‘Gustav,’ he said brightly. ‘You’re in town?’
Pause. For some reason, Greta was holding her breath.
‘Listen, I have found something with a lot of potential.’
Pause. He was rolling the goo between his thumb and first finger like a gardener with the earth. She was fertile soil waiting to be ploughed and sown.
‘Young. A bit ungainly, you know, the usual.’
Pause.
‘They always need training, Gustav. This one’s a quick learner.’
It sounded to Greta as if they were talking about a racehorse and she thought Richard was probably a trainer and spent a lot of time outdoors; he had a sun tan already and it was only June. While he was listening, he slid his sticky finger into her mouth and the taxi driver was watching in the rear-view mirror as she sucked it.
‘... OK, we’ll be at the gallery,’ Richard said finally and glanced at his watch. ‘Say 12 o’clock.’ He paused again. ‘Yes, that’s an idea. Bring it along.’
He closed the phone and turned to her. ‘Good,’ he added with a thoughtful expression.
‘Who was that?’ she asked.
He narrowed his eyes and rubbed the end of her nose with his wet finger. ‘Let’s play a game,’ he suggested. ‘It’s fun.’
‘I like games,’ she said and really meant it.
‘OK. Listen very carefully: you must do everything – everything I say. And not ask why.’
‘That doesn’t sound like much of a game to me.’
‘But there’s a prize.’
Her eyes brightened. ‘What?’
‘You mustn’t ask,’ he said.
‘Meany.’
‘Or it won’t be a surprise.’
She tapped her bottom lip with a finger. ‘But what if it’s not a very good prize?’ she asked.
‘The best prizes are like unicorns. They don’t appear unless you believe in them.’
That didn’t make much sense to Greta so she just shrugged.
‘A deal?’ he asked.
She pretended to think about it but she had already made up her mind. ‘A deal,’ she replied and they shook hands.
The streets were crowded as they stepped out of the cab. The sunshine was warm on her bare shoulders and the air smelled of ripe peaches. Richard reached urgently for her wrist and dragged her in a mad dash to the last available table at the street café on the corner beating two other couples in the process.
‘You’re quick,’ she said breathlessly.
‘You’ve got to grab every opportunity,’ he told her. ‘Grab it and hold on tight.’ He was holding her two hands across the table, he squeezed hard, then let go to snap his fingers for the waiter.
The morning croissants had been tipped down the waste grinder and Greta was starving. She reached for the menu, wincing as she changed positions on the metal chair, a blush colouring her cheeks and neck. She was learning new things about herself and knew that, of all knowledge, it is self-knowledge that matters most. If she were cast now in Macbeth or Titus Andronicus she would willingly submit her flesh to the ravages of madmen. She admired excess in others and was discovering an untapped well of excess in herself. She even liked the word excess. It was like sex only backwards.
Richard ordered a full English breakfast.
She looked up from the menu. ‘I’ll have the same.’
The waiter ignored her and Richard glanced at her with raised eyebrows as he continued the order. ‘And the lady will have the wild oats with strawberries.’ Oats, she was thinking, as the waiter wrote it down. ‘Two fresh orange juices and a double espresso.’
We’re already playing the game, she realised. ‘You can never be too rich or too thin,’ she said with sarcasm when the waiter had gone.
‘Or too obedient,’ Richard added.
Then he smiled and it occurred to her that she liked this game, whatever the prize. She was going to ask Richard if he trained racehorses but it was more fun not knowing anything, his job, his surname, his hobbies.
She focused on his blue eyes. ‘People hate being looked at on the tube,’ she remarked.
‘Not everyone.’
‘Everyone,’ she said emphatically. ‘How many girls have you given your number to?’
‘Very few as it happens.’
‘I bet that’s not true.’
‘They are always very carefully selected.’
She didn’t really believe him but was pleased anyway. ‘I was chosen?’ she asked.
He tapped the end of her nose. ‘Questions. Questions. Questions,’ he said, and he wasn’t smiling.
She tucked into her oats and strawberries. It was surprisingly good and it seemed as if even her taste-buds had had awoken like Snow White after a long interminable sleep. She glanced up. He was studying her, watching her lips.
‘Selected,’ she said, and he wiped milk from the corners of her mouth. ‘Even I didn’t know I was going to call you.’
‘Saturday evening and you’re looking at the TV listings in the paper.’
‘All the boys my age are so boring.’
‘You’re... 20?’
‘Almost.’
‘What kind of school did you go to?’
She didn’t answer.
‘A boarding school. A convent,’ he suggested and she frowned because he was right. ‘With nasty little nuns.’
‘Vicious, actually.’
‘You miss the discipline, Greta May,’ he said. ‘It is the secret of being a great actress.’
‘That’s what they said at drama school.’
‘And they were right.’
He carried on eating and Greta thought back to the brief conversation when she was in the bath; she’d had a feeling as Richard was leaving to get the pizzas that he knew exactly who she was, that they weren’t strangers who had met by chance on a train. She’d thought it then and she thought it now. She had been selected, as he put it, chosen for a role and, if that were so, she intended to give the best performance of her life.
