The Gift of Girls (12 page)

Sandy tugged again at my belt and a slurp of champagne spilled over my chest. It seemed careless, heartless, as if I didn’t matter. As if I was nothing. I was angry with Sandy Cunningham. And I was angry with Simon Roche. He must have known I wouldn’t be able to resist temptation, that I would lose all my money and, in desperation, turn to the only source available to me: the Roche-Marshall sundries account.

That’s why he had given me the computer codes.

On the Monday of my second week at the office, after that disgraceful night in the hotel with Sandy, he had asked my shoe size. He had known. He had always known. My being here at Black Spires wasn’t chance. It wasn’t destiny. I had been duped and lured here and the thought made tears well up in my eyes.

‘You tricked me,’ I said to Sandy and he just grinned.

‘When you’re a thief you take your chances,’ he replied, and the tears spilled down my cheeks in a spluttering shower.

‘I’m not a thief,’ I cried.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re a girl who can resist anything except temptation.’

I stamped my foot, spilling more champagne over my breasts. I placed the glass back on the tray on the table at our side and, with as much dignity as I could muster,
I
stormed out of the room, back across the hall and up the two flights of stairs to the boudoir where I had been clipped and creamed and clad in black leather straps. I slammed the door behind me.

With nervous fingers straining over the buckles, I undid the straps and threw them across the room. I searched through the drawers and could hardly believe my eyes as they alighted on a torture garden of whips and canes, a cat-o’-nine-tails, a glass phallus, a plastic cock attached to a pink leather harness, clips and clamps for purposes I couldn’t imagine.

The drawers boomed like cannon as I rammed them shut. I turned away and was shocked when I saw my reflection in the mirror. I looked like a wild beast, my hair styled as if by a windstorm, black smears war-painted across my cheeks. There was the sweat-sticky residue of champagne between my breasts; my nipples were so painfully erect I squeezed them as hard as I could and suddenly knew exactly what the clips and clamps in the chest of drawers were for.

I was almost tempted to go and try for myself, but that would have been giving in to an instinct too far. I could smell the pungent musk of my own arousal infusing that small room with the scent of lust. It was shameful and confusing. I didn’t want to be a disciplined drone in the City, but I didn’t want to be a submissive drone in the living room at Black Spires either. I didn’t know what I wanted.

In the bathroom I washed the smears from my face, I douched the wet discharge from between my legs and found in the cupboard the bag with my own clothes. I pulled back my hair and felt like the old me as I dressed and stepped into my shoes. It was a relief to find my mobile phone and turned it on.

There were two texts, one from Melissa:
Where the hell RU?

I texted back:
Youll nvr blv me
.

The other was from Sarah.
Going to Ministry of Sound. Coming?

I texted Sarah.
Cant. Wish I cld
, and the messages reminded me of who I once was.

‘I want my life back.’ I said the words, whispering to my reflection, but caught a curious look in my eyes, a sense that I was watching myself from beyond myself, that the girl standing there in a pale-yellow suit was an image of how I used to be, a photograph from a sixth-form trip to the Louvre when I had worn the suit for the first time, the mischievous display of cleavage swelling over my buttoned blouse and sending Sister Benedict into a paroxysm of holy fury.

She had pointed at the sky.
He’s
always watching, she’d said, and shamefully I had thought that if that were true
He
would have adored His creation, my hair shining like a raven’s wing, my long limbs sculpted by years of gymnastics, the prettiest girls in the upper sixth clustering about me like moons drawn to the pull of a celestial being. Pretty girls like to be with the prettiest girls to show how pretty they are.

Summer was coming. The end of term was coming. I would soon wriggle free of my schoolgirl skin and be released from the cloistering angst of Sister Benedict, her whiplash tongue the symbol of the whiplash cane she kept mounted on her office wall, the mute reminder of her capacity for cruelty, her abhorrence of beauty, that inaccessible quality that exasperated her more and more as it blossomed on me like a rare orchid.

