Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (5 page)

After being bent over the hull of the boat and fucked to a braying climax, it didn’t exactly feel natural walking about naked, but it didn’t seem to matter much either. When I had first set off swimming to the island without wearing a costume, I had felt daring. Then I began to feel ashamed. Now, my shame was vague as I noted that the man in black working on the Evinrude motor didn’t even bother to look at me as I was bending over next to him to gather another piece of wood. After being fucked and beaten, nothing worse could happen. I wasn’t safe. But I didn’t feel as if I were in danger either. I was just being; living in the present without a past and the future uncertain, as the future always is.

The bag was full and my man in blue looked pleased as I unloaded it next to the fire. He added the wood to the flames, placed a huge metal pot on the improvised grill and poured in water from a large plastic bottle that was new, not washed ashore, and my confidence that a boat would soon be arriving put a spring in my step when the man waved me back out to collect more wood.

On the far side of the fishing boat furthest from the shed, the hull was torn open and I pulled off some long dry planks, making the hole bigger. I crawled inside with some daft idea that I might find something to help in my escape, but there was nothing there and the big crab that scurried by almost scared me to death. I pushed my way out, took a peep at the man in black, he was still absorbed by the faulty motor, and squatted down to pee, the first chance I’d had to do so in private. I gave myself a little shake, there was no paper, and it was an odd pleasure relieving myself in the open air. The smell of my pee was rich and spicy, and I could understand why boys on country walks were always pulling out their dicks and spraying trees.

The sky above was clear blue like a sheet of silk. I wriggled my toes in the black sand. I was anxious to return to my old life, even though I knew my old life would never be the same again. I wanted to get away, I was dying to get away, but as I sat at that moment on the sand watching a seagull skimming the surface of the waves, I experienced a complete calm, an inner stillness in absolute contrast to how I should have been feeling. Had a man violated me on La Gomera, I would have been crazed with rage and anger; I would have felt degraded, used, ruined. But here in this unknown place, all rules and certainties had changed, evolved or regressed. Without money, a passport, my mobile, without a stitch of clothing, what mattered wasn’t what these two men thought of me, what I imagined other people may have thought, or what I thought of myself. Like natives who run naked in the jungle, like nomads in primitive times, nothing mattered except survival. I had never faced a real challenge and my determination to survive now made me feel totally alive and living in the present tense.

I felt my breasts. They were firm, my nipples a deep dark red and jutting out like two hard knuckles. Little spasms were still erupting in my vagina, a pulsing sensation like the sparkles left from fireworks. As I thought about the man gliding into my wet pussy my heart beat faster and the breath caught in my throat. It was specious and shameful. I had been beaten into submission only to discover that there was promiscuous pleasure to be found in being taken against your will.

It was hard to reconcile the gravity of my situation with my body’s serene response. I was a little English girl with two wild men. They could kill me, weigh me down with stones, feed me to the fish. Whatever they wanted to do to me, I couldn’t stop them. But I knew deep down that all they wanted to do is what men always want to do, and that is treat a woman like an object and fuck her until she screams in ecstasy, her moment of rapture a mark of their virility and power. I was certain every man in every night club in the West End would want to do the same as those two men, and I had made it easy by appearing on the island naked without a word to explain myself in their language.

My bottom felt warm, not tender, but glowing, a tacit reminder of being flogged. I rolled back and sprang to my feet in one flowing motion. I twisted round, brushed away the sand, and the six red stripes that marked my flesh appeared like a stigmata, like the brand owners apply to animals and slaves to show who they belong to.

It was time to go back to work. I filled the bag, collected the strip of cane that had been used on my bottom and carried the load back to the shed with some strips of planking balanced on one shoulder. The man in blue gave me a nod of approval, stoked up the fire, and I watched as he pulled vegetables from sacks and diced them in swift, practised movements. There were green peppers, heads of garlic, onions, tomatoes, corn on the cob and some long misshapen roots. He tossed the corn husks into the fire but nothing else was wasted, peel and seeds, everything went into a big iron skillet with some oil and a pinch of red pepper from a jar. The smell soon rising into the air reminded me that I was starving.

