Being a Girl (22 page)

The poet Sappho wrote that
what is beautiful is good
, and Schiller said
physical beauty is
a
sign of interior beauty, a spiritual and a moral beauty
. The nuns at Saint Sebastian's had the same view, or at least it always seemed to be the pretty girls who were made team captains and prefects.

I had never really thought of myself as being beautiful, that was Binky's domain. But I had blossomed under Jean-Luc Cartier's hand and my being there that day in the garden, bound and naked, was a sign of my inner purity, my earnest struggle to be true to myself, a stepping stone on the path of my destiny. Freedom is being yourself, knowing yourself. That moment when Jean-Luc held a glass of water to my mouth and the water gushed over my front was a Zen awakening, and I had relived it in my imagination many times since. I had never been caned before. I knew it would hurt, it would hurt a lot, and I knew, too, that I could mutate the pain into pleasure. I sucked on the rubber ball and it was soothing.

‘After you,' Dr Goetz said.

My tutor stood back on the wet grass, took a practice swing with the cane and brought the beast down on my proffered bottom. I bit down hard on the ball and a tear squeezed from my eye. Sweat gushed from my armpits. My shoulder blades
cracked. My knees trembled and my backside burned like the fires of Valhalla as the flames whipped up my spine and down the backs of my legs.

The way my hands were suspended, my toes were scarcely touching the ground and, as I wriggled, my body turned and surely looked more appealing, my dancing thighs inviting attention and that's where the second stripe came, across the soft flesh below the pouting lip of my bottom. I screamed in silence, sucked the rubber ball and pirouetted on the tips of my toes.

‘I don't recall ever seeing anything quite so lovely,' I heard Dr Goetz say, but the words faded at the sound of the cane slashing the air and printing a third stripe across my inflamed posterior, the line slicing the first two and scorching shiny stars of tenderness where they crossed.

My whole body was on fire, my pink nipples tingling, my shoulders taut, the provocative globes of my rump like red-hot coals.

‘Three,' the doctor said, and I really didn't think I would make twelve.

I noticed Dr Martin change position. The fourth crack of the cane was another diagonal, scoring my bottom from the top of my left cheek to the place where my right cheek curves into my thigh. I wriggled as if to escape the blows knowing that my wriggling bottom would be all the more enticing, and knowing that there was no escape. I had without protest allowed myself to be tethered to a tree. I had imagined it the very moment I gazed down at the photograph of the girl in the cave painting in India. I had willed it. I was in a position of total servitude, total surrender, and with that thought the pain was more tolerable. My tutor took up his position once
again, and once again the cane seared my moist folds of flesh. One more, I thought, one more and we are halfway. Sweat glistened from my body and, as the cane came down, I was aware of the sweet musky smell of my own arousal.

‘Very nice, Andy,' said Dr Goetz.

I opened my eyes and my gaze met the cool marble stare of Luther Goetz.

‘This is going to hurt, Milly,' he said. ‘Your tutor is a new convert to our calling, but I am experienced in the art.'

He stood back and gave several practice swings. I heard the thin cane cut the still air and the sound was like cotton being ripped asunder, like an axe splitting wood, like the sigh of the sky at night. I closed my eyes and tried to remain still. I would absorb the pain. I had done it before. But the pain when it came was like no pain I had ever experienced, like nothing I could imagine. The cane burst upon my bottom like an explosion, like the invasion of a foreign army. Tears pressed from my tightly closed eyelids. Sweat ran down my back and dried the instant it reached the furnace of my burning bottom.

The cane came down again and again. I was sure I would be marked forever and I didn't care. I just wanted it to be over. Two. Three. Four. Each worse than the one before, the doctor picking his spot and finding unmarked flesh to brand, lines of fire crossing lines of fire. It was nearly over. I had done it. I would take the beating as the girl in the cave in India must surely have done more than two thousand years ago, like the girl in the amateur photograph. We were sisters in an eternal tradition. It was something to be proud of and, with that thought floating into my mind, the fifth strike of the cane didn't seem quite so painful.

