The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (4 page)

Betty could make out fragments of a story that the man wearing emerald lenses was telling Leanda. 'I can assure you it happened like that.., it was in the mini-dungeon in the back of the Daimler. You know Dominic had a sex change in order to cater for Patricia's lesbianism. It was the condition of their marriage. And the Daimler. Really. Red curtains, studded black leather upholstery, button-operated dildos which telescoped from the front seat backs. Well this time, they went too far. I only heard about the arrest last week. Do you remember that time Patricia appeared at the Fetish Club and told everyone that her face powder was cocaine? Well it was. They were prepared to go that far.'

Betty drifted in and out
of the fragmentary confidences imparted by the two. Her own experiences, confined strictly to the estate, led her to make comparative associations with clients she had known. She had attended parties at which the sorbet had been tinctured with Ecstasy or some other hallucinogen, and the effects had led to extravagant orgies. High, sensual and deeply responsive to the tactile, straight men had found themselves becoming sodomitical slaves — Betty remembered seeing a pistachio ice-cream, cone and all, slide neatly into a compliant asshole, while the man hungrily searched amongst swollen cacti for the right one to suck. Betty had watched the man's normally reserved Japanese wife look on with increasing lust, the three fingers of her right hand dividing a slit with aesthetic expertise. She had done it like parting the petals of a swollen orchid, a tiny lipstick dribble extending from a smudged nether lip like a suspended trickle of wine. In her life the bizarre was the norm. There was the woman who paid her each week to renew the necklace of blue love-bites that she liked to wear as a circle around her bottom and waist. Betty renewed the lozenges with meticulous concern for detail, never increasing the size of the bite, for to do so would have incurred the client's displeasure. Each bite was the size of a pout, the tongue working on a natural rather than extended radius. This woman would examine the surface bruises with a mirror to assure herself of Betty's accuracy. The client had discovered that inciting jealousy in men was an additional incentive to sexual performance. And besides, Betty's doing it, particularly from behind, excited the woman to orgasmic frenzy. She would ask to be tickled with a pink feather as the culminating gesture to the session.

Betty wondered how the four guests at table would respond to the woman who insisted on being placed in a cage, and denied the pleasure she desired. Betty was paid to place dark green drapes over the specially made cage. Constructed from bamboo with supporting steel bars, and lined with dark blue satin, the naked blonde inside would pay her to play
a game of elusive provocation. Betty would have to brush the bars with her erection, always keeping the head wide of the woman's grasping bite, and only occasionally allowing the woman's lips the briefest contact with her prepuce. Dressed in nothing but scarlet lipstick and a necklace worn at the waist, the woman would throw herself against the bars while Betty retreated towards a star-shaped bed, all the time simulating the act of serious masturbation. The performance would go on over a period of hours. When the blonde woman inside the cage grew too delirious, Betty as instructed, threw the green drapes over the cage, thereby heightening the intensity of the woman's pleasure. The cage would rock with her demonstrative frustration, with her hands tied in a silk cord behind her head, and unable to relieve herself, her need grew to an agonising ritual. Betty would then throw off the drapes, and the whole procedure would begin all over again until the client dropped from fatigue. When the captive was too exhausted to continue, she would open the cage with a large key, and the collapsed blonde would crawl out on all fours. Betty would have received her payment on trust, before the ritual began, and sometimes she was obsessed with the crazy notion of ditching the key and running. It was only the prospect of losing an assured income that had her side with rationality. And the client's kicks came from the wager.

She was letting go the present, and colliding with images from the near past. Monsters rushed at her from a dark corridor, She had a vision of four poster beds floating down an underground river. On one of them,
a woman dressed in a red negligée was doing a yogic headstand. The bed had navigation lights, and a green one winked at the bank. Betty couldn't break up the drift inside her head. It came on inexorably. Debased acts, and ones in which she had suffered real humiliation crowded into consciousness. There were so many. She had been degraded, and she had degraded others. Where did it all end? In her lucid intervals she found herself contemplating that question. Did it all stop simply because death pulled the plug? The past, as it was on recall, showed up at anytime. It could be on the stairs, nudge you from the driver's seat, blow you back out of an alley into the middle of a traffic-gunned road. Betty had often considered how those steeped in sex had undergone the major initiations into death. Abandoning the body to a partner's potential violence, or submitting to a particular fetish demanded a corresponding empathy with personal extinction. Anything could happen in those situations, the client resenting having to pay for the realisation of a need, and she often repulsed by their physical advances. Betty had so often prepared for the end. She had felt a blade caress her throat as a Lloyds underwriter had acted out his fantasy of equating sex with intended murder. She had entered leather dungeons in which the chances of coming out alive were minimal. And death for her had come to represent the light of a Thursday afternoon falling lazily through high attic windows overlooking a harbour complex. The sky dabbling blue and green along the coast.

