Ambition

by Julie Burchill

  Unaccustomed to both the position and the beauty and pleasure of his client, the second boy spilled his seed in record time.

  The room was silent.

  ‘Como se chama?’ whispered the boy.

  ‘I don’t speak Portuguese,’ she said, raising herself to press her clitoris against his bony body. She was desperate to come, at that stage where nothing in the world matters but that. The pressure was starting to get to her when Tobias Pope exploded.

  ‘Jesus!’ He raised a surprisingly small foot clad in a shoe that cost more than the Brazilian boy would earn in a year and kicked his behind as he crouched on all fours over Susan. The blow separated them and made them cry out. ‘I’ve seen rabbits last longer! Rabbits with premature ejaculation problems! Get out, the pair of you, OUT!’ He flung open the door and pushed them into the hallway. ‘I’ll settle with Rodriguez tomorrow – ten centavos the pair of you! Now SCOOT!’ He slammed the door and mopped his brow. ‘Christ, you can’t get good help these days.’ He clicked his fingers twice. ‘Maria, Rosana, you’re more men than they are, I bet. See what you can do with her.’

  The girls jumped on to the bed, their expressions alert and curious.

  ‘Que quer?’ asked Maria politely.

  ‘She means what would you like,’ translated the tall girl.

  ‘What?’ Dazedly Susan raised herself up on her elbows and looked at them hungrily. ‘Oh, anything. I don’t know. What would you like to do?’

  ‘FOR JESUS CHRIST’S SAKE!’ yelled Pope. Maria and Rosana crossed themselves. ‘Do that thing before I get the bellhop in to do it!’

  Seizing a pillow and the initiative, Rosana slipped the Porthault under Susan’s behind. ‘Legs up, por favor.’ Quick as a flash she rotated her body so that she knelt on all fours over Susan, her groin in her face.

  Maria slid down the bed. ‘Open legs, please.’

  With her legs forming a perfect V – some sort of victory – Susan was set upon by the hot and avid mouths of Rosana and Maria, the one sucking and tugging at the clitoris with her lips and teeth until it swelled to three times its usual size, the other darting her long and expert tongue in and out. Sweating now, unbearably aroused, Susan put her arms up around Rosana’s waist. ‘Please, please, your dress,’ she gasped. ‘Please, I beg you, take everything off.’

  Like formation strippers, the three of them straightened up in the same split-second to pull off their clothes – Maria the bikini, Rosana the dress, Susan the Ozbek top. Then without missing a beat they were back in that swamp of sucking again, and Susan felt as though she was being drawn down, down, down into a multi-mouth quicksand. The two girls were into their stride now, reaching a plateau beyond mere professional pride, working as one body with two heads, licking and plunging in and around her, the noise of the three liquid orifices filling the huge room more deafeningly than the most sophisticated sound system.

  The audience reaction had changed from one of jaded contempt to one of tortuous expectation. Pope was still at the side of the bed but now bent double, his hands flat on the quilt as he peered at the junction of the three wet holes. Thalia and the boy had abandoned the desultory queue and stood on either side of him, their beautiful young faces looking over his shoulders like some grotesque perversion of a family portrait.

  ‘Please.’ Susan buried her face in Rosana’s warm and salty stomach. ‘Please let me. Please help me. I’m going to come.’ She did.

  The girls slumped, blind with sweat, against each other, two brown bodies and one white in a heap. A tic in Tobias Pope’s temple made its presence felt.

  ‘Get off her. Off her, you whores. I haven’t had my money’s worth yet.’ He turned to the boy. ‘You. Reclaim the dyke.’

  The boy looked like Marlon Brando with the souvenirs of a bad skin, the scars and punctures that in moderation make a beautiful face even more heartbreaking. He turned his back to Pope and Thalia and stepped out of his jeans. Climbing on to the bed he swatted Rosana and Maria gently, like a lioness with pesky cubs. He covered Susan with his body where she lay panting on her stomach, lifted her hips and slipped her skirt off. ‘Desculpe,’ he said, taking one, two, three pillows from the head of the bed and putting them under her.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  For answer he knelt behind her, took a buttock in each hand and thrust into her. ‘No spik Inglês,’ he apologized as he did so.

