by Primula Bond
As on the screen, which I can just see if I twist my head, there’s the pop of a bottle stopper here in the room, and Gustav’s hands in the film are pushing my dress up, and in real life they are peeling away the kimono, and massaging sweet smelling oils into my legs. He’s being gentle, but his hands move sensuously, his fingers lingering and probing, exploring and stroking, far more intimately and deeply than he did that first time. The lotion is setting me on fire. I can almost hear it sizzle, piercing the tender skin, but although I clench my bottom in pretend protest I keep quiet while the girl on the screen screeches out crossly, something about chilli.
‘My beautiful girl. You really want me to slap you? Or shall I find some props to do it with? A slipper, perhaps? Or one of my ties?’
I try to twist round to see if he’s serious.
‘That’s not in the script.’
‘There is no script. Just what I tell you to do.’ He pushes my face down into the cushions. Now I can only glimpse a corner of the screen. A pair of white legs. A young, plump bottom waiting to be striped with punishment.
Gustav pushes my legs open and goes on massaging the cream right in, up and in. Every sense is magnified. As well as the heat and scent of the creams soaking into my skin, there’s the strong, almost sickly perfume filling the air. At last, thoughts of everyone else, his brother, his ex-wife, my cousin, they all fade and pop, like a trio of burst flash guns.
On the screen I’ve gone very still. I try to look at that girl dispassionately. But how can I, when the sight of her is turning on the voyeur in me? So much has happened to that other Serena since then but, I think with another wriggle of excitement, so much still is happening.
I try to focus on the film. I demanded he take it out of its hiding place, but a new and disturbing thought insinuates itself: if he showed this film to anyone else, or if someone discovered it, Pierre for instance, it could be dynamite. Serena Folkes as an installation. Whether that’s a good thing, maybe for future publicity, remains to be seen. For now I want it just for me. This is my therapy. It worked before, when I wanted him to thrash memories of my miserable childhood out of me. Now it’s thrashing away unwelcome thoughts of his brother.
But what exactly does he think he’s teaching me?
As his long fingers swipe and wipe the cream until the whole area is alive and throbbing, I try to find the answer to that one. As before I’m feeling stoned and woozy, the heady scent of the cream curling up my nostrils into my brain, filling it with fog. The rest of my body feels floppy and weak. There’s only one part of me aching and burning.
I wonder if I’ve dropped asleep, because nothing is happening. On screen there is vague movement. He’s turned the sound right down now. My eyes are closing and Gustav seems to have wandered off.
But just as the arm on the screen rises silently so there’s a rush of air in the here and now as Gustav’s arm goes up. Here it comes, that delicious wasp sting as he slaps me hard on the butt, thrusting me forwards over the suede sofa with the force of it, making me squeal and squirm. He slaps me harder on the same spot and stinging heat from the blow sends a shaft of twisted pleasure through me.
That sharp whisk of air, then a handprint of fire on my buttock as it lands. The stinging goes deeper this time, radiates away from the original soreness, burns inside me, makes me twitch. I can feel myself closing up tightly. The tentacles of pain touch me everywhere. I twitch and groan, unable to control my own reflexes now.
‘I’ve got your little nun’s whip right here, Serena. Ready to do this all over again?’
‘Yes! Give it to me!’ I struggle at the chain round my wrists, but that just makes it tighter, the silver chain biting into my wrists. ‘I deserve it all!’
I hear him testing the whip on the palm of his hand for a moment. Then it comes down on my other buttock and the pain daggers straight up me.
He chuckles softly, whips me again, that quick, vicious whip lashing down. I am smarting with the lashes. I know I’ll be striped with thin red welts. I strain at the silver chain binding my wrists, welcoming the nasty thrill releasing me, the hot darts of pleasure shooting through.
As I struggle, the golden locket gets caught in my hair so that, every time I move, my hair draws it tighter around my throat. I try to speak but the volume on the screen suddenly turns up to full, the voices and the gasping, the whipping and the background music all drowning out my gasping attempts to breathe.
