South of Nowhere

Umah was a teenager, seventeen, maybe eighteen; slight as a girl with a high

voice and delicate hands that he moved like a dancer. He wore a string of beads

around his neck and you could hear the silver bracelets jangling on his wrists as

he moved about the boat like a bird moving through the branches of a tree. His

darting eyes followed me, not with lust or desire, but in the continuous state of

surprise a child has watching a monkey at the zoo. When our eyes met he nervously smiled and looked away. Umah stitched the rents in the sail and took

turns with Mohammed in the wheelhouse, the silver bracelets growing still as he

navigated our course across the unvarying vista of empty sea.

Samir was my lover, my protector, my reason for being. He was a god we

obeyed and worshipped. He wasn't a tyrant; a bully, a slave driver. It is the wise

master who leaves the whip coiled in the drawer. The sheikh simply saw the

world and everyone in it in clear uncomplicated terms. Like pieces on a chess

board we had our positions and the man in the black turban and the crew on the

boat understood and accepted that. Once you know who you are you can let go

of the things you crave and just be yourself.

Of course it was much easier to be myself on board the boat. There were no

magazines telling me what to wear and what to think, no advice on how to win

your man, please your man, keep your man. I had found my man and he seemed

content with me just the way I was. Time, that inflexible substance always

racing and running out, had ceased to have meaning. The days that passed were

seamless, the sun cut by the cooling breeze that appeared in the afternoon, the

stars at night shining like jewels, guiding the way as the star from the east

directed the Magi to Bethlehem with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, a

balm with all the fine qualities of bananas ground with spittle and applied to

flaming bottoms.

I saw villages along the coast, the mud-and dung-walled huts huddled around

a white mosque, the desert beyond stretching out like a silent sea. Our journey

appeared to have no purpose. There was no hurry. We stopped for whole days,

anchoring to sand banks, resting the engines. We swam, the sheikh and I, two

creatures at the dawn of creation. The men lit cigarettes and cast lines strung

with corks and feathers that lay on the surface and pulled from the sea wriggling

fish of countless colours. They wrapped the catch in wetted cotton and we

gorged ourselves on grilled tuna, lobster and crab. On days when there was no

fish, we ate rice, some dates or figs, feast followed by famine with equanimity.

Slipping in and out of the sea and in and out of the cabin with my lover, I

ceased to recollect whether or not I was naked and when the taboo is broken it is

easier to break the next one, to move further from who you thought you were

and closer to who you might become. In me there were many women, infinite

nuances and possibilities. Sometimes a mist fell, consuming the boat and as we

moved through the void I watched Samir's long fingers turning the brass bolts

that locked the portholes. He would place a taper to the lamps, his movements

performed with the minimum of effort, his shadow multiplied against the chiffon

flags. The moment our flesh touched, I was seized by an intense passion that

made the breath catch in my throat and his strong hands would stroke my arms, my cheeks, my breasts, calming the violent forces that gripped me. We lived in a

fantasy on board the boast and when night fell I was afraid that tomorrow the

fantasy would come to an end.

In the morning, the sky clear once more, I would watch Samir shave over a

bowl of water content that the sun was rising and the crewmen were going about

their ablutions, Azar smoking his first cigarette, Mo unrolling his prayer mat.

Mo's beard was pointed, neatly trimmed. Azar's hair sprouted in a carpet from

just below his eyes, covered his broad chest and was kept in a long coil below

his grubby red turban. Like the sheikh, the boy was clean-shaven, bare of body

hair; all were lithe, muscular and keen-eyed, a primal archetype to which I was

slowly conforming. My mind was clear, serene, my memory in focus. Colours

grew brighter, the edges of things more distinct. Fish tasted as the first fish must

have tasted; as the fish on the Mount of Olives must have tasted. I knew by the

smell of the air if on that day there would be a breeze or whether it was going to

be sultry and still. I could distinguish the different cries of the birds that joined

us like spies on soundless wings, following our course before returning back to

the coast fed on the fish heads and scraps Mo threw overboard, maintaining the

cycle, wasting nothing.

