Fortune Cookie #6

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 #6

Don't regret anything you do. Don't pretend you haven't done anything you've done. Transparency in sex is always the best policy. If someone accuses you of having done something with them and you can't remember doing it, then just say you did it. It is cleaner and easier that way.

The First Chapter

Sex addiction

She names it and I laugh. It sounds so clinical, as if she has transposed a disease onto my personality. I have climbed inside the novelty suit at the theatre. I am the joke act now, the sex-addict character in the play. I picture an ape, furiously masturbating in its enclosure. We see them at the zoo and we are certain that their behaviour has come from some place of damage.

“But I’m not a sex addict.”

She raises an eyebrow. I have known her since I was 18. She is the friend who has stuck by me longest. I look at her gorgeous luminous face, and I wonder why we have never slept together, not once in all these years. She sips at her coffee and watches me and I feel myself unpicked and when I am seamless there is nothing left of me but sex. I am my behaviour. I have been pathologised.

A sex addict.

I can feel the ugly monkey suit itching against my skin and for a brief moment I am repelled and also aroused by the image. I am used to this sudden rush of desire, the narcotic effect of the idea of sex, a prickly spread of it like heroin trickling through my body.

I am made of sex, I feed on the thought of it. I call myself Queer because there is no other word I know to describe this state of being indiscriminately sexual. Now she has made new words for me to worry over. Sex addict. An addiction.

I would like to tell her that I’m not addicted, that I could stop any time. It would be a joke and it would also be untrue. I can’t stop and I would not want to stop.

A young Asian man walks into the café and I glance at him and register his feminine beauty. Again the rush of pleasure. That comforting settling low in my belly. There was a time when I would have made some kind of contact with this man, smiled slipped over to his table, engaged in some light flirtation, heavier if he responded. There was a time when we might have ended up in bed together.

“If I am an addict then I have got it under control.”

“How many times a day do you think about sex?”

Almost constantly.

“How often do you masturbate?”

No more than twice a day, three times if I am bored, rarely more, unless I have to stay cooped up in the house all day.

I don’t need to answer her at all. She knows me almost as well as I know myself. She is perhaps my oldest friend.

“Heaps of people think about sex as much as I do. Men. I am just a man trapped inside a woman’s body.” A flippant throw away line and she laughs.

“Teenage boys, perhaps, but you are going to be 40 this year.”

I shrug.

“How many shrinks does it take to change a light bulb?”

“One,” she says, “but the light bulb has to want to change.”

I hold her delicately fingered hand and smile and I think about how deeply she could reach inside me with those elegant fingers. A wriggling fish of thought, fleeting, gone in a second, but there will be another and another, whole schools of thoughts flashing across my consciousness. The constant distractions of a sexual world wonderful and varied as the ocean, a world I could drown myself in and still die happily.

“I don’t think I’m a sex addict.”

I check my watch. Just enough time to catch a bus to work.

We stand and hug and there is her willowy body pressed against mine for just a moment. I rarely hug. Touching a stranger seems too intimate. Hugs are an open doorway to a flaring in my body and therefore I remove myself from these kinds of intimate gestures. No hugging, no kisses on the cheek, no holding hands unless I feel safe enough with the person I am touching. I feel that somehow they may feel the heat of my desire climbing up from my skin, that I may burn them with it.

My friend and I hug, my oldest friend. My safe and wonderful friend who has just now pinned me with her observation.

“You take care,” she tells me, and she means it. She always wishes well for me, my beautiful friend. I watch her walking away from me, graceful, slender, the tight line of her perfect breasts under a snug sweater and that liquid surge pumps through my brain. I am, of course, not a sex addict but as I watch her walk away from me I slip a lozenge of lust under my tongue as if it were a Lindt ball dissolving and vibrating in my veins.

I pause, then, and I wonder.

Free Drinks Free Food and the Ocean

There was no use struggling. The rip had caught me. If this was my last hour then it was a good one. She was on the beach, tired from her struggle. She had somehow found an edge to it and she stood naked on the shore. She would perhaps be cold now, caught by the storm, the adrenalin subsiding. She might be shivering or numb. Either way she would be beautiful with her salt slicked hair and her pale skin turning a bluish tinge.

The ocean was taking me away from her. I was glad of this. I had been gliding along in her wake for far too long. I had become pruned by my moist desire for her. I had lost pieces of myself to the nip of fish. I let the water take me gently out into the thud of heavy rain. The sky lit up, a sudden realisation catching the edge of clouds. Below me there would be sharks. All of this, and me relaxing into it.

Eventually she would return to the tent, and the man with his muscles. The man who put up the tent. We barely knew him, but he was here, sleeping beside us, carrying our bags. He was here for the tent. She needed someone to put up the tent. I bobbed into the dark and the memory of me trying to take one of the bags.

"No." she told me, "that's what he's here for." To carry our bags. To put up our tent, to buy us drinks at the marina. I look at men differently through her eyes, but I am uncomfortable in this new incarnation of myself.

Let me tell you about the time she went to the supermarket. I have remembered this story so often I wonder if I might be repeating myself. No money for food. We have both whittled away our savings. There is nothing left. There is a packet of lentils in the cupboard that my grandmother has sent to us. She lies on the couch listening to The Cocteaux Twins. She rolls her eyes at my concern.

"I will get us some food. Write me a list."

She writes the list for me because I imagine that she will prowl the supermarket in a big coat, slipping cans and packets into the various pockets. I have seen her take things before, not often, but I have seen it. I suppose there will be some leniency if we are only stealing a loaf of bread. Okay. Bread then, but she writes Camembert and polenta and marinated olives. She makes a note for coffee and for milk and for cream. Cake, she writes. She has a sweet tooth, chocolate, and because she knows that it is my favourite she writes LINDT in capital letters beside this. She creates a feast of eggplant and haloumi cheese and extra virgin olive oil.

I slump onto the couch just as she bounces out of it.

She changes, a short silk skirt, her best bra with white flowers embroidered onto it, a low cut shirt that shows off the bouquet in the places where it rests on the delicate curve of her breast. She wears lipstick and she smells like an ornamental garden in spring. Beautiful.

She returns. She returns with a man driving a red sports car - are you sure I haven't told you this already? The scene is tattooed onto the tip of my tongue. He is attractive, dressed in a casual but expensive suit. He is rich. I can smell it on him. He is holding four shopping bags in each hand. I suppose he is not used to lifting such a weight. I notice his fingers trembling, but it is probably because she is standing in front of him in that short skirt and an obvious lack of underwear.

Groceries. Brie, olives, a nice white box for a desert, proper cake from a proper baker.

Her lipstick is perfect. She hasn't even kissed him. She doesn't kiss him goodbye. She giggles. She allows him to leave the bags on the front step and she waves as if he were already a long way away. I suppose he was.

I remember this as I drift out into the wild night. Storm, rain, her standing exhausted on the beach. If this is my last hour then I am fine with it. I see her raise her fingers a little, a tiny anemone wave, but I am already quite far away.

Balloons

She holds my head in her lap and tells me to breathe deeply. People are running inside my chest, big men, hurdling, running and jumping and thumping down on my ribs. I am filled with athletes and my arms are locked and rigid over my chest. She tells me "breathe", and I take a halting breath that is half a sob and I smell her secret musky odour under the sweet floral perfume, and it makes me even more agitated.

I am the gnarled and gnomic Rumpelstiltskin from the fairytale. I am all spit and struggle. She is a part of the problem offering a solution. She is the vessel for my lust and I fill her up. She kisses my tears and I could love her or I could hit her and I am bouncing from one state to the next like someone leaping from rock to rock in an ice-capped stream.

"Imagine," she tells me, "that for every breath there is a balloon filling."

Balloons. She has learned this trick in one of her self-help sessions. I feel my chest tightening at the use of this ridiculous self-delusion. I have lived with her affirmations pinned to the wall in the toilet, tolerating her silent platitudes for the sake of her extraordinary beauty. Now she hugs me and I struggle away from her.

"Release the balloons," she tells me, "one by one." Someone elses words from her ripe, over-blown mouth. Her mouth that I have bitten. Her mouth that I have pressed my nipple against, a mouth that has never sullied itself against my vagina. Her perfect mouth.

The balloons slip from my fingers one by one.

When they are gone, floating off into the angry pale of the sky. There is nothing left for me to hold on to.

I roll out of her empty hug and I am gone. I have already left the room.

"That's right," she tells me, "let go of the balloons, one by one by one."

One by one by one and it is all gone. I am gone. She is gone. There is nothing left to hold onto and my chest eases out of the vice that has gripped it. I leave the room. I leave the house. I leave that life. And I am gone.

Judgement day

I wrote a blog post and two thirds of my audience tuned out. One fell swoop. I lost them. I know this because of my stats counter, the little button at the bottom of the page that opens to a Pandora's box of wonder and terror. We check it obsessively, we, the bloggers. We watch the number of return visitors climbing, falling, little flurries of excitement at particular times for no reason, little slumps on fine days when our audiences would rather be at the beach.

