The Gift of Girls (11 page)

I had a feeling that the level of pleasure and decadence had yet to rise, that all that I had witnessed until now was merely a dress rehearsal for the atavistic orgy that would surely take place and would surely sweep me along to places I wasn’t sure I wanted to go – and yet, deep down, deep in the primitive depths of my being, it was the place where my intuition seemed to be telling me I truly belonged. I could only assume I had been named Magdalena for some good reason.

One imagines such scenes taking place in brothels in Asia and South America, in Washington, in the Mayfair homes of Russian oligarchs. But to be here on the Kent coast, in the Garden of England, to be a part of it, suddenly felt unreal and extraordinary. I had been justifying my presence in the pragmatic terms of the mathematician, that clearing my debt of £3,100, as well as avoiding the risk of a criminal record, wasn’t merely practical, it was wise and essential. But seeing Sandy Cunningham at Black Spires shook the frail house of cards I had erected in my subconscious. There was a part of me that took pleasure in being naked in that room among the plaster nymphs, ready even for what might transpire. But on another level I was a schoolgirl still, an inexperienced teenager who belonged back along the coast at the convent I had left a short time ago, a silly girl playing at being a grown-up in a world where I didn’t belong, even if my toned, mature body clearly revealed quite a different story.

Do I sound confused?

I was. I had never been so confused in my life. It seemed as if I had been offered an impossible choice at Rebels Casino: offer up
anything
in exchange for knowledge
of
the system, a multi-entry visa to the world of independence and freedom. Now my choice was to play my namesake, Mary Magdalene, the harlot, the sinner, or get turned in to the cops. The choice was no choice at all. Was that life in the real world? Is all choice a question of compromise?

I had been holding at the same time two finely calibrated and opposing opinions. On one side I believed that the activities at Black Spires were just fun, daring, a secret and unique experience. But across the scale, I regarded it all as shameful and humiliating, an amusement perfectly normal for some, I’m sure, but one hardly pursued by girls like me. There was that phrase again. What kind of girl am I? What kind of a girl was I to become? Parents, school, life. Nothing prepares you for all these opposing choices.

Standing there urbanely in his dinner suit in that room of strangers, Sandy had shifted the finely weighted balance. My confidence had gone and a million doubts and fears held me in their terrible grip. The man I now knew as Sergio left and made his way across the room to Lee-Sun, who was pouring flutes of champagne.

The girl whom I had seen earlier showing off the stud in her vagina was being hoisted up on a wire connected to the two rings at the back of her belt. She spread her arms like the wings of a bird and I watched as she swung like a pendulum to and fro, an older man with snowy white hair pushing her gently as if playing with his grandchild in the park.

The two girls on the table had come to the end of their double act, and another girl I hadn’t seen before, a tall, striking black girl with hennaed hair and silver bracelets around her ankles, strode barefoot through the crowd like a Maasai across the Serengeti, the silver bracelets tinkling like tiny bells as she went.

Everything that had started to seem normal to me suddenly felt weird, as if two worlds had collided, and,
even
if I bridged those two worlds, I couldn’t understand how Sandy Cunningham belonged in them both as well.

Sergio had collected a tray with three glasses of champagne and paused to watch the activity around the girl suspended from the ceiling. The swinging had stopped. Another man had appeared with a small metal box from which he took a pinch of white powder that he sprinkled over the pink inner walls of the girl’s vagina. The older man with snowy hair sniffed and licked and sucked off the powder before setting the pendulum back in motion, the girl flying back and forth like a mechanical bird.

I looked back at Sandy.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

His leathery features opened in a broad grin. ‘I could ask you the same question,’ he replied.

I shook my head. I’m not sure why, but I hadn’t been quite so discomfited being naked among strangers, but with Sandy it was different. I felt a blush move over my neck and cheeks.

‘But how do you know Simon?’ I muttered

‘Simon’s an old mate of mine.’

‘But …’

He smiled again and I noticed how white his teeth were. ‘I’m not sure if I should let you in on the secret,’ he said.

He was teasing me. He knew what I was thinking, and he knew I knew. I had been absolutely certain there was no link between me stealing the money from Simon’s company and my lesson in learning how to beat the system from Sandy.

There was a link. There had to be.

‘He knew I worked at Rebels?’ I asked softly, my shoulders sagging.

‘Course he did. He had you figured out right from the start.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Well, from what I hear, you turn up to an interview at an accountancy office wearing a sexy little skirt and your tits hanging out.’

‘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.