Faith - Lesley Pearse [134]
She exhaled, then slid the banknote up her nostril and sniffed up one line. It stung her nose and made her eyes run, but she resisted the desire to sneeze and quickly did the same again in the other nostril.
‘Good girl,’ Julie said. ‘Now sniff it right back, it makes the back of your throat feel a bit weird, but that soon passes.’
It wasn’t just her throat which felt weird, everything did. She could see herself in the mirror on the wall, a person she barely recognized as Laura Brannigan, dressed in a black basque, fishnet stockings and high-heeled boots. Katy had put on her makeup for her, her eyes were dark and smoky, her lips very red, and with her dark brown ‘Afro’ hair, she was transformed into the kind of woman she’d only ever glimpsed before in her sexual fantasies.
‘Okay now?’ Julie asked.
Laura nodded, and was surprised to find she was. If she could sit here with these other girls, her breasts almost out of the basque, and nothing covering her vital parts, and not feel embarrassed, then she could do the rest.
Her debut was to be with Katy, who was wearing something which was meant to resemble a toga. It was white, and clasped on one brown shoulder with a brooch, but it was so flimsy and short that her black pubic hair was visible, as were her dark brown nipples which stood up like thimbles because she was cold.
Julie picked up an aerosol. ‘Close your eyes,’ she ordered and quickly sprayed something over Laura’s face, neck, shoulders, breasts and her belly and thighs. ‘It glistens like sweat,’ she said by way of an explanation. ‘So you look hot and sexy!’
‘You do look sexy,’ Katy said appraisingly. ‘Great tits and arse!’
Don called them then and Laura felt like a gladiator entering the ring.
The room they were to use was rigged out like a torture chamber, only all the chains and handcuffs hanging up were black plastic. Even before Don began instructing them about what he wanted, Laura could see it for herself. Katy was the victim, and she the abuser. The first few shots were easy enough to do – Katy was to cower away from her, while Laura looked menacing with the whip in her hand. The coke was working and she felt excited and uninhibited. At one point, unasked, she even put one foot up on the bench where Katy was sprawled, a display of dominance and giving the camera a first-class view of her pubic area.
‘Well done, Laura,’ Don muttered in the darkness beyond the lights. ‘You’ve got it!’
She guessed as they moved on to other poses that Don had settled on this setting for her first time because it didn’t involve her having to touch Katy intimately. Katy was her slave, there to pleasure her. This idea aroused Laura a little, just as her costume had, and she found she was acting it out almost unconsciously, to the point when Don directed Katy to kneel before her open legs and simulate licking at her vagina, she looked down at her very red, pointed tongue and for a second or two wished it was for real.
‘That’s it, girls,’ Don called out, breaking the mood. ‘Very good, both of you. Laura, you are a natural.’
Julie and Anne blew her kisses as they went out for their shoot. Julie was dressed as a nurse, in a ridiculously short striped uniform and black stockings. Anne was presumably the patient in a skimpy dress and very high heels.
‘Wasn’t so bad, was it?’ Katy said as they got dressed in their own clothes. ‘Don was right, you are a natural. I got the idea you even enjoyed it.’
∗
Laura got up from the bed and paced up and down her cell like a caged animal. Remembering that first shoot was bad enough, but she certainly didn’t want to recall all the far worse ones that came afterwards. Where did all her modesty and dignity go? Why was money so important to her?
11
As Laura looked back at the second half of 1975, and ’76 and ’77, she found much of it was blank to her. That, she supposed, was because she spent so much of it out of her head on coke, speed or alcohol. There weren’t that