Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play

5 ‘NONE OF US WANTED OWNERSHIP…’

TWO MONTHS LATER, I was living sober and alone in a Somerset country cottage with a greyhound and sixteen laying hens. I was still no closer to working it out.

I shared my counsellor’s views on dependent, grasping, vampiric relationships. I did not want to feign love or, ever again, to feel that my happiness depended entirely upon that of another human being, or vice versa.

But neither did I want casual sex with strangers or—still worse—friends, and the resultant feelings of waste and emptiness.

I had tried it, of course, since I had been sober. It is not hard today to find another pair of eyes in which needs—for validation, for comfort, for adventure, for belief—glimmer as they circle just beneath the bright surface sparkle.

Six such pairs of eyes, then, had gazed up at mine from my groin and had rolled upward into momentary unconsciousness as their owners knelt or splayed like starfish beneath me.

Two of these women had husbands, which was ideal, but one of them was already talking about leaving her husband—not to move in with me, of course. That would be far too gauche for a modern girl. No, but flats in town were hard to find. Maybe she could find somewhere just down the road from me…

As for the remainder, two had left earrings on the first night, one her ‘special’ knickers. This merely demonstrated touching fidelity to convention.

I too had never wanted one-night stands, nor regarded sex as so rare as to be desirable in itself. We were all agreed, then. But in that case, given that we wanted neither casual sex nor exclusivity and dependence, just what did we want?

Well, I wanted to give each of them a key to my house so that she could turn up when she felt like it, sit and read or listen to music, slip into bed beside me when she wanted a chat, a cuddle or a fuck. I wanted a best friend who loved every part of me.

I liked it when they cleaned my kitchen or changed the bed-linen in my absence. I loved it when they made friends with my dog. Did each such intimacy mean that I must further cut myself off from them because I was forced to deceive? What if two of them turned up on the same night? Must I then scamper around like the asinine husband of French farce, keeping them apart and hiding evidence? Must I conceal from each a large part of my nature and my life?

And they too did not want—well, maybe the jewellery shop manageress who gradually colonised my drawers with her clothes did, but more by reflex than reason—to live happily ever after with me and to bear my children. They did not want me questioning them as to where they had been and what they had done with whom.

None of us wanted ownership, but we all valued affection and courtesy and did not want to cause hurt. On the other hand, we were all sexually active and desirous and had—whatever this may mean—a great need to give and to share love. We craved adventure. We needed to explore other human territories. We wanted the freedom, the sanction, the blessing afforded by the acceptance of ourselves naked, unguarded, needy and wild.

I would never marry again. I was pretty sure of that. I doubted, even, that I would ever live with anyone in the long term. I would spend a great deal of my life alone. Once I could cope with the reflex temptations to drink, I would no doubt venture down to the pub to sit sober and hope to fascinate or meet people through my work, and form transitory attachments.

At times, she—whoever she might be—would become more dependent and demanding than I could stand, and the relationship would founder amidst grief and recriminations. At times, through weakness or chivalry, I would encourage such dependence, only to check myself and arduously to unravel the knots that I had so laboriously tied.

There would, I supposed, be occasional prostitutes. This, too, would be a moral choice. I would opt for any halfway house which would acknowledge my nature yet obviate needless damage to myself or to others.

It was not an exciting prospect, but it was all that I could allow myself.

But at that point—one grey, rain-spangled morning—the gods took a kindly hand.

6 A WHORE AND A VAGABOND

LISA WAS 36 AT THE TIME.

She was a whore and a vagabond.

She was also, amongst other things, an occasional psychiatric nurse, a registered childminder and a very good guitarist. She lived for the most part in a bright yellow Bedford van.

She was part Romany on her mother’s side, gorgio on her father’s, with a sizeable slug of Afro-Caribbean in the mix. This made her hair black, lustrous and curly and her skin the colour of wet sand and silkier than any other I have ever encountered.

Her father was a non-conformist minister, a Biblical scholar, a Grateful Dead-head and a former hippy with teeth like sunset Dolomites. I had met him at a lecture tht I had given in Manchester. He approached me afterwards to correct my interpretation of a text in Acts and to explain some hitherto unsuspected meanings—probably unsuspected even by Jerry Garcia—in Dark Star. For a grizzled, bearded minister of God, he could certainly down the Bushmills and played a mean game of pool.

