There’s a rustle, and I turn my head. Anne is holding something out towards us. By now the light in the room has fallen substantially, and it takes me a moment or two to realise that it’s the paddle that I saw in her case. I tense; this is territory, I think panic-stricken, that I have never considered going into. This is something deeper and darker than I have ever contemplated. It might seem like an innocent bit of fun. What harm can come of a bit of spanking between friends? But I’ve read accounts suggesting that it’s an area in which things can rapidly get out of hand. What, I say to myself, if I like it too much?
But I’m mistaken: Anne doesn’t intend for me to be spanked, since it’s to me that she hands the implement. My surprise and hesitation must be etched on my face, for she nods in encouragement. My hand is quivering as I take it, but I’m strangely reassured by the fluid beauty of the object. Like the dildo, it is made of sleek chocolate-coloured wood. It reminds me of a hairbrush, and I titter a little nervously at the lascivious images that spring into my mind: of private schoolgirls and reddened arse cheeks.
‘What’s the joke?’ says Anne a little sternly, and I remember where I am and wonder what’s expected of me. Anne continues to eye me disapprovingly, and I’m taken back ten years to boarding school and being called in to see the headmistress for misdemeanours I don’t recall. Mrs Scholes was her name, although nobody knew of the existence of a husband. Some of the girls said he’d probably killed himself when he’d realised what a dragon he’d married.
‘Turn him over,’ Anne barks, and I realise that the roles have been reversed. James realises too, slipping the dildo out of me. I turn over. James’s jeans have remained undone, though he’s tucked his cock back in his boxers, presumably before applying the dildo to me.
I hesitate, and it’s Anne’s cue to lose her temper.
‘What are you waiting for, child?’ she says. ‘Turn him around and then over.’
Part of me nearly chokes on the word ‘child’. Part of me wants to turn around and punch her in the face for trying to make me feel small and stupid. But this impulse is counter-balanced by an extraordinary curiosity that has risen in me like a tide. What will it be like to take charge, to spank James? I know that I’ll kick myself later if I shirk the opportunity just because I was offended by a word.
Placing one hand, rather gingerly I admit, on James’s shoulder, I steer him round. The fact that he’s a willing conspirator means it’s not difficult: I’m really only guiding rather than pushing him. There’s no coercion involved.
As he moves into place, Anne speaks again, less harshly this time.
‘Now pull his trousers down,’ she commands, and I do so, tugging a bit weedily at first and then growing braver, yanking them and his boxers until his flesh appears. His arse is handsome: toned and firm and rounded, but not so rounded that it’s womanly. It’s an undeniably masculine arse. I bring a hand to one of the cheeks, overcome with the desire to touch him.
‘No!’ nearly bellows Anne, and I remove it quickly. I’ve transgressed, I realise, overstepped the mark. This is Anne’s game and we play by her rules. Any sign of autonomous behaviour, no matter how minor, will be stamped out. I should have realised this by now.
‘Spank him,’ she goes on. I look at the paddle and then at James’s arse. I feel ridiculous. They must know I’ve never done this before, that I don’t even know where to start. I bring my arm back, take a deep breath and then swing it forwards.
James yelps, his head flying back towards his shoulder blades.
‘Not so hard,’ says Anne. ‘Build it up, slowly. Come on, try again.’
I obey, swinging more lightly this time, increasing the strength of it infinitesimally each time.
‘Much better,’ Anne tells me, calmer now. ‘Here …’ She reaches over to my free hand and places it on James’s other buttock. It seems I’m allowed to do this now. I risk a stroke and, though James emits a welcoming groan, Anne doesn’t object.
I keep stroking him as I increase the pace and pressure of the spanks. His moans grower louder and more insistent, telling me I’m on the right track. I wonder where we will go from here.
I’m just considering reaching around him and taking his prick in my fist to start wanking him, wondering if I can do that while maintaining the spanking motion – and whether Anne will allow it – when she extends a hand and takes the paddle from me. I relinquish hold, watching as she places it carefully back in her case then drops the lid and fastens the clasps with a decisive movement. That’s when I know that it’s over. She doesn’t need to say a word this time.
