Swinging
The Games Your Neighbours Play
Mark Brendon

For those readers who are still curious about this scene and would like to have a look around for themselves, I have negotiated a special free trial membership of SDC, the world’s largest swingers’ organisation. You may love it or hate it, but you will at least discover that the members are human.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part I

Chapter 1: Introduction and Apologia

Chapter 2: Taming Lust

Chapter 3: It is Everywhere

Chapter 4: Affection, Flirtation, Adventure…

Chapter 5: ‘None of Us Wanted Ownership…’

Chapter 6: A Whore and a Vagabond

Part II

Chapter 1: Swinging and Morality

Chapter 2: The Yuckiness Factor

Chapter 3: Does Gastronomy ‘Devalue’ Home Cooking?

Chapter 4: The Nastiest Obligation of All…

Chapter 5: Sex = Immortality

Chapter 6: The Vanilla One-Night Stand

Chapter 7: Swinging and Health

Chapter 8: ‘I Was Born Naked in Eden, Wasn’t I?’

Part III

Chapter 1: Invitation to an Orgy

Chapter 2: A Cinderella with a Fuck-Card

Chapter 3: The Warm-Up

Chapter 4: Dressing to Undress

Chapter 5: Time to Play

Chapter 6: Giuoco Delle Coppie

Chapter 7: Intermezzo Interrotto

Chapter 8: ‘After You‘ve—You Know?’

Chapter 9: Lessons Learned

Chapter 10: After the Ball…

Chapter 11: Swing-Clubs

Part IV

Chapter 1: Defining Terms

Chapter 2: Subcategories

Chapter 3: Bisexuality in Swinging

Chapter 4: Bonobosexuality

Chapter 5: In Defense of Hedonism

Chapter 6: When the Fun Was Taken Out of Sex

Chapter 7: The Liberating Condom

Chapter 8: The Origins of Swinging

Chapter 9: An Anomalous Orgy

Chapter 10: Swinging in the ’70s

Chapter 11: The ’80s and Beyond

Part V

Chapter 1: Cyberquesting

Chapter 2: local-swingers.co.uk

Chapter 3: Ticks and Feedback

Chapter 4: Casting the Net

Chapter 5: Dredging

Chapter 6: sdc.com

Chapter 7: Handling Meets

Chapter 8: Odditoes…

Chapter 9: …and Occasional Perils

Chapter 10: Safer Than Trawling

Part VI

Chapter 1: Who are Swingers?

Chapter 2: ‘All Those Years, I’d Been Conned…’

Chapter 3: Class and Age

Chapter 4: ‘It’s Me-Time Now…’

Chapter 5: Swinging and Marriage

Chapter 6: Taking Over the Driving

Chapter 7: The Single Female

Chapter 8: The Single Male

Chapter 9: Couples Starting Out

Chapter 10: Not for the Impatient

Chapter 11: Party Hosts

Part VII

Chapter 1: Swinging and Emotions

Chapter 2: Setting Limits

Chapter 3: ‘Let the Girls Have Their Fun’

Chapter 4: Jealousy

Chapter 5: Kamikaze Sperm

Chapter 6: ‘Tongues, or He’ll Suspect!’

Chapter 7: Hotwife

Chapter 8: The Danger of reality

Chapter 9: Giving Up Swinging

Part VIII

Chapter 1: Antecedents and Influences

Chapter 2: Orgies as Seasonal Contraceptives?

Chapter 3: The Persistence of Orgies

Chapter 4: Dollymops and Midinettes

Chapter 5: ‘Only Sex’

Chapter 6: Kissing and Fucking Considered as Fine Arts

Chapter 7: The Freedom of Forgiveness

Part IX

Chapter 1: All That Glisters…

Chapter 2: Birmigham—A Model

Chapter 3: Fun4Two

Chapter 4: Paradise Rejected

Chapter 5: having Your Cake and Eating it

Chapter 6: ‘That Frivolous Pretence…’

Chapter 7: Elaboration, Adornment, Prolongation, Enrichment…

Chapter 8: A Cautious Commendation

Chapter 9: A Romantic Ending?

Chapter 10: A Romantic Beginning

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART I

1 INTRODUCTION AND APOLOGIA

LAST NIGHT, MY GIRLFRIEND CHRISTY and I were having sex with a woman—mid-thirties, toned, blonde.

