Sophie’s Secret: Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Pleasure Read online

  'Do you like it here?' Lacy asked, turning back to face me.

  'Yes.'

  'Do you want to stay?' she continued, and held up her hand before I answered. 'Or go on?'

  'Go on,' I said immediately.

  Her features below the mask remained immobile. I followed her to the far corner beyond the dancers. We reached another door. She knocked and we entered a chamber that was hot and steamy, like a spa. There was a long narrow swimming pool, the white loungers around the edge of the room stacked with white towels. Most of the women were naked, some swimming, some standing about, some in masks. I saw one woman whose entire body was illustrated with flower tattoos, fronds climbing her limbs, blooms lighting her breasts and back and thighs, everywhere except for the small oval of her face that was totally tranquil and angelic.

  'Swim,' Lacy said. 'You can leave your clothes on the lounger.'

  She pointed to a place on the far side of the room and I went to undress. Before, Lacy had asked me what I wanted to do. This time it was an instruction and one I wanted to obey. She watched me undress and I stood before her, white, pale, naked, the tips of my breasts fizzing, my pulse racing. I felt…I felt more alive than I had ever felt in my whole life.

  I swam in the pool and, when I went back to the lounger, she was stretched out naked, except for the silver mask with its long determined nose. I straddled her, then bent to remove the mask.

  'Now you can see me,' she said.

  'I want to see you. I want to see everything.'

  'Whatever you visualize in your mind, you will see with your eyes.'

  Our conversations were fragmented, like chips of glass from the mirror ball. We had no secrets. No past. There were no lies. No promises.

  We kissed. We kissed and we kissed. She was the only woman I had ever kissed, the only woman who had ever kissed me, and it was so much nicer than kissing Jake with his sharp teeth and scratchy chin. Lacy was soft, scented, luxurious. Kissing Lacy was how I imagined it would be kissing myself.

  She squirmed away from under me and turned in one graceful movement so that we were facing away from each other, she on top now, me below. She eased back my thighs like someone in the jungle pulling back the long grass to see what lies ahead and, what was ahead was my moist pussy aching and throbbing, yearning to be touched. She lowered her head and, as she clamped her mouth over me, she closed her thighs so that I was clamped under her. We were yin and yang, two arabesques that slotted together to make the perfect circle.

  We rocked back and forth like a machine inside a volcano generating tremors that rumbled through her and rumbled through me until we erupted as one and my mouth filled with her silky larva, her magma, her fruity oils. I had climaxed before, of course, I had climaxed under her fingers, but never like this. It was as if my entire body had been turned inside out, as if every nerve and tendon and muscle and organ had been plunged in an elixir of pure feeling, a sensation beyond the mind, the intellect. It was like the Big Bang had happened and I was now one with the universe. She swiveled round and, when we kissed, the taste of the universe washed over my taste buds.

  We went back to the pool and swam, washing the liquids from us, and I thought, how marvelous, I am swimming in the goo of a million mating women.

  If I were on a journey up a mountain, at level three I was at the halfway stage. This is the point at which there is no turning back although, it occurred to me, that it is from this point where we pause to glance behind at the past to see who we were, and forward to see who we might become.

  I didn't tell Kate and Karen that I had gone up a level. I realized, without vanity, even with a little sadness, that they would never go beyond the first level. I didn't believe they were lesbians. They were wannabe lesbians dressing the part. It also occurred to me that week serving girls buying their cotton clothes in Oxford Street that I wasn't a lesbian either. My experiences at Pink were just that, experiences that had opened my mind just as Lacy with her clever tongue had opened my body.

  It was another interminable wait and I was thrilled to see her through the shadows the following Saturday. She was standing in the main tunnel dressed as an angel with little gossamer wings with a narrow headband that supported a halo on a wire. Karen and Kate had yet to start their tribal dance and Lacy inspected them as she approached.

  'Kate and Karen,' I said. 'This is Lacy.'

  'Hello.'

