Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels)

by Chloë Thurlow

  There is a moment’s melancholy after orgasm. Something has come and something has gone. Something created has crumbled to dust. Something saved is spent. There were twelve arched windows spaced evenly like the digits of a clock around the tower. He seemed to know it was time to go and I felt like the lover when her man leaves to return to his wife, and perhaps that’s what I was.

  Eight

  The Dancer

  HE LEFT ME PANTING, tingling from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, my rump burning, my rear slicked in his sweet jism.

  I thought of Umah and smiled.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing matters. It was the sheikh who made my body sing. A digit slipped instinctively between my wet cleft and the pad of that moistened fingertip ran in circles around my clitoris, the feeling making me drowsy, and I thought the shape of my distended clit was the same as the dome above my head, that magnified a million million times the two would make a perfect fit.

  My eyes closed. I must have slept and, when I awoke, the room with its twelve arched windows was silvery with starlight that bathed my body in fairy dust. I showered beneath the water jet and dressed in my suit of clothes.

  When I reached the door from which we had entered the walkway around the battlements, I was surprised to find it locked. I pushed at one side, then the other. I ran my palms over the woodwork; it was smooth, buffed by wind and sand, the surface furnished with a brass ring coated in verdigris and a row of studs spaced along the cross spars. The key hole was framed in a decorative brass plate. I bent to look, ran my fingers over the design, and realised it was the shape of a spider. I tapped tentatively with the brass ring, the sound muted in all that empty space, and stopped myself knocking again. It was more dignified to wait, to allow events to unfold.

  The night was warm, clean, pure, the sky like velvet, the light pale as a ghost. I wandered along the battlements watching shooting stars, the death display of exploding planets, the music rising from the compound slow, lyrical, hypnotic. I was a prisoner of the universe and wondered for a moment if I would be able to fly should I leap from the fortress walls. I was locked behind a studded door but felt totally free.

  On board the boat I had found myself, the inner me, masked in the subtle manipulations and influences of our times, the me hidden by the very clothes I chose, or rather had been chosen for me by designers and photographers, the editors of magazines, by the consumer machine. Little girls are dressing like adults, their hobby now is shopping not playing, their dream to grow breasts so they can flaunt them in the high street. Long before boys awaken from the long sleep of childhood, girls are aware of their sexual selves, the erotic potential school and society and mothers combine to crush.

  I thought about Mummy with her straw hat and leather gloves, a hostage to the garden with its busy trellises hung with wisteria and roses, its old olive jars bursting with rhododendrons, the plastic paddling pool folded away in the shed like a guilty secret. Mother had always done the right thing, said the right thing, dressed and thought and behaved the way she had been told to dress and think and behave. Once we moved back to England from Geneva, Daddy started doing whatever it is he does in Whitehall, and Mummy became a shadow; a woman who had lost herself because she had never found herself. She had always done the right thing, and I had a feeling that the right thing is always going to be the wrong thing, that you find yourself by stepping out of yourself.

  Mother was tall and slender. She could have been a dancer, an actress, a something, and she chose to be a garden ornament, a foot soldier in the war against the weeds inside the garden walls and the chaos outside in the big bad world.

  Time slips by like the wind.

  I waited. It is the way of the desert. When the lock finally turned and the door opened, it was Umah who had come to get me. He looked nervous, and I stroked his cheek as you may stroke a spooked pony to reassure him. He beckoned, drawing me behind him as you tease a fish from the sea on the end of a line. I followed barefoot down the narrow flights of dark stairs to the courtyard.

  During the day, the fort had the shabby look of a grand ruin from the Middle Ages. At night, a celestial display above our heads, the space lit by oil lamps and flaming torches, the compound was vibrant with music, dancing flames from an open fire, the smell of frankincense, hashish, cooking oil, the spiced and seasoned foods arranged on wooden platters and in silver dishes under the arches along one side of the courtyard, the women moving like whispers in their long flimsy djellabas, the bells about their ankles softly ringing.

