The Gift of Girls (8 page)

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, deep 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.

‘Here we are,’ Simon said.

I stepped nervously on to the drive and at that same moment two giant poodles ran down the steps from the open door, circled me and began licking my knees and nipping at my ankles. My nakedness and my ripe smell seemed to be driving them crazy; one jumped up my back, and the other would have sniffed and licked those parts of me that were more moist and intimate had I not stopped the animal with a few sharp taps across the nose.

‘No, down. Down,’ I said, and the beast barked and nuzzled its wet nose against my thighs. I brushed it away. The other poodle pushed me from behind, and I swatted it with a swift backhander.

I glanced at Simon, expecting to be scolded, but he just seemed vaguely amused and continued watching as the two beasts tried to ravage me. I realised in that instant that Simon Roche was something of a sadist, and I assumed that in me, being there naked fending off his lecherous dogs, there was something of the masochist.

‘No. No. No,’ I shouted. I hit one of the poodles really quite hard and they both ran back up the steps.

‘Lee-Sun, this is Magdalena,’ Simon now said as if nothing had happened and the man named Lee-Sun bowed ever so slightly.

He hurried up the steps with my bag and entered the house. We followed behind him. Simon stopped on the top step and I remained beside him, unsure what I was expected to do, as he turned to enjoy the landscape I assumed belonged to him.

Trees stretched densely in both directions. I could see a tower at the top of a low hill in the distance, and I could hear the sea pounding the shore on the far side of the house. The air had the same briny smell I knew from the convent built on the Westgate cliffs and looking out over the same stretch of coastline, so awfully close and yet it could have been on another planet, from another lifetime. A month ago I’d been wearing a tartan skirt and a straw boater. Now I wasn’t wearing anything at all.

6

The Mystery of Nudity

THE MOMENT HAD
arrived. I had bathed, washed my hair and anointed my skin with creams and perfume. Lee-Sun dressed me in all that I was to wear, leather straps that circled my wrists and ankles, a leather choker and a wide leather belt that sat above my protruding hipbones.

As he buckled up the bracelets and belt, he ran the tips of his fingers between my skin and the leather to make sure each item fitted snugly. It tickled, a shiver ran through me and, as I giggled, I recalled Sister Benedict once telling me that grown women laugh, only girls giggle.

I tried to control my nerves as Lee-Sun bent and attached the anklets, his round face filled with concentration. The straps and belt were ornamented with silver rings, the purpose of which I didn’t know, which was probably just as well.

I stepped into those treacherous high heels and again got that sense that my body was being pulled upwards as if by an invisible thread connected to the sky, stretching my legs and spine, straightening my shoulders, placing emphasis on my breasts, which seemed to have grown fuller, more prominent since I’d had my bottom spanked, the chemical reaction from that painful pleasure maturing me into a ripened fruit like the apples turning red on the trees we’d passed on our way to Black Spires.