She could hear them talking again. 'No it wasn't like
that, John. She has reached E grade in the lodge. After that you risk death. But a number of them were chased off the ruin of De Sade's château at La Coste. They had to run naked, handcuffed, gagged, or in whatever state of bondage they were. But they caught X. He was still tied to an oak. He was wearing the red leather mask, the gold amphalang, and there's a sign somewhere on his body... it's never been disclosed. But they let him go. He says that he dematerialised. But they wouldn't have dared keep him. Imagine the scandal if his identity was revealed. Imagine it.'

From what Betty could de
termine, the four of them were initiates to a sexual cult. Names were never mentioned. And the obvious meeting-places were clearly code words for secret venues.

No-one was attempting to engage her in dialogue. Perhaps they were punishing her for her resistance to the company. She would have preferred the whip to tickle her back as an assertive gesture, rather than undergo this connived exclusion.

Somewhere in all of this there was a green sorbet served with pralines. Betty hardly considered it. The monkey had run into the hall once, only to be pursued by the midget. Betty wondered if there wasn't a mirror through which they would all disappear. Walking towards her own reflection she would find herself telescoped into a post-death state. The big one — the final earthquake to rock Hollywood's star belt had occurred. Instead of being here she was underground in a ferro-concrete bunker lined with gold discs. Someone was screaming to her, 'I'm dead, I can't get back. Help me, help me.' And this was the singer who was worth two hundred million. It could happen that easily, Betty told herself. Mirrors were there to walk through. Betty could hear voices coming at her. It was like her drink had been spiked. It was the two men who were in conversation. 'Do you think it was human or a tiger's? Nicole won't tell me, other than it was penis that we ate.'

There was a sustained silence before the other voice came in. 'I'm more concerned about whose it was. Cannibalism can have adverse effects on the gene pool. Was the castration self-imposed or the result of an operation? Was it got from a morgue or a theatre?'

It registered with Betty that she had eaten penis as the course over which the midget officiated with such respect for the gold foil and the decorative black crosses. The delicate, salty meat served on olive leaves was once the sensitive tissue of somebody's glans. There was no end to perverse gastronomy. She felt ill at the prospect of digesting human substance. The information must have been incorrect. She was dreaming it. There was a muzzy halo to her thinking. Her conscious perceptions weren't connecting. There were gaps, blank pockets into which she disappeared. She was suddenly a child again, holding a smoking firework in her hand like a pyromaniac, or discovering facts in the afternoon, like that thing adults called death, when someone who had a name went missing and wouldn't ever answer again. She used to think they had gone off to the coast and walked out across the sea to a castle on the waves. The one that had black flags flying in the noon. Bits of her life cut in and out of awareness. She could hear one of the men addressing Nicole, only it sounded a long way away, as though someone was trying to speak to her inside a dream. 'I don't even know if he's still alive. He was living at Nice. He built his own elaborate catafalque. He spent his life in mourning for his lost youth. They say that every night he prepared for death, and dressed up for the part using elaborate make up. And every night he wrote. a page of renunciation to life, a sort of book of the dead, but in the form of a novel. It's a remarkable story. His head slept within a circle of black carnations which were cut and dyed for the ceremony. I doubt if anyone would be qualified to carry out his final instructions. And no-one seems to know if he is dead, the fiction surrounding his life has turned him into a legend. He had contrived to teach his staff a secret language, so that leakage to the press would be minimal.'

'It's the subject of biography,' Le
anda asserted. ‘Have you heard the story about his wine cellar? He buys at auctions – first growth clarets from Napoleon Bonaparte's cellar and the last Czar's; wines from every extravagant lot, but apparently there is also wine tinctured with human blood, and re-corked. He is said to have vintages spiked with Aleister Crowley's blood, Elvis Presley's, a whole pantheon of occult and cultural icons.'

'It's an amazing story,' t
he man's voice resumed. ‘Information gets out, and I suppose that's because he wants certain things to be known. In order to exist, things have to happen. An identity is often the sum of accumulative events. You can't exist to the world without facts. There's the story of how he was supposed to have opened his hands out to a guest, and they were thick with ices. It's impossible to know what's true. At least since the time he has more or less permanently entered his death room.'