  Musicians played flutes cut from gourds, lutes of the sort troubadours played at the time of Shakespeare, timbrels, finger cymbals, drums covered in stretched animal skins. The drummers maintained a complex, contradictory beat in an atonal rhythm different from anything I had ever heard before. It was music that didn’t merely awaken the senses, but impregnated them with lush sensuality.

  As I moved beyond the musicians I saw the girl who had vanished earlier in the grip of Azar’s big hand. She was dancing, framed by the firelight, her movements captivating, mesmerising, so astonishing it took my breath away. I gasped. My heart beat faster. Sweat prickled my underarms. Samir was sitting cross-legged on a mat among a group of men. He turned, aware of my presence. Our eyes met and he flashed a look I had never seen before. As he focused once more on the girl, I did the same, my toes moving involuntarily in the red dust beneath my feet.

  The girl was performing a belly dance, leisurely, to the rhythm of the slow drum, as if she were making love, her gestures snakelike, her hands above her head plaiting a rope from the sky, her hips, sharp as knives, cutting a poem from the sultry night. I was moved by the sheer immodesty of the display, but also the immodesty of her costume that didn’t so much conceal her nakedness, her sexuality, but enhanced it. She wasn’t dancing, she was masturbating, she was performing fellatio and cunnilingus with herself and everyone who saw her. Me included.

  The girl’s head was covered in a beaded, tight-fitting cap which extended over her face in a veil made from the same pearly-white beads. Her fiery eyes looked out from two diamond-shaped slits and the pearls hung in strings that jiggled over the lower part of her face. The same pattern of loosely-threaded beads stretched across her breasts and, as she moved, so one breast was briefly uncovered and then the other, her timing so precise that she was both continually covered and naked at the same time, the effect like a shimmer, a flicker, a mirage, her restrained movements accompanied by the jangle of the bracelets slithering up and down her arms and the bells about her hennaed feet.

  The dancer wasn’t fat, she was thin with gracefully carved limbs, but she had a belly, a small, round perfectly formed dome of gyrating flesh that made my eyes water and my mouth go dry. Her belly button was adorned with a green gemstone and, below her belly, just above the pubic line, she wore a skirt of chiffon strips like those in the cabin on the boat, each tucked into a beaded belt, the transparent veils shifting in such a way that you could see glimpses of her pudenda, her round bottom when she turned; these hints of her sex coupled with the fact that her face was hidden by the beaded veil all the more alluring.

  I had never been attracted to girls. I had experimented, of course. All girls do. But that night in the desert, my vagina throbbed with yearning, ached with desire. I wanted to feel that little round belly pressed against mine, her tongue in my cleft, my tongue sucking her sweet juices. I desired her as I had never desired any man. Not even the sheikh.

  It was at first a shock that such an erotic performance would exist here among primitive people, but I realised instantly that this was the prejudice of my old world coming back to haunt me. We assume we have conquered the market in all things sexual with our tabloid newspapers, celebrity gossip, the reality shows that capture a world that is unreal; silicone breasts, lap dancing, speed dating. We imagine the girls in magazines and the hunks that guide them into limousines are having better sex, more sex, tantric sex, erotic sex, threesomes, orgies.

  We ask o
urselves why our own sex lives are empty without stopping to think that the flawless breasts and square jaws decorating the covers of magazines have been doctored, air-brushed, back-lit, that half-starved girls and pumped up men on steroids aren’t having better sex, they aren’t having sex at all. Our world is a fantasy, a sleight of hand, a trick of the eye. Even the money in our banks is an illusion. Perhaps Mother knows that. Perhaps that’s why she has escaped from the world and vanished into the garden.

  The men and women in that compound on the edge of the desert, an unmarked and unmapped oasis in Africa, didn’t have these thoughts, these doubts. They were living the life we imagined, the life we dreamed existed, a life guided by the senses; the forces of nature. These people were real and, as I stood there with my long skinny body hidden by the white tunic and pantaloons, I felt invisible, mind without matter, the light left from a shooting star that died long, long ago.

