Spank: The Improbable Adventures of George Aloysius Brown (23 page)

I politely decline and instead pretend to study the furniture. After what seems like a decent interval, I casually ask him to show me his line of RattanAmour.

"
Ha ha. You want buy cane,
"
he says.
"
For you, or for master?
Ha ha. No matter. We have for cane for lady and cane for gentlemen. Best quality.
Lady one shorter. Gentlemen bigger ones, longer, more whippy, make good mark. Very fine canes.
What you want? Come, I show.
"

I follow him through a beaded curtain to a room in the back of the store. He opens a drawer and pulls out a selection, spreading them out like gems on a black velvet cloth.

I should have known.
Forgeries.
The lot of them, I could see it right away. These are good, but they
'
re knockoffs. Why am I not surprised? In a culture that copies everything from Rolex watches to Canadian ice wine, there is a knockoff for every expensive brand name, produced by the thousand in the sweatshops of Shenzhen just across the border. I am suddenly angry.

I say nothing.
I ask for proof of authenticity and he shows me the tiny trademark etched into the rattan.

How much?
I ask.

"
All canes $100 US dollars.
"

He hands one to me.
It feels good in my hands and I test its flex

"
Mmm. Okay.. But let me see that one.
"
I point to one in the bottom drawer.

As he bends to retrieve it, I give him a whack across both cheeks of his ample posterior, hard enough to get his attention.

"
Ow, ow, ow,
"
he exclaims, straightening up and grasping his backside with both hands.
"
What you think you doing? You crazy lady?
You want to test canes, here, hit pillow, not hit proprietor. I call police.
"

"
Go ahead. Call the police. If you don
'
t I will.
These are knockoffs, aren
'
t they?
"

He looks crestfallen. The indignation has evaporated.

He says nothing, stares at the floor.

"
Don
'
t pretend you don
'
t know, because I do know,
"
I say.
"
I know the lady who makes them. I know she doesn
'
t sell into
Asia
.
"

"
Canes made by auntie in Shenzhen,
"
he replies grudgingly.
"
Top quality rattan, but designs are knockoff.
Jade, precious stones, not real. No matter. Many customers buy.
More profitable sell canes than copy watch.
"

I suddenly want to get out of there.

"
I
'
ll make you a deal,
"
I say.
"
You change your ad, change the brand name, file off the fake trademark and I
'
ll let it go this time. But remember I live here, I
'
ll be watching.
"

"
Okay, okay,
"
he nods sullenly and gives his noodles his full attention, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

RattanAmours they are not, but I still want one. I didn
'
t come all this way for nothing. I chose a 32-inch beauty with a jade handle carved in the form of a traditional Chinese lion
I land a few practice strokes on a pile of cushions sending up puffs of dust that swirl and dance in a shaft of sunlight that enters from a high window.
The swishing sound is fine and right.

The proprietor of the Wang King emporium watches me, still eating

"
You want that one? Take it,
"
he says.
"
No charge.
Here, I wrap for you. Give little jar of camphor oil to keep it nice and flex.
"

Suddenly, he is all smiles. Me too.

I can
'
t wait to get it home.

But at about this time, less than six weeks after I arrived in
Hong Kong
, Jen
'
s concerns about RC
'
s health began to seem like a warning. He became morose, uncommunicative and nothing I could do would cheer him up. He stayed late at the office, and was quite often drunk when he finally came home. The joy went out of life for him and needless to say, for me too. We stopped having sex. I tried to talk to him about it, but he insisted nothing was wrong.

"
Leave me alone. I
'
m sorry, Cat. I
'
ll get over it. I
'
ve been having these terrible dreams.
"

"
What sort of dreams?
"

"
You know, what happened.
"

I tried to hug him, but he pushed me away. After a week of this I phoned Jen in
Sydney
and she urged me to leave him.

"
It
'
s over, Cat, can
'
t you see that? He needs help. You can
'
t help him.
Get out while you can
!
"

I hung up hurriedly when I heard his key in the door. He hadn
'
t been drinking, but he had a crazed look in his eyes. He confronted me, demanding I punish him and when I refused, he lost it, grabbing me from behind, tearing off my nightie. I screamed but he stuffed my panties in my mouth until I thought I would suffocate. I kicked at him and tried to struggle free, but I was powerless in his grasp.
He tied me to the bed and he beat me. I was sobbing uncontrollably. The pain was excruciating, but I felt more betrayed than hurt.
He loosened the bonds. Then without a word he left, slamming the door behind him. I took a deep breath and slowly regained my composure. I was alive. Outside, I could see more darkness than light. The neon that had enchanted me now mocked me.

This is what I did. I took a plumber
'
s saw from under the kitchen sink and I cut the cane into pieces. I wrapped his precious replica in a pillowcase and smashed it with a hammer into a thousand bits. Then I threw some clothes into a suitcase and got a taxi to the airport.

When I phoned Jen, she was just about to leave for work.

