The Gift of Girls (9 page)

Lee-Sun stood back to study his work, as a painter stands back to get a fresh perspective on a portrait. There was nothing louche in his gaze, and his expression didn’t change. I wanted him to say something, to compliment me, perhaps, to say good luck, as someone always does before a hockey match or a race. But he said nothing. He nodded sharply, then turned his eyes towards the closed door. I was ready.

There was a tall mirror behind me and when I turned and saw my reflection it looked like somebody else, a girl like me, but not me. It seemed so strange to be standing there naked except for the black leather straps cutting the line of my white body into segments. Lee-Sun had combed my hair and attached those straps as if I were a pony being groomed for a gymkhana. Like a pony, I had allowed him to go about his ministrations with a docility that produced in me a vague loss of identity. The girl in the mirror was me, but a new version, a new incarnation. I was no longer Magdalena Wallace, schoolgirl, casino hostess, accounts clerk. I was a marvellous object, a healthy young animal to be licked and nipped and toyed with, just as the twin poodles had come at me with their hot wet tongues ready to play.

My dark hair hung heavily about my shoulders. I had run a razor under my arms and down my legs. My pubes, a shade darker than my hair, were curly and perfumed, an untidy nest Lee-Sun had trimmed patiently with a tiny pair of scissors. The leather belt gave my slender waist added definition and my breasts had never looked perkier. A month ago at school I still had puppy fat and puffy cheeks. It is astonishing how a few weeks skipping meals and working nights can make such a difference: my shape, the delicate shadows below my cheekbones, and most of all the look in my dark eyes, a look that was both anxious and determined, apprehensive, even a little excited.

‘If you please,’ Lee-Sun said.

I turned away from the mirror. I was hanging back like an actress afraid to go out and play her part on stage. I had no idea of the time, but through the window from the third floor the sky was ribboned in orange, the day fading to night, the sea clawing at the beach. I had travelled twenty miles up the coast and gone in three weeks from being a schoolgirl in a convent to a concubine in a harem. Sister Benedict had predicted that something unconscionable was going to happen to me but she would never in a month of fasting and prayer have divined the speed and depth of my fall from grace. It was biblical.

There was a single star in the sky. That’s me, I thought, alone in the vast dark universe. Why did Daddy go and lose all his money? Why did I take the job in the casino? To show off because Melissa would never have done so, because Melissa didn’t have the figure or the
je ne sais quoi
to dress in that little basque and fishnets.

I had been carried along by a sense of daring and adventure. I suppose I liked being on show, and the fetish clothes I changed into each night I thought of as a costume you would wear on stage. I was flaunting my breasts and my bottom to best effect, but that was just to earn the tips that would help pay my way through uni. The real me was the girl who had won the maths prize at school and went to work each day as an intern at Roche-Marshall. I had been balancing on the high wire. I was Icarus with wings of wax, naked in leather straps and ready to fly again.

I turned away from the window.

‘It is time,’ said Lee-Sun.

‘Will I be all right?’ I asked, knowing I shouldn’t.

He nodded his head very slowly as if considering my silly question. His expression remained impenetrable.

‘Yes,’ he then said.

I looked into his eyes and he bowed from the waist. I crossed the boudoir to the door. I turned the handle,
closed
my eyes, took a deep breath and stepped out into the third-floor corridor.

I could hear voices rising up from below, men talking, laughing, the sound of music, Bach, I thought. I made my way down the stairs, tummy jangling with nerves, back straight, cautious in the high-heel shoes. I turned into a small hallway with dark-wood walls and a table with flowers standing on an Oriental rug. The arched windows were polished by the last rays of the sun and I could just make out my shadow as I paused at the bottom of the stairs.

The voices had grown louder. I had reached the halfway stage. I was an adventurer crossing the desert. There was still the opportunity to turn back, though not in my case, not unless I wanted Simon Roche to return my clothes and call the cops.

The next step would take me beyond safety, beyond sight of the known into the unknown and unexplored. One more step and I would be in the hands of providence. I gave a little cough. My throat was dry. I could barely breathe. The smell of anxious perspiration wafted up from under my freshly shaved arms, and there was a certain dampness in the crack of my bottom I was tempted to wipe away but didn’t.

