‘Keep still, girl,’ she said.
I tried but it wasn’t easy. I was panting, trembling.
What is it about pain that it can be moulded perversely into a strange and violent pleasure? The heat from the fourth blow had shot like an arrow between my legs, through the channel of my vagina and burst like champagne bubbles against my throbbing clitoris. The pain was excruciating across my thighs, yet the delight about that hidden little nub of mystery was beyond belief. It was like putting one hand in fire and the other in arctic waters, the combination exciting conflicting emotions.
My eyes flickered open and I was shocked to notice a small portrait of the Madonna on the wall above the bookshelves, a painting I had never seen in the Sister’s office before. That painting could have been a portrait of me, the same waves of night-dark hair, the same full, plump, rather impudent lips, the same large soulful eyes, the same look of agony and confusion that I at that moment must surely have worn. As the Sister was beating my backside, she was gazing across her desk at that portrait. She was chastising me, but this was also an act of self-flagellation. Inside Sister Benedict there was a void and she was beating her way through the empty space in search of herself, in search of the Madonna she dearly wanted to be.
The conflicting sensations continued with the fifth strike that she placed across the very top of my taut buttocks, just below what I’d learned was the sciatic nerve, the vibration through that nerve, up my spine and into my brain like an electric pulse that made my whole body break into a sweat. I wriggled like a fish; I couldn’t stop myself.
‘One more,’ the Sister said, and I noted now a faint tinge of admiration, even compassion.
Sister Benedict made a soft sawing motion across my bottom, choosing her spot. I held my breath. She drew back and I listened as the cane cut an arc through the dry air and licked across my backside like a dragon’s tongue, like the blade of the guillotine. The strike crossed the other five swelling rails, completing a pattern of cruel graffiti and sending that electric pulse from my brain straight to my bladder. I had drunk two glasses of orange juice and a cup of tea at breakfast. I had nervously swallowed a bottle of Evian before climbing the steps of the tower. There had been no time to go to the lavatory.
‘Now, on your feet,’ she said, and I pushed up with my hands and slid unsteadily from the desk.
The hem of my skirt was still tucked in the waistband. The jerking motion, coupled with the feel of the cool air on the pulsating lines across my bottom, added to the mounting pressure inside me. I thought for one terrible second I was going to climax standing there in front of Sister Benedict, that the spasm around my swollen clitoris was going to erupt in that elusive phenomenon, an orgasm, something we talked about at school but never expected to come true.
But it wasn’t to be my first orgasm. That would come a month later under oddly similar circumstances.
No, it was worse than that. Much, much worse.
A stream of urine gushed from between my open legs splashing noisily on the stone floor, not a trickle but a powerful hissing jet that just kept coming. I stood there petrified in disgrace and humiliation. And Sister Benedict stood there spellbound by this unexpected turn of events.
Was this my fault? Was it her fault? Was it providence?
She didn’t know. I didn’t know.
The golden shower like a rising tide spread in a lake about my shoes and meandered slowly with the room’s faint slope towards the door. As the force of my pee died down, dribbles still dropped with a splash in the puddle below me and we remained motionless like people in bed at night waiting to see if a dripping tap is ever going to stop.
The Sister’s mouth had dropped open. Her eyes were shiny. We looked at each other and in that look was an alarming complicity. My face was streaked with snot and tears, my hair wild like a tropical storm. I was naked from the waist down. What Sister Benedict had seen was the Madonna taking a leak.
She was shaky on her small feet, her shoes engulfed in urine, her heart racing, eyes wide and staring. Nothing had ever given her more pleasure and she would remember this scene for the rest of her life, this dark-haired girl with her soggy pussy and blazing bottom and long white legs standing there before her with golden liquids gushing from her young body. She would take this memory with her when she knelt on the prie dieu in the window nook at night and stared through binoculars at the girls in the upper sixth parading naked across the dorm.