The blonde woman was lying on her back on a bed, hands fluttering at my hip-bones. She had slender legs encased in black hold-up stockings, a rose tattooed on her left inner thigh, a plush, shaven pussy on which we had both been lavishing attention for a good twenty minutes, a diamante ring in her belly-button, and a sweet smile.

Neither of us could actually see that smile just then, because another girl was sitting on it—one pair of lips athwart another.

This other girl was naked and tanned deep copper, with a sliver of white skin left by the tiniest of briefs. She had short, spiky, dark brown hair.

She had introduced herself to us half an hour earlier as Laurie. She had shaken our hands then, pecked our cheeks, said ‘Hi! So, where are you from?’

Now she hung, gasping, her right hand gripping my left shoulder, her left on the nape of Christy’s neck. Her tongue lit a tangled fuse up my throat and along my jawbone and occasionally slithered into my mouth as we both—in our different ways—used the woman beneath us for our pleasure.

The blonde woman’s tongue emerged to flicker at, and to writhe into, the cleft above it, vanished then returned like a gale-blown flame.

Christy was on her hands and knees at right angles to us. Ducking down beneath Laurie, she nuzzled at the blonde woman’s breasts and stomach while her left hand reached down to finger the prone woman’s clitoris. She grinned up at me, then turned her head upward to kiss and nibble at Laurie’s nipples.

Christy’s body was being jerked and breath and sound forced from her by the man kneeling behind her. This was Laurie’s boyfriend, who was—I think—called Steve. He was as fair as she was dark, with a bang of fair honey-coloured flopping over his face. He was not Christy’s type, and he did what he was doing monotonously, as though he had just one gear. He said ‘Yeah,’ each time his belly slapped against her buttocks. That was monotonous too. She did not even look at him. She was concentrating on the feasting and the sensations up front.

Beyond us, on wall-to-wall mattresses, seven or eight naked couples were intertwined and grunting, giggling or moaning. Behind them again, against the wall, clothed couples stood watching, the men’s arms hanging limply over the women’s shoulders, the women occasionally moving to raise their lips like nymphing trout to kiss their men.

One woman was squatting on the carpet at my right. Her head bobbed to and fro at the groins of two men who stood upright against the wall. Her eyes, however, constantly swivelled to the scene at the centre of the room.

It was all really quite pleasant and, by most standards I think, interesting.

Christy pulled herself away from this Steve and rolled onto her back. She grinned up at me again, then pulled herself down the bed until her arse was on the very edge and her feet on the carpet. She vanished from my sight. A moment later her hair, then her nose, pushed at my testicles. Her mouth was warm and wet.

Steve had obviously followed her, because I felt her head banged rhythmically against the blonde girl’s groin.

I moaned, I suppose.

A quavering male voice close at hand bleated, ‘Er, darling…?’

Christy withdrew her head from between my legs. It was cold without her there.

The man who addressed us wore a grey shirt, fawn chinos and carpet slippers. His hair was white, his face soft and pink. He fingered the gold-rimmed spectacles that hung beneath his chest.

Bending down in front of me, he crossly addressed Laurie’s stomach and shaven pubis, which now slithered back and forth, a couple of feet away from his face—much closer to his wife’s. ‘Darling? Darling? Look, we really must be going. It’s half-past one. The sitter…’

Laurie politely raised her crotch and propped herself up on one leg so that the blonde woman could speak.

She raised her head a few inches. Her lower face gleamed. She licked her lips. ‘Oh, come on, Roger,’ she said. ‘Give us a break. Oh, yeah…’ she creaked at me. ‘No, don’t stop, hun…’ Her eyes shifted back to her husband. ‘I mean, fuck the sitter. I am not going ’til these guys have come.’

She pulled her right arm back through Laurie’s legs, hooked it around her thigh and, with a deep laugh and an imperious ‘Bring that thing back, darling…’ pulled her back down on her.

Roger took a step backward. He sighed. ‘It’s always the same,’ he told me with a shrug and a flap. ‘I mean, it’s alright for you guys, but some of us have to work.’

I leaned forward on my hands. ‘I know,’ I panted sympathetically as my cock slid in and out of his wife. ‘Still—oh, yes—you’ll be able to have a lie-in tomorrow, won’t you?’

‘Me? Lie-in? Ha! Forget it. I’ve got to take Tom to cricket, then I’m meant to be driving in a road-race in Devon. And I have to be up at seven on Monday morning to get to work. And the bloody sitter charges double time after midnight.’

My lips were working as I tried to stop myself from laughing.

