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Chapter 1 Kings and Queens above the Night

Kings and queens above the night

Bones. Bones, thousands of bones that people shrunk to, over the centuries. Bones so old that they told a different history from the official one taught in schools. Bones softened into dust and bones hardened into stone. Bones sealed into hundreds of urns.

I saw them, huge deep ochre and dark yellow bulging urns covering the bones, from high up in the new hotel where I stood, naked, my body pressed into the window.

My Nai pushed me into the glass as if he wanted to force me through and I would fall and be spewed into the swimming pool. Falling, I would spread out my mantle of ash and rain onto the city and join the ancient kings. My body was pale against the dark sky, soft urn for my living bones. I felt his body against mine, skin warmed in the sun, radiating back into the night like the strong red stone.

Urns sat in gardens, in streets, next to kitchens and bedrooms. Urns like towers, urns inside towers, urns that were towers.

I felt the full force of his body, his thin hard legs digging into my softer thighs, and I could hardly breathe, he gave me no space for my lungs to expand, pushed in, in, in, against the glass, I remembered I had read somewhere that glass was really a liquid, so maybe I could be pushed through, in an eternity, or at least in as long as it took for the bones of a king to fall out of changed history.

When we turned back into the room he lingered and stroked the outer skin of the thick glass.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Breast prints.’

There they were: two oily lilies.

He took them up in the swirls of his fingertips and ate the traces.

The biggest sexual organ is the internet

At first it frightened me, I knew the names and the sites that I wanted to look at but I didn’t.

And if they came up, by mistake, or by misdirection, as such sites do, even for those who really don’t want to find them, I tried not to see them but I did see them. Oh yes.

I felt the keys under my fingers, soft fingers whose touch conveys so much information. Writing on the keyboard is so sensual. I can write with both my hands, my arms, my shoulders, my whole body.

I used to play the piano, I could slide into the keys and make them respond but my piano playing was never on the same level as my playing of the internet.

I remember the first time I had access to the web at home. It was a glorious morning.

Until then I had to go to the internet café and there I wrote some fervent letters to my lovers, but of course I was well protected from the sites that drew me magically and darkly (except in California where you could access alternative lifestyle sites from the public library).

Maybe it was a good thing that the internet at home came to me late in life because by the time I had the courage to go and look, and the means to follow it up, other women had entered those landscapes of my desire before me and had made them less hostile to us.

One dark and crisp December night, one of the twelve nights of Christmas in fact, I finally entered one of the dating sites. It was just as well it was on the internet and not in real life because I was so scared that I would never ever have made it past the threshold of a club where others could have seen me.

But I had my familiar keys, and my muscle memory, and so I entered at my own pace. I dawdled a long time in the lobby, but then, I looked. I looked at some profiles, and I read what the men there were saying, what they had typed into their own keyboards, stroking them with the unique whirls of their own fingertips.

What touched me and surprised me most was that here, they showed themselves, in a way in which many men never did on the outside, not even in the most intimate encounters.

Strangely enough I found a great lover within the first few days. My kind of lover. I think of him as my gateway to the life that led me here, here in the tower above the city of kings, here to the core of my dream, and its long, slow, painful and jubilant transformation into my life.

Deeper into the night

So we are here. Really here for the second time. It’s more than a one off. He really wants to be with me another time.

The dark city, rich red bricks ripped open, walls gaping with fragmented brick dancers, bulging with the dead so that the towers crumbled, slipped into night. Urns lit up as the city was darkened down.

I wasn’t so sure yesterday, when I rang his number and heard his uncertain reply to my nervous intimacies. I was lying on my hotel bed, a delicious soreness wrapped around my ass and hips. I didn’t know the place where I was but I had been caught with a hook of hope. A tender red mark ran around my wrist, like an exotic bracelet.

With great fear of heartbreak I made my fingers press into the very foreign phone. And speak, immediately speak so that I couldn’t hear him say nothing.

But he did, anyway.