My hit rate had reached a climax. There were hundreds of people who stumbled upon Furiousvaginas using key words that make me laugh - 'cheesy penis fug', 'fatslap', 'horse vagina','watch I am furious yellow'. These people wouldn't stay. They would stumble upon my site and click away again without reading a word. The ones I care about are the returning visitors. The people who seek me out, read a post or two before turning back to their daily grind. These are the people I am conversing with. They are you.

You were a weighty congregation. You were tuning in, in the hundreds, day after day after day. I was buoyed up by the force of you. I wrote for myself but I knew that you would be there with me. It made me less alone with it.

Then there was that night. That post. That clinging on to the world with my fingertips, all wakeful pacing, a surrealists nightmare of spiral staircases, whirlpools, the merry-go-round of a thousand disparate ideas. I wrote that blog post on that night, and, what's worse, I posted it. A line had been crossed. I knew it. 150 return viewers clicked in to read about my secret world. 125 of them found themselves taken aback, challenged, confronted. They left and they were never seen again.

One true and awful thing. But still a thing of beauty in its own way. It is perhaps my favourite post, the one that I come back to. My dark secret, flung into the spotlight.

Now there are fewer of you, no more than 26 a night, a solid group of readers who are not afraid to wade out into water beyond their depth.

"You should learn from this," my husband says, "why are you always pushing people away? That's why you never get published. You write stuff that no one wants to hear. It's all one big 'fuck you'."

But all I have ever wanted is to write one true and beautiful thing. One true and awful thing that can be beautiful. I watch Michael Haneke films and there it is, that true and beautiful and awful thing, again and again and again.

I watch my stats counter less often now.

Haneke's new version of 'Funny Games' opened to less than enthusiastic audiences in America. Gerard Donovan's 'Julius Winsome' should have won the Booker but instead it has been rejacketed in B format as if it were a cheap crime novel. Cormac McCarthy's 'Child of God' is a book that all my years of bookselling has not helped me to sell. Readers prefer Jeffrey Eugenides' 'Middlesex' to 'The Virgin Suicides' because 'Middlesex' makes them smile.

Krissy Kneen will write what Krissy Kneen writes and not everyone will sit comfortably with that. I could change and learn from my mistakes and write something that the publishers will like, something fine and interesting and funny and sexy. I could become the person that you want me to become. But I am not.

I sit down each day and there is just me and the blank box on my screen and I am answerable to myself alone. Myself, and the 15 people who tuned in to Furiousvaginas yesterday and the 15 people from the night before. It is just you and me really. We are alone with this, and I will continue to dig through my history in search of the handful of true and beautiful things that lie beneath the surface of my skin.

Dead Lovers

There was that one who drowned himself. There was the one who overdosed on pills. There was the one who was incautious with his needles and lax with his medication. There was the multiple stabbings, a near miss. There was the one who didn't do it but who said it would be my fault if he did. There was the one who slept with me on his resurrection, a broken beam, and rope buns and a second chance. Where is he now? We wonder, but we don't hold out much hope.

There are the corpses of them bobbing up through my dreams and banging against the underside of my eyelids. There was that time drunk on the motorcyle without a helmet, there was that other time, and the next and the next and I would hold my breath waiting for yet another turn for the worse, but I have never been into auto-asphyxiation.

Death and sex. I tip my hat to George Batailles. Death is so close, a thin pale membrane like a hymen. Once broken it could never be repaired.

Goodbye

Where is the line between flirting and falling? Who will be the object of my next affectionate moment? When does the moment become a long, interminable series of moments? When do I become inexorably entwined, flinging my self-respect on the pyre of passion? Patterns. Maps. I am decoding. I am identifying the warning signs. I am saving myself from the possibility of uncontrollable passions. Fatal attractions.

I saw one of those fatal attractions today. The hardest one. The one I have found most difficult to extract myself from. He walked into the bookshop. He recognised me, which was a positive development. We had ended in a screaming match which cleared the whole building. The residents of several flats evacuating as if a fire alarm had been sounded. I had had six months of silence, hoping that my easy going nature would win his heart. I had already wrestled his body from his clothing and climbed it from all angles, a mountain to conquer. I had conquered. His heart was another complication, and one that was too difficult for me to locate.

We had struggled through a period of time cohabiting. His only rule was that we would not have sex while we slept under the one roof. I agreed to this, thinking he would succumb to lonely sexless evenings. He proved to be a master of abstinence. My flat had no doors, and my furtive masturbation had to be played out late at night, after he had settled, curled up against the belly of his guitar, warm from music.

Now we faced each other after all these years.

"Hello." He didn't' remember my name. I said his into the silence that came after.

"So what are you doing?" He was half here, half gone. Nothing had changed.

"Working here, writing." I handed him a card with this address. The key to my innermost secrets, my furiousvaginas, my crazy head-long shout into the dark emptiness of cyberspace. He is the repetition of a theme. There are moments of our time together glaring defiantly out from amongst the flotsum and jetsum of a my online rant. He might recognise himself, or perhaps he will find himself transformed beyond recognition by my affections.

I considered myself to be in love with him. I never said the word but I was bitten by the idea of his disdain for me. Mauled by it. Ravaged.

The night after I met my husband I sought him out and laid it all flat in the night. Pieces of a puzzle, none of them connecting. Was there any chance that this might change? This terrible holding pattern, this ridiculous to-ing and fro-ing with me on the advance and him on the retreat. I would have abandoned my potential future, a turning point. I wanted him to tell me to turn back but he refused. He told me I had nice eyes. He stroked my hair away from them and let me go.

So then the slow hiss of our daily grind and him in the flat next door and me, distracted from the potential for something long and enduring right there in the bed beside me, listening for the plucking of strings and the voice that sounded like a broken heart. Then the day when the hiss became a shriek. Boiling over. Everybody left their respective flats and congregated on the front lawn of the tumble-down house, looking up, shading their eyes, as if to catch the rare moments of a solar eclipse. All those things I said. All those true things shouted. And him pinned by the force of it, saying, 'now I respect you. now'.

Now.

"OK then," I said, and, "Bye."

A farewell to things long gone. A farewell to madness and the kind of passion that could kill a girl. A farewell to youth and what little beauty I had once laid claim to. Farewell then. Farewell.

So I sit at the end of a week of farewells and I am emptied out. I am solid with love and support and the scaffolding of a life unfolding day by day. I have friends I love and I spend my spare time punching down the possibility of loving them too much, too fiercely. I am exhausted by the effort.

"You look flat," she tells me as we share a lift later in the afternoon.

Flat. Emptied. Hollow. Sad.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. I have said it so often this week that the word rolls off my tongue.

"Really? I'm OK." I tell her.

And really, truly, I am OK.

I am.

Dark Night of the soul

Dark night of the soul when there is no sleep anywhere but in the slack face of this strange lover. Flaccid penis heady with cheesy sleep-fug, hair sweating into my pillow. Dead to my pacing and my wringing of hands.

Sex like a drug buzzing in my bloodstream. I am calmed by the pheromones the chemical release that accompanies an orgasm. Still I am all wound up. I am awake and pacing and I would run out into the dead night, the hot night teeming with the little scuttering of cockroaches, the insect hum of traffic lights. I am held to this prison of my own bedroom by this sleeping stranger who may wake to an empty house.

What if he wakes and I am gone? Will he leave? Will he take something of mine with him? What is mine to take? I have nothing of great value, an armful of photographs torn from magazines, some notebooks with words more precious to me than jewels, some paperbacks, scuffed with love, the pages all turned down and underlined.

The walls are a cage and I bump against them in my flurry. I think of lionesses, baboons loping back and forth in their lumber to escape.

The boy will wake in an empty flat and he will think badly of me. Odd predatory girl, a house full of twigs and fairy lights, the frightening intensity of the lovemaking, the strange post-coital pacing. All wound up.

I should wake him and make best use of him, another shot of my drug, another round of mouths and fingers and genitals.

I read somewhere that nymphomaniacs are obsessed by sex because they cannot achieve orgasm. This is not my problem. My problem is the space between orgasms, the terrible chasm of daily life, the social imperatives, the pointless living. I press my face against the window and look at all that wakeful night. A thousand places to run off into.

Soon, I whisper into the balm of dark. I will not bring strangers home tomorrow night. Tomorrow night I will escape and race through the electric buzz of the sleeping city in peace.

The First Orgasm

The wonderful thing about felt pictures is the way you can rub them on your upper lip and they feel like comfort. They are simple shapes cut out of bright colours. The felt sticks to itself with a satisfying grab. If you get too close all the colours blend into each other and the shapes disappear. A horse is no longer a horse. A house is not a house.

I have become obsessive about felt pictures. I lie on the scratchy carpet, pushing my body down against the short pile. The television is on, Playschool or Sesame Street or some other inane burble of music and rhyme. This is childhood. I beg for a can of mushed peas and carrot and am suddenly disappointed. I am no longer a baby. I am growing older. How is it possible that I no longer enjoy mushy peas?