Just as I had shed my papers and clothes, my preconceptions and past, the

superfluous bulk I had brought with me from London vanished from my tummy,

my thighs, my cheeks. I became sharper, sleeker, my hip bones and cheek bones

more defined, my bottom a dome divided in perfect halves. The cherry stripes

and blue bruising left by the cane and whip faded and I turned golden, flawless,

a goddess built it seemed for one thing, and it wasn't writing cover notes for new

books. I was born to open my legs and open my mouth and bathe in the sheikh's

syrupy semen, to swim like a fish in the sea by day and swim over and under the

smooth satin skin of my lover in the glow of the oil lamp at night.

Like a parched nomad arriving at a desert spring, Samir would throw off his

white turban to kneel as if in prayer below the arch of my legs, his palms

cupping my bottom, his tongue supping from my open cleft. No matter how

many orgasms oozed from me there was always more sap pressuring to escape.

We are ninety-nine percent water and by some miracle I turned the water into

wine, the vintage of the gods.

We mated on every cushion and mat, in every corner, against every wall. I

sucked him dry and I sucked him until he was hard and hot and ready for me

again. Like hunger and thirst, our sexual nature is coded into the lingering

compulsions of our primeval genes. My deepest instincts had been buried in a

quagmire of social conditioning and the sheikh, during those intoxicating days

on the boat, brought them bubbling to the surface. I wept in pleasure when his cock nudged my clitoris, my song piercing the portholes, floating over the sea

and drifting into shells that washed to shore where beachcombers would hear my

voice as they raised the shell to their ear.

On those days beneath the blistering sun I was wild, insatiable, feverish. I had

everything I desired but still there was something missing, some stone left

unturned, some bridge uncrossed, some knot left untied. I recalled as a little girl

the ache at Christmas when I saw the parcels below the tree with my name in

Mummy's big looping letters on the labels. I studied the parcels with their

ribbons and bows trying to imagine what was inside, and on languorous

afternoons in the cabin I found myself cast back into the past doing the same, my

eyes drawn to the chest of drawers, even though I knew perfectly well what it

was that lay curled and sleeping inside. I kept thinking about the whip, the way

that fiery tongue licked across my backside, driving me like the stem of a lily

through murky waters until on the surface of the pond my pink petals opened

and bloomed.

Was it really like that? Orgasms I'd read in my old life release endorphins that

give you a high and take away pain. I had climaxed under the whip. It was hard

to believe and, stirred by impulses conjured less from memory than imagination,

I dropped to my knees, slipped my fingers under the brass plates of the facia and

opened the bottom drawer in the walnut chest. I raised the coils of the whip to

my face and the lingering smell of my own discharge was like a drug, a ripe

perfume that filled my nose and brought tears to my eyes.

My fingers closed around the handle and the whip uncurled as I waved my

way through the forest of chiffon back to the mattress. We lay together entwined

like serpents, the brown leather turned in spirals around my golden flesh, the

short handle between my legs, the tail slipping between the cheeks of my

bottom, crossing my stomach and circling my back to emerge under my breasts

where the knotted tip lay in my cleavage like a talisman. The rough touch of the

plaited leather made my nipples sprout from my heaving breasts. I squeezed the

pink buds until they stung and panted with a sigh of relief.

It was sweltering hot, the air clammy, the slap of the sea against the hull a

gently striking cymbal to the heartbeat of the boat's big engines, the light

diffused through the open portholes. I lay perspiring, dreamy, lazily turning my

distended nipples and fighting the temptation to put the handle of the whip to

some practical purpose.

When the door opened, the chiffon drapery shivered and Samir appeared with

a look of ambiguity and surprise, the tic on his neck that I watched when he

shaved vibrating as if a small insect was burrowing beneath the surface of the

skin. He unwound his turban and folded the material, his eyes never leaving me. He

then took the whip handle as King Arthur took Excalibur from the clutches of

the rock and paused as if history were being made. I wriggled as he pulled at the

handle and the whip slid beneath me, the leather slicked and shiny as it slithered

through the lips of my sex.

