Ambition (9 page)

‘BOR-ING!’ decided Pope loudly. She could have crowned him. ‘
Do
something, boy!
Do something with her
! Strangle her, bite her, whistle Dixie if you must
–
anything
to break the monotony!’

The boy grabbed her ankles and hoisted them up on to his shoulders: she readjusted her body, wriggling up on to him and groaning at the deepness of the penetration. She felt as though she were a
red velvet sofa into whose plush depths the boy was sinking, never to return. Her hands gripped his hips, her dark hair spilled across the Porthault pillow, her narrow body heaved up against his
and her large soft mouth stretched in a shiny and silent scream across her teeth, smearing them with Lancôme Brun Majeur lipstick.

Unaccustomed to both the position and the beauty and pleasure of his client, the second boy spilled his seed in record time.

The room was silent.

‘
Como se chama
?’ whispered the boy.

‘I don’t speak Portuguese,’ she said, raising herself to press her clitoris against his bony body. She was desperate to come, at that stage where nothing in the world matters
but that. The pressure was starting to get to her when Tobias Pope exploded.

‘Jesus!’ He raised a surprisingly small foot clad in a shoe that cost more than the Brazilian boy would earn in a year and kicked his behind as he crouched on all fours over Susan.
The blow separated them and made them cry out. ‘I’ve seen rabbits last longer! Rabbits with premature ejaculation problems! Get out, the pair of you, OUT!’ He flung open the door
and pushed them into the hallway. ‘I’ll settle with Rodriguez tomorrow – ten
centavos
the pair of you! Now SCOOT!’ He slammed the door and mopped his brow.
‘Christ, you can’t get good help these days.’ He clicked his fingers twice. ‘Maria, Rosana, you’re more men than they are, I bet. See what you can do with
her.’

The girls jumped on to the bed, their expressions alert and curious.

‘
Que quer
?’ asked Maria politely.

‘She means what would you like,’ translated the tall girl.

‘What?’ Dazedly Susan raised herself up on her elbows and looked at them hungrily. ‘Oh, anything. I don’t know. What would you like to do?’

‘FOR JESUS CHRIST’S SAKE!’ yelled Pope. Maria and Rosana crossed themselves. ‘Do that thing before I get the bellhop in to do it!’

Seizing a pillow and the initiative, Rosana slipped the Porthault under Susan’s behind. ‘Legs up,
por favor
.’ Quick as a flash she rotated her body so that she knelt
on all fours over Susan, her groin in her face.

Maria slid down the bed. ‘Open legs, please.’

With her legs forming a perfect V – some sort of victory – Susan was set upon by the hot and avid mouths of Rosana and Maria, the one sucking and tugging at the clitoris with her
lips and teeth until it swelled to three times its usual size, the other darting her long and expert tongue in and out. Sweating now, unbearably aroused, Susan put her arms up around Rosana’s
waist. ‘Please, please, your dress,’ she gasped. ‘Please, I beg you, take everything off.’

Like formation strippers, the three of them straightened up in the same split-second to pull off their clothes – Maria the bikini, Rosana the dress, Susan the Ozbek top. Then without
missing a beat they were back in that swamp of sucking again, and Susan felt as though she was being drawn down, down, down into a multi-mouth quicksand. The two girls were into their stride now,
reaching a plateau beyond mere professional pride, working as one body with two heads, licking and plunging in and around her, the noise of the three liquid orifices filling the huge room more
deafeningly than the most sophisticated sound system.

The audience reaction had changed from one of jaded contempt to one of tortuous expectation. Pope was still at the side of the bed but now bent double, his hands flat on the quilt as he peered
at the junction of the three wet holes. Thalia and the boy had abandoned the desultory queue and stood on either side of him, their beautiful young faces looking over his shoulders like some
grotesque perversion of a family portrait.

‘Please.’ Susan buried her face in Rosana’s warm and salty stomach. ‘Please let me. Please help me. I’m going to come.’ She did.

The girls slumped, blind with sweat, against each other, two brown bodies and one white in a heap. A tic in Tobias Pope’s temple made its presence felt.

‘Get off her. Off her, you whores. I haven’t had my money’s worth yet.’ He turned to the boy. ‘You. Reclaim the dyke.’

