London, part 2: Love & Lust

I shall call her Janet because I have forgotten her name, if I ever knew it, and because the name has acquired over the years an erotic charge. It suggests suburban tidiness, make-up and artificial manners, designed as a surface to disguise lively desire living beneath.

This Janet was no prim one. She came from the edge of the estate, noted for broken windows out of which shouts and screams often issued, and front gardens loaded with cast-offs and heavyweight litter. She nevertheless qualifies for her suburban pseudonym because she was neat, groomed and sexy, and didn’t shout.

Love and lust are further apart than is commonly thought and Janet occupied the sex zone, but she is preceded in this story by another anonymous girl from the same estate whom I place in the love section, though it came to nothing, other than a permanent mark in my mind, while Janet reached a quick peak, though more Netherlands than Swiss Alps.

The love girl in this story – Dina her alias – came and went within days and she and I did nothing but talk a few times and walk along her street up to her front gate, beyond which lay her ramshackle house and an obstacle course of detritus. Despite this she was a tidy girl and lovely to me, a young boy too embarrassed now to reveal my tender age. I declared my love for her, to myself only, of course, in the traditional way.

During those few fleeting days, that I wish I could repeat, Dina provoked the well-known and celebrated symptoms in me. I told myself this tale of love, that this is what it must be and I was in posssession of it. Every scrap of her I counted and cherished. She knew nothing of my adoration though she might have read my mind. She was rash, or subtle enough to point out her bedroom window (glass intact) and this was a shrine when I passed, even when I was sure that her family had moved away.

I sighted Dina one wandering summer’s day. She was dressed in a white shirt with her sleeves rolled to three-quarter length and at the time I had a taste for this fashion because it was sophisticated and belonged to a way of life far beyond my reach. She wheeled her bicycle along the pavement and we got into conversation, then walked along together in my bliss. At one point she had to buckle her sandal and asked me to hold onto her bicycle. I placed my hand, for a lingering moment only for fear that it would burn me, on the saddle where she had sat, straddled it and warmed it. She must have worn shorts too in the heat and had thin legs that every male on earth would wish to examine.

Though I examined with wonder every part of her, gifts both from nature and culture. Even her living conditions I tried to come to terms with. I decided the squalor of her garden was an invitation to the squalor of sex, but that she surpassed this and occupied a higher state of being. At the most all I wished for and thought about was a touch, light and innocuous, of her hand, her mouth with my lips, her shirtsleeve, her shorts. Her name would have been a pleasant gift too, which I would not have sullied.

Glimpses stay with us longer than full access. Dina was even by glimpsing standards a quick one, past my sight and mind before I could get my feelings into any order. But

she has lodged in the mind in a luminous corner of her own, the first, laying down patterns to be repeated through a whole life.

Janet was a tall girl and I was taller too by the time we met some time after the localised storm of Dina. She nevertheless was an inch or two above me and I wonder about imprinting because tall slim women have continued to attract me.

Tall, slim, made-up, worldly: this was Janet. Somehow she and I met. I saw her with others and I must have given her attention though I had no plan of attack. I was 15, moderately useless. Janet: 15? How was I to know? I knew only boys, such being the conditions of the time, with girls materialising mysteriously from a breeding farm or a hand-picked enclosure, it seemed.

By a fluke we, Janet and I, ended – after some desultory hanging-out on a street corner or bus shelter – together and alone. I can’t think that I made the first move, especially when, as this page is advancing, I realise that she must have been older, maybe 16, if that was legal.

We walked somewhere without a plan. We went behind the houses, so maybe a plan was developing without words. Behind the houses there was an alley, wide, covered in cinders from the nearby gas works, and with walls to lean on. I think she started it, with a mild assault in the region of my mouth. I had to reach up to even out the deficit in height, and we were off.

Lipstick, with, it seemed, its neutral taste of a neutral colour, even though it was bright red, was a pleasant lubricant and smear for the excitements ahead. Kissing is, I have often thought, more intimate than fucking if it is done properly, with invasion into deep interiors perversely personal in this site of breathing and feeding, otherwise closed off, except for one’s dentist. Kissing inwardly also seems more unnatural than sexual intercourse, and that adds to its allure.

