‘Your legal guardian then, Miss,’ the official said politely.
I took the papers home. I didn’t know what to do next. I could hardly ask Tony’s advice, nor one of our mutual acquaintances. And I didn’t know anyone else except the charwoman, whom I suspected Tony had planted on me as a spy.
Two days later, Tony called me on the telephone. He said he would pick me up in about half an hour. I was a little nervous when I opened the door to him.
He was very pleasant. He said he had nothing to do and felt like taking a drive in the country. He would be glad of my company. I slipped into a two-piece costume and accompanied him to his waiting car.
Soon we were right out in the open country. Tony did not talk much. He accepted the cigarettes I offered him mechanically and concentrated on his driving. The car sped on for about an hour and then nosed up a little side road, round the bend of which a small farmstead became visible.
‘Where are we going?’ I said to him.
‘A friend of mine lives here,’ he said. ‘We might have lunch there.’
As we drove into the yard, a squat man with powerful shoulders came out of the house to meet us. He was dressed in dungarees and looked like an ex-convict. His broad close-clipped head was tilted to one side questioningly, and his face as he drew near was twisted in a grin of recognition. He was a man of about fifty, with a broken nose, massive hands, and small close-set grey eyes which, as they flitted across my face, seemed to look through me.
He leaned down to the open window on Tony’s side.
‘Trouble, Tony?’
‘The same thing,’ Tony said in reply, and at that moment it dawned on me that he knew of my plans.
As he turned to address me, I found myself saying, ‘No . . . no, please!’
‘No what, Helen?’ Tony said drily.
I didn’t answer.
‘Get out of the car, Helen.’
‘You’re leaving me with him?’
‘Do as you’re told!’
I got out. Tony followed me.
‘Put her in the barn for the moment,’ he said to the man.
The man gripped me tightly by the upper arm and drove me before him to a wooden building on the left side of the house.
‘Keep your trap shut or it will be worse for you,’ he said as he thrust me roughly inside. And then the door closed and the key turned in the lock.
It was quite light inside the barn. Oblongs of dust-moted light jutted downwards from holes in the roof, falling palely on the scattered heaps of straw. I sat down on the straw and lit a cigarette. But the fear of what they might do to me made me feel sick at the pit of my stomach, and I stubbed it after the first few puffs. I sat for several minutes thinking wildly of escape.
Tony stood over the brazier, watching the crossbar cattle brand become red-hot. Occasionally he glanced over at me where I cringed in fear on a heap of straw.
Duke, the squat ex-convict, stood over my naked trembling body, ready to prohibit my escape. The sharp texture of the straw prickled at the tender skin of my flanks, and my whole torso, glistening with a frantic sweat of fear, gleamed in a rigid curve under his lustful eyes.
‘Go ahead,’ Tony said suddenly. ‘Do what you like. It will be a few minutes before this iron is hot enough anyway.’
No sooner had he said it than Duke leaned over me, gripping my upper arms in his powerful hands and forcing my shoulders back on to the straw. Rippling under the sweat, all the moulded muscles of my soft underside were thus exposed to the man’s eyes, which at once fixed themselves on the nervous clot of hair between the lip of my belly and the podgy bowl of my tightly closed thighs. He released his grip to unbutton his trousers, leaving red splotches where his fingers had pressed into my upper arms. Then he bared his lower front to me, a powerful flower, stuck close with wiry black hairs under which his white skin gleamed moistly, like a mushroom in moonlight. At the sight of his desire, my fear left me, my belly and thighs took on the consistency of spawn, the latter opening as my legs arrowed at the knees, anticipating the bandit shock that would scrape the bottom of me like a ship’s keel. Duke seemed fascinated by my arched hips, by the opaque tightness of my round little belly sunk between my broad upper thighs. He sank on his big knees on the straw between the hot scissors of my legs and, guiding his member in with his fingers, he penetrated me, until his hard belly was at mine and his chest, under his sweatshirt, was riding on the firm ballbearings of my nipples. I ran my fingers gently through his hair and brought his mouth against my soft wet lips. He groaned. With all the wiles of my imagination I gave him pleasure, meeting his onslaught with caresses and encouragement where he had expected nothing but violence and resistance, and soon his movements were transformed into those of a doting lover, and his body, as it rose and fell passionately, did so almost tenderly, as though he were afraid of alienating me and depriving himself of my wonderful soft connivance. As his male seed rose in his rod, his torso was shot through with a slow subterranean tremor, and, softening my whole body towards him, I cradled him into a long and delicately protracted erotic ecstasy. His seed swallowed by the warm sluice of my loins, I continued to caress him until his heavy breathing subsided and he opened eyes that were no longer the eyes of an enemy. I kissed him softly on the lips. He accepted the kiss with dumb bewilderment.