This was swinging for you. Middle-class concerns with children and domestic budgets in amongst the groans and yelps of orgiasts.

‘Yes,’ I said sympathetically. ‘Wish I could get that sort of money for sitting on my arse…doing…mmm…nothing…’

Roger nodded. He had found a friend. ‘Well, do be as quick as you can, will you?’ he said. ‘If she lets you…’

I nodded obediently.

Roger shuffled away towards the door. ‘Oh, and Karen!’ he turned and raised his voice. He spoke very slowly, as though to a very old foreigner. ‘I’ve got your bag, OK? And your shoes are outside the dark room.’ He shook his head sorrowfully, and told me, ‘She’s always losing things…’

As he shuffled from the room, Christy allowed a giggle to bubble up. She knelt up at my shoulder so that I felt her pussy damp and hot against my buttocks. Her fingers plucked at my nipples. ‘Come on, darling,’ she croaked in my ear. ‘For heaven’s sake, think about the sitter…’

Laurie’s hand reached out for mine and clasped it. She grit her teeth. Beneath her, Karen said, ‘Hmmff,’ and burbled. Christy and I laughed and kissed. Laurie leaned forward. Her tongue joined ours and slithered around them. Her eyes sparkled, so I kissed them too.

Group hug, only naked and interlinked by tongues and genitals. We were all four united in playful naughtiness and companionship. In that moment, surely, we loved one another.

2 TAMING LUST

TO DATE ALMOST ALL the books and articles about swinging have been written by panting ‘vanillas’ (as non-swingers are known) alternately—or sometimes simultaneously—drooling and expressing disapproval.

Theirs is surely the most disreputable form of journalism. Peeking in, urging on those observed, picking out the saleable or sensational aspects of its subjects’ activities, then retreating to don an enemy padre’s uniform.

This book’s purpose is not to titillate—or, at least, not directly. If it opens up new prospects and inspires individuals or couples to conjure their own fantasies and make their own plans for sexual adventure, I am delighted. But it features few detailed accounts of sex, and studiously avoids the lyrical when it does so.

I include the mundane little memoir of last night because, commonplace though it is, it summarises much of what swinging is about. There is the sensuality, of course, and the curiosity as to the sexuality of others. There are the senses of adventure and community and, perhaps above all, the affectionate playfulness…

It also typifies the essential conventionality of swingers.

Swingers by definition respect the sanctity—or, at least, the value—of secure, enduring marriage or partnership, and the requirements of children. They do not have extra-marital affairs, nor allow their emotions to be influenced by their sexual needs by falling ‘in love’ with their secretaries, gardeners, colleagues, personal trainers, spouse’s best friends or children’s schoolfellows, to the peril of their homes and their children’s welfare.

They recognise, however, that the extended family has gone, the nuclear family couple is insufficient to meet their emotional and sexual needs, and the active sex-life-expectancy has been enormously prolonged over the past two centuries. For those reasons they cannot find all the adventure, interest and passion they require in one person, who inevitably has distinct needs and develops at a different pace from themselves.

They therefore seek mutuality in shared sexual adventures.

Let’s face it: it is a lot more amusing, convivial and revealing than, say, golf or fishing. And, while these have in large measure been gender-specific distractions—or refuges—from hearth and home, swinging is by definition a cross-gender and wholly mutual diversion.

It takes lust—the wolf that snuffles and growls at the door of every marital home—tames it, and brings it into the house as an amusing and stimulating pet.

To the seeker of pornography, those four or five bodies intertwined on the bed last night were merely performing an undifferentiated thing called sex. For those bodies’ owners, however, it was a celebration of one another, of the infinite variety of human responses and sensuous experience, and of their own strength, vivacity and beauty within that fleeting moment.

And it was without recrimination or cost—except for babysitting fees.

It was loving, laughing and irresponsible.

It was play.

3 IT IS EVERYWHERE

SHOW ME AN URBAN TERRACE, suburban close or sleepy village, and I will show you swingers. In every city, market-town and village in the Western world and beyond, there are respectable groups, couples and singles who routinely engage in recreational sex with total strangers, or with people encountered for that purpose just minutes before.

In time many of them become friends and, like any other social group, hold little parties at which they frequently run into one another, or invite one another over as if for supper. So Derek and Joan will ring Tony and Sharon and suggest that they come over for a drink and maybe a little shag.

