Fortune Cookie #2

These posts are words of wisdom that have got me through life reasonably happy and sexually satisfied. If you want to pass these words of wisdom onto friends or younger members of your family, cut out the sayings one by one, there will be about one fortune cookie each week - and buy a cheap packet of fortune cookies from your local Asian supermarket. Using tweezers, remove the existing naff saying from each cookie and replace it with one of Krissy's words of wisdom. Throw a party. Distribute the cookies. Everybody happy.

Fortune Cookie #2

If you are attracted to nerds, learn how to play Dungeons and Dragons or World of Warcraft. Do not go to a nightclub and expect to come home with a nerd in the hand.

Why I am writing this

I just read one of my vagina posts and I was scandalised. How could I write that? How could I let strangers know all this messy, ugly intimate detail? Why would I expose myself as the awkward, self-deprecating, indiscriminate bundle of pathologies that I am?

I got a little lurch of terror over what I had written. I felt as if I had been caught doing something I shouldn't have been doing, like some late-night graffiti artist suddenly trapped in the lights of a police vehicle. That tiny rush of adrenaline is enough to ensure that there is a Furious Vagina posting tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

For months my partner has been complaining that I seem to write without any kind of joy. I sit down in front of yet another incomplete work of literary fiction, struggling over every sentence, witness my terrible lack on every page - my awkwardness with structure, the way each scene struggles to differentiate itself from the scene before. I look back on those completed manuscripts papered with their confetti of rejection slips and I am torn between my tenderness for them and my embarrassment over their inadequacies. On good days I flick through them and I am pleasantly surprised at how they have turned out. On bad days I have been known to take a pen and visit the virgin pages with hand-scrawled expletives. I cannot seem to settle with one kind of relationship to my unpublished novels.

The rejections, my badges of honour are also my hair-shirts that I pull out and try on to punish myself for refusing to budge from my vision. If I had found a more likable main character then perhaps that publisher would have accepted me into her stable. If I had vilified that older woman who slept with so young a man, perhaps my novel of doomed love would have beaten Tim Winton's 'Breath' onto the shelves. Why must I always choose the difficult solution, the less palatable one. Why do teeth click when my characters kiss? Why does their breath smell of stale food rather than vanilla?

'Vaginas' has freed me from all this creative self doubt for a moment. I find myself wondering throughout the day what my post will be in the evening. If a stray thought scares me I will fashion some moment of sexual embarrassment from my past out of it. I enjoy pressing the 'publish post' button before I have had a chance to weigh up the full implications of what I have said. I like the little flutter of fear as I read back on a post and know that I should have kept that thought to myself. I like the freedom that complete honesty brings to me. As long as it is true I will post it.

I remember, in my wild days when I would look back on an evening romp with the same kind of flutter of insecurity. Am I truly horrible for having done this? Does this make me a bad person? A fallen woman? A slut? Even back then I would tell people that this was all research. I would write about it one day, one way or another.

I am enjoying 'Vaginas'. I am stimulated by it. I have re-discovered that very childlike joy of writing curled up under the covers with a torch, writing all night when I should have been sleeping.

I hope this literary masturbation is equally enjoyable for you the reader. I know you are out there, because I watch the little counter at the bottom of my blog tick up incrementally. And I thank you for joining me in my daily practice. These post are for my pleasure, but they are also for you.

The Breaking of the Hymen part 3 - blood

Who was to know there would be so much blood.

And pain. He looked down at me for a moment and he was not a bad man. He knew that this was hurting me. He paused and asked if he should stop.

We pushed on. I am sure it was barely pleasurable for both of us. The condom seemed too tight and I had not yet learned about lubrication. I was dry and there was sand and we were running to a deadline. I had to check my watch from time to time and listen out for the sounds of my mother's footsteps.

When the hymen broke it was with pained relief. The blood began to flow which eased the chafing. I didn't even attempt to join him in orgasm. The job was done. I was quite prepared to pack up tools and head down to the pub for a beer.

The blood was everywhere and I wondered how I would be able to hide it. My swimming costume was white and would be ruined. The towel was a mess of sand and blood. He rolled the condom off and there was only half of it left. The rest had disappeared mysteriously somewhere inside me. Blood and semen then. I wanted to cry but I didn't.

"What if you get pregnant," he groaned. "What if I have got the school captain pregnant."

I had a name, he knew it but he chose to see me as I had never seen myself, as a rank, a captain of a school that he attended. I looked at him then, the sports playing giant of a boy, one grade beneath me. I was grateful for the removal of my hymen but suddenly, for the first time, I wondered if I should have waited for someone I cared about a little more.

"I won't get pregnant."

"How do you know?"

"I'll get the morning after pill."

This seemed to satisfy him. He leaned over and kissed me. I accepted the kiss without pleasure. I was planning things, crossing them off an imaginary list. Get dressed, hide the towel drenched in blood, tell my mother I needed to go to the doctor. Tell her that I was old enough that she didn't have to come in to the doctor with me. Why did she always come in to the doctor with me? I had just turned 18 and therefore I was a woman and I could see the doctor by myself. There would be a fight. I knew it. It would end in tears. I would have to tell her outright. That's what I should do.

'Mother, I've just had sex and I need the morning after pill' I would say. Just like that. Quick, and all the pain would be over, just like the breaking of the hymen.

The boy was talking to me. I looked at him, tried to focus. I should listen to this tall and sporty boy who had just lost his own virginity to me. I should take an interest. I gazed at this boy who I barely knew and didn't particularly like and nothing he said could be of interest to me. I closed my eyes and lay back in the sand, gathering my strength for our departure.

The Breaking of the Hymen part 2 - sand

My mother waiting at the strand.

I couldn't travel anywhere without her. She would wait just within shouting distance, making sure that I could not get into any trouble. She worried about the kind of trouble that could be inflicted onto me, but I was restless, wanting to make trouble of my own.

She knew this was a date and that I was here with a boy. I had my one piece swimming costume on under my jeans and t-shirt. He was wearing boardshorts. We would swim. I argued that I needed some small moment of privacy, just time alone to talk and to perhaps hold hands. I'm not sure if I promised her that nothing would happen but I might have. I was determined to abandon my hymen on that beach in the light of day. I had the condoms in my pocket and I had purchased them without any assistance and nothing, not even my own promises or the presence of my mother was going to stop me executing my task.

I had a towel that was patterned. I knew there might be some blood. I had read about this, small drops of red on a wedding sheet, hung out for all the villages to cheer over. Rose-petals of colour on the virgin white knickers of some fallen girl.

I took his hand and plummeted. I ran down the beach and around the curve of ocean to where my mother wouldn't see me disappearing into the scrubby strand with the basketball player trailing from my hand like a huge kite. He caught the wind and dragged at me, but I tugged against him. There was very little time. In a matter of minutes my mother would be strolling along the sand, peering out into the ocean, looking for the little bobbing bouys of our heads.

His penis was very large. That was my first and only thought. I watched it bob up from his board shorts like a little white flag, marking a place in the centre of his wiry pubic hair. I thought about golf. I knew he played golf. He played boy-sports like rugby and golf and snooker. None of my other friends played sports at all. I could barely fathom the thought of breaking my hymen with someone who played sport.

I checked my watch and undressed hurriedly. The condoms were another thing. They seemed too small. I wrestled one out of it's packet and it was a skinny limp skin. Shrivelled, miserable.

"Do they come in sizes?" he asked me.

