These days I see online a great deal of discussion among feminists about pornography; some of them say it’s degrading and exploitative, others claim it’s liberating. I don’t really have a fixed opinion on the subject, but I can say that there’s nothing stopping it from being degrading and exploitative under certain circumstances while being liberating in others. It’s not like life is Manichaean black and white in any of its other aspects, so why should it be like that where porno is concerned? That’s not logical, is it?
Personally, I like some porno. That is to say I like porno that panders to my fantasies. I don’t like porno that involves activities I wouldn’t want to do or have done to me. I don’t wear high heeled shoes and net stockings when I have sex and I don’t get off on men ejaculating on my face and breasts, so I don’t watch porno with those things. I don’t do gang bangs so I don’t watch porno of that type. And so on.
I’ve done a few unofficial sex videos with a few boyfriends and girlfriends. None of them are online. I have the only copies that exist, and sometimes I watch them, usually when I haven’t been laid in a while. Watching my own vagina being penetrated by a stiff penis or licked by a delicate feminine tongue brings me back to memories of the first time I saw that kind of thing happen. It wasn’t in a video, though. I had an almost, you could say, ringside view.
This happened a couple of years before I went to college and met Mila, so I would have been sixteen years old. In school I hadn’t been particularly popular, which isn’t surprising, what with my mother and all. Refer back to Part One of my story if you need reminding about my mother and all her hang-ups. Anyway, I had hardly even had a friendship of any kind when there was a new girl who turned up in class one day.
I’ll call her Dina, which of course isn’t her real name or anything close to it. She is, after all these years, still a friend. She is also often in the news these days and I don’t want her being embarrassed by anything I say that might identify her. She was, and is, short and dark, with black hair just touching her collar, merry dark brown eyes, and lips that always seemed on the verge of breaking into a smile. Rather to my surprise, she was also willing to be friendly to me. I thought it was because, as the newcomer, she was out of the cliques and cabals of the rest of the class, and decided to make friends with the only other loner around. Later I found that this was only partially true: Dina had, and still has, a way of seeking out the lonely and unhappy and gifting them with her friendship. She wasn’t from our town; her family had a farm out in the wide open spaces and she was staying with a relative not far from the school. She never talked much about the relative except that it was a sister or cousin of her mother’s. I only met the lady a couple of times, though I visited Dina at home on many occasions. She seemed to be easy going and friendly, and let Dina have a lot of freedom.
Oh, and Dina was also full of mischief.
I found this out one day when she came up to me during break. I always brought my lunch from home because my mother didn’t believe in such concepts as pocket money. The school I went to had a couple of large playgrounds, and between them there was a thickly wooded slope. At one point on that slope there were two huge rocks with another above, sticking partly out of the ground, the three forming a kind of tiny cave, quite weatherproof unless it was extremely windy. I normally spent my lunch hour there, eating and then reading a novel from the school library. Nobody had ever bothered me there, so it was a good place to read and relax.
It was a very warm day, a day when everything had gone wrong. In the first place my periods had arrived at least three days early and I had no sanitary towel with me (tampon? Perish the thought; my mother would have had a heart attack at the thought of her daughter putting anything inside her vagina). Luckily I had on a black skirt, so no bloodstains were showing, though I had the intensely uncomfortable sensation of half-congealed blood clots crawling down my vagina and turning my knickers into a sodden mess. I had wadded up my handkerchief and stuck it into the crotch of the knickers, but while that reduced the leakage it made it even more uncomfortable.
Then we’d had an especially sadistic teacher taking the morning classes. His name, shall we say, was Kenneth D’Costa. Some people absolutely do not deserve to be teachers, in fact should not be permitted to be in the same room as anyone of school age. I’m not talking about paedophiles. I’m talking about sociopaths who get a thrill out of tormenting vulnerable children and teenagers, making life miserable for them, and dealing out emotional torment drop by drop, all day, every day. Everyone knows such people, and probably most people have known at least one teacher like that. But even among them D’Costa was the worst.
