Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (11 page)

The drapes over my head were swirling about like a fog. I leaned forward, gripped my knees and opened my body to take his full length into the depths of my vagina. I could smell my own arousal. I could hear the squelching of my wet parts like water running from a bath. I was like a female machine that had to be oiled with male semen every day, three times a day. Like a violin, I improved by playing, a Stradivarius superfluous without the bow, stroked by the bow, completed by the bow. My body was an overture. I could hear the tolling bells and the distant roar of the cannon bringing Tchaikovsky’s
1812
to a crescendo. Contractions gripped my stomach, a fist squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing. The nerve endings in my vagina began to sing and as the boy heard my song he burst in a swelling orgasm that pumped his sticky liquids inside me. He groaned and sighed. The muscles in the walls of my vagina took a firm grip on his throbbing cock and my tummy lurched on the wave of a slow rippling climax.

Spent, relieved, panting for breath, the boy’s cock grew limp. He slipped down on his knees and, as I stood up straight, he pushed his head between my legs and sucked his spunk from the sopping lips of my vagina, a criminal cleaning away evidence from the scene of the crime.

It was over. It didn’t matter. It was past. I was doing that thing I do. Why cry over spilled sperm?

The boy lifted the
hijab
from my shoulders, scurried to the corner of the cabin and began altering the garment, sewing in swift stitches, transferring the pins to his lips and then back into the pincushion. I tried on a pair of pantaloons that were tight around the calves and baggy at the thighs. He pinned them, too, and continued sewing. I wrapped the sarong around me and, as I gazed from the porthole, a poem from fifth-year literature slipped into my mind:

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread –
Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the “Song of the Shirt”.

Thomas Hood’s words came to me like the crackly sound of a far away radio, a message from that other world. I put an inch of water in the brass pot and washed the snail trails of semen from my thighs. I stared at myself in the mirror. My lips were swollen. Pink smudges like the sky at sunset coloured my cheeks. As I stared into my eyes, I caught a glimpse of Chengi, the sheikh’s concubine, his prize. I decided
not
to feel guilty. If I felt guilty, he would know. Lovers always know. You must hide your guilt then forget where it is hidden.

I went back to my place at the porthole. The mist had cleared. The coast was closer now. I could see the beach, mile after mile of sand without towels, umbrellas, ice cream, unspoiled, unpopulated.

When Samir returned to the cabin, I was still staring out to sea. I turned. He smiled. I smiled. He didn’t know. He must never know. He said something to the boy and the boy’s eye-lashes flashed. The work would soon be done. That’s what I thought he said, his fingers busy plying the needle and thread, stitch, stitch, stitch, and I tried to recall the second verse of Hood’s poem but it had gone, concealed in that place where the guilt was hidden. I had a new set of clothes and I had a secret. It was more than I’d had when I left the island.

Samir came to put his arms around me. To hold me. Possess me. Could he sense my treachery through his palms on my bare shoulders, through his fingers that had caressed the red sand and now brushed my collarbones? The thought that he might was something new to savour, an added spice to a favoured dish. He ran his hand over my breast and down through the fold of the sarong to my belly. I wasn’t wearing knickers. I never wore knickers. My pubic hair had grown lush, a furry creature that he stroked as you would stroke a sleeping cat. I closed my eyes and grew tense. I was ready for him. I was always ready. My clitoris peeked from its cowling and I felt the soft pad of his fingertip circling that vibrating little nub of eternal yearning. My breath caught in my throat. A quickie standing up with the boy was an
hors d’œuvre
. I was ready for the main course.

He knew. He knew me well enough. He removed his hand and stroked my shoulders, calming me. He said something, people need to say things, and I opened my eyes as I turned towards him.

‘Habibi,’ he said, and kissed me gently, something he had learned to do but still didn’t come naturally to him.

He said something to the boy then left the cabin, closing the door behind him again.

