The Gift of Girls

by Chloë Thurlow

  The man on the banquette eased himself out of the girl and she remained on her hands and knees, her breasts full like tolling bells beneath her, waiting for the next instruction. The man sat back on the cushions, pulled at her leg, and, as she turned, I saw her clearly for the first time. She had the most striking face I had ever seen, small neat features, dark-green eyes that seemed to gleam with an inner light, pink petal lips and a thick swatch of dark-red hair that tumbled like fire about her white shoulders.

  In the crepuscular light with the leaded glass behind them, she took the man’s erection into her mouth. Her movements were slow and steady as she eased her lips down over the trunk of his quivering penis, pausing and coming back up again, slowly at first, then faster like a machine gathering speed, on and on, thighs trembling, her bottom pulsating, the cheeks like bellows opening and closing. I understood spontaneously and intuitively why men were obsessed with girl’s bottoms, why they wanted to kiss them, beat them, nurture them with creams and beat them again.

  Sandy Cunningham had spanked my bottom. Jay Leonard had spanked my bottom. Simon Roche had spanked my bottom. Strangers without number at Rebels Casino had spanked my bottom. The moment a girl is exposed and defenceless, men want to bring their big hand down on her bottom. They want to insert themselves in her bottom. They are fixated on bottoms. Girls think about their breasts and men think about their bottoms. It was useful to have this knowledge, although what I was going to do with it I didn’t know.

  I carried on watching the girl, her lips pulled back over her gums as she took the length of the man’s cock deep into the soft pink heart of her mouth. I remembered Sandy Cunningham introducing me to his strong Australian erection, how my instictive aversion to fellatio instantly transformed with my greed to learn the system, how the pain and humiliation of being buggered for the first time lifted so quickly and I started to roll my hips, push my toes into the bed and rock my bottom urgently up and down the shaft of his steely penis. The spread cheeks of my bottom were greased with the discharge flooding from my pussy. I had bitten into the bed cover, pushed up on to my knees, and it had felt as if I were being carried along on a wave of intoxicating pleasure.

  Sandy Cunningham had discovered the secret me waiting to be found. He must have known that I was ready to leave childish pleasures behind me and enter this strange land where being unclothed seemed natural and the private exertions of sex in all its stripes and colours was an open and public event. Not for the first time I felt thankful for that night in the hotel in Kensington. Without it I would not have had the confidence to be standing in the twilit room, harnessed in black leather bondage straps, a stranger stroking my naked bottom.

  The girl was massaging the man’s balls, squeezing them gently, pausing for breath, her tongue flicking about the head of his penis before taking it again into the depths of her throat, up and down, on and on, the pulse of her breath rapid but even, the lapping sound of her wet lips reminding me of Simon’s poodles, the slap of her breasts like the hands of a child clapping from sheer joy. Just ten minutes earlier, with my mechanical, preset notions, the scene before me had appeared base and vaguely squalid. Now it seemed normal, natural, fun.

  The man groaned. His body stiffened. His face clenched in spasm. He pulled the girl away, clutching the back of her hair, and with his free hand he aimed his semen over her face, across her forehead, into her eyes, over her nose, the goo slipping over her cheeks and back into her mouth. A trickle of sperm ran down her chin and with a fingertip she delicately drew the stuff back between her lips. I had never seen two people having sex before. I had never seen a girl sucking off a man, and the way he unloaded his essence over her face seemed shocking, fascinating and completely mesmerising.

  How quickly the perverse appears pleasurable, the immoral innocent, the vulgar aesthetically pleasing. In just a few minutes an encyclopaedia of new thoughts had flooded my mind. Things I knew nothing about seemed suddenly clear.

  The girl with the flaming hair was beautiful, the girls in the grand hall were beautiful, and it seemed to me that beauty has to be punished. Sister Benedict never exactly said as much, but at school the plain and plump girls were prefects and house captains, while the pretty girls cleaned the blackboards, we carried the litter to the boiler room and we were castigated for breaking even the most petty rules. Beauty is desired and beauty has to be profaned, sullied and sacrificed.

