Being a Girl (26 page)

A golden girl with gilded breasts likes the domes on a cathedral glided by and I felt the wind-rush from her golden feathers. I saw a girl with an aviary of birds tattooed over her entire body. There was a girl with piercings in her cheeks and nipples, the silver chain clipped to the lips of her vagina twisting in circles like a Catherine wheel as she sailed overhead. I watched a petite blonde wearing white wings and a swan's head that perched gracefully on her long neck. Her skin was diaphanous, her feet perched on the trapeze and her tiny bottom looked like the moon rising over some distant horizon.

The girls were so comfortable with their nudity I realised fully, and with some relief, that when I first visited Jean-Luc's office my intense desire to cast off my school uniform was completely natural. I was stepping out of my old skin, my old self. I was stripping away the bridle and bonds of the convent girl to dress in the costume of my naked flesh. I understood, too, that Jean-Luc, the Laird and Luther Goetz were guides leading me on a journey to find a master. I glanced sideways at Tyler Copic. Was he the one?
They belong to me
. The notion was quixotic, energising. The girls on the trapezes, Amélie and Greta, they belonged to a special world, a secret world, my world. I felt like Alice about to begin my adventures in Wonderland.

Like the motions of the universe, the display above us was continuous and ever-changing, the black ropes and spars of the trapezes vanishing in the darkness, the glittering girls like a flock of muses appearing and disappearing through the lights like apparitions, like distant memories caught in a camera obscura. I saw a raven, a magpie, a parakeet, a falcon, a yellow-plumed bird of paradise whose display appeared to
have been choreographed and whose small, perfect white breasts seemed familiar.

I glanced from side to side. Amélie and Greta were standing tamely beside Tyler watching with glowing eyes. Van Van, too, alone now, his hands thrust in his jacket pockets, his neck bent, his mouth open. Binky had left the flock and I realised that my sister had been reborn as the bird of paradise. She had been the best gymnast at school and was the most exotic object of desire in the pleasure dome. She moved from trapeze to trapeze, her long thin arms churning the air like a swimmer in the sea, like a bird on the wing, her naked body glowing in the lights as white as a sail. Tyler must have sensed that I was tempted to join her and placed his hand over my bottom to hold me still. This was performance, he seemed to say. It was for the crowd, not for him.

When Binky had tired of her routine she dropped into Van Van's waiting arms and he carried her to the side of the arena where birds of every hue were preening and flapping as they opened their bodies to the men in suits who had slipped from their suits to connect one to the other in a continuous circle of sexual congress, cocks in bottoms with mouths on the next cock connected to the open legs of the next exotic bird, one after the other like a tableau on an erotic temple and I remembered the frescos from the walls of the Ellora caves. As my sister in her beautiful mask joined the orgy I realised she had found herself. This was what she wanted, an eternal circle of sex with her the centre of attention. The circle extended around the curve of the arena and into dark passageways that I would have enjoyed exploring, but Tyler Copic led me and the actresses away from the display towards an arched door in the opposite direction.

Four doormen were guarding the archway. One of them swung the door open and, as we made our way in darkness down a curling flight of steps, I was conscious of the beat of my heart and the sound of my heels echoing over the stone walls. In my mind I could see flying, spiralling birds in a gilded cage, and I thought I would remember what I had seen that day for the rest of my life and for the rest of my life I would be drawn back again and again to the Garden of Eden.

We reached another door and entered a cavern where the silence was so severe you could feel it on your skin. Around the walls, below the curve of the vaulted ceiling, was an elongated wine rack that stretched into the distance, thousands, tens of thousands of bottles of wine layered in dust and ancient cobwebs. Facing the wine rack were barrels, taller than a man, with small cups suspended from taps and, as we passed, each cup like the basket below a hot air balloon would faintly quiver.

‘Shoes,' Tyler said softly, and I slipped them off.

We were far below the streets of Cannes. It was cold and a shiver ran through me as we made our way through the ranks of wine. We reached an arched niche where we sat before a glass table on leather sofas, Amélie and Greta on one, Tyler and me on the other. Tyler was quiet for a long time. He just sat gazing along the length of the dimly lit cellar, at the barrels and bottles.

