slap me back and, as I raised my hands to protect my face, he slapped my breasts, first one breast, then the other. I am not sure why this was so shocking, but it was. I hit him again, and he hit me again, two swift blows as if my breasts were punching bags. Tears streamed from my eyes and a scream rose into my throat.
‘You bastard,’ I cried.
I rushed at him. I got my hands around his throat and tried to throttle him. But men are always stronger. He took a firm grip on my wrists, pulled my hands down, turned me around and shoved me back against the black rubber Zodiac.
The beachcomber was grinning, his brown teeth on show, the cigarette in the crook of his fingers.
I caught a glimpse of the man in black as he stepped away from the Zodiac and grabbed a curving strip of bamboo from what looked like the remains of a beached lobster trap. He snapped the bamboo in half and I heard the two-tongued cane come down through the air with a screeching sound that made me shudder. He did it again once more and, the third time, the cane bit like the teeth of a serpent into the soft flesh of my bottom.
I wailed in agony. I wasn’t going to take this. I pushed myself up again, my fists clenched, but before I could hit him, the man caught me by the shoulders, held me still and stared into my eyes. He spoke slowly, his voice low and threatening. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand a word. He turned me round and pushed me back against the side of the Zodiac, the weight of my body springing me back up and, as it did so, that terrible cane came down once more, the two sinewy fingers biting into my flesh, the pain like no pain I could ever have imagined or will ever be able to fully describe: a pure, unmodified pain, the pain of loss, perhaps, a pain beyond the physical, a pain that touches your soul and reshapes the strands of your DNA.
What fight there was in me had gone. I lay slumped on the black rubber hull of the boat, tears falling from my eyes, snot falling from my nose, my body trembling involuntarily. I had to take this, I had to take everything and, when the moment was right, when fate was on my side, I would flee. If it took the whole of my life, I would escape.
The bamboo cane rose up again, the air split like ripping fabric, and two lightning stripes of sheer agony carved their cruel message into my flesh. It felt as if the first four pairs of smarting wounds were kindling and the last two twins of evil lit a forest fire that burned up my spine and down over my thighs. My body was coated in sweat and I could smell the pungent whiff of the beachcomber’s piss coming back to life on my clammy skin. Somewhere at the back of my mind was the fleeting thought that having my bottom spanked and sucking off the man who had found me on the beach hadn’t been so bad after all; that there had been a perverse pleasure in the obscenity of being defiled in this way.
I was aware that the man behind me was lifting the cane one more time, but before it came down across my bottom, the beachcomber shouted at him. There was a moment’s pause, the earth stood still, and the man in black tossed the instrument of torture back on the sand.
A wave of gratitude went through me as my cheeks were prised apart and the man’s cock entered my pussy as a shark glides through the sea. I should have been dry and tense. I wasn’t. I was an ocean. I don’t know why. I was drenched with sweat and fruity discharge. The man’s erection slid into the depths of my vaginal passage, he drew back and pushed in again, the springy side of the Zodiac making the action effortless, even graceful.
Something had happened to me. Some wires had crossed. The pain from being beaten with that cane was beyond words, but the pain immediately began to diminish. It was as if my mind and body had drifted apart. I hated the man. I felt abused, ashamed, hysterical. And yet, and yet, my body felt a relief, from the pain, yes, but also from all the pent up fears and