The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 7 Page 4

  I was listening to her, and I was no longer listening: there was something impossible in her story, but nevertheless I believed more and more in the reality of what she was narrating. Usually, and contrary to the old jokes on the subject, the masochist doesn’t live on the same planet as the sadist. I would even say that they loathe each other. The idea that someone could sexually enjoy suffering, outside his own protocol, offends one extremely; the idea that the other could benefit from his own cruelty, canceling thus her own will, shocks the other. So Judith was suffering not in her flesh, but in someone else’s – and that dirty perv who was making a martyr of her, was – grudgingly – the instrument of it.

  “I’m coming to the point of that weekend,” she said after a long pause. Her silence, after a few seconds, had respected mine, a rare thing with psychopaths, who love telling their story.

  “I now live in Paris. I only go back to Laon for the ceremonies he imposes on me. He phoned me on Thursday – he was expecting me on Friday night, at the station.

  “In the train, the man opposite me was nice, well-read, and frivolous looking. We chatted, and for the hour and a half our journey lasted, I had all that time, in my head, that second thought – I was once again going toward that horror, and my belly was all puckered with pleasure, and I didn’t listen to anything that nice, handsome man was telling me. Something, insidiously, was cutting me off from the world. It’s as if I’m in a camp – a private camp, for my sole use, where the world is no longer relevant.

  “He was waiting for me. Our greetings have been reduced in time to the essential – an exchange of looks, I lower my eyes, mentally kneel down.

  “Of course, I’m not fooled. In reality, he’s a little lout who did his studies too. And who has guessed what I am since the beginning. Who has read me like no one else has read me. To be honest, I’ve already told this story two or three times – each time they looked at me, horrified, explained to me that I’m mad – so? I can diagnose that too.

  “For a while I visited some specialized circles, or which pretend to be, anyway. Some masters, as they say, and submissive girls. Poor little men, poor little wankers, always so worried at the thought that one could enjoy suffering and humiliation . . . yes, able to elaborate a script of submission, minute by minute, where all the violations are codified and punished. But with no question, ever, as to the reason, or unreasonableness, which pushes the submissive to accept those games.

  “We left for La Fère. Do you know it? It’s a garrison town since time immemorial. One of the last places before the east. In crisis now that the armies are reduced.

  “Whole army barracks are deserted, and that is where he took me. Empty huts, weeds everywhere, broken windows, abandoned dormitories, watchtowers without sentries. He stopped at the entrance. ‘Step out, go to the middle of the courtyard and undress.’ November in such a place is November twice over. It was cold and grey, I was already shivering in my coat, even more when I took it off. The rest followed, until I was naked in the middle of a paved courtyard, near a pole which, in the past, held a flag. Night was falling, he turned on the headlights of the car to cast light on me. The headlights were very white, dazzling. I heard the car door slam, I saw his shadow moving toward me . . . The taste for uniforms, you see: he was dressed like an SS officer, from cap to patent leather knee-high boots, he was holding in his hand a cosh – I didn’t recognize him at that moment, he had become so much himself, the blond hair shaved on his temples, the ruthless, limpid eyes. ‘Schnell,’ he shouted. I didn’t even know he could speak German. ‘Schnell, schnell!’ He lashed at my buttocks, while I stumbled along, moving toward a barrack hut in front of me, sliding on the wet paving stones, bent over because of the cold, the humiliation, too. I remember feeling embarrassed because of my hard breasts, the nipples stiff with cold, and arrogant. I was experiencing again the feeling I had earlier in the train, that foreknowledge of the horror – as if everything I had lived till then was only the draft for an ultimate show . . . I fell twice, sliding over the greasy paving stones. I had long streaks of mud all over my body.

