Thongs

by Alexander Trocchi

  The cat struck more quickly now with hardly a pause between the strokes. I had no need to move. With its own ecstatic shudders Coldstream's cock was accomplishing itself it my mouth. As his white lust streamed forth, he screamed with pleasure and pain. I sucked him avidly to his roots. I heard the cat swoosh three times more before Mr. Oakes' calm voice directed Hazel to stop.

  "Your turn, Duval," Mr. Oakes said.

  A moment later Coldstream was helped down and a new front was thrust hard against the hoard. This time it was bristling with shaggy coppery hairs, the balls enormous, and the cock, short and thick like the body of a fish. Warming to my work, I ran the tip of my pink tongue among the hairs of his lower belly as he was tied in place, and then, with the first swoosh, I forced the thick member between my lips and sucked deep. Duval screamed from the beginning. The shuddering motion soon caused the semen to leap hot from his pipe into my gullet. I felt a light stroke of the scourge on my back and I crooned over the throbbing penis as though I were sucking a teat.

  Next came Mr. Bing, pony-colored and slithering quick to loose his hot slime. Mr. Oakes, pink cock in its nest of black hairs came at me next, dancing like a serpent in my slime-softened mouth. After he came, I sank back on my young and trembling haunches, exhausted and lathered in sweat.

  I felt myself being lifted gently under the armpits. It was Harry again. "Your turn now," he whispered softly in my ear, and as he spoke, I knew that I wanted it. My cunt was throbbing with excitement. Invisible chains seemed to hang from my thighs and desire made my soft belly bounce against the wood. The thongs were secure. I felt a tongue thrust at my clitoris. Whose tongue I don't know. Everyone seemed to be on the other side of the board. Except Harry, who was evidently to be my executioner. Executioner! The word slips easily from my pen, like an omen!

  "Use the scourge, Harry," Mr. Oakes said. "Not too much violence."

  And then it began. My buttocks were struck by the thousand fine wires. If you can think of a shatter of glass, in the skin, in the sensitive lair of flesh beneath, or of a cracking of pores – it was not one red hot lash of fire, but a general cracking ache which caused my front to sweat and shudder against the board. At the third stroke I screamed. A needle of delight passed through my clitoris and I had the sensation of being balanced there, my body swinging on the fulcrum of my sex in an agonizing ecstasy. Once again the tears refused to rise. A flash of boiling water on a flame, a tube sunk in it, and the water rising and falling within it, just failing to reach the top. Again the bursting sensation of lungs and heart – ayeee! And the tears came like a flood, and then there was nothing but ache and the terrible relief that it was over.

  Strong hands helped me down. Brandy was forced between my lips. Then I was carried into a pleasant room where for two hours I slept.

  When I woke, Hazel was bending over me.

  "Are you all right, Gertie?"

  I smiled in reply.

  "Let me help you get dressed," she said gently.

  Half an hour later, the long black Daimler left us at the edge of the Gorbals. We walked quickly back to the flat.

  -9-

  Six months passed. Each time when I asked Hazel when she would take me again, she was evasive.

  "You mustn't be impatient, hen. You're young. You have plenty of time..."

  Plenty of time! Oh yes, plenty of time! But what of the present? What of the agonies of starvation my body suffered during those months? Had I failed somehow? Had they decided against me?

  I fell back into the old life of the slums. My body was maturing quickly. The young men of the district were beginning to be very interested in me. One had even suggested that he would like to marry me. How sorely tempted I was! Would a young and virile husband not bring relief to my starved body? But then I thought of the children and the squalor. To move from this single end to another identical, what was the point? Hazel said I had fifty pounds. She had shown me a bank book in my name but she said that I couldn't touch it, that she was keeping it for me. Surely if they had given me all that money they must have liked me! I didn't know what to do.

  Only one thing provided me with distraction at that time. Johnnie was approaching his twenty-first birthday, and as the weeks passed, his muscles grew harder. Razor King still fucked Hazel and made no move to change her for a new mistress, but he spent more time getting drunk and in the brothels. I knew even then that it was only a question of time. One day Johnnie would challenge our father's authority.

