Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (21 page)

We set out once more. I didn’t know rivers were so long and the world so empty. I saw a family of hippopotamus rising out of the river like giant boulders, antediluvian beasts that had survived flood and famine, white hunters, the cement factories, the diamond mines and salt mines, the wars, the endless wars, the international corporations, the hunger for bush-meat, that brief glimpse of the hippos a reminder that they had survived but survival is precarious and life fragile.

I could smell dust in the air. I saw the largest mosque I had ever seen emerge out of the landscape, dwarfing the trees, the mud-brick houses faintly golden in the afternoon sun.

‘Timbuktu,’ Ali-Sayad said.
‘Nous sommes arrivés.’

Explorers for hundreds of years had set out in search of the legendary lost city of gold. It appeared suddenly on a turn of the river, brown, impoverished, unremarkable. Hussein slowed briefly, then accelerated again, leaving the city behind. We travelled for another hour, two hours, I wasn’t sure, and stopped at a pier where a row of boats were tied to old car tyres.

Beyond the landing place stood a circle of tents and vehicles in a clearing, animals tethered to one side. In the distance, lit by the declining sun, the terracotta-coloured hills were embellished with yellow stone houses with thatched roofs shaped like witches’ hats.

A man and a boy, father and son, appeared, guards, I assumed. I stood on the bleached wooden decking as a few coins changed hands and for the briefest moment it occurred to me that I should dive into the river and swim to the other side, take my chances in the wilderness.

The thought evaporated as quickly as it emerged. I had not at any time tried to escape, not even when I saw the lights of the hotel. There was a part of me that wanted to see how far I was going, how far I could go, a part of me that wanted to know what was going to happen next.

A
S WE DREW CLOSER
to the circle of tents, I saw beyond the clearing a landing strip with a small jet without livery and a single propeller Cessna of the sort that used to fly me back to Kent when Daddy was stationed in Brussels and the school holidays had come to an end. Planes and pack animals. Guns and famine. In Africa you are touched by extremes and it is at the margins of things where we find out who we are.

There was an air of carnival, loud voices, drummers and flutes. The smell of camel dung and hashish, sweat, the press of people. The sun was past its zenith and with the cool came a sense of urgency. Hussein gripped my arm and we followed Ali-Sayad through the crowds to the largest of the tents, a grand structure hung on decorative posts with flaps and flags that quivered in the breeze coming off the river.

Outside, there was a long low platform and, inside, several men loomed over a trestle table, all shouting as they tried to get the attention of a man in a white
djellaba
writing in a ledger. The man had a white beard in the shape of a spade, a curling moustache and a meticulous, unhurried hand. He could have been a Mesopotamian priest. A character from another time.

Everyone smoked. Everyone was attempting to edge in front of everyone else, but it was all good-natured, these men like boys eager for the start of some special event. The man in white stroked his moustache between each entry. His head rose, his eyes would fall on the next in line and, regardless of all the pushing and shoving, only when it came to his turn was Ali-Sayad able to list his goods for sale.

I was Lot 12.

I thought about that. I thought it was a good omen. A good number. I wasn’t superstitious, but would have hated to have been Lot 13.

We shuffled out of the main tent to a smaller tent where there were bowls of water, soap, towels, brushes, everything except a hair dryer. At Ali-Sayad’s signal, I stepped from my clothes and, like an obedient Collie, those friendly dogs with long silky hair, I stood patiently as the two men set about grooming their pedigree blonde from the north. They washed the sand from my curls, they bathed my body. Hussein, always close to violence, cleaned between my toes, he ran the soapy cloth up my legs and gently between the lips of my vagina. He took a fresh bowl of water to sponge me down and I thought how easily we forget that water is precious.

As Ali-Sayad dried me with a towel, my body responded instinctively, my heart beat faster and my breasts swelled up with a prickle that pinpricked the hard pink buds. Ali-Sayad threw out his arms as if in wonder.

‘
Très bien,’
he said, and clapped his hands.

On that sliver of an island beyond La Gomera I had come to see nudity as a form of protection: the naked girl invites violation, not violence. It had been foolish to leave my costume on the beach and, from that first fatal error, step by step, mile after mile, by boat and camel and canoe, my arrival at the slave auction on the banks of the River Niger seemed predestined.

Ali-Sayad slapped my bottom with the tenderness a man shows a pony. He stood back to look at me as you would a painting in a gallery and I got the feeling he was thankful to have come to the end of the Emir’s assignment.

I had no tether about my neck or ankles. I needed no restraints. There was nowhere to go except forward. I had the blue tattoo from below my chin to my crotch and the St Christopher gripped in my palm as refugees take a handful of earth with them into exile.

