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

by Chloë Thurlow

  ‘Ouch, ouch, ouch,’ I said, and Maysoon copied me.

  ‘Ouch, ouch, ouch.’

  The women laughed and I laughed with them. I was sweaty and hot. The sun was already stoking up the engines for another sweltering ride across the sky and the last of the morning shadows had fled from the room. Amatullah took a handful of chalk dust from another bowl and coated my pubic mount. The pain subsided and she washed me again.

  ‘Chengi Akht, no move,’ Maysoon said.

  ‘As-salaam, Akht, ‘ I answered, yes, sister, I’ll do my best.

  I was relieved when it was Amatullah with her steady hand, not Yasmeen with her squint, who reached for the needle, a sadistic little tool with a short stem fixed to a cylindrical cork handle. The women grew quiet as she made a continual series of jabs in a triangular pattern just below the centre of my bottom lip. She carried on in a line down to my chin and then did the same again, dipping the point of the needle into the blue dye. I noticed blood on the white muslin Yasmeen used to wipe away the excess liquid. But I wasn’t afraid. All the women in that room were ornamented with the tribe’s arachnid and with it I would finally be accepted.

  I had to hold my head back and remain very still while Amatullah worked her way over my throat, between my collar bones and down over the narrow groove between my perky breasts that had grown fuller in those weeks I had been living in the fort. Lying flat on the mattress, my stomach curved inwards in a hollow bowl, but when I stood and took a deep breath, I had a small belly I was trying to make bigger.

  The women paused and we drank tea. It was slow, hot, arduous work and Amatullah had to gather her reserves to make sure she didn’t make a mistake. I was, I liked to think, the sheikh’s favourite concubine. My markings should be perfect and if my pubic mount was about to be engraved with a spider I wanted it to be the prettiest most spirited spider in the house.

  My bottom lip felt numb and the area under my chin was stinging, but it was a nice pain, like diving into cold water, or running really, really fast at the end of a race. For some reason, I remembered winning the 5000 metres for my school at the county championships. I had been third all the way through the event. There was half a lap to go. My legs felt like lead. But the girls were calling my name. I listened to their chant, it was a buzz, an ego rush, and I found a store of energy I didn’t know I had.

  ‘Faster,’ I said to myself, ‘Faster. You can do it.’

  My legs seemed to grow longer and I stretched out, passing the two girls I’d been chasing to break the finishing tape with five metres to spare. It was, as far as I could recall, the first time I had ever pushed through the mental threshold and gone beyond myself. This aptitude to break barriers and cross frontiers was coded in my DNA. It was no accident that I was lying there naked and sweaty surrounded by those Arab women, Amatullah continuing her art, perforating my skin with sharp jabs like the mechanical needle on a sewing machine and, unexpectedly, I recalled the second verse from Thomas Hood’s fourth year poem:

  Work! work! work!

  While the cock is crowing aloof!

  And work work work,

  Till the stars shine through the roof!

  It’s Oh! to be a slave

  Along with the barbarous Turk,

  Where woman has never a soul to save,

  If this is Christian work!

  Strange words. I ran them through my mind like a prayer and it occurred to me that with the tribal markings I would never be naked again. I would always feel covered, in costume. The world would know who I was and to whom I belonged. I wanted to belong and realised that in my wanderings as a diplomat’s daughter from school to school and from country to country, I had never really belonged anywhere.

  With these thoughts, and with utter shame, I felt a drip slip from the lips of my freshly denuded vagina. I felt excited. No, I felt warm and content, and when I am warm and content, silky liquids seep from the salacious little creature that lives between my legs. I felt feverish, light-headed. I felt the same way that I had felt that day when I won the 5000 metres. It was at the time my greatest achievement, and I had a feeling that my being branded with the blue tattoo was greater still, that I had arrived, that I was all that I could be.

  If Amatullah was aware that I was leaking, she ignored this shameless display. Her needle punctured and dotted its way down the groove below my breasts. Yasmeen wiped away the trickles of blood, and Amatullah did the same again, injecting the blue dye into the minute wounds, working her way over my belly button and down towards the pink scalded plain of my pubic bone. She paused and took a sip of tea. Yasmeen wiped the area, cleaning away the traces of chalk, and used a fresh cloth to dry the surface. She looked into my eyes and there was a brief conspiratorial moment as she ran the cloth through the lip of my vagina to dry the damp discharge.

