The Pleasure Quartet (23 page)

The third and fourth occurred at once. Two men whom I met in the American Bar of the Savoy paid me ten pounds each to have them together. I had hoped to see them make love to each other but was
disappointed. Instead they wanted to both penetrate me at once, and I let them, on the proviso that I could see the cock of the man who intended to fuck me anally first. He dropped his trousers in
the elevator, and I gave him a blow job for free, having first decided that his penis was sufficiently small to enter my arsehole.

The fifth was at least three decades older than I, and could have passed for my grandfather. I returned again to the Regent Palace and encountered the same bartender, who this time looked at me
with disdain.

The man’s name was Harry, and he worked as a podiatrist. ‘A foot doctor,’ he said, when I admitted my ignorance of the term. He had a flat rump and skinny legs and his ball
sack was pale and wrinkled. He paid me to simply stand over him and shout obscenities as he crawled at my feet, but after a few feeble attempts, I had to tell him to get up again and confessed I
couldn’t do it.

‘Touch me if you like,’ I told him, and I lifted his hands to my breasts. He began to cry, still holding my breasts. My nipples grew hard. He tipped me more than any of the men
before him.

There was a red-haired man from Missouri who told me that he was travelling the world and intended to try a different woman in every city.

‘It’s kinder for me to fuck whores,’ he told me, as we shared a cigarette afterwards. ‘Saves breaking hearts.’

I could barely understand a word he said, but I liked him all the more for it.

Another was the son of a policeman, who claimed to be trying to break as many laws as he could without ever really hurting anyone, just to piss off his father. His cock was as small as my thumb,
and stayed perfectly limp the whole time, but he brought me to orgasm twice with his tongue, and slipped a finger into my arse.

The last one didn’t tell me his name – only his wife’s. Maureen. He showed me a well-thumbed picture from his wallet. A pretty blonde with a blunt fringe, grey eyes and a wide
smile, wearing a pale blue blouse buttoned all the way up her throat. Her arm was nestled around a young boy with the same colouring, dressed all in red. They both looked awkward captured by the
lens of the camera.

‘She looks nice,’ I said. ‘And your boy.’

‘Not my boy,’ he replied, and slapped his wallet shut.

He fucked me hard, and pulled my hair until I asked him to stop. The next day I found bruises on my thighs where he had gripped me in the missionary position.

Their faces and hair cuts and smells all blended into one another, until I began to try avoiding any real personal contact altogether and just getting straight to business. I developed a desire
for cocks, without the men attached to them. I wished that I had X-ray vision so that I could look through a line of trousers standing at a bar and see whose was largest, straightest, longest,
thickest, smoothest, without being so enormous as to actually cause me pain. I longed for Edward’s cock, which had been perfect to my mind, in all of these respects.

I avoided repeat customers. The virgin who had gone down on his knees for me in the alleyway came back to the Regent Palace looking for me. I told him I couldn’t help him, and he offered
to take me to the pictures instead.

‘I don’t want to be alone,’ he said.

We watched
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush
, a lighthearted comedy about suburban youth on the make which bore no resemblance whatsoever to my reality, because someone had once told me
I looked a little like the actress Angela Scoular who featured in the film, and I let him hold my hand. His palms were sweaty. He had to hold his jacket in front of his erection as we exited the
theatre. He paid for a cab, and I took him back to Hammersmith with me, and rode him in the garden, underneath the lemon tree. I told him to never contact me again.

I often returned home sore, but never sated.

I was so terribly lonely.

Gwillam was aware of my whoring. Or was there another, better word to describe my recent unconventional sexual entanglements? Several times a day, my feelings about what
I’d fallen into veered between shame, horror, resigned acceptance, using curiosity as an excuse, and many more thoughts and back again. I knew I wasn’t doing it for the money, surely
not? So why did I keep on doing it?

I had to talk about it with someone, and there was only Gwillam who could lend a sympathetic ear and not be judgemental, I reckoned.

‘Hmmm . . .’ he said, after listening to my story. I’d provided him with a digest version and none of the crude details. ‘I just hope my own dubious example hasn’t
proved a bad influence.’ Somehow he appeared to find humour in the situation. Certainly more than I did.

I repressed a smile.

‘It’s just a phase I’m going through,’ I said.

‘Exploring possibilities?’

