28. Rabbit
On the eve of her sixteenth birthday a gift was left for Keisha Blake, outside the flat in the corridor. The wrapping showed a repeating butterfly pattern. The card, unsigned, read UNWRAP IN PRIVATE, but the slant of the p and the pointy w told her it was the hand of her good friend Leah Hanwell. She retreated to the bathroom. A vibrator, neon pink with revolving beads in its gigantic tip. Keisha sat on the closed lid of the toilet and made some strategic calculations. Wrapping the dildo in a towel, she hid it in the room she shared with Cheryl, then took the box and wrapping paper down to the courtyard to the public bins by the parking bays. The following Saturday morning she began approximating the early signs of a cold, and on Sunday claimed a severe cough and stomach ache. Her mother pressed her tongue down with a fork and said it was a shame, Pastor Akinwande was going to talk on the topic of Abraham and Isaac. From the balcony Keisha Blake watched her family walk to church, not without regret: she was sincerely interested in the topic of Abraham and Isaac.
29. Rabbit, run
But she had also privately decided she was a different kind of believer from her mother, and could survive the occasional anthropological adventure into sin. She returned inside and raided an alarm clock and calculator for their batteries. She did not employ any mood lighting or soft music or scented candles. She did not take off her clothes. Three minutes later she’d established several things previously unknown to her: what a vaginal orgasm was; the difference between a clitoral and a vaginal orgasm, and the existence of a viscous material, produced by her body, that she had, afterward, to rinse out of the ridges along the vibrator’s shaft, in the little sink in the corner of the room. She had the dildo for only a couple of weeks but in that time used it regularly, sometimes as much as several times a day, often without washing in between, and always in this business-like way, as if delegating a task to somebody else.
30. Surplus value, schizophrenia, adolescence
“We should go like this here,” said Layla and sang a new note and Keisha made a notation. “Role models,” sang Layla, in the new key, “bringing the truth, bringing the light.” Keisha made a further note. “Making it right,” said Layla, and then repeated the same words but sung as music, and Keisha nodded and made a further notation. Layla was genuinely musical and her voice was beautiful. Her mother was a well-known singer in Sierra Leone. Keisha could not sing and played the recorder rather badly. She had taught herself musical notation in a few weeks using piano music taken from church. As with everything that involved symbols and/or signification it had not been difficult for Keisha to do this and she did not know why that should be so or what such facility meant, nor why her sister Cheryl had not been similarly blessed, nor what she was meant to do about it or with it, or if “it” was a noun or a verb or had any material reality at all, outside of her own mind. The two girls were writing a song for the under-12 faith group that met in this back room on Thursdays after service. They were good friends, Keisha and Layla, though not as close as Keisha and Leah. The fact was they had not been bonded by a dramatic event, although in the mind of the church they belonged together in a natural and inevitable way. “Leading the way,” sang Layla. Keisha made a note. She could smell her own vagina on her hands. Now Layla reverted to speaking: “Or something like, ‘Sisters today, leading the way.’” Keisha made a note of this and placed parentheses around it to signify it was not yet a lyric set in stone. If these are “talents”—the ability to sing, or to quickly comprehend and reproduce musical notation — what kind of a thing is “talent?” A commodity? A gift? A prize? A reward? For what? “We follow the truth, we follow the light!” sang Layla, which had already been set in stone both musically and lyrically. With nothing to note down Keisha became anxious. Across the room hung a mirror. Two admirable young sisters, their hair still plaited by their mothers, sat on the edge of a makeshift stage, one singing and the other transforming music into its own shadow, musical notation. That’s you. That’s her. She is real. You are a forgery. Look closer. Look away. She is consistent. You are making it up as you go along. She must never know. “And then from here to here,” sang Layla, singing these words and therefore putting the instruction itself to music. Keisha made the notation.
31. Permission to enter
Though they were five, the Blakes occupied a three-bed, one bathroom unit, in which only the youngest boy, Jayden, had a room of his own. As far as Keisha could make out, privacy did not seem of any importance to her brother, who was eleven, and still prone to streaks of domestic nudity, but for her own person it was a necessity, more so with every passing day, and the arrival of the dildo prompted her to reopen an old debate with her mother.
“It’s a human right!” cried Keisha Blake. History GCSE module B16: The American Civil Rights Movement. Module D5: The Chartists.
“If there’s a fire you’d burn up in your room,” said her mother, “This Cheryl’s idea? People who want locks got something to hide.”
“People who want locks just want a basic human right, which is privacy, look it up,” said Keisha, although with less heat this time, alarmed that her mother, in the general reach of a maternal cliché, should have gathered in the truth so precisely. She retreated to her room and thought about Jesus, another deeply godly person who was not understood as godly by the sort of clichéd people who called themselves godly, though to be fair those people were probably also sometimes godly in their own uneducated way, but only by accident, and only a bit.
32. Difference
A clitoral orgasm is a localized phenomena restricted to the clitoris itself. Perversely, direct stimulation of the clitoris tends not to provoke it, causing instead pain and annoyance, and sometimes an intense boredom. A vigorous and circular manipulation of the clitoris and the labia together, with a hand, is the most direct route. The resulting spasm is sharp, intensely pleasurable, but brief, like male orgasm. On the charged question of clitoral versus vaginal orgasm Keisha found herself to be an agnostic. One might as well be asked whether blue is a superior color to green.
A vaginal orgasm can be provoked by penetration, but also by simply moving one’s pelvis forward and backward in a small motion while thinking about something interesting. This latter method is especially effective on a bus or a plane. There seems to be a small piece of raised flesh — about the size of a ten-pence piece — halfway up the wall of the vaginal canal on the side nearest your belly-button that is stimulated by this “rocking,” but whether this is what is meant by the phrase “g-spot” and whether it is the cause of the almost unbearably pleasurable sensation, Keisha Blake could not verify one way or another. However it is achieved, what is noticeable about vaginal orgasm is its length and intensity. It is experienced as a series of spasms as if the vagina itself is opening and closing like a fist. Perhaps it is. But whether this is what is meant by the phrase “multiple orgasm” was also unclear to Keisha Blake, though it seemed typical of the unassuming tendencies of feminine descriptors to accept one “close of the fist” as an orgasm in and of itself. It was perhaps simply a phenomenological problem. If Leah Hanwell said the flower is blue and Keisha Blake said the flower is blue how could they be sure that by the word “blue” they were apprehending the same phenomena?