chance to make a name for yourself working for Roche-Marshall. That wasn’t enough for you. You wanted more. You didn’t want to learn the system, you wanted to beat the system. If you train yourself to take what comes and accept it with gratitude, it’ll all work out.’
‘I only wanted to pay my own way through university,’ I said.
‘You do that, Magdalena, by working your way, by being yourself,’ he said. ‘I play the system and win because I can afford to lose. I’m grateful when I do win. I don’t
complain when I lose. I don’t complain and I don’t go dipping my hands into other people’s wallets.’
The red flame of my embarrassment burned even brighter. Not only did Sandy Cunningham know Simon Roche, he already knew what had led me to be standing there in Black Spires in the altogether. I went to speak, but at that moment Sergio reappeared with the tray and I unconsciously took one of the flutes of champagne. The men did the same and joined the rims of their glasses. Sandy looked at me.
‘To you,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know you drank,’ I responded, remembering all those glasses of cola I had delivered to him at the casino.
‘Here’s a word of advice,’ he responded. ‘Champagne is one of life’s small pleasures. Never say no to champagne, and never say no to life’s pleasures, small or big.’
He clinked my glass with his. It sounded like a bell ringing at the entrance to a lift and I went into robot mode. I raised the champagne to my lips. The bubbles went up my nose and made me quiver, the coldness of the drink and the warmth of the room making my head spin. I hadn’t eaten all day, my tummy was empty, the effervescent rush of alcohol seemed to burn the back of my eyes and I felt a trickle of perspiration run down my back.
Sandy tugged again at my belt and a slurp of champagne spilled over my chest. It seemed careless, heartless, as if I didn’t matter. As if I was nothing. I was angry with Sandy Cunningham. And I was angry with Simon Roche. He must have known I wouldn’t be able to resist temptation, that I would lose all my money and, in desperation, turn to the only source available to me: the Roche-Marshall sundries account.
That’s why he had given me the computer codes.
On the Monday of my second week at the office, after that disgraceful night in the hotel with Sandy, he had asked my shoe size. He had known. He had always known. My being here at Black Spires wasn’t chance. It wasn’t destiny. I had been duped and lured here and the thought made tears well up in my eyes.
‘You tricked me,’ I said to Sandy and he just grinned.
‘When you’re a thief you take your chances,’ he replied, and the tears spilled down my cheeks in a spluttering shower.
‘I’m not a thief,’ I cried.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re a girl who can resist anything except temptation.’
I stamped my foot, spilling more champagne over my breasts. I placed the glass back on the tray on the table at our side and, with as much dignity as I could muster, I stormed out of the room, back across the hall and up the two flights of stairs to the boudoir where I had been clipped and creamed and clad in black leather straps. I slammed the door behind me.
With nervous fingers straining over the buckles, I undid the straps and threw them across the room. I searched through the drawers and could hardly believe my eyes as they alighted on a torture garden of whips and canes, a cat-o’-nine-tails, a glass phallus, a plastic cock attached to a pink leather harness, clips and clamps for purposes I couldn’t imagine.
The drawers boomed like cannon as I rammed them shut. I turned away and was shocked when I saw my reflection in the mirror. I looked like a wild beast, my hair styled as if by a windstorm, black smears war-painted across my cheeks. There was the sweat-sticky residue of champagne between my breasts; my nipples were so painfully erect I squeezed them as hard as I could and suddenly knew exactly what the clips and clamps in the chest of drawers were for.
I was almost tempted to go and try for myself, but that would have been giving in to an instinct too far. I could smell the pungent musk of my own arousal infusing that small room with the scent of lust. It was shameful and confusing. I didn’t want to be a disciplined drone in the City, but I didn’t want to be a submissive drone in the living room at Black Spires either. I didn’t know what I wanted.
In the bathroom I washed the smears from my face, I douched the wet discharge from between my legs and found in the cupboard the bag with my own clothes. I pulled back my hair and felt like the old me as I dressed and stepped into my shoes. It was a relief to find my mobile phone and turned it on.
There were two texts, one from Melissa: Where the hell RU?
I texted back: Youll nvr blv me.
The other was from Sarah. Going to Ministry of Sound. Coming?
I texted Sarah. Cant. Wish I cld, and the messages reminded me of who I once was.
‘I want my life back.’ I said the words, whispering to my reflection, but caught a curious look in my eyes, a sense that I was watching myself from beyond myself, that the girl standing there in a pale-yellow suit was an image of how I used to be, a photograph from a sixth-form trip to the Louvre when I had worn the suit for the first time, the mischievous display of cleavage swelling over my buttoned blouse and sending Sister Benedict into a paroxysm of holy fury.