I don’t care any more. This is a different kind of stress. How complicated my life has become since October. Now I have genuine guilt and anxiety to add to the mix. Everything I’ve done and said with and without Gustav. Stepping way out of line talking so intimately to his brother. Letting Pierre think he can lean in and kiss me.
The spanking feels so good. I feel released. Confident in the man doling this out to me. Confident that I can ride any small storm I may have caused. Confident that maybe, just maybe, I am beginning to get this lovely man where I want him.
Another slap, stinging and hot on my rump, sizzling through me. I was waiting for it, I knew what was coming, the shock of the slap itself, the blood rushing to that one burning place, and the lovely afterglow. There will be the brand of five red fingers on me, and thin red lines from my little nun’s whip smacking the naughtiness out of me.
Just as in the video Gustav is silent amidst the furore, he’s behind me, above me. He smacks the other cheek hard until the heat prods and probes everywhere, fingers of fire and pleasure inside and out.
Just as in the film I lift my sore, tender bottom up in the air, and hear a low grunt of laughter.
‘Such a naughty girl. This is for all you’ve done since we came to Manhattan. The Weinmeyers, the Robinsons, the Club Crème. Worst of all, going for intimate drinks in glamorous cocktail bars with other men. With my brother, just to rub salt into the wound.’
Every inch of my bottom is sore and tender. There are spasms inside me now, deep between my legs, hungry spasms of pleasure and wanting.
He doesn’t know. Oh, Gustav doesn’t know and I need to tell him. But now he’s pushing my head into the cushion, snagging the golden locket even tighter around my throat, a glittering ligature, forcing me to take short gasps, loving the free, natural high from the lack of oxygen. I feel the dip of the cushions as he kneels on the sofa behind me and the lack of air is making me hallucinate now, reminding me of my drunken fantasies after my session at Club Crème and my dreams while Gustav was away, the two brothers coming to my bed, pressing on the mattress until it reaches the floor, pulling the duvet off me, unable to tell the difference, which one will it be, which one is going to take me in front of the other?
I squeal as someone, one of the brothers, lifts my bottom towards him, spreads open my legs. Through the noise and the music I hear the rip of his zip. His breath rasps hot, burning hot, on my neck. Who is it? Who is it? My pulse beats frantically as if hammering to get out. One of the brothers slides his mouth down under my ear, his lips dry at first, then getting wet as they linger over the spot. The tip of his tongue runs under the chain of the locket, touches my pulse, echoing the push of him between my legs, hitching my hips so that I bang up against him.
His fingers play over me, into all the slippery creamed soreness, feeling inside to open me, feeling the wetness, and then he’s in there, which one is it, which brother is it, he’s long and strong and hot and hard and pushing, pushing my face deep into the cushions, the golden locket a sharp little nub pressing against my throat, the silver chain snaking from my wrists across my back towards him, our mutual crescendo matching perfectly as he hammers the nonsense out of me and I cry out his name.
We lie there, panting crazily, my face still pressed into the cushions until he rolls me in a tangle of limbs to face him. Gustav hangs over me, unhooking strands of my hair from the golden locket. The metallic hidden object slides from side to side as he shakes it.
‘What is in there, Gustav? I walk around with that little sound knocking against my c
lavicle all day. Why won’t you tell me?’
‘I will open it for you when the time is right. I like the thought that in the meantime it’s driving you mad!’
He strokes my hair off my face. I lean up to kiss him, breathe him into me.
‘Why not now?’
‘You still have to earn the right to see what’s inside.’ His eyes crinkle slightly at the corners, his face shadowed in the candlelight as he opens his mouth to say something.
And then the door buzzer goes.
‘Ignore it!’ I screech, trying to sit up. Gustav frowns impatiently and releases my hair, but not my wrists. He holds me down for a moment longer. The buzzer goes again and he stands up reluctantly and lazily zips himself up, leaving me sprawled in my half-open kimono, the golden locket half-strangling me, the silver chain still fastened.
