Being a Girl (23 page)

Waiting at the top of the hill was a man I assumed was Dr Goetz, dressed in black, his face hidden in a hangman's hood. Beside him stood Alba Iliescu, wearing devil's horns that extended from her headdress and a black cape that swirled around her body in the evening breeze. A pentangle of white stones was laid out on the top of the hill and I noticed three wooden stakes were set in an isosceles triangle within the pattern.

Heaven In Is It As Earth On . . .

I tried to make sense of the words but my attention was fixed on Dr Iliescu. She removed her cape and stood there naked except for the devil mask, her white breasts gleaming, her hand supporting the huge penis strapped about her. She appeared to be masturbating, stroking the phallus like a man, but this I realised was an optical illusion: she was wearing the double-headed penis from Dr Goetz's study and was driving the concealed half of the phallus up inside her. The chanters were still chanting . . .

Done Be Will Thy Come Kingdom Thy . . .

I noticed Dr Iliescu's chin go back, her mouth fell open and she let go of the rhinoceros horn to stop herself climaxing. At that moment, the full moon reached its apogee and became a ball of white fire over the horizon.

The black-clad Druid bent forward and lifted the hem of my nun's habit. He ripped it along the seam, tearing it from me like he was skinning the forbidden fruit. I was wearing pink panties which he cleaved apart, one side, then the other. He turned me round and the chanters chanted even louder as they gazed
upon the pentangle gleaming upon the moon of my white bottom.

Name Thy Be Hallowed Heaven In Art Who Father Our . . .

The man in black looked up at the sky, then urged me to enter the stone pentangle. I was made to lie down. My arms were lashed to the stake above my head and my legs were spread out, my ankles tied to the two remaining stakes.

The chanters were chanting, but all I could focus on was Alba Iliescu lowering herself between my spread thighs, her lips slightly parted, her eyes gleaming like two black stars, like portals into another dimension, the devil horns piercing the moon above.

Alba Iliescu held herself steady with one hand and, with the other, guided the snake head between the lips of my vagina. A flood of warm juices swept through me and the beast throbbed with life as Alba drove the phallus in and out, in and out. There was a gush of wind which could have been a collective sigh, or a collective orgasm. The worshippers murmured their mantra, their voices growing in volume as Alba drove the rhinoceros horn deeper into my secluded places. I screamed, I screamed in pain and pleasure and knew that these two sensations were one and the same, that one doesn't exist without the other, that I must pursue both to be everything I could be.

A little pebble from a dam broke loose inside me. Liquids seeped through the gap, the gush became a tide, a torrent, a flood, and it was biblical lying there in the lunar light climaxing with Alba coming in a deluge. Her Dracula blood was boiling and she was shrieking like a werewolf.

When she caught her breath, she started again, slowly now, the twin snakes greased by our girlie
jism. The Druids began a different chant, just softly, and she continued rocking back and forth, each seesaw of the phallus filling me and filling her, and the harder she thrust into me, the more the snake wound its way up inside her. Her eyes sparkled like moonstones above me and as she sank her teeth into my exposed throat I erupted in a second vast and gratifying climax.

The chanting came to an abrupt stop and Dr Iliescu drew back, easing the snake from me. She stood over me, masturbating again, very slowly, and in the background the Druids started removing their robes. They tossed them to one side and moved around me in a circle, the men gripping their cocks and masturbating, the women squeezing their nipples and thrusting back their heads. They moved closer and closer and, one after the other, the men released their orgasms and spurts of spunk like gleaming ectoplasm coated my face and breasts, the hollow of my tummy, and I remembered that day when Dr Goetz had said they all wanted me to do my best, and I was doing my best, and it was a relief to know that at Cambridge I would get the best education in the world.

AROUND THE CORNER
from the Majestic on La Croisette in Cannes is a club called the Garden of Eden. Outside, along the edge of the pavement, a blue velvet rope hangs from chromium posts. Gorillas in dinner suits guard the entrance and, behind the rope, hundreds of wannabes stand night after night hoping to be admitted, the intense young men lugging bags full of film scripts, the girls close to naked and some terribly young. ‘Sluts in training,' Binky remarked as we turned the corner and saw the usual line up.

