The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Maxim Jakubowski Read online

  “Dirty girl, hey? Slut.”

  She looks up at him.

  “Take it out.”

  She does. “Lick it clean.”

  She does.

  Then, despite her tired protests, he binds her hands together again with the leather belt and pulls her back toward the bedroom. She stumbles and he allows her to fall over the settee. He stands back and says:

  “Yeah, that’s it. Keep your legs wide open. I’m still going to fuck your brains out, you know. I can get condoms on room service, if I want. Whenever I want. Bitch.”

  He takes a swig from the bottle of bourbon and sits back on the bed, smugly watching her spread-eagled across the settee, her genitals in technicolour display like a centrefold in a skin magazine.

  “Whenever I want,” drinking from the bottle again.

  Half an hour later, he has fallen asleep and Katherine manages to untie the belt and liberate her hands. She dresses hurriedly, abandoning the black knickers she’s had to wipe her moist crotch with. She feels soiled, violated like never before. The man’s jacket is draped over the chair by the door. She pulls out his wallet and takes all the cash. At least six hundred pounds.

  Softly, softly into the Brighton night.

  It’s now New York.

  Autumn has come, or rather Fall as they call it over there.

  Katherine has travelled to Manhattan and found a drab, cheap room in an equally cheapo rundown hotel a few blocks off Times Square, where she often has to jostle with local prostitutes in the somewhat seedy reception area, she picking up her keys – there are never any messages, they booking in their furtive johns. Soon, the working girls begin to recognize her and become friendly. The sultry weather is fading fast. She spends mornings in the Park, reading older books, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, all the novels she should have studied better when she was at Cambridge, where she’d got her 2.2 because of a silly indulgence where she had written mock haikus for one of her assigned essays. She’d deserved a 2.1 at least, she knew, her tutor had said so, but she’d also wasted too much time at pointless parties and playing ingénues badly in college plays. Sitting calmly in the sparse grass, the rumour of the traffic distant, the top edge of the surrounding skyscrapers just about visible from her vantage point, she thinks of the past. Over and over. How she first betrayed her trusting if rather dull husband with a dangerous lover, who soon became too possessive, too disturbing, until she felt she had to break things off and he went berserk. He’d always wanted to bring her to New York, she remembered. How frightening the day he had told her he had already purchased tickets for them, two or three months ahead in time, and served her with this ultimatum to come to America with him and not return to her husband. She’d panicked.

  For her lover to exact a desperate vengeance in the way of men who have projected their deepest fantasies upon a muse only to feel betrayed by their ordinary, selfish and fallible humanity. Yes, he was one for muses. What did he see in her? Why her? She knew she wasn’t worth it. She didn’t have his sense of romance, she had a cold heart, she had prosaic aspirations but then what else could she have desired with a husband who wore a suit and tie as if it were a lifetime achievement and though a couple of years younger than her, looked and acted as if he were already in his forties?

  She closed her copy of A Tale of Two Cities and sighed.

  Soon, she’d finish the book and would need something new to read. This afternoon, she could walk down Fifth Avenue to the Village, past the Flatiron Building and onto Broadway, to Tower Books on Lafayette. Soon, she also knew she would be running out of money. The Brighton cash was already dangerously low and the hotel’s weekly bill would exhaust it in a few days. By now, she supposed, her credit card must be invalid. And even if it weren’t, she did not wish either of the two absent men to find out where she might be.

  She gathered her few belongings, putting the now empty diet Coke can into the brown paper bag together with the well-fingered paperback, strapped on the shoulder bag in which she kept her passport, diary and the remaining cash and headed for Central Park South. She wore a white and red tee-shirt advertising a London mystery bookstore and a wrap-around skirt of many colours, both of which she’d found in a Goodwill thrift store near 22nd Street, shortly after her arrival here.

  A detour on the walk back to the hotel and she moved down 46th Street, past all the jewellery stores towards the Gotham Book Mart, where the second-hand stock was often reasonably priced. None of the books, however, caught her fancy today and she crossed the Avenue of the Americas and continued toward the bustle of Times Square. Tourists queued impatiently at the reduced-price theatre ticket kiosk. She ignored all the British accents among the Babel-like cacophony of the conversations.