What I do enjoy is felt pictures. Especially lying like this, with my hips pressed against the carpet and the delightful pressure on a full bladder, full of milk, no doubt, a lovely innocent pressure and the feel of sunlight burning a window shape on my calves. The colours are the best. Red horse, orange horse, yellow, all of a palate. I save the blues and greens for the other corner of the felt board. I hoard fish and cabs and grass and green houses for the cool colour end of things. I am sleepy and the colours blend into each other. They blend into the throb of a full bladder and when I cross my legs over each other there is an even greater pleasure. I can hear my mother clattering through the washing up. On television, they are singing about a rainbow, which seems significant as I gather all the fire-hued felt into it's appropriate corner.

Colour. I see colour. I feel heat and pressure and the edges of everything become indistinct. I hover at the edge of a thought. Perhaps I will fall asleep mid horse. I arrange the horses one next to another next to another. All the orange horses. Perhaps I will wet myself. Perhaps I will urinate on the scratchy carpet. The pressure builds, my eyelids droop, I see orange and red and there is a smell to it, a burned caramel sweetness and I breathe in deeply wondering what it could be.

When I fall over the edge of it I am surprised. Pleased. Surprised. It is as if I have succumbed to colour. I am filled with it, and full of the idea of smell. My skin is burning with all kinds of blue. The down on the back of my neck is sweet as honey. My body pulses in the aftermath of this transformation.

This is my first orgasm. I can name it now. I can re-live it. But back then, at the beginning of things there was no line between the colours and the heat and the scent. After this moment I fell in love with the process of making pictures with felt. I came back to this activity again and again and again and again.

Honesty

I think perhaps I use sex as a way of avoiding a serious connection. If I feel uncomfortable in conversation I avoid it by bypassing emotional intimacy for something more raw and physical. Of course now, in this new, married incarnation of myself I cannot rely on this simple magician's trick to sweep away the awkwardness. I struggle with my need to break through the surface of things. I avoid a casual hug. I shy away from massages. I fill the silences with a million unfinished projects which must be completed in a blind hurry. I have so many friends that I have no friends. When I am alone with my own company I trawl the internet for porn to save me from an awkward silence being alone with myself. I see myself as some hard shelled crustacean. Opening to a scrap of soft pink nothing.

Invisible friend

I have an invisible friend.

My invisible friend speaks with my own voice. He is twin to me. He shares my insecurities. I gift him with my lowest moments and my secret dreams. He is myself only whittled down to a more pleasing shape, a mirror to the best places in my soul.

There is a playful familiarity to our time together. There is idle, but silent, chatter and the kind of banter that I have shared with a long procession of invisible friends since childhood. There are adventures to be had and the kind of fun that kids share, without the adult intervention that can dull a fine evening.

I imagine us into a spa bath, my invisible friend and I. I can feel the jets shooting out onto my skin, the perfect position for the force of water, half crouched, half submerged, half covered in the coy placement of the foam. I have never had a spa bath with a real friend. There has only ever been still water. I imagine glasses of wine balanced cheekily on the slippery edge. I imagine chaste conversation and the pleasant chafing of skin on skin. Stray fingers, placed on thighs to illustrate one point or another. My imaginary friend touches me under the suds with my own hand, an auto-erotic pleasure that I can credit to someone else in my imaginings.

Alone and in my own time I can sneak into the fantasy of this invisible friend finding himself in a sudden lack of conversation. I imagine a kiss, a soapy slip of the fingers, just enough to topple me over the edge and down again into that earthy plummet.

My imaginary friends have never left my side, a pack of them, a gang. And here he is now, the one that speaks in my own tongue the special mirror image of myself. He has stalked me out of my childhood play and at night I nestle onto my side and into the hug that we have shared since I was a lonely, unattractive girl.

"But you are attractive" he tells me, "sexy" and the way he says it, it might be my own inflection. My own voice. Myself, surprisingly, liking myself.

Bound

He tied me to a pole because I asked him to. He used duct tape and he secured my wrists with it. There was the mattress within reach but only close enough to rest my head on. He tied a sock around my face but I could still see if I opened my eyes and squinted.

There was something strangely domestic about the morning. He filled the sink and I could hear the clatter of plates jostled together in the soapy water. Upstairs a similar scene was being repeated, our land lady washing her own dishes, a domestic parallel without the girl tied to the pole in the middle of the room.

The floor was concrete and I felt the chill bite of it in my knees. He had tied my hands low and with so little give that I could stand but not straighten. Kneeling was best. I knelt, resting my head on the pillow of my bound palms. My back arced up, my bottom raised. I knew where this was leading.

I imagined that he would look up from the dishes and watch me. I wondered if I looked ridiculous in submission, if he was grinning with the humour of it all. Perhaps he watched impassively, clocking the time by the fading heat of the water. I heard him empty the sink and fill it again. Time passing. The slow drip of dishes drying. The television upstairs chattering about nothing to no one.

My skin became my eyes. I felt the fingers growing out of my back, wriggling like an anemone, my tentacles of awareness picking out the slight changes in the breeze and temperature. If someone had photographed me like this there would have been a hazy outline, Curlian photography would have picked out the little bubble of awareness that enveloped me. I thought about the boy upstairs, his previous lover. The boy upstairs watching football on television as his mother did the dishes, and in the downstairs parallel universe, my lover, his ex-lover and me tied to the pole.

I grew restless. I wanted to call him over to me. I wanted his hands and his body and some relief from this stretching out of my skin.

He took his time over it. I imagine that he spent an age over the drying because he wanted me to enjoy my time of longing, but I am not sure I enjoyed the long minutes of waiting. When he came to me finally, I could have ripped the duct tape off the pole and finished in a second but I did nothing. Said nothing. He examined me, lifting, pulling, separating. I felt his hands still dripping with dish washing liquid. Of course I knew how this would end, but still there was the little shivery thrill of anticipation as he traced the ridge of bone arcing down from the centre of my back, slipping his finger over, but not into my anus, and hooking it into my vagina, testing the viscosity of the dampness there.

I think of dissection tables, dead things tied down, paws and legs splayed, belly's exposed to the glare of fluorescent light. The fact that this arouses me is perhaps a problem. The erotic appeal of the medical experiment has become a recurring theme.

It was the idea of him watching me like that, the openness, the vulnerability. There was no question that he would, eventually penetrate me, but he took his time. The joy is not knowing exactly when, and exactly where. The joy is the anticipation.

Of course it would end as expected but it was the time of waiting that made it particularly distinct. A shivery moment of breath on the skin, a sense of exposure, a vulnerability. Someone watching or not watching, but never knowing which. I remember the hot cold of the afternoon and the disappointment of the inevitable ending. The sound of his ex-boyfriend turning off the television at the moment of his orgasm, a sudden silence and the slight, pleasurable pain of his withdrawal. The normalcy of a Sunday morning creeping into afternoon.

I will always remember this, perhaps. I remember it now.

Gerry Bellino's Christmas Party

That night we went to Gerry Bellino’s Christmas party by accident, Eve and I. We were looking for Club Afro Caribe. My feet were blistered and sore. We sat and watched a fat man sweat under dim lights, his p’s like little explosions against his microphone. He made jokes about Italians. Mafia references. Some people laughed. I didn’t. I told Eve that I thought, perhaps, we had come to the wrong place.

“Gerry Bellino walked into this bar-“ said the man on the stage, the beginning of a joke at our host’s expense. We looked at the sad tinsel dripping off the nicotine stained walls. A Christmas party. Gerry Bellino’s Christmas party.

I stood up. I looked towards the door. A man was walking towards us. His hand was large and warm on my shoulder. He called us ladies and asked us to stay.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I thought this was Club Afro-Caribe.”

“Mr Bellino would like you to stay.”

Eve was anchored to her seat. Eve wanted to stay. Free drinks. An adventure. I could see now that every man in the room had noticed her. I could see her basking in the attention. This was that night. The same night. I could feel exhaustion settling in my ankles like sand.

*

That was the night. This is the day. This interminable day. All dank-sock sweat and uphill trudge. It is a train then a bus then another bus. Then, at the end of this marathon of public transport there is a climb and I can see the beads of moisture forming on Eve’s forehead, bubbling up from under her makeup. I should have worn makeup. Her lipstick should be called open-wound red. They look bloody and swollen. It makes her seem vulnerable I reach out and link my fingers between Eve’s and her hand is slick with sweat. Our fingers slip away from each other. She stops to blot her forehead with the back of her hand. A fat drip makes a slow trail down my back and I feel it nestle between my buttocks, wetting the flesh, a snail-trail travelling incrementally downwards.

“Should I have worn make-up?” I ask.

