‘Is it good?’ she says, and I realise these are the first words she has spoken to me since she arrived.
I nod. ‘You’ll like it.’ I push the tip inside her. Then I click on the vibrator option, ensuring that the other end is aligned with her clit. As if she’s a pro, she begins to push herself backwards and forwards. I hold on to her hips and it’s as if she’s riding me, as if she’s fucking me. Her hand inside me, meanwhile, apes the motions of her body, until we are both moaning harder and harder, on the verge of coming.
I clamp her buttocks between my hands, aware that my nails are cutting into her skin but unable to let go, like a cat with its prey. There’s a savagery inside me, like a desire to bite and maim what I love – that inexplicable desire we sometimes feel as children. I pull her down and down and she collapses over me as she comes. I let go of her with one hand and rub my clit ferociously as she cries out, and within seconds I’m crying out too, and our voices are mingling, until you can no longer tell us apart. In extremis we have become one person, one body jacking in pleasure, and as I lie beneath her limp body, drenched with the sweat of her, I think that this may be love.
When I awake she’s gone, and it’s as if I’ve had the most beautiful dream. As with most beautiful dreams, an unutterable sadness takes hold of me at the realisation that it won’t ever be true. But then I notice that the door is ajar, and, when I see Anne standing there looking at me, I know that it was true.
‘How was it?’ she says through cigarette smoke. Her eyes are narrowed, as if she is weighing me up.
‘I … You didn’t come.’ I’m aware that I’m completely naked, my body still anointed with the girl’s liquids – her saliva, her sweat, the juices from her sex – but I’m not ashamed. Anne knows me: my body, what I do with it, how I am in the throes of pleasure. I have nothing to hide from her any more.
She shakes her head.
‘Why not?’ I push. ‘Was it not part of the … the test?’
She shakes her head again. ‘This is not a test,’ she says.
‘Then, what?’
I’m sitting up now, looking at her squarely. I have nothing to lose by asking her this. She can’t take away from me what I have done, what I have discovered about myself. And feeling that I must be reaching the end of my journey, I don’t fear incurring her wrath. But I don’t believe she will be angry anyway. Suddenly we have reached a point where it seems possible to talk sensibly to each other. Maybe it’s all to do with the whip. The naughty schoolgirl in me has been punished and now I’m a grown-up, on an equal footing with Anne. Or as equal a footing as one can be on with one’s heroine.
She’s stepped towards me now, taken a seat on the end of the bed. With her hand she strokes the sheet where it is rumpled from our exertions. But she seems absent, far away from me. I’m not sure whether it is the light in here, but suddenly Anne looks very old and very tired.
Realising she’s not going to answer, I swing my legs over the side of the bed and reach for my clothes. ‘Will I see her again?’ I ask.
She shrugs. ‘Do you want to?’
‘I … I liked it a lot.’
‘I can arrange it.’
My brow furrows. The girl was divine, the sex extraordinary in spite of her ordinariness. But, if I were to see her again, it would have to be on my own terms. ‘I don’t suppose you are going to tell me who she is?’
Anne looks at me now, that gemstone hardness in her eyes. ‘I can’t,’ she says.
‘The rules of the game?’
‘There is no game.’
I begin to lose patience. I’m fed up of cat-and-mouse, donkey-and-carrot, all the jumping through hoops. I wanted James for myself, and couldn’t have him. I want the girl and can’t have her. I’m all for gaining life experience, but this is beginning to cause me pain. Attachments seem to want to form, in spite of me, in spite of Anne, and I can’t cope with having things ripped from out of my reach. The test, or the game, or whatever Anne wants to call it, must end here.
She stands up, walks slowly from the room, head down. She, too, seems depressed, at the end of it all. Maybe it’s for the best. I won’t have hard feelings. She has taught me so much – indirectly, of course.
‘Goodnight,’ I say as she exits the room.
She turns in the doorway, raises a hand. ‘Goodnight, Genevieve,’ she says quietly, and then she closes the door behind her.
