proceedings. One evening I brought some ice into the bedroom, blindfolded him and started rubbing it over his sensitive parts. He was going crazy underneath me, half enjoying the experience and half hating it. I just thought it was so interesting that he could still feel horny and excited despite the discomfort I was causing. It was perhaps the first time that I realised that I hugely enjoyed having power over another helpless human being. It’s a power I’ve enjoyed ever since; a power to be used responsibly and, at times, tempered by kindness but it is a highly addictive feeling I love to this day. I suspected even then that I was a step ahead of my peers in my sexual activities but never felt guilty about it. They probably weren’t tying their boyfriends to the bed but to me it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
As time went by, Tom and I grew bolder in arranging for me to stay the night in his bed. As far as my grandparents were concerned, Tom’s mum was happy for me to stay over at herhouse in the spare room; as far as Tom’s mother was concerned I was leaving most evenings to go home. The truth was that we were busily deceiving both of them. At the end of the evening I would say goodbye to Tom’s family and he would then offer to walk me to the nearby bus stop. We knew that while we were out the whole family would go off to bed, making it easy for him to sneak me back into the house and upstairs to his bedroom. They were having work done to the house and so for a long while there was scaffolding around the building. That made it even easier for me to shimmy up the scaffold poles after I had supposedly left to go home and climb back in through the bedroom window. In the morning, I would simply leave by the same route whilst everyone was getting up and then a few minutes later turn up at the door to ‘visit’ Tom again. ‘Morning, sleep well? Good to see you.’
In the end of course, I got caught out. I was so tired one morning that I let Tom go off to school on his own whilst I stayed put in his bed. I thought I had locked the door but his mother caught me out. It didn’t go down too well to find me asleep in her son’s bed, but the relationship had lasted for so long by then that she hardly made any fuss. The love affair with Tom had led to a temporary truce in my fights with my grandparents. But 18 months down the line, as with many first loves, cracks were starting to appear in our relationship. The end was nigh and the end of one relationship was to rekindle all of the problems in the relationship with my own family.
The real war of independence was about to break out at home, and it was not going to end well.
CHAPTER 12
GOING OFF THE RAILS
I knew Tom was lying when he told me he’d had a quiet weekend at home. I’d already heard that he and his mates had been to a local club and, in a way which was starting to typify our friendship, he hadn’t wanted to take me along. He always said that having me with him on a night out meant that he couldn’t ‘relax’ in the same way as if he was on his own. As far as I knew, Tom was not being unfaithful to me but a clear pattern was emerging. It seemed that I was good enough for him to use for sex during the week but at the weekends he wanted to go clubbing with his mates – a routine that usually involved varying degrees of drug-taking. I felt hurt and rejected. As I rather crudely put it to one of my friends: ‘I’m alright for fucking but not to be seen on his arm.’ We were going out together less and less and, although our sex life remained strong, we were obviously nearing the end. Havingcaught him out in one blatant lie I was happy to go along with a girlfriend when she suggested our own Saturday night out at my old haunt of the Hammersmith Palais. Earlier in my teens I had been ‘Miss Goody Two-shoes’ when it came to men and late-night clubs. This time I was in the mood to be naughty.
The guy who chatted to me in the club that night
Mimi Barbour
Loren K. Jones
Fred Hoyle
Charles Fort
Rebecca Shaw
Cristina Henríquez
Crystal Kaswell
Fritz Leiber
Karen Rose Smith
Zenina Masters