The Gift of Girls (15 page)

Heads turned, eyes watched, conversations paused and continued. There was no haste at Black Spires. Time was suspended.

There were more people in the hall now, twenty or so men in dinner suits and about ten girls dressed like Milly and me in the livery of the erotic. Most of the girls were my age, maybe a couple of years older, but there was one among us who I guessed was close to thirty, a striking woman wearing an elaborate turquoise and amber necklace with a long pigtail down the middle of her back. She was unclothed, the female uniform, it seemed, but without the bindings about her wrists, ankles and neck. She stood tall and proud in her nakedness telling a story while a group of four men listened intrigued.

Had she been sharing the gift since she was eighteen? I wondered. Once you embark on this life, does it become eternal, as the gift, Milly had said, was eternal? Everything was new, a little daunting, but exhilarating too.
With
my breasts firm and tingling, with a faint dampness on my back and around the puffy pink lips of my vagina, I could no longer imagine a life in the merciless domain of numbers, a career juggling figures in the Roche-Marshall office. In this erotic sanctuary with the wooden beams and vaulted ceiling, I felt as if I was back on the high wire.
Anything
might happen. We talked at school about
tantra
, about the 365 ways to have sex, a different position for every day of the year, and I couldn’t wait to try them all.

Lee-Sun was still dispensing flutes of champagne and a girl with red and green dreadlocks, her body embroidered with tattoos, was passing blini, little pancakes heaped with caviar and sour cream. Jazz was playing. I had thought at first it was canned, but I was wrong. As I moved deeper into the hall I was surprised to see in a recessed alcove a quintet – a piano, saxophone, clarinet, double bass and drums, the drummer hunched over with eyes closed as he tapped wire brushes over the snare at his side.

We dipped into the canapés and I could barely tear my eyes away from the girl in dreadlocks, her breasts a portrait gallery behind the blini arranged on her tray. Now that I was closer, I could see the tattoos crowding for space over every inch of her body. Over her breasts, down her arms and legs, her hips and ribcage, her back and her bottom were likenesses of men, young and old, men with piercing eyes and narrow lips, men with generous smiles and strong jaws, men with a look of angst and men with gritty determination, the faces drawn on her flesh about twice the size of a passport photo, their expressions changing with her movements and the pulse of her breath.

‘Amazing,’ I gasped.

‘It was everyone I’d ever slept with,’ she said with an air of retelling a familiar joke. ‘Then I ran out of space.’

I smiled.

She smiled and the faces nestling about her cleavage seemed to smile too. I felt drawn to this girl who had created this souvenir of her lovers and resisted the temptation of counting them. I took another blini, popped it in my mouth, and the caviar and cream slipped down my throat like ambrosia. Milly had collected some champagne and the bubbles tickled my nose as I sipped from the tall glass she gave me. I was learning to appreciate life’s small pleasures and, as I gazed about the room, it occurred to me that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world.

Before I’d gone rushing off in a huff, I seemed to recall the drapes in the hall being closed, perhaps to deny the last remnants of daylight. But they were open now and through the tall arched windows the ghostly light of the moon added a counterpoint to the warm glow of the candles suspended in candelabra from the ceiling and standing here and there in tridents. Their light was reflected in the suits of armour, shields, the display of swords, and picked out details on seascapes of sailing ships and portraits of country squires with the same dark countenance as Simon Roche.

Along each side of the hall were alcoves with upholstered benches and dark corners from which squeals of pain and pleasure added a choral accompaniment to the jazz. The nymphs carved on the columns had come to life, their cherubic faces saucy yet omniscient in the dancing shadows made by the candles. As we threaded our way among the columns, the perspective changed at each twist and turn, the effect reminding me suddenly of the Mesquita in Cordoba.

Everything, it seems, is linked. Just as Duchamp’s nude on the staircase, the figure cut into slithers to show a sense of movement, descends unavoidably from one step to the next, life is a series of inevitable steps. The moment Daddy shook hands with the Chinese man in a hotel room in Penang, the echo resonated across the seas and
continents
to that hotel room in Kensington where a man peeled off my clothes, enlightened my every orifice and set me in motion, one step at a time from Rebels Casino to Black Spires and down the staircase at Milly’s side into the heart of the drama.

