by Willow Sears
I’m in my towel when Sindee’s voice through the door tells me that she has finished whatever she was doing on the bed. Honey’s attentions towards me have not gone unnoticed. As we prepare ourselves for dinner my friend hints that I should use myself as a decoy: entertaining the wife in a naked state whilst the husband is left alone and vulnerable to certain pink-haired sex bombs. It is the first time she has given any clear hint that she has serious plans for getting her claws into Cas. Usually when I self-righteously demand that she tell me her intentions in this respect I am simply met with wouldn’t you like to know? expressions. Another thing bugs me, apart from her seeming indifference at potentially shattering a marriage: she is willing to give me away. I don’t want to think of her – or anybody I might fall in love with – having eyes for anyone other than me. She, apparently, is devoid of such hang-ups.
Partners should be precious. Once you commit, that should be it. For her, sharing just seems a natural part of things. Even though I resist her – and she knows why – it doesn’t hurt her to think of me giving in to some other girl. As much as I am relieved when others deflect her pursuit of me it still chips away every time she makes eyes at me and then casually ends up with someone else. She probably said all this in jest but I couldn’t even bear to do that, just in case. It reveals her priorities, even if it was just a joke. I’m not wanting to live in some weirdly chaste and monogamous world – just one in which people who look longingly into your eyes in the quiet times and tell you how much they like you and wish they could be with you, don’t then go ahead and demonstrate that you are clearly no more dear to them than some random, face-ache Polish bassist they only met a couple of hours before. I can’t do this enough love for everyone thing.
As a fashion expert I love the gowns, obviously. I studied such things once upon a time so I know how authentic they are. If they didn’t smell fresh, I would think they came direct from a museum. My purple one suits me best but Sindee has the bosom. She once told me she was expelled from public school for spitting with no reason onto the heaving ample cleavage of a pretty classmate on prom night. I didn’t tell her but I found that bizarrely erotic. We go big on the hair and make-up. Both affix a false black beauty-spot to our cheeks. We’ve got high heels on and no knickers. We look damn fine, we smell damn fine. We’s gonna slay them muthas!
Chapter Nine
Food Glorious Food
We are fashionably late into the dining hall but I only finished croquing my monsieur at half-two so I’m not sure I would have wanted the soup starter anyway. Everyone is dressed to the authentic nines, even footman Françoise and his crack team of servants – the difference is they wear powdered wigs. Everyone else is in their own hair, which means huge rock god thatches, the gentlemen paying every bit as much attention to theirs as the ladies. It’s great fun, Cas done up like the Sun King with flowing lace neckwear and cuffs, gold braided frock-coat and stockings beneath. Then there’s the big hair, the chrome rings on fingers and in ears, and all set off with a pair of brown cowboy boots. All the guys dress in similar. It looks like they are on set of their next video shoot, or something.
With sixteen of us all doing period costume with a heavy metal twist, it’s a raucous mix of debonair meets rebellion. All the guys try to act up to the part, attempting posh English accents even though we are in France, don’t you know. Sheen gets barracked for not using the correct cutlery when the sole Veronique arrives but no one questions the fact that he accompanies each course with yet another lit Marlboro. We damsels look mighty fine too. Cas’s cousin the lead guitarist has a girlfriend beside him: a deeply tanned, very pretty thing named Coco, or Ovaltine, or something – some kind of night-time drink. Presumably she has been chopper-ed in from wherever at great expense. Opposite me, Honey’s bolstered cleavage looks enough to have Isaac Newton rethinking his laws of gravity. I’m sorely tempted to flick one of my halved fish-course grapes across the table to land splat into it.
I thought the sole was the main event but I am wrong. If they eat like this for the duration of their stay they are all going to need a ship’s crane to lift them on stage. Each new course comes with ten bottles of wine selected as a perfect food match, the first glass poured for us by servants into the correct fresh glass. The navarin of lamb avec pommes splondeed comes with a red – a 1985 Chateau Ausone, or so the label says. I’m no wine expert but I can tell this is quite probably the most special drink I have been served in my life. The grapes in this were picked and crushed before I was born. Anything that old is either going to have gone off or be deserving of some attention and reverence. It smells of perfumed, slightly spicy plums and blackcurrants, maybe with a bit of cedar thrown in. If a lover of mine smelt like this, I would be happy.
