Chapter 11

Reluctantly, I moved back to London, and tried to resume some kind of life. I became seriously depressed. Ed had gone for good, and now I had lost Tori and David too. I really didn't want to go back to my old groupie life, so, ironically, considering my deeply ambivalent feelings, it looked like Margaret was all I had left. The thought of that scared me deeply, so for a while, for as long as I could hold out, which was just a few weeks but felt like months, I avoided her.

Instead, and against my best intentions I had a series of dead-end one-night-stands with strangers I picked up at the Speakeasy and other clubs. I smoked a lot of dope, swallowed a lot of pills, sniffed too much coke and poppers, and when I got sick of the strangers, I masturbated in hopeless solitude. Despair bit me hard, and as a last resort I reverted to old hobbies. I took up running, swimming, exercising in a health club gym, pushing my body until the natural endorphins lifted my mood, which had worked at school and in early university days, before the counter-culture lured me from straight behaviour, but it was all just a small elastoplast on a gaping wound.

One day in October, Ben, a guitarist I had slept with a few times at Ed's parties and had become quite good friends with, came round for a chat. I hadn't seen him for a while. I was glad to have to company, so we did some drugs, talked about the parties, and had a laugh. I sucked his cock in gratitude, and for old times' sake. Afterwards he offered me a hit of morphine. A while later, he offered me another...

"Margaret ... I need you, please." My voice was wobbling all over the place, tears running down my face.

Somewhere deep inside, the thought of Margaret had made a small spark of my near extinct survival instinct flare, some inner vision of myself sliding into a new and even more lethal addiction shocked me enough to react.

"Tomorrow afternoon, 4.30pm." She said brusquely, and rang off before I could tell her that I needed to talk to her immediately more than I wanted her to use me tomorrow.

Ben had gone; I was more alone than ever, with the knowledge that morphine was just too wonderfully comforting, and I didn't think I'd be able to resist its lure for long. I'd thrown up after the first jack, but even that didn't matter. For a timeless flight of hours, I was happy, benign, calm and friendly. Nothing mattered. I felt content; I dreamed vivid poppy-dreams. With Ben's connections and the money ever ready at my disposal, it would be so very easy to get more, to insulate myself forever against real life and the future.

Against this, my only defence was a raw nihilistic need for sexual degradation. Not much of a contest. In a life stripped of love, and almost entirely of relationships, the balance of my mind was now teetering on the very edge of complete self-destruction. It got so bad, the call I'd made a call before Margaret, this one to auntie Susan, dialling her number for the first time in three years, hoping against hope that Sarah would pick up the phone first. I wasn't surprised when Susan answered with a withering blast of bile and slammed the phone down. The only thing she told me that wasn't obscene confirmed that Sarah had left home. So why wasn't she trying to find me? Or I her? I couldn't face that one at all. Perhaps I'd ask Margaret where Sarah was, if I dared, but I knew I wouldn't.

Once I had booked my visit, I phoned the University Arms, reserved my usual room, took a handful of Mogadon, and put myself to sleep for as long as possible.

Driving up the A10 the next morning, through familiar towns and villages, I cried as I thought of what my life had become. I had everything and nothing at all, the poor little rich girl to the perfect T. All I had left to cling to was, to put it bluntly, the questionable potential of compassion from high-class S&M prostitute. A sophisticated and un-tart-like whore, whom I paid for sex, paid to punish me for being alive. Who as far as could tell thought next to nothing of me, and treated me like a piece of meat when I was in her presence. Perhaps this would be the last time ... I sang the old Stones song to myself to keep the tears at bay. But the song said 'Last time maybe, I don't know, ' and I didn't. I didn't know anything worth knowing; I didn't know myself, or my own mind.

Thoughts of suicide were becoming more tempting than drug addiction. An overdose of deliciously numbing morphine, just one more, to finish it all for good. Leave the unwanted money to that new thing, Friends Of The Earth, or Oxfam ... after all, who would miss me?

I checked into the hotel, following my usual ritual, which was a tiny bit comforting. When I thought of the house in the woods, my pulse still quickened. Despite my increasing depression, the lure of sex with Margaret still drew me there with magnetic force. This time however, I needed her mercy as well as her cruelty. Whichever way she went, whether she fucked me to happiness or even deeper despair, for a few hours I would think of nothing else but her, I would just experience Margaret. I lay on the bed, looking up at the ceiling, trying to remember how it felt to love and be loved.

Margaret sensed my doleful mood, and from the beginning she was less of the stern disciplinarian than usual. My need was so tender; I even shed a few tears as she bound me. She looked at me quizzically, almost asking why, but I avoided her eyes, and let the tightness of the cuffs and the stretching of my arm muscles lift me towards the zone I yearned for. I was tied up, naked, but not yet whipped, and she was prowling around me when the reckoning came.

"What's this?" She demanded touching the bruises and several pin-prick marks on the inside of right arm.

"I've been so bad ... Oh god ... I've never been so bad..."

