Did I merely admire Roberta, the blonde, or did I want her? As I sit here in Anne’s living room looking at the girl on the screen, I have to wonder. This one definitely stirs me, makes me want to get to know her. There’s something in the look in her eyes that gets to me, and it’s a feeling similar to the one I got when Roberta graced me with a passing glance – a lurch in the belly, a dizzy spell followed by the inability to concentrate on whatever it was I was doing at the time.
I ponder on it all: it’s difficult to know, when we girls see another girl we find attractive, whether we want them or whether we would just like to be them. I imagine there are plenty of girls thinking they are lesbians when in truth they are just admirers of particular women and their looks or clothes sense – Kate Moss, Juliette Binoche, Angelina Jolie. And plenty of others who think they are merely appreciating someone’s looks when in truth what they really want to do is get under the sheets with the object of their admiration.
It’s a tough call, requiring strict self-scrutiny and the ability to be honest with oneself. Which is just what I am trying to do now. I edge my chair closer to the table, cast Roberta from my mind and focus on the girl in the picture and my feelings about her. The image is not pornographic so much as erotic. The girl is sitting side-on to the photographer, on a simple wooden chair against a stark white background. I try to analyse what it is that appeals to me about her, beyond her looks and the resemblance to my former classmate. There’s nothing really outstanding about her – she’s neither skinny nor fat, with medium-sized boobs, perky but not in-your-face. As Anne suggested, maybe I just go for girl-next-door types.
I go back to the index. Maybe I’m not being honest with myself here either. Maybe by sticking to the known, the familiar, the everyday and unthreatening, I’m denying a whole side of myself. Anne is encouraging me to take risks, to broaden my perspective. Otherwise there’ll be no point to all of this and I might as well walk out of the door now.
I click on a thumbnail image labelled ‘Keira’. Keira turns out to be a dark-haired Irish girl with a brazen ‘fuck-me-if-you-dare’ stare. She’s wearing thigh-high patent boots and is holding a whip. Her bush is a silky sliver, her lips meaty and prominent, her breasts too large to be entirely real. She looks far too dangerous to be the girl next door. She looks like trouble.
One hand creeps between my legs even as I’m telling myself that she’s not my type. For a while I content myself with rubbing my yearning pussy through my jeans, but as I continue to look I quickly find myself wanting more, so I unzip myself and slip my hands down the front of my knickers. My clit is fat, protruding, as if on a quest for pleasure. I moisten a finger in my mouth and then apply it to my clit. It’s like an electric pulse goes through my entire body. A warm nectar floods my pants. I slide my finger down through my wetness and into my hole. Then, still staring at the screen, I pull my jeans down to my knees with one hand, first on one side, then the other, and then down and over my ankles, discarding them at my feet. When I’m freed, I lift my legs to the table, spreading myself, one foot on either side of the keyboard and the screen.
I plunge three fingers inside, then one hand, while with the tips of several fingers of the other hand and then the heel of it I attend to my burning clit. My throat is dry and I’m feeling dizzy. Anne could walk down at any minute. Or a window cleaner could appear at the French doors. The thought of being disturbed, discovered, only excites me more. Anne seems to have awakened a taste in me for being watched.
I force myself to focus on the screen, to look into Keira’s eyes. Keira’s watching me, I tell myself. This is Keira’s hand on my clit, Keira’s fingers inside me. It’s not convincing. She remains an image on a screen. I close my eyes and she floods my brain. I move to the floor, one hand on a breast, the other still inside me. With my eyes closed I am more able to persuade myself that she’s here with me, that it’s her fingers on my nipple, her hand reconnoitring my sopping core.
Images dance behind my closed eyelids: Keira leaning over me, searching my face for indications of pleasure, of what is really getting to me and how she should go on, but also images of Roberta, my schoolmate, like split-second subliminal shots in films. She’s fighting to get back up from the cutting-room floor, the girl next door. She’s refusing to be relegated to the bin. I welcome her back in and now there are two of them tending to me, running their hands over my limbs, tweaking and sucking my nipples, stroking my clit and exploring me from within. Two of them bringing me higher, higher, so that I feel I’m floating up from the floor.
