I am sexually involved with a member of my family.
Conditions and qualifications apply, but I wanted to get that statement out there. Get the worst over with.
I know there is a risk to that admission as a leading statement. You may now have already formed the basest opinion of me from that first sentence, even if you do not know its context. Can I ask you to wait for that?
At least let me introduce my defence first.
Which is essentially that this family member – and there’s still a small chance she may not even be related – is distant family. I can say that with confidence because everybody in my family is distant. The measure I use: my mam died two years ago, and I was the only relative who turned up for her funeral. I never knew who my dad was. He scarpered thirty-six years ago, the minute he learned he’d got mam pregnant with twins. Two kids, to him, were two kids too many. Mam, God rest her, was meant for many things, but motherhood wasn’t one of them. Orla and I – the twins who triggered dad’s flight – squabbled like geese from the moment we could talk. To borrow another expression from my line of work: we were a family riven by differences.
-x-
I tell you all this for perspective; background if you will. Enough, anyway, to allow me to take you forward to a Tuesday evening, several months ago, in Paradise Fields, west London. It’s a peaceful, semi-rural park; rarely busy; the occasional jogger, plenty of couples. The sun was setting on the evening in question, salmon and yellow in the west. It was unseasonably mild.
I often wander there because it’s large enough to get lost in. That evening, I was making my soundless way around the perimeter of a copse, when I looked ahead and slowed. There, in a clearing a few yards in front of me, a couple sat on a bench by a footpath.
I assess these scenes quickly and glue them into memory for later retrieval. On the left as I looked: a young woman, tallish, slim, flame-haired to her shoulders, wearing a black wool or cotton top and pale-legged below denim shorts; the guy: darker and bearded. Jeans.
I was confident with the sun setting the way it was they wouldn’t see me where I stood. In any case, they were engrossed in each other. Their mouths were mashing together in a promising way. I checked my escape routes, pulled my black beanie lower over my forehead, unzipped my trousers, and hoped.
The signs were favourable. The woman’s limbs were disordered. Her legs twisted at right angles to each other below the knee and her arms were surrendering behind her head. Her body had formed itself into an invitation to be touched. After a few moments of heavy kissing, the man realised this. He broke away, glanced up and down the path and, giving her a smirk, pushed his hand underneath her top. I could see the outline of his hand as it moved over her breast.
That was my cue to pull my cock out into the open. This would be worth the risk.
At the man’s touch, the woman twisted back over the curve of the bench in a feline stretch that drew the hem of her top up to expose the dot of her belly button. Back she came to pull his mouth to hers again.
Then an interruption: a determined jogger, headphones on, ran past, blind to the theatre on display. The woman brought down an arm; to cover herself up, I thought. But instead she grasped the hem of her top and raised it high enough to expose the pert, milk-white breast that the man was groping. Between his fingers her nipple peeked out every so often, pink as a strawberry milkshake. The man leaned over and covered it with his mouth and the woman cradled his head.
I began to stroke. This was the best I’d seen at Paradise Fields in some time; better than the middle-aged dogging couples who implore you to join in, more rewarding than the puffer-jacketed teenagers who rarely leave their cars, incomparable to the flashers. This was explicit, raw sexuality. And she was my type.
It got better. The woman’s hand shifted over and fiddled at the man’s crotch. Did the man hesitate? Possibly, but she giggled and whispered something. He looked around again, and then, slowly, she was allowed to draw his cock into the open, swollen and heavy, as stiff as my own cock that lay hot in my hand.
The man sat back to admire himself, and to watch her fingertips climb his erection and dance on the head and shuffle back down, pulling skin with them. He fought his own nervousness. He glanced in all directions, but his eyes were always drawn back to watch her, to see her move her wrist faster until it was a blur. Then words were shared between them and, in what seemed like one motion, she dipped her head to his waist, tucked her hair behind her ear, licked the head of his cock then captured it with her mouth. The man thrust up, now abandoned to her. She ducked her head a couple of times and as she lifted her mouth the rays of sunset caught her face and the skin around her mouth, pasted with her own saliva, glinted at me.
The woman retained a slippery hold of him with her left hand, but now she sat back and drew her legs together on the bench, before letting them drift apart again at the knees, forming a diamond shape. I had the perfect view of her right hand approaching her groin and the series of intricate movements she made pulling at the ragged denim of her crotch until she had edged enough of it aside that I could see – oh this was too good – I could see her pussy. The skin around it was blank and white as a canvas, her slit a delicate pink tear in it.
