Without considering the alternatives, I unwound my turban, releasing my grubby yellow curls. I pulled the hijab over my head. The St Christopher was hidden in the folds of my pantaloons and I held it tight as I slipped them off and placed them on top of the hijab. I stood there naked, and he studied the blue line running from my chin to the tuft of my pubes. Through the blonde floss you could still make out the dark palimpsest of the spider.
He seemed confused. I was a white girl with clan markings. I belonged to someone. He knew it wasn’t Ali-Sayad. Had I been stolen, bartered? Would there be a reward if he took me back where I belonged? I could see about his features that look children have doing sums in their head. These were not sophisticated people. Their abacus was the simple arithmetic of survival.
He made his decision. He grinned and beckoned for me to follow. At the back of the hut beside a toilet consisting of a low ceramic platform with two raised areas for your feet was a shower. I looked into his eyes and he smiled. The shower was driven by a pump which he activated, working it with one foot while I stood below the delicious sprays of cold water. He gave me a big green bar of soap that was surprisingly gentle and my skin burst to life like a flower.
The spider, too, was reborn. I could feel the eight legs stretching below the cap of hair. Mustaf said something in a language I did not understand, but his actions were clear. He pulled his burnoose over his head, stepped from white underpants which I’m sure said Calvin Klein around the elastic, and his cock stood smartly to attention. The man was tall and, likewise, his manhood was monumental with dark throbbing veins and a mauve head as delicate as the fairy orchids Mummy cultivated in her greenhouse.
Mustaf was clearly proud of this specimen. He was grinning a mouthful of perfect teeth as I went down on my knees, gazed up at him over the plain of his body and kept staring into his eyes as I took the monster into my mouth. I sucked and nibbled, chewed and licked. He bunched my hair in his hands in order to lever my head back and forth. My lips stretched, my jaw dropped and like a python I swallowed the creature whole. He was ready to come and whipped it out in order to prolong the delights of discovering such a willing little whore. I knew me and I knew men. It was less painful to let yourself go, do your thing, let them do their thing.
I remained on my knees. He placed his hands under my armpits and lifted me into his arms. I was as light as a child. My belly dancer belly had gone, left in the Sahara. My hips and ribs were skeletal against my white skin, and I’m sure my eyes were hungry and haunted. He ran his tongue around my lips as we crossed the hut to the stained mattress occupying the far corner. He put me down and, at that moment, I remembered my most successful book jacket, a whole sequence of scenes recalled as an old diary holds the keys to caches of memory.
We were publishing a chick lit author, a wizard at self-promotion. She had written a Guess Who’s’ Coming to Dinner rip-off: a black sculptor in love with a tall, willowy girl with protruding teeth and a long, Home Counties face. Like her, in fact. I suggested a photo of her entwined in the arms of a black model who came at a cost of £300. There was no budget for such extravagance, but she agreed to pay herself. She was only an author but Daddy was something in the City. The model was gay and disdainful, he complained that the girl had body odour, which she did, but the shots were stunning; he standing, a sculpture, like the black sculptor of her story, she clinging to him, body white as alabaster, face hidden by her long hair.
The press feeds on fast-food sex, everything known and obvious. The cover shot had something different about it, something that stuck in your mind and got under your skin. The young Scots photographer was making a name for himself and what he taught me that day was that a pornographic photo is arranged to fuel sexual desire. An erotic photo captures an erotic situation. It is subtle, puzzling, mischievous. That’s what we had achieved.
The book was mediocre but received masses of reviews, zillions of column inches of comment, an interview on Woman’s Hour. The photographer – short, solid, handsome, vibrant – wanted to sleep with me and I wanted to sleep with him but didn’t because I was being loyal to the boyfriend.
Who was that girl?
Not the author. The other one. The girl with nice legs in a short skirt and a lack of self-confidence sticking to her like a birthmark?
That girl was me, uncomplainingly, settling back on the grubby mattress with its faint smell of goats and grime, legs parted like a drawbridge to allow Mustaf’s sleek black liner to enter my harbour. He was good. He did the right things and reached the right places, his silky head pushing up to my womb, the thick meaty trunk nudging my clit and, I do declare, after those nights of mean pairings out in the desert, as he began to pump out his load, I almost blew the tin roof from the hut shrieking in unexpected rapture.
