Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (17 page)

Under the counter there was an iron safe. The goldsmith produced a key from within the folds of his cloak and, when he swung back the door, a brilliant yellow glow filled the room. He produced two one pound ingots that he gave to Samir and Samir held them out for me to take a closer look.

‘Gold,’ he said. ‘Is beautiful.’

‘It is beautiful. And you are beautiful,’ I replied.

He pointed at himself. ‘Me, me beautiful.’ Then he pointed at me. ‘Chengi, he beautiful.’

‘She.’

‘He beautiful,’ he said again. He pushed the gold ingots at me. ‘You, you take. You want?’

I pulled away. ‘No, no,’ I said, and I meant it.

He knew that. We had little language and few secrets. I smiled. I was his mother and his child. He was my father and my little boy. When we were alone, joined as one, I was Samir and Samir was me, my flesh his flesh. It was, I thought, how love should be. That love is sex in all its colours and uncountable variations.

Azar appeared in the shop and placed the ingots in a bag. The sheikh and the goldsmith touched foreheads and chests, and I was relieved to journey back to the fort where I felt safe and at home. We bathed in the stone bath, Maysoon joined us and the world was back in balance; a boy and two girls in a round tower with twelve windows. And I wondered that day as we made love with Samir if he knew the things Maysoon had taught me. Or was that our secret, the secret life of girls?

The following day, the sheikh and the other men left without a word, and I forgot my place, my role, that I was merely a woman who waited as women always wait. The days went by, two, three four, five. I felt bereft, Maysoon’s tongue small compensation for the long hours of loneliness that stole upon me. I felt abandoned, an outsider, my doubts changing to fear when at dawn one morning I awoke to find the women of the house making their way into the tower with numerous pots and bowls. Maysoon led the way, chatting and giggly, the women smiling, the bells about their ankles ringing out like funeral bells before they bury the dead. They stopped and there was silence.

Amatullah, Mo’s wife, carried an iron pot, her hands protected by cloths. She placed it down carefully on the mattress where I had been sleeping. She raised the lid and inside was a bubbling substance like the restorative goo I had seen applied to the wounded camel in the caravanserai. She removed the scarf from her head, rolled up her sleeves and stared down at me, her eyes dancing, the wrinkles growing deeper on her brow. I looked at Maysoon. The girl gave a little wave. My mouth was dry.

One of the other women held my shoulders and Maysoon took my hand. I could have fought them off but I had come to believe in fate, that we are guided by the wind and stars,
que será será
. Amatullah stirred the scalding liquid with a wooden spoon before taking a dollop of the mixture and spreading it over the bouncy blonde curls of my pubic hair.

A scream left my throat. I thought I was going to die. I gasped in pain. All the breath left my body. Amatullah shook her head and tutted. She looked angry now as she scooped out a second spoonful. She pressed her free hand into the hollow of my stomach and, as she forced the white stuff into the entrance of my vagina, it hit me that I was going to be circumcised, that once my senses were numbed by this vile concoction, Amatullah would take a knife to my vagina. The young men were away and the old men who hated me were now in charge. I was a stranger, a foreigner, an interloper. I was being punished. I was going to be robbed of my clitoris, my femininity, my secret joy of squirting girl juice into the atmosphere.

I looked up at Maysoon.

‘Is OK,’ she said, about all she could say in English, and she traced her finger down over the blue line that ran from below her bottom lip and down into her lush cleavage.

Tears were falling from my eyes, but my fear disappeared as quickly as it had emerged. I felt ashamed. I wasn’t going to be robbed of my sexuality. I was being invited into the clan. I was one of them and I realised that that was what I wanted to be. That if Samir was going to leave me waiting while he went about his business, I needed to be united to the tribe, a member of his harem. I had been sad and now I felt joyful.

Amatullah continued, spreading the mixture as you would smooth dough into a cake tray, coating the area from just below my waist, across my pubic mount and into the crack of my bottom. While the poultice set, she ran her fingertips over my limbs and her look seemed to say that she was impressed not to find any other superfluous hair.

