A Love Game

by Nicole Dere

  We were posted to a small upcountry school, out in the bush, far from the capital. Even the nearest small township, Kenjui, with its expatriate population of 120 or so, was nearly 30 miles away. And far from my imagined life of privileged pleasure, I was vitally involved from the outset in the life of the school. It was a boarding establishment – only the far-away capital had day schools. There were 300 boys – or rather young men; most were 16 when they started their secondary education in Year One. The headmaster, Mr Mwangi, a native of the region, welcomed me with literally open arms – and a hand that surreptitiously alighted fleetingly on my right buttock. I was too incredulous to be shocked at first. And even after less than two weeks on the continent, which we had spent at one of the capital’s fashionable tourist hotels at government expense, I was already developing an inferiority complex about bust and bottom on studying the ripely buxom local girls. I felt more like apologising for my scrawny backside than squealing with outraged dignity.

  ‘You are most welcome, Mrs Thoroughgood, or may I call you Janet? We need a teacher for our Class Four B English Language and Literature. This is, of course, their GCSE year. And I will welcome you taking over duties as School Nurse. One cannot beat a woman’s touch, yes?’

  My head spun as his laugh boomed out. I daren’t say no, and besides, it was nice to be wanted. Patrick was less than thrilled, but he couldn’t refuse his new boss.

  And so our life together was transformed. After years of being so self-contained as a unit, exclusively ring-fenced from all that went on around us, that bond was sundered. To my shame, I quickly realised that I was secretly thrilled by it. At 22, I felt like the dewy winged butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. I tried to hide it from Patrick, but of course it was impossible, just as it was impossible for him to hide his deep dismay at my evolving into my new state of heady independence. It was only then that I began to appreciate just how complete had been my submission and his dominance. Hence my guilt.

  And it happened so quickly. I had not been long in my role as nurse (I was still spending hours swotting up on first aid) when a young man, six foot-plus, appeared at the surgery I operated from 8 to 8.45 every morning. I was still enough of a novelty at my clinics – the young bibi mzungu(white chick) was a crowd puller – to ensure a long line, mostly of malingerers, eager to be my patients. This tall fellow, though, was, I noticed, unusually polite, hanging back and allowing his fellow students to go before him, until, at last, he and I were alone in the stuffy little grass-roofed lean-to built on to one of the dormitories.

  His name was Patrick Odhiambo. He was in Year Four, the school certificate year, and, according to his official birth date, he was 22 – only a few months younger than myself. He was from one of the northern tribes, his skin that deep glistening black, so much darker than the light brown of the native inhabitants of this province. He was remarkably handsome, and his beautifully even teeth shone even whiter against that complexion as he displayed them in a beaming grin.

  I was startled at the quiver of attraction I felt suddenly pulse between my thighs, under the light cotton of my green dress, and the even lighter cover of my snug bikini briefs. I blushed just a little, beaming back an equally enthusiastic smile. ‘Hello, Patrick.’ The name caused a different, distinct twitch of discomfort, but I added brightly, ‘That is my husband’s name.’

  ‘But I am not your husband.’

  As repartee, it was not exactly sparkling, but already my painted toes were curling under the cover of the makeshift desk. ‘That’s true. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I have a pain. And some swelling. May I show you?’

  I nodded in all innocence, still smiling brightly, as I stood up and eased myself out from behind the small folding table. Then I stopped, astonished, at the spectacle before me. With the speed of a performing magician, he dropped his neatly pressed khaki shorts, lifted the front of his white shirt and revealed the impressively dimensioned penis hanging between his limbs. My whirling mind noted that he was not wearing underpants. The shorts lay creased round his ankles.

  Despite my paralytic shock, I could not drag my eyes from their observation of his splendid cock, already half tumescent, its great head lifting, as though that distinct slit at its dome was an eye returning my fascinated gaze. ‘I – I–’ Words would not come, nor movement. Time seemed to halt as I stared at that appendage, my bemused brain taking in all kinds of detail: first the difference in its colour from that brilliant blackness of the rest of his body. The shaft was brown, a deeper than milk chocolate shade, and its massive helm even paler. Immediately above the root of the shaft was a small triangle of matt blackness, the tightly kinked scrub of curls that was his pubis. My own loins tingled in weird response as I crazily imagined what it would feel like to have those curls rubbing against my own neatly trimmed bush.