When girls scream it makes men feel as if they are the kings of the world. He kissed me like a lover, ran his long pink serpent tongue down the indigo line between my throbbing breasts, over my flat tummy bereft of the green jewel, he waggled between my bloated labia and, when the serpent sunk its teeth into my jutting, pulsing clitoris, I came again, pumping out an immodest spray that coated his carved ebony features.
‘Quelle beauté exotique,’ he said, then he switched to Arabic, which he thought I wouldn’t understand.
‘You are going to fetch a good price,’ he added, and I knew I must remain cautious to survive my fate.
We washed. We dressed. I followed as he swaggered bare-headed out to the corral. The four Arabs remained expressionless. Mustaf stood momentarily with his hands on his hips then slapped Ali-Sayad’s fingers.
We traipsed through the trees to the river bank where a narrow pirogue was tied to a wooden jetty. The boat had a canvas awning for the sun and an outboard motor. Hussein stepped aboard and the other men passed him two hessian sacks, which he stored in the back alongside the half dozen plastic containers, fuel for a long journey. He took his seat on top of the sacks and ripped the cord to start the motor.
Ali-Sayad fluttered his hand to indicate that I should go aboard. I did so and sat hugging my knees on the platform beneath the awning. He then squeezed into the pirogue’s long pointed prow, nursing a rifle, and we set off without a word, Mustaf and the other men left behind and it was impossible to understand the relationship they had with each other.
The broad green water lilies lying on the surface of the water disappeared as we moved away from the bank and gathered speed. Marsh grass stretched as far as I could see. In the trees overhanging the river nests like Chinese lanterns hung from the boughs and small birds weaved through the branches.
The sky was endless, pale blue. Ségou slipped behind us; it had seemed temporary, like a set taken down after a photo shoot. The river broadened and we bounced gently with the flow. It wasn’t long before the vegetation was left behind and it was dreamlike moving along a vein of water within the vast sandy body of the Sahara. We passed scattered villages where naked children stood waving from the banks. We saw cattle herders, men with small scars next to one eye, the marks of their tribe, their eyes following our progress with vague interest, two Arabs from the coast and a creature all in white.
I was moving further away from where I started. I loved Samir, but felt no remorse that I had found pleasure with Mustaf, and would have found the same pleasure, perhaps more, had I struggled to fight him off. I was in mortal danger, each mile navigated along the Niger taking me deeper into the unknown, but still in that moment I marvelled at the severe existential beauty of the desert and felt a fleeting thrill just being there.
In the last glimmers of day I watched from the boat the bustle of a small town crowded with traffic, buses, begging children, women carrying bananas in wide metal trays on their heads. A hotel stood on the waterfront shaded by mahogany trees and I’m sure from the kitchens I could smell French cooking. The hotel was a place for tourists, foreigners like me, and only later would I look back and ask myself why I didn’t slide into the river and try to escape.
&nbs
p; You are going to fetch a good price.
Mustaf’s last words ran through my mind like a mantra. But my journey had taken on its own momentum and some unexplained force was impelling me to my uncertain destination.
We stopped to buy fish and stopped again another few miles down river. Hussein looped a rope around my ankle and tied it to the trunk of a tree under which they made a fire. Ali-Sayad gave me cooked fish on a water lily. I ate with my fingers and sucked every bone dry. They boiled water from the river, mixed in hibiscus leaves and I drank cup after cup I was so dehydrated.
We slept beneath the stars and moved with the sun, setting out as it rose, shiny as tin, colouring the surface of the river in silver streaks. I watched fishermen balanced in pirogues casting nets by hand. They waved but I felt no inclination to wave back. Villages little changed for a thousand years clung to the water’s edge, behind them paddy fields green with growing rice.
The day was long, the sun hazy hot, the outcroppings of trees easing the arid landscape from desert to savannah. I trailed my fingers through the water. I saw crocodiles in the reeds and watched birds dropping elegantly from the sky to scoop up fish foolish enough to swim close to the surface.