The woman holding my shoulder, Yasmeen, a timid soul with a squint in her eyes, released her grip and turned to pick up the brass bowl on the floor behind her. Her fingers, I noticed, were stained the same shade of blue as the liquid the bowl contained. I didn’t work in the house. Like Maysoon, my one task was to please the master, but I recalled Yasmeen grinding petals and roots in a mortise and pestle. I remembered the words she used: indigo and saffron. She had made a dye from the plants that grew along the banks of the muddy stream beside the fort.

Amatullah carefully soaped and sponged the lower half of my face, over my chin and down between my breasts. With all this fuss being made over me, my nipples popped out, eager for attention, and Amatullah paused in her ministrations to give them a good hard tweak. I yelped. The women laughed and I laughed with them. They were unaffected. They had a naturalness I envied and tried to emulate. They had their role, their tasks. They cooked. They cleaned. Yasmeen collected herbs and spices. Maysoon and I provided the release from tension a house full of women always stirs.

This is the life inside a harem and the mere sound of the word was poetry that resonated musically in my mind. I was a slave girl, a concubine. I had no responsibilities except to please my master. Like Maysoon, I was an object of desire, and the awareness that I was valued in this house without mirrors had freed me of the vanity being desirable inspires.

Not every woman is a courtesan, but it is the logical corollary of being a woman, of painting your face, of dressing to reveal your breasts, your spine, your legs, your shape. Unless you are determined to remain a virgin, it is only a question of the circumstances or the price under which you agree to strip off your clothes and spread your legs. The female in the animal kingdom lets off an odour to attract the male just as we apply scent as an erotic signal. The consorts of the rich men I have met, the wives of peers and ambassadors, the rock chicks and footballer’s girlfriends, ornament their ears, throats and fingers with precious stones, they hobble their feet in Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo. Their underwear is skimpy, silky, soft, designed not for wearing but taking off. Was the decoration of a blue tattoo really any different?

The poultice had hardened. Amatullah picked at the top edge and, when she pulled it back, I yelped again, louder than ever. I’d suffered unnecessary hair waxings before, but they were nothing compared with this. My golden fleece was no more, every curl that decorated my mount had gone in one foul swoop. It felt as if I were on fire. And if that wasn’t enough, while Yasmeen and another girl held my legs as if I were about to have a baby, Amatullah jabbed around my vagina with a pair of tweezers snapping out any stray hairs left behind.

‘Ouch, ouch, ouch,’ I said, and Maysoon copied me.

‘Ouch, ouch, ouch.’

The women laughed and I laughed with them. I was sweaty and hot. The sun was already stoking up the engines for another sweltering ride across the sky and the last of the morning shadows had fled from the room. Amatullah took a handful of chalk dust from another bowl and coated my pubic mount. The pain subsided and she washed me again.

‘Chengi Akht, no move,’ Maysoon said.

‘As-salaam, Akht, ‘ I answered, yes, sister, I’ll do my best.

I was relieved when it was Amatullah with her steady hand, not Yasmeen with her squint, who reached for the needle, a sadistic little tool with a short stem fixed to a cylindrical cork handle. The women grew quiet as she made a continual series of jabs in a triangular pattern just below the centre of my bottom lip. She carried on in a line down to my chin and then did the same again, dipping the point of the needle into the blue dye. I noticed blood on the white muslin Yasmeen used to wipe away the excess liquid. But I wasn’t afraid. All the women in that room were ornamented with the tribe’s arachnid and with it I would finally be accepted.

I had to hold my head back and remain very still while Amatullah worked her way over my throat, between my collar bones and down over the narrow groove between my perky breasts that had grown fuller in those weeks I had been living in the fort. Lying flat on the mattress, my stomach curved inwards in a hollow bowl, but when I stood and took a deep breath, I had a small belly I was trying to make bigger.

The women paused and we drank tea. It was slow, hot, arduous work and Amatullah had to gather her reserves to make sure she didn’t make a mistake. I was, I liked to think, the sheikh’s favourite concubine. My markings should be perfect and if my pubic mount was about to be engraved with a spider I wanted it to be the prettiest most spirited spider in the house.

