Sump of dirty dreams
I smacked her/my bottom, almost in silence because of my deficient smacking skills, but making up for it with enthusiastic ‘Take that!’s and ‘How dare you!’s. I pleaded with myself and begged for mercy, and said I would do anything not to get the sack. Then at some stage I (as Miss Willis) spotted the bulge in the stable boy’s trousers and scolded the wench, saying the worst fault to be found in a working girl was selfishness and the inability to share lovely things. Did she think it was really fair for a poor working lad to be fiddling around with a callow girl who hardly knew one end of a man from another? If she was going to behave in this manner behind my (Miss Willis’s) back, it would be well for her indeed if she were to take a few lessons from an older woman and at least have the common decency to learn how to share, and to do a good job into the bargain. Heaven knows where I got all this fine and juicy stuff. The collective unconscious is a sump of dirty dreams, and I just lowered my little bucket into it.
The greater mystery, I suppose, is that all the time I thought we were being secret and absolutely disgusting (not realising that the Kama Sutra was way ahead of us) I had never thought to include any element of my own fantasies into the performance. In an all-boy school, the filth I produced was rigorously heterosexual, and now that I felt I had exhausted those possibilities, I broke ground in a new area. Far from feeling my way towards what actually aroused me, I moved further in the other direction.
The wench’s first lesson was to hand the boy over to me (Willis) while I put him through his paces until I had him moaning with delight. The moans would have been better done by third parties, but there was no helping that. It was my first real experience of a resistant audience, and it made me lose confidence. I dispensed with the boy and made love to the wench, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing. At some stage I told the stable boy to make tea for us and took the wench to bed with me.
For once the story fizzled out. There was a silence of a fairly ghastly type, and then Luke spoke very quietly. ‘John?’ he said, and my heart sank. ‘You’re every bit as entertaining a performer as I’ve been told. But perhaps there are one or two things we should discuss.’ His manner was off-hand, except that murmurs after lights-out can never be off-hand, and everyone in the dorm knew he was a man on a mission. ‘If you have nothing better to do,’ he went on, ‘might you meet me for a few words after school tomorrow? Would it be convenient to meet by the bus?’
If the mood of the dorm had been put into words at that moment it would have been Now you’re for the high jump!, with a certain amount of satisfaction. Ungrateful beasts. And I wasn’t so sure about the high jump anyway.
The meeting-place meant that there was a high degree of secrecy involved. The bus was round a corner and easily fifty yards from the front entrance of the Castle. It was an old London Transport Leyland (Raeburn drove it, which can’t have been easy). But then Julian was always saying that there were microphones planted all over Vulcan School, to monitor our conversations. It made sense that an older boy would know where to go to avoid being overheard. And why care so much about privacy if he was only going to dish me with Miss Willis?
In all the mixed feelings about Luke’s invitation and what it might mean, I was overlooking one practical difficulty. I only realised it in the morning. The Everest & Jennings was a decent enough machine, but it wasn’t suitable for all surfaces. It certainly wouldn’t go over gravel. Not very handy, now that perhaps the most important appointment of my life, demanding absolute privacy, was due to take place on the far side of fifty gravelled yards.
Perhaps this would be the one day when the low-specification machine would simply zing along, gravel no obstacle. That was Plan A. If Plan A didn’t work, I had no Plan B. I certainly didn’t want worldly Luke, who might be wanting to talk man to man, to find me stranded like an over-sized pebble among the little pebbles of the drive.
When the Everest & Jennings ground to a halt on the gravel, grit buggering the relays in the usual way, I found I did have a Plan B after all. Plan B was to wave my arms feebly about and shout ‘I say’ in as loud a voice as I could muster. And amazingly, my cries of P. G. Wodehouse distress were heard. An AB spotted me from an upstairs window and came to help. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was Roger Stott, the motive power for my sexual assault on Julian. He had shown great despatch and discretion then, and surely he would be equal to any demand I made on him now.
Roger called out of the window and said he’d come and help. He brought a pushing chair with him, to transfer me. When I explained that I was meeting Luke out by the bus he raised his eyebrows, those George Harrison brows, but he didn’t pass comment. Rather pathetically I said, ‘It’s all rather hush-hush.’ Then he said something that was rather alarming, bearing in mind I had been impersonating Miss Willis as a prodigious insatiable harlot less than twenty-four hours previously: ‘He’s rather one of Marion’s pets, isn’t he?’ Well yes, but I clung to the thought that if all he wanted to do was denounce me there were better ways of going about it than making a rendezvous by the school bus.
The school’s ABs paid quite a price for their over-class status. They might seem effortlessly superior to us, but they were being exploited all the same in a way that wasn’t necessarily to be envied. They were a mild form of slave labour, expected to help with the running of the establishment in a way that would have been unthinkable, surely, in a mainstream school. Even so, there was an obvious difference between an AB like Roger, who would positively offer to help, and the ones who undertook their tasks grudgingly and never did favours.
Roger even offered to join me later if I wanted help getting back to the Castle, which was sweet although it may also have shown some curiosity about my meeting. Would half an hour be long enough? I had no idea, but I thought I’d better say yes. I was getting wildly excited and even a little panicky. Would Luke even come? Perhaps I’d be left alone with the pounding of my suspect heart.
In fact he arrived when I’d hardly been waiting a minute. Luke Squires was as much a good-looking boy as Roger Stott, but in a different style. He was sleek with secrets. He had fair hair, which was always tousled, but tousled just so. And if Roger was the sort of incredulously handsome teenager who can’t resist looking at himself in any reflective surface, even the back of a spoon, Luke had the ability to glide past a mirror on his enchanted wheelchair without raising his eyes to it, and still to take in all the relevant information.
Lesbian Sandwich
As he approached I noticed again how smoothly he managed that wheelchair, but this time I also noticed what made his mastery of it possible. Luke was the only boy in the school to have the large wheels at the front of his wheelchair, and not the back. Most boys had to do some delicate finessing when it came to even a little bump, but Luke just lazily glided over, the little back wheel following obediently in the slipstream of his smooth momentum. Luke didn’t wheel along, he flowed. I’d been feeling pretty good about my electric wheelchair, even if it was the most basic model, but now Luke’s grace made me feel like a bumbler all over again. Not that his chair would have done me any good, without the strong, supple, only marginally spastic arms that powered it. Of course it was his air of sexual knowledgeability that gave his simplest actions a tantric aura.
I wanted so very badly to learn from him. At this stage in life I wanted instruction in cabbala, with a bit of the Apocrypha mixed in, and I suppose that was near enough what I got.