"I don't know. How do I know."

"Well didn't you ask?"

I thought of the old man behind the counter at the chemist and I shook my head more in frustration than in answer. I handed him the droop of latex, watched him scrabble with his ridiculous protrusion. Time was ticking on. My mother would be sitting on a wooden bench pretending to read her book, but mostly just watching the ocean and waiting for me to drift into view. He tried and failed to do anything productive with the condom and dropped it into the prickly grass at his feet.

Only five more condoms now. Five left. The thought that I might return home a virgin still was unfathomable.

"Here."

I pulled another little rubber worm from the packet and the hot sand scratched against my knees.

"I'll do it." I said.

The breaking of the hymen part 1 - condoms

I had bought the condoms.

He made me buy the condoms.

"You are the one who wants to have sex," he told me, "you buy the condoms". Which seemed only fair until I was standing at the counter at the chemist with a packet of condoms in my hand. I thought that they could smell my hymen. I had that whiff of virginity about me. I wanted it to be the woman who served me, but of course it was the man and I handed him the packed, making sure I met his gaze, staring directly into his eyes as if my heart wasn't thudding out my panic. I didn't even know what condoms looked like really. I didn't even know what a penis would look like.

I had already felt his penis through his trousers. I had felt it in the cinema, my hand sneaking over the armrest, spilling popcorn into my own lap, shivery fingers into his. I touched it and learned that it was made of impossible dimensions. Even my longest fattest candle at home didn't seem quite so long and thick. I had never anticipated putting something so volumous inside my body, but the hymen must be broken somehow. The virginity must be dispensed with. I made him pay half the money because surely that was fair and I stood at the counter and eyeballed the middle-aged man and silently dared him to ask me anything about my purchase of those condoms.

"I bought the condoms" I told him. He was a tall boy, six foot five, and I was a midget beside him. He played basketball and hung around a group of boys who also played basketball. He had a voice that was strangely hoarse as if he had been shouting for a long time, and yet he always spoke in an almost whisper. Sometimes I wondered if he had developed polyps on his throat from singing in the musicals. We sang together.

On stage we had to kiss and with the lights and the excitement of the audience watching, I opened my mouth to the stage-kiss and let his tongue settle against my soft palate and kept him kissing me until the music started for the next song. I was forced to drag myself away to let him sing.

I discovered that I liked to kiss. It was my first kiss, that open-mouthed one in front of a packed audience of mums and dads. The kiss dissolved the artifice between the play and life and later, at the after party, I walked straight towards him and I kissed him again. We had barely said a word to each other outside rehearsals. He liked to play sport. I liked to play the oboe and Dungeons & Dragons, and backgammon. There was no possible subject for a conversation between us, and yet here we were, kissing, and the heat of that kiss traveled down into my stomach and settled there, butting against my hymen like a demon child desperate to be released from it's imprisonment.

Jealousy

I think about sleeping with people in an oblique way, something that is a possibility, but remote.

Sometimes if I am in a lift with a stranger I wonder what would happen if the lift broke down and we were trapped in there for days. would we fuck each other or eat each other, or both, one thing after the next as we became more and more desperate for survival.

I have always thought about these situations with my friends, measuring the smoulder of desire that I feel for everybody because they are warm blooded and human and there is a distant whiff of sex lurking somewhere. If there was a nuclear war and we were at work, who would I fuck and in what order? It passes the time.

It is interesting to notice that the smallest heat of a possibility can be fanned into the full blown crackle of desire so easily.

"The more you reject me, the more I want you," I said to a reluctant lover who could not win either way. Both abstinance and sex encouraged my attentions, but abstinance left me more fiercly ravenous.

My friend points to a girl and he says that she is pretty. He would like to sleep with her. My relationship to him has been like my relationship to anybody, a slow burn of possibilities that might be whipped up by a nuclear war or a major lift failure.

I look at the girl and I see someone that I am not. She is young and cute and shy and well-dressed. Understated. Someone who is other than me. The object of my friend's desire. Here is the wind to the spark and I am engulfed by sudden flame. I waste an evening in restlessness, wondering why I am not and will never be the one that he would choose.

My friends who I do not particularly desire, do not desire me either. They desire other girls. I suddenly know that I am not and will never be that cute, shy girl and because of this I want my friend to want me.

This is the magic of jealousy. I have been tricked into long and complicated relationships by it before. It is the button that, when pressed, will set off the deafening ringing note of self-doubt. It is a familiar sound, but it still has me running in circles at it's cry, shrieking pick me! pick me! even if I am not particularly interested in picking or being picked. It is not a game I wanted to play. I have a more satisfying game in progress but the button has been pressed, the alarm has been sounded and I must close my eyes and cover my ears until the embers of desire return to the cool friendly place before he pointed and said she was pretty.

Summer. Childhood.

We don’t talk about masturbation. No one talks about it.

‘You Wanker’ we say and we snicker as if wanking is an activity that only a few lesser human beings partake in. Almost everybody does it. There is some whispered myth that women do it less often than men, but perhaps it is just that women admit to doing it less often than men.

When I discovered it, the full knowledge that certain pressures of my fingers would produce such an overwhelmingly pleasurable result, I could not stop doing it. I became an expert at it, finding places that would be private, times when I could sneak away and would not be missed.

Bath times, quick trips to the toilet, and in the evenings, drowsy from the day. I shared a room with my sister and I practiced staying awake till I was certain that she would be asleep. I was stealthful as a ninja, the bare minimum of movement, one finger rubbing so gently that the bed wouldn’t even creak. In the day time on the weekends I could sometimes find a quiet spot, private, secluded. There was a crawl-space beside the house, overgrown with Jasmine and gated by two gardenia bushes pressing their branches together. This was my favourite place, the summer scent, perfumes clamouring, the fat buzz of bees droning sleepy in my ear. I pull down my shirt, exposing my shoulders to the scratch of leaves and the finger creep of a lazy breeze. I imagine I am naked but I am not. I haven’t even taken my knickers all the way off. I have pulled them to one side and they are a damp obstruction but I work around it. There will be grass in my hair, twin plaits, all that wiriness pulled tight, contained. My skirt might suck the damp from the soil. I will be in disarray when I push my way back into the world, blinking at the slap of sunlight. Subterranean creature dragged reluctantly into the day.

There is no other human being in my imaginings. There is just the sense of all the elements settling on my flesh.

The scent alone, whispers love. White flowers, sharp and sweeter than honey. I can’t breathe but for the sense of flowers.

In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is overcome by poppies. This same drugged haze of scent pulls me down into a languid morphineous fug.

When my mother calls I am a long way away, drifting towards a precipice without hurry. The sound of her voice shakes me out of my timelessness and I am rushing, scared by the possibility of discovery. The fear is a kind of excitement, hurrying towards a quick, barely satisfying climax. I dig my fingers into the soil, replacing the smell of my juices with earth worm castings and loamy grit.

Fortune Cookie #1

These posts are words of wisdom that have got me through life reasonably happy and sexually satisfied. If you want to pass these words of wisdom onto friends or younger members of your family, cut out the sayings one by one, there will be about one fortune cookie each week - and buy a cheap packet of fortune cookies from your local Asian supermarket. Using tweezers, remove the existing naff saying from each cookie and replace it with one of Krissy's words of wisdom. Throw a party. Distribute the cookies. Everybody happy.


