Eat Me (26 page)

‘How do you know all this stuff about Tibet?' quizzed Jody.

‘Adventure Holidays Package,' Ellen replied. ‘I studied the brochures. Then the Chinese started clamping down on Tibet again, so I just booked a flight to Bali. Anyway, he says something in Tibetan, and you observe that he has the classic handsome Tibetan features, the high, prominent cheekbones, lively narrow eyes, thin lips and reddish brown skin with a coating of mountain dust. A jagged scar marks the right half of his forehead and cuts through his thick eyebrow. When he gestures to you to hop up behind him, you don't think twice.

‘He takes off at a gallop, and you're holding on tight and he's laughing and you're laughing, and the sky is the most brilliant blue you've ever seen in your life and the yak butter-and-sweat smell of his chuba is almost overwhelming. He takes one of your hands with his left and feels how smooth it is compared to his own callused mitt and laughs again, and takes it and moves it down to the waist of the chuba, tied up with a red sash, and you feel something hard and long, which he places in your hand. Carefully—you're feeling more balanced on this flying horse now—you close your hand around it. Ha! I know what you girls are thinking! But he's showing you his dagger, of course. It's encased in an exquisite sheath crafted of silver and wood. You admire it, and then reach around to give it back to him. Your hand slips down to his woollen breeches and he catches it and holds it against his muscular thigh, which you can feel working against the horse's sweating girth. The smells, the mystery of this man and the rocking of the horse's spine against your clit are combining to make you quite horny.'

‘Did everyone go to pony club except me?' Camilla asked with a touch of regret.

‘You didn't miss much,' Jody assured her, ‘though I did have my first orgasm while cantering bareback. Then I fell off. I've associated sex with danger ever since. But hold on a tick, Ellen. Isn't this just an exotic twist on my cowboy story?'

Ellen laughed. ‘Isn't every fantasy just a variation on a theme anyway? So, finally, you see in the distance a round tent made of compressed yak hair, and you pull up in front of the tent. He hops off and helps you down, and his warm, tough hand holds yours a second longer than necessary. He leads you inside and, lighting a fire of yak dung, makes tea from a fragrant brick, which he strains into a brass churn, and mixes with pungent yak butter. He offers this to you in a wooden bowl, and then, with his fingers still smelling of sweat, horse and leather, pinches up some barley meal, dips it in his tea and rolls the tsampa into a ball, which he then places in your mouth. You lick his fingers. Soon he has put aside your bowl of tea and he is kneading your breasts like tsampa and laying you down on furs, to make vigorous love to you, again and again, until the night comes and it grows cold and he pulls more furs over you both and takes you again. You sense he was made in the precise mould of your insides; no man has ever fitted so perfectly before, filling you in all the right ways. You adore his lean, muscular dark body, the tautness of it, with its brown nipples and sparse body hair, and you love that strong spurt of his seed when he comes.' Ellen paused and frowned. ‘Although, I suppose, you really ought to have been using condoms.'

‘Oh, Ellen, it's just a fantasy,' Jody protested. ‘I didn't have to wear an equestrian helmet, remember?'

‘Yes, but, I don't know, I think it's important to valorise safe sex practices even in fantasy.' Ellen glanced over at Camilla, whose features betrayed a slight hint of impatience. ‘Oh, never mind. At the first light of dawn, you reach for him but he's not there. You pull your clothes around you and walk outside, where you find him curled up with a sheep. You're not sure what to make of this, but when he beckons you over, you go and the two of you lie with the sheep, enjoying its warmth, and then make love next to the animal, under the fading stars and by the light of the rising sun. He is tender and ardent, and for nearly a month you stay there, getting used to the oily tea and the smell of the yak butter and the taste of the tsampa and the surprising sexuality of the sheep. Every day you make love so many times you lose track. But after a while, you begin to crave a wash, and some fruit, and clean clothes and conversation. Besides, the short Himalayan summer is coming to an end. With regret, you take your leave.'

‘How poignant,' Camilla commented.

