The Exchange (12 page)

‘So you fuck other people’s husbands, do you?’ she snarled, and I spasmed as the paddle came down on my bare buttocks.

‘You dirty dirty bitch,’ she added, striking me again, and then, ‘So you let strangers go down on you, do you? Well, take this.’

This time it was almost too hard. I was an amateur at this, I realised – what I’d done with my ex-lover had been more tomfoolery. Tatiana was taking it beyond the level of a game; in some part of herself, she really was angry with me. I couldn’t understand why she seemed complicit in Morgan’s actions yet felt the need to hurt me. Or maybe she was just getting so caught up in the act that her emotions had got out of control – with a little help from the champagne.

As if sensing that I had had enough – or perhaps that she herself risked spiralling out of control – she tossed the paddle to the floor then reached up and freed my hands from the manacles. Rolling me over onto my side she looked into my face, and as I returned her stare she let her hand drop to my pussy and, pushing all five digits inside, began fingerfucking me. Then she lowered her head and brought her lips to me. I opened my mouth and our tongues began to dance around each other. After a while she took one of my hands and guided it to her own pussy. I bunched up my fingers and inserted them inside her. As I did so, I felt movement on the bed behind me, and glancing over my shoulder saw Alice clambering on. Spooning me tight so that I felt her breasts and pussy against my back and buttocks, she reached round and let her fingers flutter about my nipples.

For a while Tatiana and I matched each other’s rhythms, and when we came, we came together. Alice, pinching my nipple between the fingers of one hand and fingering her clit with the other, came hot on our heels.

***

I lay alone in the dark remembering all this, and then I got up and, sneaking around so as not to wake any of the prone bodies littered about me, located my clothes at the end of the bed and pulled them on hurriedly. Then I crept out of the penthouse and took the lift down to the ground floor.

In the apartment lobby, a doorman looked at me blankly. Despite my state of dishevelment and the fact I was completely overdressed, his face betrayed no surprise. He was either incredibly good at his job, I thought, or he’d seen it all before.

I spilled out of the door onto Park Lane. The sunlight made me dizzy and I held my hand up in front of my eyes, wincing.

I couldn’t remember what happened after Tatiana and I fucked – it all became a bit of a blur. I recalled sitting up, dazed, and noticing that many of the others had come in from the terrace and had presumably been watching the three of us on the bed. Then there was nothing much. Perhaps I’d simply fallen asleep, drunk and exhausted.

As I stalked across Hyde Park in my ludicrous Space Age wedges and wilted dress, I replayed the events of the night in my head again. I didn’t feel shame, exactly, but I felt confusion. And I felt disappointed that, in spite of all my intentions, I’d got myself into trouble after all. I’d let a bunch of strangers take advantage of me and, though I’d been willing at the time, it felt all wrong. I didn’t want anything to do with them again, yet I knew that Tatiana and Morgan wouldn’t want to draw a line under it.

The sad truth was that I didn’t fancy either of them. Morgan might be a decent fuck, but he wasn’t my type at all; there was no way I would have picked him out had he not come in search of me and found me in a moment of weakness. The same went for Tatiana – although we hadn’t had any problem fucking each other the previous night, she didn’t really do it for me. She’d taken advantage of a moment when she knew I was incapable of saying no.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like girls. As I said, I often thought about the bodies of the other girls at Club GaGa, when I was wanking at home. Walking around half-naked or naked with other beautiful girls in the same state, backstage at the club, did make me feel horny too. I’d never got off with any of them, but I had slept with a few girls in the past.

The first was at the terrible English boarding school that my parents packed me of to, and that episode basically came about because I was lonely and confused. I was seeking comfort, and instead I got sex.

I was in my bed in the dorm. It was the early hours of the morning, and I’d been unable to get to sleep. I’d only been at the school about a week and I felt lost and abandoned. I didn’t want to make any friends because I didn’t count on being there very long. Exhausted from tossing and turning, I slipped my pyjama trousers down around my thighs and started rubbing at my pussy. I tried to be quiet, of course, but one of the other girls must have been awake too and heard my breathing accelerate, for suddenly there was a dark figure leaning over my bed.

