The Gift of Girls (14 page)

Some of the girls at school had started shaving their pussies so that they looked like children, but I had a sense that men were drawn to the enigma of our pubic hair, our creamy, uncontrollable discharge producing the faint whiff of the stable; that bare hairless flesh is more desirable with the token of our prehistoric self, a reminder of the animal we once were and can be again if the man knows which buttons to push.

For some reason, I felt at peace, eyes closed, head buried, my back arched, the globe of my backside neatly divided, Milly riding up and down on the phallus, drilling inside me as if within my hidden passageways she might find some marvellous secret. Time had lost formality and shape, the awareness of yesterday and tomorrow, of things to be done and things achieved, of hurry and waste. Time was never wasted, for time not doing one
thing
was spent on another, and doing nothing at all was of itself doing something.

It occurred to me, too, that I lived each moment with an imperceptible tension, an anxiety, a need for continuous pretending, sudden improvisations, quick justifications of who I am and what I am doing. In sex, as in pain, you are in the present moment, and it is only in the present that we are truly and completely alive.

One night on that holiday in Marbella, I wandered through the gardens of Puente Romano to the bay. A hot wind was blowing across the Mediterranean with the scent of the red sands of Africa, the fragrance of pleasure and lust. I was embraced by the night, by the heat, by the moon and stars. I slid from my pink bikini and swam naked. I swam for a long time and, when I left the sea, I reached for my swimwear and, instead of dressing, I walked through the gardens among the courting couples and families making their way home from the restaurants and bars, those two scraps of pink material in my hand, my body free in the hot Andalusian night.

It was the first time I had done something quite so brazen, walked naked in a public place, and the feeling was exhilarating, enriching, empowering. I had felt completely, utterly, thoroughly alive. I was living in the present, as I was that moment on the narrow bed on the top floor at Black Spires.

My breath grew faster, my heart beating in my chest. I could hear Milly, too, panting for air, and suddenly, as the piston beat of the phallus moved up a gear, we both gasped in climax, her girl-juices and the jism of my inner being erupting in a liquid gush so warm and heady I felt for a moment as if we were melting, molten essence to be reshaped for whatever the future had in store.

We collapsed in a tangle of limbs and giggles. Milly’s petal lips found my mouth and we kissed again. The phallus was bouncing about between us, wet and silly, strapped in a harness about her. She rolled over.

‘Undo it, Magdalena,’ she said, and I slipped the straps from the buckles.

She took the dildo from me, passed the straps between my legs, through the crease in my bottom, and tightened the buckles about my waist. I was kneeling on the bed, the pink cock jumping up and down like a small excited boy. What a wondrous thing it was, this male appendage with the smooth sides and bulbous head. Milly leaned forward, licked the shaft, then took the head into her mouth. She looked up into my eyes as she sucked that cock, and I felt the pressure of her tongue pass through the plastic like an electric current and ignite the star of my swollen clitoris. It’s weird, but it doesn’t seem to matter how big your orgasm, or how many you have, there is always more juice up there waiting to come flooding out.

Milly lay back, spread her legs and I fell on her like a satyr in a mediaeval painting, pushing up into her wet places and driving the dildo deep into her throbbing pussy. She closed her eyes and threw back her head to reveal her long throat. I was tempted to bite that white throat, I felt so aroused raising and thrusting my hips, the pink thing impaling her like the arrows on the school badge piercing Saint Sebastian. Milly moaned and cried, thrusting her pelvis and drawing the beast in still deeper, her total abandon revealing to me that to submit to the will of another provides its own unique pleasures, that there is power in submission as well as domination.

It also occurred to me, at that moment, pushing this hard pink cock up inside this slender girl, this mirror image of myself, that sex with someone you barely know, with a stranger, has its own special allure. Sex with Milly was a form of masturbation. The base of the phallus fitted snugly within the oval of my moist labia and nursed my clitoris like a fingertip.

Milly pushed down from the pit of her back and wrapped her long legs around me, locked at the ankles. I
thrust
harder and she let go with a scream that must have frightened the seagulls nesting under the eaves, a scream that made the room tremble and shake out the dust lodged in lost forgotten corners. We collapsed, wet and spent, her hot discharge coating my thighs, mixing with my own.

