Czytaj książkę: «Kinky»

Chapter One

There’s a place further down the street where I work that I can’t figure out at all. From the outside, it looks like your standard Shoreditch warehouse converted into an ‘art space’, the Victorian brickwork decorated in multicoloured swirls and curls, but so many people come in and go out of its heavily fortified black entrance that I think there must be more to it than that.

And there seems to be some kind of door policy too. For every half-dozen people who are admitted, another four or five are turned away. From my desk at the ad agency, I watch the ebb and flow.

‘I reckon it’s a brothel,’ says Anton, breaking from Angry Birds for a moment to look out of the window with me.

‘But there are just as many women visiting as men.’

‘A bisexual brothel, then.’

‘I don’t think it’s a brothel,’ I say, but I’m not so sure he’s wrong. Although the visitors vary wildly in age, sex and appearance, rather a lot of them seem to be dressed to impress. I’ve seen a woman in full rubber body stocking and spike heels go in there with a man in a Savile Row suit. Another time, a man was actually carrying a bullwhip. One gorgeous young guy crawled along the pavement from the corner with a collar and leash attached to his neck. The woman ‘walking’ him looked like a retired librarian. It’s odd and fascinating. My money’s on a private sex club, but it seems to open all hours rather than late at night, and most of the people who enter look no different from the average collection of Joes on my morning commute.

Anton’s attention reverts to his smartphone. ‘Get in,’ he says. ‘Just got a text from Riley – she’s got free tickets to a secret DJ Mentallist gig at the Fish Bowl. You up for it?’

‘Ohhh.’ I half-rise from my seat and then plonk myself back down, glumness personified. ‘Can’t. Really got to finish this campaign. Looks like I’m going to be pulling a late one. Sorry.’

Anton shrugs. ‘No biggie, blood.’

He likes to try and sound like a mockney version of someone out of The Wire, but Anton is actually the privately educated son of a brigadier.

I wave at his retreating figure and gaze down at my chaotic notepad. If I don’t come up with a slogan for this bastard air freshener by the end of the evening, I’m sunk. Maybe ‘This will freshen your bastard air’. It’s better than the crap I’m coming up with at the moment, at least. ‘Give your nose a break’. Ugh.

I hunker down and try to clear my mind, not an easy task when your mental clutter could fill a mental landfill site.

Some time around eight, I happen to look up from the catchphrase nightmare and notice something different about the Building of Enigma.

I hurry over to the window and squint through the blinds. Running along the bottom of the wall, barely above pavement level, are a series of narrow barred windows, slim rectangles with their long sides parallel to the ground. I’ve often tried to peer into them in passing but found them blacked out and impenetrable.

Tonight, one of them glows with light.

Abandoning the bastard air freshener, I grab my bag and head for the lifts, my feet hardly touching the ground.

Outside, the darkened street is deserted – or so I think. Before I can cross to the object of my curiosity, a hand touches my shoulder and I swing around, irritated and slightly nervous. This isn’t the safest area of town, the classic price you pay for being edgy and hip.

‘Scuse me, you have a light?’

The voice is foreign, the speaker dressed in a way that places him somewhere between art student and gypsy, all leather bracelets and ripped jeans. The thing that really captures my attention, though, is his amazing moustache. You don’t see facial hair like that except in yellowed photographs of Victorian military men. I’m so struck by it that I forget to answer for a moment, until he makes a flourish with his hand, drawing my eye to his unlit cigarette.

‘No?’ he says.

‘Um, no, sorry,’ I say, wanting him to go away so I can spy in peace. I feel awkward going over to the building and blatantly rubbernecking in front of a stranger.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘You know where is a bar?’

‘God, there are hundreds round here. Just walk in any direction.’

I turn to cross the street, tense with the idea that somebody might put the blackout blind back down at any moment. Sod this random tourist. I’m going to get my answer to the mystery that has plagued me since I joined Cre8iv back in the spring.

‘Why you are unfriendly to me?’

Oh God, just go away! He is following me across the street, his voice plaintive, his belts jangling. How many does a man need anyway?

‘All English girls are like this?’

I reach my target and crouch on the pavement, getting myself into optimum peeking position.

‘Please stop harassing me,’ I snap, then I take a huge lungful of toxic London air and fail to find any more words until a heartfelt ‘Oh my God!’ escapes my lips.

‘You are OK?’