  I was still dumb, helpless to stop him as he reached out a great hand and took hold of my thin wrist. I stared impotently down at those long fingers, spread darkly over my skin, noting the contrasting pale neatness of his roundly trimmed nails, before he placed that warm, throbbing, silky column of living flesh in my own yielding grasp. I felt that great potent surge, the rising rigidity of the enormous shaft, transmitting its electric power through my own skin, to that moist, quickening centre deep within, and only inches from this awesome weapon. Oh God! My reeling brain formed a coherent thought again. He’s going to fuck me. (Not “rape me”, I reviewed later, to my fierce shame.)

  But all he was doing, my laggard mind acknowledged, was moving my captured hand along the hard, mighty length of him, masturbating, and making me an accessory in the act. ‘Stop! Stop it!’ I gasped, in a hoarse whisper. (Again, another awkward question at my own merciless later interrogation: why the hell didn’t you scream your head off?)

  My eyes were still riveted on his prick, rock-hard rod now, jutting upwards, to my vivid fancy like the bowsprit of Nelson’s Victory (which I had seen in more innocent days during a school excursion to Portsmouth Dockyard.) ‘You like fanya jig-a-jig,madam?’ He grinned down at me as though he was offering me a cup of tea or another biscuit. ‘Or as we say in English, would you like to fuck with me?’

  Fuck with you? my mind screamed hysterically. I’ll fuck with you all the way to the headmaster’s study, and then it’s youwho’ll be fucked, boyo! But all this was in my disordered brain. The only sound I made was a kind of strangled wheeze, though I did manage a feeble squirming in his grip, from which he released me.

  ‘Put that away!’ I gasped, at last tearing my gaze from his virile sex. ‘You can’t – you mustn’t ...’ I couldn’t even cry as I stared back at his still smiling features. ‘It’s very ... bad,’ I managed, my face burning.

  With amazing aplomb he bent and pulled up his shorts, somehow managing to store his engorged penis out of sight. ‘It doeshurt, madam. And, as you see, it swells very much. I need some ease.’

  ‘Not from me!’ I said faintly. ‘You can do that for yourself. Now please go! And please – don’t tell anyone about this. It would be very bad – you would be expelled.’

  But far from showing fear or shame, his eyes sparkled as he nodded. ‘I say nothing. It is our secret.’ It was me who blazed crimson with shame as I nodded in return, and sank weakly back in the chair, trembling in every limb after he had gone.

  But, in its way, Odhiambo’s splendid cock became the symbol of just how great was the change which had come about in my life. Before that seminal moment in that stuffy hut (don’t take my words too literally, we’re dealing in metaphors) I had been no more than an appendage too, an indivisible part of Patrick (Thoroughgood)’s life. Apart from him I had no real existence, even when I was sweating and stammering my hopeless way through my day at work. I was his, in every sense of ownership, and blissful to be so.

  I never mentioned the extraordinary few minutes in the sick bay to a living soul, though their effect was so profound. I sat there limp as wet lettuce and shaking in every limb for the next half hour, my th
oughts rioting. How couldI tell anyone, least of all myPatrick? All hell would break loose. He would probably kill or maim him, and spend the rest of his life behind bars. And it would all be my fault. But what on earth couldI do? ‘Our secret,’ the young man had said, with that handsome grin, and marched out with his ‘Good morning’ as if I had just dished out a couple of aspirin. I was on fire as I vividly pictured him regaling his mates with his adventure. ‘I lobbed it out, right there in her hand. She was gagging for it, man!’ Or Bantuwords to that effect.

  Yet even as I shivered in horror, I felt the deep thrill of physical recall – the sight and texture of that awesome throbbing length of muscle, its giant proportions. To my genuine shock and disgust, I found the very hand that had been burnt by that living, surging flesh was now stroking the folded valley between my thighs, over the snug and stickily moist hidden furrow of my vulva. I snatched it away, with a gasp of repulsion. God! How depraved was I, to be wetting myself with excitement at the glimpse of a stranger’s prick? And what a prick it was! And hewas, I added in hasty penitence.