Fortune Cookie #1
Always develop a deep burning attraction to people that no one else finds attractive: there will be less competition and people who are less sought after will be better in bed. Believe me. It is true.

obsessive

I knew where he was at every minute. At least I thought I did. I would look up from my vodka or my coffee or whatever, and think, he will be riding home from the city, or, he will be listening to that band he likes in the Valley.

Sometimes I'd test myself on it and turn up at the place he would be. He was always there. I had a kind of sixth sense for him. I knew it was creepy to be hooked in to his every movement as if I'd inserted a tracking device when we were having sex, but there was nothing to be done. I was plugged in to him. My radar was always poised and waiting for some weird signal to arrive.

I thought that he was me. We were similar in many ways. We were both playful as monkeys, food fights, chases, games of backgammon, some of which ended in strange illegal moves that left us breathless with laughter. We were odd, awkward in company, prone to leaving a room in a sudden panic for no reason. We were both a little mad, we made nests in other people's houses but we never seemed to settle anywhere ourselves. Once I threw all his clothes out of the window of a third story flat, and then he threw all mine, and then we were naked in the night, daring each other to run off into the park.

I loved him, but he didn't love me. He said he would love a girl who was homely and smelled of bread dough and cake. He wanted a girl who hung her clothes up on hangers, a girl who ironed and who didn't put up with any of his nonsense. He told me this when we were in bed together and he wasn't the first one to mention my lack of feminine wiles and so I shrugged and kept at it, hoping that the delirium we shared in bed would make up for my lack of skills in the ironing department.

We fucked so hard that we tore the sheets off the bed.

"I'd love a girl who knows how to make hospital corners," he said.

The Dissapearance of my Cleavage

It is not advisable to be old and still sexual. People will look at you as if you have stepped in something. It seems that society finds older people sexually distasteful. When an image of someone naked and lined flashes up on the television screen it is invariably to get a laugh. We are not supposed to find them attractive. We become repulsive to ourselves in our decay.

You may have noticed that my cleavage has suddenly disappeared under layers of clothing, appropriately chaste high necklines. I have bowed to pressure. I have become sexless in my middle-age. I have enjoyed my cleavage for far too long.

When all the rest of my body has given me grief my tits have remained my true friends, the one part of my body that I can still enjoy in broad daylight and unclothed. Even though I have hidden them because of public pressure, I still look at them from time to time and think that this part of me alone is something to be proud of. But you will never enjoy them again. I have hidden them from you and they will never make a return.

I resent this public censorship, of course, I was born to resent any kind of censorship. I wish I could flaunt the one piece of flesh that I am proud of, holding it up like a red flag to a bull, watching you huff and stamp and roll your eyes - how dare she become old and still wear her tits out like that. It is because of your silent disapproval that I have become self-conscious, and even I cannot wear my skin proudly when I am self-conscious.

I do want you to know however, that even if I am covered from neck to knee, even if my head were to be shrouded, my hands secreted in gloves, my feet strapped into heavy boots, even then, beneath my public modesty I would still have a furious vagina.

In the Cruel Light

In the cruel light of day I can not bear to look at myself. That is the problem with stopping to think about it all. In the moment of sex there is nothing but forward motion. There is pleasure and the active taking of pleasure and there is giving back and everything is in motion. Now, with the light and the stale sheets still damp, there is a pause and I am left with myself and I am ashamed.

This is what other women feel, I am sure of it. I see the signs of it in their eyes as they fail to meet my fierce gaze.

In my own head there are indigestible clues:

I walk past a group of boys who sit, spotted and ugly in the drunken gutter. I hear one of them howl like a wolf and yell out 'dog'. It is only a moment later that I realise he is referring to me. The moment lodges in my brain like a blood clot.

The fetid drunken homeless man shambles past and looks up at me, blurry eyed, his breath a nightmare as he spits out the word 'fat' and then moves on. Another clot forms, throbbing in my temple.

The group of men at the pub who point at me and call out 'there's your girlfriend' and splutter laughter to each other. A hook in my head that could catch fish.

Then earlier, the girls at school, the boys at school, the magazines that tell me I am built badly, the eyes of my friends as they linger over the pretty girls, the thin girls, the leggy blonds and whistle their approval. The teacher that told me I should loose weight to get the role in the musical. My invisibility when I walk into a cafe especially when I see the boys alert to the joys of every other girl.

I am unlovely. I am overweight. I am too fiercely smart and combative. I do not wear matching underwear. I do not wear scent or makeup or work out in a gym. I have grown older as we all grow older and there are still kids to grow up and into that teenage moment of desirability.

I stand amongst the stained sheets wishing it were darker, wishing there was no mirror in the room, wishing there was still flesh pressed up against mine because when it is all kissing and sucking and touching there is no room for looking or pondering over those brain hemorrhaging kernels of derision lodged in my memory.

Barely Older

I was barely older than them. In my early twenties. They were teenagers as I had never been a teenager, all giggly and blonde and fine tanned skin from a bottle, their uniforms too short at the waist and the little indentations of their belly buttons marring the perfectly flat surface of their stomachs.

You could smell them. They were all cheap perfume and sweat and heat. The heat was something else, I could feel it through my knees which were closer to them. When the bus lurched and one of them fell towards my lap there was heat in there too. I wanted them to be naked. I wanted this more than anything in that moment. I was appalled at myself, but I wanted it. They were ripe. They were peach fuzz and perfect sweet flesh. I wanted to bite down into them before the flesh was spoiled by their slow trudge towards death.

This makes me a monster, this moment of longing. They would look at me and curl their lips back in disgust if they knew about my sudden flush of lust. They would look at my flesh, which was never beautiful and smell my damp earth muskiness and make hideous squealing noises in their disgust.

I settled back into my seat on the bus. I pulled my knees in and away. I looked out of the bus window. I wondered if I had some kind of problem, to be lusting after girls who were barely grown. Would I still lust when I was thirty? Forty? Seventy? Would I be more and more perverse the older I became? Could I still blame the glossy magazine and TV advertising for my desire for something young and beautiful?

Bagged and Gagged

I had to sleep with him because he paid for dinner. Not just dinner but drinks as well. I tried to pull my wallet out but he waved it aside and I felt my enthusiasm dissipate. Now I would have to sleep with him and I had had to endure his conversation for a whole evening, a boy who never seemed to tire of talking about himself.

The pillowcase was an inspiration. The imperative was to find away to stop him from kissing me. He had the kind of tongue that kept invading my mouth, a hard probing tongue that made me think of the dentist chair. I couldn't breath because of it. I wanted to spit. I'm not sure why I thought of the pillowcase, but suddenly it was there and I reached for it and I jammed it over his head, a kind of cotton bag that kept his tongue away from the inside of my cheeks. He still kissed me through the yellowed fabric, but it was a chaste kiss, damp but inoffensive, and with his face hidden he could have been anyone. I imagined that he was someone else, anyone else. Someone who hadn't bored me for the better part of the evening, someone who hadn't paid for my expensive dinner at a restaurant.

This was my first actual date, and I realised then why I had never dated. It was all the conversation that scraped at the fabric of a perfectly fine eveing with the fingernail shriek of his voice. Even with the bag, I could hear him, droning on and on, sex talk. How could sex talk be so monotonous.