I was hanging at the end of the rope, and then he caught me again.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘I am here,’ I said. ‘I am Senta?’

Senta in veils

I am Senta. This is not the name I was given, it is the name I chose when I chose this life.

I chose to live this life, but I did not choose the dream underneath. The dream has been with me since before I can remember. It has brought me here, and here is the beginning of this story.

This story is a journey without a map. There are no official signposts, no patterns to follow.

On the contrary, it is a path that almost everyone I knew would have warned me against, or tried to keep me away from, a dangerous deviation from the common path. If they had known I was taking it.

They didn’t know, because I spent most of my life guarding my dream in the secrecy of my mind. I lived a life behind a shimmering veil of silence.

I had good reason for such secrecy. But I had also good reason for coming out of the shadows: I was driven by my dream.

Books have been written about people like me. Most of them were written by those who warn against and disapprove and condemn.

Some of them were written by people like me, a few even by women like me. But they don’t tell my story.

I am Senta. I believe there are many like me, but as yet there are no books that tell our tale, and there is no big narrative to celebrate the mystery of our lives.

So there was no map, and I didn’t know where to go. The only thing I knew was that I shouldn’t be going there at all.

I found a way. This is the map I created, and wrote down for myself.

It’s not a straightforward path, and it may not lead where you think or even hope it will lead. Coming out of the shadows and following the dream does not lead to automatic happiness. Is it worth it even if conventional (or even unconventional) happiness is not possible? Or not possible for me?

I don’t know.

It’s not the kind of story where you know.

Midnight high over the city of urns

‘I want to fuck your breasts, your beautiful –’ he stopped as soon as he heard himself, as if he mustn’t declare his passion for me. Not even at a moment like this, when he was doing things no one should see and no one did see except me (Ah! But maybe that was the reason?) and although he wasn’t holding himself back in other ways. He grabbed my breasts hard and forced his penis in between them. He pushed my own hands away. He drove himself in slow and hard, pressed my breasts so close together that only sweat could run between them. I felt him move inside the closeness. My breasts, compressed from all sides, hardened up under his grip. They hurt where his fingers dug deep. I imagined round red grooves all around the breasts like wounded pearls.

His fingers hurt more than his penis. I wished it was the other way round. I wanted to concentrate all my sensations there but the fingers drilled harder for pearls. He looked down at me and laughed and started to move the hard breasts up and down, first together, then in a kind of asymmetric rhythm. He pushed my breast up, up against my collarbone with all his strength. I have never read about this in any books but the pressure of my breast against my heart made me shout with lust and my thighs jumped up to be met. He laughed again, very wild. He was still fucking my breasts, using them to stroke and cushion and create a complex pressure system for the thousands of pleasure points on his penis. He used my breasts and he wouldn’t do anything about my thighs. Every time he pushed up, my clitoris started to pulse. I could hardly bear the distance. I wished and wished and I began to feel the soft white liquid of my desire at the entrance of my vagina. I started to cry with longing and he laughed again. I tried to lift my hips and brush them up against his legs.

‘Stop that.’ He took one hand off my breast and slapped me hard in the face.

‘I am sorry, my Nai.’ My hips came down, but I could hardly keep them from rising again. He gripped my breasts even harder. I shouted. He laughed. I heard a deep moan of frustration, lust and pain rush out of my mouth, all mixed together, nothing held back, yielding to my body, my body yielding to his. Wild laughter, wilder screams. There is no such thing as wave and rider. There are so many waves, and we are both riding them together and each riding different ones. My clitoris was so wired, I would have given anything for a touch. Anything but the greater lust of obedience. He saw that in my eyes, I saw it in his. He slapped me again.

‘You need that,’ he said, his voice shaking.

I cried. This time I cried, I didn’t stop it. Big blurry tears.

‘Please please please.’

‘Oh no.’

But then he pushed his full weight down on me, I could feel his hot ass on my stomach, the blood must be roaring through his skin to produce such industrial temperatures. His weight came down on my soft vulnerable body. How I love to feel his weight on top of me. He doesn’t release me, he pushes down into me, full skin on skin contact, harder and heavier, a counterweight to the slow turning of the earth.

