Mr Singh touched his fingers to his turban in a salute and glanced in my direction without actually looking at me. I was a naked Lady Godiva, Mr Singh one of those good citizens who lined the streets without taking so much as a peep.
Mr Roche opened the door and I felt proud that I had made it across the lobby without fainting or having hysterics. We descended the narrow flight of concrete stairs with their decaying smell of damp and ancient dust. Even in summer, history spirals up from beneath the pavements and foundations, the ghosts of Roman centurions, Viking warlords, slaughtered princes and barren queens. How could a girl in modern times be walking naked towards her own doom? A silver Range Rover beeped as the door locks were released and I climbed into the passenger seat as if this big shiny vehicle were a sarcophagus about to bear me down to the underworld.
He tossed the bag with my clothes into the back. ‘You won’t be needing those,’ he said. I already knew that and considered it cruel of him to say so.
He turned the ignition key and the electronic doors across the front of the garage rose, letting in the sun. The car pushed out into the City traffic and I sat squirming on the black leather seat conscious that everyone in the world could peer through the polished windows and see me sitting there naked.
‘Don’t squirm down in the seat, Magdalena. It looks untidy,’ he said.
I did as I was told.
I sat as if I were wearing clothes, the seatbelt emphasising the shape of my breasts, making them more prominent, my face half-hidden by my hair. It was embarrassing to be sitting there like that; actually, it was shameful, but I felt protected, as if in the hands of fate. I didn’t have to make any choices or decisions. My credit cards, keys and mobile phone were in the plastic bag with my clothes in the back of the car. I was like a child in some ways, totally free, free of my clothes, free of responsibility. I just had to do anything demanded of me. In thirty-one days I would be free and, at that moment, it seemed an eternity away.
‘Sit still,’ he said. ‘You’re wriggling about.’
‘That’s because it hurts,’ I replied.
‘That’s nothing, Magdalena. That was just a little bit of … foreplay.’
He saw my face screw up in trepidation and patted my knee.
‘You can do this, Magdalena,’ he added, his voice almost kindly. ‘Like all things in life, if we accept new experiences with equanimity we learn and grow from them.’
‘What do you learn from having your bottom spanked?’ I asked petulantly.
‘What do you think?’
I wasn’t sure. It would never in a million years have crossed my mind that a man one day would smack my bottom – I mean, like that, naked over a sofa. I didn’t know such things went on, even though Sandy Cunningham and Jay Leonard had both in their teasing way warned me that I was ready to have my bottom tanned and that with their preparatory slaps I was being primed for a proper spanking. The three men didn’t know each other and yet they seemed like members of the same club, a secret league of gentlemen spankers. But that was just too silly, too paranoid. I put it out of my mind.
What had I learned from having my bottom spanked?
‘Well?’ he demanded.
‘Not to take things that don’t belong to me.’
‘Isn’t that rather obvious, Magdalena?’ He sounded disappointed and angrily changed lanes, cutting in front of a black cab.
It was obvious. I sounded like a schoolgirl standing before Sister Benedict and I was anything but that. I was a woman with sticky thighs and a burning bottom sitting naked in a motor car. Perhaps there was some deeper meaning to my being punished in this way, some cryptic piece of wisdom I needed to learn and Simon Roche was about to teach me? I had wanted to believe he was just a pervert who had tricked me into stripping off my clothes, tricked me into taking twelve strokes from his leathery hand, tricked me into this journey to the evil-sounding Black Spires.
But no one had told me to take the money from the Roche-Marshall account.
I was the master of my own destiny and it seemed logical to be moving across London in a silver Range Rover ready to accept what was coming to me. Like fledgling birds being tipped from the nest for the first time, you only learn, I realised, by letting go, by letting go of everything you have ever thought or imagined or believed in, by letting go of all preconceived ideas and perceptions and flying on the wings of your intuition.
