The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

it, the onset of lust. Like when they were in his office, clandestine adulterers and she knew he was about to pull his underwear down and release his thick, dark, tasty cock. She opens her eyes to chase away the dream of the past and for the first time sees, albeit in a myopic blur, the eyes of some of the men in the audience. Hungry. Malevolent. Get on with it, they say. Katherine slips her fingers under the elastic of the bikini bottom. Pulls the garment an inch away from the flesh of her stomach. Tease them a bit, she thinks. A cavalcade of pianos attack the chorus and she swiftly pulls the knickers down. She now stands fully nude, her hips and shoulders still adhering to the syncopated whirlpool of the big band sound. Isn’t the song over yet? she doesn’t feel sexy at all. She feels very much alone.

She has never stood nude before in front of more than a single man; never even skinny-dipped or gone to a nude beach. How many are there in the audience? She peers sideways into the stage wings. The other girls are no longer watching. But Bloom is, the damn cigar still hanging from his lips. She can’t read the expression on his face from where she stands. She twirls around, remembers the wooden pole over there on the far side of the stage. Waltzes toward it. Shove. Bump. Thrust. Grind. Her body feels wet, the sweat must be pouring down her back, there’s no air, the spotlights are so fucking hot, Jesus, the sweat must be sliding down between the crack of her arse. She reaches the pole and grabs it; her hands are moist as she circles the pole and sketches a few new improvised dance moves like a medieval virgin courting a maypole. The apparatus is in fact metallic. She grinds against it. The hard, round circumference mashes against her pubes, she places her breasts against it and it fills her valley. The song never ends. She throws her head back, the delicate orbs of her breasts stand free, firm, shiny under the film of sweat, she bends at the waist and blushes instantly as she senses her vagina gape open as she does this. But the audience can’t see, she’s too far from the front rows. She stands again. Dance. Dance until the end of time, Kate. She wriggles her backside, keeps on massaging her breasts, if only to keep her hands busy, the movement is quite mechanical as if she were spreading soap or foam over her chest. Yes, yes, he did do that when they had shared their first bath tub. The song ends. One more to go. A familiar riff splits the brief silence. The Rolling Stones. Satisfaction. Much too fast, what is she going to do now? For encores? She has to continue, do more. Needs the tips. Show them more. She moves back to the edge of the stage, dances with exaggerated languor as she mentally rakes up the good times, the bad times, the wedding in the chapel of their old college in Cambridge. Her left hand moves from breast to navel, and she pushes it deep with a corkscrew motion into the narrow pit of her belly button. A guy in the audience whoops and hollers. The other hand also abandons the tender nipple it had been tending and hovers over her sex. She swivels her hips like a belly dancer. The finger parts the hair, the darker curls, tip-toes like a scalpel across the now moist aperture. The other hand joins it soon and holds the lips open. She’s so wet, it must be dripping onto the stage floor. She squats on her haunches and deliberately inserts one finger deep inside her cunt, as the guys in the front row open their eyes wider than they ever thought they could. She can no longer hear the music. Keith Richards must still be playing. She moves the finger deep inside, impales herself on it while a finger from her other hand squeezes her protruding clitoris. A hand emerges from the audience, holding a green bill. Closer, girl, closer. She inches her cunt forward until she’s in a precarious equilibrium on the very edge of the stage. The man, whose face remains in the shadows, slides the money into her gaping cunt. She inches her way back. Stands up, the bank note sticking out from her innards. Dances. Bumps. Grinds. Thrusts. The audience whistles, applauds loudly. The music has now ended. Lisa, the black girl who’d sent her here, is waiting over there by the side of the stage to do her turn. Katherine bows to the invisible men in the darkness. Her audience. She pulls the note out from her vagina, half of it is soaking wet with her juices. She waves it. The men shout all sorts of things at her. She sticks two fingers back inside, twists them round to further loud yelps and brings them to her mouth where she licks them clean. Prisoners of lust, he had once described their fatal liaison. The stage lights dim and she can make out more of the meagre audience. There’s only a dozen of them, but the noise they’re making is enough to fill a soccer stadium. She recalls Brighton and Adam Smith, turns round and gets down on all fours and, sobbing gently, thrusting her rump out toward the anonymous men, she cruelly pushes her still lubricated finger into her arsehole. She’s about to pull it out and show them how she can also lick shit like the best of sinners when Bloom and two of the other burlesque dancers hurriedly pull her offstage to the loud protest of the screaming guys.

