Being a Girl

by Chloë Thurlow

  ‘Here, lassie, look at the mess you’ve made,’ he said, and obediently I polished the puddles of sperm from the table.

  I had just finished the task when the door opened. Byron returned pushing an old-fashioned serving trolley, the wheels squeaking. Mrs McTavish carried two bowls and soupspoons; she was sucking at her gums and tutting to herself. She set the bowls down in front of us. Byron placed an enormous tureen in front of the Laird and Mrs McTavish served three plates of stew. She glanced in our direction as she sat opposite Byron. The Laird was between them at the head of the table.

  ‘Come on then, eat if you’re going to,’ he said.

  We ladled soup into our bowls, filling them to the brim. The steam was hot and the smell was delicious. We sat and ate like two little animals. Soup dribbled from my mouth, down my chin and fell, burning my breast. As I wiped the drips away with my hand, the Laird caught my eye and smiled.

  ‘Tell me, Mrs McTavish, have you ever seen finer titties?’

  ‘What are you talking about, mon?’

  ‘Look at them, bright as wee buttons.’

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ she said, and the Laird grinned as he ate his soup.

  His eyes were flicking constantly from the bowl in front of him to the two of us, squeezed together on the stool like ornaments on a shelf. I tried to picture us both in the Laird’s eyes, two naked girls like two little animals, our breasts perky, our cheeks and eyes bright, our bodies electric with life, with new sensations.

  It was only as I filled my tummy and my heart began to beat more normally that I became aware that our clothes had been taken away. I gazed back along the table at the Laird.

  He nodded.

  ‘Aye, lassie,’ he said. ‘You can bed down in the woodshed. If you piddle in the straw like wee animals you cannae expect a bed to sleep in.’

  ‘What about our clothes?’

  ‘You won’t be needing those. Not tonight.’

  Binky looked at me for an explanation but there wasn’t one. I looked back at the Laird and felt a warm dribble leak on his piano stool.

  3

  Primal Urge

  I WASN’T A girl any more. I was a woman. I had lost my virginity. Did I look different? Did I smell different? When I sashayed by in the street could men sense that I had gone through some subtle transformation? Subtle? Perhaps total is the right word. I think I may have grown an inch taller! And as for the little monkeys, they were just so out there!

  I stared for hours at my face in the mirror. I looked at my reflection in every shop window. I was even studying my eyes in the shiny side of the butter knife that day in the restaurant when we had lunch with Mummy.

  ‘Milly, you didn’t used to be quite so vain,’ she remarked as she caught my eye.

  ‘She’s discovered the inner Camilla,’ said Binky; my little sister had a way with words.

  Although I flushed, Mummy was rather too preoccupied gazing at her own reflection in the mirror on the wall facing our table to take much notice of me. Someone once said the faults we condemn in others we excuse in ourselves and I’m sure he must have had my mother in mind when he said it.

  The purpose of this lunch at the Jewel Royale was for mama to tell us that she had to go away on ‘urgent business’ for the weekend and we mustn’t invite the Chelsea riffraff back to the house for a party, which had happened before when we were younger and found ourselves deserted during school holidays by our parents. They were so spoiled.

  ‘I know what you children are like,’ she said.

  As the waiter fussed around with bread rolls his eyes fell first on Binky’s cleavage and then on my own. We didn’t lunch together very often these days and dressed to kill when we did. Kill each other, that is. Mummy’s eyes followed the waiter’s eyes and if I could read her mind I am certain she was thinking just how much her daughters were like her, less children, more rivals. My step-mother was used to being the most beautiful woman in every room she entered and the expression on her face at that moment reminded me of the Wicked Queen when she inquired as to who was the fairest of them all and the mirror, inanimate thing that it is, gave the wrong reply.

  ‘Do you really need quite so much bust on display, Binky?’ she asked, and turned to me. ‘And you, Milly.’

  Binky glanced down at her breasts welling over the white lace trim of a bra pushing over the scooped neck of a sleeveless black dress. ‘It’s summer, Honey,’ Binky said, and lit a cigarette with a golden tip.

