The Gift of Girls (25 page)

I had no idea of the time or how long I had slept, but felt refreshed and fully awake, primed for adventure. Perhaps all the semen I’d swallowed had given me fresh energy. I slid from the sheets, took Lee-Sun’s hand, and left Big Oil murmuring in his sleep, deciding on the day’s price of oil, I assumed.

We raced back along the corridor and down the stairs to the grand hall, empty now, the candle wax melted into grotesque carvings, wedding dresses for headless brides, the light through the windows like crossing swords. We climbed the staircase of the far wing and, on the top floor, I returned to the boudoir where I had learned the art of making love with a dildo from Milly. I had since coupled and trebled in every way and felt momentarily sad that in this house of love there was so much to learn and I had learned so much in so short a time. I showered and then followed Lee-Sun to a long chamber, like a dressing room in a theatre, and, like a theatre, it was filled with voices and laughter.

There were about fifteen girls in various stages of applying make-up and dressing in masks. Everyone was chewing toast and drinking coffee and fresh orange juice, and I realised that there was a kitchen somewhere with staff to care for us, that behind our pleasures others were working, cleaning, carrying the bags. I was content to be up above with the gods, not labouring in the basement below.

Several girls turned to wave. I recognised Milly, though barely. Her face had been painted in a palette of yellows, ochre and umber, and her body was dyed a dark coppery red. She was lacing up a pair of gold Nikes. I hurried towards her and we kissed cheeks.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Hello.’

‘Well?’ she asked.

I shrugged and grinned.

‘What if Sister Benedict could see us now,’ Milly continued and we broke down in a fit of giggles.

As my eyes ran over the other girls, from one to the next, I was reminded for some reason of making flick books as a little girl with my
abuelo
, my Spanish grandfather; he was quite the expert, drawing figures slightly different on the corner of each page of a notebook, then flicking through the pages to reveal the illusion of motion, a running bull or a flamenco dancer. As the newcomer, I was stark naked, but I could see the final image in the flick book, how I would appear when the costume was complete.

I was starving and stuffed myself with toast and jam. Milly combed my hair and helped me dress. It was a costume of sorts we would be wearing, but it amounted to merely the head and tail of a fox, a real head and a real tail, she told me. She started with the make-up, painting my face that dark-ochre colour before adding yellow streaks to highlight my eyes. I was still eating toast.

‘Careful, you’ll get crumbs smeared across your face.’

‘I’ve had a lot more than crumbs smeared across my face,’ I replied and we giggled once more.

It was like being in the showers at school after hockey, especially when we’d won a match and everyone was in good spirits.

By the time Milly had finished making up my face, I had stopped looking like me and had that haunted animal quality I’m sure foxes feel. That was the plan for the day, she explained. Now that fox hunting had been banned, our masters had devised their own variation. Milly used a large brush to paint my body in that coppery colour, down my arms and sides, my tummy and legs. She turned me round and paused to admire the six scarlet lines raised across my bottom.

‘Big Oil?’ she asked and I nodded. ‘Did he make it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know exactly what I mean, Magdalena,’ she said and I blushed through the sunny shades of make-up.

‘For the first time in ten years,’ I boasted, and Milly brought me back down to earth.

‘He always says that, the old devil.’

‘No …’

‘You can’t trust a thing they say.’

She carried on painting and I carried on eating. There was fruit salad and hard-boiled eggs. I hadn’t eaten a thing the previous day and I had a feeling I was going to need all my energy. When she had finished with the painting, she sprayed me from head to toe with a fixer that made my skin feel tight, as if I was covered in sperm again.

There were numerous boxes containing new trainers. I found some that fitted and slipped them on. Milly attached the tail to my belt and it hung down all tickly between the tender cheeks of my bottom. Poor little fox, I thought, and stopped stuffing myself to put on the mask. It fitted over the top and back of my head, leaving a gap for my eyes and providing me with a long snout – to sniff out what, I wasn’t sure. Milly hooked the rings on my collar to the clips on the mask so that it fitted snugly and felt more comfortable. I helped her do the same and we turned to the mirror. I was ready. A foxy little fox identical to all the other girls, in fact so identical I’m sure our mothers wouldn’t have been able to tell us apart.