‘Oh, and there’s this rather nice new couple who’ve just moved into the area…Nothing fancy. Just the six of us. And we can’t go on too late because Joan has to be in Westminster by eleven tomorrow…’

Sometimes these couples will go on holiday together, and perhaps they will go out one night to a Spanish, Mexican or Dominican swing-club to whoop it up with the locals. Sometimes they will go to Cap d’Agde—the French town wholly dedicated to nudism and swinging—or to one of many resorts and hotels throughout the world providing for ‘the Lifestyle’…

There are millions of swingers worldwide (four million is the generally accepted estimate in the US alone) and many millions more who are curious about the lifestyle, or aspire to become part of it. It has become perhaps the Western world’s biggest and most rapidly booming subculture—and its most widespread secret.

Although they are to be counted only in their thousands, ferretkeepers and Civil War enthusiasts, steam-train afficianados and cryptographers seeking to unravel the Beale code all have their own publications. For many reasons, however, there are few—if any—books by a practising swinger offering bona fide, sympathetic information and an insight into this massive social phenomenon.

The problem is that swingers are, by nature and long habit, discreet.

They may be unashamed—even proud—of their activities and of their fellows. They may know that the law protects them from overt discrimination. They, like ‘homosexual’ men and women, are adults engaged in an entirely consensual leisure activity which is—or, at least, should be—nobody’s business but their own.

So, of course, were foxhunters and bareheaded motorcyclists, but that didn’t prevent government and illiberal moralists from pretending that it was the welfare of the fox or the rider that warranted their intervention (though they have shown no such concern for battery hens).

Swingers have no prey. Even the commonplace transaction with a prostitute, the making of pornography, the habitual wine-bar or clubbing seduction, may be exploitative of one who, by reason of age, idiocy, poverty, drug-addiction, emotional need or force majeure, is in fact unwilling or reluctant. Swingers, however, play exclusively with other adults who have chosen this lifestyle. They obtain explicit consent before any sexual contact.

Yet for all this, most swingers are unwilling to subject themselves or their families to the censorious and lubricious judgements of the media who, at one level, cringe like adolescents from acknowledgement of genitals (unless they are swathed in white slipper satin for religious ceremony or shaven and sanctified by ‘the miracle of birth’), and at the other, gawp at them with yearning but profess outrage at their functions.

Sex may be the throbbing heart of our marketing and media culture, invariably—and oh, how wrongly—presented as desirable. We may regularly expose poor, bare, forked man—and woman—but, when we come to acknowledging that we actually have sexual functions and emissions, we might as well still be dressed as china bells.

Over the past three years, while researching for this book, I have been a swinger. In the course of this period, I have visited many private parties and most of Britain’s principal swingers’ clubs, as well as hotels, beaches and resorts throughout Britain and beyond where adults openly engage in sexual play.

I have had sex (in Clintonian and non-Clintonian senses) or—as swingers have it—I have ‘played’ with several hundreds of female strangers and acquaintances with whom I have little or no other connection. Sometimes they have been alone, sometimes in pairs. Sometimes there have been as many as seven or eight in one afternoon or evening. Quite often, I have known their forenames before I did so.

I have generally done so in the presence of my girlfriend and these women’s husbands or boyfriends. And at the orgies that are our principal diversions, we have been amidst forty, fifty or sixty or more couples, most of them naked or sparsely clothed, and similarly engaged.

Tabloid journalists pruriently ‘investigating’ the swing-scene always ‘make their excuses and leave’. I have stayed. I make no excuses for it. It has been instructive, companionable and often great fun.

I could pretend to dispassion or disdain. I could now clamber back onto the raft of respectability and express disapproval of the swinging lifestyle. This would be both dishonest and unconvincing.

Yes, sometimes the experience has been banal, squalid and depressing, but the same could be said of regular eating out or concert-going. This has been a function of peculiar people or circumstances, not of the activity itself.

In general, I have found swingers amiable. They are sensualists and libertarians, unembarrassed and intent on sharing pleasures with childlike openness. Given its ubiquity and the diversity of its practitioners, however, swinging inevitably has its share of crass berks and power-hungry bitches who believe that tantra is a plural.

But only in societies where responsibility has been usurped by law can such people thrive. Subcultures, if not illegal, are without the law. Swinging is therefore dependent on reciprocity and is self-policing. In my experience, such people are soon ostracised and find themselves on the grimy fringes of the movement. Should you find yourself amongst them, simply leave. Their faults are not those of the milieu which, in general, I have found to be good-natured and enormous fun.