  Mummy had honey-coloured dark blonde hair and encouraged us to call her Honey which, except for reasons of irony, we never did. She sighed and as the air escaped from her scarlet lips it stirred the coils of blue smoke rising from Binky’s cigarette. Mummy was one of those women who needed to be admired. She had always traded on her beauty and, at the unforgiving age of 39, I’m sure, like the Wicked Queen’s disillusionment with the looking glass, what mother saw in her own reflection was the cruel hand of gravity dragging her down. Her beauty was waning, fading, the freshness of youth was slipping, sliding, running away, and it occurred to me with my limited experience that what mattered to her most was her beauty. I don’t think she was really interested in sex. What she wanted was to be desired.

  A year ago during the last summer hols when I had gone one clammy hot day to look for something in the greenhouse, I found Mummy perched on the potting table with her knickers around the heel of a red Manolo Blahnik shoe, her legs spread and the Polish gardener with his tongue inserted in her like a key in a lock. Her back was arched and her head was thrown back, but what shocked me was that her pubic hair had been shorn like some porn star and the dome of her mount was as smooth and white as a porcelain vase.

  My mother shaves her pubes! It was hard to believe, to comprehend, to appreciate.

  I watched through the crack in the door, my hand over my mouth, my cheeks burning red with shame and embarrassment. I had still been a virgin then, of course, and was both repelled and drawn to this bizarre scene, this movie clip: my mother with her skirt rolled up around her waist, the gardener slurping over her wet parts like a dog lapping from a puddle, Mummy puffing away like a steam engine straining on a steep hill as she thrust her shiny mount into the gardener’s mouth.

  The gardener was about twenty, a sullen boy who spoke English without recourse to vowels. Neither Binky nor I had found him remotely fit with his stained teeth and overgrown Adam’s apple, but he must have had a robust and energetic tongue. I watched it, long and pink and healthy as it moved in and out of Mother like the feeler of some enormous insect stabbing at ants or dipping for sap in the hollow of a tree. They kept going for ages, sighing and slurping, their bodies moving mechanically like a primitive machine. I was frozen like a statue in the park, my eyes glued to this terrible, extraordinary thing I was seeing.

  The boy sank to his knees and pushed Mummy’s thighs wider apart, his sweaty hands leaving muddy streaks on her ivory skin. Her bottom lifted from the potting table and when the red shoe clinging to her toes fell and clattered with a bang to the floor I involuntarily let out the breath I’d been holding in an anxious gasp. I’m quite certain Mummy heard me, but she was too far gone by this time and starting shrieking. It was the first time I’d heard a grown woman having an orgasm and it sounded like she was having a baby.

  I crept away and never mentioned this shameful episode to my mother, although it came often into my mind. It was hard to believe I had seen her pristine white bottom on the dirty potting table surface, her £200-a-pair silk knickers hooked in the heel of her shoe, her pubic mount perfectly shaved and gaping over a thirsting mouth. I still find it hard to believe that she truly wanted to have sex with the gardener with the hot sun blazing through the greenhouse roof. What Mummy craved was the gardener, a boy of twenty, wanting to have sex with her. For Mother, being a great beauty was her raison d’être, an end in itself, and I suppose as she turned forty she would require a revolving door of East European handymen to confirm this axiom.

  I glanced at M
ummy across the table. Behind her was a tall graceful palm in a black ceramic pot, its fronds gently shadowing the side of her face. The waiter was still looming over Binky, peering through the cigarette smoke at the pale moons of her girlish breasts like an inquisitor analysing evidence of witchcraft. He was dressed as a bishop in a long white cassock and stood on a white square like a chameleon in camouflage. The Jewel Royale had a chequered floor and the staff were attired as chessmen, bishops, knights, the Maître D, an old queen, dressed as a king. Binky was enjoying the attention and as I studied her studying the menu I realised that my sister was just like Mummy. She wanted every man she met to fancy the pants off her but, in spite of our adventures on the Isle of Skye, she really wanted to keep her pants on.