There was no need to speak. There was nothing to be said. I wanted him so

much. I wanted him this way, a faithful slave with an indulgent master. I went up

on my knees to display my perfect bottom, my sex wet as a dew-kissed flower. I

was sopping, my labia running with the juices of anticipation, the puffy lips in a

nest of golden fleece peeled open and pushing through my thighs, pink and

inviting, fruit from an enchanted tree. My mind had turned off. I was all instinct,

all animal, and hungered for the searing swathes of the strap across my hide.

The sheikh cleared the flags from above, giving the whip space to draw

breath. I clenched my stomach muscles and the first crack was like a shot from a

starting pistol, its retort detonating a crimson flare across the small of my back. I

cried in agony and ecstasy and appreciated for the first time why those words are

placed together. I kept my eyes pressed tight and felt the glow from that first

stroke warm every part of my body.

Samir tested the whip, splitting the air, and brought it down again, the second

lash falling just below the first, the two lines like tracks vanishing into nowhere,

my limbs bucking, sweating, the fire on my naked flesh awakening all my

primitive longings. I dreaded the pain as the whip crossed the mounds of my

posterior, but it is at that moment when you feel the height of your sensitivity

and awareness, unconditionally alive. It is a level of being beyond the

commonplace, the accepted, the understood, where mind, body and soul dissolve

into the unknown. With that quill of perfumed leather the sheikh was writing his

name on the parchment of my bare skin. I had wrapped myself in the whip

because without words it was the only way for me to show that his will was my

will, that with the whip he would mark me as his.

As the pain subsides, a luxurious warmth winds through your guts and heats

the oils of your womb. I could think of nothing more feminine than being on my

hands and knees being disciplined in this way by my lover. My days had been

lost in eating and swimming, to hedonistic pleasures. I needed the taste of the

whip to remind me that I was alive to the point where even death had ceased to

be frightening. I could feel contractions. The lighthouse of my clitoris was awash

in pleasure and desire. If I died now, at this second, in the petite mort of orgasm,

my life would have been worthwhile. I would have lived the way I was born to

have lived. I would have transcended the mundane and touched the sublime.

This, I thought, is true happiness. A momentary pause. A moment to draw breath. Then one more, a little lower,

placed expertly, the whip's flashing tentacle scorching his name into the

unsullied flesh. The liquids gathered about my vaginal lips let go with a scented

spray fine as mist that filled the cabin with the aroma of ardour and want. I had

taken three lashes and was still sturdily on my hands and knees, stomach

stretched tight as a drum, my body wet, my mind wandering.

I remembered when the beachcomber bent me over and beat my bottom with

his hand. Even then, that first time, a turmoil of warped feelings began to emerge

in me. When I opened my mouth for his cock, it was such a relief from being

spanked I found perverse pleasure being abused in this way. He released his

come over my face and then pissed on me, over my cheeks and into my eyes, my

mouth with the sour taste of his sperm, my breasts, his hot pee trickling down

between my legs where I knelt before him wrists bound like a slave girl.

That scene came often to my mind. It was … amazing, sadistic, so bizarre that

such a thing could happen, that something in me at that moment died and

something came unexpectedly to life. I was the baby bird breaking the shell and

seeing that there was another world outside the nest. My life had always been a

lukewarm bath of mediocrity. My great fear wasn't in being violated by a

stranger, it was slipping inexorably into cliché, familiarity and insignificance, an

ant on the ant hill with my short skirts and Wonderbra.

The beachcomber had changed all that with the first strike of his palm, the

pleasure he took in spraying me in piss all the greater because he must have

known it was something he should not have done, that stolen pleasure may taste

sweet but it will come at a price. It was little wonder that he was terrified and

stood there wringing his hands as the sheikh took the cane to the man in the

black turban.

