The Gift of Girls (23 page)

I slipped into my black shoes. My back curved in an imperceptible bow as if tensed for action and, in the cool air of the corridor, my nipples popped out, hard and inquisitive. The warm pony smell rising to my nose made me feel quite giddy. Simon scrutinised me in the same way as he had studied me that day at the interview. Then, it was my breasts rising and falling over the line of my blouse that held his attention. Now, it was difficult to know what intrigued him most.

As I thought about that, I was again aware of seeing myself as he must have seen me, and the picture brought that faint smile back to my lips. Every inch of my body was smeared and streaked with discharge, semen, sweat, saliva and champagne. The cocktail was in my hair, thick and lush over my stomach and thighs, sticky and matted in my pubes, sunk in the wells below my collarbones and embedded in my bellybutton. Female fish leave their eggs in vacant places and male fish cover them in sperm. That was me, a living, moving, breathing depository of male and female essence, a
tableau vivant
to be called
All Life Begins Here
.

‘Are you enjoying yourself, Magdalena?’ he asked, and I paused before answering.

‘No, I’m having an awful time,’ I said.

He tried not to smile and failed. I’d got him.

‘Come,’ he instructed.

As we moved towards the stairs, he patted my bottom in the same way that he’d patted his poodles when I first arrived at Black Spires. It made me feel like one of the family. I was at my piquant best, a salacious little creature fit for nothing but fucking, and I assumed as we descended the stairs that this was Simon’s fetish, to have me finally after everyone else, after he could have been the first, with me covered in spunk and as smelly as a goat house.

Another flight of stairs went down to the main hall, but we continued through a vestibule and turned into a wide corridor with flowers in vases on walnut tables. The passage had an arched ceiling like a tunnel and it seemed to go on and on as far as I could see.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, forgetting myself.

His brow rippled. ‘Isn’t it more interesting not to know? he asked.

I thought about that and nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I replied, and then added, ‘Thank you.’

He slowed his pace. ‘For what?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘For everything. For giving me the chance to, you know …’

‘Make an honest woman of you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will never do anything like that again.’

‘I know that,’ he said darkly and we came to a stop outside an oak door that was wide and arched like the entrance to the chapel at school.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

He knocked and, as he turned and made his way down the passage, I shivered and my perky breasts stopped showing off.

‘Come,’ boomed a voice from inside.

We all want to know what it is that waits behind closed doors but, naked and smelly, still flying like Icarus in the slipstream of the orgy, I suddenly felt as if the sweat and
sperm
holding my wings were melting and gravity was pulling me back down to earth.

I turned the metal ring and entered a large room with a vaulted ceiling supported by beams and the same narrow arched windows as those in the mirror room. It was a bit like the chapel at school, but without the altar and pews. Instead, there was an enormous bed, a sunken bath in a recess edged by leaded windows and, across one wall, a display of whips with one and two and three and more tails, canes long and short, phalluses, harnesses, gags, clamps and things I had no names for, implements more of torture than passion, it seemed to me. I chewed my lips and waited.

Sitting in a wingback chair reading what looked like a financial report was the Texan. I remained where I had entered, just inside the door, while he read on for several more minutes, this drawn-out delay reminding me of my role. He finally placed the magazine on the table beside him and knitted his fingers across his chest. I stood immobile, shoulders back, hands gripped in front of my smelly pussy, and the way he looked at me recalled the way people look at abstract paintings at the Tate Modern when they are not entirely sure if they should be deferential or if they are being made a fool of. It was a questioning, sceptical study through pale-blue eyes with a hint of cruelty and madness, the eyes and the look of Sister Benedict.

‘You’re Magdalena,’ he finally said.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘How old are you, girl, fourteen?’

I almost corrected him but stopped myself. ‘Just about,’ I replied and a fleeting smile ran across his thin lips.

‘You’re a busty girl for your age,’ he added.

‘It’s my hormones,’ I explained and he laughed.

I had said that once already tonight but I had learned from theatre that, when a line works for the audience, it works even better when you repeat it.

‘You know who I am?’ he now asked.

‘You’re the man who decides on world oil prices,’ I said.

‘That’s me. Ben Olson,’ he continued. ‘You get the initials: Ben Olson, Big Oil.’

