It was a typical little family scene at this tearoom terrace on the south coast of England. A young woman, still young enough to be called a girl, and with the acne on her right cheek to prove it, was trying to get her very young daughter to eat a piece of fruit cake. The toddler had a glass of Coke to wash it down and the mother had the same. They were a couple you could find in any town in the UK.
The mother was of medium height and neither overweight nor thin, but slightly out of shape, like a big cushion that needed a good shake to redistribute the stuffing. Her mousy hair was cut into an inverted bob, which meant that the back curved upwards, not down, exposing her pale, lightly haired, and oddly pristine neck. She was wearing a tight black top with “Sparkle” spelled out in sequins, and her belly bulged over the waistband of her cheap jeans. She spoke in an ugly mishmash of accents that had as its base a generic London/south of England whine but with the stretched vowels of West Indian immigrants. It was as if she and her millions of peers were trying to belong to this new tribe which had picked up the basics of the English language but overlaid it with something less stiff and formal, something “cool”.
The role models for this new dialect were the English professional footballers who managed to cling to a place in top teams in the face of an avalanche of foreigners. They had learned in the playground that the combination of t and h was difficult and unnecessary, so an expression like “I fink va guy’s a top top player” came through the TV into the nation’s homes and va kids copied it. “Top top” I should explain, means very good, and the er on the end was elongated to aaah.
It’s the way language develops and has done since the beginning of verbal communication. This ordinary, perfectly decent young woman was living the final stages of her youth as a single mother (sorry, muvvaah) in the only way she knew how. She had proved she was fertile, which may or may not be the reason so many girls waste their teenage freedom by becoming pregnant. Or did they do it because sex was free entertainment and to insist that the tattooed partner who humped them in sad bedrooms and parked cars use a condom would just spoil everything? Some say it’s because the council gives them a flat if they have a child to look after, but while that might look a reasonable theory in the UK, it doesn’t hold true in Africa, the Caribbean, and countless countries where no such benefits apply.
This is all speculation, I admit. I am never going to know one of these girls well enough to get the real story. The women I know are their own mothers, the middle-aged women who probably got married to the previous generation’s hopeless boy in the sad bedroom or the parked car when she got pregnant and thereafter lived a conventional married life. And now they are grandmothers, their cycle rushed through, so the marriage ended in predictable divorce and they are now back in the market, trying their luck with other women’s cast-offs. They think they are past their best because they couldn’t get away with wearing their daughter’s black sparkly top and they don’t understand the music the kids listen to these days. It’s not songs with a pattern of verses and choruses, but endless tides of rhythm that seem to lead nowhere.
The young woman’s mother was across the table from her daughter and granddaughter. She was wearing slightly loose jeans which weren’t meant to be like that, but just didn’t hug her in the right places. On top she had what used to be called a blouse – a woman’s shirt – open one button more than was necessary for comfort, because if she had one saving grace it was her chest, that lifelong advantage that had seen her through the bad times with a bit of pride. And now that she was adrift with the rest of the post-divorce flotsam, her breasts at least boosted her as being worth looking at. Men couldn’t help it and she would have felt sorry for her less voluptuous sisters if they hadn’t been rivals.
So, this table of three women was presided over with a quiet, downmarket dignity by a grandma who doubted she was attractive but was open to persuasion. Yes, she thought to herself at times, she was still sexy. She had learned more about having a good time in bed than most of these bimbos would ever do – even her beloved daughter, who was so wrapped up with raising the next generation on next-to-no money that she couldn’t do anything properly.
The little girl picked up her cake and threw it with the aimless mischief that stirs up such youngsters from time to time. It hit my hot chocolate with surprising force and launched it from the glass mug over the table and dripping onto my thighs. The mother scolded the girl but didn’t have the confidence to apologise to me, or even to look at me. But grandma was on her feet immediately, grabbing tissues from neighbouring tables and sweeping back the milky brown tide from the cliff below which lay my hapless loins in their sandy chinos. Apologising profusely, she dabbed at my trousers and then apologized again for her presumptuousness. I scraped my chair backwards to escape, but that threw her off balance and she stumbled, her hand landing on my leg to steady herself. Even as this happened to her, she remembered to use her secret weapon, and my eyes feasted upon her fine breasts in their black bra.
As she pushed herself back onto her feet, the woman’s hand slipped further into the warm valley between my legs and when she had regained her equilibrium, she withdrew her fingers with a flourish.
The mother and the little girl beat a hasty retreat, apparently to meet some friends, but grandma stayed, adamant that she would buy me another cup of chocolate. Her name was Mandy.
“Oh,” I said appreciatively.
“What?”
“Not really a grandma’s name,” I explained.