  “He made me enter an old dormitory, then a room next to the showers. He hit me behind the knee and I collapsed on the frozen tiles. He grabbed me by the hair, dragged me to a corner, and tied me with handcuffs to a leaking pipe. He hit me four or five more times, I was screaming, protecting my face. Then he threw his crop on the floor, took out a pair of scissors from his pocket, and started to cut my hair – I used to wear it medium-length till four days ago. The locks fell on my shoulders and belly – he was cutting it short, hacking at the mass.

  “When I came back on Sunday, my head completely covered, when I undressed in my bathroom, and my mirror showed me that poor bungled head, with the white trace of his snips, I didn’t recognize myself – no, it’s not that, I recognized someone who was not me – who was me only externally, but in a few snips, he had made another woman come to the surface.

  “He tied me up and left me there, all night. I didn’t hear the car go. Night fell, I was alone, I ended up shouting, crying, there was just the sound of the wind, the cold, the damp. All night long. For a moment I was crying so much that I felt nauseous and vomited bile. No, that is not the right word. I was vomiting myself, that’s it, myself.

  “He came back in the morning, he was still speaking German. He told me I had to choose between absolute submission and immediate death. It was like lightning, you know. The feeling of recognizing a scene one has already lived. The other, in me – not me, for I would have preferred death – the other said she wanted to live, and that she would do what he wanted and that she would submit.

  “He made her kneel down, while leaving her tied up – the hand-cuffs slid on the pipe, he opened the trousers of his uniform and forced his cock in her mouth. She sucked him as she could, awkwardly – as if all my science had vanished. After a minute, he kicked her in the belly, telling her she didn’t know how to do it, that I couldn’t do anything. That she was just good enough to lick his boots – he pushed her neck down, and I licked the patent leather. I still have the smell of polish in my head. Again he kicked me, she collapsed at the bottom of the wall, bent over. Something warm ran along my back, and I realized he was pissing on her.

  “He untied her, dragged her around the whole camp. It was drizzling. She was frozen stiff and she was burning inside. A little later in the old kitchen quarters, he plunged two fingers into her sex – the leather of his gloves was frozen, but he plunged them effortlessly, so ready, open, and available she was.”

  She is silent. Is it my turn to say something? From the start I had created for myself an attentive mask, and slightly doubtful, too. The abomination of her story must not taint my listening. The purity of her story must not provoke my own desire.

  “To cut it short,” she resumes, “we stayed there for two days. He barely fed her, some filthy things thrown on the floor, that she had to lap up, her hands handcuffed behind her back. He penetrated her in every orifice, without ever coming. He hit her a lot, yes. He tortured her, in fact. It’s incredible what a boy with imagination can do with needles, time, and alcohol. All the time he called her a filthy Jew – and it was a red rod plunging deep into her, each time, to touch the other, the one suffering inside her – not her, for she was in the ecstasy of a fantasy realized.

  “She reminds me – this is going to make you smile, isn’t it? – that she thought several times about her mother, that mother she never knew, thinking she is the one who should have expiated, but that she had passed to her the torch of guilt – and it’s her she blamed for being a survivor, in that long female filiation, since her grandmother, who had done what was needed to survive, in the past, and didn’t talk about it, and the whole story was coming out now, and it was her shouting the shame of survival, under a low sky . . . At three in the afternoon, on Sunday, it was almost dark, and there was that sudden storm. He left her in the middle of the courtyard, chained, with rusty old chains, to the pole in the middle, like a f
allen flag. Washed by the rain of her stains. He left in his car, he looked at her from far away, she could see the smoke of his cigarette coming out of his open window. He turned the headlights on, like on Friday night, to illuminate her ruin.”

  She is silent again.

  Looks at me.

  “You have some doubt,” she says.

  I don’t know if I doubt her. I no longer know, in reality. She has that characteristic of the perverted, she knows the cause of her delirium, she has explored in detail the transferred guilt, the unbearable survival. Fifty years after the end of the war, it’s still there, the memory passed on like an inheritance.

  She stands up suddenly:

  “You have some doubt,” she repeats.

