The Island

WHY I DECIDED TO swim out to the island I'll never know. I had discarded my

magazine. There was nothing worth reading. I had discarded my costume to try

and fill in the white spaces around my tan. I had discarded my boyfriend without

realizing, when I went on holiday on my own, that the hours would hang so

heavily that it was almost better to be with someone you didn't like, than to be

lying there on the black sands of La Gomera with no one to talk to.

There were a few people further along the beach sitting under a red-and-white

striped parasol. I could hear their laughter as it carried on the still air. I almost

wished someone would walk by and say hello. Being naked might be something

of a conversation opener. Or stopper! It was hard to know, some people would

be embarrassed, and if it were someone like Bobby, my ex, he'd stand gawping

and then like a schoolboy say something stupid. That's why he'd been discarded;

tall, dark, handsome, he was a walking cliché, a boy masquerading as a man.

I was 22 now. It was time to grow up, time to put childish pleasures behind

me.

I'm a woman.

I shouted the words at the sky.

I'm a woman. I'm a woman. I'm a woman.

I giggled to myself, stretched and let out a long sigh. It was the first time I had

sunbathed nude and enjoyed the feeling of the sun warming my pink nipples. I

squeezed the tips between my thumbs and first fingers, a tremulous feeling

racing down my spine and making me squirm like a cat. My breasts in my

cupped hands felt unusually full and it was blissful lying there with my eyes

closed behind big sunglasses, sliding my palms over the curve of my waist, my

hip bones pushing through the skin, gleaming and slippery with sun oil, and

down into the silky patch of my pubic hair. Being naked outside in the sun and

salt sea air makes you feel so sexy and it was sad being sexy all on my

lonesome.

Between my legs I discovered a hint of moistness. A stray finger slipped inadvertently into the open cleft, juices seeped over the seashell lips of my pussy

and my cheeks flushed with sudden shame. What if someone were looking? I sat

up and glanced to the left and right. The people further along the beach were

folding their parasol and leaving. I watched their figures grow smaller as they

vanished across the dunes. I was suddenly, completely, alone.

Behind me, spines of rock rose up like the walls of a castle. The sea and sky

were the same shade of blue, and I could just make out a black dot on the

horizon. I thought at first it must be a boat, or a mirage, perhaps, but, as I

focused, I could see the outline of what looked like a small island pinned with

the silhouettes of palm trees.

I wandered down to the water's edge, shaded my eyes, and tried to judge the

distance to the island. It was shimmering in the heat haze, green like a jewel on a

surround of blue satin. La Gomera is one of the seven Canary Islands, but the sea

is sprinkled with an archipelago of atolls and reefs; I had seen one rugged

outcrop covered in coarse grass and inhabited by goats, the bells about their

necks showing that they belonged to somebody: that everything and everyone

becomes a possession, is owned and spoken for, even slivers of rock in the

middle of the sea.

On a whim, I threw my sunglasses back on my towel and strode into the surf

breaking on the shoreline. The long hours of afternoon stretched vacantly before

me and I thought idly I might leave La Gomera and travel on to El Hierro, the

Meridian Island, the smallest of the Canaries, the furthest south, the furthest

from London.

'The further the better,' I heard myself say and I wasn't sure why, what I was

thinking, what I was running away from.

I stood very still, my toes digging into the black sand, a small white figure in a

dark volcanic landscape. It was one of those days when the world may just have

been born; everything was new, unformed, innocent. The small island before me

was ringed in a veil of mist, making it more inviting, more of a mystery. I took a

deep breath and dived into the surf. I wanted to make certain my eyes weren't

playing tricks on me, that the island was real, more than real, that it was a lost

paradise, that on the island I would find whatever it was that had been missing

from my life.

The sea was cold and I moved in steady over arm strokes through the water,

warming myself as I gathered speed. I had read in my guide book that

Christopher Columbus had stopped in La Gomera to take on fresh water and

bananas before sailing in search of a western route to the Indies. He had stayed

long enough to become the lover of a noble woman on the island and I couldn't

envisage anything more intense, more exciting, than to make love with an adventurer before he sets off on a journey into the unknown.

