Sex in the City--London Read online

  Her heart, her heart her gypsy wilderness.

  And here I was a prisoner of the Hampstead triangle, circumscribed between Camden Town to the south, the A406 to the North, Highgate to the east beyond the lush open-air vastness of Parliament Hill Fields and the dirt of the Edgware Road to the furthest east. Here I stewed, here I yearned in this summer of longing. In the home of the so-called bourgeois novel and overvalued properties. Unable to venture beyond those parts of London I associated with her, the roads we had walked, the museums, cinemas, supermarkets we had frequented, the beds we had fucked in, the pavements on which she had walked, the alley where she had squatted down and peed under cover of darkness when caught short while I stood red-faced as a lookout for passers-by, the cafes where we had slowly sipped espressos, the flower stall where I had bought her a single rose, the tapas bar where she had introduced me to cold potatoes with sour cream and chilli powder (or, come to think of it, maybe that had been in Barcelona … The mind wanders so …).

  But summer in London seldom lasts long and soon the implacable waltz of the seasons had drawn to an end and autumn came, or fall as the Americans called it.

  I tried to venture out of my Hampstead fortress, cleverly concealing some form of temporary visa inside my heart. One step at a time, one further stop daily on the Northern Line. Mornington Crescent. Take a deep breath. Euston. Warren Street. Control your emotions. Goodge Street, once the battleground for another disastrous campaign some ten years back. Tottenham Court Road. Leicester Square, gateway to Soho …

  The man he met at the Groucho Club was a friend of a friend of a friend. Martin had been vouched for, somehow.

  ‘You’ll still have to be vetted by a couple of the others,’ the other man said.

  ‘I quite understand,’ Martin answered.

  He gave a phone call and one hour later they were joined by two others. Well-dressed businessmen, suited and tied. A few drinks later he was formally approved.

  ‘How do you find them?’ he asked.

  ‘Chat rooms, ads, by personal recommendation …’

  ‘Recommendations?’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘Jesus …’

  ‘All quite normal women. No money changes hands, ever.’

  The spokesman for the group was in his early fifties, slight in stature, his beard streaked with white. Earlier in the conversation, he’d mentioned he’d returned just a few weeks back from his holidays, sailing his boat along the coast of Turkey. Another was a surgeon, and the third had some unspecified job in the City.

  It was agreed Martin would be able to join their next session.

  They met in the cellar bar of a big impersonal hotel right by Victoria train station. Two of the other men in the group were already there, nursing beers, when Martin arrived.

  The young woman walked into the bar ten minutes later, accompanied by the group’s leader. She was barely out of her teens. She appeared at first hesitant, even shy, but, after a few drinks, she relaxed and loosened up. She was a student nurse. On later occasions, they would gang-bang an older bank assistant manager who’d travelled up for the occasion from the South Coast, and on another occasion a single mother who wanted to be a poet and who, having discovered his media connections, would later mail him some stories she was working on; they were actually quite good. Sometimes, the group booked the hotel in Victoria, but sometimes they used another hotel near Old Street. And, one time, the basement of an empty store on Old Compton Street which one of the guys had access too through his job. The hotels were principally chosen for their busy nature and the fact that five or six men entering the lift to the upper floors together with a single woman would not attract undue attention.

  ‘Your first time?’ he asked her. This was still at the bar. Two of the other men had walked over to the bar to pick up another round.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Me too,’ he attempted a smile.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she replied.

  ‘Why are you doing it?’ It wasn’t quite what he wanted to ask, but the right words couldn’t quite form on the edge of his lips. She looked so young.

  ‘You know, a fantasy. I think all women have them. Just want to know what it would feel like. Silly, no?’

  ‘No, not at all.’ The others returned and their one-to-one conversation came to an abrupt end.

  A few weeks later he would discover that following that initial evening she had continued to see some other members of the group and been taken to a swing evening at a private club, and later dogging in a lay-by off the M25 where she was shared with total strangers in the dim light of the car beams. But he was not invited to those follow-up events.

