Sex in the City--London

by Maxim Jakubowski

  I went to some seedy strip clubs in Soho and I’d look at the dancers and wonder how they got there, what happened in their lives that found them wiggling and jiggling on the stage. I had fantasies that they were prisoners, made to dance, and was surprised that the notion turned me on.

  The Girl on the Egyptian Escalator

  by NJ Streitberger

  SPENCER COULD HEAR HER from the top of the escalator. Having spent a frustrating hour trawling the china and glass department for a glass bowl to replace the one that had recently been sent to punchbowl heaven, he was irritated, tired and somewhat in need of a drink.

  It was his own fault. Sale season at Harrods was rarely conducive to effective decision-making and he regretted entering the building almost as much as smashing Laura’s bowl.

  It had been a genuine accident. Unavoidable. Well, as unavoidable as domestic accidents involving excitable collies and their indulgent co-owners can be. He had simply been tossing a stuffed squirrel into the air for Jolyon to catch, making sure it did not get caught in Laura’s mother’s chandelier when the wretched dog, having secured the battered and much-chewed soft toy with a flying leap had swept his considerable tail across a low table, taking with it a small cigarette box (empty of cigarettes for many years) and the aforementioned fruit bowl, similarly devoid of contents.

  Why anyone should wish to keep empty receptacles in places of extreme vulnerability was a mystery to Spencer but, due to the somewhat terrifying nature of his putative mother-in-law and the unassailable psychological grip she exerted on his bride-to-be, he kept his thoughts to himself.

  He was marrying into genteel, patrician, vaguely aristocratic and very rich Knightsbridge old money. He had encountered Laura at a charity ball held at the Natural History Museum a year earlier. She had been accompanied by an American hedge-fund manager whose swarthy appearance and pitbull aggression had seemed entirely out of keeping with the pale, willowy blonde draped languidly on his arm. Spencer had been in a party of colleagues from the bank who were one of the charity’s biggest patrons and had found himself sitting next to her during the lavish dinner. Her companion, whom Spencer had immediately dubbed ‘The Neanderthal’, had eaten little, perspired a lot and absented himself from the table more times than was strictly necessary, leaving Laura alone with a wobbly apologetic smile and an unspoken but evident entreaty to be rescued.

  Spencer had done the honourable thing and seduced her. When she had taken him home to meet ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ he detected less a sense of approval than relief at the fact that he was Anglo-Saxon, British-born and had decent prospects in a more respectable branch of the much-maligned world of high finance.

  Even so, he never felt quite at ease among the faded chintz and porcelain of the family home in Egerton Crescent and the feeling that he was a barely tolerated outsider was never far from his mind. Consequently, he had felt himself evolving into the kind of man that his relentlessly middle-class mother had always rather wanted him to be: polite to the point of obsequiousness, burying his natural masculine vulgarity beneath shovelfuls of politeness. He had even adopted their way of referring to Harrods, in effect the family’s local store, as the ‘corner shop’ run by that ‘loathsome little rug merchant’.

  Much as he tried to deny it, he was having second thoughts about his future with Laura. Not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with her – she was beautiful in that deceptively wan, fragile way that covered a will of steel inherited, no doubt, from her imperious mother. As such she was perfectly suited to her position as head of valuations in the photography department at Bonhams which was situated, usefully, just around the corner in Montpelier Street. But he was beginning to wonder if the prospect of marriage to Laura was worth the aggravation of embracing her family for the rest of his life. It was a tough call.

  Lately, his old self had started to cry out for exercise. Nights at Boujis with the boys, racing his mountain bike through red lights and along every pathway in Kensington Gardens except the one designated for bicycles. He was starting to rebel.

  Now this. A frustrating, panic-induced trip to the ‘rug-merchant’s’ corner shop. He had just managed to narrowly escape castration on one of the poles placed strategically for that very purpose at the head of the descending escalator, after a double-wide American woman had tailgated him through the store like a Mack truck, when the sound of a distant but arresting female voice rose to his ears from somewhere below on the adjacent ascending escalator.

