The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

A MAP OF THE PAIN by Maxim Jakubowski

IT ALL BEGINS in Blackheath, in South East London. They are in the kitchen, chatting aimlessly while preparing the evening meal. He drones on about the cutbacks at the BBC and his fears for his job. She isn’t really listening to him. Her mind is miles away, in a bed with another man who touches her in all the right places, in all the right ways, another man who has betrayed her so badly.

He moves over to the fridge. Opens it, searches inside.

The heat is oppressive. London has not seen the likes of it for years. And he still wears his tie.

“I don’t think we have enough tomatoes for the salad,” he says.

Her husband the vegetarian.

She fails to answer.

“I said we’re low on tomatoes.”

The information registers through a haze of mental confusion.

“I’ll pop over to the 7-Eleven on the High Street,” she volunteers. “They’re still open. I should have bought more stuff over lunch at the Goodge Street Tesco. It won’t take me long,” she says.

“I’ll come along,” her husband says. “Keep you company.”

“No, it’s all right,” she answers. “You can prepare the dressing.”

He’s always been good that way, willing to cook and do things in the kitchen. She picks up her shoulder bag, with her purse and the manuscript she’s working on and walks out onto the mews.

The night air is stale and sticky. She is wearing her white jeans and an old promotional tee-shirt.

She walks at her usual jaunty pace past the Common. Toward the shops. And breezes past the convenience store where a few spotty youths are squabbling by the ice-cream counter, and a couple of drab, middle-aged men are leafing through the top shelf girlie magazines. She heads on to the railway station. Network South East. The next train to Charing Cross is in five minutes. She uses her monthly Travelcard.

At the London station, she calmly collects her thoughts. Smiles impishly at the imagined face of her husband, waiting all this time for the final ingredients for the salad, back at their house. She catches the tube to Victoria and connects with the last train departure to Brighton.

Once, with her lover, she had gone there for a weekend, yeah a dirty week-end, she supposes. It was on the eve of a political party conference and the seaside resort had been full of grim-faced politicians and swarms of television journalists. She’d spent most of her time outside the hotel room where they had fucked more times than she had thought possible in the space of thirty-six hours, absolutely terrified of venturing across her spouse, or some colleagues of his who might be familiar with her, even though he worked on the business and economics side and she well knew he could not be in Brighton right then.

Katherine spent the night ambling up and down the seafront, enjoying the coolness of the marine breeze and sea air after the Turkish bath of her London suburbs and the publisher’s offices where she worked. It was wonderfully quiet; no drunks to accost her, just alone with her thoughts, the memories, the scars of lust, the mess that her life now was.

Her lover had betrayed her. And she, in turn, had betrayed both men.

She wanted to wipe her mind clean of everything, to erase the wrong-doing and the pain she had inflicted on them. To start anew, like a baby arriving into the world, free of fault, innocent, like a blank tape ready for a new set of experiences, a new life almost.

In the morning, she booked herself into a small bed and breakfast on a square facing the old pier. She shopped for new clothes, which she paid for by credit card. She ate fish and chips, like a tourist and even found the Haagen-Dazs ice-cream parlour she remembered from a previous visit to one of the backstreets. Maraschino cherry delight. The weather was warm but nowhere near as bad as London. On the promenade, she bought a floppy straw hat to protect her pale skin from the fierce sun. She took a nap in the afternoon in the cramped room of the small hotel. Before dozing off, she had switched the TV on and seen her husband on screen looking all jolly and smug on the business lunch programme, reporting from the car park of an automotive parts factory. It had been recorded two days earlier. She awoke later from a dreamfree sleep, enjoyed a leisurely bath during which she depilated her legs and cut her toe nails, and, clean and refreshed, slipped on the new lightweight dress she had purchased earlier, low-cut, dark blue with white polka dots, billowing away down over her long legs from a high waist.

“First night away,” she remarked to herself, as she walked out into the dusk.

She meets this guy in a pseudo-Texan Cantina. He says he’s from one of the unions. She’s had a couple of beers, and he offers her a glass of tequila. It burns her throat and stomach.

“I canvass for Labour locally, where I live,” she tells him, to indicate that at least they share the same political affiliation. She’s always suspected, despite his indifferent denials, that that bastard of a lover she’d been involved with had actually voted Tory. How in hell could she have slept with him?

He smiles at her, well, more of a leer really.

So what? she thinks.

She follows him, his name is Adam Smith, back to the bar of the Old Ship where he is staying for the conference. It’s already pretty late, and there are only a handful of people left in the penumbra of the bar. She has a couple of vodka and oranges. Her head feels light. Better this than the heavy burden of all the memories and the guilt, she reckons.

“Is that a wedding ring?” the guy enquires, pointing at her finger.

“Yes,” she answers. “Does it bother you?”

It all floods back. How her lover would delicately slip both the wedding and the thin engagement rings off her fingers before ceremoniously undressing her from top to bottom, before they would make love in the basement to the sound of the whirring fan and the light of the long-life candle she herself had bought near the Reject Shop on Tottenham Court Road.

“No, I was just wondering, that’s all,” he remarks.

“If it bothers you, I can take them off,” Katherine says.

“No, no,” he says, annoyed by this turn of events. But while he is still saying this, she has already wet her finger and slipped both the rings off, deliberately dropping them at the bottom of her glass.

“Satisfied?” she asks.

Is she drunk, he wonders? “They’ll be closing the bar any minute, I reckon,” he says, ignoring her earlier remark. “Can I entice you up to my room for a final nightcap?”

She isn’t drunk. Just a bit lost, she guesses. She looks at this man called Smith of all things. His tie isn’t straight, his shirt has a few drink stains, scattered across its front. She can read him like a map. But what the hell?

“Yeah, why not?” she answers, grabbing her bag still loaded with the manuscript from her old life, and stands up, abandoning the rings in the half-empty glass of booze.

As he inserts the electronic card into the door, he leers at her again. Why must he be so obvious, Katherine thinks?

The door swings open.

He stands aside and Katherine walks in.

The room is medium-sized, dominated by a large king-size bed. A door on the right leads to a bathroom. On the walls, anonymous prints of naval victories from the Napoleonic wars. She smiles; it might have been worse: it could have been the classic print of the Eurasian woman with the blue face. If it had been, she thinks she might have walked straight out again.

He follows her in and the door slams quietly.

He walks to the bedside table where a large bottle of scotch stands, no, bourbon. Four Roses.

He takes his jacket off. His shirt is straining at the waist, his girth stretching the button holes.

“Drink?” Adam suggests.

She hates the stuff but answers “Why not?” That’s how it’s supposed to go, isn’t it?

“So,” he sits down on the edge of the orange-brown bed-spread, loosens his tie. “How much?”

“How much what?” She hesitantly sips the harsh booze from the glass.

“How much do you charge? All that married woman crap doesn’t cut much ice, you know. I don’t care, I’ll pay the going rate.” He takes a thick black leather wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket. Opens it and pulls out two fifty pound notes. Katherine notices there are quite a lot more where they came from.

He hands her the cash. “Okay,” she says, taking it.

She stands to begin undressing.

He smiles.

She unzips the dress where it cinches her waist and pulls it up above her head. And off. All she is wearing is her underwear. The black bustier and knickers set and the matching suspender belt and dark stockings. What she always wore for the assignments with her lover. Her skin is pale, her tummy flat like a marble table, her thighs full, the tight suspender belt biting in to the skin above her hips.

She moves to unhook the bustier but Adam interjects: “No, keep your top on. You haven’t got much up there. I’d rather you didn’t.”

She stands there, legs apart, wondering what to do next. Thinking, why am I so passive? I know what I’m doing. Fleetingly, she remembers how, one night, in the thrall of rapture, he had whispered in her ear: “One day, Kate, you will walk all the sexual stations of the Cross, you see.” At the time, she hadn’t quite understood, but had found it sexy, him saying things like that, it fired her lust up even more. Now, she was beginning to understand.

He gulps down the contents of his glass. She obliges, doing the same. He pours more bourbon.

“Well?” she asks.

“Take your pants off,” the union representative demands.

Katherine unhooks a stocking, but the guy interrupts:

“No, keep your stockings on.”

She bends and pulls the knickers down, slipping the thin fabric across the nylon and over her flat shoes. She leaves the garment on the hotel room floor and straightens up again.

Her pubic curls lie flattened against her damp skin. He gazes at her lower stomach, all traces of his smile now disappearing as he drinks in the sight of her nudity.

“Come here,” he says. She moves closer to him, her cunt facing his eyes, as he remains in the chair.

His fingers invade her thatch, spreading the dark curls. He slips a finger into her gash. Probes.

“You’re not very wet, are you?”

Katherine stays silent.

He withdraws his finger from her sex. Brings it up to his nose, sniffs. Grunts.

“Suck my cock.”

He unzips his fly.

Katherine kneels by the chair. He pulls his penis out. It’s semi-erect, pinker than others she has come across. Not that she’s encountered that many. A handful of clumsy groping sessions and fucking in the darkness at University, following alcoholic parties, and then her husband, uncircumcized and reliably sturdy, and five years later the damn lover, circumcized, thicker, darker, pulsating, veined like a tender tree. Life as an uninterrupted parade of male members!

She takes the man’s cock between her fingers, pulls on the foreskin and the glans emerges, reddish, the colour of fever. She lowers her head, opens her lips and takes the member into her moist insides. He’s not too big. She hates it when it makes her choke. Her tongue slowly makes contact with the swelling penis, circles its extremity; he tastes different, a slightly acrid, sweaty odour, musk and urine. Suddenly, she feels his hand on her head, fingers burrowing into her thick curls, pressuring her mouth to go deeper and swallow his cock up to its hairy hilt. The tip of her tongue dallies over the cock’s small hole. When she touches him there, there’s a trembling, a nervous shudder that courses through his whole body. She senses he is about to come and sucks harder on his now fully-grown member. He tries to hold back but she stimulates the base of his cock with her fingers while her tongue relentlessly keeps on teasing his opening.

“You bitch,” he sighs, aware that she is trying to finish him off. Expediting the job.

But the surge can’t be halted, and within a few seconds his whole body spasms. As this happens, Katherine opens her mouth wide to disengage herself from his throbbing cock, but he viciously holds her head down even harder and comes inside her mouth. She gags on the hot stream of come and has no other choice than to swallow the stuff. Bastard, she mutters under her breath. It sticks in her throat. She feels like being sick. Finally, he releases his hold on her head and she is allowed to pull her mouth back. She wipes her lips with the back of her hand, to eliminate the lingering taste of his seed.

His quickly shrivelling penis still dangling like a marionette from his open trousers, he gets out of the chair before she has time to stand up again and signals her to the bed. She sits on the edge, and he forces her down so that her long legs dangle over the side. He lowers himself down to the carpet, and sticks two fingers into her cunt.

“Still dry, hey?” he says, forcing his way past her labia.

She looks down at him, his face cunt-level, thinning hair bobbing up and down between her thighs. She distractedly notices there’s a ladder near the knee of her left stocking. How did that happen, she wonders?

His fingers slip in and out of her sex. She has no feeling of excitement. This is what being an object is, she reckons.

“Your cunt hair is too long,” he tells her, parting the curls around her opening.

“I don’t go to the barbers very often,” she attempts a feeble joke.

“Wait there. Don’t move,” he says, rising and moving over to the settee where a battered attaché-case lies. He opens it and pulls out a nail kit and a small pair of scissors.

He pulls on her pubic curls, untangling the longer ones and trims the extremities along a straight line. It feels funny. She looks down after he has completed the work. Her bush is now distinctly thinner, and the lips of her sex are plainly visible behind the growth.

“There, that’s nicer, isn’t it?” he remarks. “Now you can see the merchandise.”

She doesn’t answer.

“I want to see inside,” he says. “Use your own fingers. Open up.”

She obeys.

He peers inside her, his eyes piercing her innards.

Her lover used to say that her insides were the colour of coral. She closes her eyes.

“I’m going to fuck you now,” Adam says. “Where do you keep your condoms? In your handbag?”

“I don’t have any,” Katherine replies. “I’ve already told you, I’m not a whore.”

“Bloody hell,” the man says. “Shit. You don’t think I’m gonna put my cock inside there; I don’t know where you’ve been before.”

“You didn’t mind my mouth,” she says, a tad angrily. “That was good enough for you, wasn’t it?”

