Being a Girl (27 page)

‘Come,' he said, still whispering. ‘We have one more surprise for Milly.'

Tyler ducked out of the niche and we followed him to another door in the opposite direction to which we had come. The door was made of dark wood and studded in black iron rivets. Tyler turned the round handle and motioned for me to lead the way. We left the crypt of dreaming wine and, as I made my way down a spiral of stone stairs, I imagined I was a reproduction from Marcel Duchamp's
Nude Descending a Staircase
. We had analysed the painting in art class, a small canvas depicting successive movements of a single body, and though I had looked at the print on countless occasions only now, naked on a spiral
staircase, did I recognise that just as art does not depend on an established set of rules, nor does life. I understood, too, that my lack of desire to be famous, to be a star in the movie firmament, gave me an unfettered sense of freedom. I was a Duchamp ready-made, a functional object with a fresh aesthetic.

I wasn't cold now. There was a smile touching the corners of my lips. My breasts moved just slightly with my movement and I could see in my mind's eye facets of my naked form in constantly moving shadows. I enjoyed that sense of the scene before me appearing and disappearing with each curve on the spiral. The staircase ended in another domed arena where, at the centre, there was a circular pool with water shivering on the surface like molten gold. The pool was shallow and around the perimeter, sloping up from the edge, was a bench two metres wide covered in what appeared to be fur the same lustrous colour as Binky's blonde hair.

Both in the pool and stretched around the circular bench were naked girls, girls swimming, making love, in twos and threes. I could smell the pungent scent of desire. I could hear the irrepressible gasp of girls in ecstasy. In Dante's inferno the denizens descend into deeper layers of hell. In the Garden of Eden, I had a sense of entering paradise.

Tyler Copic left us and climbed the stairs to the gallery above the pool. I noticed the bearded man, the Oscar winner, at a table with two other men and Tyler went to join them. I glanced from table to table and, as I did so, Greta told me who they were. I didn't know all their faces, but I knew their names. They were the producers, agents, screenwriters, the directors, famous actors, the men in suits. I remember David telling me the first filmmaker was Georges
Méliès, a Frenchman. The movie business began here, in France, in Cannes, and those men on the gallery were the chosen few who made the films that guided our lives and shaped our thoughts. There were no women on the gallery, no men in the pool, just a sea of beautiful girls all perfectly formed and full of grace, sculptures come to life from a pagan temple. The gilded roof of the dome warmed the light into a golden glow that gleamed like oil on their naked flesh and seemed to give those girls an inner radiance.

As we moved towards the pool, I noticed that each girl stood very straight when she walked and when she swam in the golden water her long limbs made barely a ripple. I saw when their eyes met mine that their gaze was clear, sharp, unclouded by doubt, and what was most striking was the sense of abandon, the shameless lack of inhibitions, the way that one girl would sink her tongue into the intimate parts of another, take her to orgasm, and move on to the next. There were girls who were well known, actresses and models from the pages of magazines, the girls I had seen walking among the arches above us, but here beside the pool they were starkly, nakedly themselves. There were no divisions, there was no sense of competition, just an inexorable desire for pleasure.

Greta took my hand. We slipped into the pool. It was shallow at the edge and, as I waded towards the centre, brushing shoulders with all those divine beings, my feet were nursed in fur, a moving carpet like reeds on the bed of a lake, an immense pelt from a woolly mammoth. The water was smooth like an unguent and, as I began to swim, I savoured the syrupy tang of girls, their slippery essence softening the water and igniting my senses. Greta followed and, as I climbed from the pool, we slipped down together
on the yellow fur, two sacred creatures discovering the universe.

We kissed. Her lips were full and the white chalk on her face had vanished in the oily balm of the pool. I licked her cheeks, the hollow of her throat, I slipped her breasts into my mouth, first one then the other, biting down on the crimson buds until she squealed with delight. Her breasts were small and muscular, her ribcage well defined, her stomach concave as she lay with her legs stretched out on the bench. Her pussy was open. The silver rings were slicked in juice. I caressed them with my tongue and pulled them with my teeth. As I did so, Greta May writhed under me, shivering with satisfaction. I swivelled round. I sank my tongue deep inside her creamy wet cleft and, at the same time, I felt Greta's tongue reach into the core of my body. We were joined. Two convent girls from Saint Sebastian's.

