The Gift of Girls (22 page)

This, I thought, is what life is. This is how it works. People want to let go, strip naked and follow their base instincts wherever they may lead them. The masters of the universe understood this: when you have everything, wealth, power, respect, achievement, connections, what remains?

The orgy.

All the people out there reading their newspapers and watching their TV sets were listening to politicians and pundits with about as much power to intervene in events as the captain of the
Titanic
when his ship struck that fateful iceberg. Everything that Milly had said earlier made sense now on that round bed with our stripped bodies magnified to infinity.

The man below me shot a cannonball of hot spunk up my bum and a little squirt, small as a tear, was released by the man in my vagina. He’d done well. I’d done well. Our bodies collapsed in a boisterous pile. There were lips and mouths everywhere, kissing, licking, biting, and I’m sure I saw Number Four, the man who’d arrived with Milly, take Number Three’s cock in his mouth, and I thought, why not, they are probably partners. I found myself kissing Milly and realised that kissing men would never have quite the same appeal. Girls’ lips are soft, tender, sugary, plump and taste of heaven. They are made to be kissed and being kissed was a pleasure every bit as great as having three cocks filling my three orifices.

As our lips parted and another cock wound its way into my mouth, it was impossible to know who it belonged to, and this lack of a face and name, of the man’s persona, his character, his being, made it all the more pleasurable. There was an equality on that circular
dais
, that lozenge of white linen. Our individualities were consumed in the pure sweet decadence of the orgy, an almost spiritual ritual that allowed my soul to grow wings and fly.

Others were appearing in one and twos, the emerald twins like Siamese twins, the links of their bracelets and anklets joined left to right so that they walked in step, swinging their arms like soldiers. The girl with the panorama of tattoos led the older man with snowy hair by his small erection. He looked dazed and boyish. I watched another girl I hadn’t seen before appear on all fours, the rings on her choker linked to the belt of a Cabinet Minister who had recently resigned ‘to spend more time with his family’.

Now I knew what the euphemism meant. This was his family. We were his family. In the photographs of him in the newspapers he had looked tense and anguished. In the mirror room he was naked, relaxed, content, the belt like a dog lead in one hand, his free hand nursing his erection. He paused and shot a stream of spunk over the girl’s back. She had reached the edge of the bed and another man immediately shoved his cock in her pretty mouth.

The tattooed girl had reached the side of the bed at the same time. She was shuffling the wrinkled flesh of the older man in one hand and in her free hand another man had found his way into her palm; her arms moved like the beams on an ancient spinning jenny, up and down, up and down. The Maasai was performing a belly dance around the Arab sheik, the bells about her ankles ringing, her spiralling hands finding their way into the folds of his jalabah to unleash the serpent, as the notes from a flute encourage the cobra to rise from his basket. She began rocking the monster up and down to the same rhythm as the tattooed girl, and those men, at the same time, as if linked on a circuit board, launched their stuff over the writhing bodies of those on the bed, great spurts of semen
that
blinded my eyes, went up my nose and in my mouth. It was like being baptised.

Someone opened a magnum of champagne with an explosive pop and the bubbly stuff cleared the gunk from my eyes and slipped deliciously into my mouth. With my lips stretched open for more, the great heaving mound of the older woman, the one without bonds, lowered over my face. It was like being a bear in a cartoon putting your head in a jar of honey, the sweet sticky stuff covering my chin, my neck, my breasts. She tired of me and moved on to Milly, bending forward at the same time to nurse a stray erection emerging from the mass of limbs and torsos, male bodies and female bodies in one erotic display like a painting depicting the bacchanal that emerged in Rome 200 years before Christ and in which it was the female who ruled. As it should be. And would be again, I thought. It was the best time ever to be alive and better still being born female.

Girls everywhere were growing more comfortable and confident about exhibiting their curves, their chic, their nudity. Heels were higher. Clothes were tighter. Breasts were everywhere, and thighs, too, and backs and bare tummies. Even newsreaders are chosen for the cut of their cheekbones, the mystery of their cleavage, their unreserved sensuality. The pretty young blondes are easing out the grey men in grey suits with their deep, doom-laden voices as those in charge of the media, those masters of the airwaves, come to see that news of war and chaos is sweetened when read through cupid lips.

