The Last Living Slut (11 page)

That night, I ran away from home. As my family watched TV, I ran out—out into the streets, toward the home of my mother’s friend, who never asked any questions.

“Comin’ round for a cuppa, are you?” she asked when I burst in. Her family’s molded smiles set in stone ignored my tear-stained face and bruises. No one asked questions. They just chose to disregard what my stepfather was doing to me. It was a taboo subject, and we all had to shut the fuck up about it.

Chapter 22

I
soon returned home, but I was getting tired of home life. The beatings came less frequently, but the fact that no one ever tried to help made me angry.

“You’ve always been a difficult child,” my mother said, trying to be diplomatic. “You’re not the easiest person to live with sometimes, and of course that makes people angry.”

Coming from my own mother, those words stung like a punch to the gut. I had nowhere to go; I had reached a dead end. At school, I lost interest in everything. My love of books and poetry branded me a nerd; being a rebel and talking back to the teachers was much more cool.

Desperate to fit in with the other kids, I stopped playing the piano, put away my books, and started wearing tiny skirts with see-through tops. I plastered my walls with pictures of Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, and Greta Garbo, and I started taking acting and dancing lessons.

At sixteen, I entered my first talent competition, which was held at a nearby church. For days before the event, I practiced my dance moves and sang lyrics over an instrumental backing track. On the evening of the competition, I wore a white, lacy see-through top with a leather mini-skirt and fishnet tights. Then I covered my head and body in a traditional Islamic hejab so the audience would assume I was going to perform a sweet Iranian folk song. Just before going onstage, I removed the hejab to reveal my slutty outfit and did my number. The audience sat frozen, unsure how to react. When the song and dance routine ended, the stunned vicar managed to choke out, “Thank you for that.” I left the stage, happy that I’d managed to sing and dance so well without losing my breath.

After that, I practiced nonstop in my room. “She sounds like an animal when she sings,” my stepfather joked to my cousins. I didn’t give a fuck about him throwing shitty remarks my way. Nothing could hurt me now—I was made of iron.

One Saturday afternoon, when no one else was around, I dared to defy him. When he told me to stop singing, I ignored him.
Wallop!
Down I went. Reeling in anger, I screamed and flailed and struck him back. Big mistake. He punched me until I hit the ground, then he began kicking my body. I lay still, weeping, until he stopped, breathless and pale. He left and went downstairs to put on the kettle. The pain meant nothing; my pride hurt more. I couldn’t stand the humiliation. I was the loser in the fight, angry that he’d won only because he had more strength. Downstairs, I heard my uncle and aunt arrive.

“Having a catnap, are we?” my uncle said, peering into my room.

With everyone I knew turning a blind eye to what went on in our home, I took my life into my own hands. At school that year, I decided I needed to make some money to help me escape my home. My stepfather and I didn’t speak anymore, and my mother was always tired from working all day at a children’s home. The only thing I had was the raging sexual energy inside me that made my pussy throb like a wild animal.

Whenever I was alone in my room I had to ferociously release this feeling all on my own. I loved it. Out it gushed like a hot fountain. I’d rub faster and faster, stifling my moans so no one would hear. Lying in the middle of a puddle on the linoleum floor, limp with euphoria, I thought not of boys, but of being free.

In search of that freedom, I started making secret weekend trips to London to dance in a sleazy strip joint in Soho. The place was a tiny orifice in the wall of a tight alley. Its rusty peach walls and burnt coral curtains drew me into its razzmatazz.

“Changing room is there, luv,” the woman who managed the club told me on my first day. She didn’t even ask for my ID. I was seventeen. “The DJ will announce when you’re on, so get ready.”

In the dressing room, I mumbled hello to the other dancers. They all looked about ten years older than me. Feather boas and bangles were flung on chipped mirrors lit by anemic fluorescent tubes. Everywhere glitter glue oozed and dribbled on honey limbs and jelly titties. Talk of bad boyfriends, ill kids, and rent swirled into a whirlpool of words. I was nervous as hell but thrilled to be showing off my body to a bunch of men waiting for me on the other side of the flimsy curtain. I put on my school uniform, did up my hair in pigtails, and stole a peek at the magazine photo of Axl Rose I’d brought, which never failed to give me a wetness in my pussy.

Then I heard my name. I strolled out and calmly slid off my shirt and tie to expose my breasts to the warmth coming from the crowd of cheering, sweaty men. It hit me all at once. I finally felt good about myself—turned on, fueled by the sexiness of my own swelling tits, my curves, and that picture of Axl.

At that point, my existence splintered into two different ditches. At home I lived in a curdled mess comprised of a rabid stepfather and an overworked mother. Our flat, sweaty with my mother’s homemade food, was a place of ever-brewing anger and bitterness, sugared over by her attempt to exude love from her steaming rice and stews.

Outside my room, my father argued with my mother in the relentless orange light. “She’s a worthless, unemployed waste of space,” I heard my stepfather tell my mother one night. “Why is she still living at home? Tell her to get out.”

“Sshhhh!” my mother whispered. “She’s not worthless. She just needs time to get things done. You have no right to say things like that.”

My mummy was my hero for standing up to a bully. But inside I felt he was right. I was nothing—until I put on my Walkman and dissolved into the Doors or Guns N’ Roses. Until I was limp and euphoric on the floor once again.