Of course I knew I was attractive. Pretty girls always do. You can’t help but compare yourself with other girls; girls in the street, in the newspapers, on the sides of buses, on advertising hoardings. You know from the look in men’s eyes when you board the bus or the tube and they either look away to avoid seeing that which they can never have, or they press closer than they should to feel for just a moment the warmth of your flesh through their
clothes
. They want to get close to you, smell you, take you in on their senses and imagine in their dirty minds all the things they want to do to you.

By the time you are sixteen and have tuned into Youporn and Bangbus, you know what it is men want to do and you know if you are the kind of girl men want to eat and bite and spank and lick and pierce. You are afraid and intrigued by this knowledge, attracted and repulsed; you want to remain a virgin and you want to be a whore. Sex makes you think about sex. It makes you grow moist between your legs with that sticky wetness you scoop up with the tip of your finger and savour on your tongue, the bittersweet taste of being a grown-up.

You know when you are in a café or bar with your girlfriends and the men at the next table are watching if it is you they are watching. And why. It gives you self-confidence. Poise. A feeling of power. It is as if you are a gift to the world and you can bestow that gift on anyone of your choosing. And it is you who has the choice. There is the person you see in the mirror, the person you present to the world, and as you are growing up you become aware that inside there is another you, the real you, bursting like a baby bird to come out of the shell.

Was my choice of mathematics at the London School of Economics just a ridiculous whim? Was I going against my true character? People told me to go to drama school, become a model, get on a media training course and read the news. I had the ‘televisual’ look, they said: trustworthy and intelligent, sexy yet serious. I was, they said, a girl with it all, and now I was a girl with nothing, nothing but the prospect of a criminal record.

Sister Benedict had called me conceited, vain, narcissistic and shallow. She accused me of seeking mirrors to assess my reflection. It was true: when I got back to the dorm I would strip off my uniform and check my reflection, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a hand on my flat
tummy
, my fingers gently squeezing the buds of my pink nipples, stroking the lush tuft of my velvet pubes, turning to examine the neat sphere of my bottom, a mathematician with dividers calculating the perfect geometry of the arc. I would slap my backside as you slap a pony to make it gallop, quaking as the delightful warmth burned my skin. I dreamed of being spanked before I actually imagined being spanked, and being spanked seemed to have awoken me to my true potential.

It occurred to me that Sister Benedict had had more of an influence on my life than Mother, who was always busy doing something, although what I was never quite sure. Father, poor man, had invested everything on that one big deal with the Chinese man and watched every penny he had slip from his grasp as, in an unbearable parallel image, I had watched my savings cleared from the computer screen in Simon’s office.

The Sister with her voodoo inclinations had predicted that I would come to no good, that I would come to some place like Black Spires. Everything I had done since walking from the gates of the convent in Westgate a month before had conspired to bring me here to this small room in my pale-yellow suit wanting to leave and wanting to stay and not being sure what I wanted at all.

I sat on the narrow bed and looked around the room – the long mirror, the flowers carefully arranged on a shelf, the leather bonds scattered across the floor, the arched window with its view of the black night. Now I was ready to go I remembered that I had stolen £3,100. I was certain if I got the train back to Victoria Simon wouldn’t go to the police. I would tell them everything, how I had been tricked into parading about naked against my will – how I had been tricked into offering up my bottom to a man in a Kensington hotel room.

I was angry with Simon Roche, and I was even angrier with myself because I knew in the heart of my
sub-conscious
self it hadn’t been against my will. Not entirely. I had enjoyed the attention in my fetish clothes at Rebels, and it was irritating to acknowledge that I liked being naked. I adored being naked. It had given me a thrill to enter the living room and see all eyes turning in my direction. Being naked suited some perverse thing inside me that I had been coming to accept before Sandy Cunningham turned up with his self-assured smile and bow tie.

My heart was pounding. I was breathless. I crossed the room and gazed out at the sky. It was pierced by a billion stars. I thought about classics at school, how the gods when they die don’t disappear but transform into animals and mortals and constellations. I wanted to be up there with them, a star in the sky, a god of the night.