‘Can I help you with that?’ said a voice that I recognised belonged to Aileen, a pretty Irish redhead with – I’d noticed in the changing room before gym – great boobs.

‘Sure,’ I said, peeling back the bedclothes and letting her in.

She slid down beside me, and it quickly became clear that this wasn’t her first time with a girl. She knew exactly where to touch me, and before long, as she stroked her long fingers down over my clit and then teased them at my hole before starting the whole process again, I had to pull a pillow out from under my head and hold it over my face to stifle my moans and try to stop myself waking up the whole dorm.

We didn’t kiss at any point. For most of the time, her head was on my chest, her tongue encircling each nipple in turn, over and over. And I didn’t come, although I did feel an immense wave of warmth and wellbeing.

Afterwards we lay there, and I told her I was a virgin. She asked me if I wanted to fuck her and I said I wasn’t sure. She told me there could always be a next time. Then she reached down and wanked herself into orgasm, holding my hand, her fingers tightening around mine as she came, silently, head thrown back against the pillow, mouth wide open and eyes squeezed shut.

‘That looked fun,’ I whispered, and she leaned over and kissed my forehead.

‘It was,’ she said. ‘Next time I’ll teach you how.’

The next morning, I was embarrassed and avoided looking at Aileen or having anything to do with her. That made my life at the school even more stressful, and of course by raising new questions about my sexuality it made me feel even more confused about what was happening in my life. Though I’d never slept with anyone, I’d had boyfriends and made out with them. This extra question over my future – my whole identity – made me anxious.

After a few days, Aileen accosted me in a corridor and dragged me into a nearby store cupboard, where she kissed me brutally on the lips. My ignoring her, she said, was driving her crazy. She couldn’t stop thinking about me.

I told her how bad I felt, that I liked her and wanted to be her friend but was unsure how I felt about what had happened. I just wasn’t sure I liked girls, I told her, and it seemed wrong to carry on until I was more sure.

Aileen laughed ironically. ‘Look,’ she said, touching my shoulder. ‘I really don’t mind if you use and abuse me to discover yourself. I’m good for the ride. It’s not as if I’m talking about us falling in love and spending the rest of our lives together.’

I wasn’t sure to begin with, but Aileen appeared at my bed that night and after two blissful hours I knew what it was to come and I knew what it was to give pleasure to another woman. I knew every corner and crevice of her body intimately, and she knew mine. I still wasn’t in love with her, but she had given me an incredible gift and for the rest of my short-lived time at the Grove Academy, before I managed to get myself thrown out, we fucked whenever we could, wherever we could get away with it – in our beds in the dorm, in the middle of the night; behind the boathouse down by the river; even, once, in the library, up against the bookshelves late one evening, after all the other students had headed upstairs.

I left the Grove Academy suddenly, without a word to Aileen, and though I missed her, I didn’t make any attempt to keep in touch. The Grove was part of my past now, and I felt that staying in contact with her would keep it alive in my mind. I wanted to break free and make a new start.

I’m not sure if Aileen tried to contact me, because I moved back to Paris and into the squat, so I was basically unfindable. I didn’t do any social networking or anything in the public eye so I really was out of the loop.

At the squat I led a wild life, losing my virginity to a man, to Lex, who lived there with his girlfriend Corinne. The place was essentially a commune, with much of the free living that that implies. For a while I was part of a threesome with Lex and Corinne, although all three of us slept with whoever we wanted to, men and women. There were no kids around, so we didn’t feel we needed to set any moral boundaries. We were free-spirited and happy to live without rules or consequences, knowing that it couldn’t last but determined to appreciate it as long as it did.

So it wasn’t that I didn’t like girls. If one happened to come along and we hit it off and both felt something, I wouldn’t hold back. But I did prefer guys. I preferred the hardness of their bodies, the smell of them, the abundance of hair. And I liked cocks. Being fucked by a dildo or vibrator was good, but – Konrad aside – there was nothing like a hot, hard, beating cock inside you.