While I was sliding my tongue around Greta's bejewelled lips, a tongue pressed into my bottom and though I thought it was probably Amélie who had joined us, I wasn't certain and that sense of not knowing was all the more exhilarating. Greta began to climax below me, she raised her bottom from the furry bench and as she exploded in orgasm, I did too, and we rolled over in a mass of arms and legs. It wasn't Amélie who had joined us. It was the girl with an aviary of birds illustrating her flesh. She lowered her sex over my waiting mouth while Greta opened my knees and pushed her tongue back inside my pussy. I felt complete, joyful. There is something reassuring about the feel of the whip and the cane, but for heavenly bliss there is nothing like the taste of girls.

I swam in the pool. I kissed girls as they floated towards me. We climbed out of the creamy water and
probed each other's secret places. In this hall of paradise I would be presented with every manner of indulgence and realised that however far I was taken I was sure I would go further. I was grateful to Tyler Copic for having shown me the world of film the camera never sees, but my destiny was not to wear his brand. I was, I realised, not born for fame but for the anonymous realms of unknown pleasure.

DAVID WAS IMPRESSED
and a little resentful that I had made the acquaintance of Tyler Copic and Van Van de Vere. There are no secrets in the film industry except, perhaps, the golden pool below the Garden of Eden. David had been given a grant by the Film Council to develop a feature; there are blind babies and homeless people on the streets of Kensington, but filmmakers have to be supported, too, and using the Film Council award prudently, David asked me to go with him to Agadir for a week so I could add my input to the script. I was down from Cambridge and June was the perfect time to add a new layer to my Cannes suntan.

We stayed in a bungalow on the beach. I stretched my limbs below the sun in a black bathing suit. I let the sand trickle through my fingers and the days trickled by in the same leisurely way. We avoided the Europeans. We were travellers not tourists. We ate in the old town with its smell of spices and couscous, the women in veils, like shadows in the night. Men in turbans played backgammon, throwing the dice and stamping counters noisily over wooden boards. David handed out cigarettes and joined in, cupping his hands and blowing on the dice, bathing them in magic.

Beyond David, across the bar, I became conscious of the man who I would come to know as Omar watching me as I raised a glass of mint tea to my lips. He was standing with the light behind him in a pale linen suit, his hair sleek and shiny, his eyes endless as tunnels. I was sucked into them. David played for just a few dirhams but his winnings paid for our roast lamb, and he still had a little wad of grubby notes when we left the bar to wander back to our compound on the beach.

We are drawn to routine, to creating patterns. I ate fresh mangoes and watched the sun warming the sheet of African sea. Girls with covered heads and kohl-farded eyes sat at my feet with beads and sugared almonds as I read David's crime caper set in East London, a sort of
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
meets
Swimming With Sharks
and wisely not too original. Tinny music seeped from the minarets around the mosque and in the cheerful chaos of the kasbah I gazed at the violently-coloured sweets and nougat, woven rugs, brass hookahs, money belts with hidden pockets, men selling loose cigarettes, blind beggars with jostling hands. I found a carved alabaster atomiser filled with oil of frankincense, then I found two more and bought one each for Mummy and Binky.

We went that night back to the same little eating house. David played backgammon with a man with small impish eyes and a long white turban. Omar watched from the distance, tall in the background like the minaret above the mosque. I smiled at him with a sense of familiarity, but he didn't smile back. He just stared at me and my neck grew pink under his gaze. The man in the turban played recklessly. I told David this later, when we were alone, but he assured
me that I didn't understand the game. He knew what he was doing. It was good research. Anyway, he had won the equivalent of $50 and next day in the kasbah he bought me a sequinned silver dress that shimmered like fish scales.