After beating the man, I followed the sheikh to the waiting dinghy. I didn't

think about what I was doing. I had no plans. I had no future or past. It was the

logical conclusion of my long swim from La Gomera, a way to reconstruct the

present. My thoughts were still taking shape, but I was aware, I had even felt it

at the time, that the obscene thrill that had touched me when the man in black

spread my caned cheeks was shameful and disloyal. I had stolen a moment of

pleasure that belonged in truth to Samir. I needed this second chastisement to

pay for that disloyalty.

I remembered back on the beach watching the two men staring out to sea. I

had been caught up in the drama of waiting. The boat was late. My fate was

delayed. But I should have known, somehow I should have known, that my

destiny lay just across the horizon. When the man in black violated me I should

have wept for him to stop. I had wanted to believe he was raping me. That's what my mind kept saying. But not my body. As I lay across the black hull of

the Zodiac gasping, I didn't cry out in pain, I cried out for more.

Who was that girl in that other place, at that other time? That girl with a

boyfriend and a passport containing her photograph and a name no one had

spoken for more days than she could recall? That girl with invisible blinkers and

sixteen pairs of high-heeled shoes occupying closets and corners and dusty

spaces below the bed? Thoughts. Memories. They drifted away as the whip

spoke once more and I had to scramble back in my mind to remember how many

I had taken.

That was number four.

Three in straight lines, the fourth unfurling across my hips and tickling the

fine-skinned area just above the groin. At all the points where the stripe cut

across the first three lashes, little fires burst into life, pinpoints of agony on a

field of pain. I was rocking back and forth, sweating, crying, doing my best,

remembering again what Mummy said: beware of what you wish for. I girded

my loins, I pressed my eyes tightly closed, I steadied my arms and took deep

breaths through my open mouth.

As I wriggled the target must have been all the more enticing and the sheikh

let go with another lightning flash crosswise over my burning backside, that fifth

lash so close to the last one it felt as if I were being cleaved in two by some

supernatural force, the waves of pain touching every area of my body. The heat

was intense, suffocating. I felt as if I were wet clay shaped by the sheikh on the

potter's wheel and plunged into a furnace.

All the air in my lungs gathered in a burst of energy as the whip's moist

tentacle embraced my flesh and I released a cry of such overpowering force, the

people on the coast must have heard this primal scream and thought the day of

judgment had arrived, that the earth itself was about to explode. My strength had

gone. My arms were weak and shaking. My flesh was sopping. My nipples were

as hard as rocks. A great fist was clenching my entrails. I summoned one last

gasp of breath and whispered.

Whip me. Whip me. Whip me.

The sheikh unleashed the sixth long caress a fraction above my pussy and my

clitoris emerged erect from below its hiding place like an antenna beaming my

desire.

Samir dropped the whip and bent to lick my wounded bottom, the healing

saliva as he eased his tongue across the welts drawing out the sting. My pussy

oozed and the tip of his tongue carried the sticky sap from the pink lips of my

vagina to the winking black eye of my bottom. My hips and thighs clenched in

hunger and fear. He had fucked me and fucked me and fucked me, three times or our times or five times a day, but my anus remained a mystery I wanted to

share. I had saved myself for my sheikh. I wanted him in my pussy and my

mouth and I wanted to feel his fierce cock drilling into the heart of my being,

into that part of me where no man had been before.

I had fallen back on to the mattress after the sixth strike from the braided

bullwhip, but I wedged my knees under me, stretched my arms and pushed back,

wriggling, grinding my butt, drawing his meaty tongue into the gaping black

hole of my deepest yearnings.

There is a little muscle at the entrance of your backside designed for pushing

downwards. By careful, and I suspected practised manipulation, the sheikh

quickly taught that muscle to work in reverse, to draw his tongue inwards and

upwards where it reached nerve endings that had lain dormant and now vibrated

with life. The pain from the lash had gone, evaporated. I was all want and need

and desire.

He spread my knees, opening me further as you open a folding ladder to give

it balance, and must in a few moments have rid himself from the burden of his

embroidered shirt and baggy trousers. Once more he licked and kissed the red

stripes he had painted across the mounds of my bottom and returned his clever

tongue to the squelching walls of my ass, a skeleton key picking the lock of my

secrets.

