The Gift of Girls (4 page)

‘No, no, no. You keep it,’ he said.

‘I can’t do that …’

‘You earned it, didn’t you?’

He gazed from my lips to my protruding nipples, then back into my eyes. Again I recalled the books of Jean Rhys and Anaïs Nin. I was a girl being paid for my services and it was shameful and thrilling.

‘Remember, good luck runs out and bad luck always changes,’ he added. ‘When you’re on a winning streak, keep playing. If you’re losing, know when to stop.’

‘That’s great, thank you.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

3

The Fall

ALL THAT HAD
happened that Saturday night in Sandy Cunningham’s hotel room kept playing through my mind like a clip from an erotic movie. I kept pressing pause to ponder the details, the way he had undressed me like a rare and precious gift. I suppose that’s just what I was. What I am!

I was getting
so full of myself
, as Sister Benedict always said. But it had only just dawned on me that I wasn’t a young girl any more. I wasn’t living behind the high walls of the convent. I was a woman – in every sense of the word. I filled the burlesque costume at the casino really rather well. My long body had filled out – all rounded and enticing at the top, my bottom pouting and desirable. Add to this my dark liquid eyes and protruding hipbones and I had all the accoutrements of feminine power. I was eighteen, the best age to be. Men would now be clay on my potter’s wheel, butter in my hands. I was the mistress and men would be my slaves. I was free, free from the past, from childhood, from my money worries.

I knew the system.

In the video replaying through my mind I could see Sandy unsnapping my stockings from the garter belt and rolling the fishnets down my silky legs. I remembered the way the money in my knickers had scattered over the floor, sticky and sweet smelling from being pressed
against
my bare skin. I adored the way he had caressed my body, my breasts sparkling and fizzing, as his hands, like the palms of a sculptor, released me from the prison of my self. I could summon up the feeling that had come over me when he first put his tongue in my bottom, how I had felt depraved, debased and exhilarated all at the same time.

There are millions of articles about anal sex in girls’ magazines but they always focus on whether you should or shouldn’t do it. They describe the best lubricants, the perfect position; they say it’s the best way to keep your man interested. They describe this act as if it is a gift reluctantly given. But when it comes to describing the actual feeling, the journos aren’t sure what to say because describing feelings is never easy, and one girl won’t feel the same way as the next. Men take pride in the sense of violation, imagining they are explorers conquering new continents. But what they don’t know is that girls want to be conquered. We are designed to be conquered, penetrated, to give up our prizes, not with reluctance but with joy.

Deep down in the subconscious of every girl is an unquenchable thirst, a hunger, a desire to be desired to a point where pleasure turns to pain and the pain turns to new, unknown, unimaginable realms of pleasure. When Sandy Cunningham made my bottom wet and slid his cock inside me I felt mortified that I was letting him do this, and yet, at the same time, I wanted him to. I had made a pact. I had known when I stepped into the mirrored lift at that hotel in Kensington that I would do anything to learn the system and that Sandy with his suntanned face and saucy blue eyes would do everything he wanted in exchange. I was ashamed but intrigued, breathless and electrified.

It hurt, it really hurt, and I was tense because what Sandy was doing at first seemed depraved and shameful. But with each thrust, the tension slowly ebbed. The
anxiety
faded. My muscles began to relax and the pain became tolerable, less painful than pleasurable, like something completed, something that is meant to be. With my head buried in the soft down pillows, with my eyes sealed like two steel shutters, with my pussy oozing sweet nectar over my thighs, I was overcome by a sense of wickedness and debauchery, and also a sense of wellbeing. I had discovered a part of myself that was new and had been waiting just below the surface to be discovered.

I had been on that legendary trip around the world. I had taken Sandy Cunningham in all my private places, my pussy, my bottom and my mouth. I was feeling guilty, naturally, but as I lay naked in my own little bed in my own little bedroom late on Sunday morning, with Melissa and Sarah sitting with gaping mouths on the edge of the bed, I couldn’t help feeling pleased with myself.

After vowing never to tell anyone, I told the girls everything. I mean, it’s impossible to keep secrets from girls you’ve been boarding with for yonks, and of course I lingered over every shudder and thrust, every wet sordid detail.