In spite of my resolve, I had been wriggling non-stop and determined to remain still, to take the twelfth stroke of the cane with dignity. My body was ablaze with new feelings, new sensations, and it was with complete horror and even embarrassment that as the cane crossed my flesh one last time I felt a contraction inside my sodden pussy and sighed silently through a long smouldering climax. How? Why? It was something to ponder later and now I hung there suspended from the bough of a tree feeling deeply debauched and deeply satisfied.

I used what strength I had left to stretch up, my feet left the ground, and I swung backwards and forwards, the movement of air cooling my poor little bum, my scored thighs, my burning pussy. When I opened my eyes, the two academics in their short trousers were studying me with what I thought was awe and respect. Could they have done what I had done? I didn't think so.

‘Take her down, Andy, I won't be a moment,' Dr Goetz said and went hurrying back across the garden to the house.

Dr Martin untied the rope from the tree and I came slowly back down to earth. He freed my bonds, released the gag, and I collapsed in his arms. I was trembling, aftershocks of my orgasm clenching my insides. Dr Martin carried me back to the shade below the green canopy and, at that moment, Dr Goetz reappeared with a tub of ointment. He sat in his chair.

‘Here, Andy, over my knee.'

Dr Martin did as he was instructed. He lowered me to my feet and bent me over Dr Goetz's knee. I thought I was going to be spanked and was too weak to argue. I was wrong. The doctor removed the
top from the tub he had brought from the house and I flinched as he soothed ointment into my fiery cheeks.

‘Witch hazel,' he said. ‘It will smart for a moment, then the pain fades.'

He was right. After the initial moment, the sting went away and I felt a wave of pleasure course through my body. The sun was slipping towards the horizon, scoring orange stripes on the pale blue dome of the sky, and I remained stretched over the doctor's lap as he spread the ointment over the orange stripes on the dome of my bottom. I was a well-beaten and satisfied girl at one with the universe.

It was almost dark and getting chilly when I came to my feet. Dr Martin had thoughtfully gone to get a towel and I enclosed myself in its folds.

‘Thank you,' I said, and walked slowly back into the house.

I thought about taking a shower, but the witch hazel was so soothing I decided to stay sticky. I lay on my tummy on the unmade bed and called David. I told him what had happened that day in the garden and, the moment I had finished telling him my tale, he asked me to tell him again.

‘Why?'

‘When people tell their stories they always remember more details the second time,' he replied. ‘It's a writer's trick.'

I could hear his breath race.

‘David, are you masturbating?'

‘Are you joking? Of course I am.'

‘Slowly, slowly,' I said. As my fingers slipped up inside my wet parts I understood the pleasures of phone sex for the first time.

Over the coming weeks I watched the grass grow greener as it slowly knitted together and, like the lawn, the welts on my bottom slowly healed. The caning had left me poised, calm and focused. My gaze was clearer, my mind sharper. I could remember every detail in the books I was reading for my course and my essay on the role of castratos in Renaissance opera received an appraisal from Dr Goetz that made my tutor so proud he sent me a dozen roses that I stood on the shelf below the window in my room. I had never received roses from anyone before.

I joined the philosophical society and met up with several Old Bashers at Tamara Tucker's gunpowder, treason and plot party. As a good Catholic girl, Tamara found it
fwightfully wisqu
é burning Guy Fawkes on a pyre of packing crates. The garden was filled with rowing blues and rugger toffs, young men with floppy hair and girls who reminded me of Mummy in their designer shoes and Tiffany bracelets. Fairy lights like falling snow glimmered in the trees and the retro band playing music by The Who kept conversation at a minimum.

I drank too much champagne and went home with a scrum half named Guy or Oliver or James, something historic. In the hall outside his room, he pulled off my clothes in the way you might toss items in a laundry basket, dropped his trousers and hoisted me like a trophy on to his erection. As my feet left the ground his firework exploded and he was too inebriated to be embarrassed. I got a taxi home.

The petals fell from the roses. The days were growing shorter. I went Christmas shopping between lectures and was packing to go home for the holidays when Dr Goetz invited me to join the coven in the country to celebrate the winter solstice. It would
mean delaying my return to London, but activities surrounding Luther Goetz were likely to be educational and would almost certainly be more interesting than the student parties punctuating the days.