Only five cocks before, she thinks. A bloody woman of experience… No, not even, the first two she never gave head to.

She looks at this man, and finds him ridiculous. Overweight, standing there with his small cock peering out between the curtains of his half-open trousers.

She giggles.

He reacts badly and slaps her across the cheek.

“Don’t…”

“I’ve paid. I’ll do exactly what I want to do, woman.”

“Bastard.”

He slides his belt out of the trouser top, and she’s totally unprepared for this, as he grabs both her wrists and binds them together. Tight. She’s too slow to react. Vulnerable, obscenely undressed in front of this stranger with her cunt wide open, her black stockings in disarray, her small breasts feeling heavy inside the cups of her bustier, her cheek still on fire from the blow. Adam pulls her by her bound wrists towards the bathroom, pushes the door open with his foot.

Katherine is frightened. What now? She has read too many serial killer novels. For Christ’s sake, she edits them. In her bag over at the bed and breakfast, there’s even a manuscript for one that takes place in Arizona. Fiction editor found slaughtered in Brighton hotel. Will he slit my throat and arrange my mutilated body in a pornographic vision that goes beyond obscenity? Will he carve off the tips of my breasts, insert the carving knife in my cunt and slit me all the way up like a chicken? Will he cut my labia off and display them partly chewed inside my open mouth?

She shudders.

He pushes her down on the toilet.

“There,” he says.

“Yes?” she enquires.

“I want you to pee, and I want to watch. Come on, open those legs wide, wider, now. Come on. Show me that piss squirting out of you.”

“No,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Undo my hands, then maybe. If I can manage it.”

He does. She tries.

Katherine has never peed in front of a man, of any one. She blushes intensely. Closes her eyes and concentrates. He fills a toothbrush mug with water and forces her to swallow. And again. She can feel the warmth inside her stomach, the muscles tensing. He keeps on standing there, silent now, watching entranced the quivering, moist entrance to her cunt.

Finally, the flow is unleashed. The odorous liquid flows.

It feels both painful, like a particularly strong period bursting from her and rupturing some remote part of her body, but also pleasurable, like a fourth division orgasm, a satisfying but unremarkable feeding of the lust inside, not unlike the routine lovemaking she had been having for ages with her husband.

Adam watches as the thin stream of pee first dribbles out, then streams arc-like into the bowl, emerging from the thin opening between her cunt lips. As she tightens her throat, he approaches a finger, allows the liquid to pearl over it like a cascade, and inserts it suddenly into her pouring aperture. Then another finger, yet another and savagely stretching the muscles inserts his whole fist into her. Katherine screams in agony. But the windows of the hotel room are closed and Brighton doesn’t hear.

Finally, the flow stops and he withdraws his hand. It still hurts and she is about to cry, as he slaps her face again and cries out:

“You bitch, you enjoyed that, didn’t you.”

She nods.

“Stick a finger up your arse.”

She makes a gesture of protest but he swings the belt close to her cheek.

He pulls her off from the toilet bowl, pushes her onto her knees, on all fours. Manipulates her so that her rump points upward and guides her right hand (how could he know she was left-handed?) toward the dark cranny of her anus.

“Now,” he said.

To urge her on, he places his foot above her other hand, as if to tread on it.

She slowly inserts her middle finger into the puckered aperture. The ring of muscles rebels against the intrusion and she barely manages half a nail.

“More,” Adam says, and steps harder onto her free hand.

She pushes the finger harder. The ring of flesh relaxes. She feels another need to pee, but holds back. Finally, the finger plants itself deep inside her arsehole, spearing herself up to its first joint. The feeling is not unpleasant.

“Dirty girl, hey? Slut.”

She looks up at him.

“Take it out.”

She does. “Lick it clean.”

She does.

Then, despite her tired protests, he binds her hands together again with the leather belt and pulls her back toward the bedroom. She stumbles and he allows her to fall over the settee. He stands back and says:

“Yeah, that’s it. Keep your legs wide open. I’m still going to fuck your brains out, you know. I can get condoms on room service, if I want. Whenever I want. Bitch.”

He takes a swig from the bottle of bourbon and sits back on the bed, smugly watching her spread-eagled across the settee, her genitals in technicolour display like a centrefold in a skin magazine.

“Whenever I want,” drinking from the bottle again.

Half an hour later, he has fallen asleep and Katherine manages to untie the belt and liberate her hands. She dresses hurriedly, abandoning the black knickers she’s had to wipe her moist crotch with. She feels soiled, violated like never before. The man’s jacket is draped over the chair by the door. She pulls out his wallet and takes all the cash. At least six hundred pounds.

Softly, softly into the Brighton night.

It’s now New York.

Autumn has come, or rather Fall as they call it over there.

Katherine has travelled to Manhattan and found a drab, cheap room in an equally cheapo rundown hotel a few blocks off Times Square, where she often has to jostle with local prostitutes in the somewhat seedy reception area, she picking up her keys – there are never any messages, they booking in their furtive Johns. Soon, the working girls begin to recognize her and become friendly. The sultry weather is fading fast. She spends mornings in the Park, reading older books, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, all the novels she should have studied better when she was at Cambridge, where she’d got her 2.2 because of a silly indulgence where she had written mock haikus for one of her assigned essays. She’d deserved a 2.1 at least, she knew, her tutor had said so, but she’d also wasted too much time at pointless parties and playing ingenues badly in college plays. Sitting calmly in the sparse grass, the rumour of the traffic distant, the top edge of the surrounding skyscrapers just about visible from her vantage point, she thinks of the past. Over and over. How she first betrayed her trusting if rather dull husband with a dangerous lover, who soon became too possessive, too disturbing, until she felt she had to break things off and he went berserk. He’d always wanted to bring her to New York, she remembered. How frightening the day he had told her he had already purchased tickets for them, two or three months ahead in time, and served her with this ultimatum to come to America with him and not return to her husband. She’d panicked.

For her lover to exact a desperate vengeance in the way of men who have projected their deepest fantasies upon a muse only to feel betrayed by their ordinary, selfish and fallible humanity. Yes, he was one for muses. What did he see in her? Why her? She knew she wasn’t worth it. She didn’t have his sense of romance, she had a cold heart, she had prosaic aspirations but then what else could she have desired with a husband who wore a suit and tie as if it were a lifetime achievement and though a couple of years younger than her, looked and acted as if he were already in his forties?

She closed her copy of A Tale of Two Cities and sighed.

Soon, she’d finish the book and would need something new to read. This afternoon, she could walk down Fifth Avenue to the Village, past the Flatiron Building and onto Broadway, to Tower Books on Lafayette. Soon, she also knew she would be running out of money. The Brighton cash was already dangerously low and the hotel’s weekly bill would exhaust it in a few days. By now, she supposed, her credit card must be invalid. And even if it weren’t, she did not wish either of the two absent men to find out where she might be.

She gathered her few belongings, putting the now empty diet Coke can into the brown paper bag together with the well-fingered paperback, strapped on the shoulder bag in which she kept her passport, diary and the remaining cash and headed for Central Park South. She wore a white and red tee-shirt advertising a London mystery bookstore and a wrap-around skirt of many colours, both of which she’d found in a Goodwill thrift store near 22nd Street, shortly after her arrival here.

A detour on the walk back to the hotel and she moved down 46th Street, past all the jewellery stores towards the Gotham Book Mart, where the second-hand stock was often reasonably priced. None of the books, however, caught her fancy today and she crossed the Avenue of the Americas and continued toward the bustle of Times Square. Tourists queued impatiently at the reduced-price theatre ticket kiosk. She ignored all the British accents among the Babel-like cacophony of the conversations.

The yellow taxis roared down Broadway as she crossed the main road under the shadow of the gigantic neon displays. Katherine looked up. There, that’s where the black girl at the hotel had said it would be. A fading sign: Girls Wanted For Burlesque Show. On both sides of the small theatre’s entrance were large emporiums selling all the latest video and electronic junk.

She ignored the Israeli salesmen aggressively pitching their wares to any tourist lingering long enough outside and walked through the side entrance into the building.

“My friend Lisa sent me,” Katherine says.

The little guy smoking an evil-smelling cigar lounges back in his chair and looks her over. At the front of his cluttered desk is a board with his name: Guy N Bloom. The office smells of damp and old newsprint. On the wall, old kitsch posters of past vaudeville shows coexist with full-colour spreads of more recent, and explicit beefcake, tanned women flashing obscenely gaping pink split beavers, many of them signed To Guy, my favorite guy and other such witticisms.

“Your top,” he indicates.

Katherine pulls the white tee-shirt over her head, her breasts fall free, she hasn’t been wearing a bra. She’s never really needed to wear one.

The response is predictable.

“Not much up there, hey?” the older man says.

“I know I’m not very voluptuous, but…” she begins to say.

“I like your accent, though. Limey, hmm?” He smiles. A mask of kindness almost invades his lined features. “Tell you what, you look a bit Irish to me. Pull your hair back, all those curls, there’s too many of them.”

She follows his instructions and bunches her myriad curls together and pulls the thick clump back to reveal her forehead. She doesn’t like herself like this, her forehead is too large.

“Interesting,” says Bloom. “You’re not really that beautiful, but you’ve got something, you know. You’re different; I think the guys might well like you. Pity about the tits, though. Turn round and give me a looksie.”

She does.

“No need to take it all off, just pull the skirt up. Let me see your butt. Yeah, thought so, great legs, honey, ass is a bit big, very white, not seen much tanning. Definitely, they’ll like you.”

He explains the terms of employment.

“How much money you make is up to you. The better you are, the more they like you, the more tips you’ll get. It’s all tips. We don’t pay any insurance, so you look after yourself. You supply your costume, or lack of costume should I say…” he sniggers.

“No funny business inside the theatre. What you arrange outside is your own business, and I don’t want to know anything about it. Understood?”

“Yes, I understand,” Katherine says. “When can I start? I really need some money. Bills to pay, you know.”

“First shift starts tomorrow at two, honey. I might actually come and have a look myself, you’re different, should be interesting. Sometimes I regret I’m no longer a young man. Maybe your bump and grind routine will be more intelligent than the other gals. Show some imagination.”

Of course, Katherine thinks, I have a degree in English from Cambridge, what do you expect?

And thinks one brief moment of her erstwhile lover, who made such a song and melodramatic fuss after she had rejected him of the fact he had never seen her dance. Well now, honey, you’d have to pay, she says under her breath.

The other girls explain how to string the whole thing together. Katherine has bought herself a spectacular bikini, spandex or something like it, shiny, leather-like, and another dancer, a girl with a pronounced Tennessee drawl lends her a feather boa and some silk scarves and shows her how best to drape them around her body. In the cramped dressing-room, she slaps on her best scarlet lipstick and loses one of her soft contact lenses, the last one from the old British prescription. The floor is filthy and she can’t find it again. She takes the other out. Things are blurry now. At least, she won’t see all the bloody men in the audience too close. A saving grace.

“Have you chosen your tunes?” another dancer asks Katherine.

“What tunes?”

“You know, kiddo, the music you want to dance to.”

Kiddo. The girl under all her flaky make-up is barely out of her teens. Worn before her years. Katherine will soon turn thirty. She reckons she might well be the oldest here. Never mind.

“I hadn’t thought of it, really. I’ll dance to anything they play.”

“Here, use this,” the girl says, handing her a CD. “It’s great, but the rhythm is not really me. You have it, you use it.”

Katherine peers at the label. Shake by the Vulgar Boatmen.

She waits in the wings, watches the first three girls do their numbers. She can’t believe it. They are lewd, provocative, dirty, wonderfully indecent. She can’t do any of this. Really, she can’t. What am I doing here? In Times Square, cesspool of the western world, where a few doors away a derelict cinema is still screening Deep Throat and black pimps sashay down the street like living cliches, and there’s Bruce Springsteen’s Candy’s Room booming in the air as the black girl gyrates on stage and bends and stretches her body to an impossible degree and the time comes and Katherine holds her breath back and makes her way to the illuminated stage.

“Go, blondie, go,” shout the other dancers as she reaches the centre of the proscenium. They sense it’s her first time and show solidarity.

But the music doesn’t start, and she stands there, paralysed, crucified under the dual assault of two glaring, hot spotlights, her medusa curls held aloft by the conditioning mousse, her shiny underwear glittering, her legs long and white, all the bruises from back in London now faded away. She wets her lips. Tries to see the audience and can only distinguish a few trouser legs emerging from the outlying darkness. Not even a dirty mac in sight.