  The man at my side had not asked my name. I had not been introduced to him. Like the girl with green eyes and the girls in the hall, I was not a person, I was an object there at Black Spires to perform a service, and knowing that made it easier not harder to accept. With acceptance the fear lifts and other emotions filter into your consciousness.

  Now the performance was over, the man looked spent, his face drawn, his eyes listless after the petit mort of his orgasm. But the girl with sperm drying on her face looked refreshed, more alive, a goddess dressed in her nudity. She took the man’s limp cock into her palm and gave it a lick. It quivered briefly again with new life and she lowered her mouth over its length and sucked it clean.

  The girl had been bending over and now stretched her back, swung her legs round and placed her feet on the floor. The man fluttered his fingers, dismissing her as you would dismiss a concubine in a harem, and I recalled Simon Roche’s words.

  The girl stepped into her black high heels and strode, spine straight and with utter elegance, out of the room. We followed, the intense man with his hand about my waist, his fingers tucked into the leather belt. As the red-haired girl exited into the hallway, we made our way towards the corner of the living room where several men were watching the two girls I had seen earlier with the tall man with the turquoise belt. The girls were stretched out on a long wooden table, head to toe like the sign of Pisces, their tongues like keys each picking at the other’s lock, their heads bobbing up and down as they sucked the juices from their partner.

  The girl on top had dark hair pulled back in a band and all I could see of her from my position close to the head of the table was her long narrow back, her head bent at an angle, her crown rising and falling above a statuesque blonde with corkscrews of bubbly hair and a thin unblemished body. The blonde girl’s pussy had been shaved, giving her a childlike look, innocent and debauched like a figure in the background of a painting by Breughel. The puffy lips of her vulva were pulled back to allow her companion’s tongue to worm its way around the swollen nub of her clitoris. Both girls were moaning, groaning, humming, the onomatopoeia of their song magnified in the quiet room where the sound of Bach seemed far away as if in another building.

  The girls were immediately below a chandelier that illuminated their ivory flesh and made the men in their black suits seem like spectres drawn to the feast. The blonde girl moved faster and faster, her bottom rising and falling with a little slap back upon the table. She drew back her legs and arched her spine in a contortionist display of muscle control and rocked her shaved mound up and down in orgasm, her song losing its tune and growing in pitch.

  The tall man with the jewelled belt appeared to be the conductor of this dissonant duo and, while the girl on top was still reaching for her climax, he brought his hand down on her backside, beating the plump round mounds over and over again, the white flesh turning pink. The blonde on the bottom returned her tongue to her friend’s gaping vagina until the dark-haired girl achieved what she was so urgently seeking and let go with a piercing scream, her vast roaring orgasm creating a cacophony of broken music.

  ‘Just look at that, they can’t get enough,’ said the tall man with what I thought was probably a Texan accent. He pulled the little blonde by her ankles, separating the girls, and lifted her legs in such a way that she was hooked on to his shoulders. He lapped at her oily orgasm, his meaty tongue reaching deep inside her gaping parts, the juices flooding from her, coating the Texan’s chin and spreading over her soft thighs.

  Another man slipped his cock from his trousers and buried its length in t
he mouth of the dark-haired girl. She went up on her hands and knees, making the same tableau as the flame-haired girl when she was being anally pierced in the other room, an arrangement that arches the back, pulls in your tummy, shows the weight and shape of your breasts, a position that changes the definition of what it is to be merely human and shows a potential for being fully physical, part human, part animal.

  I was spellbound watching this intricate scene, the dinner-suited men in bow ties, the naked girls with black straps about their ankles and wrists, the chandelier above painting fields of light and shadow on their delicate curves, their long limbs and fine bones, the depth of their poise, their composure, their ability to be living in the moment as only pure creatures in nature ever really do.

