sea and the smell of olive trees and baked stone permeating the air – the spectre of my twin self, my avatar, but I had always been too young to understand my strange desire to swim naked at night beneath the canopy of stars, to run naked through the hills, and had suppressed these pagan inclinations.
I was suddenly aware that there is only this second, that life is fraught and fragile and often pointless, that to be truly alive is to consent to life
in extremis
, to consent to life to the point of death. I had been in danger when I left school of going to university, getting a degree in economics and making my way like a drone among drones, of existing in the world like a wave lost among other waves. Instead I was standing naked in a room full of dark-suited men, a man clutching the leather belt about me, that belt and those bracelets highlighting my nakedness. I wasn’t free, I was in bonds, and those bonds were liberating.
Some of the men gathered about the table had stopped watching the girls and I became aware that they were watching me, watching my reaction. Was I appalled or stimulated? They would have had no way of knowing. I was lost in my own thoughts. The past seemed to be vanishing like the ice caps, the future was uncertain, nonexistent. I felt like a fully formed foetus floating in the amniotic soup waiting to be born, to be reborn, and, as that image nursed me in its fleeting embrace, the past and the future came flooding towards me in a great icy cold wave that almost knocked me off my feet.
Sandy Cunningham was standing on the other side of the table.
7
Betrayal
HE WAS STANDING at the back of the crowd of men watching the two girls, his saucy blue eyes bright as chips of sky, a smile on his rugged features. He nodded at the man still clinging to my belt and my companion led me away from the table towards him.
‘Hello, Sergio, how are you?’ he asked.
‘Ah, so you are here,’ the man with me answered.
‘Where else am I going to be?’
Sergio nodded in acknowledgement of the obvious and the two men shook hands before edging away from the crowd. My throat had gone dry. My knees were shaky. I was in shock. I mean, what was Sandy Cunningham doing here?
The two men spoke for a few minutes, business, numbers, stock-market prices, a world that was familiar to me yet alien in this vaulted temple with the plaster nymphs on the columns supporting the roof, the flesh nymphs performing in the candlelight, a complex symmetry.
For the first time since descending the stairs from the third floor I felt the full impact of what it means to be undressed, naked in a room full of men in suits. Even Sandy looked smart in his dinner jacket, his bow tie neatly arrayed in two sensuous wings, the elegance of his black attire in counterpoint to my white unclothed body, the contrast magnifying the sense of my nakedness, intensifying the erotic tension – and that, I recognised, was the purpose of the
mise-en-scène
, each minute detail arranged as if by a film director to create an air of sublime decadence and pleasure.
I had a feeling that the level of pleasure and decadence had yet to rise, that all that I had witnessed until now was merely a dress rehearsal for the atavistic orgy that would surely take place and would surely sweep me along to places I wasn’t sure I wanted to go – and yet, deep down, deep in the primitive depths of my being, it was the place where my intuition seemed to be telling me I truly belonged. I could only assume I had been named Magdalena for some good reason.
One imagines such scenes taking place in brothels in Asia and South America, in Washington, in the Mayfair homes of Russian oligarchs. But to be here on the Kent coast, in the Garden of England, to be a part of it, suddenly felt unreal and extraordinary. I had been justifying my presence in the pragmatic terms of the mathematician, that clearing my debt of £3,100, as well as avoiding the risk of a criminal record, wasn’t
I was suddenly aware that there is only this second, that life is fraught and fragile and often pointless, that to be truly alive is to consent to life
in extremis
, to consent to life to the point of death. I had been in danger when I left school of going to university, getting a degree in economics and making my way like a drone among drones, of existing in the world like a wave lost among other waves. Instead I was standing naked in a room full of dark-suited men, a man clutching the leather belt about me, that belt and those bracelets highlighting my nakedness. I wasn’t free, I was in bonds, and those bonds were liberating.
Some of the men gathered about the table had stopped watching the girls and I became aware that they were watching me, watching my reaction. Was I appalled or stimulated? They would have had no way of knowing. I was lost in my own thoughts. The past seemed to be vanishing like the ice caps, the future was uncertain, nonexistent. I felt like a fully formed foetus floating in the amniotic soup waiting to be born, to be reborn, and, as that image nursed me in its fleeting embrace, the past and the future came flooding towards me in a great icy cold wave that almost knocked me off my feet.
Sandy Cunningham was standing on the other side of the table.
7
Betrayal
HE WAS STANDING at the back of the crowd of men watching the two girls, his saucy blue eyes bright as chips of sky, a smile on his rugged features. He nodded at the man still clinging to my belt and my companion led me away from the table towards him.
‘Hello, Sergio, how are you?’ he asked.
‘Ah, so you are here,’ the man with me answered.
‘Where else am I going to be?’
Sergio nodded in acknowledgement of the obvious and the two men shook hands before edging away from the crowd. My throat had gone dry. My knees were shaky. I was in shock. I mean, what was Sandy Cunningham doing here?
The two men spoke for a few minutes, business, numbers, stock-market prices, a world that was familiar to me yet alien in this vaulted temple with the plaster nymphs on the columns supporting the roof, the flesh nymphs performing in the candlelight, a complex symmetry.
For the first time since descending the stairs from the third floor I felt the full impact of what it means to be undressed, naked in a room full of men in suits. Even Sandy looked smart in his dinner jacket, his bow tie neatly arrayed in two sensuous wings, the elegance of his black attire in counterpoint to my white unclothed body, the contrast magnifying the sense of my nakedness, intensifying the erotic tension – and that, I recognised, was the purpose of the
mise-en-scène
, each minute detail arranged as if by a film director to create an air of sublime decadence and pleasure.
I had a feeling that the level of pleasure and decadence had yet to rise, that all that I had witnessed until now was merely a dress rehearsal for the atavistic orgy that would surely take place and would surely sweep me along to places I wasn’t sure I wanted to go – and yet, deep down, deep in the primitive depths of my being, it was the place where my intuition seemed to be telling me I truly belonged. I could only assume I had been named Magdalena for some good reason.
One imagines such scenes taking place in brothels in Asia and South America, in Washington, in the Mayfair homes of Russian oligarchs. But to be here on the Kent coast, in the Garden of England, to be a part of it, suddenly felt unreal and extraordinary. I had been justifying my presence in the pragmatic terms of the mathematician, that clearing my debt of £3,100, as well as avoiding the risk of a criminal record, wasn’t
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