A guitar chord and the song begins.

She swings her hips to the beat, pulls the green silk scarf draped over her shoulder across to her throat, caresses the material as it lingers there, a fragile noose of fabric, her knees bend to the rhythm, her bare feet drag slowly across the stage floor, she closes her eyes one moment, pulls with her free hand on the other scarf circling her wrist and waves it in the air where it floats slowly, suspended like a slow-motion kite during the festival at Blackheath, the scarf swims down and lands on the gentle rise of her breasts. She dances in one spot, her body circling the area in a steady motion, every breath in her soul singing parallel to the melodic waves of the rock and roll tune. Her fingers linger over the silk square now protecting her pale chest, she slides them down the narrow slope, from the brown mole at the onset of her cleavage to the tip of her left breast, where she rubs the still concealed aureola through the recalcitrant plastic-like thickness of the bikini bra. Katherine remembers the bump and grind tradition and, when the beat accelerates, with an artificial smile piercing her scarlet lips she pushes her bum out, and then her crotch. Dance, girl, dance. She takes hold of the silk scarf still draped over her chest, slips it between the thin strap and pulls it across the valley separating her two slight promontories, and out again, throws the piece of fabric in the air and allows it to drift down to the stage floor where she kicks it away just a few inches with her toe, as her hips keep gyrating mechanically to the music which seems to be growing louder and louder. She unclips the bra and loosens her breasts, soon to cover them chastely with the other silk piece until now adorning her throat like a thin choker. She feels her nipples growing erect under the thin gauze. Her body undulates steadily as she lowers both her hands and begins to gently massage her nipples through the fabric, like she saw the other women do before and when the chorus of the song jumps in, she pulls the silk piece away to reveal her front unencumbered. A few claps in the sparse crowd. She dances on, Salome of only two veils. She can feel sweat rising through the pores of her unveiled skin. A clammy feeling under her armpits where she had shaved only yesterday afternoon. Her upper lip, which she’d bleached at the same time, itches. The beat goes on. Come on, baby, give us more skin. She dances on, trying somehow to lose herself inside the relentless music. Bump and grind. Push your bum out; shove that crotch forward, show them how the mound of your cunt stretches the fabric of the bikini bottom. Bump. Grind. Push. Shove. The song ends. Another begins without a pause for breath or reflection. Every stage number is divided into three ritual parts, three songs or pieces of music. The new tune is an old big band blast. Brassy. She quickens the movement of her wavering shoulders and the geometrical patterns her arms are tracing in the glare of the harsh spotlights. She moves two steps forward, closer to the edge of the stage where small coloured bulbs imprint rectangular patterns of gaudy colours over the white skin of her legs. As her hands keep on caressing her breasts, she feels a tremor in the pit of her stomach. She recognizes it, the onset of lust. Like when they were in his office, clandestine adulterers and she knew he was about to pull his underwear down and release his thick, dark, tasty cock. She opens her eyes to chase away the dream of the past and for the first time sees, albeit in a myopic blur, the eyes of some of the men in the audience. Hungry. Malevolent. Get on with it, they say. Katherine slips her fingers under the elastic of the bikini bottom. Pulls the garment an inch away from the flesh of her stomach. Tease them a bit, she thinks. A cavalcade of pianos attack the chorus and she swiftly pulls the knickers down. She now stands fully nude, her hips and shoulders still adhering to the syncopated whirlpool of the big band sound. Isn’t the song over yet? she doesn’t feel sexy at all. She feels very much alone.

She has never stood nude before in front of more than a single man; never even skinny-dipped or gone to a nude beach. How many are there in the audience? She peers sideways into the stage wings. The other girls are no longer watching. But Bloom is, the damn cigar still hanging from his lips. She can’t read the expression on his face from where she stands. She twirls around, remembers the wooden pole over there on the far side of the stage. Waltzes toward it. Shove. Bump. Thrust. Grind. Her body feels wet, the sweat must be pouring down her back, there’s no air, the spotlights are so fucking hot, Jesus, the sweat must be sliding down between the crack of her arse. She reaches the pole and grabs it; her hands are moist as she circles the pole and sketches a few new improvised dance moves like a medieval virgin courting a maypole. The apparatus is in fact metallic. She grinds against it. The hard, round circumference mashes against her pubes, she places her breasts against it and it fills her valley. The song never ends. She throws her head back, the delicate orbs of her breasts stand free, firm, shiny under the film of sweat, she bends at the waist and blushes instantly as she senses her vagina gape open as she does this. But the audience can’t see, she’s too far from the front rows. She stands again. Dance. Dance until the end of time, Kate. She wriggles her backside, keeps on massaging her breasts, if only to keep her hands busy, the movement is quite mechanical as if she were spreading soap or foam over her chest. Yes, yes, he did do that when they had shared their first bath tub. The song ends. One more to go. A familiar riff splits the brief silence. The Rolling Stones. Satisfaction. Much too fast, what is she going to do now? For encores? She has to continue, do more. Needs the tips. Show them more. She moves back to the edge of the stage, dances with exaggerated languor as she mentally rakes up the good times, the bad times, the wedding in the chapel of their old college in Cambridge. Her left hand moves from breast to navel, and she pushes it deep with a corkscrew motion into the narrow pit of her belly button. A guy in the audience whoops and hollers. The other hand also abandons the tender nipple it had been tending and hovers over her sex. She swivels her hips like a belly dancer. The finger parts the hair, the darker curls, tip-toes like a scalpel across the now moist aperture. The other hand joins it soon and holds the lips open. She’s so wet, it must be dripping onto the stage floor. She squats on her haunches and deliberately inserts one finger deep inside her cunt, as the guys in the front row open their eyes wider than they ever thought they could. She can no longer hear the music. Keith Richards must still be playing. She moves the finger deep inside, impales herself on it while a finger from her other hand squeezes her protruding clitoris. A hand emerges from the audience, holding a green bill. Closer, girl, closer. She inches her cunt forward until she’s in a precarious equilibrium on the very edge of the stage. The man, whose face remains in the shadows, slides the money into her gaping cunt. She inches her way back. Stands up, the bank note sticking out from her innards. Dances. Bumps. Grinds. Thrusts. The audience whistles, applauds loudly. The music has now ended. Lisa, the black girl who’d sent her here, is waiting over there by the side of the stage to do her turn. Katherine bows to the invisible men in the darkness. Her audience. She pulls the note out from her vagina, half of it is soaking wet with her juices. She waves it. The men shout all sorts of things at her. She sticks two fingers back inside, twists them round to further loud yelps and brings them to her mouth where she licks them clean. Prisoners of lust, he had once described their fatal liaison. The stage lights dim and she can make out more of the meagre audience. There’s only a dozen of them, but the noise they’re making is enough to fill a soccer stadium. She recalls Brighton and Adam Smith, turns round and gets down on all fours and, sobbing gently, thrusting her rump out toward the anonymous men, she cruelly pushes her still lubricated finger into her arsehole. She’s about to pull it out and show them how she can also lick shit like the best of sinners when Bloom and two of the other burlesque dancers hurriedly pull her offstage to the loud protest of the screaming guys.

“Are you crazy?” Bloom screeches at her. “You fucking slut, you want to get us closed down?”

The girls all look at her as if she were insane.

“Goddam limey. She’s deranged, a freak, you must be sick to get your rocks off this way.”

“Get her outta here. I don’t want to see this woman again. She’s downright crazy. Out.”

They bundle her into her day clothes.

Back on Times Square, a thin rain falling, likely to mess up her perm, Katherine unclenches her fist and extracts the bank note. It’s a hundred.

Certainly worth a few more miles on the clock, on the road to nowhere.

In Miami, she discovered some men had long, thin cocks and allover tans.

On alternate days, Katherine cruised the clubs and discos in the art deco district of Miami Beach, window shopping like any other tourist, quenching the ambient heat with a steady diet of cold sodas and ice-creams, while on others she worked a few continuous shifts in a shady strip joint – here, they no longer called them burlesques – all the way up the less fashionable area in the Northern reaches of Collins Avenue, beyond the Adventura Mall, where the highway to the Everglades began. Now, she’d perfected her act. Kept it simple, cleanly sexy, beyond the temporary madness, the excesses of Times Square. She grew accustomed to shaking her gangly body, grinding her crotch with a grimace feigning ecstasy against the metal of the central pole, thrusting her white, square butt toward the punters, teasing the vociferous crowd, keeping her legs together, letting her hands do the roving, a mechanical spectacle tailored to the unsatisfactory pop songs she had thread together to punctuate her movements.

The nights were long and empty in her room at the beachside inn. The paint on the wall flaked in places creating ever-changing Rorschach tests in the humid penumbra. Six in the morning was always the worst time, and time and again she had to control herself and not pick up the pink telephone and call London. But which one? Which past man? And then always remembered the time difference. And anyway what would she say? Sorry? I’m really sorry, but I don’t want to come back. She read a lot. At Bookstar they deep discounted and the other day, even though she couldn’t really afford a hardcover – she’s not getting very good tips – she had indulged and bought the new Anne Tyler novel, which she read in small doses, to stretch the pleasure.

Sunday is her day off and like a good working girl she goes to the beach, with a basket of fruit and a cold box full of drink cans. She’s got this new rather daring outfit, with a thong cutting deep into her crotch, separating the two globes of her backside like a piece of meat. But she always keeps her top on. Her husband would approve. Her skin burns easily, so she has to shield carefully under a parasol. The sand gets everywhere, as she ritually turns onto her stomach, then her back and again her stomach, and tried to concentrate on her reading. She knows that later she would have to use the shower nozzle against her cavities to excavate the millions of small grains stuck to her perspiring skin, nestled between her bum cheeks and even inside her vagina.

This rugged-looking man walked by her parasol, briefly obscuring the sun. Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw his feet in the sand just a few inches away from her town.

“Guapa muchacha,” he said with a strong Hispanic accent.

Katherine looked up.

“Hi,” she said.

“You’re not from here,” he remarked.

“No, I’m not.”

He sat himself down next to her; he wore a silk shirt with exotic rainbow patterns and baggy trousers cinched at the waist.

“Let me have a guess,” he smiled.

Katherine smiled back.

“I know, you’re Australian. I saw that movie, you know.”

She burst out laughing, her hand flying up, lost her page as the book fell into the sand and closed.

“You look like Nicole Kidman, the chick who married Tom Cruise.”

“So I’m told. It’s all the curls, you see. But no, I’m not from down under. I’m English, you see,” she explained.

“No kidding,” the man said. “I’d never have guessed. You look more Swedish, or Dutch, you know.”

“Actually Irish a generation or two back,” she said.

“Very beautiful,” he flashed ivory white teeth that must have cost a small fortune in dental care.

“Thank you.”

He took her hand in his, shook it and introduced himself:

“My name is Steve Gregory,” he revealed.

“That’s a very American name,” she pointed out.

“Well, not really, it’s Gregorio. Esteban Gregorio. But I changed it. Came over from Cuba. What about you?” he asked her.

“Eddie,” she said.

English Eddie was her stage name. Her damn mother had insisted on making her second name Edwina.

“That’s wonderful,” he exclaimed and offered her a cigarette.

A hundred meters away, the sea murmured and the waves of the Caribbean lapped the warm shore.

Katherine sighed.

Steve had brown eyes. Dangerous eyes. The sort she’d seen before, the type of eyes that could make her do things she shouldn’t. The top buttons of his shirt were open to reveal an abundant growth on his brown chest. She surprised herself by looking down at his trousers and the strong bulge there, and thinking what sort of shape his cock must be.

Later, he took her for a light but spicy salad lunch to this hut further down the beach. It was delicious but she drank too much wine. He seemed genuinely surprised when he found out where she worked, but he kept his hands to himself. He told her about Cuba, spoke of politics and food and, gazing at her, of things of beauty. And fast sports cars.

And was dumbfounded when he learned that she did not drive.

“You mean you haven’t got a car?” he asked her.

“No, I’ve never even taken driving lessons.”

“Amazing,” he said.

“Well, I’m just an old-fashioned girl, I suppose,” she answered.

When they parted in late afternoon, he had a business appointment he just couldn’t put off any longer, he gently kissed her on the cheek. Gallant to a tee. She had expected more. He promised to come and see her at the club very soon.

