Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (20 page)

Where there are hills there are clouds, a greater likelihood of rain and a few desperate trees and flowers. We descended from the heights on a ladder trail and crossed a plateau paved with gigantic black slabs of petrified carbon. The sky is pallid. The sun remains all but motionless for many hours, burning my hands, burning my retina, shrivelling the spider disappearing beneath the stubble claiming my pubic mount.

The sun is pitiless, relentless, the sun and the wind a level of purgatory Dante never knew because you must cross the Sahara to know this hell on earth. My skin is as dry as parchment, stretched tight as a drum. I am ready to burst into flame. My body tingles and itches. My teeth ache. Sand enters every crevice. My mind swims and I see a misty picture of that girl shedding her clothes to cross the sea. I see water everywhere, gushing rivers and pounding surf, Jacuzzi whirlpools, Lake Windermere, the showers at school. I am on the edge of delirium and think of Samir as I press my eyes tightly shut.

Chengi, I come. I come.

The heat is furnace hot, searing, scorching, mind-numbing, uninterrupted and my heart bursts with relief when I see in the sky traces of pink as the sun dips into the horizon and sheds an orange glow over the empty landscape. I feel as if I have been delivered from an ordeal, heated on a brazier, beaten with hammer blows and stronger as a result.

The men did not come to my blanket that night. We ate little, we drank all the water in the goatskin bags and I slept drained and exhausted.

The desert next day gave way to tree scattered savannah. I saw huge termite mounds and squat baobab trees that reminded me of being a girl of twelve and reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s
The Little Prince.
When the first buildings came into view the sound of the yellow parakeets brought a piercing, poignant moment of sorrow to my heart.

We reached a town I would learn was called Ségou. It clings to the banks of the Niger, the wide, sluggish brown river that winds its way into the dark heart of Africa. Ségou smelled of sewers, diesel and fish. I saw in the distance a water tower topped by a flag and the dome of a mosque. There were the usual traders selling CDs, red pottery and rifles. In places where there is little food, no sanitation or roads, schools or housing, you find cell phones and the most sophisticated weaponry in the world.

We dismounted beside the river and the camels dipped their heads into the flow. Their pink tongues were like scoops drawing at the surface of the water, they drank without haste and were surprising graceful.

We were joined by a tall, ebony-skinned man in a crocheted skullcap and a white burnoose. He was closely-shaved with smooth features. He slapped fingertips with Ali-Sayad, but his bright eyes had fallen on me. The man, his name was Mustaf, led my camel into a corral where two horses chewed at the grass on the river bank. The others followed. They hobbled the animals, then gathered to drink tea in the shade beneath a copse of palms.

When Ali-Sayad and Mustaf started to raise their voices I knew they were in negotiation and I had a feeling that it wasn’t the cost of stabling the camels they were discussing. They reached an agreement and my four travelling companions returned to their places beneath the trees.

Mustaf waggled his finger.
‘Vous venez,’
he commanded, and I followed him into the tin-roofed hut.

Without considering the alternatives, I unwound my turban, releasing my grubby yellow curls. I pulled the
hijab
over my head. The St Christopher was hidden in the folds of my pantaloons and I held it tight as I slipped them off and placed them on top of the
hijab
. I stood there naked, and he studied the blue line running from my chin to the tuft of my pubes. Through the blonde floss you could still make out the dark palimpsest of the spider.

He seemed confused. I was a white girl with clan markings. I belonged to someone. He knew it wasn’t Ali-Sayad. Had I been stolen, bartered? Would there be a reward if he took me back where I belonged? I could see about his features that look children have doing sums in their head. These were not sophisticated people. Their abacus was the simple arithmetic of survival.

He made his decision. He grinned and beckoned for me to follow. At the back of the hut beside a toilet consisting of a low ceramic platform with two raised areas for your feet was a shower. I looked into his eyes and he smiled. The shower was driven by a pump which he activated, working it with one foot while I stood below the delicious sprays of cold water. He gave me a big green bar of soap that was surprisingly gentle and my skin burst to life like a flower.

