Before I’d gone rushing off in a huff, I seemed to recall the drapes in the hall being closed, perhaps to deny the last remnants of daylight. But they were open now and through the tall arched windows the ghostly light of the moon added a counterpoint to the warm glow of the candles suspended in candelabra from the ceiling and standing here and there in tridents. Their light was reflected in the suits of armour, shields, the display of swords, and picked out details on seascapes of sailing ships and portraits of country squires with the same dark countenance as Simon Roche.
Along each side of the hall were alcoves with upholstered benches and dark corners from which squeals of pain and pleasure added a choral accompaniment to the jazz. The nymphs carved on the columns had come to life, their cherubic faces saucy yet omniscient in the dancing shadows made by the candles. As we threaded our way among the columns, the perspective changed at each twist and turn, the effect reminding me suddenly of the Mesquita in Cordoba.
Everything, it seems, is linked. Just as Duchamp’s nude on the staircase, the figure cut into slithers to show a sense of movement, descends unavoidably from one step to the next, life is a series of inevitable steps. The moment Daddy shook hands with the Chinese man in a hotel room in Penang, the echo resonated across the seas and continents to that hotel room in Kensington where a man peeled off my clothes, enlightened my every orifice and set me in motion, one step at a time from Rebels Casino to Black Spires and down the staircase at Milly’s side into the heart of the drama.
I had never before seen a room like this, or people like this; the girls self-assured with their bodies unashamedly displayed, the men all with a certain ill-defined similarity, a certain mien which I could only describe as the look of power, the look Daddy had before he lost his money. Like Daddy, these men would never find pleasure in the same way as other men. They seek out the edges of things, the dark extremes where only the brave and reckless dare to go. Their brains are always ticking. They rarely sleep and they rarely smile; Simon Roche was a good example. In his glass temple in the City of London, Simon didn’t have friends. He had employees, secretaries, lackeys. It was in situations like this, I realised, in this ambience of domination and submission, among the swords and shields, where he was truly himself.
Normal desires would never satisfy Simon Roche and Sandy Cunningham, nor any of these men. I was sure they all had wives, one wife after another, trading in the old for the new with hosts of children to carry their names and genes into the future. They are individuals, I thought, men who don’t make connections in the normal way.
That night in the hotel room in Kensington, when Sandy calmly removed my clothes and proceeded to do me in every way, it was his air of confidence that persuaded me to let go of all uncertainty and let it happen. Boys just want a quick feel, a quick poke, a quick hand job. Men like Sandy, like all the men in the grand hall, had deeper needs. They were in no hurry to satisfy those needs and, when they did satisfy them, it would be in ways I could only begin to imagine.
My imagination was set alight as we joined a group gathered about an alcove where two men were playing chess across an enlarged board. Two girls dressed like me with the addition of masks, one red, the other black, knelt on the side of the table like acolytes learning esoteric moves from grandmasters.
The chess pieces were red and black ivory, long, vaguely phallic with oversized heads. The two men playing were the Texan I’d seen earlier and an Arab in a long white jalabah, his distinctive sunglasses, moustache and goatee familiar, perhaps from the newspapers.
As their turn came, the men didn’t move the chessmen, but pointed to the piece they wished to move and to the square they wished to move it to. The girl at their side, the red mask working the red pieces, the black moving the black, had to bestride the table without upsetting the pieces and lower her cleft over the bulbous head of the chosen piece, the motion causing them to wriggle in such a way that it made their bottoms and breasts tremble and vibrate, to the delight of the audience, me included.
Lifting the chessman didn’t appear to be as difficult as lowering the piece on to the chosen position, and it took all the force of their vaginal muscles to complete the move. The rounded heads of the pawns, the castle battlements, the queen’s crown and bishop’s mitre glistened with streaks of discharge, and the chessboard was dotted with dewdrops of girl-juice.
