Strange Desires

by Joe Simpson Walker

  Title Page

  STRANGE DESIRES

  Joe Simpson Walker

  Publisher Information

  Strange Desires published in 2011 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

  Copyright © Joe Simpson Walker

  The right of Joe Simpson Walker to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This Is Fiction. In Real Life Always Practise Safe Sex

  Aunt Lynda’s Attic

  Lucy drove fast and kept the CD player turned up loud. Since she preferred to have the sun roof and all the windows open, her car’s appearance was heralded by the engine’s roar and a thunder of jungle drums, bursting into the quiet and stillness of the country lanes. In the passenger seat, Tim turned to watch the pedestrians staring after them: horsey-looking local women in quilted jackets and green wellies, fell-walking types in shorts.

  Lucy caught him doing it. ‘Want me to slow down?’ she yelled over the music, the motor and the rush of speeding wind that blew through the roof and windows.

  ‘No! Faster!’ Tim shouted back, laughing.

  ‘Sure?’

  She was teasing him, testing his nerve. ‘Go on!’ Tim said, ‘faster!’

  Her bluff was called. Looking down, he watched her foot on the accelerator. It stayed where it was, holding the pedal down with a steady pressure, keeping up the speed but not putting any more on. She was wearing ankle-high black boots, with chunky heels and platform soles three-quarters of an inch thick. Short as the boots were, their tops were hidden inside Lucy’s leather jeans, which were slightly flared at the ends, but which clung to her thighs, crotch and arse as if painted on with black gloss. Between her belt and the hem of a cropped T-shirt, two or three inches of lithe, slim waist were on view. She had on shades with big black lenses and heavy frames, but had pushed them back on to her forehead, where they rested on thick blonde hair.

  Tim took in the sight with complete satisfaction. Lucy was a knockout, and she was his girlfriend. And as of two weeks ago, she was an heiress. Out of the blue her old Aunt Lynda had left her property, shares and a substantial sum of cash.

  ‘Sure Auntie won’t ask for it back?’ he said, or rather called.

  Aunt Lynda was not deceased. Far from it. She was just married, at an age when Elizabeth Taylor or Zsa Zsa Gabor might have learned to think twice. With her new husband, who was a millionaire thanks to a venture in waste disposal systems or some similar business, she’d set off for a new life in the Mediterranean, dropping behind her everything that belonged to the old country.

  ‘Why should she?’ Lucy answered. ‘If they got divorced, she’d be richer than she ever was. She gave everything away. She said she’d sooner have us enjoying her money now than looking forward to when she pops off.’

  ‘So you get the country retreat.’

  ‘And everything in it.’

  ‘Sure there’ll be anything there worth having?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Auntie told me that when she went she wasn’t taking anything from the old cottage except the clothes she stood up in. And the place is full of stuff. Mum says she was always into doing things on a whim. She’d see something, buy it, then buy something else and forget about it. But she never threw anything away. That was too much like hard work. So nearly everything ended up stored in the cottage, which is a gorgeous old place full of things that are probably worth a fortune.’

  ‘So you’ve been told,’ Tim said. ‘You’ve never actually seen the house. It might be a wreck.’

  Now he was teasing her. Lucy answered with her boot, pressing the platform sole down just a little harder, and the trees and hedgerows of the lane flew past with added velocity.

  Tim sat back with an exaggerated air of cool. Then he lifted a hand and placed it in Lucy’s lap. His fingers landed on the zone of smooth bare flesh between her top and jeans, traced a path and found the little pit of her belly button. With a practised fingertip he burrowed into its depths. Lucy shifted in her seat for a moment. Then, without slowing down, she took one hand from the wheel and gave Tim’s wrist a slap.

  Their journey’s end came not much later. A turning took them off the lane on to a private road, that rose as it went on and wound a wide circle round an iron fence and lowering trees, too dense and shady to allow much view of what lay beyond. Then they were at the gates of Aunt Lynda’s country retreat.