It was another new pleasure swimming naked. I felt alive, wanton, a wild

child who had escaped from captivity, from the rush and clamour of the city, the

underground train, the snatched sandwich for lunch, the sense that life was

speeding off into the distance and no matter how hard you ran you'd never catch

up. I enjoyed the rhythm of my limbs as I carved a path through the waves, my

breath steady as I raised and lowered my head from the water. The sea that bore

me forward was the Atlantic Ocean, the same vast corpus of water negotiated by

Columbus in 1492, and it was hard to remember that in the Canary Islands I was

further from Europe than the dark heart of Africa.

When I paused to rest, I realised I had swum further than I had intended. The

small hillock of land I was approaching and the beach I had left behind seemed

to be exactly the same distance away. I could see the rock face climbing from the

sand up to the mouth of the volcano on La Gomera, and I could see before me on

the island the waving palm fronds like long fingers casting an invisible net.

I was at that moment no different from Christopher Columbus and faced the

self same predicament. Once the Niña, the Pinta and the flagship Santa Maria

reached a certain point the maps ended. The way ahead was obscured in rumour

and risk. But to go back would be ignoble, defeatist, a failure. It occurred to me

that having reached this point, I had to continue. That this shifting Rubicon in

the middle of the sea was also a turning point: I must go back and remain who I

was, who I had always been, or go forward and renegotiate my destiny.

These thoughts skipped through my mind like waves of electricity leaving

light and darkness in their wake. I had quite forgotten I was naked and knew

even as I continued that I should have returned to the sands of La Gomera, to my

towel held down by four shiny black stones, my swimming costume, my

sunglasses, my mobile phone. I would look back on that long swim and wonder

what madness had seized me and driven me on in strong, even strokes, my arms

a machine, my legs kicking, my breath filling my lungs, each stroke taking me

away from the past, from the known into the soul of the mystery, into the heart

of my own undiscovered self.

What made me be so thoughtless that day, so reckless, so irresponsible? Many

times I would ask myself this question on those dark nights that lay in the future.

Was it a sense of boldness, a touch of madness, of promiscuity? A lone girl,

shamelessly naked in the great expanse of the sea. I had finished with university,

finished with my boyfriend. I was free. Totally free. I was at the beginning of my

life and, like Columbus, I wanted to enter the unknown.

There is a Greek island that is said to move about the Aegean and I was

beginning to wonder if the island before me was that very place, that the shaving of rock had cast off its ties and drifted across the Mediterranean, slid by the

Rock of Gibraltar and was heading west for America. After leaving the midway

point, that point where I should have turned back, I had swum on for a long time,

yet the island seemed no closer, that rather than taking me towards the line of

palm trees, each stroke was pushing it like a ball further away.

I rested, treading water, and glanced back. Before, I had been able to pick out

the red and yellow stripes of the Spanish flag above some building on La

Gomera. Now, it was a blur like a far away bird flapping on the horizon. There

was no question of trying to swim back now. My fate was sealed and I swam on,

paddling on my back, conscious suddenly that I would be arriving in a strange

place without money or papers, as naked as the first creatures that crawled from

the sea.

As that thought permeated my mind, I was suddenly afraid of the deep water,

the silence, the isolation. I turned on to my front and swam faster, like an athlete

at the end of a race. The moment of panic passed and I was relieved as the

shapes and forms of the island grew firm, the trees, a pale beach, the ruins of a

tower on the low peak. The next time I rested, my feet touched the sand of the

sea bed and I waded slowly ashore.

I was on an empty beach dotted with shells and carapaces of every size and

shape, shells in a kaleidoscope of colours like a flower garden. There were brick-

coloured starfish, razor shells I stepped around so that I didn't cut my feet, open

shells with the dried skeletons of minute life forms and shells being carried

methodically by hermit crabs. I saw bigger crabs with their swift sideways

motion, running one way then the other, their eyes protruding like cartoon

figures showing shock and surprise. I shivered with cold but the sun was heavy

with the midday heat and I quickly warmed up as I picked my way through the

shells to the dunes rising up at the edge of the beach.

The island had seemed small when I set out from La Gomera, but it was

bigger than I had expected, the coastline stretching perhaps a mile in each

direction before curving away from view. I climbed the dunes and lay down. I

was exhausted. I may even have slept, for it was the sound of footsteps on the

shingle that brought me back to my senses.