The drums beat louder as Ali-Sayad led the way across the circle to the platform arranged outside the big tent. He took my elbow to support me as I climbed the three rifle crates serving as stairs to take my place. I gazed out at the intense, concentrated, inquisitive faces. It was like being in a dream, a fantasy. I had left London to go in search of adventure. I had wanted to lose myself in order to find myself. Somewhere, the line must have blurred. I had reached an extreme I didn’t know existed – within me; within the world.

I had become a character from
One Thousand and One Nights
and remembered the Sultan who beheaded three thousand virgins after finding his wife in the arms of another man. Only Scheherazade escaped the same fate and did so with a guile I didn’t have. I had only one story to tell. How I had set out across the sea, fallen in love with a young sheikh locked away by his wicked father, and how I was now standing vacant and paperless before an ocean of men with an eye for business, and how I knew, I knew without doubt, that their business was the guilds and chains of oldest profession.

From Timbuktu I would journey on to some brothel in Hong Kong, Kuwait, Bangkok, London. Slavery knows no borders. There is an unending stream of hapless girls following the silk routes and trade routes to the furthest corners of the earth. My deepest desires had been awakened and what had been my joy would become a life sentence, a daily, nightly, everlasting performance on my knees, my back, with my mouth open and legs open. I would be beaten, whipped, damaged, and what had been my pleasure would turn as pleasure does to eternal pain.

I had entered the core of the female condition, that place where you go when you shed your clothes like an outer skin to seize the future. I glanced at the other girls along the platform. We batted our eye-lashes and ran our eyes over each other as if this were a competition and, in a way, women are always competing in the primeval struggle to be acknowledged as a desirable object. I exchanged nods with Oriental twins, also naked, we were all naked. A slave has no rights to modesty. There was a tall Massai from the jungles of Serengeti, silver anklets at her feet, her hair hennaed. There were others I couldn’t see, tall and short, black and brown, commodities for all tastes. It is hard to understand why, but in sharing your suffering the suffering is more tolerable.

The buyers were wandering past the platform to inspect the goods. They, too, came from everywhere, all shades and races, Tauregs, Berbers, Turks, tribesmen from the nearby Dogon villages. I saw Arabs from the Persian Gulf with distinctive beards and chequered headdresses. There was a woman in a blue burkha, her face hidden by a mask. I saw two black men in white suits, men with scarred cheeks, monarchs in animals skins, and I saw a white man in a linen suit, polished brogues and a pale blue tie speaking French with a man who could have been an Aztec in a cloak woven from feathers. They came closer.

The white man was English. I knew by the way he spoke French, good but imperfect, like Daddy. He could have been a member of the same club. He stopped to look up at me, the blonde floss between my legs, the cobalt stripe dividing my breasts, my green eyes. He turned to the man with him.

‘
C’est une sauvage!’
he said and looked back at me.

‘I’m English,’ I said. ‘Help me? Please can you help me?’

He stood back, surprised, offended, as are some people when they come across a beggar asking for change in the street. His jaw locked, but his eyes remained mobile, icy. They were leopard’s eyes, and I looked away, across the crowd. I was a slave in a market that was coldly secular in that tropical waste. There was no escape. For thousands of years girls have been stripped, strapped, enslaved and sacrificed. Man can’t stop poisoning the air, cutting down the rain forests, killing the last rare species of animals and plants. Was there any reason to believe slavery and the sex trade would ever end?

Tears touched the corners of my eyes. The sky was pink, the sun laying out a matador’s cape over the Sahara. Night would soon be falling. You go through darkness one step at a time. I looked out at the multitude, searching every face. I wanted to believe Samir was out there, that he had come to find me, but the dream was hopeless.

The old man in the white
djellaba
climbed up with his ledger behind a lectern, hammered his gavel on the wooden top and the auction began. He announced what I assumed was Lot One in a voice raked by tobacco smoke and the men in the clearing responded with bids in a polyglot of languages. I understood the numbers, one, ten, twenty, but had no notion of the currency they traded in, dollars,
franc Africaines
, Krugerrands.

The lots went quickly. A Chinese man in a red suit with shimmering silver threads bought the twins and his rivals clapped, the crowd parting to allow him to claim his goods. The woman in the mask, the wife of one of the Gulf sheikhs, acquired a small submissive girl with timid eyes and I imagined she would spend the rest of her life in Saudi or Dubai cleaning, mending, making do, sewing at once in double thread a shroud as well as a shirt.

