The Gift of Girls (26 page)

From my bird’s-eye view, the forest was a narrow strip edging the sea and stretching as far as the tower. It was impossible to run those ten miles through the trees without getting caught and it was only by standing back, or rather by being up there in the crow’s nest, that I could see the whole picture and really work out how to reach my destination.

Behind me, beyond the trees, there were fields with ripening crops, and in the distance I could just make out what looked like a tractor moving leisurely on a country
lane
half hidden below tall hedgerows. My best chance was going to be out there in the open, in the unknown: more frightening, for sure, more dangerous, but more of a triumph when I reached the tower.

The sound of the quad bike grew closer. I saw one of the girls running for her life and two masters of the universe gaining on her, the Arab on his black steed, the other on his roaring machine. The little fox hadn’t seen the muddy pool coated in leaves in the clearing just in front of her and, when she did, it was too late. She stumbled and fell face first into the mud.

The quad bike braked, swerved and fell on its side. The sheikh reined in and the horse trotted into the muddy pool. By the time the quad rider had scrambled out from under his machine and made a dash for the pool, the sheikh had already slipped from his saddle. He lifted the girl by the back of her belt and unhooked her tail, which he waved exultantly in the air.

Now that her tail had been won, the girl stood and unhooked the clasps holding the fox’s head in place. She shook her head, releasing her hair. It was Milly. Of course. Even from the distance she was unmistakeable with those red flames dancing in the sunlight. I wondered if she had decided on the same ploy, to escape from the confines of the woods, or whether she had seen me taking off in a new direction and blindly followed.

It didn’t matter. The race for her was over and the men who had captured her, all sweaty and covered in mud, claimed their prize. The sheikh, the fox tail in his teeth, turned her over on the edge of the mud pool, pulled his erection from his robes and took her with the careless haste of a ravening beast, of a boy on the bottom field, and I wondered if there was something about the great outdoors that gave men such urgency.

Milly pushed up on her hands and knees. The sun gleamed on the copper paint coating her hide. She was like a little animal, covered in dirt, doing what animals
are
meant to do, her rolling motion harmonious like poetry, like the jazz musicians who had played in the grand hall. The sheikh was slipping in and out of her wet places, faster and faster, his white robes in the mud turning as black as the oil he pumped from the desert and sold at prices he and Ben Olson decided upon. The quad-bike rider, who had been slowly masturbating, slid his cock between Milly’s gorgeous lips.

Two things went through my mind: how enjoyable it was to watch others making it, especially in the open, and how, if I had not stolen that £3,100, I would not have been there now on top of the world.

I probably should have climbed down the tree and continued through the brambles to the field of rape, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Milly and her lovers. I adored sex in its array of colours and varieties, doing it, seeing, imagining it. If there is a battle between the sexes, that battle must logically end in union, in possessing and being possessed. It follows to my mind that it is the female who, after losing every battle, wins the war. Possessing leads always to disappointment, while being possessed is eternal. I remembered a visiting bishop at prize-giving one year saying that everyone is born with one gift and his was to serve. Mine, too, I thought, and watched as the two men changed positions. The quad-bike man took Milly in the places moistened by the sheikh and the sheikh cleaned the juices from his cock in Milly’s agreeable mouth.

Satisfied, satiated, her tail tucked into the sheikh’s belt, the fox mask swinging from her fingers, Milly climbed up behind the horseman, her long white legs like zebra stripes against the horse’s back, and the sheikh trotted off behind the quad bike he had beaten to the prey.

When they vanished from view, I climbed back down from my perch and continued picking my way through the undergrowth. The brambles cut my legs, but the blackberries were big and juicy, that shade of blue like a
bruise
, like a raven’s wing, and there was something oddly sensuous being naked in the middle of nowhere eating fruit ripening in the wild. I ate my fill and pressed on, away from the woods, until I reached a tall barbed-wire fence impossible to climb over, which I imagined marked the edge of the Black Spires estate.

I followed the fence until I found a place where the land dipped and I dug out the leaves and wet earth until I had made a hole big enough to crawl under the wire. Once I had crossed to the other side I would have reached the point of no return, the point we should always try to reach.

