My First Fantasy

I didn't fully make the connection between masturbation and sex until I was about 15. By about 13 or 14, I began to have my suspicions about it, but I wasn't completely sure until I was 15 and decided to try thinking about boys while I was masturbating to see if it worked - and of course there was no turning back after that. The fact is, my masturbating didn't have a lot to do with explicitly sexual images until then. I had to consciously make them sexual - and at first, this felt like taking an indirect detour. Before I deliberately wrought this change in my fantasies, sex wasn't the point. People weren't the point. Touch wasn't the point and nor was love, attraction or any other form of interpersonal emotion. It was about me and the world, about life and death, the supremacy of pleasure over all those considerations, and about letting go.

I wish I could remember my first time, but it's just too far back. It began before my first memories. I remember always needing to do it when my mum had dressed me in certain clothes. Dresses and pyjamas were ok, but any skirt with a firm, tight waistband or trousers that encased my little thighs would give me the same feeling I now associate with wearing tight jeans - arousal. When it happened, I would go off and press myself against one of my favourite articles of furniture. Yes reader, yes. My first major sexual relationships were with furniture. For instance, if the coast was clear, I'd sometimes crawl under the dining room table and wrap myself around one of the legs and hump it. In my bedroom, I remember forming a very strong and lasting attachment to a corner of a white chest of drawers with a big picture of Pluto on the side. But I think it was the Fourth Banister From The Left on the landing that was probably my all-time favourite household fuckbuddy. It was made of wood, coated in glossy white paint that soon became warm to the touch, and it was square in shape. By God, yes. Very, very square. I know, I know, it sounds devastatingly sexy. And indeed, it was a very sultry object to me and I was often powerless to resist its glorious white, painty, woody allures. I remember that I used to stick my legs around the slender and seductive shaft of the Fourth Banister From The Left and cross them so that they were dangling down into the abyss. I never remember getting caught. I remember always knowing it had to be secret. I wonder about that sometimes. I think perhaps I may even have done it in my pram, before I can remember anything, and my mother might have stopped me and scolded me. Because how else would I have known - at the age of 4 - that I had to hide it? But this is just speculation.

Something I do remember for sure is that I tried to show my little brother how to do it - I would have been about 6 or 7 at the time and he about 2 or 3. I invited him to try the enticing charms of the Eighth Banister From The Left - an attractive banister which ought to have set his pulse racing with excitement. I showed him how to make sweet love to the Eighth Banister From the Left and promised him a big surprise at the end of it. He sat there for a little while, his podgy little legs swinging loosely up and down as he waited for his surprise; and then he just seemed to lose interest. I was highly affronted, as I recall. I felt as though I had just offered to share the most monumental of all life's secrets with him, and he just crawled off in the middle of it in order to satisfy a more pressing urge to drag his Fisherprice tractor backwards and forwards over the carpet. I was deeply disappointed in him. I don't think I managed to forgive him for many years.

I still remember some of my fantasies from this time. Pretty much all of them involved either falling or getting stuck in a tight place. About a year ago, I decided to try out one of my toddler fantasies to see if it still worked and was amazed to find that it did. A classical one had me dangling off the side of a cliff, clinging on for my life. A faceless individual would come by and reach down to help me. To be rescued, I would have to grab their arm so they could pull me up. But then the tingling feeling would begin - it would be something between fear, a delicious, stomach-churning giddiness, a hot sizzling vibration and deep, unfathomable excitement. It was very like the feeling I got when I was high up on a swing and I looked down between my legs just as the ground was rushing up towards me. In the fantasy, this feeling would be so incredibly wonderful that I would stop caring about whether I fell down the cliff, because I wanted it to go on and on. So I'd hesitate, still clinging tightly to my rocky ledge. I'd dangle there in a dilemma, trying to force myself to relinquish the sensation of pleasure in order to grab my rescuer's hand and save my own life. I'd reason with myself. I'd try to convince myself how much I wanted to live, thinking of all the people I'd miss and who would miss me if I died, and I would know that, viewing the situation sensibly, I HAD to grab that hand. The person above me might then say "Take my hand - quick". At this point, I would have to make my final choice between being rescued - surviving, but losing that wonderful feeling - or risking falling down the cliff because I just couldn't resist it; because it was just too tempting and for that all-important split-second, an intense but fleeting pleasure seemed more important to me than my life and everyone and everything in it. The orgasm came at the exact moment when I was making the decision and thinking something along the lines of, "Yes, it's madness, but what do I care?", and as I was climaxing, I would unbend my imaginary fingers and let go of the side of the cliff and plummet down through the air as my astonished and disbelieving would-be rescuer stooped over the edge watching me recede, my clothes flapping around me and my hair swirling around my face. I was always very peaceful and happy at this moment, knowing that nobody alive would ever understand my decision, that I would never see anyone I knew ever again, but that I had made the right choice - the only possible choice.