The boy looked like Marlon Brando with the souvenirs of a bad skin, the scars and punctures that in moderation make a beautiful face even more heartbreaking. He turned his back to Pope and
Thalia and stepped out of his jeans. Climbing on to the bed he swatted Rosana and Maria gently, like a lioness with pesky cubs. He covered Susan with his body where she lay panting on her stomach,
lifted her hips and slipped her skirt off. ‘
Desculpe
,’ he said, taking one, two, three pillows from the head of the bed and putting them under her.

‘What’s happening?’

For answer he knelt behind her, took a buttock in each hand and thrust into her. ‘
No spik Inglês
,’ he apologized as he did so.

She screamed. He was huge. ‘Please stop. Please.’ He continued, unperturbed. She looked over her shoulder into his face, as clear-eyed and untroubled as a three-year-old watching its
favourite TV show. Back and forth moved his hips, back and forth moved the huge thing inside her.

‘You two!’ Pope gestured frantically at the dazed girls on the bed. ‘Suck! Suck her tits! PRONTO!’

They crawled clumsily up to the copulating pair and wriggled beneath Susan’s straight arms. Lying on their backs they fumbled at her breasts, latching on to the nipples within seconds of
each other and sucking greedily.

Susan looked down at them as the boy fucked her. Their eyes were closed and they looked almost happy. She felt a wave of fondness for these strangers who sucked at her, one who would die of AIDS
within the year, one who would marry a hideous and humane Canadian chiropractor, have many children and cosmetic surgeries and be treated like a duchess till the end of her days.

The feeling in her nipples connected with her vagina. She looked over her shoulder and smiled at him; he smiled modestly back, proud of himself, a real pro. She touched her clitoris, and the boy
behind her and the girls beneath her exploded in a moment of non-specific ecstasy. She threw back her head and howled.

They separated, shiny with sweat which made lewd noises as their skin unstuck. They smiled with embarrassment and avoided each other’s eyes.

‘OK.’ Pope’s voice flat. ‘Order champagne whatever you want, wash and go. I’ll be back in ten minutes I don’t want to find anybody in this room who’s
the wrong side of beige.’ He left.

Rosana, Maria and the boy looked questioningly at Susan. ‘Please, the bathroom?’

‘There.’ She pointed.

The door closed behind the three.

Thalia walked to the foot of the bed. She folded her arms and one foot in its high heel tapped slowly on the floor. ‘
Desculpe –
excuse me, please. But haven’t you
forgotten something?’

‘What? Please.’ In her disarmed state, the fierce and beautiful girl in black frightened her.

‘Yes, I remember. It’s
me.
You’ve forgotten
me.
’ The sadness of Thalia’s voice was a thin disguise. ‘You fucked all those people and you
forgot about me. Poor little Thalia.’ She sighed deeply. ‘Always this is the way.’

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t think straight. I don’t know what you want but if it’s money I’m sure—’

‘MONEY!’ The girl was on the bed now, crouching over Susan’s naked body. She held up her hand, and Susan cringed. ‘See this?’ She laughed shortly. ‘No, baby,
I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to
love
you. Like
this
.’

Later Susan Street reflected that if a man had been a fly on the wall of the bedroom on the Avenida Atlantica that night, he would never again ask with a sneer what on earth lesbians did in bed.
The sneer, and the smile, and the superiority, would have been wiped right off. Because a world away from Rosana and Maria and their delicate mouthwork, there was Thalia and her endless fury.

Already sore from the three boys, she couldn’t help twisting and arching, couldn’t help grabbing the girl and kissing her – Thalia viciously spat huge mouthfuls of saliva into
her mouth as she did so – and couldn’t help those words pouring out of her mouth, all four-letter and the most obscene one being LOVE, until Thalia pulled out in disgust.

‘You.
You.
You’re
the whore. Not me. You know why? Because you
love
it. You don’t have to do these things. I do. With your advantages I could have
done – why, I could have done
anything.
You disgust me. You whore.’ She stood over Susan on the bed and spat on her. ‘And you know what’s the worst thing? I could
fall in love with a whore like you.’

She was still lying on the bed in a state of shock when Pope came back. It was still before nine and the noises of revelry from the city were getting louder.

‘Enjoy it?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ She felt shattered. But would rather have flung herself from the balcony than let him know.

‘Good for you.’ He opened the wardrobe.

‘Are we going to the carnival?’