The stocking was a master stroke. He I tied it around his chattering mouth and he became silent all of a sudden. Another stocking for his hands and he could not even squeeze and poke at me. I felt myself relaxing into the anonymity of the event. When he groaned I shushed him and he quietened miraculously. I began to enjoy the blank canvass of his body. I fished my vibrator out from under the pillow and I let him buck his hips up to meet my strokes, one small compensation and it seemed to make all the difference to him. He came as quickly as I did and as silently.

He called. He called and called and called. I told my flatmate I was out and he relayed the information over the phone.

"She says that she's out".

He made me laugh. You could probably hear it over the phone.

My flatmate asked me why I was avoiding him and I told him and he could barely understood, "but you slept with him," he said, incredulous. "You tied him up and gagged him and slept with him. He must think all his Christmases have come at once. Why did you do that if you hated him?"

"He paid for dinner." I told him, "and drinks."

I don't think he ever understood my reasons, but he kept fending off the poor boy's calls as a true man must.

"I'd sleep with you two if you were bagged and gagged, " I teased, but the truth is I would have slept with him butt naked in the bright moonlight without blinking. I was fond of him and he was fond of me, but when I suggested it, he shook his head.

"You're just not my type, my love," he said.

Misery Memoir

It had to come to this eventually. How could any joyous romp turn out all right. There is an inevitable low point, a 'poor me' and 'how badly wronged'. They call them misery memoirs and it is almost impossible to have a memoir without the miserable bit, even if it is a hooked on a thorn, abandoned, bloodied scrap of fabric from a fine silk gown.

In the shape of things it should be left till last because that is where it ended. The joyous dancer crashing into the thorny bush leaving me bruised and winded for a number of years to come. The dark patch that followed, the time without skin, another story perhaps but not one that I will bore you with.

The following is tedious enough and I'll tell it now and out of order because its best to get it over with.

His name wasn't Peter, but I'll call him that. A sad man, all low status slumping shoulders and visible ticks. Ugly too. A crooked moon face and old, when I was still bursting out of childhood. I slept with him because I thought that no one else would. I pictured myself in his scuffed and ugly shoes, directionless despite his advanced years, stray pup. He wasn't terribly smart or witty and he was poor. He owned a battered car and only one key and I gave him a bed out of fondness for the down-and-out.

He had a habit of arguing whilst driving. He liked to close his eyes and lean on the accelerator and yell that he would kill us both. I used to laugh. Death was just one more adventure that I wasn't afraid of. There was no beckoning future. I read Camus and Sartre. I walked on sleepless nights through parks and beside railway lines. I flirted with death as passionately as I flirted with life. His screwed up face and his shouting made me giggle. He never crashed the car, but now I know how dangerous his behaviour must have been. I should have kicked him back onto the streets but I didn't. For a while he had no power over me. I watched him eat and I felt pity, a man cradling his plate as if I might suddenly lunge across the table and remove a snow pea from his hungry mouth.

He was brutal in his powerlessness. He picked out women I knew and pointed to them just out of earshot. 'She is more beautiful than you,' 'she is more feminine', 'she is the kind of nature-girl I prefer, you are all steel edges and cracked concrete', 'you would never be my choice if I had one', 'you are the consolation prize and I like every other woman I see more than you'.

He wore me away one niggle at a time. Of course I believed him. I knew that they were more beautiful, more girlish, more mysterious than me. I liked them too. I shared his fascination with the other women. I looked at myself and the facts of my body were written in the mirror. Not beautiful. Not lovely, but still someone who enjoys the world through every pore. He couldn't criticise me for that. The other girls seemed to step back from themselves and the world and I dove straight into it. I felt that this blind forward motion might have its own attractions - unstoppable force, fierce advocate, fiercer lover, fiercest friend.

It was the night that Peter wanted to make love to that other girl. She was flirting with him. She flirted with everyone and unlike the others, he chose to see her flirtation as a curled finger, beckoning him closer. I was at the party too, invisible beside him. I watched her reel him in and I was jealous.

I left the party early, drawing my own conclusions. At home I refused to fume. I lit candles, poured myself a shot of vodka, read a book and felt the wave of calm envelope me. I went to bed at a reasonable hour but when he opened the door I was awake.

I said no. I said that I didn't want to. I said I don't like this. I struggled just a little. I tried to remove my hands from his fists and it seemed to be his weight that pinned me but of course it wasn't. I was powerless because he told me I was hideous with each thrust, and with each thrust I believed him.

'I'd be fucking her if I could' he said, 'you are nothing in comparison, easy ride, not the same class of woman' and I found myself suddenly unable to argue, unable to struggle my hands out from the place he had raised them to above my head. He came even though he wasn't wearing a condom and the next day I was lead on the sheets, a monument to my fallen self.

He bought me a dozen red roses and told me he had never bought anybody flowers before and I thanked him for it. This terrible double-crossing of myself. This is what I regret more than anything.

He stopped yelling at me in the car. I no longer had the energy to disagree with him. I had been someone who had enjoyed the world through every pore but now I found I had no skin. I let him climb on top and I wondered what had once held me together because now I was sagging into pieces on the bed.

He left me for a woman I had once loved soon after that. She was more lovely than I could ever be. I had loved her for it. He loved her for it too.

And then there was that time when I sat in the park night after night and did nothing about finding somewhere to crawl into, out of the rain. That lank and listless time that would be the guts of the misery memoir if I could write that kind of thing.

It was the end of the story for a while, and when a little girl pointed and yelled for her mother to 'look at that lady', I heard instead 'you are nothing compared to every other woman', and I sat back down on my park bench and busied myself with the effort of breathing in and out, making sure I kept trudging through my life one day after the next.

Jackpot part 3

It is easy to disappear when there are two penises entering you. This is what I like most about the double entry. As long as the smaller one is in the back and the larger one is in front there is barely any physical discomfort. It is easy to become a conduit, bringing the two men together, feeling them touch through the delicate membrane of my skin. There is no pressure for me to perform. The men perform for each other. I am free to watch them find each other's mouths over the tiny obstruction of my shoulder. When their tongues lap hungrily at each other I am there to watch. I join the kiss only so that my tongue can see like a snail's probing feeler, sticky eye. I see them exploring the wet cavities of each other's mouths. I feel their cocks butt up against each other. I feel them change their rhythms so that their thrusting is synchronised.

They suck my breast, two tongues each eager to prove that they are more desirous of my flesh. It is a competitive consumption of my body, their wrestling for position is half tooth and nail.

Richard is triumphant in the battle because he is privileged enough to have my anus. The grip is tighter. The position is dripping with fascination for the other lover who must content himself with a more conventional entry. I feel the new lover reach around with his extraordinarily long arm just to check that Richard really has found an entry into my bowels. I feel him stroke the sensitive muscle with his fingertips, slipping on lubricant, forming a perfect O around my partner's penis. The extra pressure is too much for him. We feel the pulsing start, the two of us, this new lover and myself. We feel the uncontrollable spasms of his hips as he relinquishes any thought of gentleness and pumps hard, forcing himself into me in a jerking rhythm.

I see the man beneath me thrust his head backwards exposing his throat. He is about to come too. I try to lift myself off him, he is too big for me. I attempt a subtle retreat, but Richard is still collapsed on my back, his hips twitching in an echo of his orgasm. The boy bucks forward and it hurts, but it is also pleasurable which is a surprise. He thrusts high and hard against the shrinking swell of Richard's penis. I am flushed with the effort of taking him in.
I feel the pumping of it stretching me and I press my thumb against my clitoris, scratch it back and forth. I want to come. When there is a new lover in my bed I never come. I save it up for later when Richard and I are alone and have more time to recount the events of the previous encounter finding pleasure in reflected glory. But this is my prize, the boy who makes me spill milk, drop cups, fumble cakes into customers laps. This is that boy and he is hurting me in his uncontrollable pleasure and I climb with him. Richard is still inside me and the contracting must hurt him because he winces, eases himself away.