I was aware of two things simultaneously: the fact that help was on its way

and, more worrying, that I was naked, no clothes, no phone, no watch. Nothing.

The approaching figure was a man in a turban and a loose blue tunic that

billowed about him. He didn't hurry and approached as you might a nervous

animal, a unicorn perhaps. It occurred to me that the island might be private

property, that I was trespassing. Not that it would matter. I obviously hadn't

stolen anything. In a way, I felt safe. I would be able to explain that I had swum too far and couldn't endure the long swim back. I was certain there must be a

boat and hoped the man in the blue tunic was a fisherman. I had left my money

in a purse under my towel on the beach. I could pay him.

I stood, unsure what to do with my hands, whether it was best to hide my

breasts, my pubic hair, those bronze curls shiny and a shade darker than my hair

falling wet and sandy about my shoulders. I tried to picture myself as the

stranger must have pictured me, and decided it was best to be cool, act as if

being naked was the most natural thing in the world. I remained motionless,

spine straight, breasts thrust forward. I felt embarrassed, of course, but also

mischievous, proud, vaguely superior, a mass of swirling, changing emotions

that swept through me under the gaze of the stranger.

As he drew nearer, his expression didn't change. His face was as dark as

mahogany, burnt by the sun, his features below the folds of his turban sharp and

angular, a strong nose and piercing eyes shiny as chips of coal. He was carrying

a large sack and, as he transferred it from one shoulder to the other, he made no

pretence that he was studying my prominent nipples, my nervous smile, my

green eyes trying to maintain the façade of self-confidence.

The man came to a stop. He said nothing. I gave a little shrug.

'Look, I wonder if you could help me?' I said. I pointed back across the sea to

La Gomera. 'I've swum from over there and didn't realise how far it is.'

Still he said nothing. Rather, he moved to one side to consider me in profile.

He moved again, slowly, inspecting my back, and I recalled men on market days

in country villages doing the same with livestock.

'Look, I left my costume on the beach,' I explained.

My heart was pounding. My breasts were rising and falling with each beat,

even my round bottom appeared to be moving involuntarily. I realised as he

completed his circle around me that no man had ever eyeballed me in this way

before, not so much with lust, but with the detachment of a customer about to

make an offer on some odd piece of bric-a-brac at the flea market.

'I have some money, back there,' I said, aware of the quaver in my voice. I

pointed again. 'If you could take me back.'

If he understood me, which I doubted, he took no notice. I could have been a

lost dog barking, for his expression remained the same like the cold face on a

piece of carved brown marble.

'I swam all the way …' I said, my voice trailing off like a wisp of smoke.

Several moments passed. I wasn't sure what to say. The man didn't say

anything. He placed his bag on the sand and, as the mouth fell open, I saw that it

contained a large conch shell. It was pink lipped, shiny and perfect.

He cupped his jaw. I could see a look of calculation in his furrowed brow. Around his neck, he wore a pendant on a long leather thong. He lifted it over his

head and, the way he did this, I thought for a moment that he was going to give it

to me. Perhaps he expected me to lay back down on the dunes and have sex with

him and this was a form of payment, a custom, the exchange of gifts, the pendant

for me, my body, the only thing I had to trade.

The notion was both terrifying and vaguely absurd. Being naked was an

invitation, explicit, unequivocal. I was aware that as a woman, like all women, I

chose clothes to make myself appear desirable, exposed, defenceless, but I was

protected by the gossamer veil of those clothes. Once you strip and exhibit your

body you demonstrate that you are willing, available, fair game. When the man

at the party begins to unzip the back of your dress, unless you stop him, you

have made a pledge, a covenant. Once he peels the dress from your shoulders

you are already lovers.

These thoughts were fleeting and I would have plenty of time to ponder them

more deeply. I was aware, as any girl of my age would be, that I had the sort of

physique men admire, my breasts were full and I ran in the park at weekends to

keep my legs shapely, my waist trim, my cheek bones and hip bones prominent.

Agh, I thought, all is vanity. I was aware, too, standing there before this stranger,

that in truth I had little experience of men, of the world, that for me sex had

remained an immature endeavour that was never quite satisfactory and always

over almost before it begun. That time when a man did begin to unzip the back

of my dress I giggled and stopped him.