  It was only the second penis I had seen, in the flesh, in all my life, I recorded. I had no brothers, and had lived a childhood of lonely solitude. But I must at some stage have seen those little wrinkled innocent teapot spouts of juvenile winkies? But note the question mark. I could not recall any. I’d seen a few representations later, as I approached puberty – photographs, mainly in medical tomes, peeking in dark corners of libraries or bookshops, staring at glossy art books, or classical statues, like the Boy David – they were all so cute and puckered and modest in size that they seemed pathetically unthreatening.

  My one and only real-life experience had been frighteningly, ecstatically different. My lover Patrick’s prick! Satin soft, squat and beautiful, then shazam! Huge and rampant, a rod and staff, hard iron piercing me through to the very quick, filling me, flooding me – terror and delight, my conqueror.

  And now – now! Patrick’s prick again. AnotherPatrick, dark and mighty, even more colossal – I daren’t compare ... but couldn’t help it. A colossus, this one, its touch burning me, branding my conscious, and my unconscious, so that my cunt pulsed and flooded with imagined joy at the agony and wonder of being pierced by it.

  I couldn’t tell a soul, least of all my husband, but I was terrified that my air of distraction must surely alert him to the crisis which had occurred, even if he didn’t know its nature. I was wrong. Perhaps he assumed that my distraught manner was simply an indication of the general revolution disrupting our insulated relationship since we had begun our new expatriate life. It laid its mark across our sex life on the very night of the incident. Sprawling naked on our bed after his shower, he paraded his roused manhood for me, and seized my wrist to pull it down to his stirring penis. It was such a mirror image of the shocking event of the morning that I actually visualised those strong dark fingers grabbing me, holding me against that virile column, and snatched my hand free with a soft squeal of horror. He did not question my totally uncharacteristic revulsion, but rolled away, presenting his back in silent, injured rejection of me. ‘I’m sorry ... I feel ... I don’t feel well,’ I stammered, the tears welling up, my throat clogging.

  ‘Sleep in the spare room!’ In my semi-hysterical state, it was like a slap in the face. I recoiled literally, and did as he had bidden, crawled away like a punished puppy.

  The following days were a torment, as I waited for some follow-up from that weird few minutes in the sick bay: a reaction from Odhiambo, or from the other students, their sickening, lecherous looks. Every beaming innocent grin and cheerful, ‘Good morning, madam!’ made me cringe, and my face colour up to heated beetroot. Every friendly glance made me feel I was being stripped bare by their piercing dark eyes. This went on for several days, during which, to make my misery even worse, the situation at home remained one of simmering tension and non-communion.

  Then Odhiambo waylaid me one afternoon, waiting for me outside the classroom where I had been teaching. ‘You must not be worried, madam,’ he said at once, taking the rucksack which I used to carry the 30-plus exercise books I was lugging back to the house for marking. He fell in by my side. I felt dwarfed by him, yet his clear, gentle concern was greatly comforting. ‘I swear to you, I have not spoken to anyone about us. About what happened. And I must apologise to you for my behaviour. Forgive me.’

  I was still blushing, stammering even, but I was moved by the genuineness of his shame. ‘It can be difficult, I know. A young boy. Feelings, instincts–’ My voice died away. I was talking as though he was a kid like those at school back home. This was a young man. Myage, for God’s sake! And in the forefront of my mind, vivid as a film in full colour, I saw that resplendent dark chocolate prick, felt its pulsating strength against my soft hand, its potent effect on my own melting sex.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘PLEASE! DO NOT CRY– Janet!’

  The use of my first name was like the jangle of an alarm bell. It should have been enough of a warning. In truth it was – but I didn’t heed it, just as I hadn’t heeded all the other signs that had led up to this critical moment. I suppose afterwards I eased the burden of my guilt by trying to blame the whole mess of the disintegrating relationship between my husband and me on his intransigence, his determination to exert absolute rule over me in every aspect. But I must bear my own measure of responsibility for the way things have turned out, as I’m sure you’ve already realised. After more than six years of willing subservience to Patrick, my sudden revolt, and its dire consequences, says as much about the complex deviancy of my nature as the strange circumstances that have brought me here.