Honey tips one bottle and squints at the label, reading aloud from it, slowly and hesitantly, like a non-clever child.
“Shadow Ozone,” she intones. “Françoise rickons each bottle of this is worth over two hundred bucks!”
“Well, fucking A!” exclaims Sheen sarcastically, and downs his in two or three hearty gulps before slamming his glass back onto his silver coaster with a big, stained-lipped grin. “Now fetch me some bourbon!”
It is more Philistine behaviour. I should be tutting and looking embarrassed but actually I can’t help but smile along with everyone else. The surrounding grandeur is head-spinning and the profligacy on show exhilarating. If any of us get to be old timers, huddled together saying “Do you remember that time...” all this is going to seem surreal. It will be the chugging down of expensive clarets and smoking through one of the finest meals that we are ever likely to be served that make it so. And Sheen isn’t finished yet.
“Hey, Françoise – where are those mademoiselles?” he loudly demands of our footman, who clicks a finger towards another servant and has them scurrying out to quickly return escorting the blonde and her sexier raven-haired friend from earlier. Both are now naked, something that as usual seems to surprise me more than any of my fellow diners. Who knows what they have been doing in the interim? Maybe just happily chilling out and smoking dope in their birthday suits, waiting for the real rock star excess to begin. Raven Girl still has signs of a pink rear end from her spanking.
“Time for your feast, baby!” says Gio the bassist, who doesn’t have a girlfriend present beside him to spoil his fun. He scrapes his chair backwards and points under the table to show the groupies where they are to go. I’m thinking there is no way Raven Girl is going to get on her knees under there but she does. I really don’t have her measure at all. So, here I am during our cheese course, with conversations all around me about which Queen’s of the Stone Age line-up was best, which brandy should be put on the rider for the forthcoming festival, and whether if you lived on the moon and had a dog you would need to walk it or just let it float about on its lead – and under the table two naked girls are dishing out oral favours.
“Bon appétit!” says Gio with a big grin on his face.
Sheen instigates a belching contest before we have even finished our cheese and Sindee bags the runner-up spot, to the delight of the males present. The drummer then suddenly decides he wants some drugs and simply gets up and leaves. Gio in turn decides he wants a go on the sit-on lawn mower he has spotted outside our windows. He wants to ride it through the maze. He rises and shamelessly displays a glistening erection, taken mid-suck from the mouths of those below. It is smeared with purple lipstick which tells me that Raven Girl has played her part in entertaining him. He drags her along with him, throwing open the French doors (do the French call them this, I wonder?) and running out onto the manicured lawn, cock still out.
A few get up to stretch legs and try to find comfort from their swollen stomachs. I take my wine and go outside. It is well past nine but the sun is still clinging on. It is a warm and golden evening, so still. A blackbird chatters out his day’s-end story. Many is the time on this tour that I have felt claustrophobic enough to scream. To have such outside beauty and peace is so
ul filling. I am in this fabulous dress, drinking fabulous wine in stunning surroundings. It could feel like the most romantic place on earth if not for the whooping bassist firing an imaginary pistol into the air and riding around with a still rather serious-looking naked emo beside him.
I head off before Mrs Casanove can come and cling to me. It’s nice not to have the madness all around for once even if the evening has been entertaining. I stand half-hidden by a tall sculpted box hedge with the twin fountains before me. On the lawn behind me mini picnics have broken out: groups of two’s or three’s sipping wine and finishing their cheese, or just taking in the calm whilst smoking. It all feels rather genteel. This is the life, I suddenly think. Imagine having such opulence and freedom all of the time. Some of these guys could conceivable know this in a few short years.
I think of the buzz I got from my brief stage appearance alongside Sindee. I recall how brilliant it was to hear the guys jamming away this afternoon, how fabulous it would be to play music in a place like this and then dine here, sleep here, live here. It is these thoughts that make me glow and they’re the bits I’m not actually here to catch on camera. The binges and the debauchery might seem like the fun part but perhaps they are only there to help make the slog tolerable. You have to go through that madness to find clear air on the other side, and very many won’t make it. I saunter into the maze. What if Sindee were to track me down here now, or even Honey? In this dress, in this place, I could surely put it all down to a dream?
