Her Master's Voice by Jacqueline George Page A

once. The groove between her lips was deep and dark, and Sherry could see the black wrinkled petals of her hidden flower bursting out.
    Ranji watched her stare. “You really like me?” she asked.
    “Of course. I’m jealous. You’re so sexy. I love your colour, and your figure.”
    “I’d better get dressed quickly, or we’ll be late for the Irishman.”
    “Irishman? I thought he was Chinese.”
    “Oh, it’s just his name. Yhee Lu Pat, Paddy Yhee, The Irishman. Same person, and the same evil bastard. But we’ll be all right. The taxi driver’s been told to stay and wait, and telephone Papi if we’re not out in an hour. Now, let me get dressed and we can go.”
    Ranji brought a sleeveless choli from her case. “Look at this. I had it made just for times like this.” She held it up for Sherry to admire. The choli was white and silky. There was very little to it, and it seemed too small to restrain breasts like Ranji’s. “It’s stretchy. You wait until I get it on.”
    She pulled it up onto her shoulders and around her breasts. There were four silver hooks and tabs at the front that left her cleavage open. She fastened them and settled her breasts comfortably in their confinement. “There! What do you think?”
    The white stretchy material cuddled her exactly, and the blackness of her nipples showed clear where they tented the fabric. Her breasts looked even more nakedly on offer than they had been before. “Ranji! You can’t go out like that! All the men will want to touch you.”
    “Of course they will. That’s why I had it made from stretchy material and not some boring old cotton drill, but my sari will cover them, more or less.”
    She had a white and gauzy sari, a single light length of printed muslin with stylised flowers in purple, grey and black at its hem. Ranji deftly tied a ribbon around her waist and started to tuck the sari into it. A quick weaving of her outstretched fingers formed the pleats and she tucked them in too. She wound the tail around her and threw it over her shoulder, pinning it to the choli.
    Sherry smiled at her transformation. “Houri!” she said. “From a distance you look like a proper Indian lady but when you get close enough, well, this Irish man is going to love you.”
    “Probably,” said Ranji, “and if he’s got the energy, he will probably want to love you too. Come on, let’s go.”
    An elderly Sikh driver waited by the black and yellow cab. Sherry felt embarrassed by his white beard and moustache. She just knew his grandfatherly eye could see through their sexy clothes, but he held the cab door open for them without comment and drove them out onto Holland Road.
    The Irishman had his lair in the Telok Blangah industrial estate. The taxi wound into the labyrinth of Government rental workshop units, crowded with vans and people. Amid the chaos, welders cut steel on the workshop concrete aprons and fabricated complex steel structures. The cab worked its way to an anonymous four-storey concrete terrace. They drove past the busy workshops on the ground floor and stopped at a small door at the end marked ‘Fire Exit, Keep Clear’. Inside bare concrete steps led up and the girls started to climb.
    Ranji was breathing heavily as they finally reached the top and put her hand on Sherry’s arm to hold her back. “Wait a minute. I don’t want to go in panting.”
    “What are we going to do? Is this another lesson?”
    “No, I shouldn’t think so. I don’t know what Papi’s promised him, so we’ll just have to do what he tells us. I’ve heard he’s quite conservative about sex, but you can never tell.”
    Sherry felt increasingly uneasy. She had finally adapted to the idea of flute playing lessons. She no longer felt uncomfortable playing with strange flutes under Ranji’s critical eye, but this afternoon seemed to go beyond that.
    “Why are we doing this?” she whimpered.
    “I’ll tell you later. Now, smile and let’s go.” Ranji pushed the heavy