I had never before seen a room like this, or people like this; the girls self-assured with their bodies unashamedly displayed, the men all with a certain ill-defined similarity, a certain mien which I could only describe as the look of power, the look Daddy had before he lost his money. Like Daddy, these men would never find pleasure in the same way as other men. They seek out the edges of things, the dark extremes where only the brave and reckless dare to go. Their brains are always ticking. They rarely sleep and they rarely smile; Simon Roche was a good example. In his glass temple in the City of London, Simon didn’t have friends. He had employees, secretaries, lackeys. It was in situations like this, I realised, in this ambience of domination and submission, among the swords and shields, where he was truly himself.

Normal desires would never satisfy Simon Roche and Sandy Cunningham, nor any of these men. I was sure they all had wives, one wife after another, trading in the old for the new with hosts of children to carry their names and genes into the future. They are individuals, I thought, men who don’t make connections in the normal way.

That night in the hotel room in Kensington, when Sandy calmly removed my clothes and proceeded to do me in every way, it was his air of confidence that persuaded me to let go of all uncertainty and let it happen. Boys just want a quick feel, a quick poke, a quick hand job. Men like Sandy, like all the men in the grand hall, had deeper needs. They were in no hurry to satisfy those needs and, when they did satisfy them, it would be in ways I could only begin to imagine.

My imagination was set alight as we joined a group gathered about an alcove where two men were playing chess across an enlarged board. Two girls dressed like me with the addition of masks, one red, the other black, knelt on the side of the table like acolytes learning esoteric moves from grandmasters.

The chess pieces were red and black ivory, long, vaguely phallic with oversized heads. The two men playing were the Texan I’d seen earlier and an Arab in a long white jalabah, his distinctive sunglasses, moustache and goatee familiar, perhaps from the newspapers.

As their turn came, the men didn’t move the chessmen, but pointed to the piece they wished to move and to the square they wished to move it to. The girl at their side, the red mask working the red pieces, the black moving the black, had to bestride the table without upsetting the pieces and lower her cleft over the bulbous head of the chosen piece, the motion causing them to wriggle in such a way that it made their bottoms and breasts tremble and vibrate, to the delight of the audience, me included.

Lifting the chessman didn’t appear to be as difficult as lowering the piece on to the chosen position, and it took all the force of their vaginal muscles to complete the move. The rounded heads of the pawns, the castle battlements, the queen’s crown and bishop’s mitre glistened with streaks of discharge, and the chessboard was dotted with dewdrops of girl-juice.

Chess has never been much of a spectator sport, but played in this way there is all the tension of motorcycle racing, a sense of imminent catastrophe and disaster. The people in the audience were holding their breath as they watched the girl in the red mask move crablike, her white toes with pearl varnish on the nails manoeuvring to get purchase on the marble tabletop.

She lowered her bottom as if to pee, squatted over the bishop nominated by the sheikh, her flared labia like
some
exotic sea creature dropping over the pointed headwear and conveying the piece at an angle across the board as it slipped and slurped from her wet pussy. Gravity was pulling the bishop down the greasy channel, while sheer pussy power sucked it back up and finally plopped it out on the desired square to a thumping round of applause.

The old Texan adjusted his bootlace tie as he leaned forward and studied the move. He drummed the table with his fingertips, the audience went silent, and finally he pointed at the black queen on her home square and across the board to the pawn left unprotected by the bishop’s precipitous advance.

The girl in the black mask was Oriental, small and lithe with no body hair, a neatly depilated pussy and powerful calves. She stood and stretched one leg across the board to make an arch. With her hands on her waist, she lowered herself over the unsuspecting pawn, sucked it up with one fierce snatch of her snatch, and held the piece as if gripped by an invisible fist. She stepped back across the table and thrust her prominent mound at the Texan. Taking the base of the pawn, he ran the domed head around the creamy curve of her labia before placing it in his mouth.

