Being a Girl (18 page)

Everyone switched from being quiet to being totally silent as Stephanie stood before us stark naked, arms slightly apart, her bush thick and curly and it occurred to me that when David had suggested
I shave off my silky fleece it had been for his fun, not for his film. That's what happens when men learn how to spank girls. They learn how to take liberties.

Stephanie pulled at the belt securing my robe and Maja slid the garment from my shoulders. The crew had already had a good look at Stephanie Jones and now as all eyes fell on me a wave of colour ran over my neck and cheeks. It's quite strange being naked in front of so many people. I had imagined it often enough, but it was a curious pleasure to finally experience it.

‘Where do you want us, darling?' said Stephanie in her plummy voice and I noticed David's Adam's apple wobble as he swallowed.

He wanted us on the sofa, petting and touching, kissing and caressing, doing what comes naturally. It's not something you can describe in a script, and although David only wanted twenty seconds of film, we wriggled about under the hot lights for sufficient time to give the editor plenty of material to cut and the crew a full-on lesbian show with the queen of family television in the starring role.

I'm not sure how it happens, or why it happens, but with the camera eye watching all other eyes disappear. Your nerves disappear. Your inhibitions disappear. The sofa was a black planet spinning in the white universe of the tiers of lights. I had acted before in a million school plays, but acting for the camera is different, inanimate but intimate, you feel real, your feelings are real, authentic. I felt love, desire, an aching tenderness. I was wet, my back was wet on the leather sofa, my armpits were wet, my pussy was open like a wet exotic flower, warmed by the lights. My body I realised was a magnetic force, a personality in its own right. People wanted to touch me, kiss me, pet me,
suck me. A sheen of dew coated my thighs. I was a lake of desire and pleasure. I had never been so wet before, never felt such stimulation before, and I was suddenly terrified that I would always need an audience to reach true satisfaction, the ultimate orgasm.

Stephanie kissed my breasts, she kissed my lips, and I opened myself like the gates of paradise as she abandoned my wet mouth to sew kisses like rain spots over my neck, my collar bones, the dimpled cavern of my throat. She traced a trail of saliva down between my breasts, my diaphragm, vibrating like the skin of a drum. She spread my thighs and began to climb the snake from behind my knee, across my hip bone and down, down to the open cleft of my clean-shaven pussy. Her long tongue like the probing tongue of a snake explored the honey-strewn lips of my vulva and as her tongue slipped inside me I was aware of the grey boom lowering above my head to capture my sighs, the juicy ripples of Stephanie's steady motions between my thighs, the soft slap of our damp flesh under the hot lights.

When David whispered ‘And Cut,' his voice seemed to come from a great distance and it took me a few moments to remember we were on a film set, that we were making a movie, this was art, not sex. Adam wrapped Stephanie in her robe. Maja did the same for me. And we walked slowly, proudly, chins high like Oscar nominees across the trip wires of the wriggling black cables and upstairs to the costume department.

Stephanie was aglow, eyes like fireflies, her lips gripped in the way of people trying not to smile. She was Christopher Columbus on the deck of his galleon staring out at America; what would become America. Maja and Adam seemed to realise that we wanted to
be left on our own and when they closed the door, Stephanie put her arms around my waist.

‘Hope you didn't mind, you know . . .' she began.

‘It was lovely,' I replied.

‘I didn't know,' she said, and paused. ‘I didn't know it was so . . . so nice. I've never, you know, never experimented.'

‘Then you should,' I told her. ‘I certainly am. I want to do
everything
.'

David had been really rather clever starting with the lesbian scene. It settled everyone's nerves and, apart from being an hour or two over schedule each day, the shoot ran like clockwork. We did the long seduction scene at a bar in Soho owned by a friend of Hermann Mann. He had told David that the rushes had made him ‘truly excited'.

The editor had played around with the lesbian scene and the twenty seconds he'd cut from the twenty minutes was all rather pretty and innocent, a girlie kiss, a pan over my swollen lips, a shot of the little monkeys, then a close-up of me looking like the cat that got the cream as Stephanie slides from frame to lap up the liquids gurgling between my thighs. One sip and you are addicted.