There are more sophisticated ways of trafficking people, but this nameless clearing where the trade routes crossed was a bridge to the past, a reminder of the myth of Timbuktu. While we are busy making wars to bring democracy and western customs to Africa and the Middle East, in the third world, the old world, the people continue their ancient traditions. This wasn’t merely a slave market, it was a demonstration of defiance.

An aloof girl from India, an arrangement of jewels on fine chains running from her nose to her top lip and down to her belly button, was caught in a bidding war between the king in animal skins and a man whose coiled whip completed the ornate costume of a Maharajah. When he outbid his rival, the Maharaja snapped the whip in the warm air to celebrate. The girl shuddered, her features revealing pangs of agony and ecstasy that I recognised, and I desired only that she learned to appreciate the ambiguous joys of discipline.

There was a roar and a fresh round of applause when the Massai strutted up and down the platform. I had seen anorexic mannequins on the catwalk with the same loping gait, the same vague expression, and it is strange but true that even the highest paid model is no more than a slave to commerce. The Massai was purchased by a swarthy, barrel-chested man with a knife scar across his eye and down his cheek. He immediately fastened a leather collar around the girl’s neck and marched expressionless across the clearing like a circus performer leading a wild cat.

The girls had all gone. I was alone, centre stage, the last rays of the sun like a spotlight. The musicians played, the bids came from every direction, the sum and the excitement mounting. Among those exotic girls I was a rarity, a milky-skinned blonde with emerald eyes and a tattoo. I tried to see myself as they saw me and, with hazy vanity, I thought I was worth my weight in gold.

The bidders approached, predators stalking their prey, the Englishman, the man from China, the tallest of the sheikhs, a Taureg in blue with tattoos on his face, a nomad who had stopped wandering or was seeking someone to wander with. Would it be such a terrible life, I wondered? I had crossed the Sahara. I belonged to the desert. I caught his eye. I smiled. I willed him to win.

One hundred.

Two hundred.

This thousand, that thousand.

The numbers rose. The auctioneer pointed his mallet like a compass needle, his smoky voice rising to fever pitch.

At the back of the crowd were two black men in white suits, white shirts and white ties. I had seen them earlier. Now, they edged forward. At the same time, they were leaning into each other as if to whisper secrets. They seemed to have come to a decision.

The bidders were shouting, but now one of the two men in white raised his hand and called out a figure that drew a gasp from the crowd. The gasp was followed by silence. The highest bidder at an auction is like an Oscar winner, an Olympic champion. Other men get a tingle in their groins and look on in awe tinged with envy.

The auctioneer stroked his moustache. He closed his ledger with a boom that echoed through the silence. He glanced at the Englishman, the Chinese man, the sheikh with cunning eyes, the Taureg. He glanced over that sea of faces and pounded his gavel down on the lectern.

‘Sold.’

The men in the clearing in the last light of day cheered and they weren’t cheering for me. They were cheering for my owner.

Ali-Sayad approached the platform and gave the man who had bought me my clothes wrapped in the turban. The man tucked the bundle under his arm and the two men bowed in a way that would have been oddly moving had my situation been different.

I followed my new master, eyes glazed. I tried to keep my back straight, proud like the Massai, and I wondered how my life would have been had the Chinese man bought me and I’d left with the twins. I was relieved not to have been sold to the man with the leopard eyes. Whatever indignity awaited me, it would have been far worse had the tool of my torment reminded me of Daddy.

We were joined by the other man in the white suit as we moved through the circle of tents. I thought we were going back to the river, but they turned in the opposite direction. We crossed the dust to the airstrip where the pilot and co-pilot were starting the Cessna. We climbed aboard. I was told in perfect English to dress. I strapped myself into the safety harness and the plane took off into the dark sky.

We flew at low altitude due south over Burkina Faso and Benin towards Lagos on the coast of Nigeria. The pilot never spoke to air traffic control, but the two men talked, their language drifting in and out of English. I didn’t speak to them and they didn’t speak to me. It was as if we had made a pact and I thought the less said the easier it would be for me to keep my wits about me. I was going to be raped, tortured, they would break my will and I would comply to their every demand, to every man’s sadistic invention.

The terror gripping my mind was so exhausting I slept and the sun had already risen when I opened my eyes. The dry desert plains had turned into bush and jungle. As the plane banked, I could see out of the window the green landscape vanishing below a tide of cement and glass, the tall buildings owned by bank and oil companies surrounded by mile after mile of slums, the biggest city I had ever seen.

We landed, bouncing over the ribbed surface of the runway. A Mercedes was waiting. I sat in the back with one of the men, the other climbed in the front and the driver took off, the sun beating on the black metal outside, the air conditioning whispering over my bare feet.