He gave me a wooden spoon and I stirred the rice boiling in the big pot. There was sufficient food to feed a small army and I wanted to ask why we were was cooking so much, why he had pissed on me, why he had stopped the other man beating me after three blows from that cane I now fed with pointless triumph into the fire. I had a desire to talk, but had no language in which to do so, and anyway my companion was content humming to himself as he turned the vegetables in the skillet. I hummed, too, finding his tune, and he jiggled his shoulders rhythmically as he glanced at me, his expression that of a parent happy to be working with his child. We hummed together as if without a care in the world, smoke filling the fish shed, and I couldn’t recall ever having gone so long without talking.

At work, we didn’t read the books we promoted. We read the synopses, we leafed through the author profiles, and we chatted over cappuccinos with cinnamon buns and almond croissants. P.R. is all talk, talk, talk; my life was a whirlpool of tittle-tattle and chatter. Everyone was hungry for each grubby little crumb of gossip and rumour, drawing it corrosively into our souls from the mouths of friends, the radio, magazines, the newspaper where Bobby worked. We were talking without listening to each other or to that voice inside that must have conveyed me to the Canary Islands, stripped my costume from my limbs and urged me to swim across the ocean from the known to the unknown; from security to danger. I was standing there barefoot and naked beside that man in the scruffy blue tunic because a secret version of myself must have wanted it to be that way.

He tasted the rice, his expression saying it was nearly done. It was then that we heard the roar of an engine and it seemed as if the relief felt by the man cooking was contagious and I felt it too; everything was progressing as it should, the food would soon be on the table, the machine was working; within the confines of my present existence, harmony had been restored.

We rushed outside. The man in black looked pleased, but he didn’t punch the air as do game-show contestants when they answer some inane question or tennis players when they score a point. It was just as well, as the engine immediately spluttered and died. The man called, my companion tapped my bottom with the flat of his hand, and I ran down the beach to see what was wanted. The mechanic turned the key again, the engine fired and, conversing in sign language, while I nursed the throttle, easing the rubber grip back and forth, he ducked under the engine cowling with a screwdriver and made adjustments until the motor was running smoothly. He stood straight, waiting for a few moments, looking intently at the engine, then closed the clasp on the cowling. He said something, his voice sharp, then made scissors with two fingers and pointed at his eyes so that I watched as he turned off the engine, unhooked the orange cable holding the key and slung the cable around his neck.

Perhaps he had bought me for 50 euros and as my new owner was making sure I understood that there was no escape.

I followed him back up the beach. In the shed there were two plastic jerry cans filled with gasoline. He shoved a pole through the two handles and we carried them together, one at each end. I was at the front and could feel his eyes on my back, on the red welts he’d placed on my bottom with the cane since turned to ash in the flames. We put one of the plastic containers in the boat he had just repaired. When we placed the can in the other boat further down the beach, he went through the same ritual, pointing at his eyes, removing the key and hanging it on the cord around his neck.

‘Yes, dear, I got the point the first time,’ I said, and he stared at me until I looked away.

The tide had receded far out beyond the bay and a strip of black sand stretched around us like a velvet band of the sort I wore during my preppy period before university. We ambled down to the water’s edge where crabs were emerging from the hard sand. We stared out to sea. He grinned and pointed.

I could just make out the shape of a boat heading towards us from a point at the centre of the horizon. The man shaded his eyes and glanced up at the sun as if to judge how long it was going to be before the boat arrived. He wasn’t wearing a watch and I imagined his life was driven by the motions of the sun and moon, the stars and tides, by the forces of nature, that the way he had beaten and penetrated me was a demonstration of passion more than violence. He said something, then rubbed his stomach, asking it seemed if I were hungry, and I nodded eagerly. Like the older man, in his eyes I saw the expression one might have for a child, a look incompatible with the fact that I was a grown woman and happened to be stark naked.

We made our way back to the shed. The older man had laid out three plates. He served a small portion of rice with the vegetables on two metal dishes, then heaped a generous portion on a porcelain plate with a Chinese scene in dark blue. He gave me the pretty plate. He said something to the other man and, when they both chuckled with laughter, I tried to read their banter in their body language. Now that each in his own way had left his seed on me, they displayed no interest in me sexually and treated me merely as a curiosity as Europeans during the age of discovery must have shown the indigenous peoples brought back from the jungles of Africa or the crumbling cities of South America to be exhibited in music halls and travelling shows.

We went outside, out of the smoke, and sat cross-legged on the sand watching the boat growing larger as it approached. There were no forks or spoons and, copying the men, I made little balls with the rice and vegetables and popped the food in my mouth. Not only my body, my taste buds seemed to have burst into life and nothing I had ever eaten before had tasted quite so marvellous. I ate quickly, hot oil dribbled from my fingers on to my breasts and the momentary sting on my bare flesh was a reminder of what it is to be fully alive.