4 AFFECTION, FLIRTATION, ADVENTURE…

I WAS 47 YEARS OLD when I set out on this journey. I had been married for seven miserable years and divorced for twelve, ten of which I had spent in a more or less monogamous relationship. Now, on leaving rehab for alcohol dependence, I was alone.

‘Sex is just another quick fix…’ my counsellor told me on my last morning at the clinic.

Emma was charming, sympathetic, proficient, almost prim. I had to remind myself that before she became sober, she had lived the usual junky life of blurry jags, blags and shags on the streets. Now she crossed stockinged legs beneath her desk and wiggled the lavalliere at her throat.

‘…just another quick fix, another way of refusing to look at yourself and who you really are. As you know, it can be an addiction too.’

I shook my head. It was during my three-month stay in the clinic that my long-term girlfriend at last decided—really quite reasonably—that she had had enough. I was confronting a solitary existence out there.

‘Cocteau used to complain that he was asked to travel on a filthy, cramped train to nowhere,’ I told Emma, ‘but when he took opium, he was enabled to jump off and sit on the banks amidst the flowers, yet here were all these people urging him to get back on the train. I understand why it is not a good idea to take opium or alcohol if you are an addict, but I don’t understand why it is invariably bad to get off, stretch your legs and breathe the fresh air.’

‘Sex can be just as dangerous as alcohol or opium,’ she said.

‘I’m sure it can, Em, but so can food or oxygen in excess. Doesn’t alter the fact that they are also essentials. And sex is—or it can be—a very good thing. It’s a loving thing, an adventure, a great game when played between equals and friends, a madness in controlled circumstances. It lets you escape from the paltry, transitory concerns and the isolation of every day. I think I can now live without alcohol, but I really don’t think that I can live without sex. You’ve just levelled all the mountains in my landscape. Now you seem to be telling me that I should cut down the trees as well. Just a featureless desert…’

‘No, no, no,’ she soothed. ‘We’re not saying that you must avoid sex. Just relationships—and just for the time being.’

Outside on the gravel drive my fellow-patients sloped out of the front door and slumped onto benches or sprawled on the sun-dappled lawns to smoke and shake and chat.

‘Look, I know the rules,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand them. No “relationships” for at least twelve months, and then only with a potplant. Then an undemanding pet like a hamster, then a dog, and finally another human being…And you say we don’t have to avoid sex? That pot-plant had better be a cactus.’

Emma intoned it like a catechism response. ‘Sex for its own sake is just using another person to escape from reality…’

‘Yes? And? Flying is just an escape from the equally inexorable forces of gravity. It can take you somewhere you want to go, or you can just go for a whirl, land where you took off, and it gives you a thrill and a beautiful view of the world. And if it’s mutual?’

‘…and you need to focus on who you are, what you need for happiness, and that must come from inside you. You need to find peace and serenity within yourself.’

‘Certainly, but myself is a sexual being. Serene isn’t exactly easy when you’re shaking with longing every time you see a frolicsome sheep.’

‘Hey, no! I’m not expecting you to be totally celibate…’

‘Thank you.’

‘…but only on the strict condition that you don’t give the other person power over your contentment or emotional stability. Your life depends upon that.’

‘I know that. I realise that,’ I nodded. ‘But listen, Em. I still want to share large aspects of my life. I want affection and adventure and flirtation. I want freedom. Are you saying I should just be a brutal, uncaring exploiter, then? Hurting others who expect more of me? Love ’em and leave ’em, and to hell with the consequences? Is that how you ensure the next generation of patients here?’

‘No, of course not,’ she smiled indulgently.

‘So, sex but no relationships? Which means—what? Whores?’

‘No!’ She reconsidered. She gulped. ‘Well, maybe. Possibly. But that can leave you feeling lonely and degraded. Just someone strong and not needy…’

‘I turn gay, then?’

‘That’s not fair.’ Her lips writhed. She did unnecessary things with papers and smiled. ‘Look, Mark, there are many people of both genders who can give love without sex and can share sex without regarding it as proof of ownership or allowing it to become a replacement obsession. It shouldn’t be such a big deal for you…You must never allow it to take the place of your Higher Power.’

‘Frustrated desire is far more likely to do that,’ I told her. ‘Not desire for sex, as such, but desire for the warmth, the closeness, the laughter, the excitement…’

‘Precisely,’ she said, as if it meant or proved anything. ‘The excitement…’ She leaned across the desk and laid a hand on my forearm. ‘It’s all right,’ she added, ‘you’ll work it out.’

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.

PART II

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