The Gift of Girls (17 page)

My next conquest filled my throat and I performed the same surgery, nursing the hard thing, teasing and tormenting the pulsating head with its unseeing eye, taking it down deeper into my throat and sucking hard until, like a geyser erupting, another floodtide of hot stuff filled my mouth with that lemony, cheesy, subtle, unnameable tang I remembered from that first time with Sandy Cunningham.

His sperm was still dripping over my face when a third man unbuttoned his flies and presented his skeleton key to unpick the lock to my puffy full lips. As he pressed his penis into the soft tissue of my throat, I wondered if this was my gift, that with consummate skill I could nurse these throbbing pieces of the male and receive their essence in exchange for the gift of relieving all tension and anxiety.

‘
Muy bien. Qué boca tienes!
’

What a great mouth, Sergio had said, and I revelled in the compliment.

I licked and sucked, I nipped and tacked, and this man whose face I hadn’t seen withdrew his cock, held the moist shaft in his clenched palm and, like a fire-fighter with a hose, put out the flames of my burning cheeks by spraying my face with his sperm. It went up my nose, over my chin, over my forehead, into my eyes and he pushed the hosepipe back into my mouth for me to suck out the last hesitant drop.

There was a muted round of applause which I heard but didn’t see. I was unable to open my eyes as they were thick with spunk, but I imagined a group must have gathered about our alcove, and a fourth man presented his gift, slipped it into the wash of semen coating my throat and drilled inside the soft membranes as if in search of something small and lost. He reached his climax deep in my gullet and I was still gagging his sperm down
when
he withdrew and another cock pressed into my cheek.

My neck and throat were getting sore with all this activity but I thought this was a small price to pay for the service I was performing and, anyway, I knew from gymnastics that muscle burn heals by working through the pain. I was giving and receiving the gift. The universe was in order.

I reset my jaw and another muscle-hard piece of meat pressed down my throat and tickled my windpipe. It was bigger than the rest, I thought, the enormous head clanging my tonsils like church bells. I had self-learned the technique of swallowing, drawing air from deep in my lungs and breathing through the narrow passage encircling this monster that pushed deeper and deeper down and down as if into the core of my being.

My eyes were closed, but I pressed them more tightly shut and tried to visualise myself kneeling in the
prie dieu
, my face and dark hair coated with semen, my breasts pushed out, tingling with pins and needles, gummy with layer after layer of fresh essence. What I could see was something aesthetically pleasing, completely natural, a perfect young girl with gymnast poise nurturing her gift, a girl who had found in life the very thing she was born to do.

My eyes flickered open and I caught a glimpse of the Arab’s sunglasses, his thick moustache and goatee, his head thrown back, his jalabah pulled open. He withdrew the monster and added another coat of jism to my sticky features, the stuff pouring out of him in vast spurts like milk from the udders of a cow, enough, I was sure, to fill a bucket, and all of it drenched my face, my chin, my breasts. When he had finished, he pushed his cock back into my gaping mouth and his taste, I realised, was rare and exotic. I recalled walking through the Grand Socco, the market in the old town in Tangier, the aroma of spices, roasting lamb, mint tea and hashish smouldering in brass hookahs.

There were more, five, six, seven, I lost count and what did it matter? I did what was expected of me, I received and I shared the gift. I sucked those hard cocks until they were soft and satisfied. I lubricated my skin with enough semen to give an elderly woman a facelift and, when it was over, I went upstairs with Milly where I showered and rubbed my body with precious oils.

The night wasn’t over. It had barely begun.

10

The King Makers

THE STAIRCASE DESCENDED
before me once again and, when I entered the grand hall, the lights appeared to be darker and the activity more intense. Several of those men in dinner suits were now dressed in their birthday suits. They were on chairs, on the floor, in corners and alcoves, their bodies decorated with the limbs and mouths of heavenly girls.

I stood and watched one of the men I had seen spanking the twins. One of those gamine girls was now sitting astride his hips seesawing up and down the mast of his stiff cock while the other squatted on his face, her wet gash over his mouth. The girls were facing each other and, while their pussies like pistons pulsed rhythmically up and down, their lips were pressed together in a continual kiss.