Chess has never been much of a spectator sport, but played in this way there is all the tension of motorcycle racing, a sense of imminent catastrophe and disaster. The people in the audience were holding their breath as they watched the girl in the red mask move crablike, her white toes with pearl varnish on the nails manoeuvring to get purchase on the marble tabletop.
She lowered her bottom as if to pee, squatted over the bishop nominated by the sheikh, her flared labia like some exotic sea creature dropping over the pointed headwear and conveying the piece at an angle across the board as it slipped and slurped from her wet pussy. Gravity was pulling the bishop down the greasy channel, while sheer pussy power sucked it back up and finally plopped it out on the desired square to a thumping round of applause.
The old Texan adjusted his bootlace tie as he leaned forward and studied the move. He drummed the table with his fingertips, the audience went silent, and finally he pointed at the black queen on her home square and across the board to the pawn left unprotected by the bishop’s precipitous advance.
The girl in the black mask was Oriental, small and lithe with no body hair, a neatly depilated pussy and powerful calves. She stood and stretched one leg across the board to make an arch. With her hands on her waist, she lowered herself over the unsuspecting pawn, sucked it up with one fierce snatch of her snatch, and held the piece as if gripped by an invisible fist. She stepped back across the table and thrust her prominent mound at the Texan. Taking the base of the pawn, he ran the domed head around the creamy curve of her labia before placing it in his mouth.
‘Texas tea,’ he said.
He put the piece to one side while the Oriental girl went through the same performance, straddling the table, seizing the queen before, with perfect vaginal control, positioning it in the centre of the square formerly occupied by the captured pawn.
The men clapped and I was sure they must have been thinking, if she can do that with those chessmen, what’s she going to do with the swollen king bulging at the front of my trousers.
I gazed at Milly. I gazed at the faces of the men around the table, and it occurred to me that it is in the small things in life that people find happiness; that the rather solemn, arrogant game of chess can be enlivened with such a simple, inoffensive innovation, that winning and losing is less important than the pleasure of taking part.
Four weeks earlier and about a dozen miles from Black Spires, I had been a schoolgirl at a convent, bursting from my uniform. My skirt had grown too short for my long legs. The buttons of my blouse could barely contain my impertinent breasts. I was unusually fit from the vaulting horse and parallel bars, but too rounded and luxuriant to pursue gymnastics. I was made for a different path and I got a sense of what that path might be the moment I slipped into fishnets at Rebels and Kate pulled the laces tight on my Lycra basque. I stepped into high heels and realised instantly that a naked girl would always feel dressed in heels, that heels shape you and make you.
It was in black heels and nothing else that I had set off on my journey from Simon’s office back along the familiar roads going south into the Kent countryside. I had found myself. I belonged here. I had been drawn here by something more than mere chance. The imps of destiny are always shuffling the cards and dealing the hands you play. I was meant to apply to Roche-Marshall to be an intern, to work at Rebels, to gamble my way into debt and duplicity.
How else would I have found my true vocation?
I was overcome suddenly with a feeling of liberation and contentment. I could feel the hand of fate squeezing my hard nipples, stirring the warm oils in my throbbing sex, in the sense of arousal piqued by
my own nudity.
The past and the future had become remote, abstract, mere concepts. In the dancing shadows made by the candlelight, with the hallucinogenic jazz haunting the high ceiling, I was in a present that was dreamlike, a fantasy, a fleeting, harmless decadence one imagines, as you may imagine being a princess or winning the lottery, but never really believes is going to come true.
It had taken time and imagination to create this scene at Black Spires. In the house of fate, this mansion with many rooms, nothing had been left to chance. Just as the men wore the look of power, the girls wore their beauty unashamedly but without arrogance or hubris. With tattoos, studs, shaved mounds or ample hair, with ivory-white skin like Milly or the ebony shine of the Maasai, the girls seemed special, each in her own way, and I wondered if there was anything special about me beyond being eighteen and eager to learn.
