The Gift of Girls Read online

  My companion introduced himself. His name was Sandy Cunningham. It was all very formal. Magdalena Wallace, I said. He patted my knee as you would pat a restless pony. It was all so weird and all so easy.

  There was nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with making it with a sixth-former from the local grammar school on the bottom field; heavens, the third-year girls were at it like rabbits. But Sandy was a man, an adult, and I really had no idea how I had come to be sitting there in a taxi with him and how I should behave now I was there.

  ‘You’re not nervous, are you?’ he asked me.

  I blushed. ‘No …’ I paused. ‘Yes, I am a bit.’

  He patted my knee again. ‘I can have the taxi drop me, then you can go home,’ he suggested. He looked into my eyes. My pulse was racing. There was a throbbing in my temples. A tightness across my chest. I felt like a reprieved prisoner and, now I was free, I wasn’t sure what to do with my freedom. I watched the shop lights race by, a few late-night couples wandering home, a drunk sitting in the gutter drinking from a bottle wrapped in a bag.

  There are in life few moments that are of the essence, direction-making or changing, few decisions that determine who we are and what we might become. This was one of those moments, one of those decisions. It was as if sitting in that taxi in high heels and fishnets there were two girls, the me I thought I was and the me I really am. Freud says we are all someone else underneath, and the real person underneath has different feelings. The feeling I had as the black cab slowed outside a hotel in Kensington was that if I didn’t take this opportunity to learn the system I would have an entire lifetime to look back and regret it.

  The taxi stopped.

  ‘We’re here,’ I said.

  ‘Remember, anything,’ he said.

  I nodded and bit my inflamed lip.

  The uniformed desk clerk gave Sandy that man-of-the-world sort of grin as we entered the soft light of the foyer. I felt like shouting, ‘I’ve never done this before,’ but that would have been childish and, anyway, the moment had passed. I was standing facing the row of three lifts watching the numbers rise and fall and trying to work out square roots as they shifted and changed.

  The silver doors in the middle lift pinged and, as they whispered open, it felt as if a rock were being rolled away from the mouth of a cave. It was like the beginning of an adventure. Once I entered the cave I would be setting out on a journey.

  I paused. Like the two girls I had imagined in the taxi, I was one person outside the lift. I would be another if I entered.

  ‘Shall we?’ he said.

  As the lift was about to close, Sandy put his arm in the space. The doors shuddered impatiently, then opened again. There was still time to make an excuse and leave, but dire straits call for desperate measures. Sandy Cunningham knew how to beat the system and I entered the mirrored cubicle thirsting for knowledge. He pressed 7: the fourth prime number; VII in Roman numerals; the Hindus invented it and the Arabs shaped it. There was a girl at school who had the number tattooed on her bottom after sleeping with seven boys in three days at Glastonbury during the rock festival. Seven is said to be a lucky number and my stomach lurched as we glided through the void, our reflections captured in the glass, a girl with pink cheeks and a floor-length raincoat, a man in a creased linen suit, a puzzled look on his sunny features.

  Up through the numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The doors opened and I followed him along the corridor with its dimly lit floor lights and trays of half-eaten snacks from room service abandoned outside locked rooms. The hour was late. Insomniacs listened to the soft hum of televisions; you could see a flicker of blue light below some of the doors. We turned a corner and, as we reached room 713, I felt a pang of regret that it was this room and not one of the others, although that was silly. In theory I believed in lucky numbers, but unlucky numbers are an invention of the devil.

  He shoved a key card into the lock and a green light indicated when the mechanism was ready. He turned the handle and I entered a vast luxurious suite which surprised me: he clearly made a fortune playing the system, I thought. We made our way through the living room with its sofas and baskets of fruit into the bedroom with its enormous bed, leather armchairs, a television and pink lampshades that gave the room a pastel glow.

  He closed and locked the door.

  ‘I’ve never done anything like this before,’ I said, the words escaping from me in a terrible rush.

  ‘Neither have I,’ he replied and he knew I didn’t know what he meant. He smiled. ‘I’ve never told anyone the system, not anyone, not ever.’

