The Gift of Girls (18 page)

‘But that’s terrible …’

She shrugged. ‘That’s the way it is.’

‘That doesn’t mean it’s right,’ I returned.

‘It doesn’t mean it’s wrong either.’

I thought about that and something else struck me. ‘Why isn’t there anything in the newspapers, on television?’

‘There is, sometimes, little snippets. But they own the newspapers, they are the media. The
club
,’ she said, stressing the word, ‘began in the 1950s to counter what they saw as the threat of global communism. Now they shape the world to suit free enterprise – and the communists have joined the club.’

The Oriental girl had concluded her ministrations with Sandy and he was buttoning his flies before shaking hands with Sergio. Had a business deal been concluded? Would CunniLingus now be carrying Sergio’s wine? Or was that too simple, too obvious? As Sister Agnes always said, you have to look below the surface of things, in the space between the numbers, in the subtext underpinning the words. I glanced around at the men, naked, dressed, half-dressed, the most beautiful girls you would ever see catering to their every whim and desire.

‘The men here? In this hall?’ I asked.

‘They’re not all here, Magdalena,’ Milly said, as if answering a child. ‘There are thousands across the world. They all know each other and they work together to make the world the way they think it ought to be.’

‘At the expense of everyone else,’ I said impatiently.

‘They believe it is to the benefit of everyone. They are creating what they call the New World Order. War and famine are purely economic,’ she said, and of course I understood that.

‘I learned that at school,’ I put in.

‘They are working to make a world where free trade will finally do away with the need for war and famine.’

She gave another little shrug, as if this was a theory she neither believed nor disbelieved would work in practice. I
gazed
at her perfect lips, her perky breasts, her carved hipbones and taut tummy. It seemed weird to be standing there naked except for the bondage straps with this gorgeous creature discussing the intricacies of power politics, weird and yet, suddenly, not so weird.

What Milly had said made sense. It was something I had come to feel intuitively studying economics with Sister Agnes. She had left her job as a high-flyer on Wall Street to take holy orders; she was a dedicated teacher and I learned a lot from her, although the principles of economics are something you just know, as baby birds know how to fly. I had never bothered to think about the ramifications that deeply; at school, you want to get As, not change the world, and if you do want to change the world, then you’d better get those As first.

I stared into Milly’s eyes. They were wise, knowing, composed, bright like chips of glass in a stained-glass window. Her voice reminded me of a wind-chime, delicate, at perfect pitch, those cupid lips turned in such a way that you could never imagine a lie passing through them. From the moment she had entered the room upstairs after my tantrum, I’d been certain I’d seen her before, that I knew her from somewhere.

‘Who are you, Milly?’ I asked.

She smiled. ‘I was waiting for you to guess,’ she answered and took my two hands. ‘I’m an Old Basher.’

‘What?’ I almost fell over.

‘Camilla Petacci. I left Saint Sebastian’s when you were about fourteen,’ she explained. ‘I remember seeing you like a young pony hurrying through the corridors with your hair flying like a mane.’

‘You must have been one of the older girls we were so envious of.’

‘I suppose,’ she said. ‘I went to Cambridge and now …’ She shrugged and glanced about the room. ‘Now this is me.’

‘That’s, like, amazing …’

‘Not really. If you think about it, we can do whatever we want. We are the lucky ones.’ She glanced down at our naked bodies and gave her little shrug. ‘We were born like this.’

‘And you never wanted to do anything else?’

‘I did think of becoming an actress,’ she replied. ‘I did a film that won a prize at Cannes. I was slated to do another with Tyler Copic …’

‘Tyler Copic?’ I was flabbergasted.

Milly nodded. Everyone knew Tyler Copic, not that I was interested in his movies; they were for me just propaganda, simplistic yarns about good and evil, with America the guys in the white hats, the emblem of all that is Good, the evil menace threatening the New World Order portrayed by terrorists or Russians or the Arabs.

‘He’s here somewhere,’ Milly added, and glanced over my shoulder.

Tyler Copic was here. The Texan and the sheik were deciding world oil prices. Sergio owned Cataluña. It was incredible.

‘Why didn’t you make the film?’ I asked.