Many are the days he’s reduced me to the point of tears, mocking everything I did and even the way I dressed and talked. I was not the only one either; D’Costa would focus on one victim for a few weeks until the thrill of tormenting him or her wore off, and then move on to a new target for a while, and then yet another, before eventually returning to the first one. He had a keen nose, though; he would never, ever, target anyone whose parents were rich and influential. Of course, these days he would have been reported many times and compelled to change his behaviour or be dismissed from his job, but I am talking about the mid-1990s. Back then, at least in the kind of school I attended, emotional vampires like him could do as they pretty much liked.
After so many years all of D’Costa’s abuse has blurred in my memory into one undistinguishable whole, so I don’t remember exactly what he said or did that particular day. I do remember that what with my unexpected menstruating, every word that dropped from his rat-trap of a mouth cut quite twice as deep as usual, so as soon as the lunch break started I fled to the cave, desperate to get there before I began to cry.
Only when I got there I found someone already there, looking into the little space between the rocks. It was Dina.
“This is where you run off to every lunchtime, isn’t it?” she said over her shoulder. “Don’t look so dismayed. I’m not going to take it away from you.”
I approached cautiously, as though closing to a large dog of uncertain temper. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”
“I just thought you might want some company.” She shrugged. “After this morning, if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t want to be alone. But if you want me to go away, I will.”
“No, don’t go,” I said. At first I said it because I didn’t want to hurt her, even though I thought I didn’t want her there. Then, even as the words left my mouth, I realised that I very much did not want her to go. I really did not want to be alone. “I’d like you to stay. Really.”
“Well, then, come and sit down.” Suiting herself to her words, she sat at the entrance of the cave, leaving enough space for me to squeeze in beside her. “Is he always like that? D’Costa, I mean.”
“Yes. Wait, and sooner or later he’ll start on you, too.”
“Well, something has to be done about him then, doesn’t it? He needs to be taught a lesson.”
“Right, that’s what everyone thinks, except the few he never picks on. But who’s going to do anything?” I noticed that she had no lunch packet. She’d hurried to the cave right away, without waiting to get something for herself. “Are you hungry? You can have my food. I really don’t want a bite.”
“Yes, thanks.” Without the slightest self-consciousness, she ate my egg and salami sandwiches. How do I know, even after all these years, that it was egg and salami? I know because that was the invariant lunch I made for myself, toasted bread with egg and salami. To this day I still make it at least two or three times a week. “It’s hot, isn’t it? Awful.” Taking off her shoes and socks, she wriggled her toes in the grass with a pleased sigh. “Why don’t you take yours off? It’s so much more comfortable.”
Stolidly, I unlaced my shoes and pulled them off, and then my stockings. It was only when they were off that I realised to my horror that the leakage through my panties and handkerchief had spotted and streaked the fabric. Dina’s eyes went to them too.
“You’re on the rag? An accident?”
Miserably, I admitted what had happened. To my surprise Dina laughed. “And you were resolved to suffer through the rest of the day? Stay right here. I’ve got spare sanitary towels in my bag, I’m never without them. I’ll be right back.” Springing to her bare feet, she rushed off like the wind and in only a few minutes returned, with not just the towel but a clean pair of knickers. “You can return those later,” she said. “I’ll just stand guard and make sure nobody comes while you change. No, don’t thank me. You’d do the same in my position.”
I was far from sure that I would have done the same, but when I finished changing in the furthest interior of the cave and crawled out, I saw Dina standing there with an intensely thoughtful expression on her face. “What did you do with the bloody knickers and hankie?” she demanded.
I had put them in the brown paper packet in which I had brought the lunch that she’s eaten, for disposal later. “Wait,” she said. “Don’t throw them away. Remember how D’Costa needs to be taught a lesson?”
“Yes?”
“You know that car he drives?”