Too late – Gio and Raven Girl have beaten me to it. I don’t even hear their sounds until I round the corner. I gasp but it looks for all the world like I have come there specifically to watch. I’m still not used to her nudity. She is bent over again, once more using hands on knees as support. He is behind her, stockings pulled down his muscular thighs and his frock coat pulled up, hiding the worst of their rudeness. His teeth are gritted and he presses forward into her as if her tightness is hard to plunder. She whimpers, still strangely quiet. She could be a ravished innocent but I saw her get under the table without hesitation. I see that same defiance still in her expression. Gio doesn’t falter on seeing me. It is nothing strange for this tour. He just grins a little and keeps up his slow, panting thrusts.
“I’m in her derrière,” he feels compelled to tell me. I’m looking into the intense eyes of a girl who is being fucked up the bum. The hairs all over my body stand up in one instant sweep over my skin. I wish I had my camera. Not to catch where he is inside her – although I am sorely tempted to pull aside his coat and see – just simply to catch that face, daring me to tell her that she is wrong. How could I? Who knows how many of her fantasies are coming true right at this moment? She says something to me through her gasps and sighs. I don’t understand any of it. Maybe she is telling me that it is my turn next, or that if I raise my skirt she will give me pleasure too. I still want to think of her as an innocent, a Joan of Arc with the fire being lit beneath her, but such romantic notions are simply misplaced.
What’s more, it’s exciting, witnessing her defilement. I finally drag myself away through some scrambled ideas of what I think is fitting behaviour for me, but at the same time I know I want to stay. Yes, I wanted her to harbour thoughts of pure romance with the likes of me rather than being, very possibly, every bit as filthy-minded as Sindee, but at the same time I know I wanted to stay and watch her being dirty. I wanted to see her getting fucked in her rear, the slapping thrusts quickening and getting harder. I wanted to hear her squeals as he sprayed hot inside her. I wanted a picture of her face as he did it. Somewhere inside me, I think an equally naughty bitch might be trying to get out.
Going back up to the house I note that most of the groups have returned inside. No one asks where I’ve been, although Honey raises her eyebrows questioningly. The table is laden with desserts. Not one or two but masses of them: legions of puddings ready to attack our already defeated digestive systems. The cream-giving cows of the départment must have been squeezed dry. There must be a million calories in sweet form here to be devoured.
“Want some gad-oh?” Honey asks me. Françoise is quickly there to help provide my every dessert need. I do indeed opt for gateau – a sumptuous strawberry one. I could have opted for flan but who the fuck goes on a European rock tour to eat that?
“Woah there!” exclaims Sheen, looking down at his lap. The blonde is clearly still under there going about her oral business and not worried that this particular man has a lady friend at his side. “You wanna get down there and show her how it’s done, baby?”
I’m sure he has a slap coming his way courtesy of Cucumber Girl, but she just smiles, pushes back her chair and slips below. He is still giving out a snigger of contentment as the first splodge of cream whizzes past my nose. The culprit was Honey, smiling archly, the offending spoon used as a catapult still held upright. I give her a look of pretend shock but do not respond. Not immediately, anyway. I wait until her attention is drawn down the table and then I let loose, catching her with a glancing blow to the shoulder. Suddenly it becomes obvious that this mass of very creamy, messy puddings was not ordered by accident.
I have to say that as food fights go, given the ammo at our disposal, it isn’t the most catastrophic. Maybe it is always checked by the awareness that chucking cakes around is a bit lame for hard-bitten rockers. However juvenile, it is still entertaining and rebellious, so no one quite has the inclination to demand we all grow up. It starts as further sly spoonfuls aimed at the unwary. Most miss, whizzing past heads onto the wooden floor behind or splatting harmlessly onto the table or into glasses of very expensive sweet wine. It doesn’t fully escalate for some time and even then it doesn’t quite become an arm-flailing bloodbath. Mostly it is the clothes that bear the brunt. I get a splodge to the hair from a shot aimed at someone two seats down from me. Honey takes a ladleful at point-blank range to the cleavage. We were all still eating and drinking and chatting during this, as if it isn’t happening.