When we are done he holds the base of our lover's penis, keeping the condom on while he withdraws. He peels it off the man and feels the length of it all slippery with sperm. He slips his lips over it and tastes. This is against the rules of course, but I watch him do it, feel the prickle of arousal begin anew. We could go again, the three of us. The possibility of this is in the air. We lick the taste of each other off our skin, gently. There is time. It is barely dark. There is time for tea, or wine or perhaps some conversation, although when I see their mouths meet, teeth clinking awkwardly off each other, sharing the taste of our lover's sperm, I feel my stomach lurch and I am not so sure there will be time enough for chatter.

Jackpot part 2

The door was still open and Richard was a surprise for us. Richard standing in the door, grinning. I had brought him a prize, hunter, gatherer. It could have been anyone, a stranger on a bus, someone I met at work last night, anyone. He wasn't to know that the soft groans from beneath me were the sweet chinking sounds of a jackpot paying through, the one I had wanted for so long, suddenly in our bed. He joined us without introduction. His hand, linking fingers with, then replacing my own on the generous length of penis, my body impaled on top of it, slowly relaxing to consume more of it. I felt his fingers edging into me, stretching the flexible skin, thickening the load. I felt him reach up inside me with his spidery hand and measure the length to the tip of the cock, marveling at the size and shape of it. Then the fingers withdrew and I felt his tongue lapping around the boy, touching my clitoris briefly before making the long journey down to that tender pale flesh of the man's belly. I kissed the boy. He had a sensual mouth, wide and warm. His spit tasted of oranges. His tongue was long and it pushed up between my teeth and the soft underside of my lips. I wasn't sure if he had felt Richard's arrival, if he knew that the soft squeezing pressure was not some internal muscular trick that a whore might use, but the excited fingers of my lover. I had told him about Richard of course, warned him, tested him. If you find me at this address you will find Richard there as well. I kissed this new found prize and there was a gentle pressure on my anus, a tentative testing with a fingertip followed by the cold nozzle of the lubricant and a sudden icy trickle shooting inside me, slipping around the edges, readying me for the next part of this strange but pleasant dance.

Jackpot

It was all to do with timing. I was clothed in evening wear, high boots, a dress that billowed. There was opera on the stereo. All this because \i couldn't bare the idea of washing up, a job I hated and rarely completed, without the theatre of the dress and the music. I made a performance of it, treating myself to sips of chilled wine between each burnt bottomed pan, the egg so old it had fused with the metal. I scraped back layers of aluminium to find a clean surface.

When he arrived, the last of the dishes was dripping foam into the precarious pile by the sink. The door was open and he stood in the loungeroom and the muslin cloth was flapping in a hot breeze and I turned around and it was like a scene from some movie. Him so beautiful, me in my evening gown and my rubber gloves, the opera screaming to an exquisite crescendo.

I almost laughed. The poetry of the moment struck me as comical. I had given him my address but I didn't expect him to find me. He was a customer at the cafe and every time I spotted him perched on one of the cane stools I became inept. I dropped cups, fumbled cakes off their plates, once I even dropped the whole tray, hot with dishes just washed.

He made me nervous.

Because of this I didn't try to speak to him. I took my clothes off, standing in boots and bra as the opera quietened to a duet.

I walked past him into the bedroom where our king-sized futon kissed three of the walls and when he stumbled out of his trousers I noticed that his penis was too large. He was a tall man and was short enough to approach it warily. I could only fit a fraction of it in my mouth. I rolled the condom part of the way using my lips, but I was forced to back off, finish the job with my fingers. It was the first time this had happened to me. I wondered if it would hurt.

I was wet, which was unusual. I am not the kind of girl you read about in pornographic magazines. My excitement leaves me perhaps a little damp. Even after orgasm there is a discreet slick of juices, just enough to give a slippery edge. I like the feel of lubricant and face cream and spit but I am like a desert, hot and fierce with passion but with only a hazy glimpse of moisture, a mirage. This day, perhaps because of the heat or the opera or the hours standing at the sink in high heels there was little need for lubricant. I used it anyway, the size of his penis made a little knot in my lower abdomen. Too big for me. I thought he might hurt. I squeezed the clear stickiness onto my palm and marvelled at the distance travelled by my fist, each stroke a journey all the way from the tip to the flat of his belly which was surprisingly pale and soft, like something new born and desperate for protection.

I layed him on our bed, this man that I had wanted for so many weeks. I straddled his hips and settled myself down gently, only a small way.

How could I take much more of him into me. I measured the uncharted territory with my hand. I would need both hands to cover it. I stroked the vulnerable length with my fingers, my hand an extension of my cunt, massaging all the length of him. With my other arm steadying myself I wondered how I would bring myself to orgasm without loosing my grip on him completely.

And Then he Fell Asleep

...rolled onto his back and fell asleep. Just like that.

"...rolled onto his back and fell asleep."

"What? Just like that?"

"Just like that?"

I shouldn't have said anything, of course. The situation brought my sexual prowess into question and I was quite proud of my prowess. I wrapped the doonah around me tightly and sat at the kitchen table and he settled a cup of tea in front of me. The comfort of steam. I sniffed.

"He was fine when he was on top, it's just when we changed places he just seemed to close his eyes and then that was it."

"Fell asleep..."

"Just like that."

My lover would be shivering in his sleep. There was nothing but a cotton sheet to keep the night away. I huddled into the warm layers of down and held the fragrant cup against my lower lip.

"Am I boring? Do you find me boring?"

He shook his head, "He had too much to drink."

"I'm going to tell him about it in the morning."

"I know you are."

"I'm will."

"I know it."

I sipped. He turned over onto his back and I was on top and I was just finding a rhythm when I looked down and saw that he had fallen asleep.

"Just like that. I can't believe it."

And he tutted like a good friend should and sipped his tea.

Places to have Sex

The couch. The one that feels like velvet and has to be washed after because it stains.
The sisal carpet, the one with the rope burns.
The back of his panel van, and he said he'd never done it in there before and I still find that difficult to believe.
On the beach, with the shell grit and the cuttlefish bones and I feel like a caged bird.
In the cupboard, where I feel safest despite the limited opportunities for movement.
On the balcony, and only because of the ecstasy and the hour of the morning.
On the boardwalk in the botanic gardens where we can pretend I am just sitting on his lap.
In the Roma Street parklands before they were the Roma Street parklands.
In the archbishops garden, and only because I couldn't see the fascination she had with it.
In the bus stop because the bus was delayed.
On the train because the train was delayed.
In the restaurant because the food was delayed.
In the playground when we were all grown up.
In the kitchen because of the implements.
In the garden because of the dirt.
In the bath because of the lack of dirt.
In the bed.
Sometimes, even in the bed.

DIY Vibrator

It was perhaps the most romantic present anyone had ever given me. It was something he had made himself, put time and effort into. It was an unexpected present and although it looked a little Tonya Todman (or perhaps Bob The Builder), it worked fine and I was pleased with it.