  She leaned forward, kissed each of them in turn on the cheek and led me away instantly by the hand. We crossed the floor of dancing bodies, through the door to level two, out through the corner exit to level three and straight to a door painted black which I hadn't noticed before.

  'Are you ready?'

  I nodded.

  'How can you be certain?'

  'I sense it.'

  'Why did you come to Pink the first time?'

  'Fate.'

  'What were you seeking?'

  I shrugged. 'Nothing. Me.' I shrugged again. 'You.'

  'What are you seeking now?'

  'Everything.'

  She smiled. I smiled. She knocked. The door opened and I was inspected by a towering black woman, like Lacy with a shaved head, her entire body bereft of hair and coated in an oil that was shiny even in the dim light. She leaned forward and sniffed around my neck.

  'Mmm,' she said.

  Lacy again took my hand and we entered a passage with shelves and a long shop rail where we left our clothes. We exited on the far side into a round room with a domed ceiling lined with mirrors and lit by hidden lights that created a warm pink glow. The floor was springy, like a mattress, and upon the linen-covered surface were naked women, fifteen, perhaps twenty, their bodies locked in an enormous cat's cradle linked by tongues, fingers and what I realized were strap-on dildos of the sort I had giggled over in those Aladdin's caves in the backstreets of Soho.

  Lacy pulled closer and whispered. 'This is what you have been waiting for.'

  'Is it?' I replied.

  'And what they have been waiting for.' I looked back at her. 'Fresh meat. You are going to be fucked until you are raw.'

  Her words were icy, alarming; captivating, too, a promise and a warning. I had passed the point of no return. Crossed the bridge. There was no way back. Lacy moved forward into the ring and I glided behind her, the springs in the floor making it feel as if I were on a trampoline being rocked and bounced further and further into the unknown. A hand reached for my hand and I sank into the swarm of bodies. Lips planted themselves on my lips. A hot tongue speared my mouth. Teeth bit down on my breasts.

  At first, I was in shock, but those hands and tongues and teeth found a rhythm constantly changing like the tides as new hands and tongues and teeth sucked and sipped and nipped at my body. I was wet with sweat and the oozing oils of those women, and I thought, if erotic has a smell, a taste, this is the taste, the gunk and goo from girls in the midst of wild lascivious sex. Someone was sucking my toes. A sopping vagina dropped like a jellyfish over my mouth. I sucked out the sting and it turned to honey on my lips.

  For years I had dreamed the same dream where a spider devours its mirror image and had read in Freud it represented the sexual fear of the unknown. My dreams were colonized by naked women in veils and naked men without heads. What I had visualized through the confusion of dreams had materialized in the pink glow of the orgy room. I had been shielded behind the shroud of family, class, upbringing. But rooted in me was the yearning urge to overstep the limits, to break the taboos, to give myself to sweet debauchery. It was empowering, emancipating, so marvelously anarchic. I had never known I had wings and now I could fly. I had finally broken the chains of an imposed respectability, a morality that belonged to that part of society that was not for me.

  A woman is fulfilled by being filled. We are born with wet vacant places designed to be plugged. Understanding that is at the heart of female liberation. We are taught to be obedient, programmed to serve. Our role as animals is to continue the species. Our role as women is to seek the c
ore of our sexuality. Knowing that, feeling it on my skin, was like opening a safe door and finding the key of life.

  As the girl with her pussy in my mouth stiffened, the spasm clanged the bell of my vibrating tonsils and the resonance travelled through my gut, into my belly and ricocheted over the walls of my vagina, a soggy preparation for what was now to come.

  Lacy was strapped into a transparent dildo made of crystal. I lifted my knees for her, raised my hips and, as she slid into me, I saw that this phallus had two arms, two heads, and the other was slipping into her. As Lacy pushed into me, I was pushing into her. As she made love to me, I was making love to her. It was magical and made perfect sense.

  All around me women were kissing, coming, sucking, their damp bodies under the lights one mass of arms and legs like a multi-limbed octopus. Whatever their color, they were black and white and brown and Oriental, the velvety interiors of their mouths and pussies were pink. We were in Pink and a part of Pink and the name Pink lit the sky outside for the universe to see.

