Breasts

I often dream of breasts. I understand that this is something to do with comfort, maternal care, a mother love, the comfort of milk, fulfillment of the desire to feed. None of these explanations can diminish the low groan in my groin when I think of breasts. The shape and the texture of them, the perfect weight, rested in your palm, the joy of a nipple twitching towards an erection. The ache in the back of my jaw when I remember that strange adult suckling that can overwhelm a girl. I see them nestled into someone's bra, the twin globes swelling towards my attention and I imagine lifting them out of the nest of cotton and silk.

I will not go to the Bath House. I will not be alone with the breasts that are so close in their pendulous exposure, that I could reach out and gently cradle. Sometimes when I am lost in the flesh on flesh, my own breast is close, hanging into the mouth of the man I am with. I lean and push my tongue into his mouth and there is my nipple and my tongue can touch it. My own breast a poor replacement for that of someone new, but with my eyes closed I can suck and I am sucked and the pure sexual surge of the shape and taste of a breast is an amazing thing.

In the light of day there is something a little disturbing about the idea of a breast. It nudges against the line between the adult and the child. It is a complicated place, an interface between the infant and the very adult world of sex. There are other parallels, the swallowing of ejaculate, the suckling on a penis and the milky white warmth at its conclusion.

She put her nipple in my mouth and made me taste it, the sour milk, the bitter sweetness and the sore cracked flesh of a breast that had once been soft and firm against my cheek.

Is there nothing that can be enjoyed without this underlayer of unsettledness? Is there no pure pleasure or purity of sadness or joy? Bitter sweet like her milk. Bitter sweet like the very act of sex, like the love I feel for my lover and for all the other potential lovers who are merely friends, for all the children who will one day grow up to be lovers, for the old and the infirm who long for the pure pleasure that their memory affords them.

There is nothing but a series of complications. I am suckling at the breast that is my life and swallow the bitter sweetness that is my share of it.

Assertive Jealousy

I shut the computer and he is gone. It is as simple as that. Of course there is the moment of regret, the empathy that is so constant. Not just a voice telling me that I should perhaps consider someone else’s feelings, but an actual jumping into the body of the other person, a haunting. I sit with my fingers resting gently on the silver surface of my laptop and I am there inside him in his quiet bedroom, with the little red light announcing that the conversation has been terminated. The girl is gone.

For a moment he / I am disappointed. We were having a conversation in a fashion and without her / me, I will be alone with an unfinished assignment and my music and a wakeful night. He / I stare at the little red light beside her / my name, Krissy Kneen and I am wishing she/ I would relent, open my computer and continue to chat over the internet, but it is only for a moment. Some other name pops up into my facebook-driven consciousness. A girl he knows/ I know. A quick ‘hello, how are you doing’ and the haunting is over. I, Krissy, myself, no longer regret the decision to shut down the conversation.

I am not unique in his world. I am unessential. I am also not in a position to compete with Jayne or Eve or Libby or whoever else the boy is otherwise engaged with. I am married. I am not particularly good looking. I am old enough to be his mother. I am old enough to have had sex with his mother. The boy is a kid. All the boys in my life are kids. I feel like a teacher on duty in the playground at a boys school. They jump around, excitedly, ‘look what’s happening, Miss,’ ‘Have you read this book, Miss?’ we converse, and I can fool myself into thinking that they are my peers, but I will never fool them. They ditch me at the first sign of a pretty face and I am left to my own resources.

He is my imaginary friend. I’m not certain how we started to converse so regularly on the Facebook chat. He contacted me one night. I was alone. Perhaps my husband was overseas or working late. I know I was in bed, warm in my pyjamas. I was looking up pornography, my vibrator nestled on the pillow beside me. Then this popping sound, a flashing from the facebook tab. I saw his name. A friend of a friend. We had met once before at a writer’s festival. He was vaguely funny, perhaps a little over-eager. I remembered the slightly nasal whine of his voice, a very distinctive comic lilt.

‘Hello’

A greeting from someone I barely knew.

‘Hello.’

A beginning.

He asked about books I was reading, books I had read, questions about writing, story, character. A very cleverly targeted set of questions. I could not end this kind of conversation. I slipped into a frequent chatting, looked for the little green light of him whenever I arrived home. I grew incrementally fond. The evenings when he was absent were interminable. I became incautious, divulged my insecurities to someone that I had barely met. There was always someone else on the other line to him. He chatted with several women at once. ‘A mirror’ he wrote and it was a comment intended for some other girl. I felt a snag of jealousy. I was not unique. I took my place in a long and varied queue. ‘She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever met’ he said ‘I’d forgotten how gorgeous she was’ ‘I have a date with her tomorrow’. I was diminished in the crowd. I sat with my computer closed and knew that he would be there, happily engaged in a chat with someone else. The jealousy fermented.

I have a husband. I have a life, a love and no reason to be jealous of his bevy of young attractive women. I have no particular interest in the man, the boy, and yet I struggled with the realisation that I had no special place in his life.

‘I would kiss her’ he said, ‘she is pretty’.

I slapped the laptop closed after a particularly hurtful rave about the attractiveness of someone I had met and felt quite jealous of. My jealousy. My burning jealousy. The acid of it eating in to the lining of my stomach, an ulcerous emotion.

Beauty

I am beautiful.

People never see this, and I must admit that I have not encouraged them to notice. I am too busy noticing the various lovelinesses of my friends. I avoid catching my eye n the mirror. When I see my own reflection I wonder how they will see me, and anticipate the worst. But I am beautiful. I am a clock with a complexity of wheels and cogs making slow ticking circles inside. I am a surprise, a lucky dip of opposing ideas all moving in tandom, multi-directional. I have added to myself with time. I was once raw edged and uncomplicated. Now I am something more than this. I have grown into the kind of beauty that is never simple or obvious.

People do not see this. People do not look.

I lurk in my invisibility, in my drag-queen veneer, all faux-woman. I am a mask of overt sexuality, a caricature. I am my behaviour.

Writing a memoir is like pearl-diving. I come up to take breath and my hands are mud and my life is all cut open and spilled out but for a moment here, now, I have found the pearl that I suspected might have been there all the time. Sooner or later it will slip through my fingers. The oyster will snap shut, all ugly grey shell and questionable reputation. But for now, for once, for a brief moment I have found it, and I know that despite what they may think, I am beautiful.

