My old friend Aristotle said the only rational course to pursue in life is the path of happiness and I reminded myself of his advice as if his words were a prayer that needed to be repeated often. The nuns at Saint Sebastian’s would say that if what you are doing makes you happy and what you are doing harms no one, it must logically be the right thing to be doing. A girl at school when I was fifteen died of head injuries after diving into an empty swimming pool. Another, a promising ballerina, lost her leg in a car crash. Disaster can catch us at any time. Plane crashes and cancer, tragedy and loss. Life is an obstacle course. There is only this moment. It is brief and precious. Only when you appreciate that are you, philosophically speaking, truly alive and truly free to be yourself.
Did Tyler Copic comprehend these things?
I’m sure he did.
Did Amélie and Greta not belong to him?
Some men can see into the mysterious core of the feminine psyche. They understand the ambiguity of our deepest needs and, as I sat in the Garden of Eden in my golden frock, my mind floated on the champagne bubbles back to that Gothic mansion on the Isle of Skye where I had finally lost my virginity and become a woman. Binky and I had returned home with red bottoms and a secret so terrible and marvellous we could never have told anyone because no one would have believed us. We had peeled off our clothes. We had been smacked and cropped. We had without urging fallen on each other in a frenzy of wild lesbian sex, and we had then been simultaneously serviced across the dining room table. We had reached the outer limits of unimagined pain and a deep, unknown sense of gratification. We had drawn the sweet nectar from chalices so similar to our own it was like making love to yourself. As the Laird broke my maidenhead it was as if the blinders had been taken from my eyes. It was the moment of awakening. It was as if my virginity had been sacrificed on the altars of my own subconscious desires.
What was so shocking, so shameful, so revealing, and the reason why it was something Binky and I had never talked about, was that once we had got over the embarrassment of removing our clothes we had relished every moment of our humiliation. We were stark naked, our proud bodies glistening with nervous sweat in the firelight, our nipples smouldering with tension, our pussies growing damp under the watchful eyes of the two strangers. We were miles from anywhere, cut off from London, from school, from parents, from the past, from our own reality. In the Laird’s island redoubt we were free like birds to forget ourselves and just be ourselves. We had been frightened, yes, petrified, but like the moth drawn to the candle flame, it is fear of the unknown that draws you into the unknown.
We had slept that night in the stable and didn’t get our clothes back until the following afternoon when a driver appeared with Binky’s little pink car. The Laird paid for the repair and we paid him back by collecting eggs, feeding the chickens, sweeping out the barns and outhouses, buildings filled with poo and fetid straw that hadn’t been cleaned for years. The Laird believed young girls should be strapped, spanked, mated and kept naked at all times. They are wee animals who find true contentment when they get back to nature.
Were you to say such a thing in the cold light of a Chelsea cocktail bar it would sound absurd, but on that brisk summer’s day as I walked around the farmyard covered in mud and dust, my pussy and armpits moist and smelly, it felt completely natural and not at all unpleasant, a rehearsal, in fact, for my turf-laying adventures in the garden of Luther Goetz.
As I looked back over the months since leaving school and going up to Cambridge, I felt fortunate to have met Jean-Luc, Hamish the Black Watch, Dr Goetz, and felt sorry for girls who had not had the same opportunities as me. David Trevellick had warmed to the enchantment of strapping me with his belt, but I had come to see that the pleasure, my pleasure, comes not from leading but from being led, from being in a position where I become a part of something outside myself, in a state where I am an empty vessel ready to be filled with every extreme of sensation. I understood, too, I understood now, that every smack and spank, every caning and whipping was more than an indulgence for those administering the chastisement, it was an indulgence for the one receiving it. It is in this state of submission that I pass from the shadows of confusion and insecurity, the human condition, the human dilemma, and find myself in pure radiant sunshine, in a crystal light.
I turned to look again at Tyler Copic.
They belong to me.