The spider, too, was reborn. I could feel the eight legs stretching below the cap of hair. Mustaf said something in a language I did not understand, but his actions were clear. He pulled his burnoose over his head, stepped from white underpants which I’m sure said Calvin Klein around the elastic, and his cock stood smartly to attention. The man was tall and, likewise, his manhood was monumental with dark throbbing veins and a mauve head as delicate as the fairy orchids Mummy cultivated in her greenhouse.

Mustaf was clearly proud of this specimen. He was grinning a mouthful of perfect teeth as I went down on my knees, gazed up at him over the plain of his body and kept staring into his eyes as I took the monster into my mouth. I sucked and nibbled, chewed and licked. He bunched my hair in his hands in order to lever my head back and forth. My lips stretched, my jaw dropped and like a python I swallowed the creature whole. He was ready to come and whipped it out in order to prolong the delights of discovering such a willing little whore. I knew me and I knew men. It was less painful to let yourself go, do your thing, let them do their thing.

I remained on my knees. He placed his hands under my armpits and lifted me into his arms. I was as light as a child. My belly dancer belly had gone, left in the Sahara. My hips and ribs were skeletal against my white skin, and I’m sure my eyes were hungry and haunted. He ran his tongue around my lips as we crossed the hut to the stained mattress occupying the far corner. He put me down and, at that moment, I remembered my most successful book jacket, a whole sequence of scenes recalled as an old diary holds the keys to caches of memory.

We were publishing a chick lit author, a wizard at self-promotion. She had written a
Guess
Who’s’ Coming to Dinner
rip-off: a black sculptor in love with a tall, willowy girl with protruding teeth and a long, Home Counties face. Like her, in fact. I suggested a photo of her entwined in the arms of a black model who came at a cost of £300. There was no budget for such extravagance, but she agreed to pay herself. She was only an author but Daddy was something in the City. The model was gay and disdainful, he complained that the girl had body odour, which she did, but the shots were stunning; he standing, a sculpture, like the black sculptor of her story, she clinging to him, body white as alabaster, face hidden by her long hair.

The press feeds on fast-food sex, everything known and obvious. The cover shot had something different about it, something that stuck in your mind and got under your skin. The young Scots photographer was making a name for himself and what he taught me that day was that a pornographic photo is arranged to fuel sexual desire. An erotic photo captures an erotic situation. It is subtle, puzzling, mischievous. That’s what we had achieved.

The book was mediocre but received masses of reviews, zillions of column inches of comment, an interview on
Woman’s Hour
. The photographer – short, solid, handsome, vibrant – wanted to sleep with me and I wanted to sleep with him but didn’t because I was being loyal to the boyfriend.

Who was that girl?

Not the author. The other one. The girl with nice legs in a short skirt and a lack of self-confidence sticking to her like a birthmark?

That girl was me, uncomplainingly, settling back on the grubby mattress with its faint smell of goats and grime, legs parted like a drawbridge to allow Mustaf’s sleek black liner to enter my harbour. He was good. He did the right things and reached the right places, his silky head pushing up to my womb, the thick meaty trunk nudging my clit and, I do declare, after those nights of mean pairings out in the desert, as he began to pump out his load, I almost blew the tin roof from the hut shrieking in unexpected rapture.

When girls scream it makes men feel as if they are the kings of the world. He kissed me like a lover, ran his long pink serpent tongue down the indigo line between my throbbing breasts, over my flat tummy bereft of the green jewel, he waggled between my bloated labia and, when the serpent sunk its teeth into my jutting, pulsing clitoris, I came again, pumping out an immodest spray that coated his carved ebony features.

‘
Quelle beauté exotique,’
he said, then he switched to Arabic, which he thought I wouldn’t understand.

‘You are going to fetch a good price,’ he added, and I knew I must remain cautious to survive my fate.

We washed. We dressed. I followed as he swaggered bare-headed out to the corral. The four Arabs remained expressionless. Mustaf stood momentarily with his hands on his hips then slapped Ali-Sayad’s fingers.

We traipsed through the trees to the river bank where a narrow pirogue was tied to a wooden jetty. The boat had a canvas awning for the sun and an outboard motor. Hussein stepped aboard and the other men passed him two hessian sacks, which he stored in the back alongside the half dozen plastic containers, fuel for a long journey. He took his seat on top of the sacks and ripped the cord to start the motor.