***

Back at Rachel’s, I headed straight for the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My hair, previously neatly slicked back, now looked dirty and ruffled, like a baby bird fallen from a nest. My heavy black mascara was smeared around my eyes and encrusted on my lashes in fat, dry blobs. I stuck my tongue out at myself but the joke fell flat.

I ran a bath and soaked for a long time with a face-pack and a hair masque to revive me. As I lay there, drowsy, I listened to the hum of traffic and wished I hadn’t gone to Park Lane with Tatiana and Morgan. If only I had gone alone, I thought with hindsight, I was sure to have met some interesting people. Instead I’d just met these perverts who used me to spice up their orgies, who saw me as a kind of trophy.

It had happened before – people ‘adopting’ me because of the way I looked and dressed. There was an edge to me, I knew, that couldn’t be bought by money or faked. I was a rebel, and these people wanted some of that. They didn’t realise that rebellion was not what you did but who you were. No matter how much wife-swapping you did, no matter who you fucked in front of your spouse, you couldn’t help but remain part of the establishment. Whereas people like me could never become part of it, however much we tried. Not that I wanted to be part of it, of course.

Tatiana’s kinkiness, I felt, was all trumped up. Afraid of boring her husband, she played the dominatrix, the part-time lesbian, the complicit cuckquean. But I suspected that deep down she’d derived no real pleasure from spanking me, and deep down she wasn’t into girls. She was just going through the motions to pass the time and make herself seem interesting. And I had been caught in her net. I was a way of giving her a little street cred.

I got out of the bath and looked at my body in the mirror as I towelled myself dry. I was beautiful, I told myself. I was precious. I was worth so much more than this.

Arriving at Club GaGa, I was met by Lisette, who was all fired up at the prospect of debuting her new act, Veil of Illusion. She led me into the warren of changing rooms behind the stage, and for a while I just watched in fascination as she transformed herself from a pretty, sexy, natural, make-up-free girl like many others outside the club into a sultry, exotic goddess, swathed in diaphanous veils over belly-dancing bloomers and a bustier. At her wrists and ankles jangled cuffs with bells, while a kind of golden powder made her face with its dramatically kohled eyes shimmer beneath the harsh backstage lights.

As she underwent her metamorphosis, she told me a little about her life and let me take pictures of her as she applied her make-up. Her parents were of Algerian origin, she told me, and after emigrating to Paris had eventually opened a restaurant. She helped them out there sometimes, she said, but she was fed up of having no money and a friend had suggested this.

She hadn’t been doing it for long, which is why she was only now putting on her first solo act. And because there were no other North Africans on the roster, she had been allowed full rein to express her heritage in the act – ‘Well, sort of, at least,’ she said with a slightly rueful smile. Her parents didn’t know what she did, she confessed, although she wasn’t ashamed of it and found that – most of the time at least – she actually quite enjoyed it.

After a while, she started to get nervous, so I left her alone with the glass of fizz that she had ordered up. Roaming the labyrinth of rooms, I took pictures of the half-naked girls wandering around. Some looked startled when the flash first went off, but when they saw it was another woman, they quickly relaxed. I introduced myself to a few of them, told them I was a friend of Rochelle’s and that if I decided I wanted to use any of the images, I’d check back with them first. Most of them seemed flattered, rather than concerned. Some even struck poses for me, although I was really looking for something more naturalistic. I was thinking again of Brassaï and in particular his backstage images of cabaret life in all its tawdry glamour. These girls were all about front; what I wanted was to get behind that brilliant, often blinding surface and capture some of their truth. Whatever their truth might be.

One small, very slim girl caught my eye. She looked like a younger version of Dita Von Teese, with raven hair and chalk-white skin. But what stood out most was that she kept herself aloof from the rest of the girls. Perhaps she was just new, but she had a mystery to her that went beyond that of the more upfront girls. Something about her reserve suggested to me that she wouldn’t be happy about being photographed, so I held off. But I mentally earmarked her as someone to come back to, at a less frantic time, when the girls weren’t getting ready for the show. Perhaps, if I sweet-talked her and showed her some of my work, she’d agree to a series of portraits. Even posed images, I knew, could be revelatory.