  The dance went on and on, the girl’s shadow magnified by the firelight and repeated around the walls like a vast mural. The music quickened, the girl moved faster without losing grace, that quintessential object of desire becoming more desirable, a reminder that if there is a God he placed us here on this earth to mate, to love, to find joy and happiness in everything we do and where else but in our sexual nature can we find complete and utter bliss? We are not made to work, to save, to achieve, to appear on reality TV. We were designed for sex. This thought had been approaching me every since I sailed away on the sheikh’s boat, and the girl’s erotic performance had finally embraced my mind like a revelation.

  The dance ended. The string players and cymbals stopped suddenly and, to the slow beat of a single drum, the girl vanished like a will-o’-the-wisp, her feet barely touching the ground as she slipped into the shadows and was gone. There was no applause. The men remained where they were sitting while the women floated from the arches with bowls of baked fish, roast chicken dipped in red sauce, green peppers, onions, falafel, rice, unleavened bread hot from the oven.

  The men dug in with their fingers, working the rice and peppers and fish together into precise balls they popped into their mouths, and it occurred to me that even in the way the people took their food there was a spontaneity, a naturalness we had reduced to ritual with our knives and forks, our manners and conventions. We had formalised eating to a level where all joy had gone, replacing the taste sense with alcohol, a glass of white at lunch, a beer after work, a good Rioja at dinner, but not too much. Even our needy little greed for the grape we diminish counting units, drinking, while regretting every glass; eating, while trying to stay thin; seeking friends who endorse our own opinions. People like us. I suddenly didn’t want be people like us. I wanted to be people like them. I wanted to be me and, standing there in the moonlight knowing no one, without a name, in mortal danger, I felt more like me and more alive than I had ever felt in my twenty-two and a half years.

  I watched until Samir beckoned and sat where he indicated, at his side but just behind him, in the circle but not a part of the circle. I noticed Hanif, out of blue jeans and wearing a white djellaba, the same as Samir, his white turban held in place by golden braids. He was one of several men who were clearly chieftains of some sort, while Azar, Mohammed and Umah were part of a secondary group of a dozen or so men who completed the ring in the shadows beyond the firelight.

  The two older men who disapproved of my presence wore the same sour expressions and one of them spat as the sheikh slowly unwound the turban I was wearing, unveiling me like a painting. I shook my head and my sun-bleached curls spilled about my shoulders. He was showing me off as people show holiday snaps after their two weeks in Tenerife; as in the days of exploration travellers returned to Europe with rare birds and tobacco and natives with bones through their noses.

  The men continued eating, nodding meditatively as they studied my hair, my eyes, their dark gaze following my fingers as I went to unpin the spider brooch at my breast. In those weeks on the boat, I had grown accustomed to nudity. Without clothes I was the version of me that fitted my vision of me, the alter that was real, organic, pagan. Perhaps I may have felt a need to compete with the beauty who had danced in those diaphanous veils; that in this world of the senses I was validated by my sensuality, by revealing what is normally kept hidden.

  Samir covered my hand with his to stop me and I looked up into his eyes. He squeezed my waist, digging into the spare flesh, demonstrating that the gold standard for beauty here in Africa where people went hungry, wasn’t skeletal sacks of skin and bone but the well fed belly of the dancing girl. He sent me off to join the women, gesturing to his mouth that had swallowed his own semen that afternoon to indicate that I should go and eat.

  Like the men, the women were neither welcoming nor unfriendly. I was flotsam brought in on the tide. I would remain or I would depart, and both eventualities they treated with equanimity. The woman whom I had assumed was Mo’s wife waved her small hands over the bowls and platters. I ate standing up. I was suddenly ravenous, and the food was delicious, fresh, strange, exotic, tastes that touched my senses and made my fingertips tingle. I moved from one bowl to another, filling my belly, testing everything, the turmeric and red sauce burning my cheeks.