Only once did Hussein slow and I held my breath as we glided closer to the riverbank.
‘Regardez.’
Ali-Sayad spoke softly and pointed.
A herd of giraffes came out of the bush, the sight of these tall creatures so unreal as to seem like a mirage. They raced towards the river. I thought for a moment they were going to plunge into the water, but they swerved, each making the same dramatic motion, and took flight along the riverside. I followed their progress as they moved further away. Hussein didn’t speed up and, when I looked back, I saw an infant giraffe, awkward on its long legs, trying to keep up.
A leopard was trailing languidly behind. The giraffe turned to follow the herd, but then turned again, setting out on its own fatal course. The leopard curved gracefully, increased its pace and took off into the air, its wide jaw sinking deep into the giraffe’s slender throat.
I screamed.
‘No. No. No.’
The men laughed. Hussein accelerated and I sat for the rest of the day staring out at the changing landscape through the prism of my teary eyes.
We camped in an inlet where tiny birds ran up and down the hard sand in a military dance. They had acquired more fish which Ali-Sayad cooked on an open fire. I drank hibiscus tea. A breeze licked the surface of the river and the sky turned a vinyl black so impenetrable the trees lost definition, the stars didn’t shine and the men again that night didn’t come to my blanket. I slept with a rope around my ankle tied to Hussein and dreamed that I was a giraffe.
We set out once more. I didn’t know rivers were so long and the world so empty. I saw a family of hippopotamus rising out of the river like giant boulders, antediluvian beasts that had survived flood and famine, white hunters, the cement factories, the diamond mines and salt mines, the wars, the endless wars, the international corporations, the hunger for bush-meat, that brief glimpse of the hippos a reminder that they had survived but survival is precarious and life fragile.
I could smell dust in the air. I saw the largest mosque I had ever seen emerge out of the landscape, dwarfing the trees, the mud-brick houses faintly golden in the afternoon sun.
‘Timbuktu,’ Ali-Sayad said. ‘Nous sommes arrivés.’
Explorers for hundreds of years had set out in search of the legendary lost city of gold. It appeared suddenly on a turn of the river, brown, impoverished, unremarkable. Hussein slowed briefly, then accelerated again, leaving the city behind. We travelled for another hour, two hours, I wasn’t sure, and stopped at a pier where a row of boats were tied to old car tyres.
Beyond the landing place stood a circle of tents and vehicles in a clearing, animals tethered to one side. In the distance, lit by the declining sun, the terracotta-coloured hills were embellished with yellow stone houses with thatched roofs shaped like witches’ hats.
A man and a boy, father and son, appeared, guards, I assumed. I stood on the bleached wooden decking as a few coins changed hands and for the briefest moment it occurred to me that I should dive into the river and swim to the other side, take my chances in the wilderness.
The thought evaporated as quickly as it emerged. I had not at any time tried to escape, not even when I saw the lights of the hotel. There was a part of me that wanted to see how far I was going, how far I could go, a part of me that wanted to know what was going to happen next.
Twelve
Scheherazade
AS WE DREW CLOSER to the circle of tents, I saw beyond the clearing a landing strip with a small jet without livery and a single propeller Cessna of the sort that used to fly me back to Kent when Daddy was stationed in Brussels and the school holidays had come to an end. Planes and pack animals. Guns and famine. In Africa you are touched by extremes and it is at the margins of things where we find out who we are.
There was an air of carnival, loud voices, drummers and flutes. The smell of camel dung and hashish, sweat, the press of people. The sun was past its zenith and with the cool came a sense of urgency. Hussein gripped my arm and we followed Ali-Sayad through the crowds to the largest of the tents, a grand structure hung on decorative posts with flaps and flags that quivered in the breeze coming off the river.
Outside, there was a long low platform and, inside, several men loomed over a trestle table, all shouting as they tried to get the attention of a man in a white djellaba writing in a ledger. The man had a white beard in the shape of a spade, a curling moustache and a meticulous, unhurried hand. He could have been a Mesopotamian priest. A character from another time.