There were more brambles on the other side, but beyond, fifty yards on, was the stone wall I’d seen from the treetop. I made my way to the wall, climbed over and entered the field, a golden fox invisible among the swaying blooms of rape. Rape was a strange name for a beautiful plant. It was being grown as a renewable energy source, and I wondered if the sheikh and the Texan and their cohorts in the New World Order fixed the prices of crops and food as well as petroleum, if everything was fixed, the stock market, the banks, the government.

The sun had grown hotter. I was tempted to remove the fox head, but thought that went against the spirit of the chase. I was not supposed to have left the woods, of that I was certain, but the rules and the spirit are not the same thing, as those alpha males and masters of the universe I’m sure would have agreed.

After crawling under the fence, I was covered in mud and, where I had sweated, the mud had turned into a sticky paste that was oddly pleasant and made me feel less naked. Little flies were buzzing around my head, and I had the shock of my life as I looked down and saw a rabbit standing at my feet washing behind his ears. His nose twitched and he looked up at me as if to say, ‘I’ve never seen a fox like you before.’ Then he went jumping off.

On the far side of the field the wall was higher and ran alongside a dense hedge. I found a five-bar gate, which I climbed, and dropped down to the lane I’d seen from the oak tree. The vehicle I’d seen earlier was indeed a tractor and at that moment it turned the corner and skidded to a halt.

‘Bloomin’ heck.’

The tractor driver was about my age, a young lad with a shock of scruffy blond hair, lots of muscles and eyes as big as dinner plates. His mouth had dropped open and the fag in his mouth dropped on his bare chest. He started fluttering his hands about, slapping his chest, flinching and dancing in his seat. That over, he looked back at me, his mouth still open.

‘Bloomin’ heck.’

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I hope I didn’t frighten you.’

He swallowed and managed to recover his composure. ‘Nah, we’re used to seeing girls without any clothes on wandering round these parts,’ he said, and I wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic or whether the locals knew what went on behind the walls of Black Spires.

‘It’s just a game. I’ve got to get to the tower.’

I pointed, but he didn’t bother to look in that direction: his eyes were fixed on my bristling nipples, the mud over my breasts and down my tummy to the sticky patch of my pubic hair.

‘Still got a long way to go,’ he finally said.

‘Will you help me?’

Again he paused and a calculating look gripped his features. ‘I might,’ he answered. ‘What are you going to do for me?’

I paused. A smile came to my lips – a smile of recognition. I was getting to know myself.

‘Anything,’ I said.

He climbed down from the tractor, opened the gate and backed the vehicle in. I followed and he closed the gate again.

‘How come you haven’t got a stitch on?’ he asked.

‘I thought you said you were used to seeing girls running round in the nude?’

‘In my dreams.’

He grabbed hold of me and I tensed up. I gripped his arms. ‘Not like that,’ I told him. ‘The way to make love to a woman is the way you would cook a small fish.’

He thought about that for a moment and then tried to kiss me. It wasn’t easy with the fox’s head in the way. He pawed at my breasts, my bum, my hipbones, and I calmed him down, unbuckling his belt, lowering the zip on his jeans and unleashing his hard cock. I drew the loose skin backwards and forwards and he let out a long sigh of relief.

‘There, that’s better,’ I said.

I went down on my knees, popped it in my mouth to make it wet and leaned back to take a closer look. It was beautiful, glistening in the July sun, the white skin soft as silk, smooth as glass, the helmet as pink as my own wet parts. His cock smelled like fresh milk, young and full of energy, and slid like a greyhound down my open throat. He soon started to pant.

‘Bloomin’ heck,’ he said, and I let it slide from my mouth, teasing it with some nips and nibbles, rimming the groove.

He pulled his trousers over his muddy boots and I turned, going down on my hands and knees, country style. He paused for a moment; men always do faced with the choice, my slippery wet crack or the dark pulsing ring of my anus. He was too eager to think about lifting the pleated cape about my throbbing clitoris and giving her some action first and rushed in one swift charge through the pink lips of my labia into the moist warmth of my pussy. I pushed back on my hands and knees, my position reflecting exactly that of Milly and the sheikh on the edge of the mud pool, but my rider was young, bounding with health, his cock like an explorer conquering new worlds.