  ‘What are you thinking? You are a complete loser! I don’t know why I bother. You’re a total waste of time. How can you be so fucking stupid all the time!’

  In spite of the fact that the as-yet-unseen origin of this tirade was evidently screeching, her voice was strangely attractive. Actress, he thought, without actually thinking. She has such marvellous projection. Her voice was raised, the volume high enough to reach several floors and yet there was no distortion, no ugliness in the tone. Only in the words themselves.

  Yes, he thought. She must be an actress. And this is a performance.

  Intrigued in spite of himself, he stared down at the ascending escalator, trying to find the creature responsible and the poor sap to whom the torrent of abuse was directed. Finally, after peering past swarthy men in designer stubble and bottle-blonde broomsticks, he saw her.

  She was standing on the step above her victim, with her back towards him. He could see the wild raven hair, tossing around as she spewed her verbal venom, her shoulder blades tensing and shifting beneath her skin-tight jacket. He watched as her hands gesticulated wildly and seized the attention of everyone else crowded on to the escalator, as if they were her audience in a packed theatre.

  With a half-smile of humiliation playing around his lips, the object of her contempt simply stood looking up at her rapt in a combination of self-loathing, wry amusement and sheer admiration. He was easily as tall as her, athletically slim with dark curly hair and a sharp nose. A handsome boy, Spencer thought. Thoroughly undeserving of this blatantly public act of humiliation. Already, he was writing the scenario, the back story that had led up to this appalling public spectacle.

  As the two of them approached with agonising slowness, she suddenly turned around and their gaze met and locked. Her eyes flashed with an almost feral light, her mouth was curved in a way that was half-sneer, half-snarl. The poor fellow might have been wearing the trousers but there was no doubt about who was the Alpha creature in this relationship.

  Spencer couldn’t tear his eyes away. She saw him and stared straight through him, challenging him to say something. He clammed up, unable even to open his mouth. As they passed each other on the escalator, he descending, she ascending, he had the ridiculous compulsion to leap across the barrier between them and grab her, clutch her body against his and take her right there, right then, on the bloody escalator.

  Christ. He hadn’t had that kind of jolt for years.

  She continued to stare at him, their heads twisting as they passed, as if their eyes were linked by an invisible thread. His insides felt funny, as if someone was messing about in his bowels. Eventually, she gave a kind of snort and a sneer and turned her face back towards her victim. He seemed smaller, shrunken in the process, as if some vampire had sucked his life essence out of him, leaving him a husk hanging on to the handrail of the escalator. He was, Spencer thought, ready for the sarcophagus, doubtless inspired by the elaborate Egyptian fakery of the walls and the decorative plasterwork surrounding the escalator. He was mummified, the living dead.

  Poor sod.

  He reached the bottom of the escalator and tried to look back up but was prevented from standing still by the avalanche of bodies coming after him; though he did catch a glimpse of her swaying raven hair as she stepped off the end of the moving staircase. Oddly, he could not see the about-to-be ex-boyfriend at all, though he should have been standing right behind her. He seemed to have disappeared. All this was academic, however, as he was immediately caught in the surging crow
d and was swept out towards the front doors of the store and soon found himself standing in the street.

  He wandered along Knightsbridge in a kind of dream state for a while, idly staring into shop windows not because he wanted to but because it was expected of him. It was a kind of Pavlovian reaction. Look. Want. Acquire.

  If only he hadn’t ‘looked’ at her.

  He tried to distract himself by considering the need for a pair of Church’s half-brogues, reduced to the not-unreasonable sum of £160. He knew he already owned a pair of brogues but a chap can never have enough shoes. He passed on, wandering into Uniqlo and idly sorting through the skinny fit jeans that were reduced by 30% with an extra 10% discount at the till if bought today. He needed another pair of jeans like a hole in the head.

  He knew what he was doing. Displacement activity, it was called. He went back into Knightsbridge and tried to urge his feet towards the Victoria & Albert Museum. Maybe culture would cure his ills.