Eve shrugs. She is gorgeous. Her blonde hair is wind-mussed. She smells ripe with body-heat and perfume. I haven’t worn perfume. I don’t own perfume. I could have worn some of hers. She has a collection of little bottles cluttering her bedside table. When I lift them to my nose I remember her naked flesh, bursting with the overblown sweetness of fruit and flowers. My back teeth ache with the desire to bite down on her nipple. I have never thought to use her techniques of seduction, her scents and her shampoos, her blush and her berry lipsticks. Now, catching my breath, half way up this hill in the dry-roast of suburban Runcorn, I begin to wonder whether I should have had an extreme makeover before venturing out.

“You look fine,” Eve tells me, by which she means; you look sweaty and unkempt and not particularly femme.

“We’re almost there, aren’t we?” hopeful, staring up yet another hill, checking the map to see if there is an easier way around. There isn’t. We flap the damp fabric of our shirts. A whiff of her perfume.

“Sweaty is fine,” I tell her. Sweat is actually sexy.

We continue to climb.

*

I don’t know what we were expecting, but this isn’t it. The boy is too young. He is wearing boardshorts and a Hawaiian shirt. No shoes. The flat is small and smells faintly of mould. The carpet is threadbare in places and there are several empty XXXX cans crushed onto a breakfast bench dividing the loungeroom from the kitchen. The boy is perhaps 19, perhaps 20. By the time I am inside his apartment, I have decided that I don’t want the job but I have no way of communicating this to Eve.

“We saw your add in the paper.” Eve has turned on the charm, a thick dollop of it, oozing out from under her heavy lidded eyes. Flirtation is her weapon. She aims it expertly at the boy. I see him waver under the onslaught. All his Christmases standing at his front door. Eve is the jackpot. I am a distraction.

"Yes indeedee." he says. He is ridiculous. I glance at the slight tenting of his boardshorts. Eve has this effect on all the boys. "Glad you could come ladies," double entendre intended.

The sweat is drying on my back making my skin cold despite the weather.

"How does this work?" Eve asks, eyelids stuttering low.

"Well," he is nervous. He scratches his elbow and I notice a wide patch of scaly red where the skin has been scraped raw. "After the audition, we just take bookings. Get this thing rolled out. How's that sound?"

Audition. Sounds like a hollow thud. Sounds like I'm back in drama school, sounds like panic attack and it smells like that acrid reek of phobia that stains the dressing-room walls nicotine yellow. Eve is nodding.

"It is a double act." She coos, her bedroom voice tickling his already attentive ball-sac.

"All things are up for negotiation." He grins. Leers. He is an ugly boy.

She is nodding, but I am already shaking my head.

*

That night we went to Gerry Bellino's Christmas party. We thought that Club Afro Caribe was on that night, at that venue. Eve liked Club Afro Caribe. I often went and sat with a beer just watching her dance. Everyone always watched her dance. The Italian man asked us to stay and I knew that Eve wanted to, but I declined.

"There's this English guy, this Irish guy, and this Italian, right?" The man on the stage was snickering as if even the idea of the joke was funny.

I told them I was tired, and I was, and I walked out of the bar, thinking that Eve might stay. She didn't. She walked home with me instead.


In the loungeroom, slipping off our shoes, I told her that I didn't want to work for the pimple-faced boy and she told me that she already knew it.

*

In the bedroom, lying, side by side without touching, I asked her if I smelt bad, like a wild animal, a bat or a possum or even a fox. She giggled and shifted so that her fragrant hair fanned out over her pillow.

"Don't be silly," she said, which wasn't really an answer.

"You only tolerate me because you think that men find you more sexy when you're a lesbian." I said, not expecting an answer.

"Go to sleep." she said.

And eventually I did.

Key words

I checked my stat counter today, so much information about the people that have visited this site and how they came here.

These are the words that have brought you to me and it makes me smile:

Diy vibrator
Vibrator DIY
Diy vibrator motorbike
Older Vaginas
Hymen Midget
Penisfisting
Bill Henson
Watch I am furious yellow.

Sniffing Fragrant Vaginas
Vaginas
Dealing with Rejection
Rejection Collegue
Inserting carrot into vagina
The big vaginas.com
Why is my toilet block
Head job

Deflowering
Deflowering the virgins
Free deflowering virgins
Denueve, Catherine
Cat Vagina
Deflowering virgin girls
Beautiful virginas
Truck vagina
Yellow Swimming Trucks

would put or insert or shove * in my or her pussy or vagina or cunt -myspace -youtube -torrent -scribd

Furious inspiration pictures
Krissi spit swallow
Horse headjob
Bestial pregnancies
Horse in my vagina
Horse in vagina
Do Horses have Foreskins

picnic in a vacant lot

I gave him an address on a note card. "Meet me at-" I left a time and a place. "Dress, Formal". I had seen him at the restaurant and I liked the look of him. There was perhaps a moment of flirtation. I wrote the note and had it delivered to him by one of the other staff. High romance.

I thought about him all afternoon as the food was cooking. A lasagnia. A dish that was easy to transport, It would stay hot, wrapped in a tea towel, and if the boy didn't turn up I could take it all back home and we could dine on it for several nights. We didn't have enough money to be wasteful with food.

It all fit into the one basket, two plates, the cuttlery, the food, the wine and two dozen candles. There was a bit of work in setting the candles in their paperbags. I had to clear away long grass, chip packets, an abandoned shopping trolley. It looked quite pretty when it was done, the picnic blanket in the centre of a flickering glow. I had worn an evening gown and heels. The heels sank into the loose earth when I walked. There were insects. I checked my watch and poured myself a glass of wine. He wouldn't be coming. He was late. I had decided that I should eat my portion anyway and watch the stars. A picnic for one in a vacant lot. I had brought a book and I would read by candlelight.

I was therefore surprised to see him, dressed in a suit and with a remarkably comic bow tie. The bow tie should have been a warning for me but it wasn't. He just looked quite beautiful and he loomed above me, looking at the world of candlelight that I had created and he had a good laugh. He told me I was completely mad and I poured him a glass of wine.

He wanted to sleep with my flatmate.

Of course there was the romance of the situation, some kissing, the furtive squeeze of a breast. The vacant lot was only a few houses away from our own and we threw the blanket on top of the dirty plates and kicked dust onto the candles, watching the scraps of paperbag catch fire and drift up towards the sky. The air was alight with hope and there was laughter and holding hands.

She met us at the door. I had forgotten my key and she opened the door in her nightgown. It was a little scrap of white fabric and she looked like an angel with her perfect body and her halo of brushed blonde.

I felt him shift and he let my hand slip away. His whole body turned towards her as if she were the fireplace on a cold night. My fingers caught chill and I rubbed them against my thigh to warm them.

Bad to worse.

There is a kind of man who will not use a condom, a generation of boys just a little older than myself who were unmoved by the vision of the grim reaper. We lie naked beside each other and the condom is a little flaccid thing, drooping between my fingers which is some small indication of the evening ahead of us. I am exhausted by negotiation and I let him slip inside me just for a short while. I am exhausted by my own efforts. The note writing, the cooking, the set-decoration for the vacant lot, the condom negotiation. I lie beneath him with my knees drawn up to my chest and my toes pressing against his nipples and all the joy has gone out of the thing. I push him away with my feet. There is the wet sound of our parting. I nestle down to finish the job with my mouth but there is no reciprical gesture. Instead he tells me that he is impressed by the idea that I could suck his penis when it is ripe with the taste of my own juices. Of course he has not tasted my juices.

"So tell me about your flatmate."

Perhaps this is when I begin to hate him. I pull away from his body which is firm and long and un-haired. A perfect body and a golden mane fanning out on the red satin pillow.

"Are you interested in my flatmate?"

"I'm just asking." he says and pushes his hips closer to me. I pull away.

"She's beautiful," I tell him and he agrees. I can feel him on me, his aftershave smeared onto my chest, his spit on my lips, a smear of his pre-come on my stomach. I watch his perfect penis bounce excitedly at the mention of my flatmate.

"She's still up. You could go talk to her, she'll probably make you a cup of tea."

He is climbing into his suit pants, pushing his erection down under the belt of it, dragging his collared shirt up and over his head. He stands on my bed, dishevelled and beautiful.

"You want a cup of tea?"

I shake my head.

He leaves the door open as if he is expecting to find his way back inside it. I close the door and lie back on thee bed and think about the little sparks of burning paper bag floating up into the night sky. There is something underneath me and I scratch up a wormy withered condom. I pull it back like a sling-shot and snap it up towards the pressed metal ceiling. It arcs up, not quite managing to hit the roof and falls, limp and vulnerable to the bed beside me.

Crush

I am capable of obsession. I knew this when I turned 16. I thought of nothing but him. I sat next to him. We played the same instrument in the band and there were his beautiful, delicate fingers on the keys. His clarinet case was always neat and perfectly ordered. I threw my reeds in with unruly abandon they were split and stained and had chips knocked out of the finely shaved wood. He cleaned his metal keys until they shone. I hid the crusty verdigris under my sweaty fingers. I was a mess. His organisation underlined my disorder.