  Amatullah’s sleeves had slipped down her arms and there was a collective sigh of relief among the women as she rolled them back up again. She took a breath and leaned forward. I could no longer see what she was doing and closed my eyes as the point of the needle danced over my tender flesh. She worked quickly. My mount was her canvas and she was Salvador Dalí.

  Yasmeen continually wiped the area. Amatullah coated the needle in dye and, with my eyes pressed shut, I could see in my mind the spider surfacing through my skin like a photograph developing in a tray of chemicals. The creature was already there, it had always been there. Amatullah wasn’t engraving the spider, she was tracing it. I was born with the stigmata.

  I kept my eyes closed. I felt like a baby swimming in the amniotic fluids inside the womb. I thought about Mummy at home in the garden. The roses would be in full bloom, the petals turning brown around the edges, ready to fall. I wanted to call Mummy. I wanted to tell her I was safe. I was fulfilled. I was happy. I was me.

  Ten

  The Emir

  ALL NIGHT MY BODY trembled with fever. I was in a sweat, my mind blank, my flesh sizzling as the indigo dye burned indelibly in a line from my chin to my sore naked pussy.

  All next day, I was shaking with chills. As I watched the shadows inching around the walls, the contentment I’d felt as Amatullah put the final touches to the spider slipped into despair and melancholy. I had an intuition, a sixth sense, that something terrible was going to happen, that my being branded wasn’t the beginning of something but the end. The shadows conjured up an army of dark figures coming to carry me into exile. I was Juliet pining for my Romeo and saw our love ending in poison and death.

  Maysoon sat beside the bed. She brought me food, dates, cashews, soups made from spices, sweet balls of rice with sesame. I had an emptiness inside. I tried to eat, but had no appetite, no energy. The girl held my hand and stroked my hair. The pain of those million pinpricks was constant but bearable and I was overcome by a growing sense of misery and loss.

  My desire to have Samir inside me was an ague; a craving. I had a cramp in my womb, a sensation that was both unsettling and exhilarating. The fever returned when I slept. I tossed and turned and in my nightmares I was lost in the desert, a barren plateau in every direction; I was on a train racing over a bridge without tracks; I saw myself falling and felt saddened when I realised with horror that I was pregnant, my belly swollen like ripe fruit, a bottomless pit awaiting below my churning arms.

  I awoke perspiring with a hollow tummy and a yearning to have the sheikh’s children. I wanted lots of them, handsome boys with shiny eyes and girls who would wear the blue tattoo. In my dream, I saw us walking together as a family, not in the coastal town beyond the fort, but in London, along Sloane Street and Knightsbridge.

  It took many days for the marks to heal. My chin was bruised and there were scabs in a line down my chest. I couldn’t see the spider clutching my pubic area. The wound was covered in a mottled carapace like the shell of a tortoise. It stung when I peed. I gritted my teeth and tears sprang to my eyes. Maysoon wiped away the drips with her fingertips and I felt nostalgic for those sweltering afternoons squirting in playful fountai
ns into the air. Time is relentless, always racing. The past withers the moment the page turns.

  The light in the arched windows above my bed grew less harsh and the oven heat of the tower lessened as August must have drifted into autumn and I imagined the trees in the garden at home turning into a quilt of russet and gold.

  When I asked Maysoon where Samir had gone, she shrugged as if such things were not her concern. She threw up her fine shoulders and smiled, her lips turning into a bow, her white teeth framing the little pink tongue that had impelled me to edge of delirium. While I had not lost the custom of thinking about the future, Maysoon was fixed in the moment, to the urges of her body and passing desires.

  I couldn’t help wondering what Maysoon would do when she were old, when her flesh lost its sweet smell and suppleness. But the girl seemed to have been born knowing that the future we imagine is abstract, unreal, the false God that makes us sacrifice present joys for illusory far greater joys at some unspecified time. It is this attitude that makes us build careers, invest, save for pensions, rejecting the day for the gnomes of tomorrow.