I wish he would drive me down into the earth, deep, deep, down into the earth, his bones would seal me in, until my body turned to dust, until I was the earth, bound by the weight of the atmosphere, packed in by gravity.

I have wanted that for such a long time.

Outside in the night, the ancient kings held their breaths, waiting in the shadows of their urns for another, better life.

Slow red dust drifted over the gardens and murderous motorways.

Up in the glass-walled tower, I went to the bathroom to change into my little latex dress that I had bought one afternoon in Brighton, not the first time I ever considered such a dress, but the first time I actually took it off the rack and took it into the changing room to try. I could hardly open the zip I was trembling so much. I checked and checked that the curtain was fully closed, which was not easy in a small boutique called ‘Black Tantra’ where the friendly assistants would pop in with their twice-pierced tongues.

It was very difficult to put on. I had to pull it up over my breasts and closing the zip at the back contorted me past my yoga limits. Good thing it was stuck on my hips. But the amazing thing was that I was wearing it, here, right now, and I was looking at myself in the mirror and I saw a woman in a high-collared latex dress, shiny black following her curves, and a lacy veil from her breasts to her hips. I would have to wear this without a bra!

The woman in the mirror was not me. I knew that with absolute certainty. It wasn’t a metaphor.

I was not that woman. Maybe it was a woman from my future, although at that point I couldn’t believe it. More like a visitor from another planet.

But even then I liked her.

I showed myself to him, with my metal-heeled shoes and my dress. I walked in and I stood and he looked at me. I felt beautiful. I blazed like quicksilver in the night.

‘Hmm,’ he said. He sat and he looked. My body filled up with brilliance. I could have stood there forever. I wanted to be looked at, like this, with this desire, with this nascent lust, I wanted to be this stimulating, satisfying shape forever.

Many times, in the past, before I began this particular journey, I was looked at like that by a man and in time I looked back, with the same, with at least the same desire. Many times, as I was blossoming under the gaze of a man, I was then brutally rejected. Told that he didn’t really look at me like that. Told that he had looked at me but that now he had changed his mind. Told that he would never have looked at me if he had known what I was really like. And certainly would look at me very, very differently now that he had discovered my outcast sexuality.

‘But but but,’ was all I could stammer, in my mind, if I was lucky, out loud, to be shouted at, called names, threatened with pathologies.

For me, a man’s desire is not a given. Not something I can operate from, take for granted, choose from, even play with.

So in this moment I was standing there, a shape in my Nai’s gaze, I was very aware of how precious it was. He loaded me up with all the ancient attributes of being female.

My body creates desire. My Nai looked at the place where my legs met the edge of my very short dress. He saw my breasts, half tight secret shapes, half uncovered under the lacy bondage. My nipples could feel it, the progression from smooth to rough, soft pearly sweat under rubber skin to where the pattern of the lace imprints itself into the delicate substance of my breast.

All breasts, all legs, all hidden vulva. All body, woman’s body. All surface, all curves, all shapes. Shape of desire in man’s eye. Desire that will make him act, make me act.

Shape to create sex and create life.

I look at him and I see all that. He looks at me and he sees me and sees more than me. He sees the shape I am and the shape I will be. I take all the power that is in his gaze and let it load me up. It fills every pore and atom of my body. It makes the electrons race. They dance and jump and bump into each other. They’re celebrating life with great abandon.

There is this theory that the shapes your body assumes in yoga positions are shapes of ancient rituals when men and women would slide into the spirits of animals by assuming their forms. The cobra, the lion, the swan. Some people go even further and say that those shapes are already there, waiting for us in the form of hidden energy. They wait, and spring into life when we enter them. Then, these people say, we don’t just assume the shapes of the cobra, the lion, the swan. We become them.

Maybe the shape of the woman is one such shape. The shape of the woman that I feel now, painted inside the walls of a cave, on the shell of a turtle. My Nai’s gaze is the catalyst that helps me to find it.

