‘What?’
She pointed at my bottom. ‘That?’
I shrugged and rolled my shoulders. It was barely pink now. The tanning only lasts a few days and the hot shower had brought the colour back.
‘I’ve got a job,’ I told her.
‘Where? At Rent-a-Bum? Bums are Us?’
‘Bums are Arse,’ I replied and was rewarded with a rare Binky smile.
She came up and turned me around so she could have a closer look. She pressed a finger into one of my round cheeks and the pink fled away and left a white patch. ‘You like all that stuff, don’t you?’ she said.
‘I think all girls do if you give them the chance.’
She shook her head. ‘You’ve always been weird,’ she said. She bent and planted kisses on each of my cheeks, which was sweet. ‘But why?’ she then asked.
‘Why what?’
‘Why do you like being spanked?’
‘It’s hard to explain. It’s like asking a bird why it likes singing. Or why fish like to swim.’
‘Fish just swim because that’s what they do. It’s natural.’
‘So’s this,’ I said, and spanked her bottom with the flat of my hand.
‘Ouch. You bitch . . .’
‘Come on, Binky, that didn’t hurt.’
‘Yes it did.’
‘Binky . . .’
‘It did. Sort of.’
We stared at each other. Binky’s green eyes were shiny with that look girls have before a party or a pop concert, excitement and expectation. The sun was going down, bathing the room through the tall windows in a pastel glow. Everything was feminine, sensuous, seductive, the pink walls, my pink bottom, Binky all coy and smouldering like Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu Créa la Femme, Daddy’s favourite film. Binky’s eyes flickered about my features, my shoulders, my breasts, wantonly erect and throbbing. In the orange light on a summer’s day, anything might happen . . .
I spoke softly but forcefully.
‘Binky, take your top off.’
‘What?’
‘Take your top off.’
‘Milly, are you crazy?’
‘Roberta, take your top off. Don’t argue, just do it.’
She looked back at me as if I had lost my mind. She was dressed and I was stark naked but, oddly, being naked gave me a sense of authority, of empowerment. I stared into her eyes and kept staring until she blinked and her chin dropped. Her delicate features wore a puzzled look, but then slowly she pulled her blue and white sailor’s shirt over her head and dropped it on the bed.
‘Satisfied?’ she demanded.
‘No, Binky, that too.’
She was wearing a sexy little white bra that held her breasts like cocoons, like fresh fruit ripened from sunbathing in the garden. She went topless, just to upset the Polish gardener, or Mummy, should I say, who thought of the boy as her own personal property.
‘Milly . . .’
‘Now!’
‘God, you are such a bitch,’ she said but, as she spoke, she unclasped her bra, held it out at arm’s length by her fingertips and dropped it on top of her matelot shirt.
My sister had perfect breasts, two precise domes with small hard nipples the colour of pink champagne, the same colour as her engorged lips that she was nervously biting. I’m sure the Polish gardener must have found them totally gorgeous. Binky certainly did. Mummy, too, aesthetically, of course. I stared at her breasts and she impulsively started to stroke the enflamed tips with the pads of her fingers. I heard the breath catch in her throat. The top button on her bell bottoms was undone. I waggled my finger up and down and she responded instinctively, her long fingers snapping open the rest of the buttons one by one. She wriggled her hips and slid the white material down her long creamy legs.
She stood defiantly before me. I had used Jean-Luc’s power, Jean-Luc’s technique. She was in my hands. I was certain I could do anything and there was something I was dying to do. I often pictured in my mind that day when Monsieur Cartier pulled at my knicker elastic and stared greedily down at my pubes. And that’s what I did. I pulled at the thin band of white elastic, just gently, and gazed over Binky’s flat stomach at the nest of copper-coloured hair like filigree on a statue. We both looked up at the same time and, at that moment, without being told, Binky pulled at the sides of her knickers and eased them over her round bottom.
Binky likes to be admired and I admired her. I turned her round like an antique, like a sculpture, running my palms over her precise curves. She writhed and wriggled, rolling her shoulders, pushing out her breasts.
‘You’re beautiful,’ I said.
‘Do you really mean that?’