  The yellow taxis roared down Broadway as she crossed the main road under the shadow of the gigantic neon displays. Katherine looked up. There, that’s where the black girl at the hotel had said it would be. A fading sign: Girls Wanted For Burlesque Show. On both sides of the small theatre’s entrance were large emporiums selling all the latest video and electronic junk.

  She ignored the Israeli salesmen aggressively pitching their wares to any tourist lingering long enough outside and walked through the side entrance into the building.

  “My friend Lisa sent me,” Katherine says.

  The little guy smoking an evil-smelling cigar lounges back in his chair and looks her over. At the front of his cluttered desk is a board with his name: Guy N Bloom. The office smells of damp and old newsprint. On the wall, old kitsch posters of past vaudeville shows coexist with full-colour spreads of more recent, and explicit beefcake, tanned women flashing obscenely gaping pink split beavers, many of them signed To Guy, my favorite guy and other such witticisms.

  “Your top,” he indicates.

  Katherine pulls the white tee-shirt over her head, her breasts fall free, she hasn’t been wearing a bra. She’s never really needed to wear one.

  The response is predictable.

  “Not much up there, hey?” the older man says.

  “I know I’m not very voluptuous, but . . .” she begins to say.

  “I like your accent, though. Limey, hmm?” He smiles. A mask of kindness almost invades his lined features. “Tell you what, you look a bit Irish to me. Pull your hair back, all those curls, there’s too many of them.”

  She follows his instructions and bunches her myriad curls together and pulls the thick clump back to reveal her forehead. She doesn’t like herself like this, her forehead is too large.

  “Interesting,” says Bloom. “You’re not really that beautiful, but you’ve got something, you know. You’re different; I think the guys might well like you. Pity about the tits, though. Turn round and give me a looksie.”

  She does.

  “No need to take it all off, just pull the skirt up. Let me see your butt. Yeah, thought so, great legs, honey, ass is a bit big, very white, not seen much tanning. Definitely, they’ll like you.”

  He explains the terms of employment.

  “How much money you make is up to you. The better you are, the more they like you, the more tips you’ll get. It’s all tips. We don’t pay any insurance, so you look after yourself. You supply your costume, or lack of costume should I say . . .” he sniggers.

  “No funny business inside the theatre. What you arrange outside is your own business, and I don’t want to know anything about it. Understood?”

  “Yes, I understand,” Katherine says. “When can I start? I really need some money. Bills to pay, you know.”

  “First shift starts tomorrow at two, honey. I might actually come and have a look myself, you’re different, should be interesting. Sometimes I regret I’m no longer a young man. Maybe your bump and grind routine will be more intelligent than the other gals. Show some imagination.”

  Of course, Katherine thinks, I have a degree in English from Cambridge, what do you expect?

  And thinks one brief moment of her erstwhile lover, who made such a song and melodramatic fuss afte
r she had rejected him of the fact he had never seen her dance. Well now, honey, you’d have to pay, she says under her breath.

  The other girls explain how to string the whole thing together. Katherine has bought herself a spectacular bikini, spandex or something like it, shiny, leather-like, and another dancer, a girl with a pronounced Tennessee drawl lends her a feather boa and some silk scarves and shows her how best to drape them around her body. In the cramped dressing-room, she slaps on her best scarlet lipstick and loses one of her soft contact lenses, the last one from the old British prescription. The floor is filthy and she can’t find it again. She takes the other out. Things are blurry now. At least, she won’t see all the bloody men in the audience too close. A saving grace.

  “Have you chosen your tunes?” another dancer asks Katherine.

  “What tunes?”

  “You know, kiddo, the music you want to dance to.”

  Kiddo. The girl under all her flaky make-up is barely out of her teens. Worn before her years. Katherine will soon turn thirty. She reckons she might well be the oldest here. Never mind.

  “I hadn’t thought of it, really. I’ll dance to anything they play.”

  “Here, use this,” the girl says, handing her a CD. “It’s great, but the rhythm is not really me. You have it, you use it.”

  Katherine peers at the label. Shake by the Vulgar Boatmen.