The week had flown by. I liked the warm dry air. The smell of the desert. The feel of the waves on my skin. I washed my hair in rose water and shaved the down from my armpits. I sprayed oil of frankincense into the air and it fell in a haze that coated my skin. I dabbed the fragrance behind my ears and below my breasts. Loose strands of my dark hair hung negligently about my face when I pinned it up and my lips were shiny as apples when I painted them red. My skin was lustrous, warm and damp, my appearance provocative in this land of invisible women. When in Rome, do as the Romans, I thought, slipping into a white bra and pants before stepping into the silver dress.

I was the only woman in the little eating house. David had already won a pile of dirhams from the old men, $50 or more, and that was the stake Omar suggested across the table when he approached. Strict rules. It was a large sum, and for the first time the special dice was brought into play, a dice with the numbers 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64, a doubling device. Either player could double the stake at any time, and his opponent either accepted, or conceded the game.

I gripped David's arm. ‘Don't,' I said.

He shrugged me away. Omar was holding out his hand. He was urbane, gracious, looking down as if from an ivory tower.

‘Omar,' he said, introducing himself.

‘David.'

They shook hands. I was not introduced. I have no name. I am an object. A silver fish.

‘We will play three games,' Omar continued, and I marvelled at his good English.

He sat. David sat. The men in the bar moved closer to watch, and I watched them, pulling on cigarettes, rewrapping their turbans.

David started with a double four. He tossed a succession of high numbers, secured a stronghold and, after rolling a double three twice in a row, doubled the stake. The move was ambitious, aggressive, a filmmaker's move. Omar rattled the two dice in his open palm as he studied the board, then conceded.

As they gathered the pieces David tried to hide his smile. He glanced at me and a trickle of sweat ran down my back into my knickers. The room was full of smoke. Someone offered me a chair, but I preferred to stand. In my heels I was taller than most of the men. Height gives you confidence. The dice danced across the board, the counters changing patterns like chips of glass in a kaleidoscope, and it is all so meaningless this winning and losing, I thought. The second game was closer, first one then the other moving ahead, and only with the last throw of the dice did Omar win without doubling. David remained $50 ahead.

They lined up the counters. Omar looked at me for the first time, looked closely, his steady gaze validating me as a woman, and it occurred to me that he was challenging David on a level too subtle for David to understand. Like a good film script, the game wasn't about what it was about; it had undertones, subtext: desert man against city man, the third world facing the developed world; it was the past in stasis viewing the glitzy future across history and tradition, and I grasped that in this battle of cultures I was the prize. Did the Greeks not launch their fleet in pursuit of Helen after she sailed to Troy?

‘Good luck,' I said to David but I was looking at Omar.

‘Inshallah,' he said. ‘God willing.'

David threw first. He quickly moved ahead and after throwing two doubles in a row he set the doubling dice on two. The stake was now $100. It was time for Omar to forfeit the game. He played on. His expression was unchanging. His eyes turned to me as he slid his counters forward.

When David moved half his pieces into the home stretch he doubled again to $200. The amber dice thudded like drum rolls as they bounced from the sides of the board, arranging themselves enigmatically. I could smell mint tea and sweat, the frankincense on my skin. I was hot and tired. I wanted to sleep, wake with the sunrise, swim once more in the sea before flying back to London. I watched David turn the doubling dice to eight and knew that my life was about to change, completely, and forever.

Omar threw three doubles in a row, two sixes, two fours, two fives. They were level suddenly. Either could win. I was cupped like the dice in the hands of fate. David tossed a weak two and a one. Omar looked closely at the board before turning the double dice to sixteen – sixteen times $50.

I could hear the beat of my heart. My breasts were rising and falling like waves inside the sequinned dress. Before Omar's gaze I felt naked. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat and watched his hand open like the pages of a book, the dice springing from his long fingers, juggling themselves into the numbers he needed.

Omar could have doubled again before the end of the game but settled on winning $800.

There was a long sigh around the room. Then silence. There was no question of David not paying. It is something men understand. There is a code. Debts must be honoured. He looked from Omar to me, then back again. The shiny eyes of the watching men followed. Omar's expression remained unaffected.