“You must be a fantastic dancer,” he said. “I can’t wait.” In fact, Katherine wasn’t very good at the dancing thing, really. The other girls working at the joint were all so much better, they had more natural rhythm, the blacks and the Latinas. So, to capture the attention of the men in the audience, she knows she has to offer something different. Not just her amazon build and fair skin and heavy hips. She has shaved her sex, banned the dark curls from between her strong thighs and only kept a thin line of pubic thatch rising straight above the gash, like a small arrow pointing toward her navel. Maria, who helped her do it one evening, had suggested she trim it in the shape of a heart, but Katherine felt that would be quite vulgar and inappropriate. Before every shift, she carefully places a cube of ice over her nipples to render them erect, hard, more prominent, then dries the aroused tips and rouges them with shocking red lipstick. Then, she dips the stick toward her outer labia and colours them beautiful, a fine line on either side delineating the lips, gently separating the geometric poles of her nether opening. She has to remember during her act not to smudge the war paint too much. The other dancers don’t like her too much. They think she’s a snob, can’t really gossip or indulge in silly small talk like they do between sets. She’s the first stripper they’ve come across who spends her time in the dressing room when not on duty actually reading books. By people they’ve never even heard of. Not your usual Stephen Kings or John Grishams. Thinks she’s clever and better than us, does English Eddie, they grumble between themselves.

It’s the little extras, Katherine knows, that keep the tips coming. She pouts like other dancers, smiles hypocritically as she sheds the thin items of exotic clothing, sticks out her tongue in pre-orgasmic languor, licks her fingers as she would a penis, bumps and grinds like the best of all sluts, teases the invisible males out there carelessly, quickly opening her thighs wide and obscuring the forbidden vista with the palm of her hand, bends over unchastely to reveal the darker band of skin dividing her arse, dances the night and day away, while her mind remains on cruise control, empty of thoughts. She senses the clients in the outlying audience, the smell of man, a quick thrust of her lower stomach forward and there must be one there, no, there, who’s j erking off to the sight of her, his hand buried deep inside the trouser pocket, holding his cock in a tight noose as he moves the envelope of his palm and fingers up and down the trunk and comes all over his underwear. She rubs her damp crotch against the small Afghan carpet she now dances on, to avoid splinters in her feet, grinds her lower stomach against the hard floor and a few artificial moans escape as the music quietens momentarily, and somewhere in the back row must be a guy with his dick actually out, rubbing away furiously under a newspaper or a magazine while he drinks in the sheer erotic vision of her and imagines her spread-eagled on some filthy bed while he fucks her like there was no tomorrow. Likely story. Yes, they masturbate, they dream, they drool, and this way, she rationalizes, she has power over them.

Control.

Of men.

Like the two left far behind.

The house lights come on, the stage lights dim and the dancers stream out and tour the front rows. They are fully nude. Some of the guys in the audience leave then, while others hurriedly move to the edge of the stage if there is still free space. With their back to the men, the women move from seat to seat, up to a couple of minutes next to each respective guy, words are exchanged, greenbacks change hand and the transaction completed, the stripper either sits on the guy’s lap while he paws her breasts until his time is up or alternately stands in close proximity to the punter and allows his hands to wander all over her body. The first two customers say nothing and Katherine moves on to the next seat. The man remains silent, but nods positively. He slips her a couple of crumpled notes. He’s old. He rises, he’s short, but then most men are compared to her. She moves closer to him, her bust rising gently. He peers at her eyes. His own are watery and vacant. He lowers his hand to her cunt, and swiftly inserts a finger inside her, stretching her dryness.

“Hey!” she exclaims. “Off limits.”

But the elderly customer fails to respond. They can mangle the dancers’ breasts, guessing which are real or silicone-assisted, they can slime over their skin to their heart’s content, they can touch, caress, tiptoe like piano-players over the soft bodies, but not down there. His finger moves deeper and Katherine is obliged to open her thighs more to facilitate his intrusion. His nails are scratching her insides. His breath stinks to high heaven. She’s about to seize his errant hand to pull it away when the next dancer in line jostles up to her for her turn and the man withdraws and sits down again. Katherine moves on down the flesh parade. It only took a minute or so, or was it more? None of the other men want her, they’ve had their fill of skin elsewhere already.

It itches like hell inside. She just hopes it’s not bleeding from his nails, that he has not infected her. She’s an illegal alien, enjoys no medical protection.

Back in the communal dressing room, she grabs a small pocket mirror from her bag and rushes to the toilets. Spreads her thighs open and examines the inside of her vagina. Yes, there’s a bad scratch there, but it’s not bleeding. She forces herself to pee, to evacuate any foreign elements. She washes herself out thoroughly. When she returns to the backstage area, all the women from her shift have already gone. A couple of dancers from the six p.m. batch have arrived and are already undressing. Katherine sits herself by one of the make-up mirrors and cleans the lipstick away from her body and slips on a cotton shirt and a pair of loose, baggy shorts. She replaces the mirror in her bag and pulls out her purse to safely put away the meagre notes from the parade. Jesus. Her heart misses a beat. There’s no money at all in there. She swears mightily under her breath. A Latina dancer she’s never seen here before gives her a strange look. One of the girls must have taken it. Could have been any of the women. None of them really liked her. Shit. She had all her cash in there. She can’t open a bank account because of her status. Nearly two hundred and twenty dollars, she remembers. How the fuck is she going to settle her bill at the inn tomorrow? Buy groceries. She’d never raise that much in tips in such a short time. Even if she were sheer sex on a stick. Complaining to the elusive club gaffer would be quite useless, she knows.

At the stage door stands Steve. He’s now wearing a sharp pale grey suit and she’s never seen shoes so shiny. The Miami dusk feels sultry. He smiles at her as she walks out of the joint.

“Hey, you were incredible, Eddie. Are all English girls like you, tell me?”

She answers with a feeble smile and explains what happened.

“Ah, pretty woman, don’t worry, it’s only money,” he says.

He leads her to his car, parked just outside, a big convertible with shiny metal hubs and metallic green paintwork. He opens a door for her, and she gets in.

“Yeah, but I needed that money, you just don’t understand.”

As he settles into the black leather driver’s seat and switches on the ignition and the air conditioning starts up with a vengeance, Steve says:

“I know how you can earn a lot of money.”

“When?” Katherine asks.

“Right now, if you wish,” he answers and picks up a cellular phone. The car glides away from the kerb as he begins a long conversation in Spanish. She can’t understand a word of course. She’d taken French as her foreign language at the Epsom grammar school. Wasn’t even very good at it.

A mile or two down the road, he completes his transaction on the phone.

“All set, honey. For a girl like you, no problem. You see, you’re exotic. Good money. Indeed,” he flashes her a broad grin, slips a cassette into the car’s system and a raucous beat fills the car, drums and all sorts of wondrous percussion punctuating a joyful Latin tune.

She says nothing but looks at him enquiringly.

“Relax, Eddie, relax, it’ll be good. Really good,” he says.

She doesn’t like the “honey”, the “exotic” or the “relax”. But what are the choices?

A penthouse suite at the Fontainebleau Hotel. A valet has taken the car to be parked. Katherine feels out of place in her shabby casual wear, but Steve reassures her. “It’s not important, Eddie, don’t worry.” The lift alone, shiny mirrors and gold-plated knobs everywhere must have cost a million. A long corridor with expensive prints all the way down the walls like a museum or an art gallery. They reach the door. Steve knocks three times. They open.

“This is Eddie,” he introduces her.

There are half a dozen dusky middle-aged businessmen in expensive silk suits that put Steve’s garb to shame. This is real money, she recognizes. Further back, there is another man, sipping a glass at the huge bar overlooking the balcony. He’s black, a giant, must be all of seven feet.

“Meet Orlando. You’re from England, aren’t you? You won’t know him, of course, he’s with the ‘Gators. One of our local heroes.”

The black guy mumbles something as he weakly shakes her hand.

“A drink, Eddie?” one of the businessmen offers unctuously. “Absolutely anything you want. A bit of food, we can call room service, if you feel like a snack.” All the guys are watching her attentively. Katherine feels uncomfortable. Never liked hotel rooms since that first time, that Tuesday at the Heathrow hotel when she had for the first time gone over the edge and jettisoned part of her life.

She declines the offer of food, has an ice-cold beer. Dos Equis.

The black guy still stands silently at the bar, looking her over. Most of the businessmen have settled onto chairs and a couple of massive couches. Waiting.

Steve sets his own glass down and comes over to her.

“See, it’s like this, Eddie. One thousand dollars. Yes, a whole thousand bucks. My commission is twenty per cent. Fair? No?”

She feels her stomach sinking. What’s worth all that cash?

“What do I have to do?” she asks.

“A live show. These gentlemen are important business contacts of mine, all the way from South America and down there, they don’t have the entertainment we have here in America, so they want to enjoy a real special show.”

A private show. Katherine breathes a sigh of relief. It could have been worse, much worse, she supposes.

“But I left my stage gear at the club,” she points out. “You should have told me; it’s not really sexy with these things I’m wearing now.”

A frown crosses Steve’s face.

“Oh, come on, don’t be coy, we’re not paying this sort of money for just a strip turn. A live show. Sex. Real sex. Fucking. Here on the bloody carpet, girl, where they can all see it all up close.”

“What…?” she protests.

“With Orlando here,” Steve adds, pointing at the towering sportsman. Absurdly, in her utter confusion, she vainly tries to guess which sport: basket ball, football, baseball? He continues: “Orlando is a legend. They call him the black stud and my friends wish to see him in action, with a blonde, with very white skin. You. Comprende?”

She looks at the black athlete. He is impassive.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can, bitch, and you will. You’re not going to disappoint my friends, are you? Or you’ll damn well feel my mighty wrath, woman. Don’t disappoint me,” he threatens her. She swallows hard, gulps down the end of her beer. Steve takes her right arm and leads her to the geographical centre of the room, all the businessmen sitting in a circle of sorts around the spot, none of them more than ten or at most twelve feet away. Yes, they would have a good view. Full cinerama widescreen gynaecology in close-up. Better than IMAX.

“Okay, come on, now,” Steve says brusqely.

She keeps on standing there, hesitant.

He is becoming increasingly irritated.

“Eddie, I’m losing patience.”

He suddenly takes hold of her shirt and pulls it open. Reluctantly, she takes it off.

The men all smile.

“Orlando, she’s all yours. Let’s see that famous big black dick at work,” Steve says excitedly. “Ride the white bitch. Ride her.”

She unbuttons the shorts and slides them down her hips and legs. Her black knickers haven’t been washed for a few days. There’s a small hole on one side. She blushes, bends and with her back to the ring of businessmen, takes them off. She looks up. Orlando is already down to his underpants. His chest is quite hairless, the colour of ebony. He wets his lips as his gaze explores her exposed body. The bulge in his crotch rises slightly as he catches sight of her shaven sex. She places her hands needlessly in front.

He extricates his cock from the pants.

It dangles out against his taut thigh.

“Jesus Christ,” she says.

His penis, still soft and unaroused, is enormous. Like a donkey, she thinks. I can never take that inside. It’ll rip me apart. He faces her, a few inches away from her. She shivers. His thing down there is like a stick of wood, heavily veined, delicately textured. She smells the man, his odour is strong, fierce. She accumulates saliva at the back of her mouth and swallows it down.

“Suck him, make him grow,” a voice says in the background, outside of the circle of light in which she feels imprisoned.

She kneels down, touches Orlando’s cock. Lifts the shaft to her dry lips. Underneath she sees the heavy sack of his balls, the lined thin skin holding the heavy testicles, the bulging scrotum. She approaches her mouth. She can feel his member throbbing as she holds it. It’s growing already. Her tongue emerges and reaches the tip of his glans. He has no foreskin. She closes her eyes and moves her head, her mouth forward. The cock slides between her lips, brushes against her teeth and, pulsing all the time, lodges itself against the back of her throat. She almost chokes and has to adjust her position, raising her head slightly, still the sportsman’s penis grows until she feels her whole mouth full, invaded. Her tongue moves around the thick shaft, licking, caressing, tasting the man.

“See, it fits,” she hears Steve, commenting. “I told you she was a big girl. Look at that ass, the butt of a queen, truly.”

She sucks and sucks to little emotional reaction from the black giant. She’s afraid he will come in her mouth, literally drown her throat with his semen, choke her to death. Right then, he places a hand on her freckled shoulder and says: “I’m ready, girl, now.” And pulls his cock out of her aching mouth.