Greta wriggled in her chair and the lightning flash across the marks of discipline made her wriggle even more.
The two couples they had beaten to the table were still waiting, each glaring at their partner, blaming them for the delay, and when she thought back to those months when she’d lived with Jason what had lodged in her memory was the pettiness of it all, his reprimands to make her better, his smelly socks, the sink full of saucepans and grey stubble in her toothbrush.
In a relationship there is always tension but with a stranger all those pressures are forgotten and you can just give in to your fantasies. Her mind stretched back over the three years since she’d left school and what she recalled most was doing things she didn’t really want to be doing, learning her craft with dull repetition, reading for parts that rarely came, the incessant ennui. She wasn’t exactly sure what ennui meant but it was from a play by someone wicked like Jean Genet or Guy de Maupassant and she knew it was something intolerable.
Richard stirred his espresso.
‘Why didn’t you get me one?’
He didn’t reply and she remembered she wasn’t supposed to ask.
‘Coffee bleaches the calcium from young bones,’ he then said.
‘What about my cigarettes?’ she asked hopefully.
‘Ah, yes.’ He had insisted that she leave her bag at his flat, she didn’t need money or her mobile phone, he explained, and carried her Camels in his pocket. He gave them to her and she slipped one between her pouty lips. It waggled as she spoke.
‘Do you have my lighter?’
He took it from his pocket and held it up between two fingers, but instead of giving it to her, he pushed the ashtray across the table. ‘Take the cigarette out of your mouth and break it into small pieces.’
The cigarette froze.
‘What?’
‘I don’t need to repeat myself, do I, Greta?’
The game, she thought, and reluctantly did as she was told, breaking the back of the Camel
and discarding it.
‘Now take them all out of the packet, one at a time, and break them into the ashtray.’
She sniffed haughtily but it was for her own good she realised and obeyed his instructions. He watched the pile of ruined cigarettes fill the ashtray and then crushed the empty packet.
‘Smoking is strictly against the rules,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know there were other rules as well.’
‘Then you must learn, mustn’t you,’ he said firmly and she nodded tamely because she knew he was right. Richard pushed the ashtray to one side. ‘Come on,’ he added, ‘you need a new dress. That’s for evenings.’
He paid the bill and the girls who had been waiting for the table gave her a dirty look as they passed. Richard took her hand as if it were a part of him and they crossed the road to wander among stalls of glittery tops and turquoise jewellery, healing crystals and flak jackets. She slowed to watch a cartoonist drawing sketches but Richard tugged on her hand and she trotted along like a pony, clip-clopping in her backless black suede shoes behind him.
She could smell Indian spices and ice cream, the sharp tang of petrol as the fire-eater blew streams of flame from his blackened lips. Richard tossed her lighter into his hat. Everything was going, going, going. She had left The Stage on the table at the restaurant. She didn’t need to search for a part. She already had her role.
Boys were taking off their T-shirts and tucking them into the backs of their jeans and girls were wearing less and less and she thought one day a clever designer would come up with the ultimate design and dress them in nothing at all.
As they moved into the heart of the market the crowd was more dense and people were staring at her as if they knew her from somewhere but couldn’t quite recall where. It puzzled Greta that she was getting so much attention and decided not to think about it and just enjoy it. She was seeing herself as if from outside herself, her aura faintly glowing. Like her bottom.
She gave it a little wiggle and at that moment her line of vision was struck by a sulky brunette in a silver dress, her body moving amorphously, her velvet eyes as she lowered her dark glasses full of energy and secrets. She ran her tongue over her lips and there was something carnal in the way she slid her fingers across Greta’s bare arm as they crossed.
Greta straightened her shoulders and swung her hips. Richard was still holding her hand when they stumbled upon the perfect stall where white cotton dresses swayed above on a line like clouds in the breeze. They went through the rail and Richard found a Little Miss Muffet outfit with puffy sleeves and a high neck. It was truly awful. She pulled a face and then shrugged when his stern look reminded Greta there was a prize at stake.
‘You have to try it on.’
‘What?’ she said. She couldn’t believe it...
‘Here,’ he said emphatically.
‘Richard...’
He folded his arms.
‘Don’t you remember,’ she whispered, ‘you ripped my knickers off. I’m not wearing anything.’
He held up his palm as if it were a paddle and showed how it could be put to good use. Greta looked around her.
‘There are like... loads of people.’
Sweat prickled her armpits. Her cheeks coloured. He wanted to see her naked in the busy market and the scary thought struck her that she wanted it too. She had a craving like thirst or hunger – or for nicotine – an irrepressible desire to expose her breasts that tingled, her moist pussy, her bottom with its pink stripes like a badge of obedience and humiliation. She wanted to take her clothes off in the market place just as she had done all those years ago in the garden.
Richard was staring into her eyes as she reached for the thin black straps and slid them one at a time over her shoulders. She hesitated. There were corrugations on his brow, a look of impatience about his lips. She continued, peeling the material from her breasts. She paused for just a second, pulled at the tie and let the dress fall shimmering about her ankles.