And then Keira’s standing astride me. She’s forced Roberta aside, is looking down at me, brandishing her leather whip. There’s a black glint in her eyes. She knows she’s dangerous and she relishes the dark thrill she can unleash in me. I throw my arms back over my head onto the floor, slave to her, under her spell. Let her do her worst. I am entering new territories.
The doorbell interrupts my wild reverie and I leap up, pull on my jeans and stuff my damp knickers into my back pocket. Smoothing down my hair and trying to steady my breathing, which is coming in saccades, I hurry down the hallway and open the front door. It’s a courier for Anne, a large white puffy envelope handed over by a girl in leather and a motorbike helmet. She smiles at me through the visor as she hands over her clipboard with the document I need to sign acknowledging receipt. Her dark eyes shine and I go weak at the knees. When I close the door I have to lean back against it, I feel so dizzy.
It takes several minutes for me to recover myself sufficiently to take the parcel up to Anne.
I stand outside Anne’s door for a while, wondering what I am going to say to her. I’ve found out so much about myself in the last hour or so, but none of it is really very conclusive. In fact, what I’ve found out, beyond the fact that, yes, some girls do turn me on and I would like to sleep with one and find out what it’s like, is that I’m a bundle of contradictions. Demure girl-next-door types do attract me, but so do dangerous ones in thigh-length boots wielding whips.
After a while, as if sensing that I am there and growing impatient at my hesitation, Anne opens the door.
‘Come in,’ she says. The usual harshness is gone from her voice, replaced by what may even be gentleness. I wouldn’t swear on it, but it’s as if she can sense that I’ve put myself through the mill, that all of this soul-searching is taking its toll on my brain as much as my body.
I step inside, hand over the parcel. She takes it and looks at the label.
‘Ah good,’ she says. ‘I’ve been waiting for this.’ But she places it on her desk unopened, turns back to me, eyebrows raised. ‘Well?’ she says.
I smile a little helplessly, shrug. ‘It’s – I don’t know – it’s …’ I don’t know how to say it, or even, really, what I’m going to say.
She pats my arm, and again I sense something almost maternal in her gesture.
‘It’s not easy,’ she says, ‘finding out who you really are, beneath all the layers, the hard crust that has built up over the years.’ She stares beyond me, as if quite taken by her analogy. ‘It is,’ she says, ‘now I come to think of it, rather like a volcanic eruption. You fight so hard to repress all those untidy urges, and when you do start letting them out, it’s like a surge of hot lava – exhilarating and liberating but frightening too.’
Her eyes come back to me, and suddenly I am scared. Her pupils are huge in the low light, and I feel as if I am being sucked into a black hole. Anne, I think, has bewitched me. I’ve been a fool to think she is doing me a favour: this is all about her and her need for control. Bored of her life, her solitary writer’s life, she has been seeking an outlet for her frustration, looking for sport. And something in the way I responded to her questioning in the interview told her that I would play along with her.
And yet, and yet … Much as the void in her eyes scares me, her amorality, I feel that I am on the brink of something important and that to back away from the precipice would be to shirk my duty to myself, now that I have star
ted out on this route. Of course, there’s nothing to say I can’t pick up a girl myself – go to a lesbian bar and score with some chick. But I’d have to get wildly drunk first, just to have the nerve, and what’s the point of that? What would be the point of a drunken shag that I wouldn’t be able to remember? How would I know if I wanted to do it again?
I look at Anne. Whatever her motivations and true feelings towards me, or lack of them, she can be useful to me. I have to keep reminding myself of that fact. She illuminates a path that I simply would not have the guts to follow myself. In fact she illuminates two different paths: the one that leads to my being a writer, and the path to erotic self-discovery. How the two are linked is not yet clear to me: they may intersect at some point, or run parallel for a time, or join at their endpoint. But that they are linked has become obvious to me. To try to follow one without being aware of the other would mean failure.