He found this amusing and laughed to himself as he stood. He was tall, well over six foot six, and about sixty, I guessed; at least he looked a lot older than Daddy, who was forty-two. Ben Olson turned on the large mixer tap that rose like the neck of a swan from the floor over the bath, took a jar from a shelf and emptied a generous helping of blue crystals that foamed as the hot water splashed into the pale-pink porcelain.

‘You’re about as rank as a mare that can’t be broken,’ he remarked and glanced across the room at the torture garden of whips and canes.

‘I’m already broken, Ben,’ I said as I stepped into the water.

‘Let me tell you something, I’ve never come across a filly that didn’t race better after a spot of discipline,’ he replied, the icy look in his eyes making it clear that the subject was now closed.

In the corner there was a three-way mirror and, when he pulled his chair closer, I could see more clearly his lined face with strong features and, in the mirror’s reflection, the shiny dome of his bald head with a fringe of iron-grey hair. I lay back in the bubbles trying to relax and he watched as I soaped my limbs and washed away the glaze of semen. His face was old but his eyes were as sharp and shiny as diamonds. He didn’t seem to be looking at me but into me, into my hidden fears. He loosened the turquoise clasp holding the bootlace tie tight to his throat and crossed one long leg over the other.

‘Now tell me about you, Magdalena,’ he said. ‘People always fascinate me.’

‘All people?’

‘No,’ he replied and his voice grew as icy as his eyes. ‘Always remember this, I’m the one who asks the questions.’

I was lying in hot water but a chill ran up my spine. I finished washing my face, added more hot water, took a breath and settled back under the quilt of bubbles. I told him everything. How I had gone to work in a casino as a hostess as well as becoming an accountancy intern. How I had got into problems gambling and stolen £3,100 from the Roche-Marshall account.

‘They caught you with your hand in the cookie jar,’ he remarked.

‘I’ve never done anything like that before.’

‘That’s because you haven’t had the opportunity.’

I flushed. I explained that I had only done it because I was desperate, because my father had lost his money in a publishing deal with the Chinese man, and that elicited a sudden look of sympathy.

‘He should have known better than get into bed with those guys,’ he said.

Poor Daddy, I thought. Poor Mummy. Poor Rafael. Would my brother ever survive sixth-form college? He was small like Mummy with Father’s heavy features, while I was much bigger like my father, with Mummy’s hair and Spanish looks. Rafael had an angel’s name but he was never going to become a master of the universe.

‘Daddy’s trying to start a company selling second-hand aeroplanes,’ I murmured, more to myself.

‘That right?’

‘In the Middle East,’ I added.

‘Good market for it,’ replied Ben Olson. ‘Does he know anything about aircraft?’

‘He’s a pilot,’ I replied. ‘He sold his own little Cessna. Now, I’m not sure, he’s making contacts, talking to people …’

‘What’s your name, again?’

‘Magdalena.’

‘Yeah, I know, the rest of it.’

‘Magdalena Maria Manzano Wallace.’

‘That’s a lot of names for a little girlie,’ he said as he leaned over to pull the lever that drained the bath.

I stepped out, glancing round for a towel, but there wasn’t one. Big Oil removed his jacket and placed it over the back of a chair with his bootlace tie. He stretched his right shoulder.

‘Don’t grow old,’ he said. ‘You get problems. And I’ve got a problem.’

‘I’m sorry …’

‘You know what my problem is?’ he asked, and as I shook my head he tapped the area of his crotch. ‘It’s finished, lifeless, dead as a tree stump, dead as the European Union.’

He shrugged. I shrugged. I was dripping over the wooden planks of the floor, but the room was hot and my being there naked and wet like this, with the Texan towering over me in his Cuban-heeled boots, underlined both his absolute supremacy and my complete loss of freedom and free will. I was his prisoner, a bird in a cage. I was wet clay: he could shape me and make me into anything he wanted, and this sudden realisation added to my sense of fear, but also to the sexual tension. The leather straps, wet from the bath, made me feel for some reason more vulnerable, more naked, but my nipples were prominent and a spasm stirred in my womb. Even after the restless excitements of the tower, I remained an eager student in the house of the erotic.

Ben Olson glanced at the torture garden, and I followed his eyes as they roamed over the display.