‘Exactly . . .’

‘Well, if like me, you don’t see it as a permanent sort of activity, I’d say there is no harm in it,’ Gwillam stated. ‘It’s all experience.’

Since Iris had left to shack up with Thomas, Gwillam had become a true friend. Like a brother, almost, and because of his own sexual inclinations didn’t feel in any way like a threat.

I nodded. But then I would have done so whatever justification he had offered me in the circumstances in my unspoken search for forgiveness.

‘Talking of experiments,’ Gwillam said, ‘I’ve been invited to a rather particular celebration tomorrow. Should be something of an eye-opener. And I’ll be off-duty,
so to speak, so in a better position to enjoy the fun. Care to join me?’

I agreed.

Rain was pelting down outside the tall Belsize Park two-storeyed mansion and we’d rushed from Chalk Farm underground station optimistically hoping our flimsy umbrellas would not be blown
away or torn apart during our hurried progress to the house, carting along our surprisingly light shopping bags in which Gwillam had packed our outfits for tonight.

There was no one at the door to greet us. Beyond the open front door was a small well-lit hall and an umbrella stand already bursting with dripping brollies packed tight in an architecture of
calculated chaos. The house had a welcoming warmth to it.

I followed Gwillam in, shook the rain off my jacket and undid the shawl that had, not entirely successfully, kept my hair dry. Gwillam pulled back his hood. He looked at ease, if out of breath
from our frenzied uphill run from the Tube to the house.

He caught his breath.

‘Have you been here before?’ I asked him.

‘I have,’ he replied. ‘But I was otherwise accompanied on that occasion, if you know what I mean.’ He sketched a weak smile. I instantly recalled, heat surging into my
wet cheeks, the spectacle at the party in the Chilterns of him being used by the other man, his thin body shaken by the vigorous thrusts of the stranger fucking him. ‘But I’m not
working today,’ he added quickly, seeing the confusion on my face.

He had warned me earlier that this was an occasion where we would have to dress up. ‘A fancy dress party?’ I had asked. I hadn’t been to one since I was a child, and still
remembered the choice I had then been given to be either a fairy princess or an evil sorceress. I had chosen the latter, while Iris had opted for the side of virtue versus evil.

‘Not quite.’

I hadn’t questioned him further. I trusted Gwillam.

The door to the street swung open behind us as we stood there brushing off the rain, and I glimpsed a cab driving off as an older couple sheltered under voluminous capes stepped in to the hall
and silently acknowledged us before quickly divesting themselves and laying their sodden outerwear on the wooden bench to our right.

I gasped.

Under their travelling clothes, they were both encased in thin, black leather bodysuits that shadowed every inch of their form, capped off by knee-high boots. Hers sported thin, rapier-like,
heels and his, thick wedges that added a good few inches to his height. Both looked unnaturally pale, making me think of vampires in a bad Christopher Lee B-movie, and their eyes were an eerie
shade of green. Must have been contact lenses, I reckoned, as they were strictly identical in colour, and I didn’t believe in coincidence.

Seeing them emerge in all their thin, leather-sheathed splendour, even Gwillam lost some of his assurance and stood there gazing at them, his lips half-open, as if uncertain what to do next.

The man rapidly looked us up and down, disapproval on his emaciated features.

‘We had to travel here on foot,’ Gwillam blurted out by way of explanation, and pointed at the wet carrier bags we had set down on the ground.

The man blinked. The woman standing by him smoothed the creases in her outfit, her long fingers travelling lazily across her curves.

‘Over there.’ He pointed at a recessed door. ‘You’ll be able to change,’ he said.

He turned his back to us and stepped to the end of the hall and into a dimly-lit corridor. The woman followed him.

Once again we were alone. Gwillam picked up the bags and pushed the door open with his foot. It was a small windowless room. There was a built-in cupboard which was open and in which an
assortment of clothes were hanging or draped across the closet’s floor, and a dozen or so shoes were scattered in a corner. Other guests had come in here prior to our own arrival to also
change into their chosen outfits. There were two narrow wooden benches on either side of the small room, on which we could sit.

‘Good,’ Gwillam said. ‘Now to blend in better.’

