Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story Read online

  The competition in my friend’s bedroom was followed by all of us sharing a whispered, graphic account of what we thought we might do to attract Tom’s interest were he to stroll in through the bedroom door. We none of us knew much about sex but could all imagine a few of the sexy delights we might offer him. (With the experience I’ve since gained in the adult industry, I could offer him an even better time now, should he ever wish to take up the offer.)

  With Tom’s, lip-dampened photographs safely put away for the night, all three of us had settled down to sleep on a couple of mattresses spread out across the bedroom floor. The house was already quiet: my friend’s mother had gone to bed and her father was in the habit of staying up alone until the early hours downstairs. I snuggled down under the sheets in the middle of the group and, with our bedtime much later than usual, we must all have fallen quickly off to sleep. I don’t really have any idea of what time I woke up, but I was conscious of this sudden, freezing cold sensation on my legs; it was utterly ice cold. I woke up with a thudding heart, which is a bizarre experience to have, and was aware of someone else in the room. I was wearing just a short nightshirt and knickers and, kneeling at the end of the bed, lifting up the hem of my nightie and staring intently at my pants, was my friend’s dad, Ian. Even more disturbingly, he was wearing nothing except his underpants.

  He looked more terrified than me when I spun around and saw him. He was mouthing the words ‘sorry, sorry, really sorry’ as he jumped up and sped out through the bedroom door and off down the stairs. By then I was screaming; it was such a shock and it took me a moment to realise that he must have been looking under the covers for a while before he disturbed me by actually touching my clothes. With my friends now awake and asking what had happened, my would-be voyeur’s wife came sleepily into the room.

  ‘He was going to touch me, he was going to do something to me,’ I gasped.

  ‘What on earth do you mean? Touch you? Who was touching you?’

  ‘Ian. He was lifting the quilt up and looking at me; he was looking at my pants, he was going to do something…’

  The words tumbled out in a jumble because I was truly upset and frightened. It was the first time that I had ever thought that somebody was going to touch me like that. It dawned on me that I could have been raped and I was shaking with fear. My friend’s mum looked shocked and called downstairs to her husband: ‘Ian, Ian, come upstairs would you?’

  He wandered in to the room as cool as a cucumber, and by now fully dressed. ‘What? What’s going on, what’s the matter?’ he asked, his face all puzzled innocence. He listened, and did a good job of appearing to be horrified, as his wife explained that I was ‘making accusations’ that he had been in the bedroom.

  ‘But I’ve just been downstairs watching the telly,’ he protested. ‘What’s she on about?’ And then he turned directly to me, still cowering under the bedclothes: ‘What are you talking about; I haven’t been near you.’

  Faced with a blatant lie, I pleaded to be believed: ‘But he was here, honest… he was just wearing his pants.’

  ‘What colour pants did he have on?’ asked his wife.

  ‘Black… he was wearing black pants and nothing else at all.’

  ‘Well, that’s odd because he doesn’t have any black pants anyway. You must have been dreaming. You’ve let your imagination run away with you. It’s naughty to say such things… Now let’s say no more about it and get you all back to sleep.’

  I was pretty sure that his wife believed me about what had happened but had decided to protect her own family, whatever the truth of the matter. Then the guy’s daughter also joined in the attack. ‘It’s all that Tom Cruise stuff, isn’t it?’ she declared. ‘We’ve been talking about kissing him and then you must have dreamed it and blamed my dad!’

  ‘No… I’m telling you, I’m telling you… he was in the room and looking at me.’

  ‘Well my dad wouldn’t do that. And we were here on either side of you and I didn’t feel anything.’

  And that was that. I was left, basically, accused of being a liar and nothing more was mentioned about the incident. I knew I hadn’t imagined what had happened but, in the face of such united family resistance, I had no way of proving it. My last thought as I finally drifted back to sleep was that it had been dark in the room and perhaps those pants had been blue, not black.

  That was the end of my summer trips to stay with my friend. Although I had spent lots of time there in the past I never stayed in that house again. Nobody said a word about the covers that had moved in the night-time, the incident was never mentioned in any way, but I was never invited again. I wanted to tell my grandmother about it but I thought, ‘his wife doesn’t believe me, his daughters don’t believe me, why should anyone else believe me?’ Not long afterwards, however, the next time I saw my biological mother, I told her the story of what had happened and why I was no longer staying with my friend. I was still angry and upset that nobody had done anything about it.