11: And the Little One Said …
IT’S HARD TO get up the next morning, knowing that I must leave but not having a clue where to go. There’s Vron’s, of course, but something tells me I won’t be welcomed there with open arms. The last thing I need at the moment is to feel unwanted, an intruder in someone else’s home, even if that someone is my sister.
Other than that, I can’t think. So I lie in bed telling myself to get up and pack my case but not actually doing anything about it. My mind is occupied by James and the girl from last night. If only I could go to them, I’d feel better, but James has warned me away, and I’ve no idea where – or even who – the girl is. My situation is hopeless.
An hour later, no closer to a solution, I pad downstairs for breakfast. I’m hoping I won’t run into Anne, but Sod’s Law is at work again and she’s in there, flicking through a journal as she waits for the kettle to boil. From the living room I hear the sound of Hettie vacuuming.
Anne raises her head when she sees me, eyes me warily, as if she knows something’s up.
‘You look peaky,’ she ventures. ‘Didn’t you sleep well?’
I pull back one of the chairs and sit down. I put my head in my hands, and then suddenly I’m doing what I promised myself I’d never do in front of Anne – I burst into tears. I sit there shaking and sobbing and making an unholy display of my feelings. I’m just trying to collect myself enough to get out of the room and upstairs, intent on packing my bags and getting the hell out of there even without a clue where I’m going, when I feel Anne’s hands on my shoulders. Slowly she starts to pull me up and for a moment I think she’s going to hug me. But no, Anne remains Anne, as cool as a cucumber. Instead of hugging me she keeps hold of my shoulders but steers me through into the living room, guiding me down to the sofa, ushering Hettie out with instructions to leave us alone for half an hour. Then she disappears, before returning a few moments later with a steaming cup of tea. She places it on the coffee table in front of me.
‘I put a sugar in it,’ she says. ‘For comfort.’
Anne makes tea with milk. It’s one of her few concessions to Englishness, aside from living in this country. She still writes in French and dresses in a French way. I imagine she thinks and dreams in French. I wonder if she fucks in French. I wonder if she fucks at all. James must know. Perhaps James even fucks Anne, and that’s why he doesn’t want me. At this rate I don’t suppose I will ever know. Anne is keeping schtumm, and James has disappeared off the scene.
Anne has crossed over to the mantelpiece, lit a cigarette. Leaning back against it, blowing rings of smoke out into the room, she looks self-consciously dramatic, or like a character from a novel.
‘Don’t go,’ she says at last, without looking at me. She clears her throat. ‘I know you’re thinking of leaving and I think it would be a mistake.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’re not finished yet. You’re not finished. There are things you still have to learn.’
‘Like what?’
She screws up her faces, looks waspish. ‘If it was a simple matter of putting things into words,’ she begins. ‘But it’s not. There are some things that can’t be taught. Some things you can only learn for yourself.’
‘Then why do I need to stay here?’
Her eyes turn on me, as icy and empty as a polar wilderness. ‘Because,’ she says, enunciating each syllable as if I’m a halfwit, ‘I can facilitate these things for you.’
‘And what,’ I say, hardly able to believe that I’m asking the question at last, after so long, ‘is in it for you?’
&n
bsp; She waves one hand. ‘I have no stake,’ she says. ‘I just want to help.’
I chuckle but without amusement. ‘You like watching. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re a voyeur.’
She continues to direct her cold blue stare at me. ‘You simplify everything,’ she says, then shrugs and looks away. ‘I suppose it’s inevitable. You’re young. But I thought that this, at least, would have shown you that life is much more complicated than you think.’
I open my mouth to reply, although I’m not sure what I’m going to say, when she sweeps from the room, having evidently decided that the conversation is over. And, although part of me hates her for having bossed me around, for having told me what I can and cannot do and made me feel small, I know that she’s right. I’m not done here, and I still have things to learn, things for which I need Anne. Unfinished business.
