Innocence Lost

by Bradley Stoke

  “Come in! Come in!” her sister said hurriedly and then fussed her into the living room.

  Innocence sat down in a slightly worn armchair just by the gas fire and just opposite a large but battered television.

  “Make yourself at home, and take off some of your clothes.”

  Innocence took off her wimple to reveal her shaved head, which alarmed Chastity.

  ”What have they done to you?” she shrieked. “You look terrible! Why don’t you put on some other clothes?”

  “I don’t have any other clothes,” replied Innocence honestly.

  “They haven’t been mistreating you, have they?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But your hair…”

  “I chose to sacrifice my hair for the Lord.”

  “Well, while you’re here you can’t dress like a nun.”

  “Why not? I can’t go round naked, can I?”

  The two sisters chatted together, and Innocence became further aware of the extent of her sister’s incomprehension at her choice of vocation. However, she came round to agree that it would be inappropriate for her to dress like a nun while she was in a state of indecision as to whether to remain one. When Kedi arrived, dressed as always in nothing and making no concessions to the fashion of the district, she suggested that Innocence stay naked at home, but wear her gown when going out. Chastity tried to persuade Innocence to dress more fashionably - at least to wear stilettos and stockings - but Kedi sided with Innocence.

  “If she do not want to dress like that and if she wants to hide her gift of the gods from curious strangers then she has every right to do that.”

  As the days went by, Innocence began to feel her adherence to her Holy Order was slipping past her. Perhaps, she considered, her attachment needed the constant reinforcement of being with other nuns and regular prayer. However if her faith could slip so rapidly after such a brief respite it may be that Kedi and her sister were right in saying that a religious vocation was not for her. (Chastity seemed to think that those who practised prostitution for Christ might be on to a good number, although she didn’t like the idea of not being able to veto who you made love to.)

  At first, Innocence tried to resist the inevitable relaxation of her behaviour, but it wasn’t too long until she decided to abandon wearing her gown altogether even though she continued shaving her head as a mark of spiritual respects. She decided to wear stockings and stilettos, but also opted to wear a dress and knickers to cover her penis. This made her seem quite eccentric, but not as eccentric as she might have seemed otherwise. She felt a bit uncomfortable in the district, and felt that she wasn’t quite ready to be so immediately immersed in the world outside the Convent.

  She’d already succumbed to Kedi’s advances, so she was unable to resist making love to her each night, which Chastity initially seemed not to mind. “What matters is that my darling sister is happy!” she professed.

  After a while, Chastity seemed to get restless about her lover dividing her time so diplomatically between the two sisters. “I love you both,” she complained, “but I get less than half of your attention.”

  She gradually tried enticing Innocence into making love to her, but her sister resisted her attentions quite firmly. In fact, Innocence became quite forceful in physically pushing her sister off her as she transferred her tongue from Kedi’s vagina to the penis that was energetically thrusting into it.

  “When I make love to you,” Innocence declared, “is the time I will definitely have left the Order.”

  This time inevitably came, and when Chastity’s mouth met her sister’s and she wasn’t pushed aside she knew that Innocence had left her religious vocation behind her. She hid her thoughts from her sister as Innocence’s penis entered her for the first time that a penis had entered her at all since she’d left Une’s lovers behind. She trembled as Innocence thrust away at her remembering their love sessions in the past and Chastity’s little preferences. She orgasmed with a frightening intensity as Kedi and Innocence brought her to one, then two, then three and finally four climaxes. She shrivelled away with postcoital exhaustion and predicted to herself that the following day her sister wouldn’t be shaving her head.

  And this indeed was what happened, but Innocence had made another decision. She brushed her hand over the stubble on her head sitting on a chair with no clothes on and staring over at Kedi and Chastity who were sitting close together naked but for Chastity’s stockings.

  “I’m returning to Brook!” she announced.

  “Returning?” wondered Chastity.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” Innocence announced. “I need to go somewhere somehow more pure. Somewhere with simple principles.”

  “And you think you’ll find them in Brook!” scoffed Chastity. ”You’re just as unlikely to find salvation or whatever you want in Brook as in a Convent. Brook is nothing more nor less than a naturist’s paradise. You surely don’t believe that nudity solves anything or makes things better?”

  Kedi sniffed. Her own attitude towards clothes was culturally determined but no less firmly felt for that.

  “If Innocence thinks Brook is the district where she is to be happiest, then she must go!” she opined. “It is a more good place than here. The people are more honest and more open.”

  Innocence knew very little about such things as her only real experiences of Brook were the Convent there and her reunion with Purity - but these had impressed her. Perhaps she could find herself in Brook like her schoolfriend lover had. “I’m sure it will be good for me. And I must get away from everyone I know and think for myself.”

  Chastity smiled indulgently. “I’ll lend you some money to start off with,” she agreed. “But you’ll have to get a job while you’re there.” Chastity was earning good money in her job in a shop selling computers, video and audio equipment, and this together with Kedi’s earnings as a street sex entertainer and some office cleaning made just enough for them to have saved enough money to be relatively generous.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “As soon as I can!” Innocence announced, stroking the unshaven hairs of her legs. She sipped slowly from her cup of coffee. “I just feel I’ve got to get moving!”