  In a few quick movements, she undresses. Her body is a wound, covered in bruises, gashes, cuts, and scabs. And I look neither at the dried blood nor at the traces of blows. Only at that milky skin, or what’s left of it, the very dark triangle between her thighs, then her face again . . . Time stops.

  “Kneel down,” I say. “Head down, come on, will you never learn?”

  Of course, and as every time, I plunge deep into her mouth, up to the hilt, as far as her glottis, until she has tears in her eyes.

  “You told our story really well!” I say.

  And as always, for five years, it’s only when I remember her story that I manage, finally, to come.

  Hand-Jobs

  Mike Kimera

  Is this thing on? Ok. Strange, I don’t normally get to see myself on video. It doesn’t really look like me. So, anyway, let me read this so that I get it right.

  I am subject 103. I’m male, 57 years old, 5′ 11″, 211 lbs, heterosexual and widowed. I confirm that I am taking part in this sociology study of my own free will and that the material in this tape can be used anonymously for academic research.

  Your advert said that you wanted to hear from people with strong sexual preferences; well, I have one of those. These days it’s my only sexual preference.

  This is hard to say, even to a camera.

  I like hand-jobs from whores.

  I know how that sounds: selfish and pathetic but that doesn’t stop it from being true. It’s not all that’s true. I used to enjoy making love with my wife. But that was as much about the love as the sex. And even then, if I’m really honest, fucking never matched the gob-smacking impact of a good hand-job.

  My dad bought me my first one the week that I started as a conductor on the buses, back in 1967. “One good job deserves another,” he’d said. Then he’d added, “And say nowt to your mother.” Like I was going to go home and say, “Mam, you’ll never guess what me and Dad did today.” Daft pillock.

  My first time wasn’t a very sophisticated affair. Back then it was called getting a hand-shandy. I got mine from a blousy woman who smelled of beer and fags and who wore enough make-up to paint the Queen Mary. I sat beside her in the pub on the Dock Road with me Dad sitting opposite me, while she tossed me off with one hand under the table and supped her half of stout with the other. I sat there trying to look like nothing was happening while all the while I wanted to shout and groan and swear. It didn’t take long but it was long enough for me to know that I wanted more.

  I know everyone thinks that the Sixties were swinging but round our way there was no such thing as free love – you paid up front. It put a dint in my pay packet but it kept a smile on my face.

  I may have been ignorant but I wasn’t stupid. I’d seen mates pay and get the clap. I didn’t want to wear a rubber – it was like wearing Wellington Boots back then – so I got into the habit of hand-jobs.

  ’Course, nowadays it’s all blow jobs and that, but this was years before Linda Lovelace showed how deep her throat was. And besides, most of these girls, you wouldn’t want to go near their mouths; you know where they’ve been.

  I got tired of the buses after a year or two and did a spell in the Fleet Air Arm on the Ark Royal based mostly out of Malta. I was on joint Brit/Yank shore patrol, in the Gut in Valletta, cleaning up the mess when things got ugly. I saw a thing or two that taught me to keep it in my pants unless I knew I was in safe hands so to speak. Before Malta, I thought brothels were like saloons in the Westerns, something grand but tacky, not some crumbling dive filled with drunk sailors and young women with old eyes.

  I came home in ’73 and courted Patricia Mahon, a nice girl who’d lived down our alley since she was a kid. The third time we went out together I took her to the Gaumont to see “Don’t Look Now” because she’d said she liked ghost stories. We sat in the big seats in the back, where it was dark and we could cuddle. I’d expected a bit of kissing and that but nothing more. Except it turned out that the movie was quite sexy and Patricia Mahon, while still being a nice girl, had learnt another use for the handkerchief the nuns had made her carry at school. While Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland where at it on the screen, I was getting the most exciting hand-job of my life in the back row of the cinema.

  Patricia and I never spoke about sex. Not even after we were married. We just did it a lot. Then we had the kids and we did it less. Then she got ill. The thing is, even when she was ill I’d get hard. My cock has no conscience but I do. I was celibate a long time.

