Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (22 page)

We crossed a bridge, it was miles long, endlessly long. I thought about leaping from the car, swimming back to Lagos, but we were going too fast and the automatic locks had been engaged.

Beside the highway the land was flat, the bush dotted with gnarled trees like bent spirits fleeing from the city. Time did its thing and passed.

‘What month is it?’ I asked.

The two men seemed surprised that I had a tongue.

‘October,’ one of them replied.

‘October?’

‘The twenty-fifth.’

Three months had passed since I left the beach. It was a time as short as it is long and, again, I got the feeling that measuring time by the movement of the clock and the motions of the universe was spurious. Twenty minutes waiting for the Tube and a night with Samir were both forms of eternity.

The highway narrowed and we turned on to a track overhung with mature palms, thorn trees, trees laced with creepers and beards of twisted vine. We turned again and reached a clearing where a cement single-storey building stood surrounded by high walls and iron gates.

The driver parked. There were several luxury cars, a swimming pool with leaves floating on the surface. The building was like a fortress with grilles over the windows and double doors where a man sat nursing a rifle. Although unadorned outside, inside it was as lavish as any ambassador’s residence I had ever seen.

From the marble hallway I passed into a living-room with mahogany floors and leather sofas, wood sculptures, animal skin rugs, a huge chandelier below a ceiling with fleur-de-lis cornices. There were a dozen men, most in white. They were speaking English and stopped when I entered. They looked me up and down, not with lust, quite the opposite, more as the family Capulet may have viewed a Montague entering the fold.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘There has been some mistake.’

‘You do not speak,’ said a tall man with a neat beard.

‘I’m not a prostitute,’ I countered.

The man frowned. ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘Now, please do as you are told.’

‘I will not,’ I returned.

He smiled, more bemused than angry.

‘She’s as stubborn as a goat,’ another man said.

The bearded man threw up his shoulders. ‘You know what happens to goats,’ he replied.

The others all roared with laughter and it was their laughter more than their condescension that made my eyes prickle with tears.

‘I’m English,’ I shouted. ‘My father’s a diplomat. There’s been a terrible mistake.’

The bearded man did not respond except in his expression I caught a hint of disdain.

I’m English. My father’s a diplomat. I’m important. I’m white.

Was this what he heard? Was that what I meant?

‘Please,’ I said again.

He ran the tip of his finger over the spot below my bottom lip and down the curve of my throat. He then took my arm and, with the two men who had brought me from Mali following, I was hurried along a corridor to another room where I was locked inside.

The room was spotless, white marble walls and a marble floor, a squat-style lavatory and a wide sink with a single brass tap. It was like a surgery, the feeling enhanced by what appeared to be a massage table with straps hanging from either end, the only item of furniture.

I patrolled the four walls. I watched the sky through the narrow window turn orange, green and purple. I tried to think about Samir but, as I lay on the table staring at the shadows on the ceiling, what came to mind was my school in Kent, hockey matches, the old-fashioned uniforms, the silvery glow of the light in the chapel, a time all the more pleasing when seen through the prism of a teary memory. I was aware how lucky I had been. While I lacked for nothing, most people struggled to have decent lives, in England, more so in Africa. Even my running off into the unknown was the escape of privilege.

At least in the desert I had learned to while away the hours. I slept. I woke. The sun rose and I waited. I know a whole day must have gone by because I was starving and felt an enormous sense of gratitude when one of the men brought me some bananas, nuts and a bottle of water. Shortly after I had eaten, the door unlocked once more and several men in white suits entered with a much older man who walked with a cane. He wore big sandals, a loin cloth and shawl like a mystic.

He spoke to the bearded man. He addressed him as Thomas, and he translated.

‘Take off your clothes,’ he said, and I did so because I had learned that it’s not worth making a fuss.

Leaning on his cane, the old man ran his free hand over my body like a blind person, feeling my breasts, my waist, my hipbones and thighs. He ran his finger from my chin down the tattoo and, when he looked up again into my eyes, he seemed puzzled and said something I didn’t understand. There was nothing lewd in his examination. The marble room with the table and straps made it seem more medical than sexual.