He passed one of the bags to me and busied himself emptying the other onto the bench on which he perched and proceeded to pull off his sodden shoes. I walked over to the other bench at the
opposite end and did likewise, and kicked off my flats. I looked up, seeking a mirror or something in which I might be able to adjust my make-up. There was nothing. How was I expected to look
good?

Opposite me, Gwillam had by now taken off his shirt, revealing his anaemic hairless chest. As I was pulling off the tight Electric Garden T-shirt I was wearing, tugging it past my ears, I
realised with dismay that I was wearing underwear that didn’t match, a pair of simple white cotton panties and a red, lacy padded bra. Then, as I my hands delved into the shopping bag and
found nothing but a pair of heavy metal-tipped boots, a long thin stretch of narrow black satin and an instruction sheet folded in four indicating a myriad ways in which the ribbon might be tied to
constitute an outfit, I knew instantly that the state of my lingerie was of no consequence tonight as I was unlikely to be wearing any.

I unclasped my bra, allowed it to fall to the ground and began the laborious exercise of untangling the slippery piece of fabric, and was puzzling out how this curious if abbreviated outfit
should be worn properly, standing there in just my jeans, when Gwillam called to me, and snapped me out of my reflective daze.

‘I need your help, Moana.’

I looked over at him. He had risen from the bench and was now stark naked. He stood upright, his thin pink cock hanging between his legs, cushioned by the soft, seemingly elastic sack of his
balls and the slim outline of his white thighs. It was strange how I could peruse Gwillam’s naked body with neither attraction nor repulsion. I was entirely indifferent to his nudity.

‘I have to get myself into the outfit,’ he said, pointing at the pool of black latex he held out in his other hand. ‘Can you talc me over?’

I must have looked confused.

‘If you cover my body with talcum powder, it will make it easier to slip into the suit,’ he explained. ‘I’d do it but I’m bound to miss a bit and then make it tear.
Latex sure is a bastard.’

He extracted a plastic Boots baby talcum container from the carrier bag and held it out to me.

‘All over,’ he advised. ‘Start from my feet.’

I shook the container and a fine mist spread across my hands like a suspended cloud of dust. I began by coating the raised soles of his feet, and then methodically spreading it upwards across
his ankles and calves. The natural whiteness of Gwillam’s skin now took on a cartoon-like unnaturalness as I reached his knees and distributed the baby powder onto his thighs. Just a hand
away from my fingers now, his cock imperceptibly twitched.

At that same moment, the door to the changing room opened and a tall woman barged in, throwing off a wet green mackintosh and kicking it into a corner.

I looked up. And recognised Matilda.

‘Ah, the young playthings!’ she said, peering down at us through a sodden fringe she promptly combed back with her fingers.

I felt defensive, struggling for words to justify being caught massaging baby powder into a naked guy while squatting down uncomfortably on my haunches.

‘It’s for the costume,’ I muttered. Gwillam stared at her with a look of deference. He also knew who she was.

‘Yes, I know, dear,’ Matilda said. ‘Latex outfits can be a bitch to slip on, can’t they?’

She looked away from us. She was wearing a thin white silk tunic, Japanese in appearance, which starkly revealed every curve of her body beneath its shimmering looseness, the outline of her hard
nipples beneath it dark hillocks pointing upwards to her swan-like neck. Her lipstick was crimson, her eyes lined with a strong frame of darkest kohl. She looked imperious. And dangerous.

‘Don’t stop because of me,’ she added, fussing with her hair, her long nails streaking through it in an attempt to order it back into the shape she preferred.

Gingerly, I shook the container and the mist floated momentarily in front of my hands before settling down on Gwillam’s exposed skin, the top of his thighs, his cock and balls and, my mind
a deliberate blank, I began to spread it across his whole midriff. Even though not at full attention, his penis felt hard to my touch. I tried to remind myself that we were related. I heard him
hold his breath as my hands washed across his body and his parts.

I kept on liberally coating his skin with talcum powder, finally making my way past his stomach and now generously spreading the white cloud into his chest, neck and thoroughly under his arms.
Gwillam thanked me and took hold of the latex costume, wriggling his way into it, first forcing his legs into the second skin and then, with difficulty and a measure of studied contortion, his
hands followed by his arms. I could see how the coating of talcum powder made the exercise easier; without it, even slow progress would have been almost impossible to achieve, as well as decidedly
comical to witness.