Being a Girl

by Chloë Thurlow

  Since arriving back from Scotland, Binky and I had seen hardly anything of each other. The experience had woken me like Snow White from a dream, but Binky didn’t want to talk about what had happened and was spending all her time with the mechanic boyfriend with dirty nails who had sold her the VW beetle with violet trim. I glanced at her across the table in the Jewel Royale. ‘How’s your boyfriend?’ I asked, breaking the silence, and she shook her mop of yellow curls as if to shake away a migraine.

  ‘Ready for the sack,’ she said.

  Mummy took a cigarette from Binky’s packet, slipped it between her lips, sucked the startled flame from the lighter and looked like Lauren Bacall as she blew smoke over her shoulder.

  ‘Now that you’re back from wherever you’ve been, don’t you think you should find some work?’ she said.

  ‘Work?’ said Binky.

  ‘I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.’

  ‘Like, you do, Honey?’

  Mummy sighed with feigned exasperation, but except for being beautiful, our mother had never done anything in her life; horse riding, swimming from yachts in the Mediterranean, skiing at Cortina d’Ampezzo, tantric yoga, manicures, pedicures, colonic irrigation, sun beds, spreading her legs for the Polish gardener. But work? She had grown up with her two sisters and a brother in the country with stables and tutors in a big old house that was falling down around their ears and had been taken over by the National Trust when Pompa died to pay his debts.

  ‘It won’t kill you, either of you,’ Mummy said without conviction, and when Binky lit another cigarette I was tempted to take up smoking it looked so cool.

  ‘Actually, I’ve got an interview,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ said Binky. ‘Where?’

  ‘I’m not telling you.’

  ‘You sound like a politician.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I get the job.’

  ‘When!’

  ‘You’re such a pessimist,’ I said.

  ‘A pessimist, Milly, is just a well-informed optimist,’ said Binky, and turned to Mummy to add, ‘I’m learning how to repair cars.’

  ‘How lovely.’

  Binky glanced up at the white bishop and added: ‘A Chicken Cæsar Salad, please.’

  Binky was good at changing the subject.

  Like my sister, I had no intention of doing something brain deadening like stacking supermarket shelves or waiting tables and was rather pleased sitting in the restaurant that Mummy was about to bolt for the weekend. This little lunch wasn’t so much about our finding jobs and not smashing up the house than the fact that if Daddy happened to call we shouldn’t mention that she was away. Not that we would. Binky and I had met Daddy’s ‘friend’. She was about two years older than me, a Parisian fashionista with gamine hair, a little turned-up nose and the figure of a boy, which was Daddy’s taste and, if truth be known, mine too.

  ‘Milly?’ said Mummy.

  ‘Oh, just a green salad, I think,’ I said.

  ‘She’s trying to lose five pounds of ugly fat,’ said Binky with a sigh.

  That wasn’t true. Not exactly. But Binky was as thin as a blade of grass and if I wallowed in chocolate biscuits a little lip of fat would appear on my tummy and I’d have to eat more chocolate biscuits because I was depressed.

  The waiter glanced at Mummy.

  ‘Salad, please, and a glass of white wine.’

  ‘Me, too,’ said Binky.

  ‘It’s cheaper to get a bottle,’ the bishop gravely intoned and we all nodded in agreement.

  We pushed our food around our plates, picked at the bread that came with olive oil and a dish of garlicky olives and, what with the second bottle of wine and the Irish cream coffee, we were all a bit squiffy by the time Mummy called for the bill.

  I tripped off downstairs to the loo and was sitting there peeing like mad and leafing through my address book in search of inspiration when the card given to me by Jean-Luc Cartier slipped out from between the pages and dropped into the crotch of my knickers. It was like an invitation to adventure. I had told Binky I had an interview to go to, now I would turn my white lie into the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  As I wiped my pussy, my clitoris started screaming for attention. I gave her a good hard pinch to keep her quiet. My knickers were round my knees and I really have no idea why, but I ran them down my legs, slipped them off and pushed them into the bottom of my bag. I was wearing an immodestly short skirt and it wouldn’t take very much for everything to be on show.