James knows too: already he’s sitting up and putting himself away, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. A little flustered and embarrassed now that the momentum has been interrupted, I pull my skirt down and reach for my knickers, bra and shirt. I’m disappointed again, only this time it’s not because I didn’t have James inside me, since I had a more than adequate substitute. It’s not even because I didn’t reach orgasm – not the be-all and end-all of a sexual encounter. No, it’s because seeing – and hearing – James’s delight in being spanked has sparked my interest: would I enjoy, as he does, the smack of hard wood against the soft flesh of my buttocks? All at once something that I have never dreamed of trying has become an ache within me. I know that I won’t be satisfied until I’ve experienced it.
I give Anne a meaningful stare, hoping that she’ll get the message by some kind of telepathic means, but she’s gone all businesslike, tucking her case back under her arm, turning for the staircase without a word. I follow her, less because I seek her company than because I don’t know what to say to James if we’re left alone. My expensive education failed to instil in me the basic etiquette of spanking, left me clueless as to what to say to someone whose arse you’ve just pinked raw with a sculpted piece of wood.
When I reach the bottom of the stairs, Anne has already crossed the room to the console table by the door and is on the phone, calling a taxi. When she replaces the receiver, she turns to me.
‘They’ll be right here,’ she says. ‘Do you have everything?’
I nod.
‘Good.’ She opens the front door to the apartment and I follow her out. Neither of us bids James goodnight; he’s still up in his room. Nor do we talk to each other in the lift, or in the cab on the way back to Bayswater. It’s only as she’s opening her own front door back on St Petersburgh Place that she addresses me.
‘You can have the day off tomorrow,’ she says.
Then she closes the door onto the dark street behind us, and I follow her up the hall and watch as she continues up the stairs without another word.
‘Goodnight, Anne,’ I venture, but she’s already disappeared, and I’m left alone, my words evaporating into the silence that surrounds me.
5: Down Time
I WAKE TO the rain against the panes of my attic-room windows, and for the longest time I can’t bring myself to cast off my covers and get up. It’s like when you’re a kid and you wake up and you don’t know where you are, only this is more serious and more disorientating: I know where I am, but for a few terrible moments I don’t know who I am. And during those moments, a wave of desolation washes over me, and a kind of homesickness for the life I had not so long ago – my life with Nathaniel, safe and predictable, boring perhaps, but as comforting as the blanket I used to trail around with me as a kid, in and out of dirty puddles, through the house and up into bed with me, to ward off night terrors.
As if in a reflex action back to those long dark nights of childhood, I scrunch myself up into a ball, hugging the duvet to me, eyes closed tight. When I finally do sit up and face the light, the first thing I do is reach for my mobile and summon up Nate’s number on the screen. I know that, if I sit here staring at it, I won’t make the call though. I know that I’ll talk myself out of it. So before I can do that I jab the green button with my thumb and listen to the ringing tone, wondering what I’m going to say. It’s not even as if I want him back: I’m the one who ende
d it and I’ve never seriously thought, even at my loneliest moments, that I made the wrong decision. I guess I just want the reassurance of his voice, something to bring me back to myself, or at least to the girl I was before all this weirdness started.
The tone goes on and on, and I’m gearing myself up to leaving a message – or probably to open my mouth to leave one but then change my mind – when suddenly Nate picks up.
‘Gen,’ he says, sounding surprised and a little wrong-footed. It’s been a while since we talked, and the last time was pretty unpleasant. He was still very down about the split and begged me to meet him to talk things through. Having done that a couple of times before, I was adamant I wasn’t going to put myself through it again. Not only for my own sake, but for his – seeing or talking to me, I realised, made things worse for him, setting him back on the wrong track. It raised his expectations only to disappoint them again, and that wasn’t fair. I told him all that, but he was enraged that I refused to see him, that I had that power over him. I guess that’s why he sounds so dubious now. I shouldn’t have called.