  Those two girls, the one on her hands and knees, the other with her back on the table, her pussy locked into the mouth of the Texan, were denied all rights, any sense of self-determination, but this, I thought, is what being truly erotic is. Choice removes the potential to reach beyond yourself, to seek and find that certain indescribable something that poets and drug addicts try to reach and try to explain and never can. The scene was charged with vibrancy and drama. Anything could have happened. Like Caligula ripping into the stomach of his wife and dragging out his own unborn child with his teeth, the Texan might at any moment have stopped lapping at the blonde and eaten her. The man at the other end of the table could so easily have throttled the dark-haired girl and ejaculated into her dead mouth.

  This didn’t happen, but the fact that the mental image ran through my mind was at once both horrifying and electrifying. It was a relief to know that deep in the dark, untamed parts of myself I possessed such an imagination. In the past I had glimpsed briefly – in distant villages across the Iberian peninsula, with the sound of flamenco echoing over the sea and the smell of olive trees and baked stone permeating the air – the spectre of my twin self, my avatar, but I had always been too young to understand my strange desire to swim naked at night beneath the canopy of stars, to run naked through the hills, and had suppressed these pagan inclinations.

  I was suddenly aware that there is only this second, that life is fraught and fragile and often pointless, that to be truly alive is to consent to life in extremis, to consent to life to the point of death. I had been in danger when I left school of going to university, getting a degree in economics and making my way like a drone among drones, of existing in the world like a wave lost among other waves. Instead I was standing naked in a room full of dark-suited men, a man clutching the leather belt about me, that belt and those bracelets highlighting my nakedness. I wasn’t free, I was in bonds, and those bonds were liberating.

  Some of the men gathered about the table had stopped watching the girls and I became aware that they were watching me, watching my reaction. Was I appalled or stimulated? They would have had no way of knowing. I was lost in my own thoughts. The past seemed to be vanishing like the ice caps, the future was uncertain, nonexistent. I felt like a fully formed foetus floating in the amniotic soup waiting to be born, to be reborn, and, as that image nursed me in its fleeting embrace, the past and the future came flooding towards me in a great icy cold wave that almost knocked me off my feet.

  Sandy Cunningham was standing on the other side of the table.

  7

  Betrayal

  HE WAS STANDING at the back of the crowd of men watching the two girls, his saucy blue eyes bright as chips of sky, a smile on his rugged features. He nodded at the man still clinging to my belt and my companion led me away from the table towards him.

  ‘Hello, Sergio, how are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah, so you are here,’ the man with me answered.

  ‘Where else am I going to be?’

  Sergio nodded in acknowledgement of the obvious and the two men shook hands before edging away from the crowd. My throat had gone dry. My knees were shaky. I was in shock. I mean, what was Sandy Cunningham doing here?

  The two men spoke for a few minutes, business, numbers, stock-market prices, a world that was familiar to me yet alien in this vaulted temple with the plaster nymphs on the columns supporting the roof, the flesh nymphs performing in the candlelight, a complex symmetry.

  For the first time since descending the stairs from the third floor I felt the full impact of what it means to be undressed, naked in a room full of men in suits. Even Sandy looked smart in his dinner jacket, his bow tie neatly arrayed in two sensuous wings, the elegance of his black attire in counterpoint to my white unclothed body, the contrast magnifying the sense of my nakedness, intensifying the erotic tension – and that, I recognised, was the purpose of the mise-en-scène, each minute detail arranged as if by a film director to create an air of sublime decadence and pleasure.

  I had a feeling that the level of pleasure and decadence had yet to rise, that all that I had witnessed until now was merely a dress rehearsal for the atavistic orgy that would surely take place and would surely sweep me along to places I wasn’t sure I wanted to go – and yet, deep down, deep in the primitive depths of my being, it was the place where my intuition seemed to be telling me I truly belonged. I could only assume I had been named Magdalena for some good reason.