So much had happened since I had left Saint Sebastian that this scene in the tower, shocking though it had been, had fallen to the back of my memory. It was the last time the Sister had beaten me and, from that day on, she appeared to have a faint flush about her cheeks when I sat in her Latin class or our eyes met across the chapel. Her final report when I left school painted me in the sympathetic lines of the Madonna on her office wall and, to my complete surprise, I got an A in classics.
That day in the Sister’s office came back into my mind as I followed Simon into the alcove at Black Spires. I knew what was expected of me and knelt as if in prayer, my tummy and ribcage against the back of the chair, my full breasts nestled on the low padded rail at the top.
My mouth fell open as Sergio Buenavista produced his conquistador cock and slid it between my pouting lips. I closed my eyes. I could smell olive oil, crispy pan, the silky touch of the Mediterranean, and remembered swimming naked at Puente Romano.
Not counting the dildo, only one penis had been in my mouth before and that belonged to Sandy Cunningham. I had anticipated hating the experience, but it had turned out to be rather enjoyable, as it was now, wrapping my tongue around the throbbing extension of this handsome Spaniard. I sucked for all I was worth, up and down, in one cheek then the other, biting and nipping the smooth stretched skin, flicking the tip of my tongue into the groove around the head of his cock and running it back down the shaft again.
Sergio gasped and groaned, pushed deeper into my throat, then gripped the back of my head so that he could release a great spurt of hot semen that filled my mouth and pressed out of my lips. I kept going, the milky stuff oiling the shaft as it softened and he withdrew.
‘Muy bien. Qué boca tienes!’
He whispered the words, and of course he didn’t know that I spoke Spanish.
He had loved it. I loved it. I loved the feel of his frothy warm come seeping through my teeth, over my lips, across my cheeks and chin, dripping on to my breasts, my nipples puckering in pleasure and surprise. And as I knelt in the prie dieu, my spine was curved and my long white neck was drawn back to take another hard cock in the space vacated by Sergio.
My next conquest filled my throat and I performed the same surgery, nursing the hard thing, teasing and tormenting the pulsating head with its unseeing eye, taking it down deeper into my throat and sucking hard until, like a geyser erupting, another floodtide of hot stuff filled my mouth with that lemony, cheesy, subtle, unnameable tang I remembered from that first time with Sandy Cunningham.
His sperm was still dripping over my face when a third man unbuttoned his flies and presented his skeleton key to unpick the lock to my puffy full lips. As he pressed his penis into the soft tissue of my throat, I wondered if this was my gift, that with consummate skill I could nurse these throbbing pieces of the male and receive their essence in exchange for the gift of relieving all tension and anxiety.
‘Muy bien. Qué boca tienes!’
What a great mouth, Sergio had said, and I revelled in the compliment.
I licked and sucked, I nipped and tacked, and this man whose face I hadn’t seen withdrew his cock, held the moist shaft in his clenched palm and, like a fire-fighter with a hose, put out the flames of my burning cheeks by spraying my face with his sperm. It went up my nose, over my chin, over my forehead, into my eyes and he pushed the hosepipe back into my mouth for me to suck out the last hesitant drop.
There was a muted round of applause which I heard but didn’t see. I was unable to open my eyes as they were thick with spunk, but
I imagined a group must have gathered about our alcove, and a fourth man presented his gift, slipped it into the wash of semen coating my throat and drilled inside the soft membranes as if in search of something small and lost. He reached his climax deep in my gullet and I was still gagging his sperm down when he withdrew and another cock pressed into my cheek.
My neck and throat were getting sore with all this activity but I thought this was a small price to pay for the service I was performing and, anyway, I knew from gymnastics that muscle burn heals by working through the pain. I was giving and receiving the gift. The universe was in order.
I reset my jaw and another muscle-hard piece of meat pressed down my throat and tickled my windpipe. It was bigger than the rest, I thought, the enormous head clanging my tonsils like church bells. I had self-learned the technique of swallowing, drawing air from deep in my lungs and breathing through the narrow passage encircling this monster that pushed deeper and deeper down and down as if into the core of my being.
