The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (5 page)

And he was here again now
, as she lay there waiting for release or punishment. He was dressed as she used to be, in blue leans with a dark tailored jacket and a white button-down shirt underneath. He was holding a pair of dark glasses in one hand. He was tentative at first, and clearly suspicious of being hurt. He stared at her as though implanting his image as a reality. He wanted to be really sure she took him into account. Betty thought how it was like seeing someone standing at the end of an alley, someone you thought you knew, but nevertheless surprised by his being there. He seemed casual but assertive, bored, but wired to immediate action. Betty felt a sense of irreconcilable guilt at having neglected the person she had once been. But there was no way in which roles could be reversed. She couldn't any longer have him assert dominance, and herself go into the dark room and live there on periodic recall. Too much had happened to allow for this regression. But he was there to give her strength. He was called Mike. She had answered to that name for her entire childhood and youth. Mike. He had run for a red ball in a park circled by cypress trees. He had built imposing sand castles, lit bonfires in October woods, run with a dog through village streets at nightfall. But at some stage his development had been terminated. He was no longer needed in the mirror. His plain clothes couldn't compete with the girls’ skirts and tops that Betty had adopted. But at first he had been phased out slowly. He was wanted during the day — he was Mike at school — even if Betty resented it; and his place was assured at family meals. But upstairs he wasn't required. Foundation, lipstick and eyeliner disguised his features. Male clothes were discarded for silk panties and a short skirt. Betty had luxuriated in the feminine. Mike had grown to be a satellite on occasional recall. But he was wanted whenever Betty dressed as a girl, picked up girls, and laid them with a man's authoritative sex. His role was increasingly confined to a testosterone level.

He was standing there sad-eyed, asking Betty to listen to his psychological advice. He wasn't asking for ascendancy, only consideration. Mike didn't want to be violated. She could tell that. He was holding out for respect. He was saying, 'Don't let them rape us. Think of me. I don't want to be had like a woman. Oppose these people. They have no right to invade our body. I shall come between you and them. I shall be the reproachful image which will inter
pose between you and pleasure.'

Betty steadied her focus on the man she had forgotten. His awkwardness and sense of rejection were becoming less pronounced now that she gave him the space to claim a partial identity. He kept coming at her from a past given autonomy by the present. This time he was reading by the seawall in the white room. The book was opened and partly screened his face. A girl in a minimal red bikini bottom was sunning three towels away
. She was listening to music on an mp3 player. It was a beach scene from Betty's youth. That day, that hot moment, were freeze-framed into her mind as she waited in agonized suspense for her captors. Mike wasn't reproachful of having been denied a life. He was just there offering her his psychological support.

Without warning the screen came to life. Betty found herself facing the dungeon in which she lay, only the film had been shot with more accentuated light. A teenage girl, dressed in a black beret, a black micro-skirt and sheer tights was sitting legs arched on the leather floor. The master of ceremonies was sitting opposite her, silently reading a large book. Betty recognised the man as the one at dinner who Nicole had called John, his steel-blue hair and aesthetically delineated cheekbones drawing attention to the idiosyncratic manner in which he buried his smile behind pursed lips. This man was closed to every form of overt emotional expression. Some intrinsic editing process cancelled out all
spontaneous responses. He was deeply absorbed in reading. The schoolgirl placed her thumb in her lipsticked mouth, extracted it, and began tickling herself under her skirt. Her eyes bumped up big and black. When the voice track cut in, the man was heard instructing her in the erotic arts. 'The width of a woman's shoe should be directly proportionate to that of a man's penis. The one should fit the other like a glove. Place it.' Betty watched as the young girl slipped off a precocious stiletto, lifted the man's erection from the folds of a silk tunic, and neatly inserted it into a pointed red shoe. With considerable dexterity she also accommodated the scrotum in the heel part. 'Now blow on it, nothing more,' his voice commanded. The young girl lifted his genitals in the red stiletto and began to blow rhythmically on the sensitive glans. Disdaining to show any sense of pleasure, the man continued to read. Clearly thinking in stereo, and restraining sensory impulse for mental concentration, he continued to read. 'In the course of giving head, a woman should reapply her lipstick three times, the tone dramatically reddening as climax is neared. The rhythm should be slow and investigative. The culinary etiquette of eating asparagus being one example, rolling a soft chocolate on the tongue being another, practising on Japanese toes being recommended, so too the application of the lips to a red carnation. The student should begin by applying a thin coat of honey to the frenulum, and using tension points as mouth stops. Proceed.'