There was also the passion he had for his music. We sat in class and listened and I could see him following the rise and swell of the music with that intensity that still moves me in a lover. The kind of monofocus that plunges me into a book that I am reading, and obliterates the real world for the duration. There was also his shy humour, the delicate arrogance of youth. All this made him irresistible to me.

And then there was the weight of my virginity.

I'm not sure when my daydreaming tripped over from the thought of him leaning across my shoulders to help me with my fingering, to the thought of him naked, prising my virgin knickers down over my thighs. This was the pre-sex kind of sexual tension, ripe with possibilities that can never eventuate in any physical beginning. I stopped sleeping. Refused to eat. I lost eight dress sizes in six months. Sex rumbled in my belly like a tapeworm. By the time I asked him and he turned me down there was barely anything left of me at all.

Author Photo on the Back Jacket

Don't look at the author photo on the back jacket. It just spoils the whole thing. Don't go to writer's festivals and meet them, or watch them on day-time talk shows. At best you get studied performance, at worst you hear a shattering of dreams.

I make the mistake of wanting them all lined up inside my bedroom like hand maidens. I imagine that I want them to read to me as I make love. I imagine that making love to them one at a time would be akin to taking their variously beautiful books off the shelf and plunging, whole-bodied into them one by one, oiling myself with Ondaatje, curling up with Crace, immersing myself in Donovan or Nin or Delilo, imagining that they would be as skilled lovers as they are wordsmiths.

Michael Ondaatje writes like an angel and he speaks like one too, quiet and kind of monotone in a voice that can send you to sleep before the completion of a sentence. He is a gentle man and a thoughtful man and quite attractive in his own way, but when he reads from a book we hear an angel's soothing lull and it is difficult to see the passion behind the words.

I have lined up several body doubles for the back jacket of my first published novel. I am quite attracted to the author photo of Zadie Smith who looks young and beautiful and quite intelligent. I also know some very beautiful people who would not sue me if I used their photograph to advance my career, I am always open to suggestion.

Pornography

Someone had a photograph of a woman with a carrot in her vagina. This was the day of the school swimming carnival. I never participated in sport, bringing notes from my mother to make sure that I would be exempt.

This day, however, was a hot day, a languid summer day smelling slightly acidic like the juice of an ant squashed between your fingertips.

I have always loved to swim. I swim very slowly but I can swim for hours at a time without tiring. I love the breathy rythm of it, the way the surface of the water creeps above your ears, obliterating the world.

I signed up for the 200 metres.

I lay on a towel in the sun.

There were whispers about the photograph before anyone had seen it. Apparently the red-haired boy had it in his bag. I thought about how it would be to put a carrot in my vagina. I thought about how I smuggled candles into my bedroom sometimes and used those late at night when no one could see me. I knew it would be the same as using a carrot, but somehow the idea of a vegetable inserted into someones vagina was something that played on my mind.

I thought about how if she had a photo taken, then there would have to have been a photographer watching her insert the carrot into her vagina. I wondered if he had watched her do it, if she had gone into the next room like an artists' model and emerged with the carrot properly inserted, removing the light cotton sheet from around her shoulders, then lying or sitting with the carrot artfully arranged on the divan.

My race was next. I had never been in a race before. I had never worn my swimmers in front of my peers. I wondered suddenly if I should have signed up for the race at all. I still had the note from my mother, but would it now be too late to table it and have myself scratched from the starting block?

I was wondering this when someone brought me the photograph. Not a real photograph, but a picture of one torn from a magazine. Sepia. Old. It reminded me of the elegantly posed portraits of our great grandmothers. Only this grandmother was not wearing any clothes and there was a carrot in her vagina.

I needed to take my school dress off. I was wearing my bathers underneath. Everybody else had already changed into their bathers and lay in the lazy spread of the hot bleachers or flat on their backs with their knees spread to make an even tan. I could never lie like that. I folded the photograph into the novel that I had been reading, even though Wendy Jones was waiting to see it, and stashed it deep inside my schoolbag. I didn't want to remove my dress in front of everybody but they had called my race and everyone else was already standing near the edge of the pool. I pulled the sack of check fabric over my head. The corner of it snagged on my glasses. New ones, pink government issue glasses with little upward curls at each edge. In a few days I would lose them as I always did and it would be six months before I could get a new pair. I wondered when my mother would tire of replacing them. I folded them roughly and shoved them in beside my novel. They would be more scratched. They would be bent. They would be almost ready to lose when I took them out once more.

I stood at the starting block. The other girls wore bikinis. Bikinis were big that particular year. The other girls had sleek flat chests and skinny hips. I was too round. I was aware of my new breasts which were already so large that you could hold a pencil under them. I had read about this in someones magazine. Are my breasts too floppy? And of course I had answered the multiple choice questions when no one was looking.

I missed the starting gun but I plummeted anyway, a moment's delay and then the fat slap of water, the bliss of underworld oblivion. I thought about the woman with the carrot in her vagina. Did the cameraman adjust the carrot, moving it a little this way or the other, pushing or pulling. I wondered how these things could be orchestrated. I wondered if the woman had family, if she told her mother about the photographer, if she married him or perhaps had children with him, or if the photographer was a woman. Would it be easier to have a woman moving your carrot a little further in, a little further out. I wondered about the hundreds of people who had seen this photograph since then. I thought about that woman with the carrot and her ability to bring a whole new generation of new teenagers to orgasm. I wondered whether the red-haired boy had masturbated using this picture, and if I also masturbated using it, would that mean that the red haired boy and I could be lovers.

I saw the blue tiled wall approaching. Half the race run. I kicked and my arms windmilled and I reached out for the tiles, felt them beneath my fingers. Was about to turn and head for the finish line when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

I bobbed to the surface panting. One of the teachers was leaning into the pool and tapping my head. My tight wiry hair had spilled out from the neat plats. There was a waterfall of hair in my eyes but I could see that there were no other swimmers in the pool. The others had finished their race. I was only half way through.

I gasped, found words, realised I was quite puffed. I had held my breath for quite a way. I always found it difficult to coordinate my breathing with the flailing of my arms.

"I can finish." I gasped. It was only another 100 metres.

"They're waiting to start the next race. You an get out at this end now. Better not hold the races up."

I nodded, ducked under the little coloured floaties marking the lanes. I emerged from the pool in my one piece swimming costume and every one was watching me. I knew that I should be embarrassed, but I wasn't. I sat with my towel and my school bag beside me and the photo of the woman with a carrot that I would sneak home and stash under my bed at home. I had just procured my first piece of pornography. There would be more.

Becoming Catherine Deneuve

We all grow up to be somebody. We make our self up, one piece at a time from all the possibilities around us.

When I grow up I want to be as warm and cuddly as my mother.
When I grow up I want to be as sensual as Marilyn Monroe.
When I grow up I want to be as kick-arse as bat woman.
When I grow up I want to be Catherine Denueve

And then we grow up and we become the same person we were as a child only with affectations gleaned from comic books and movie stars and real life heroes. Underneath the various masks, nothing much has changed.

I will not magically turn into Catherine Denueve. I will not become the refined but ultimately sexy French superstar despite the hours of watching, pressing re-wind, watching, longing, watching...

I will be the same unsettled, scatty soul that grew bored of climbing a tree, half-way up, who could weep for the loss of a play friend or a toy until, a matter of days later, I could not remember why I had been crying, who could turn around and start a book from the beginning and come to the ending full of wonder, as if I had never visited it before.

I am a middle-aged married woman. I sometimes glaze through my days in a fug of forgetting. I am swept up in a hungry tide of romantic possibilities. I allow myself to wander freely amongst all the romantic possibilities.

How does my sexual memoir end? I ask my friend and he looks at me with a wistfully sad smile and keeps silent. He will not be the one to tell me that Santa Clause is not real. There is an ending and I am living it and it is fine and full of compromises and quite a bit of joy. There is no satisfying turn-around where my ordinary life crashes against my fantasy realm and I discover that I have a secret double life full of wild sex and gorgeous lovers.

Sometimes I feel like the little lame boy in the Pied Piper who was left behind in reality when all his friends were swallowed up by the mountain into some wonderful fantasy world. I come home to the same flat each evening. I sleep in the same bed. I make love to the same man. My wild days are long gone and I miss the roller coaster ride that they brought to me, but I love my husband who is drop-dead gorgeous and keeps me on the simmer. Every time I catch a glimpse of him doing the washing up or slipping into the shower I know I am lucky.

Not a particularly satisfying ending for a sexual memoir, not the Catherine Deneuve sexy French film noir.

It all ended in quiet boredom, a good deal of contentment and occasional unrest.

This will not be the last chapter of the memoir because my audience will yawn and groan and throw the book across the room in dissatisfaction. There must be a better denouement. If you, my audience, have other suggestions for the way you would like to see it all come to a close, please finish the story for me in the section marked 'comments'.

At the end of this story, please someone make me become Catherine Deneuve.