I was growing impatient. 'Look, do you have a boat or not?' I demanded. 'Is

there someone else who does? Is there someone I can talk to?'

The man had been busy untying the knot in the leather thong. He slipped the

pendant into the folds of his tunic and paused to study me again as he made a

loop in the thong. He then rubbed his thumb and fingers together in that gesture

people make to indicate money.

Typical, I thought, that's all he's worried about.

'If it's a question of money, you will be paid, you know,' I told him.

I held out my palms as if in a show of sincerity. I wasn't sure what was

happening when, in one unexpected movement, he grabbed my arm and slid the

loop in the thong over my wrist. I was as tall as the man, probably just as strong,

and should have punched him in the face, fought him off. But his action was so

quick, so sudden, I froze like a statue and, before I could react, he swung me

around, wrapped the thong about my other wrist and tied my two wrists together

behind my back.

Now I did react. I screamed. I kicked at the man. I tried to bite him. But he

moved away from my gnashing teeth and my screams vanished into the sound of the waves breaking on the beach. I thought for a second that I could try and run

away, but I would tear my feet to shreds on the razor shells, and how fast could I

run with my hands tied behind me?

I was trapped like a cornered animal, bound, powerless. The horror of this

realisation was like a spike in my chest. Great tears welled into my eyes and

rolled over my cheeks.

'Please. Please don't hurt me. Please.'

My voice was a whisper, a whimper. I had been slightly pompous. Now, I was

pathetic.

'Please,' I said again.

My eyes glazed in tears. The sun on my head made me giddy. I thought I was

going to faint. Why had I swum away from the beach at La Gomera? It was

madness. What was I doing sunbathing in the raw? I had always hated that sort

of thing. The girls at school who wandered around after the showers without

anything on were show-offs. That wasn't me. I was embarrassed by my ripe

breasts, my wild hair, the salt and sand sticky on my bare skin. I must have

appeared like a girl eager for some raunchy action, but I wasn't, I really wasn't. I

was petrified being there on the dunes with this stranger leering at me, and didn't

know why my nipples were so blatantly, shamefully erect, why standing there

bound and naked my body had turned into a landscape of unfamiliar and

inexplicable sensations.

The man didn't seem to notice my tears. He waved a warning finger that said

don't move. I obeyed. I didn't move. I remained motionless while he ran his

hands over me, down my sides, my hips, my thighs. He felt my breasts, pressing

down as you would test the flesh of a chicken at the butcher's. He then squeezed

my nipples so hard I squealed in pain. Still I didn't move as he ran his hands

down my back and I thought I might die of shame when his dark fingers slipped

between the cheeks of my bottom into my moist cleft.

'Please,' I said, my voice faint.

He looked at my lips as I was speaking, as if he were trying to understand or

was sympathetic to what I was saying. Then it dawned on me: perhaps he was

mute, or deaf, a poor beachcomber who had never seen a naked girl before. I

wanted to touch his arm, his shoulder, reassure him that it was all right. I wasn't

angry. I just wanted to go home.

'It's all right,' I said in a calm voice. I spoke slowly. 'Let's go and get some

help.'

He nodded as if he had understood and, when I smiled, he smiled back

through a mouthful of broken brown teeth. Again, in one swift motion, he swung

me around and I couldn't believe it as he laid the flat of his hand across the mounds of my bottom, the slap so fierce and shocking, I thought for a moment I

was having a heart attack.

'No, no, no,' I cried, and he struck me again, much harder.

Tears spurted from my eyes. I tried to move away, but he seized me around

the waist, bent me double and held me tight as he spanked me as hard as he

could, one slap after another, over and over again, the beat of those slaps so loud

they blocked out the sound of the sea. A tide of pain radiated out from my

bottom, down my legs and over my back. But the pain wasn't as hard to bear as

the humiliation, the unimaginable indignity of this stranger with bad teeth in a

dirty blue smock bending me over and beating me like a child, like an animal,

like … I don't know what. I had thought he was going to give me that pendant

and then insist on having sex. Being thrashed in this way was almost worse.

'Ouch, ouch, ouch,' I cried.

