The Pleasure Quartet (33 page)

I turned my back on Thomas and moved around to the front of the cross. Iris’s eyes were closed and the ghost of a smile lingered on her lips, as if she had fallen asleep in the middle of a
very pleasant dream. I stretched up onto the tips of my toes to reach her mouth and kissed her gently. She opened her eyes.

‘You came,’ she said.

‘I came. For you.’

‘Beat me.’

I nodded my assent.

She closed her eyes again.

I walked over to the trolley and examined its contents. Picked up the flogger by its wooden handle. It was slim in the middle and wider at either end, shaped like a women’s body. The hide
strands were slim and cool to the touch. I placed it back down again and moved through the other items, running the tips of my fingers over each one and considering Thomas’s words and the
response of my body to each one, the instinctive knowing that told me whether each instrument was right or wrong on this particular occasion. The silver spiked wheel; too cold, too sharp. The
single tail, too fierce. The paddle, too hard, and conjuring something of the ridiculous in my mind; images of young women, skirts pulled up to their waist and laying over men’s knees, more
comical than arousing. That, and it would surely cause far more pain than I desired to inflict.

None of them was right.

I turned back to Iris’s body on the cross. Just watching her strapped there, unmoving, made me melancholy. I was aroused by the thought of touching her, but not by the thought of hurting
her. Not in the same way that I knew Thomas was, and Matilda had once been with her subs. And yet I wanted to please her also. I wished there was a juke box and I could play music. Something to
fall into, to distract myself from the pain and confusion of my own thoughts.

Instead I stood behind Iris and conjured the image that Thomas had suggested. An invisible cord, joining her to me. I pictured it travelling from my palm through her back to her heart, and with
that in mind, I raised my hand and swung. I imagined that the cord binding us together was elasticated, so that when I moved my hand up into the air and then brought it down again onto her
buttocks, it stretched taut and then pulled me back again. She jumped in response to the impact and cried, ‘Oh!’ Her whole body tensed, and then relaxed again.

I hit her again, and again, each time easing the sting of my slaps by holding my palm firmly against the point of impact after each strike. Her skin had turned red, layers of handprints
overlapping each other in radiating shades of pinkness. Her thighs had begun to twitch. Her spine began to move; a caterpillar-like grinding motion travelling outwards from her hips, driving her
groin against the padded cross. She was moaning.

I paused momentarily, cupping her buttocks, and turned my head towards Thomas. He had pulled his chair closer but appeared to be glued to it, his torso and legs stretched forward as though he
was ready to jump to his feet and run to us. His eyes were glazed, his lips parted. I raised one hand into the air and he followed its trajectory as though hypnotised.

Iris arched her spine, pushing her arse into the air as much as she could in her bound position. She was wriggling, but not in a way that suggested she wanted to escape her bonds but rather, as
if she wanted me to hit her harder, taunt her more. Her parted legs were wet. My fingers found the valley of her buttocks, travelled down to her entrance. She was dripping. As wet as I had known
her to ever become, even wetter than she was when I licked her and my saliva mingled with her juices to create a torrent, the essence of our fucks. I wanted to stop the spanking, fall to my knees
and catch the fluid that leaked from her, fuck her with my tongue. But I knew that was not what she wanted.

I willed the voice of the Ball’s Mistress to speak in my head. I wanted to know why she had brought me here, forced me to explore this part of myself. Why, for all the things that Iris and
I had shared, we did not have this one crucial element of our desires in common.

There was no answer.

I thought of Iris, and all that we had shared. Memories of our childhood and coming of age spent together. Discovering the power and pleasure of our bodies and each other. The landscape at that
place that felt like the end of the world, the edge of everything, where I had first buried my mouth between her legs. The crashing waves, the Ball’s guests, painted like animals, seals and
sea birds, freewheeling on currents of air, amid the crashing waves, against each other. I wondered where we would be now if we had never left.