‘Texas tea,’ he said.

He put the piece to one side while the Oriental girl went through the same performance, straddling the table, seizing the queen before, with perfect vaginal control, positioning it in the centre of the square formerly occupied by the captured pawn.

The men clapped and I was sure they must have been thinking, if she can do that with those chessmen, what’s she going to do with the swollen king bulging at the front of my trousers.

I gazed at Milly. I gazed at the faces of the men around the table, and it occurred to me that it is in the small things in life that people find happiness; that the rather solemn, arrogant game of chess can be enlivened with
such
a simple, inoffensive innovation, that winning and losing is less important than the pleasure of taking part.

Four weeks earlier and about a dozen miles from Black Spires, I had been a schoolgirl at a convent, bursting from my uniform. My skirt had grown too short for my long legs. The buttons of my blouse could barely contain my impertinent breasts. I was unusually fit from the vaulting horse and parallel bars, but too rounded and luxuriant to pursue gymnastics. I was made for a different path and I got a sense of what that path might be the moment I slipped into fishnets at Rebels and Kate pulled the laces tight on my Lycra basque. I stepped into high heels and realised instantly that a naked girl would always feel dressed in heels, that heels shape you and make you.

It was in black heels and nothing else that I had set off on my journey from Simon’s office back along the familiar roads going south into the Kent countryside. I had found myself. I belonged here. I had been drawn here by something more than mere chance. The imps of destiny are always shuffling the cards and dealing the hands you play. I was meant to apply to Roche-Marshall to be an intern, to work at Rebels, to gamble my way into debt and duplicity.

How else would I have found my true vocation?

I was overcome suddenly with a feeling of liberation and contentment. I could feel the hand of fate squeezing my hard nipples, stirring the warm oils in my throbbing sex, in the sense of arousal piqued by my own nudity.

The past and the future had become remote, abstract, mere concepts. In the dancing shadows made by the candlelight, with the hallucinogenic jazz haunting the high ceiling, I was in a present that was dreamlike, a fantasy, a fleeting, harmless decadence one imagines, as you may imagine being a princess or winning the lottery, but never really believes is going to come true.

It had taken time and imagination to create this scene at Black Spires. In the house of fate, this mansion with many rooms, nothing had been left to chance. Just as the men wore the look of power, the girls wore their beauty unashamedly but without arrogance or hubris. With tattoos, studs, shaved mounds or ample hair, with ivory-white skin like Milly or the ebony shine of the Maasai, the girls seemed special, each in her own way, and I wondered if there was anything special about me beyond being eighteen and eager to learn.

I could see more clearly now what Milly had meant by the gift: that sex, erotic sex, imbues the participants with an unimaginable power, a power that grows as it passes among those who understand and are humble to it. Milly with that plastic dildo had reached new places hidden inside me and unlocked a desire for more, more extremes, more innovations. She had taught me by actions rather than words that, of all the gifts a girl has, nothing is more precious than the gift to give and receive the ecstasy of orgasm, that pure moment when the body dissolves into its own essence and reaches perfection, a moment of satisfaction for people who can never be satisfied.

Wasn’t this the meaning of life, alchemist’s gold, the philosopher’s stone? Those last months at the convent I lay awake night after night thinking about my future. After five years behind those high ivy-covered walls, I had learned that the only truth, as the philosopher Wittgenstein had said, was in numbers, that words were the invention of man, the device of the devil. Like molten steel, words can be moulded into anything from prison bars to an extension bridge to be thrown over a river that may or may not exist.

People were so good at spinning those words and throwing out advice – jugglers with sharp knives – take a gap year, be an accountant, go to the LSE, have a career, so many words I didn’t really know where I was going or what I wanted. Numbers were truth and I was a perfect
34-24-34
. I was five feet and ten inches in bare feet, 70 inches in primes, 10 times lucky 7. And it’s as rare as ambergris to lose five times in a row at blackjack.

What did it mean? Was it just words? That clever little Hungarian Ludwig Wittgenstein adored the axiomatic certainties of numbers and said philosophy consists of no more than this analysis: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.