Everyone smoked. Everyone was attempting to edge in front of everyone else, but it was all good-natured, these men like boys eager for the start of some special event. The man in white stroked his moustache between each entry. His head rose, his eyes would fall on the next in line and, regardless of all the pushing and shoving, only when it came to his turn was Ali-Sayad able to list his goods for sale.
I was Lot 12.
I thought about that. I thought it was a good omen. A good number. I wasn’t superstitious, but would have hated to have been Lot 13.
We shuffled out of the main tent to a smaller tent where there were bowls of water, soap, towels, brushes, everything except a hair dryer. At Ali-Sayad’s signal, I stepped from my clothes and, like an obedient Collie, those friendly dogs with long silky hair, I stood patiently as the two men set about grooming their pedigree blonde from the north. They washed the sand from my curls, they bathed my body. Hussein, always close to violence, cleaned between my toes, he ran the soapy cloth up my legs and gently between the lips of my vagina. He took a fresh bowl of water to sponge me down and I thought how easily we forget that water is precious.
As Ali-Sayad dried me with a towel, my body responded instinctively, my heart beat faster and my breasts swelled up with a prickle that pinpricked the hard pink buds. Ali-Sayad threw out his arms as if in wonder.
‘Très bien,’ he said, and clapped his hands.
On that sliver of an island beyond La Gomera I had come to see nudity as a form of protection: the naked girl invites violation, not violence. It had been foolish to leave my costume on the beach and, from that first fatal error, step by step, mile after mile, by boat and camel and canoe, my arrival at the slave auction on the banks of the River Niger seemed predestined.
Ali-Sayad slapped my bottom with the tenderness a man shows a pony. He stood back to look at me as you would a painting in a gallery and I got the feeling he was thankful to have come to the end of the Emir’s assignment.
I had no tether about my neck or ankles. I needed no restraints. There was nowhere to go except forward. I had the blue tattoo from below my chin to my crotch and the St Christopher gripped in my palm as refugees take a handful of earth with them into exile.
The drums beat louder as Ali-Sayad led the way across the circle to the
platform arranged outside the big tent. He took my elbow to support me as I climbed the three rifle crates serving as stairs to take my place. I gazed out at the intense, concentrated, inquisitive faces. It was like being in a dream, a fantasy. I had left London to go in search of adventure. I had wanted to lose myself in order to find myself. Somewhere, the line must have blurred. I had reached an extreme I didn’t know existed – within me; within the world.
I had become a character from One Thousand and One Nights and remembered the Sultan who beheaded three thousand virgins after finding his wife in the arms of another man. Only Scheherazade escaped the same fate and did so with a guile I didn’t have. I had only one story to tell. How I had set out across the sea, fallen in love with a young sheikh locked away by his wicked father, and how I was now standing vacant and paperless before an ocean of men with an eye for business, and how I knew, I knew without doubt, that their business was the guilds and chains of oldest profession.
From Timbuktu I would journey on to some brothel in Hong Kong, Kuwait, Bangkok, London. Slavery knows no borders. There is an unending stream of hapless girls following the silk routes and trade routes to the furthest corners of the earth. My deepest desires had been awakened and what had been my joy would become a life sentence, a daily, nightly, everlasting performance on my knees, my back, with my mouth open and legs open. I would be beaten, whipped, damaged, and what had been my pleasure would turn as pleasure does to eternal pain.
I had entered the core of the female condition, that place where you go when you shed your clothes like an outer skin to seize the future. I glanced at the other girls along the platform. We batted our eye-lashes and ran our eyes over each other as if this were a competition and, in a way, women are always competing in the primeval struggle to be acknowledged as a desirable object. I exchanged nods with Oriental twins, also naked, we were all naked. A slave has no rights to modesty. There was a tall Massai from the jungles of Serengeti, silver anklets at her feet, her hair hennaed. There were others I couldn’t see, tall and short, black and brown, commodities for all tastes. It is hard to understand why, but in sharing your suffering the suffering is more tolerable.
Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) Page 20