The tourist guy kneels down next to me. I try to flap him away with my shaking hand, but he is having none of it. He leans forwards, wanting to see what it is that has shocked me so.

‘Wow,’ he says, sounding impressed. ‘This is typical London bar?’ He chuckles. ‘The English vice, right?’

‘Uh-huh.’ I can’t speak, I’m too engrossed in what I’m witnessing.

We are looking down into a plain, cell-like basement room. The exposed brickwork is painted white and bare of decoration. A bank of four old-fashioned school desks take up the central space, while facing us at the end is a chalkboard with some Latin verb conjugations written on it. The verb of the day appears to be Flagello – to flagellate. Very apposite, given that the stern-looking middle-aged man standing beside the board is wielding a crook-handled cane of the type that was banned in schools when I was a wee girl.

At three of the four desks, their backs to us, sit two overgrown schoolboys and an overgrown schoolgirl. I had no idea you could get school uniforms in adult sizes but obviously there’s a niche market out there.

At the front, beside the ‘teacher’, a woman of about thirty, pigtailed and mini-kilted, stands on a chair with her hands on her head. She is trembling a little, her face is flushed, but it’s unclear whether fear or excitement predominates in her emotions. I suppose it must be excitement, given that the sight of her in her humiliating predicament is making my stomach squirm a little and my knickers dampen. I try to attune myself to what might be going through her mind and find myself surprisingly keen to experience it at firsthand.

I hold my breath, then let it out when the teacher lifts the hem of her skirt with the tip of his cane, revealing the kind of navy-blue gym knickers that went out in about 1975. She is made to hold the skirt up and turn around, giving the class an eyeful of her full, rounded bum.

The teacher says something, swishing his cane through the air, and she steps off the chair, carefully, hands still on head, then she bends and places her palms flat on the seat, sticking out that arse so that the gym knickers stretch and outline it in pitiless detail.

The teacher addresses his pupils, punctuating his words by smacking the hand that isn’t holding the cane down on the disgraced girl’s bottom repeatedly. Her flesh quivers but she keeps her position. How painful is it? I wish I could hear through the heavy glazing. I want to know what that sounds like.

He stops and says something to the girl, who stands and then peels down her knickers to her knees. My breathing is ragged as the freshly spanked pink globes are revealed to shameful view. God, what must she be thinking and feeling? If she’s anything like me, she’ll be soaking wet around the crotch. I’ve had this kind of fantasy for years, but never expected to see it in action.

She reassumes the position, sticking her arse out at the teacher’s injunction and spreading her legs wide enough for me to be able to see, even at this distance, that she is aroused. Doesn’t it bother her that everyone can see?

I want to put my hand down my skirt, but the inconvenient presence of tourist guy thwarts me. For his part, his eyes are on stalks, his long nose almost butting the bars in his eagerness to get the best view. What a voyeur. Yes, I’m a hypocrite.

The teacher flexes his cane then positions himself at a suitable distance from his victim’s well-presented derrière and draws back his weapon.

He holds it there for so long that my chest begins to ache with expectant tension. Then he flicks his wrist, the cane blurs through the air and makes contact with her bottom. I flinch, and so does she.

‘Ouch,’ says tourist guy.

A line of white appears on her skin, then it turns redder and redder until she has a magnificent scarlet welt across the broad centre of her arse. It looks wildly painful. I want to know how wildly painful it is. And I want tourist guy to fuck off so I can masturbate whilst contemplating this. But that’s going to have to wait until I’m in my bed, I suppose.

The teacher lays six strokes in total, and the girl somehow miraculously stays in position, though she flexes her feet and bobs up and down after each cruel blow. She is made to kiss the rod while I admire the gorgeous pattern of red stripes she bears on her bum for all to see.

Teacher tucks her skirt into her waistband so she can’t hide her punished condition and makes her stand back on the chair, while he turns back to the board and the conjugation of Latin verbs.

Then, disastrously, he looks up, directly at us, and freezes in horror before opening a door and bellowing something out of it.

‘Shit!’

In my haste to back away, I fall on my behind on the pavement. The massive black door is opening, the security staff on their way out.

Tourist guy yanks me up by the elbow. ‘Come on,’ he urges, taking to his heels and running with me to the end of the street and into the council estate beyond, dodging around the blocks at breakneck speed. He has long legs and apparently superhuman stamina, and my heart is banging fit to explode from my chest by the time we hit the nearest pub and take refuge inside, me wheezing, him laughing.