In the next alcove, I watched a reverse mirror image. The Maasai was on her back taking one man between her legs and sucking off a second balanced precariously on the edge of a table. The two men, like the twins, were facing each other, not kissing, but negotiating a contract. I heard them tossing out numbers, percentages, production schedules, penalty clauses, and it made perfect sense that business should be conducted in this way, not in the stale air of board rooms, but in casual summits of extreme intimacy, in the midst of an orgy.

An orgy!

The very word sent a shimmer of excitement up my spine. It’s something a girl always imagines in her secret dreams, but to actually be there, to be a part of it, was so amazing I had to pinch my pulsing nipples to make sure I didn’t wake up to the chime of the chapel bell and realise I was late again. I wasn’t late. I wasn’t dreaming. I was wandering without haste through the grand hall stark naked, the leitmotiv of my new life. Far from being ashamed of the way I am, I was at peace with myself, knowing that it would have been impossible to be any other way. We become what we are.

I looked round for Simon Roche but couldn’t see him. I recalled for some reason that day at my interview, how Heathcliff from
Wuthering Heights
had pressed into my imagination as Simon swept back his hair and fixed me with his penetrating eyes. It was at that moment that he peered into my schoolgirl mind and read my unknown desires.

Would he penetrate other parts of me that night at Black Spires? I really had no idea. Simon’s desires seemed governed by his faith in discipline. He had stripped and spanked me in his office. He had taken me through the pain barrier to the heights of that embarrassing orgasm. He had guided me to the alcove containing the
prie dieu
. But it was Sergio Buenavista who had led the file of men who left on my flesh the gift of their warm semen.

I was certain Simon had not been among them. He appeared and disappeared like a shadow in the flickering glow of the candles, a good host ensuring his guests were accommodated. He was both present and absent, and when I joined the revelry, as I surely would, in my fantasy Cathy would finally know the touch of her Heathcliff.

Another chess game was in progress and two different girls in masks were leaking over the board as they conveyed the pieces in their fit young pussies. The girl in
the
red mask had shaved her pubes to devil horns, which I thought totally brilliant, not that the devil’s clasp prevented her dropping the red queen and scattering the opposing pawns.

We remained watching for a few moments, but the game after the brief upset grew monotonous and the erotic, I realised, needs constant change and variety; repetition is the death of desire.

It was so easy to wander blindly into the world of cliché. Most people do. They don’t choose their lives. They follow the well-beaten path into the abyss of tedium and obscurity. I had been until this day, this night, nothing more than a reflection of society’s rules and codes, its prescriptions and formulas. Girls from council estates get their lips pierced and a tramp stamp across their lower back; they dream of being a Page 3 girl and end up working in supermarkets. Girls from boarding school go to uni, dream of being TV presenters and marry men who work as bankers. The girls, rich and poor, have babies, the dreams perish and they stare into the mirror as lines carve disappointment into their faces. They grow old. They grow old quickly.

Simplistic? Of course. But no less true.

From Saint Sebastian, I had gone straight into an accountancy office to beef up my CV before starting at the London School of Economics. I was on that well-beaten path until temptation flashed across the computer screen and I was enticed by the deadly sin of greed, mesmerised by the unknown, lured to the high wire. The high wire is life, they say. Everything else is just waiting.

A faint smile pressed into my lips and the shiver of excitement running up my spine was replaced with the tang of want.

I wanted
everything
. I rolled my shoulders and stretched like a cat. I had guzzled the life-giving force from a dozen men and transformed their essence into raw energy, a new identity. I was a rare exotic bird from an
endangered
species. I had broken the shell of the cliché and was reborn as the girl I was supposed to be – not a girl, a woman, a slave to my senses.

Simon knew me better than I knew myself. He had divined my potential. I was there at that country house to receive and exchange and to pass on the gift. Didn’t Sister Benedict always say, quoting You Know Who, that you reap what you sow. What you put out comes back in giddy unfathomable pleasures Simon Roche understood implicitly and I could only begin to imagine.