What did he mean? Amélie Ames and Greta May were under contract? Now they had made one film for him they were obliged to make another? Or was it more literal? Or more ambiguous? His blue eyes were turquoise in the foggy ruins of the light. He was listening with apparent fascination to a young man revved up on false confidence who had stopped to pitch a film idea, which he did in thirty seconds. The boy produced from his pocket a single sheet with his concept in 150 words, shook Tyler’s hand, said way to go as he held up a fist in an anarchist salute to Van Van de Vere and disappeared back into the river of lost souls drifting by our booth.
Tyler dropped the film idea on the floor.
‘An Officer and a Gentleman meets Reservoir Dogs.’
‘Star Wars.’
Tyler and Van Van spoke a private language, a code. Tyler came to his feet, the sign for us to move on.
We abandoned the champagne and wandered the colonnades between womb-shaped niches where girls in various states of bondage and nudity sat and perched and lay spread out on the oval tables like objects in a museum, like models backstage at a fashion shoot, like dolls being constructed on a conveyor belt, like actresses preparing for Titus Andronicus or Satyricon. There were girls on their knees performing fellatio, girls in chains, à quatre pattes, white bottoms showing between the banquettes and the tables, their two orifices invitingly open, one pink and slippery, the other violet and all the sweeter, forbidden fruit graciously offered. There were girls on laps, legs spread, vaginas spread, anuses spread, heads thrown back, breasts free, so much sex and so open, and so public, I realised I was on a journey of one thousand miles and had barely taken the first step.
The Garden of Eden was a house of many rooms and moods. It would, I thought, be easy to become lost in the maze, to move from one erotic scene to the next, one womb to the next. People here felt safe as I’m sure the first people felt safe before temptation and Flood. I could see it in their eyes, in their graceful unhurried movements. It was hot. Sticky. Girls as girls do when they see other girls naked were stripping down to the bare essentials, getting out of themselves. Being themselves. Something printed in invisible ink in the depths of our subconscious was coming to light. In the new millennium girls were growing taller, fitter, our own atavistic genes taking us by surprise. My body was the treasure chest that held all the pleasures of original sin. I was in my golden slippers with my full breasts and dripping pussy the quintessence of sex. I could smell sex on me. I could smell sex in the air, spicy and faintly vegetal, the aroma of male sperm pooled with the scent of girlie excretions, sweet and oily to the tongue, the stuff of life, a heady mixture that made my heart beat faster. Film people talked the talk but the labyrinth to me was a place for being not talking and I had an intuition that it was those who kept silent who made films.
The arches were evenly spaced, identical whichever way you turned, and I was reminded of a school trip to Córdoba when we visited the Mezquita, the mosque so vast and perfect the cathedral built in its interior at the time of the Inquisition is dwarfed to insignificance. Was this significant of something? Did it resonate with my life? I had yet to discover who I might be, what I might be, but at nineteen I was in the process of choosing and as we weaved our way through the twists of the maze it was like turning through my mind’s web of neurons and synapses and for some reason hard to explain I could feel rising in me like mercury in a thermometer a bubble of pure contentment, that special intense joy that comes from living totally in the present.
My skin prickled in the golden dress and I understood as Tyler stroked my hip bone in the patient way of the faithful co
unting prayer beads that I would be taking it off for him before the night was through. He moved his hand to the curve of my bottom and I wondered if through the sheer fabric he could sense the marks of the pentangle.
I adored being a girl and I adored being surrounded by girls. They were everywhere. Like the dancing fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like gilded butterflies. Like angels with gossamer wings fitted on harnesses and on these wings they were flying through the arches like genies escaping bottles. There were girls on tables, kissing in corners, their mouths filled with smiles, with filmmaker appendages, their nude bodies landscaped with glittering seas of semen. There were girls I’d seen on magazine covers, models from the catwalks of Paris, from the silver screen, stars whose names I knew, their slender perfect bodies they had worked so hard to create finally liberated from the stifling prison of their costumes and their clothes. Mirrored balls turned on the ceiling picking out our faces, moving impetuously on to the next and the next. People alone and in pairs were dancing to the throb of the music. It came at us in ebbs and flows as we grew nearer and then drew away from the speakers, French rap, free-form jazz, discordant, unfamiliar, mesmerising. We stopped at one of the oval niches where the dwarf joined us.