  The girl appeared, still practically naked, the veil gone, a cape about her shoulders, the bracelets motionless. I could see in the light of the oil lamps lines of henna radiating over her features. A black beauty spot rested above the curl of her top lip and, from just below her bottom lip, a finely-etched tattoo ran down her chin, over her throat and continued in a thin blue line between her breasts, over her seductive belly and disappeared below the low slung belt of beads, the line following the same course the sheikh had taken with his finger down my body that afternoon.

  I looked into the girl’s eyes, two balls of black fire floating on lakes of the whitest white; eyes full of vivacity and mischief. Her long lashes and heavy eyebrows were darkened in kohl. Around her eyes and curving down her cheeks were two arcs of pale green and dark green sequins, the same shades as the stitching on my tunic; a sign, it seemed, that everything is connected. She smiled. I smiled. She moved closer, close enough for our bellies to touch, and licked the turmeric stains from my cheeks.

  My breath caught in my throat and a shiver zipped up my spine. My entire body was a touch paper on a firework and suddenly I was fizzing. I was about to explode, atomise and reform with new ideas, new opinions, new desires. Everything I had ever known was forgotten.

  I had gone into a daze and came out of it as the older woman made a cackling noise in the back of her throat. As I glanced at her, I realised how similar she was to the girl, an older version. Perhaps the girl was eighteen and she was her mother, a woman of less than forty but aged and worn, and I thought that this time of being young was so fleeting you had to grab it before it passed, that in life we get one opportunity to indulge our fantasies, and this was mine. Perhaps one day in the distant future I would spend my hours pruning roses below the shade of a straw hat and I would smile and be happy as I thought back to that summer when all inhibitions disappeared.

  The woman gave me a beaker filled with icy water and I wondered how they managed to keep it so cold without refrigeration. I drank the water down in one gulp and she filled the beaker again from a gun metal-coloured urn.

  ‘Shukran,’ I said.

  When I gave the beaker back to her, she touched my hair, running it through her fingers. She said something to the girl and they both laughed.

  ‘It’s like straw,’ I said, and they shrugged on hearing these meaningless words, and I thought I’d give anything for a bottle of conditioner.

  ‘Maysoon,’ the girl said, pointing at herself, and she repeated her name. ‘Maysoon.’

  ‘Chengi,’ I replied, and the women laughed once more.

  The musicians began to play again and I was astonished when Azar got up to dance. His movements were harmonious but awkward, his long loose hair flying about like a cloud of smoke. Where the men in the circle h
ad sat spellbound and silent when the girl danced, they now clapped and laughed, and the more they laughed the more exaggerated Azar’s dance became.

  Maysoon pushed me forward and we moved closer as Mo stood to join in the display. He placed his hand on his heart and bowed. He appeared to ask Azar to dance, and Azar curtsied in a feminine way that made the men roll back and forth in peals of laughter. The dance was like a tango or a salsa, a dance from my world but bizarre, and I wondered if it were me they were mocking and, if it was, I didn’t mind. We deserved to be mocked.

  The two men finally fell over and Azar leapt on Mo and appeared to be kissing and biting his neck. The men in the circle rolled about and slapped each other on the back.

  The musicians packed up their instruments and went to eat. I followed with Maysoon and joined Samir as the men came to their feet. We strolled through the open gates, Samir and Hanif with some other the younger men, and I noticed that Azar was close by with a Kalashnikov over his shoulder.

  Along the near wall, closest to town, the caravanserai that had appeared lifeless during the day was thronged with little camp fires and gatherings of men without women amusing themselves with primitive games and chatter. I watched an older man with a white beard fleecing a younger man with the three shell trick, moving the shells in arcane patterns over a lacquered tray, and no matter how many coins the young man slapped down on the ground, never once did he find the pea beneath the right shell.

  Samir had a go and lost. Then Hanif. Then another man.

  The sheikh had another go and, when he was about to choose, I put my hand over his to stop him. The night grew silent. All motion ceased. Even the snake charmer blowing his flute paused mid note. I pointed to another shell. I don’t know why I knew, I just knew. I felt it.