  I climbed back up the stairs wiggling, my bottom enjoying the sense of freedom, and it struck me that bottoms really do want to be out there, free and exposed. Your bottom is a part of you, but special and separate, the gateway to your soul. It’s almost religious. Or was that the white wine doing the talking? Anyway, Mummy was wearing a white suit and standing on a white square in the restaurant foyer. Binky was in a black dress unsuitable for daytime on the black square beside her, swaying slightly from side to side. For some reason, an uncontrollable wave of happiness passed through me as I joined them. Mummy seemed happy to have Binky drive her home, even drunk, but I was almost on top of Leicester Square and left them to it.

  I tripped along Piccadilly and it was nice to feel the air around my thighs and between my legs. A man washing windows gave me a hard stare and I was tempted to pull up my little skirt a couple more inches and give him a flash. I didn’t but probably should have done. It’s important if you have urges to act on them, I think. People hold back much too much. If everyone would just give in to their fantasies I’m sure the world would be a much better place.

  An open-top car slowed beside me in the traffic and the driver said ‘Great legs,’ as I trotted by.

  I ignored him, of course.

  I wound my way through the narrow streets of Soho, pressed the buzzer on the only door I knew and ran two at a time up the narrow staircase.

  Now this is very weird. Jean-Luc Cartier didn’t seem at all surprised to see me; quite pleased, I must say, but I had the distinct impression that he was almost expecting me. He was the first man to have persuaded me to take off my clothes, the first man to have spanked my bottom, the first man who had rolled back the stone from the mouth of the cave and released all the pent-up power of my first orgasm. A virgin orgasm, and as rare as ambergris, I had come to realise. It had been special to me, a wake-up call, but there had no doubt been zillions of girls who had offered up their backside to his hand and mine was just one of a gallery of mooning bottoms belonging to girls who had scurried in looking for work. Please, Monsieur, spank my bottom and give me a job!

  ‘You’re back,’ he said, and beckoned with his finger.

  I followed Mr Cartier down the spiral staircase. There was a girl about my age sitting at the computer and looking intense as she scrolled through photos of actresses, doing it so quickly it looked like a speeded-up film. My head was swimming with those lunchtime drinks and my mind was spinning as I watched the smiling faces come and go as if on a roulette wheel and when the wheel stopped the lucky actress would be a star. Perhaps all of life is like that. Just chance. One fluky thing happens and it leads to the next, success is just a spin of the wheel.

  I wondered whatever happened to Virginia Ward, my old school chum who had beaten both me and Binky to the job, but now wasn’t the time to ask.

  The girl swung round on her swivel chair and her full lips broke into a smile that made me wonder if she knew something I didn’t know. She was wearing a tight-waisted blouse with a hint of tanned flesh that peeped provocatively over the top button and pulsed faintly with her breath.

  ‘This is Tara Scott-Wallace,’ said Mr Cartier. ‘Tara, this is . . .’

  He’d forgotten my name.

  ‘Milly,’ I said. ‘Camilla Petacci.’

  Tara smiled and turned back to the computer where the spinning wheel had come to a stop at a well-known TV star who had just walked out of one of the soaps. She had made her point, confessed her �
��substance abuse’ to the tabloids, and now she was smiling seductively from the screen looking for a job.

  Like me.

  Jean-Luc Cartier looked me up and down, at my white mini and kitten heels, at the T-shirt two sizes too small that I’d stolen from Binky’s room. My step-sister was right: I was a complete tart.

  While the old seducer was studying me, I gave him a good once-over at the same time. Jean-Luc was much younger than I’d first thought. Everyone over thirty looked positively ancient. Daddy was about 45 or something and I suppose Jean-Luc was a few years younger with a lush sweep of hair going faintly silver at the temples, an open shirt with a few sexy coils of dark hair peeking over the buttons and beautifully creased trousers.