  More and more, Johnnie stayed in the house when Razor King was out. As the days passed, he troubled less and less to conceal his desire, and at times, especially when Hazel was scantily clad and washing herself in the tin basin, he would sit astride one of the chairs a few feet away from her, his elbows resting on the back, and an expression of ironic amusement on his face. He seldom said anything. He just sat and watched.

  Johnnie was probably the only man in the Gorbals who would have dared lay a hand on Razor King's woman. He dared when finally he did so because he was the same man his father was, only younger, and with the absolute knowledge of the young, he sensed his own growing manhood and compared it to the man who was dying in his father. He had little love for Razor King. Our mother had been one of Razor King's women and both Johnnie and I had seen her on more than one occasion before her death, struck bleeding on the floor, our father, the black belt in his hand, swaying drunkenly above her.

  On the other hand, Johnnie didn't blame Razor King for this. The poison of hatred was to a great extent neutralized by an intuitive sympathy of one rogue male for another. Such incidents between husbands and wives went on all the time in the Gorbals. Men like Johnnie and Razor King were untroubled by conventional notions of justice. Things happened. Blood was spilled. A man reacted to the immediate situation. And if he had the reputation of being a wolf, he had to live up to that reputation. If you have terrorized all men over a period of time, you become the slave of your own brutalities. Any deviation, any mercy shown, is interpreted as a weakening. And a weak wolf doesn't become a dog. A weak wolf is destroyed.

  In a way Johnnie admired our father. Simultaneously, he despised him as a dying man. There had been many Coopers, men not quite brave enough to deal with the wolfish John Gault, and who had been marked for life because of a wrong word, but Gault was growing old, drinking too much, spending too much time in orgies with whores, and Johnnie knew that there would be other men, younger, unwasted, braver, more cunning men, and one day Razor King would be battered down on a stone pavement.

  Johnnie was waiting. He had nothing to lose.

  On the street he was recognized as the son of Razor King, a young man who was fast growing to be his father. Few men would have dared to cross him for fear of his father's reprisals. It was as though he had decided to wait until his father suffered the defeat that was bound to come. His position depended on courage and strength. He didn't lack courage and never would, but the strength was going. One day he would die or be beaten, as some boxers are, into idiocy.

  Johnnie knew this, and Hazel knew it, and so did I. Johnnie waited, enjoying in a detached way, a spectator. I watched with excitement. It was all I had during those long months I wasn't called to the big house. I had no love for our father. Only his brutality fascinated me. And if that brutality could be smashed by another's, I would be fascinated no longer. I watched Hazel. She didn't resent Johnnie's ironic attentions. Sometimes I felt she encouraged them. I knew that one day she would give herself to him and that then it would be a matter of days.

  But all this was not enough.

  I was starved. My father had not laid a finger on me since the night he thrashed me naked on the table. And my body cried out for brutal treatment. Once tasted, the sweet poison of punishment is irreplaceable. What could an ordinary man offer? Caresses? A sentimental love?

  It might have been eight months after my visit to Mr. Oakes' house that I realized I could stand it no longer. It would have been easy to give myself to one of the boys in the
communal privy on the stairs, but he would want sex, the ordinary lustful sex with his naked belly on mine and his seed eventually in my womb. Any one of a hundred would have been glad to serve me, even to marry me, especially perhaps to marry me, for I was every bit as beautiful as Hazel and I was the daughter of Razor King. Intuitively I knew that whoever I gave myself to would try hard to get me pregnant. And that did not fit in at all with my plans. I suspected that Mr. Oakes required me to be a virgin. I might allow myself any sexual extravagance short of the ordinary act of copulation.

  I left the house one day about two in the afternoon and it was not until I was nearly there that I realized where I was going. Cumberland Street! To the shop of the lascivious old shoemaker!