Cheats
had taken a serpentine course from the original concept and now contained more of the indefinable oo la la Jean-Luc Cartier had said it needed. It had grown complex, more
nouvelle vague
, David explained, although being a first-time director, he remained angst-ridden as we sat below the neon strips in his kitchen shaping the dénouement to keep the sexual tension as taut as a bow string.

It was just what they did when they were shooting
Casablanca
, the best film ever made, said David, write
the script at night and go out and shoot it next morning. That was David's dream, to remake
Casablanca
, which I thought rather silly. If
Casablanca
was the tour-de-force everyone said it was, if no one could match the stature of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, what was the point in making an insipid colour version of a black and white masterpiece?

There wasn't a point, none at all, not that I said as much. I grinned and agreed. That's what girls are expected to do. We play roles. We are obedient. We become what we are expected to be . . . although I could see a time coming when I rebelled. When I met the right man, I would be the perfect woman.

Anyway, we gave the script the final tweak and I was feeling feisty when we climbed into bed. I laid David down in the missionary position, straddled him like a jockey and worked my knees into his flanks as I rode him across the finishing line to an ecstatic climax.

It was late. We were drained, literally, and the last day of shooting was the longest, a full twelve hours from eight until eight. I could hardly open my eyes when I rolled out of bed all damp and sticky, but a film set is like a drug, as soon as you get a whiff of eggs and bacon frying the fatigue flows from your body and you feel completely alive.

We returned to the house of those kindly people the electricians were tirelessly chipping. Murray McVite exploded every five minutes and the runners named Max and Garth and Jake were running around with polish and marker pens concealing the scratches and scuffs.

‘It's like being a virgin letting your house be used by a film crew,' said Murray. ‘It only happens once.'

The gaffer shone the spotlight in Murray's eyes.

‘Just testing,' said Pete.

‘Bleedin' sparks,' Murray muttered, and I realised that all the yelling and complaining was just movie ritual, that the crew, like members of a family, like the actors themselves, had roles to play. Assistant directors would always be ill-tempered, the sparks would always be grumbling, and the runners were destined to run around like headless chickens never entirely sure what they were supposed to be doing.

The two Petes, ably assisted by the runners, were now chipping the paint on the stair stays as they lugged the light stands upstairs. David would be shooting two scenes in the bathroom, the one where Ricky drops his mobile phone down the loo, then the space would have to be ‘re-dressed' to look like a different bathroom for the scene where he peels off the bloody bandages and reveals the tattoo on his chest. First though, in natural light, we would be shooting the scene where the girls are clearing the shelves and Ricky appears with a towel around his waist.

Roddy Wise was already in make-up with Adam. I managed to squeeze by the commotion on the stairs with a cup of coffee and was leaning on the windowsill in the back bedroom watching the sun polish the glass sides of the buildings at Chelsea Harbour when Stephanie Jones arrived in a little white dress and a straw hat.

I hadn't seen Steph since we'd done our lesbian scene and she had gone through a complete metamorphosis. She was 42 and looked suddenly like a girl, her hair mussed when she removed her hat, her eyes aglow, her lips painted scarlet. Just as I'd suspected, my girlie juice was an elixir. I had between my legs the fount of eternal youth, the philosopher's stone,
the white shell from which Venus emerged in a painting by Salvador Dalí, sublime and surreal. Steph looked marvellous and I was certain I was responsible. I had awoken the inner Miss Jones and it was something to be proud of.

Maja delivered our camouflage pants and tank tops and Stephanie asked me to lower the zip on the back of her dress. She stepped from the material and my mouth dropped open. She was naked, not a stitch, just a pair of white killer heels that bowed her back and made her breasts all perky.

‘Well, it is hot,' she said, ‘and I feel so sexy walking along the street exposed.'

I remembered that day when I'd gone for lunch at the Jewel Royale with Mummy and Binky, and after lunch for no apparent reason I'd whipped off my knickers and marched through Soho to see Jean-Luc Cartier. It confirmed my theory, girls just want to be seen in the altogether, bare as new-born babies, they want to be free of macho posturing and enjoy the gift of their beautiful bodies. I stared at Stephanie's fiery-tipped breasts and a curious thing happened, my own breasts started to buzz and tingle as if the sparks had joined us with invisible wires.

