Branded

In the past I'd been repressed, then liberated. Now I was jaded. Trying to get a sexual response out of my body was exhausting. Like an imbecile hammering on a piano, I had the stamina, the objective—to come—but I could not bring forth a melody.

Day after day I tried. I needed to. It was summer, as sultry as London gets, and I had just got in from work. Feeling hot and grubby I lay on the sofa, my hand placed over my cunt, frantically shuffling through what had once been my hot buttons to orgasm. I paused at each image, to see whether it would do the trick. A porn star, blonde hair in medusa-like ringlets wearing only hot pants, unzipping them and lowering herself onto my face. Nothing. Next image. Myself as a nurse—embarrassing really even to have such a tawdry fantasy—kitted out in suspenders and a tiny uniform. I have just parked my trolley full of pills beside the bed of a handsome male patient. The rest of the ward is asleep. He is awake but stares at me impassively.

"Now, let me find your pills," I say, and as I bend down, pulling the trays out, looking for his medication, the inevitable finger creeps under my panties. I turn my head, shocked, cry, "Sir! What on earth do you think you're doing?" all the while still with my arse in the air, relishing the fact that his fingers are already bringing forth a hot blast of pleasure. In the fantasy I start to moan. Eventually I straighten up, drag the curtain around his bed, then staddle him, all the while moaning through clenched teeth, "Oh sir, no sir, I can't possibly. Oh sir!"

This image had once done the trick of getting me hot. But tonight, as on every night this past month, nothing. I slid my hand out of my pants. I tried to remember how exciting it had been as a teenager, to masturbate surreptitiously, separated from my parents by a thin wall, feeling dirty and high. I tried to recall all the wasted years, when I had been too self-conscious to wank myself off in front of men, thereby denying my own pleasure and … damn it, what was the point of remembering, none of it was getting me any closer to release.

It was getting on towards seven when I suddenly remembered that I'd arranged to meet Paula, a thirty-year-old TV producer. She had once been the flat mate of my ex-boyfriend Daniel and we seemed to be forever arranging to meet and then, one or the other of us would cancel. I decided that I couldn't let her down again. I slipped on my linen trousers and drew the belt—woven from soft strips of brown leather—through my palm, then fastened the buckle.

I walked the three blocks to Bertorelli's, a bar in Charlotte Street. I scanned the tables outside, then went in. Spotting her elegant neck, her expensively bobbed red hair, I walked up behind her and rested my hand lightly on the shoulder of her gray jacket, and as she looked up at me her angular face looked like a series of planes chopped out of a chalk face. She had been chain smoking, judging by the heap of butts in the ashtray in front of her.

We talked about nothing that I can recall for several hours. We drank two bottles of wine. The room was a blur. I felt tired and wanted to go to sleep. I half listened as she psychobabbled about my ex.

"You know, I don't think you're over Daniel. Oh, you act as if you were—" She waved her cigarette expansively in front of her face, "but I'm not sure I'm convinced."

"I am, believe me. If I never see the little shit again it'll be too soon."

She gulped down the last of the wine, reminding me of a just caught fish gasping for air. "It might do you good to have some sort of closure. To realize that you're better off out of the relationship."

I decided to make one last stab at resurrecting the evening. "Jerry—you know, you met him at my dinner party—well he asked me about you."

"Oh yeah?" I could feel her skinny shoulders tensing under the suit jacket.

"Well, he asked me whether you were AC/DC."

"What do you mean?" A ringlet of hair fell across her face. Her eyes, pale blue, were fixed rigidly on my face.

"You know. Christ! He wanted to know whether you swing both ways."

She was silent. "Do I …" she said falteringly, her eyes lowered. "Do I give out that vibe?"

"Well, you are pretty androgynous looking I suppose, not that that means anything."

"I'm not a lesbian." She spat the word out. "Jesus! I love men." She reached over and rested her fingers on her leather rucksack as if she were about to leave.

"I never said you were."

"You said I was androgynous."

"Okay. Let's just drop it." I surveyed the long bar, the crumpled shapes hunched on barstools. People moving towards the exit. How late was it?

"No, I won't. What did you mean by it?"

"Look at it as a compliment."

"How can it be?"

"Well, look at Sharleen Spiteri, that singer from Texas. She's androgynous looking."

"Oh." Her shoulders relaxed a little. "But she's beautiful."

"Yes. I guess so."

Then time speeded up again. I tried to change the subject but somehow she always managed to drag it back to this topic.

"I'm not gay."

"All right. I heard you the first time."

And soon we entered one of those drunken rows that are violent without really being about anything. I was so drunk by now—we had since moved on to brandy—I was past caring.

"You're the one who's fucked up, not me."

"Yes," I said, chuckling. "You're probably right."

Then I remember being out in the street, with my arm slipped through hers, her face ghostly under the street lamps, a stream of abuse flowing from her mouth. Me, numb, leaning against her lean frame, wishing that someone would take me home, make me some cocoa and let me slip into a deep, dreamless sleep. Instead, I found myself following her up some stairs, swaying unsteadily along the corridor of a moving bus.

"You need to come home with me," she was saying. "I don't think you should be alone tonight. I'm frightened you'll try and harm yourself."