The massive member stands tall, an inch away from her face. She finally opens her eyes. She’s never seen a cock so big, so thick, so long. No, she mentally protests, it’ll kill me. It’ll never go in. It’s physically impossible. It stands at attention, rigid and hard, like a lethal weapon.

She turns around. Steve and half the men have got their cocks out or trousers down. They all seem incredibly thin and long.

“He’s got to wear a condom,” she protests.

“No,” says one of the men.

Katherine stands firm.

“Then I can’t go along with it, I just can’t,” she says. It’s possibly her out.

“For a thousand bucks, you’ll do what we say,” Steve screams at her. “This ain’t no government health education advertorial.”

He walks over to her and suddenly punches her in the stomach. She bends forward, not so much in pain, but out of breath.

“There, that’s a gentle warning.” He pushes her head down to the floor, “Okay, black stud, poke her. First, turn her over so we’ve a good view.”

Orlando moves her body round, spits into his palm, wets his cock and positions his raised dick right by her opening. Katherine is on all fours, rump raised to his level, he pulls her hips up and she almost loses balance. She feels the tip of the cock brushing hard against her outer lips. The black man thrusts hard and the glans enters and jams, only, partly embedded inside her. Her muscles already feel so stretched, she squirms. Her involuntary movement loosens the inner labia and the main shaft moves an inch forward. It hurts. Bad. His large hands seize her rump as he pushes again.

Two of the men are betting.

‘It’ll never go in.”

“Yes, it will. She can take him. Hey, Steve, the stud needs some lubrication, help him out.”

She hears him move close and feels a cold liquid pouring down over her ass and into the vaginal gash, pearling over the black cock. Champagne. Orlando grunts, thrusts hard, his hips dictating the sharp movement, the shaft moves further up her cunt. How much more? She moans. Tears are coming to her eyes. One final shove and he is finally all in, she is tearing, she is being cut in two. The black man begins to move inside her, the top of his cock feels as if it’s moved so far it’s inside her stomach, scraping manically against her inside walls. The movement increases and she blanks out her mind, the pain down there now feels like an anaesthetic, remote, someone else’s. Eternity and over.

“Great ass, hey. Love that mole under the left butt, or is it a beauty spot?” Steve remarks from his vantage point.

White on black.

Black cock inside white cunt.

“Turn over,” one of the men says. “Missionary, now.”

Orlando disengages. It feels like a hole inside her. He pulls her over and down, settles her shoulders and the back of her head on the carpet. She looks down on her body. She is gaping open. She gasps, it’ll never close up again. The outer lips are redder than they were with all the lipstick. The black sportsman, with his cock still at full mast kneels down and with one hand moves the cock back into her. He bobs up and down over her, as the dick slides in and out until it reaches port and impales her totally. Then he pulls her legs up and places them over his own shoulders, still thrusting savagely inside her all the time. For the first time, she feels an early wave of pleasure run through her. Her nipples are so sensitive. Why doesn’t Orlando touch them? Please. Her lover did. The black man’s breath grows shorter. She senses his climax approaching as his eyes open and close in quick succession as he pistons on inside her, his big balls slamming like a metronome against her bum.

“Hey,” Steve shouts out. “Orlando, my man, don’t come inside her. Let’s see your spunk on her face.”

The stud digs ever deeper into her. Vaginal farts punctuate his movements as the air left inside her is displaced by his sheer bulk. Finally, he pulls out hurriedly and his come spurts out like a geyser, white, creamy, burning hot over her shaven mons and her thighs.

“He missed the target,” one of the jokers says.

The black guy, spent, looks Katherine in the eyes. “Sorry,” he whispers. “I needed the money too. Gambling debts.”

He walks away, standing tall, to fetch his clothes.

Quarter of an hour later. Orlando has left and all the businessmen have had another round of drinks. Katherine is still spread out on the thick carpet of the hotel suite, aching madly, her legs still obscenely apart, the lips of her sex still unnaturally dilated, it still hurts too much to close her thighs and steal her live porno movie away from the men.

“So, gentlemen,” Steve says. “Good show, hey? Nothing beats a big, strong blonde. Any of you want a sample now? Please yourselves. No extra cost.”

How can he, Katherine mutters?

The South Americans confer between themselves. Finally, one of them says: “Thanks, but no thanks, compadre. That pussy’s been used up for today. I’d float in there. I don’t care about the black guy, they’re all bloody animals, but I don’t know where that pussy’s been before. I’ve a family, you know. Get rid of her.”

Steve pulls her up. She staggers across the room. He slips her an envelope, together with her crumpled clothes.

“It’s all there. Now you can nicely bugger off, Eddie. And don’t even think of ever mentioning this to anyone or I’ll cut you up so badly your mother wouldn’t recognize you. Understood?”

He opens the door and pushes her out into the corridor.

She’s quite naked, she knows she looks a real mess, the black stud’s spunk is still seeping out somehow between her lower lips, or is it some sort of personal secretion? There’s a bad bruise on the inside of her thigh.

As he closes the door:

“I’d slip something on pronto, girl, if I were you. There might be a hotel detective on the prowl,” he laughs.

She hurriedly dresses and makes her way to the lifts. Yes, her lover had once said, I will celebrate you like no man has ever done, Kate. Yes, all the things he would say as his fingers kept lingering in the small of her back after the act of love.

She’s travelled to Las Vegas. Another stage of her American kaleidoscope. She’d remembered someone once saying how cheap the food and hotels happened to be, subsidized as they were by all the gambling. One of her directors had been there for a bookselling convention, and mentioned the fact. Like a modern Jack Kerouac heroine she’d made the journey on Greyhound buses, crisscrossing the vast plains and their surrounding roadside galleries of decrepit motels and gas stations. And then, one morning at dawn, racing out of the desert into the garish canyons of light of Vegas, she had come across her new, temporary home.

She found a small residential hotel at an unfashionable end of the Strip, where the gamblers never went and working-class families with kids, mostly from New Jersey, stayed. She even managed to bargain down the weekly rate. She avoided the big casinos and the glittering joints. Not again. She tried to get waitressing jobs, but they all said she was too old. Did they mean unattractive, she wondered? Here, most of the women were icily perfect. Surgically designed to appeal to the average American male. Frosty lipstick, eye shadow galore, tight skirts, no visible panty line. Not quite her.

After costing her room and the steak breakfast specials ever on offer all around, Katherine estimated she could last a whole month before she would run out of cash. I need a holiday, anyway, she thought.

She often walked out to the desert when night fell, to breathe in the pure, dry air. She grew to recognize all the amazing species of cacti growing in the wilderness that surrounded the town. The night sky was so amazingly clear. If only she could remember which constellations were which from her wasted school days. The heavens were a subtle tapestry of lights, delicately enhanced by the reddish glow of the electric city illuminating the surrounding mountains.

Less than a year ago when she and her husband had moved into their new mews house, before all hell broke loose over her affair, she had intended to fulfil an earlier ambition and begin writing stories in earnest. She’d finally have a study, a space of her own. Nothing had come of it. Life had conspired to thwart her again.

Now was the time, Katherine decided, buying a yellow legal pad.

The story begins.

“My husband is a good man. My husband is a gentle man. Even though the passing of the years has hardened him and he is no longer the young man with whom I shared my early student poverty, he is still the man I sleep with. I smell his stale breath when he awakes in the morning and it does not offend me. I see the faint stains in his underwear before I load up the washing machine and it doesn’t shock or disgust me. My marriage is the most important thing in my life. I treasure it. I protect it from the storms. I shield myself behind it. I’ve messed up so many other things, but my marriage will survive against the odds and divorce statistics. It will work. It must work.

“My husband and I argue a lot. He cries when we go to sentimental films, while my eyes remain dry. I have a cold heart, you see. I’m not romantic. I don’t know why. The way I was brought up, I suppose. We’ve lived together seven years, married for five of them. Two flats. One house. No children. My husband wants us to have babies, and he is becoming more insistent. Soon I shall turn thirty; I mustn’t leave it too late, he says. I don’t want kids right now, I tell him but what I mean is that I don’t want kids at all. I don’t like the way adults go all soft and mushy in the presence of babies; children get on my nerves, they cry, they show off, they are loud. I would be a bad mother.

“Once I could have justified my actions by invoking my career, my brilliant career. Now I can no longer do so. People think I have a prestigious job, but it’s not what I thought it would be. There are too many frustrations. So, I am left with much emptiness.

“The lovemaking is not what it used to be. We’re growing older together. Too familiar with each other. All too often, at night, he is tired and falls asleep without even finishing reading the financial papers. He is ambitious, has lofty aspirations for his own career. Works hard. Some times, in the morning he feels randy and arranges his body against mine, presses himself against my back, rubs his cock against my arse, lazily fingers my breasts. I wet my fingers and lubricate my opening and manually insert him. On most occasions he’s only half-erect. He screws me in utter silence. I like being taken from behind. It makes me feel more sensitive. Our morning fucks barely scratch the itch in my guts. Oh, there’s nothing bad about it. I’m sure most other couples are no more animated or passionate than we are. Once or twice a year, he whizzes me off to a small country hotel for a long week-end. The lovemaking is better. I even orgasm sometimes. But in the mornings, it’s always over too fast. He comes inside me and my thighs are all damp as he pulls out and rushes to the bathroom. He only has a half hour left to shave, wash, dress, eat before he leaves for the studio or the outside broadcast he’s been assigned to. But, all in all, he is a good, kind man, my husband. He forgives my trespasses. Tolerates my wild, irrational tempers. The tall man I married for better or for worse.”

She put her pen down. Enough for today.

She takes a coach and visits the Hoover Dam, one hour’s drive out of Vegas.

The view is majestic. The vast expanse of water in the lake is utterly surreal in this desert environment. She journeys down with visiting crowds to the bottom of the dam, to the heart of the concrete monster and feels quite dwarfed by the sheer power of the construction. At the end of the tour, she goes to the caféteria with its huge bay windows at water level and sits herself down with a coffee and a sticky cake. A man accosts her. Identifying his accent is easy. He’s Welsh. Works in local government or education, it doesn’t quite register with her. But it’s nice not to have to communicate with yet another Yank. He’s here with a group of friends. Fellow professionals, he insists. Enjoying a spot of gambling. They’re having a small party and card game in their room at the Mirage tonight. Yes, the Casino with the live volcano outside. Would she like to join them? She must be homesick, surely. It would be nice to hear more normal accents. Two of the boys are from Bristol, he tells her.

Once in the room, she first notices the other woman. Auburn hair, round face, dark glasses, black halter top and tight white jeans. The other men, the Brits, seem unappealing. More like lager louts on a sun, booze and sex holiday to Ibiza. Her host, his name is Maurice, effects the introductions. She quickly forgets the men’s names. Two of them are junior doctors and the third one a sales executive, a rep for a pharmaceutical company who’s probably picking up the bill. The woman’s name is Vicky.

It is not my real name, she tells Katherine when she joins her in the bathroom where they powder their nose and cheeks. “It was Liliana, but it was wrong. I just don’t feel like a Lily or a Liliana, really. So I changed it.”

She is American, from Phoenix, Arizona, has been in Vegas six months now, some waitressing, some hosting, a personal escort agency had found her tonight’s gig. “Very respectable, classy, you know, they actually advertise in the local papers. So you’re English too? Who do you work for?” she asks.

“I don’t,” Katherine answers. “Freelance,” she explains. Why complicate matters? She knows all too well why she has been invited here tonight. Fresh meat. Orifices.

There are dark shadows under Vicky’s eyes. Her face is heavily freckled and the freckles continue all the way down her front and disappear inside her cleavage. Her neck is intensely pale. She wears her hair up in a delicately sculpted bun. She is quite small and delicate and once must have been ever so pretty, baby-faced until time finally caught up with her. Her eyes, once the sunglasses come off, are revealed to be dark green. Hypnotic. Under the halter top, she has medium-sized breasts, Katherine sees, as Vicky lifts the material to powder her tits. A reflection catches her eye in the mirror. Katherine can’t stop herself staring at the other woman’s breasts. They are so round. Almost perfect. Pierced. She’s even a touch envious of both these impeccably rounded orbs and the striking adornments. She’d never have the guts. She used to faint at the dentist’s.

“You’re very pretty,” she tells the other woman.