‘Very beautiful!’ Tony said ironically from where he stood by the brazier. ‘Now get up, Duke, and let’s get on with the business.’
I felt the man on top of me freeze.
‘Quick, we haven’t got all day.’
Duke got up slowly. He stood back and adjusted his dress.
Tony smiled ironically over at me. ‘And now, Helen,’ he said, ‘you’re going to be taught a lesson.’
The brand, in the shape of a cross, gleamed at the end of the pole. He touched it against a wisp of straw, which flared instantly.
‘Turn her over and hold her down, Duke.’
‘Aw, leave her alone,’ Duke said.
I flashed a pleading glance at him.
Tony, noticing it, said: ‘So you’ve fallen for the bitch, have you, Duke? Well, isn’t that romantic?’ He turned to me. ‘You’re going to be branded, Helen,’ he said. ‘On your left buttock. If you turn over and lie still, it will be over in a moment. If you struggle, you’re liable to get burned in other places. Will you hold her, Duke, or would you rather watch?’
Duke glowered at the floor and said nothing.
Tony approached me with the gleaming brand.
‘Turn over, Helen,’ he said dangerously.
I stared at him and then, when he was within a yard of me, I cried out: ‘Stop him, Duke!’
The ex-convict moved with a rapidity which one would not have expected in so heavy a man. Tony, turning to protect himself from the sudden assault, raised the brand at Duke, who grasped it at the haft in one huge hand, at the same time bringing his short thick knee up with incredible force into the other’s groin. Tony, his eyes full of amazement, let out a horrible scream and fell writhing to the floor. Duke measured his distance and kicked out with his sharp boot deliberately at the other’s head. It landed with a blunt thud. Tony twitched for a moment and lay still.
I stood up, still naked, and moved over to Duke. I took the brand, which he was still clutching at the haft, and threw it on the straw. Then I walked silently into his arms and pressed him against my warm body.
‘Thanks, Duke,’ I said. ‘Now let’s get out of here.’
‘We’ll take the car,’ Duke said.
‘Just a moment,’ I said, and stooped down and took Tony’s wallet from his inside pocket. Then, slipping into my clothes, I followed Duke quickly through the door. He went into the house and came out a moment later with a bag.
We drove quickly out of the yard, and soon we were heading at speed along the main road. ‘We’re going to Melbourne,’ he said. ‘I’ve got friends there.’ Looking back the way we had come, I noticed a pillar of smoke rising from the direction of the barn. I said noth
ing to Duke, whose eyes were glued on the road in front of him.