  After my wife died of the cancer, I knew there’d never be anyone else. At least no one I wanted. And I knew I’d get sad and twisted without a woman’s touch. So, when things got tough, I went back to the whores.

  Of course it’s all changed now. The girls don’t hang ’round saying “fancy a nice time, Deary” any more. These days the whores have websites with photos and lists of services and how much everything will cost.

  I prefer older whores. I’d not want some slip of a girl, young enough to be me daughter, touching me like that. And I like them to be English. Not that I’m prejudiced or anything, but you read about how some of these girls from Russia and Thailand and the like are here against their will and I don’t want that on my conscience.

  I shopped around a bit in the beginning but nowadays I go to the same few girls when I’m in the mood. They know what I want and they don’t make a fuss. One of them even makes a decent cup of tea.

  Still, it’s not the tea you want to know about, is it? You want to know about the sex.

  Well, there’s not much to tell, really. Sex is not about the words is it? It’s about the doing. And I know just how I want it done. I like to stand. And I don’t like to take me clothes off. I prefer the girl to sit. Kneeling would make me feel like I had to hurry up and if she stands she gets too close and I’d have to pay her too much attention. When she sits, she can work in comfort and I can concentrate on what I’m there for.

  I’ve always found it easier to come standing up. And better too. I stand there and unzip (I always do that myself. I hate having people fussing down there) and then I let the dog see the rabbit.

  Most of the time, I’m at least at half mast when the girl starts and if it’s been a while I’m fully at attention. They know I don’t want them to use their mouths, not even for talking, so they pour on some baby oil and get started.

  I like to hold on to something for balance, a chair or the mantelpiece or something, and I keep my eyes closed. The girls are good at what they do and soon my arse is clenching and the muscles in my thighs are as hard as my cock. Towards the end I’m up on the balls of my feet with my head tipped back and my mouth partly open. When the come starts to flow it’s like flying. I feel light and happy and released from everything, even gravity. Then I thank the girl; wash up in the sink and go. I like just being able to go like that. It helps me keep the mood for longer.

  Of course you don’t stay free of gravity for long. After a while what you’ve just done feels dirty and weak and you want to tell yourself that you’ll never do it again. Except you know that that’s bollocks, a passing mood that wears off soon enough. I’m not proud of what I do but I’m not ashamed neither. I’ve lived long enough to know there’s some things you just have to do, so you do them wit
h as much dignity and as little fuss as you can.

  That’s all I’ve got to say, really.

  I’m not sure it’s any help to you but it felt good to talk about it. Not that I’d want to talk to anybody about it face to face but talking to the camera is like being in confession only without the Hail Marys after.

  Now let’s see if I can switch this thing off without breaking anything.

  Attempt to Rise

  Alana Noel Voth

  Drowning is not so pitiful

  As the attempt to rise.

  Emily Dickinson

  The summer before my sixteenth birthday, it was all over the newspaper, BIG BOLD headlines that announced, “Joe Wilde wanted for murder.” I saw his picture once: older guy with a leathery face, black eyes, and a black moustache. The girl he took was my age. According to the newspaper, Wilde told this girl he was a photographer and lured her to his car. There, he hit her in the head with something then drove across the southwest with her in the front seat beside him. People saw them together and weren’t worried about the girl’s spaced-out eyes and bleeding temple. Wilde killed her outside Durango, Colorado and then dumped her body off an overpass where she tumbled through underbrush to a creek. Her head remained submerged underwater until the highway patrol found her days later.

  My father used to smack me for insubordination. Definition: dirty looks, stomping, slamming doors, and wanting to know why. Because I said so. That was all I got from my father followed by a smack to my head.

  My kindergarten teacher was a man. He stood behind me waiting for me to pick up a pencil with my left hand so he could tell me to use my right.

  “No,” he’d say, “use your right hand, Lena.”