Sex in the City--London

by Maxim Jakubowski

  In my early twenties I did live in London with a cute boyfriend (who went on to become my husband) for a short while. We were poor, it was cold and grey, but we were happy. I remember one night we went to bed with the luxury of a borrowed gas heater and woke up covered in sticky floral wallpaper. It had literally slid from the walls overnight because of the extreme dampness in our flat – which six months later was condemned and pulled down!

  Having progressed from those meagre student days, a few years ago said husband took me to a charity dinner at The Grosvenor House Hotel. I knew very few people, and as he chatted with colleagues I was content to sink into a leather chair in the Champagne Bar and indulge one of my favourite pastimes – people watching.

  The ambiance was muted; men kept their voices hushed and ladies sipped golden bubbles with little fingers poised. A pianist tinkled in the background and the sombre bar staff were attentive yet discreet. It struck me that with all the elegant dresses and finely suited men, a passing time traveller would have had difficulty guessing the year, or even the decade, we were socialising in. There were no mobile phones, no bluetooths and no ipods on show, just chic people on their best behaviour. Perhaps a glance out the window at cars slicing through dark puddles would have given a clue; limos, Lexuses, Bentleys and Mercs, rushing the rich and famous, royalty and celebrity to the other Park Lane venues surrounding us.

  As people arrived in the Champagne Bar and greeted one another it became hard to tell who was catching up with old friends and who was being introduced for the first time. I studied my husband in his pristine tux holding a perilously thin flute of champagne. He laughed at something someone said, nodded his head and then turned and caught my eyes. I returned a smile and wondered what it would be like if ‘we’ we’re just being introduced for the first time.

  I’m pleased to say if we had just met at that moment, I’d still fancy him like hell and still want to have his babies. But what would it be like to play a game, come back and fool everyone? Could we in fact fool anyone? Or would people guess by our familiar body language that we were a couple and knew each other’s deepest, darkest desires? And what about the genteel staff in this sophisticated hotel, would they be so crass as to challenge our behaviour if we thought up the naughtiest way possible to become acquainted? It got me thinking!

  Woke up with that Hampstead Blues Again

  by Maxim Jakubowski

  THERE’S LONDON.

  Then, there’s the real London.

  And then again, there is the unreal London, a world of shadows, imagination and a well of loneliness.

  That was the London he’d inhabited since Julie left him.

  He often wished he had the power within him to make things fade away, the subtle art of erasing memories, feelings, associations, but that was an ability he did not possess. Sometimes he even felt he had no talent whatsoever, and was ever amazed that he had reached this stage in his life when material and professional success and the admiration of others was a given. All a facade, he knew; others could not even guess at the desolation inside.

  I am a hollow man, he reflected. Without her, I am nothing.

  But, in the meantime, life had to go on.

  He worked, he lectured, he attended glittering parties for the launch of books at the Groucho Club, Soho House or The Horse Hospital, film premieres on Leicester Square, the opening of exhibitions in shiny art galleries in Bond Street or South Molton Street, he commented on the radio on matters artistic, or even sometimes became a talking head on late-night television on subjects intellectual, and watched as his bank account steadily grew in size.

  Which brought him little pleasure or satisfaction.

  There was the London in which he functioned, an artificial stage on which he lived, but like a dark cloud following his every step, there was also Julie’s London. The places they’d been together on her only visit here. Locations he could not deliberately avoid for ever: the cavernous galleries of the Tate Modern, the counter at the 3rd floor bar where they could overlook the ant-like commuters trooping up and down the Millennium Bridge below while sitting on their high stools; the Tesco supermarket in Finchley, where he had uncovered her amusing craving for Hula Hoop snacks; the restaurant in Coin Street where they had shared a bad meal; the coffee concession at Luton airport before she had taken the escalator to the departure lounge, clutching the John Lennon box set of CDs he had given her (or was it the Clash box? or had that been on a separate occasion and not in London?); the black shelves of the Notting Hill branch of Waterstone’s where he had proudly pointed out to her a well-fingered copy of his only book which had been sitting there gathering dust for ages now, this after a stroll down Ladbroke Grove and the Portobello Road Market which she had found terribly disappointing (one day he had promised to take her to Camden Town if she ever came back to London); the rippling waters of … Enough now! It was over. She would never return. She was now with another, others, somewhere; she had moved on. And he was the one still encased like amber in the unforgiving past. Enough. Over and out.

