The Gift of Girls (7 page)

I tried to picture myself bent over in that shadowy office, stark naked, vulnerable, tall in black heels, my body long and slender and glistening with perspiration, my breasts hanging heavily and tingling with new sensations. I could smell sweat under my arms, feel the damp ooze between my thighs and the blaze sweeping down my legs to my toes and up my spine to my confused and feverish mind.

Down his hand came again.

‘Ten,’ I said.

I was almost there, almost eager for the next one. Something unexpected and terrible was happening to me. My sex was throbbing, pushing through my thighs. A sticky moistness was gathering about the inflamed lips. I could imagine nothing more shameful. I was finding perverse pleasure in my humiliation. I was panting for breath. The pain had stretched over my back, across my shoulders and down to the fiery tips of my tingling breasts, and with the pain was a warm, cosy, comforting feeling like taking a hot bath after a cold swim.

Down it came, harder than ever, his handprint branding my flesh, a shooting star of agony and ecstasy running up my spine and into my brain.

‘Eleven.’

The dampness between my legs had grown into a steady flow. I could feel a hot trickle ooze down my inner thigh. My armpits were a lake. My hair was wet. Tears
had
dried on my face. I sniffed hard and could smell my own arousal, the scent not of suffering but of nameless shameful desire. I pushed up on the balls of my feet and the tall heels of my shoes left the ground. I arched my back and pressed down with my hands and, as the twelfth great spank crossed my skin, something inexplicable happened: I started to come.

‘Twelve,’ I said. ‘Twelve, twelve …’

I was gasping for air, wriggling like a fish on the end of a line, my body going into spasm as an orgasm, much bigger and more demanding than that time with Sandy Cunningham, ripped through me and I collapsed over the arm of the sofa, my bottom red hot and throbbing with pleasurable jolts of pain.

‘It’s nearly six, time to go,’ he said.

I was unable to move. I just lay there, quivering and spent. He took my arm and somehow I eased myself unsteadily on to my feet. I thought I saw in his eyes an odd sort of pride, but that may just have been a reflection of my own feelings, and mingled with that pride was a sense of shame far greater than the pain of my burning bottom. I’d climaxed under his hand. I didn’t know such a thing was possible. It wasn’t something they wrote about in
Cosmo
and
Nuts
. This was a new world, and I felt privy to a marvellous secret more valuable than the system.

5

Journey to Black Spires

HE TOOK THE
bag with my clothes from the desk, lifted the telephone receiver and spoke to his secretary. ‘I’ll be at Black Spires for the weekend. I don’t want to be disturbed unless it absolutely can’t wait.’

There was a pause. I was panting for breath, my bottom like a burning brazier, ears honed trying to listen.

‘I’m sure I will, Hannah,’ he said. ‘And you too.’

I’m sure I will what? I wondered.

It was time to go and the horror of what now faced me only entered my consciousness as he opened his office door.

‘If you please,’ he said.

‘But …’

‘Magdalena, this isn’t a game. You understand our contract. You will do everything, and anything, and you will do so without question. Now, for the last time, is that clear to you?’

My head dropped. ‘Yes, Mr Roche,’ I mumbled.

‘Now, head up and don’t mumble.’

I made my way unsteadily like a sleepwalker across the pale wooden planks of the flooring, through the open door and listened as the lock clicked shut behind me. I was stark naked on the seventh floor of the Roche-Marshall building, my bottom scarlet, my thighs coated shamefully in my own discharge, my hair in tangles, my
pubes
sopping. There was sweat on my back, my body was taut and shapely in the magic black heels and it occurred to me as the lift opened that in high heels you feel less naked, you are poised rather than posed, and Simon Roche had been very clever acquiring them.

As we stood in the cool air of the descending lift I remembered rising in that mirrored amber-lit box at the hotel with Sandy Cunningham. That had been a week ago. I had done it all in seven days. Actually six! I had become a whore, a gambler and a thief. At least I wasn’t an alcoholic, I mused, my lips creasing with the briefest smile as the thought flickered like a candle flame in the dark heart of my imagination.