I thought about everything that had happened since I started work at Roche-Marshall. In truth it had been fun. I had been balancing on the high wire. I had felt completely alive, free after years with Sister Benedict watching my every move, her grey eyes like an x-ray machine seeing through my uniform and finding shapes and forms to criticise.

The Sister had made it clear that she didn’t like me and I knew deep down that it was only because by the time I turned seventeen I was taller than her, the school’s Madonna and Mary Magdalene, the virgin and the whore. I was all those duplicitous things that had driven Sister Benedict behind the cloistered walls of the nunnery, where she could look with envy and despair on girls like me – and on me in particular. I had hated her and now I felt sorry for her. It had been a mistake to take the money from Simon’s account, the mistake she had predicted and longed for. I would make up for it. Somehow, I would pay him back.

I huffed on the glass and wrote the figure £3,100, then rubbed it out again.

What if he did go to the police?

He could prove I was a thief and I am sure they wouldn’t believe me if I said he had spanked my bottom, driven me across London without any clothes on and then had me dressed in leather straps, soft creams rubbed into my skin, my pubes trimmed. My mother, if I were to be charged as a criminal, would finally make good her threat and commit suicide. Spanish women are hysterical and dramatic. She would do it to prove a point. Daddy would be so ashamed, and poor Rafael, when he started in some state sixth-form college with the chavs, would be devastated. I wouldn’t only be ruining my life, I’d be ruining theirs too.

A shooting star crossed the sky and vanished. Life’s like that – a shooting star. A moment of brilliance and it’s gone for ever. If only Sandy Cunningham hadn’t turned up. I would be down there still ready to confront my fate. It was hard for me to face up to it, but I had been manoeuvred in a certain direction and, once on that course, I had hurtled off as if on a helter-skelter recklessly spiralling down, down to the mess I’d made of things.

I had been given a chance to pay for my mistake, and now I’d gone and blown it. I checked the time on my mobile, grabbed my bag, took one last look about the room and, at that moment, there was a soft tap on the door.

8

The Gift

THE DOOR SLOWLY
opened and standing there was the girl with flaming-red hair. She entered, closing the door behind her.

‘I thought you might need some moral support,’ she said.

‘I was just about to go home,’ I told her.

‘I wish you wouldn’t.’

I was surprised by this remark. What did she mean? ‘But why?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer. She just shrugged and asked, ‘Is it your first time?’

‘Yes.’

‘I remember mine. I was terrified,’ she recalled and smiled. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Magdalena.’

‘We’re both Ms,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m Milly.’

She smiled as if there was something extraordinary in this coincidence. She then crossed the room and stood just a few inches from me. This was a little unnerving, and more so when she leaned forward to press her lips to mine. I wasn’t expecting this, although having seen the girls downstairs on the table supping from each other’s wet parts it shouldn’t have surprised me.

The taste of her lips was sweet but hard to describe, the taste of dew to a robin, perhaps, or honey to a bee. Those
lips
were, as I had observed in the window nook below, the most marvellous lips imaginable, soft yet firm, pliant yet tender, pink as the inner lips of her pussy, I’m sure, and, as that thought went through my mind, I wondered where it had come from.

What was happening to me? Could I have changed so much? And so quickly?

When I was dressed in the livery of black leather straps, had I taken on a different personality? Or had I become who I really am, who I was meant to be? It should have been strange and abhorrent arriving naked at Black Spires and being prepared as a fetish object by Lee-Sun. But it wasn’t. I felt like an actress about to go on stage, Sally Bowles in fishnets and a bowler hat, or rather leather bands and trimmed pubes: not me exactly, but one of the characters within me, a character capable of any role, any form of perversion.

I had experimented with girls at school but, like those occasional rolls on the bottom field with the local grammar boys, it was all clumsy and fumbling, an awkward kiss, a grope, a feeling of something lost rather than gained. With Milly it was different. This wasn’t playing. She was a reminder of who I was, of what I could become, a mirror image of me in the uniform of black straps that I had cast off and thrown angrily about the room.