I had taken the beating and come through it, but it’s not being spanked that transforms your thinking; it’s the humiliation, the disgrace, the degradation, the feeling that now a barrier has been crossed it will be so much easier for the next barrier to come down. Each new ordeal prepares you for the next until who and what you are reshapes the helixes of your DNA and you become a different person.
… You will be spanked and cropped, caned and humiliated, you will be penetrated and violated … You will be a concubine in a harem. His words ran through me like fear through startled birds. That’s what I had been promised. That’s what I had accepted.
‘Well, Magdalena?’
I’d forgotten to answer his question. ‘I’ve learned my lesson,’ I said.
‘You have learned a lesson. You told me at the interview that you believe in discipline. True discipline comes from total obedience. That, my dear, is what you are going to learn.’
‘But what am I going to have to do?’ I blurted out.
‘You know the answer to that as well as I do.’
‘Everything. Anything,’ I said.
‘Yes, Magdalena, anything and everything.’
His dark voice had grown still darker. A chill ran up my spine. To make it worse, he turned on the air conditioning and an icy draught rose up my legs and tickled my bottom. In the dead air of the car I could still smell the fruity seepage between my legs. Heady and intoxicating, it reminded me of the stables, pony riding, wearing shiny leather boots and riding tack. It seemed as if only yesterday I was a child and now I was sitting starkers beside a man who was all but a stranger, heading for the great unknown.
The cars moved like a steel snake along Commercial Road towards the Blackwall Tunnel. We stopped at traffic lights and a man in a white van did a double take as he saw me sitting there. His mate leaned over and coughed out a mouthful of smoke. They both had shaved heads and enormous eyes like some extinct variety of prehistoric insect, their features white and mobile like soft putty, shifting into a variety of expressions – shock, lust, a terrible envy. Girls like me travel naked in silver Range Rovers with men like Simon Roche, not insects in dirty white vans.
Girls like me?
These words flashed in my mind like a neon sign lighting up above the entrance to a nightclub. What sort of girl was I? A month ago, a week ago, I would have been able to answer that question. I was just like Melissa Maybury and Sarah Van Spall, a convent girl with good A levels and the future rolling out before me like the red carpet at the Oscars.
You make one wrong turn and the way ahead becomes misty and muddled. For some reason I remembered visiting the Mesquita in Cordoba the year I was fourteen and my younger brother Rafael was twelve. Before Daddy lost his money, before I had to expose my charms at Rebels Casino, we had gone every year to Spain. Like Mummy, it was where I most felt at home, where in the primeval air I thought I might one day discover who I really was. In Cordoba I adored the whitewashed houses, the winding cobblestone streets and, most of all, the ancient mosque built more than a thousand years ago by the Moors, great astronomers and mathematicians who had kept the light of learning burning through the long night of the Dark Ages. The vast cupola above the mosque is supported by hundreds of tall, slender columns whose shadows make an intricate maze as the sun circles the building and lights the marble floor through the high-arched windows. I became lost in the crisscrossing layers of shadow and was surprised to come across the cathedral constructed within the building: a Christian place of worship in the heart of Islam. Even the zealots at the time of the Inquisition had been too moved by the
beauty of the Mesquita to destroy it, and it had occurred to me that beauty was the only treasure worth seeking.
‘Are you thinking about what I said?’ he asked suddenly.
‘No,’ I said truthfully. ‘I was thinking about the Mesquita in Cordoba.’
‘Ah, yes, of course, you have something of the Andaluz gypsy about you, something quite wild and reckless.’
I had always thought of myself as being more cautious than reckless. Had I changed so much, died and been reborn? Cut flowers don’t know they are already dead. ‘My mother is Spanish,’ I said. ‘If she knew I was sitting here without any clothes on she would die of shame.’
‘Are you dying of shame?’ he asked. ‘Or are you secretly enjoying yourself ?’ He waited for me to reply.
‘I’m not enjoying myself, no,’ I said.
‘But you’re not hating it either, are you, Magdalena?’