She had not stopped masturbating him, but now she worked on herself too, her legs splaying. She strummed herself with her forefinger, keeping up a different rhythm for him that I tried to match with my own strokes. It finished perfectly; his hips rose, her legs stretched wide and her jaw sagged, my cock went numb in my hand, and we all came at almost the same time. His seed shot over her shorts and on her legs where its whiteness was camouflaged. Mine ran up a nearby tree. As we got our breath back, as she lay there exposed, came the best moment: she looked glassily in my direction. For a second, I believed that I was a central part of the sexual intimacy that I had seen.
-x-
I should stop here and re-assess what I’ve written. As a lawyer, any success I’ve made of my career has been built on presenting information in a logical order to build towards a conclusion. Which I’ve failed to do so far; I’ve approached my defence disjointedly. You need to know why I was in that park, watching. And for that, I need to take you back again to my youth.
Though we were twins, Orla and I never got on. When I was a child I thought at least there was an understanding between us. In the great cell-splitting wonder that preceded our births, Orla was allocated the looks and the confidence; I was given the brains and the drive. Orla got long, autumnal red hair and dark brown eyes and skin as white as bath enamel. I got ten GCSE certificates.
I thought we were both content with that division. When I turned sixteen I realised I was wrong.
That’s when the lads in my year started to hang about our kitchen like it was the green room for a TV talk show. Orla’s prettiness now had a purpose: she’d turned tall and had acquired a graceful body without effort. Within weeks she had a boyfriend who began to stay over. When she bored of him, he was succeeded by another. It all passed mam by. But it changed my life.
Let me be clear: you might think from what I’ve intimated so far that my sister and I were irresistibly attracted to each other. Not so: there’s a switch in your brain, isn’t there, that tells you that no matter what others see your sibling – in Orla’s case, her big eyes with pupils dark and final as full stops, her long legs, her skin, her lithe figure – she remains, to you, sexless.
Or at least nine-tenths of you thinks that way. The other tenth of your brain is aware you are sixteen years old and that sexual activity takes place in your house. It works away at the other part of your intellect, battering it with imagination.
My bedroom adjoined Orla’s. I had to place pillows over my head to dull the fountain of nonsense she spoke to whoever she slept with. But there was little I could do about the headboards of our beds resting against the same cheap plasterboard wall. By some Newtonian law of physics, the momentum of every movement in Orla’s bed was transferred through the wall to mine. Subconsciously I interpreted these movements: the sharp rap of the headboard was her boyfriend pressing her shoulders down and entering Orla from behind. When my whole bed moved, that was down to Orla climbing on him and riding him like a horse. The little tap-tap noise was the pulse of them smacking against each other, tense and close to climax. I created a scene of explicit sexual abandon in my head and long before I heard Orla command her boyfriend to come in her, I’d emptied myself into scraps of toilet paper.
It was worse when I started watching.
Returning from a bathroom visit one night I noticed Orla had left her bedroom door ajar. Her bedside light was on too. As the hallway was in darkness, and they were making so much noise, I reasoned I could educate myself without fear of being noticed. I got a view of her bed and the two naked bodies on it. At first, Orla’s boyfriend was on top of her, grinding, Orla’s legs swaying either side in the air like spring saplings. Then she twisted under him and rose and straddled him. She fucked like that, erect on his body, her fingers drawing intricate patterns on his bony chest.
Her sexual confidence would have excited anyone and I was able, by means of some sort of metaphorical squint, to divorce what I was seeing from Orla. In the glow of a bedside light, I saw two strangers, one of them beautiful, doing something intimate. I saw a woman’s nipples as perfect as I could have imagined them: penny-sized and light pink, as they rose and fell; I saw a run of sweat travelling down her torso; I saw an erection, red and angry entering her through the dark red triangle between her legs. And the sigh that accompanied it, the togetherness of bodies. The unfiltered raw relationship that I was so envious of made me wank in the dark hallway until I came in my hand.
The door was open on many night-time excursions. Too many. But I was too blinded by fascination or naive to consider this. In truth, Orla was setting a trap. One night she stopped riding her boyfriend and looked out to where I was masturbating, somewhere in the gloom. “Frank,” she called out in a mock-sensuous voice, “just come if you want a threesome.” She giggled into her boyfriend’s chest. My face burned in the dark.