  VIII

  In Which Innocence is found in a Vegan Commune; and gains profit by untrammelled display to an unknown public; and in which Dodie discovers Innocence in the cool mountain air.

  Innocence made the journey to Brook by train, waving goodbye to her sister and Kedi and wearing the clothes she thought best suited her destination. These were a pair of baggy shorts, sandals and little else except for the rucksack she had over her shoulders. She had decided that the clothes of her sister’s district were not really appropriate. The train eventually surfaced in Brook and she disembarked at the town of Sauterelle. She didn’t know anyone in Brook except her former lover, Purity, and she thought it would be best to stay with her.

  She didn’t really know where to go when she arrived in the town - it was much larger than Divin and there were no signposts pointing to Purity’s commune. She humped her rucksack over her back and wandered through the streets of thronging bare flesh forever glancing around in the hope of seeing Purity’s distinctive dark skin. Purity had given her some very sketchy directions but they didn’t seem at all adequate as she paused by a street map just outside a municipal building. She felt curiously conservative in a town where almost all younger people were thoroughly naked and she could compare her own hidden endowments with those of all the men there. However, the street map was of some assistance and she established that the way to Purity’s commune was several miles away. After a lot of questioning and searching around, she eventually found a bus that took her within two miles of the commune from which she could walk.

  She had curiously romantic views of what Purity’s commune would be like. She did not expect it to be in such a very rundown farmhouse. Just outside, sitting in the sun, were a naked couple in the distinctive unkempt appearance th
at Purity had told her to expect: the man with a long untidy beard obscuring what little of his face was not already covered by his long hair and the woman’s face similarly hidden by her long curtains of hair. Innocence introduced herself to them.

  “I’m looking for my friend Purity,” she explained.

  “Purity,” mused the woman pushing a curtain of hair to one side revealing a long nipple on a tiny breast. “I don’t think she’s here at the moment. She’s always going off all over the place, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” agreed the man. “She’s always travelling. I don’t think she’s decided what she wants from Brook.”

  Seeing how disappointed Innocence was with her friend not there and discovering that she really didn’t have alternative accommodation, the couple said that she could stay at least until the evening when the commune could discuss if she could stay longer. All decisions affecting the commune had to be decided communally and there were meetings every night for several hours concerning the issues involved. “I think we spend more time talking about what we can do than actually doing it!” remarked the man.

  While Innocence waited for the evening meeting to start, she was introduced to other people of the commune. Everyone had let their hair grow freely, wherever there was hair to grow, and Innocence felt very odd with only the stubble of hair on her head which made her look thin and slightly malnourished. They also wore no clothes at all - not even robes or jewellery or shoes - making Innocence feel even more distinct from her company. Not only was there an attitude of naturalness in how people appeared, there was a total openness about their sexual behaviour. Several couples or groups of more than two were indulging in sex when Innocence first met them, and there was no attempt to stop for Innocence’s sake. The man would continue fucking away while chatting, totally unembarrassed about it and totally unconcerned about any sensitivity Innocence might have.

  Innocence joined in the communal dinner, which was a kind of amorphous mush of boiled vegetables which tasted overcooked and rather too spicy. There was no crockery or cutlery used and Innocence had to dip her hand into a large mound of tepid mush to take handfuls of the food and then direct into her mouth what little of it didn’t immediately fall onto either the floor or onto her breasts. She began to appreciate the lack of clothes as a way of keeping the laundry duties low.

  Eventually, and in a somewhat chaotic way, the meal evolved into the communal meeting she’d been told about. She sat through what seemed to her a very tedious discussion between at most three of the twenty or so people gathered there concerning the political and moral perspectives regarding fairly mundane things such as a shit rota, the division of shared spaces for the benefit of women’s freedom from male oppression and the need to demarcate the commune from the road by some kind of a sign. Almost all the discussions were unresolved and there were no votes taken. One of the people who did most of the talking had a habit of wandering well off any subject of general interest to such subjects as her personal relationships and her unsympathetic views on people who wore wool or silk.

  Innocence tried hard to appear as interested in the discussion as she felt she ought to be, but she felt rather disorientated and focused on the joints that were being passed around and had more than once lost touch of what the actual topic of discussion was supposed to be. It, therefore, came as a bit of a surprise to become aware that she was now the subject of conversation and that a man with only a nose visible through the black and grey hair of his face was trying to attract her attention.

  “Do you agree or not, sister?” he was asking.

  Sister? wondered Innocence, thinking for a moment they must have thought she was still a nun, but then remembered that everyone addressed each other as sister or brother.

  “With what?”

  “You can stay in the commune for as long as you help with the chores and preparing the food,” prompted a man near her whose attempts at growing a beard had resulted in only a few sorry black wispy strands.

