The girl was being helped by two of Dalziel’s boys to peel her pink knickers off, raising her hips off the divan so a dark triangle of pubic hair was visible. Despite my misgivings I felt the excitement in the room, the murmur as the air thickened with lust, the music pulsating so I felt it in my breastbone, wreaths of smoke from cigarettes and joints and God knows what else hanging in the air around us, and the drug already in my veins surged through me again.
‘Place her in the crucifix position,’ Dalziel ordered. They did it. She was almost frighteningly floppy and acquiescent.
Azazel removed the goat-head and we saw it was a boy with a head like a bullet and hair like a brush; a boy who looked somewhat out of place amongst all the beautiful people. He was sweating and red-faced, and his eyes glinted with excitement as he undid his trousers.
‘Form a queue,’ Dalziel drawled from behind the divan where he was stroking the naked arse of a tall dark boy. Then the short boy was between the girl’s legs and pulling her dress down, sucking on a dark nipple he had freed and fumbling with his trousers, and then with a great groan he was in her and she was turning her head back and forth as if she was indeed enjoying it, or perhaps she was just delirious. Then Dalziel and the dark boy were kissing and Dalziel bent the boy forwards over the divan and was biting his neck, grinding into him. Someone turned the music up louder still and couples were pairing off. Lena and another girl writhed against the wall together, and James took me by the hand and led me out through the French window.
He pulled me into him and kissed me again, and although the night was freezing I didn’t seem to feel it and he untied my halter neck impatiently and pulled my catsuit down. He hiked me up onto a small wrought-iron table and we fucked right there in the garden. He was only the second boy I had ever had sex with but I felt so fluid right now, made of air, I might do it with anyone. At one point a light in the upstairs window of the house next door went on and I didn’t even care.
‘Someone’s watching us,’ I murmured in James’s ear and he just thrust harder.
‘Let them,’ he whispered, and I moaned with pleasure.
Afterwards we went back inside to find the girl had gone. Only the silk scarf lying on the floor showed that she had been there. Dalziel and the boy were on the divan now themselves. They looked like they were sleeping, wrapped round each other, and suddenly I felt very cold.
‘You’re OK,’ James said, ‘you’re just coming down a bit,’ and he gave me his jacket; someone else offered me a line of white powder chopped out on the table but actually I didn’t want it. Lena was so out of it she was crawling on the floor, laughing in her knickers and bra, occasionally barking like a dog, much to the hilarity of various bystanders.
‘That was full on, wasn’t it?’ a dishevelled boy said to James, his eyes like saucers, his nose streaming from the drug he’d just snorted.
James lit a cigarette. ‘Too busy having my own fun, mate.’ He kissed my shoulder and I smiled decadently. ‘What was?’
‘When the girl started to come round.’
‘What girl?’ I said.
‘The druggie. She was about to change her mind, I swear.’
My stomach plunged, and I felt icy. ‘Change her mind?’
‘Yeah. She changed her mind for a minute there.’ The boy looked dazed, a little rueful, perhaps. ‘But Dalziel soon sorted her out.’
‘What do you mean?’ I looked around for my coat. ‘What does that mean?’
‘He sorted her some more smack. She was OK in the end. Could have been ugly, though, couldn’t it?’
‘Ugly?’ I intoned stupidly. I wanted to leave now.
‘Yeah. Less adultery. More like …’ He glanced round nervously.
‘More like what?’ James prompted.
‘You know what I mean. More like rape. Specially with bloody Brian.’
‘Brian?’
‘Azazel. The goat-demon. Very apt. He gets out of control, that boy. Dalziel wants to watch that.’ The boy zipped his trousers up. ‘That’s the trouble with oiks.’
I thought of the girl, all floppy and blank, and I winced. I thought of my little room in the halls of residence and all my things there, even the green lampshade from home, and I wanted to be there now.
‘Do you think she’s all right?’ I asked the boy, and he shrugged.
‘Happy as Larry last time I saw her. Once she’d stopped crying and the new smack kicked in.’
I grabbed James’s hand. ‘Can we go?’ I asked him. ‘Please. Now.’
We left.
‘God, I’m freezing,’ I said out in the street. ‘I can’t warm up.’
James put his arm round me, and we went back to my room and I stripped off and put on my pyjamas, socks, my warmest jumper, but still I was freezing. He held me as we listened to Massive Attack and got into my single bed, drinking tea and talking into the dawn. We didn’t mention Huriyyah but I knew we were both thinking of her. And somehow, James never left.
In the cold light of day I didn’t feel so proud of my behaviour, in fact I felt ashamed.
‘So that was Society X?’ I asked James as we walked into Brown’s coffee-shop the next day.
‘Yes, it was. Just for the privileged few,’ he said – which apparently included me now. James explained that it was Dalziel’s brainchild, his pet project. Was I a pet? I saw myself out in the garden half-dressed; I kept thinking of the girl’s vacant face and her eyes that were so glazed and unseeing. I didn’t understand what had got into me. Apart from James, and illegal substances, of course. I felt strange. Somehow different – and older.
It was all about breaking the Ten Commandments apparently, James explained, hence X, the Roman numeral for ten. Dalziel was writing a dissertation on it for his theology module, James said, and he apparently wanted to prove that you can have free will and choice and still live in the confines of civilised life but outside organised religion. It all sounded very peculiar to me – far more about decadence and doing exactly what you liked than any aspect of religion. And although there was a part of me that was hugely flattered by Dalziel’s attentions, the truth was, last night was beginning to feel more than a little sordid. I had enjoyed the Ecstasy at the time but it scared me too; how consumed I felt whilst I was on it. Society X felt dangerous and exciting, but also out of my league entirely. Over the next few weeks, it began to feel nasty and puerile too.
I made a few enquiries about Huriyyah but no one seemed to know her. I scanned the newspapers, but I never heard anything about her. I started to forget: I busied myself with my new life at Oxford. My father sent me money for a push-bike and I marched against the Kosovan conflict.
I found that I was enjoying my lectures. I finally shook Moira and met Jen and Liz, who were more like me: we became inseparable. I got on with my work. And James and I were sort of dating; he was sweet and seemed keen, and I found that I liked sex, I liked it a lot – it was liberating. But I was worried by Society X and the lure it had for him. I tried to fight the feelings that were emerging for him, his big brown eyes, his funny smile, his protective air. I would not go to any of the X meets that he asked me to, and this annoyed him though he tried to hide it. I could see the attraction but it repelled me too. I was not that kind of girl. I felt very grown-up when I made this decision.
I read a lot of Hardy and I thought of Jude’s words: ‘this city of light and lore’. I worked hard and started to embrace the fact that I was part of this ancient institution. Some of the confidence of the kids there rubbed off on me; I became less shy and slowly I began to inhabit my own style. Occasionally I felt confined – the tourists in their cagoules and with their big maps, snapping us through the railings, like animals in the zoo – but mostly I just felt