A memoir chapter without much sex part 4

There is no way to know how long I have been lying, here, minutes, maybe hours. I wake to the sound of cars, less of them now, the rush hour long gone. How long? There is pain. It is the kind of pain that is a physical shearing away of my skin. I feel it in my scalp, waves of it, washing over me. I am in an ocean of the stuff and it is difficult to breath but I do, small shuddering breaths. So, I have fallen. I may have broken something, my foot, or my leg or my back. There is the possibility that I have snapped my spine. I certainly feel as if it will be impossible to move. With difficulty I reach down towards my body. I am in my pyjamas and it feels as if I have wet myself. I touch the damp fabric and the pain is something new and all consuming. My hand is wet but not with urine. There is blood, so much of it. I peel down my pyjama pants and there is blood on my thighs. My first thought is of sex. I have destroyed the possibility of pleasure. Somehow I had slipped and caught the edge of the speaker box in my crotch and now there will be no orgasms. Even now, in the pain, I think about life without the relief of an orgasm. If this is the case then I would rather be dead. I wonder if I could somehow develop the ability to have non-clitoral orgasms, the fabled vaginal ones that I have read about. I wonder about reconstructions, plastic surgery, a stitching up of ruined flesh and the softer skin taken from the back of my neck or my elbow. I lie awake in the pain for what seems like a mess of days. Somehow, eventually I will have to move. My elbows act like knees. I drag myself along the ground like someone participating in army manoeuvres. I kamakaze crawl. I but up against the door and here it is like a mountain, something to be conquered. Somehow I manage to drag myself to my knees without fainting. I stretch for the door handle and somehow, miraculously, it is in my hand. The door is open. I am sprawled in the corridor and there is no one about and there is the lift at the other end and I must crawl to it. I think of ants dragging twigs that are hundreds of times larger than themselves. I think of maggots, hatched and wriggling, seemingly on the spot, babies burning their skin on carpet, grunting their frustration, edging towards tears.
She screams when she sees me. The lift doors open and she screams. It must seem that I have been attacked, stabbed. She sees the blood and she shrieks. I relax into her panicked care. She pulls me into the lift and we are somehow in the lobby. I am kneeled beside, I am tended to. I sink into the hurt and the embarrassment of it all. They ask me what happened and I am not sure how to say that I was sleeping in the top of a cupboard without sounding like a freak. I am a freak. The ambulence drivers glance at each other and I know that it must be bad. I am thinking – I will never have sex ever again. I will never have an orgasm. I will die now. Must die. They give me pain killers and I become drowsy and it still hurts, but I am distanced from it.
In the hospital the doctors come in packs, a (collective noun) of doctors who look but don’t touch. There is a swelling that has grown to the size of a cricket ball and it is a purple black canker.
The same question. “How did this happen?”
I invent a complex story about spring cleaning, the same fall described in detail but with a different prologue. I know that they can feel the lie. I do not lie. This is a new thing for me, this invention, this half truth. They know that there is something amiss and so they hold me, feeding me pain killers, trooping through the ward and lifting the pristine pastel blue of the hospital dress, telling me to spread my legs as if I could have clamped them together in my present state. It occurs to me that they imagine I have been abused. One nurse asks me about my living situation, my boyfriend.
“I fell out of a cupboard” I tell them again and again and it must sound like ‘I ran into the door’ or ‘I slipped down the stairs’. It is a lie in it’s unlikeliness.
I ask them if I can leave. It has been three days and I am missing university. They keep me under observation but they do very little. When a week is up the release me into the world. I have enough money for a cab fare but I will have no money for phone calls home or bus fares or food when I am there.
I hobble to university on crutches. I sleep in the bottom of the cupboard with the speaker box murmuring a classical lullaby. Bach. I have a sudden longing for my grandfather and his piano and I take the tape out of the machine and replace it with a mix tape of songs of sadness and longing. Love is A Stranger of A Different Kind, Ground Control To Major Tom. It calms me to know that I am not alone in my disconnectedness.
Time passes. The bruising fades, the swelling eases back to a kind of normalcy. I masturbate carefully in my cupboard nest. No response at first, but slowly my body responds to my touch. A gentle orgasm. A slow return to form. The orgasms ease the loneliness a little. I abandon the crutches. I find myself restless in the evenings and I leave the confines of my student prison and wander the streets of Spring Hill. The houses are beautiful. The beautiful people in them have city lives full of excitement and families and friends. Everyone is busy doing something of importance it seems. I glimpse them through half drawn curtains. I pass them spilling out from the doorways of pubs. I get to know the street walkers by sight. I venture to the edges of parks. I stand under the glow of street lights and am bathed in otherworldiness. There are mad people pacing and talking to themselves and wandering in endless circles down streets, up streets, around streets. I pass the same man several times and suddenly realise that from his perspective it may be me who is mad and aimless. I sit in my lonely grey room with the flowers sagging under the weight of days, petals dropping in time to the rythmless strains of early Pink Floyd. I become restless too quickly and I am back to walking. Time passes and passes and passes some more.

A memoir chapter without much sex part 3

And so I wake in a pre-dawn moment and I am entombed. It is cold and cramped and there is a numbness in one of my legs. I can hear the traffic, the oceanic swell, and in this way I know that I am not at home. First night away from home. I am homesick for the press of dogs around my knees, warm dampfur bodies, the smell of birds, the smother love of my family, peering through the window to make sure that I have somehow survived another night.
I have survived the night. There is a fierce pride in this. I shift and shake my foot and feel the painful prickle of blood rush back into parched veins. Despite the general family consensus that I would have difficulty surviving in the world, I am still here. I have seen a movie by myself. I have walked home. I have rested after a fashion. I shrug the night off, swing my legs out so that I am hanging off the high ledge of the cupboard like a terracotta angel. It is then that I realise how far it is to the floor.
The speaker box is there beneath me. It is a simple matter of turning in this cramped place, clinging to the structure of the cupboard with my arms, elbows splayed, then lowering myslelf onto the tall rectangle of wood. From there it is a simple thing to slip onto the floor.
I sit on the precarious ledge for what seems like a long time. The sound of traffic fills out. Tide coming in. commuters rising, showering, dressing. There is a sudden peel of laughter from somewhere down the corridor. Girls gathering, running towards the lift and down to breakfast in the communal dining place where boys are allowed but not encouraged. I am stranded and alone with this. The room lightens by increments. Black turns grey then lighter grey. There is nothing beautiful. There is a small square blue-tacked to the wall above my desk. I can’t make out the picture from my eerie but I know the image in my heart. A dirty, wind-harried child leans out through a rail towards a sea-breeze. She is a sepia traveller, now grown old perhaps, dead, the legacy of her children and her children’s children spreading out from this photogrph of migration like a sad stain. But at this moment there is still the possibility of a new life. There is still a kind of resigned hope in her gaze. Life might not turn out quite like she expected. There may be an easiness somewhere on the distant horizon. She peers towards the ocean and there is some hope.
I will find more pictures. I will hang them above my desk and day by day they will spread across the walls, creaming over towards the bed and into my dreams. I will pick flowers. I will have no money to buy flowers, but I will pluck them from fencelines and pop them into a water bottle on the desk. I will search for flowers with a scent, jasmine, mock orange, all of my favourite smells to bring some pleasure to a lifeless space. I will fill the room with music to dispel the ache of emptiness. And, more importantly. I will find bodies to touch mine. I will be naked with someone new. I will provide my flesh with a distraction.
But first I must climb down out of the cupboard. First things first.
There is a family folklore, the kind that families invent for you. In this story I am clumsy. I am vague. I have barely a toe on the earth and the rest of me is lost to the atmosphere. “That’s Krissy” they say when I spill tepid liquid out of a cup of tea. “Typical Krissy” when I forget my sentence half way though. It is with this fabled clumsiness that I execute a halting turn edging my bottom towards the perilous drop. There is nowhere to lodge my fingers. I hook my elbows around the door frame. There is nothing to do that will lesson the risk of a plummet. I take slow sure breaths. I will have one chance at this dismount. I tighten the muscles in my arms and this is my support. I crawl to the very edge and then there is the clean jerk of my body falling, but I am safe. I am held up by my arms. I search about for a foothold, feel the edge of the speaker box and my probing sets it to listing back and forth, a precarious balance. I can feel the judder in my arms and the slow burn of effort. I am light. I am as slight as I have ever been, thinned down by a stubborn refusal to eat. I am light, but there is no muscle to hold me here for long. I rest a toe on the speaker box. I will have to let go and there will be a small fall in this, but I will be perched in saftely. I can visualise the result. I hold my breath and then I let go.