It was some kind of battery thing that whirred and jiggled when you flicked a switch and then gaff tape and the jewelled green handle of a screwdriver held in place. I wasn't certain when I first opened the wrapping. I was all, 'oh, thanks' without really understanding until he turned it on and it started to buzz and the green end bounced quickly back and forth.

I knew about vibrators I had seen them in porn but I had never actually met one in real life. Now I had. A home-made thing constructed with a little skill and a lot of tenderness.

He unwrapped me in turn, and there was a click of plastic on bone when it rattled against my pubis. He pressed the screwdriver end inside me and the sound of it was muffled by his hand, the various folds and clutches of flesh. I could feel the judder of it echo out towards my skin. A little twitching, and I was quick to distance myself from the situation, talking myself down, because it would all be over if I jumped off to quickly.

It was difficult to stay removed from my body. The vibrations called me back into myself. My skin was twitchy tingly. I dragged his head towards me and kissed his open mouth and whispered love into him.

I wanted it to last, but of course it didn't and I tripped into the disappointment of an early conclusion.

The problems with a urinal

I hiked my foot onto the metal splash back and held my skirt back and peed. There were men at the trough, several men, hardly any and they seemed annoyed to be standing beside a girl who was pissing in their urinal. They are territorial, men. They claim their ground, feet sturdy and placed wide on the urinous concrete. Tipping their hips forward confidently.

"This isn't a place for ladies" one of them said to me, glancing at the obscenity of my vagina, curling his lips back as if it were split and rotting fruit. There were men in every cubicle, I could see their feet butting up against each other, hear the fleshy slap of them against the metal walls. There were groans and sucking sounds and a kind of high pitched whine that sounded more like annoyance than pleasure.

"Well the 'ladies' is no place for poofs." I snap back, stepping away from the trough, smoothing down my skirt. Relieved.

I stomped out past the same desperate women waiting in the same desperate queue as the gentlemen slapped and slurped and banged around in the girls toiletcubicles.

My hands shook just a little. It was brave of me to rest my boot against the splashboard of their urinal and piss standing like a man, the leather fags and the body-builders eyeing off the dissapointment of my genitals. I couldn't have done it without the four vodkas. I wouldn't have needed to do it if I hadn't had the four vodkas.

Now it was done.

"I pissed standing up at the boys urinal," I told him, my gay lover.

"Don't be stupid."

"No I did. I really did."

He grinned and then he nodded. "That's my girl." he said.

A variation

I had developed a routine. It had been two weeks since my last lover. This was a some kind of record. My skin had tightened around me, calsifying into some kind of shell. I thought of science fiction monsters, creatures from lagoons. When I sat beside someone on the bus I pulled as far away from them as possible. When the bus jolted me towards them I would flinch. I went out, spoke to no one, came back home, mumbled to myself, flicked the heater on and mumbled to myself. I had started to paint again and the worn boards of the floor were speckled a vivid blue.

I had fallen into a pattern, odd little meals magicked out of unidentifiable packets from the Asian supermarket. Pots of green tea sipped alongside shots of vodka. I listened to the same music over and over and no one complained. I would pause in the middle of things, painting, writing, eating, dressing, and pull out the faded pornographic magazines from under the bed. I chewed through batteries like lychee jelly cups.

I found myself predictable, I bored of my own company. I was particularly concerned about the pornography. Uninventive, servicable, ordinary. Girl on girl, girl on boy, boys on girl. I caught myself drifting off whilst masturbating, wondering about the dried shrimp and how I should rehydrate them.

I knew a boy who became excited about rocks. He was studying geology. He spoke about rocks as if they were pornography. He kept pictures of core samples in a pile beside his bed.

I wouldn't be boring if I could become excited by rocks. That would interest me.

Unusual passions. I pulled books randomly from my shelf and read them, pants abandoned, vibrator purring. Could I get excited about satellites, the history of the ABC, a complete history of madness, mutants in sideshows, a girl stepping through a looking glass?

True, it takes a little longer, and a travel guide to Slovenia quite challenging, but eventually it is indeed possible to orgasm to almost any tune you play.

Naked Girl in the Road

She ran out naked onto the road and I stood on the front steps looking like I'd just survived a toga party, naked but for a white sheet wrapped around my body, a chrysalis shuffling out onto the front stairs. Bare, cold feet, a little drunk, kissed lipstick bleeding out from my bruised mouth.

She stood in the road and anyone who was awake at 3.30am could have seen her.

"Just come inside Cyn." I tried to whisper, but she was too far away for that. She was halfway down the road and sobbing. The police would be called. Domestic violence situation oh Grey Road. Female victim standing naked in the street. Female perpetrator near-naked on the stairs.

"I just can't do it,"she wailed, and if the neighbours had been sleeping, they certainly were not asleep now. Cyn was distraught. Cyn was crying. Cyn was drunk and disorderly and if the police weren't on their way, I would have to call them before she did some damage to herself.

Cyn had seduced me. She was younger than I was, still at school, but she had been talking about sex before I had even seen a penis properly. There were nights when we would lie in front of the television, watching Rockie Horror over and over and talking about how it was OK to be queer.
"If you were, you know, like that"she said, shuffling closer to me on the couch, "Then it would be fine. Perfectly natural."

One time, late at night she touched me high up on the thigh, a sleepy brushing of her fingertips but when I rolled towards her she pretended to be sleeping. Once she brushed my breast with her shoulder and I thought that it was deliberate, even though she pretended it was an accident. She talked about how it would be okay to be naked together, but we never were.

The seduction lasted years. I had grown and left home, she had grown and whined about leaving home but hadn't. We had drunk too much and Richard was in the other room. She talked about all those evenings watching Rockie Horror. She laid her head in my lap and cried about how she had the opportunity to seduce me and how that opportunity had now passed. She touched my knee and sighed through a thick clog of tear-induced mucus.

"Its fine for me to have sex with women." I told her. Richard and I had a kind of loose arrangement. He wouldn't mind. "I could clear it with him first."

But she didn't seem to want the bother of me 'clearing it'. When she kissed me it tasted of passion fruit. I hated those terrible premixed drinks, but now, on her breath, they tasted sweet. Most of it went as expected. Drunken fumbling, slippery fingers clumsily inserted. The carpet hadn't been vacuumed for a while and there was dust and fluff stuck to our backs and an itch of carpet burn on our knees.

Fun. Drunk fun. But wen I kissed the soft underbelly of her she moved my head back up, away from my target. I tasted the passion pop of her mouth.

She ran out naked onto the road because of my vibrator. An over-reaction. She backed away from the thing as I were about to attack her with a cattle prod. I had nuzzled into the split-fruit flesh of her until I was drunk with the scent of her, sweet and sticky wet, my face awash, catching the slippery drips on my fingers, sliding them up over her parted thighs. She seemed to be enjoying this. I felt the insistence of her hips pushing into me and I slipped my hands under her soft lightly furred cheeks and held her closer. She even moaned.

I brought the vibrator out because I knew how good it would feel. Her, all wet and open and on the edge of things, the whir of it echoing through her body like a song. She would perform that death-plummet for me and I would watch it all, close up. Testing the pulsations with the tip of my finger, breathing cold air over her when she gasped back into the world, her heart pounding.

She opened her unfocused eyes when I moved away from her, looking at my body as if I were something that she might eat. I hoped she would. I so hoped she would.

"Right back."

But when I returned she looked at the vibrator, small, yellow, an inoffensive stick of moulded plastic, and she stood and ran out naked onto the road.