My eyes were closed, but I pressed them more tightly shut and tried to visualise myself kneeling in the prie dieu, my face and dark hair coated with semen, my breasts pushed out, tingling with pins and needles, gummy with layer after layer of fresh essence. What I could see was something aesthetically pleasing, completely natural, a perfect young girl with gymnast poise nurturing her gift, a girl who had found in life the very thing she was born to do.
My eyes flickered open and I caught a glimpse of the Arab’s sunglasses, his thick moustache and goatee, his head thrown back, his jalabah pulled open. He withdrew the monster and added another coat of jism to my sticky features, the stuff pouring out of him in vast spurts like milk from the udders of a cow, enough, I was sure, to fill a bucket, and all of it drenched my face, my chin, my breasts. When he had finished, he pushed his cock back into my gaping mouth and his taste, I realised, was rare and exotic. I recalled walking through the Grand Socco, the market in the old town in Tangier, the aroma of spices, roasting lamb, mint tea and hashish smouldering in brass hookahs.
There were more, five, six, seven, I lost count and what did it matter? I did what was expected of me, I received and I shared the gift. I sucked those hard cocks until they were soft and satisfied. I lubricated my skin with enough semen to give an elderly woman a facelift and, when it was over, I went upstairs with Milly where I showered and rubbed my body with precious oils.
The night wasn’t over. It had barely begun.
10
The King Makers
THE STAIRCASE DESCENDED before me once again and, when I entered the grand hall, the lights appeared to be darker and the activity more intense. Several of those men in dinner suits were now dressed in their birthday suits. They were on chairs, on the floor, in corners and alcoves, their bodies decorated with the limbs and mouths of heavenly girls.
I stood and watched one of the men I had seen spanking the twins. One of those gamine girls was now sitting astride his hips seesawing up and down the mast of his stiff cock while the other squatted on his face, her wet gash over his mouth. The girls were facing each other and, while their pussies like pistons pulsed rhythmically up and down, their lips were pressed together in a continual kiss.
In the next alcove, I watched a reverse mirror image. The Maasai was on her back taking one man between her legs and sucking off a second balanced precariously on the edge of a table. The two men, like the twins, were facing each other, not kissing, but negotiating a contract. I heard them tossing out numbers, percentages, production schedules, penalty clauses, and it made perfect sense that business should be conducted in this way, not in the stale air of board rooms, but in casual summits of extreme intimacy, in the midst of an orgy.
An orgy!
The very word sent a shimmer of excitement up my spine. It’s something a girl always imagines in her secret dreams, but to actually be there, to be a part of it, was so amazing I had to pinch my pulsing nipples to make sure I didn’t wake up to the chime of the chapel bell and realise I was late again. I wasn’t late. I wasn’t dreaming. I was wandering without haste through the grand hall stark naked, the leitmotiv of my new life. Far from being ashamed of the way I am, I was at peace with myself, knowing that it would have been impossible to be any other way. We become what we are.
I looked round for Simon Roche but couldn’t see him. I recalled for some reason that day at my interview, how Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights had pressed into my imagination as Simon swept back his hair and fixed me with his penetrating eyes. It was at that moment that he peered into my schoolgirl mind and read my unknown desires.
Would he penetrate other parts of me that night at Black Spires? I really had no idea. Simon’s desires seemed governed by his faith in discipline. He had stripped and spanked me in his office. He had taken me through the pain barrier to the heights of that embarrassing orgasm. He had guided me to the alcove containing the prie dieu. But it was Sergio Buenavista who had led the file of men who left on my flesh the gift of their warm semen.
I was certain Simon had not been among them. He appeared and disappeared like a shadow in the flickering glow of the candles, a good host ensuring his guests were accommodated. He was both present and absent, and when I joined the revelry, as I surely would, in my fantasy Cathy would finally know the touch of her Heathcliff.
Another chess game was in progress and two different girls in masks were leaking over the board as they conveyed the pieces in their fit young pussies. The girl in the red mask had shaved her pubes to devil horns, which I thought totally brilliant, not that the devil’s clasp prevented her dropping the red queen and scattering the opposing pawns.