When I had finished, the man in blue indicated the shed with his thumb, pointing behind him, and I went hurrying inside like Oliver Twist hungry for more.

When I returned, the two men were still eating their modest rations. They appeared to chew each grain of rice, savouring the food, and I realised I had a lot to learn, that in my cappuccino life I always left two thirds of the almond croissant, the pizza crusts, the glass of white wine I didn’t want even when I ordered it. My friends and I and everyone talked about the melting ice caps and vanishing forests without doing anything more than talk. We consumed and chattered and contacted the BBC and the cable channels to promise that this author and that author was a witty raconteur, hilarious but at the same time deep and interesting, really great television. Even in the book business you are selling dreams.

My belly was swollen by the time I had finished and I stretched out on the sand staring up at the sky. When the men lit up, I fancied a cigarette and lay there breathing in their smoke. I ran my palms over my tummy and felt like a turkey that was being fattened for Christmas.

Why, when the men ate so little, had I been given a heaped plate of food and then, like a fat girl at boarding school, gone scurrying off for seconds? Why had I been given the one china plate? They were mocking me, having fun, I decided. As the white European, would I not normally expect special treatment? Didn’t we as a people always take the best and leave the scraps for the natives?

Now I was the native. With the stripping away of my clothes, I had been stripped of identity, a past, of preconceptions. I was stuffing my belly because I didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. I possessed nothing. I wore nothing. I was nothing. I was grateful for the plate of food, for the feel of the warm sun on my skin, for any small kindness.

T
HE BOAT WAS RUST-COLOURED
, probably an old fishing vessel, although it looked as if it had been patched together from the cannibalised parts of many boats. At the stern, the flag moving idly on the breeze was from a country I couldn’t identify, the pale configuration on a dark background suggesting the Skull and Crossbones and making me wonder if on my long swim I had slipped through a time warp into NeverLand.

The tide had gone out another hundred yards or so and the boat dropped anchor almost as far again beyond the low-water mark. A spiral of fumes rose up in a pale corkscrew, the motor booming like a heartbeat that echoed over the sea, the sound intrusive after the long hours of silence; there was no electricity on the island, no wailing radios or fizzing neon, no car horns or rowdy crowds.

When the motor died, the fumes dispersed and there was a momentary calm before the lap of the waves and the night birds continued their song. The sun was going down, staining the sky orange, but the light lingered and from where I stood between the two men I could see people emerging on deck, the numbers swelling until the side of the boat was a wall of bodies like passengers waiting for a delayed train on the Underground. A white dinghy was lowered over the side and, while some of the men loaded it with sacks and containers of water, others climbed one at a time down a rope ladder into the sea.

They waded towards us through waist deep water like survivors from a shipwreck. They were carrying sports bags, rucksacks, baskets, parcels tied with twine; I saw one man in a shiny suit and tie balancing a well-travelled suitcase on his head. As they left the boat, they appeared as silhouettes, one indistinguishable from the next, but as they drew closer I saw that the people coming ashore were weary Africans, black as ebony, some with tribal marks scarred into their cheeks and foreheads, the whites of their eyes vivid in the fading light.

Behind the men were four women in bright dresses and headscarfs. The first moved nimbly down the rope ladder. One of the men on board leaned over the deck and dropped an infant into her outstretched arms in the same casual way that his two companions were lowering sacks to the man in the dinghy. The other three women were having difficulty negotiating the rope ladder and the same man climbed down, either to help or hurry them along.

Once they were off the boat, the women moved towards us with the slow rhythm of buoys bobbing on the tide. When they were closer, I realised that the three women were pregnant, their great bellies swollen to the point that I thought one or all of them might at any moment have given birth right there in the sea.

As the men waded ashore, my first thought was that I was the only white person among those dark-skinned people. Then it struck me like a revelation, like the sudden lash from a bamboo cane, that I alone was without clothes. Since the beachcomber had found me, I had been defiled, flogged, fucked and pissed on. I had been treated abominably, yet the fact that I was naked had gone clean out of my mind until those tired people in their modest finery wandered across the sand and flopped exhausted against the dunes.