A memoir chapter without much sex part 2

The building was old and tall and impressive in the way that hospitals or homes for the mentally ill are impressive. There was a dining area on the ground floor. Girls sitting in groups, girls eating or watching television. Girls laughing and whispering and glancing up at me, the stranger in their midst. They could smell my difference. They heard it in my accent and saw it written on my sallow skin. Short, smart, fiery. They nodded to me in the lift but I noticed how the conversation suddenly fell away. I heard the sound of it start up when I slunk down the corridor to my room. My room was grey and small, a desk sunk into one corner, a bed skulking on another. The wall to ceiling cupboard was finished in a wood veneer, the warmest thing in the place.
I lay on the bed and the springs creaked. There was a sign in the lobby warning that men, including members of the family were not allowed past the dining room. The creaking springs seemed like a secondary alarm. No tossing or turning or petting of any kind. I imagined they wouldn’t expect the girls to put the springs to the test. The Country Women’s Association did not anticipate the idea of love between girls, or else they shrugged it off. I had been left in their care. Free but still imprisoned it seemed. I lay on the bed and listened to the steady creak in time to my breathing. I switched the bedside light on. Grey shadows slicing geometric shapes out of a grey room, monochrome. Grey on grey on grey. A deafening palate blended out of white and black. I pulled the novel out from under my pillow and tried to read. Black writing on white paper. Black and white and all of it grey.
I pulled the Doona off the bed and opened the door of the cupboard. Such a small cramped space but large enough for me to make a nest. Dark in the cupboard and safe, and the wood is fast against the wall, no creaking springs. I wriggle out of my pyjamas. I touch myself for comfort and I it is comforting, but brief. When I am finished there is still the grey room outside and the sounds of the city and the first night alone. First night ever alone. First night ever alone.
I drag the oversized speaker box towards the cupboard. It is an easy thing to climb up onto the box. I have to drag myself up on tip toe, balancing against the cupboard door. I hook my arms through the upper reaches of the cupboard and I drag myself up, scrabbling awkwardly on the lip of the upper shelf. When I am finally up there it is closer than the bottom of the cupboard. There are pillows up there and extra blankets. I am here and I am safe and suddenly terribly tired. I cry for tiredness. Soft tears with no force behind them. I miss my family. I miss my home, my gaol. I am finally free and yet I wish I was not free. I wish I could be captured again, held against my will. I long for chains and rules and the smother of love. I press my face against the pillow. There is no air, and here I am hoping that I might drown in this tiny space above the cupboard. And slowly, breath by shallow breath, I fall asleep.

A memoir chapter without much sex part 1

I was in the Queen Street Mall and there were people everywhere. There were groups of them, giggling couples holding hands, rangy tribes of teenagers hooting to each other across a sea of heads.

I stood in the middle of the throng clutching my map. My coat still held a fug of popcorn and malteezers in its folds. The scent of the cinema. Strange to be standing in the dark when I entered the cinema in the glare of my first day in the city. I am alone and out in the world. Alone. I have never been alone like this. I stood at the bus stop and I realised I had never bought a ticket for myself. I had never read a timetable. I had never sat in the movies without someone beside me. I glanced around at the unfamiliar shops, the people passing, the other lives so full of purpose. Other peoples lives. Nothing to do with my own and I knew now, at last, I was alone. I turned the map over in my hands, matching my direction against the street signs. I had never had to follow a map before. I had been ferried from home to school to the shops and home again. I had never been responsible for my own direction. Now I was free to go anywhere. I was free. I found the street and walked it. Such a long way really, so many unaccompanied steps. I was eighteen, and apart from my walks along the beach I had never walked such a long way alone before.

The first censorship

My sister gave me a book for my birthday. It was by an author I liked. It was set on a distant world, in a place far far away just like in a fairytale. I had been wanting to read it for months.
It was my eleventh birthday

In my eleventh year I met Gillian. It was the year I fell in love. It was the year when I connected the dots between a longing for physical sensation and a longing for a particular person. My eleventh year was all about love.

There was a cake my grandmother had made and a little princess Leah figure on top of it, her white robe sinking into the icing. There were twelve candles, one of them placed too close to the little action figure and I watched as her face began to blister and blacken and my mother smothered the plastic girl in white icing and I washed her and vowed to love her more because of her disfiguration.

I opened my presents and they were mostly books that I had coveted. I would read them all, but first I would read the book my sister gave me because I had been longing for it.
Someone had cut some of the pages out.

My mother saw me notice them and was quick to explain.
“Just one bit that is adults only.”

I counted the numbers on the bottom of the pages. I could feel my rage perculating inside me. There was the biley hiss of it just below the boil.

That sex stuff.

I noticed the tight-lipped anger of my sister. This was her present to me and it had been hacked into, damaged, desecrated by the censors.

I thought of the picture of the girl with the carrot in her vagina. I thought of all the books my sister had stolen from the library and passed to me in the dead of night. Sex stuff, love, kissing and sometimes even more than this. I thought about the note I had to take to my English teacher excusing me from reading the set text because of the unsuitable content.

There was an awkward moment then before the cutting of the cake. They sang happy birthday to me but there was a reticence about the part that goes ‘hip hip hooray’. I read that book later in the dark, using a flashlight under the covers. When I came to the missing pages I closed the book and I imagined things that I had never seen written even in the banned books snuck to me at night. I knit in all the darkest possibilities, casting a spell to bind together the empty fragments of the missing pages. I thought about the worst things possible, the rapes and the ravaging, the fondling of the dead and the dieing. A spell I cast that night that would haunt me perhaps for the rest of the night. I will never flinch, I told myself. I will see it all, no matter how bad it gets. I will look at it. I will seek it out. I will devour it all.