‘What’s funny?’ I pant, sinking on to a banquette, staring at him.

He has a crazy laugh. He looks crazy all round. What the hell I’m doing in a pub with him after watching a live sex show I just don’t know.

‘This is funny! I am in London three hours and I love it already. Is it like this always?’

‘Not really.’ I regain some rhythm to my breathing. ‘Well, a bit, maybe. Shit, do you think they saw our faces? I work in the building opposite. I don’t want to be recognised.’

‘Don’t worry. What do you drink?’

‘I could murder a stiff vodka and tonic.’

‘Ah, vodka. I like you. Right, stay there, I buy.’

I watch him go to the bar. He has this swagger about him, and he obviously charms the pants off the barmaid, who giggles and blushes her way through the transaction. At one point he leans forwards to let her touch his moustache. What a tart. Why am I even in this pub with him? I should just go home, but I feel the need to deconstruct what just happened, and nobody else would understand, so I stay.

He comes back with two tumblers of vodka and one bottle of tonic, setting them down with a flourish. He seats himself opposite me and flashes me a crooked smile.

‘This is great,’ he says. ‘This morning I am in shitty apartment in Moscow and now I am in London pub with a nice girl. Thank you to my good luck.’

‘You’re Russian,’ I say, finding it a little odd that I’m making small talk with a man I just watched a kinky schoolroom scene alongside. Should we not maybe mention it?

He thrusts out an arm. ‘Dimitri,’ he says. He offers a hand to shake, or so I think. When I put mine in his, he raises it to his lips and kisses it. I am so undone by this that I forget to tell him my name until he prompts me.

‘Rosie,’ I tell him, somewhat reluctantly.

‘English Rosie,’ he says with a charming smile. When you look at him properly, he’s actually quite cute even if his style suggests his life is one long Glastonbury Festival. His eyes are an amazing steely blue and the moustache deflects attention away from cheekbones you could cut yourself on. Plus there’s something endearing about his enthusiasm and confidence. He has the air of a man who loves life and is determined to live it. That’s not so common in a city full of achingly self-conscious hipsters. It’s attractive.

I eye him over the rim of my vodka glass, wondering where the evening will go. It slipped out of my grasp long ago and now I feel that all I can do is let it take its own course.

‘So,’ I say, unable to avoid the topic any longer, ‘this is turning out to be quite an, er, interesting evening.’

‘Interesting, yes. I have questions. Many questions. First – what happens next?’

‘Next?’ I don’t quite understand what he means. ‘We drink our vodka?’

‘No, with those people. That man beats that girl. What are they doing now?’

‘I’ve no idea! I guess he repeats the experience with the other three.’

‘You don’t know? Don’t you watch them before?’

‘No! I’ve never seen it. It’s the first time they’ve left the blind up. That’s why I wanted to watch – because I wanted to know what was going on in there.’

‘Really? So it’s not because you are a pervert?’

I spill my vodka. ‘No!’

‘Hey, hey, calm, relax. I don’t want to insult you. I think you enjoyed the show, that’s all.’

My face flares into fiery heat. Was it that obvious? I can’t look at his sly grin, and I can’t think of an answer.

‘It’s OK,’ he says, after a few seconds of silence. ‘I enjoyed it too. Why not? It’s just a bit of sexy fun, right? Oh, now you are embarrassed. I don’t mean to embarrass you.’

One slender finger touches my cheek, brushing it tenderly. A high-voltage shot of desire streaks down to my groin. Fuck. I think I fancy this freak show of a dude.

‘This is just too weird,’ I mutter. ‘I don’t know what I think.’

‘You don’t have to be shame,’ he says. ‘Everyone has their little different what’s the word?’

‘Quirks? Kinks?’

‘Kinks. Right. You like this spanking kink, no shame.’

‘I think shame is kind of the whole point.’

‘Oh, OK! You like to be shame! I get it.’

‘Why am I discussing my sexual preferences with you?’

‘Because you like me. Anyway, what happens next in there? You think they all are spanked. Do you think it becomes sexual? Does he fuck them?’

‘What, all four of them? I doubt it.’

‘True, four in a row is hard. But possible.’

He winks at me and I slap the air in front of his face. What a cheeky bastard this man is. What a sexy cheeky bastard.