She shouted out at me: “You think you’re so smart, Frank, with all your qualifications and heading for a fancy career. Always mam’s favourite. But you look as daft as a box of nails standing there in the hall, with your dick hanging out.”
The next morning at breakfast I said the guys she fucked were losers, that she was better than that. What did she get out of it? Did it put money on the table, Orla? Did it change her life? No, the fuck it did not. So why do it Orla?
Orla gave the tiniest gloating laugh, like she’d scored another one over me. “Where the fuck do you think this is, Frank? Sugar Town? I don’t screw them for money. You know what I get from it, Frank? The feeling I’m worth something. That’s more than you’ll ever get.”
Orla let the world know I was a pervert; that I watched my sister have sex. My school life disintegrated. The confidence I lost with the opposite sex never returned. But she got what she wanted, as she always did. She fell pregnant, which meant that at the age of seventeen she was able to jump the queue and move into her own council home. Later I heard she’d had a daughter and named her Madeleine. But this came as second-hand news – Orla never came near me or Mam again.
-x-
If I owe my sexual education to Orla, I hold her responsible for its trajectory and its limitations. I am reduced to passive spectating. I’ve been a regular here at the park for years, and I’m not the only one. There’s a little gang of us and we pass each other at a respectful distance. The irony is that for all the time we spend watching, I couldn’t tell you what any of the others look like.
Paradise Fields is a perfect location. It’s a twenty-minute walk from my office, which is far enough away to lower the risk of bumping into work acquaintances, but close enough to allow me to shut up shop early once or twice a week and drift over to the park at a time when it is in the hands of those it should be: the beautiful people who want to be seen and the ones who admire them.
The couple I’d seen that autumn evening played on my mind for many weeks after. I was desperate to witness such intimacy again. But I saw no sign of them for a month, until, on another Tuesday afternoon, as the light was fading, I saw them again. Or at least I saw her again – the man she was with this time was taller, with fair hair. They were walking hand-in-hand along the bank of the canal that splits the park. They passed me at a distance, and I began to follow, praying for a repeat.
After a hundred yards or so, the couple turned off the canal path into a lightly wooded area, where I could follow their progress by the sound of the dead leaves they scattered as they walked. I closed in on them, my view initially fractured by low branches, but I could see she had her back to him and was wearing similar clothes to last time. She turned to him. It was a cold evening on the edge of winter and her breath formed tiny clouds in front of her. She didn’t hesitate. She took off her sandals, her shorts, her pants, her shirt, her bra and lay them in a small pile on the leaves on the ground. I closed to within a few yards from them and, with my cock already bursting from my trousers, I began to masturbate.
The man threw off his jacket onto the ground between them. She kneeled forward onto it and unzipped him, drawing her fingers along his cock as it emerged, as if measuring it. Her tongue ran along its underside, then over it, then underneath. Whenever his cock lolled; she captured it again with her tongue.
I’d been lucky again with my position; it allowed me the perfect profile of the scene. In the gloom, the woman’s body had turned ghostlike, desaturated of its colour, from her hair, her nipples, her pussy. She was a monotone; dark and light, like an art photo, and shadows fluttered across her body like piano keys.
She went lower and pressed her lips to the inside of his thighs and his knees, a secret, unnecessary gesture that I loved. She twisted around and, still on her knees, lay her head on the man’s jacket on the ground. She lifted her bottom, presenting herself. I had to stop masturbating for fear of coming too quickly. I watched, hands pinned to my sides, my cock pointing helplessly at my chin.
The man kneeled behind her and gently adjusted her before spitting on his fingers. She arched her back and there were more little gestures between them. This was what a loving sexual relationship was like. The woman’s knees slid apart on his jacket and he guided himself into her. She turned her head and they kissed as they fucked. He pushed himself up, mounting her; they moved faster and steam rose from them in a swirl of mist. He began to moan; there were whispers between them, or little commands; I heard her say she wanted his spunk inside her. I sensed they were close, so I gripped my cock again. As soon as I did I spurted over the branches in front of me.
They came soon afterwards, in a warm, slow embrace. When the man pulled out, she twisted back on the jacket and giggled, her limbs splayed and wasted. I tucked myself in and crept away, warm with spent excitement and an inexplicable attraction for that woman.
-x-
And so to today, the last working day before Christmas. I like to go out to lunch, to escape from the office and loosen my tie, especially at this time of year. Just a bowl of soup at the cafe around the corner. And that was where I was when the unexpected thing happened. I saw the woman for a third time….