The view through the porthole remained the same, the silver sand, the occasional clump of tall palms, but I could now also make out a point on the horizon where the coast turned and disappeared. I could smell change on the air, the push and pull of humanity, the reek of people crowded into one place. I thought about London, my job, the Underground where men watched me. I had always suspected what lay behind the shadows in their eyes, what they wanted to do to me, to girls like me, but had been wired to misread their signals, to be confused and upset when I should have been celebrating my unplumbed gift.

I recalled my bedroom in Fulham, the cupboard so full it was impractical to take anything out or to add anything new to the sagging rail; knickers and bras like silken sprites fleeing from open drawers; skirts and blouses back from the dry cleaners suspended from the curtain rail on wire hangers under bags of plastic. My shoes paraded across the room like shoes at a sale, red heels, black heels, trainers, mules, cowboy boots, Crocs, espadrilles, French ankle boots.

I was a slender size 7 with a shoe fetish and there were times when Bobby slipped his feet into my shoes. He squeezed into my pants and bras, filling the cups with balls of tissue. He ran my stockings up his legs, snapping them to a garter belt, he abhorred tights and adored the frippery and fantasy of being a girl as he wriggled into my skirts, holding his breath to button blouses and pull up zips. I painted his face, his long lashes, his sulky lips. In the red wig I had bought for a fancy dress party, with his high cheekbones and small features, he made a far more likely lady of the night than the trannies we saw hurrying on clip-clopping heels to clubs in Soho. I am sure had he surrendered to my whims and gone out cross-dressed he would have found something in himself he didn’t know was missing. It is something every man should do, every woman should do. How do we know who we are if we haven’t tried all the costumes in the wardrobe?

Dressed as Roberta, he liked me on top and cried fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, an echo of all things subtly connected, our life a glorious puzzle, a road map where all things lead everywhere else. We are a mass of dissociative personalities, potentials and promise. Bobby at his all boys boarding school always took the female leads in the drama club, as did boys in Shakespeare’s time. He was Juliet, Desdemona, Ophelia, Portia and Beatrice. He had a taste for greasepaint and, as a journalist, he was a performer feigning interest in the celebrities in which he had no interest at all. Bobby was a toff, a snob, a slender boy with a silver spoon and a silver tongue, lanky and girlish with his narrow waist, long legs, a pert little bottom I’m sure the masters must have considered in need of discipline.

I enjoyed Roberta more than Bobby and had realised on board the boat as I gazed at the orderly world of the shifting tides that when I had left my underwear littered about my flat it was to tempt the
her
from him; that at those times with Roberta deeply inside me it felt as if I were embedded in him, in her, that I had grown a phallus and had the power to release in us both the spectral majesty of the ultimate orgasm as surfers travel the oceans of the globe in search of the ultimate wave.

My new suit of clothes when I put them on brought back these memories in a sudden rush and they seemed like false memories; memories that belonged to someone else, the doppelganger Chengi who remembered Bobby like a character from a film or a book; so real as to seem real when the reality was Umah tying the ties on the
hijab
, adjusting the shoulders, admiring the fine stitching, a slave to his art. I stepped into the pantaloons. They were snug now, made-to-measure.

‘Perfect,’ I said, and he grinned.

Umah had flawless teeth, white and even, full lips. Like the sheikh. I had let this boy fuck me. Just like that. It was unbelievable. It was wonderful. And it meant nothing. It was just sex. I was living the reality of who I was, of what I was capable of becoming, and didn’t know that one day it would save my life.

The boy produced a long white scarf edged in a green curlicue pattern that matched the embroidery on the
hijab
and matched my eyes. He dug into his tunic and, like a magician, pulled out a handful of hairpins that he used to pin up my hair before wrapping the cloth in coils around my head. He tucked the tail of the scarf below my ear and showed me how I could tuck in the remaining short length of material in such a way that I concealed my mouth and chin.

I stepped away and looked in the mirror. With the turban covering my hair and the tunic hiding my shape, I looked like a boy, like an Arab prince from a story by Scheherazade. I looked as Bobby would have looked wearing these clothes. Umah made some adjustments to the turban. Our eyes met and he held his finger to his lips.

‘
As-salaam,’
he said.