Betty found herself transfixed as the young girl produced a lip brush and a pot of honey, and extracting the man's erect penis from the shoes began to coat the skin with a fine lacquering of amber honey. She applied herself with the meticulous diligence of a make-up artist. She pulled her head back and examined her work. For good measure she tinctured honey into the slit, took out a scarlet lipstick and satisfied that it was exactly the right tone, began delicately to apply her mouth to the engorged cock. Savouring the honey, her tongue flickered between her lips like a snake's. The man registered no appreciation of her oral expertise. The girl began assiduously to work up from the base to the head in dabbing flicks, and then increasing her tempo proceeded to flatten her tongue more firmly into the skin. She applied the pressure necessary to give a love bite to the triggering head. The man continued to consult the book while the girl experimented with various rhythms. There was no
t the least sense of synchronicity in their actions. The girl stopped at this point, checked her lipstick and applied another layer of scarlet gloss. She now took the penis into her lips, resting the shaft on her nether lip and working at it with the upper. Little by little she took it into her mouth, demonstrating the tongue rolling a soft chocolate method, her green eyes looking up at the man's expressionless ones. He showed no vestige of pleasure at the girl's alacritous versatility. He continued to read impassively. The girl now began to feed on his cock. She took it in like a rigid mauve banana. Her movements were vigorous, she was going down on it and taking it deep into her throat. It was like she had discovered a favourite flavour and was anxious to know it to the full. After a time of working at this committed speed, she stopped for a pause and touched up her lipstick. It was the third part of the prescribed ritual. Once again the man demonstrated no premonition of pleasure at her making up a last time to bring him to orgasm. The girl seemed instinctively to know a strategy best calculated to please. With her painted red fingernails she began tickling his balls, while her mouth was strained to an expansive oval accommodating his taut sex. There could be little doubt that the man was nearing an orgasm, despite the emotional repression he showed. And the girl sensed it too, for she took all of his cock into her mouth and increased the tantalising motion of her fingertips. The man jolted three or four times in spasmic thrusts, and the girl held him tight inside. They remained like that for a long time, she unwilling to release him and he declining to make any comment on the climactic experience. He continued to read with the same unimpassioned note of boredom. Eventually the girl let his penis go, and the film cut out as she returned to her sitting position opposite the master of ceremonies. Betty was left wondering what action had ensued. Did the girl masturbate to the man's instructions? Did she ride him later oh, their two bodies floating like somnambulists on a bed removed from time? Did she discover that although she was connected to his penis, he was untouchably far away in another dimension? Perhaps they were living in parallel ones. Betty had known men who were never able to come. They experienced pleasure, but were unable to ejaculate. They could make love for hours but to no conclusion. She usually avoided these, for they tired her with their unappeasable frustration. She had read how Marcel Proust, when he was unable to relieve himself at the sight of a naked boy, had a cage of rats brought into the room. His thrill came from seeing the rats attack and kill each other; a perversion that Betty surmised would be aesthetically viewed at the château. Proust had a dread of direct physical contact, and half of Betty's clients were the same, preferring to act out elaborate fantasies rather than to engage in one to one sex. Microphobia. Autophobia. She just wanted to get out of this dungeon, and go back to a familiar bar by the port. But she could hear footsteps now, and the grating of hinges as a heavy door was ceremonially unlocked.