  ‘I believe you Miranda,’ my mother said, ‘but don’t tell your grandmother, she won’t understand how anyone could do that and it will upset her dreadfully.’

  My mother said that my story had not come as a surprise: ‘I know the family and I know him, he’s a creep and he’s tried it on with women before. I know one woman who was pinned up against the wall in their kitchen and had to fight him off.’

  It was yet a further shock to me that she could have been so naïve. I was shocked that my mother had never warned me of the dangers I could face, even though she knew some of that family’s history and that I had stayed there often in the past.

  Looking back now at what happened, I think my fears of rape and sexual assault were probably an over-reaction. Knowing men better as I do now, I guess that the guy was little more than a frustrated voyeur and that he would have been unlikely to do more than look whilst two other girls slept in the same bed and his wife was next door. But it was hardly conducive to making me trust the adults in my life. Not long afterwards I was to lose my virginity to another predatory adult – in fact to two predatory adults, twice my age, in the same sexual adventure… on the same afternoon.

  CHAPTER 7

  SEX EDUCATION

  It is perhaps unsurprising that I never received any form of sex education, or information about my own sexual development, from my grandparents because, although I did not realise it at the time, they were of a different, older generation who found it deeply embarrassing to talk about sex in any shape or form. In our house, if anything remotely sexual ever came on the television, there would be a muttered word or two such as, ‘We don’t want this nonsense, do we?’ and channels would be switched as fast as my granddad could find the remote control. That meant that I was fast approaching my teenage years with little more than playground gossip to prepare me for the emotional and physical changes that were beginning to affect my body. I had, of course, picked up a pretty good idea of the general mechanics of reproduction from friends and the occasional television glimpse when parents were out of the room, but it was certainly never explained in any authoritative way.

  What I did get from my grandparents was a subtle, though continual, pressure to avoid any possibility of teenage pregnancy; hardly surprising when you consider what had happened to their own 15-year-old daughter not so many years before. Nothing was ever said directly but the thought was always there. I must be careful not to have a child as my mother had done. The message was drummed in by implications with small comments such as, ‘You know you have to get your education Miranda’ or ‘You’ve got to go to university to do well. You want to live your life to the full, perhaps go travelling before you settle down.’ The idea that I must do well at school and get qualified with a good education was a constant theme.

  I suppose my earliest grasp of the fact that there were distinct differences between the sexual equipment of boys and girls came in my first days at school. I remember at the age of six or seven playing childish games of ‘doctors
and nurses’ with friends in the more secluded areas of the playground; all variations of some kind on the age-old children’s curiosity of ‘show me yours and I’ll show you mine’. It was all very innocent, and all a far cry from the sort of grown-up doctors and nurses games I play with my clients these days. Ironically, given the fact that I now spend much of my time with people stripping their clothes off in front of me, as a child I was always the one who hung back and never, never, volunteered for the ‘I’ll show you mine’ part of the equation. I was far too shy and retiring to have even considered pulling my pants down. I was far more the type who would stand quietly at the back and observe.

  When I was about eight years old there was one girl who had older brothers and sisters and who was, for a while, thought to be the fount of all knowledge about sex. Her brothers had clearly gone out of their way to share all of the intricate details of human sexual reproduction. ‘You have to have two boys and one girl and they put the girl on their shoulders and shake her around a lot and this green stuff comes out and you have a baby,’ she explained one day to a group of us, all eager to learn of the hidden delights of romantic love. Even at that age I knew that this explanation differed somewhat from the accepted wisdom of our playground, but looking around at the other girls I could see that several of them were worrying that her version might just be the correct one.

  It was at the sort of childish age where you see people kissing on television and immediately start to cringe; you are curious but it all seems a bit revolting to contemplate. I think I knew enough to find the whole idea of the vigorous shoulder-shaking rather amusing, but none of what I knew had ever been verified by a teacher or any other adult. I did talk about what the girl had said with my friend, Jennifer, and she agreed with me that it was complete nonsense. She told me that she talked about sex often with her parents and was surprised that I had never asked my mummy about it. ‘You should ask her where babies come from,’ she said. The thought of doing that was so alien to me that I never even contemplated following her advice. It was not until several years later, long after I had lost my virginity, that I ever had such a conversation with my grandmother. Purely being mischievous, and already knowing the answer, I posed the classic question: ‘Mum, where do babies come from?’