‘Maybe they all have an orgy on the desks. I haven’t got a clue.’

‘You think they pay him? Or he pays them?’

‘Oh, perhaps. Or they could just be like-minded friends who get together and play ye olde boarding schools every third Wednesday of the month. I guess that happens.’

‘Hmm.’ Dimitri’s eyes cloud over for a few moments and I watch him lose himself in thought. I start to wonder about him. Who the hell is he and what is his purpose in coming to London? Is he as mad, bad and dangerous to know as the vibe he emits suggests? ‘You see, Rosie, I need work. I need money. I think I could beat some asses for a living. Easy, no problem. And I will enjoy it too. Better than working in some kitchen, right?’

‘I’m not sure the market for that kind of thing is exactly huge,’ I demur, and then I break off and hide my face with the food menu because the ‘teacher’ and his four pupils have just walked through the door.

‘Hey, great, I can ask him!’ exclaims Dimitri, ignoring my wail of ‘Fuck, no!’ He springs out of his seat to confront our new acquaintances.

I follow him, trying to stop him, but I am too late. I hide my face in my hands and utter desperate prayers while he accosts the teacher.

‘Excuse me, I am new in town and I have a question.’

‘Oh, really?’ The teacher sounds wary, but he doesn’t seem to recognise us, which is some scant comfort.

‘Where is good fetish club in London?’

Silence.

‘Oh my God,’ I mutter into my hands.

‘Is this some kind of joke?’

‘No joke, I promise. I like to spank girls back home in Russia and I am requiring this service in London, is possible you can help me?’

I really think I might die of cringing.

‘Shall we drink elsewhere tonight?’ The teacher addresses his flock. ‘I can’t cope with lunatics just now.’ He turns stiffly and leads his pupils out of the pub.

‘Great. Nice work,’ I snipe. ‘What the actual fuck are you on?’

‘Hey, you like shame, I give you shame. What’s wrong with that?’

I am seriously contemplating calling an emergency taxi when the door of the pub opens again and the girl who was caned, pigtails still bobbing, slips in and tiptoes up to us.

‘Sorry about him,’ she says, cheeks pink. ‘But if you want to know the best place in London for BDSM and fetish, it’s actually just around the corner from here.’

‘Oh yes?’ Dimitri leans towards her and she seems to quiver like an aspen. Oh God. He obviously has this effect on all women.

‘It’s called Kinky Cupcake, but you can’t just go in. You have to know the password. It’s members only.’

‘How you get to be a member?’

‘You make friends with another member. I’ll be your friend if you like.’

‘I will like that a lot.’ His voice is all low and seductive, bloody man-whore that he is.

She giggles. ‘OK, tell the doorman that Trixietots sent you. The password is Lacoste.’

‘Trixietots. Lacoste. Right.’

‘Have fun. Maybe I’ll see you in there sometime. I really ought to go now, or Mr Strict will wonder where I am. And I don’t want to make him angry, believe me.’

She giggles again, flutters her eyelashes and flees.

‘Does this happen to you a lot?’ I ask, curling my lip. ‘Random women throwing themselves at you?’

‘You are jealous?’

‘No! But you love it, don’t you? You’re a man-whore.’

‘Man-whore? A gigolo? I could do that. I am very good at the sex.’

I give up. This man’s relationship with shame is utterly opposite to my own.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ he urges and drains his vodka.

‘Go?’

‘Yes, to this place, of course. Kinky Cupcake. You want to see inside, don’t you?’

Of course I do. Of course.

But now? And with him?

‘They won’t let us in. Or they might let you in, but probably not me. You’re the one old Trixietots there was interested in.’

‘Stop make excuses. What are you afraid of?’

‘I’m not afraid.’

‘Yes you are. I know why you’re afraid. You may have to be honest about your, what was it, your kinks. You’re scared of your kinks, right?’

‘Wrong.’

He shakes his head, giving me a look of disapproval that makes me see exactly how good he’d be as a stern teacher type. Very good. Blinding.

My legs buckle. Suddenly I just want him so badly I could …

‘You want this,’ he says, bending down to speak the words into my ear. ‘Here is your chance to get what you want. Take it.’

‘Don’t leave me in there,’ I whisper. ‘Stay with me.’

‘I’ll stay with you, I promise.’

He takes my hand and walks with me back across the estate and into the street where I work. The office lights are all out now, but it’s too late to panic about the air-freshener campaign. I have a new campaign on my mind.