My cheeks burned with embarrassment. ‘No,’ I muttered.
‘Did you ever imagine having an orgasm merely from being spanked?’
I didn’t want to answer, but that was against the rules of the game: unspoken rules, to be sure, but I knew them nonetheless.
‘No,’ I said.
I sensed a faint smile about his lips, and Simon Roche never smiled. As he talked about my being spanked and having an orgasm, a strange charge went through my body. I became tense and was aware that a bead of juice was welling into my labia before leaking over the black leather seat. I could smell once more the faint aroma of arousal and wondered why sitting naked in the traffic surrounded by people dressed and stressed as they hurried home was a turn-on, that perhaps deep down I didn’t know ‘me’ at all.
‘Aren’t you just a little intrigued to ponder what might happen in the next thirty-one days?’ he continued.
‘No, I’m terrified,’ I told him.
‘Really? That’s marvellous. A touch of fear makes things much more exciting for everyone, even you,’ he remarked.
‘I’m not sure how fear is going to make anything exciting,’ I said.
‘You’re not afraid of what’s going to happen to you.’
‘What?’ I demanded. ‘Of course I am.’
He smiled again. ‘No, dear girl, you are afraid of what you might learn about yourself.’
He sighed as the traffic ground to a halt. We were next to the pavement outside a furniture showroom. I could see my reflection in the shiny glass, eyes bright, breasts firm, hair every which way. I tried to focus on what he had said, but it seemed totally unreal to be sitting there nude in black high heels, totally unreal that Magdalena Maria Manzano Wallace, the girl I thought I was, could have got herself into this disgraceful position.
The traffic started moving again.
‘Magdalena, if you acquit yourself well,’ he said, ‘we will talk again about your future.’
I gasped. ‘Really?’
‘I always do what I say. Always.’
I had been so preoccupied thinking about the £3,100 I’d stolen I’d almost forgotten that I had lost all my savings. I didn’t have a future.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know what I’m going to have to do.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Yes, honestly,’ I said, but, even if I didn’t know exactly, I had a pretty good idea and the word honestly didn’t exactly apply.
‘Well, you’ll just have to wait and see.’ He sounded like Mother. ‘Discipline is the path to happiness and freedom.’
It was a lifeline. I clenched my fists and resolved to try to do everything he wanted.
I glanced out of the window. Ten minutes in slow-moving traffic and already I was used to the blank stares of car drivers and van drivers, pedestrians on the sidewalk, men in kaftans with beards, women in long skirts, their heads and faces covered except for their shiny expressive eyes. In a multicultural society, I was the fallen woman, Jezebel, Mary Magdalene. I had, as Sister Benedict was wont to say, got too full of myself.
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for myself sitting there with my red bottom and yet, perversely, at the same time, I felt vibrant, alive, my fingers and toes tingling with pins and needles, my body vibrating with new sensations that zinged through my nervous system. My breasts seemed fuller, firmer. My nipples were fizzing fireworks about to explode, and it took all my willpower not to reach for them, caress them, roll the soft pink buds between my fingers as I had done so often in the shower after hockey and at night in the dorm surrounded by sleeping girls. I sat with my shoulders back, knees together, hands over my pussy, the scent of my juices hanging in the air. I was leaking still and was sure when I got out of the car there would be a puddle on the black leather seat.
Two girls my age in short skirts and off-the-shoulder tops stared into the car as we ground to a halt. They waved their hands like I was a celebrity and I couldn’t stop myself smiling. My mood had lifted. I was on a roller-coaster – terrified one moment, excited the next, apprehensive of where we were going and anxious to get there.
When I saw the money belonging to Roche-Marshall disappear from the computer screen I’d felt suicidal. There appeared to be absolutely no escape. I had been ensnared by my own greed, trapped in my own labyrinth. When I got the opportunity to save myself by bending over to display my white bottom I had done so really without a second thought. I had stepped from my clothes and slipped with a sense of relief into the shoes Simon Roche removed from that green and gold box.