That first and fateful censorship gouged an indelible mark into my flesh, a brand that would identify me in the coming years.

last birthday post ever

Don’t take your suit off for me. I’m not certain that I want to see the muscles, variously defined. The work you have invested in the creation of this new body that people comment on when ever you leave the room. I saw you first before the work was done. Round-shouldered, perhaps but beautiful. I called you beautiful on your special order forms. The others let me serve you. They were amused at my sudden heart-flutter, my clumsiness with pens and paper and my inability to work the computer whenever you were about.

We have become friends. You humour me when my self esteem is low. You tell me that you are watching, through the bright lens of my window. You lie for me because you are almost perfect. I tell you that I have trouble listening whenever you are near. You are like a light turned up too bright. I hover moth-like in the space around you. You read one step ahead of everyone around you. Your sharp intelligence is something that I long to cut myself on. I follow the trail of you, book by book. I open Proust and I smell the sharp clean cologne that would pleasantly suffocate me. Yes I use the image of you, sometimes, when I am alone. The quick fix of your studied dress, your turn of phrase, your laughter. All of this never fails to satisfy a moment of my need. I keep your clothes on in my dream of you, I keep you as I see you, wonderously kind and good and always laughing with me, my always beautiful companion, my firefly burning yourself out inside the pleasure centres of my brain.

Transmission cancelled

I appologise for the lack of blog post tonight. This technical failure is due to the purchase of a very large vibrator with a series of rotating balls in the middle of the shaft of it, and did I tell you that it was extremely long and quite thick and has a humming dolphin thing at one side of it that has multiple speeds and although it is quite a technical challenge to get the thing all humming along in synchronicity, I never would have expected the result. All this for half price (batteries not included which delayed the outage in transmission for several days) at the Honey Birdette closing down sale at West End.

No, this is not an advertisement, but ladies, you've got to get yourself one of them dolphins.

Spam Mail

OK so I didn't write this, but I wish I had. This of course is the most sexy vagina post to date. I found it in my inbox, marked as spam, but really I feel the label is just heartless.

Good day, my dear friend

I came here to look for my second half, my soulmate, my friend. It is
interesting to tell about myself to you, as I haven't seen you ever before.
But I feel something inside. I feel like a little sign of hope that I am not
doing this in vain. I feel that you have the friendly soul to mine.
What I want to find is Love. Yes, Love from the big letter. Love demands
everything - to present yourself, your soul to the other person. I want to
do this. I want to learn you better. If you want the same, I will be very
glad. I want to meet you and spend life with you together. I want to comfort
your heart with tenderness and care. Maybe our souls belong each other? If
you want to find that you, please write me here.

Happy Birthday To You

You would be a fine lover. I imagine you would take your time, a slow but careful progression of events, not pre-arranged, no sex taken from a manual for you. You are quick to respond to cues that others throw you. A skilled dance partner, watching for signs of pleasure and building on them moment by moment. Sex would be a sculptural project in your hands, a joyful work of art and half the pleasure in the building. You hesitate to value one art form above another and the art of love would be your finest creation. I am resigned to the fact that I will never read this masterwork, penned by your hand. It is a story to be read by the caress of fingers like a blind girl interpreting a sonnet in Braille. But there are others more suited to this task, young women, pretty, unattached. I bow away from a symphony un-played. I will be waiting outside the concert hall while the music finds a more appropriate ear. I will learn about the work of art, glumly waiting for the occasional review or judging the quality of the piece by the face of the audience. The pretty young things will be glowing with the kind of understanding that only participation can bring. I will take my pleasure from you at a distance, a waking dream, a flirtation, a vague understanding, that there are wonders in the world that I will never experience in the flesh, and strangely, I am at peace with this.

Song of the Siren 2

I think I dreamed of you last night. I woke with the covers thrown back. I woke to sweat and a tropical fug that clung to my pyjama top all earthy mulch and a smell like the underside of felled branches. My kidneys ached. I woke in a foetal curl and there had been your back, a staircase of a spine climbing towards the underside of my chin. I woke with an empty hug and a vague whiff of guilt for the boy who seemed oblivious to our night tangling.

He was there in the dream, my boy. He was watching our energetic coupling, the fight and tear of cats negotiating the heady world of sex. He was sad and disappointed. He shook his head. I noticed but I couldn't stop. There was the flesh of you and I would never be sated by it, but I devoured it furiously.

I knew that it was you even though she had the face of someone I have seen in the real world. I knew that this was the second half, round two, the wrestle in all it's pornographic glory. No watery imagery, no fish this time but flesh and blood and spit and sticky juice. A real life tussle relegated to the land of nod.

I opened my eyes to the memory of a guilty pleasure, and the knowledge that I had enjoyed you, I would enjoy you, I will always enjoy you Ms Siren Part 2.

The need outweighs the desire

I do sex but I do not do desire.

I am reading an erotic novel and it is all about love. There is some coy confusion about fucking but the woman can go on and on about desire as if the actual act of sex was something that stands in the way of a gluttony for longing.

Tonight, I think, I will draw it out. I will spend hours building up to the act itself. I will tease and touch and gesture vaguely in the direction of sex. But when the moment comes I want it and I can’t be bothered with what others might call foreplay. I want the act, the final release for the meniscus of desire. I want the spilling over, the spit and blood and sweat and come. I want the viscousness of flesh on flesh and although I try to sting the moment out, the rage of it spills over and I look at the clock, hoping that I might have snuck over the two and a half minute mark, and find that I have disappointed myself yet again.

I think he will become bored of the speediness of the act. I think he will want some woman who plays with the idea of denial, a carefully orchestrated dance, a maybe-later kind of seduction that invents exhaustion, headaches, periods and mental strain to string the act of it out for as long as possible.

Next time, I say as I fume in the throbbing aftermath of an orgasm that has wracked my body, leaving me breathless and boneless and aching with the uncontrollable contractions. Next time I will play it out more. I will pretend disinterest, I will make him work for me.

False promises. Next time will be the same desperate gluttony for quick release, the need outweighing the desire. The consummation urgent, desperate, violent.

And afterwards I will lie in the aftermath and wonder, yet again, if I am going it wrong.

Revenge Post

You ask about revenge, and yes, I think I can write about that.

I wish you were a more attractive person. I have a tendency to identify with the physically repulsive among us. I take their side out of habit. I inhabit the flesh of the grossly overweight, the badly scarred, the ones with skin diseases or a hair lip. I feel myself to be the butt of so many jokes and jibes that I am quick to stand for them and take their punches into my own equally unwanted flesh. But you are ugly. Hideous. Your bitter soul has spilled over and eaten at the flesh. Your ugliness is bone deep and I could never cut it out. There would be nothing left of you, no scrap of flesh worth coddling back to health.