  Once finally in the room, the young nurse was summarily stripped. She had lovely, round breasts. High and firm. She had been ordered to shave herself below and had followed her instructions to the letter. She wore no panties, just hold up black stockings.

  The leader of the group unzipped his trousers and presented his cock to her, forcing her down to her knees. She took him into her mouth. This was a signal for the other men to all undress. He looked around at the ocean of male flesh now crowding him. They came in all shapes and sizes, and he was glad to see he was not the smallest, or the fattest either.

  While she hungrily sucked on her first cock of the evening, others began to finger her other holes, greedily exploring her, forcing her, feeling her up like a prime cut of meat. Cocks hardened, jutted. His eyes took in the room, the scene of the crime. The window looked out on a dull panorama of city roofs. On the bedside table, a small pile of condoms and various tubes of cream and lube. On a desk near the fridge, someone had brought a couple of bottles of wine. Both red. Three glasses and a mug. A few sex toys were scattered around, including a monstrous two-headed dildo that surely wouldn’t fit into any woman’s openings without tearing her apart, he thought.

  It did fit, he would later observe, as two of the men, an hour or so later, after all her holes had been used by every man in the room in succession and on some occasions together, busied themselves stuffing the black dildo deep into her vagina while the other extremity was, inch by inch, forcibly buried into her anus. The young nurse breathed heavily as the operation took place, on all fours on the bed, her mouth impaled onto the thick cock of a heavy red-haired man.

  ‘Good girl,’ someone said.

  By then, he was already spent. He had ventured inside all her offered holes, once even felt her gag on his hard cock as it hit the back of her throat as the black doctor thrust into her from behind and the motion threw her involuntarily forward more than she had expected.

  The others kept busy. Between fucks, they would hand her a glass of wine, or later water, which she requested, and some would gently mop her brow when the sweat began to drip from her fevered forehead. She never complained or asked for a break. He looked at the scene, trying to place himself in the skin of a dispassionate observer. One of her stockings was badly torn and the one on her other leg was bunched up around her ankle. She was ravaged, but still rather beautiful. The men in the group circled the bed, their damp cocks bouncing against their thighs as they moved along to play with her.

  The cocks.

  Thick and thin, conjugating every possible geometrical angle, smooth and veiny, bulbous, heavy.

  He gazed at the other men’s cocks. Wondering what it must feel like to have a penis in one’s mouth, what it would taste like, how it would fill his insides. What it would feel like to be a woman. And experienced a brief flash of yearning. And envy.

  Right there and then, at the heart of his first gang bang Martin momentarily understood what it would be like to be submissive and knew that if he were a woman, he would also be a woman who would gift herself to men. To strangers.

  There could be no greater gift.

  The young nurse shrieked. Someone had pushed too far. Somewhere.

  ‘Enough,’ she protested.

  But her blushing face was radiant, ecstatic even.

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nbsp; The men respectfully moved away from her. She slipped off the bed and the tangle of bodies.

  Spent condoms littered the hotel room carpet.

  ‘I think I need a shower,’ she said.

  Looked at the circle of bodies surrounding the bed.

  ‘Wow! That sure was some party,’ she laughed and headed towards the bathroom.

  They all dressed and one by one left the hotel room, leaving her behind with just the group’s leader who had initiated the original contact with her and escorted her there.

  Martin attended a further five gang bangs organised by the motley group. None of the men involved ever knew each other’s’ name. Those were the rules. And he soon came to understand the other unwritten rules of the game. Because it was a game, consensual, lustful, sexual. The group provided a need and, surprisingly, some of the women even returned on a few occasions.

  Every time, he told himself he wouldn’t attend the next event. Feeling shameful, guilty, angered by his own frailty and cowardice. This was not the Hampstead way, surely? But every man is led by his dick and, even if he left it to the last minute before confirming his attendance, he would be present at the pub or the bar where yet another new girl would be introduced.