Then I feel my dress rising up my legs and hands running up my bare thighs. I look down to see Blondie smiling up at me, licking those same lips that had just been around who knows how many cocks. In the midst of a food fight the oral sex is still going on! Do you remember that time in the chateau..?
“Non, merci,” I say to her, putting my hands down to arrest the advance of hers up my leg. It was an instinctive response and she simply disappears again to move on to someone else. I could have let her, let those hands continue their hair-raising journey without interference and not even bothered to look down to see if it was her or the Dutch porn star at work. I could have got my wet, turned-on pussy licked and no one would have been any the wiser. Would I have silently let Raven Girl do it to me, I wonder, if she had got to me before Gio got to her? Then Sheen drags a whole large creamy cake in front of him and submerges his face right into it so that as he comes up for air he is completely covered.
“Who the fuck threw that?” he says, to great amusement. This escalates things although cream is neither easy to direct nor does it travel far. I hit Sindee in the cheek with a strawberry slice that clings on grimly before sliding down, but in the main I try not to pick too many fights because I don’t want to spend the rest of the night stinking of dairy products. Honey keeps aiming at me and missing. I get her one to the chin.
“Fucking bitch!” she smoulders at me, looking all lusty, and then wipes the mess off with two fingers and sucks them clean, like they had just been inside me. The flan ends up on the head of the blonde whilst she is in the process of doing her stuff on one of the record company guys. She is dragged out and put on the table top, sprawling amongst the remaining desserts and short-falling cream projectiles and expensive plates and cutlery, sending wine glasses tumbling over. The servants stand around us, unmoved.
In comes Gio with Raven Girl and things immediately go all Bugsy Malone, with her being manhandled in front of the huge fireplace and pelted firing squad-style by several of our male companions. She takes han
dfuls of chucked cream, all over her, even on that rude backside of hers – another thing I find surprisingly erotic. What a dirty girl I must secretly be! When I turn back around that same record company guy who had flanned Blondie’s head has now dragged her messy frame to the edge of the table and is fucking her. No lie! Right there he stands, just a few seats down from me, holding her legs up and apart and shamelessly pumping in and out of her. I can see his pussy-wet cock. A few hours ago this had been about refinement and fine dining and now there is sex happening on the very same table.
Some of us look to make our escape whilst the going is good. The drawing room becomes the place for people to towel themselves off. I hear Honey, who looks like she has come a poor second in the Great Choux Bun Wars, inform her husband that she needs to go get changed. Before she disappears she deliberately looks my way and mouths something. I think it was don’t you go anywhere. She is trying to look all sultry and she has lumps of kiwi fruit in her hair. I wonder if I should make my escape right now, but I sense another show is about to be performed. What has just gone on is almost immediately forgotten. Most would have talked about it for weeks but here it is just another mad episode of many used to pass the time. Now it is more drinking, more drug-taking and thankfully more music-playing. Acoustic guitars come out of nowhere. Musicians must have special concealed pockets for them. Cas even has a harmonica. Where on earth did he hide that in stockings so tight?
I’d made myself look a bit of a fool earlier by asking how they were going to get all their kit to the next venue in a helicopter. Of course they have other instruments to those still loaded onto the equipment lorry, almost as many as they like. They get given them. They are sponsored, essentially. Strings, amps, cymbals, no doubt bagpipes too if they wanted. The makers want them using their products. When their stage pyrotechnics once went wrong and set fire to Sheen’s drum kit, and they all poured whiskey on it to fan the flames, the next night he sat behind a brand new one at no cost to himself. Ten grand in dollars-worth of percussion, plus shipping costs. Contrast this to Russell LeMuscle, who bitched for three days solid because he needed a new bass pedal and thought the two hundred should come out of band funds and not his own pocket. In the end the manager said he’d take it out of expenses. And by ‘expenses’ he meant the next amount of wages he was due to pay our stupid drummer. These are the opposite poles of this industry and every lowly band thinks they are just one good break from being where Thunderhed are now. Success might not even be down to talent. It could be the right image at the right time, pure luck or shrewd marketing, one catchy chorus. That’s all that separates the dingy motels from the grand chateaux.