‘The wine sleeps like children and no one knows its dreams.'

His voice was soft. I had to lean closer to hear him. He ran his hands through his silver hair.

‘Ten years ago I stood with the world at my feet on the summit of Mount Everest,' he said. ‘I have tasted
the meat of an albino elephant and eaten the brains of a Himalayan monkey. They say the creature's brains will awaken your dreams.' He showed his empty palms. ‘Like Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman, we find the footprints, never the myth.'

He paused and turned the silver ring he was wearing around his finger.

‘Did you know Spanish fly is actually the dried body of the Cantharidin, a green beetle, not a fly at all? In Gujarat, ground rhinoceros horn is a speciality. An aphrodisiac?' He shook his head. ‘Just another story. They should leave the horns where they are, where they belong, on the rhinos. Once we kill all the animals, as we surely will, we will be humans without humanity. It is the animals, the fish and the birds that remind us we are human.'

He gazed off again into the distance.

‘Amélie, the '47 Saint-Emilion,' he then said and she slipped off obediently along the line of waiting bottles.

‘I have trained ten thousand girls,' he continued. ‘I have turned girls into stars and turned them into black holes, empty spaces. I have seen the Aurora Borealis, the sun setting on Kuta Beach. I have rattled the keys to paradise and when you see the flying birds in the Garden of Eden life is almost bearable.'

Our eyes met. Had he read my thoughts? Had he planted his thoughts in my mind?

He looked back at the sleeping wine and a feeling of melancholy in that hushed silent place touched me like a cold hand. I glanced at Greta. She was sitting with one leg over the arm of the sofa, the pads of two fingers teasing the rings in her labia. Her chalk-white face was untouched by emotion and I coveted her
poise, her acquiescence, the silver charms like silver fish in the pink pool of her open body. My tranquillity was disturbed by the Himalayan monkey, the hunted rhinoceros, but as Greta May smiled the melancholy lifted and I understood that like her my role was not to fret on matters over which I had no control. I had been made the way I am for another purpose. If Tyler Copic was the high priest of cinema it followed that I, as the naked girl in
Cheats
, was an acolyte, a disciple, an extra in this new world religion.

Greta continued to smile, she continued subliminally to nurse the rings in her exposed cleft, and I admired her equanimity, her complete acceptance of everything. It had seemed an odd coincidence that, like me, Greta May had been a pupil at Saint Sebastian's, but in that quiet place, on that black sofa with Tyler Copic, nothing seemed strange and everything was magically real.

He put his hand on my leg, just above my knee.

‘Every night when I sleep I am robbed of the opportunity to travel to faraway places, to have an adventure, to be someone else or something else. I come here to listen to the wine dreaming and believe that one day I, too, will be visited by dreams.' Tyler paused and looked at me once more. ‘For a man for whom no pleasure is denied there is only the subconscious. He who sleeps without dreaming, for all that he has in the waking world, he is a man deprived of one third of his life.'

Amélie returned with the wine opened and four crystal glasses on a tray. She placed the tray on the table, filled the glasses equally and sat again beside Greta.

‘The secret of wine is patience,' said Tyler. ‘The wine has waited for us. Now we shall wait for the wine. Let it breathe.'

We waited. The minutes passed. Tyler then came to his feet and offered me his hand. I stood. So did the girls. He turned me around to lower the zip on my dress. He turned me back to face him and peeled the gold silk from my body as if it were a cover over an oil painting. As I stepped from the material, the last traces of melancholia drifted away and a wave of contentment passed through me. I was in my natural state. A fragile smile flickered in Tyler's eyes. He appreciated my full breasts that defied gravity, firm and erect, my pert nipples, dewy-pink like rosebuds. My hips were miniature boomerangs that inscribed arcs like bookends edging the plain of my tummy and my dark pubic hair was a verdant mat smelly, I'm sure, with the carnal thoughts in my mind.