I had been given a good spanking, something Sister Benedict had always said I needed. But the chill sense of foreboding before being spanked actually turned out to be far worse than the whiplash of Simon’s hands on my bare bottom. I had a vague sense of satisfaction from having endured the beating. Knowing that I wasn’t going to have a criminal record was an added comfort. My punishment was going to be less official, more traditional, more in-house, and a chill ran through me as I imagined spending the next thirty-one days as Simon Roche’s slave.

The doors opened on the ground floor. I hung back, peeking out through the open lift as if afraid of the light. I could see people moving about the front desk manned by Amanda, who looked like a man in drag and, for some reason, always seemed to give me a dirty look when I arrived for work each morning. She was signing a slip for a tall bicycle messenger, a Rastafarian wearing yellow lycra and a black helmet with flames down the sides.

Mr Singh, the uniformed porter, was standing beside the revolving doors, stern and stately with his mature beard and dark all-seeing eyes. When he saw us he came to attention like a toy soldier.

I stepped out into the main lobby as the doors were about to close. I felt small and hopeless, totally humiliated.
What
could I have been thinking? I had read articles in the
London Lite
and the
Evening Standard
. Gambling was an addiction. People were running up huge credit-card debts, they were losing their homes, throwing themselves under trains. Deep down, I had known all along that there is no system, there is no secret. Of course, you may have a lucky run and win. But luck runs out and, if you keep playing, you will always lose. Always.

‘Are you ready?’

I had closed my eyes, blocked out the past. Blocked out the future. The lobby was brightly lit and the sun outside the glass building was still high in the sky. It was the end of July and it would be light until ten, and for some reason being naked in the daylight made me feel more exposed, like some nocturnal creature desperate to scurry back to its hole before the dawn predators came to gobble me up.

I nodded my head.

‘After you,’ he said. His voice came from another dimension, dark as night.

I took a deep breath, straightened my shoulders, sucked in my butterfly tummy and led the way, my black heels tapping out a drum roll as I crossed the concourse to the door that led down to the garage.

The bike messenger had removed his Ray-Bans and openly stared, enjoying the show – a nude girl parading through the glass beehive as if for a fashion shoot. The frankness of his gaze was humiliating but at least honest. Amanda wore a tight, condescending look about her lips, and I noticed that her scorn was lit, too, by the green-eyed monster. In every girl, I’m certain, there is an exhibitionist, a desire to expose herself, and I was aware that, except for my red bottom, I must have been an enviable sight in Amanda’s eyes – an untamed, satiated young animal stepping from the wilds beside Simon Roche, the king of the jungle.

Mr Singh touched his fingers to his turban in a salute and glanced in my direction without actually looking at me. I was a naked Lady Godiva, Mr Singh one of those good citizens who lined the streets without taking so much as a peep.

Mr Roche opened the door and I felt proud that I had made it across the lobby without fainting or having hysterics. We descended the narrow flight of concrete stairs with their decaying smell of damp and ancient dust. Even in summer, history spirals up from beneath the pavements and foundations, the ghosts of Roman centurions, Viking warlords, slaughtered princes and barren queens. How could a girl in modern times be walking naked towards her own doom? A silver Range Rover beeped as the door locks were released and I climbed into the passenger seat as if this big shiny vehicle were a sarcophagus about to bear me down to the underworld.

He tossed the bag with my clothes into the back. ‘You won’t be needing those,’ he said. I already knew that and considered it cruel of him to say so.

He turned the ignition key and the electronic doors across the front of the garage rose, letting in the sun. The car pushed out into the City traffic and I sat squirming on the black leather seat conscious that everyone in the world could peer through the polished windows and see me sitting there naked.

‘Don’t squirm down in the seat, Magdalena. It looks untidy,’ he said.

I did as I was told.

I sat as if I were wearing clothes, the seatbelt emphasising the shape of my breasts, making them more prominent, my face half-hidden by my hair. It was embarrassing to be sitting there like that; actually, it was shameful, but I felt protected, as if in the hands of fate. I didn’t have to make any choices or decisions. My credit cards, keys and mobile phone were in the plastic bag with my clothes in the back of the car. I was like a child in
some
ways, totally free, free of my clothes, free of responsibility. I just had to do
anything
demanded of me. In thirty-one days I would be free and, at that moment, it seemed an eternity away.