There was a rap on the door. ‘Ten minutes to make-up.'

Steph opened the door and found Jake still standing there. ‘Tell Adam we need fifteen,' she said, and closed the door again.

I peeled off my clothes and the electrical charge zipped across the room and drew us together with a force that took my breath away. Stephanie had tasted the elixir and was thirsting for more. I dropped into the leather chair under the window, stretched my legs over the arms and she kneeled to the holy orifice. Now
girls' tongues are not like boys' tongues, but I was soon a river of oily goo that Steph supped from my clean-shaven pussy and I thought how brilliant, we needed a high degree of sexual tension in the living-room scene and what could be better preparation?

When we finally got to make-up, Roddy Wise was just leaving. He looked closely at me, he looked closely at Steph, and his lips pressed together in a knowing smile.

‘Well, well, well,' he said.

Adam leaned out the door. ‘This isn't a conveyor belt, you know,' he said. ‘I can't do two at once.'

‘Tyrant,' hissed Steph and he grinned.

Roddy strolled off along the corridor, his shoulders rising and falling as he chuckled to himself.

We managed to get the morning schedule done by the middle of the afternoon. We were two hours late already but everyone seemed to think the three morning set-ups had gone well and after lunch, Adam carefully painted the snake tattoo on my leg. I dressed and stood in the bath so that he could spray my clothes; in the film we'd been caught in a downpour leaving the wine bar; girls in wet clothes look sexy and it gives them an excuse to change into something more comfortable, like nothing at all.

I had put on one of Mummy's dresses, a reproduction chiffon ensemble from the thirties with a bow like the bow on a chocolate box on my shoulder. To hold the bow in place, Maja had found a silver snake pin in the Portobello Road; it was perfect: the snake was the film's leitmotiv and my bare leg with the fake tattoo would one day grace the case of a DVD. We had written out Amanda's change into the red kimono. It was redundant. Girls like Amanda Marshall wouldn't waste the effort.

Maja and Adam followed me downstairs. The crew was waiting. Murray shouted for everyone to be quiet and one of the runners gave me a bottle of champagne; it had already been opened so it would be easy for Ricky to open. The sound people would put the pop in later in the edit.

‘And, action.'

Max snapped the clapper board. ‘Amanda's Flat. Take one,' he said.

‘Mark it,' said Dudley, and the cameras were turning.

I stood there in the damp dress, hair sticking to my forehead.

‘You're not in a hurry?'

‘Not at all.'

The camera stays on Ricky as I leave the room and return with a bottle of champagne and two cold glasses, one containing the sleeping draught. I give the bottle to Ricky. I smile girlishly as the cork pops. Some champagne spills over his hand. I smile again. I take the bottle and the camera follows me on the dolly as I go to fill the two waiting glasses. Amanda is such a bitch and I feel like a bitch as I turn with a look of adoration pasted on my sweet features.

‘To . . . to what? To beauty,' he begins, and I say my lines as I watch him drink the champagne. I talk about being gang raped, being locked up and beaten up, the dominatrix in a leather mask, the backlash. I am a siren singing from the rocks, Eve the snake woman, a girl of eighteen, the ultimate object of desire. What man could resist betraying his lover?

We drink. I refill the glasses and the camera follows as I leave the room, the lens tracking my high heels. I unclip the snake pin as I go. I pause and let the dress fall to the floor. You see the dress, my legs, the
snake. I continue, the camera always on my heels, my calf, my thigh. I let my bra drop like a white cloud behind me. I pause again and delicately, oh so sexily, slip off my knickers, one leg at a time. Now I am naked. The camera pans slowly up my legs, over the snake circling my thigh, over my bottom, my back. I glance over my shoulder for a fraction of a second and toss my hair as I leave the room.

The reverse shot reveals Ricky wearing the expression of the man about to be given the biggest box of chocolates in the world.

We do four takes. Between every take Adam sprays my dress with water and the runners scurry around polishing the damp spots from the floor.