As a very small child, I don't think my fantasy can have been quite so complex as this. What I have just described was probably the more sophisticated version that slowly developed from some simpler original fantasy while I was growing up. Even today, I find the image a startlingly apt description of the state of mind I - and perhaps all women - have to reach in order to orgasm. Just to be quite clear here: you have to reach this place first, and then you can climax. It's never the other way around: that climaxing induces this state of mind. Not for me, anyway. I'm sure this is why so many women have problems reaching orgams. Men can orgasm by mistake. They have to concentrate on not coming too soon. Women have to concentrate every fibre of their mind and body in order to get there at all. You have to be able focus on the supremacy of your pleasure over all other things and at the same time, to be able let go of yourself so completely that for a few seconds, you couldn't care if you lived or died; and you have to time and control those two complex states of mind and bring them into a perfect alignment.

To John Thomas From Lady Jane

You may think it a joke but it's true: my first love, John, was a ditch digger. That was his job. He lived on a farm outside the hamlet where I grew up. The day he asked me out at the village show, he was an exotically grown-up 21 and I had just turned a demure 17. I say demure, but if truth be told, I was only outwardly so, and if you'd ever seen the glint in my eye, you'd have known that for all my coyness, underneath I was as rampant a vixen as ever ruined a country lad. At my school, I was the only 'A' level student from “up the valley” and I still remember the shrieks and giggles of outrage when I announced the liaison to my fellow sixth-formers in town. To them, he was "a simple country lad" and hence an object of titillated amusement. He could hardly read or write, he signed his name in block capitals and dirt was ingrained in his hands like the markings on the skin of a panther. Inevitably, the entire school proceeded to rechristen me "Lady Chatterley" and as I walked through the gates each morning, I would be hailed with cries of "Thou looks right rosy this mornin'! Appen Milady paid a visit to John Thomas last night?" As I made my way to lessons, I was often greeted by rounds of inexpertly choreographed groin thrusting accompanied by an intermittent touching of forelocks and the odd obsequious bow.

"Have you even read the book?" I would demand, "Or did you just jizz off to your dad's porn version?"

"Aye Milady."

I, for my part, quickly shrugged off my demure image, instead adopting the charming custom of cursing my fellow students as "a bunch of childish fuckers" and sticking my fingers up at them in a manner that owed precious little to my well-bred literary namesake. In the canteen, one girl made it a popular tradition to relate fantastically lyrical tales of Milady’s imagined adventures in a breathless, throaty voice, lingering on the rough feel of those filthy workman's hands upon her soft, quivering ladyflesh and unfolding tales of passionate romps in cowsheds, hencoops, silage pits and other such deeply romantic settings. But I didn't really mind the teasing; the truth was, I took a secret pleasure in it. The eroticised deference my presence now commanded was far from unpleasant and the sight of fine young men spontaneously thrusting, caressing their groins and genuflecting as I passed through the corridors was not without its appeal. And, apart from anything else, I was amused; they were so very close to the truth.