She was wailing something about Richard, something about breaking up a beautiful relationship, she was drunk and slurry and I suspect it was not about Richard at all.

"It's bloody raining." Just a light drizzle, but I didn't want to be wrapped in a sheet in the rain in the middle of the road.

I felt something beside me and it was Richard. He rested his sleepy hand on my shoulder and watched Cyn, naked and teary in the light drizzle.

"You should go and get her."

"Every time I go anywhere near her she runs away."

He sighed. He was a small man, thin and slightly hunched and skittery as a foal. He stepped out into the rain in his pyjamas. Old man Pyjamas with blue vertical stripes. He was a gentle man. He put his hand around he naked waist and said something and she folded herself into him. He brought her back to the house, little slow steps, whispering all the time and stroking the soft curve of her hip. He brought her in and we sat and she wouldn't look me in the eye. She nuzzled into his shoulder and I saw the difference in her body, all of her pointing at him, breasts, nipples, knees, wanting him to touch her. He noticed. He gentled her away.

He wasn't straight and she wasn't gay and I wasn't particularly discerning but I had slept with both of them. I shook. My head. I made us all a pot of tea.

Death or Sex

The rope burns stood out, livid against the skin of his neck. He had tattoos and peircings before anyone had even thought to pierce themselves. He smelled of tobacco and weed and mulch as if he had been sleeping under a pile of fresh cut grass. Here were bruises on the inside of his arm and I thought I could smell the chemical tang of the drug fermenting under the tender pale skin there. He was at the end of it. Gone past the end of it. The end of it should have been an hour ago when he dragged a chair up to the end of the noose and broke a rotten beam with the dead weight of his surrendering body.

I knew him a little, not too well. We had spent some gentle moments together, the eye of the storm. He had made me tea. I had served him coffee, forgotten to charge him for it.

There was something dangerous about his pale naked body, the veins that stood out too brightly against his midnight skin, the sepia colour of him as if he were an old photograph, already fading. I kissed him on the mouth and felt the wet of his tongue and thought about disease.

He wanted to be inside me, just for a moment. Skin on skin, which is something I refused to do. His tears were acid. Each one a pain for me to bear. I ingested them. I had some of him inside me. It was a little thing to ease myself into his lap. Just for a moment. I felt his jilted death skulking in the corners of the room. I chased the thought of it away with the heat of my body, slippery with life. When he clung to my hips it was more despair than passion. I let him rest there, at the brink of it, although it contravened my rules. I settled and gave him my stillness. I felt his body calm. I touched the red welts on his neck. He arched his back and it was over. I didn't expect it, but the fact of it was there between us.

"I'm sorry."

He had touched life in me and I felt his death too close. An unfair exchange. I wanted to be angry but there was his life, as it was, stretching uncertainly for another day, perhaps more.

"Well, we won't do that again." I told him and we never did.

She Was In the Pool with Someone Else

When I came back from getting the take-away she was in the pool with the boy, hiked up onto the edge of it and with her legs dangling around his ears. I knew what he would be tasting, caramel, burnt with a vaguely earthy aftertaste that was not altogether pleasant.

Her head lolled to one side when I came in with the takeaway containers and set them down on the cane table. I sat down with them and watched and a chemical taste settled in my throat. His finger in the place my own finger had been. His tongue replacing mine feathering the little nub of her clitorus. No difference for her at all, and what I tasted was a reflux of jealousy.

"Come on," she said then, "Join us." But there was nothing I wanted less than his tongue anywhere near me. I didn't like him. Never had. He was a skulking canker in the house and I did everything I could to avoid him.

I watched him working on her and ate palak paneer straight out of the container and the heat of it obliterated the taste of her cunt.

"Join us" and she held out her pale flat breasts as if they were naan. I had forgotten to get naan. I wondered whether I should go back to the shop and get some. It was just a short walk down the road. When I returned he might just have finished eating her out in the pool. Or maybe not. She took forever to come, but that was just with me. Maybe she would be quicker with him. Maybe he'd stop before his jaw started to burn with the effort of it all.

"Just going to get naan." I told her. Not him. But he nodded anyway.

"Stay," she said, plaintively, "I thought you'd want to join us."

It was unkind to change the rules like this. 'You can sleep with anyone you like except that creepy flatmate' is not a particularly open minded kind of relationship. I wondered whether I should tell her that I wanted her exclusively, but when I watched her sprawled across the cold concrete, the little towers of her nipples rising from the flat pancakes, her pubic hair a thin red haze rising up to tickle his nose, I knew I didn't like her enough for that. I didn't like her enough to even sleep with her again.

"I'll be back in a minute."

But I lingered just outside the gate, enjoying the sweet haze of mock orange staining the warm night, feeling the rush of air in the wake of every car. My mouth tasted of cumin and chilli and I could just smell her juices on my fingertips, but when I had the naan in my hands there would just be garlic there and nothing more.

Breathaliser on your computer

I can't write my blog today because someone might read it.

I think back on this life that is half over or half begun and the inadequacies leap up and snap at me. I think about my manuscripts. Words that I have poured over, hoarded, worried at. Worn words, and frayed. I think about the process of catching beautiful ideas, bright flashes of life, fireflies that I have secreted in my bottom drawer till all the light is worn out of them. My real writing. The stuff of my dreams.

But here I am each day, weeding the true stories from my past and piling the clumps of dirt and limp spines of grass and the occasional wild flower in a heap littering the footpath outside my apartment for all to see.

So now my green waste moulders on the internet, stale and unread, at best glanced at, one click in a dozen. I have no control over how you read it and little control over how I tell it to you when I have to post something every evening.

So I did this and I did that and none of it is particularly interesting. And isn't it just a little sad to think of the middle aged woman disgorging her secrets, her badly fading youth discarded in someones bed so long ago. I think of nightclub singers, impersonators, people who perform with monkeys and it makes me uneasy. Sometimes I see a reflection of myself in someone elses romantic fiction and I am ashamed. Then I read something beautiful, bitter-sweet. I want to hug the pages or eat them and some glimmer of hope returns.

So anyway, there will not be a sexy blog today because the writer has developed acute performance anxiety.

I will, instead, mention an invention that I would like to release into the world. It is a breathalyser attached to your computer. Before you write a blog post or send an email you must blow under .05 on your computer or the thing will power down. You just can't click 'send' or 'publish post' until your blood alcohol has returned to a reasonable level.

Until I have invented this and it is on the market, expect a post tomorrow night and tomorrow. An 'I did this and this and this' ad naseum. Then one day there will be a complete memoir and the whole will be greater than the sum of it's parts.

Avoiding being home alone

I go out to write at cafes. It is too easy to waste your time with pornography when you are home alone. There is that bottom drawer with the toys and the Internet. I try to write but I am forever distracted. They have given me an office and I sometimes work in there. There is no internal lock which is important, but something happens when I write and my skin becomes electric and leaning on the table, brushing up against the paper-bin, feeling the slight breeze from the half open window behind the row of metal bars brings me back into myself. Sometimes I push a chair in front of the door and do it quickly, excited by the idea that someone might just barge in and find me with my hand down my skirt. Mostly I put myself in public where I can be trusted to remain chaste. Distracted by the crowds and the chatter. Saved from myself by everybody else.

I wonder if everyone is like this, trying to place distractions in the way of masturbation, filling their lives with high tea and breakfast with friends and walks down the park to stop themselves from becoming permanently hunched over their excitement, frigging till their sore.