When a man is involved in the warm chrysalis of a woman, the confederacy of motion, the mutual seed pleasures, can take place on various axes. We had writhed on soft gimbals in a hot seizing flux and reflux, quavering, vacillating, gyrating, hairs against hairs, mingling, sliding on soft graphite, passing and repassing, hips, shoulders, mouths, hollows, a navel to a mouth, a thigh to an arm, a breast between buttocks, the bellies slithering, until, after an hour of drunken love, we had reeled into a final position, each lusting for his spasm, such that I, looking down between the two smooth marble hillocks of my breasts at the hot shuddering tub of my chevron-tipped belly, saw, in my squatting position, my own greedy containment of the male thing, hard and perpendicular, from which I derived my pleasure. I was rotating slowly on the soft orbs of my buttocks while the man, very white under his crinkly black hairs, was lying in a prone position stark naked below me, his hands at my hips, abetting, urging my fluctuation. The big iron bed, the lair of our erotic crucifixion, creaked beneath us as his spike, gleaming with the silvery wetness of my passion, and my more soft insistent sheath met and remet, withdrew partially, and joined in the next and deeper thrust. Soon his hands fell away from my hips and his clenched fists prised themselves under his own buttocks to raise his phallic spine close at my furrow. This last hard movement, interpreted by my body as the symptom of the imminent emission from his, caused every valve of my carnality to be flooded with the juices of erotic sensation, and rising again for the last time on my dripping thighs, I brought the whole weight of my smouldering torso down upon the blunt thick spurting thing which clove me into delirium. At that moment he toppled me under him, and the hairs of his chest were like live terminals against the amorphous sludge of my breasts, while my greedy little belly shuddered against him in an effort to drain him dry. The tremors in my wrists, flanks, and calves continued for some time under the sweet suffocation that I continued to experience beneath his spent weight.
Later, I eased him onto the bed beside me.
‘Well?’
‘What?’
‘You promised me good news, Duke.’
He grinned, moving one of his hands between the dripping softness of my thighs.
‘Tonight, Helen,’ he said.
I pulled him close to me, so that the tips of my breasts touched his chest and our thighs met.
‘You mean it?’
‘I’m smuggling you aboard tonight,’ he said. ‘The ship sails in the morning.’
‘Where for?’
‘Singapore,’ he said.
I put my tongue between his broad lips.
‘Take me, Duke,’ I whispered.
His finger was already at work in the mounting juice between my legs.
Chapter Five
We are camped tonight near a town. Before I was finally led to the tent which, nightly, is prepared for me, I had time to gaze at the white walls, at the minarets, at the straggling dwellings of the poor which ride up the side of a hill.
Last night, for the second time, I was not called upon. The uncertainty of my existence is exasperating. I affirm that existence, nakedly and purely, through my sex. Or rather, it is affirmed for me by the desire of another to possess my body. Sentiments are death. I have shed them all. I want no part of them, want them to be no part of me. Apart from the mind which, for the last time, is taking the trouble to record the events which have led up to my new and purer existence, the mind which I shall allow to die as soon as the record is complete, I am only my sex, only thighs, belly, and breasts, ready to experience and to give experience, ready to feed, but more vitally than any of those subaqueous plants which, in the pale beauty which draws, destroy that which is attracted. My tentacles too are fatal, but only to what is not relevant, to what is not carnal, that is to say, to all that is civilised. Mine is the true culture, all that is deep, all that is not surfaces; the pullulating sting of thighs, luxuriance, omnific – the only, and the dark fertility. How I long for the day, the hour when this journal will be finished, when, communication made, I can sink finally and be absorbed by the archaic part of myself, coming to be, surely, with the rising of sweet juices, as a sheen-haired torso only, in the maw of whose thick flesh lurks a terrible dagger of delight.
How boring the world is! Like a nun, I seek a place of retirement, wanting to meet others only on the altar of my wonderful religion, only in those dark rites in which the incense of my pleasure will be burnt. My genuflexions will be towards flesh and my litany will be those lust-inspired whispers that have no meaning other than to increase the teeming pleasure of my body’s heat.
But what is exasperating is my inability to command a meeting. I cannot seduce if I am not near. No one comes. But, though I am temporarily unsatisfied, I am not afraid, for I suspect – the idea grows on me – that I already know my ultimate destiny. We shall see.
In the hold, on a mattress between two giant crates, I was very close to the throb of the ship’s engines. Once a day Duke, who had signed on as one of the crew, visited me with food. He sat and watched me while I ate, and then, after I smoked a cigarette, or even while I was smoking it, he would caress me below my skirt until, fully aroused, I lay back and allowed him to take me on the mattress.
This went on for over a week. By that time we were far out to sea, ploughing our way towards Singapore. Then, one day, we were discovered.