The dildo slipped from her drenched pussy and I lay on my back, the shaft of plastic slicked and erect above my belly. She rolled against me and pushed the tip of her tongue into my ear, nibbled on my ear lobe, licked my cheek.

‘I can hear your heart racing,’ she whispered.

I smiled. I stroked her red hair, her shoulder, so pale in the moonlight. I felt happy, satisfied, like a greedy cat, in touch with the moment. I could see the moon through the leaded windows.

‘I’d been about to go,’ I said.

‘Are you glad you didn’t?’

‘What do you think?’

‘You are going to be happy with your new life, Magdalena.’

I wasn’t sure what she meant.
My new life?
‘I don’t understand …’

‘Once you become a slave of your senses, there is no way back,’ she said. ‘Once you submit to the gift of pleasure, you want to give and receive the gift again and again, in different ways and the same way, for ever and ever.’

I lifted myself up on my elbow to look at her. The shadows made by the moon’s glow give Milly’s features the look of a costume mask, carved and perfect, too perfect to be fully human, her blaze of red hair like a beacon in the misty white light. She was extraordinarily beautiful, too beautiful for a normal life.

‘Stay there,’ she said, and slid from the narrow bed.

She filled a bowl with warm water and returned with a cloth and some soap. She washed the gooey stuff from
between
my legs, the cheeks of my bottom, my thighs, the champagne stickiness from my breasts. She then went and found my belt, the straps that fitted around my neck, my ankles and wrists. As she buckled them in place, I felt as if I had come home after a long journey, that I was me again, and all my worries over whether or not I had been tricked by Simon Roche and Sandy Cunningham didn’t really matter. If I had been deceived, it was by my own greed, by the allure of the blackjack table, that sensual click of chips moving across the green baize. If I had in any sense been betrayed, I had betrayed myself.

When Simon asked me at the interview whether I looked ‘fetching in a leotard’, I should have guessed that there was more to Mr Roche than the dull accountant he was pretending to be. Numbers, he remarked, demand the subjugation to discipline. ‘That’s something I like in a girl!’

All the clues were there. He had measured my legs in cherry-red heels, he had taken a long look at my breasts peeking outrageously over the top of my blouse, and had set about finding out exactly who I was and what he must have assumed I subliminally desired. He had given me access to the Roche-Marshall codes, to all that money lying unused in the sundries account. He had placed temptation before my eyes, but it was I, not Simon Roche, who had given in to that temptation. I was sure he had discovered that Daddy had lost his money and I was obliged to work in Rebels, dressed as if for a night at a fetish club.

Sister Benedict like the Ghost of Christmas Past slipped once more into my mind. ‘
If you dress like a harlot, you become a harlot. It’s the law of cause and effect
.’ That’s what she said to me that day we visited the the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and those words for some reason had stuck in my mind like a jingle you keep humming even after you’ve grown sick of it. We had entered the museum as a group and I went straight to the
one
painting I was dying to see. I had queued for ages and was suddenly standing alone before Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, the
Portrait of Lisa Gherardini
– the
Mona Lisa
.

Everything that has been said and everything you imagine about the
Mona Lisa
is true.
La Gioconda
, as she is called, really is enigmatic, and what you can see in her brown eyes and cheeky smile is the look of a woman who has just got out of bed and can’t wait to climb back between the sheets. I recognised that look, not as a girl with heapings of sexual experience, but a girl anxious to leave the confines of Saint Sebastian and begin my experience.

It had been at that moment that Sister Benedict made her appearance. She scrutinised me as I was scrutinising the portrait and transferred the sexual subtext from Leonardo da Vinci’s painting to me in my pale-yellow suit.

‘If you dress like a harlot, you become a harlot. It’s the law of cause and effect.’

‘Thank you, Sister, I will bear that in mind,’ I said, and she swept off in her long black habit to ruin some other girl’s visit to the museum.

Do parents not know when they send their daughters to convent school they run the risk that their little sweetheart, while confined behind the ivy-clad walls, will turn into either the virgin or the whore, that the nature of this old-fashioned education draws you to one extreme or the other? I looked like the Madonna but I thought like Mary Magdalene, the fun girl, the risk taker.