  He banished Julie from both his life and dreams and entered another London, one with which she held no connection.

  At a concert at the Roundhouse, he met Aurora, the Spanish girl. Beirut were playing, Balkan brass, hints of klezmer and gently fey Americana, a combination that spoke to all his sensibilities. In the crowd at the bar, during the interval, he had accidentally knocked over her glass and bought her a replacement. Diet Coke to his Classic Coke. An hour or so later as the concertgoers were filing out of the venue on Chalk Farm Road, he brushed shoulders with her as the stream of human traffic met a brief bottleneck descending the stairs from the balcony. He was about to apologise, but she turned her head towards him and recognised him. She smiled. He smiled back. Of such minor things, life is made.

  It was raining outside, quite heavily. He had an umbrella in his ever-present tote bag. She visibly hadn’t, he noticed, as she momentarily stood outside on the pavement clearly unsure as to her next step: walk to the tube station, wait in the rain for a cab, step back and shelter for a while in the theatre?

  ‘Do you live far?’ he asked, as he deployed the umbrella over the both of them.

  ‘No, West Hampstead,’ he noted her accent. ‘It’s not very distant.’

  ‘I know … look … I have a car parked near the Lock. I can give you a lift. My own flat is just beyond Hampstead Garden Suburb, so it’s not out of my way.’

  As if to encourage a positive response, the pouring rain intensified in ferocity.

  ‘OK,’ she agreed.

  They became lovers one week later.

  It would have been earlier, but she had a flatmate who worked as an intern for an Aids charity, and she had to wait for her friend to go away to Brighton for the weekend for an educational conference. She wanted their first time together to take place on familiar ground.

  Aurora had curling, dark auburn pre-Raphaelite hair and alabaster skin.

  ‘Come to the bedroom,’ she asked. They’d been having coffee after she’d invited him back, after catching a Lars Von Trier film at the Everyman. The choice of the cinema and its plush double sofas sitting two had not been his. It was the only screen in North London showing the movie they’d both agreed to see together.

  Sitting so close to her with no divider, he could feel the heat her body generated in the darkness. They both fidgeted a little, either because of nerves or the fact the double-seater did not restrict them each to a single position. He unfolded his leg and as he did so her thigh brushed fleetingly against his.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered, just as she was about to say the very same thing. They looked at each other and laughed. Someone in the row behind shushed them. They both fell silent but their hands moved closer and touched. He took hold of hers. She did not resist the deliberate contact.

  Aurora leaned against him, and he caught a drift of her perfume. She whispered in his ear ‘your hand is so warm …’.

  ‘I know,’ he said. Julie had
always been telling him that. His feet too … Martin, the human radiator!

  ‘A penny for your thoughts?’ she asked him, spinning him out of his reflections.

  ‘They’re not even worth a fraction of that.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I come dead cheap,’ he joked.

  Later, she’d put a record on, ambient piano music by Ludovico Einaudi. But the constant thrum of the traffic streaming towards Kilburn High Street outside the first-floor flat muted the sounds. Melodies morphing into an indistinct wall of confused sounds. Julie had been a fan of The Clash. He hadn’t. Julie’s hair also curled like a Medusa-like web. But it hadn’t been red. Julie wasn’t here. He was. With Aurora. And he was no longer sure whether he really wanted to make love with her, to her.

  She reached towards him.

  ‘So when do I find out if you are equally warm in bed?’ she smiled.