The Second Officer, catching sight of Duke, his pockets stuffed with food, became suspicious. He followed Duke down to the hold.
There, just after I had begun to eat, he came upon us.
‘You are a stowaway?’ he said to me. It was almost a question, although, on a cargo ship, I don’t see how there could have been any doubt about it.
Duke stood up. For a moment I thought he was going to attack the officer, but he evidently changed his mind.
‘Duke, report at once to the bosun! Tell him to put you in irons! You, madam, will come with me.’
Duke, like a whipped dog, slunk away. I was never to see him again. When he had gone, the officer helped me up from the mattress and walked me in front of him towards the ladder.
‘Will I be sent back to Australia?’ I said nervously.
‘We certainly won’t put back for you,’ he said sharply. ‘Further than that, I’m not in a position to say what will happen to you. Now get going. You are going before the Captain.’
As we walked across the deck towards the stern, the eyes of the seamen who worked there followed me. One of them whistled. The officer ignored him. I followed behind him, finding it difficult to walk on the tilting deck on my high heels.
We climbed down through a companionway to the Captain’s cabin.
‘Wait here,’ the officer said. He knocked and entered.
A moment later he came out and told me to enter.
As I did so, he closed the door behind me, and I heard him climb back up through the companionway.
I was in a fairly large-sized cabin, furnished with dark wood, hair sofas, and brass fittings. The Captain, a heavy, red-haired man with bulbous blue eyes in which there were red specks, looked me up and down from where he sat behind his desk. A map was spread out in front of him and hung down almost to the floor on one side. He was not wearing his cap, and his carrot-red hair stuck up in an angry shock on his head.
After a moment’s silence he said: ‘Are you Duke’s wife?’
I shook my head.
‘You’re his whore, then?’
I flushed.
‘Answer me, woman, what the hell are you doing on my ship?’
‘I want to go to Singapore, sir.’
‘Oho!’ he said with a sneer. ‘So you want to go to Singapore, do you?’
I nodded.
‘This . . . is . . . not . . . a . . . passenger . . . ship!’ he thundered.
I said nothing.
‘You couldn’t pay for your passage?’
‘Oh yes, but I haven’t got a passport.’
> ‘You haven’t got a passport. And do you think they would let you ashore at Singapore without a passport?’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘How much money have you got? Put it on the desk!’
I took the money out of my bag and placed it in front of him. He gazed at it in amazement and then counted it. There was more than five hundred pounds.
‘Quite a little fortune you have here,’ he said more quietly. ‘Where did you steal it?’
‘I didn’t steal it.’
‘We shall see. Meanwhile, I shall take care of it. What is Duke to you?’
‘Just a friend.’
‘You’re lying. A man doesn’t smuggle a woman on board ship for nothing. You’re his whore, aren’t you?’
‘We’ve made love, if that’s what you mean.’
‘What else d’you think I meant! You whore for him. You’re his tart. It’s plain English.’ His plain English was uttered with an Irish intonation. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Helen.’
‘This is not a tea party, you damn whore! I asked you your name! Smith, Jones, Jackson, Green or Fauntleroy?’
‘Smith,’ I said quietly.
‘Where are you from?’ He had begun to take down the details in a notebook.
‘Melbourne.’
‘Age?’
‘Nineteen.’
The questions followed one after another until finally he laid down his pen, blotted the entry, and closed the book. Then he stood up.
‘You’ll work while you’re on board my ship,’ he said. ‘Get this cabin cleaned up. I’ll attend to you later.’ He walked towards the door.
‘Will you let me go at Singapore?’ I said.
‘You’ll be put ashore where you came on board,’ he said shortly. ‘The police will want to ask a few questions no doubt.’
It was late at night when he returned. He had been drinking heavily. I was sitting reading on one of the horsehair sofas. He swayed drunkenly into the cabin, looked almost surprised when he saw me, and then he leered.
‘You stand up when I come in, whore!’ he bawled.
Helen And Desire Page 5