After half an hour upstairs with Milly, I had come to see that, when you submit, the potency of pleasure is that much greater. Just as the moon’s light is a reflection of the sun, submission is a mirror image of domination, the yin to the yang, the perfect interplay of opposites.

Milly’s fingers linked my own. The red queen had lost confidence after her spill and was under threat from an upstart black pawn.

‘Mate in three,’ she predicted.

She was right.

We journeyed on.

The girl illustrated with her lovers was suspended with arms outstretched between two columns, her bare feet spread and resting on the heads of two stone nymphs. The lips of her vagina were ornamented with two golden rings and the pink folds of her sex were dangling from the vine of her pubic hair like forbidden fruit on a tree in the Garden of Eden – not an apple, according to Sister Benedict, that was the wrong translation, but guava, the dark exotic fruit native to the Caribbean and South America, a detail, if true, which threw into question the veracity of the entire Old Testament.

This thought flitted through my mind as we passed under the arch of the girl’s legs and I stretched up to drink from this upturned chalice.

‘You’re incorrigible,’ Milly said.

‘Thank you,’ I replied.

The Arab and the Texan were talking quietly together.

‘Oil prices,’ Milly whispered. ‘They decide.’

‘Decide what?’ I asked.

‘How much oil costs per barrel.’

‘But it’s a market, surely, it fluctuates depending on supply and demand,’ I said.

‘That’s what they want people to think. It’s not like that. Nothing,’ she emphasised, ‘is ever as it seems.’

‘It would be dull if it was,’ I responded, something I’d read once, and it drew a smile from Milly.

I looked back at the two men totally oblivious to the sexual acrobatics being performed about the room.

‘And they decide?’ I repeated.

‘The men here are the most powerful men in the world. Didn’t you know that?’

No, I didn’t know that, not that it came as a complete surprise. I glanced across the hall at Sandy Cunningham and Sergio Buenavista. They were sitting together in an alcove, Sandy with his trousers about his ankles, the Oriental girl on her knees sucking him off while he chatted with the Spaniard, and I couldn’t help feeling a little rush of pride that Sergio at this moment did not appear to require the same service. I had sucked him dry.

‘Sandy Cunningham?’ I asked

‘He owns CunniLingus.’

I was shocked. I used the cut-price airline every time I went to Spain. I remember the controversy over the name when the company was launched, but that had been calculated, it was all free publicity, and in less than two years CunniLingus was on everyone’s tongue and the airline had become the biggest carrier in Europe. I knew. I had read the
Financial Times
every day while we were studying economics with Sister Agnes.

‘Amazing,’ I said, and glanced at Sergio.

‘Wine,’ she said. ‘He owns half of Cataluña.’

‘Simon?’

‘You don’t know?’

I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t know anything,’ I admitted.

The men gathered at Black Spires were the men who made the decisions, Milly explained.
The
decisions. They were entrepreneurs, oil men, diplomats, media moguls, landowners and aristocrats – Sergio was the Duc de Peralada; they were financiers, bankers, the heads of international institutions, a cabal that stretches around the globe and promotes the careers of politicians whose views serve the interests of free trade and the multinational corporations.

‘They are the king makers,’ she continued. ‘It is within their power to pick who governs.’

‘What about democracy?’ I said. ‘Don’t the people decide, one man, one vote?’

She smiled, those lovely lips like a rare bloom, one of
Las Señoras de la Noche
.

‘No, Magdalena, it’s not like that. The king makers choose. They know when it is a good time to have a war or a recession, when the war should end, and when optimism should replace fear and doubt. Chaos doesn’t just happen, it is created – it keeps people in their place. And when chaos does happen naturally, in some disaster, they rebuild the stricken area in their own image – or, like in New Orleans after the hurricane, they leave it to rot. When people give money in those big charity appeals, they decide how and where that money is to be spent.’

I looked back at Milly aghast. ‘But it can’t be true,’ I said.

‘Remember the tsunami in Asia a couple of years ago?’ she asked and I nodded. ‘The aid money went to help international companies build tourist resorts in the places where the coast was cluttered with fishing villages and native communities. Tourists bring wealth and fishermen don’t need pristine beaches to ply their trade.’