Betty caught at words an
d fragments of sentences she couldn't grasp. She was convinced that perhaps she too was dying, find that what she heard and saw belonged to the underworld. She had known that trance state in illness. There wasn't anything tangible to hold on to, just the mind's autonomous drift through hallucinatory clusters. She was nosing into grey zones through which pink fish floated. A gigantic mouth yawned open and shut. There was a city inside it. And suddenly there were white monkeys sitting on what appeared to be a cemetery wall. They were all looking in her direction. She could feel the power of that collective stare pushing her back into herself, until she blacked out in a slow motion somersault to nowhere.

*

Part II

The Dungeon

When
Betty came to she was lying on leather. The black surface moulded itself to her body. Someone had sprayed her hands with gold body paint, for they became instantly visible to her as two fluorescent toads squatting on either side of her. She was lying face down, and the positional arrangement of her hands and feet was such that she couldn't move. But there was no crudity of handcuffs it shackles. Some sort of invisible adhesive tape secured her Immobility. Betty rested her head on the point of her chin. She was lying lacing a blank maxi-screen. The room was lit by two flaming oldies, one protruding from the mouth of a white statue, the other socketed into a kneeling marble form. The pervasive stillness was like being at the bottom of a lake. Betty imagined panthers, jaguars, pumas, slumped down beside her. Black on black.

What she recalled was th
e bizarre dinner table, the conspiratorial stretches of conversation that had been issued wide of her, the unnerving silence that pervaded the château — and green the man's lenses that had fixated her, as though she had confronted an alien with emerald VR contact lenses instead of eyes. Her mind was busy reassembling fragments of the narrative. The woman talking to her from behind the limo's partly open window, and the other one in the moulded leather skirt, the sexual liturgies delivered by the midget and the two oriental pashas, the hints at a menagerie contained within the house. Visuals flashed across consciousness. She had found herself in this position often in the past, but always voluntarily. Dungeon bondage was one of her specialities, an elegant cigarette drooping from her cherry gloss lips as she hung suspended from a chain, a man kneeling in front of her, blowing her engorged erection. It was so close to death, and the mutual stimulus came from this recognition. Betty regarded each S&M trip as a pre-death initiation. She often hoped to die in an act that was as flagrantly anti-social as it was self-debasing. Violating convention by bringing its administrative bureaucrats down to their gold-plated knees for her whip-hand was part of Betty's attraction to being a prostitute. It allowed her to undermine those proponents of political correctness — politicians, bankers, accountants, lawyers — the whole glitterati of moral pretence had opened wide for enemas, or shouted obscene imprecations as the whip had established slats like a blue venetian blind across delicate flesh.

Betty blamed herself for having ended up captive at the château. She should have considered the possible dangers in being transported out of town. She usually dictated her own reference points, and only rarely and to her detriment allowed a client this prerogative. Her neck was free, and she hadn't been blindfolded. She could assess the sizeable dimensions of the room in which she was bound. The torches assisted her in this. They gave proportion to the dark. Betty anticipated anything. She was doubtless being watched on a closed circuit screen, and she knew at some stage the four people would impose their needs on her vulnerability. She remembered on another occasion having been whipped with pink roses — the man had gone on and on striking her oiled bottom with the generous heads, and when they snapped on their stems, he would place the flower to his lips and then float it in a large terracotta bowl of red wine, Betty wondered if they were discussing among themselves what they would do to her. It should be the preferences entertained by the implacably cool men and the aesthetically perverse women. Tyrannical pleasures of every kind had been carried out on Betty's submissive body. She had acquiesced to bondage because she trusted in the master's ability to modify his threats. Here the terms were potentially unconditional, as no demands had been raised. Her subjective fears were of orgiastic violation, at least of the kind that appeared to exploit her nature as a woman who possessed a penis. Betty liked the contradiction. To receive an orgasm as a diva
, and to impart that received pleasure to a woman, was to her a complementary unity.