There’s a quiet murmur of voices and I give a silent sob of relief that it’s not Pierre but one of the doormen, handing Gustav my camera cases and iPad. Gustav thanks the guy and turns to me, the door still open behind him, his eyebrows raised questioningly.
‘He says your equipment was just delivered to reception. They didn’t leave a name.’ He hands me the iPad. ‘But they said to be particularly careful with this. You lost your stuff? What is the matter with you?’
‘I didn’t lose it. I was going back to collect it.’ I run my fingers round my sore wrists and take the iPad off him. ‘But everything was delayed by that girlie video, and then the drink with Pierre. They locked up the theatre over the weekend with my things inside.’
The iPad must have been switched on all this time. The battery is dead. I carry it into the bedroom and plug it into the charger.
As I come back out into the salon the peace is shattered by a manic flapping in the doorway as if a bird has been trapped in the building. ‘Where is she! Where’s my beloved cousin?’
Polly’s voice is high and reedy with anger as she pushes through the door that Gustav has not yet closed. She lurches through the hallway and into the sitting room. I pull my slippery kimono over my damp nakedness and take a faltering step towards her.
She looks even thinner and paler than before, not helped by the fact that instead of her usual neon colours she is dressed from top to toe in funereal, baggy black. She stops dead in the middle of the floor and is staring past me at the TV screen. Gustav has paused the film so that all there is in the centre of the wide screen is my white bottom, striped with red, the fuzzy outline of a whip shivering down onto it.
‘My God! It’s even worse than I thought!’ she gasps, her hands up over her white face. She looks like Oliver Twist in the oversized cap and baggy raincoat, her legs bare, her satin ballet pumps stained by the rain. ‘You’re all at it! All whipping the living daylights out of each other, and it’s not just some kind of artistic illusion, either. You’re all masochistic freaks!’
‘Calm down, Polly,’ says Gustav. ‘You can’t come in here shouting the odds. Pierre said you weren’t with us at the Library Bar the other night because you were in Boston.’ He comes up beside her and takes her arm. She stiffens, but she doesn’t shake him off.
‘Serena knows I never went to Boston, but you’d all love that, me out of town so you can all have a good laugh at me.’ Her eyes slide from the screen to me, her face hectic with fury. ‘Look at you, all ravished and undone. That the way Pierre left you after your night at the Gramercy Hotel?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You’ve ruined everything, Rena! He was the one. You saw us together at Halloween, all loved up. How could you come on to him?’ She takes a step towards me, but her skinny legs give way so that she slumps down in the middle of the rug. ‘I asked you to talk to him, not sleep with him! You should have seen them, Gustav, your long-lost brother plying your girlfriend with cocktails. Playing with her hair. Kissing her!’
‘He didn’t kiss me! And I was only doing what you asked me to do.’ I slide across to crouch next to her on the floor, horribly aware of my brazenly skimpy kimono and the sticky scent wafting off my legs. ‘You won’t like what he had to say, though.’
I glance up at Gustav. That stony look on his face has crystallised. He closes the front door very slowly and comes to stand beside the fire. I notice him quickly unclipping the silver chain from the sofa, but it’s still attached to me.
‘Serena has told me they met for a drink to go through the day’s shots. She’s told me what they talked about.’ His voice is deep, calming. ‘Your cousin and I have learned through bitter experience not to have any secrets.’
I smile at him anxiously from my lowly position on the floor, keep my eyes on him, but he doesn’t smile back. I rely on that voice to keep me grounded.
I turn back to Polly, stretch out my hand, but she flinches away from me. Her eyes are almost transparent with rage. Cold fingers crawl up my spine.
‘What has Pierre been saying?’ I ask her quietly, kneeling up, pushing myself at her, trying to flash a silent warning at her. ‘Whatever it is, it’s lies.’
‘Nothing directly. We don’t speak, thanks to you!’ Polly snatches the hat off her head and throws it to the floor. With her hair shaved so close to her perfectly shaped head she looks like a chick just hatched. ‘Because you kept putting off talking to him for me, I was reduced to skulking outside the theatre.’ Polly shifts away from me, scrabbles in her big bag to bring out her phone. ‘I saw the two of you sitting on the steps the other morning. I got inside, saw you both flirting up on the stage, you dressed up like a harlot, him prancing about like he owns the place–’
‘But he does own the place,’ Gustav remarks quietly. I so wish he was over here, next to me.
