The Gift of Girls (16 page)

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, agonising, 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.

‘Keep still, girl,’ she said.

I tried but it wasn’t easy. I was panting, trembling.

What is it about pain that it can be moulded perversely into a strange and violent pleasure? The heat from the fourth blow had shot like an arrow between my legs, through the channel of my vagina and burst like champagne bubbles against my throbbing clitoris. The pain was excruciating across my thighs, yet the delight about that hidden little nub of mystery was beyond belief. It was like putting one hand in fire and the other in arctic waters, the combination exciting conflicting emotions.

My eyes flickered open and I was shocked to notice a small portrait of the Madonna on the wall above the bookshelves, a painting I had never seen in the Sister’s office before. That painting could have been a portrait of me, the same waves of night-dark hair, the same full, plump, rather impudent lips, the same large soulful eyes, the same look of agony and confusion that I at that moment must surely have worn. As the Sister was beating my backside, she was gazing across her desk at that portrait. She was chastising me, but this was also an act of self-flagellation. Inside Sister Benedict there was a void and she was beating her way through the empty space in
search
of herself, in search of the Madonna she dearly wanted to be.

The conflicting sensations continued with the fifth strike that she placed across the very top of my taut buttocks, just below what I’d learned was the sciatic nerve, the vibration through that nerve, up my spine and into my brain like an electric pulse that made my whole body break into a sweat. I wriggled like a fish; I couldn’t stop myself.

‘One more,’ the Sister said, and I noted now a faint tinge of admiration, even compassion.

Sister Benedict made a soft sawing motion across my bottom, choosing her spot. I held my breath. She drew back and I listened as the cane cut an arc through the dry air and licked across my backside like a dragon’s tongue, like the blade of the guillotine. The strike crossed the other five swelling rails, completing a pattern of cruel graffiti and sending that electric pulse from my brain straight to my bladder. I had drunk two glasses of orange juice and a cup of tea at breakfast. I had nervously swallowed a bottle of Evian before climbing the steps of the tower. There had been no time to go to the lavatory.

‘Now, on your feet,’ she said, and I pushed up with my hands and slid unsteadily from the desk.

The hem of my skirt was still tucked in the waistband. The jerking motion, coupled with the feel of the cool air on the pulsating lines across my bottom, added to the mounting pressure inside me. I thought for one terrible second I was going to climax standing there in front of Sister Benedict, that the spasm around my swollen clitoris was going to erupt in that elusive phenomenon, an orgasm, something we talked about at school but never expected to come true.

But it wasn’t to be my first orgasm. That would come a month later under oddly similar circumstances.

No, it was worse than that. Much, much worse.

A stream of urine gushed from between my open legs splashing noisily on the stone floor, not a trickle but a powerful hissing jet that just kept coming. I stood there petrified in disgrace and humiliation. And Sister Benedict stood there spellbound by this unexpected turn of events.

Was this my fault? Was it her fault? Was it providence?

She didn’t know. I didn’t know.

The golden shower like a rising tide spread in a lake about my shoes and meandered slowly with the room’s faint slope towards the door. As the force of my pee died down, dribbles still dropped with a splash in the puddle below me and we remained motionless like people in bed at night waiting to see if a dripping tap is ever going to stop.

The Sister’s mouth had dropped open. Her eyes were shiny. We looked at each other and in that look was an alarming complicity. My face was streaked with snot and tears, my hair wild like a tropical storm. I was naked from the waist down. What Sister Benedict had seen was the Madonna taking a leak.

She was shaky on her small feet, her shoes engulfed in urine, her heart racing, eyes wide and staring. Nothing had ever given her more pleasure and she would remember this scene for the rest of her life, this dark-haired girl with her soggy pussy and blazing bottom and long white legs standing there before her with golden liquids gushing from her young body. She would take this memory with her when she knelt on the
prie dieu
in the window nook at night and stared through binoculars at the girls in the upper sixth parading naked across the dorm.

So much had happened since I had left Saint Sebastian that this scene in the tower, shocking though it had been, had fallen to the back of my memory. It was the last time the Sister had beaten me and, from that day on, she appeared to have a faint flush about her cheeks when I sat in her Latin class or our eyes met across the chapel.
Her
final report when I left school painted me in the sympathetic lines of the Madonna on her office wall and, to my complete surprise, I got an A in classics.

That day in the Sister’s office came back into my mind as I followed Simon into the alcove at Black Spires. I knew what was expected of me and knelt as if in prayer, my tummy and ribcage against the back of the chair, my full breasts nestled on the low padded rail at the top.

My mouth fell open as Sergio Buenavista produced his conquistador cock and slid it between my pouting lips. I closed my eyes. I could smell olive oil, crispy pan, the silky touch of the Mediterranean, and remembered swimming naked at Puente Romano.

Not counting the dildo, only one penis had been in my mouth before and that belonged to Sandy Cunningham. I had anticipated hating the experience, but it had turned out to be rather enjoyable, as it was now, wrapping my tongue around the throbbing extension of this handsome Spaniard. I sucked for all I was worth, up and down, in one cheek then the other, biting and nipping the smooth stretched skin, flicking the tip of my tongue into the groove around the head of his cock and running it back down the shaft again.

Sergio gasped and groaned, pushed deeper into my throat, then gripped the back of my head so that he could release a great spurt of hot semen that filled my mouth and pressed out of my lips. I kept going, the milky stuff oiling the shaft as it softened and he withdrew.

‘
Muy bien. Qué boca tienes!
’

He whispered the words, and of course he didn’t know that I spoke Spanish.

He had loved it. I loved it. I loved the feel of his frothy warm come seeping through my teeth, over my lips, across my cheeks and chin, dripping on to my breasts, my nipples puckering in pleasure and surprise. And as I knelt in the
prie dieu
, my spine was curved and my long white
neck
was drawn back to take another hard cock in the space vacated by Sergio.