  Of course! Why hadn't I thought of it? He would be glad to give me what my body demanded. My cunt began to itch as I walked quickly towards his shop.

  As I turned into Cumberland Street, he was opening the door for the afternoon's business. I stopped abruptly and stared at him. He looked up and saw me. Something in my expression must have told him I had come to see him. He was between fifty and sixty with a bald head and a gray bristle on his face. He had a slight stoop. When I made no move to walk on, a small smile played on his thin lips. His hand fell down to his crotch and he gripped the meat there beneath his dirty brown corduroys. He held it speculatively, looking at me, his lips apart, his tongue licking the upper one. And then, when I still didn't move, he darted into his shop out of sight.

  I followed him like a zombie.

  The interior of the shop smelled musty, of leather. He was nowhere to be seen. But I knew where to look for him. He was in his usual place, in the back shop, and he had his bare cock out and was tapping it like a soft fat pencil against the glass. When I walked straight to the connecting door, he jumped aside in glee and, stuffing his penis back into his trousers, opened the door for me.

  When I went in, he put his fingers to his lips like a conspirator and said: "Shh!" Then he darted out to the front shop and locked the front door. He pulled down the blue blind. And a moment later he came back through, his old stubbly lips trembling.

  "Ah've seen you before?"

  I nodded.

  He thrust his hand at once under my skirt and stuck his middle finger in my cunt. I leaned against him, breathing heavily. Over his shoulder I saw bundles of leather bootlaces on his workbench. He forced me against a wall and thrust his small potato mouth against mine. His tongue slobbered against mine. I made no effort to resist. It was important that I should capture him completely.

  He was very nervous. I wondered if I was the first who had actually entered his lair.

  When finally his mouth came away from mine, I put my lips against his ear and whispered: "I want to be whipped!"

  He pushed me away to arms length and stared at me greedily.

  "You'll take all your clothes off?"

  I nodded passionately.

  His false teeth clicked. He reminded me of a dirty sheep. He was shivering with anticipation.

  "On the couch," he said.

  He pointed to a dusty old horse-hair sofa at one side. It was at that moment piled high with shoes.

  "Won't take a minute," he said breathlessly.

  While he stacked the shoes on the floor, I stripped naked. My body was covered with a cold sweat and my flesh was quivering.

  He turned to face me. When he saw I was naked, he let out a small excited croak. He threw himself on his knees in front of my cunt and started to lick me furiously. I let him do it, working my hot and sweaty crotch against his stubbly mouth. I groaned with pleasure. He lapped the slime out of me like a thirsty dog. I came, shuddering with his old bald head jammed like a hot turnip between my thighs. He felt me come and lapped furiously. Then, a little exhausted from having stood while he did it, I slipped away from him and lay face downwards on the horsehair couch. My flesh quivered at its cold rough touch. I rubbed my cunt there and my smooth white buttocks quivered.

  "The thongs!" I whispered.

  He nodded quickly. But first he stepped out of his trousers and threw his dirty underpants aside. His old cock stood out bent like a boomerang and twitching.

  "The thongs!" I whispered urgently again.

  "Take one first," I said huskily. "On my buttocks, as hard as you can!"

  He obeyed. The thin leather thong cut my buttocks.

  "Again!"

  He struck again.

  "Again!"

  He struck for a third time.

  I was quivering with pleasure.

  "Now take a handful and strike me all over, on my thighs and my back as well!"

  He thrashed me soundly. I came twice under the punishment. I asked him if he had a thick belt. He was shuddering with emotion and I noted a bead of sperm at the end of his prick. He too had come in punishing me. He produced a black leather belt not unlike my father's. "Thrash me with that, as hard as you can, ten times!" I begged him.

  His eyes glinted.

  "Be my master!" I breathed passionately.

  That set him erect again. A cunning look came on his face.

  "You'll do as I say!" he said.

  "Yes! Oh, yes!"

  He cut me hard with the leather belt. I writhed in agony. All the time he muttered filthy obscenities at me.

  "Give me your cunt again!" he commanded.