My bottom lip felt numb and the area under my chin was stinging, but it was a nice pain, like diving into cold water, or running really, really fast at the end of a race. For some reason, I remembered winning the 5000 metres for my school at the county championships. I had been third all the way through the event. There was half a lap to go. My legs felt like lead. But the girls were calling my name. I listened to their chant, it was a buzz, an ego rush, and I found a store of energy I didn’t know I had.

‘Faster,’ I said to myself, ‘Faster. You can do it.’

My legs seemed to grow longer and I stretched out, passing the two girls I’d been chasing to break the finishing tape with five metres to spare. It was, as far as I could recall, the first time I had ever pushed through the mental threshold and gone beyond myself. This aptitude to break barriers and cross frontiers was coded in my DNA. It was no accident that I was lying there naked and sweaty surrounded by those Arab women, Amatullah continuing her art, perforating my skin with sharp jabs like the mechanical needle on a sewing machine and, unexpectedly, I recalled the second verse from Thomas Hood’s fourth year poem:

Work! work! work! 
While the cock is crowing aloof! 
And work work work, 
Till the stars shine through the roof! 
It’s Oh! to be a slave 
Along with the barbarous Turk, 
Where woman has never a soul to save, 
If this is Christian work!

Strange words. I ran them through my mind like a prayer and it occurred to me that with the tribal markings I would never be naked again. I would always feel covered, in costume. The world would know who I was and to whom I belonged. I wanted to belong and realised that in my wanderings as a diplomat’s daughter from school to school and from country to country, I had never really belonged anywhere.

With these thoughts, and with utter shame, I felt a drip slip from the lips of my freshly
denuded vagina. I felt excited. No, I felt warm and content, and when I am warm and content, silky liquids seep from the salacious little creature that lives between my legs. I felt feverish, light-headed. I felt the same way that I had felt that day when I won the 5000 metres. It was at the time my greatest achievement, and I had a feeling that my being branded with the blue tattoo was greater still, that I had arrived, that I was all that I could be.

If
Amatullah was aware that I was leaking, she ignored this shameless display. Her needle punctured and dotted its way down the groove below my breasts. Yasmeen wiped away the trickles of blood, and Amatullah did the same again, injecting the blue dye into the minute wounds, working her way over my belly button and down towards the pink scalded plain of my pubic bone. She paused and took a sip of tea. Yasmeen wiped the area, cleaning away the traces of chalk, and used a fresh cloth to dry the surface. She looked into my eyes and there was a brief conspiratorial moment as she ran the cloth through the lip of my vagina to dry the damp discharge.

Amatullah’s sleeves had slipped down her arms and there was a collective sigh of relief among the women as she rolled them back up again. She took a breath and leaned forward. I could no longer see what she was doing and closed my eyes as the point of the needle danced over my tender flesh. She worked quickly. My mount was her canvas and she was Salvador Dalí.

Yasmeen continually wiped the area. Amatullah coated the needle in dye and, with my eyes pressed shut, I could see in my mind the spider surfacing through my skin like a photograph developing in a tray of chemicals. The creature was already there, it had always been there. Amatullah wasn’t engraving the spider, she was tracing it. I was born with the stigmata.

I kept my eyes closed. I felt like a baby swimming in the amniotic fluids inside the womb. I thought about Mummy at home in the garden. The roses would be in full bloom, the petals turning brown around the edges, ready to fall. I wanted to call Mummy. I wanted to tell her I was safe. I was fulfilled. I was happy. I was me.

A
LL NIGHT MY BODY
trembled with fever. I was in a sweat, my mind blank, my flesh sizzling as the indigo dye burned indelibly in a line from my chin to my sore naked pussy.

All next day, I was shaking with chills. As I watched the shadows inching around the walls, the contentment I’d felt as Amatullah put the final touches to the spider slipped into despair and melancholy. I had an intuition, a sixth sense, that something terrible was going to happen, that my being branded wasn’t the beginning of something but the end. The shadows conjured up an army of dark figures coming to carry me into exile. I was Juliet pining for my Romeo and saw our love ending in poison and death.