‘What?’ He laughed. ‘Drunkenness, drug abuse, stupid peasants in stupid costumes and street crime? If I want that I can go to the South Bronx or Brixton.’ He looked at
his watch. ‘No, we’ve been good tourists – we’ve fucked the natives and helped the economy. Get dressed, we’re going home.’

She sat in the aeroplane over London feeling used and shabby under the complexion-wrecking lights and thought about the weekend. So she’d slept with various swarthy types of either sex and
come dangerously close to having her cervix split open by one of them . . . big deal. It had only been a Hispanic variation on her dark distant past. Then why did she feel so bad about it?

She ordered a split of Cristal and tried to shake the feeling. The really remarkable thing had been the Montes episode – what had
that
meant?

On an impulse she copied the number from his card into her Filofax and wrote by it LOUISA MOUNT. She tore the card into tiny pieces and put it under her seat. She knew Pope went through her
things when she was sleeping and with a mind like his he could easily put one and one together and come up with Luis and Cristina Montes, some relation.

She didn’t know why she was keeping the number. Maybe because after what she had been through in Rio, a man with a burning desire to wipe Tobias Pope from the face of the earth was the
lifestyle accessory every clever girl needed this year.

‘Susan?’ Bryan O’Brien queried. All eyes in the editorial meeting were on her. Someone sniggered.

‘Oh, yes, Bryan?’ She’d been thinking about Rio.

‘I said great lead. Sex, miscegenation—’ He turned to the most refined of the reporters, Charterhouse boy, and said in his broadest outback accent, ‘That’s
inter-racial screwing for you Limey oiks – and money. Three kinds of dirt. Great.’

The assembled staff looked disappointed.

‘Thank you, Bryan.’ She shot a triumphant smile around the room and demurely lowered her eyes.

‘Can you stay behind for a minute, Sue?’ The hacks filed reluctantly out. When the door had closed behind the last one, he asked her, ‘Have you heard about the Moorsom
business?’

‘Joe Moorsom? What business?’

‘Dirty business, Sue. He plans to ask some questions in the House about Tobias buying out Tooth. You know, foreigners coming over here, taking our newspapers – good socialist
internationalist stuff. Tobias finds him very irritating, Sue.’

‘But it’s not important, surely. What’s a question in the House? It hasn’t hurt Murdoch.’

‘A piece of grit in the eye isn’t important either, Sue. But it causes a hell of a lot of irritation and it can lead to something nasty if you don’t get it out quick. Tobias
seems to think Moorsom won’t stop there, that he’ll make a habit of it, cause some bad publicity. The thing is, Sue, I was talking to one of the lobby boys and they said you were
friendly with Moorsom, oh, years ago, when you were still a reporter . . . ?’ He looked at her expectantly.

‘I don’t particularly like the way the boys in the newsroom use the word friendly when it concerns a man and a woman, Bryan,’ she said coldly. ‘And I can assure you that
there is not nor ever has been anything between Joe Moorsom and me.’

‘OK, Sue.’ He looked at her oddly. Damn, she’d gone too far. She left the office. He knew she was lying, she could tell. There was something between her and Joe Moorsom,
something no one else shared. There was a fifteen-year-old rentboy with a scare thrown into him and a story to tell.
Rupert Grey was thirteen when his parents discovered he was
‘queer’, as his father put it. Till then, his parents had thought of him merely as ‘theatrical’.

But one day a note from the headmaster of Rupert’s minor public school arrived, requesting the urgent attendance of Major and Mrs Grey. There they were horrified to hear that their son
had been found below the assembly stage engaging in oral sex with a timid Chinese boy while above them the school choir performed the Saint Matthew Passion.

Rupert did not help his case by uttering a low highly audible moan of delight at the words ‘oral sex .

It was decided that he would be given one more chance to ‘pull himself together’. He would attend counselling sessions twice a week and if he could rid himself of his
‘perverse desires’, the head told the shocked parents, the boy would have a good future. ‘He is naturally bright, but lazy, and spends a good deal of his time showing off in front
of the class.’

For the next two weeks Rupert found home life unbearable. Whereas before he had been allowed to lounge in his ‘boudoir’, free to enjoy ‘the delicious view in the looking
glass’ undisturbed and read aloud choice passages of Wilde, Huysmans and E.M. Forster, he now found a concerned parental head popping around the door every ten minutes to see if
‘Everything was right?’