Sex in the City--London Page 9

  She rubbed faster, sliming his face with a combination of juices and secretions, locating his nose with her engorged clitoris.

  As she moved faster and faster, her orgasm rising from her centre of operations, Spencer felt that his features were being rubbed away and that he would end up a faceless zombie doomed to roam the city streets after dark – the erased man.

  She roared as she came, clawing the wall in her ecstasy.

  A little while afterwards, she flicked his flaccid cock with a contemptuous fingernail.

  ‘Well, lover. What shall we do now?’ she asked, with a cruel curve of her mouth.

  Too drunk to fuck and too fucked to drink, he could do nothing but groan in reply.

  Having called in sick the following morning, he looked up the number of the British Museum. Three tablets of Berocca fizzed noisily in a glass on his faux granite kitchen top.

  ‘British Museum.’

  ‘Oh, hello. Can you put me through to the Egyptology Department?’

  ‘Certainly, sir. Hold for one moment, please.’

  Three seconds passed.

  ‘Egyptology.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Hello. I am trying to trace one of your consultants. I am doing some research and someone gave me her name as a possibly useful contact.’

  ‘I see. What is the name?’

  ‘Sekhmet.’

  ‘Sekhmet what?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’

  ‘Is this some sort of joke?’

  ‘Oh no. Not at all. But I assume there can’t be many people with that name working there.’

  ‘I can assure you, sir, that there is no one of that name working here or even associated with the Museum. Not alive, at any rate.’

  Spencer’s scalp tingled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sekhmet is the name of an Ancient Egyptian deity. There are several extant images of her in existence. It is highly unlikely that anyone would name their daughter after her.’

  ‘Why would that be?’

  ‘Because she is considered the most formidable and destructive of the Egyptian gods. She is usually depicted with the head of a lion. In the Ancient Egyptian world her name is synonymous with overwhelming female power and bloodshed. She is also known as The Mistress of Dread or The Lady of Slaughter.’

  ‘Oh, er, I …’

  ‘Now, if you’ve quite finished wasting my time, I have better things to do. Goodbye, sir.’

  The line went dead. Spencer put the receiver back very, very gently.

  The crunch came when he failed to perform one Saturday afternoon, after she grabbed him on the sofa where he had been dozing in front of the Six Nations Championship.

  She stood over him, having pulled on her jeans without bothering with underwear, and sneered down at him.

  ‘Time to go,’ she said. ‘The Sales are on.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he groaned. ‘There are loads of sales. Why now?’

  ‘There is only one,’ she said.

  And so he found himself standing on the Egyptian escalator as she spat her venom at him. Too tired to respond in kind, diminished and defeated, he suffered the agonies of public humiliation in a kind of bewildered daze, like a naughty little boy or a dog who had peed on the carpet.

  ‘You’re useless!’ she screamed, glaring down at him from the step above. ‘Call yourself a man? You’re so fucking wet you should be going out with a sponge, not a real woman. You’re nothing but a loser. Go back to Mummy, loser!’

  Although he was dimly aware of people staring at him he just stood and took it, a half-smile on his lips.

  ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you! See? You can’t even look me in the eyes. Where is your spunk? I don’t know what I ever saw in you.’

  He was about to say something when she turned and stared across at the descending escalator. A young blond man with a rugged, weather-beaten face and an athletic figure was staring at them with amusement. He looked pityingly at Spencer who could do nothing but smile stupidly back and watch as the guy turned his attention to Sekhmet. Spencer recognised the look – the blond guy was experiencing the same impact that had struck him a few months earlier. Don’t, he thought. Don’t look. And whatever you do, don’t turn back. You’ll be sorry.

  But it was too late. The guy was hooked.

  Spencer was so weak he couldn’t summon the energy to challenge her, to resist the inevitable. Trailing behind her he could feel himself growing smaller. It was an illusion, of course, a manifestation of his psychological diminution.

  All the same, when the escalator reached the top and Sekhmet walked off, she heard a woman who was standing two steps behind her comment in a conspicuously loud voice: ‘God, this place is filthy. Look at that pile of dust. You’d think that loathsome little rug merchant could afford to employ decent cleaning staff.’