  I was different.

  I was . . .?

  A complete tart, according to Binky.

  A ‘good girl’ the Laird had said, as I had stood there absurdly proud with a tanned bottom and his sperm oozing from me.

  Since my return from Scotland there had been a certain spring in my step, a twinkle in my eye, a vague new confidence. I had been a tourist. Now I had taken the journey. I felt serene, contented, in what the nuns at school would have called a state of grace. The world was my oyster. I was still waiting to hear whether I had got a place at Cambridge but, if I didn’t, I would take this small failure philosophically. I would have a gap year and go and stay with Daddy so I could work on my French and ruin his love life.

  It was so much easier being a grown-up. I had come to see that virginity wasn’t so much a precious commodity, a prize a Geisha sells in order to pay for her education, but a terrible burden, a responsibility thrust on women, unasked for and unwanted, and one we are challenged to guard at risk of becoming outcasts of the clan. It was all so mediaeval. Virginity is like having a faint shadowy moustache, sort of sexy on certain Spanish women, but better not there at all. Virginity is for girls in storybooks, secret adventures and pony club.

  I was a woman now.

  I liked saying this to myself. I am a woman. I am the figurehead on my own ship. The master of my own destiny and desires. I am going to do everything.

  They say you always remember your first and I know I certainly will! How could anyone forget the Laird of the Black Watch? When Hamish popped into my mind, as he often did, I had this terrible fear that I would never again meet anyone quite like him. That the first time would be the best time and my life would become an eternal quest in search of the next great orgasm. The next thorough spanking!

  Spanking. It was still an absolute mystery to me. Two men had inveigled me into taking off my clothes and three men had spanked me until my bottom was a roaring fire and my pussy leaked liquid ecstasy. Spanking and orgasm. It was a surreal combination. What did this mean? What did it say about me? About men? Were all men obsessed by bottoms? Did they all want to put you over their knee and tan your buttocks? We had learned in Classics at school about Aristotle and he said the way to happiness is to be your ‘authentic natural self’. It seems to me that it was perfectly natural that men would want to spank girls and, ipso facto, girls must all secretly dream of being spanked. They did and they just never got the opportunity to realise it. I was lucky.

  When the girls had talked late at night in the dorms about their first time, no one ever mentioned spanking, corporal punishment, discipline, humiliation, sado-masochism, role play, words that whirled around my head like little birds on currents of air, flying for the chaste pleasure of flying. I had left school to take a journey with my sister. But the real journey I was taking without maps, without a route, with no sense of a destination. Confucius, or somebody else who was just as clever, said a journey of one thousand miles starts with the first step, and I thought a journey of one thousand orgasms would obviously start in the Isle of Skye. I was a wanderer in the dreamy dark realms of the senses and if being an explorer is my destiny, I suppose the best thing to do is pursue it with all the energy and conviction in my soul. Or in my knickers, anyway.

  There, you see, I have become philosophical. I am the butterfly easing my wings from the prison of the chrysalis. I am a girl growing into the woman. When I lie in the bath running my palms over my nipples, they are a woman’s hands enjoying the springy erectness of a woman’s nipples. When I spread cream over my thighs, the dewy dampness around my natal cleft is the arousal of a woman who knows what it is to be a woman. I had enjoyed doing all the things that girls do, all that studying and gym and bitching and thinking about boys, but I had arrived back from Scotland with an intuition that the next bit of life is going to be much more fun.

  When I was growing up, I had always thought of virginity as something sacred, mystical, a soap bubble, perfect and impermanent. When you reach the age of fourteen, you saunter along the high street on Saturday, the only time we were allowed out of the convent, and you are aware that men are analysing you, ogling you, sizing you up. When they catch your eye, you understand that what they are looking for is some outward revelation that the treasured little membrane stretched invisibly up there is still up there, and what they desire more than anything in the world, and would give ten years inside the walls of the chrysalis to bring that desire to fruition, is to go crashing through that cherished and ephemeral maidenhead.