"
You say your flight leaves in two hours. It
'
s roughly eight hours flying time to
Sydney
. I
'
ll pick you up the airport.
"
She didn
'
t even press me for details of what had happened.
"
Even if he tries to find you, he won
'
t know where you have gone. You will be safe here.
"

And for a while I was.

Ever since he met Joanne and visited her little bed-sit in
Basildon
, George had been determined to learn more about the life of Catherine de Medici. Joanne had given him a brief history of erotic discipline as far back as the Ancient Greeks and had told him that the 16th century Queen of France was notorious for her delight in spanking the bottoms of
"
the most beautiful and noble
"
ladies of her court. Now this was something George could relate to, but a lifetime of writing municipal reports had taught him the value of accuracy if you are going to put something down on paper. So when his hero the Time Lord bedded Boadicea, or was seduced by Cleopatra, or broke into the Bastille to discuss erotic literature with the Marquis de Sade, or helped Casanova escape from his jail cell at the Doge
'
s Palace in Venice or, and this George found most fanciful of all, encountered the future Duchess of Windsor in a brothel in Beijing, he would need to be historically on solid ground. What happened during those encounters he would share with his readers, the part that was pure fiction, and no-one could argue with that. George moved Catherine de Medici to the top of the list.

In the politically correct nineties he had helped to draw up the worksafe standards for Putney and District and he reflected with amusement that such employer conduct, even by royalty, would not be tolerated today, but the thing was: W
w
s it whimsy, or someone
'
s fanciful view of history, or could he find any evidence that Catherine de Medici had spanked her ladies in waiting? So as usual, and with his customary bureaucratic thoroughness, George applied himself to the pursuit of historical plausibility.

During a visit to the dusty archives of the
National
Museum
he found several references in mediaeval documents to a court festival in 1577 at Chateau Chennonceau in the
Loire
Valley
, one of several palaces owned by the Queen. On that occasion, according to one account, Catherine, who was then Queen Mother and in her sixties,
"
made the ladies of her court parade half naked and smacked them on the buttocks with the palm of her hand.
"
Here was the testimony he was looking for.

Good for her, he thought. If he were Queen of France, he would probably have done the same thing, but unfortunately for George, the aspiring novelist, that was all the empirical evidence he could find. He couldn
'
t believe there were no more details.
Here was this incredible event unfolding and no one apparently took notes. However, he found a wealth of other anecdotal material he could use.

Catherine de Medici, by all accounts, was a woman of literary, artistic and culinary interests. Born Caterina Maria Romula di Lorenzo de' Medici., in Florence in 1519
she was 14 when she married in Marseille the second son of the Duke of Orleans, Henry, a boy of her own age.

Those were the days, George thought, as he recorded the details in his notebook.

He reflected ruefully on his own teenage years growing up in
East Grinstead
. When he was 14 he hadn
'
t even kissed a girl let alone had sex with one; indeed his only experience under the sheets was with one hand on the little fella and the other aiming a flashlight at a pop-up book of nude photos hoping he would make it to the finish line before his mum came to kiss him goodnight.

He sighed and read on.

"
Young Prince Henry danced and jousted for his bride and the couple left their wedding ball at midnight to perform their nuptial duties.
"
George chuckled to himself, wondering if jousting was a mediaeval euphemism for bonking. Apparently it was,
because a few pages further on he was astonished to read that the King himself had accompanied the young couple to their bedroom and had stayed until the marriage was consummated, later noting for the record that
"
each had shown valor in the joust.
"
George wondered if Henry had spanked Catherine on their wedding night propelling her down a sexual path she apparently followed for the rest of her life. The thought intrigued him. If he did, it likely it didn
'
t happen until after the King had left. He remembered his own wedding night in
Alicante
and was grateful in retrospect that no member of the English royal family had been present to hear the applause.
He remembered it was the next day he had purchased el cepillo and back at the hotel when Pem was teasing him, he whispered in her ear that he had bought it for both of them.
He remembered how she had blushed when she heard this and had kissed the tip of his nose.

"
You all right there, sir?
"
the archivist interrupted his reverie.

"
Yes, sorry, I was miles away. History will do that to you.
"

"
Just to let you know, we close in an hour.
"

"
Thank you, yes, I
'
m nearly done.
"
He read on, filling pages of his notebook with his neat cursive script.

He read that Catherine de Medici was credited with introducing Italian cooking to
France
, bringing with her an entourage of chefs, pastry cooks, confectioners and distillers and introducing to the French court delicacies such as pasta, artichokes, aspics, baby peas and broccoli. It is also said she invented women
'
s knickers which made George laugh out loud prompting an admonishing glance from the archivist. George had a mental image of the Queen, quill in hand, sketching a prototype for the royal seamstress.
In any event, he thought the invention of knickers to be a splendid achievement at least on par with splitting the atom and such innovation would have been entirely in character with the Queen as the wearing of unmentionables by her ladies in waiting would have greatly contributed to her majesty
'
s amusement, or at least that was his experience. Lowering the last line of defense, be it bloomers of the finest silk, or made-in-China cotton panties, thus gradually revealing in their slow descent a shapely derriere, was always a magical moment in Pimlico when Pem was over his knee.