  That made me feel better. It made me feel that what I was going to get was worth what I was going to give, although what exactly I’d be expected to give I wasn’t sure. It seemed as if I was being inducted into some wonderful secret, something esoteric and divine, and it didn’t seem quite so disgraceful as he peeled off my long raincoat, put his arms around me and kissed me on the lips.

  I was quite shocked by this, although I’m not sure why. I had pictured myself lying back on a bed, eyes pressed tightly shut, Sandy Cunningham bouncing away on top of me. I was going to give my best, I always do, but kissing just felt weird and I pressed back half-heartedly at first and with somewhat more enthusiasm when I realised it really wasn’t so bad.

  His fingers began the long task of unlacing the corset. It came away in his hands and I sighed with a sense of release as he placed it over the arm of the leather armchair. He kissed my neck and shoulders, my collarbones, then bent to unclasp my stockings. He rolled them down my legs and I slipped out of my shoes. He unsnapped the garter belt and studied this strange harness before placing it with the corset. He did everything slowly, undressing me as you would open a surprise parcel, and it occurred to me that this was the difference between a man and a boy. Boys want to do everything so quickly they leave a girl feeling that it’s all a bit of a waste of time.

  Sandy was like a scientist doing research on my lips, my chin, my neck. My breasts were throbbing painfully, my nipples prickling with pins and needles. I had the odd feeling that I wanted him to bite me, bite me hard, but he didn’t: he took my nipples in his mouth, one at a time, and suckled on them like an infant. They popped out and became hard and the pins and needles went away. Slowly, slowly, he kissed my rib cage and the hollow of my stomach. He went down on his knees and, as he carefully lowered my knickers, a shower of £5 and £10 notes scattered like leaves around our feet.

  ‘Blimey, must be fifty quid here,’ he said.

  ‘That’s because it’s Saturday.’ My voice was a whisper. I was naked, stark naked with a strange man just about old enough to be my father. He was on his knees sniffing and licking at my pussy and I couldn’t understand why I was so aroused, why I was so wet. What I was doing was out of character, so unacceptable, so absurd and outrageous, it was shamefully, lusciously exciting. My body was sheathed in perspiration. After six long hours trudging around the casino having my bum spanked I felt totally and wantonly alive.

  I arched my back and pushed out my breasts. I cupped the back of Sandy’s head and pushed his face into the wet gash of my open pussy. I sighed as the lips of my labia parted and his tongue wormed its way between my legs.

  Sister Benedict had always implied that I had the potential to be wicked, and being wicked, I realised, was liberating. All through my life I had been imprisoned by views and opinions that didn’t belong to me. I was a gymnast. I was a bird. I wanted to be free. I wanted to fly. I had sat through a million exams and now I was in a strange room with a strange man holding the cheeks of my bottom and lapping at my pussy.

  It was so unlike me, so depraved and intimate I would never be able to tell anyone, not even Melissa, who claimed to have done it all by the time she was fourteen. But I was sure she had never done this, never stood boldly naked with a man’s long tongue like a key opening the secrets between her legs, her breasts on fire, her reflection captured in the dark face of the television screen. I was an intern at Roche-Marshall in
the City of London and soon I would know the system.

  A moment of doubt pricked my mind: I remembered reading in a book by Jean Rhys or Anaïs Nin that a girl should always make sure she is paid before the act, not after. But Sandy Cunningham seemed an honourable type and I was too absorbed to do anything but enjoy the feeling of my own warm juices turning sticky on my thighs, the sharp jolts of pleasure as contractions zipped like electricity through my tummy. I was remotely aware that my sense of shame and embarrassment made the sensation more intense, more thrilling. I was a bad girl, and being bad after always trying to be good was liberating.

  I had an inkling that every woman fantasises about having sex with a stranger, about being taken by accident, by chance, as a prostitute, and then taking the money to perform the service. There is something logical in it all. Why else would prostitution be the oldest profession? Was it really so terrible, so shameful? What is our role, after all, I wondered? What are we supposed to do with this life? I was born with certain assets: I was good at figures and, ironically, I had become a figure, a long slender figure 8, the sign of infinity.