  “And that you take off those disgusting clothes!” snorted a rather fat woman with a rather large and furry birthmark on her thigh.

  Innocence didn’t feel able to argue in her marijuana-induced haze, so against her normal inclination she took off her shorts and knickers and stood up shakily feeling a little ridiculous. Her penis dangled down with no feeling, but attracting a great deal of attention.

  “I agree with everything you say,” she said in a voice that sounded rather incoherent and wobbly.

  “Are you a brother or a sister?” asked one of the main speakers.

  “What a sexist question!” immediately snapped another.

  “Gender is not important!” agreed another.

  The meeting degenerated into a fervent argument - with everyone in agreement - that Innocence’s gender was not a subject of discussion, dispute or voyeurism, while it was quite clear to Innocence, as she slowly lowered herself onto a bean bag, that she was the subject of all these things. She sadly picked up her shorts and knickers and hesitated over putting them back on again, but decided rather to pack them hastily into her rucksack which was resting just behind her.

  “Don’t worry about it, sister,” said one man with a wispy pale goatee and long pale hair. “You’re accepted into the commune.”

  “Am I?” wondered Innocence slowly stroking her penis and watching with a kind of disinterested fascination as it falteringly got larger.

  She noticed as she masturbated herself that she was watched with rather the same fascination as an animal in a zoo, and nobody took the opportunity to join her. She felt quite lonely as she came into her hands and allowed the semen to trickle through her fingers and onto the floor. Before long her consciousness left her and she collapsed on the floor by her own little stain and amongst the spillage of her dinner. All around her the meeting continued, apparently regardless, concerning matters of awesome triviality, which made staying awake inconceivably difficult.

  The commune seemed to be divided into a majority whose work was concentrated entirely on the running of the commune and felt a certain satisfaction in their separatism from the outside world and those whose contribution to the commune was to bring in the money they earned by working. Perhaps because Innocence had never adopted the commune by choice, she felt more sympathy with those in the latter category. One of these was Bouche, a girl who didn’t even pretend to have no interest in Innocence’s penis but spent rather a lot of time admiring and discussing it. To Innocence this actually felt better than the company of most of the others who so studiously averted their attention from her most prominent feature in a way that made Innocence feel actually rather more selfconscious and embarrassed. Most people in the commune, however, avoided contact with her altogether.

  Bouche was a petite girl with tiny breasts that were mostly nipple and very girlish hips. Like all the girls in the commune, she didn’t believe in even the ostentation of a ribbon in her hair but she did nonetheless plait her hair. This meant that her face shone out rather than being obscured by either a curtain or a mound of hair. She made her living, Innocence was intrigued to find, in a photographic studio.

  “Are you a model?” Innocence wondered.

  “No, not at all,” laughed Bouche. “I don’t think I’ve got quite the right figure or features. And, anyway, I’d have to shave my legs and get my hair styled to do that.”

  What Bouche did, Innocence discovered, was to fellate the male models who posed for the studio. There wasn’t much of a demand for just nude models in the newspapers and magazines of Brook as nudity was so widely visible, but the demand for erotic or pornographic photographs was in no way diminished because of that. What she did was help at the studio by stimulating the penises of the male models so that they were fully erect for the photographs that would appear in women’s magazines or newspapers. This inevitably included semen shots, but these weren’t always used.

  “It’s not always very photogenic,” Bouche explained.

  A lot of people in the commun
e disapproved of Bouche’s source of income, but it didn’t bother her. “They say it’s sexual exploitation and I’m contributing to it. But I’m not the one being photographed and it’s not like proper sex, not like real pornography. And besides I enjoy it. I can give several dozen blow jobs in a day. And I’ve become an expert.” She smiled indulgently at Innocence. “Here. Let me demonstrate.”

  Innocence didn’t mind as Bouche took her penis into her hand and then with a mixture of caressing with her fingers, licking with her tongue and manipulating her lips, throat and teeth, bring it to a very full erection.

  “The art of my work,” explained Bouche when Innocence’s penis was as engorged as it had ever been, “is to bring the penis to its maximum point and to hold it there for as long a time as possible. And, my! You certainly are splendidly endowed!”

  Innocence also needed to earn some money. Her sister’s generosity was not sufficient for Innocence to stay in Brook for very long, and she didn’t feel too enthusiastic about spending her time emptying latrines, preparing stews and attending the interminable meetings. There was no evidence of Purity returning yet, and Innocence felt she’d rather see a little more of Brook than just Sauterelle. She’d heard, for instance, of the snow-covered mountains of Les Grandes Petites, and wanted the opportunity to visit them. Bouche appreciated that and suggested to Innocence that she pose for her photographic studio. “They mostly only photograph men, but I’m sure they’d make an exception in your case. And because you’re so (let’s face it!) unusual you’ll probably get paid a better rate.”

  Innocence had more than a few reservations about being photographed by strangers and then to be viewed by many more strangers in their magazines and journals, but Bouche persuaded her that there really wasn’t any pain involved.