“Thanks, dear.” She readjusts her top, wriggles her bum inside the tight jeans. “Shall we? Your English buddies are waiting for their entertainment.”

The men ply the girls with drinks. The ensuing conversation is rowdy, suggestive but innocent enough to begin with. Maurice, who seems in charge of orchestrating the proceedings, is particularly boisterous, and his jokes are actually on occasion witty. They order snacks from room service, and the obligatory champagne. Katherine relaxes. Gazes at the men. Tries to imagine what they would all look like in their birthday suits. That one must have a hairy chest, what about the beer belly on the other one, another must surely have a big cock, don’t like the last one though, looks a bit evil.

“Well, boys, this is Vegas. Time to gamble. What’s your poison?” Maurice asks.

“Poker.”

“Strip poker.”

They all giggle and look toward the two women sipping their drinks on the mustard couch.

The pharmaceutical rep devises an infinitely complex set of rules for the game, to ensure they all shed clothing fast enough, including Katherine and Vicky, who are assigned to respective card players.

They play.

Vicky is the first to end up unclothed. Katherine still has her underwear on. And garter belt and stockings. She knows from experience how much men like her when she wears them. The carousing Brits are soon all shirtless, one is down to his jockey shorts.

The American woman has a small, compact body, her legs are not that great, and sports two thick gold rings on her nipples. Adorned a la modern primitive. The rings glisten inside the pierced puckered, dark red skin of the nipples. Katherine can’t disguise her intense fascination. Neither can the guys; their tongues almost sticking out when they catch sight of Vicky’s extraordinary boobs and their unnatural metal extensions. One of the medics deliberately loses his next hand to carry Vicky to the next stage where forfeits begin.

“She has to play with her tits,” one of them orders.

Vicky does.

She twists the darker skin between her nimble fingers, pulls the tips of her round breasts through the hoops of the rings, distends the flesh to impossible proportions. Asks the man nearest to her to lick her fingers and then smears the moist secretion over her abnormally erect nipples. They are all entranced. Katherine included.

Vicky tires of manipulating herself. “Next round,” she says.

Inevitably, all the clothing is shed. The men sit there around the table, self-conscious, exchanging nervous glances at each other, a couple of them are semi-erect, another handles himself but fails to harden his stem; too much drink.

“Isn’t this great?” Maurice exclaims to break the silence. “More champagne, ladies and gentlemen.” He stands up to get the last bottle from the room service trolley. He has a fat, floppy arse.

He brushes past Katherine as he pours the drink for her and, with his free hand, roughly fondles her left breast. She finds it, and him, deeply unpleasant and shivers. He ignores her reaction.

The women are now excluded from the card game and the men play between themselves for forfeits. Katherine looks over at Vicky. The auburn-haired woman has settled back on the couch, her legs wide open in a truly indecent posture. She joins her, thighs together, more demure. She can’t stop herself looking down at Vicky’s bush where she notices a thin line of secretions separating her cunt lips. Vicky notices her gaze. The inner juice seeps into the thick rust-coloured vegetation.

“I’m a bit excited,” she confesses. She’s a bit drunk. “I hope they ask us to do it together first,” she says.

Katherine bites her tongue. She’s never had any kind of sexual contact with a woman before. Well, there was this girl, Diane, back at grammar school. When they showered after hockey one day, Katherine had once blushed to her roots when she had been caught daydreaming and staring at the other girl’s budding breasts and the first growth of thin hair on her pubis. She looks into Vicky’s green eyes. She has an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach. On the other hand, she’s getting wet, inside. Anticipation?

Inevitably, British males have so little imagination, that’s what the guys ask for.

Vicky takes Katherine’s hand and leads her to the carpet. The men settle in their chairs, pulling them away from the card table, idly fingering their cocks.

She gently pushes Katherine down, her back against the floor. She slides back, parts Katherine’s thighs, opens her legs wide and moves her head towards the beckoning crotch. She licks the shaven lips, and a jolt of raw electricity runs through Katherine’s body. Jesus. Vicky gnaws at the entrance and soon inserts her tongue inside the now dripping vagina. The men have grown totally silent. The agile, experienced tongue moves in as deep as she can manage it. Katherine closes her eyes. The warm, velvety, darting tongue then moves upwards and envelops her clitoris. Katherine can feel the bud swelling. She can no longer control her body and a spasm races across her stomach. The tongue deftly extracts the expanding clitoris from its thin hood and Vicky moves her head forward slightly so that her teeth are now chewing Katherine’s button. Jesus. Jesus. She sighs. He used to do it exactly the same way. But the American woman quickly tires and now uses two fingers to bring Katherine off. As she does so distractedly, she whispers:

‘You taste really nice.”

Katherine looks down at the auburn bun bobbing up and down between her thighs and the jerky movement of the hand ending up inside her, stimulating her inner parts with knowing cunning and talent. The pleasure moves up and up through her.

“69?” Vicky suggests.

She circles Katherine’s body and lowers her own, hairy dark cunt over Katherine’s face as she lies down on her, stomach to stomach, breasts almost joined, slightly out of alignment. She licks away at her cunt again in the new position and Katherine timidly extends her tongue upward where it loses itself in the woman’s thick, curly bush. She has to use her fingers to find a way through the pubic hair, separates Vicky’s cunt leaves and slips her tongue inside the other woman.

She tastes so strong. Katherine almost gags initially, but overcomes her reluctance and begins licking the inner walls opening up above her. Vicky is a prolific secreter and soon her juices are flooding Katherine’s mouth, settling in a ring around her mouth, pungent, an abundant gluey deposit.

“Wow,” says one of the men.

Soon, Katherine finds a rhythm and her tongue patterns its in-and-out intrusions against the movement of Vicky’s head and mouth lower down. It even settles into a routine. She feels the heat increasing in her throat and lungs. She must be so wet down there too. It’s both repugnant and perversely pleasing. She wonders if men really enjoy it.

A hand strokes her damp forehead. She opens her eyes again. It’s one of the men.

“Oh, it’s a waste of talent,” another says. “Now for the real stuff.”

Yet another walks over as Vicky disengages herself and Katherine is left sprawled, open, spread-eagled on the carpet as the men surround the two women.

Passively, Katherine and Vicky allow the men to position them, next to each other, on all fours as two move to the front and insert their cocks into the women’s mouths and the remaining two fuck them doggie-style from behind. The cock in Katherine’s mouth is flaccid, and all her best efforts fail to raise it from the dead. In her rear, Maurice pistons away, punctuating his thrusts with hard slaps on her rump. He withdraws, and exchanges positions with the medic who’d been screwing Vicky. The new cock plunges into her still dilated opening, and the guy quickly comes. In her mouth, the useless cock is just another piece of meat. The third man removes himself from Vicky’s mouth as Maurice, still hard, keeps on screwing the American woman relentlessly and positions himself behind her. The plump man’s labouring instrument is very thick and painfully stretches her cunt muscles. However, he ejaculates quickly, and Katherine feels her innards drowning in the mixed come of the two men. The man in her mouth still labours on, to no avail.

“Hey, not there,” Vicky screams, next to her. Katherine turns her head but cannot see what Vicky is complaining about to Maurice, or the other man. She’s no longer sure who is doing what to whom.

After all the fun and games are over, the two women wash themselves out in the adjoining bathroom. Katherine watches the men’s seed mingle in the tub with the soapy water, as it seeps, on and on from her body as she squats over the bathtub.

“Well, that was quite fun,” Vicky remarks, adjusting her make-up in front of the bathroom mirror.

They leave the Mirage together and become friends. But they never have sex together again. “I prefer men,” Vicky tells her one morning when Katherine, curious, questions her. “Anyway, your heart wasn’t in it. You’re not truly bi.”

When the cash runs out, Vicky helps her get a job in a peep show on the wrong side of town, where she herself does the occasional shift when funds are short. The money’s good and the security guys see to it that there’s no funny business. Six hours a day, Katherine sits in a cubicle in diaphanous lingerie, while men open the door to enter the other side of the closet, a glass window separating them. There is a telephone to communicate between the two areas. For five dollars, the men get three minutes during which she strips and follows their utterly predictable instructions. They are without surprises. They ask her to touch herself. Breasts. Pussy. Sometimes even feet. For an extra ten dollars, which they can insert through a hand-sized aperture in the glass partition, she will spread her legs wide and open her vulva to their gaze, for an extra twenty, she will even insert a flesh-coloured dildo inside her cunt and pretend to masturbate. Invariably, they all lower their trousers to jerk off. An attendant has to wipe the come off the glass partition and sweep the floor with disinfectant every fifteen minutes or so. When rent day approaches, Vicky teaches her a new trick, which is strictly speaking not allowed, but where the management operate a blind eye policy. For another fifty dollars, she will also allow the guy to thread his hand through the opening and paw her. One day, one man goes too far and scratches her badly. Katherine gives up the job and packs her meagre belongings. There are too many books, all used, read a few times each already, too much to carry. Vicky says she’ll join her. They leave Las Vegas and head for the Coast.

Katherine is waitressing at the bar of a big hotel near LAX. Randy businessmen make half-hearted passes, but don’t seem too disappointed when she politely turns them down. She’s not the Angeleno type. The tips aren’t too good and the hours are long and awkward. She still lives with Vicky; they share a small apartment in a block near Pacific Palisades. Vicky sometimes disappears for days on end. Katherine never asks where she has been. There are often marks on her body. One morning as she surprises her in the shower, Katherine sees that the small American woman now sports a snake tattoo weaving its way down from her navel to her bush. Christ, that must have been fucking painful, she thinks. Another time, she sees a bad scar on Vicky’s rump. Deliberate. Burnt into the flesh. They are seldom together at the apartment any more. Waitressing and sex work hours seldom coincide.

It’s Katherine’s day off. Big plans for today; she’s going to lounge by the communal pool and finally start Proust. She’s been putting it off for years. And next, she’s planning on Dostoevsky. She’s always been meaning to fill these gaps in her literary culture.

She lies in bed, vaguely daydreaming as always of the men she has left behind. Does she still love, miss, think of them? She just doesn’t know any longer. Vicky walks in. She looks rough.

“Hi, Kate? Got the day off, hey?”

“Yes.”

“Listen. I badly need a favour,” she says. “I’m feeling damn rotten. My period has started and I’m in pain all over. But I’ve been paid in advance for a job today. Can you go there instead?”

“What sort?” Katherine enquires.

“A film.”

“Nudity?” Katherine asks.

“Yeah, of course. But if you ask, they won’t show your face. There are lotsa other girls involved, so they won’t mind.”

Vicky runs to the bathroom where she is promptly sick. She returns, awfully pale and tense. She nervously insists. “Please, I just can’t face it today. Be a pal. Please.”

Katherine acquiesces. She’s stripped before. Never before a camera, though. And she likes Vicky in a quiet, affectionate way.

Vicky books a cab for the afternoon. It’s a villa in the Hollywood Hills. She bargains with the producers.

“It’s all fixed. He even said that if you’re real glamorous, you could get a bonus. I told him you’re incredibly tall and have wild hair. He was very excited. You’ll have to doll yourself up a bit. Here,” she extracts a note from her handbag. “Fifty bucks, buy yourself something special at the mall, something nice. You English gals have so much taste.”

Katherine spends it all, and more, at Victoria’s Secret, where the lingerie is supposed to be English but comes from somewhere in Ohio or thereabouts, she read in a magazine. The underwear is slinky, the silk glistens, she knows how easily she could become a serious silk fetishist with stuff like this. She could spend a fortune on underwear alone. A black slip that adheres to her body through the sheer force of gravity, a pair of knickers, more like a thong, the sheer fabric dissecting her bum cheeks and enhancing the drop of her wide hips. A brassiere that hooks up at the back like a corset. Stockings as soft as flesh. In the cubicle, she looks at her body in the mirror. She feels the onset of wetness between her thighs. God, I’m such a slut.

The villa has white walls, most of the furniture has been moved out the main room, and its windows open up on a large pool outside. They’re already filming there when she arrives. A brassy, artificial blonde stands inside, the water lapping around her waist, her breasts are large and unnatural. A silicone job, no doubt. A tubby guy sits on the edge and she is sucking his cock with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, while the camera peers into the action in close-up. The cameraman is incredibly hairy and wears only Bermuda shorts. Out of camera range, two other couples lounge around, some nude, others with towels around their waist. She recognizes one of the men. It’s Steve; Esteban, from Miami.