  ‘I won’t be a minute,’ he said.

  He turned away and looked over the girl’s shoulder at the screen.

  The office was just as I remembered it, the same blinking blue lights on the computers, the same low table where I had discovered there was more to life than A levels. I had laid back on that table with my breasts exposed and lifted my bottom from the glass with barely a moment’s hesitation when Mr Cartier had pulled at my knicker elastic.

  I’d been dying to take my knickers off. I don’t know why. Being naked under the gaze of a stranger is a special sensation that’s so hard to describe I think girls should just take a deep breath, clench their teeth and do it. It’s liberating. It’s fun – illicit pleasure and that’s the best. It’s life on the high wire and everything after is just waiting to get back up there and strip off again. There is no greater pleasure than being naked. Well, except being spanked, of course.

  It occurred to me as the water fountain gurgled rudely in the corner that had Jean-Luc Cartier not initiated me into the mysteries of discipline I would never have been ready for the Laird and his knickersniffing companion Byron McBride. Sooo embarrassing!

  I had come away from the encounter feeling eager to learn more about myself and my unknown desires. And I had come to the conclusion in the last few days, during those long afternoons in the bath, that Binky was more the orgy type. I don’t think she was really cut out for S&M, although she is nearly a year younger than me and has plenty of time to learn its odd delights.

  I giggled. I was in a silly mood. I was becoming decidedly wet thinking about our trip to Scotland and that wasn’t what I was doing in Jean-Luc Cartier’s office. I was on a mission.

  Mr Cartier glanced at his watch and gave Tara her instructions. ‘Choose six from this file and print out the details for me,’ he said, and glanced at his watch again. ‘Bring them up to me in about ten minutes.’

  Her green eyes sparkled as she turned in her seat. ‘Oui, Monsieur,’ she said.

  I followed Monsieur back upstairs to another office where he sat in a big leather chair. I sat opposite him in a smaller chair set back a few feet from the desk, the glass top reflecting the lights sunk into the ceiling. I was crossing and uncrossing my legs like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, and he leaned forward with his elbows on the desk, staring up my skirt.

  ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’ he asked, and I opened my legs a little wider to applaud his double entendre.

  ‘Are you casting any films?’

  ‘You want to be an actress now?’

  ‘Nooo.’

  He smiled. ‘What then?’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘I am casting films and television shows every day. That is what I do.’

  ‘Then there must be some work for me, as an extra, or a runner. Isn’t that what you call those people who run around on a film set?’

  ‘Do you have any experience?’

  ‘I was in just about every play at school ever. You should have seen my Lady Macbeth.’

  He smiled. ‘Très bien,’ he said. ‘Now, what is it, you want to be in a film crew or you want to see yourself in a movie?’

  I pulled at my bottom lip while I thought about it. What did I want? What did I really want? After taking off my clothes for Monsieur Cartier and, rather more reluctantly, for the Laird of the Black Watch, what I really wanted was to be exposed, to be on show. To be seen. I was, at eighteen, at my very best. I was Aphrodite, the daughter of Zeus, born from the swell of the sea, mysterious and mythological, the goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture. Binky had come along less than a year after me. She had always been the baby. She had always got all the attention. Now, it was my turn.

  ‘Either,’ I said after a long silence.

  ‘You seem to be filling out rather nicely,’ he remarked.

  He was gazing at the skimpy T-shirt stretched across my breasts. As I looked up into his eyes I had a strong feeling he was going to ask me to take it off, you know, just for old time’s sake, and of course that’s exactly what he did.

  ‘Slip it off, Milly, let’s have a look.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  I was pretending to play hard to get. Well, I mean, you have to. It’s part of the fun.

  ‘You do want me to represent you?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘I haven’t seen you in performance. I can’t sell the goods if I haven’t had a feel in the pig bag.’

  ‘A pig in a poke I think you mean.’