The rhythm of my palm rising and falling against her flesh began to follow the pattern of the waves that moved in my mind, steadily growing in strength and height until the sea was in a frenzy
and Iris’s moans had become louder than the imaginary cries of the gulls soaring above the rocks. I was no longer controlling my hand as it pulled back and fell down against her, one almighty
slap after another. The invisible thread that still joined us together seemed to be pulling me towards her, as though it were Iris who was orchestrating her own beating rather than me dishing it
out. Or perhaps, in some mysterious corner of our souls, the Mistress of the Ball lurked, urging us to reach new heights of pleasure and exploration.

The ocean’s roar gradually quieted, reducing to just the steady laps of gentle waves on the shore.

Iris’s limbs shuddered and twitched. Her hands tucked into fists and then relaxed. Her breathing was shallow. She licked her lips. She turned her face to one side, eyes closed. She was
still smiling, the same goofy, benevolent, deeply satisfied smile, like that of a contented cat.

‘Oh, Iris,’ I said.

I pulled my smock over my head and dropped it to the floor, bent down and unbuckled her ankle straps, then reached up and loosened the bonds on her wrists. She still clung to the cross, her arms
and legs tensed, each muscle taut as a whip in flight. I pressed my body against hers, our glistening dampnesses merging. The front of my legs tight against the back of hers, my breasts squashed
flat to her shoulder blades, my fingers threaded through her fingers, my face buried against her neck, her dark hair mingling with mine.

Thomas had moved from his chair and was standing in front of Iris. He wrapped his hands around the cross’s beams and pulled himself up to join us, kissing first Iris on the mouth, and then
me. His lips brought me abruptly back to the present; he tasted of coffee and sugar. Physical sensations returned to my body. I was thirsty, my arm was tired, the flat of my palm was sore and red.
Sounds began to filter into my perception. Iris was laughing and between giggles, kissing Thomas passionately. I remembered the crowd behind us and turned. They still stood passively, a silent
Greek choir, bar the rasp of their breaths and the creak of stiff limbs moving.

I stepped down from the cross and Iris stepped down after me. She caught my shoulder as I turned away and placed her fingers under my chin so that our eyes met.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and planted a brief kiss on my lips.

‘That’s okay,’ I said weakly. It felt like one of those occasions where words could never be enough to express the truth of everything that I felt. My emotions were too messy,
too confused.

I pulled her into an embrace and we held each other. I wished that the embrace symbolised a joining together. A strengthening of our union. But instead, it seemed to me like the beginnings of a
letting go. The rope that bound us together was loosening, and I feared that it might soon fall away altogether. We would always be close. But Iris was no longer my Iris. We had grown away from
each other.

‘I need to sit down,’ she murmured. Her face had turned even paler than usual and her legs buckled beneath her.

Thomas scooped her up into his arms as if she were a child and carried her over to the chair. He sat down and cradled her on his lap. They sat with their cheeks touching as if they were propping
each other up.

The crowd gathered in the room began to disperse to other corners of the party.

‘I’m going to find something to drink,’ I told Thomas. ‘You two will be okay here?’

He nodded. Iris looked up at me and smiled. Her eyes were glazed and unfocused.

‘We’re okay,’ he said. ‘I asked one of the Ball staff to bring us some water and something sugary.’

I wasn’t hungry in the slightest.

‘For Iris,’ he added, ‘she likes chocolate, afterwards. Or cookies. Or hot cocoa, with honey. For the comedown . . .’

‘Oh . . .’ I still had so much to learn. I had not yet experienced that state of elation that came with the sudden drop following a BDSM induced emotional and physical high. Did I
want to? I still wasn’t sure. I would let the Mistress of the Ball beat me, if she wished to, but perhaps no one else.

The waiter arrived. A young man sporting a thin moustache and dressed in black and white like a formal English butler, bearing a silver tray on which three glasses rested, a pitcher of iced
water flavoured with lemon and mint, and an assortment of pastel coloured macaroons and cream-filled miniature sponges, their tops cut into halves and decorated to imitate butterfly wings.

I remembered with a surge of self-consciousness that I, too, was quite naked, but neither the suited waiter nor the remaining assembled and clothed celebrants nor Thomas seemed overly shocked or
titillated by the fact.