  She screamed. He was huge. ‘Please stop. Please.’ He continued, unperturbed. She looked over her shoulder into his face, as clear-eyed and untroubled as a three-year-old watching its favourite TV show. Back and forth moved his hips, back and forth moved the huge thing inside her.

  ‘You two!’ Pope gestured frantically at the dazed girls on the bed. ‘Suck! Suck her tits! PRONTO!’

  They crawled clumsily up to the copulating pair and wriggled beneath Susan’s straight arms. Lying on their backs they fumbled at her breasts, latching on to the nipples within seconds of each other and sucking greedily.

  Susan looked down at them as the boy fucked her. Their eyes were closed and they looked almost happy. She felt a wave of fondness for these strangers who sucked at her, one who would die of AIDS within the year, one who would marry a hideous and humane Canadian chiropractor, have many children and cosmetic surgeries and be treated like a duchess till the end of her days.

  The feeling in her nipples connected with her vagina. She looked over her shoulder and smiled at him; he smiled modestly back, proud of himself, a real pro. She touched her clitoris, and the boy behind her and the girls beneath her exploded in a moment of non-specific ecstasy. She threw back her head and howled.

  They separated, shiny with sweat which made lewd noises as their skin unstuck. They smiled with embarrassment and avoided each other’s eyes.

  ‘OK.’ Pope’s voice flat. ‘Order champagne whatever you want, wash and go. I’ll be back in ten minutes I don’t want to find anybody in this room who’s the wrong side of beige.’ He left.

  Rosana, Maria and the boy looked questioningly at Susan. ‘Please, the bathroom?’

  ‘There.’ She pointed.

  The door closed behind the three.

  Thalia walked to the foot of the bed. She folded her arms and one foot in its high heel tapped slowly on the floor. ‘Desculpe – excuse me, please. But haven’t you forgotten something?’

  ‘What? Please.’ In her disarmed state, the fierce and beautiful girl in black frightened her.

  ‘Yes, I remember. It’s me. You’ve forgotten me.’ The sadness of Thalia’s voice was a thin disguise. ‘You fucked all those people and you forgot about me. Poor little Thalia.’ She sighed deeply. ‘Always this is the way.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t think straight. I don’t know what you want but if it’s money I’m sure—’

  ‘MONEY!’ The girl was on the bed now, crouching over Susan’s naked body. She held up her hand, and Susan cringed. ‘See this?’ She laughed shortly. ‘No, baby, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to love you. Like this.’

  Later Susan Street reflected that if a man had been a fly on the wall of the bedroom on the Avenida Atlantica that night, he would never again ask with a sneer what on earth lesbians did in bed. The sneer, and the smile, and the superiority, would have been wiped right off. Because a world away from Rosana and Maria and their delicate mouthwork, there was Thalia and her endless fury.

  Already sore from the three boys, she couldn’t help twisting and arching, couldn’t help grabbing the girl and kissing her – Thalia viciously spat huge mouthfuls of saliva into her mouth as she did so – and couldn’t help those words pouring out of her mouth, all four-letter and the most obscene one being LOVE, until Thalia pulled out in disgust.

  ‘You. You. You’re the whore. Not me. You know why? Because you love it. You don’t have to do these things. I do. With your advantages I could have done – why, I could have done anything. You disgust me. You whore.’ She stood over Susan on the bed and spat on her. ‘And you know what’s the worst
thing? I could fall in love with a whore like you.’

  She was still lying on the bed in a state of shock when Pope came back. It was still before nine and the noises of revelry from the city were getting louder.

  ‘Enjoy it?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ She felt shattered. But would rather have flung herself from the balcony than let him know.

  ‘Good for you.’ He opened the wardrobe.

  ‘Are we going to the carnival?’

  ‘What?’ He laughed. ‘Drunkenness, drug abuse, stupid peasants in stupid costumes and street crime? If I want that I can go to the South Bronx or Brixton.’ He looked at his watch. ‘No, we’ve been good tourists – we’ve fucked the natives and helped the economy. Get dressed, we’re going home.’

  She sat in the aeroplane over London feeling used and shabby under the complexion-wrecking lights and thought about the weekend. So she’d slept with various swarthy types of either sex and come dangerously close to having her cervix split open by one of them . . . big deal. It had only been a Hispanic variation on her dark distant past. Then why did she feel so bad about it?