So, ugly as you are, I take my revenge quickly and with a sharp pleasure. Can I write about revenge? I never have. Lets try it now. Let us see how I may debase you as you have attempted to debase me, just one in a little series of projects for you. Bully that you are. A systematic taking down of people who have done nothing to deserve it but to push against your inflated ego for a moment, listening to the stale heated air hissing away, pissing into the bluster.

Hog tied. This is how you would be for me. Tied like a pig, and of course your arse is raised, that hideous heap of flesh that reeks of things pulled dead from the sea. Weed from your arse, slippery and skanky, weed from the very deep of the ocean laden with bottom feeders and the clack of crustaceans fiddling in the bitter tangle.

I place you on the strand, in this, my written revenge. I place you at the turn of night to day, at the coming on of the tide. You are buffeted, wrack and ruin, pale bloated flesh and your face flushed red from holding out the tide.

I could stay and watch the crab-nip and the shark-frenzy tearing scraps of over-blown meat from those bad bad bones, but there is no pleasure in it. I know that hog-tied, face down, this will end badly for you. You would want me to watch, to feel sorry for you, because everyone that has seen you knows how much you love an audience, the sound of your pathetic voice pontificating, so much bilge belched into a cringing captive crowd.

The sweetest revenge will be my disinterested footprints, the toes turned away from your torture, even the shape of my bare feet disappearing in the next wash of salt to your wounds.

My revenge is tattooed on my back, in the absence of my body, in my clean clear conscience as you draw a limited edition of laboured breaths.

Song of the Siren

I don't know who she is but I imagine she is strong. I imagine her smart and sassy, a forger of new paths, an adventurer. She is sea-faring. There is salt on her skin. Her jeans, just above the top of her gumboots, are dark and dragging with sea wrack. I lie her on the bottom of the little boat and there are buttons where a zip should be. I work with frozen fingers. I have been gutting fish and the folds of denim might be the leathery armour of shark skin. She is lithe and muscled as a shark. She could turn in a second and her teeth would catch and hold me, but she chooses to be still, all but the gentle rise and fall of her belly, upturned and waiting.

She is someone out there in the real world. She is a person of flesh and blood, but my mind clamps down on scale and fin. Her words are fish nips, bait swinging before my ravenous mouth. She knows that I would land her and gut her and that my lips are tight from my desire to taste the soft flesh of her. Song of the Siren, a stalking shadow hovering somewhere out there beyond the vacuous internet chatter.

Jump on my hook now, Ms Siren. It is baited full of juicy gore.

Exposing Myself

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Eve

Eve came to us from a different school. She was pretty, large brown eyes and a wide, open face. I noticed how quick she was to laugh. Good natured, fine-limbed. She would never become my friend. She would be a friend to the pretty girls, the popular girls.

I had taken to sitting on my own at lunch times. I had a notebook, which I covered with pictures of my sci-fi heroes. I drew elves and goblins in the margins. I wrote my stories around the pencil drawings. There were a group of characters returning to the pages of my notebook every day. They were my friends. At lunchtime I would gather them and we would fly together into the outer reaches of the universe. I loved each one of them for different reasons, one for her beauty, one for her fieriness, one for his kindness and another because he was an outsider, prickly and argumentative as I could be, tolerated by the rest of the crew. I liked this character particularly and often he would crawl out of the pages of my exercise book and lie with me as I went to sleep, his arms wrapped around my itchy shoulders, whispering his secrets into my ear. Sometimes I touched myself and thought about this scratchy loner and brought myself to orgasm. My phantom lover.

I was old enough then to know that this was love, even though I didn’t know about the mechanics of the act. My fantasies were all touching and holding and all about my own body. His was clothed and sketchy. He was thin, weedy even, not conventionally attractive. I had a clear image of his lopsided smile and his clear intelligent eyes.

I imagined that he was sitting beside me on this particular lunchtime break. There was the sound of children playing, shrieks and giggles and little gaggles of girls whispering their secrets. Eve sat down in the place where I imagined my invisible friend to be sitting. I glanced at her and closed my notebook. I didn’t want this pretty new girl to be looking over my shoulder, reporting back to all the other whispery girls at the other side of the playground.

She unwrapped her lunch without comment, offered me some of her sandwich as if this was the kind of thing that we did every day. I refused politely. I had been taught not to accept food offered to me by others. ‘You never know what they put in it’, ‘they might have touched it with dirty fingers’, ‘there might be saliva on it and saliva carries germs, you might get sick’. And so I shook my head and sat nervously. She didn’t ask me what I had been writing. She took great joyous bites of her sandwich and told me that she believed in ghosts. I wasn’t sure if I believed in ghosts but I liked the idea of them. She told me about a séance that she had conducted at her last school. She told me that she had contacted a girl who had fallen off the monkey bars and died. She said that she would like to conduct a séance here. She began to plan it, including me in her scheme as if we were friends.

We became friends. The next day she brought her own exercise book and sat where my invisible friend might sit and asked me for the beginning of a story. We wrote it together, discussing the characters and the plot, and when the bell clanged we raced to finish it, breathless and flushed with the effort as if we were racing to finish an exam before the teacher could collect the papers.

I gave her my invisible friends in the weeks that followed. She choose a different name and we all climbed aboard my old familiar spacecraft, which was prone to leaks and creaks and unaccountable mechanical failures.

Sometimes, at night, just before sleep, I thought about Eve and she was there in the bed beside me. Her fragrant hair fanned out on the pillow, her gentle laugh tickling the hairs on the back of my neck. Sometimes her hands would stray under my pajama top and then I would turn to her and give myself completely, which meant a kind of pressing together of the idea of her and the edges of myself. She gave me a lavender notebook and I began a diary. ‘There is something I dare not tell anyone’, I wrote in it, ‘something I feel, a terrible thing. Something I shouldn’t feel’. In this way, secretly I felt the force of our intimacy.

I was wracked by guilt. She would touch me on the arm and laugh and I would vibrate with the joy of this kind of contact. I drew pictures of myself with my lips sewn together with thick thread. There were no words to describe the thing I felt for her. I could call it love, but it was not as pure or as innocent as the kind of love you could read about in Enid Blyton books. I found Wuthering Heights at the back of a bookshelf and I knew that the Katherine / Heathcliffe kind of love was the only way to describe it. I knew also that this was the kind of love that could destroy friendships. I felt the force of it threatening to tear me apart. I was disemboweled by this kind of love. I lost myself to it. I would have followed her like a lemming, leaping to my death on her passing whim.

She stayed at our school for a year, and when she moved away I was inconsolable. We hid at the side of the school and cut into our skin with broken glass and pressed our flesh together. For her it was a game to play. For me it was a pact with the devil and I had given up my self-respect for her, the first of my intimate relationships.

I wrote to her every day, great wads of paper with the tiniest scrawl of writing traveling up the margins of each page. I told her everything except the thing that I couldn’t exorcise from the front of my mind, that I was in love with her, a far from innocent love, a deeply physical need that plagued every waking moment, an addiction. A terrible frightening fog of need suffocating everything in its path.