  I took a firmer grip on Sandy’s head and he pumped his tongue like a piston in and out, in and out. I could feel something fiery and mysterious moving through me, something the girls at school talked about like they talked about ghosts when the lights in the dorm were turned off, though, like ghosts, few girls had actually ever seen one, felt its touch. My ghost was coming now and, at that moment, the worst possible moment, he let go of my bottom and just stopped. He stood up. I sighed and, like a deflated balloon, all the air went out of me as he scooped me into his arms and tossed me quite roughly on the bed.

  ‘Was that all right?’ he said, and shamefully I nodded.

  He removed his crumpled suit, his blue polo shirt and his boxer shorts. Only as I gazed at his cock did I realise that I had never actually studied a man’s penis before. Boys always act as if they are late for a train. They whip your knickers down, push up inside you, and just as it’s beginning to feel nice, that’s it, they shoot their milky sperm inside you, or over your stomach, and then go all soft and silly.

  Thank heavens for the pill, I thought, as Sandy Cunningham slid across the bed and pushed his hard cock inside me. I was so wet, there was no pain, no awkwardness, just a feeling of mild relief, a feeling that I had done the right thing. I wanted to learn the system and buying that privilege with the only currency available to me was the sensible thing to do. I thought for a moment of Sister Benedict and forced the image out of my brain.

  My legs rose automatically and I locked them around Sandy’s back, urging him deeper and deeper inside me. The contractions I’d felt before he stopped thrusting his tongue into my pussy returned once more and a few hot moments passed before that elusive climax gripped my chest, moved down in a gathering wave through my insides and burst out of me in a frenzy of unimaginable pleasure. I had been in prison and, with that orgasm, I was set free.

  Sandy had held back with a gambler’s instinct for self-control and when he pulled out I felt a terrible sense of loss. I didn’t want it to be over. I didn’t know what I wanted. This wasn’t a bit of fun on the bottom field with a boy from the local grammar. This was the real thing. This was adult sex. I was still filled with shame but also an odd sort of pride, these two emotions competing for space, my mind confused, my body revelling in the moment.

  He was wriggling from my locked legs and rolled me on to my tummy. He grabbed the pillows from the top of the bed, wedged them under me so that my body formed an arch and before I knew what was happening, his tongue was pushing into my bottom. I couldn’t believe it. I froze. I didn’t know what to do, what to think. It felt so strange, so wrong, so new, so nice. In the land of love I had been a blind person and in probing the eye of my bottom Sandy Cunningham was drawing the blinds from my eyes.

  My bottom was so tight only the tip of his tongue pushed through the tiny ring, but the more he pushed, the more the ring opened and drew him inside. At first I just lay there feeling guilty and embarrassed, letting him do it, but the movement set off a chain reaction. I started pushing down with my toes, rolling my hips, thrusting my bottom at him, his big moist tongue slicked with the oils leaking from my pussy, making me so wet I thought I might float away on a tide of intoxication.

  When he stopped, I had that same sense of loss as when he’d withdrawn from tonguing my pussy. I wiggled my bottom like a monkey in the zoo and what happened next I had not been expecting. Of course, we had all talked exhaustively in the dorm about anal sex and we read about it in Cosmo and Nuts. But it was a step beyond my imagination, and all the pleasure of having his tongue inside me vanished with the pain and humiliation as he took a grip on my jutting hipbones and pushed his cock deep inside my virgin bottom.

  ‘Agh, agh, agh,’ I squealed, gasping for air, and he pushed harder and harder, drilling as if for precious minerals inside my body.

  I bit the bed sheets to stop myself screaming and widened my legs as with each thrust my body arched further. I took a grip on the headboard, pushed my feet into the bed and, to my complete surprise, as I widened my legs the pain went away. I was horrified that I was allowing a stranger to do this, to have mounted me in this way, but through the shame the pain was turning to pleasure. Those two senses, like smell and taste, were indivisibly linked.