Just like in the theatre, now we were in our costumes and make-up, we had to wait an age before Lee-Sun reappeared.

‘They are ready,’ he announced.

‘And we are ready for them,’ said the Maasai, recognisable as she was the only one among us barefoot.

We ambled down the staircase, out through the double doors and down the steps into the raucous gathering assembled in the courtyard. It was an astonishing sight. There must have been about thirty, perhaps forty men on horseback, quad bikes and motorbikes, some in jogging
clothes
limbering up ready for the chase. Among the horsemen I recognised the Duc de Peralada dressed in riding pink. Ben Olson looked refreshed in a cowboy outfit, a whip coiled in his hand, silver spurs attached to his boots. The sheikh was on a tall black stallion with an ornate saddle, magnificent in white robes that danced on the breeze.

Riding bareback, naked as ever, was the woman who had lowered her cleft over my face during the orgy, poised, back straight, awe-inspiring. It was difficult to tear my eyes away from her and I only did so when Simon Roche approached with his two giant poodles on leads. The waft of our scent was driving the dogs wild. They were slobbering and barking, their jaws a hair’s breadth from our slippery parts.

Sandy Cunningham looked like a Hell’s Angel in an ensemble of chains and black leather. He revved his Harley Davidson and drove towards me, then swerved to a stop.

‘Is that you, Magdalena?’ he asked.

‘How did you guess?’

‘You’re wearing the brand, girl,’ he replied, and glanced at the Texan. ‘We had a little chat about you this morning.’

I turned to look at my bottom. The red lines were visible through the thin layer of copper paint, a raised grid I was strangely proud of, though I wasn’t entirely sure why. I wanted to ask Sandy what exactly he and the Texan had been chatting about, but he dragged on the accelerator and shot off again.

Two butlers in black appeared with silver trays balancing sherry in crystal glasses and the men raised those glasses as you do before the hunt. I noticed the butlers never looked in our direction, at this gallery of decorated girls, and it occurred to me that, just as there were workers in the kitchen, there must also be grooms in the stable, cleaners, maintenance staff, chauffeurs and pilots. Serving the masters of the universe was big business,
almost
certainly well paid, and I was sure it was only men who were offered those jobs.

That would explain the glass ceiling, but not the fact that among the men gathered in the courtyard was that solitary woman. Was she just a token, the exception that proves the rule? If she were equal to the masters, why was she naked?

I turned to Milly, and pointed. ‘That woman …’

‘I’m told she’s a Minister in the French Government,’ she whispered in reply. ‘And, by all accounts, more powerful than the President.’

‘But why hasn’t she got any clothes on?’

‘She likes it that way, I suppose,’ she answered. ‘She was one of us once, you know.’

‘Really?’

‘She has shared her gift,’ said Milly.

I looked back at the woman on horseback through the slits in the mask. Our eyes met and I was sure I saw in them a look of complicity. The ties binding the powerful and the erotic were many and subtle. I had thought I had learned so much at Black Spires, but realised now that the more you know the more there is to know, that I was setting out on a long journey and had barely taken the first step. My old life was fading from my mind like the mist over the trees. The sun pressed through the clouds, warming my skin, and now that the fumes from Sandy’s motorbike had gone, I could taste the tang of the sea. The land smelled primal and verdant after the storm the previous night.

Milly pointed at the tower standing above a low hill on the horizon to the south of us, in the direction of Saint Sebastian.

‘That’s our destination,’ she said. ‘The first girl to reach the tower is the winner.’

‘What will she win?’ I asked her.

‘Mmm, I’ve never thought of that. The men are all rogues. I don’t think there’s any chance of anyone winning.’

‘That’s not fair,’ I said, and she shrugged philosophically.

As I looked round at the gathering once more, I was stunned to see Jay Leonard, the TV actor fond of smacking my bottom at Rebels. He wasn’t a master of the universe, surely? He was just a soap star. He was wandering round with a notebook writing down figures.

‘Bets,’ Milly explained. ‘They love gambling, all of them. They’re betting who will get the furthest.’

‘But he’s just an actor,’ I said, pointing at Jay.