We had left David in the bar at the Majestic surrounded by admirers and journalists.
Cheats
didn't win best short film at Cannes, but being nominated is recognition in itself and David was being hyped as ‘on the way', an auteur with a personal signature. He was 24 and awfully handsome, all the more so with the new confidence gained from his film. Other writers were now giving him feature projects to read and, with Hermann Mann his tutor, he had abandoned his own bag of scripts and acquired a Hugo Boss black linen suit.

When you imagine the Cannes Film Festival, the first thing that comes to mind are the stars in starry glitter walking the red carpet to premières, the phallic
lenses of the paparazzi, the ravenous eyes of the watching crowd. Of course, that's all very important, glamour sells, but beyond the bright lights in smoky screening rooms, Cannes is a casino, a thieves' market where fortunes are made and more often lost. A Korean who has had good sales at home will sell his feature at Cannes to small-time distributors who put on subtitles or dub the voice track before seeking a release in their own country. Big studio films get automatic distribution, but indie movies have to fight for screens in the marketplace.

It is at Cannes where miracles happen and dreams break on the rocks of cold hard reality.
Cinema Paradiso
, a nice little film hardly seen in Italy, was discovered in some dive miles from the palm-lined promenades, repackaged and screened all over the world. In counterbalance, there's a forest of film scripts that remain unread, a million miles of unseen film that will remain unseen, and the movie business is all so nebulous that when I'm grown up I shall probably go into something secure like the art world or politics.

I was surprised to learn that more than half the business done at Cannes is in the porn market, erotica, hard core, snuff flicks from Brazil, bestiality from beastly places. Glamour sells, but porno seems to sell even more and, while I had been freeing my mind of unyielding opinions at uni, David had been sitting in the editing suite with Sacha Vance cutting the twenty steamy minutes of Stephanie Jones tonguing my shorn pussy into a five-minute short that he screened to distributors, not to get a release – Stephanie would have sued to be sure – but to show he had more than one string to his bow. David Trevellick would do
anything
to make a feature and,
while I wasn't entirely sure that such overt ambition was an attractive quality, what I did know was that successful artists, successful people, are sure of their goal and follow its trajectory until they get there. They don't have a bow with many strings but an arrow they fire into the heart of their vision.

At least David had paid my expenses to attend the festival. As Binky had a gap in her exam schedule, she came, too. Except for Christmas, we had spent little time together, although I had kept up a constant email appraisal of her revision. She had, as I expected, applied to King's College and, when I told Dr Goetz, he stroked his beard in the reflective way that showed his mind like a search engine was scanning the spiralling helixes of probability and chance.

‘Does she have the right attitude for King's?' he enquired.

‘If you mean does she enjoy being spanked, the answer is yes,' I replied, and he promised to have a word in the right ear.

Nothing is ever as it seems. Thank goodness.

Under the doctor's tutelage, I had become more confident. I knew how to hold my own in discussion. I knew how to walk, how to dress, how to present my chin, raised slightly, turned to one side. I had abandoned my wardrobe of jeans and trainers, ragged skirts and slashed shirts. I wore dresses that clung softly to my curves, stockings held by thin elastic garters, no knickers except on the odd occasion each month. I looked more refined, more sophisticated, more elegant. I looked older. I was older. I was nineteen, my body smooth and graceful, my thin arms like the necks of swans, my legs long and tapered in needle heels. A naked woman feels fully dressed in high-heeled shoes.

This sense of being older wasn't something friends would have observed, but a change I could see in the mirror's reflection, in the subtle depths of my dark eyes, in the serene curve of my lips, in the retroussé slope of my little nose. I had lost all need of haste, all feelings of anxiety, and experienced a curious pleasure being in the midst of my contemporaries knowing that below my clothes I wore a badge of moonlight, that I had knowledge of things that few of them would ever know. The rowing blue named Guy or Oliver or James who had taken me home and plonked me down on his oar had no notion of what pleasure he may have had. What pleasures he may have given. The students talked about current affairs and fashion, skiing holidays and idle caprices. I had tasted the forbidden fruit and that night, as if drawn by fate, I would enter the Garden of Eden.