And still his hand came down again and again, scolding the mounds of my

delicate rear, one side, then the other, his leathery palm clapping like thunder

against the burning plump cheeks as systematically he beat the soft surprised

skin like a drum for some primitive dance. I was shaking and trembling, my feet

scraping at the sand, my hands behind my back trying in vain to shield those

fierce relentless blows.

He spanked my bottom for all he was worth. He spanked me until sweat

poured down my back and between my breasts that hung heavily below me. He

spanked me until the pain was so unbearable, so shocking, so beyond my

imagination or vocabulary that the pain almost ceased and it felt under the hot

sun that I was being sacrificed in some strange ritual.

Now that I was able to tolerate the pain, I began to get the feeling that this

beating would last for ever, through the whole of eternity, that he was going to

spank me until the flesh peeled from my skin, that I as a naked white girl on this

tiny nothing of an island was being punished for all the centuries of abuse and

torment suffered by all the peoples on the forgotten continent through the long

history of forever. Whatever was wrong with the world, it was my fault. I had to

pay.

The power in his blows diminished and he only stopped beating me when he

was too tired to continue. He forced me down on my knees.

'Please. Please. Please. Please. Please,' I cried.

I looked up at him. 'Please don't hurt me,' I said, and he responded by taking

a grip of the back of my hair.

With his free hand, he pulled his cock from his tunic and pushed at my closed

mouth. He spoke now for the first time. He said something in a deep, gruff,

bullying voice and it didn't matter that I didn't know what it was he had said. Iwas on my knees, naked, beaten, the man's cock pressing against my lips and

nose. It smelled like an exotic food from some far away place, ripe and fruity.

The head was mauve and bulbous with a gaping eye like a piercing.

It occurred to me that I had never been so close to a man's cock before, not

like this, in broad daylight, in the sweltering midday sun. With my hands tied by

the thong, I felt like an actress in a porn film. With my burning bottom and tear-

streaked face, nothing seemed real. I was afraid, I was terrified, but I felt

protected, too, by this sense of unreality.

He squeezed my cheeks and I opened my mouth to allow this exotic fruit to

slide between my open lips. He took a tighter grip on the back of my hair,

pushing and pulling my head, jerking his cock further and further down into my

gullet. I felt as if I was going to gag, and almost did gag, but I breathed through

my nose, opened my mouth wider and sucked harder and harder, wrapping the

length of his cock in my tongue, giving all of my effort just to get it over with. I

closed my eyes. The sun beat down on my back. My bottom was stinging.

Three days ago I was working in the PR department at a publishing house in

the centre of London. I caught the 14 bus along the Fulham Road to go to work

every morning. I had a drink in the West End before making plans to go out for

the evening. I wore a denim skirt an inch or so too short and red heels with black

tights, blouses that revealed a coy few inches of my breasts, short jackets nipped

in at the waist. Bobby, the boyfriend, was a celebrity journalist on one of the

evening papers. We went to bars, clubs, movies, gigs. We had friends, lives,

futures, uncertain yet predictable, understood, safe. I was living the London life

and was bored to distraction. I felt like a clone among clones. A sheep among

sheep. A party girl among party girls. I had wanted so desperately to do

something different and would never have imagined in a million years being

naked on my knees in an unnamed place with a stranger's cock down my throat.

Be careful for what you wish for, my mother liked to say, you might just get

it.

With my eyes closed, with that hard cylinder of hot flesh slipping in and out

of my throat, I almost forgot my disgust, my fear. It's like gardening, I mused.

Backbreaking and tedious when you begin, but the physical action of pulling

weeds and trimming bushes becomes an end in itself, an ephemeral pleasure. It

wasn't that, of course, far from it, but the pure mechanics of sucking that man's

cock had become unconsciously no different from sucking Bobby's cock,

something he couldn't get enough of, and something I had control over, as I had

control over Bobby.

Was that why I had grown bored with him? Was that why I had set off for the

most remote part of the Canary Islands on my own? I had wanted an adventure and got more than I'd bargained for.

Perhaps I had been spanked for trespassing and giving head in this way was

payment for my being helped to get back to La Gomera?