  At the final gang bang he attended, back at the hotel near Victoria station following a few forays into different areas, he reached the depths of abjection.

  The woman was a librarian from High Wycombe and they had liberally taken their pleasure with her, when a stray member of the group, taking a break from their activities had gone to the hotel bar downstairs to get some extra drinks and returned with another woman he had somehow seduced in record time or at any rate convinced to join them all in the room. She was not taken back by the spectacle of six naked men writhing lewdly around the pale body of the younger woman, cocks at attention, hair in disarray. She announced she would not participate but wanted to watch.

  Right then, the woman who was the evening’s main attraction was on her knees on the edge of the bed where Martin sat with thighs wide apart, feeding on his cock. He was tiring, losing his hardness. The woman from the bar watched them both, nursing a glass of gin, her eyes eager, her lips moist as she observed their congress. He avoided her gaze and pulled the librarian’s face away from his crotch, and raised himself slightly so that her face was now looking straight into his rear hole. He spread himself.

  ‘Lick me clean,’ he ordered the young woman. And took hold of a belt which just lay there on the bed, abandoned earlier as part of another sexual variation and placed it around her neck.

  She buried her nose and mouth inside his crack and beavered away, held in place by the belt.

  The woman from the bar snickered in her nearby corner as Martin was rimmed.

  For just a moment, he left his body and became an observer of the scene, watching it all from afar, detached.

  And felt sick inside.

  How could he fall any lower?

  Ten minutes later, he was dressed and racing through the hotel lobby and signalling for a cab.

  ‘Take me to Hampstead,’ he asked the driver.

  ‘Where in Hampstead?’ the cabbie asked, ‘It’s a big place, Hampstead is.’

  ‘I’ll decide when we get there.’

  The night traffic was sparse and they soon crossed the Marylebone Road, cruised through Regent’s Park and reached Camden Town and then Belsize Park.

  ‘Take right, past the Royal Free,’ he said.

  ‘You’re the boss, mate.’

  He ordered the taxi to stop when they reached the pond by Jack Straw’s Castle.

  His mind was bubbling with confusion.

  On the one hand he felt downright disgusted at what had become of him these past months. The senseless sex, the indifference, the emptiness. Images of the women, the men, the cocks repeatedly breaching openings in full Cinemascope close-ups against the large screen of his conscience, the animalistic sounds of unfeeling lovemaking, the cocks, the hard, warm cocks …

  For a moment, he was tempted to enter the woods by Jack Straw’s Castle’s car park, an area notorious as a gay cruising ground. He stepped one way, then another, hesitated, and finally walked slowly towards home.

  He didn’t reach the stone steps leading to his flat until well past midnight. He could have hailed another taxi, but the walk had calmed his nerves.

  There was a half moon above the imagined Hampstead map of green.

  Someone was sitting, bunched, on the highest step, just by the door.

  It was Julie.

  She looked up at him and the pleading in her eyes just broke his heart.

  ‘I’m back,’ she said.

  ‘I always knew you would return,’ he said.

  About the Story

  ALTHOUGH I WAS BORN in London, my parents moved to France when I was still very small. I was regularly shipped back to London during school breaks, to stay with my aunt in Bayswater, but my appreciation of London was long limited to much-awaited visits to Hamley’s on Regent Street and Saturday morning movie shows and I never truly came to know my own city until I finally returned in my mid-twenties.

  I now live a few miles from where I was born and, despite a few years in Italy and the temptation of New York, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. London is not just a city, it’s a hundred different places, each with its own personality, shopping centres, parks, character, geography. It’s also so wonderfully diverse and easy to live in (I’ll make an exception for the transport system) and, when it comes to culture in all its shapes and sizes, offers a veritable and inexhaustible cornucopia of offerings you would never tire of, but then we don’t have the extremes of temperature so many other places suffer from. But nowhere is perfect.