At the time, during my year’s separation from my long-term girlfriend before I went into rehab, I was living near Bath. Somewhere in the evening Gordon Shavalar had leaned on my shoulder and told me, through hot fluffy breath, that I should look up his daughter who was mostly based down west these days.

I had taken him at his word.

Lisa and I had met six or seven months before I had enrolled at the clinic. We had at once been attracted.

She was a laconic, luxuriant sort of girl with a slender, athletic but sensuous frame, ornate tattoos on her left shoulder and down her right upper arm, forearms taut and sinewy as a hare’s, and a funny little rag doll face which suddenly sprang into life with a happy smile or a mock-sardonic sneer.

Clothes looked uncomfortable and ungainly on her. Remove them, and she moved with an imperious degree of self-possession and a childlike natural elegance. She did not draw in her little round stomach or extend a hand to protect herself as she shambled about naked or in bra and knickers. She clothed herself in nudity. She wore it beautifully. She was a very lovely animal to watch.

And she was a lovely animal with whom to make love—for that, mysteriously, was what we had found ourselves doing.

I don’t know how it happens, how first the caressing and kissing and fucking move into synch, so that ferocity and tenderness, hunger and savour, adult and child, human and beast, male and female all coexist and intermingle. Then suddenly, fear and need and all the horrors and vulnerability are also offered up for inspection and approval, are blessed, sanctioned and loved, and memories from before birth—and maybe from before language—emerge, are recognised and find their echoes. Then distinctions vanish and you gaze into her eyes, and something deep within her says ‘Yes’ and opens up to babies or to death, or to whatever acceptance may bring, and you are lost and home, all at once.

Which is a crappy mess of an explanation, but, if I could express it any better, it would not be worth doing. And, oh, it was. It is.

‘God,’ she had said, ‘I really like that energy.’ I did not understand this, but since other women have said much the same thing and since the energy is mine, I accepted it without objection.

And so she had stayed, sometimes for as long as four whole days. Then she would start to be brisk and dismissive as she created distance between us so that she could escape, because her independence and her solitude were more sacred to her than anything else.

And for weeks after her departure, if I called her on her mobile, it was, ‘Yes. What was it?’ and I would find myself cut off if I so much as dared to try to chat companionably. On one occasion, she reiterated without the least prompting, ‘It’s not as if we made love or anything. I mean, yes, it’s good sex, but for fuck’s sake, man…’

Sometimes she just fled so that she could be back in her wagon, with its little wood-burning stove and its bookcase with ropes anchoring each rank of books, and its tutus and flowery frocks hanging from the ceiling, and whips and giant patent fetish-boots tucked away beneath the bed.

She would spend whole weeks just parked in a copse somewhere, smoking dope and chilling and ‘being real’.

Sometimes she headed off with fellow-travellers to find a location for a rave or ‘free party’ out in the country and to send out the secret mobile phone messages that draw ‘cheesy quavers’ in from all over the country. I went to one of these with her—just two days and nights of drifting and dancing and sleeping, rough feasting and occasional, incidental fucking in the woods, all to the sounds of trance and techno and drum’n’bass. I liked everything except the sounds.

Sometimes—for two or three months at a time, and for two or three days a week—she would take a job as a ‘working girl’ in a massage parlour.

‘Yeah, I’m proud of giving good value,’ she told me. ‘I can disconnect so it doesn’t touch me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t give them what they need.’

Once I introduced her to a dear old friend, a paediatric sister at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. The two women got on well. They teased me relentlessly. They walked the dog a lot together. Tilly, my nurse friend, came to a conclusion that surprised her. ‘I don’t know if it’s genetic, or a product of upbringing and experience,’ she said, ‘a deficiency or an attribute, but she and I are the same. Loads of women say to me about my job, “How can you give so much to a dying child, then come in and find him gone and his bed occupied by another, and just keep on giving?” So I get accused of being heartless and unnatural in the same breath as I’m called an angel and a saint.

‘And Lisa does the same, and she’s accused of being unnatural too. She’s a carer and gets paid for it. She just has that ability—like me—to cut herself off in order to survive. It doesn’t make her any less sincere or valuable, and she gets called all sorts of unpleasant names too.