I had my mother’s features, but my father’s sense that life was meant to be spent on the high wire. I had been treading slowly, a step at a time, over the abyss and it had taken so little for me to go plunging into the void … my shoe size, the system, the hypnotic turn of the cards, Sandy Cunningham in his creased suit scooping in blue £50 chips. All the clues were there and only now, with
Milly
carefully fixing the buckle that held the choker tight to my neck, did I see the pieces of the puzzle slot together and form a picture in my mind.

Simon Roche must have known I was going to get into financial trouble and plunder the accounts. But how did he know I was the sort of girl who would with little persuasion strip and bend over the arm of his black leather sofa to be spanked – spanked to the state of that shameful orgasm? Most girls would have wept and waited for the police to come. Not me. I opened my buttons and, like Saint Sebastian, I bared my breast to take the martyr’s punishment.

Was that flash of cleavage at the interview enough to tell Simon Roche everything he needed to know about me? Was I that obvious? While Simon played the Devil placing temptation in my way, I so easily stepped into the persona of Faust. I craved carnal, not spiritual, knowledge and the moment I entered the secret code into the Roche-Marshall computer I was irrevocably damned.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Milly asked me.

I smiled. ‘Oh, God, I’m not sure. The Devil tempting Faust.’

‘You never quite leave the convent behind. Not ever,’ she said.

‘But how did you know?’

‘I know lots of things, Magdalena. All in good time …’

She sat cross-legged on the bed and stroked my leg; it felt nice. ‘There is no greater gift than the gift of pleasure,’ she said, continuing her theme. ‘And of all the gifts, none is so great as erotic pleasure.’

‘You mean fucking?’ I said, but she didn’t laugh.

Milly was deadly serious as she explained what she meant by the gift, and it was strange because I had already been thinking of sex as a gift. But there was more to it than that. The erotic, truly pursued, she said, is an art form that can inspire us, lift our hearts, revive the soul – just like the
Mona Lisa
, I thought. People speak of
talent
as being a gift, and being a master of erotic love is a true talent.

‘A gift, a personal gift, not like a present, can never be owned or bartered or sold,’ she said. ‘To be alive is a gift and, if your body is your gift, you must accept that with gratitude and dispense the gift.’

I recalled Sandy Cunningham speaking of gratitude. ‘You must cultivate an attitude of gratitude,’ he had said. ‘You didn’t want to learn the system, you wanted to beat the system.’

‘Dispense it to, like, anyone?’ I asked breathlessly.

‘Oh, no, Magdalena, you have to be discerning,’ she answered. ‘The gift is eternal and grows upon being given. Once given, the receiver is obliged to reciprocate and pass on the gift. Only those who understand the nature of the erotic as art are worthy of receiving the gift.’

It all seemed so complex. ‘How do you know who’s worthy?’

‘You just get a feeling for it,’ Milly said, her pink lips turning into a smile. ‘When you give yourself completely, to a man or a woman, when you submit to their will, you create a psychic bond with that person, a trust, and that trust turns on the light of your inner being. We are only alive to the degree that we can allow ourselves to be moved. Your role, my role, is to be a vector of pleasure.’

‘A vector of pleasure,’ I repeated. It sounded so amazing.

Milly stepped from the bed, her back faintly curved from the perfect turn of her round bottom, and stroked her fingers through the flames of her fiery hair. She reached out and pulled me gently from the bed. We held hands and looked into each other’s eyes, our own eyes, the tips of our breasts just touching and sending shivers of pins and needles through my body.

‘Are you ready?’

‘I am now,’ I replied.

‘It’s show time,’ she added, and opened the door.

9

Nude Descending a Staircase

THERE ARE FLOWERS
in Spain called
Las Señoras de la Noche
with blooms that open only at night. They enjoy the warmth without the sun and glow a pale-ivory colour in the light of the moon. I had always admired those flowers and realised that I was one of them, a Lady of the Night, my skin radiant as I descended the stairs with Milly, our black heels tapping out a drum roll to mark our entrance.