‘How old was he?’ asked Sarah.

‘About forty, and really quite handsome in that Australian sort of way,’ I replied.

‘What’s it like?’

‘What?’

‘You know,’ said Sarah, ‘in the …’

‘In the bum?’ I asked her.

‘Yes.’ She nodded and leaned forward.

‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘You have to relax and just let it happen.’

Sarah hugged herself as she thought about that.

Melissa was more practical. ‘Are you going to teach us this famous system, then?’ she asked.

‘Oh, no, you have to pay for that,’ I told her.

‘I bet it doesn’t work.’

‘Well, we’ll see.’

I stretched my back and yawned. I was deliciously tired still and closed my eyes.

Melissa spoke to Sarah as she got to her feet. ‘That’s what happens when you bonk your brains out all night.’

‘I wish,’ said Sarah, and I opened one eye to give her a wink.

They closed the door behind them. I slept all afternoon, and that night, with the money I’d won playing blackjack with Sandy – proof if proof were needed that my story wasn’t exaggerated – we went to the Funky Monkey and got thoroughly caned. I had always been the least adventurous of our little threesome and we drank endless toasts to my new-found immorality, as Melissa put it. I could tell she was dead jealous and Sarah admitted that she intended to take Saint Matthew’s advice if the same opportunity ever presented itself to her.

Monday morning I woke without a trace of a hangover and had a spring in my step as I marched into the glass temple at Roche-Marshall wearing a navy-blue pencil skirt, a skinny white T-shirt and Sarah’s red military jacket with the wide collar and two rows of brass buttons running at angles from the shoulder to the waist.

‘Very patriotic,’ Simon Roche said when he made his usual morning call. ‘How was your weekend?’

‘It was … unreal.’

‘You’ve got colour in your cheeks, Magdalena. Did you go on a long country walk, or was it something more stimulating?’

A picture of Sandy Cunningham on his knees lapping at my pussy came to my mind and now my cheeks really did turn red. ‘Well, yes it was …’

‘Stimulating?’

‘Actually, yes.’

He smiled. ‘You’re blushing,’ he said. ‘How charming. By the way, what size shoes do you take?’

‘A narrow six,’ I replied and looked back at the rows of numbers on my monitor.

He left, smiling still, and it was another five minutes before I suddenly thought how weird it was that he should ask my shoe size; but then, Simon Roche was a weird sort of bloke. He was tall, darkly handsome, a storybook figure, his voice a sensual baritone, his black eyes looking into my secrets. I’m not sure why, but I had the strangest feeling that he knew exactly what had happened to me on Saturday night in that hotel room in Kensington.

I worked extremely hard and by lunchtime I had done everything I had been expected to do and had some free time to start making my fortune. I registered my credit card with an online casino, clicked into the blackjack and bet £10 on the nine of clubs. I drew the Jack of Diamonds and the dealer drew two cards before going bust. I was already winning.

In an hour, I had accumulated a profit of £200 and called it a day. There was more work to do and I didn’t want to make any mistakes.

That night, while Kate was lacing me into my corset, I saw in my reflection a different me. There was something about my expression: my eyes seemed brighter, more focused, my lips were fuller, redder, more pouty.

‘Do I look different to you, Kate?’

‘You look like a slapper. Did you get it off with that Ozzie?’

The colour crept over my neck. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said.

She grinned, then turned around so that I could lace her up. Kate had a narrow, V-shaped back with small breasts, but I pulled the corset strings so tight that what she had was all on display the way she liked it. She took a big breath and pushed them out a bit further.

‘It’s show time,’ she said, and went trotting off to the main bar.

Men liked Kate. She was sassy with tomboy features, wide cheekbones and the most juicy pair of lips I had ever seen, like ripe cherries. Men seemed to want to protect her and through the course of the evening she tended to get fewer spanks on the bottom and more tips than me. I wasn’t sure why, but it didn’t matter. I knew the system. Kate didn’t.