Dealing with Rejection

Sometimes someone says no, but less often than you would expect.

A strange man, sitting in a cafe, seeming to be lonely and distracted is probably lonely and distracted. If you sit beside him and talk to him and have any kind of simple connection and suggest that you have sex with him, with no strings attached, no numbers exchanged, no names if that is better for him, then he will probably say yes. He has probably never had this question put to him before, and if he initially says no, out of fear and confusion, he will often return the next day and retract his previous statements. You will probably end up sleeping with him and it will be fine and you will have passed some time pleasantly and return to the daily grind without complaint.

The ones that say no are the ones that worry at you. They are the ones you like. Someone you know and who you care about more deeply with each passing day. Because you have some glimmering of emotional attachment they see right through your prickly armour to that subterranean place where you are shell-less, all soft bodied crustacean. You lose your power in your fondness for them. You lose your sharp wit and your mystique. The people who know you best know that you have crumbled. Like a set for a cheap western you are all meticulous facade but behind the luminous detail there is nothing but empty space and wind and the prickly gyroscopic twirl of tumbleweed.

Spit or Swallow

It seems impolite to spit on the first date.

This is a new person, this naked body full of curious smells, scars in unexpected places, hair or hairlessness, a stray tattoo emerging from its hiding place, a pleasant surprise. This body is a history, a childhood, a teenage angst, this is the lover of strangers and someone's child, awkward and perhaps trembling and maybe a little suspicious of the casual way you picked him off the street and brought him to your home.

There is the dance of fingers, tongues, the threat of teeth on skin. There is the touching of this strange new body, watching the gentle rise of a penis that has not yet divulged the whole of its story.

You are on your knees eventually at any rate. When all the teasing has been teased out there is always oral sex. Your mouth is full and it relieves you of the pressure to speak. You have said too much already. You have used words that seem obvious to you, words like 'cock' and 'fuck' and 'cunt', but when you said those words his eyes widened and you knew that maybe you had overstepped that invisible line that you are always crossing unintentionally.

Spit or swallow. You will need to make a choice now. You know it is close because of the salty slipperiness on your tongue, not an unpleasant taste but one that gives you pause. You pause. You take breath. You will need to pull away or you must be prepared to swallow when the moment comes.

This is a first date therefore you will swallow. You always swallow on a first date out of politeness. No mess to clean, no tissues, and he may not want to kiss you when you have finished, which will save you from the more invasive intimacy of his tongue against yours.

There will be space afterwards for you to take your pleasure slowly. There will be a moment of rest in which he will be dazzed and slow and happy and in this space you can play unhindered, finding other parts of his body to rub against, taking what you need without the distractions of his inexperience.

He will never be as confident in sex as you. Not the boys you like, the fine examples of geekdom, the loners and the crazed and the sad young men. They warn you with a small pressure of their hands that you should pull away now, the model of politeness, and, filled with first date etiquette, you hold fast till it is done.

Bill Henson

I must talk about Bill Henson. I have taken Mnemosyne off the shelf and rest it on my knee. It is a thick dark book, heavy with threat. I look at each of the photographs and I become unsettled. Page after page of loneliness. It is as if Bill Henson has climbed through my eyes and collected samples from my brain. The sad and bitterly sexual world of vacant lots, dead highways, childhood grief and the false comfort of strangers.

I look at the boy who might be a girl and I am aroused. The image reminds me of the paintings I used to stare at in the thick book of art prints on my mother's bookshelf, cherubim with their embryonic penises. The young Christ, cradled on some woman's knee. My first pornography I suppose, the Rape of the Sabine Women, Leda and the Swan, the lush canvass of human flesh and the miracle of colour, yellow ochre, cobalt blue, viridian crimson. Always the smell of oil paints in my nostrils, always a furtive hand, pressing into my crotch as I turned the page with my other hand. Art and sex. A virile combination.

I remember the images that Bill Henson is referencing. I remember the overwhelming scent of desire that accompanied my experience of them. Recently, in London, I walked through a gallery transfixed by colour and form and shadow and looked for the signs indicating the rest rooms, the WC as they say over there. The idea of sex and art is so intricately linked in my mind that these two become one.

The young boy in the photo has an erection. Looking at the photo reminds me of the constant rise and fall of my own youthful desires. I couldn't prime a canvas without imagining the sticky glue of white paint applied to my own skin. I wanted to be painted. I wanted someone to paint a picture of me and also to paint a picture on me. I wanted to be observed, desired and touched. I have not moved on. I am the young boy in the Henson photograph, so full of desire and a longing for sensation.

I don't like to be touched. I hate to be massaged. I shrink from the hugs of strangers. I came to every new lover, naked and full-bodied, pressing my skin quickly against theirs to overcome the shock of physical contact. It is like leaping into an icy pool, sudden sex and then it is over. I become acclimatised to someones touch like they cure people of their phobias, a spider in the hand, a snake on my chest, a rat in a cage.

I turn the pages. Beautiful glossy pages. I am longing to paint. I smell linseed oil and turpentine. There is dirt under my nails but it is only mud. I want the dirt to be iridescent like the wing of a butterfly, like the bright red light on plate 311 in Mnemosyne.

Everyone is talking about Bill Henson and I am leaving the cold, lonely longing of my flat and heading to the art shop in town to rub the heavy cartridge paper on my upper lip.

Girl in the Bath

She made me take a bath because she didn't want to taste my vagina. I am sure of this. She wanted to seduce me and there was a time when I would have wanted that above all things. But time had passed now. I was less innocent in matters of sexuality. I felt quite tired from all the poking and prodding and the emotional stretchmarks had begun to show.

I had loved her, but now all I could think was that she had made the bath too hot, and she wanted a bath so that she would not taste my vagina.

She filled the bath with suds that would hide my breasts and the shape of my thighs and when I had disappeared under the cloyingly sweet foam she reached under the surface of the water and touched me, safely out of sight, out of mind.

Years before I had brought her to her first orgasm. The vibrator I bought her was to rectify a lifetime of self denial. I taught her how to use it and I wanted her to use it on me, but she didn't.

That night she did, and I let her and I enjoyed it with a sad detachment, like taking a favourite toy out of the cupboard, holding it to your nose, to smell the last traces of your long-gone love then folding it back into it's box before abandoning it to dust and dark and memory.

So I made love to the girl and she made love to me and when it was over, she was damp eyed and I kissed her, tasting nothing but spring apple bath-foam and the minty flavour of her toothpaste.

Bestial

I thought I would give birth to a creature that was half-dog, half-human. I dreamed it to life, it was gestating in those dark moments before wakefulness when reality is an echo at the very top of a deep well. I dreamed the thing was pink, squirmy baby colour, but with a fine coating of fur and black eyes and a long penis stretching the length of its belly and ending in a bright red worm which retracted its head when the creature breathed. In dream, I held the thing at arm's length, the hideous proof of what I had done.

What had I done?

Here is a small child at the top of the back stairs. It is hot and she, I, let me own this because it is my story after all - I have come here because this place is one of the few safe places in the whole of the house and garden. This tiny corner of the world makes me invisible. My mother, standing at the sink can strain and stand on tiptoe but she will never see more than my shoes and only then if I choose to stretch my legs down to the second step.

It is hot and the dog is panting. It is a young dog, new to my house and more quick to play than our Labrador who sleeps on my bed and presses her nose into my lap when I am crying, but who likes to lie around most of the time.

Because of the extraordinary heat the new dog is calm for once. He is perched with his haunches pressed into my hip. I stroke his sleek fur, short and clean and gingerish. On this day he can not settle. He sits and pants, shifting, stands and pants, shifting. I watch him, remembering all the times I have felt this way, itchy with heat, distracted by potential games but lacking the energy to chase them. I pat the inside of the dog's thigh, so lean but meaty, like something that could be torn from a corpse and gnawed on. I am always thinking this kind of thing, although I know that I should not be. In a Dr Suess story, I learned that I should only think of fluffy things or else I might just 'thunk up a glunk'. I simultaneously want, and also do not want, to thunk up a glunk.

The dog stands and shifts and its meat-bone thigh is at little-girl height and its penis is right here, panting in time to his breaths. The little red worm of it is slipping in and out of its velvety sheath.

I watch it.

Glunk. I thunk. Don't thunk a glunk.

At school, yesterday, someone had made a joke about mums and dads sleeping in the same bed and wearing no pyjamas. Everyone laughed. I didn't.

"My mum and dad never slept in the same bed,"I had said.

"But they must have at some time."

"No."

"At least once."

"No."

And then the joke had turned nasty, the little nip of giggles directed right at me. Kiddy mirth like piranha. I knew that this must be like the 'Santa Clause Thing' when they would ultimately prove that they were right and I was wrong.

The act, apparently, involved a dad putting his thing and then some kind of white stuff and then a baby.

Here, on this hot concrete step, I look over at the new dog and it's wormy thing and there is indeed some white stuff, just like they said there would be.