  Maysoon hooked her fingers about my lips to force out a smile. She ran her hand through the air, showing me a boat at sea, her mime confirming my guess that the sheikh was taking the Indian man and the other immigrants I had met to the Canary Islands to begin a new life. We are all nomads, each one of us eternally making our way home. The girl danced. She kissed my lips, her long black hair tickling my breasts. She ate the food I didn’t eat and left with the empty bowls to join the activity and gossip among the women.

  One of Scheherazade’s stories is about a small animal that lived at the top of a tower in a state of lethargy and awoke when someone climbed the stairs. Like the chameleons that basked in the sun on the fortress walls, the creature had the ability to light up and changed colour as the steps drew closer. The story defined me those long days without Samir. Each time I heard the sound of the door opening and closing, the swish of robes along the walkway with its earthenware tiles patterned with brick-red spiders, the spider between my legs pulsed with life as if my lover had finally come.

  My mind healed as the scabs fell away, but that feeling that my future was uncertain remained, a pain only the sheikh could heal. I hungered for him and feared he would never come and came to see that fear and arousal are patterns on the same piece of cloth.

  The door was no longer locked. I could escape. But why would I? Where would I go? I was no longer a nomad. I was home, a child in a diaphanous dress that billowed about me as I explored the fort’s many corridors and hidden rooms; they were endless, a maze, and sometimes I became lost and had to wind my way back through the labyrinth like Ariadne after slaying the Minotaur. Some of the rooms must have been empty for many years, and there were rooms below ground with the cold chill of things best forgotten.

  The two old men who had been infuriated when I first arrived with the sheikh followed my every move with glaucoma-dulled eyes, watching me as if I were a cuckoo hatching from a parakeet’s nest. I watched them chewing on wads of betel, spitting, kicking up eddies of dust as they shuffled away. I would scurry off on bare feet to join the women on hot afternoons when they sat in the shade under the colonnade in the courtyard making jewellery.

  They threaded silver chains with turquoise and coral, amber and desert jade, their creations all the more remarkable because they were put away and never worn. The women clucked their tongues as they talked. I understood what they were saying but not always what they meant. I had learned Arabic like a child by listening. The women laughed and corrected my pronunciation, their words like lines of poetry with a distinctive metre, a rhythm, a subtlety. Their words were a libretto. A continuum. Like time. It was passing. Another sunset. Another sunrise. Another day without Samir.

  It was early morning, cool still. I was in the kitchen, filling my belly, and watched as Amatullah and Yasmeen filled three baskets with necklaces and bracelets.

  There was an air of excitement all through the fort. Traders with pack animals and colourful costumes had appeared from the south. Yasmeen told me they came every year and the caravanserai became raucous with the snorts and whinnies of camels and horses, the snake charmer playing a flute, the sound of a hammer beating a metal pot, the press of people enjoying the cool now the hot months were passing.

  Did I look sad and lost? I’m sure I did.

  ‘Chengi, you come,’ Amatullah said.

  I pointed to myself.

  ‘Me?’ I asked.

  She looked around the room as if searching for someone who wasn’t there, then smiled. ‘Yes, girl, you,’ she said and my heart swelled in my chest.

  ‘Ma’assalama.’

  Thank you, I said.

  Amatullah threw up her hands to show there was no need for thanks. I was one of them, a woman among women. To hide my hair, they dressed me in a blue quilted burkha and I carried the third basket out into the crowds.

  Amatullah and Yasmeen were calm, unruffled women who moved through the fortress like shadows. But when they bartered with the merchants, they metamorphosed into harpies, raising their fists, cackling and hollering, parting with the trinkets as if those necklaces and bracelets were glued to the baskets in which they lay wrapped in muslin cloths. In contrast, their quick fingers grasped for the goods they were taking in exchange: saffron, worth its weight in gold, Yasmeen said; rugs from Persia, shimmering bolts of fabric from Pakistan, bush meat packed in salt from Kenya, live birds from faraway jungles, foods for a feast I assumed was to celebrate the return of Samir.