  She ordered a split of Cristal and tried to shake the feeling. The really remarkable thing had been the Montes episode – what had that meant?

  On an impulse she copied the number from his card into her Filofax and wrote by it LOUISA MOUNT. She tore the card into tiny pieces and put it under her seat. She knew Pope went through her things when she was sleeping and with a mind like his he could easily put one and one together and come up with Luis and Cristina Montes, some relation.

  She didn’t know why she was keeping the number. Maybe because after what she had been through in Rio, a man with a burning desire to wipe Tobias Pope from the face of the earth was the lifestyle accessory every clever girl needed this year.

  FIVE

  ‘Susan?’ Bryan O’Brien queried. All eyes in the editorial meeting were on her. Someone sniggered.

  ‘Oh, yes, Bryan?’ She’d been thinking about Rio.

  ‘I said great lead. Sex, miscegenation—’ He turned to the most refined of the reporters, Charterhouse boy, and said in his broadest outback accent, ‘That’s inter-racial screwing for you Limey oiks – and money. Three kinds of dirt. Great.’

  The assembled staff looked disappointed.

  ‘Thank you, Bryan.’ She shot a triumphant smile around the room and demurely lowered her eyes.

  ‘Can you stay behind for a minute, Sue?’ The hacks filed reluctantly out. When the door had closed behind the last one, he asked her, ‘Have you heard about the Moorsom business?’

  ‘Joe Moorsom? What business?’

  ‘Dirty business, Sue. He plans to ask some questions in the House about Tobias buying out Tooth. You know, foreigners coming over here, taking our newspapers – good socialist internationalist stuff. Tobias finds him very irritating, Sue.’

  ‘But it’s not important, surely. What’s a question in the House? It hasn’t hurt Murdoch.’

  ‘A piece of grit in the eye isn’t important either, Sue. But it causes a hell of a lot of irritation and it can lead to something nasty if you don’t get it out quick. Tobias seems to think Moorsom won’t stop there, that he’ll make a habit of it, cause some bad publicity. The thing is, Sue, I was talking to one of the lobby boys and they said you were friendly with Moorsom, oh, years ago, when you were still a reporter . . . ?’ He looked at her expectantly.

  ‘I don’t particularly like the way the boys in the newsroom use the word friendly when it concerns a man and a woman, Bryan,’ she said coldly. ‘And I can assure you that there is not nor ever has been anything between Joe Moorsom and me.’

  ‘OK, Sue.’ He looked at her oddly. Damn, she’d gone too far. She left the office. He knew she was lying, she could tell. There was something between her and Joe Moorsom, something no one else shared. There was a fifteen-year-old rentboy with a scare thrown into him and a story to tell. Rupert Grey was thirteen when his parents discovered he was ‘queer’, as his father put it. Till then, his parents had thought of him merely as ‘theatrical’.

  But one day a note from the headmaster of Rupert’s minor public school arrived, requesting the urgent attendance of Major and Mrs Grey. There they were horrified to hear that their son had been found below the assembly stage engaging in oral sex with a timid Chinese boy while above them the school choir performed the Saint Matthew Passion.

  Rupert did not help his case by uttering a low highly audible moan of delight at the words ‘oral sex .

  It was decided that he would be given one more chance to ‘pull himself together’. He would attend counselling sessions twice a week and if he could rid himself of his ‘perverse desires’, the head told the shocked parents, the boy would have a good future. ‘He is naturally bright, but lazy, and spends a good deal of his time showing off in front of the class.’

  For the next two weeks Rupert found home life unbearable. Whereas before he had been allowed to lounge in his ‘boudoir’, free to enjoy ‘the delicious view in the looking glass’ undisturbed and read aloud choice passages of Wilde, Huysmans and E.M. Forster, he now found a concerned parental head popping around the door every ten minutes to see if ‘Everything was right?’

  ‘Mother, if you mean in your typically bourgeois way am I engaged in orgiastic delights with smooth-skinned China boys, sweat-oiled Negroes and hirsute Greeks, the answer is – only in the imagination. Now shut the door on your way out, there’s a duck.’

  One evening his father knocked on the door.

  ‘Entre.’