I am in this spot where no one can possibly observe me. If I had been sitting anywhere else I would never do it, but I am here, and so I will.

I touch it, the thing, and when I touch it, a drop of milk oozes onto my finger and I pull aside my knickers quickly and make it go where the kids at school have told me it should go.

The idea of a baby, half-dog, half-child, begins to gestate in my imagination.

*

Let me tell you now, I was the kind of child who gathered snails and let them crawl over my shirt leaving silver trails. I was the child who rolled in mud and told my mother I had slipped and fallen in a puddle. I was a child who kneaded a bar of soap in hot water until it was a viscous brew. I liked to sink my fingers in egg-white and chalk dust and rubbed the little nuggets of rosin I found on the floor at ballet on my upper lip.

*

There were weeks of secret nightmare births, I was followed by wolf-howls and padding shadows. I opened my legs in front of a mirror, checking for any signs of a beastial pregnancy, thinking that one day I might reach inside myself and feel the embryonic row of canines growing in a soft-furred skull.

This story has remained a secret until now. I have told no one, not even my best friend who I would tell everything to. Now after a sleepless night, plagued by half-dreams and the idea that I might have to once more reach for the anti-depressants, I drag the mongrel foetus out of the mire of memory and fling it into the world.

Perhaps tomorrow night I will begin to sleep again.

The Toilet Block in The Park

The boy sat on the bench waiting. He positioned himself under a light, in full view. I viewed him there, sleek and pale and furtive but with a sudden calm descending when someone ventured by. I was hidden under a hedge, behind the woody scramble of it pressed against a wire fence. I had a coat wrapped around me and a satchel for a pillow.

Everywhere the insect rustling of leaves, a balmy cocroachy kind of night and me out in it. I was black on black and he was all golden glow. There was a toilet block nearby. This is how it seemed to work: one boy, this golden boy, would sit, jiggling his knee till some other boy arrived. This one was a dark shadow, edging by his arc of park-light . The new man waited outside the toilet block for a while, pacing idly as if he were just filling in time before popping back to work.

Then the deliberate stride into the squat brick building, a significant pause. The golden boy now still and upright, tight inside his pale clothing, erect, straining up from his seat as if he were a volcanic eruption about to occur.

When he stood it was as if he were a soldier on parade. All the straight armed tension in his body turning his stride into a march. I watched him glance around stiffly, checking that he wasn't being observed. How long does it take to get a headjob in a toilet block? Or was there more to it. Was there a partial removal of clothing, a bare-backed fucking with the toilet seat a handy place to rest a knee. I imagined the golden boy bent over the cistern in that sickly blue light they use to stop the junkies from finding a vein.

The thing about homelessness is that there is nowhere comfortable and private for masturbation. I clamped my hand between my legs and nestled my pubic bone against it and I rubbed quickly. No one would notice me down here in the dark crawlspace under a hedge. No one would expect a human being to settle down for the night in a claustrophobic space like this. The boys took significantly longer than I did. I watched, smoothing my skirt down over my drawn-up knees as another, older man crept into the spotlight and nestled down in the waiting space.

I wondered what would happen if I needed to use the toilet block. Would I be holding up the queue. I closed my eyes, dozed opened them. A new man sitting, smoking, waiting. I felt the throb in my bladder, but it if I just held on, I knew it would pass.

Fortune Cookie #7

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 #7

Choose long term lovers by their taste in novels. I would rather share a bed with someone who loves Cormac McCarthy, Don Dellilo and Gerard Donovan than with someone who shares a fondness for Lindt chocolate and Threadless Tshirts. Threadless might go broke, Lindt might give you diabetes but Blood Merridian will be with us till the grave.

Happy Birthday Scott Spark

This happens in that quiet little upstairs flat where the air ticks with the restlessness of refrigerators and oil heaters. Little sounds float to the surface of the silence, popping like bubbles in the strange new lull. Benjamin Law is away. The space he has left eases out like oil on water. The flat is filled with the lack of him.

Scott Spark opens his eyes to that Benjamin-less silence and smiles into an unfamiliar quiet. Without his whirling-dervish of a partner there is room for him to stretch and listen and take his time coming to terms with himself and the world.

Downstairs, in the same building, there is an almost identical flat and I am in it. It is late and I am sitting at my computer and I am trying to get ahead with my blog posts but there is the little ticking of the oil heater and the small, lonely sighs of the refrigerator and my partner, sleeping off a virus in the other room. Our flats are the same, the upstairs and the downstairs, only my bedroom is built where their lounge room is and therefore, Scott Spark is lying above the very spot where I am shifting in my chair, rubbing icy hands, on the hot metal of the heater, trying to focus on the computer screen in front of me, when, behind the blank page, there is a world of pornographic images whispering up from cyberspace like pesky poltergeists.

I take a deep breath, exhale. Above me, minutes later, Scott Spark eases onto his side and sighs, a little fragment of my own breath drifts up through the floor, filtered by the apartments in between, my cleansed breath entering his parted lips, my wakeful heat easing up through his mattress causing a gentle lick of warmth to creep up over his thighs.

We are both thinking about sex, a synchronicity of thought and movement as we give in to our temptations at the exact same moment. Scott Spark shifts a little, reaches for the bottle of lubrication that has taken up residence beside the bed since moments after Benjamin Law stepped on a plane and left the country.

It is almost nothing for me to shift to another tab on my computer, just a quick point and click and a site I have saved in my favourites loads with a slow clunkiness, grinding with effort as the machine drags itself beyond all the other programs and applications that I have failed to close, past a littering of files clogging up my desktop. I watch the little beach-ball of death doing it's pained dance on my screen and for a moment I think this session will be prematurely over and I will loose all my unsaved work when I am forced to re-boot.

While I am scrolling through a seemingly endless array of 'Naked Naughty School-girls', 'Sexy Naked Celebs' and 'Shemale Sex Movies' I catch sight of one called 'Soapy Asian Handjobs' and I think of Ben Law. Thinking of Ben Law, I think about Scott Spark who is currently also thinking about Ben Law.

Ultimately I bypass the Asian Hardcore for the more ambiguous 'Hotties Fist Outdoors' because it is just too weird thinking about people you actually know whilst trawling for porn. That is exactly the kind of behaviour that repeatedly gets me into trouble, my fantasies tangling with my real-world tripping into my writing, causing all kinds of creative and interpersonal turmoil.

I click on the link provided and that little hiccup in my process has corrected the momentary intersection between art and life. Scott Spark reaches for the tissues. I am still waiting for my clunky computer to crunch over into the great cyber-outdoors.

All is right in the world once more.

Head job in the stairs.

I gave him a head job in the stairwell when I shouldn't have.

He had a partner. The first few times we made love there was no mention of a partner. She emerged from his silences slyly like a magic trick, suddenly the velvet of his real world was swept aside and she was there all the time. He had already been unfaithful with me and therefore he said we should continue, even with the work lights turned all the way up and all the mechanisms behind his sleight-of-hand exposed.

I could see his point, but I didn't like him well enough to follow through with it. She seemed like a nice enough girl, smart and passionate, an environmental activist. She wore organic hemp clothing and went on all the marches. I wished her well. I wished he would stop cornering me in the hallway or outside the house asking for just once more, a final goodbye. I didn't see myself as the kind of girl who would sleep with someone else's boyfriend without permission. I thought I would be particularly bad at keeping those kinds of secrets.

I gave him a head job in the stairs because I was a little drunk and more than a little lonely. It was a turn for the worst. I hadn't had sex in weeks. I go a little mad when I haven't had sex for a week or so. I was ready to tear the clothes off anyone and he was there in the hallway, following me in my search for the loo. The mechanics of the thing would be impossible, a cramped stairwell, me in an evening gown with ripped hems, mended with gaffer tape, him in a suit. It was a gallery opening. We could have fallen onto the stairs and clung to the rail for support, but I wasn't sure it would be all that comfortable.

The head job just stirred things up again. I smelt the pungent damp crotch odour, tasted the salty pre-come and the frustration of it all reared up in my chest. Surely there was someone to have sex with. Surely, in this throng of art-loving bohemians I could find somebody to drag outside to the park up the hill to take the pressure out of me, that hissing-kettle fury of a girl half-crazed by desperation. I pulled away from him and he groaned.

"Come on. Just a bit more."

"You have a girlfriend."

"You've started now, just a minute more, just a little bit, it will make no difference."

I pushed past him and I stumbled down the stairs. Someone else pushed through the door at the bottom, someone who knew me vaguely and who would have seen me on my knees at his feet. Spared from that at least.

I stepped out into the champagne and all the cliche's about form and style and colour that were ricocheting off the canvasses. I didn't care about the subtext or the delicate subtlety of texture. I wanted a root. I wanted it right then and there. I looked around at all that water, an ocean of gaudy pretentious flesh and realised there was not a single one of them who would offer me a drink.