  Lacy stiffened like an arrow stopped in flight, threw back her head and yelled yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. She rolled away. The dildo slicked with juices slipped from me and another woman plunged in among the heaving bodies. She fondled my hipbones, squeezed my breasts until they tingled with pain, then she bit down into that part of my neck just above the collar bone that sends tremors of pleasure shimmying down your backbone. She was grunting like a wild beast with fresh prey. Fresh meat.

  I wriggled and noticed she, too, was strapped into a dildo, a long, ivory-colored device with carvings down the side. She rolled me over and pinned me down, the phallus breaking the barriers of my virgin ass and touching nerve centers that grew brighter and glimmered like stars in the night sky. She reached parts of me I didn't know existed, erupted in an orgasm that shook her body and released from her throat a roar like a wave that could drown the whole world.

  Others were appearing in the round room, the women in red cat suits, three girls in bird masks, the girl with the garden of tattoos. She traversed the labyrinth of naked bodies and, as she kissed my lips, it occurred to me that kissing men would never be the same. Girls' lips are soft, tender, sugary, plump and taste of sex. They are made to be kissed and being kissed was a pleasure every bit as great as being fucked red raw with dildos in every orifice.

  The moment our lips parted, another pussy shaved like a sea shell dropped over my mouth, a pussy without a face or name, this girl's character and persona unknown and making it all the more pleasurable. There was an equality on that circular dais of white linen. Our individualities were consumed in the protean decadence of the orgy, a spiritual ritual that allowed my soul to grow wings and fly.

  The first light of day was coloring the rooftops of Soho when I made my way home from Pink. I had swum in the pool, bathing in girl juice to bathe away the girl juice, and it struck me that all life is irony and pleasure is the only pursuit worth pursuing. And by that, I don't just mean pleasures of the flesh, satisfying though they are. I mean the pleasure of pleasure. The pleasure of art and music, of eating, of not eating, of learning, growing, being all that you can be, not what others expect you to be. It is not easy to be an individual, to carve your own path, to swim against the stream. But to do so is life. All else is compromise.

  The last stars were still folding. The light was pale and silvery. I sucked in the air of the new day. I adored Soho at this time, the street people rising from cardboard boxes, the trannies and prossies with makeup-smeared faces; the drunk teenagers in pools of vomit, the runaways wondering whether to run home again. I always felt safe in Soho. It was as if my lewd uniform were an invisible suit of armor.

  Lacy had disappeared earlier and left with my clothes a note with an address in Wardour Street and three words: Ask for Scarlet.

  I zipped it in my red leather jacket and counted the hours waiting for Monday to come.

  The weather was stifling. Getting through the morning took so much energy it was hard to concentrate on the customers, a constant stream of girls buying cut off shorts with frayed hems that showed the curve of their bottoms, tops designed to reveal the tanned flesh of their breasts. How long would it be before we grasped the truth of our primeval genes, and took to the streets stark naked? They were innocent and joyful those girls of fourteen and fifteen and I wondered if any of them would ever find their way to Pink.

  I made sure I was on a different lunch break to Kate and Karen that Monday and set off for Wardour Street with the air of a spy meeting a contact. My destination turned out to be a shop I had passed many times without the contents ever registering on my senses. Inside, there were racks and shelves stuffed with porno magazines, books, DVDs and things beyond imagination or description. I man with sallow skin like a creature the lives under sea was sitting behind a glass counter reading a newspaper and smoking a rollup. He looked up with dead fish eyes.

  'Scarlet?' I said.

  He pointed behind him with his thumb, relit his rollup and returned to his newspaper. I made my way down a narrow flight of wooden stairs to a basement room without windows, the air cooled by a fan that swiveled back and forth like a watching face.