  Not that it mattered. Spencer was nowhere to be seen. And by the time the escalator had completed its circuit, the pile of dust was gone for good.

  About the Story

  THE STORY WAS INSPIRED by a true incident. A cut-glass bowl was indeed smashed by the over-enthusiastic sweep of my border collie’s tail. I did make a trip to the store in question during the sales to try and replace it without success, though that’s another story.

  I was born in the East End, grew up in South London and have lived in Earl’s Court, Kilburn and Chelsea. Like most Londoners, I am fuelled by an urban machismo that gives me licence to defend my city to the death against any detractors. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m with Samuel Johnson on this one.

  Knightsbridge is an area that I know well as I pass through it almost every day en route to somewhere less self-satisfied. However, I am a sucker for The Sale (There Is Only One) and have flashed my plastic on more occasions than I care to remember in the Men’s Dept. But when you can snap up a pair of size 12 Edward Green shoes for £99 instead of £595 it seems worth the hassle of running the gauntlet of unleashed predators who are prowling for the similar bargains.

  Given the fact that London is both an ancient city and a trans-cultural metropolis it seems perfectly reasonable to suggest that ancient Egyptian deities (among other mythical creatures) would be as attracted to it as American bankers and French chefs. We live cheek by jowl with the past and while I have never met a woman quite like Sekhmet, I know plenty of people who have.

  Not long ago, I spent some time with the man responsible for the extraordinary carvings and construction of the Egyptian Escalator and as a result I felt an overwhelming urge to use it as the backdrop for a story.

  Apart from the opening gambit, the rest of the story is pure fiction. Cross my heart, Darling.

  The Caesar Society

  by Kristina Lloyd

  I LIKE SOHO. IT’S horrible. It used to be worse and I liked it even better then. Black doorways and neon-lit nastiness excite and appal me. I want to slip from the street and into a world where the women are all Rimmel and skag, where the carpets smell of come, and no one looks you in the eye except for cash. I hadn’t mentioned this to him though. You don’t, do you? Not before a first date.

  We met on a website called Looking for Crooks. No, that’s a joke, it was called something else. His username was The Big Man and, if you ask me, that’s going to get any girl’s attention. After a few emails and a nice phone call, we arranged to meet in a bar in Wardour Street, some chi-chi place full of media types close to my place of work. It didn’t really suit him. In his giant’s hand, his pint glass was dainty and I couldn’t get over the size of his thumb. Nearly twice the length and thickness of mine, it rested against the glass, its broad, flat nail reminding me of the head of a cock. We talked about Spain (he was very tanned and said he had a holiday home there) but mainly I was thinking how his thumb looked like a cock, albeit a rather flattened cock, and I was wondering how it would feel to have him crushing his big fingers into my cunt, his great bulk looming over me as I came.

  After one drink (two for him) we left for a Mongolian restaurant where he said we�
�d get the best treatment because he knew the owner. It was early autumn, an evening of people clinging on to summer as it ebbed away. Bars and restaurants gleamed with light, mellow like old apples in a hay loft or cosily orange like pumpkins and bonfires. Smokers clustered on the pavement, chatting, laughing, talking on their phones and rubbing their arms against the cold. I felt as if they all knew something I didn’t, something important about clothes or films or the right thing to say. They seemed bony, fast and made of surfaces. My date drew a deep, deliberate breath, cast grandly about his surroundings, and said, ‘Ah, I remember when all this was whores.’

  I found him embarrassing. They fussed over him in the restaurant. Staff from the back came out to shake his hand, grinning with an enthusiasm bordering on panic as he clapped them on the shoulder. I wasn’t introduced. Show-off, I thought, though I didn’t know who he wanted to impress, the staff or me. En route to the restaurant, we walked through Walkers Court, a sleazy little alley top-heavy with XXX signs, its brash adverts making an urban twilight of sulky purple and cheap red neon. It got me right there, right in that place of shame and longing, but I played it cool. We passed back the same way after dinner, walking through those colours of fucking, the purples, reds and pinks bleeding into the night. I didn’t know what to do or what to say about it all. I think he was watching me. I think he saw that I was bothered and aroused by the vulgarity and the soulless, transactional trash.