Most of the men scarcely gave me a glance although others, the younger ones, the boys, gazed at me as children gaze at television with amazement and wonder. Was this a glimpse of their dream? Of the future? Did the girls in Europe really bare their bodies for the newspapers and magazines and parade in the gold-paved streets half naked? That was the question in their eyes and it made me ask myself if I, if we, if all of us were lost in surface desires and pleasures, in materialism and individualism, in the lust for instant reward and gratification. Was I with my tabloid breasts and blonde curls the symbol of a world gone wrong? That’s how it seemed to me at that moment with the eyes of those black women sweeping over my body. That it was all my fault, the fault of PR and advertising and fashion and greed and celebrity gossip, that I, a naked blonde, was the root of all evil.

I followed the progress of the three pregnant women. They had joined arms and, as they caught sight of me, they slowed to a standstill and stared in the way of people confronted by something shocking and inexplicable, a village in flames; dry river beds; boy soldiers. They studied my hair, my breasts, my long legs, and they looked into my eyes, their gaze switching from shock to disappointment and foreboding. If they were going to find naked savages in the lands of the north, it was hardly the best place to rear their unborn children.

That’s what I read in their long pause for reflection. I wanted to explain, to apologise, to move my uncovered self from their path, but my feet had grown roots into the sand; I was a hare in headlights mesmerized by their gleaming eyes. As they finally continued up the beach, I had a vision of the three witches in
Macbeth
and recalled their terrible curse.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

I was cursed. I was lost. I was going nowhere. I wanted to be like those people with a mission and hope. Those women would have saved every precious penny over a very long time, years probably, and were leaving Africa in this precarious way to start a new life. They had timed their journey precisely and, should they give birth once they arrived in Tenerife or Cadiz or Almeria, their new babies would be entitled to Spanish citizenship. They would have passports, a future, all the things we take for granted and I had left behind.

Articles I had read on the black diaspora questioned whether the schools and health services and work forces could absorb the flood of new immigrants with new colours and cultures and religions. I had no idea if this was true or not, we only know what we read and what we conclude through the prism of our own experience and prejudices. Europe to me seemed to be bursting at the seams, growing dusty and worn, decaying from within like an apple with a worm at its core. There must have been countless numbers of people like me anxious to escape from that world without knowing why or what exactly we were trying to escape from. It made sense that this subconscious craving to go and be some place else was echoed across the continents by others, that at heart we are all nomads travelling in search of something that will never be found and may not exist.

The women sat together on the dry sand and my attention turned to the white dinghy soaring over the water, the motor like a slow hand clap getting gradually louder until the craft glided on to the beach and stopped. The man who stepped out was dressed in white, a carefully turned turban, leggings, baggy around the top, tight over his calves, and an embroidered shirt that reached below his waist. His skin was pale, the colour of ivory piano keys, and in his expression was a look of surprise he was trying to conceal.

Like the three women, he looked at me, not so much at my nudity, but into my eyes; he looked away and looked back again. He studied my face as if it were a puzzle and, unable to unravel the mystery, he shouted impatiently, clicking his fingers, and the beachcomber hurried towards us, spine bent almost double, his silky words sounding like a servant’s entreaty, each line a refrain ending in the word
sheikh
, which I assumed is what the man in white must have been. He was much younger than the beachcomber, about my age, I thought, clean shaven and clearly in charge. He had arrived on the beach in the dinghy and stepped out without getting wet while three other men in turbans waded through the sea behind him.

The man in white fluttered his fingers in a dismissive gesture and stood watching as I helped the beachcomber unload the dinghy. The sacks weren’t so heavy, but the water came in round containers like you see in offices and weighed a ton. As I bent to lift those bottles one at a time on to my shoulder, the sheikh just stared with the vaguely bored expression an employer might show someone surplus to requirements.

You’re fired!

It was a line from an inane television programme that entered my mind like a magpie in a starling’s nest. I shook my head, shaking out the nonsense, and adjusted the weight of the bottle.

As I picked my way back through the crowd of immigrants to the fishing shed, my first thought was that the sheikh was annoyed that I was parading around like some porn star in a skin flick. But, of course, it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t my state of undress that had made him cross, but its potential consequences. The Africans were being smuggled into Europe. It was illegal, dangerous, lucrative, I’m sure, and something I should not have been allowed to witness.