In my room, later that day, after a long walk in the park, I sit down with my diary and list ten things that I’ve learned about myself since I met Anne:
That I find older men attractive.
That I find younger men attractive.
That I get a thrill from being watched when I have sex.
That I like spanking people, or at least spanking James.
That I like to be whipped, although I’m not sure I’d do it again.
That I like girls.
That I like different kinds of girl.
That I’ve been denying my appetites in the past, and that that was unhealthy.
That I do have things to write about.
That I’m lonely.
It’s an odd, disparate, ragbag list, and one from which I can draw no real conclusions except that my journey so far, the journey that I began when I moved in with Anne, has been worthwhile, in the sense that it has advanced me as a writer and a person. The last entry, though, floors me. It’s something I’ve never consciously thought and, now that I have, I’m devastated. All this gain, and yet ultimately I’m very very alone. Anne, potentially a mother figure, is cold and distant, a user. James won’t allow me to build a bridge to him. And the girl – the blonde girl – might as well be a figment of my imagination, so insubstantial is she. Our encounter – fleeting, ethereal, ungraspable – has all the qualities of a dream. Suddenly I find myself wondering whether it would have been better to stay with Nate after all. Stagnant though our relationship, our sex life, might have been, surely it was preferable to this ache, to this terrible, biting loneliness?
I wonder that I only feel this on a conscious level now, although I must have been lonely at Vron’s. I guess I must have been blocking it out then. There were always people, Vron’s friends and colleagues, drifting through her flat, hanging out, on their way to or from this party or that hip new club. I fell in with the crowd sometimes, without ever really being part of it. I guess that must have masked my essential solitude. That I haven’t seen any of them, or even my sister, since leaving her place proves that to me.
There was one night, just one, when I felt as if I might belong, or begin to belong. I’d been living there a good month and a half, perhaps even two, sleeping on the sofa and hanging out in cafés by day. One night Vron came in at about 2 a.m. with a bunch of friends, among them an amazing Somali guy, with skin like burnished ebony. I was still up, watching some crappy film. Vron turned off the TV and switched on some music, a Kruder & Dorfmeister CD. Still wired from the club, she and her friends drank some more and started dancing.
I watched the Somali guy for a while. He moved like nobody I had ever seen before – fluidly, as if the music was moving through his limbs, had become part of him. He had his head thrown back, his eyes half closed. He was losing himself. I was envious. I always felt so damn self-conscious, even when I was just sitting in a café, trying to write. In fact, looking back now, I think a lot of the problem with becoming a writer was to do with this pose, this affecting to be a writer without having become one.
After a while, recovering himself a little, he saw me watching him and, smiling, came over to me. Extending a hand, he drew me up from the sofa and pulled me into the centre of the room. Wrapping one arm around my waist, he began to gyrate again, gradually expanding his movements until it felt to me that he was losing himself again. Only he wasn’t. Through his hipster jeans I could feel the press of his dick, and he was hard. He wanted me.
It was the first time since Nate that someone wanted me. Or at least that I was fully aware of. Blokes did give me the eye in the street, often, but that meant nothing – you never knew whether it was you or if they looked at every girl that way. Looking at Nadif, as his name turned out to be, I felt giddy with desire and possibilities. Remember, Nate was the only guy I’d been with at this point.
I pressed myself against him, suddenly brazen. I wished I’d had something to drink, but I daren’t pull away and go to fortify myself with a glass of wine or vodka for fear of breaking the mood. His hands tightened on my hips, mine on his shoulders. My breasts tingled. Even sober, I felt drunk. What was this boy, this man, doing to me? I was losing control and I loved it. I wanted the world around us to disappear, all these people to bugger off home and Vron to go to bed so that I could drag Nadif over to my sofabed and hump him senseless.
I could see Vron staring at me, and I thought I saw a sneer of disapproval on her face. She didn’t seem too keen on me being in with her crowd; I think having her baby sister around cramped her style. I looked away, determined not to let her spoil my fun. Why should she be the only party girl?