The leather floor cushioned aco
ustics, but Betty heard the jab of two pairs of spiked heels cross the intervening divide, and stop at the level of her feet. She couldn't look round to see who was standing behind her, and she tensed in the uncertainty. Someone or something was licking her toes, and adrenalin shot through her circuit as she realised it might be the leopard. And if it was, the leopard might be instructed to work its way upwards to her thighs. She was still staring at a blue screen. She believed that if she projected hard enough she could travel through it. Her astral propulsion would power her like a jet. Her captors would find nothing but a hole burnt in the blue.

The asperity of a hot tongue interrogating her toes, ceased. No-one came forward. Betty lay t
here every nerve alert, as the silence was punctuated by the rapid breathing of an animal. Then it appeared. The leopard walked along her right side on an extended lead, and sat down in front of her head. Betty was able to observe how the cat's feet had been fitted into four high heels, the live inch stilettos that Nicole wore with her constrictive leather skirt. The consequences were those of creating a surreal monster. It also meant that although the animal was deprived of claws, the leather heels would be equally effective instruments should the creature lash out with its paws. Betty thought she was connected with a nightmare. At any moment she would wake up and consign the incident to a dream. The leopard settled down and lay on the floor, eyes lazy with potential menace. Betty felt nothing. Fear had displaced her. She wasn't here or anywhere.

And quite suddenly there were two figures standing with their backs to her, right and left of the leopard. They were dressed in identical black leather. The curve of their figures told
Betty that they were women. She imagined it was Leanda and Nicole, features disguised by masks that left holes for the eyes and mouth. Neither of the two paid any attention to her. Rather, they acknowledged the torches, and stared direct at the flame. When she looked again she could see that one of the women was performing a rite with a black dildo. She was intoning a chant, and offering the mamba to the statue. She held it to the marble lips, and Betty heard the voice engaged in a liturgical imprecation. The leopard yawned, and flexed its stiletto paws. Betty had the apprehension that the dildo was being offered up prior to its entering her. She had a vision of the two women strapping it on respectively, and violating her with the fierce pretence of being men. And where were the two men? She could hardly believe they had left the château after dinner, their long wavering headlights pushing white feelers through the country dark. Were they in a relationship, the two of them hiring a penthouse overlooking the harbours, the red and green shipping lights winking on the night waters? And did the man with emerald lenses change them to violet or orange? Betty's suppositions were conjectural. She had lived for so long amongst people who were of indeterminate or exchangeable gender, that she took no-one's sex at face value. She knew only the odd and the extreme. Men who dressed up as women for sex, were to her the norm. And she had been had in the past by women who strapped on dildos with the intention of entering her as men. She knew a client who kept a cupboard full of interesting shapes, colours and sizes. Some of them were personally made for her. There were green, blue, mauve, silver and gold artificial phalli which for her extended the vocabulary of sexual possibilities. How many women or men had been made love to by a gold penis on which was drawn the eye of Horns? And for purposes of pure decoration, the woman had dildos encrusted with jewels, metallic or velvet phalli which instead of flowers she placed in a vase beside her bed. That room came back to her now. The woman pleased that she wasn't a real man, for the ritual surrounding the wearing of a dildo thrilled her. So too did the making out of instructions for the craftsman who delivered her specifications in a series of satin shoeboxes.

Having offered the mamba up as part of a weird ritual, the leather figure kissed it, and returned to her standing position facing the statue. Betty kept blanking out b
y closing her eyes, in order to avoid the leopard. The creature remained slack, but tensely alert, It won like a tuned guitar, waiting to be played. The two figures continued to stand with their backs to her, and then one of them, without warning, spoke.

'You will be
released at dawn, and driven back to the city tomorrow tonight. You will never know this place nor will you remember where it is situated. You are a paid captive. You are expected to obey. You have been given a drug which will subliminally alter your conception of time and space for a week. Your memory of what has happened here will be erased. So too the knowledge that you have eaten flesh from the sacrificial penis.For it was penis we ate at dinner, that most subtle of homeopathic aphrodisiacs. Your priapic virtues will increas
ee
normously as a consequence.'