I comforted myself with this thought and did that thing I know men like: I

rimmed the eye of his penis, the tip of my tongue nursing and nudging all the

nerve endings on the bulging head. He stiffened and relaxed again. He was in no

hurry. He pushed his cock back into the depths of my throat, gripped the scruff

of my hair and forced my head back and forth in slow even strokes. Just as it had

felt as if my arms were a machine as I swam to the island, now my whole body

was a machine focused on the turbine of my stretched mouth slipping and sliding

and slurping and sucking at his engorged penis.

The man started to groan and grunt. He was about to come, but at that

moment, he removed his cock and sprayed his seed over my face, into my eyes,

my nose, the sticky hot goo running down my cheeks, dripping from my chin

and landing on my breasts. After overcoming my fears and trying my best to be a

good sport sucking his cock, I felt dirty, sullied, dumbfounded. No man had ever

done this to me before. It was so degrading, so decadent, so alien to who I was.

Who I thought I was.

The man let out a long sigh and pushed his cock back into my open mouth. I

started sucking him off again, the flesh greasy and moist with his semen, and I

kept on draining that length of flesh, drawing out every last speck of sperm until

his cock grew flaccid and he withdrew.

If I thought it was over, it wasn't. He shook his penis a couple of times, let out

another sigh, and pissed over me. It was hard at first to comprehend what was

happening as the yellow arc of hot pee struck my face and I sat there on my

knees as the liquid ran over my neck, my breasts, my waist, into my pubic hair

and down over my thighs. I wanted to move away, but I was paralysed in shock,

with horror. I closed my eyes and squeezed my nails into my palms. I couldn't

imagine anything more degrading, more perverted, more beastly. Being pissed

over made sucking the man off and even being spanked seem normal.

He shook the drips from the tip and tossed his cock back into the folds of his

tunic. As he did this, he looked back at me and I saw in his inscrutable

expression a trace of condescension. I felt debased and demoralised, but at least I

hadn't antagonised him. He was a man and I was a naked young girl. I had made

a mistake setting off for the island without wearing my costume and he had

taken advantage of me. It was unforgivable. It was totally unacceptable. It was

probably illegal. But it was natural, too, and more terrible imagining what had

happened there on the beach than what had actually happened.

Deep down in a secret place I would rather not have peeped into, I felt an inexpressible sense of incredulity that I had been able to perform fellatio on a

stranger and, dare I admit it, a sense of strange obscene pleasure. Girls have

fantasies of being alone on desert islands, of being naked and having sex with

men who appear from the sea. I had lived the dream, the fantasy. Being spanked

and sucking his cock had been terrible, yet not so terrible.

But why had he pissed over me when he could have turned away and pissed

on the beach? What did this mean? Was I marked as his property as dogs mark

trees and doorways? Was it to show that I was nothing, less than nothing, that to

him I meant no more than the patch of sand where he could have aimed his

urine? I had a million questions and I was still on my knees with a stranger who

didn't speak my language.

He squeezed my lips again and made me smile. He then said something I

didn't understand and laughed. He leaned forward and took my bottom lip

between his thumb and finger and pressed down so hard I squealed in pain. He

laughed again, even louder. I didn't know what this meant: was this a love ploy?

Was this how people kissed on this strange island? I didn't know. Everything

was alien and terrifying. It was as if my past had vanished and I had at that

second been born, hatched from an egg, naked, nameless, bound at the wrists

and, paradoxically, free of all those things I had wanted to leave behind.

Freedom isn't free at all. It comes at the highest cost.

I glanced up and the man pulled at my arm to help me stand, not easy from a

kneeling position with your hands tied behind your back. He motioned, raising

his chin towards the hill behind us. He lifted the bag with the conch shell on to

his shoulder and I could do nothing but follow, my feet burning on the hot sand,

the cactus spines spearing my ankles and calves, the man's urine drying

pungently on my bare skin. My flesh prickled with heat and my face felt parched

as the sperm dried in a fine invisible layer trapping strands of my hair. The taste

of his seed in my mouth was like a stale olive.

I turned and peered back across the sea. There was a faint mist now. The coast

of La Gomera had disappeared as if it had never existed. I had told my parents

that I wanted to spend a few weeks on my own; to find myself, I said. It all

sounded so corny, so silly. Far from having found myself, I was more lost than

ever. Someone would come across the towel held by four stones on the beach,

my sunglasses, my dry costume, my purse with credit cards, 400 euros and my

passport. Would they hand them to the police or keep them?