I hold on tight as he knocks on that oft-regarded door.

It opens a fraction.

‘Password,’ demands a disembodied voice.

‘Lacoste,’ says Dimitri.

The door opens.

‘Sign the members’ book,’ says a black-suited man, but as he looks at us he frowns. ‘Are you new?’

‘Trixietots recommended us,’ I tell him.

‘Both of you?’

I nod, hoping upon hope that this will be accepted.

‘Which of you is the dom and which the sub?’

I blink, understanding neither of these terms.

‘Or are you switches?’

Switches?

‘She likes for me to whip her,’ says Dimitri helpfully, and I kick him rather violently in the ankle, though he seems not to register. ‘Don’t you, Rosie?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Tell them,’ he insists. ‘Say the words.’

Oh God, you bastard!

The doorman laughs. ‘I get the picture.’ He hands a blue badge to Dimitri. ‘You’re the dom.’ My badge is red. ‘You’re the sub. Now hold on there a minute and I’ll call up Mal and O. They’re the owners – they’ll want to vet you.’

‘Vet us?’

He nods, the phone already at his ear while he waits for the other end to pick up. ‘Yeah, Mal, I’ve got a couple of newbies here. You got a minute to come and do the necessary? Great. I’ll show them up.’

We follow him up some narrow stairs and through a door that leads to a little waiting room. It would almost be like a dentist’s waiting room, if the magazines didn’t feature cover models in latex and the pictures on the wall were of rotting teeth instead of people tied up with their rude bits on show. The pot plants and the water cooler give an incongruous everyday feel to what I am sure will not be an everyday experience.

‘They won’t be a moment,’ says the doorman. ‘I’ll get back downstairs now, if you don’t mind. Had a bit of an incident earlier with vanillas trying to spy on us – better make sure everything’s clear.’

Once he is gone, I turn to Dimitri. ‘Vanillas? I feel like I’m learning a whole new vocabulary here.’

He squeezes my hand. ‘Think of me. I am learning English too.’

‘I feel a bit nervous. What are they going to do? What’s this vetting?’

He puts an arm around my shoulder. God, it feels nice. I would be happy just to sit there like that for the rest of the evening.

‘Don’t worry. It’s an adventure. Enjoy it.’

That seems to be his philosophy of life, I muse. I snuggle into his side and he rubs his fingers soothingly up and down my upper arm. He smells of so many things – cigarette smoke, wood smoke, mint, something herbal a bit like a joss stick. I breathe him in, inhaling intoxication.

The spell is broken when a door beyond the waiting room opens and a man dressed up as a vampire beckons us in.

I look askance at Dimitri, but he appears to be qualm-free, striding into the office with that snake-hipped swagger I had admired earlier.

Sitting behind a desk is a woman in a very smart 1940s-style skirt suit and a pillbox hat with a veil.

‘Good evening,’ says the vampire, putting out a hand for us to shake. ‘I’m Mal, and this is O. We’re the people behind Kinky Cupcake – we own the lot of you.’ He laughs. ‘You’re new here, I gather, so we need to run through a few things with you. Nothing to worry about – we just have to make sure all new members are genuine deviants, if you like. It’d be a shame if a journalist or somebody unfriendly to our interests slipped through the net and ruined what we’ve got here, don’t you think?’

‘Sure.’ Dimitri nods vigorously. I offer a weak smile.

‘So I’m going to run through the dos and don’ts of the club with you, and then I just need a little demonstration of your dynamic, if you don’t mind. I gather you, sir, are the dom and this lovely lady is your sub, so perhaps you could show us how you like to spank her, or a bit of bondage maybe …’

What? My mouth falls open and I stare at Dimitri, aghast.

‘Ah, don’t be shy now,’ pipes up O in a sexy husky voice. ‘We’ve all seen it a thousand times. You’ll see me whipped by every dom in the place before too long. But I know the first time in front of other people is hard, so please be aware that I sympathise. I envy you too. Gosh, that feeling of being on the edge of a precipice – the exhilaration. I’d give anything to relive that, you lucky thing.’

‘If you’re really not ready, I can get him to spank O instead,’ offers Mal, but I shake my head.

No. If he touches any woman’s bottom, it will be mine.

‘No, no,’ I croak. ‘It’s fine. I’ll do it.’

I’ll do it.