‘It’s a hobby of mine,’ he explained and turned with a lopsided smile. ‘If this don’t wake the old fella, nothing will.’ He removed a bull-whip from a spring clip. ‘You like the look of this one?’

I wasn’t sure what to say, but my knees were trembling
and
my voice when it came was a whisper. ‘It’s quite nice.’

‘Quite nice! I love that. You English are always so … understated,’ he said. ‘I’m going to beat you with this whip, Magdalena. You going to be able to take it?’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Good for you, girl. That’s how the Pilgrim Fathers built America, whipping their wives and doing their best.’

He fondled the whip, running the long plaited leather through his fingers as if he were waxing a bow before playing the violin. ‘I’ll tell you something I learned from my daddy,’ he said. ‘When one of these is used in the right pair of hands the tip of the whip moves at over 700 miles an hour. It’s hard to imagine. You’re going to hear a crack as the whip slices the air. That crack, girlie, is what’s called a sonic boom. A long time before men built airplanes, whips were the first tools to break the sound barrier. What’s the name of your daddy?’

His question caught me unawares. I was mesmerised by his long white fingers stroking and caressing the whip, as the length of that whip was soon going to be stroking and caressing the poor little mounds of my bottom.

‘Gordon,’ I finally said.

‘Well, that’s nice. Let’s make him proud of you.’

At the foot of the bath there was a sturdy double wooden rail bolted into the floor. It was designed for towels, but I could see as he crossed the room and ran his palm over the top rail that it would serve as a useful prop for his particular fetish: pretending I was fourteen and beating the living daylights out of me. I approached and he tugged on one of my bracelets. The rail was equipped with two perfectly spaced ring clips that he attached to the rings on my leather bracelets. With my hands gripping the rail and my wrists held steady, I shuffled back my feet and presented my backside.

‘Cute ass,’ he said. ‘That’s something I like in a girl, a cute ass.’

‘Thank you.’

I didn’t wonder for a moment why, if my ass was so cute, it had to be beaten, but I knew it had to be done, and just bit my lip and waited.

‘Now, Magdalena, I don’t want you to hold back. I want you to cry out long and loud, the louder the better. A lot of the guys in this place are halfwits who shouldn’t be here. They’ve done themselves in fucking you women. Let’s see if we can wake ’em up and put the fear of God into ’em.’

I now caught out of the corner of my eye the sight of Big Oil removing his shirt, his trousers, his cowboy boots and boxers. He had the longest penis I had ever seen, and I’d seen quite a few that night. It hung halfway down the inside of his long white thigh, completely inert. He could see me watching and he demonstrated just how unresponsive it was, weighing the monster in his palm, bobbing it up and down.

‘If you can wake him up you’ll be the first girlie to do it in a decade,’ he said.

I gave a shrug and held my breath as he seized the bull-whip. He uncoiled the tail, playing out its length in a series of swift, jerking motions, three, four, five times, the leather biting the air. He looked magnificent standing there, white as marble, naked as a Greek god. He beat the air one more time and I heard the crack, the sonic boom; it almost split my eardrums and I wondered if the sound travelled through the halls and corridors to wake the masters of the universe from their slumbers in the tower.

He was ready. I was terrified.

‘This is going to hurt, girlie,’ he said. ‘But it’s the only way.’

He got in position behind me. I tensed, my palms gripping the rail, legs spread for balance, feet steady, breasts motionless, nervously poised, my nipples itching with fear and expectation.

I heard the whip slice the air and as the tongue flicked swift as lightning across my backside I didn’t at first cry out. I was in shock. I was stunned. Bewildered. I gasped. My knees trembled and sweat broke out across my entire body. A message ran through my cerebral cortex. It said: this is pain. This is pain such as you have never known before. This is pain that you will remember always.

Then I screamed.

The taste of that whip was an experience beyond my imagination, beyond the range of my senses, something I had no name for, a throbbing, pulsing ache that spread out in every direction as if my body had been plunged into a furnace. As the fire burned at its brightest, I screamed again from the depths of my lungs, a scream that made the glass in the arched windows vibrate, its echo hammering over the vaulted roof and bouncing across the strip of sea that ran those twelve miles down the coast to the convent in Westgate where Sister Benedict lay in her little bed dreaming about the girls of the upper sixth across the quad innocently tuning into YouPorn.