‘
Insh’allah,’
I answered, and he nodded with great seriousness. We are, each one of us, in the hands of fate.

When I climbed the steps to the deck, I could see the waves swelling over the rounded boulders at the point. I could see fishing boats rocking in the swell, some buildings painted in pastel colours, the paint faded; the tower and dome of a mosque like a white lighthouse and a white egg poking above the line of the horizon. I could smell civilization, salt, dust, fish, history.

Samir spent a long time looking at me and nodding. I tried to read every tic and change in his features. The sheikh and the sailors communicated with shrugs and gestures, by the most minute ripple in their brow, an eye opening or closing a fraction, a nose flaring, a chin jutting, by an array of movements and manoeuvres that registered shock, anger, doubt, joy and indecision. When the sheikh beat the man in black and when he flogged me with the bullwhip, his expression had been the same even though the thoughts running through his mind must surely have been different.

Umah was standing to one side, shoulders bowed. When the sheikh spoke, the boy raced back to the cabin and returned with the spider brooch which Samir pinned at that place where my cleavage peeked through the fold of the
hijab
. I studied Samir’s features as he connected the clasp and didn’t know if this addition to my costume was for reasons of modesty, if the brooch were a gift, or if the spider motif marked me as his now the six welts on my backside were hidden.

Azar climbed on deck, wiping sweat from his face like a miner rising from the pit, eyes blinking constantly against the noon day sun. He lit a cigarette and nodded with approval when the sheikh presented me to him. He said something and Samir danced about guffawing with laughter.

What had Azar said? What was their humour? I was like a baby without language, a plaything to be adored and protected, and like a baby I laughed, too, as Samir swung me round to check my rear view. He turned me back to face him, his features like chips in a kaleidoscope arranged in expressions I had never seen before. Samir liked me dressed like this, like a boy, like a pasha, like Aladdin, like I was somebody else, and that’s what love needs, to be constantly changing positions and personas.

He adjusted the spider and said something.

‘
Insh’allah,’
I said.

When they laughed I hid my face with the tail of the turban, and they laughed more.

Azar went back below decks and Umah started to take down the sail. The drum of the engines slowed as we rounded the point and an earth-coloured shanty town began to develop before my eyes, the small fishing boats in the foreground each with a man dressed in a loincloth and turban standing and casting a net by hand, their skin baked black by the sun, their limbs sinewy and strong. The beach was littered with boxes and crates, broken boats and bits of machinery. The walls of an ancient fort spilled in ruins down from the hills and, below, the buildings rose up without pattern or design, arches and towers shoulder to shoulder at different heights and styles, the architecture of chance.

The sheikh’s boat had a name but the script was in Arabic and I had never learned what it was. Before us was an interchangeable row of similar boats tied hull to hull along a jetty that could have been thrown together by the tide, by the same hand of chance, the uprights made from the trunks of palm trees, all at different heights, the deck pieced together from tea chests and packing cases, the landing place, the buildings, the very town, an illustration of the impermanence of all things.

Seagulls wheeled through the air above, screeching. Men on shore and the men on board cried out, the combination of voices an operetta. I could smell food and sweat and dust and smoke. The boy threw an anchor far off from the stern and I stood with the sheikh at the prow as we slowed to a stop by hitting the end of the jetty, the jolt making the entire structure rock back and forth before settling once more. Mo stepped out from the wheelhouse with a rare smile, his gold tooth gleaming, his pointed beard neatly combed, and I realised that this was home and they were happy to be home in a way that I never felt when I had been away and returned to England; that for me growing up in Washington and Geneva, nowhere was home.

The men unloaded the sacks we had brought with us from the island. They contained the shells the beachcomber had fondly displayed in the fish shed on the island. I had no idea why they had brought them, why conch shells from the Canary Islands would be any different or have greater value than the shells that must surely lie along the shore beyond town. That was the extent our cargo. Three sacks of shells. And me.

Samir stepped ashore. He looked away as I jumped down behind him and didn’t take my hand. He looked back, hooked the turban across my face, and his malleable expression seemed to set and harden.