What the men of the New World understand, what I was beginning to understand, is simply this: that nothing matters. Nothing. Just this one moment in time and how you best spend it. People are born, they live, they die and the wheel keeps turning. Banks crash and people starve. Empires rise and empires fall. Our time is brief and fragile. If we strip away our garments with our self-doubt
and
self-imposed morality, what’s left is a round room with many mirrors where people can be themselves.

The bacchanal was banned in Rome by the petty politicians who had not been invited to take part. People loathe seeing others enjoy themselves, and condemn others for the very things they most wish to do themselves. For 2,000 years, our sexuality has been repressed. For 2,000 years, women have been made to feel ashamed of their natural urges, their natural instincts, their desire for multiple partners and that inimitable freedom only found in the hedonistic heat of the orgy. That was going to change. It was changing. There was a revolution going on and I wanted to be out in front of the charge waving the banner.

I heard the shrill ripping of the air behind me and turned my head to watch as two men brought their leather belts down on the perky bottoms of the twins, their wrists hooked to rings set invisibly in the mirror walls. Their bodies moved like sublime snakes as the pain and pleasure blazed up their long spines. The men beat them mercilessly, the girls cried in ecstasy and the two men like rampant fauns set about filling their backsides, their fiery cocks demanding attention after the stimulation of the beating.

Other girls, girls I hadn’t seen before, were leaning across the mass of bodies on the bed, their legs spread, the masters of the universe piercing them back and front. More champagne showered over me. Over us all. We were one. I was drunk and delirious. Time was suspended. The temperature had risen. Every space in the round room filled, the white bed raised above the black carpeted floor in an eruption of naked flesh. I sucked and I fucked. I took one cock and two and three and four. My skin was alive and electric with new sensations, coated with semen, girl discharge and sweat.

For a girl, sex is at the heart of our nature, it is our pleasure and deepest desire. For a man, more than
pleasure
, more than a sense of conquest, sex is a fantasy. The moment a man vanishes inside a woman, he is free from the chains of squalid reality. If he is going to stay one step ahead of reality, he must emerge from that woman and disappear into the next. The fantasy must be kept alive by changing constantly, changing partners and having partners adapt and change through costume and mask, something I had yet to see in Black Spires but felt intuitively would come before I had served out my thirty-one days.

In that marvellous mirror ball where you didn’t know which body belonged to whom, your sense of self was lost in a whirlpool of sweating, throbbing flesh, each sensation fading into a new sensation and taking you deeper and deeper, higher and higher, until you became one with the whole. In a world of theories, equations and maths, small amounts of matter can contain vast amounts of energy. The orgy is the centrifuge that refines and enriches the life force. Your own pleasure and energy is multiplied to infinity by the vicarious pleasure of those around you.

The temperature had gone up a few more degrees, the lights were low and the moon’s silver glow through the high arched windows gave those tumbling, frolicking bodies the look of ghosts and spirits, of satyrs and elves. I watched the men and girls matched in every conceivable way, and in ways beyond conception, exploring and exploiting the supreme pleasures of each other. Men were spanking girls. Girls were spanking girls, kissing girls, licking out girls in one orifice while the other was filled by a passing cock still with enough energy to stay upright. When it comes to group sex, women have far greater capacity than men; men grow flaccid and tired while women just get more randy.

The men in the mirror room could do anything, and what they wanted to do was be with each other and be with us, the girls with the gift in the house of mirrors. I
was
overcome with a sense of unfettered joy. Any girl can be an accountant. Any girl can get a first at the LSE. Any girl can get a boyfriend, get engaged, get married, be like the cows and zebras and continue the species. You had to be special to be there at Black Spires and I felt special taking part in that carnival of euphoria and delight. The round room was a circus ring without a ringmaster, anarchic, debauched, perfect.