Tyler held my shoulders. He turned me into profile. He turned me again and, like a man reading Braille, ran the tips of his fingers over the curvature of my bottom. The fine lines crossing my flesh were only visible in moonlight, but as a man who surely knew how to administer those subtle scars he must have sensed their presence. As if by a force of will, the cheeks of my bottom parted and his hand slipped in the slot, sliding through the curve and into my wet pussy. I was dripping, dripping, on the verge of rapture, and his finger caressing the star of my clitoris was racing me all too quickly to climax. As the air caught in my throat and my heart swelled in my chest, he stopped and stroked my bottom until the sensation passed.

I know, I know I have said it before, but I adore being a girl and nothing at that moment would have given me more pleasure than for Tyler to have bent me over the sofa and tanned my bottom until it was the same shade of red as the wine standing on the
glass table. I knew, too, even as the thought was running through my mind, that for a man like Tyler it is the anticipation of pleasure more than pleasure that he seeks. He took his hand away and Greta licked the juice from his fingertips. Tyler was staring into her eyes and the ellipse of her raised eyebrows as she sucked his fingers gave her the look of a Japanese Geisha and I suppose that was her role.

Amélie passed each of us a crystal glass. As we touched the rims the sound resonated like a high-pitched bell over the ceiling.

‘Shush,' Tyler said, ‘the wine is sleeping,' and we smiled.

We slowly drank the Saint-Emilion. I know nothing about wine except the delight it stirs on my taste buds, but I cannot imagine a vintage with greater depth, more sensitivity. As the dreamy liquid coursed through my body, I got a sense of the rolling hills of Bordeaux, sunlight on vineyards, the rich harvest of 1947. I sipped my wine until it had gone and the teardrop that remained in the well of the glass was too deep for me to reach with my tongue but I tried anyway. Tyler saw me.

‘Shall we open another bottle?' he asked.

‘No,' I said. ‘One dream is enough.'

‘To begin with,' he said.

The girls replaced their empty glasses on the table and we watched them strip from their costumes, first Amélie, then Greta. It was like a performance, and although Tyler had been everywhere and tasted every fruit, I was sure this show he would always enjoy. Greta slid the strap from the buckle holding Amélie's harness, Amélie pirouetted on her toes and her costume stripped away from her body in a continuous ribbon of black leather. She did the same for Greta
and as Greta turned in a circle I could see a shiny scar at the pit of her back.

Before I could look closer, Greta showed me the silver disc that turned in the ring she had been wearing at her throat. On it were little ticks and scores like hieroglyphics.

‘Blow,' she said, and when I did so the spinning symbols spelled the name Tyler Copic.

Greta turned so that I could see her back. So did Amélie. Each had the identical scar immediately above the crack in their bottoms.

‘You can touch,' said Greta.

The scar consisted of the letters TC.

I looked at Tyler. He was holding his wine glass and I could clearly see on the dull silver ring he was wearing his initials in reverse.

I touched the scar on Greta's back. It was smooth and must have been scalded into her skin with the ring heated until it was white hot. It was hard to imagine what agony it must have been, but pain passes, it is the sister of pleasure, and as the girls turned back to face me I wasn't surprised to see how inordinately proud they were with these tokens of belonging.

We stood there quietly, the silence in some way drawing us closer. Tyler had said little about himself. He had asked nothing about me. But as a man who had seen everything, he must have perceived in the erotic outtakes from David's film something in me that could reach its full potential were the ring that he wore to sign a contract on my flesh. Was it chance that his limousine should have pulled up at the moment when Binky and I were approaching the Garden of Eden? Perhaps so, and perhaps there is no such thing as chance, that each coincidence, each
random encounter has been plotted by the stars and destiny is how we respond to that coincidence, that arbitrary encounter.

I glanced at Greta, at Amélie, two naked girls with finely drawn features on painted faces, and it occurred to me that for Tyler Copic, a man for whom no pleasure is denied, a man who can make the dreams of others come true, the one true pleasure he had was to have complete power over girls who are young and malleable and at their very best, the moment when they are in full control of their own power. Power meeting power is the unstoppable force of the film world. Tyler's brand on Greta and Amélie was an outward sign of who he was, of what he could do. Greta and Amélie were girls who knew what they wanted. They wanted careers. Now, they belonged to Tyler Copic. One day they would be stars. They would leave him, perhaps, find other men to serve, but the brand on their bodies would remain, a reminder that wherever they went and whatever they did, he would always be their master.