‘I’ve … I’ve been looking,’ I manage at last, ‘at girls.’
Anne’s lips twist into a wry smile. ‘And?’
‘And – I don’t know. Different things, really. I’m not sure.’
‘You’re still not sure, is that it?’
‘No, it’s not that. I … I think I should. I mean, I really want to. Only …’
‘Spit it out, girl.’
There she goes again, with the ‘girl’ thing, the school-mistressy condescension. I have to take a deep breath to stop myself from reacting, from throwing it all back in her face. I avert my eyes from her scornful face, fix them on one of the Picasso lithographs.
‘I want to,’ I say. ‘I’ll show you.’
Up in my room, I take solace in my diary, writing pages and pages. Much of it is vitriol aimed at Anne, to whom I feel somewhat enslaved and more than a little bitter. But once I’ve got all that out of my system, once I’ve brain-dumped onto the once-pristine white paper, staining it with my bile, I am free to write about my feelings towards Roberta and the other women I fantasised about. Before long I’m feeling all hot and bothered again and having a session on my bed with my Rock Chick, visions of Keira in my mind.
I’m nervous about tonight, of course, and astonished that Anne thinks she can pull it off at short notice. I wonder where she is going to go to procure me the woman of my dreams. That woman, of course, is Keira. I decided it was just too complicated to tell Anne of my ambivalence, of my yearning for two very different kinds of women. So to make life simpler, I called up the erotic website on the computer in her study and clicked on Keira’s picture. I didn’t look at Anne’s face as I did so, afraid that she’d be smirking at my choice. Afraid that she’d have an ‘I knew it’ look on her face. Sometimes I feel that Anne knows me better than I know myself.
When I’ve come, I slumber for a while, conserving my energy. I didn’t have a wild sex life with Nate, and all of these exertions are wearing me out. Tonight is a big night – a life-changing one – and I want to be up to it.
10: The Woman
ANNE AND I are sitting in the living room, drinking a sherry together. She doesn’t know that I’ve already had a couple of swigs from the vodka bottle she keeps in her drinks cabinet. Much as I said to myself I wanted to go into this sober, open-eyed and with all cylinders firing, my nerves got the better of me as the minutes ticked by, and my hands were trembling so much when I came downstairs that I had to have something to strengthen my nerves.
We’re not talking, but it’s a companionable rather than an embarrassed silence. A thoughtful silence, as if we are both mindful of the significance of what is to come. Anne doesn’t look nervous, but then why should she? She won’t be directly involved, although without even consciously thinking about it, I have accepted without questioning that she is to be present, in her usual observing role. Now that I do think about it, I wonder that I am so seemingly unfazed by it, and then I wonder if in fact Anne’s presence is helping me this time, if I’m not actually using her as a crutch to face a situation that I might not be able to countenance all by myself.
At the squeak of the front gate I jump up, nerves ajangle. Terror-stricken, I look at Anne, but she stares back calmly, and in her eyes I think I see something mocking again. Going to wimp out? they seem to say to me. Can’t go through with it? And in turn I think, Fuck you. I am going to do this. I won’t give you the satisfaction of seeing me fail.
The footfalls on the stone path have ceased and are followed by a knock on the door – loud, assertive, unabashed. I rush for the door. Facing up to things is easier, I’m discovering, than holding back. All I want to do, really, is run upstairs and hide under the duvet, alone. A night with my Rock Chick would do me just fine. But I will hate myself in the morning for having taken the easy way out.
Through the patterned glass panes of the front door I can see an outline, the shape of a figure dressed in black. With detachment I watch my hand reach for the latch, and it’s as if it belongs to someone else.