‘Yes, Binky, I do,’ I said as I reached for the leather belt discarded on the floor.
She watched my movements like a kitten, frightened but fascinated. The thing with beauty is that it expects everything, to be admired and chastised, adored and abused, worshipped and whipped. I slipped the tongue of the belt through the buckle, made a loop and tightened it over her wrist. Binky stared into my eyes. This was a new game, new territory. She didn’t know where it might lead her, and where it led her was across the length of my bed. I tied the end of the belt to the bedpost, reached for the long Gucci scarf thrown over the key to the wardrobe and secured her other arm to the bed.
She turned, looking up at me. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
I kissed her bottom. ‘I’m just making you comfy,’ I replied.
Binky likes to be in control. She didn’t necessarily want to be tied to my bed but she had found me pretty and perfumed and completely starkers and if there is one word that describes my sister that word is competitive: the eye is drawn to nudity; go into a room with a thousand women and one of them is naked and every gaze will be on her, young or old, shapely or shapeless, she will be the centre of attention. Binky’s motto since the age of three has been anything you can do I can do better. Just like me that first time in Jean-Luc’s office, Binky had not taken off her clothes because she had been told to. She had taken them off because that was what she wanted to do.
In the wardrobe I found two more scarves which I tied around each of her ankles. Each ankle I tied to the end of the bed. Binky was prone, stretched like a starfish, her white bottom peering up at me like the moon, pert and seductive, the lips of her vulva pushed through her thighs. I ran my hands between her legs. She was sticky and sopping wet.
‘You didn’t answer me,’ Binky said.
‘What am I going to do? I’m going to thrash you, lassie. That round bottom you keep pushing oot is going to be tanned until it’s raw.’
I spoke with a Scottish accent, naturally, and Binky yelped as I brought my hand down across the pouting cheeks of her bottom.
‘Right, that’s enough. Untie me you bitch . . .’
Smack. Down came my hand again.
‘I’ll kill you, Camilla . . .’
Smack. She was twisting and turning, but I had done a good job binding her to the bedposts and it didn’t matter how much she turned, I found the target. I smacked her again and again, and her bottom turned pink and red and crimson. She sobbed and she spat and then she pushed herself up on to her knees, stretching the scarves to offer up her little bottom to be more thoroughly and efficiently disciplined. I counted, six, seven, eight, nine, and she pushed her bottom higher and I smacked her harder.
Her pussy had opened like an oyster shell between her legs and the puffy lips were slicked and shiny, oily jism leaking down the inside of her thighs. This was what Binky needed, what she secretly craved. And ten, I counted. My palm was sore, but I had a job to do and wouldn’t stop until I’d finished. Her cries of pain had become sighs of pleasure. Eleven. ‘Agh, agh, agh.’ She was biting the bedclothes, tossing her golden curls, wriggling like a fish, her back arched. Twelve. ‘Yes, yes,’ she screamed, and I tasted the oyster on my tongue as I slipped into her wet pouting cleft.
‘Milly, Milly, Milly, Milly . . .’ She took a deep breath. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.’
She collapsed back across the bed and as I licked the sting from her red bottom she purred contentedly. I felt inordinately proud. I had spanked Tara Scott-Wallace in Jean-Luc’s office, but Tara I’m sure knew more about discipline than she was letting on, and I was pleased to have taken my little sister in hand and led her into the magic kingdom. She wouldn’t have to waste her time with that awful car mechanic with the petroly breath and dirty nails. She could go out into the world and really find herself.
I untied her. She reached down with her hands and nursed her bottom in her palms. Her hair was stuck to her cheeks and her eyes were glowing like coals.
‘Your turn,’ she said.
‘No time, darling, I told you, I’ve got a job. Almost.’
From my exertions I was covered in perspiration and had to step back into the shower. When I came out, Binky was curled in a ball on the bed. She watched sleepily as I spread my clothes all over the bedroom. One thing we had learned from Mummy and that is that you should dress for the occasion and with that in mind I tried one thing after another. Sometimes Binky nodded with approval. Sometimes she shook her head and pointed her thumb down like Cæsar. I really didn’t have a thing to wear and only after rejecting everything did I remember that in the seduction scene in Cheats Amanda wears a red kimono over red underwear.