Maysoon sat beside the bed. She brought me food, dates, cashews, soups made from spices, sweet balls of rice with sesame. I had an emptiness inside. I tried to eat, but had no appetite, no energy. The girl held my hand and stroked my hair. The pain of those million pinpricks was constant but bearable and I was overcome by a growing sense of misery and loss.

My desire to have Samir inside me was an ague; a craving. I had a cramp in my womb, a sensation that was both unsettling and exhilarating. The fever returned when I slept. I tossed and turned and in my nightmares I was lost in the desert, a barren plateau in every direction; I was on a train racing over a bridge without tracks; I saw myself falling and felt saddened when I realised with horror that I was pregnant, my belly swollen like ripe fruit, a bottomless pit awaiting below my churning arms.

I awoke perspiring with a hollow tummy and a yearning to have the sheikh’s children. I wanted lots of them, handsome boys with shiny eyes and girls who would wear the blue tattoo. In my dream, I saw us walking together as a family, not in the coastal town beyond the fort, but in London, along Sloane Street and Knightsbridge.

It took many days for the marks to heal. My chin was bruised and there were scabs in a line down my chest. I couldn’t see the spider clutching my pubic area. The wound was covered in a mottled carapace like the shell of a tortoise. It stung when I peed. I gritted my teeth and tears sprang to my eyes. Maysoon wiped away the drips with her fingertips and I felt nostalgic for those sweltering afternoons squirting in playful fountains into the air. Time is relentless, always racing. The past withers the moment the page turns.

The light in the arched windows above my bed grew less harsh and the oven heat of the tower lessened as August must have drifted into autumn and I imagined the trees in the garden at home turning into a quilt of russet and gold.

When I asked Maysoon where Samir had gone, she shrugged as if such things were not her concern. She threw up her fine shoulders and smiled, her lips turning into a bow, her white teeth framing the little pink tongue that had impelled me to edge of delirium. While I had not lost the custom of thinking about the future, Maysoon was fixed in the moment, to the urges of her body and passing desires.

I couldn’t help wondering what Maysoon would do when she were old, when her flesh lost its sweet smell and suppleness. But the girl seemed to have been born knowing that the future we imagine is abstract, unreal, the false God that makes us sacrifice present joys for illusory far greater joys at some unspecified time. It is this attitude that makes us build careers, invest, save for pensions, rejecting the day for the gnomes of tomorrow.

Maysoon hooked her fingers about my lips to force out a smile. She ran her hand through the air, showing me a boat at sea, her mime confirming my guess that the sheikh was taking the Indian man and the other immigrants I had met to the Canary Islands to begin a new life. We are all nomads, each one of us eternally making our way home. The girl danced. She kissed my lips, her long black hair tickling my breasts. She ate the food I didn’t eat and left with the empty bowls to join the activity and gossip among the women.

One of Scheherazade’s
stories
is about a small animal that lived at the top of a tower in a state of lethargy and awoke when someone climbed the stairs. Like the chameleons that basked in the sun on the fortress walls, the creature had the ability to light up and changed colour as the steps drew closer. The story defined me those long days without Samir. Each time I heard the sound of the door opening and closing, the swish of robes along the walkway with its earthenware tiles patterned with brick-red spiders, the spider between my legs pulsed with life as if my lover had finally come.

My mind healed as the scabs fell away, but that feeling that my future was uncertain remained, a pain only the sheikh could heal. I hungered for him and feared he would never come and came to see that fear and arousal are patterns on the same piece of cloth.

The door was no longer locked. I could escape. But why would I? Where would I go? I was no longer a nomad. I was home, a child in a diaphanous dress that billowed about me as I explored the fort’s many corridors and hidden rooms; they were endless, a maze, and sometimes I became lost and had to wind my way back through the labyrinth like Ariadne after slaying the Minotaur. Some of the rooms must have been empty for many years, and there were rooms below ground with the cold chill of things best forgotten.