‘Hello,’ I say at last. ‘I’m sorry – this is silly. I … I …’
‘What’s up?’ he says. His voice has softened; he’s concerned about me.
‘I … I dunno. I just wanted to hear your voice.’ It’s the truth, however unlikely or irrational it seems.
‘Is something wrong?’ he says, and there’s a pain around my heart, like a stitch. I have to resist the urge to curl back up, foetus style.
‘Not really,’ I say, and my voice sounds false, too high, too bright. I fight back the tears. I wish I could tell Nate all about what’s been happening to me, but apart from not knowing where to start, and the unlikeliness of it all, I know that I would lose him totally were he to find out what I’ve been up to. My first lover and one-time best friend is not the person to confide in about Anne and James.
He knows me though, and he knows not to push it. ‘Well, it’s good to hear yours,’ he says gently. ‘Your voice, I mean.’
‘You too,’ I manage, still quavery and hollow feeling. ‘I’m sorry about … Last time we spoke, I was –’
He interrupts me, and I’m thankful, having had no idea what I was going to say. ‘Harsh’ is the word that comes to mind, but it was a harshness based, as I have said, on a sense of fairness. Which means that it wasn’t really as negative as it sounds. There was a positiveness behind it, an attempt to move forwards.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he interjects. ‘I understand. And, in any case …’
His words trail off, as if he’s thought again, and suddenly I’m interested in how he was going to go on.
‘In any case, what?’
‘Oh, nothing. I shouldn’t have … Oh, what the hell, you have to know sometime, I guess. It’s just a bit –’
‘Have to know what?’
‘I didn’t expect it to happen. It’s still early days. But I’ve … Well, I’ve met someone else.’
There’s a falling feeling inside me, as if a stone is plummeting down through me. When it stops, there’s a horrible cold, dull sensation in the pit of my belly, and a vague nausea. I’ve lost him, I think bitterly. There’s no going back. Whoever she is, it must be serious. He wouldn’t mention it if it were just a shag.
‘Who? When?’ I stutter eventually.
‘Her name’s Anne-Mette. She’s Danish.’
‘Where did you meet her?’
He pauses, and I picture him smiling to himself as he recalls the moment he fell in love again and broke away from me, like a balloon becoming untethered and flying away into the sky. When the past he was clinging to became history, a photo album relegated to the bottom drawer. The day he stopped crying for me.
‘In a deli,’ he replies with a chuckle, after his moment of loving recollection.
I imagine him walking in and browsing the counter before his eyes alight on the blonde beside him and his belly lurches with desire, a desire that extinguishes everything we had together. I imagine him looking her up and down – surreptitiously, of course, but lingering on her large breasts emphasised by a close-fitting T-shirt. He always was a boob man, Nate; was always reminding me, as he slipped my bra straps from my shoulders and bent forwards to suckle at my nipples, erect for him, that that was what had first attracted him to me – my firm, well-rounded breasts, honey-hued and as soft as the skin of a newborn.
Then he clears his throat, readying himself for the conversational gambit that will let the blonde know he’s interested without frightening her off.
Cut to his room, the room in the shared house in Brighton that I know so well, where my clothes used to hang beside Nate’s in the wardrobe. It was there that we moved together after uni, after Nate got a graduate job in a software company. For a while we were happy, or thought we were. Looking back now, it’s clear that things had started to go stale between us. The sex was petering out, and not only on my account. In fact, Nate cried off more than I did, claiming he was worn out from the early starts and the late nights, from struggling to make his mark and prove to his boss that he was indispensable. Arriving home, he’d reach for a cold beer before reaching for me, and then go on to polish off a bottle of wine to himself while watching a thousand inanities on the TV.
I was working part-time at a bookshop at the time, and supposedly trying to write the rest of the time. My aim was to break into women’s mags as a money-earner, in doing so buying myself time to write the novel I talked so much about but could never get started. But it wasn’t happening. Pitch after pitch was not so much rejected as stonily ignored, and my morale was ebbing. The days when I wasn’t at the shop it was all I could do to bathe and dress. If I did, I walked along the seafront wallowing in self-pity. If I didn’t, I’d sit at home drinking coffee and staring out of the window at the brick wall onto which our little studio faced. No wonder Nate stopped wanting to fuck me. We barely even talked.