  His father entered, looking serious. ‘Father, this is a rare treat! Why, if I’d known you were coming I’d have laid on some very tall blond Nazis for you to kill. Pray, take a pew.’ Rupert gestured at a pile of silken cushions beneath a huge sepia poster of Rudolf Valentino.

  ‘I’ll stand, if you don’t mind. Son, I think it’s time we had a jaw. I know that you think I’m an old fuddy-duddy – I am, and proud of it. But I’ve had a lifetime in the army, and I’ve seen all sorts of men. You don’t shock me. I’ve seen queers that would make your hair curl—’

  ‘Please,’ murmured Rupert.

  ‘I know that you hate your mother and me but, you may laugh, we’ve only ever wanted the best for you. I’ve feared the worst about you for a while now. But your mother’s a woman—’

  ‘Lucky bitch,’ the boy whispered under his breath, examining his fingernails. His nails, bare of varnish, looked positively, obscenely naked.

  ‘—and you’re breaking her heart. Mine went years ago. All I want to say is, try to understand. Your mother and I grew up in a different world. We didn’t have the advantages youth have today, but it was a simple life, and a happy one. I sometimes feel sorry for young people nowadays, there are so many temptations—’

  ‘Father, have you ever considered abandoning the army in order to set up a small petit-point sampler retail outlet? You’ve just managed to pack more cliches and homilies into that speech than an entire week’s output of The Archers.’

  ‘Listen, son. What I’m trying to say is, you’re like an alien to us. We don’t seem to be able to speak the same language. But maybe, just perhaps – well, together we can work this thing out. You’re our son, queer or not, and we love you.’ The major stood there, looking at his Hush Puppies.

  Rupert flung himself backwards on to his satin quilt, hugged his knees and burst into peals of laughter. ‘Cue the violins, bring out the onions – father and son embrace, mother weeps with happiness, celestial choirs sing and Douglas Sirk yells “PRINT!” – oh, Father, you’re positively camp!’

  The snooping of his parents, the sniggering at school – Rupert had adopted what he called the Law of Queens: ‘Never complain, never explain’ – and the desire for ‘something grand and glamorous’ all conspired to put Rupert on the last train to London one Monday night. Having forged his father’s signature on a cheque and withdrawn five hundred pounds from the bank, his plan was to check into a West End hotel and ‘pu
rsue a stage career’. A gay London friend had promised to introduce him to the iconoclastic ballet dancer Sebastiane Boxer, who was widely believed to be more than a little interested in ‘Young men with Talent’.

  He spent his first week in London drunk on pink champagne. In the evenings, when his dreams of glory were not good enough company, he wandered along to Piccadilly to get ‘a tasty takeaway’. On the eighth day one of them stole his cash and he was forced to do a runner from the hotel, leaving his precious clothes behind to avoid detection. He went to a bar called Bette’s to drown his sorrows at someone else’s expense account and ended up in a transvestite squat in Spitalfields.

  After another two weeks, Sebastiane Boxer pronounced himself ready to see the boy. They met at his huge studio at St Katharine’s Wharf, Boxer all charm as he promised the boy an audition. That night they slept together, though Rupert reflected that sleep was the last thing on Boxer’s mind. He felt stiff in all the wrong places as he limbered up the morning after, watched silently and sullenly by the rest of the troupe.

  ‘OK, Rupert, let’s see if you’re as good vertically as you are horizontally,’ Boxer called from the stalls.

  Rupert gave the cassette boy the nod, and the strains of Sheherazade filled the stage. But not for long. He was mid-jeté when there was a frantic signal from the stalls and the music was clicked off. Rupert fell to earth with a bump. He felt like Icarus.

  ‘My, you dance just like Isadora Duncan!’ said Boxer, striding on to the stage. ‘Right after she broke her neck, that is.’ He looked at the boy and shook his head kindly. ‘You’re a pretty child, Rupert, but you have about as much talent as my charlady. I suggest you go home and continue with your two times table.’

  When he got back to the squat, the place was wrecked, the occupants evicted and the sad remains of his finery dumped in the street. Weeping, he cadged a coin from a passer-by and called his mother. She told him tearfully that his father had gone to the police over the forged cheque. Hanging up, he realized there was no going home.