  We had sex that night at his place, a sparsely furnished bachelor pad above a supermarket in Chinatown. It would be unfair (though not inaccurate) to call him fat. He carries some extra weight, mainly around his gut, but he carries it with confidence. He looks good – staunch and solid – because he’s six and a half feet tall, and he is mighty. Naked, he’s almost majestic, his torso a curve of polished pine sprinkled with dark hair, and his arms are big and strong. He said he worked in construction (on and off) and he had the body you might expect of a man who spliced hard labour with easy living.

  I like fat men because I climax more easily when I straddle them. My clit anchors to their bulk as we fuck and my inner thighs bounce on cushioned flesh. It’s comfy. Fat men generally know how to make a good breakfast too. My desire for the fatties, however, is pragmatic rather than erotic. I never fantasise about them. I fantasise about lean muscle, sneering thugs and men who could do me harm. But I quit chasing the bad men a few years ago, figuring it was best to keep them locked up in the safe space of my head. But I did try, really I did. I tried to find a man who could switch on the meanness for kicks then switch it off and become a person who was warm and kind, who had a GSOH and was ‘comfortable in his own skin’, a phrase I’ve discovered to be very popular on dating websites. Eventually I decided if these men exist, they’re all taken.

  My craziest moment was joining a fantasy-fulfilment network called The Caesar Society. Seize her. Get it? The group catered for those of us with kidnap fantasies. They made a big deal of the fact the founders were a bunch of professional women who wanted recreational sex, no strings attached. For a tidy sum, they’d arrange for you to be ‘kidnapped’ by guys who kinked for this but knew how to play safe and who’d been thoroughly vetted by the organisation. How, I wondered, do you get a job checking out men’s kidnap skills? It sounded more fun than data analysis. I completed a detailed Caesar questionnaire, submitted to a video interview and identified a range of men who buttered my muffin.

  Fat men didn’t make the list. They came later when I bottled out of the whole deal. I was a nervous wreck. I couldn’t sleep at night for fear someone would break in and rape me (even though I hadn’t ticked that option). Walking alone was fraught with genuine danger. How could I know whether the footsteps quickening behind me belonged to a hero intent on fulfilling my fantasies, to a nasty piece of work or neither? Even though The Caesar Society stipulated sex attacks would only happen within agreed time frames, my sense of self-preservation became so skewed that I terminated my membership and decided to centre my energies on a safer option: fat blokes, big bastards. Men who couldn’t run as fast as me.

  Things went well with The Big Man (aka Dave) for few weeks. I had a lot of orgasms and we entertained each other, in part because we didn’t have much in common so everything was news.

  ‘Wow,’ I would say, ‘I didn’t know you could get stuff like that past customs.’

  ‘Javascript?’ he would say. ‘Isn’t that some poncey coffee?’

  He was in his late forties, me in my early thirties. We both knew the relationship was going nowhere but there was a tacit understanding that was cool for now. It passed the time. Then he asked me to meet a friend of his for lunch in Soho. He meant just me and the friend, not the three of us. Dave had something confidential he wanted handing over and couldn’t do it himself, too busy.

  ‘Recorded delivery?’ I suggested.

  ‘Easier if you do it, Ali,’ said Dave. ‘It’s just this envelope. Plus, I reckon you’ll like him.’

  He was right about that. Mack (as in Mack the Knife) was waiting for me in an Italian greasy spoon, a poky little caff decked out in formica and plastic. Cocky and cool in a slate-blue suit and open collar, he sat with his arms on a table, steepling his thumbs, a man with money but no class. I sat opposite him on a red, vinyl banquette. In the corner, a fruit machine was winking lemons and cherries, and the cup of tea I ordered was so strong and stewed I read it as a sign I wasn’t welcome back.

  Mack had a handsome face, cheekily boyish but aged, and his shorn hair was an extraordinary colour, a honey-beige shining like an animal’s pelt on the dome of his skull. Above one ear, a small scar of hairlessness flashed a note both tender and menacing. I thought how heavenly it would be to have his head between my thighs, his hair smooth as velvet as his thick wet tongue splashed in my thick wet folds. I pushed the thought aside, trying to focus on the task in hand.