“Are you crazy?” Bloom screeches at her. “You fucking slut, you want to get us closed down?”

The girls all look at her as if she were insane.

“Goddam limey. She’s deranged, a freak, you must be sick to get your rocks off this way.”

“Get her outta here. I don’t want to see this woman again. She’s downright crazy. Out.”

They bundle her into her day clothes.

Back on Times Square, a thin rain falling, likely to mess up her perm, Katherine unclenches her fist and extracts the bank note. It’s a hundred.

Certainly worth a few more miles on the clock, on the road to nowhere.

In Miami, she discovered some men had long, thin cocks and allover tans.

On alternate days, Katherine cruised the clubs and discos in the art deco district of Miami Beach, window shopping like any other tourist, quenching the ambient heat with a steady diet of cold sodas and ice-creams, while on others she worked a few continuous shifts in a shady strip joint – here, they no longer called them burlesques – all the way up the less fashionable area in the Northern reaches of Collins Avenue, beyond the Adventura Mall, where the highway to the Everglades began. Now, she’d perfected her act. Kept it simple, cleanly sexy, beyond the temporary madness, the excesses of Times Square. She grew accustomed to shaking her gangly body, grinding her crotch with a grimace feigning ecstasy against the metal of the central pole, thrusting her white, square butt toward the punters, teasing the vociferous crowd, keeping her legs together, letting her hands do the roving, a mechanical spectacle tailored to the unsatisfactory pop songs she had thread together to punctuate her movements.

The nights were long and empty in her room at the beachside inn. The paint on the wall flaked in places creating ever-changing Rorschach tests in the humid penumbra. Six in the morning was always the worst time, and time and again she had to control herself and not pick up the pink telephone and call London. But which one? Which past man? And then always remembered the time difference. And anyway what would she say? Sorry? I’m really sorry, but I don’t want to come back. She read a lot. At Bookstar they deep discounted and the other day, even though she couldn’t really afford a hardcover – she’s not getting very good tips – she had indulged and bought the new Anne Tyler novel, which she read in small doses, to stretch the pleasure.

Sunday is her day off and like a good working girl she goes to the beach, with a basket of fruit and a cold box full of drink cans. She’s got this new rather daring outfit, with a thong cutting deep into her crotch, separating the two globes of her backside like a piece of meat. But she always keeps her top on. Her husband would approve. Her skin burns easily, so she has to shield carefully under a parasol. The sand gets everywhere, as she ritually turns onto her stomach, then her back and again her stomach, and tried to concentrate on her reading. She knows that later she would have to use the shower nozzle against her cavities to excavate the millions of small grains stuck to her perspiring skin, nestled between her bum cheeks and even inside her vagina.

This rugged-looking man walked by her parasol, briefly obscuring the sun. Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw his feet in the sand just a few inches away from her town.

“Guapa muchacha,” he said with a strong Hispanic accent.

Katherine looked up.

“Hi,” she said.

“You’re not from here,” he remarked.

“No, I’m not.”

He sat himself down next to her; he wore a silk shirt with exotic rainbow patterns and baggy trousers cinched at the waist.

“Let me have a guess,” he smiled.

Katherine smiled back.

“I know, you’re Australian. I saw that movie, you know.”

She burst out laughing, her hand flying up, lost her page as the book fell into the sand and closed.

“You look like Nicole Kidman, the chick who married Tom Cruise.”

“So I’m told. It’s all the curls, you see. But no, I’m not from down under. I’m English, you see,” she explained.

“No kidding,” the man said. “I’d never have guessed. You look more Swedish, or Dutch, you know.”

“Actually Irish a generation or two back,” she said.