  It’s heady stuff. Your little tits are exploding from your chest like anarchist bombs, your bum is growing pert and round, your hip bones are jutting out like scaffolding around the wall of a castle, a barricade you raise up to protect the prize while, conversely, and at the same time, you long for an errant knight to slash away your clothes and pierce the heart of your being with his comely sword. Like the butterfly stretching its wings and taking to the air for the first time, you are conscious quite suddenly of your girl power and you keep that power until your virginity has gone.

  But then what happens? Do you become powerless? Or do you acquire a different sort of power?

  I still wasn’t entirely sure. Most girls lose their virginity at fifteen or sixteen in the summer holidays with the best friend of their brother in the garden, or on the living room sofa while parents are out at the theatre or at one of those irksome dinner parties my parents attend with dreary regularity and inflict on our own dining room when Daddy’s home from his important work in Brussels.

  That was the usual scenario with girls at Saint Sebastian’s and those girls would appear in September with the braces removed from their teeth and a look of inner knowledge in their glossy eyes. They gazed dreamily out of the window, tossing their hair like startled ponies when the nuns in the classroom raised their voices to demand attention. I always had mixed feelings towards those girls, envy and superiority, and tried to imagine what it is like doing it, something, of course, you can’t imagine, as baby birds can’t imagine what it is to fly until they are shoved from the nest.

  They say that girls at state schools are losing their virginities at thirteen and fourteen and half of them are pregnant before they even do their GCSEs. We loved reading about the underclass chavs in the tabloids left behind by the maintenance staff and gasped with wonder at the wayward morals the journalists described. New Council Flat Given To 14 Year Old Girl With Twins! Who’s Going To Pay? Disgusting!!! Bring Back The Birch!!!

  Yes please.

  But it’s true, though. I have seen with my own eyes girls pushing buggies who surely remember having been pushed in buggies just a few years before. From childhood to motherhood without passing GO. Mummy blames television and the fashion industry, television for its overt sex (and that’s something she does know about!) and the fashion industry for dressing little girls still sucking dummies as starlets and models. Instead of ribbons and bows now it’s chains and leather. By the time they take the dummies out of their mouths they are ready for the first cigarette and, as we were warned at Old Basher’s, one thing leads to another.

  If you were caught creeping into another girl’s bed in the dorm for a kiss and a cuddle the nuns would turn a blind eye, unless they were perverts, b
ut God help the girl caught puffing on a fag; one hundred laps of the top field, letters home to parents, an interview with Father McMurphy, the parish priest, with his slobbering lips and strange eyes: blue eyes that seemed to hover in a red sunset, the result, I imagine, of too much communion wine. Still, he didn’t smoke, and the girls caught smoking redeemed themselves returning from their marathon wet with sweat and chanting a few Hail Mary’s while Father McMurphy stroked their skinny knees.

  Now here’s something that I have been thinking about for a long time: back in Jesus’s day, cigarettes hadn’t been invented. There is absolutely no reference to tobacco in the Bible. So who decided smoking was a sin?

  Anyway, I was not one of those girls with the new haircut and a twinkle in the 4th form and can only attribute this to the fact that I have no brothers, no male cousins and the Polish gardener clearly prefers older women. Perhaps being far from home he misses his mother?

  During the long drought in my sexual growth, I had developed a romantic, 18th-century attitude to virginity. I was Emily Brontë drooling over Heath-cliff; a Capulet chained to a Montague; Isolde burning with desire for Tristan; Honey Bunny with big eyes for Pumpkin in Pulp Fiction. Virginity was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the Holy Grail, the answer to the riddle in The Da Vinci Code, something you wanted to share with the man you loved and, like most girls who managed to save their little pearl in the oyster until they were eighteen, I had grandiose dreams of sharing it with a knight in shining armour, some dashing Sir Lancelot who would whisk me away on his big white stallion to the world of make-believe. Instead I got naked, spanked and spangled by Hamish the Laird of the Black Watch and that was going to be a hard act to follow.