He sees and waves.

“Hey, if it isn’t English Eddie?”

She acknowledges his presence with a silent gesture.

The peroxide blonde in the pool changes position with the man and he starts sucking on her genitals, once the cameraman has changed his film. Her pubes are also peroxide blonde. The straw yellow patch seems so damn wrong. A young guy, who looks more like a student, but is actually the director, shouts out:

“Come on, give it some more life. You’re supposed to be enjoying it.”

The porno actor ignores him and chews away impassively.

Finally, “Cut. Let’s move on to another scene. Everybody’s here. The whole cast. Orgy time, kids.”

She’s asked to strip. They won’t even let her wear the new lingerie. A female assistant powders her thigh to hide a small bruise, then moves on to another one of the women who spreads her thighs open and instructs the gofer to powder over the pimples spreading like a rash around her cunt.

The director orders them to spread out in a daisy chain by the pool side. She’s asked to fellate the guy in front of her as he lies on his back and Steve rams her from behind and the peroxide blonde from the previous sequence licks out his arsehole and fingers his balls while he moves in and out of Katherine.

One fleeting moment, she imagines her husband out on the town with a group of other journalists and friends, maybe tomorrow his brother the architect is getting married; they have a meal in Chinatown, cruise the pubs getting increasingly drunker and land in some Soho film club to watch dirty movies. He recognizes her cunt, and is sick as he is forced to watch the alien penis invade her private sanctum in larger than life dimensions. Which is how he must have felt when he had learned of her cheating. The hurt.

Steve pumps away, whispers:

“Fancy meeting like this again, lady. Destiny, I’m sure.”

The director has them change positions.

Now a small redhead is asked to eat her out while Steve’s long, thin member invests her mouth and forces its way almost down her throat. Another’s hand roughly manipulates her nipples, twisting, pulling, squeezing between sharp nails. She can’t see anything. The strong lights blind her and all she can hear is the monotonous whirr of the nearby camera’s motor as it captures the scene and her infamy forever. The redhead isn’t very good. She has a small bald patch and a birthmark on her back, like a map of Italy. Her aroma is distinctive. Do all redheads smell this way?

Behind her, she hears one of the guys cry out that he’s coming, and the cameraman rushes off to catch the moment; the man’s momentary partner fakes aural orgasm. Katherine tastes the pre-ejaculate filtering from the tip of the Cuban’s cock shortly before he withdraws. The sparky assistant brings them all cool drinks and they move inside the villa.

The women don’t speak to each other as they troop in. The men follow. The tubby one has lost his erection. As the next camera setup is prepared, he strokes himself to regain his rigidity. It doesn’t work. The director asks the girls to help him out.

“I don’t do that,” the redhead says.

The peroxide blonde says:

“He smells. At the pool was enough.”

Katherine lowers her eyes when the young director looks in her direction.

“Okay, okay already,” he calls the young assistant over. “Hey, Markie, this is what they taught you at film school, no? Help the poor guy out.”

“You bastard,” the all-purpose assistant answers, but moves over to the temporarily impotent actor and takes hold of his cock as she lowers her mouth toward it. “Better not film any of this.”

Soon, the actor is functional again.

He’s instructed to mount Katherine in the missionary position while the others adopt a variety of lovemaking positions around them. He squeezes himself inside her and quickly loses his hardness. They’re filming the others. He moves ever so slightly inside her so as not to slip out. He winks at her. She’s quite happy to keep on pretending. This goes on forever, and no one notices their lack of ardour as the other couples make up in noise and movement for the faking couple.

“Cut. You can all rest a bit now. Steve,” the director calls over to him. “You seem fresh. In better shape than the other guys. Okay, you and curly hair here, let’s do the anal.”

The others walk away to the pool.

Katherine suddenly realizes what comes next.

“No, no, I can’t do that,” she says, pleadingly, to the men, the young whey-faced director, the aggressively erect Steve and the sweating cameraman.

“Love,” the director says. “It’s part of the deal. Every hardcore movie has anals now. That’s what the guys want. Don’t tell me you’ve never done one. Everyone in the business has to. It’s the money shot.”

“I won’t come inside you,” Steve adds. “When the time comes, I’ll pull out and do a facial, okay?”

The cameraman signifies his assent.

“No,” Katherine timidly pleads one last time.

Steve takes hold of her wrist and twists it hard.

“Eddie,” he says, “you’re a bit of a tease, aren’t you. I remember the last time, you like to play hard to get, hey; you always have cold feet, don’t you?”

Markie the assistant comes over as they set Katherine down on her stomach and help her raise her rump so that the camera can catch it all. They adjust the lights. Shine the warm spots on her utterly exposed rear. Markie carefully sponges Katherine’s genitals and between her cheeks, to clean the perspiration away and then gently pours some oil around her anal aperture as well as Steve’s penis still standing at attention.

Katherine closes her eyes. She’s never been entered there. Penetrated. Fucked. Sodomized. But, she remembers all those nights lying in silence next to her sleeping, cuckolded husband, her whole body consumed by the thoughts of transgression. Her lover had soon discovered how sensitive she was down there and they had often speculated about it. Sometime after they had split up and he was writing her these desperate letters to get her back, change her mind, he had revealed that for weeks he had kept some butter in the fridge in his office for that very purpose.

The cameraman adjusts his focus.

“Filming.”

Steve inserts one finger inside her to spread the oil around. With his other hand, he parts her arse cheeks as wide as he can and places his hard cock against the puckered opening. Initial pressure, the sphincter muscles resist and he makes no headway. He grabs his stem and holding it in a tight vice manually begins to spear her anus. The head moves an inch or so past the outer ring. It feels like constipation backwards. She clenches her teeth. The lubrication takes effect and with one swift move the head inserts itself. Katherine holds her breath.

“Yeah, nice and slow,” the cameraman, or is it the director, says.

She’s tearing, she knows it. Her opening is being sundered. Literally split apart. She’s often fingered herself there, but this is like a knife, a pole, a gun.

Steve thrusts his hips and breaks through. The cock savagely tears in and impales her to the hilt.

Katherine screams.

This is worse than anything ever. She wants to faint, die, make it all go away. Her whole soul seems focused on the opening to her arse where the long, thin cock is planted. Steve ceases all movement. She senses the cock still growing inside her, her inner walls being forcibly pushed further and further back.

“Focus closer. Now. Now.”

The man initiates a steady movement, a quick coming and going inside her guts. To her utter shame, Katherine feels an odious sort of pleasure, excitement radiating out from her forced aperture down to her cunt, up through her stomach. Her heart falters. The movements increase. Every reverse movement of the cock a few inches out of her hole pulls the inner flesh out, the tight, textured pink private flesh sticking like glue to the dark thrusting cock, and then back in again. Secretions accelerate, coat the moving penis trunk in a ring of white thin cream.

“Hey, she looks good,” another male voice explains. The others have come in from the pool to watch the action.

“Yes,” says Steve, between regular thrusts. “She has the perfect butt for anal. Great fit, man.”

The other man is in front of the kneeling Katherine. She looks up. He’s growing erect, his pole rising steadily as he keeps on watching the Cuban digging into her depths in a metronomic movement, and her head shaking forward with every thrust.

“What about a DP, man?” the voyeur asks the director.

“Good idea,” he says.

Katherine’s mouth is so dry. She gasps for breath.

“Look, she’s all flushed,” the other man says.

Katherine’s face and chest have gone a deep shade of pink. Like a stain racing across her body, as the orgasm approaches, stronger than anything before. The cock in her arse still keeps on moving deeper, seemingly labouring her intestines, she wills it further, her inner muscles gripping the hard tool, sucking it in a vampiric embrace.

Steve slows down, pulls her back slightly, still carefully lodged in her rectum and the other porno actor slides down on his back and moves under her raised upper body. She can feel her sweat raining down over him. He slithers into position and positions his cock under her sex lips. She feels the wetness shamefully dripping from her cunt onto his glans and he inserts himself.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jeezus…”

Both men are now fucking her.

They move in unison. As one thrusts, another retreats to the edge of his respective opening. Fire races through her. Her mind is on fever. They now coordinate their movements and thrust inside her together. The cocks rub against her inner walls, teasing each other through the thin layer of skin separating them. She imagines the vision of her double penetration on the cinema screen: the two inhumanly large cocks tearing her pale, white skin in two, digging ever deeper holes, the inhumanly dilated ringed anus as one pulls back, the gaping vaginal gash open like a flower of desire as the foreign object buries itself inside her everaccommodating cunt. Her husband and her lover watching, both masturbating away. This is me, this is me, she says.

“I’m running out of film,” the cameraman says. “We need the come shot.”

The two men withdraw violently, wrenching her guts, take hold of their cocks and pump away manually at speed and come. Over her. Her face. Her rump.

“Lick it,” the director says.

Her tongue moves across her lips, tastes the salty emissions, it sticks in the back of her throat when she tries to swallow.

“Good show, Eddie,” Steve says, smearing his come all over her smooth back side. “We should do it again, in private, you know. I can teach you some more tricks.”

The other women quickly expedite another sequence where they gluttonously eat each other out for the length of another roll of film. Katherine rests. Sips several cans of beer. It grows dark outside. All the actors are growing tired.

“I’ve got another few minutes of film left,” the cameraman points out. “Waste not, want not. Anything we haven’t got in the can yet?”

Steve says to the director: “Do you want to try and do something different? I’ve only seen it done once, you know, by Cameo, a double cuntal.”

“That would be good,” the young man says. “Who?”

“I’ll do it,” Katherine says.

The positioning is awkward. It’s not painful; since the black guy in Vegas, she knows she can take any size. And by now, neither of them can stay fully hard. They clumsily do the act. One of the cocks keeps slipping out. Neither man feels the friction of the two pricks against each other inside her very stimulating. Ten minutes is all it takes. They might salvage two minutes in the edit.

Cut.

That night, she writes again in the yellow legal pad.

“My lover is a pornographer. My lover writes vile stories in which he degrades me. I am always amazed by how white his eyes are, peering into mine as he moves inside my body. He has dark curls on his chest and whispers dirty words in my ear when we are engaged in the act of love, making wild promises he will never keep of all the cities and places he will one day take me to. My wild lover whose hair never stands still says he no longer wants to share me. He betrays our original agreement and scares me deeply. He is unpredictable. I never know what he will say or do next. To me. To my ignorant husband.

“When my lover loves me he positions me on the bed or, more often because of the unfortunate nature of our clandestine encounters, on the floor. He cups his hands under my bum, and raises it slightly while his mouth approaches me. He parts my lower lips with gentle, loving care, brushing my moist curls back and kisses the outer folds of my sex. He takes his time. He does not hurry. He teases my senses like an expert. He knows every inch of my body and trips the light fandango all over. He divides my sex into dozens of distinct areas and knows the right word and touch for each. Mons. Outer labia. Inner labia. Folds. Bud. Hood. Walls. Vagina. Cervix. Spots all the way from A to G. Where did he learn all this? Watching porno movies, he says. His tongue moves inside me and he takes my clitoris, the small bud, in between his lips. He chews, he licks, he sucks and bites it and the inside of my cunt. He tastes my moist intimate secretions and never protests. I know I smell down there. He sniffs me and smiles. He perspires and I drink in his sharp scent. Until I cry enough, I want you inside me now. And his thick, dark cock plunges in to me. Chews my ear lobe. Licks the acrid perspiration from my arm pits. He has no shame.

“As he fucks me, my lover inserts a slow finger up my arse, beyond the tiny ridge of flesh that just hangs there like a super-fluous growth. We copulate, his finger pushes, slides, swivels, rotates inside me and a warm feeling invades my stomach and I almost pee all over him as we move together convulsively and my head bangs against the bed rest or the office wall.

“After love, we talk. And he frightens me again. We share saté sticks and Tesco dips in the darkness. Once he brings sushi pieces.

“We fuck again. Like animals. Over and again. He never tires. We are sore. I never want to go home.

“The last time I saw my lover, it was pouring and my hair was flat and he held an oversize umbrella to protect himself. I shouted at him, swore. He didn’t say much, just handed me this letter he had written and walked away through the drizzle. Peace, is all he asked. How can you, I thought? But my erstwhile lover sometimes has no decency. He is a wild, dark-haired man. My late lover who angers me so much I once almost tried to hire some thug to go and break his legs. I suppose I read too many crime books.”

Her insides ache. She goes to sleep.