The doctor drove an old maroon Bentley and I enjoyed sinking into the wrinkled leather seat at his side. We collected Professor Martin and one of the wan women, who appeared dressed from head to toe in black with a black veil and whose name as if by some literary convention was Dr White.

We sat in silence, mesmerised by the lap of the tyres on the road. The buildings thinned and disappeared, the country lanes became narrow, the headlights making amber haloes on the hedgerows. Tall trees with bare branches patterned the sky and in the crepuscular light it felt as if we were moving through a dark tunnel of time. After this, the shortest day, the days would grow longer, the cycle would continue. I felt connected to that cycle, a tiny dot in the portrait of time.

We passed through high gates set in thick privet. The track descended into a valley and in a cleft between the hills stood a Gothic mansion with towers and turrets, arched windows and gargoyles leaping from the corners of the roof. Dr White led me to my room and stood on the threshold gripping my arms with trembling hands and staring into my eyes as if I was about to go into hospital for an operation.

‘I love the full moon, don't you?' she gushed, but didn't wait for an answer. ‘You'll find your costume on the bed,' she added and glided along the corridor on feet dancing to music only she could hear. Academics are by nature weird and the women are the worst.

A nun's habit lay on the eiderdown. Black candles lent the room an eerie glow and adorning the red
flock wallpaper were prints of prehistoric creatures in repeating patterns that reminded me of Escher, but the drawings were peculiarly unsettling and androgynous, lizards eating little girls who are defecating little boys who in turn are eating lizards. They were signed
Pandora
and I imagined that the room with its blood-red ceiling and red carpet was the very box from which sprang all manner of depravity.

The black habit was made of the same fabric as the maid's uniform. As I peeled off my clothes to try it on, a slice of moonlight entered the glass doors like an ethereal hand that beckoned me to the stone balcony outside. I thrust back the doors and, protected by the birds of prey guarding the balustrade, I stood in the lunar glow breathing the intoxicating air of the solstice.

It was December 21st but I didn't feel cold. My flesh was feverish. A ray of milky light entered the top of my head and shot through my body. My bottom was tingling with pins and needles. I ran my fingertips over the fine lines left from the caning. I looked back over my shoulder and, in the reflection of the glass windows, I could see a pattern scorched into my skin. Like moonlight on moving water, like a photograph emerging in a developing tray, the pattern took the shape of a pentangle, the silver scars, invisible by day, illuminated by the ghostly light of the moon. I was branded by the moon. People through time have worshipped the sun but I from that day on would always belong to the moon.

I left the doors open and went to dress in the nun's habit, the garment making me feel both religious and sacrilegious, each containing a shade of the other, needing the other. I was tingling and moist, my thighs prickling. The white cap covered my head, framing
my face, and the habit clung to my full breasts. I looked sexual, predatory, and it occurred to me as I gazed into the bevelled mirror that nuns must know the effect they have.

There was a knock on the door. I turned and Dr White entered, costumed now as a Druid in white. She led me through the labyrinth of stone corridors that were rather similar to those in the dream I'd had that night when I drank too much Peralada cava, the night of the soirée.

We arrived at a hall where the rest of the group were similarly dressed, some with their hoods in place, their eyes like black holes as they followed my entrance. The sky was lit by a sprinkling of early stars and all eyes flickered frequently towards the moon as it climbed through the heavens beyond the high arched windows.

A bent waiter with a club foot was passing flutes of fizzing cava and laid out on a table was a selection of food, all in black and white: little rings of goat's cheese dotted with caviar, quails' eggs in black pepper, black olives, black rice with slivers of cuttlefish, aphrodisiac selections from Gala Dali's surrealist cookbook, said Dr White, although my tummy was too tense for anything except champagne.

My tutor approached across the room wearing his hood, but he was taller than everyone else and I knew it was him by his sloping, slightly diffident walk. The moment he joined me, one of the ghostly figures peering from the window called, ‘It's time,' and everyone hurried to deposit their plates back on the table. Professor Martin took my elbow and guided me towards the door and outside, on the stone flagging, we formed two ranks. I was positioned immediately behind the first two and we set off in a
snaking file towards a low, perfectly round hill we approached up a stone path. The Druids chanted as they went.