We moved from the studio when a room became available with some colleagues of Nate’s. He thought it would be good for us, would bring us out of ourselves and into the social life of Brighton. I guess I hoped so too. But it only tore us further apart, as Nate began going out with the boys, leaving me at home, staring at the four walls. That’s when I realised our time was up. I was shocked when he resisted, when he fought for us to carry on. I was touched too, and gave it another six months. But, although he made an effort, I realised that the spark was gone. Not only the sexual spark, but the spark inside me. I had let my inner fire be extinguished by circumstances and I needed to get it back. That’s why I moved to London.
And so Nate was left to his room, and for a while the scent of me must have hung in the air he breathed. My ghost must have haunted the place, making it hard for him to accept I was gone. It’s always easier for the person who goes away, who leaves the shared place and starts afresh in a room or house unblemished by memories. Now, though, an exorcism has taken place. The Dane – statuesque, I imagine, with cropped hair and big green eyes and a fresh, wide, breezy smile that takes your breath away – has chased me out of the room for good, and out of Nate’s heart.
‘Are you still there?’ comes Nate’s voice down the line. His words break into my vision of the onset of their passion. She’s responded to his advance in the deli, accepted his offer of a coffee at a little corner table overlooking one of the The Lanes with their cobblestones and chic boutiques. She’s not in a hurry, having just finished her shift at the Scandinavian crafts gallery where she works – where I’ve decided she works.
They chat, and he decides that, in spite of the physical differences, there’s something about her that reminds him a tiny bit of me – that that’s what first attracted his attention. Only she’s better than me: she’s taller, she’s leggier, her breasts are higher and bouncier, her eyes are bigger, warmer, softer. She’s not got that irritating mole on her left cheek. Her hair is silkier, and blonde where mine is dark.
He leans in towards her, strokes it lightly. They�
�ve moved on from coffee to beer now; they’re on their third and he’s feeling daring. She doesn’t react disfavourably; she’s surprised, he can tell by the sudden stiffening of her body, but those eyes tell him it’s OK, that he can carry on. His hand stays on the side of her head, moves round to her face, with its ruddily glowing pale skin stretched over a magnificently angular cheekbone and sweeping down to an enticingly square jaw. Her eyes twinkle, invite him to kiss her. He leans in further.
Before they know it, a little tipsy, they’re falling into our – his – room, falling onto each other, not even making it as far as the bed before they start yanking each other’s clothes off, their teeth clashing in the wildest and most yearning of kisses. And, as they do so, he’s not even thinking of me, of the first time between us – more hesitant, for certain, after the long, slow build-up, but unquestionably memorable.
It wasn’t just that it was the first time for both of us; perhaps it was the slow burn of it too, the way we’d driven each other half-mad with desire as we inched our way to sex. We’d met in the college bar, introduced by mutual friends, and I’d known from his furtive glances over the rim of his beer glass that he was interested. I was flattered: with his long dark fringe and boyish face, he reminded me a bit of Alex from Blur. When I found out he played guitar, that did it for me – I was an indie girl if ever there was one.
Music was our way into each other. I found out from friends what he was into, boned up on it in music mags that I read during boring lectures, and used that as a way of talking to him and getting to know him in a non-threatening way. I was awkward with the opposite sex: my single-sex private education had made boys into an alien species imbued with excitement and threat. I didn’t know how to relate to them on a non-sexual level.
Of course, I’d had one or two boyfriends before uni, but I’d never really gelled with anyone, never gone beyond snogging. The minute I felt a hand begin to roam, make a snail-like path towards my breasts, I backed away. Thinking about it now, I guess I was afraid of my appetites, of what would happen when the dam opened. I knew that there’d be no going back, and so I held on. I wanted to be sure.
The Apprentice Page 7