He spoke again and two of the men held my arms. The old man continued and Thomas translated.

‘Are you a virgin?’ he asked.

I didn’t know what to say. I shrugged. My cheeks reddened. ‘Not exactly,’ I answered.

The two men holding me tightened their grip and the old man plunged his hand between my legs and deep into my vagina. I gasped and I was just as shocked as the man when he removed his fingers coated in blood. He turned away, frustrated, irritated, I wasn’t sure, and the men all filed out of the room with bowed heads, one of them taking my clothes.

That same man came back with sanitary towels, hand towels and soap. For the next four or five days I remained alone in that room like a prisoner on death row. Food was brought to me without a word. I was cold at night and hot by day. I had not had a period for a long time. I’d even begun to wonder if I were pregnant and half hoped that I was.

I tried hammering on the door, but it was pointless. I cried. I grieved for a life that was gone. At first I did exercises, stretches, yoga, handstands, but weeping was a better way to pass my time. I knew, I sort of knew, what was going to happen but it was too bizarre to contemplate. I dwelled instead on happy times in the red fort with Samir and Maysoon. I nursed the St Christopher and tried without success to pray. I remembered my round belly. It had gone. I had grown as thin as a leaf.

Finally the old man returned. My period had passed. I was clean and the table in that room was put to the use for which it had been designed. I didn’t struggle when they laid me along its length and tightened the buckles on the four straps occupying the four corners, pinning down my arms and legs.

One of the men was carrying a white ceramic bowl which he placed on the counter beside the sink. The old man carried a woven bag and from it he unpacked some smaller bowls, a pair of scissors with big rounded handles and what turned out to be a cut-throat razor of the sort barbers use.

As the old man opened the blade, I shook so much the other men had to hold the table so that it didn’t topple over. He was going to cut my throat, bleed me like a goat before roasting me on the barbeque. I was going to be eaten. Tears flooded my cheeks. I closed my eyes and opened them again when the old man spoke.

‘Keep still,’ Thomas translated. ‘He’s not going to hurt you.’

The old man had put the razor down and picked up the scissors. He now cut off my sun-bleached locks, hacking at the curls and letting them fall to the floor. He worked quickly and soon I was shorn. The men removed the straps from my ankles. I drew my feet back and, as the old man trimmed my pubic hair, I remembered the women preparing me for the blue tattoo and it felt at that moment that everything is linked, that just as there was a thread running down my body, there was a thread running through my life, and that if we can just close our eyes and see that thread we will know who we are.

The old man made a lather with soap and warm water from the large bowl. He shaved my head. He ran the blade down my legs and shaved the stubble from my pubic mount. The spider emerged, hanging from the thread, and the men leaned closer, watching open-mouthed as the creature stretched its legs. In Mauritania, that spider may have been a warning, a reminder that I belonged to someone, but here in the backwoods of Nigeria it was merely a curiosity, the customs of one tribe meaningless to the next.

The patriarch used a sponge to wash my head and between my legs. He seemed pleased with his ministrations and looked at me as a wood carver may look at the trunk of a tree. They buckled my legs, left the room, and there I lay watching the light change. I was more naked than I had ever been before, as smooth as a baby, a born-again virgin.

They came back for me at twilight. The old man had abandoned his cane and was dressed in a long white gown embroidered with moons and stars. He seemed taller, his face hidden by an elongated mask carved in the form of a firebird with a pointed beak and bloody lips. Through the mask’s eye slits, fanned with flames of red and yellow, his eyes seemed misty and primitive.

All but one of the other men were masked, bare-chested and wore white loin cloths. The remaining man was naked and shaved of all body hair. He had slit eyes like a toad. He was tall, muscular, and his large cock bobbed between his legs like a nocturnal creature moving to the rhythm of the single drum one of the men played. The others carried twisted sticks decorated with feathers, bones and strings of glass beads they rattled as they moved like a wave towards me and back again in a rolling motion. They chanted and wailed. They drank from the earthenware jug they passed from hand to hand. Like the old man, they seemed stoned.