Without warning the screen became animated. Betty was looking at an intimate love scene between Leanda and Nicole. She knew she would be punished for being made a voyeur to their amatory games. Leanda was down on all fours, her bottom filmed
by a transparent pink triangle. Nicole's tongue was working like a hummingbird's across her slit. Occasionally she would pause, and apply a lipsticked pout to Leanda's bottom. She would leave the outline of a red carnation on her cheeks, and then return to stimulating Leanda's pussy. Nicole's bottom was framed in identical panties. There was now someone behind Nicole, only the buttocks were male, despite the extreme delicacy of the cunnilingus being delivered. And Nicole was instantly excited. She began transmitting to Leanda something of the pleasure being imparted to her. Her bottom was rotating to the man's tongue. He had instantly found the exact location of her excitement. The three of them continued in this chain of oral stimulus, only after a time Nicole offered Leanda's haunches to the man, and she by lying on the floor in the opposite direction to the couple, and by inserting her head between the man's parted legs, was able to suck his genitals in concourse with the rhythm he had struck up with Leanda. Nicole teased his balls like sweets. She pecked them tentatively, lipping them as a fish might the surface of a lake. The man had now slipped down Leanda's pink panties, and had worked himself fully into her back passage. Leanda was impaled on his deep, slowly articulated strokes. He was enjoying it, and intent on making her wait. Nicole kept on nibbling, her legs spread wide, while a fourth androgynous intoner entered the scene, and squatting in front of Nicole lifted her in to his engorged cock, establishing by that a complex quadruple geometry. This rhythm continued with each partner building towards climax. Nicole's legs were hooked right over the kneeling man's shoulders. As she moved convulsively towards orgasm, her tongue manipulated the other man to thrust conclusively into Leanda. There was a slackening of the tension that had sustained the four.

The film cut dead, and the screen reverted to a blue rectangle. Betty imagined that this was a taster of things to come. The first in a series of films that would culminate in live action. She lay there staring at the bl
ue meditative blank. It was as though a bit of sky had got into a dungeon. Betty imagined treating the space as a swimming pool, and diving into a blue membrane that parted fluently round her body.

Images jumped out at her again. This time the camera followed Nicole from behind as she walked the length of one of the
château's corridors. She was dressed in a seam-splitting emerald sequined mini-skirt. The thin indigo seams of her silk stockings pronounced the curve of her legs. She was walking with deliberate provocation in the direction of a recessed window guarded by a stone lion. And without warning, the two oriental girls who Betty had seen at dinner appeared, one in front and one to the rear of Nicole. They too were dressed in costumes that hinted at fetishistic ritual. Their manner was less challenging than oneiric. They looked like dream figures jumped out of Nicole's head.

Nicole froze. Her hands dropped to her hips, and her bottom continued to rotate in full circles despite her immobility. The orienta
l girl positioned behind Nicole began walking slowly towards her affecting the same stylised manner of walk. She looked like she had been stitched into royal blue silk, her red heels matching her scarlet wig. And simultaneously, the girl who had materialised by the recessed window began to move in from the opposite direction, her movements exactly synchronising with her partner's. They appeared to be moonwalking, their progress indefinitely delayed. There were rooms to left and right of the corridor, but Nicole made no attempt to consider the options of escape. Rather she seemed excited by the prospect of danger. The two women closed in on her, all three of them dressed as though they were models in a Herb Ritts shoot. Betty found herself triggering with anticipation. The oriental woman behind Nicole, at the risk of splitting her seamless dress, knelt down and brought her head to the height of Nicole's bottom, and with unexpected ferocity slashed open the zip on her emerald skirt. The upper part of Nicole's body looked like a flower escaped from its sheath. The skirt hung open in a V, and the two hands busy caressing her buttocks began slowly to manipulate the sequined fabric, looking to have it give, but finding an extreme flexibility in its tightness. The erotic thrill was in the difficulty of stripping Nicole. Meanwhile the other woman was kneeling in front of Nicole, and her hands slipping around the waist attempted to assist her partner in taking off the moulded skirt. Nicole was growing visibly more excited by the delay. She wanted to be free and unrestrained, but instead was confined to this glittering second skin. The constricted skirt would only give fraction by fraction, and Nicole made no attempt to assist her captors. But by degrees the crack of her naked bottom appeared. She was wearing nothing but a black silk suspender belt under the skirt. The combined efforts of the two women succeeded in finally forcing the skirt to the back of Nicole's thighs, and from there to her shoes. The green scales sparkled like a tropical fish on the stone floor. The three women, with Nicole in the centre, walked hand in hand down the corridor towards the stone lion. Betty thought the place resembled a chapel. The tenebrous atmospherics were gothic. When they reached the lion, Nicole was transformed into an assertive disciplinarian. The creature held a riding crop in its stone jaws. The two women were made to strip, and bent over the lion's body. Nicole began flicking the whip over their round bottoms. The decorations made by her work were like painting. Red stripes began to appear alternately on their buttocks; a series of horizontal cuts that followed the curve of the flesh. Nicole appeared excited by the correction she was administering. She would stand back admiringly, her left hand straying across her own bottom as though empathising with the severity of her discipline. Neither of the girls was bound, and neither made any attempt to elude their voluntary punishment. Rather, both of them appeared to be ascending the scale towards orgasm. Their breathing grew heavier, there was a spasmic thrust from the pelvis which commented on pleasure. And as climax was anticipated, so Nicole increased the ferocity of the whipping. A throaty howl, pitched to a note of ultimate pleasure was wrung out of the throat of first one girl, and then the other. And pleasure attained, they crumpled, subsided to their knees, backs still facing the camera. Nicole stood over them, the perfect locket-shaped proportions of her bottom accented by her green spike heels. She returned the whip to the lion's jaws, knelt down, and began kissing the buttocks she had ravaged.