  There is a joke, perpetuated by Time Out’s occasional North/South issues with different covers, that you are either from North London or South London, and never the twain shall meet. The joke has some grounding in reality and there is an element of truth in the fact that Londoners are very ‘regional’ and make only rare forays into neighbouring zones, let alone across the river (I’ll make an exception as a Northern denizen for the South Bank arts complex and the Jubilee Walk from the London Eye all the way to the Globe Theatre, but then being by the Thames, it’s barely in the South, is it?). Which is the genesis of this story. Yes, I do live close to Hampstead, long ago the jewel in the Bohemian crown of London, and now all too residential, expensive and fashionable, and also for ages the heart of the middle-class English novel. So the idea of a love story circumscribed by invisible London frontiers came to mind. The rest is, of course, strictly the product of my imagination.

  Rain and Neon

  by Elizabeth Coldwell

  WHEN HE DASHED INTO the café that night, collar turned up against the steadily falling rain and sketch pad under his arm, I thought he was just another art school know-it-all. Heaven knows we’d had enough of them in Vettori’s over the years. They would commandeer the big booth in the corner and sit there for hours, occasionally ordering more cappuccinos or a toasted teacake which a couple of the girls would split between them, and sit there bitching about their tutors and the ridiculous amount of work they were expected to do. They had opinions on everything from music to the cost of living in London to sex – but mostly sex – and they were all utterly convinced they were going to be the next Damien Hirst. They were too loud, too attractive, too confident, and they reminded me of how I had been before life had got in the way of my dreams.

  It was because of the students that we set a minimum charge over lunchtime, to stop them hogging tables when we were at our busiest. On the whole, I preferred the perpetually harried runners who worked for the nearby film production companies: they dashed in, ordered four coffees, a Danish pastry and a couple of egg-and-bacon baps and dashed out five minutes later in a tangle of styrofoam cups and grease-spotted paper bags. Tonight, however, it was quiet. Not that Soho is ever completely deserted: even at three in the morning you’ll find some lone soul wandering the streets.
But the rain was doing a pretty good job of keeping people away, so if Sketch Pad Boy chose to linger, I was in no hurry to chase him out.

  When I went over to take his order I was surprised to see that his pad was actually open, and he was drawing something with rapid sweeps of a soft pencil. Though it had barely taken shape yet, I could tell his subject was the building across the street, which had been a pub favoured by heavy metal and Gothic types until it had been sold for redevelopment about six months earlier. I didn’t say anything then, but when I returned with the cup of strong tea and the tuna mayonnaise sandwich he’d asked for, I commented, “I’ve never seen anyone take so much interest in a boarded-up pub before.”

  Without even pausing in what he was doing, he answered, “That’s because you see a boarded-up pub where I see an old Soho landmark.”

  I was right, I thought. Just another art school know-it-all. And then he looked up from his pad and I found myself staring into the bluest pair of eyes I had ever seen.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was rude, I know, but I’ve never liked being interrupted when I’m working.”

  “That’s fair enough.” I turned to walk back behind the counter.

  “No, hang on,” he said. “Let me show you, if you’ve got a minute.” I had more than a minute; apart from old Joe, one of the regulars, who was methodically working his way through a plate of liver, bacon and chips, the place was empty. Papa Vettori wouldn’t like it if he knew I was sitting chatting to a customer, rather than wiping down tables and restocking the display of chocolate bars by the till, but he was away tonight, visiting his wife who was in the Royal Marsden. So I perched on the seat beside him, ready to spring up if a customer walked in or Joe wanted to settle his bill.

  “I’m working on a project,” he explained. “I want to capture the real spirit of Soho before it finally disappears. I mean, you look at the beautiful Victorian tiling on the front of the pub. When the bulldozers move in, that’ll all be gone. And what will replace it? Probably some tiny, overpriced flats with all the architectural merit of a shoebox.”