‘Voilà!’ he announced.
The men inspected the confections laid out on his mortar board.
‘M&Ms,’ Tyler said.
He chose several of different colours and tossed them back into his throat. He closed his blue eyes, then pinned me like a knife thrower in his gaze as he opened them again.
‘You like it here,’ he said. It was a statement, not a question. He had read my mind.
‘Yes, I do.’
Suspended from the arch before us like a figure in a painting by Brueghel was a girl in a black hood, hands stretched above her head, her feet resting on the stone capitals at the place where the columns turned into the arch. I noticed that around her wrists, ankles and neck were black straps similar to those worn by Amélie and Greta. The split between her legs was at head height. Van Van paused, held her thighs and, as he slid his tongue up inside her, I thought how pleased she would be should someone tell her that the best director at Cannes that year had shared her wet parts. The director’s tongue was going in and out like a piston, the girl’s breasts were bobbing and swaying with the centrifugal force, and I could hear her wailing in ecstasy inside the hood.
‘Who are all these people, where do they come from?’ I asked, turning to Tyler Copic.
He didn’t answer straight away. He took my two hands and looked me in the eyes. ‘They are film people,’ he said. ‘People who make films. People who want to make films. People who want to be in films. Making films is a mission, a crusade, a journey through an impenetrable jungle. You’re never quite sure why you start making a new film and once you start you can’t imagine you’re ever going to finish. When you do finish, you have to slake off your old skin like a serpent and renew yourself. The people who come here understand that.’ He paused. ‘Do you understand that?’
‘I think I do,’ I said.
He let go of my hands and looked at me for a long time in my little gold frock. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.
I pressed my finger to my lips and thought carefully before I answered. ‘Ancient,’ I said, and he nodded without smiling.
‘So am I.’
His voice was little more than a whisper and in our few words was a complicity, a contract. Tyler Copic was a man who would expect a woman to abandon all sense of herself and surrender to his will, to be his slave, his property. I glanced back at Amélie and Greta, erotic handmaidens following in our wake.
They belong to me.
He ran his palm slowly down my back and under my skirt. As he stroked the bare skin of my bottom I trembled. I wasn’t wearing knickers, naturally. This seemed to satisfy him enormously and I was pleased to have provided him with this unexpected pleasure.
Beyond the arch was another niche and as we moved on through the legs of the girl in the hood, I saw the girl who had gone down on the doorman as we were entering the club. She was lying across the table, her arms lashed at the wrists by belts that curled around the table legs. Her knees were spread so lithely they were touching the table top and a broad-shouldered man with a beard was lapping like a hungry bear from the lips of her vagina. He threw back his head, roared like a beast in the jungle, and then saw our little group around his alcove.
‘Tyler,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d see you here.’
‘Is there anywhere else to be?’
The two men hugged like lovers. The girl grinned at me. The man with the beard was an Oscar winner, a household name, and her little pussy was the fount of his inspiration.
‘Sweeter than maple syrup,’ he said, his fleshy lips obscene as they opened behind his beard. The wiry bristles were drenched. ‘I’ll catch you downstairs.’
Tyler glanced at me. ‘We’ll be there.’
The bearded man leaned closer to Tyler Copic. ‘Prizes mean zilch, what I want to know is are you taking any money?’
‘The film’s not on release yet.’
‘Yeah, but how are the rights going?’
Tyler shrugged. ‘We’ve sold A Girl’s Adventure, well, everywhere.’
‘The United States?’
‘Every territory.’
‘You’re always ahead of the trends.’
‘Is there anywhere else to be?’
The bearded man threw up his hands and was shaking his head as he turned back to the ingénue on the table. She lifted her rear from the surface, bowed her spine and her sopping pussy opened, pink and shiny as a sea shell.
‘You have to finish what you start,’ said the beard and dipped back down into the silky sea.