As Greta stepped away from the black pool of material she was overcome by a surge of contentment. The tingle that crossed her bottom as it was exposed to the air tempted a squirt of moisture from her lower lips and her flush turned crimson as she reached for the Little Miss Muffet costume. Richard was about to give it to her but suddenly changed his mind.
‘No, it’s not you,’ he said, and gave it back to the stallholder.
Greta was so disorientated by Richard’s ability to turn the normal world upside down, she hadn’t noticed the stallholder trembling slightly, his mouth ajar. A crowd had gathered as if they were at a slave market in ancient Athens and a few words from a play slipped into her mind: It’s not a woman’s beauty that bewitches, but her nobility, a line from Euripides, and she threw back her head and stood proudly naked for everyone to see.
Richard pointed at another dress hovering above on a wire coat hanger and she’d had her eye on that one all along. The stallholder lifted it down using a hook on a long pole and she remembered the sulky-eyed brunette as the soft cotton received her curves, the bodice tight, hugging her stomach, revealing the chasm between her breasts. The skirt was embroidered in the same pattern of fleurs-de-lys that decorated the ceiling in Richard’s bedroom and Greta couldn’t help wondering if this were more than mere chance, that the chain of events were like the links of a chain all connected and binding her to her true destiny.
As she stood straight again the silent audience spontaneously put their hands together in applause before merging back into the crowd.
‘There. That wasn’t difficult, was it?’
She shook her head and smoothed down the fabric.
‘One day, Greta, you’ll demand it.’
She wasn’t exactly sure what he meant but couldn’t ask. Richard considered her carefully before nodding to the stallholder. He took out his wallet and when the man folded her black dress, Richard waved it away before he could place it in a carrier bag.
‘She won’t be needing it,’ he said, and again she bit her tongue to stop herself asking why.
Chapter Four – The Object
GRETA FELT RATHER SMUG as they wandered away from the stall. She would never have dreamed of taking her clothes off in a crowded market before, her breasts exposed, her pubic hair damp and faintly smelly, her bottom bare and criss-crossed with the geometry of her first thrashing.
She had a suspicion that Richard had a taste for corporal punishment and there would be more to come. The thought made her both shudder and tingle at the same time. She had reached the conclusion, at least subconsciously, that it was good for her. She was wet clay on the potter’s wheel. Each slap and spank was moulding her, making her, each strike of the belt turning her into something symmetrical and perfect.
Then, there was something else, something utterly amazing. After the strapping she had taken, her orgasm reached new heights, new depths, new tones and textures. Richard had burnished all the nerve endings in her little bottom, illuminated that mysterious dark place that her own fingertip had petted gently and buggered her mercilessly. Magnificently. She slowed for a second to consider the game, the sense that she was taking part in a theatrical casting, and wondered what the role really entailed.
Her hand was jerked and her heels drummed a tattoo as she hurried like a geisha to catch up.
Richard tightened the grip on her hand, not with affection, but as if he were a strict parent with a child, or a teacher with a disobedient girl. She knew there was no future with Richard... like in Richard & Greta, Greta & Richard, but what made the smile widen across her full pink lips was the realisation that she didn’t want to be a part of something, one half of a whole, the other shoe in a pair. She just wanted to be herself, explore her own potential.
Potential? The word came into her mind like an echo and she wondered where it could have come from.
‘Come along,’ he said.
Talk about a slave driver!
At the end of the market two plump girls in bondage were stepping from a
taxi and Richard held the door for them before ushering her in.
‘The Serpentine Gallery, please,’ he said in his nice accent and the driver tooted his horn as he pulled rudely into the traffic.
Richard turned to take a close look at her. He removed her lip gloss from his pocket, redrew her lips and gave her a tissue to blot them. He straightened her hair with his fingers and then used the same tissue to flick the dust from the toes of her shoes.
‘They don’t really go, do they?’ he said and she couldn’t help feeling that she’d let him down.
‘Sorry,’ she murmured.
He sat back with a cross look. Greta almost asked what was troubling him but knew she mustn’t. Was it the black shoes? The worry lines creasing her brow? Was she looking like Medusa with her wayward coils of hair? The No Smoking sign on the glass partition made her desperate for a quick puff but her cigarettes had gone, even her lighter, and it had been a present from Tara. She felt a sigh rise through her bones and entwined her fingers in Richard’s hand for comfort.
‘How am I doing?’ she asked.
He fluttered his hand in an iffy gesture and she felt terribly disappointed. She was trying to be good and resolved to try even harder.
The taxi stopped at the gallery and she stood quietly to one side as he paid the fare.
‘Don’t let me down now,’ he said.
‘I won’t, I promise,’ she answered and really meant it.
He walked quickly ahead and she tripped along the path into the gallery. It was warm inside, the light softened. A few people were moving like dancers below the high domed ceiling. On display was a collection of mixed media sculptures, smooth voluptuous objects in wood, steel and stone, each form so seductive you wanted to reach for them and, so rare in a gallery, you were invited to do so. She ran her palm over sweeping curves of white stone, across fans of shiny copper, over stiff carved phalluses of grained polished wood.
A Girl's Adventure - full length erotic novel Page 3