I did. It was a luminous yellow vehicle, very long and low and wide. Probably it would count as a vintage car these days. D’Costa was intensely proud of it. “What are you planning?”
She told me, breaking off to giggle. By the time she was done I was grinning too. “When should we do it?”
“Can’t right now, the lunch break is still on. Can’t after school, the car parking will be full of people and D’Costa might turn up at any moment. The best time will be just as the lunch break ends…”
“…everyone will be hurrying to class and nobody will notice us,” I finished for her. “We’ll be a bit late for class though.”
“It’s only Geography. It’s not as though old Mrs ___________ will say anything.”
She was perfectly right. Old Mrs ____________, the Geography teacher, cared only about finishing the lesson with as little fuss as possible. Still, we needed to draw as little attention to ourselves, so, pausing only to put on our shoes and socks, we made our way along the wooded slope to a point where it ended at a low stone wall. The car parking was just on the other side of that wall.
“We’re in luck,” Dina said, peering over the top. “He’s parked his car right next to the wall. Nobody’s going to see us. Give me a leg up. I’m too short to reach.”
The bell that signalled the end of the lunch break was going off as I boosted her to the top of the wall and then scrambled up myself. There was nobody in the car parking, trees heavy with leaves screened us from the view of the school windows, and the only people visible were some hurrying figures in the distance running to get back to class. Crouching behind the car, Dina took the paper packet with my wadded up handkerchief and knickers and pushed them into the car’s tailpipe. Crouching beside her, I took a twig lying on the ground and prodded and poked it in as far as it would go.
“There,” Dina said with a giggle. “By the time he comes to drive off, the blood will have clotted and that will be like a solid plug, and halfway up the pipe to boot. An interesting time he’ll have getting his car to run, I’ll bet.”
We never did find out what happened when D’Costa tried to start his car. Of course we could have hidden somewhere and watched, but that would have been too much like tempting fate. What we did notice was that his car was missing from the car parking for the next week or so, and he was a little less likely to get on anyone’s back quite as much after that.
That is the kind of person Dina was.
So, at that point Dina and I had become very good friends, but I was still taken by surprise when, just before the start of the summer holiday, she came to me with an offer.
“I’ll be going to my family’s farm,” she said. “Why don’t you come along with me?”
“You really want me to?”
“Of course I do, Juliana. You should know by now that I don’t say things out of pity and all that rot. Anyway, my sister says you can come along.”
“Your sister?” I knew Dina had a sister, who was about three years older, and who lived on the farm. I didn’t know that she had any say in who came visiting, though. “Don’t your parents have anything to say about it?”
Dina laughed with delight. “My parents are going to ____________ (a certain country on the other side of the planet) for a couple of weeks. They basically want me there to keep an eye on my sister, and my sister to keep an eye on me. And my sister thinks if I’m with a friend I won’t be bothering her too much.”
I didn’t ask what kind of “bothering” her sister might think she would do. “I’ll have to ask my mum.”
“I’ll come along.” And she did…wearing clothes that bordered on being Victorian, and with a manner that was so obsequiously polite, with downcast eyes and speaking in a low murmur, that anyone less self-absorbed than my mother would have smelt an entire colony of decomposing rats at once. My mother, though, ate it all up…like the carcasses of decomposing rats….and agreed without any demur.
“At least it’ll keep you out of my hair for a few days,” was all that she said. “And farm people are conservative. They won’t let you get any ideas in your head.”
Later, as soon as we were outside and out of sight of my mother, Dina began laughing so hard she literally leaned against a lamp post, and then slid down it until she was sitting on the pavement. “Conservative,” she gasped and spluttered. “Oh my.”
“What on earth are you on about?” I asked. “It isn’t as funny as all that.”
“Isn’t it?” she responded. “You’ll see, won’t you?”
The day of the trip, we went together to the railway station quite early in the morning. The first train we took was to another city an hour to the north, where we changed to another train that took us three hours to the west, to a smaller station where we changed to yet another train, this one that stopped everywhere and trundled along so slowly that cars on the highway zoomed past.