"Have I given you that impression?"

"Yes. When we get back to my place we'll thrash things out. You've got a lot of problems to deal with." I collapsed on a double seat as the bus rounded a curve, and she fell against me. "You must stay the night. Not in my bed, of course."

"Of course." I pressed my fingers to my throbbing temples.

"You don't care at all, do you?"

"About what?"

"About me. I bet you'd like to sleep with me, then the next morning you'd probably clear off before I woke up." She jabbered on, her white profile stark against the grimy window of the bus and the night beyond it. She poked my chest. "That's what I mean about you. You treat people like … objects. You have your way and then discard them."

How wrong she was. No one had attracted me in months. Before that I'd had a spate of frantic promiscuity, a reaction against the period of monogamy with Daniel.

Her words no longer registered, and yet, thrillingly, something in me, long dormant, was pulsing into life. It was a desire to do something, something rather nasty to Paula. My palms began to tingle in anticipation and I felt a wave of nausea rise in my throat, knowing that I was going to have sex with her, whether she liked it or not.

Soon we were at her house. She started to make coffee, then abandoned the task, turning to me to say, "God, I'm bushed. Maybe we can talk in the morning?"

"Sure," I said. "Whatever. Where do you want me to sleep?"

"Sleep? Oh yes," she said nervously, her hand going up to her throat. "I'll show you the spare room."

It seemed to take forever for her to stretch a white sheet onto the bed, to tuck it in neatly and then smooth it out, until finally it was perfectly flat. She had taken off her jacket and her small breasts, braless, were squashed under her white Lycra t-shirt.

She hesitated, pushed back her hair. What was she waiting for?

"Well, goodnight," I said, sitting down on the bed and pulling off my shoes.

She gave me a last wide-eyed look as my hand came to rest on my belt, then scurried out of the room.

I undressed and slipped under the covers. The bravado that I had felt in the bus had evaporated. She had said that her lodger, Steve, was asleep in another room. It was probably best to abandon the whole plan.

I touched myself between the legs. My pussy felt hot but also numb. I ought to go to sleep. I tried to block out the memories of the evening that rushed in, the jumble of pointless conversation, the white blur of the street lights that had formed a jagged line as we'd rode on the top deck of the bus.

I slept, or at least I think I did, but it could have been for minutes or hours. Looking down, I saw that I had flung off the blankets. The dawn was filtering through the blinds. In the half-light I saw my belt buckle glisten on the floor.

Staring at the ceiling, my eyes dry, my heart pounding, I decided that I would chance it. If she were to let out a bloodcurdling scream, then so be it.

I picked up the belt, and without thinking what I was going to do with it, moved towards the door. I had never slept with a woman. I had never wanted to, until now. There was something about her. Just the thought of her hand fluttering up to her white throat suddenly made my cunt throb into life.

I pushed open the door to her bedroom. I had expected her to be asleep, but I soon saw her eyes look at me and grow wide with fright. I hesitated. What was I doing here?

Stepping forward, I tried to keep my face impassive as I slid under her duvet. She didn't move away and I felt her against me. Her skin felt like cashmere, soft and covered in a fuzzy down. She tensed.

I put my hand over her mouth, but she made no move to scream so I pulled it away.

"You know I can't," she said, matter of factly.

"Yes. I know." I kissed her neck, then pushing her shoulders into the bed, kissed her hard on the mouth.

"No!" She turned her head away. I grabbed hold of her hair and yanked it. She began to whimper, but it was so feeble it was ridiculous. Why didn't she simply push me off?

First we went at it like two clumsy puppies, breasts squashed together, biting at each other's flesh, tearing skin with fingernails, we rolled all over the bed until I faced her cunt, and I lapped at it until she came, then she reciprocated, but all this was just a prelude, I could sense it, for something that she wanted to happen, yet could not articulate.

"Are you happy now?" she whispered, her neck all wet with sweat.

"No," I said. "I'm not quite finished with you yet." I'd come, and my body still reverberated, craven, wanting more.

"I think you've done quite enough …" My hand closed around the belt and I hit her with it, softly at first, on her breasts, along the coltish length of her thighs. I felt the tension building up in my cunt, and all the sensations tumbling into each other. I no longer knew what I was doing. Now I turned her over, and the belt slipped in my sweaty palm, so that the belt buckle grazed her buttocks as she began to shout, "No! I don't want to," all the time arching her body off the bed, to meet the belt, as it whipped across her.

I whipped her with a fury. I was merciless. I didn't care what I was doing and still she screamed "No!" so loudly that I began to doubt her story that there was a man in the house.

I came to out of my trance and looked down at her pulverized backside. There were streaks of blood on the white flesh. I put my mouth down and licked her clean of blood. I felt so very tired. Too tired to come.

When I woke up she was still asleep. The ferocity that had possessed me, that had made me mark her with my belt had dissipated. Despite my hangover I felt a strange peace lying heavy in my limbs.

I went to the bathroom and took a shower. I had caked blood under my nails. Suddenly I felt a restlessness, a need to be gone.

I pushed open the door to her room. She was sprawled across the bed, wrapped tightly in a white sheet. I picked up my belt, then went into the other room to dress.

I left the house before she woke up. Just like she said I would.