“Well, I’m… that’s not all I am,” Mandy protested.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s a nice name. And I know you haven’t always been… Shit, my name’s Steve.” I offered my hand and she shook it gently, a bit taken aback. She had warm, soft hands. Her eyes flickered across mine and down to my knees.
“Those are gonna stain,” she said, nodding at the damp fabric sticking to my skin.
“They’ll be fine,” I said.
“No,” she insisted in motherly mode. “You need to wash them before they dry.”
Despite my protestations, ten minutes later I found myself in her cramped two-bedroom flat, sitting in the kitchen wearing a pair of women’s blue tracksuit bottoms that ran up my crack and squeezed my balls however I sat. The washing machine rumbled in the background as I stood up and tried to unencumber my nether regions without drawing attention to them.
“Half an hour,” Mandy said encouragingly, aware of what I was doing. “I’ll give them a quick tumble and then iron them.”
We talked about this and that, my job as an “IT consultant” (I fixed computers and printers and phones that people dropped down the toilet) and hers as a cook in a care home.
“Your granddaughter’s a handful,” I said.
“Drives Kayleigh up the wall,” she replied. “I wouldn’t want to be young these days. The seventies was easier, not so complicated. T Rex, David Bowie. And you know what, I bet they was all shagging every girl they could get their hands on and nobody cared. Not like today, with Harvey Whatsisname and all the rest. But it’s just men shagging girls what want to be shagged. It’s always happened. They used to joke about “the casting couch”. Me and my mates wouldn’t have objected if David Essex had tried it on. Not very PC I know, but, you know, it’s gone too far the other way. Now it’s not funny. Poor blokes daren’t do nothing now. But the chase was all part of the fun, weren’t it? Now you’re all scared stiff.” She looked at me, with less of a piercing glare than a kindly gaze. “Look at you,” she said. “Ever since I invited you back to my place you’ve been wondering if you was going to get off with me. But maybe it’s a trap, you’re thinking. Maybe I’ll scream the place down if you try anything. I’m right, ain’t I?”
“It’s always been a bit like that,” I told her. “But nowadays everybody’s scared of being called a predator or something. It’s refreshing to hear somebody like you talking about it in a reasonable way.”
“Somebody like me?” she interrupted.
“You’re a normal person,” I said, scrambling to get the tone right. “There are women who think like you but because they’re famous their PR people shut them up. Catherine Deneuve, the French actress,” I said hesitantly. “She said what you’re saying but the next day she retracted it because she’d have got murdered on social media. She enjoyed the chase and the fact that somebody has to start things and it’s normally the man. But the world is full of people who make themselves out to be puritans now, and extremists who can’t see shades of colour, just black and white. You’re either an angel or you’re a devil.”
Mandy sat back in her kitchen chair. She had a strong body, not toned but naturally muscular. With her long black hair and dark eyes, she had something of the gypsy about her, and she looked like the kind of woman who could take care of herself. Her breasts gazed defiantly at me and her legs were slightly parted, so her crotch seemed to be looking at me too, but subtly, unconcernedly. She was a woman, I was a man, and men and women looked at each other before engaging in hand-to-hand lovemaking, just as people did with hand-to-hand combat. Same sort of interaction, but with a different purpose. I got the definite impression that Mandy wanted me to start something.
I decided to turn the tables on her. I leaned back in my chair in the same way she had done, and in doing so my legs parted naturally. With the ill-fitting jogging pants, this revealed the contours of my cock and balls. I looked away, out of the window, to allow her to have a good look without feeling I knew she was doing it. I gathered that she did that. I stood up again. Now that she had checked out my bulges, she had one foot in the door of our joint venture. I reached down and adjusted myself.
“Sorry,” I said. “They’re not really my shape.”
“I know the feeling,” she replied. “I lost a bit of weight recently and these jeans should be more comfortable, but they’re not, because they’ve been stretched to a shape that ain’t me anymore.” To illustrate her point, she pulled at the waistband, where there was plenty of room, and then grabbed at the top of her thighs, where she could barely pinch enough fabric to move it. “You don’t lose it all over at the same time,” she explained. “Some girls, the first thing that goes is their boobs. Still got a fat bum but no tits. Fortunately, that don’t happen with me.”
“No, you’re in great shape,” I said.
“You’re a smooth talker, Stevie,” she responded. “Got a nice voice. Where’d you get that from? Education, I mean.”
I told her about my upbringing, my middle-class family and the good school I went to on a scholarship, not because my parents paid. And a year at university before I dropped out because I felt I could do without it.
“Everybody’s got a degree these days,” I said in conclusion. “It doesn’t mean much anymore.”
“Not where I come from, they haven’t,” she said, quite seriously. “So anyway, why ain’t you rich and famous?”