We continued on from the egg room beneath the arches and came to an arena lit by a cat’s cradle of criss-crossing lights. The arena was high with a domed roof like a bird’s cage and suspended from the darkness above on long ropes were a number of trapezes where girls in the masks of different birds were flying through the beams of light. The trapezes hung just above our heads and in the shadows a crowd had gathered, everyone peering up with the absorbed expressions I imagine people would have in the presence of a miracle. The masks fitted neatly over the heads of the girls, disguising them completely and giving them the look of mythical creatures from a new and better world. In a mask, in a disguise, I thought, there is no need to explain anything to anyone.
Nearly all the girls were naked, their lithe bodies varnished in sweat and shimmering like silver needles as they traced a path through the spotlights. Girls were slipping from one bar to the next and from the bars into the arms of waiting men or waiting women. Other girls as they appeared from the dark recesses around the sides of the arena were lifted up, they swung back and forth, back and forth, twisting one way and the other, passing like acrobats in the circus from trapeze to trapeze and I thought the feathery masks gave them more élan and I’m sure more confidence. The fragrance wafting about the arena was a heady elixir and I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the perfume of girls, that ripe, lusty odour, spicy perspiration on perfect flesh, sticky with exercise and lust. I could smell the cologne of their oily discharges, the pre-orgasm scent of desire, rich as a drug. I could smell sex and the smell sharpened my senses and made me wet.
There were girls in bondage, in fetish, a girl in skin-clinging latex wearing the head of the phoenix. I admired two black girls in sumptuous corsets cinched so tight it made their waists surrealistically small. Their breasts were pushed forward like polished aubergines and their long ebony legs were swinging rhythmically to and fro below the cross-spar of the same trapeze. Their heads were in the masks of mynah birds and through the pale-orange beaks I could hear them softly cooing.
A golden girl with gilded breasts likes the domes on a cathedral glided by and I felt the wind-rush from her golden feathers. I saw a girl with an aviary of birds tattooed over her entire body. There was a girl with piercings in her c
heeks and nipples, the silver chain clipped to the lips of her vagina twisting in circles like a Catherine wheel as she sailed overhead. I watched a petite blonde wearing white wings and a swan’s head that perched gracefully on her long neck. Her skin was diaphanous, her feet perched on the trapeze and her tiny bottom looked like the moon rising over some distant horizon.
The girls were so comfortable with their nudity I realised fully, and with some relief, that when I first visited Jean-Luc’s office my intense desire to cast off my school uniform was completely natural. I was stepping out of my old skin, my old self. I was stripping away the bridle and bonds of the convent girl to dress in the costume of my naked flesh. I understood, too, that Jean-Luc, the Laird and Luther Goetz were guides leading me on a journey to find a master. I glanced sideways at Tyler Copic. Was he the one? They belong to me. The notion was quixotic, energising. The girls on the trapezes, Amélie and Greta, they belonged to a special world, a secret world, my world. I felt like Alice about to begin my adventures in Wonderland.
Like the motions of the universe, the display above us was continuous and ever-changing, the black ropes and spars of the trapezes vanishing in the darkness, the glittering girls like a flock of muses appearing and disappearing through the lights like apparitions, like distant memories caught in a camera obscura. I saw a raven, a magpie, a parakeet, a falcon, a yellow-plumed bird of paradise whose display appeared to have been choreographed and whose small, perfect white breasts seemed familiar.
I glanced from side to side. Amélie and Greta were standing tamely beside Tyler watching with glowing eyes. Van Van, too, alone now, his hands thrust in his jacket pockets, his neck bent, his mouth open. Binky had left the flock and I realised that my sister had been reborn as the bird of paradise. She had been the best gymnast at school and was the most exotic object of desire in the pleasure dome. She moved from trapeze to trapeze, her long thin arms churning the air like a swimmer in the sea, like a bird on the wing, her naked body glowing in the lights as white as a sail. Tyler must have sensed that I was tempted to join her and placed his hand over my bottom to hold me still. This was performance, he seemed to say. It was for the crowd, not for him.
Being a Girl Page 19