I took a good grip on the pineapple carving at the top of the second flight of stairs and ran the palm of my hand down the polished banister, drawn by the siren call of voices. Step by step I approached a large baronial hall where the drapes had been closed and flickering candles gave the scene an ambience that was dreamlike, decadent but not uninviting. There was a high vaulted ceiling supported by broad columns decorated with sculptures of nymphs. The dim light, the high ceiling, the columns and those celestial creatures gave me the feeling that I was entering an ancient temple.

There were perhaps fifteen or twenty people, mostly men, mostly wearing dinner suits and bow ties. I saw
three
girls dressed identically to me in nothing but leather straps and realising that I wasn’t alone gave me some hope that I would survive this terrifying ordeal. I had allowed Sandy Cunningham to remove my clothes. I had stripped before Simon Roche in his office. But I had never been naked in a room full of strangers and, entering among those suited men, I felt like a human sacrifice prepared for some primitive ritual, one of those nymphs from the supporting columns, only made from flesh and blood.

The voices stilled as I crossed the threshold and the moment of silence made me feel more vulnerable, more exposed. The men assessed my body like farmers considering dogs and horses, their eyes running over my breasts, my nipped-in waist and long legs, the directness of their appraisal reminding me of the bicycle messenger polishing his Ray-Bans as he watched me cross the glass lobby at Roche-Marshall. Could it only have been a few hours ago? It felt like an eternity, as if time had become formless and I was a space traveller moving at light speed between different dimensions, from the known world to all that is perilous and alien.

I came to a halt just inside the doorway. I took a breath and tried to look nonchalant as I gazed about the room. Two of the girls were in the far corner beside a tall man wearing a loosely knotted tie and a belt with a big turquoise buckle. The girls turned with blank expressions and I wondered if like me they were concealing their fear behind a cloak of cool detachment. The third girl was sitting on a long, low sofa peeling back the lips of her vagina to reveal the metal stud buried in the pink flesh.

Simon Roche was standing behind the sofa talking to a dark-haired man of about thirty, perhaps a little more, with broad shoulders and an intense expression. Simon nodded in my direction and the man immediately made his way towards me.

This was it. This was what I had been prepared for, and I was glad he wasn’t old, and glad he wasn’t English,
or
least he didn’t appear to be. He studied me for several moments, my breasts, my lips, my eyes. He didn’t speak, but in his expression I sensed approval, although that could just have been me projecting my need for approval. The man took my hand and led me out of the main hall through one of the two sets of double doors on our right into another room with recessed windows such as you might find in a restaurant or hotel.

The room was dimly lit but I could clearly see a girl dressed like me suspended by the rings in her bracelets from hooks on one of the columns that supported the arch over the windows. The girl’s toes barely touched the ground, and a man who had loosened his bow tie was holding the cheeks of her bottom and driving his tongue between her legs. The lapping sound, like a dog at its water bowl, was loud in the confined space of the window nook, and the pungent perfume of lust was hypnotic like the whiff of marijuana.

When the girl had reached the level of moistness the man desired, he released her from the hooks and, without a word passing between them, she stretched out on the wide banquette before the windows. The man removed his clothes without so much as a glance in our direction and proceeded to feed his erection into her wet bottom.

I remained rooted to the spot. The man with me supported my elbow. I covered my mouth with my palm and watched the naked girl rolling her hips, drawing the man deeper inside her, and I felt ashamed being there, a voyeur at what in that first moment I considered a squalid, distasteful affair, a scene from some late-night film on cable television.

I imagined the girl was reluctant to be there in that window nook, that like me she had been forced to perform this service. I wanted to turn away but my feet were glued to the floor, my gaze following the line of the girl’s back, the slow cadenced motion of her bottom. I could hear the even beat of her breath, and slowly, like
the
sun coming up over the sea, it dawned on me that, on the contrary, the girl was not unhappy to be there, that this was an exchange, a contract, perhaps, as with Simon Roche I had a contract to be here, erasing my debt as well as my wicked crime.