  He was just about to cross the road when he suddenly stopped moving, causing a man with a mobile phone clamped fiercely to his ear to bump into him and swear.

  Without another thought, Spencer turned and started walking back towards Harrods.

  Inside, he headed straight for the Egyptian escalator, pushing and shoving his way through the crowds. Once he was on and ascending, he studied every passing face. He went right to the top of the store and raced through each department, trying to retrace his steps at the same time attempting to imagine which department she was likely to have been headed for. He searched in vain and eventually wound up back on the escalator, descending disconsolately to the ground floor, taking one last desultory look at the people who passed him, ignoring their hostile glares.

  As he stepped off at the bottom he saw her standing by the door, looking at him.

  ‘Having fun?’ she said, with an arch of an eyebrow worthy of Vivien Leigh.

  ‘I thought …’ he began, changing tack halfway through. ‘Where’s your friend?’

  ‘He’s history,’ she said, leading the way out of the store.

  Shirt buttons popped and flew across the room and expensive La Perla silk tore as they attacked each other in her Flood Street flat. There was no time to think, no time to consider the folly of their union. It was crazed, sweaty, slippery-slidey-crawling-all-over-each-other sex. He drank in her odours, nuzzling her nipples into hardness and sucking on the miniature pink volcanoes. He delighted in her unshaven armpits, slick with musky sweat and felt her hand beneath his balls, pulling him inside her. In their frenzy they fell off the bed, still engaged in loin-to-loin combat, and rolled across the floor until he had her pinned against the wall, to ram into her with such force it was if he wanted to push her through the wall into the next room, or the next dimension. She had one hand on his shoulder, digging her nails into his flesh for purchase and the other on his buttock, pumping him into her. She bit his chin as she climaxed, drawing blood, and he howled as he reached his own orgasm.

  After some moments of breathlessness, they subsided and he collapsed onto his back, flopping out of her. She stood and stepped over him, walking towards the kitchen. In a blur he watched the sway of her sweat-slicked bottom, admiring the shameless manner of her stride which revealed the soaked tuft of dark fur between her thighs and the way she stretched her arms upwards to ease the muscles.

  He heard a bang and sat up, vaguely nervous. She came back into the room, holding a bottle of champagne. She swigged straight from the bottle and scattered some of it over his cooling body before handing him the bottle. He drank, coughed and drank again.

  ‘I love the Sales,’ she said. ‘You never know what you’re going to find.’

  It couldn’t last, of course. Not at that level of intensity. He did his best and, to be sure, she inspired him to extraordinary feats of stamina that surprised him. She was nothing like Laura, whose enthusiasm in bed was tempered with a well-bred politeness that he now realised was a terrible turn-off. Laura always came with a delicate ‘Oh-Oh-Oh!’ and then immediately took a shower and brewed a cup of Lapsang.

  Sekhmet, on the other hand, was an animal. She just threw on her clothes and took him out to San Lorenzo still stinking of sex, often rubbing her hand over his crotch underneath the table as he tried to eat his asparagus risotto without groaning.

  ‘Where did you get a name like that, anyway?’ he asked her, when he could breathe again after a particularly savage workout.

  ‘I was named after an Egyptian goddess,’ she said.

  ‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘You don’t look Egyptian.’

  She struck him playfully, leaving talon-marks on his cheek.

  ‘My friends call me Seksie,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t begin to imagine why,’ he whimpered as she wrapped her fingers around his aching cock.

  It didn’t take long for Laura to realise there was something amiss. Exhausted by Sekhmet’s insatiable appetites, he was unable to fulfil Laura’s relatively modest requirements. It was when she noticed a particularly musky smell on his shirt that she twigged. There were tears, recriminations and the summoning of the parents. As far as they were concerned, he was toast. He moved out of the flat they had bought together in Queensgate Place and into a rented studio in Earl’s Court, which in spite of their proximity was a bit like moving from Maidenhead to Mars.