‘It’s a female thing, I think. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just conditioning, but the caring thing is always associated with females and so is the ability to disconnect. So in some of us, the two exist side by side. Maybe we’re more highly developed than other women. Maybe we’re less developed—throwbacks or something. Either way, I reckon the world should be bloody glad we exist…’

Lisa had always told me (like a cross between Mary Poppins and Aslan, which is quite appropriate really), ‘One day, I’ll just be gone.’

One day, six weeks before I went to the clinic, she was. Her mobile number was unobtainable.

So what did I do? I, of course, got drunk, and damned her.

But that clogged Mancunian voice awoke me at ten o’clock that gloomy, sober morning. ‘Hi, baby boy! How’s it going? You off the sauce now, darlin’? How was the Gulag, then?’

‘Lisa,’ I croaked, then sat up and cleared my throat. Rainwater was chuckling as it streamed from the gutter outside my window. ‘God, Lisa! How…? Hey, how are you?’

‘I’m OK. Saw your mate Tim in Ashburton the other day. He told me where you were…’

‘You just evaporated last time,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d gone for good.’

‘Always told you, didn’t I? I come and go…’

‘Oh, come, darling, come! Where’d you get to? Where are you now?’

‘Could be with you in an hour, actually,’ she said. ‘Be really nice to see you…Yeah, go on. Shitty day. Give me directions and get the coffee pot on…’

I whooped as I laid down the receiver.

It took Lisa just half an hour to have the fire lit in the sitting-room and to be in her usual state of undress in a red lacy bra and knickers.

If there was contrivance or sexual intent there, it was carried lightly. She knew that I enjoyed watching her. She enjoyed being watched and the sensations and the freedom of nakedness.

She lay open, her limbs petals to a flower in full bloom. Her head and shoulders were raised on brocade cushions. One knee was raised, the other hooked and sagging off the sofa. Her left hand lolled at the scarlet, lacy escarpment at her groin. Her right held a joint on which she drew deep.

She had looked around the house and pronounced it ‘OK’. She had become quite excited about the still intact water-heating copper in the pantry. She had been in Avignon, she said, for the Festival, and had then wandered on down into Italy, but had not yet been ready to set off on her long discussed ‘big trip’ to Romania (where she hoped to buy a patch of land), and on through the Russias.

She had returned just two weeks earlier, and had already found a massage parlour in Taunton where she now worked for a couple of days a week. She was also busy organising a huge late-summer rave, somewhere in the Wiltshire downs.

I sat at my desk, telling her of the struggles of rehab and responding to—or, more often, deleting—emails. Concentration was not easy with those gaping thighs, inexorably framing and leading the eye to their apex.

I swivelled my chair round. ‘Just what is it,’ I asked her in admittedly fatuous frustration, ‘about pussy?’

She giggled and shrugged. ‘Well, if you don’t know, I don’t reckon I can tell you.’

‘No, I know it’s a daft question, but really, where does the visual power come from? Striptease, the can-can, the fan-dance, the split skirt, the miniskirt, they all posit a desire to see this somehow climactic organ. Men and women alike, we all crane and strain for that moment of revelation, but of what?’

‘Nuts, isn’t it?’

‘Very specifically, no.’

‘Tee hee. S’pose not.’

‘Anyhow, your arrival is a boon and blessing,’ I told her. ‘Not just because I love to see you, but because, for once, you’re not forbidden fruit. If women were available on prescription, I’d be told to take two of you before meals…’

‘Hey. Not sure I like that,’ she said ruefully. ‘I like to be forbidden, or, at least, exotic…’

‘Oh, darling, you are all of that,’ I growled.

‘…not sort of standard issue therapeutic. You mean this not being allowed to have a relationship bit? Well, yeah, at least you know that I’m not going to want to move in or depend on you or anyone else.’

