Stanley took off his T-shirt, lifted one of the pillows on the mattress, and pulled out a rubber bat. Then he knelt down on the bed and gave it to Derdâ. She took the bat, and Stanley lowered his eyes. Then he unzipped his pants and brought them to his knees. He braced himself against the mattress and looked up at Derdâ like a dog. Derdâ could see a hard piece of flesh jutting out from his midsection, and she noticed bruises around his swollen spine. Caressing the protrusion between his legs as he balanced on his knees, Stanley looked up at Derdâ and begged her with his eyes. He was waiting for the first blow. In a sudden movement, she slammed the bat down on his back.
Her eyes went dark with terror and Derdâ ran out of the room.
But three hours later she was back, beating Stanley so much that the paint on the bat began to peel off.
Stick was a pub on a corner deep in the backstreets of Camden Town, a neighborhood fueled by the underground scene of madmen and degenerates. Stanley stood behind the bar absently wiping a beer mug with a towel as filthy and pathetic as a floor mat as he talked to Mitch, who sat on a stool at the bar. Mitch was American. He had come to London because where he was from most people thought S&M was a brand of soda. He’d found Severin in the personals of Torture magazine and he quickly made himself her slave. But it didn’t work out. She woke up one morning and told him she was a lesbian. Set free from his bondage with her, Mitch lost his grip on reality and sank into a dark void. He was listening to Stanley’s story, wiping beer off his chin with the back of his hand and adjusting the monocle over his left eye. It was attached to an earring in his left ear by a thin chain.
“But you should see her, man, she’s beautiful! It’s hard to explain, I don’t know. You know these Arab women—totally in black. You can only see their eyes. She’s one of them, probably Turkish. I mean, there are lots of them in the building, the custodian told me. He’s a Turk, too, I think. Whatever, she has a husband or a brother … some guy with a beard. They live in the flat across from mine. I’d seen the girl a couple of times before, but of course we’d never spoke. But yesterday she comes and knocks on my door.”
“How old you think she is?” Mitch asked.
“How should I know? But she must be pretty young. At least she seems young.”
Hearing this much was enough to turn Mitch on. But he wasn’t sure if he should start stroking himself through the hole in his pocket—Stanley might get annoyed if he realized he was doing it. He stopped himself and asked him for another beer.
Stanley took his dirty glass and refilled it with beer and put it down in front of Mitch. It was ten o’clock in the morning and Mitch was the only customer in Stick. They kept talking.
“What was I saying? Yeah, she just came over and knocked on the door. She had these pictures. I took them and looked them over. She’d obviously drawn them herself.”
Mitch was already a little drunk. Excited, he said, “Didn’t you ask her in?”
“Patience,” Stanley said. “Listen, she’d drawn all this stuff on paper she’d ripped out of a notebook—a man hitting a woman, and something even stranger, there was a heart, painted in red, but guess what—I think it was real blood.”
“Fuck,” Mitch moaned. He thought of Severin. She always got sick when she saw blood. “Fuck,” he said again.
Stanley laughed and went on.
“I’m serious. Whatever, so I wait until evening to make sure the guy with the beard wasn’t around. I kept checking the scene through my peephole. The man never turns up. So I go and knock on the door. She opens it and I look into the apartment and it seems like she’s there alone.”
“Did she say anything? I mean, didn’t you talk to each other?” asked Mitch.
“No, no, she doesn’t know any English. Anyway, so I took her over to my place. You won’t believe it, Mitch, it was like a dream! An incredible dream!”
“Did you see her face?”
“Are you crazy? What’s the fun if I see her face? I didn’t see her face at all. Not even her hands. She was wearing black gloves.”
“Yeah, I know,” Mitch said. “They go to the Tesco on my street. Five women all dressed in black. They walk up and down the aisles like ghosts. I was behind one of them at the cash register once. She was wearing those long black gloves …”
Mitch went quiet. He tried to imagine all the Muslim women in the world with every part of their bodies, even their faces, covered. Then he said, “If you ask me, they’re probably the sexiest women in the whole world.”
“Who?”
“Muslim women. See, they must be just too sexy, and that’s why they cover themselves like that. The message they’re giving us is, if we uncovered ourselves you guys would lose control. You get it? They’re saying to men, look, if we took off these clothes, you’d lose your minds! Yeah, that’s it … I’ve never thought of it like that before … but that’s just how it is! Otherwise, why would a woman cover herself like that, unless she was the hottest woman in the world?