  One imagines such scenes taking place in brothels in Asia and South America, in Washington, in the Mayfair homes of Russian oligarchs. But to be here on the Kent coast, in the Garden of England, to be a part of it, suddenly felt unreal and extraordinary. I had been justifying my presence in the pragmatic terms of the mathematician, that clearing my debt of £3,100, as well as avoiding the risk of a criminal record, wasn’t merely practical, it was wise and essential. But seeing Sandy Cunningham at Black Spires shook the frail house of cards I had erected in my subconscious. There was a part of me that took pleasure in being naked in that room among the plaster nymphs, ready even for what might transpire. But on another level I was a schoolgirl still, an inexperienced teenager who belonged back along the coast at the convent I had left a short time ago, a silly girl playing at being a grown-up in a world where I didn’t belong, even if my toned, mature body clearly revealed quite a different story.

  Do I sound confused?

  I was. I had never been so confused in my life. It seemed as if I had been offered an impossible choice at Rebels Casino: offer up anything in exchange for knowledge of the system, a multi-entry visa to the world of independence and freedom. Now my choice was to play my namesake, Mary Magdalene, the harlot, the sinner, or get turned in to the cops. The choice was no choice at all. Was that life in the real world? Is all choice a question of compromise?

  I had been holding at the same time two finely calibrated and opposing opinions. On one side I believed that the activities at Black Spires were just fun, daring, a secret and unique experience. But across the scale, I regarded it all as shameful and humiliating, an amusement perfectly normal for some, I’m sure, but one hardly pursued by girls like me. There was that phrase again. What kind of girl am I? What kind of a girl was I to become? Parents, school, life. Nothing prepares you for all these opposing choices.

  Standing there urbanely in his dinner suit in that room of strangers, Sandy had shifted the finely weighted balance. My confidence had gone and a million doubts and fears held me in their terrible grip. The man I now knew as Sergio left and made his way across the room to Lee-Sun, who was pouring flutes of champagne.

  The girl whom I had seen earlier showing off the stud in her vagina was being hoisted up on a wire connected to the two rings at the back of her belt. She spread her arms like the wings of a bird and I watched as she swung like a pendulum to and fro, an older man with snowy white hair pushing her gently as if playing with his grandchild in the park.

  The two girls on the table had come to the end of their double act, and another girl I hadn’t seen before, a tall, striking black girl with hennaed hair and silver bracelets around her ankles, strode barefoot through the crowd like a Maasai across the Serengeti, the silver bracelets tinkling like tiny bells as she went.

>   Everything that had started to seem normal to me suddenly felt weird, as if two worlds had collided, and, even if I bridged those two worlds, I couldn’t understand how Sandy Cunningham belonged in them both as well.

  Sergio had collected a tray with three glasses of champagne and paused to watch the activity around the girl suspended from the ceiling. The swinging had stopped. Another man had appeared with a small metal box from which he took a pinch of white powder that he sprinkled over the pink inner walls of the girl’s vagina. The older man with snowy hair sniffed and licked and sucked off the powder before setting the pendulum back in motion, the girl flying back and forth like a mechanical bird.

  I looked back at Sandy.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

  His leathery features opened in a broad grin. ‘I could ask you the same question,’ he replied.

  I shook my head. I’m not sure why, but I hadn’t been quite so discomfited being naked among strangers, but with Sandy it was different. I felt a blush move over my neck and cheeks.

  ‘But how do you know Simon?’ I muttered

  ‘Simon’s an old mate of mine.’

  ‘But …’

  He smiled again and I noticed how white his teeth were. ‘I’m not sure if I should let you in on the secret,’ he said.

  He was teasing me. He knew what I was thinking, and he knew I knew. I had been absolutely certain there was no link between me stealing the money from Simon’s company and my lesson in learning how to beat the system from Sandy.

  There was a link. There had to be.

  ‘He knew I worked at Rebels?’ I asked softly, my shoulders sagging.

  ‘Course he did. He had you figured out right from the start.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well, from what I hear, you turn up to an interview at an accountancy office wearing a sexy little skirt and your tits hanging out.’