‘Exactly. Straight out of the text-books. Ex-addict’s dream…’

‘You should be an escort in the States,’ she said suddenly. ‘My mate Annabel said that a while back when she heard your voice on the phone. She’s right, too. That voice, that energy, you’d make a fortune…’

‘You reckon?’ I considered the irresponsible vision that her words conjured. ‘I’d almost do that, you know, if it didn’t just mean fat, blue-rinsed matrons, endless Viagra and the slow death of the soul. Lots of sex, adventure, lots of new, interesting people…’

‘Yeah, you’re good at the giving bit,’ she said dreamily, readjusting the cushions so that she could lie back, ‘just no good at having things taken from you. Good at the excitement and the novelty, bad at the day-to-day grind…’

And that is when she said it.

She said, ‘You ought to try swinging, you know. Probably not standard therapy, but you’d like it…’

‘I don’t know…’ I frowned, but yes, my heartbeat quickened.

On the one hand, the word evoked associations with freedom, sensuality and uncritical acceptance. I had enjoyed just eight very happy threesomes to date, and I had loved the experiences. There had been no pleading or striving for acceptance or pardon. Sexuality had simply been acknowledged, shared and celebrated.

On the other hand, I associated the organised version with shamefaced suburban desperation, sleaze and squalor.

I said, ‘It always sounded like fun in theory…’

‘So, why not?’

‘Ah, I wouldn’t know where to start,’ I said, very much hoping that she might have a few suggestions, ‘and I’m too ancient, aren’t I?’

‘Of course you’re not! Fuck, there are swingers out there well into their sixties. You’d be a breath of fresh air. Decent looks, manners, slim. Answer to a maiden’s prayer, you.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Well, I would like to try…’ I sidestepped out from behind the desk. I picked up my mug. As I bent to lift hers from the coffee-table, I kissed the top of her head. She raised her lips to kiss mine with a ‘Mmmmm’.

‘Anyhow,’ I asked, as I headed for the kitchen. ‘How do you know all this? Swinging’s not your scene, is it?’

She cocked her head this way and that. ‘Er, yes and no,’ she replied. ‘I mean, it’s a counter-culture, isn’t it? And there are real people on that scene. And they’re seekers, aren’t they? And the sex—the erotic stuff, the sights and stuff - can be really good.’

I walked into the kitchen, leaving the door open behind me. I flicked on the kettle and rinsed the mugs under the tap. ‘But yeah,’ she called over the sofa-back and her arm, ‘it’s mostly sort of middle-class and can be scared and up its own arse. But, you know, we’re talking people trying to face their fears and be what they are. I prefer the free party scene. Less accent on the sex there. Sex is just, you know, one of the means of expression, and everyone is just mad. The swing-scene, it’s like “We’re all mad and free but in a sane and respectable way”, you know?’

‘But how—when were you involved?’

‘Oh, shit. You can’t not be. You point me at ten houses, I’ll find you at least one swinging couple.’

I made the coffee and headed back into the sitting-room. ‘So, would you give me a hand?’ I asked casually. ‘Getting started, I mean.’

She shrugged. ‘Yeah, OK. You set it all up. I’m saving for a big trip, so I’m going to be around for the next six months or so. I’ll do a few parties and meets with you. Give me enough notice, I’ll come with you. You’ll make friends quickly, though.’

And that was that.

In volunteering to escort me, Lisa was presumably volunteering to have sex with a number of males and females as yet unknown to us. This struck me as, at once, strange, shocking and exciting. I felt grateful to her. I still, for some reason, regarded such an undertaking as a sacrifice. She disabused me of the notion with a shrug. ‘Sex is a pleasure, and I don’t fuck people if I don’t fancy them, so it’s no big deal.’

No big deal to her, perhaps, but the notion that I could enjoy a full, exciting and adventurous social and sexual life, do no damage and return to privacy, hard work and freedom was enthralling.

Lisa and I went to bed at around three o’clock. Darkness fell, lives began and ended, hours and half-hours pealed about the world. We did not notice. We took breaks for cigarettes and chat, and even once to take the dog out, lock up the hens and fry a few eggs for ourselves before returning to the chaotic and cluttered bedroom to resume our joyous conversation until early morning.

I had been terrified when first I emerged from the clinic. For thirty years I had not fucked a girl without at least a glass of champagne to enhance her glamour and quiet my critical faculties. I had feared that the whole business might prove comical or simply depressing. I need not have worried. Sex was far better and more interesting and intense than in my drinking days.

And now I had the chance to join the secret, underground society of swingers.

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