‘No, he doesn’t! He hasn’t got any money! He doesn’t even have his own chauffeur, like he pretended in London. He lives rent-free in a SoHo flat owned by Mrs Margot Levi. I’ve been doing some digging, you see – why didn’t I do it before? – and that theatre was bought by some film people to use as a sound stage. He’s a bit-part actor who buys dresses!’
‘I’ve got this information down on my iPad from our briefing, Polly. There’s a little more to it. He never said he owned it, though I admit he implied it to begin with. He may not have much money of his own but he’s refurbishing the theatre for a production company. Designing it. Directing the show. Everything.’
Gustav clears his throat. He’s stroking his chin, but his hand, the silver chain still wrapped around it, is trembling, making the metal glint in the fading light.
‘Polly, you’ve misinterpreted some perfectly innocent situation. From what I can gather it’s not Serena you should be yelling at, it’s my brother. God knows he’s got some answering to do when I get to him. He’s misled us, even if he hasn’t exactly lied. He’s obviously not as successful and influential as he made out. That’s why he keeps insinuating that he needs money. And what’s he doing living in Margot’s flat?’
‘He told me that, too.’ I close my eyes, horribly aware how cosy that sounds. ‘That’s where they lived when they first arrived in New York, and that’s where Margot left him. As far as I know she’s never reappeared, but he said staying there was all part of the hold she had over him. Maybe she still has?’
‘I know the flat. I gave it to her. That’s why I am living at the opposite end of Manhattan now.’
Gustav and I stare at each other across the vast empty space. He said ‘I’, not ‘we’.
‘Forget about fucking Margot! What about little Rena and your brother?’ snaps Polly, hectic flushes streaking her cheeks.
‘Stop it, Polly!’ I reach out and shake her. Her eyes are huge and blank and unseeing as if she’s drugged. ‘If you’ve been staking out the theatre, you’ll know he takes his pick from a bevy of girls, a different one every night.’
‘Or so he says!’ she screeches. ‘He never wanted to do it half the time! Even when things were going great I thought it was because of me, so to comfort myself I put it down to those awful scars he kept hidden away. But this
is all far more messed up than I realised. I’m pretty certain now there were always other tarts on the side, but then you, Gustav, came into the picture and now, whoops, there’s Serena, who’s ruined everything!’
I fling my hands in the air helplessly. ‘Stop stalking him. Walk away with your head held high. Don’t let a bastard like that come between us, for God’s sake.’
She curls herself into a ball and bangs her forehead on her bony knees.
‘I may as well show you the evidence, then you can both decide what to do.’ Polly jumps to her feet and rushes at Gustav as if he is trying to escape, waving her phone in the air. ‘Look at these pictures. How about this for having no secrets, Gustav! Not only were they kissing at that hotel, for all I know they got a room, but did you know that Pierre and Serena are sloping off to Venice for a cosy jaunt? Did you know that your brother is planning to steal your girlfriend?’
I’m too late to stop her. She has pushed her phone under his nose, and Gustav is staring in horror at it, his face hollowed by the light cast from the screen.
‘Is this why you’ve been so cagey and strange ever since I got back, Serena?’
I shake my head with a strangled cry and try to get up, but I only get as far as my knees. I look like a nun, praying for forgiveness. Gustav slowly turns the phone towards me. It’s a blurred close-up of Pierre’s dark head bent over mine in the Gramercy Bar three nights ago. Gustav scrolls along the next one. A close-up of Pierre’s lips on mine.
I have to say something, quick. ‘It’s not how it looks. He was fixing my scarf round my neck, and he went to kiss me goodbye, and he misfired, that’s all.’
Gustav’s face goes deadly white. He hands the phone back to Polly and opens the door. She averts her head haughtily and marches out onto the landing as if throwing this little tantrum has given her some long-needed strength.