I was 13 years old and I thought that I might die from the want of her.

Truth and the Tampon Story

He wore a tampon in his rectum.

I sat in my corner, a little drunk, a slight slant to the world, and one shoulder slipping slowly down the lead paint. Big night. The air so thick with the fog of weed that everything was in soft focus. The alcohol acidic, cheap bottles lying in the centre of the room, still spinning distractedly. Nobody cared where this last one would land, we had all decided to choose 'truth'. Not a dare left in the room.

"So I put a tampon in and wore it all day."

Okay.

"To feel what it's like to be a woman."

So.

"I think that now I'm just a little closer to that."

Then.

The bottle swings to a stop at my knees and it's all truth truth truth and I've been telling all my secrets all night and the guts of me are exposed and gory. These people aren't even my friends really. I blink up through the candle light at the flushed expectant faces. My candlelight, my flat. And I wonder why I decided to invite them anyway.

"Truth," someone says, "Truth".

I pull myself up the wall a little. Settle the glass of vodka into my lap.

"I only invited you here so that I could get Aaron to come. I didn't want to have a dinner party at all, I just wanted to see Aaron again and he wouldn't come if it was just me, didn't come anyway, but you guys were kind of the lure."

They are silent. They stare. The man who put the tampon up his arse shifts uncomfortably as if he were still wearing it.

"Tell us about the junkie with the rope burns around his neck that you had sex with."

I look at her. She knows me better than the rest of them. She knows my stories and that I have many of them.

"Tell us about the Rocky Horror Picture Show girl and the vibrator."

I sigh and take another swig of vodka. I am drunk and sad and lonely amongst so many people I barely know.

So I tell them another true story and then another, because none of them really want to know the truth.

Yoga

So now the stretch and lift and pause and the straining of muscles and the blossoming of the hips and chest cavities. I am my body. It is so easy for me to abandon my thoughts and become one pulsing, widening body. I can ignore the cloying scent of incense. I can overlook the cheese-cloth skirts and the little silver bells around people's ankles. I am my body and my body is sensual and it revels in this slow stretching of self. Yoga is like sex. Walking is like sex. Swimming is like sex. Sex everywhere that my body is pressed to find it's own rhythm. I fall into the metronome of sex. My body sweats and drips and pinks with the rush of blood.

They have to ruin it with the meditation. This lying still and listening to whale song played on a tinny CD player. They have to drone in that terribly placating anti-panic voice "breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth..." I breathe. Focus on your breath. I breathe or else I would die. I am still and silent and I can hear the god-awful drone of whales and all the incense comes flooding in to my lungs as I draw breath in, to a count of ten, releasing it into a room full of sweating, humming, cheese-cloth wearing women and a man, (that man, the same kind of man who can always be seen amongst a bevy of attractive cheesecloth wearing women).

The meditation is anti-sex. The meditation winds me up and quashes my desire, replacing it with a burning resentment. I resent the meditation. I resent the people who chose to record the sonic roar of under-water beasts and called it 'health-giving'. By the time the meditation is finished I am about as far away from calm as one could ever be.

Yoga is sex, but the humming bit just winds me up.

the harness

She dragged the chest out from under the bed and opened it. This after a real-estate agent kind of tour. The kind that educates you about the taps in the bathroom and points out the finer details of the recycling. We had moved through the study, the linen cupboard, the toilet that was for my use and the one that I should not use. Everything neat and shiny like a homewares magazine. The new season sofa, the glasswear fresh out of a box, the ethnic rugs spread out like the wings of exotic butterflies and pinned to the floor with non-slip tape.

"If you're going to live here then you might as well know about this in advance."

She opened the box and I knew what would be in it. It suddenly made sense of her perpetually conservative clothes, her heightened sense of order. Her fondness for me despite my habit of slouching through life two steps behind her enthusiastic march.

She had put some effort into the collection. She pulled a harness out from amongst the neatly placed, folded, rolled implements and I could smell the craftmanship. That fresh leather tang. Perhaps she treated the leather regularly, the way she waxed the furniature. She held the spidery thing out and I weighed it, all creak and jingle, heavy in my palms. I had a box like this myself. My box was cardboard, an old shoe box. Hers was something of brass and wood. My harness was a length of hardware store quality rope, variously knotted. My gag was a scarf. I reached into the box and ran my fingers over three purpose built gags. One with an imposing rubber ball riveted into the mouth piece, one of red silk with gold embroidery, one a bone-shaped piece of wood, a bit, like the kind you might use whilst riding.

The tour of the house took on a different pace. There were hooks. She showed them to me. One with a potplant balanced in it's ornate claw, one that held nothing but was fixed into a supporting beam Major constructions. Nothing makeshift about any of it. A fortune spent on the art of bondage. This was designer bondage. All of my vague attempts at containment and sensory deprivation suddenly became craft projects. Oh so Tonya Todman. She had somehow turned the art of S & M into a consumer project. I had never seen equipment of this quality. I ran my fingers over rubber and leather and silk. I touched every manner of restraint. I followed behind her neat skirt, her perfectly aligned ribbed stockings, her little court shoes, so perfectly beige and suede. There was paint on my jeans, and my boots were scuffed and when I put my bag down on the carpet she held her breath as if I had tipped a glass of wine on the pale shag pile. It's true. There would be dust and sand and dirt trickling from the creases of my suitcase. I was messing up her place just by stepping inside the house.

"You'll sleep in here," she told me. The room with the solid hook behind the painting of the ballerina. Degas. I liked degas but for some reason the ballerina in the blue tutu made me feel uneasy. A print. I had never slept with a print on the wall before. I had torn photographs from newspapers. I had paintings from my friends and relatives. I painted on stretched canvas and rested them against the walls of my room. I lived with art, but I had never lived with prints framed with expensive mat board. My own paintings would remain in bubble-wrap, languishing in the garage. Dungeon, I thought, languishing in the dungeon. My new doona cover had little coffee coloured flowers on it. The pillows were white. I knew that my hair would leave a dark imprint on the pristine purity of the cotton. I knew that a ghosting of my body would seep out through my oily skin and discolour the sheets. I knew that sooner or later I would bleed without warning and I would be up for a new set of sheets with a frighteningly high thread-count.

We returned to the beginning, the loungeroom. I had placed my book on the arm of the couch, a torn peice of paper marking my place. She lifted the book off her couch and handed it to me.

"You might want to put this by your bed, now you know where it is."

I imagined that sooner or later, she, and her neat, short be-suited husband would ask me to remove that ballerina by degas, would hog-tie me and winch me up the wall. I shuddered at the thought of the expensive harness with it's new-leather smell. I longed for my own makeshift ropes and multi-purpose ties. I longed for my casual sprawl of a house, the noisy D & D playing boys who left their empty pizza boxes to stain the old carpet. I looked around my magazine showpeice of a room and wondered if all yuppy couples had an expensive and imported chest under their beds.