At this point, the heavy reverberation of a door being open
and shut announced Leanda's entry into the film. She too was seen from behind. She was carrying a large black wooden heart in her arms. She was dressed in nothing but minimal see-through blue panties. She walked on high matching heels. The corridor was now strewn with big yellow chrysanthemums. Leanda was seen walking through that yellow ruckus. She held the black heart out in front of her, and there were diamante sprays in her hair. She walked towards the recessed window, a leopard padding behind her, the big cat evidently trained to obey her instructions.

Betty froze. Her
heart turned over at the prospect of a leopard inhabiting the château's corridors, and perhaps being admitted to the dungeon. The rehearsed elegance of the film surrogatized the pointers towards implicit danger.

Betty was fixated as the leopard switched sides. It went over to Leanda's left as though informed by some subliminal message. Leanda's journey from one end of the corridor to the other seemed to occupy a lifetime. It was a passage through the underworld. Betty watched as the leopard waited obediently for Leanda's instructions. Leanda stood off at a short distance from Nicole, whose tongue had shifted to one of the woman's toes. With her bottom resting on her heels, the sensitive underside to her feet had become charged as erogenous zones. Nicole was finding those places where the nerve impulses came alive. She did this by following the other woman's finger, for she outlined on her right foot the map that should be pursued by Nicole's tongue. Leanda stood there imperiously surveying the kneeling triptych. The leopard remained sitting upright at her side. At a sudden command from Leanda, the big cat stepped forward and ran its tongue the length of Nicole's spine. The latter evinced no disquiet at the proceedings and continued to excite the oriental girl through pressure on her foot. At another command from Leanda, the big eat altered its strategy, and began caressing Nicole's bottom with its tongue. The film cut at this image, and Betty was left to reflect on the surreal juxtaposition of Nicole receiving oral stimulus from a leopard.

The screen returned to a blue rectangle. Silence packed the leather dungeon. Betty kept killing the impulse to panic. The atmospherics worked into her until she felt her mind had interiorised the place in which she was captive. She was trapped in a cell within a cell. She hallucinated orgiastic excesses. There were penises in every orifice; her lips, her ears, her bottom.

She was lying on a red velvet cloth thrown over a grave sunk into the flagstones. Her masochistic convulsions were too much for her perpetrators. She objected to nothing. Debasement couldn't touch her. She defused sexual frenzy by her inability to be shocked. And in between fantasies, she was preparing herself for her captors. She knew a door would open at some stage, and the staccato tap of spike heels articulate a direct line towards her. Would she be blindfolded and handcuffed, her neck placed in a collar? Her mind
backtracked to events in the past when she had been exploited. It happened rarely, as Betty's job was about attaining the upper hand, and when it did, the resulting imbalance had her reassess her psychology. She had never quite locked the door on the man who lived in a rented room in her psyche. He was recalled in the it of her sexual pleasure. Her universe was still phallocentric, although in every other aspect of her life, she chose to live as a woman. On the occasions when she was exploited, the man appeared. He came out of a green painted door, and stood there a long time blinking into a light to which he had grown unaccustomed. He seemed to want to remind her that he too had a part to play in her nervous impulses. He seemed to be saying, 'Don't lock me in here for ever. The door is open even if the windows are boarded up, and besides, I need to speak. I'm left too solitary. All I have is a place in your unconscious.'