A few days later, Katherine almost collapsed with pain while serving behind the hotel bar. The head barman sent her home and she went to see a doctor. She had a bad infection. No doubt someone on that crazy film shoot. At least it wasn’t Aids. All the money she had saved had to pay for the necessary antibiotics.

Vicky has gone. One morning, her clothes and belongings were no longer there. On her own, Katherine could not afford the rent.

She looked at her face in the bathroom mirror. Her brown eyes seem dull. She has spots. She took a long bath, soaking in the warmth. The hairs above her crotch are growing back, hard, wiry, the shaving had irritated the skin and she squeezed some yellow pus from a small pimple there.

She packed her clothes in a canvas tote bag, leaving the legal pad on the dresser. She had only managed to write a few pages. E for effort.

Once on the highway, she hitched North to Seattle. Not one driver made a pass at her during the course of her journeys up the coastline.

They seek her here, they seek her there, they seek her everywhere, but Katherine hides her shame among the deep forests of the Pacific Northwest, reaches the Seattle hills and the vast expanses of blue water that surround the city. She takes up smoking. It rains a lot. On clear days, she gazes at Mount Rainier looming over the horizon of the Seattle skyline. On the way here, she has lost most of her clothes, and barely has enough to keep her warm as winter approaches. But she still holds on to the sheer silk lingerie from Victoria’s Secret, even though she has no occasion to wear it any longer, living as she does in tight, soiled tee-shirts, an old brown leather waistcoat, a birthday present from her lost husband, and patched-up jeans.

She moves like a white ghost through and beyond the sexual pale.

There’s an advertisement in the local free paper. An agency is looking for entertainers. Good pay. Open mind required. The first job she is given is to jump out of a massive cake at a party for a group of Microsoft localizing editors celebrating the completion of another software development project. She is given a skimpy outfit, all glitter and vulgarity. She emerges from the hollow cake. They’re all so young. Boys really. She steps out and dances on the table top. They holler and cheer like frat boys. She shakes her butt, tweaks her nipples inside the thin fabric of the oversize bra, and then pulls her small tits out to another triumphant roar from the boys. Later, she smears the remnants of the rich cream from the cake all over her body and allows the drunken technicians to lick it off her. Very few actually take advantage of her, barely a tongue or a hand ventures lower down. After she has cleaned up, she joins some of the guys for a friendly drink. They’re rather boring. Even here, most can only discuss computer lore. One of the young men stares at her behind thick round glasses. She goes home with him. He’s clumsy but gentle and she stays with him for a fortnight. He buys her small cute presents, a teddy bear, a bracelet. Katherine doesn’t like cute. He’s besotted with her. Gets a small ring, some special alloy that means a lot in computer land, proposes marriage. He doesn’t care about her past. Loves her. Will make her happy. It’s never an option for Katherine, Martin is kind but he just has no poetry. She leaves his condo without even writing him an explanatory note. That’s what I do to men who worship me. You should have known.

She is used and abused.

In a vacant car lot next to the Egyptian Theatre, she gives blow jobs for just a few bucks. The men come in all shapes and sizes. When they lower their pants or open their flies, she smells the evil in them. They come unwashed, young and old alike. She retracts the foreskins and licks away the smegma, swallows them with her eyes wide open. Soon, she has a regular clientele, all modestly content to be fellated by the tall English chick, who will eat cock to their heart’s content, but no she won’t fuck. She doesn’t do that, dear. She could open an art gallery with portraits of men’s appendages. Soon they all taste the same and she grows used to the salty streams coursing down her throat. They like it when she swallows and some pay her more.

Some local prostitutes object to this outsider taking business away from them. They ambush her one night and kick her badly in the ribs and the face. Cut large chunks of her hair off, but she has wild curls to spare. She hurts for weeks and accepts the needle from some biker on Capitol Hill. It helps. Blanks out the hours. The memories. The guilt. The biker shares her with some friends. She needs the dope and indifferently becomes their plaything for a while. Deke, the leader, brands her, an inverted swastika on the inside of one thigh, she’s property. She sleeps with three bikers in one filthy bed, they take turns with her. The session lasts three days as they move from orifice to orifice like a sexual tag-team, violating her without feeling, playing with her like a raggedy doll, inserting objects, bottle tops, Swiss army knives, fruit. To keep her submissive they feed her the heroin. Needle marks, punctures on her arms would scare away the punters, oh yes they have plans for her, so they teach her to inject the dope into her cunt lips. The high is phenomenal.

My adventures as a whore, she reflects in a rare moment of lucidity. Might even be a book in it, she thinks. Kate in the land of cunt.

A businessman picks her up one evening while she is cruising Mercer Street. He’s good to her. Convinces her not to return to the bikers. Even accepts to provide her with the now necessary junk for her habit. He sets her up in a small apartment. He’s married of course. He visits her three times a week. Gives her some spare cash. She starts buying books again. But she’s too passive and he soon tires of her. Takes her to a leather club and offers her in exchange for some form of life membership. She is trussed up, whipped, fucked in the darkness by one man after another until she is sore and her lower lips actually blister, she can’t see any of them as a latex mask covers her face. She is roughly handled, fisted by men as well as women, tied to a rack, pissed on, slapped. In the cold morning they let her go. The businessman has taken back the keys to the flat. He’s out of her life. She wanders the wet streets.

There’s a reading and signing at the Elliott Bay Bookstore. It’s a British mystery writer. She once met him at a party at some conference she’d had to attend in Nottingham. He doesn’t actually recognize her but takes her back to his hotel afterward. She’s pleased to follow, having nowhere to go. He’s very full of himself, actually reads her a new story he’s working on once they’re in bed together. The story’s okay, but the editor in her does feel it still needs some more work. He’s obsessed by her arse, fondles it with genuine awe and affection, but draws back when she presents her damaged sex, and refuses to make love to her. Scared of catching something. He leaves her sleeping in the hotel room when he departs very early in the morning for his next gig in Vancouver. She has a mighty breakfast on the room. His publishers are probably picking up the tab, anyway. She smiles, the industry at least owes her this; she was bloody underpaid…

Her cunt heals. It’s a resilient body part.

She finds a job in a peep show cum strip joint on the corner of First and Pike, facing Pike Place Market where they sell English papers, only a few days old. She does a girl-girl show, anonymously Frenches these other chicks while the thin audience sip their microbrews against the roar of the rock music on the sound system. One of her co-workers takes a shine to her, but Katherine easily convinces her that on stage it’s fine, a job, but she has no further interest in women. The woman, her name is Judy, dolefully accepts this and they become friendly. Judy keeps on raving about the sheer beauty of Katherine’s body. It’s unusual, not common, she points out, you’ve got style, girl. She convinces Katherine to go in for a piercing. Judy sports a ring in her navel. The guys love it, you know, you’ll get much better tips. Body jewellery turns them on. In the basement of a record shop that specializes in vinyl, she slips her knickers off while Judy smiles at her. The heavily tattooed owner guides her to an operating table, lowers it and places Katherine’s ankles into stirrups. He rubs ice over her cunt. Says it’s better than an injection. His fingers part her and he presses against the thin hood of her clitoris, the membrane swells. Nice, he remarks. Nice and plump. As Judy, whose idea it all is explains, you’ll see Katherine it’s even more spectacular than the navel, hands him the sterilized needle and walks across to hold Katherine’s hand. The universe explodes inside her head when he threads the needle into and straight through her clit hood. Hold on, one of them says. The pain doesn’t last long. Fucking Jesus. Her lower stomach is on fire. She clenches all her vaginal muscles, breathes deep, relaxes one moment, breathes deep again, expels the air, her sphincter lets go and she feels a thin stream of shit extruding out of her back orifice. She blushes deeply. Don’t worry kid, the guy says, I’m used to it. But already the localized pain is less intense. She feels all wet around her thighs. God, has she also peed over herself? The guy wipes the black plastic table. He threads a small pearl onto the needle and it slides down to lodge itself between the fleshy hood and her bud. It’s beautiful, Judy exclaims. Suits you fine says the man with the tattoos. More ice to dull the sensation. Katherine finally manages to relax. Don’t touch yourself down there for a few days, the guy says as he later releases her from the table, the pearl now fixed in place, this foreign object peering out all shiny and precious from between the lips of her sex, this adornment, this jewel inside her jewel.

Judy is right. Men do like it.

A Japanese executive takes her to his suite on the top floor of the Madison-Stouffer. All Puget Sound and the islands beyond are spread out, a Cinemascope vision, beyond the bay windows. Apart from the Sky Needle, there is no way you could be any higher in all of Seattle. He strips her, places her against the tall windows, flattens her against the glass, spreads her legs, an offering to the sky outside, she has to close her eyes for fear of vertigo, only the plate glass separates her nudity from the void outside and the ground fifty or so floors down. He licks her rear, caresses the thin pale hair at the small of her back, her breasts are squashed against the glass, he slides his head in between her parted thighs, advances his tongue and inserts it from behind into her gaping cunt. He licks the pearl, chews her bud until the orgasm races through all five foot ten of her from top curls to toes. Later, he offers her an expensive jade necklace after inserting it one piece at a time into her vagina, then pulling it out with deliberate slowness, every piece bathed in her juices which he proceeds to clean with his tongue.

Her daily existence becomes a Sadeian procession of humiliation and pleasure.

One man asks her to pummel his body, harder, harder, I want it to hurt, before he can get hard. She concentrates on all those in the past, the betrayers, the abandoned, to focus her anger and strikes him with repeated fury. When the blood begins to flow from his nose and lips, she panics and flees, without payment.

She signs on for a porno loop. Three black men fuck her in the arse in quick succession while she stands bent over a wooden table. The filmmaker only has a super-8 video camera and never turns to film her face. For days afterwards, the pain endures and she hurts when walking. They’ve actually torn her. To think she once shuddered at the thought of Caesarians. She heals. For another pervert, she accepts to be tied up in a cave where she is administered an enema by a pocked, butch dyke, while he noisily jerks off. She wallows in the expelled liquid, rubs her skin, bathes in the shit-infested waters surrounding her on the black rubber sheet. She allows a one-legged grizzled and bitter Vietnam veteran to fuck her with his stump. While he moves the bone inside her bowels, he loudly sings Born In The USA off-key. And then actually cries when she leaves his motel room.

The cycle of inevitable degradation continues.

Like a penance.

One night, in dire need of junk, she’s at the bar of this swank hotel, looking for passing custom when Steve Gregory walks in. Silk suit and all attitude.

“Christ, baby, you’ve let yourself go,” he says. “But, you see, it’s destiny, we meet again.”

She smiles feebly.

“I need cash, Steve,” Katherine says.

“You need a fix, more like. If you stay here, you’re not even going to get spare change, Eddie.”

He ponders one moment.

Her brown eyes beg.

“Come to the car,” he says. She follows.

He drives out of town. Parks in the darkness, near the Boeing fields. Slips his hand under her blouse. Feels her up.

“Still nice and firm,” Steve says. “That’s the nice thing about smallish tits, they seldom go flabby. That’s an asset you’ve got there, honey.”

He opens the glove compartment and hands her the junk. She shoots up. It’s good quality stuff. She listens to the stars out there, allows the river of ice to invade her whole body. It’s too strong, like a whack to the heart, she’s obliged to put her head on his shoulder.

“I’ll take care of you, Eddie,” Steve says.

He doesn’t even want to fuck her anymore. She’s beyond it.

“See, I know this very private club down in New Orleans,” he tells her, caressing her cheeks with genuine care and concern as she dozes on. “I think we’re going to make a great team, you and me, Eddie. A great team. You’ll like it there, the food is just too much and it’s never cold. You’ve never told me if you like sea food? Do you?”

She assents with a shake of her head, his fingers move through her hair, playing with the tired curls. “Goodbye Seattle,” she whispers. She likes it when men play with her hair. Yes, she does.

Katherine dreams.

Of New Orleans. A city she has repeatedly been told is wonderful. Fragrant. And deliciously evil.

Yet another place her lover insisted he would take her to and no, he hadn’t. They had not embraced in an assortment of fancy New Orleans hotel rooms which had once been slave quarters and where cockroaches roamed free. And never would. A city of cemeteries, storms and bewitching music.

Her pale skin shivers as a last ferry leaves the harbour for the journey across Puget Sound to the scattered isles.

New Orleans.

Katherine finally sleeps. The pain goes away.