  Tim gave a whistle as he saw the house. A wreck it most assuredly was not. It was a smallish building of two floors, but as far as he could tell was in perfectly good repair, and it was curious to look at. The door stood squarely at the front of the house, flanked on either side by a tall arched window and to left and right beyond by squat rounded turrets of dark red stone, which rose to a sloping black-tiled roof. Set in the roof was a little cupola, or dome, which was nearly all glass, like a greenhouse or a conservatory. The path up the front garden ran between beds of well-ordered roses and on either side and round the back, the grounds were thickly wooded with shrubbery and trees.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said as he and Lucy got out the car. ‘What with the location, it’d fetch a good few quid on the market, whatever’s inside.’

  ‘And it’s mine,’ giggled Lucy. ‘Mine, all mine!’ She ran up the garden path, brandishing the key of the door.

  Inside the house was well aired and light; the afternoon sun poured through the tall windows. But there was a lot of stuff around: furniture, ornaments, curiosities, antiques. Time and again Tim whistled as he examined some object and made a guess as to its potential sale price. Lucy, however, seemed to grow more and more attached to everything she saw. ‘I’m keeping this! ...and this ...and this! I don’t want to let any of it go, ever.’

  ‘Getting just like Auntie, aren’t you?’ Tim said. ‘How do we get upstairs?’

  They found a spiral staircase in the left turret. It climbed round and round as far as the upper floor, but no higher. There seemed to be no access to the loft, with its windowed little dome. ‘Must be more stairs somewhere. Other end of the place, maybe.’

  From the upper landing, a few steps took them into Aunt Lynda’s former bedroom. It was lushly decorated in pink, blue and white, and there was a four-poster brass bed. Let into the wall was what seemed at first sight to be a massive wardrobe. Lucy turned the key. Tim was at the window, surveying the view it gave, and had his back to her. He heard her gasp with surprise, and turned to find that the doors of the supposed wardrobe gave on to another flight of stairs, leading once again upwards.

  ‘The way to the loft! It’s like something from a fairy story, isn’t it? Come on.’

  Lucy was right. They climbed the hidden stairway and found themselves in a long room with a high sloping ceiling. The floor beneath their feet was softly carpeted. The air was fresh, and filled with light as the sun shone down from the dome, and through smaller windows on either side. There was no dust, no feeling of grubbiness or neglect about Aunt Lynda’s attic. It was a beautiful place and from the first look around, it was evident that it housed the biggest and most personal of her many collections.

&
nbsp; It was full of clothes. Dresses for all occasions and seasons hung in order on long free-standing racks, placed side by side, leaving only narrow aisles for a visitor to move through. Shoes stood by the wall, ranked in pairs on towers of shelving. There was a three-winged full-length mirror, six feet tall, and two or three chests of drawers. Pulling open drawers at random, Tim and Lucy discovered deep layers of underwear and hose.

  ‘I’d been wondering where Auntie’s clothes were,’ Lucy said. Her hands were on a silken summer frock, printed in yellow and blue. She ran her fingertips downwards, trying its smoothness. ‘When I saw the wardrobe - thinking it was a wardrobe, and only as big as it looked - I thought, that’ll never hold all her stuff if what I’ve heard is true.”‘

  ‘Why?’ Tim said. ‘What had you heard?’

  ‘That she’d never wear anything often enough to wear it out. And that she kept everything she ever wore, right back from when she was young.’

  ‘I can believe that,’ Tim said. ‘Do you see how old some of this stuff is? ‘

  Lucy was wandering among the dresses, making her way up and down the aisles between summer frocks and evening gowns, but he remained by the drawers. One after another, he opened each one and looked inside, at the strange, old-fashioned underwear. There were brassieres - ‘bras’ was too short a word, somehow - with cups designed to contain the wearer’s breasts completely, sheathing them in cones of padded silk, with wiring on the undersides. Straps as wide as belts rested on the shoulders and the back buckled together with two stout clips.