Ali-Sayad fluttered his hand to indicate that I should go aboard. I did so and sat hugging my knees on the platform beneath the awning. He then squeezed into the pirogue’s long pointed prow, nursing a rifle, and we set off without a word, Mustaf and the other men left behind and it was impossible to understand the relationship they had with each other.

The broad green water lilies lying on the surface of the water disappeared as we moved away from the bank and gathered speed. Marsh grass stretched as far as I could see. In the trees overhanging the river nests like Chinese lanterns hung from the boughs and small birds weaved through the branches.

The sky was endless, pale blue. Ségou slipped behind us; it had seemed temporary, like a set taken down after a photo shoot. The river broadened and we bounced gently with the flow. It wasn’t long before the vegetation was left behind and it was dreamlike moving along a vein of water within the vast sandy body of the Sahara. We passed scattered villages where naked children stood waving from the banks. We saw cattle herders, men with small scars next to one eye, the marks of their tribe, their eyes following our progress with vague interest, two Arabs from the coast and a creature all in white.

I was moving further away from where I started. I loved Samir, but felt no remorse that I had found pleasure with Mustaf, and would have found the same pleasure, perhaps more, had I struggled to fight him off. I was in mortal danger, each mile navigated along the Niger taking me deeper into the unknown, but still in that moment I marvelled at the severe existential beauty of the desert and felt a fleeting thrill just being there.

In the last glimmers of day I watched from the boat the bustle of a small town crowded with traffic, buses, begging children, women carrying bananas in wide metal trays on their heads. A hotel stood on the waterfront shaded by mahogany trees and I’m sure from the kitchens I could smell French cooking. The hotel was a place for tourists, foreigners like me, and only later would I look back and ask myself why I didn’t slide into the river and try to escape.

You are going to fetch a good price.

Mustaf’s last words ran through my mind like a mantra. But my journey had taken on its own momentum and some unexplained force was impelling me to my uncertain destination.

We stopped to buy fish and stopped again another few miles down river. Hussein looped a rope around my ankle and tied it to the trunk of a tree under which they made a fire. Ali-Sayad gave me cooked fish on a water lily. I ate with my fingers and sucked every bone dry. They boiled water from the river, mixed in hibiscus leaves and I drank cup after cup I was so dehydrated.

We slept beneath the stars and moved with the sun, setting out as it rose, shiny as tin, colouring the surface of the river in silver streaks. I watched fishermen balanced in pirogues casting nets by hand. They waved but I felt no inclination to wave back. Villages little changed for a thousand years clung to the water’s edge, behind them paddy fields green with growing rice.

The day was long, the sun hazy hot, the outcroppings of trees easing the arid landscape from desert to savannah. I trailed my fingers through the water. I saw crocodiles in the reeds and watched birds dropping elegantly from the sky to scoop up fish foolish enough to swim close to the surface.

Only once did Hussein slow and I held my breath as we glided closer to the riverbank.

‘
Regardez.’

Ali-Sayad spoke softly and pointed.

A herd of giraffes came out of the bush, the sight of these tall creatures so unreal as to seem like a mirage. They raced towards the river. I thought for a moment they were going to plunge into the water, but they swerved, each making the same dramatic motion, and took flight along the riverside. I followed their progress as they moved further away. Hussein didn’t speed up and, when I looked back, I saw an infant giraffe, awkward on its long legs, trying to keep up.

A leopard was trailing languidly behind. The giraffe turned to follow the herd, but then turned again, setting out on its own fatal course. The leopard curved gracefully, increased its pace and took off into the air, its wide jaw sinking deep into the giraffe’s slender throat.

I screamed.

‘No. No. No.’

The men laughed. Hussein accelerated and I sat for the rest of the day staring out at the changing landscape through the prism of my teary eyes.

We camped in an inlet where tiny birds ran up and down the hard sand in a military dance. They had acquired more fish which Ali-Sayad cooked on an open fire. I drank hibiscus tea. A breeze licked the surface of the river and the sky turned a vinyl black so impenetrable the trees lost definition, the stars didn’t shine and the men again that night didn’t come to my blanket. I slept with a rope around my ankle tied to Hussein and dreamed that I was a giraffe.