The way I look back at him, with my eyes, with my mind, with my body, transforms him too. He looks, he gets excited by my shape. He is changed, his body is changed, the composition of the chemicals in his brain is changed, the outward shape of his body is changing. This is how he shows his adoration, his devotion. It’s a kind of tribal dance. It’s the Sunday school of the DNA.

Personally I think, when I can still think, before I melt away, that the positions we assume in sex are maybe just like the yoga positions. They are there, waiting for us, waiting for us to slip into them and then they take us over.

Power exchange

I am looking at him.

No, he is looking at me. And I am taking it in, the way he looks at me.

There is promise and thrill in this exchange. And a lot of love and trust. I am strong, I am free, I am wild. Just as he, in everything.

And I am here by my own choice.

I take in his energy. I let it go down into my very core.

He can see exactly what is happening. I hold the moment. I am in control. He humbly waits for my decision.

I choose to surrender.

Slowly, the balance of power between us shifts.

I give myself to him. He takes my power from me.

This is a complex, sophisticated process.

And it is wonderfully erotic and deeply fulfilling and dizzyingly wild. And it can happen without a word, without touch. Breath by breath.

I submit. I submit to his domination.

That is what I want. That is what he wants.

I am his submissive. Maybe for a lifetime, maybe just for now.

The tension between us is generating its own charge.

Submission to him arouses me. This is my true sexuality. Not my social role, not at all, but my sexuality.

Like many sexual orientations, it needs the right match to thrive.

Looking at each other, we have found it.

I am naked.

He is fully dressed.

He reaches out towards me.

He could do so many things to me, right now.

My submission calls for them. My vagina is opening her soft red mouth.

I want to yield and I want him to meet my softness with ruthless force.

I long to be subjected. In my way.

He touches my hair. Follows the long strands down over my shoulder and to the tip of my breasts. I am still.

My hands are bound behind my back.

Safely, in soft wide leather cuffs.

Securely, I cannot undo them, not that I want to or have ever tried, and I am powerless before my lover.

My dominant, my Dom.

He touches me, any way he wants.

I hold still. He gives, I receive. And I am in his power.

I don’t know what he is going to do next. And he doesn’t say.

That is another kind of power.

He tells me to go down on my knees.

My vagina gives a satisfied little tug.

My mind plays with the infinities of erotic subjugation.

I sigh.

I kneel on the floor, naked. He stands over me, still fully dressed.

‘Look at me,’ he says and slaps me softly in the face. A very light touch, almost a caress but not quite. I understand it perfectly. I should have looked at him without being told. This is part of his discipline. The understanding between us is part of the power exchange. We are very tuned into each other.

I look up at him.

My perspective has changed. I am much lower down now. This is my new and rightful place. At his feet.

I am getting dizzy. I am getting closer to the place of powerlessness, to the place of total yielding.

He slides his hand over my hair again but this time he grabs it, hard. All the nerve endings on my head start to scream. I have goose bumps all over my skin. He is making his domination physical.

I look into his eyes the whole time, although mine are filling with tears. He smiles. My subjection has been forced out into the open.

When he is satisfied, for now, he lets go of my hair and I kneel, hands bound behind my back, head dizzy in more than one way.

My master’s hands wander to his own body.

I am getting very moist. I think I know what is going to happen.

‘Watch,’ he says.

I do.

Slowly, very very slowly, my master is taking off his belt.

The sound as he undoes the clasp is humiliatingly, exhilaratingly familiar. I couldn’t stop looking if I tried.

He draws the belt out. Long, wide, well-worn leather. He slowly runs his hand along its length. I’m going to give up breathing.

He takes a step towards me until he stands so close that his crotch is pressed to my mouth.

I don’t know what he is going to do. Whatever it is, I will submit.

He is my master.

‘Down,’ he says quietly.

I understand. I obey.

I bend forward and lower my head until my face touches the floor, right next to his shoes. My bound hands sink into my back and come to rest on my shoulders.