  ‘A pig in a poke! You English are really very funny.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  He clapped his palms softly together then swept his hand through his hair as if to enjoy its lushness. ‘Come along now, off, off. I am getting old waiting.’

  ‘That’s not why I’m here . . .’

  ‘Of course you are,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not.’ I giggled and the white wine turned red as it burnt into my cheeks.

  ‘Milly!’

  ‘Oh, all right, then.’

  I stopped crossing my legs and crossed my arms to pull my T-shirt over my head in one smooth movement. I was wearing a white cotton bra and the little monkeys were jouncing freely with each beat of my heart. So wanton.

  ‘No under-padding?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘In the brassière?’

  Such a funny word brassière, but so sexy when it’s said in French.

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s not, how do you say: beat about the bush!’

  ‘Very funny.’

  He smiled. I think Jean-Luc Cartier really liked me. I liked him, anyway. He was fun. I unclasped the hook at the front of the bra and peeled back the two cups like I was opening two halves of a coconut. What is it about Jean-Luc Cartier that makes me want to do this? Those velvety brown eyes, that velvety soft voice like a mantra, like a chant . . . take it off, take them off, take everything off. My pussy was sticky and my breasts swelled out above my ribcage like slowly inflating balloons. It felt good to be sitting there in nothing but my white mini and high heels.

  Mr Cartier stood to get a proper look and sat on the corner of the desk looking down at my pert nipples and willing me to fondle them. I tried fairly hard not to. This was a business meeting, wasn’t it? But, as Oscar said, I can resist anything except temptation, and my itchy fingers were soon rolling the plump pink buds of my nipples between the pads of my fingers, squeezing and pinching until a delectable flush ran up over my neck and cheeks. The damp feeling between my legs was beginning to haemorrhage and warm juice smelling of the girls’ dorm at Saint Sebastian’s was coating my thighs.

  I was dying to take off my skirt. Why? Where did these impulses come from? It was all new to me, new and fun and exciting. I didn’t know where these feelings came from or where they might lead me, but I knew it was best to follow your instincts, wherever they led you. I adored being a girl. A woman. I wanted to be ogled and fondled. On show. I wanted to be spanked until my bottom sang, spanked and licked and buggered. Before I had set off with Binky for Scotland I hadn’t been exactly sure what buggered even meant. Now? Now, just thinking about it made
the breath catch in my throat. I had three openings and when they were filled I felt fulfilled. I remember Sister Theresa saying she felt complete when she was on her knees and I suddenly understood what she meant.

  A million questions were flying about inside my head and while I was searching for answers it came as a relief when Mr Cartier took my hand and eased me to my feet. Without giving it a thought, let alone a second thought, I pulled down the zip at the back of my skirt and let it fall to the floor.

  There, naked at last!

  ‘You’re not wearing any knickers.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘C’est colossal! Excellent!’

  ‘It was just . . .’

  ‘A lady never explains.’

  Jean-Luc Cartier ran his finger like a saw between my legs and when he took his finger away it was shiny and slicked with my sticky discharge. We stood there for ages like a tableau vivant, frozen in that solitary moment, both looking at that glistening wet finger. He took a deep breath through his nose like a wine connoisseur and then popped the finger in his mouth.

  ‘Delicious,’ he said.

  I had come to ask him for a job and here we were, five minutes into the meeting, and I was starkers, wet dribbles leaking from my pussy, my poor little breasts tingling like electric fuses.

  ‘You are so wet, Milly.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘You mean you didn’t realise?’ he said.

  He put his finger back in my pussy, ran it in and out, in and out, then popped it back into his mouth again. He had a perplexed look about his features, two lines crossing his brow. He looked me up and down for a long time, he stroked my shoulder and hair, then stared into my eyes.

  ‘It’s gone, hasn’t it, Milly?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come on. You know.’

  I felt the colour rise once more over my cheeks.

  ‘Was it . . . glorious.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good. You are just beginning. You have a special gift,’ he said. ‘You will be marvellous.’

  I felt my heart thumping, my breasts taut and quivering. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.