I fancied something alcoholic, so made my goodbyes and departed, this time choosing the door opposite the one that I had entered by. It linked to another long corridor and further unexplored
rooms. Each one contained a different party. In one, ballet dancers pirouetted, nude besides their pale pink slippers. They were an assortment of shapes, sizes and ages, none of them matching the
tall, slender physique that I associated with the ballet classes I had endeavoured to avoid during high school. There was no audience, nor any music. The dancers were apparently moving each to
their own tune.

In another room, a man hung from the ceiling as a woman trussed him in a complex network of thick red rope. He had long blond hair that hung down past his shoulders and hoops through each of his
nipples. She was dark haired and dressed in cream-coloured latex jodhpurs and a cream corset, so tightly cinched around her waist that her bosoms spilled over the top each time she bent down.

I saw Gwillam in the next room. The expression on his face was beatific, unsurprisingly, as he was lying on top of an enormous bed and surrounded by a bevy of men, all of them slim, clean-shaven
and appearing to be aged from eighteen to thirty. They were not having sex, but caressing each other in a daisy-chain of multi-handed massages.

I continued down the corridor, moving past a veritable chorus of pleasure, isolated moans, cries, the crack of a whip, lips touching, limbs on limbs, fucking, dancing, each Ball guest exploring
their own personal road to Nirvana. In an alcove adjacent to one of the larger rooms I passed Clarissa and Edward with a woman between them, and Patch standing to one side and overlooking the
threesome. The woman between them was red-haired with a round body, her hills of flesh in sharp contrast to Clarissa’s bony frame. Her ginger locks draped over Edward’s thighs as she
went down on him, her head jolted back and forth by the impact of Clarissa’s thrusts as she rode her with a strap-on.

Edward called to me as I walked by, encouraging me to join them, but I pretexted a prior engagement and continued on, content to merely observe and soak in all of the games around me.

Finally I discovered several trolleys piled high with wine resting in buckets of ice, fruit juice, sandwiches, patisseries and cut fruit. They were unattended, and everything looked too perfect
to consume but I tucked in nonetheless.

‘Are you enjoying your evening?’ said a voice behind me.

I recognised her sultry lilt immediately. The Mistress.

I turned quickly, hurriedly gulping down a piece of cherry-glazed chocolate mud cake that I had taken a small slice of.

‘Sorry,’ I said to her, my mouth still full.

‘Don’t apologise. Take as much as you want to. There are no rules here, besides those that each individual creates for themselves. Do what you want to, nothing more, nothing
less.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘and yes, I am having a wonderful time. Everything is . . . beautiful.’ I struggled to find a word that would convey all that I intended, because no
such word existed.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked me.

‘I feel . . . home.’ I said. ‘I feel like I’ve come home.’

‘Good,’ she replied, and continued on up the corridor. Was it my imagination, or had one of the creatures etched onto her back unfurled a wing and winked at me?

I blinked, poured a large serving of sweet white wine into a glass and sipped it.

Again I thought of Cape Reinga, and how different that experience of the Ball had been. Joan’s diaries, her confessions and the apparent differences and similarities of each event. I had a
sudden longing to know and understand more about it. How such a thing had been created, how it was organised, and why? I hurried back to find Gwillam. Of all those in attendance, he would be the
most likely, I felt, to help me answer all of my questions. And he might know when and where we would see the ceremony that I realised concluded every Ball, the Mistress rising at dawn.

I did not come across him immediately but waltzed between a whole series of galleries of love, of bliss amplified and released and unforgettable images and movements, dances and fucks, games of
celebration and ecstasy and pain, until my mind became saturated by the extreme nature of what I was witnessing throughout the endless rooms of Mad King Ludwig’s castle and I somehow
disconnected, wandering like a phantom along corridors, cellars and impossibly dimensioned rooms and caves and wells full of sorcerers, imps, penitents, lovers, torturers and angels.

Then morning came. And the Mistress appeared in all her splendour as the Ball finally climaxed and we were released from our earthly shells. Became pure and innocent, bathed in the water of our
juices and the most beautiful feeling of joy.