I could see more clearly now what Milly had meant by the gift: that sex, erotic sex, imbues the participants with an unimaginable power, a power that grows as it passes among those who understand and are humble to it. Milly with that plastic dildo had reached new places hidden inside me and unlocked a desire for more, more extremes, more innovations. She had taught me by actions rather than words that, of all the gifts a girl has, nothing is more precious than the gift to give and receive the ecstasy of orgasm, that pure moment when the body dissolves into its own essence and reaches perfection, a moment of satisfaction for people who can never be satisfied.
Wasn’t this the meaning of life, alchemist’s gold, the philosopher’s stone? Those last months at the convent I lay awake night after night thinking about my future. After five years behind those high ivy-covered walls, I had learned that the only truth, as the philosopher Wittgenstein had said, was in numbers, that words were the invention of man, the device of the devil. Like molten steel, words can be moulded into anything from prison bars to an extension bridge to be thrown over a river that may or may not exist.
People were so good at spinning those words and throwing out advice – jugglers with sharp knives – take a gap year, be an accountant, go to the LSE, have a career, so many words I didn’t really know where I was going or what I wanted. Numbers were truth and I was a perfect 34-24-34. I was five feet and ten inches in bare feet, 70 inches in primes, 10 times lucky 7. And it’s as rare as ambergris to lose five times in a row at blackjack.
What did it mean? Was it just words? That clever little Hungarian Ludwig Wittgenstein adored the axiomatic certainties of numbers and said philosophy consists of no more than this analysis: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Wow!
It was good advice. Daddy had lost his money. Mummy was suicidal. I was flat broke. What was there to talk about? After leaving Saint Sebastian, I lay in my bed in the flat I shared with Sarah and Melissa wondering what the hell Wittgenstein meant. I had been accepted as an intern, but I was bursting for adventure, desperate for adventure. After those nights at Rebels I came home and didn’t sleep because I didn’t want to sleep. Every time you go to bed you wake another day older.
A smile came to my lips, not the sort of smile that comes when something is passingly amusing. This was a smile that comes from deep down in your gut. For some reason, I was so happy I slapped Milly’s bottom as hard as I could.
‘Ouch,’ she said. ‘You are such a bitch.’
She was grinning. She understood. We were sisters-in-arms.
We moved further through the hall. I noticed Simon talking to the Spanish man – ‘Sergio Buenavista,’ Milly whispered, as if I should know who he was, but didn’t. The two men were watching a display by twins, gamine girls with short boyish haircuts and green bindings rather than black, the colour matching their emerald eyes.
I knew men were fascinated by twins and to accentuate the fixation the rings on their leather bracelets and anklets had been clamped together like the links of handcuffs, hand to hand, foot to foot in pretty green heels. They were facing each other as two other men spanked their bottoms with their bare hands, first one, then the other, and with each blow the twin receiving the smack was thrust into the other. They were dripping in sweat, their heads thrust back with looks of rapture, and, after being ravaged so thoroughly by the pink plastic cock in the room above, I could see how this playful spanking was amusing for those watching and a pleasure for those taking part.
The men gathered about the older woman were laughing uproariously, her story ended.
‘I find it hard to imagine her taking a beating,’ I whispered to Milly.
‘I have a feeling her gift is giving beatings,’ she replied, and I realised I had a lot to learn.
At that very moment, Simon hooked his fingers over the side of my belt and pulled me towards him. His eyes were black orbs that danced with reflected flames of the candlelight; he was devilishly handsome, authoritative, intimidating. Sweat prickled my underarms.
‘You’re over your little spat?’ he asked.
I flushed. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry …’
‘Try not to let it happen again, Magdalena.’
‘I won’t, I promise.’
He stood back and took a closer look at me, at my perky breasts, which I knew he admired, but then at me, into my eyes, into my being.
‘You seem different,’ he said.
‘Do I?’ I replied saucily, with more confidence.
He glanced from me to Milly and back again. ‘She is quite something,’ he remarked.
‘A gift,’ I responded, and he flashed one of those occasional smiles.