I found just the thing in Mother’s closet. She has more clothes than the designer floor at Harrod’s and more shoes than Imelda Marcos. Binky and I were getting into the habit of stealing her things and she never even noticed. I dressed in front of the mirror and, turning to my sister, I did Mummy’s Lauren Bacall look over one shoulder.
‘We did some erotica stuff. For the dyke market.’
‘Wow!’
I glanced at the clock. It was the right time to leave but I thought it was important to be late, keep David waiting, let him think I wasn’t coming. Binky was rolling around on the bed, bending into all sorts of funny shapes trying to get a good look at her bottom. It was bright red, as red as the kimono, and I could feel the heat from across the room.
‘I’m going to tell Mummy what you did,’ she said, playing at being a little girl.
‘If you do, I shall spank you again.’
‘Then I’m definitely going to tell her.’
She grinned and then stretched out her arms as she clambered up on her knees. We kissed and although I was sure I would in my life kiss hundreds of girls, I was sure none would ever quite feel the same as Binky. It was like kissing yourself, erotic and autoerotic at the same time, her lips like my lips, a mirror image, a perfect fit, plump and delectable. Now she had found the Bardot look she was going to be unstoppable. She ran her hand up my leg.
‘It’s not the time but the hour,’ I said and skipped from the room as the sun slipped over the rooftops.
Part II
I was tempted to get a taxi, but walked all the way to Gloucester Road. I had to ask directions at the Indian newsagents and a man with a turban and big shiny teeth directed me to the adjoining street with its Victorian lampposts and red brick buildings. climbed three steps to a blue door with the number 36 in brass numerals. I hit the bell beside David’s name and he buzzed me into a darkened hallway of black and white tiles that reminded me of the floor at the Jewel Royale.
He was standing in the doorway of the ground-floor flat and ushered me into his living room, a typical boy’s flat with screens and keyboards on every surface, cream walls and a fire of false logs that made the room so hot I had an immediate desire to take all my clothes off. The fire was in front of a long black leather sofa – the casting couch, I thought, and it occurred to me that David Trevellick had probably brought loads of girls to his flat and now it was my chance I really had to make the most of it. Girls want to get into erotic situations, but it’s up to them to make sure they do.
‘Red wine?’ he asked.
‘You read my mind.’
‘I wrote the script.’
I laughed. He had been studying the day’s castings on his laptop and one of the girls I’d left in the outer office was frozen with her mouth open. As he poured the wine the computer went into stand-by and the girl faded to black. I sat on the corner of the sofa with the split in the kimono displaying a peachy slice of thigh and we got straight down to business. Script business, that is.
In the story, Ricky and Young Amanda leave Greens and it takes ages to find a taxi. In that time, they get soaked to the skin. Amanda suggests going back to his place, but Ricky tells her he has the builders in (a lie, of course, as the viewer will know from the flashback with Older Amanda staring around the living room). Young Amanda agrees to take Ricky back to her flat. They are now in the back of a minicab.
I glanced down and read the instructions in the script.
AMANDA shivers. RICKY puts his arm around her and she cuddles into his side. Then his mobile phone rings. He doesn’t answer.
AMANDA: It might be important.
RICKY: Nothing’s that important.
RICKY is squeezing his thighs together. He clearly needs to use the loo. He speaks to the Asian driver.
RICKY: Can’t you go any faster?
DRIVER: Sorry, filthy night.
AMANDA:(whispering)Hope so.
This, I thought, was where the script started to go off course. Amanda is a shrewd and sensual woman. She would not make it so obvious that she wants to be seduced. I thought it cleverer if after the Driver says: Sorry, filthy night, it cuts to Ricky trying to control his elation, as well as his bladder: here is this gorgeous 20-year-old girl (well, 18) and she’s just gagging for it.
The taxi arrives at a big old house where Amanda shares an apartment. Her mates are away, of course. They go in, and Ricky rushes to the loo. While he’s peeing, his mobile phone rings again and as he takes the machine from his pocket, he drops it down the lavatory pan. This slightly comical turn is to make Ricky endearing, David explained, even though he is about to betray Older Amanda and sleep with the young girl.
