Finally, the flow stops and he withdraws his hand. It still hurts and she is about to cry, as he slaps her face again and cries out:
“You bitch, you enjoyed that, didn’t you.”
She nods.
“Stick a finger up your arse.”
She makes a gesture of protest but he swings the belt close to her cheek.
He pulls her off from the toilet bowl, pushes her onto her knees, on all fours. Manipulates her so that her rump points upward and guides her right hand (how could he know she was left-handed?) toward the dark cranny of her anus.
“Now,” he said.
To urge her on, he places his foot above her other hand, as if to tread on it.
She slowly inserts her middle finger into the puckered aperture. The ring of muscles rebels against the intrusion and she barely manages half a nail.
“More,” Adam says, and steps harder onto her free hand.
She pushes the finger harder. The ring of flesh relaxes. She feels another need to pee, but holds back. Finally, the finger plants itself deep inside her arsehole, spearing herself up to its first joint. The feeling is not unpleasant.
“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 ingenues 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.