  A woman sat in front of a giant mirror in a gilt chair with red velvet cushions and arms. She was wearing a red girdle that shrank her waist and pushed out her bare breasts in two domes mounted in teats decorated with golden rings. A mask of red feathers covered the top half of her face, making you concentrate on her scarlet lips that were shaped in a bow of the sort hunters carry in fairy tales. She stood. She was tall in red heels, her legs sheathed in red stockings held by garters. Her stomach below the girdle was ornamented with a ring that matched the piercings in her breasts. Everything about her exuded the same tone of decadence and indifference I had witnessed in the photographs by Helmut Newton in the saffron-room at Pink.

  Her red lips opened. 'What do you want?'

  'Lacy sent me.'

  'Ah.'

  She spread her arm about the room, indicating the walls crammed with whips, canes, straps, spanking paddles and implements I vaguely recalled from a school trip visiting the dungeons at the Tower of London. Inside glass cases like you would see in a jewelers were dildos of every shape and color, vibrators, anal lubes, oils and jellies. There were handcuffs, chains with locks, wrist and ankle restraints; masks, hoods, cat suits, latex suits, leather suits, suits with hoods that covered the head and face, even the eyes, a zipper where the mouth would be.

  A shiver of fear ran over the toggles of my spine. She listed her wares like a commentator on a horse race, her words rhythmic, compelling, and coming at me faster and faster…'Ball-gags, clit clamps, nipple clamps, pussy pumps, collars on leads, chastity belts not,' she said and paused. 'that you are going to want one of them.'

  On a rail there were uniforms for a French maid, dominatrix, a fireman, a bunny girl and a bunny rabbit, a ballet dancer, a nun's habit, a fascist costume with a peaked cap and jackboots, a schoolgirl with a hobble skirt, a monkey suit and suits in spandex and rubber…I was breathless. That little room packed to the rafters with this great panoply of erotic paraphernalia made me feel like Alice in Wonderland.

  'Wow,' I said.

  'Wow indeed.' She snapped her fingers like a hypnotist to wake me up. 'I have a package for you.'

  She opened a drawer and placed a small box on one of the glass display cases.

  'You can open it,' she said, and I did.

  Inside, there were six black leather straps, five of them supporting metal rings, the sixth with a black sphere about the size of a ping pong ball gripped at the center. There was also a zip-lock bag containing something wrapped in cotton wool. I fondled the bag, squeezing the plastic, trying to imagine what lay within.

  'Take a look?'

  She brushed away the thick frond of black hair covering the eye of her mask.

  I popped open the zip-lock, separated the cotton wool and found two glass balls about the size of marbles linked by a fine gold chain. I had no ide
a what they were or what they could possibly be for.

  'You must try everything on. I will help.'

  There was nowhere to change, but it didn't matter. I was in an erotic grotto with every erotic gadget and device ever invented. A changing room would have been superfluous. I took off my clothes and she reached for the straps. She buckled them in turn, one around each wrist, the same with my ankles; the fifth she fastened around my throat. She help up the last strap.

  'Girls used to dream of wearing ball gowns. Now they want to wear ball-gags,' she said. 'Open up.'

  The ball filled my mouth and I sucked on the black plastic as she fastened the strap around my head. Breathing through my nose made my entire body shimmy and shiver. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, my white body cut in sections by the black straps, my eyes bulging, the green of my pupils bright as emeralds, the whites whiter, my vision as keen as a bird of prey. I was a woman from a Helmut Newton photograph, aloof, hidden, authentic, unfamiliar.

  We reinvent ourselves through our clothes and, in this outfit consisting of no clothes at all, I felt as if I had broken through all pretensions and deceit. The girls I served in the store go out in their promiscuous attire with makeup and scent to show they are in heat, sexually available, ready for action. But the clothes are, at the same time, a tease, a come on, a deception, their semi-nakedness a fig leaf sending out contrary messages: innocence and decadence; vulnerability and poise; vanity and insecurity. Girls – I was one, I am one – don't know who they are, what they are, what they want to be. We dress in the style of clothes our friends wear, the clothes in the high street shops, the current fashion, the latest logo, and go out like sleep-walking advertizing signs, accomplices in the commercial masquerade.