Sometimes, after a night out, John and I would take a detour over the fields in his old Land Rover. He used to let me drive, although I was nowhere near getting a licence. I remember there was a collection of tweedy caps in the back, and I used to like putting one on and imitating a selection of toothless old codgers from our village as I drove along. I loved the almost helpless way he laughed and I think he loved the playful way I provoked him. Then we'd find a dark, deserted spot next to a dry stone wall or a little wood, spread out a blanket and fuck with the wordless concentration of wild animals. It was always damp and freezing cold at nights and the air was swarming with bloodthirsty insects, so we never fully undressed. Our eager hands would rove over the goose-pimpled landscapes of our bodies, searching out secret folds of flesh beneath each other's clothes, panting and fondling, teasing and grasping in the throbbing blackness of the chill, grass-scented night.

Unfortunately, there was one major drawback to our night-time al fresco trysts. It was the sheep – those ubiquitous, dumb observers of our outdoor lives. So lumbering and stupid by day, they seemed to take on a new, surprisingly unsettling guise by night. There we would be, quite happily rolling about in a state of frothing carnal ecstasy on an old green blanket in the dark, contracting a perplexing profusion of cuts, bruises and severe grass burns in the process, when one of us would look up and discover, quite by chance, that at some unspecified point we had become enclosed within a tight ring of luminous greenish eyeballs, all gazing blankly down at us like pairs of weirdly floating peeled eggs that had - for reasons yet to be explained - been vigorously boiled in phosphor and then festooned about us in the manner of fairylights. Straining to focus in the blackness, we would eventually realise that motionless sheep must have somehow materialised noiselessly around us from every corner of the field with the precise objective of staring impassively at our writhing entwined figures. This was slightly off-putting, to say the least. The suspicion flitted through my mind that they could well be in the employ of my father; woolly white chastity guardians – his own personal army of sheepbots. I wouldn’t put it past him, even now.

The first time it happened, I believe I may have emitted the very, very briefest imaginable of bloodcurdling screams; not that I’m generally the screaming type, but when an erect male is present, one so often finds oneself obeying the traditional niceties of courtship. And yet, I cannot stress how deeply scary the phenomenon was, the first time it occurred. It was all just a teensy bit too reminiscent of a scene from a zombie film – but with sheep. The strange thing was, as we soon discovered, if you made the tiniest movement by day the sheep would bolt away bleating, but at night nothing we did seemed to faze them. We could clap, flap our arms around, run at them shouting "Shoo!" and "Mint sauce!" and "Oh God, just fuck off, you fluffy perverts!", fling hand grenades, turn fire hoses on them, pump lead into them with machine guns whilst cackling like maniacs and screaming “Die, die, you woolly bastards, die!”; never once did I see one of those buggers flinch. They just stood there obdurately, like stiff palace guards, frozen into position while tourists waft leaflets and burgers and Union Jacks in their faces.

But youthful ardour must needs prevail and, in the end, we learned to ignore the soundless apparition of their bulky forms and the horrible unblinking eyes that hovered in the air around us. Yet, try as I might, I could never rid myself of the continual sense that they were watching and waiting. As soon as our backs were turned, I feared they might leap on us from behind, wrestle us to the ground and suck out our soft, liquefied brains. It must be said, much as I adored country life, teenage sex could be a rather grisly business.

Daytime al fresco couplings didn't present the same disadvantages. The sheep remained picturesque, docile and were mostly quite well-behaved. We would seek out a wild, beautiful spot right up the valley, next to a tiny bubbling stream, with the hills rising up around us and buzzards whirling in the sky above. The only hitch with these rendezvous was that I always had to take the dogs with me as an alibi for my father, who seemed to be labouring under a totally unfounded impression that I was incapable of performing lewd acts in front of animals. Regrettably, though, despite my carefully laid plans, the dogs proved more troublesome in their way than the sheep. They used to go splashing around in the stream as we were getting down to the business of hyperventilating and roughly tearing each other's clothes off. But just as things were getting interesting, they'd come bounding back up to us and one would start shaking itself, showering our naked bodies in icy, dog-flavoured stream water, meanwhile the other would absolutely insist on joyously ramming a cold wet nose up the most conveniently located unprotected arsehole with the unerring accuracy of a guided missile.