  In his little kitchenette, Spencer poured a glass of Shiraz and wondered where his life was going. Clearly, he was in the throes of sexual obsession and although he felt regret at the loss of Laura and all that she represented – wealth, respectability, comfort – he was inclined to believe that he had made, albeit by default, the correct decision. Marriage to Laura would have evolved too quickly into a plateau hemmed in by a narrow circle of friends whose social circumstances kept them circling the same limited pool of interests. Charity balls, dinner parties, property portfolios, art to be collected rather than admired and explored. No, it was not for him. Boredom would have set in. It would have been far too restricting. All things considered, he was better off without her. Even so, he wondered just how long he would be able to keep up with his new companion.

  He started to fade at work, exhausted to the point that his concentration ebbed. As the markets collapsed, he lost the edge he needed now more than ever to shift and sell, buy and jettison. The computer screens blurred, his mind slowed down, clotted with images of Sekhmet. Physically, he was a ruin. His body was one big bruise.

  He was summoned into Sir Trevor’s office.

  ‘What the devil’s going on, Spencer? Your figures are atrocious. We’re all in the same boat here and we cannot afford this kind of slippage. Are you on drugs?’

  ‘God, no. No, sir …’ he stammered. ‘I, just, er, I’m a bit tired that’s all.’

  ‘Tired? Tired!’ exploded Sir Trevor. ‘You can’t afford to be tired. Nobody can these days. This is your one and only warning. Shape up or ship out.’

  He went back to his station, depressed and totally demotivated.

  ‘You wimp,’ she said, when he unwisely told her of his troubles at work. ‘Why didn’t you tell him where to get off?’

  ‘Because I’ll never get another position like this. The market is already overcrowded. And there are plenty of younger chaps out there just itching to step into my shoes. There’s a recession on, you know. In case you hadn’t noticed.’

  Clearly, she hadn’t. Whatever it was that she did, which remained a mystery to him, Sekhmet was evidently well-heeled. Her flat in Chelsea was spectacular, filled with expensive objets d’art of museum quality, however she acquired them. Yet she treated everything around her with a cavalier disregard for their value. In the throes of passion, they had smashed at least two Chinese vases from the Tang dynasty and toppled a Roman sculpture, chipping off an ear – events which would have caused apoplexy in any curator. Sekhmet simply brushed the pieces into a black plastic bag and dumped them in the dustbin.

  ‘What do you, er, do?’ he asked Sekhmet as she untangle
d herself from the sheets and stood up.

  ‘I’m a consultant,’ she said over her shoulder and went into the kitchen to locate a bottle of champagne.

  ‘Who are your, uh, consultees?’ he asked, attempting to rise from the wrecked bed.

  ‘Oh, you know. The British Museum. The Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Places like that.’

  ‘I see.’ He didn’t.

  ‘Anyway, why do you want to know?’

  ‘No reason. It’s just …’

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she asked, pushing him back down onto the bed. ‘We’ve only just started.’

  Oh Christ, he thought.

  ‘I hope you’re thirsty,’ she said, looking down at him, swinging the freshly popped bottle of bubbly in one hand like a club.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Parched, actually.’

  ‘Good. Stay there and don’t move.’

  She lay on her back beside him, raised her hips and opened her legs. While he watched, fascinated, she spread the lips of her cunt and emptied the contents of the bottle inside her.

  Oh my God, he thought, suspecting what was to follow.

  She tossed the empty bottle aside, knocking an Ancient Greek amphora off a plinth onto the floor, where it smashed.

  Pinning his shoulders to the bed with her strong hands, she sat astride him, sliding her wet cunt up his chest until she was sitting astride his face. Positioning herself over his lips, she relaxed her vaginal muscle and pissed the newly aromaticised champagne into his open mouth. He drank and gagged, choked and spluttered as the foaming liquid sluiced down his throat and entered his nose, virtually drowning him in a stream of vintage Bollinger and Eau de Vulva.

  As it ended and he started to get his breath back, she lowered herself onto his face and began rubbing herself back and forth over his lips and nose, smothering him in her musky, salty, champagney cunt.

  ‘Stick out your tongue,’ she commanded. ‘Make it stiff.’