The two old men who had been infuriated when I first arrived with the sheikh followed my every move with glaucoma-dulled eyes, watching me as if I were a cuckoo hatching from a parakeet’s nest. I watched them chewing on wads of betel, spitting, kicking up eddies of dust as they shuffled away. I would scurry off on bare feet to join the women on hot afternoons when they sat in the shade under the colonnade in the courtyard making jewellery.

They threaded silver chains with turquoise and coral, amber and desert jade, their creations all the more remarkable because they were put away and never worn. The women clucked their tongues as they talked. I understood what they were saying but not always what they meant. I had learned Arabic like a child by listening. The women laughed and corrected my pronunciation, their words like lines of poetry with a distinctive metre, a rhythm, a subtlety. Their words were a libretto. A continuum. Like time. It was passing. Another sunset. Another sunrise. Another day without Samir.

It was early morning, cool still. I was in the kitchen, filling my belly, and watched as Amatullah and Yasmeen filled three baskets with necklaces and bracelets.

There was an air of excitement all through the fort. Traders with pack animals and colourful costumes had appeared from the south. Yasmeen told me they came every year and the caravanserai became raucous with the snorts and whinnies of camels and horses, the snake charmer playing a flute, the sound of a hammer beating a metal pot, the press of people enjoying the cool now the hot months were passing.

Did I look sad and lost? I’m sure I did.

‘Chengi, you come,’ Amatullah said.

I pointed to myself.

‘Me?’ I asked.

She looked around the room as if searching for someone who wasn’t there, then smiled. ‘Yes, girl, you,’ she said and my heart swelled in my chest.

‘
Ma’assalama.’

Thank you, I said.

Amatullah threw up her hands to show there was no need for thanks. I was one of them, a woman among women. To hide my hair, they dressed me in a blue quilted burkha and I carried the third basket out into the crowds.

Amatullah and Yasmeen were calm, unruffled women who moved through the fortress like shadows. But when they bartered with the merchants, they metamorphosed into harpies, raising their fists, cackling and hollering, parting with the trinkets as if those necklaces and bracelets were glued to the baskets in which they lay wrapped in muslin cloths. In contrast, their quick fingers grasped for the goods they were taking in exchange: saffron, worth its weight in gold, Yasmeen said; rugs from Persia, shimmering bolts of fabric from Pakistan, bush meat packed in salt from Kenya, live birds from faraway jungles, foods for a feast I assumed was to celebrate the return of Samir.

I had made a vow long ago never to wear knickers again and, except for the St Christopher on a thong around my neck, I wore nothing beneath the burkha. My head was covered and my kohl-framed eyes were hidden behind a mesh. The area below my bottom lip was itchy and it seemed as if the thread was stretching as the blue spider awoke from its slumbers and slid down into the furrowed lips of my vagina. My throat was dry. My breath came in short gasps. The earthy smells of men and animals made me wet and feverish.

A plump, bare-headed Arab in a dusty white kaftan was beating the flanks of a donkey with a whip, the sound of those lashes like a piece of music once loved and heard again unexpectedly. He leaned back, flexing his arm and, as the leather snapped, I felt a tingle down my spine. My palms were damp. My back was running with sweat and I felt breathless as I recalled the tongue of the whip crossing my bare flesh on the boat, the sheikh extinguishing the fire with his tongue, the stripes I wore with pride and which healed all too quickly. There is something unutterably arousing being hidden in veils, something masochistic, yet perverted, and my desire for the sheikh became so intense I felt a trickle of drool slip down my thigh.

I didn’t realise I had come to a complete halt. I had closed my eyes and saw myself in the cabin at sea, my fingers clenched around the porthole, my backside baring the marks of the cane administered by the mechanic. I remembered the feeling of relief as I bent forward, curling my toes, gritting my teeth, the snakebite of the sheikh’s short-handled whip searing my spread cheeks, that alchemical miracle of pain turning to pleasure as the lines of fire sizzled across my astonished bottom. Six times the lash came down and with the seventh my fate was sealed, I was purified, consecrated as the sheikh’s concubine.