  ‘As long as you don’t expect me to be much else, too. I’m no multi-tasker!’

  He took her hand and they made their way to the bedroom.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely.’

  ‘Then I want you to keep the light on,’ he ordered. ‘And I want to be the one to undress you.’

  Her shape was on the right side of voluptuous and her rose-coloured nipples were attractively puffy. She knelt topless on the shag carpet and assiduously took my cock into her mouth. She was visibly experienced in the craft and care of men’s cocks, blending loving tender care with the ideal and correct amount of roughness. And just the right touch of saliva in her oral caress, that clever slip and slide of pliant, warm lips, of tongue and teeth. Moving in agonising laziness from tip to stem to balls, lingering here, concentrating there, a finger and then another teasing the demarcation line between my perineum and my sphincter, clenching, releasing, wetting, sucking, licking the whole ridged geography of my penis and the bodily territories that bordered it.

  I closed my eyes.

  Thought of another blow job. A yearning remembrance of things past. Julie one night after we’d walked down towards the ravine of the Vale of Health. The moon’s pale rays reflected across the rippling surface of the small pond. The heat of her mouth. The maddening tangle of her hair beneath me. The uneven and disturbed texture of the tree against which I was leaning, which I was polishing with the palm of my right hand while my other hand kept hold of Julie’s head, guiding her mouth’s steady movements around my cock.

  ‘I can’t hold on much longer. I have to come.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, come into my mouth, my love.’

  The Hamsptead night around us was punctured by my deep moan, the obscene sound of my release, the flow of my spend inside the cauldron of her mouth, her throat.

  The croaking of a frog, or was it a duck, somewhere across the pond.

  The hiss of Julie’s breath as she swallowed me.

  ‘You taste sweet.’

  ‘Really?’

  The memory faded and I was back in the room with Aurora.

  ‘You’ve done this before, I see?’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded, allowing my hard cock to slip from between her dark lips. She gripped it between her fingers and continued the up and down motion with mechanical precision. ‘That previous lover, the older man, the mathematician, sometimes wanted me to suck him for hours. He trained me. I told you about him, didn’t I?’

  Maybe I hadn’t been listening properly at the time.

  ‘Trained?’

  ‘He was an older man. I was younger then. Naive. It was when I was doing my degree. He would take me to these clubs, fetish, BDSM, and have me pretend I was his slave. He wanted me to suck him in public, while others watched. At first, it was hard but I learned to blank it out.’

  ‘Just sucking?’

  She drew back as her own memories no doubt flashed back.

  Flushed ever so slightly. ‘Not always …’ her eyes avoided mine.

  My neglected cock hardened again. ‘Come here,’ I indicated, and pulled her jeans off. ‘On your knees. Face the wall. Yes, like that.’

  Her regal and generous arse positioned itself at the right angle. Just the way Julie had grown to place herself to greet my vector of entry as our bodies had once so quickly become accustomed to each other and the geometry of our couplings. I squinted and peered at the flank of her left thigh. No stain.

  The eye of her anus shone in the unforgiving brightness of the light bulb above, surrounded by the darker shadows of her pale Mediterranean skin.

  I hesitated one brief instant as I adjusted myself to the myriad differences between her and lost Julie. My hand caressed her firm rump, tracing imaginary longitude lines across her ample orbs, inveigled itself between her crotch, still dry, and spread her even further. She drew her breath.

  ‘Did he also spank you?’ I asked Aurora.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Just did, I reckon.’

  Spanking had never quite been my scene but right there and then, a stone’s throw from Kilburn High Road and technically still in West Hampstead with this fragile young Spanish woman voluntarily at my mercy, the compulsion to hurt her, mark her, swept uncontrollably over me.

  I smacked her hard, three or four times in succession until the shape of my fingers peered back at me like a pattern imprinted across the white skin of her arse cheeks.

  She began crying.