‘As are you,’ he said, and I felt inordinately proud.
He took my champagne glass and gave it to Milly before leading me into an alcove containing a prie dieu of the sort Sister Benedict kept in the window nook in her room in the high tower at the convent. I had assumed it was positioned for her private prayers until, alone one day in that room waiting to be reprimanded, I knelt on the chair and realised it had a perfect view across the courtyard into the uncurtained dorm of the upper-sixth girls.
Did Sister Benedict watch us parading about in the nude showing off our burgeoning young breasts? I thought she probably did and I’d probably find the bird-watching binoculars she carried on field trips, if there was time to rifle her drawers. There was no time. She entered and caught me kneeling on her sacred chair. She looked into my eyes, just as Simon Roche had done, and I looked back with defiance and knowing.
She knew I knew, and that created a sexual frisson as she told me to stand, lift my skirt and bend over the desk. What had I done wrong? I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter.
It was to be the last time that Sister Benedict tucked the hem of my skirt neatly in the waistband and pulled my knickers down to my knees. She took the cane with the shepherd’s crook handle from the wall and I listened to the whoosh as she brought it down through the air, testing the spring, the angle, the significance of the ‘follow through’, as the coach had told us in tennis.
Caning girls may have come to an end in state schools, even most private schools, but my Spanish mother had signed an agreement of acceptance that corporal punishment at the Convent of Saint Sebastian was an obligatory form of chastisement for errant pupils, of which the Sister had clearly decided I was one.
‘I am going to give you six of the best, Magdalena. What do you say?’
‘Thank you, Sister.’
I squirmed in embarrassment. I had been disciplined like this before, but still it was humiliating, a teenaged girl made to bare her bottom and accept a thrashing from this aging voyeur, this degenerate Peeping Tom, this woman in charge of my pastoral care.
She sliced the air once more, bringing the cane down through the empty space beside the desk. She placed her leathery hand on the small of my back and whipped that instrument of torture across the neat little white hills of my perky young bottom that Simon had accused me of pushing out so arrogantly as I paraded through his office. The cane bit into my flesh like a line of fire and the pain was immediate, ag
onising, yet unfathomably tolerable.
The second strike came, landing with a crackle like lightning a few inches below the first, closer to the curve of my bottom, closer to my moist pudenda pushing through my slender thighs, and for some reason I remembered once shuffling through the dictionary during a Latin class and discovering pudenda came from pudere, to be ashamed, and thought it silly. How could something so pretty and so normal be shameful, even displayed so candidly for Mother Superior?
I clenched my tummy, gritted my teeth, held my breath and waited for the third.
It came down like the strike from a sword, cutting diagonally across the first two and searing into the soft flesh, the points where the raised weals intersected sharp stabs of agony on a field of pain. Sister Benedict expected me to cry out. I had heard other girls howling like wolves from the tower, but I had no intention of giving her that satisfaction. Snot ran from my nose and tears welled in my eyes, but I gritted my teeth and my voice lay locked in my dry throat. I had been caned before. I could take it.
‘Halfway there, Magdalena,’ the nun said smugly, and I wondered why beating my bottom gave her such pleasure and could only conclude that my bottom was unusually appealing and there is something about beauty that bullies and tyrants want to despoil.
‘Thank you, Sister, I said, and found it hard to keep the tone of irony out of my voice.
I paid for that tone. You always do. The fourth strike from the cane was much harder than the other three. Just as in tennis, the Sister had found her pitch, her angle, the cane sizzling as it raced through the air and cracking like a whip across the top of my thighs, missing my sex by a fraction, the heat and its proximity to the lips of my flower making me writhe and leak over her desk. With all my wriggling, my underwear slipped down my legs to my feet. The nun unceremoniously grabbed my ankles, slipped my knickers over my shoes and dropped them a moment later on the desk, a moment in which I was sure she had examined the gusset for evidence of my wanton arousal.
The Gift of Girls Page 12