Janet and I kissed, making up, both of us, the method, according to movies or according to desire. I think more of the latter if my excitement was a measure, and hers, because she did not wish it to end. Janet, kissee. Me kissee too. We were mutually enthralled. The proof lay lower down.

My own lower-down was inflamed and in a state of insistent rigidity that any small trigger would send into blast-off. And only kisses had happened.

Janet’s lower regions I knew nothing about. I was an alien from a planet without females and no one had explained biology. My school ignored it. Jesuits preferred life without biology.

Bit by bit we moved lower. Having kissed her throat, delicious. And I could have loitered longer there. Then her breasts. They were hidden by her tasteful blouse which during our embraces threatened to become more exposed, and the glimpses of her cleavage excited me further. I could not bear much more stimulation without exceeding myself, as one book of the Old Testament expressed it for the young David. Maybe we paused; maybe we talked about other matters. Any personal talk would have been fatal for my retention.

I was curious, and just curious enough not to bring it all to an end with a touch or firm embrace or movement, or more of that kissing, that would soon have meant a volley of shudders through my whole system.

I wondered about her centre. I tentatively used my hand to begin such an exploration. She promptly took my enquiring hand and encouraged it. She helped too by lifting her skirt, tight though it was, up her thighs. What followed became the most memorable part of this episode of lust though we were only beginners, clumsy innocents learning the rudiments. Though she knew what she wanted more than I did.

She was wearing stockings. That was the rule then. Stockings held up by a garter belt. There are generations of men for whom the term garter belt causes immediate tumescence. From the garter belt hang straps that by a clever little fixture attach to the stocking tops to hold them aloft. Between the top of the stockings and the panties there is bare, silky inner thigh, no silkier skin on a woman. So the roving hand passes across the stocking fabric, itself enought to excite any sensual man, to the soft prime flesh itself, and this only a preamble to the panties and what lies inside them. It is a much celebrated journey. I, aged 15, clumsy and ignorant, embarked on it with Miss Janet, who was keen to accompany me to heaven.

Which bit is best, I still wonder. The higher one goes the better it should get, in theory, but as one often hears, the journey surpasses the destination. I don’t know. A supporter of the glimpse theory might well pause for long at stage two (thigh flesh), for example. I know that I took some time over each part, as if I was an old hand, and I had a strong urge to talk about each part with Janet, to enquire, to celebrate what my young hand was finding, in her hidden underskirt.

It was filthy what we were doing as indulgently as we could, or I could. She was passive, receptive, yieldingly irresistible. I know I stayed wordless, though I also grunted and pressed my engorged cock against her leg and moved it as if I was a beast of the field. I was a dirty frotteur and I didn’t mind because I did not have any mind left in my pleasuring.

She wanted what I was doing and she wanted more. My hand on her inner thigh was as delicious a sensation as I had ever known outside orgasm itself and I lingered there as long as indecency allowed. She made little moans of approval, especially when I inched higher into the secret region. I had never seen the cunt and its region. I did not know what to expect.

The panties were regulation for the era, that is silky and baggy, not tight little things designed by someone who dislikes sex. Silky panties, with give, are panties with generous donations to the invader who can touch and enter, feel and think about it,  silken delight to explore.

Inside them, moist as something melting, deliquescent the true word, accompanied by more feminine moans from her, Janet all made-up and very tidy, was the great moment, and my finger or fingers made their entry. I was startled by the pubic hair, somewhat, but it felt more bestial, that we were both of us flawed filthy humans trying out atavism, a word I did not then know.

For a short interlude I must have lost my erection because I was thinking about what was happening, curious as if a witness to an experiment, like something in science, maybe my missing biology lessons.

At this point there was a tragic incident. On the dusky air a coarse woman’s voice cried out from a nearby back garden Janet’s name, with knowing authority. “My mum,” she said.

“Janet, I know you’re there,” said the mother loudly enough to raise the neighbourhood.

“I’d better go,” she said. And did.