  I had made a vow long ago never to wear knickers again and, except for the St Christopher on a thong around my neck, I wore nothing beneath the burkha. My head was covered and my kohl-framed eyes were hidden behind a mesh. The area below my bottom lip was itchy and it seemed as if the thread was stretching as the blue spider awoke from its slumbers and slid down into the furrowed lips of my vagina. My throat was dry. My breath came in short gasps. The earthy smells of men and animals made me wet and feverish.

  A plump, bare-headed Arab in a dusty white kaftan was beating the flanks of a donkey with a whip, the sound of those lashes like a piece of music once loved and heard again unexpectedly. He leaned back, flexing his arm and, as the leather snapped, I felt a tingle down my spine. My palms were damp. My back was running with sweat and I felt breathless as I recalled the tongue of the whip crossing my bare flesh on the boat, the sheikh extinguishing the fire with his tongue, the stripes I wore with pride and which healed all too quickly. There is something unutterably arousing being hidden in veils, something masochistic, yet perverted, and my desire for the sheikh became so intense I felt a trickle of drool slip down my thigh.

  I didn’t realise I had come to a complete halt. I had closed my eyes and saw myself in the cabin at sea, my fingers clenched around the porthole, my backside baring the marks of the cane administered by the mechanic. I remembered the feeling of relief as I bent forward, curling my toes, gritting my teeth, the snakebite of the sheikh’s short-handled whip searing my spread cheeks, that alchemical miracle of pain turning to pleasure as the lines of fire sizzled across my astonished bottom. Six times the lash came down and with the seventh my fate was sealed, I was purified, consecrated as the sheikh’s concubine.

  My knees trembled. Moisture was gathering between my legs and around the tops of my thighs.

  The plump man must have known I was a girl who enjoyed the taste of the whip. He had stopped flogging the donkey. When I opened my eyes, he was standing close to me staring through the mesh screen into my yearning soul, my unquenchable thirsts. He ran the tips of his podgy fingers over the lash he was holding and grinned a mouthful of red-stained teeth. That man wanted to beat me and it was terrifying to realise that I wanted to be beaten. It was discipline that I needed, and it was this deficiency since the sheikh had left that had found me mournful and melancholic. I was a slave to my own primal hungers. I could take the whip but would never be tamed. This was my weakness and my stren
gth. You are what you think. Be yourself and try to be happy. But first, be yourself.

  Odd phrases as if from some other world fluttered like pennants in my confused mind. The spider was moving. My pussy was sodden. My mouth had fallen open.

  ‘Assalamu alaikum.’

  God be with you, the man said, our momentary connection making me feel as if I were standing there stark naked.

  My throat tightened with anguish and I would have remained rooted to the spot had Yasmeen not grabbed my hand and pulled me away.

  ‘Tut, tut, tut, Chengi,’ she said, and I realised Yasmeen was wiser than I had thought, that she had been privy to my hysterical musings, that my tendency to underestimate people was, as Mummy said, my Achilles’ heel.

  We hurried back into the fort, our baskets filled. Being out in the world, even for that short time, was invigorating. I was a vampire with a transfusion of fresh blood. Those days of doubt had slipped back beneath the surface of things. I climbed the stairs with a silver tureen I found in the kitchen. I sat outside the stone shower, leaned against the battlements, the sun dipping in the east over the sea, and studied in the fading light the spider’s reflection in the shiny sides of the bowl.

  By raising my chin and pulling on the thread, by flexing and contracting my vagina muscles, I could urge the spider to go up on all eight legs. I could make it move one way, then the other, and I could imagine nothing more erotic than Samir’s resolute cock parting the eight dancing legs and feeding the ravenous creature the spider was guarding.

  The tattoo branded me as a member of the clan and protected the clan’s possessions. I was a part of something. I belonged. I shook myself like a puppy running out of the sea and, with an intake of breath, a sigh of relief, a moan that glided up from my chest, I slid forward, my legs spread. My pussy was a lake. My clit throbbed, smarted, vibrated like a bell that rang out the message that I had been neglecting this little fount of all pleasure.