It was Thomas and the naked man who released the straps that held me. I swung my legs to the floor and, using the sticks to tap my shoulders and the backs of my legs, they danced around me as I was herded from the room, down the corridor and out of the building through a back entrance that led to a narrow gate.

We moved away from the compound on a jungle path soft with leaves underfoot. The drummer beat faster. The men kept passing the jug, their movements became more exaggerated, their voices melodious, mesmerizing. We reached a clearing lit by a ring of seven smouldering fires. They added fresh logs and the sparks ran through the air like red sprites lighting the circle of trees where human skulls appeared like pale lanterns in the branches and the long fronds of creepers hung over me like the stretched hands of ghosts.

My knees weakened. I was about to fall. The naked man steadied me and kept a grip on my arm. I kept going, one step at a time to meet my fate. The trunk of a dead tree with the topside carved flat had been placed at the centre of the clearing. It could have been an altar in church and I recalled when Sister Agnes led prayers I had always thought how silly it was, how if Our Father Who Art in Heaven really cared for his children he would have sent plagues and boils and painful deaths to all the dictators and murderers and evildoers in the world.

I was lifted and laid on the altar. The sticks rattled, the sound like hissing serpents. The voices deepened as if the chant had new significance. I had lost the will to do anything but observe myself from outside myself. They stroked my limbs, as if to calm me. There was no aggression, no violence. I was a precious object, a lamb, a calf, an innocent.

Some of the men had abandoned their voodoo sticks. They continued to stroke me as their witchdoctor poured a pungent smelling oil over my body from my shaved head to my dusty feet. They worked the oil into my skin, turning me over as you baste a plucked chicken. Still the drummer beat louder. The voices turned from a chant to a wail. More logs were heaped on the fires and the flames sent hideous shadows marching through the trees.

The men who had abandoned their sticks held me tightly. The witchdoctor produced a knife with a long thin blade and a carved handle which he gave to the naked man. The witchdoctor took my right hand, the hand holding the St Christopher. He pulled my fingers back. I tried to resist and gasped forlornly when my fingers opened and the medallion slipped to the floor.

The witchdoctor danced up and down, screaming at the moon rising over the trees. He then grabbed the St Christopher and ceremoniously dropped it in the fire blazing at my feet. My journey was over. He looked back at me, the eyes in the bird mask more terrifying. He grabbed my hand and straightened my fingers. The others chanted and rattled their sticks as the naked man leaned over me with the knife and slit my wrist. A spasm ran through my body. I was sweating but felt cold. I wriggled and the blood gushed over my fingers into the calabash one of the men was holding.

I grew weaker as the blood drained from me. I was on the point of passing out when the witchdoctor seared the wound with a burning unction. The man with the earthenware jug added some drops from the brew they had been drinking to the blood and they sipped the concoction, passing the calabash from hand to hand.

The moon’s light had grown brighter, picking out the carvings on their devil masks. The witchdoctor used his fingers to make circles in the oil around my breasts, my heart and the lips of my vagina. I was dazed but could still understand how simple people believed that in these rites they were calling upon some power beyond themselves. I could understand why girls might feel fortunate to have been chosen as offerings and why a virgin gave the ritual a sense of purity and significance.

The chant became a single continuous note. The naked man, his cock erect now, like a knife, raised the blade, it glinted above me, he cupped my left breast and, as he leaned forward, the shadows above went out of shape. I heard the rush of people moving through the bush. As the man began to run the knife below my breast, cutting the skin, marking his line, his arm was jerked away and he screamed in agony as the butt of a rifle struck his jaw.

Samir appeared. I thought it was a hallucination. The witchdoctor grabbed for the knife the naked man had dropped but he, too, was clubbed to the ground, this time by Azar, his eyes like live coals below his filthy red turban. I heard the familiar sound of Umah’s bracelets rattling on his wrists. He scooped me into his arms and with Samir on one side and Azar on the other, they strode through the clearing using their Kalashnikovs as cudgels and clearing the way.