The door opens in slow motion. A face appears, unsmiling, a little severe. She’s like, I think, a younger version of Anne: dark bob, angular face, inscrutable eyes. She’s wearing a belted overcoat with a chic French air to it. She says nothing.
‘Come in,’ I say at last.
She steps inside, looks around appraisingly as she starts to shrug off her coat, then hands it to me. Beneath it she’s wearing the sort of body-conscious stretch black dress, entirely featureless, that you used to see in the 1980s. Think Emmanuelle Seigner dancing with Harrison Ford in Frantic – one of the great nightclub scenes in film history. Slinky, seamless, ultra short. Underneath it she has seamed stockings, and on her feet are a pair of almost vicious-looking black stiletto boots. She’s like a gorgeous cat, stealthy, mysterious and amoral, inhabiting a world of her own. I can’t imagine where Anne knows her from – or, perhaps, where she found her.
She walks ahead of me, and I can tell by her slight hesitation between the living room and the kitchen doors that she’s not been to the house before. Which makes the latter option more likely. Again, I wonder how one goes about that – how a forty-something woman in London procures another woman for her female acolyte. Is it a matter of just picking up the phone, calling in some favours, plumbing one’s social network? Or did Anne perhaps contact an escort agency, describe her requirements and hand over her credit card details? If so, and this is a commercial transaction, does it make the experience any the less real?
The girl presents herself to Anne, and the pair nod to each other in greeting, which doesn’t help me to establish whether they have met before or whether they have some kind of relationship, however tenuous – are friends of friends, perhaps. Then Anne gestures towards the drinks cabinet in the corner.
‘Can I serve you anything?’ she says.
The girl nods. ‘A brandy would be good,’ she replies.
Her voice is warm and husky, and I start to tremble again. I don’t want them to sit drinking and chatting; I just want to get on with this. I head over to the corner and, as Anne turns away to proffer the girl her drink, I serve myself a generous slug and down it in one. Then I turn to them.
‘Shall we go upstairs?’ I’m astonished by my forcefulness, but I can’t hold out any longer. I am going to meet my destiny, am walking towards my future.
Two pairs of raised eyebrows meet my words, but nobody protests. I place my glass down and head out of the room, confident that they will follow. On the stairs a moment of doubt is followed by a sense of intoxication as I see them come out of the living room and begin to ascend too. I know that my control is illusory, momentary, but asserting myself makes me feel less at the mercy of whatever it is that Anne has set in motion. Which is something that I assented to her putting in motion, of course, and that I want as much as I fear.
Once inside the guest room I sit down on the end of the bed and slip off my shoes. The girl strides in ahead of Anne and stands in front of me, draining the glass that she’s carried up with her, one hand on her hip. Then she puts one foot up on the bed, her knee bent
, and pushes me back.
Surprised, I try to struggle up, but already she’s crouched over me, tugging at my jeans, undressing me. I look towards Anne for a reaction, taken aback that things are happening so fast, wondering if this is what she has instructed the girl to do or whether the latter is acting of her own volition. But Anne isn’t even looking: she’s busy rearranging the cushions on her armchair, tidying her little nest in the corner.
The girl continues being forceful, stripping me with impatient tugs and yanks of my clothing. Naked I lie in front of her as she surveys me, her regard cool and appraising. I reach for her, try to pull up the hem of her dress, but she brushes my hand away, then takes hold of me and turns me over. I gain only glimpses of her over my shoulder as she holds my wrists together and binds them with something that feels like rope.
I avoid looking at Anne, the architect of my humiliation. I don’t want her to see how this is both appalling and arousing me, calling forth as it does memories of those sixth-form days when I lusted after Roberta while steaming at yet another reprimand from Mrs Scholes. A confusing time that has never really resolved itself in my mind. Perhaps that’s why I am here now. Perhaps all of that – single-sex public school, a Sapphic crush, and a sadistic and possibly even lesbian headteacher – was bound, at some point, to lead to this.
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