‘Well then,' Jody said, picking up the thread, ‘after a few detours, you end up smack in the middle of Tokyo. Traffic, suits, neon, department stores, noodle shops and more people moving down the pavement in front of you at any moment than you saw your entire time in Nepal and Tibet. You are feeling a bit dazed. You finger the heavy silver necklace given to you by your Tibetan lover. As you are crossing the road, a man in a suit takes your elbow. You look at him curiously, not sure how to react. He is speaking to you in Japanese but you make out the word “coffee”. You think coffee might be a nice idea. You allow him to steer you past several nice, warm and cosy coffee-shops, to which you gesture, and into a back alley and a rather sleazy-looking place. You are feeling a bit more wary now. You've just noticed that the man is missing two fingers. It is seeping into your travel-lagged brain that he is probably a yakuza gangster. You will have your coffee and bolt. The waitress brings over your coffee, and nods to the man. This strikes you as strange, and you suddenly recall stories about yakuza involvement in white slavery. As the drug in the coffee begins to take effect, you dimly perceive the yakuza pulling out of his briefcase a videotape of
La Belle Aussie Slut à la Plage
, the porn flick you made at Cannes. That's the last thing you remember before coming to.

‘Your head is spinning and your eyes are heavy. Bit by bit you become conscious of the fact that you are lying down, naked, on a long, low table, around which kneel two dozen Japanese men in traditional dress. You are trying to comprehend what has happened when it occurs to you that there are small, cold things placed all over your body. You strain to pick up your head. Before dizziness forces it back on the table, you manage to see that you have been made into a tray for all manner of sushi and sashimi. Your pubic hair has been shaved, as has the hair underneath your armpits, and something about the tightness of the skin on your face tells you that you've been made up quite heavily with what you guess is the white paint of the geisha girl. Your pubic mound is covered with something warm—you realise later that it is rice. There is something pushed up into your vagina—a baby octopus?—and something else— a strip of eel?—up your anus. Something is burning your labia and clitoris and nipples—you realise it must be hot wasabi mustard, and your sex is becoming engorged and embarrassingly, frantically needy, your nipples painfully hard.

‘The men, who are quite handsome, and dressed like something out of a Kurosawa epic, all brocades, half-shaved heads and triangularity, are nodding and exclaiming with delight, and after they've admired you for a while one says, “
Itedakimas
!”—“
Bon Appetit
!”—and the others chorus it. One raises a pair of bamboo chopsticks to pluck a morsel of raw tuna from your navel. After he swallows it down, encouraged by the others, he bends down and plants a wet kiss on your bellybutton. Now it's a free-for-all. Some of the men dispense with chopsticks altogether and just put their mouths to your body and keep their lips on you as they take the raw seafood into their mouths. It's a feeding frenzy. The men are moving around your body now, taking mouthfuls of rice from your pubis and licks of wasabi from your vulva. Your entire body is being nibbled, and licked and kissed and touched and rubbed and stroked by these men, one of whom slowly devours the octopus from your vagina, and then another, lifting and parting the cheeks of your arse with both hands, eats out the eel. Just as this is happening, you see one of them part the folds of his robe and direct his own straight, shiny eel into your mouth. Hungrily, you suck him off, and he has no sooner spasmed and withdrawn when the next is poking his dark red tuna between your lips. You sense another man straddle the narrow table by your hips and suddenly, with a great thrust, he enters you from below. There is just a tiny little piece of octopus still in your fanny and it's tickling you inside, stuck fortuitously just next to your g-spot, like one of those extra knobs on the fancier dildos. You come within minutes, but he's still going strong, and you come again, and again. Two men are biting your nipples and yet another is manipulating your clitoris. Someone is sucking your toes, someone else has your hand in his mouth, and yet another is slapping his cock against your thigh. You feel another cock—or is it two?—pushing through your hair, humping your head, rubbing your forehead. The cold sashimi has all been devoured, or pushed off to the tatami, and now your skin tingles with smeared wasabi and you are suddenly cresting and writhing and pumping, and this just sets all of them off at once, and they're coming inside you and coming all over you, your face, your body, your legs and arms, and of course there's one in each hand and you have come so much and so strongly that you're beginning to lose consciousness. You fade out just as they're stroking your skin with their hands, rubbing in the cum like body cream. Your eyes close.

