Searching For Sicko Man

I’m sitting, some months later, in a Sunday-night pub in South London. Sugar Man’s playing on the radio. Nobody’s here except for me and the barman, and he’s skulking in the back and only ducking out occasionally on fake errands to see if I’m still there.

Met a false friend

On a lonely dusty road

Lost my heart

When I found it

It had turned to dead black coal

I’m barely awake. Sober, but barely awake. I clutch my pint like a lifeline. My eyes are open in fits and starts.

The barman comes back and pretends to be rearranging the glasses and says,

“Long weekend?” at me.

Well, I could tell him. Probably the best friend that I have right now came to my house last night. In one of her fanciest outfits, as per my instructions. A slinky black dress, high heels. She looked quite astonishingly sexy.

After she’d arrived, I wound my hand into her hair and dragged her bodily up two flights of stairs. I tied her wrists in front of her so tightly that they cut into the skin. I stuffed a red plastic ball-gag into her mouth and I tossed her over a chair and bound her there and hitched up her pretty black dress and yanked down her tights and pants so that the bare arse was exposed.

‘We’re going to play a game,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to give you three strokes with an implement. On the third stroke, you’re going to yell out a number between one and ten, depending on how much it hurts you, and the one that hurts the most is the one we’re going to use. If you don’t manage to yell a number out, we’re going to repeat the exercise until you do. And obviously, since you’re going to be a little muffled - if I don’t hear what you’re saying, we’re going to repeat the exercise until I do.’

She whimpered - and then nodded.

‘As an example,’ I said. ‘Hand.’

I turned and gave her one, two, three hard slaps with the palm of my hand.

She squealed, ‘Five.’

‘Paddle,’ I said, in quick succession. ‘Spatula. Spoon. Crop.’

As the crop struck her, she shrieked,

“Ten. Ten.”

And I knew we had a winner.

‘Twenty strokes,’ I told her after dinner, pushing her down onto all fours across my bedroom carpet. ‘All you have to do is stand twenty strokes, with your hands and feet exactly where they are. But every time you squirm away, every time your hands and feet shift, we’re going to add another five. If you move more than five times, I’m going to truss you up in place and we’ll go all the way to fifty. Understood?”

She shuddered - but nodded.

With the third stroke of the crop, she began to buck back and forth, moaning in pain - and the bucking grew more violent as the numbers ticked on.

But she stood it. All the way to twenty, she stood the worst I could give her, and she didn’t fucking move. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or proud of her.

I took her in my arms. Her breathing was ragged; she was shivering and close to tears. She pressed her face into the crook of my chest and squeezed her body close into mine, for the comfort of it.

“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s OK. You did it.”

I brushed back her hair. Her eyes gazed up into mine. And I slipped my fingers down into her crotch to feel the wetness there for myself.

“Do you need a break,” I asked her, “or are you good to continue?”

She blinked - and then she nodded.

“Good,” I said. “We’re going to try for thirty.”

And she closed her eyes and shook her head, vigorously, no, no - but she did as she was told, all the same.

And what fucks me up is not that I was capable of doing this to her, not that it made me hard, not even that I’m so screwed in the head that I couldn’t even fuck her afterwards-

-what fucks me up is how fantastic I feel, how elated, even now.