More often than not, we'd be hurtling towards a glorious crescendo when both dogs would come scampering up and collapse onto us, pressing their clammy, stinking fur onto our exposed skin and bestowing a well-intentioned but toe-curling lick on the nearest crevice. Many was the time I'd be lying on my back, tentatively approaching what promised to be an exquisite climax and the happy muzzle of one of the dogs would loom into view as it playfully attempted to drop a truncated sheep's head or a decomposing squirrel onto my face. If I ever tried to push them off, they'd look so sad and hurt that my annoyance would melt into guilt and pity. All in all, I probably used to have more laughing fits about the dogs than orgasms. But we still loved it. It was an intoxicating feeling, fornicating completely naked in broad daylight, totally exposed within the vast expanse of a breathtaking landscape, with nothing – no walls, ceilings or barriers of any kind – to hem you in or protect you. Only sky and land. And rotting sheep cadavers. And dead squirrels – let’s not forget them.

But in spite of the danger of putrefying animal remains descending onto my face, the sensation felt primal and somehow timeless, and I remember that it made me feel very small and vulnerable, too. Sometimes I lost all sense of orientation. Like when you stand on your head for too long and you begin to feel as if you might drop off the floor and plummet towards the ceiling at any moment; I would feel as if I was clinging to some remote, topsy-turvy tangent of the planet, and I could see nothing at all that was preventing me from falling off the side and spiralling away into space.

I left John when I left the village to go to university. It was a terrible wrench for us both and he did all he could to persuade me to stay: he tried to give me the little Austin Morris he'd been restoring ever since I knew him; he proposed marriage; he offered me a life in the prettiest little cottage on his farm. But I had to go. He had to stay. I had paused for one summer on the brink of adulthood, but now the time of parting had arrived. Like a hothouse flower and a bramble, we could not have shared the same soil for long.

John stayed single for what seemed like years and years and then eventually married my childhood foe, Michelle – one of the most evil freckle-faced bitches who ever commandeered a public toilet, but that’s just my opinion. All I know is, she never let him have any fun and she wouldn't let him speak to me anymore. But if ever he was out on his own and he saw me, back on a visit, we'd sneak away to the village pub, get wrecked together, talk nonsense and fall off our stools laughing, as if no time had passed at all. Sometimes it took all my willpower not to reach out and hug him, but I knew that I couldn't, because I was the one who broke his heart and it was wrong to think I could mend it with a hug.

I last saw him two years ago, just before my parents moved away. It was to be my last night in the village, and, feeling lost and fiercely fragile, I made my way to the pub. I needed to feel that sense of belonging one final time, before I could say goodbye. He arrived, as if by arrangement, and I took the chance to steal another evening from his life. When the pub closed, we staggered out, arm-in-arm, crooning some ancient jukebox melody, pretending to be drunker than we were. Then we stood for a moment on the dirt track that led through the village, joining it, to the right with distant civilised worlds, to the left with the wind-lashed hills of our home. As our merriment died, the air seemed to resonate with the memory of our voices, like the vibrant hush that follows the lullaby. I could hear the trees and the bats chirping. The air was damp with drizzle and wild winds whipped my hair so that I could hardly see him in the darkness. He turned to me, pushed me gently back onto the gritty wet sandstone of the wall and, pulling the dripping hair from my face, he pressed himself against me and gave me a sad, slow kiss. It had been so long. I'd forgotten how soft his lips were and the clean smell of dirt and tractor oil. But now I can remember it. Then he took one road and I the other. I have never seen him since.