‘Sit still,’ he said. ‘You’re wriggling about.’

‘That’s because it hurts,’ I replied.

‘That’s nothing, Magdalena. That was just a little bit of … foreplay.’

He saw my face screw up in trepidation and patted my knee.

‘You can do this, Magdalena,’ he added, his voice almost kindly. ‘Like all things in life, if we accept new experiences with equanimity we learn and grow from them.’

‘What do you learn from having your bottom spanked?’ I asked petulantly.

‘What do you think?’

I wasn’t sure. It would never in a million years have crossed my mind that a man one day would smack my bottom – I mean, like that, naked over a sofa. I didn’t know such things went on, even though Sandy Cunningham and Jay Leonard had both in their teasing way warned me that I was ready to have my bottom tanned and that with their preparatory slaps I was being primed for a proper spanking. The three men didn’t know each other and yet they seemed like members of the same club, a secret league of gentlemen spankers. But that was just too silly, too paranoid. I put it out of my mind.

What had I learned from having my bottom spanked?

‘Well?’ he demanded.

‘Not to take things that don’t belong to me.’

‘Isn’t that rather obvious, Magdalena?’ He sounded disappointed and angrily changed lanes, cutting in front of a black cab.

It
was
obvious. I sounded like a schoolgirl standing before Sister Benedict and I was anything but that. I was a woman with sticky thighs and a burning bottom sitting naked in a motor car. Perhaps there was some deeper
meaning
to my being punished in this way, some cryptic piece of wisdom I needed to learn and Simon Roche was about to teach me? I had wanted to believe he was just a pervert who had tricked me into stripping off my clothes, tricked me into taking twelve strokes from his leathery hand, tricked me into this journey to the evil-sounding Black Spires.

But no one had told me to take the money from the Roche-Marshall account.

I was the master of my own destiny and it seemed logical to be moving across London in a silver Range Rover ready to accept what was coming to me. Like fledgling birds being tipped from the nest for the first time, you only learn, I realised, by letting go, by letting go of everything you have ever thought or imagined or believed in, by letting go of all preconceived ideas and perceptions and flying on the wings of your intuition.

I had taken the beating and come through it, but it’s not being spanked that transforms your thinking; it’s the humiliation, the disgrace, the degradation, the feeling that now a barrier has been crossed it will be so much easier for the next barrier to come down. Each new ordeal prepares you for the next until who and what you are reshapes the helixes of your DNA and you become a different person.

…
You will be spanked and cropped, caned and humiliated, you will be penetrated and violated … You will be a concubine in a harem
. His words ran through me like fear through startled birds. That’s what I had been promised. That’s what I had accepted.

‘Well, Magdalena?’

I’d forgotten to answer his question. ‘I’ve learned my lesson,’ I said.

‘You have learned a lesson. You told me at the interview that you believe in discipline. True discipline comes from total obedience. That, my dear, is what you are going to learn.’

‘But what am I going to have to do?’ I blurted out.

‘You know the answer to that as well as I do.’

‘Everything. Anything,’ I said.

‘Yes, Magdalena, anything and everything.’

His dark voice had grown still darker. A chill ran up my spine. To make it worse, he turned on the air conditioning and an icy draught rose up my legs and tickled my bottom. In the dead air of the car I could still smell the fruity seepage between my legs. Heady and intoxicating, it reminded me of the stables, pony riding, wearing shiny leather boots and riding tack. It seemed as if only yesterday I was a child and now I was sitting starkers beside a man who was all but a stranger, heading for the great unknown.

The cars moved like a steel snake along Commercial Road towards the Blackwall Tunnel. We stopped at traffic lights and a man in a white van did a double take as he saw me sitting there. His mate leaned over and coughed out a mouthful of smoke. They both had shaved heads and enormous eyes like some extinct variety of prehistoric insect, their features white and mobile like soft putty, shifting into a variety of expressions – shock, lust, a terrible envy. Girls like me travel naked in silver Range Rovers with men like Simon Roche, not insects in dirty white vans.