  She waits in the wings, watches the first three girls do their numbers. She can’t believe it. They are lewd, provocative, dirty, wonderfully indecent. She can’t do any of this. Really, she can’t. What am I doing here? In Times Square, cesspool of the western world, where a few doors away a derelict cinema is still screening Deep Throat and black pimps sashay down the street like living clichés, and there’s Bruce Springsteen’s Candy’s Room booming in the air as the black girl gyrates on stage and bends and stretches her body to an impossible degree and the time comes and Katherine holds her breath back and makes her way to the illuminated stage.

  “Go, blondie, go,” shout the other dancers as she reaches the centre of the proscenium. They sense it’s her first time and show solidarity.

  But the music doesn’t start, and she stands there, paralysed, crucified under the dual assault of two glaring, hot spotlights, her medusa curls held aloft by the conditioning mousse, her shiny underwear glittering, her legs long and white, all the bruises from back in London now faded away. She wets her lips. Tries to see the audience and can only distinguish a few trouser legs emerging from the outlying darkness. Not even a dirty mac in sight.

  A guitar chord and the song begins.

  She swings her hips to the beat, pulls the green silk scarf draped over her shoulder across to her throat, caresses the material as it lingers there, a fragile noose of fabric, her knees bend to the rhythm, her bare feet drag slowly across the stage floor, she closes her eyes one moment, pulls with her free hand on the other scarf circling her wrist and waves it in the air where it floats slowly, suspended like a slow-motion kite during the festival at Blackheath, the scarf swims down and lands on the gentle rise of her breasts. She dances in one spot, her body circling the area in a steady motion, every breath in her soul singing parallel to the melodic waves of the rock and roll tune. Her fingers linger over the silk square now protecting her pale chest, she slides them down the narrow slope, from the brown mole at the onset of her cleavage to the tip of her left breast, where she rubs the still concealed aureola through the recalcitrant plastic-like thickness of the bikini bra. Katherine remembers the bump and grind tradition and, when the beat accelerates, with an artificial smile piercing her scarlet lips she pushes her bum out, and then her crotch. Dance, girl, dance. She takes hold of the silk scarf still draped over her chest, slips it between the thin strap and pulls it across the valley separating her two slight promontories, and out again, throws the piece of fabric in the air and allows it to drift down to the stage floor where she kicks it away just a few inches with her toe, as her hips keep gyrating mechanically to the music which seems to be growing louder and louder. She unclips the bra and loosens her breasts, soon to cover them chastely with the other silk piece until now adorning her throat like a thin choker. She feels her nipples growing erect under the thin gauze. Her body undulates steadily as she lowers both her hands and begins to gently massage her nipples through the fabric, like she saw the other women do before and when the chorus of the song jumps in, she pulls the silk piece away to reveal her front unencumbered. A few claps in the sparse crowd. She dances on, Salome of only two veils. She can feel sweat rising through the pores of her unveiled skin. A clammy feeling under her armpits where she had shaved only yesterday afternoon. Her upper lip, which she’d bleached at the same time, itches. The beat goes on. Come on, baby, give us more skin. She dances on, trying somehow to lose herself inside the relentless music. Bump and grind. Push your bum out; shove that crotch forward, show them how the mound of your cunt stretches the fabric of the bikini bottom. Bump. Grind. Push. Shove. The song ends. Another begins without a pause for breath or reflection. Every stage number is divided into three ritual parts, three songs or pieces of music. The new tune is an old big band blast. Brassy. She quickens the movement of her wavering shoulders and the geometrical patterns her arms are tracing in the glare of the harsh spotlights. She moves two steps forward, closer to the edge of the stage where small coloured bulbs imprint rectangular patterns of gaudy colours over the white skin of her legs. As her hands keep on caressing her breasts, she feels a tremor in the pit of her stomach. She recognizes it, the onset of lust. Like when they were in his office, clandestine adulterers and she knew he was about to pull his underwear down and release his thick, dark, tasty cock. She opens her eyes to chase away the dream of the past and for the first time sees, albeit in a myopic blur, the eyes of some of the men in the audience. Hungry. Malevolent. Get on with it, they say. Katherine slips her fingers under the elastic of the bikini bottom. Pulls the garment an inch away from the flesh of her stomach. Tease them a bit, she thinks. A cavalcade of pianos attack the chorus and she swiftly pulls the knickers down. She now stands fully nude, her hips and shoulders still adhering to the syncopated whirlpool of the big band sound. Isn’t the song over yet? she doesn’t feel sexy at all. She feels very much alone.