Keep them, probably, I thought. That's the way people are. That's the way we

have become. I had left my backpack still stuffed with clothes on the floor in my

room in the pension where no one spoke English, where no one had bothered to

register my name. They would think I had travelled on and would return later for my things. They wouldn't want to go to the police, make a fuss, waste time.

Girls are always wandering off these days. That's what they'll say to themselves.

She was a foreigner. You know what they're like. She'll turn up. And if she

doesn't, it's nothing to do with us. They will put my backpack in the storeroom

and forget that I had ever existed.

The man lit a cigarette, the harsh-smelling smoke an intrusion on the clean

sweet air. We had left the sand and were walking on coarse grass thick as reeds.

I could see the tower more clearly, but no other people, no buildings, no sign of

life. The sun was stoking up the fires of early afternoon, but at least there was a

cool breeze rising off the sea.

We entered a twisted maze of low, windswept pines sharing the hillside with

giant cactuses and bushes with brilliant yellow flowers. It was all perfect, pure,

untouched, and I couldn't understand why one of the hotel chains had not come

along and ruined it all with a resort complex, a yachting marina, a spa.

My situation with each step I took became more surreal, more difficult to get

my head around, those steps as I climbed the hill taking me further from the

certainty of who I was, who I had once been. It was beyond absurd. I was naked,

sweaty, my face coated in dried sperm, my bottom glowing after the man had

bent me over and thrashed me, something I could not have imagined ever

happening to me, to anyone, and something that had certainly never happened

before. I mean, a girl, me, in modern times being beaten in this way, not so much

to inflict pain, I realised, but to show exactly what our roles were, to show who

was the master and who was the slave.

Slave.

The very word made a lump form in my throat. I had been spanked to instil in

me a sense of discipline. I had rashly, stupidly, set out swimming naked to the

island and destiny had punished me for it.

Did I deserve to be spanked?

Certainly not. But having survived the ordeal, it wasn't as terrible as the

upsurge of fear when that hand came down across my bottom the first time. As

the pain passed, transmuted as if my some piece of alchemical wizardry, there

was a brief mad moment when I experienced a grotesque satisfaction in being

bent over in this way without rights or choices, past or future. In pain you are

living in the present and as the pain passes there is pleasure from having endured

the pain.

What was even more astonishing, and something else I couldn't fully grasp,

was that the beating had contained a distinctly sensual element. I had known

even as that hand came down again and again on my bottom, I had felt

intuitively, instinctively, subconsciously, I'm not sure how, but I had known the man was beating me in this way to prepare me for all that was to follow. He

wasn't trying to hurt me. He was breaking my will.

When I went down on my knees to let his cock slip into my open throat, it was

such a relief from being spanked, not only did it provide pleasure for the man,

there was in me a contradictory gratification made preposterous as his semen

burst from his cock and exploded over my face. Bobby had never done anything

like that and perhaps if he had we would still have been together.

I felt ashamed to have these thoughts and wondered where they could have

come from. Being naked strips away more than your clothes, it reveals unknown

facets of your true nature. I had thought of myself as a career girl, independent, a

climber on the slippery pole of achievement and success. But really, I was just as

happy to let others make the decisions, to follow where the road of life led rather

than trying to hack out my own individual path. Had the stranger seen something

in me I had not known existed? Did he look at me and see a girl who wanted to

be pissed on?

The suggestion was mortifying. I pushed such thoughts from my mind and

concentrated as we climbed to the top of the hill. I glanced back again. The mist

was thicker. La Gomera had gone, vanished from the landscape. It struck me that

no one in the world had any idea where I was. I had heard of girls disappearing

and now I knew how it happened. They did something stupid. One wrong turn

leads as if by the law of cause and effect to the next. And once you stray from

the path, it is all but impossible to ever find your way back.

The man changed the bag from one shoulder to the other and turned

occasionally to nod. I found myself nodding and smiling back at him. It is

inexcusable, I know. I had been used in the most outrageous way. I was totally

vulnerable, humiliated, in grave danger and grateful like a beaten dog for this jot

of human connection