  My instructions were to conceal the envelope, on which Dave had written ‘3’, inside a newspaper then set both down on the table. After lunch, Mack would take the paper with him. Well, I kept my side of the bargain but the subterfuge seemed pointless because after a few minutes of stilted chat, Mack retrieved the envelope and slit it open with a finger. A heavy silver watched flashed below his sleeve, pale wiry hair romping around the strap. Boy, how I love a man suited and booted with a big wristwatch on a hairy arm.

  Mack grinned, removing a strip of paper to study it. I could see a line of handwriting but couldn’t make out the words. After several moments, he looked up at me with fresh, interested eyes. His grin broadened.

  Oh the shark has pretty teeth dear,

  And he shows them pearly white

  ‘Can I ask what this is about?’ I said.

  ‘You can,’ said Mack. ‘But we won’t tell you.’

  Oh, be still my beating heart! A man who takes such pleasure in his own casual cruelty is a man who can tie me up in knots – literally, if I have anything to do with it. Mack opened his book, a doorstep of a thriller with gold embossing, and slotted the strip of paper between a couple of pages, leaving the first few letters visible. He was playing games, toying with my curiosity. At first, I refused to take the bait. I picked up the menu and ordered pasta with tomato sauce. That was it; just pasta and tomato sauce. No frills here. Mack said he’d already eaten.

  ‘You’re not much of a lunch date, are you?’ I complained.

  When I thought he wasn’t looking, I dropped my eyes to the slip of paper and read VKH. A car registration? I ate about a third of my pasta, a huge dish of spaghetti flecked with red. No one came to stand by our table with an enormous pepper mill and a gentle smile. When Mack’s phone rang, he excused himself and went to take the call outside. I didn’t waste a second. On the slip of paper was a string of letters that made no sense. I could see at once it wasn’t a foreign language, or at least no language I’d ever seen. So either it was a reference to something I knew nothing about or it was code. I’m good at code. I’m a computer geek. I worship Alan Turing. They hadn’t ban
ked on that. Keeping an eye on the door, I rummaged for a pen, cursing myself for having no paper in my bag, then wrote the letters on the underside of my forearm:

  VKH LV D SDLO RI WLWV DQG D KROE. XVH KHU.

  The woman behind the counter glanced my way. She looked too tired to care. ‘I need to get back to work,’ I said when Mack returned.

  He reached across the table and grabbed my wrist. He squeezed, giving my skin a tiny twist, and looked me dead in the eye. My groin flushed while my mind recoiled at his manhandling of me. Rude, arrogant bastard, I thought. And also: I bet you’d be great in the sack.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll meet again,’ he said, releasing me.

  His fingermarks were imprinted on my wrist. I was sure of it too.

  I thought about him that night when I was straddling Dave, the aroma of dim sum and crispy duck mingling with the scent of sex. Streetlight filtered through curtains as red as the paper lanterns in the restaurants below, and the film of sweat on Dave’s forehead took on the orange gleam of sodium; or perhaps that was the Spanish sun.

  I closed my eyes and thought of Mack slamming me hard against a wall; Mack bending me over a table, fucking me in the throat. I thought about him tugging my hair and calling me a whore; thought about him wanking on my tits as I knelt at his feet, naked and bound; thought about his cock in his fist, in my cunt, my arse, my mouth. ‘You’re going to take it,’ he’d say, ‘whether you like it or not.’

  Truth to tell, my thoughts had been non-stop dirty ever since I’d deciphered their code after lunch. It was a doddle. I’d suspected a Caesar cipher; it’s the one most people know, a system where messages are encrypted by shifting the plaintext letters several places further along the alphabet to create the ciphertext. Told you I was a geek. The letter D in isolation most likely represented ‘a’ or ‘I’, our only single letter words. If it was ‘a’ that meant a shift of three. I sat at my desk, gazing at my inked arm. The number 3 had been written on the envelope, hadn’t it? I tried it out, writing the letters on a scrap of paper.