‘Brilliant,’ I said.
Ricky fishes the phone out of the loo and it is Older Amanda telling him she had a safe trip to Paris and the production company has put her up in a swish hotel. He speaks softly and hurriedly and, after drying his phone on Young Amanda’s towel, he turns the mobile off and goes to join her.
AMANDA has changed into a short red kimono.
David nodded appreciatively as I read the line. I was in character.
AMANDA: You’re not in a hurry?
RICKY: Not at all.
She gives RICKY a bottle of champagne which he opens. She takes the bottle to fill two glasses – the glasses have been in the refrigerator and he doesn’t notice the faint trace of white powder in the bottom of one of them. He raises his glass.
RICKY: To . . . to what? To beauty.
AMANDA: Beauty?
RICKY: To you.
AMANDA: To me? Or to beauty?
RICKY: To you both.
AMANDA: Beauty’s not always what it seems.
RICKY: But it’s always beautiful. You’re beautiful.
AMANDA: I suppose the casting directors must think the same. I’ve been gang raped, beaten up, locked up and cut up by a dominatrix in a leather mask. But there’s a moral backlash, don’t you think?
RICKY: Iguess . . .
AMANDA: Not in the going to church sense. But in the important things. The only thing we have is relationships. That’s what matters to me. If I had a boyfriend and he cheated on me, I’d pay him back. I mean really pay him back.
RICKY: Hell hath no fury.
AMANDA: You bet.
RICKY: (raises glass) To relationships.
AMANDA: Relationships. (beat)I won’t be a minute.
AMANDA refills the glasses
FLASHBACK:
RICKY waves to OLDER AMANDA as she enters the train terminal at Victoria.
RICKY: Bye, Amanda.
OLDER
AMANDA: Goodbye, Ricky.
RICKY watches YOUNG AMANDA sash
ay across the room and out the door.
His head spins. It’s the wine, the champagne, the hour. I mean really pay him back. What did she mean by that? Little bitch! He swallows hard. Drains his glass. He should go home. Text Amanda. His Amanda. But the girl is a gift, fresh as the dew, all legs and breasts, pink pouting lips, neat little ankles in pointy red shoes. She is Eve and he is the first man, Adam at the gate of temptation. He just wants to carve another notch on the gun. Put another deposit in the memory banks. Just be there. It has nothing to do with sex, betrayal, lust. He wants to be himself. Be the old Ricky Simmons vanishing under the weight of time and disappointment. And what does that bitch Imogen Black mean by You don’t get ahead by getting behind? He’s not getting behind. He’s getting there. He’s making it. You Get A Good Rum For Your Money! Just one more good fuck.
He goes to look for the Girl and finds her in the bedroom. Young Amanda has removed the kimono and stands motionless in a red bra and knickers. She glances at the bed and says ‘wait for me’, then disappears into the bathroom. Ricky undresses and climbs into bed. There is a satisfied smile on his face. Then we cut to the denouement. The twist.
I flicked through the script, reading the end, then looked into David’s eyes.
‘Why is she wearing underwear?’ I asked.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, she is seducing him, isn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
‘But then she’d be naked, wouldn’t she?’
‘I don’t know.’
I glanced around the flat. ‘David, let’s try it,’ I said. ‘See how it works.’
His doubtful expression showed that he was going along with something he wasn’t sure about. David had set out to write a revenge story, but Jean-Luc must have seen the themes of sexual supremacy and frustration coiling like snakes beneath the surface. Writers don’t always know what they have written until after they have written it, and readers interpret things according to their own experience. A month before while I was doing my A levels, I would have seen the story in the way David saw it. But Mr Cartier had opened my eyes to new vistas and it was clear to me now waltzing through David’s flat in Mummy’s Agent Provocateur underwear that Cheats was not about Ricky trying to pull a young girl, it was about Amanda Marshall destroying Older Amanda’s relationship with Ricky thoroughly and forever. She was not a sweet girl who had been corrupted. She was the corrupter, a complete and absolute bitch. It was a great role.
Being a Girl Page 10