I set a fake smile onto my lips and wandered back into the immaculate loungeroom where my host, my friend, my landlady had set a pot of steaming jasmine tea on an elegant coaster amongst a nest of matching cups.

Standing outside

Standing outside looking in, it is all just hairless beasts. It is just mindless fucking, the key to the survival of the species.

I watch the prelude to the dance out there, on the street. I observe it all quietly, a predator myself, and I can spot the rest of us. Shark-like. Slowly moving in a chosen direction, glancing into the windows and the doorways, but without a sense of urgency. I watch the sharks stop to talk and in an instant it is clear if they are hungry or distracted. I can smell the imminent kill.

We are the eaten or the eaters but sometimes, quite often, we fall outside the feeding frenzy.

I am standing outside looking in. I am not the eater or the eaten. I look, but I no longer participate. I am growing older. Grown old. I have become invisible in the scheme of things, and because I am content in my marriage I am no longer the shark, sauntering by. I look, but I refuse to participate. There is no frenzied kill, there is no sex.

No sex.

Standing outside of it all, there is no sex.

Faking

Orgasms don't sound like that unless you are faking it. I have heard the kind of noises from the women performing on videos, people demonstrating the sound what a theoretical orgasm might sound like, orgasms as the backing track to rock songs, strippers, vocalising their faux excitement in the heat of a dance.

These are the noises that I have never made in the height of passion. My throat constricts.  At best it is a strangled grunting, like an animal, the hollow sound of wind on the open neck of a bottle, a pained gasping. My lovers have made other sounds. The men have been mostly silent or expelling a mono-syllabic rasp of air. The women have made trilling sounds at the backs of their throats like the sound a cat makes when it sees a flying creature, the universal feline word for 'bird'. Sometimes the women have sighed or gasped prettily, high and grinning celebrations of sound.

This sound is different. It is a pornographic climb and it continues to make it's warbling way up the scale in perfect tones and semitones until the hypnotic shrieks reach an impasse and the sound drops down an octave and begins it's run again.

We sit in the lounge room and drink our tea and turn the sound up on the television. We glance at each other now and then and occasionally he smiles and nods in the direction of her room.

He leans closer to me and he whispers, "she's faking it."

And I smile conspiratorialy and nod. "I think she might be." I tell him, under my breath so that she won't hear over the clamour of her climax.

the moment of sleep

In the moment of sleep, the images sink from my mind and enter my body more completely. There is of course the coloured flashes that we all read about, the racing from one barely related thought to the next. There is the random, but somehow linked procession of people and places and ideas, and mine are fleshy and lustful, the same a moment before sleep as they have been all throughout the day. The tiresome orgy of touch and feel, and I barely notice the depravity of them. They have become so commonplace.

Then the sudden sinking. The thoughts melting into my body. My body ingesting sex and becoming sex. The moment of perfection, gone as soon as it is here. I feel it low in my belly, this coming together of mine and me, this perfect fusion. I feel a kick of it on the underside of my pubis. It is like the kick of orgasm or the sudden shifting of a child reaching out through my skin. Sometimes it wakes me. Sometimes it is connected to a face, a friend, someone I have spoken to during the day, someone who would be appalled at my sudden coupling of their image and this sexual surge.

I am never embarrassed. I blink into the space that is left by the idea of sleep chased off into the wakeful night. I take a moment to remember the person who hovers in the static left by the proximity of dreaming. Him or her. Someone who, in other circumstances might have become my lover. Someone who has remained chaste, but dear to me. My attractions are indiscriminate at these times. It might be someone beautiful or someone less so, either way, for a moment they have merged with my lust and I am at peace with this.

My friends. My acquaintances. My loves. My plunging into sleep.

I close my eyes and begin the process of falling anew.

Dry Read

It is a dry read: as in not wet. I understand the metaphors. I have used them myself. I use it now as I drag myself back to the book that is all conversation and scant description. It is not moist.

Moist is a word that is associated with sex. It is all about the cunt. That damp, hothouse of a cavity that leaks viscous juices and comes in a flood I have heard although I have never been exposed to this in the flesh.

The thought of sticky damp is an aphrodisiac. The shelling and sucking down of oysters, the plunging of my fingers into the warm thick wet chemistry of wallpaper paste, all this is about sex.

I would be a disappointment. I am a desert of lust, a mirage of moisture, an incessant desire that has always needed lubricant, or at least spit. We read 'drip' or 'flood' or 'awash'. In porn the women become oceans. Wet as whales, slick as seals. I am stranded on the sand and despite my love of water there is not a drop for you do drink.

When she tells me about her trick - the dam bursting, the explosion of juices soaking into the carpet, I am aroused and slightly jealous and regretful of my missed opportunity to stand at the edge of the falls and anoint my forehead with the abundance that I seem to lack.

Little love

I fall in love just a little bit, even though I said I wouldn't do that anymore. I can't help noticing his quiet dignity. His kindness. His subtle humour and, forced to stand so close in such a cramped space there is the flesh as well, constantly brushing against mine. I try to love without lust but there is always lust. So lust, then, and just a little love, or quite a lot of love, acutally, and there is this melancholy brew for me to drink down, slowly, on a day drawn out. We say goodbye and barely glance at each other and my heart breaks just a little for those few people I have loved and had no language to explain the way I feel for them. Slow sad love, like a dance in time to the monotonous drone of the daily grind. Everything in it's right place except this little fragment of misplaced emotion that I have picked up like lint and curled into my hand with no place to rest it.

Two Weeks of Abstinance

I could have filmed the whole thing, the slow disintegration. It would have made a fascinating study into the human mind.

I was contained, imprisoned in a tiny shack, shivering with the icy breeze off the ocean. Somewhere out there there would be the slow ponderous passage of whales, a world of underwater silence and fish-eat--fish. There is comfort in knowing that the life cycle is continuing under the deafening tidal rasp. Eat and eaten, and therefore everything is in it's right place.

I am at the top of the food chain. I steam a small parcel of shark meat and I force myself to return to the chair. It is a marathon and I am delirious with the writing. I have pushed through the boundary between this world and the next. I am a fictionalised version of myself. I emerge from the pages of the novel and I feed and water and steel myself before plunging in once more.

The world I have created is dark and sensual. I dive in and it is as if I were in my own soul, dank water, dizzy with the claustrophobic airlessness of the ocean. I am on a writing retreat and I have set myself a target, 40 000 words in two weeks. No excuses. And because I know myself too well, I have banned the use of masturbation. I have become a monk, a cold turkey monk. There is a folder for pornography but I have refrained from opening it. I wake too early in the cold dark and the ocean calls but I will not go to it until I have written at least 2000 words. If I haven't' reached my target for the day, I will remove my privileges. No alcohol, no coffee, no food. I will be hungry for each word. Hungry mostly for sex. My self denial is complete.