As Binky and I clipped along in our heels towards the club, a limousine pulled up and a group of
very
important people stepped out. I knew they were very important by the way the faces of those queuing behind the blue rope lit up like the lamps on the seashore at twilight, the way tears fell from their eyes, the way they elbowed each other as they pressed forward. They waved their arms, the little girls showed their breasts, and the gorillas in dinner suits, film grips moonlighting by the look of them, pressed back like rugger props in a scrum, punching teary faces, manhandling slices of bare flesh and allowing one or two ragged nymphets to enter the hallowed portals of paradise.

Two silky women in capes slid from the limo behind a tall man with silver hair in a ponytail and another, younger man, who had won best director for
A Girl's Adventure.
His name was Van Van de Vere, and although the alliteration was becoming the soul of all that was cool, vogue and sexy, as I had yet to see the film, and as I only knew it was Van Van by the breathless chant of the fans, I didn't get that heart-moving blast of adrenaline people seem to experience when they are confronted by the famous.

Van Van was the rising star in whose slipstream David was setting out to follow, a pioneer taking high-concept erotica mainstream. Had David left the Majestic with us and remained with us that evening, he would have felt as if he had died and gone to heaven; at least he would have gone to the Garden of Eden. Such are the laws of probability and chance.

I wasn't drawn to celebrity in the same way and considered fame abstract and undependable. Imagine being famous and not being recognised. Imagine being known by reputation only and having to explain yourself all the time. I was once at a dire dreadful luncheon at the Tuscan villa where Daddy had grown up. Sitting at the long table under the lemon trees was an oil engineer from Texas who turned to the English woman at his side and asked in a voice to awaken the dead, ‘So, tell me, honey, what do you do?' Her eyebrows shot up like arrowheads. ‘I am,' she said, ‘the Minister of Health in the House of Lords,' and the Italians all had a good giggle. They were not impressed by such things. The Italians at the table were all counts and princesses. Everyone in Italy has a title and, if they don't, they do the courteous thing and make one up.

I was only a little girl at the time but the brief exchange came back to me as the man with the silver ponytail marched along the pavement away from the screaming horde and placed his arm around my
waist. He was tall, he was wearing a white suit and he had a Texan accent.

‘I've seen you somewhere before,' he said.

‘I don't think so.'

Like a giant octopus, he engulfed Binky in his free arm.

‘I see everything at Cannes. Everything,' he said. ‘You girls trying to get in?'

We were now walking towards the club entrance, the fans screaming and crying, the girls tearing off their clothes, the boys tearing scripts from their shoulder bags.

‘Actually, no,' I said.

‘Actually, no! Hey, Van Van, don't you just love that accent?'

‘British,' he said.

Binky glanced at me and shrugged. She was dressed in a black backless shift with a neckline that hung in swags and showed her long white neck to best effect. As a blonde she looked well in black. I was wearing a Diane von Furstenberg dress revealing one shoulder, the slant of the neckline repeated in the angle of the hemline, those 26 grams of golden thread complemented by Jimmy Choo shoes, a chain-mail evening bag shaped like a new moon and earrings consisting of three rings of gold, each containing a shifting universe of glittering stars, a Christmas gift from Dr Martin.

The dress, as Mummy remarked when she bought it for me at Christmas, was not designed so much to be worn as to be taken off. Now that Mummy had lost the parental fear that her daughters were going to rush out and get pregnant, something that happens for some arcane reason on council estates in the North of England, she was making a superhuman
effort to treat Binky and me more as apprentices than rivals, and saw herself as the master of seduction. Except for dipping each day into the
Daily Mail
, Mummy was not burdened with the ordeals of a formal education and believes girls should know how to ride, how to dress, how to cross their legs, when necessary and with elegance, and how to flirt in at least two languages as well as English. ‘Anyone who doesn't know one of the three really isn't worth speaking to.'