In and out. In and out.

Holding my cheeks. Making me wet. Slurping and sucking. The sheikh was

slow, restrained, patient. A connoisseur with a fine brandy. A horse whisperer

with a neglected pony. I wanted his cock in my mouth and I wanted his cock

buried in my backside.

I was born to be doing what I was doing, to be there at that moment with an

unknown man in an unknown place on all fours having my bottom lashed and

kissed, my anus moistened and reamed. My breasts hung like pendulums

marking time as Samir pushed his face into the spread cheeks of my bottom, his

fine tongue carving a path into the scented canal of my virgin anus. I was

swaying back and forth, moving with the rhythm of the sea, the motion of the

universe, the sheikh holding my thighs, his fingers finding their way into the

pungent fruit of my sopping vagina to graze the flaming nib of my clitoris. I

sighed with relief. I panted for air. I pushed back harder and when his tongue left

my drenched ass the pain of parting was delectable because my hunger would

soon be satisfied.

Samir's cock pushed at my bottom as a hand pushes as an open door, with

pressure, not force. There was a momentary pain, as there's pain when your

hymen snaps, but then I heard a faint pop like a bursting bubble as the head slipped into that tight little hole. I was holding my breath, arms tense, my tummy

sucked in. I pushed back and he pushed forward, his cock slicked with slimy

discharge slipping in and out, deeper and deeper, and I let out the air I was

holding in a long and grateful sigh.

I was proud to have saved my treasure for Samir. It didn't matter that the

beachcomber had pissed on me and the other man had made me cry out for more

as I lay across the side of the dinghy. All that mattered was that unique and

special moment as my lover's cock rooted itself deeply and totally in the fertile

soil of my grinding ass.

Something missing had been found. I was complete. The walls of your back

passage are hung with elusive pleasure points. The walls are soft elastic that

stretch to take your man. It is where he wants to be, and it was where I wanted

Samir, me on my hands and knees, my mouth wide, gasping for air, his cock a

battering ram beating at the castle keep. I bucked like a donkey. I howled like a

wolf. I wriggled like a fish. I was feverish, hysterical. I cried in satisfaction. I

was finally fulfilled. If I had a dream, this was my dream, to be there in that

place where time had stopped, where the past and future had dissolved into an

all-embracing present.

While I screamed with pleasure when we made love, the sheikh had always

been hushed and it was a joy to hear the beat of his breath and the cry of his song

as his body stiffened and he burst in a screaming climax. I felt the hot gush of his

sperm wash through my insides and I sang out too in a roaring orgasm that stole

the last of my strength and we tumbled like an octopus in a mass of swirling

arms and legs.

The sheikh lay on his back sweating, exhausted, delirious, eyes shiny, his

chest vibrating as if the tic on his neck had infected the rest of his body. I

smoothed the hair from his brow. When I kissed his lips his tongue that had been

buried in my backside wriggled into my mouth and I tasted my own obscure

fragrance. My hand had drifted as if with its own will to hold his softening cock

and in my warm palm it began to harden.

From the moment I had opened the chest and gazed at the whip coiled in the

bottom drawer, I had wanted him in my mouth. I ran my kisses from his lips

over his chin, his throat, across his smooth chest and down to his cock in its nest

of silky hair. I licked it like a kid with a lolly, lick, lick, lick, my slobber making

it pop up rigidly as if asking for more. I straddled him like a pony and slipped

the shaft back where it belonged. It was my cock. It was on loan to the sheikh. I

needed it back. It had been deep in my ass and now I needed to ride the beast to

a second orgasm.

He arched his back, he thrust his pelvis and the little sheikh grew harder as it 'Habibi. Habibi. Habibi,' he whispered.

Baby. Baby. Baby.

Time was stitching a shroud around me. I was trying to mine every grain of

happiness from every passing moment because the passing moment like that

moment long ago in the garden would never be repeated. On this boat without

haste or clocks I imagined a giant hourglass with sand slipping relentlessly from

top to bottom, and felt that night the rush of the sand going faster.