As this realisation passed through me, I removed the hand covering my mouth with a hint of embarrassment that I had made such an immature schoolgirl response, that my reaction had been so typical, so clichéd. I took a deep breath and, as I watched the girl on the banquette through fresh eyes, without preconceived notions of right and wrong, good and bad, in the light of the special world that existed within the walls of Black Spires, I began to find a certain beauty in her movements, an aesthetic quality that provoked in me a sense of calm anticipation. The fiery tips of my breasts were prickling and I watched now with a feeling of wonder and unexpected exhilaration.

The girl, as if aware of the tableau vivant they were creating, manoeuvred herself into a shape that was strangely, artistically pleasing, pushing down on her spread palms, her slim arms straight, her back curved in a taut bow, her bottom rounded into a perfect circle like a target broken by the arrow of the man on his knees behind her. There was something animal and yet completely natural about this pose, the girl surrendering her body in a way that would bring her partner ultimate pleasure and, in doing so, pleasuring herself.

It occurred to me for the first time that sex in this way, with strangers, was more sensual, more fervent, more passionate. Sex for schoolgirls is just clumsy groping, a finger in your pussy, a little wet cock that flies briefly and flops like a shot bird. In the long hall behind me there were men, not boys – men, I assumed, who knew exactly what they wanted, what they expected, and the girls, brought there for whatever reason, determined to fulfil those expectations and, in so doing, fulfil their own.

It was strangely empowering as it dawned on me why the men were dressed and the girls were naked. There is something logical about it. Nudity
is
erotic and eroticism, it seemed to me, can reach the very core of our being and take us into that sacred place where you find your true self, the place that school, the church and society conspire to conceal. When you are naked, all barriers are down. There is no pretence. You are just you. A girl is a sexual being. We dress and act out our sexual role at all times, subliminally and yet intuitively.

For a girl, being naked is just a continuation of what’s normal, at what’s hinted at in the clothes we wear – skinny tops, short skirts, each item carefully chosen to expose sections of our body like slices of ripe fruit. Our clothes are less for protection than for insinuating all that lies beneath. Clothes are not worn to hide our nudity, they are worn to emphasise it and, artfully attired, a girl can appear more than naked.

Every time you pump up your breasts and go out with an inch of lace framing your cleavage you are inviting every man in the street to gaze with longing and desire at your breasts, to imagine the touch of your skin, the moistness of your pink secluded parts. You tell yourself that you are dressing for you, but you’re not. You’re dressing to be ogled at and lusted after. You dress for men, so being undressed for men was consistent with what you are, what I was at that moment watching: that awe-inspiring girl with her perfect bottom spread for a man I’m sure she didn’t know, his cock a lance buried brutally in her pretty bum.

It was a marvellous and unnerving revelation. So many things that had always been unclear and ambiguous suddenly made sense. The girls at school were constantly unbuttoning their blouses and the nuns never seemed to tire of telling them to button themselves up. The girls were desperate to have their cleavage on show and made up for it on Saturday afternoons when we were allowed
to
go into town. We wore cardigans over our T-shirts and took them off to show our breasts to the sun the moment we left the school gate.

The town girls all looked like little prostitutes with their cheap clothes and kohl-blacked eyes; they had angry expressions and I always wondered what they were so angry about and assumed it was because the town boys deserted them to pursue the convent girls like hungry jackals the moment we threw off our cardies and snaked our way into town.

We were playing the game of sex, the oldest game in the world, the one invented by Eve in the Garden of Eden. We wanted to go to the best universities and become high flyers in the City or read the evening news on the BBC. But what we wanted most of all was to be admired as gorgeous sexual beings.

My heart had been pounding since I’d left Lee-Sun in the room at the top of the house. Suddenly it was still. I continued to be afraid, but the iron fist gripping my tangled entrails had loosened its grip. It was velvet now. I knew that anything and everything that can be done to a girl was to be done to me, but the sense of shame and humiliation lessened as it occurred to me that the prime reason why we do not give in to our natural instincts is because it makes a mockery of the rules and hypocrisy of so-called decent society: blessing the planes before dropping the bombs, the politician leaving office for untold fortunes in foreign places, moving the pederast priest from one parish so he can sin again in another.