Power has been exchanged.

He is the owner of my body and my soul.

He will do with me what he wants.

He may use his belt, on my naked, pale round ass, exposed and presented to him. He may turn round and take me from behind. He may play with the deep band of female arousal that goes from my ass to my clitoris, until I forget my name and even that I used to be a simple human.

Oh – what is this, exactly? Is there a name?

People call it BDSM. Yes it’s a Californian committee term.

I call it my sexuality.

My true sexuality, hidden under transparent veils.

The round-the-world ticket

I only ever wanted to stay in Bangkok for three nights.

I remember sitting in the travel agents in London, looking at the coloured bands spanning the map of the world, smooth and slightly rounded to fit the curvature of the planet. The bands were the journeys I could take. It was my choice. But there were certain conditions.

I’d found my way around California, New Zealand and Australia and now I was stuck.

‘You’re going to need another stop on your round-the-world ticket,’ said the travel agent. A fingernail traced the coloured band, swerving slightly as if with the vibrations of the flight, predicting turbulence.

I had heard of Bangkok. Of course I had heard of Bangkok. Enough that I didn’t want to go there.

You see I didn’t know it then.

On the other hand, it did seem to be well connected.

Outside, the snow was falling in thick fairytale flakes.

It mounted up on the pavement, it even covered the street, between cars, it was too abundant, the tyres couldn’t smash it down.

I thought of my shoes. I was going to be dancing in wet slush before I got home.

‘OK,’ I heard myself say, ‘let’s put in Bangkok.’

‘Yes, I think that’s a sensible choice,’ said the London travel agent. ‘It’s a good place to get to somewhere else.’

Sensible choice! Ha!

The snow flakes, big as my palm, pressed their spokes against the window. They didn’t look real but they were. All snowflakes are like that, it’s just that usually you can’t see it.

The back-up date

The smells. The smells were so different. So very strong, so individual, like the soup of seven spices. And the sound. So much sound. So much sound altogether, so many layers: the crickets that never, never stopped, even right in the middle of the city, the cars, the horns, the music. And the people. So many people.

I was overwhelmed. Just less than twelve hours ago I had been in the Australian desert looking at a sky with stars closer than humans. And all my life, right up to this point, I had always been a little chilly, somewhere deep in my bones. It was not good, but I was used to it.

When I got into Bangkok I felt the heat and my body expanded. Then I entered the jungle. The jungle of buildings. The jungle of smells and sounds.

My mind was flooded. My body was happy. This was her kind of town.

We had made contact on the internet.

I was by that time quite good at finding, selecting and meeting men. I had found them in London, San Francisco and Sydney.

I had no great hopes for Bangkok, but I made dates. Of course. I always made dates, and apart from him I had a few back-up dates.

Well, actually, my Nai was the back-up date.

That’s why we met so soon, just hours after I flew in, into the new continent. It was the only way I could fit him into my dating schedule.

So tired, the top of my neck was a glass fibre skull, I lay down on the strange hotel bed – run down and shabby like many before but filled with a different kind of air.

The smells were everywhere and I couldn’t decode them.

I could feel the moistness and remembered that the city swam on a vast underground river.

I took out my little golden book that had become quite plump from its journey and I looked at his phone number.

Part of me kept shouting: ‘I want to sleep! I want to sleep!’, another part was drifting off without speaking, and I kept waking, clutching the little book, staring at the number, looking at the small sturdy clock that was efficiently showing the passing of the new, Bangkok, time.

It’s always scary, hearing the voice for the first time. It is often so disappointing.

It confronts me with my dreams.

Today, swimming in the jungle with my eyes closed, it didn’t feel so sharp. How to judge anything? I was in a different world.