  I turned over and raised my cunt to his face. He sucked away all the accumulated sweat and slime. I thought he would never get enough. Then, suddenly, he was going to shove his prick in me.

  "No! Not that! I want it!"

  He grinned delightedly and brought it near my face. I took it at once between my lips and sucked all the sperm out of his old body. Then I turned on my face and lay exhausted. A moment later I felt his face on my buttocks and his tongue, like a soft scoop, was working at my anus.

  It was dark when we woke.

  He lit a paraffin lamp and stood staring down at me. I noticed that his cock was erect again and that he was masturbating. When I went to take it in my mouth, he shook his head. He seemed to derive pleasure from my watching him. He grunted, winking at me all the time. Then, when he was about to come, he threw himself voraciously on my arse and I felt his big prick burst painfully into my tender anus. The pain was excruciating, but gradually the familiar sensation of pleasure overriding pain came to me. I twitched beneath him like a landed fish.

  Who would have thought there was so much pleasure to be derived from one old man?

  I stayed with the shoemaker until ten o'clock at night. Just before I left, he hooked his finger in my cunt again and drew me close.

  "Next time it'll be better!" he croaked.

  He knew I would go back.

  -10-

  It was a full year before I saw Mr. Oakes again. I knew that Hazel saw him at least once a month and, as her fair body was never lacerated, I presumed she fulfilled the function of whip mistress solely. Sometimes I was able to look at her bankbook when she was at the lavatory and I saw the steady increase in her savings. It was about that time, just before my second meeting with Mr. Oakes, that I began to feel superior to Hazel. She was simply a paid professional. For me, on the contrary, the realm of pain and pleasure was a religion. It was unthinkable that I could ever earn my living in the way Hazel did.

  After I met my shoemaker, I no longer looked forward with the same desperation to the day when I would be invited to visit the big house again. Old Willie knew that my young body was demanding, that the more terribly he inflicted humiliations and punishments upon me, the more urgently my body and soul cried out for their increase. And he was an accomplished leather-smith. In a short while he had created not only the most fiendish of thongs with which to lacerate my trembling flesh, but had also fixed pulleys to the ceiling and floor of his back shop, so that my young torso, thonged at wrists and ankles, could be stretched and held taut like a quivering bowstring of flesh, and in four or five excruciating positions, to meet its punishment. He became a master in the art of flagellation, the hi
gh priest of my terrible cosmos of pain. He did everything with adoration, thrashing my flesh, thrusting his old lips voraciously into my sweating cunt, twisting thin black thongs of leather around my thighs with a stick. He made many instruments. Perhaps the most terrible of all was the simple leather instrument which the called "The Prick." It was a long cock of laminated leather as thick and three times as long as a strong man's rampant member. Had he not used it with great care, it would have been a killing instrument. It could be used either as an instrument of flagellation or as a ravisher. Other interesting implements were "The Brush," "The Beads," "The Balls," "The Crushing Cunt," and "The Five-Fingered-Spranger." The last was a masterpiece of simplicity and efficiency: five eighteen-inch rods of flexible steel covered with leather thrusting from a handle shaped like a human hand.

  Perhaps I would be spread-eagled like a spider web between floor and ceiling while he was licking my cunt. I asked him what he intended to do to me.

  He would give a small throaty laugh.

  "A good brushing to begin with, ha! Eh? And what d'ye say to a sprang after? And then a prick!" And with that he would spit some yellow phlegm on my belly and stretch me to breaking point.

  Thus, when I came to meet Mr. Oakes again, I was not at all impressed by his superior manner. Moreover, I had remained a virgin in the technical sense, for although the leather prick had been thrust into me brutally on many occasions, the shoemaker had never tried to put his own prick into me. We had agreed that my cunt was a shrine to be worshipped at but never penetrated by human member, that no semen should ever sully our shrine. For that purpose, when he saw fit, he used my anus or my mouth.

  One day Hazel said to me: "I want you to give this to a friend of mine, Gertie."