He climaxed quickly and as the sperm oozed out of my pussy, I remained in the same position, waggling my bum until he got the message and fed his oiled cock into my back passage. I stretched my thighs, taking all of him – he was hard still – and we got into a steady rhythm, tango dancers moving as one until we reached a grand finale, an orgasm of biblical scale, a seismic shift that must have changed the tectonic plates below the Garden of England.

‘Agh, agh, agh,’ I screamed.

‘Agh, agh, agh,’ he echoed.

And we collapsed in a heap laughing.

‘Bloomin’ heck,’ he said once more, and I fed his shrinking cock below the snout in the fox’s head and sucked it clean.

‘There, is that better?’ I asked.

‘Blimey, I wish there were more girls like you.’

‘I don’t,’ I replied. ‘Come on, I’ve got a race to win.’

‘You haven’t told me your name,’ he then said.

‘I know.’

He pulled his trousers up and buckled his belt. He drove out of the field, back in the direction he’d been coming, and I closed the gate behind us.

‘Here we are, jump up here,’ he said.

I climbed up and balanced on the big mudguard, the metal hot on my tender bottom. The vibration as we bounced along the lane loosened the sperm inside me and it oozed out in a continual stream like honey being poured from a jar. I was muddy, spunky, sweaty, totally satisfied, and really at that moment wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else in the world.

‘I shall call you Foxy,’ he said.

‘And I shall call you Blondie.’

He patted my head and I looked up at him through the slits in the fox mask. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘how come you’ve got those red lines across your bum?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Looks like someone’s been having a go at you.’

‘It’s nothing. Just a little whipping,’ I said in the hope that that would shut him up. It didn’t.

‘Bloomin’ hell, fings you lot get up to,’ he continued. ‘Where you from, anyway? You’ve got one of those funny accents.’

‘Kensington, if you must know,’ I replied, and screamed. ‘Look out!’

He’d been looking down at me instead of the way ahead and almost drove off the road into a ditch.

‘Oops a daisy,’ he said and got back on course.

The lane followed the field, turning to the left, and from my position above the hedgerow I could see the barbed-wire barrier cutting across the landscape as if fencing in a secret. Blondie had a wide grin on his face and the muscles in his arms and chest were golden like ripe apples, tempting me to take a bite.

Suddenly we stopped. A car was coming in the opposite direction and the lane was too narrow for the two vehicles to pass. The tractor pulled up close to the fence, the camber tipping me an angle so that I almost slipped off, my legs shot out and I grabbed on under the big mudguard as the car inched by. The window was down and, as the driver leaned out to wave in thanks, he almost got a mouthful of pussy.

I waved back. The tractor started up again. We followed the fence, the road climbing steadily. As the lane curved to the left, the tower loomed up like a standing stone above a low conical hill, like a giant phallus, and I could appreciate why primitive people were drawn to these sites to make offerings.

‘There it is,’ he said.

As we drew closer, I could see the gathering, the horses, the riders, the quad bikes, the girls who had been caught, the men in jogging clothes doing stretches. I could hear the dogs barking and could just make out Sandy Cunningham going in circles round the tower on his motorbike.

‘Can you stop?’ I said, and the tractor ground to a halt. ‘I’ve got to get through that lot without being caught.’

Blondie looked thoughtful as he climbed down from the vehicle. Under the seat there was a metal box and from the box he pulled a filthy blanket which he gave to me.

‘Hide under that,’ he said. ‘Try not to make it dirty.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ll just drive through the lot of them. They won’t stop me,’ he replied.

‘It’s worth a try.’

He climbed back in his seat. ‘Where’s Kensington, anyway?’ he asked.

‘Next to Chelsea,’ I said, ‘where they play football.’

‘Load of fairies,’ he remarked, and put his foot down.

As the tractor went hurtling along, I pulled the blanket over my head. I wrapped it around my body and peeked out through a narrow gap. Blondie turned off the lane through an open gate and as we bumped over the grass I was terrified of being tossed off the bouncing mudguard.