  My bottom was drawing him deeper inside me and I used the muscles I’d made strong on the parallel bars to hold him, to clench him tighter. I was sweaty and wet. All my routines as a gymnast had shaped me for this. I wasn’t made for the Olympics, for winning prizes, my breasts had grown too ripe and lush, my bottom too perky and round. I was made to be on my knees, my back arched, my breasts hanging heavily like udders below me, my strong arms supporting a stranger drilling into the very heart of my being.

  Anal sex. Just the words were a turn-on. Anal sex. Anal sex. Anal sex.

  I was whispering the words in my mind like a mantra. Sex had always been fun but short-lived and far from satisfying. It was like losing at chess. The game contains its own pleasures, but winning makes all the moves and strategies and hours of devotion more meaningful.

  Sandy started to moan. His grip on my hipbones grew tighter. I let go of the headboard and all but left the bed and took wing as his cock finally erupted. I felt the flood of come wash through my back passage, pumping away as if releasing some precious elixir that would now belong to me. We collapsed back on to the bed sheets in a tangled octopus of quivering arms and legs. I was panting for breath and relished the pleasure of his hot semen slipping out of my bottom into my gaping pussy and pubic hair.

  This was my first time, the first time I’d done it properly. I was tingling all over as if parts of me that had been asleep had been woken like Snow White with a kiss and all that follows. I felt guilty, ashamed, but I was proud, too. I’ve done it. I’ve done it. Now, I would learn the system, I thought, but Sandy Cunningham had something else in mind.

  He rolled me over and straddled my torso. He slid forward, pushed the pillows under my shoulders and presented the head of his dripping penis at the door of my closed mouth. It bobbed up and down like something alive, a little creature with its own free will, tickling my lips and nose. I could smell a blend of scents, Sandy’s semen, my own discharge, my own dark places, and tentatively, like a snake, I pushed the tip of my tongue between my closed lips to lick the big mauve head.

  I had never done this before. Of course boys had tried, boys will try anything and everything, but I had always pulled away and told them they were disgusting. I didn’t think Mr Cunningham would have appreciated any schoolgirl reluctance and opened my lips wider to allow it to slip inside.

  The head of his cock filled my mouth. The trunk had grown soft, but he kept pushing it in and out until it grew hard again. Just as I’d first been unwilling to take this alien object up my bottom, all the fine tissues of my throat wanted to reject his cock. But he patiently kept pushing down into my yawning mouth and, by doing a s
ort of breathing trick to stop myself gagging, I started to appreciate the odd pleasure of sucking and nipping at the warm piece of flesh. I was tempted to bite down hard, it seems a natural instinct, but controlled the urge, wrapped the shaft of his cock in my tongue and contented myself with sucking as hard as I could.

  Sandy Cunningham went faster and faster, deeper and deeper. He took a grip on the side of my head; my jaw was aching, my ears hurt, my mouth was stretched wider than the figure in Munch’s The Scream. I felt a wave of satisfaction when he squirted out a speck of sperm that splashed against the roof of my mouth and tickled my taste buds with the tang of something bitter-smooth, like lemons and Greek yoghurt.

  He withdrew slowly and I licked my lips. He looked down at me for a long time. The lights were dim but I could see the sparkle in his blue eyes.

  ‘You’ve got a long way to go, babe, but you’ll get there,’ he said.

  My body was electric. My palms were all sweaty. I was so happy. ‘What about the system?’ I said.

  He grew stern and shook his head. ‘You must be joking, that’s a trade secret.’

  I gasped. ‘But … but you promised, you …’ Tears pricked my eyes. I’d been conned. I’d been cheated. I’d let this strange man do everything and now, and now … ‘But I’ve done everything you wanted.’

  ‘And you weren’t bad for a beginner,’ he said, and leaned forward to lick away my tears.

  ‘You did promise.’

  ‘Let that be a lesson to you, never trust anything but your own instincts,’ he said. I sniffled and as I went to speak he sealed my lips with his finger. ‘Tell me something, was it terrible?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Was it the best ever?’

  I tried not to nod and sniffed again. ‘You did promise.’

  ‘And a deal’s a deal.’

  He grinned. He was making fun of me. That’s the problem with being eighteen, you don’t know when men are really serious and when they’re just pulling your leg. I sighed with relief.