Someone brought some vodka shots out, and the music was turned down and we all congregated around the coffee table, on Vron’s large suede floor cushions. Someone starting talking to Nadif, and the rapport that had grown between us was broken. A girl on my other side started talking to me, and when I finally managed to break free of the conversation, I found that Nadif had disappeared, along with several others among the party-goers. From across the table, Vron was looking at me with what looked to be triumph. She was happy, it seemed, that I had been disappointed. I almost suspected her of engineering it somehow. But of course Nadif was a free agent. If he’d really wanted me, he would have stayed. What we’d had was a momentary flirtation that he’d forgotten about within moments. When someone suggested moving on, he’d forgotten me altogether.
Naturally, I masturbated on my sofabed that night, after everyone finally left, as dawn was streaking the sky outside the window. It was Nadif I thought of as I prised myself apart with my fingers, drenched with my own juices; Nadif’s firm dark prick that had sought me through the denim of his jeans. I hoped I would see him again, but he wasn’t one of Vron’s usual crowd, and I had reason to suspect that she didn’t want him to associate with me for whatever reason.
It was a month or so before I understood her reaction, when I came home one day and saw Nadif emerge semi-clad from the bathroom and head for her bedroom. His dark limbs gleamed, and beneath the towel wrapped around his waist I imagined the silky smooth baton of his dick, a magic wand of dark wood. I felt a pang then, for what could have been. Vron and I are pretty similar, looks wise, although, since she works in fashion, she is more glamorous and groomed. Nadif had fancied me, had wanted me that night, but she’d put her foot down because she planned to move in on him herself. I was pissed off, of course, but I told myself that it was fair enough, really – he was her friend, and she had first dibs on him.
So I was lonely at that time, but without really realising it. I was kind of trundling along on autopilot, treading water, not really thinking about my life. To someone like Vron, so ambitious, so driven, I was probably a bit of an embarrassment. A lost cause. The little sister who’d split up with her first boyfriend and was adrift in London, without a job, a man or a hip circle of friends like her. She must have pitied me, in her cold fashionista heart, disdained me, and thanked the stars that she wasn’t me.
Tears prick my eyes as I sit on my bed at Anne’s thinking about all this, and about how meeting James and the girl has brought these feelings out int
o the open. It’s clear to me that I’m lost in London, always have been. I never found my footing in those three months at Vron’s, and then I went straight on to Anne and the very ground fell away beneath me. I need to find terra firma. But how? By leaving Anne, or by staying? By getting out of London entirely?
Confirming what I have been discovering of late, writing all this down soothes me, gives me some kind of respite from the swirl of thoughts in my head. It simplifies things, I find – or rather, it shows things to be simpler than they seem in the clamour of my head and heart, which seem to be telling me different things for much of the time. Or alternating in their advice, which is disconcerting.
I wonder if it doesn’t simply come down to the fact that I have nowhere else to go, and no one to go to, that I am still here. Anne, frosty as she may be inside, is the first person to show interest in me in a long time. Nadif, it turned out, was equally happy with my sister. Not that it lasted long between them – he was around for about a week, in various states of undress: in his boxers in the kitchen, making coffee to take back to Vron in bed; on the sofa in her bathrobe, flicking through her magazines; on his way back and forth from the bathroom. And then he ceded his place to someone else. Vron is as ruthless in matters of the heart, or the loins, as she is in her professional life. She seems to suck her lovers dry and discard their husks without a second thought. From one beautiful boy to another she skips, never allowing feelings to intrude. Like Anne, she seems to have been hewn from a block of ice.
Perhaps, I write in my diary, that’s where I have gone wrong – by allowing myself to start feeling, first for James and then, latterly, for the girl. I should have remained detached, aloof, as if this were a scientific experiment – which it is, in some ways. I should have remained on the surface, looking in from the outside, observing myself as if I were a character in a film. I’ve lost all perspective by getting in too deep. I should have run away as soon as I realised that I stood no chance of getting James to myself. Now it’s too late.
The Apprentice Page 17