‘I got bored. I don’t like being paraded around in public,’ she replied with a smile. ‘Not dressed, anyway.’

I sighed and all the air gushed from my body. I then remembered that Milly hadn’t told me about Simon Roche.

‘Simon?’ I asked.

‘It’s like a mediaeval court. Simon’s the chancellor,’ she answered. ‘If there is going to be a war or a famine, a billion dollars spent on aid in Africa, or a merger between two foreign banks, Roche-Marshall crunch the numbers.’

Everything had been worked out, planned, organised. War, famine, chaos and disaster were just strategies in the global game of chess. I went quiet as I let this sink in. Was this the adult world? The real world? Most people didn’t know these things; they didn’t even suspect these things. I was privy to the greatest secret of our times, a
conspiracy
. The world of business, the media, of competition was not how it seems. Nothing is how it seems, as Milly had said.

‘And us? Me and you, the others?’ I asked her.

‘You have to answer that question on your own.’

‘What’s your answer, Milly?’ I said. ‘What’s your future?’

‘The future normally looks after itself,’ she replied with that characteristic shrug she had. ‘I suppose I’ll marry a cabinet minister or a congressman – someone who needs a companion with a head on her shoulders. Women have a more important role to play than you may think, especially educated women.’

‘Join
them
?’ I said, indicating the men in the hall with my chin.

‘Haven’t you noticed? Even Arab monarchs have pretty foreign wives and most of them have probably passed through Black Spires.’

‘Really!’

‘Really.’

It was a lot to take in. I felt chosen and cheated, both at the same time. I was here to give the gift of myself, and would receive in exchange the gift of knowledge, of touching and being touched by power: the ultimate aphrodisiac, I’d heard it said.

‘The members of the
club
are special and you are special, Magdalena, or you wouldn’t be here,’ Milly chimed in her melodious voice.

I felt lines furrow my smooth brow. Was I special? Or was I just another shapely naked girl, here to serve the fantasies of the most powerful men in the world?

We were facing each other, our breasts almost touching, and it occurred to me that it didn’t matter. Nothing matters except the present moment. The nude doesn’t have to see the entire staircase. Just the next step. I was here now. In thirty-one days my debt would be paid. I would be free and there would be another new day,
another
beginning. I was, for this brief time, a part of the New World Order. A tiny part, an associate member, but it was an exciting time to be alive and I felt a faint spasm deep in my damp vagina. I was eighteen. Milly was twenty-two. I had plenty of time before I made any giant decisions.

She was standing motionless while my heart beat furiously in my chest. I admired Milly’s stillness, just as I admired the way she moved like a bird on unseen waves of air, with unpretentious elegance. She wore her nakedness like an invisible suit of clothes. I had never seen her dressed, but it appeared that in rejecting clothes she was also rejecting the complex condition of womanhood in order to be a complete human being.

Milly had had the chance to become famous playing a role in a Tyler Copic film. But she didn’t want to be famous. The famous give themselves to the great unknown public, to the fans and feature writers. They become icons and icons are in some peculiar way already dead. At Black Spires the girls in their nudity were the embodiment of life.

If Milly had been dressed, if all the girls had been dressed, the party at Black Spires would merely have been following the conventions of standard social gatherings, powerful men, pretty girls, bonking behind closed doors. By stripping away our clothes and dressing us identically in strategically placed black straps, the erotic quality of our true nature had emerged automatically, naturally. The girls had been turned into beautiful objects without challenging opinions and identities. The men of the New World Order were men who got straight to the heart of male desire and, I was beginning to suspect, female desire, too.

I gazed again at Milly, Camilla Petacci, a Cambridge graduate, an actress, an Old Basher, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I stared again into her widely spaced eyes and what I saw was a look of equanimity. She
understood
the quintessence of the gift and it seemed suddenly that, once you embrace this universal concept, everything falls into place; it is the key piece in the Chinese puzzle that makes all the other pieces fit together.

Once more I had that sense that I was in the right place at the right time. We were living in the new millennium, the age of freedom, of female self-determination and empowerment. My being there at that country house was an opportunity, not a punishment, the chance to mould myself into the epitome of grace and fleshly perfection. I wanted to realise my own slowly forming desires and exude the miraculous arousal of a woman desired before all men’s eyes.