It eats into my time like acid and now that he is away there is no one to distract me from myself, no one to check that I have not shut tight the blind eyes of my apartment, turned the volume of the computer to it's lowest point. The neighbours hear the buzz of my vibrator, climbing quickly through it's limited range. I imagine that they think it is a some kitchen implement. I am blending sauces. Lots of sauces. Sauce after sauce after sauce.

With my husband gone I have become a saucier.

Three Girls and an Appology

I agreed to it because I wanted to sleep with them. Both of them. Who wouldn't. They were beautiful. They were my height, the three of us all under 5'2", blond and sandy brown and breasts so pillowy that it was all I could do to stop myself from burying my head in their chests every time we had a conversation.

I wanted to ease those breasts out of their twin plunging necklines right then at the very mention of it.

"But not until we find a man who will sleep with the three of us together."

Ah. You see, here was the sticking point.

We listed names one after the other. Men we all wanted (one name). Men we could all tolerate (two names). Men one or the other of the girls would absolutely refuse to sleep with (a whole list of names stretching out over four blank pages). I didn't veto anyone. I just wanted to sleep with the two of them together and whoever the man was seemed superfluous.

One of the tolerable two found himself at our kitchen table. There were only two of us girls there, the third was still at work. We discussed it. The boy seemed amenable to the idea, and he, like myself, wanted too ease my flatmates plunging neckline down just a little. I watched him fumbling with the sheer fabric and I wished I had just got right down to it without waiting to be invited. His head fit snugly between the rise and fall of them. I saw peachfuzz, a flash of nipple-pink. She giggled. She seemed to enjoy the attention for a moment till she slipped away from the kneading of his fingers and settled herself back inside her dress. She told him to wait until it was a complete contingent.

The boy leaned back in his chair and locked eyes with me and lifted an eyebrow. I knew what he meant and he knew that I knew and I had found an unexpected ally in all of this. I could already see us down at the pub for a post coital beer, discussing the ins and outs of the thing, comparing and contrasting notes as if we had just sat through a game of soccer.

When we were finally in bed, he gave me a wink as if to say 'how good is this?' It was indeed fine. The girls were like unwrapped presents, pink and drenched in perfume and with hair that spilled out over each other's chests. Every part of them was fragranced. Each strand of hair dripping sweetness, the smooth shaved skin under their arms, the underside of the necks, both blooming with scent.

I would be a contrast to them. I would underline their femininity by my musky skin. My nipples olive, my flesh a dark tan, my hair too rough and wiry to run your fingers through. I kissed them each in turn, soft kisses scented with Cointreau, orange blossom tongues, the hard line of their teeth, and suddenly it was his mouth against mine. The boy that we could all tolerate. A battle of lips and cheeks and the roughness of his re-emerging stubble. He measured the generous bulk of my breasts in his palms and I wondered suddenly if I was something alien to him, not a boy, but something other than the perfumed paradise of girl-flesh. I broke away from the kiss and returned to the promise of breasts, such an animal urge to suckle, such an overpowering urge to bite down on the pillowy swell.

One of them got cold feet and it was over, almost before it had begun. The boy had submitted to the disappointment of a condom reluctantly, found his way inside me with more enthusiasm. They were lying down, the two of them, four breasts in a row. I was completely occupied with flesh. I suppose I was the easiest beginning for him. I was his place of entry and he took it. No preamble, no negotiation, just a sliding inside, a reaching over my shoulder. I felt his finger pinch the nipple that I was licking, I felt a thumb in my mouth. He was reading my actions like braille, touching the hard nipple, the soft wetness of my tongue. He was there at the point of our connection. I could feel him moving inside me and I wondered if I would be able to feel them through his body as well, lie on his back and edge his hips closer to theirs, force his thrusts to follow my preferred rhythms, slip my finger into their bodies beside his penis just as his thumb was nudging in to my own mouth in the wake of a nipple. He was moving towards this. I could feel him withdraw suddenly, shift to one side. I was ready to sidle over, on top of him when one of them told us to stop.

They left us alone in bed. First one of them, suddenly teary. Gasps of pleasure replaced by sniffing and sobs. The second was up and after her and the hot space where her body had been touching mine turned icy in a second. I lay in the bed and listened to the conversation playing out in the kitchen. The boy lay facing me. His brow a knot of complicated muscles flexing and relaxing in their confusion. I shrugged. If I was a real girl I would have understood. I would have explained the complex web of their emotional shifts and changes.

I just shrugged and rolled my eyes and knew then that I was different to them in some fundamental way.

The evening was over. I could tell by the little sniffles and the sound of the kettle being filled. I was all wound up and I wanted to finish what we had begun. I climbed on to him quietly. I didn't want them to know. I wanted to be in the kitchen with the girls, all female solidarity, but I had to finish this off first. He seemed to understand and he was ready for me. This in silence as if we were having an affair and the wives in the next room drinking tea and debriefing (endlessly debriefing) what we had begun together but were finishing without them.

We both closed our eyes and I was imagining the swell of breasts and the soft moist places that I had barely touched but that were livid in my memory. I buried my head in the pillow when I came and there was the smell of flowers and of fruit and somewhere, a hint of the true smell of them, something clean and earthy.

We rolled apart and listened. It was over, and we knew it. We dressed quietly and paused in the doorway.

"I feel like a beer," I told him, "and a cigarette."

He nodded, "The pub is just down the road."

We snickered. We steeled ourselves. We walked into the kitchen where the girls stopped and stared at us, and pulled their satiny robes around their soft pink bodies. I wondered why I didn't have a satiny robe. I sat beside the tolerable boy and listened as they explained the impossibility of it all to us. We nodded and made calming sounds, little grunts and sighs that made us seem understanding and sympathetic. They started from the beginning and explained it all again and again.

Eventually I yawned. "I should walk him to his car," I told them, placing an understanding hand on on of their shoulders.

We sat at the pub and I lit his cigarette from the end of mine and we drank beer.

"Well, that was something." he said and I grinned.

We sat and drank beer and said nothing until I remembered something I'd read in the paper about experiments with rats and mazes and he had read it too and then we talked about that until our glasses were empty. We hugged awkwardly, like blokes hug, stiff bodies bouncing off each other, and then he got in his car and drove home.

This Morning I Stepped on Someone's Abandoned Breasts

Reading and walking. There is an art to it. My feet skitter, twisting on cracked paving, the toes of my shoes thumping against tree roots thrusting up through the pavement. This morning, reading and walking I slipped and my heart sank. It could have been tragic, a dried little puddle of vomit, some Monday morning dog excretion in the middle of the path, an abandoned nappy, a bulging condom tied in a knot.

I stopped and looked back. I paused. I could feel the little furrow along the ridge of my brow deepening. Breasts. Someone's abandoned breasts tipped out onto the footpath and I had unwittingly stepped on the little latex cups.

No one would believe me, Krissy of the furious vagina. It was too perfect a fit. Sinisterly snug.

I took out my phone and cleared a space, deleting photographs of rotting fish and weed and the flash of a salmon jumping. I aimed the camera and snapped them up. Two perfect breasts, nipples kissing the dirty concrete, their lurid pink cups scooping sunlight out of the air.

Fisting.

see:

http://www.nerve.com/PersonalEssays/Kneen/Early-Exposure-Remembrance-of-nudie-pics-past/