I broke down, and in a few short bursts told her what had happened. For a few fleeting seconds I thought I saw empathy in her eyes. While I sobbed and blabbered, begging forgiveness for my failings, her mouth set in a grim line, and she was already swinging the tawse. Why did I expect her to change, to caress and comfort me? I should have known better than that.

The first blow, when it came, was as severe as any I had known.

THWAPPP!! On my bum, which caught fire almost instantly. Then, miraculously, she uttered words I desperately wanted to hear.

"You will never..." THWAPP!! "Ever..." THWAPPP!!

"Touch that shit..." THWAAAPPP!

"Ever..." THWAAAAP! THWAAAPP!

"AGAIN!" Margaret was helping me in the way she knew best, responding to my non-sexual needs, by using the ways of sex we both understood so well.

"Promise me!" THWAAPPP! THWAAPPP!

"I promise, I promise..." I wailed.

THWAPPP! THWAPPP! THWAPPPP!

I jolted and squirmed from the vigour of my punishment, but I didn't complain. This time I truly deserved it. I had let myself sink to unforgivable depths. As the blood rushed in my veins, the hot pain Margaret created led me into the zone once more, and I felt strange new thrill, because now I knew I would obey Margaret, not as in the past when I had acquiesced willingly enough to her demands for the sake of fierce sensation and the calm aftermath, but because now I had no option, I knew really wanted to obey her.

A wave of relief washed over me, followed by a consciousness that I knew in my soul was genuine submission, not only to her strength and experience, which was usual, but this time to the irresistible force of her personality as well. For the last two years I'd thought that I was giving myself to Margaret, but all she'd had in truth was my body. She'd been my Bluebeard's secret, compartmentalised, beside my life rather than part of it. Now, in my hour of greatest need, and in her own unique way, it was she alone from everyone I knew who was there for me. As she dropped the tawse, fell to her knees, and with a throaty growl twisted her left hand straight into my barely moistened sex, I gave up my free will to her, completely.

From that moment on, it was different. We had broken through the barrier of impersonality, and into each other's lives, though Margaret did not go so far as to acknowledge the change in words. Before, when she took and used me, I had retreated into myself, finding the hot magma core of my being in the painful extremes. Now I was open, sensitive, all emotions visible and alive.

Margaret reached into me, her hand pushing and probing, fingers flexing as my juices began to flow and lubricate, she seemed to cup my cervix, massaging it until I began to shake. Now I badly wanted to touch her too, to feel her skin against mine. I had never felt about her like that before.

"Tell me how much you want to obey me," she growled, drawing her hand almost all the way out, while holding me wide open.

"More than anything in the world Mistress ... OOhhh!" My wail was cut off when her fist punched lusciously back into the wetness, winding me for several seconds.

Yes, I had submitted at last, and it was truly beautiful. I had just called her Mistress for the first time, and as a reward, that evening Mistress Margaret took me to a very special place. She was brutal and gentle all at once, caressing, teasing me with sweetness in ways she never had before, then reverting, quick as a flash to controlled violence, so that I became deliciously disorientated, laughing and crying in a bliss that came again and again, sometimes to a subtle flick of a finger, sometimes to the light flat smack of tawse on clit.

She dropped me to the floor, cuffed my wrists, rolled me onto my knees and blindfolded me. She took my arse passionately, rather than cruelly, with her biggest strap-on. Dragging me to my feet again, she threw me onto the old leather sofa, yanked off the blindfold, and then knelt on the floor between my lifted, wide parted legs.

"I'm going to give you something now that'll keep you off that shit. All you'll be addicted to is what I do to you. You will need no other..."

As she spoke, her icy eyes were burning me up, and ominously, incredibly, she was lubricating both her hands. She was definitely excited this time. I began to see an even more thrilling version of Margaret emerge. I found myself smiling at her, and even though the smile was not returned by her mouth, her eyes softened, and crinkled slightly at the corners. I lifted my handcuffed arms above my head, jubilantly accepting her thrusting fingers in my pussy and arse.

"I will need ... no other..." I echoed her breathlessly, watching transfixed as she began to open both orifices at once.

This time there was no deliberate discomfort in what she did to me, only the natural deeply sexy pain of stretching. Margaret had fucked me so thoroughly by then that a double penetration was, in a way, the only logical step forwards. Her left hand slid smoothly into my cunt, her right took a while longer, pushing, wiggling and thrusting patiently until I had widened sufficiently. I moaned for it, groaned for it, cawed and begged in a way I hadn't dared to beg before. When she eventually gave me what I asked for, because it was Margaret, because it was me - Jill Gaskell, because it was suddenly and naturally us, because of that most of all, it was better by far than I had imagined. Her hand slowly entered my bum, and sank deeper, filling my bowels, rubbing against the hand in my cunt just millimetres away, I felt a new completeness, a soaring joy, and I half-came. It was an awe-inspiring moment, branded into my memory forever.