Those shoes were another mystery I didn’t think about at the time, but now, looking down at my feet in the car’s footwell, those courtly heels that made my spine arc in a bow and pulled back my shoulders so that my breasts were pushed forward seemed oddly perfidious, a Trojan horse in a game of wits.
‘Why did you buy these shoes?’ I asked.
‘Don’t you like them?’
‘Yes, yes, of course, but I mean, why?’
‘They fit all right?’
‘Yes …’
‘I thought you’d like them.’
‘I do, but how did you … how did you know?’
‘You know the answer to that question as well as me.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You will,’ he said with a tone of finality and I let it drop.
He had asked my shoe size before I stole the money and, if he knew I was going to rob his company before I knew myself, he was even smarter than I thought. Was I so transparent? Did he know that when temptation was put in my way I would seize it? It didn’t make sense. He didn’t know I worked at Rebels Casino. He didn’t know I would meet Sandy Cunningham and take up a life of gambling and theft. He can’t have done.
It seemed as if from the very first moment when I went for the interview at Roche-Marshall circumstances had contrived to give Simon Roche power over me, the power to do anything he wanted. I had taken off my clothes. I had given him my damp knickers to inspect. I had slipped into those beautiful black shoes, stretched naked over the arm of the sofa and allowed him to spank me. It had been painful, but pain, I realised, could mutate from base metal to gold, from agony to a strange inexplicable ecstasy.
Perhaps that was the great secret the alchemists had been seeking. It wasn’t spiritual rebirth, it was corporeal. I wasn’t connected to some higher spirit, but something deep and earthy. Like my ancestors who worshipped pagan gods before the Christian missionaries arrived from the Holy Lands, I belonged to the soil, to everything ripe, fecund, pubescent, and Simon Roche seemed to have unmasked my true nature.
Under Simon’s hand, the tectonic plates had shifted on a fault line running through me and, as his last and hardest spank crossed my inflamed bottom, I had erupted in a vast embarrassing orgasm that sent a tidal wave of magma gushing over my thighs. It is hard to believe that such a thing is possible and I certainly wouldn’t have believed it had Melissa or Sarah told me.
‘Ah, about time,’ he said, changing lanes again and accelerating.
The car plunged into the dark tunnel, de
ep into the earth, deep below the river, and as we rose into the light on the far side it felt as if on one side of the tunnel I was one person and now I was another.
The steel snake broke up into hundreds of parts, shiny as fish, as the car raced towards the M2. I enjoyed the speed and wanted to go faster. We turned off towards Faversham. It was getting on for eight, the sun high still, the sky, after the haze across London, pastel like a sheet of pale-blue silk. I knew the names of the villages; I had gone to school not far away, on the coast.
We passed oast houses and windmills, orchards laden with fruit, fields of strawberries and yellow rape seed, everything healthy and fresh and growing. He turned on to a lane that ran between mature oaks and, rounding a bend, I saw two black spires rising above the tree line. A three-storey house with many windows enlarged on my retina like a photograph in developing fluid, then vanished again as the lane dipped and ran along the side of a tall fence overgrown with ivy. Beside an arched gate there was a painted sign with the words ‘Black Spires – Private’. The gates opened the moment they recognised the silver Range Rover and we crunched over a long drive arcaded by trees, the house coming into view again.
On each side of the house stood round towers supporting the spires, and below the slate roof the cream stucco walls were pierced by arched windows and decorated with a loop of fleur-de-lys in black iron that ran across the façade between the ground and first floor. Black Spires looked like a dwelling transported across the sea from Normandy, out of place on the English coastline, but when you are naked in a new place everything is strange and nothing is strange.
The car circled the drive and came to a halt at the bottom of a flight of six stone steps. An Oriental man in baggy black trousers and a collarless shirt emerged with a smile and automatically took my bag of clothes from the back of the car.
The Gift of Girls Page 6