Still, when I heard him, I felt a little amused and I felt a little wary. Now I look back on it I smile how my impressions shifted – from the way he talked on the phone I thought he must be in his fifties. He spoke American with a softness of accent that seemed a little British and that reassured me. He was a man of many nations. He told me that he used to work for a newspaper, so I imagined an older journalist, maybe left over from the Vietnam War, maybe a correspondent who was no longer up to date and chose not to return to the Western life. Drinking gin tonics and relaxing into another rhythm. He talked to me with an old-fashioned American politeness, and he listened to me so that I felt less like a total stranger. Who had just flown in from another continent. Who he was meeting to discuss playing BDSM with.

But what did I know? I had only been here for a few hours.

I fought it but I did fall asleep again, just woke up in time to stagger up and put on my lucky red velvet t-shirt. And go out, into the smells and the sounds and meet him. In a place I would have to find without a map.

Crickets were waving a carpet of silver sound the night we first met.

The night we first met, boats and stars threw lanes of golden light on the river.

They did, they did.

Mosquitoes danced to their deaths.

Exotic rum circled our blood.

This is not the kind of observation that makes people take you seriously, and so maybe I shouldn’t say it, but it is true. It was that kind of night.

I walked through the evening crowd, pavements submerged under stalls selling more smells, and many colours, swimming through the reef of people who belonged here. I didn’t, but I did not feel out of place. I just floated along with them. I could see the bar at once, it was quite big, open air, very loud. The sun had already set, at 7 p.m. in the summer, and the mosquitoes were flirting with electricity.

I did see the bar but I didn’t see him. That is, I did see him but not the man who went with the voice of the afternoon. This was a young man’s bar.

But he saw me.

Maybe I described myself better to him than he did to me. Maybe I look more like my voice? Or maybe there just weren’t many white women of my age wearing dark red velvet tops moulded over DD breasts around. (In all my time in Bangkok I never saw more than four or six of them, including the two in my mirror.)

He called. He called my name. ‘Senta. Hi, Senta.’

I love it when I hear that name, and it means me.

‘Yes, I am here.’

‘Yes, I am Senta.’

Yes, I am Senta. You just created me. Well, I created myself. But you called me. Called my magic like a spirit.

Less than half a day in that strangest of cities and already I was Senta.

Someone had called me by my name.

I recognised the voice.

It must be him. His voice came out of a slender young man sitting by himself on a bench against the wall, a well-worn backpack by his side. He was wearing a loose white shirt, he was very pale, and he had deep, dark eyes. Later I was told by other women that he was a very attractive man, after the fashion of the day. I have to admit I didn’t see that. All I thought was: he talks so old and looks so young.

Out of shock I said ‘yes’, and there we sat, next to each other in the evening.

When I think about it, the most wonderful lovers I’ve met never made much of an impact on me with their looks.

At first I was just sitting there, looking at the young face, listening to the old voice. I decided to drink an orange juice.

He looked at me, his eyes blazing, and he drew me into easy conversation. I later discovered that he was very used to making conversation with first time strangers, even when he was a boy, and that for most of his adolescence he used to show his parents’ post-colonial friends around when they came to Bangkok. So he seemed quite fluent in this situation, making small talk, laughing with me, putting me at ease, welcoming and open, but not too smooth.

But I could also tell he wasn’t as used to dating as I was.

And that was how it would be: he was the one who lived here, who knew his way around, who had done many things I only dreamed of, and he was the one who was a little shy, and unused to things, and had never done many things that he himself was dreaming of.

He led and I followed, I led and he followed me. Not as easily, not as magically as on that first night, but always a little bit.

It was the magic of the power loop.

Looking at him, sitting in his white shirt against the wall, talking about something or other that was the custom in Bangkok, I felt suddenly very happy. This is how it was supposed to be, in other people’s books, mostly men’s, mostly fantasy, flying into a new continent and meet a lover by nightfall. And now it was happening to me.

I was by that time an expert at first dates, and I kept all the precautions. I listened for things that didn’t make sense, I tried to connect his talk about himself and his real life experience as far as I could tell, and I tuned into the feeling between us. I had developed a sensor for the kind of relationship I wanted. I asked him all the right questions, and he gave me all the proper information.