My knees trembled. Moisture was gathering between my legs and around the tops of my thighs.

The plump man must have known I was a girl who enjoyed the taste of the whip. He had stopped flogging the donkey. When I opened my eyes, he was standing close to me staring through the mesh screen into my yearning soul, my unquenchable thirsts. He ran the tips of his podgy fingers over the lash he was holding and grinned a mouthful of red-stained teeth. That man wanted to beat me and it was terrifying to realise that I wanted to be beaten. It was discipline that I needed, and it was this deficiency since the sheikh had left that had found me mournful and melancholic. I was a slave to my own primal hungers. I could take the whip but would never be tamed. This was my weakness and my strength. You are what you think. Be yourself and try to be happy. But first, be yourself.

Odd phrases as if from some other world fluttered like pennants in my confused mind. The spider was moving. My pussy was sodden. My mouth had fallen open.

‘
Assalamu alaikum.’

God be with you, the man said, our momentary connection making me feel as if I were standing there stark naked.

My throat tightened with anguish and I would have remained rooted to the spot had Yasmeen not grabbed my hand and pulled me away.

‘Tut, tut, tut, Chengi,’ she said, and I realised Yasmeen was wiser than I had thought, that she had been privy to my hysterical musings, that my tendency to underestimate people was, as Mummy said, my Achilles’ heel.

We hurried back into the fort, our baskets filled. Being out in the world, even for that short time, was invigorating. I was a vampire with a transfusion of fresh blood. Those days of doubt had slipped back beneath the surface of things. I climbed the stairs with a silver tureen I found in the kitchen. I sat outside the stone shower, leaned against the battlements, the sun dipping in the east over the sea, and studied in the fading light the spider’s reflection in the shiny sides of the bowl.

By raising my chin and pulling on the thread, by flexing and contracting my vagina muscles, I could urge the spider to go up on all eight legs. I could make it move one way, then the other, and I could imagine nothing more erotic than Samir’s resolute cock parting the eight dancing legs and feeding the ravenous creature the spider was guarding.

The tattoo branded me as a member of the clan and protected the clan’s possessions. I was a part of something. I belonged. I shook myself like a puppy running out of the sea and, with an intake of breath, a sigh of relief, a moan that glided up from my chest, I slid forward, my legs spread. My pussy was a lake. My clit throbbed, smarted, vibrated like a bell that rang out the message that I had been neglecting this little fount of all pleasure.

It had been weeks since I had last had an orgasm. The sight and sound of the lash in the caravanserai had reminded me of who I was, what I needed. I stroked the spider. I found the pumping heart of its hidden eye and coated the bowl I was holding with a squirt of creamy warm broth that gushed out of me like nectar from an exotic fruit, waves of luscious discharge thick as milk from a cow.

If only men knew!

That night after we ate, our bellies engorged, Maysoon and I danced. The women had made me a costume like that which I had seen the girl wearing the night I came to the fort, the same close-fitting cap fringed with pearls that covered her face in a constantly moving veil, the same arrangement of beads looped in strings across her torso in such a way that, as she danced, so her breasts were alternatively covered and uncovered; the green gemstone sparkling in her navel above the diaphanous curtain of her low slung skirt that revealed and concealed her sex as her belly gyrated, the lush dome of golden flesh like a rising sun that mesmerised the men gathered about the fire.

Never before had I seen anything so sensual, so erotic, so arousing. Now I too could dance the dance. I had those weeks learned from Maysoon how to grind my hips and rotate my distended belly, nurtured during those days of indolence. My limbs were long, my body unblemished except for the mark, as white as candlewax now that I had spent so much time in the shade.

Maysoon hummed a tune and we moved in perfect rhythm, ivory and golden, like two queens from an extravagant chess set. We danced until we were breathless, we shed our costumes and the taste of her warm brine in my mouth that night was an elixir, a magic potion, the antidote to the poison Juliet had so foolishly gulped down her throat.