No one knew about my secret life—of the dancing, the nakedness, the jubilation I felt in front of the crowds of men. I didn’t dare think what would happen if my family ever found out. To my family, to the kids at school, and even to myself, I was a total dork who read every book in the library and volunteered with animal rights groups. I was a shy virgin with no friends. To my stepfather, I was a useless waste of space. But when I was dancing, relishing the love I felt in front of the crowd, I felt wanted.

I didn’t want to lose my virginity until I was fully in love and issued the promise of a forever relationship. I wanted my first to be my last, and never to let my eyes stray in another direction. I wanted a man who’d love me back and always be there for me.

So I waited. And waited. I had this craving for a male body to entwine with mine, but I was too frightened even to let a man kiss me. The thought of a penis going in my vagina disgusted me. And so I held out for the one, and believed that it would happen one day.

In the meantime, I got myself off with girls—younger girls in particular. I didn’t fancy the ones in caked makeup and garish shoes. I liked them simple and unvarnished. One who caught my eye was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who lived in the neighborhood. Chubby and chirpy, she reminded me of a chipmunk with her happy-go-lucky demeanor and sharp, shiny teeth. Her name was Leila and she looked up to me. So I invited her over to our house and took her into my room, where we sat up all night watching a program called
Carnal Knowledge
on TV.

“Have you ever done it with a boy?” Leila giggled as we sat on my bed in the flickering dark. In the early hours of the morning, my room hummed with the glow of the radiator and the television’s silver lights.

“No, but I wonder what it feels like,” I said matter-of-factly. “Let’s practice and see how a boy would do it,” I continued, laying her down on my bed and climbing on top.

I spread her legs and took off her panties. She was still giggling. Then I took off my panties and rubbed my pussy along hers.

“That feels good.” She laughed that chipmunk laugh.

I was close to coming. I rubbed our pussies harder and harder together until I orgasmed, letting out a moan that I was sure would wake my parents. I left a nice gush of cum on her.

“Don’t stop now,” Leila pleaded in a low groan.

But I was done. Climbing off her, I wondered what sex with a boy my own age would be like.

Chapter 23

I had never done It with a Boy — Just a Fifteen-Year-Old Schoolgirl.

A
t the age of twenty-one, I rolled off the edge of the rusting tin lid that was my home and fell into London life full-time. There I discovered a hidden world of Middle Eastern and Pakistani men’s social clubs—sweaty, hard-boiled candy drops of privacy stitched into niches of East London—where a multitude of Arab men poured a flurry of cash notes over the dancing girls like flying feathers as they performed the dances of
One Thousand and One Nights
, either belly dancing or Bollywood-style.

Work began at midnight in a neighborhood full of dimly lit curry houses and Indian textile shops, all gold-threaded and shuttered for the night. My Pakistani flatmate, Nasreen, and I would arrive at the club lugging bags fat with costumes. We often worked at a grimy-carpeted cesspit of a place called Sholeh, where we performed barefoot because after dancing all night, high heels killed our feet. The manager, Surinder, a short tubby Indian guy with his shirt half untucked, welcomed us with syrupy greetings and ushered us to the toilets or his cluttered office to change. There we would find a couple other girls already squeezing into heavily embroidered chiffons and mouthwatering silks, gold bangles, arabesque tunics, and thick eyeliner. I jangled in my weighty metal hip belt loaded with coins and a heavily jeweled bra dripping with tassels. I put on a head scarf fringed with gold coins to tantalize and give a promise of what was underneath.

Surinder would start chattering to Nasreen in their language, but all I could make out was
chicken korma
this or
lamb bhuna
that. The deafening thud of Hindi-Punjabi music signaled us to enter the hall. A harem of women danced in the middle of the room. Nasreen and I were instructed to go to the tables, to dance where the men were allowed to touch us, grab our hips, and grill us with persistent, sticky questions.

“Do you do anything else?” They’d raise their eyebrows as their heads bobbed from side to side with leery grins.

“No.” We had to say it with a smile and hold back the urge to hit them. When the Arabic music came on, mesmerizing through the thick smoky air, I’d make my way to the middle of the floor to dance. Slinking along to the music of my childhood, I shimmied, snaked, and rolled my body, sometimes putting the sequined veil on my head to get further nods and full-toothed grins of appreciation. The dance was pure temptation, wrapped in crushed vermillion saris, or belly-dancing costumes tasseled with sticky sequins and heavy beading with a promising veil drawn over the eye. It was more about the suggestion of flesh than the actual thing itself—a single raised brow, the lingering sweep of an eye, the shimmy of a hip.

So I shimmied for money, with every curve, every snake-hip move, every quiver of the breast, belly dancing to perfection. In the corner, over by the decaying snooker table, dark-skinned and skinny as a sprig, Nasreen threw Bollywood moves at the ogling men around her.

“Very skinny,” the men in turbans would say, shaking their heads sadly.

“And a dark one,” others would murmur, as Nasreen forced her mouth to keep stretching for the smile she had to freeze on her face to pay the rent.

The combination of me peering from behind the veil and my tits heaving out of my sequined top always caused a horny stir among the Arab men.

One night, the disgusting, salivating oily men, with their faux Muslim beliefs and thick turbans, finally got to me, and I actually started feeling horny. I grabbed my heaviest head scarf, draped it over my head and mouth, went out into the middle of the dance floor, and removed my heavily tassled bra to go topless in front of the men. My tits jiggled, my nipples stiff as cherry pits as I played with them. But it was my covered hair and face, seen in this context, that was the most erotic to them: The symbol of Islam wronged with the taboo of a naked pair of breasts.