‘Well, yes, but his father owns the rights to half the casinos in the world, and Jay runs Jabber TV, the cable company. It’s all multi-tasking now,’ she added and we broke down in a fresh bout of giggles.

When I was able to get control of myself, I glanced from Jay Leonard to Sandy Cunningham to Simon Roche. They were all in on it, tricking me on to the road to Black Spires, to my standing here outside this big house this July morning in nothing but a fox’s head and tail. I tried to feel angry, but I wasn’t. I was determined. I would show them. Show them all. They on their quad bikes and fine horses weren’t going to catch me.

Someone blew a hunting horn. The dogs barked excitedly and Simon came back towards us.

‘To the tower,’ he yelled dramatically, raising a whistle to his lips and blowing. ‘You have ten minutes’ start.’

The Maasai didn’t delay for a second. She sprinted out of the courtyard, crossed the gravel driveway and bolted into the woods. She looked as if she knew what she was doing and I followed, Milly close behind. The rest of the girls spread out in a fan, picking their way through the wet undergrowth, the sound of their footfall like a whisper through the trees. The Maasai was loping along, shoulders forward, her long legs moving mechanically. In no time she began to pull away from me and almost immediately I could feel the burn in my thighs.

In ten minutes I could run about two miles. I calculated
that
it was ten or twelve miles to the tower. By the end of the third mile, we would be tired and the horses and vehicles would have caught up with us. Like all games of chance, this was weighted on the side of the bank, the house. If we had a chance it was slender, hardly a chance at all.

We had left Milly behind and the Maasai had gained a hundred yards on me. I could hear the rev of those motorbikes and quad bikes, the horns, the dogs, the beat of hooves. The pack was coming. It was impossible to outrun them.

I could see patches of sea through the undergrowth to my left. I imagined most of the land to my right belonged to Simon Roche, but where the woods of Black Spires ended there was real life, country lanes, isolated farmhouses, the small hamlets we had passed through on our way from London. If I could cross the boundary from Simon’s land without getting caught, I would stand a better chance. It was going to be embarrassing if someone from the outside world saw me, a naked girl disguised as a fox, but it was the only way.

Milly was far behind me now. Two other girls had gone off to the left. Perhaps they intended to try to swim to the tower. The hoof beats were like a war drum pounding louder, getting closer. I paused to look back. The mask gave me tunnel vision and it wasn’t easy to focus across the breadth of the landscape. I couldn’t yet see, but I could hear the riders coming and at that moment I felt like a hunted animal fleeing for my life.

I took off at a right angle away from the sea, away from the direction of the tower, and pelted as fast as I could, swerving through the undergrowth, leaping small bushes and puddles, the slight slope of the land adding to my momentum. When I had first entered the trees, it had seemed as if I were in a dense forest, but in a matter of minutes the trees thinned out and I could see below in the distance a golden field of rape seed edged by a stone wall.

Where the ground was no longer in shadow, it was thick with brambles and blackberry bushes whose thorns tore at my legs. I slowed to pick my path more carefully and, as my heartbeat stilled, I heard the pack drawing closer. Glancing back, I caught a glint of silver on a horse’s bridle and imagined for a moment that I was an Apache brave running naked out of the past, the US Cavalry hunting me down with their long rifles.

Now I really knew what it was like to be hunted. I searched for an escape. There was nowhere. The trees were sparse, mostly saplings, a few ancient specimens with gnarled bark and long memories. The brambles grew thick all the way down to the yellow field still a half-mile away. I stopped completely. I could hear one of the quad bikes revving loudly. I could smell the exhaust. Tears welled in my eyes, but I gritted my teeth and I wiped those tears away. I wasn’t a fox. I was a gymnast.

I sprinted flat out towards a big old oak tree with a low-hanging bough that I reached in one flying leap. I swung my legs up and was thankful for all the hours I’d spent on the parallel bars. I clung to the bough, catching my breath, hanging there like a little monkey. I then crawled upside down, hand over hand, until I reached the thick trunk with its blisters and knots that formed a ladder and allowed me to climb into the heights like Jack on the Beanstalk. I kept climbing until the ground below me was out of sight.