‘When you come to, you're lying in a bubble bath in a luxury hotel. There's a silver platter by the marble bathtub on which sits your passport, your purse, a bottle of warm sake and a beautiful black lacquer box which you open to find a lavish Japanese supper inside. You take up the chopsticks, pincer a slab of sashimi, dip it in the wasabi and soy, and then put it into your mouth, savouring the taste and wondering if it was all a dream. The skin behind your ear tingles. You reach up to scratch it and find a tiny trace of wasabi there.'

Camilla realised she was squeezing her thighs together. Then again, so were the women at all the adjacent tables.

‘That's a hard act to follow,' Ellen commented, after a long pause. ‘Maybe we should just take our heroine home and give her a rest.'

‘Good idea,' Camilla nodded. She gasped, ‘Ohmygod, darlings, I can't believe it.' The others looked in the direction of her gaze. Trent was standing there, staring at Camilla as if he couldn't be quite sure that it was her. Camilla ventured a tight little smile.

‘Truth is stranger...' whispered Jody, fascinated.

Trent stepped into the cafe, but before he reached their table, two twenty-year-old girls in pale makeup and brick-red lipstick jumped up and threw themselves in front of him. He blinked at them. ‘You're Trent Bent!' one exclaimed. The other was biting her lip and looking up at him coyly through heavily lined eyelids.

‘Uh, yes,' he grimaced, looking over at Camilla apologetically. ‘I suppose I am.'

‘You're our idol,' declared the more forward of the pair. The other giggled and nodded, her eyes wide and upon him.

Camilla looked on, half in horror and half in amusement. Trent had aged badly, rather like Bram in
Eat Me
, she suddenly realised. Had Philippa seen him and not told her?

‘Thanks, really, but I...' he strained out a smile and looked down at his arm, upon which a young female hand had taken a firm grip.

Camilla shook her head and a great wide smile broke out across her ever-luscious lips. ‘Nice to see you again, Trent,' she said. She pulled a card out of her purse and handed it over to him. ‘Call me sometime if you want to go for a coffee. That's my office number. I'm usually there.'

‘I'd, uh, like that,' stumbled Trent, as the girls pulled him firmly down onto a seat at their table. ‘Really. I'll call you.'

Camilla turned to the others and winked. ‘The more things change...' she commented under her breath.

‘What a morning!' Jody laughed.

Ellen glanced at her watch. ‘I've actually got to go soon,' she said regretfully. ‘I've got a goddess workshop at one.'

‘And I've promised to visit Jonathan's folks with him. Not exactly a fantasy afternoon, but there you go. Reality bites,' Camilla shrugged. ‘What are you up to this weekend, Jody?'

‘I've got a hot date,' she winked, grinning. ‘With a cool young man. I'm interviewing for Josh's replacement.'

‘You,' Ellen said, shaking her head and smiling, ‘really are a bad girl.'

‘Next thing you know you'll be wanting to spank me,' Jody offered provocatively.

‘Anytime,' Ellen said. ‘And you know I mean it.'

‘So, what are we going to do about the book?' Camilla pressed.

‘I say,' Jody said, ‘we don't say a word about it unless Philippa brings it up.'

‘Agreed,' nodded Ellen.

‘
D'accord
,' said Camilla.

JUST DESSERTS

Philippa handed the weekend papers to Cara. She sat down next to her on the sofa. They were wearing matching silk robes. Cara narrowed her cat eyes as she looked through the papers.

Philippa got up again and paced.

‘Sit down,' Cara said. ‘You'll drive me crazy.'

She sat down.

When Cara found what she was looking for, she threw the rest of the pile carelessly on the floor. She read silently and without expression.

Philippa curled herself into a ball and put her hands over her face. ‘Well?' she peeped after a while.

‘You want me to read it to you?'

‘Please.'

‘Brace yourself.'

‘Braced.'

‘“Indigestible Prose from the Smelly Deli.”'

The ball that was Philippa grew smaller.

‘
Eat Me
is a stale collection of erotica cooked up in the filthy oven of one Dick Pulse's fetid imagination. It is a veritable gorgonzola of a book, its stench as overpowering as its narrative is underwhelming. Like the vegan mentioned in Chapter Two, this reviewer couldn't bring herself to swallow.' Cara looked over at Philippa, and laughed. ‘Only joking, dear-heart. Now sit up straight and listen to what they really said.'