Knowing what you want is a long step towards getting what you want. My body was trembling with mysterious yearnings and nervous perspiration rose in a sheen over my skin. I felt tingles like cold fingers stroking the chords of my back bone. I was a Stradivarius waiting to be played.

Milly leaned forward, our breasts touched and I felt a burning sizzle in my nipples as she pressed her perfect lips to mine.

As we parted, I half turned and Sergio took my hand.

‘
Ven guapa
,’ he said in Spanish.

And I was whisked through the hall, past the musicians playing something familiar, a movie theme from a Tyler Copic film, most probably. We passed below a wooden arch and reached another flight of stairs that I hadn’t seen before. The Duc continued to hold my hand as we climbed the staircase to a passage lined on each side with closed doors.

We walked the length of the passage and entered a large, circular room, the tall, phallic-shaped space occupying one of the Norman towers at the far ends of the building. The curving walls were a continuous mirror such as you see in a ballet school, the arched windows
above
like blades of moonlight. The walls supported a dome made of countless mirror tiles, a mosaic where I could see myself cut and sliced and reflected in a million different ways.

The room was bare except for the black carpet on the floor and the round bed like a giant white lozenge below the dome. It was a room designed for one thing only.

Sergio closed the door behind me and watched as I strode on black heels around the perimeter of the room: Magdalena, the wayward girl from Saint Sebastian’s endlessly repeated, stark naked in this sumptuous boudoir, her hair like black fire in the subdued lighting, the mirrors around me and above me allowing Sergio Buenavista to study my every curve and coil, my long legs climbing to that arrogant bottom, the slope of my V-shaped back reaching wide shoulders with well-defined shoulder blades, the source of angel wings waiting to grow, the swell of my breasts that had grown fuller since I entered the dark portals of Black Spires.

I could see myself, too, from every angle. Without clothes, except for the straps accentuating my sexuality, there is no fumbling, no foreplay, no doubt as to why I was there in this temple of mirrors. I felt neither vanity nor self-possession, but a sense of freedom, that air of equanimity I had seen about Milly.

The abstract perception of myself as a new school leaver stumbling into adult life had transformed into the solid reality of me as a marvellous gift of pure animal sexuality. I had always thought of myself, the inner me, and my simmering, unripe passions as two separate things, two concepts at odds with each other. Now, at that moment, in the infinity of reflections, I could only imagine my existence in terms of my passions. It was me in those mirrors, the real me. This is who I am, I thought. This is what I want.

Sister Benedict, like Simon Roche, had known that
right
from the start. The Sister had tried to beat it out of me, and Simon over the arm of his sofa had beaten it into me.

I approached my prey and he drew me below one of the three chandeliers hanging on long chains from the dome. He took a grip on the heavy flesh of my lower lip and pinched down until my lip must have been as red as a rose in full bloom. He pulled me closer, a hand on the small of my back, and transferred my stinging lip into his mouth, biting down gently and sending quivers through my entire body.

He ran his hands over my shoulders, down my arms, over the line of my waist. He stroked my prominent hipbones, my fluttering tummy. I was ready for anything, but anxious nonetheless. I wanted to be my best. My breasts were throbbing, jutting from me like the prows of pirate ships, the Jolly Roger flags of my flaming nipples demanding attention. I thought he would reach for them, squeeze them, bite me hard. But he didn’t. He turned me round, unbuckled my belt, and dropped it on the floor at our feet. In the soft light of the chandelier he spent a long time studying my bottom. It was pink still from the beating and he prodded me with his fingertips to see, I suppose, how tender it was.

When I had first arrived at the house, after fending off Simon’s lecherous poodles, Lee-Sun had led me upstairs to the dressing room and produced a bottle of ointment he said was arnica. I bent over the end of the narrow bed and, swallowing my pride, allowed him to rub the pale creamy liquid into my inflamed bottom. My first instinct had been one of acute embarrassment, the hub of my sex appearing through my burning thighs, the winking diamond of my bottom thrust in the air. But Lee-Sun’s attention was solely therapeutic and I got the feeling that he had performed this task with spanked girls many times before. The fire in my bottom dampened down and the pain soon went away.