She had pointed at the sky. He’s always watching, she’d said, and shamefully I had thought that if that were true He would have adored His creation, my hair shining like a raven’s wing, my long limbs sculpted by years of gymnastics, the prettiest girls in the upper sixth clustering about me like moons drawn to the pull of a celestial being. Pretty girls like to be with the prettiest girls to show how pretty they are.
Summer was coming. The end of term was coming. I would soon wriggle free of my schoolgirl skin and be released from the cloistering angst of Sister Benedict, her whiplash tongue the symbol of the whiplash cane she kept mounted on her office wall, the mute reminder of her capacity for cruelty, her abhorrence of beauty, that inaccessible quality that exasperated her more and more as it blossomed on me like a rare orchid.
Of course I knew I was attractive. Pretty girls always do. You can’t help but compare yourself with other girls; girls in the street, in the newspapers, on the sides of buses, on advertising hoardings. You know from the look in men’s eyes when you board the bus or the tube and they either look away to avoid seeing that which they can never have, or they press closer than they should to feel for just a moment the warmth of your flesh through their clothes. They want to get close to you, smell you, take you in on their senses and imagine in their dirty minds all the things they want to do to you.
By the time you are sixteen and have tuned into Youporn and Bangbus, you know what it is men want to do and you know if you are the kind of girl men want to eat and bite and spank and lick and pierce. You are afraid and intrigued by this knowledge, attracted and repulsed; you want to remain a virgin and you want to be a whore. Sex makes you think about sex. It makes you grow moist between your legs with that sticky wetness you scoop up with the tip of your finger and savour on your tongue, the bittersweet taste of being a grown-up.
You know when you are in a café or bar with your girlfriends and the men at the next table are watching if it is you they are watching. And why. It gives you self-confidence. Poise. A feeling of power. It is as if you are a gift to the world and you can bestow that gift on anyone of your choosing. And it is you who has the choice. There is the person you see in the mirror, the person you present to the world, and as you are growing up you become aware that inside there is another you, the real you, bursting like a baby bird to come out of the shell.
Was my choice of mathematics at the London School of Economics just a ridiculous whim? Was I going against my true character? People told me to go to drama school, become a model, get on a media training course and read the news. I had the ‘televisual’ look, they said: trustworthy and intelligent, sexy yet serious. I was, they said, a girl with it all, and now I was a girl with nothing, nothing but the prospect of a criminal record.
Sister Benedict had called me conceited, vain, narcissistic and shallow. She accused me of seeking mirrors to assess my reflection. It was true: when I got back to the dorm I would strip off my uniform and check my reflection, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a hand on my flat tummy, my fingers gently squeezing the buds of my pink nipples, stroking the lush tuft of my velvet pubes, turning to examine the neat sphere of my bottom, a mathematician with dividers calculating the perfect geometry of the arc. I w
ould slap my backside as you slap a pony to make it gallop, quaking as the delightful warmth burned my skin. I dreamed of being spanked before I actually imagined being spanked, and being spanked seemed to have awoken me to my true potential.
It occurred to me that Sister Benedict had had more of an influence on my life than Mother, who was always busy doing something, although what I was never quite sure. Father, poor man, had invested everything on that one big deal with the Chinese man and watched every penny he had slip from his grasp as, in an unbearable parallel image, I had watched my savings cleared from the computer screen in Simon’s office.
The Sister with her voodoo inclinations had predicted that I would come to no good, that I would come to some place like Black Spires. Everything I had done since walking from the gates of the convent in Westgate a month before had conspired to bring me here to this small room in my pale-yellow suit wanting to leave and wanting to stay and not being sure what I wanted at all.
I sat on the narrow bed and looked around the room – the long mirror, the flowers carefully arranged on a shelf, the leather bonds scattered across the floor, the arched window with its view of the black night. Now I was ready to go I remembered that I had stolen £3,100. I was certain if I got the train back to Victoria Simon wouldn’t go to the police. I would tell them everything, how I had been tricked into parading about naked against my will – how I had been tricked into offering up my bottom to a man in a Kensington hotel room.
I was angry with Simon Roche, and I was even angrier with myself because I knew in the heart of my sub-conscious self it hadn’t been against my will. Not entirely. I had enjoyed the attention in my fetish clothes at Rebels, and it was irritating to acknowledge that I liked being naked. I adored being naked. It had given me a thrill to enter the living room and see all eyes turning in my direction. Being naked suited some perverse thing inside me that I had been coming to accept before Sandy Cunningham turned up with his self-assured smile and bow tie.
My heart was pounding. I was breathless. I crossed the room and gazed out at the sky. It was pierced by a billion stars. I thought about classics at school, how the gods when they die don’t disappear but transform into animals and mortals and constellations. I wanted to be up there with them, a star in the sky, a god of the night.
The Gift of Girls Page 9