Every scene in every act unwound and ended. The men in the room were exhausted, drunk, slowly losing themselves to sleep. I, on the other hand, was fully awake, my body burning like a bright light. I had, as Milly had said, been born with the gift, and I realised at that moment that everything I might achieve in my life would be less from my own efforts than from nurturing that gift.

I had watched through the hours for Simon Roche to appear in the round room and now he did appear, fully dressed, tall and stern, his dark eyes finding me where I had been all that time, in the centre of the large bed, in the centre of the room, in the centre of the activity.

He remained in the doorway and, as he beckoned, I realised that this was the moment I had been waiting for.

12

The Olson Ranch Brand

IT WAS DIFFICULT
to extricate myself from the twisted knot of limbs and make my way through the obstacle course of couples and trios still copulating about the floor. Everywhere you looked, in every direction, reflected in perpetuity and multiplied in the mirrors
ad infinitum
were the naked bodies of masterful men and willing girls satiated in the dying embers of the bacchanal.

The scene was mythic, glorious, almost spiritual, and I could see both why the Greeks and Romans in pagan times had revelled in this strain of human excess and why early Christians with their teachings on renunciation and the virgin birth had brought it all to an end. That is, I thought, until now. Sodom and Gomorrah had fallen. We were living in a post-apocalyptic, bankrupt and broken new millennium. Just open the pages of any tabloid. Watch cable TV after midnight. Put ‘orgy’ into your search engine. What people want to do most is fuck and fifty years of free love was taking us full circle back to classical times. The orgy was back.

How many men that night had left their sperm in me and on me? It was impossible to calculate and that, it seemed to me, is the difference between the purely promiscuous, the wife swappers, gang bangers, the nervy stab at group sex, and the sublime, wholly decadent gift of the orgy. The orgy is not about base numbers, it’s
about
that place in the mind beyond numbers, beyond definitions, that place where body and soul are one with our primal urges and natural instincts.

To take part in an orgy, you must forget who you are, who you were, who you thought you might one day become. You cease to be an individual with a history, a culture, dreams and future plans. You go beyond morality, beyond philosophy, beyond rational thought. The purpose of meditation isn’t to
think
about something. The purpose is to
still
the mind, think about nothing, enter the void. The orgy has the same abstract yet mystical quality. At the heights of ecstasy you are merely a body emptied of all things except animal instinct, the way man was before the guava grew on that twisted tree in the Garden of Eden.

My mind had been still but it wasn’t still now. It was filled with thoughts, and images as my tummy was filled with butterflies. A faint smile touched my lips as I made my way towards Simon Roche, a shoe in each hand. He didn’t return my smile. Standing there on the edge of that sea of hot flesh in his suit, he was a stranger peeping in on paradise, I thought, his bow tie and crisp shirt a masquerade, while the nudity on all sides of the circular room was wholly natural, unaffected, a representation like in an art gallery where he, dressed, was the spectator, the uninvited guest, and we, the celebrants of the orgy, an oil painting of man’s innermost desire. We had created a
tableau vivant
of the sort the great surrealist Salvador Dali´ staged at his Spanish home in Cadaqués, a gathering of perfect strangers who, after sufficient pink champagne, stripped and performed for his sexual and artistic gratification.

Dali´ didn’t like to touch or be touched. He liked to look.

The smile slipped from my lips. Simon’s dark eyes were on me, but as I crossed the room my own eyes strayed continually towards the wall of mirrors. I had been
conscious
since that moment when I first discovered myself in the long mirror in the bathroom at Saint Sebastian that wherever I went I was accompanied by my own image of myself, that I had got into the habit of observing myself being looked at. It was a form of vanity, I suppose, at least to Sister Benedict, but more, I now thought, the sign of someone glimpsing the seeds of the gift, or rather the ghost of the gift growing corporeal.

Simon stood to one side. The door closed behind me, and there was silence except for the whisper of the wind whistling under the eaves and the pounding beat of my heart. I felt as if I had just run a marathon.