If the people were captured by the authorities when they landed in Spain, when they described their journey, they would all remember seeing a naked white girl. When my being missing was reported, as it would be when my two weeks holiday came to an end, the police and Coast Guard would know where to begin their search and who exactly they were searching for.

The feeling of optimism I’d had when I first saw the boat on the horizon had gone. I was in terrible danger. In swimming away from La Gomera without my costume, I had placed myself in the hands of fate and my fate it seemed was now inextricably entwined with the man in the white turban. As I came back out of the shed, I glanced at him again. He was standing there like he owned the world and, in that warm night, a cold chill ran up my back bone.

We made several trips to unload the provisions from the dinghy into the shed. The beachcomber lit oil lamps and filled plates with rations of vegetables and rice. I was taken aback, although I shouldn’t have been, and embarrassed, too, when I was sent out, two plates at a time, to feed the people on the sand. I gave food to the women first and they watched my every move, the dance of my blonde curls, the sway of my breasts as I bent to give them the plates, my green eyes full of desperation and shame.

‘Do you speak English?’ I whispered. ‘
Parlez vous Francais
?’

I spoke, a woman to women, but it wasn’t that they didn’t understand, it was as if they didn’t hear me at all. They took the food, but behaved as if I were a ghost, invisible, some demon that might damage their unborn children. I went back into the shed and returned again with more plates. I spoke to the men, but the only response I got was a shake of the head, and mostly nothing at all. One young boy ran his palm over my thigh, but the man at his side pulled his hand away and, as he glanced nervously at the man in white, I knew my fear of the sheikh was justified.

When I was making my way back into the shed for the sixth or seventh time, the woman with the child, a boy of about two, hissed and beckoned me in a soft melodic voice. From out of her straw basket she produced a folded sarong which she held in her outstretched hands. She was trying to give it to me. My heart beat faster. This small act of kindness was more than I could bare. Perhaps this woman knew what it was like to be a slave.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

The woman stood and opened the sarong. In the remains of the daylight, I could make out the blue pattern on a white background, the same colours as the porcelain plate from which I had eaten my own rations before the boat arrived. I wanted to see this accident of fate, these matching colours, as another link in a chain, that more than coincidence, destiny was at work and my being there in the middle of nowhere had some purpose, that I would be delivered from this ordeal and be a better person after the experience. I would leave PR and join a voluntary group in Africa, dig wells, feed the hungry. I would do something.

Our eyes met and she smiled. The woman wrapped the material around me, covering my breasts, tucking it expertly so that it didn’t open. The hem of the sarong reached my knees and, dressed in this unexpected gift, I stopped feeling like an object, an outsider. I didn’t belong. I didn’t want to belong. But I didn’t not belong either. The tears that trickled over my cheeks moistened the dry surface of my heart and filled me with new hope.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

I continued going back and forth with plates until all the people had been fed. Enough food remained for the man in white and his three sailors, and I was impressed that the beachcomber had worked out exactly how much he was going to need, that there was no waste, that these people had learned to use everything, to throw away nothing. I stacked the dishes. I thought the beachcomber was going to instruct me to wash them, but he had something else in mind when he grabbed one of the oil lamps and crossed the shed to the display of found objects laid out on the long shelf.

He rooted around for a few minutes and, when he called me, he held in his palm a St Christopher on a tarnished chain. He hooked it around my neck and stood back, expressionless, studying me in the necklace and sarong as if we were a couple about to go out to a party. This man was a bully quick to take advantage of any opportunity; he’d sold me for a fuck for 50 euros, yet he had stopped his companion from beating me when the man in black was still warming up.

It was all so confusing, so hard to interpret, so foreign. The beachcomber inhabited a world of harsh realities and constant uncertainty. He survived on whatever the sea brought to shore. He was primitive, uncompromising and it was little wonder when he found a naked girl on the beach that he softened her up with a spanking and used her mouth to unload his semen. If the facts had been laid out for me in court I would have said guilty with extenuating circumstances, a conditional discharge, don’t do it again.

I was dressed now, my costume completed with a Christian token and again in this world without language I could only assume one thing: I was with the St Christopher about to begin a journey.

Outside, the orange light had faded and a few hesitant stars appeared in the sky. The man in the black turban, the mechanic, joined the three sailors who had arrived with the sheikh and, in pairs, carried the Zodiacs down to the sea. Two of them made their way back to the fishing shed to collect containers of water which they loaded on board with the gasoline cans; the last fresh water and fuel before the refugees reached Spain.