“Lack of ambition,” I said. “Not that kind of family. Some parents, they’ve got big plans for their kids. They want them to be a doctor or a lawyer, just because that’s what makes a lot of money. But I grew up with the idea that you should do what you’re good at, what your heart’s in. I found I was good with technology, so that’s what I do.”
“You not married?” she asked, pursuing the essence, what made me like I was. I explained about a long relationship that turned into an engagement, then fell apart because we realized it just wasn’t meant to be. She told me about Billy, her ex-husband, a taxi driver, and how they had been crazy about each other and got married on the strength of that craziness. And then, after Kayleigh had been born and the magic had been ground down by reality, what had been a happy marital bed had turned into a battlefield.
“Don’t marry just because the sex is great,” she advised me solemnly. “It just papers over the cracks.”
All this time we had been sitting in the kitchen, our genitals aimed at one another, parting and closing our legs without realizing it, as the mood took us. Now Mandy snapped back into the present.
“So tell, me, Stevie, while we’ve been sitting here putting the world to rights, what have you been thinking about?”
“I think you know what I’ve been thinking about,” I said a bit bashfully.
“Sex,” she said. I know. But what exactly? What would you really, really like to do with me? Go on, you won’t shock me.”
“I want to lick your arse,” I said, defenceless and with no backup plan. She shifted very slightly in her seat.
“Just that?” she asked.
“No, lots of other things first,” I said with increasing confidence, having not been shot down in flames. I want to kiss you all over, all the places people don’t normally go.” She raised her eyebrows for more details.
“Your armpits,” I said. “Your ankles. The insides of your elbows. Behind your knees.”
“You like to worship a woman,” she said sagely. “I’ve read about that. Never met anyone though.” She looked at me steadily before continuing. We’d better stand up and get started.” She stood, leaning back against the now-whirring washing machine, and I stood in front of her and we kissed. Her body had an eloquence that her mind strove for but couldn’t quite manage. Her tongue was far more creative and expressive in my mouth than performing its vocal duties from her own. She put her arms around my neck and I put my right hand inside her shirt and felt her breasts.
There was a flurry of activity and voices outside on the landing and the door opened, straight into the room where we were. Small footsteps scampered in and a little voice said, “Hey grandma.”
“Kylie!” her mother rebuked. “Grandma’s busy.” The two rushed into the front room, where Kayleigh grabbed something off the table and the two rushed out, Kayleigh apologizing as she went and Kylie twittering her incomprehension. Mandy had not batted an eyelid. As the door closed, I still had my hand in her bra, although the nipple I had been fondling had lost its firmness.
“Just as well we didn’t go straight to your worship routine,” Mandy said with a short laugh. “Kylie’d be asking me what that man was looking for in my bottom.”
I was both relieved and happy that she had approved my unusual proposition.
“Come on,” she said, pulling me towards her bedroom, “before the dynamic fucking duo think of something else they’ve forgotten.”
The room was warm and smelled of the morning’s toiletries. It hadn’t been tidied up because she hadn’t been expecting a visitor, so it felt oddly sexy because it was as it would be normally. A wardrobe door was open and a t-shirt clung precariously to the back of a chair. A flimsy, lopsided IKEA laundry basket loitered in a corner, laden with clothes and underwear that had been next to this remarkable woman’s skin. I fought an impulse to find yesterday’s knickers and smell them.
Mandy was pulling my borrowed jogging bottoms down and enjoying the discovery of my undulating underpants.
“That more comfortable?” she asked brightly.
“Almost,” I replied, and she pulled my Pierre Cardins down and off. She kissed my half-erect cock and licked my balls. Then she stood up and dispensed with her shirt and jeans, leaving just a small pair of designer panties. They were bright yellow with red stitching around the edges, like a household duster. I held her close and slipped my hand into them. You never know if you’re going to find hair in there, but I hoped I would, and thought she was that kind of unreconstructed woman. I was right. Mandy had a full patch of 1970s pubic hair, such as David Essex would have been picking out of his mouth if she had had her way.
“Oooh God, you’re a proper woman,” I breathed.
“You like that, do you?” she said with a seriousness that lust had given the edge over humour. “Okay, now here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do… exactly what you want to do, but I have a special offer if you’d like to hear it.” I patted her bottom to make her continue.
“Now that I know a bit about you,” she said, “I think you might enjoy a golden shower. Yes?” She looked into my eyes, a sparkle in hers. I wanted to smile nonchalantly, but the imminence of such a treat made it impossible.
“Which way?” I said, my voice dry and cracking.
“I could pee on you,” she offered politely. “Unless you want to…”
“No, that would be great,” I interrupted.