I paused and studied myself in the mirror. I did look different. Not
full of myself
, but more confident – less the schoolgirl, more the
femme fatale
. I hadn’t eaten very much those last few days and it showed immediately. My waist had grown trimmer, my shoulder blades more defined and my boobs seemed to have become fuller, more rounded, more saucy, more tempting.

It dawned on me now, after lacing Kate into her corset, how incredibly important they are. Breasts, that is. I mean, your bust is everything, the shape, the weight, the form, the feel. The first thing a man looks at is your breasts. Then your waist. Then your bum. But it’s your boobs that lead the way, the prow of the ship of which you are the master.

At school we were made to button our blouses up to our chins. The nuns were so obsessed with keeping our breasts hidden all the girls wanted to do was set them free. We wandered around the dorms topless in our navy-blue drawers, our breasts springing up and down like jolly toys. It didn’t take much persuasion for you to allow the local grammar school boys to slide their hands up the back of your blouse and then you had to wait impatiently as they tried to unsnap your bra. You could spend an hour on the bottom field getting damp knickers waiting for them to find the combination and more often than not you’d have to do it yourself. Pop the buttons, disengage the bra, lie back and let those clumsy boys have a good feel. Girls really do love their breasts and they love having them on show. It’s weird but true.

I leaned forward and planted a kiss on the mirror.
‘You slapper,’ I said in Kate’s ‘Sarf Lunnen’ accent and slapped my bottom.

I carried my tray with a certain
je ne sais quoi
and endured more smacks than usual, though for some reason I minded less and collected more tips. It was, for a maths scholar, simple arithmetic: 2+2=4. A teenaged girl dressed in corsets and skimpy black knickers draws men’s hands to her bottom like iron filings to a magnet in the physics lab, like moths to the flame, like nuns to their knees. It was part of the job and seemed less demeaning that night, just a bit of fun. I was a gorgeous object and men for some cavemannish reason have a strange desire to venerate and despoil all that is beautiful.

People sipping cocktails were sliding their money across the blackjack and roulette tables. Men with plummy voices, Arabs in robes, soigné women with deep tans and chic dresses built columns of chips on the table before them and watched those chips sink like old tower blocks dynamited from their foundations. They hadn’t studied the law of averages. They didn’t know that games of chance ebbed and flowed, that through the power of mathematical probability the cunning player knows how to ebb in fractions and flow in primary numbers. I sucked in my waist, pulled back my shoulders and felt faintly light-headed as I toured the golden-lit room with my tray of complimentary poison.

I kept looking out for Sandy Cunningham and he finally turned up just after midnight in his crumpled suit. I dashed over with a Coke and it was sort of strange, because in the video film of our night together he was much taller than me, but in real life in my heels I was much taller than him. I told him I had won £200 online that day and he was really impressed.

‘Better to be lucky than clever,’ he said. ‘Remember, ride your luck and cut your losses.’

‘I will, I promise,’ I said.

In the two or three minutes I was there he played three hands with £50 chips and pulled in £150.

I circled the casino. Jay Leonard, the soap star with the heavy hand, waved a £10 note in the air as I approached and I thought, ah well, in for a penny, put the tray down and presented my posterior for a moment’s discipline.

SLAP
.

‘Ouch, that hurt. That really hurt,’ I said. And it really did hurt.

‘Best twenty quid I’ll lose tonight,’ he replied, and his mates laughed.

‘That wasn’t twenty, it was ten,’ I said.

At that, like a magician, Jay pulled a rolled £10 note as if from behind my ear. ‘One more for the road?’ he suggested.

‘Not so hard this time,’ I said and bent forward.

He twirled his arm in circles like he was a propeller plane about to take off and the spank across my poor little bum was so hard tears jerked into my eyes.

‘Ouch,’ I cried, and all the soigné ladies gave me a dirty look as if I’d sworn in church. I suppose the casino is a sort of church, a place where the rich and famous go to worship money.

Jay Leonard rubbed my bottom with his palm. ‘There, there,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me that little touch hurt?’

‘Yes, it did.’

‘Well, it’s a good idea to get used to it.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Your bum was made for spanking and I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be getting more than its fair share in the future.’

‘That’s what you think,’ I said.

‘That’s what a little bird told me.’

‘Then my advice is don’t listen to little birds.’