I wash quickly, barely touching my skin. I sleep with my fingers prickling with cold above the covers. Like a recovering alcoholic, I steer myself away from any thought of sex.

At night I have no control over myself. I slip into the kind of dream state that I remember from childhood, dark pits of dream stuff foetid with the ferment of archetypal detritus. I am plagued by images of people I know, tongues and mouths, chaste friendships re-created by Hieronymus Bosch. I dream of him, in his suit, always in his suit, but I am naked.

He tells me to sit and I sit. He tells me to spread my knees, my labia, and I am all open places. I am the gut of a fish. He looks, standing in his pristine suit, but he will not touch me.

He denies me my pleasure and I can only watch his hand pushed down his suit pants, the shape of it stroking his penis that is denied me.

I wake to my alarm, early, dark, cold, and I would run down to the ocean and gulp sea-water. I am mad enough and desperate enough to do this, but there is my discipline, my 2000 words. I climb into the hug of my doona, banishing the last echoes of the pleasure that my sleeping body has taken without me, and then I sit down, chastely, and I write.

sorry

He falls in love in a second.

Love at first sight. The powerful kind of instant attraction that belongs in fairytales or golden wedding anniversaries or television sit coms.

"I have an attraction." he tells me, and I don't want to know anything about it. I want to leave and walk back to my own, delicately balanced life. I have the feeling that he wants to hold me as he topples down that abyss where the real world is just a small point of light at the end of a great echo.

I know what is down there, the place he is falling to. If we were in the ocean I would kick away, burying my head in the silence of water and I would leave him there to drown.

"I don't know," he has locked his fingers in the fabric of my coat. I would not be able to walk away without a struggle. I see the abyss stretching out as dark and clear as his stare. "It happened so suddenly just then, your friend, your beautiful friend. I am attracted to your friend."

Love falls like a hammer in the place of echoes that he is calling from. Love at first sight. Love with teeth and claws to rip that thin veneer of sanity from his fragile bones.

I want to tell him that I have been there too, that I hold myself back now. That I fall in love five times a day and shrug and let it go. I want to tell him that he just wants to be touched by someone, anyone, a stranger, but there is that awful intensity in his stare.

I step away from him, feeling his fingers peeling off my coat one by one until I have put a save distance between us.

"Ok then, see you."

And later in the evening we walk past the place where he is still standing nailed to the spot by the pain of instant love.

The Dance.

It was the three of us together, but she just held his hand and sang and watched as I helped him rid himself of his innocence. Everything so gentle. He was coddled into a kind of sexual awakening. We were his friends. I was, perhaps his best friend. We had slept on a mattress on the floor and I had listened to him on so many occasions.

"Could I be gay? What if I'm gay? How will I know if I'm gay?"

How will you know for sure unless you sample every option, any option. I had tired of his perpetual virginity. He was the yin to my yang.

"How do they do it? Gay men? What are the machinations of the act?"

He listened to my detailed explanations and he groaned.

"See I don't know if I can do that."

"You don't have to do that."

"Well what will I do then? Tell me what I should do?"

We put the music on that he would like. We fed him. I had slept with her before and together we lay on the same mattress and listened to the same hopes and fears.

"What if I am? What if I'm not? What am I then? What if I am nothing or everything or if I will never have the opportunity to make a choice."

We did it without speaking. There was no planning, no signal, no negotiation. We stripped him of his clothes and when he was naked there was only the music, and our hands, and her humming. It was like a dance, which was something we were all comfortable with. We had danced together many times. This naked dance, and his erection, bouncing it's questions between us.

I kissed him in silence. I kissed his penis and there was music to regulate my rise and fall. When the music stopped we froze, all three of us, as if we were just children playing games. The first note of a new song and I relaxed onto him, took him into my body. This first time, gently.

It was a moment of grace between us. The last moment. Years later we would intimate that we both knew what had happened between us.

He came, and I swallowed gently, careful not to frighten him. He would need to base his ultimate decision on what had occurred between us on that night. He stroked my hair. I noticed the sideways curl of his penis, the coy turning away from me, and wondered if this was always the way with him, or if he had tucked it too tightly and the curl was just the memory of a comforting dressing to the left.

We kissed, the three of us, and later, when he had gone, we mentioned the delicate curl of his penis. I had never seen one like that before. I seemed to be always retreating from my touch like a frightened animal.

He liked boys. It was decided. He walked away from us into a brilliant career and never once looked back. I was momentarily disturbed by this. I felt abandoned. We had been constant companions, but there would be others. There are always others.

She and I joked that he liked my head job so much that he never slept with a girl again, and then we quarrelled, this girl and I, and she never slept with a girl again and I was left to wonder why I was always their first, and always their last.

In the lift

In the lift with the two Japanese girls, and I am hideous. I am skulking behind them and all the hair on the skin of their necks are highlighted in flourescent gold. I am the creature to be hunted down, frankenstein built. I watch the fur on the soft white collar of one of the girls. I watch the neck and it's light fur. I see the coy downward cast of eyes that are fringed by the most exquisitely dark lashes, deer like. And they are so thin. I could catch them up each in the crook of one arm. I could bundle them together and carry them without effort.

At school I dreaded any kind of sport because the girls would race into the showers, peeling away their privacy, exposing their flesh to the monster in their midst. Then there is the sauna. I have been but I don't like the uncomfortable closeness of other people's flesh. It is as if my body will betray me, sprouting an erection like a pointing finger, a flag to mark the place of greatest disturbance.

So in the lift I breathe more shallowly. I can smell the pleasant cherry scent of their flesh. We climb too slowly. This is like a scene from a movie. Look out! Turn around! He's behind you!

The doors open with a gasp of relief. One of them, the one with the fur lined jacket, turns and bows and thanks me although I have done nothing. Thank you for not acting on your impulses perhaps. Thank you for remaining at a respectful distance.

"Thank you" she says and the doors close and I the beast is once more contained.

first girl

So I wondered how I would appear in comparison. Less beautiful, less feminine, less. Generally less.

In the wild a female animal will mate with another female to make sure that her place in the pecking order is secure. Maybe I slept with her because she seemed so worldly, younger than me, perhaps, but more experienced. And when I was up close there was just the taste and texture of her, the idea that there was more to her, my hand, half disappearing inside her, my tongue, pushing as far as I could manage. The idea that somewhere inside her there would be something of myself, my feminine side, somehow buried inside her skin.

I found that I was shaking. I could not still my hand. It was the smell of her, the taste, my tongue thick with her viscosity. The back of my palate tingling with a strange new and not unpleasant taste. The pungent smell of her on my fingers, the sudden urge to push too hard, to enter her completely, to climb inside her.

I felt the lack of whatever it was I would need to enter her. I thought of Freud and how he would be proud of this kind of penis envy. I wanted to be inside her in a way that men had been inside her. I ached with the need to enter her. This would be the first of many nights of longing. I have grown used to this.