“Okay,” she said happily, as if we had concluded a potentially tricky negotiation. She sank to the bed and pulled me on top of her. We kissed, and there was a warm, all-encompassing feeling of something approaching love as she slid down my body, rolled me onto my back and took my cock in her mouth.
“You have a very nice cock,” she said. “Anyone ever told you that?”
I shook my head.
“No, people don’t,” she apologetically. “Women are afraid to sound too knowledgeable. That’s a good word, ain’t it? Not bad for an old boiler.”
“You,” I said, stroking her side, “Are not an old boiler. You’re a…” I stopped, unable to find the right words.
“What?” she urged.
“I was going to say you’re a wonderful woman,” I said.
“That’s all right with me,” she said. “I’ll take that. No one’s ever called me wonderful before.” She brought herself up to lie next to me and lay on her back, expectantly. I kissed her tenderly and then made my way down her cheek to her neck and licked her there. She sighed contentedly. I lifted her left arm and placed it carefully with the hand above her head. This exposed her armpit, which I kissed and began to lick. It was lightly fragranced with a cheap, supermarket deodorant. I felt her tense and then relax as she began to enjoy what, for her, was clearly a novel experience.
“That’s nice,” she said happily, enjoying the reality of the menu I had promised her and perhaps wondering what the next course was. I pulled her arm down from its lofty position and licked the inside of her elbow. “That is too,” she added.
I slid down between her legs and made myself comfortable in the warm, heady environment of Woman Central. I kissed her pussy lips and licked her crotch before getting my tongue in her slit.
“Oooh!” she exclaimed. “Help yourself to anything you want, won’t you? Lovely man.”
“You’re beautiful,” I said. “I’ve read that a lot of women think they’re ugly down here. All I can say is you are beautiful.”
“Nah, it’s like some weird kind of sea creature,” she said.
“it’s weird,” I agreed, “But fantastic. And yours is beautiful.”
“If you was designing a minge,” she began, and I could feel her drifting off in her imagination while I kissed and nibbled the thing she was thinking about, “Wouldn’t you make it a smooth, curvy kind of thing, like a tunnel you drive into, so the guy gets his dick into the slip road and he’s straight in there?”
“You mean why do you have flaps?” I suggested.
“Well, yeah, I suppose I do.”
“Some practical reason, I expect,” I said. “Keeping stuff out unless it’s a dick-shaped object that you actually want in there. It hasn’t got a zip, has it? Or buttons.”
“Or Velcro,” she said, and we both laughed.
“Yes, so it sort of seals itself,” I said. “I’m not really an expert in human design.”
“I’ll tell you what you are an expert in,” Mandy said, breathing in deeply. “Licking my fucking hole. Maybe we should just shut up and have sex. I’m gonna cum.”
Suddenly her thighs spread and she lifted herself, pressing her crotch into my face and rubbing it up and down, wailing as if she was on a roller coaster. When the earthquake had subsided, she gripped my head with her thighs and stroked my hair with both hands.
“Was you serious about licking my arse?” she asked hopefully. “Cos now would be a good time.”
“Get on your hands and knees,” I said brusquely, and she was in position in a split second. She had a deep crack, with plenty of padding in her buttocks. That meant I had to pull them apart.
“Granny, what’s that man looking for?” she laughed, then fell silent as she experienced something new and, I could tell, divine. After half a minute she couldn’t stop herself from talking again. “What are you looking for, Stevie?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve found,” I replied.
“Oh my God. What?” she asked.
“I’ve found the most wonderful place on the planet,” I said, and she reached behind to give me a playful slap.
“Silly boy,” she admonished. “You’re excited, aren’t you? I can feel your heart beating from here.”
“I am excited,” I admitted. “Of course I’m excited. This is the thing I love most and it’s extra thrilling because… it’s you.”
“Oh be quiet,” she said and slapped me again. “Listen. If I ask you to marry me in a minute, just ignore me, okay? You think I’m a lunatic, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said, and we both enjoyed the play on words.
“Ssshh!” she said. “I’m gonna cum again.” Before the words had died in the air, she gave a quiet yelp, then tried to silence herself by humming. Then another yelp, and a bit of babbling about what a lovely guy I was. And finally a third yelp.
“Three little orgasms one after the other,” she said. “You’re very good at that. Come up here and kiss me.”
We kissed within an enormous cloud of love and affection, then lay entwined and silent for several minutes. It was late afternoon and darkness was about to fall. We fell asleep and drifted deliriously in a dream of our own making.
When we awoke it was dark outside and I got up and started dressing.
“You got somewhere to go?” she asked drowsily.
“Err, no,” I said. “Thought I should get out of the way.”
“Don’t be silly, Stevie,” she said, patting the bed for me to sit down. “Besides, you ain’t cum yet and I want that in my mouth. You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying here with me.”