  They were matched by high-waisted, full-bottomed knickers, of a cut more generous than the shorts some girls wear nowadays, but made to fit tightly and smoothly against the skin. It was strange, Tim thought. Back in the days when Aunt Lynda had been young, it seemed that women had dressed to show off and even exaggerate the shape of their bodies, but had not been permitted - by their parents, employers, society, or whoever - to display bare flesh. He found corsets, some with cups, some made simply to enclose the waist. From all of them there dangled suspenders with not just two straps for each stocking leg, nor even four, but six. It was as if the fall of a stocking and the revelation of a naked thigh or calf had been considered a disgrace, so awful a thing that it was worth several minutes’ worth of struggling with hooks and clasps to guard against it.

  He opened a new drawer and found Aunt Lynda’s stockings. They were stored on tubes of cloth, each pair laid together then wrapped carefully around the outside of a tube. Tim hesitated to touch them. He’d handled the bras and panties and corsets, but only very gingerly and had been careful to replace each item exactly as he found it. The idea of leaving Aunt Lynda’s underwear disturbed gave him a strange sense of wrongdoing. It was as if she were still there, a spirit from the past; or as if he’d slipped backwards in time and with the unravelling of years had turned into a naughty, dirty boy, prying into something that was most definitely not for his eyes. He was afraid to handle the stockings because he wasn’t sure he could roll them up again so neatly.

  ‘Hey, Tim, can you see my keys?’ Lucy’s voice came over two or three walls of dresses. ‘Did I put them down over there?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you did,’ Tim said, with a catch of his breath and a slight start. ‘Do you want them?’

  ‘No. I just wondered what I’d done with them.’

  The urge was irresistible. He lifted one of the tubes of cloth out of its drawer, and slowly unwrapped a pair of the stockings.

  What were they made of? Not silk: some fabric that was artificial, man-made, yet beautifully smooth and sheer. Nylon. Around the tops were dark bands for the suspenders to grip, and on them the maker’s name was stamped in white lettering. Down the back of each leg ran a seam, a long straight black line, from the top to the heel. And there, a box of seams drew the shape of a Cuban heel, a discovery that Tim found surprising and strangely exciting. He could almost see a pair of shapely female feet entering the wispy nylon, filling it, making it tight, bringing skin to press against the heel seams. He could almost feel a pair of legs under his hands, with tight nylon against his fingers, and the long black seams drawing their lines up the backs of calves and thighs.

  He rolled the stockings up again, taking each turn as a step in itself. When he was done that pair looked no different to their untouched neighbours; at least, he hoped they didn’t.

  He pushed the drawer shut, and tried another. It was locked.

  What could be in there? He had to know. Lucy was still buried among the dresses; but her keys were there for him to take. Only one key on the ring was small enough to fit. As silently as he could he unlocked the drawer.

  Like all the others it slid open without a sound. But this drawer did not contain clothes. Instead it was full of papers. For a minute or two Tim’s thoughts flicked back to matters of value, as he turned the papers over, imagining hidden wills. But there was nothing in there to do with business. There were bundles of private letters, all in their envelopes, addressed to Lynda in at least twenty different hands. Under them he found diaries and small manuscript books, their pages covered with writing. He turned over the drawer’s contents quickly, almost roughly. His sense of being a guilty intruder seemed to have vanished with the realisation that nothing here had ever been close to Aunt Lynda’s skin; nothing he was handling had touched her nipples or bottom or crotch. Then he picked up a diary by the spine, and from between the pages something fell out. It was an old photo of Aunt Lynda. There was no name to identify it, nothing written on the back, but it was obvious. In the face she really looked a lot like Lucy.