  I spat into my right hand, still stinging from the assault on her flesh, and lathered my cock and entered her from behind in one single, brutal movement.

  Aurora shrieked.

  ‘That hurt,’ she protested.

  ‘But you want it this way, you like it, don’t you? I can feel it …’

  ‘Yes,’ she sobbed. ‘Yes.’

  I had known the odd intrinsically submissive woman during the course of my past feeble erotic adventures. Somehow I was drawn to them. Could almost identify them in a crowd. But didn’t quite understand what drove them. And all too often craved to experience what made them tick, how they felt. A thoroughly dangerous curiosity.

  Her reply encouraged me and I began to fuck her with all the anger that Julie had left simmering inside me. As if I was taking revenge on her by proxy. There had been nothing submissive in Julie; on the contrary, what I most adored about her was her rebellious, gypsy streak.

  Inside Aurora’s cunt, I could feel my cock harden even further, grow within her holy heat as her tears ebbed and flowed and soon poured alongside the rhythm of my thrusts.

  ‘That hurt,’ Aurora later said, shrinking away from me as I attempted to cuddle her in the exiguous single bed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m not her,’ she added.

  ‘I …’

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ she interrupted my stillborn protest. ‘Look, I want to sleep now. You can stay. Or you can go. Up to you.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ I had no wish to drive home right then, winding my way up the Finchley Road and past the Heath Extension lost in thoughts that would make me feel bad about myself or evoke yet more unwelcome memories.

  The doorbell to her flat rang in the middle of the night. I drowsily checked my watch. It was past three in the morning. She rose from the bed, dragging the top sheet away from me. I noticed that she had, at some stage while I slept, slipped her cotton knickers back on. I heard muffled voices at the door. I stayed in bed. Aurora shouted out ‘It’s just a friend. He wants to talk. We’ll stay in the lounge. Don’t worry.’

  I dozed off.

  Later, half an hour? An hour? Alone in her bed, I recognised familiar sounds on the other side of the closed bedroom door that led to the rest of the small flat. Moans, sighs, indecipherable words. Sex. Aurora and her visitor were having sex. On the couch? On the floor? I was already forgotten. And not even an invitation to join in, I wryly reflected. Strange how old boyfriends emerge from the woodwork at the worst possible time. Or was there ever a
right time?

  Early in the morning, with delivery vans rushing up Kilburn High Road with their daily freight, buses now criss-crossing North London again after a night’s rest, I tiptoed over the entwined bare bodies of Aurora and some bearded guy with a pony tail sprawled across the lounge floor and made my way out of the flat in silence. Another ghost from the past. Her past. Unlike me, she felt the need to hold on to him after the sex. Spooning, touching, maybe still embedded within each other. Giving her what I couldn’t.

  My car was parked across the road. The pavements had dried since the previous evening’s showers. I started the engine.

  All too soon, it was summer again. My first without Julie.

  She was driving across the Baltic States and then Poland in her camper. I knew this, as I spied on her FaceBook page and had mastered Google Alerts to keep an eye on her newspaper filings. Towards the end of August she would be going to the Venice Film Festival, keeping the expense down by parking the camper van at one end of the Lido.

  My own destinations were somewhat less exotic and distant, lazing in the sun in Golders Hill Park, eyeing the female tennis players hopping about in their unbelievably short skirts and tanned thighs, watching small kids feed the farm animals behind their wire enclosures or flying kites over the green wide open manicured fields towards the top end of the park, while munching on salmon and cream cheese bagels I had picked up earlier from the Carmelli Jewish bakery on Golders Green Road, and listening to the balmy afternoons waste away and the sound of my longing heart. At any rate, there were worse ways of cultivating a good tan.

  I didn’t want to hear about the gold chains her lovers now wore, or the dull words through which they burrowed under her skin, the petty offerings they bestowed on her, the love they stole.

  Her skin, her hand upon my neck.

  This skin, her fingers on my skin.

  Her kiss, her heartbeat her breath.