  Such as that late afternoon when I sat in the patch of flattened grass, on the bank which edged the narrow, turgid water that oozed past the boundary of the school compound. It was known simply as the Ruizi, the “river”. My comforter was Odhiambo, my other Patrick. Already this had become a favoured retreat, a secluded spot where we could meet without much fear of discovery by other staff or students. The only possible observers might be the young boys who brought the native cattle down to drink at the opposite bank, where there was a beaten path and a muddy, hoof-marked strip of shore. But they usually waited until late afternoon before watering the cows, and anyway the bellows of beasts and the yelps of their drovers were adequate warning of their approach. All we had to do was lie down to be screened by the high, dry, golden stalks of the grass surrounding us.

  Not that we had anything to hide, I told myself. What was wrong about a teacher giving extra tuition to a favoured student to help him with his GCSE English? Which didn’t help at all to allay my feeling of guilt and subterfuge, nor the feeling of quickening excitement every time I made my way to our surreptitious rendezvous. And Odhiambo felt the same.

  The books which were our alibi lay discarded as I told my private griefs to my attentive and, at first, perfectly respectful swain. The tears soon flowed as I recounted the latest in the growing list of grievances at my husband’s cruel transformation, and his cold neglect. ‘He never ... we never ... he doesn’t show me any affection,’ I wept. Odhiambo was a bright boy – young man, young man! I kept correcting myself. He didn’t need me to spell out what I meant but couldn’t say. As proved by the way in which he moved, and those long arms took me into his breast, where my tears wet his newly pressed, white uniform shirt, with the cheap blue cotton badge of the school crest sewn on its pocket. He cradled me, rocked me gently back and forth, like a parent nursing a child. But I was no child. And neither was he.

  Suddenly his fingers were lifting my wet face, and we were kissing. I could feel those thickly cushioned lips, pressing ever more tightly, sealing me to him, the strangled little whimper of protest that died in my throat, as my own mouth opened, and our tongues curled and twined and writhed in passionate need both to possess and be possessed. We were lying down now, wrapped together, his long black legs rubbing against my slimmer, paler limbs, our skin fired by the intimate contact, for he wore only t
he stiff khaki shorts, while the light hem of my thin cotton dress was up around my hips, my little white briefs on peeping show.

  ‘No! No! We can’t! We mustn’t!’ I gasped, dragging my mouth free for a gulping instant, then gnawing wildly at his face once more. Then I felt his strong hand clamp down, curve into the fold of my flesh, over the narrow crotch of my knickers, felt those long fingers, already such a potent feature of my sleeping and waking dreams, aligned along the groove of my vulva, pressed against my sex lips, felt the flooding wetness of that strip of cotton. I was on the edge of coming. Fear nudged a nose in front of screaming desire, and my legs scissored, my hips dragged away from his touch, and I cried out.

  He had a deep bass voice at the best of times, and now he let out a rumbling groan as he desisted from his amorous assault. My hand was on his wrist (a reversal of my heated dreams). I thrust it down, away from the focal point of my clamorous need, and it landed on my thigh, clutched at the softness of my flesh, holding on in desperate plea. I gave up my struggle, let it lie there, my own smaller palm spread feebly over it, and let my dishevelled head stay hidden at his chest. ‘I can’t!’ I wept, my voice no more than a scratchy whisper. ‘I’ve never been with anyone ... except my husband. Please, Patrick. Please understand.’

  ‘But, madam! My darling! I must – I want to play sex – I have to fuck with you!’

  Even as I forgave his lack of expertise in the subtleties of English, my mind winced at the gross indelicacy of his language. Why couldn’t he say “I want to make love to you”, as he did in my own solitary fantasies? His hand was creeping once more up my inner thigh, his fingers touching the tight seam of my briefs. I could feel my resistance seeping from me like the increasing stickiness only a fingernail’s distance from his searching digits. Somehow, I made a last desperate stand. ‘I’ve never been with another man!’ I pleaded. ‘My husband is the only one. When you exposed – showed yourself to me – in the sick bay that day – that was only the second penis I have seen!’