  When it had been taken, Aunt Lynda was perhaps eighteen or nineteen. Her hair was blonde, and her figure was small-breasted, slim and lithe: its shape showed well under a light-coloured frock with short sleeves, a tight waist and a loose skirt that rested only just below the knee. On her feet was a pair of elegant dark shoes with straps over the bridge of the foot and square-shaped, moderately high heels. Her calves were only visible from the front but somewhere behind the picture, like a reflection in a mirror, Tim seemed to see black seams.

  With a renewed curiosity he flicked through the pages of the diary in his hand. A certain word caught his eye, and he read this entry.

  ‘April 19. Another beautifully sunny but windy day. I volunteered to do the shopping. Anthony is still away, so I borrowed his bike again to ride down to the shops. A man’s machine is heavier than a girl’s, but I got up a racing speed, though the effort made me perspire. (Here Aunt Lynda had first written ‘sweat’ then crossed it out.) By the time I was in the High Street my bra and knickers were sticking to me underneath. I liked the feeling. At the greengrocer’s young Mr. Edmonds was looking at me again. I was outside the shop, choosing oranges and apples from the boxes, which are placed so near the pavement that you have to bend over to get anything from them. The wind was blowing, and I could feel it lifting my skirt. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Mr. Edmonds’ shoes and trouser bottoms stepping through the doorway and standing there. I’m not sure how much he could see. Once or twice a gust blew that made me feel quite undressed at the rear. After being perched on the bike seat, and with the leaking of perspiration, my knickers were clinging to my buttocks very closely. I think if the wind blew strongly enough, it might have given everyone a good view of the cleft in between. I could feel the material lodged up my bum. Young Mr. Edmonds is not a bad-looking man, and when we speak he’s never bad-mannered. He’s really quite shy. I wonder what he would say if I asked him about his penis? Told him I have a unspeakable longing to be fucked? “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!” I might say. I’m so fond of using that word in my head. If mother heard me say it out loud, I think she’d still give me a good spanking, even at my age...’

  ‘Tim? Look at this! What have you got there?’

  He started round. Lucy had emerged from the maze of dresses.

  ‘Old letters? What do they say?’<
br />
  ‘Oh - a - a lot. It doesn’t mean much to me. I don’t know who the people are that she’s talking about.’ He put the diary down, its covers closed. ‘What have you got?’ he asked in turn. Lucy was holding one of Aunt Lynda’s summer frocks, printed silk in yellow and white. It was very like the dress in the old photo; could it even be the same one?

  ‘It’s my size,’ Lucy grinned in delight. ‘Nearly all her dresses are. Her shoes fit me, too. So let’s see about the undies.’

  ‘You - you want to put them on?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I? They’re mine, aren’t they? Come on, Tim. What do you think will go with this frock?’

  He stood aside and let her root through the drawers. Aunt Lynda’s underclothes came in many colours; the commonest were white, black, peach, and various shades of blue and violet. Lucy chose white for bra, knickers and corset, and stockings with a dark flesh tone. She changed there on the spot, in front of Tim, as she’d done often enough at home. The T-shirt was pulled up from her shoulders, and at once her small but shapely tits were bare. She unzipped her ankle boots and threw them off, then unbuckled her belt, opened her trousers and drew them down, wriggling her hips as she freed herself from the skin-tight leather. Thong panties followed, and she was nude.

  Putting on Aunt Lynda’s outfit was a slower business. First the knickers, pulled up snugly on to her hips. Her belly button disappeared behind their high, firm waistband. Then the brassiere, swallowing her breasts in its cups, buckled on fast between her shoulder blades. The corset, with seven hooks , seven clips and half a dozen suspenders dangling in readiness for stockings.

  ‘Do the back ones, will you?’

  Tim had already assisted her into the corset and bra. Now she drew the nylons up on to her legs, and while she clipped them into place at the front of her thighs he did the same behind. It took a little effort. They were both clumsy, unused to what they were doing and for both, hands were made unsteady by a mounting thrill.