We remained watching for a few moments, but the game after the brief upset grew monotonous and the erotic, I realised, needs constant change and variety; repetition is the death of desire.
It was so easy to wander blindly into the world of cliché. Most people do. They don’t choose their lives. They follow the well-beaten path into the abyss of tedium and obscurity. I had been until this day, this night, nothing more than a reflection of society’s rules and codes, its prescriptions and formulas. Girls from council estates get their lips pierced and a tramp stamp across their lower back; they dream of being a Page 3 girl and end up working in supermarkets. Girls from boarding school go to uni, dream of being TV presenters and marry men who work as bankers. The girls, rich and poor, have babies, the dreams perish and they stare into the mirror as lines carve disappointment into their faces. They grow old. They grow old quickly.
Simplistic? Of course. But no less true.
From Saint Sebastian, I had gone straight into an accountancy office to beef up my CV before starting at the London School of Economics. I was on that well-beaten path until temptation flashed across the computer screen and I was enticed by the deadly sin of greed, mesmerised by the unknown, lured to the high wire. The high wire is life, they say. Everything else is just waiting.
A faint smile pressed into my lips and the shiver of excitement running up my spine was replaced with the tang of want.
I wanted everything. I rolled my shoulders and stretched like a cat. I had guzzled the life-giving force from a dozen men and transformed their essence into raw energy, a new identity. I was a rare exotic bird from an endangered species. I had broken the shell of the cliché and was reborn as the girl I was supposed to be – not a girl, a woman, a slave to my senses.
Simon knew me better than I knew myself. He had divined my potential. I was there at that country house to receive and exchange and to pass on the gift. Didn’t Sister Benedict always say, quoting You Know Who, that you reap what you sow. What you put out comes back in giddy unfathomable pleasures Simon Roche understood implicitly and I could only begin to imagine.
After half an hour upstairs with Milly, I had come to see that, when you submit, the potency of pleasure is that much greater. Just as the moon’s light is a reflection of the sun, submission is a mirror image of domination, the yin to the yang, the perfect interplay of oppo
sites.
Milly’s fingers linked my own. The red queen had lost confidence after her spill and was under threat from an upstart black pawn.
‘Mate in three,’ she predicted.
She was right.
We journeyed on.
The girl illustrated with her lovers was suspended with arms outstretched between two columns, her bare feet spread and resting on the heads of two stone nymphs. The lips of her vagina were ornamented with two golden rings and the pink folds of her sex were dangling from the vine of her pubic hair like forbidden fruit on a tree in the Garden of Eden – not an apple, according to Sister Benedict, that was the wrong translation, but guava, the dark exotic fruit native to the Caribbean and South America, a detail, if true, which threw into question the veracity of the entire Old Testament.
This thought flitted through my mind as we passed under the arch of the girl’s legs and I stretched up to drink from this upturned chalice.
‘You’re incorrigible,’ Milly said.
‘Thank you,’ I replied.
The Arab and the Texan were talking quietly together.
‘Oil prices,’ Milly whispered. ‘They decide.’
‘Decide what?’ I asked.
‘How much oil costs per barrel.’
‘But it’s a market, surely, it fluctuates depending on supply and demand,’ I said.
‘That’s what they want people to think. It’s not like that. Nothing,’ she emphasised, ‘is ever as it seems.’
‘It would be dull if it was,’ I responded, something I’d read once, and it drew a smile from Milly.
I looked back at the two men totally oblivious to the sexual acrobatics being performed about the room.
‘And they decide?’ I repeated.
‘The men here are the most powerful men in the world. Didn’t you know that?’
No, I didn’t know that, not that it came as a complete surprise. I glanced across the hall at Sandy Cunningham and Sergio Buenavista. They were sitting together in an alcove, Sandy with his trousers about his ankles, the Oriental girl on her knees sucking him off while he chatted with the Spaniard, and I couldn’t help feeling a little rush of pride that Sergio at this moment did not appear to require the same service. I had sucked him dry.
The Gift of Girls Page 13