Frank's Wild Years

We will be in a room. The door will be locked. They will be outside, listening, mostly, but one at a time they will press their faces to the keyhole and watch. This is the fantasy that we come back to, her version of it. She is beautiful and the idea of someone watching her is exciting. In my version of the story they are both in the room with us, too close-up to get a proper look, all hands-for-eyes and unidentifiable mouths. They will taste and touch and smell us and all the performance will be taken out of the thing it will just be an experience we share together.

We discuss this over a glorious meal and polite wine in a very civilised kitchen. They have just done up their kitchen and we are about to launch into our own renovations.

Renovations. This is a word for other people's lives, a mums-and-dads kind of word along with the concept of 'mortgage repayments' and 'educational choices'. We are grown ups now. Our 'husbands', another grown up kind of word humming with the death knell of finality, talk about tradesmen. They pore over contracts and little catalogues for stone bench tops and she lays her hand on my knee and admits that her eyes glaze over at the very mention of a tiler. I tell her that I once saw a porno about a tiler and she laughs and shifts her hand a little further into my lap and suggests we leave the 'husbands' to it, moving to a different room where we can 'girl talk'.

Of course she wants to talk about sex. She has been reading my daily blog and she remembers. She was there around the pool at the naked Tupperware party. She slept with several of my lovers, before or after their on-line appearances. We modelled naked for the same artists several times and we have hugged without our clothes on more often than we can remember.

"Why have we never made love?" she asks me suddenly. "Were you never attracted to me?"

This woman was beautiful. Still is beautiful. She has that kind of luminous skin that reminds you of film stars in the 1940's. She is tall and willowy and dark and her body still remembers it's youthful bounce and vigour where mine is slouching even further towards decay.

"Maybe we should do something now and you could write a blog about it afterwards."

She might be joking or perhaps this is a proposition. We have discussed the possibility before, her dark little locked-room peepshow for our husbands' pleasure. My version where there is less opportunity for the disappointments of the visual stimulus.

I should jump at the opportunity to touch her, but I am sad. It has been a difficult week. Only hours before a boy at the bottle-shop pointed to me and snickered "What about her?" A collective merriment at my expense. These things happen too often.

She describes the locked door and the keyhole and I think about my life as it is and I sink just a little bit further into my boring self pity.

The boys have finished their kitchen talk and our conversation is cut short when they join us. She sits under the light with her luminous skin and her beautiful open face and her youthful body and I wonder why I have never slept with her in all these long and variable years. I think about the possibilities we have discussed, that perhaps our wild times are not completely over. A line from a Tom Waits' song is set on repeat in my head.

Frank settled down in the Valley, and he hung his wild years on a nail that he drove through his wife's forehead.

I look up, sad and bleary-eyed. They are talking about sex, past loves and humorous situations. "Why don't you blog about that one?" her husband asks me. We all laugh, and he moves on to stories of schoolyard bullying, the hilarity of our past mistakes. I become more cheerful as the conversation turns to people we would like to punch in the head.

And Frank? Whatever happened to Frank? Well:

His wife was a spent piece of used jet trash
Made good bloody-marys, kept her mouth
shut most of the time, had a little Chihuahua
named Carlos that had some kind of skin
disease and was totally blind.

They had a thoroughly modern kitchen;
self-cleaning oven (the whole bit)
Frank drove a little sedan.
They were so happy.

One night Frank was on his way home
from work, stopped at the liquor store,
picked up a couple of Mickey's Big Mouth's.
Drank 'em in the car on his way to the
Shell station; he got a gallon of gas in a can.

Drove home, doused everything in
the house, torched it.
Parked across the street laughing,
watching it burn, all Halloween
orange and chimney red.

Frank put on a top forty station,
got on the Hollywood Freeway
headed North.

Never could stand that dog.

The Sex Writers

They turn up occasionally on television or in a magazine. The sex writers. The people who have brought you to orgasm any number of times, crouching furtively behind your laptops glancing at the drawn curtains or the locked door as if it might suddenly swing open to the uninvited hoards.

The writers of sex suddenly appear on a talk show, or in a special guest spot on a sit-com. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and look at the sex writer, live, for one appearance only! It is a freak show, and they are singularly freakish, grossly overweight, myopic, squinting up into the bright lights of their exposure, blinking like some wormy creature dragged from the safe warm darkness of someone else's excrement.

Never forget: the people who have no difficulty getting it, barely think about it, rarely want it, and need not articulate it. Imagine the fug of our collective longing wafting up from all the ugly people smelling of sweat and semen and a lifetime of rejection. It is the overlooked amongst you who can bring you the greatest pleasure and every time you glance at us in pity or in disgust, you are just generating material for your own reading pleasure.

Please enjoy.

Blindfold

Perhaps the blindfold was just one step too far. He was up for it, of course. He knew I would take him somewhere secret. He let me tie the cloth around his face, inching his crotch towards me, eager to begin the night's proceedings.

I had arranged a driver. He didn't expect this, and as he heard her voice, a whispered call to action, I felt him shrink. By this time I had tied his arms behind his back, tightly enough to make it difficult for him to escape.

I was new to this. Until now it had all been one more petal pulled off a fragile flower. He loves me or he doesn't, the flowers all tacked together like a daisy chain. I looked back on my insipid handful of lovers and they were all smudged over as if they had been shot in soft focus and with Vaseline smeared on the lens. They were David Hamilton photographs, and I in my billowing black dress, running through some field or other.

I tied his hands and he was shaking, half with pleasure and half with a kind of nervousness. He barely knew me and he was putting himself at my mercy. His edginess made me feel warm, a little inflated with the possibilities that I had never even considered before this.

I took him to the mountains.

He tried to speak in the car and I told him not to. I told him that he should just listen to the sound of the tyres on gravel, the sound of the sealed roads slipping away, the pungent scent of the country climbing in through the windows.

I lay him on an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar house and left the blindfold on him, left his hands tied. I undressed him. There was no way to take his shirt off without releasing his hands. I could have ripped it. They do that kind of thing in movies and in books. I could have found the scissors and cut the fabric at a seam. It would have added to it all, the sound of the scissors scraping metal against metal, snip snip. It looked like an expensive shirt. He was an architect and on a reasonable wage. I could never have saved up enough out of my Austudy to replace it, so I left him with his shirt unbuttoned. I licked his chest, found the rising buds of his nipples and sucked on them, one at a time. It is not the same as the nipples of a girl, man's tits are tight and mean and leave you wanting.

I moved lower, concentrating on the straining penis, just enough spit to lubricate the inside of the condom. I was going to concentrate on my own pleasure. This was something that I had never done with a partner before.

It was because of the blindfold.

I stood and watched his body unobserved. It was a fine collection of skin and muscle and bone, a strong body, thin but well-formed. I watched it, but there was no quick lurch of desire in my stomach at the sight of his erection. When I turned him over on the bed I saw the tight curve of his arse and it was fine and quite beautiful but I felt no emotional attachment to the thing. I touched it. I settled myself on top of it, straddling the curve of flesh. I traced the indentation with my thumbs. He bucked back against me. He wanted me inside him. This is something we had done before, something I enjoyed, but his insistence turned me off the whole Idea.

I lifted myself off him and went to my overnight bag. My vibrator was a small finger of black plastic. Nothing special, just one adjustment, on or off, a minimum of fuss. Tonight I would focus on my own pleasure. Just me, my vibrator and the blind body of this other person.

I would take my pleasure.

He wriggled in frustration. He was a landed fish. There was of course the quick image of a short knife gutting. In this new role, an aggressor, there was an underlying possibility of violence simmering around us.

I lowered myself onto him and I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the power of it, but something shifted between us. We would never again become the kind of lovers we might have been. I think that night in the woods was the beginning of the end between us, but for me, perhaps it was the beginning of a whole new thing.

foreskin

Boys my age don't have foreskins.

I didn't know this then but I do now. There is a whole generation of men who wouldn't recognise a penis in it's natural state. Generation Y have them. Generation X don't.

It was strange to see a boy my age with one. Not used to the subtle differences in handling, I treated it much the same as I would have a circumcised one. I grabbed it roughly, pulled an kneaded it and let my teeth scrape against the soft skin of it. I felt him shrink away from my attentions and I took it personally.

When he inched away, I believed it was because my stomach was less than flat, my skin pasty, my hair too tough and wiry, my breasts, overfilled and maybe just a touch too bouncy.

It was of course the sensitivity of the thing, the gentle cradling of that excess of skin, keeping the whole thing safe from chafing, leaving his penis particularly sensitive to the less than patient attentions of his voracious lover.

My experience with foreskins is limited, but it seems that that piece of soft flesh is enough to make the owner sensitive to changes in the weather, little breaths are magnified, a gentle humming whilst felating has an instant and obvious effect, even the barest tickle of the tongue registers to seismic proportions.

I wonder if the simple removal of a foreskin has changed the collective consciousness of a whole generation of Australians. Women who think that their attentions are not energetic enough. Men who, wearing a condom, would sometimes prefer to sit down and have a nice cup of tea.

There needs to be a study.