“Believe it or not, this is called an express,” Dina said. There was hardly anyone on the train, because at every tiny stop people got off and nobody got on. “I always say that it’s because they exclude anyone in a pressing hurry.”
I’m mildly ashamed to admit that I laughed.
The shadows were getting long when the train finally decided to wander into Dina’s station, which seemed even smaller than the rest. We were the only people to get off. We didn’t have much luggage; Dina had advised me to take as few things as necessary, because we wouldn’t be very formal on the farm. Later I would find out what she meant by that.
“Is the farm nearby?” I asked, as the train began to groan and whine its way on again and we began making our way to the exit along the deserted platform.
“What? No, it’s an hour’s drive away. Don’t worry, my sister said she’ll be picking us up.”
Her sister was waiting outside the exit. She was a large, fresh faced young woman, as fair as Dina was dark, as plump as Dina was thin. It was hard to imagine the two were actually of the same blood. Only much later, when I met their parents, did I realise that Dina took after their father and her sister, Betty, after their mother. She was dressed in a t-shirt that did nothing to conceal her large bosom, and which ended a couple of centimetres over the waist of a pair of blue shorts whose slightly frayed bottoms were stretched over her ample thighs. I noticed with surprise that her feet were bare. Rings twinkled on several of her toes.
“Hi there,” she said to me. “So you’re Dina’s best friend ever. She’s been going on and on and on about you, of what a wonderful person you are. An undiscovered diamond, I think she said.”
I blushed. “I’m sure she exaggerated.”
“Oh no, I didn’t,” Dina said. “I told her exactly what you’re like.” She looked her sister up and down. “I see you changed as soon as Mum and Dad were out of the house.”
“Of course I did,” Betty replied. “The moment they were far enough that they wouldn’t come back.” She saw me glancing at her feet. “Except for those. I never wear shoes except in the depths of winter.” She laughed. “Barefoot Betty, my mother calls me. Bee Bee. Come on, let’s get to the car.”
It was the first time in years that I’d been in the country, so I paid little attention to the two sisters talking as we drove to the farm. Betty was behind the wheel while Dina and I shared the back seat at first, but Dina kept leaning over the seat to talk to her sister and Betty kept looking back over her shoulder to reply, so finally I suggested that Dina move up front before we had an accident. After that there was less wild swerving over the road.
We arrived at the farm just about dusk, and I have not much memory of the first evening. It wasn’t a farm with livestock – except for a couple of huge and friendly dogs who rushed out to greet us and slobbered all over Dina, and finally condescended to sniff and wag at me – so there wasn’t any feeding to be done. Betty conjured up a supper of which I only remember that it was as substantial as it was tasty, then we dropped, exhausted, into bed, and I was asleep as though someone had clicked a switch and turned off my light.
The next morning, I woke late, and stumbled off looking for the bathroom. Instead I managed to wander into the kitchen. Betty, robed and with some kind of cloth wrapped around her head, was already there, and greeted me with a grin. “Hey there, sleepyhead. Your friend is still snoring her head off. Care for some tea?”
I despise tea, but didn’t want to say so, so I had to accept a mug. After that I was directed to the bathroom, and when I had finished and made my way back to the kitchen, Dina was there too, looking disgustingly awake and fresh.
“So what are you planning to do today?” Betty asked, when we had obeyed orders to swallow the omelettes and toast and sausages she had made. “Going to show Juliana around the farm?”
“We’ll do whatever you aren’t doing,” Dina replied. “As you know perfectly well, I’m sure.”
“Well, not today,” Betty said, laughing. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
I hadn’t the faintest idea what that was about, and asked Dina when we were out of the kitchen. “She means her boyfriend might be coming round tomorrow,” she said, grinning. “And she won’t want us hanging around while she fucks him, that’s all. Let’s get changed and I’ll show you around the farm, just like she said.”