  She has never stood nude before in front of more than a single man; never even skinny-dipped or gone to a nude beach. How many are there in the audience? She peers sideways into the stage wings. The other girls are no longer watching. But Bloom is, the damn cigar still hanging from his lips. She can’t read the expression on his face from where she stands. She twirls around, remembers the wooden pole over there on the far side of the stage. Waltzes toward it. Shove. Bump. Thrust. Grind. Her body feels wet, the sweat must be pouring down her back, there’s no air, the spotlights are so fucking hot, Jesus, the sweat must be sliding down between the crack of her arse. She reaches the pole and grabs it; her hands are moist as she circles the pole and sketches a few new improvised dance moves like a medieval virgin courting a maypole. The apparatus is in fact metallic. She grinds against it. The hard, round circumference mashes against her pubes, she places her breasts against it and it fills her valley. The song never ends. She throws her head back, the delicate orbs of her breasts stand free, firm, shiny under the film of sweat, she bends at the waist and blushes instantly as she senses her vagina gape open as she does this. But the audience can’t see, she’s too far from the front rows. She stands again. Dance. Dance until the end of time, Kate. She wriggles her backside, keeps on massaging her breasts, if only to keep her hands busy, the movement is quite mechanical as if she were spreading soap or foam over her chest. Yes, yes, he did do that when they had shared their first bath tub. The song ends. One more to go. A familiar riff splits the brief silence. The Rolling Stones. Satisfaction. Much too fast, what is she going to do now? For encores? She has to continue, do more. Needs the tips. Show them more. She moves back to the edge of the stage, dances with exaggerated languor as she mentally rakes up t
he good times, the bad times, the wedding in the chapel of their old college in Cambridge. Her left hand moves from breast to navel, and she pushes it deep with a corkscrew motion into the narrow pit of her belly button. A guy in the audience whoops and hollers. The other hand also abandons the tender nipple it had been tending and hovers over her sex. She swivels her hips like a belly dancer. The finger parts the hair, the darker curls, tip-toes like a scalpel across the now moist aperture. The other hand joins it soon and holds the lips open. She’s so wet, it must be dripping onto the stage floor. She squats on her haunches and deliberately inserts one finger deep inside her cunt, as the guys in the front row open their eyes wider than they ever thought they could. She can no longer hear the music. Keith Richards must still be playing. She moves the finger deep inside, impales herself on it while a finger from her other hand squeezes her protruding clitoris. A hand emerges from the audience, holding a green bill. Closer, girl, closer. She inches her cunt forward until she’s in a precarious equilibrium on the very edge of the stage. The man, whose face remains in the shadows, slides the money into her gaping cunt. She inches her way back. Stands up, the bank note sticking out from her innards. Dances. Bumps. Grinds. Thrusts. The audience whistles, applauds loudly. The music has now ended. Lisa, the black girl who’d sent her here, is waiting over there by the side of the stage to do her turn. Katherine bows to the invisible men in the darkness. Her audience. She pulls the note out from her vagina, half of it is soaking wet with her juices. She waves it. The men shout all sorts of things at her. She sticks two fingers back inside, twists them round to further loud yelps and brings them to her mouth where she licks them clean. Prisoners of lust, he had once described their fatal liaison. The stage lights dim and she can make out more of the meagre audience. There’s only a dozen of them, but the noise they’re making is enough to fill a soccer stadium. She recalls Brighton and Adam Smith, turns round and gets down on all fours and, sobbing gently, thrusting her rump out toward the anonymous men, she cruelly pushes her still lubricated finger into her arsehole. She’s about to pull it out and show them how she can also lick shit like the best of sinners when Bloom and two of the other burlesque dancers hurriedly pull her off stage to the loud protest of the screaming guys.