  ‘Well, it’s the husband planting a seed… and then it grows…’ was the hesitant reply.

  ‘Like in a cabbage patch,’ I ventured, trying desperately not to laugh.

  ‘No, no, not really like that. I’m sure they will tell you all about it at school soon.’

  I was fast approaching my teens, knowing most of the mechanics of sex but nothing of the emotional turmoil it might bring. With our lack of communication about the subject, my grandmother had never even mentioned the concept of periods to me, although I knew that I would one day start them because there were already girls in my class at Middle School who were having them. Then my best friend Jennifer came on with her periods before me and, in probably more detail than I might have wanted, insisted on telling me all about it.

  My own periods started when I was 12, in the holidays between leaving Middle School and starting at High School. I remember I was wearing blue fishnet tights under a denim skirt and had been shopping with my grandmother. When I got home I discovered I was bleeding but, of course, I had no pad or tampons to use. I talked to my grandmother who had nothing for me either. ‘Isn’t that odd,’ she said, ‘I was thinking today when we were out that I should have bought something for you because you would be due around this sort of age, but I didn’t actually get anything at all.’ That was not actually much help to me at the time but my ever-resourceful grandmother made up a kind of pad out of cotton wool and gauze and then bought me proper pads after that.

  And so I celebrated my thirteenth birthday knowing little more than I had picked up in playground gossip. I was vaguely interested in boys and I think I must, by then, have discovered masturbation. It was a secret pleasure to be enjoyed under the bedclothes at night and increasingly often in the morning before dragging myself out of bed to face another day at school. My day-to-day life, however, was still largely devoted to the twin pursuits of coping with becoming a teenager and with sport at school.

  Unfortunately for my moral welfare, the same could never have been said about my best friend Jennifer. Although still a virgin, Jennifer was crazy about sex and boys, any boy, of any shape or size or age. Now, don’t get me wrong, I too was curious about boys but just not on the same industrial scale as Jennifer. I used to spend a lot of my time at her home because both her parents worked and we would often have the run of the house before they got back in the evening. She could always get into her parents’ bedroom and I was soon introduced to her father’s collection of soft-porn girlie magazines. More intrusively still, Jennifer would delight in peeking through her mother’s wardrobe and showing me her ‘kinky underwear’. We would sometimes dress up in them and show off in front of the bedroom mirror. They were all rather innocent, Anne Summers-type outfits rather than seriously kinky fetish wear but it seemed terribly naughty at the time. It was certainly hard to imagine my much older ‘mother’ buying anything remotely like that.

  It was sometimes hard to get Jennifer to think or talk about anything else other than boys and so there was certain inevitability about what was to happen next. My friend’s voracious appetite for meeting men, and my naïve willingness to follow, led us both into danger one day.

  We regularly played a game after school in which we would head for the local shops and straightaway hitch up our school uniform skirts shorter and shorter. The game was to see how many car drivers would beep their horns and how many men might try to chat us up on the way. I loved the attention and was every bit as keen as Jennifer, but we were both about to learn a valuable lesson: that you can take such teasing too far. On one sunny afternoon, we were walking to the local shops as usual and happily collecting our requisite quota of ‘beeps’ from the passing cars. Suddenly one vehicle pulled into the side of the road right in front of us. A young Asian guy got out and stood smiling in front of us. I could see a couple of older men in the back of the car.

  Smiling and friendly, this young Asian lad came out with a line which, even then to our 13-year-old ears, sounded as corny as hell.

  ‘My dog’s just had some really cute puppies,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come and have a look at them?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

  ‘Oh come on. We only live up the road. Where are you two from? Come on and have a look, you’ll love them.’

  The more both of us said we weren’t interested, the more persistent he became. He was chatting, chatting, chatting but I ended up just repeating: ‘No, no I’m not interested.’ While Jennifer finally said, ‘No I’m not going to see them, I’ve got puppies at home,’ and took a step back.

  ‘Come on Jennifer,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’

  With no warning he suddenly grabbed me around the middle and tried to drag me to the car. I was too shocked to scream but I was wriggling and fighting like mad. He might have succeeded in forcing me in through the open door but then Jennifer grabbed me and started pulling me away. He got hold of Jennifer too but by then I had hold of the fence and nothing was going to make me let go. Even at that age I was strong and wiry from all the sports I played at school, and I was hanging on for dear life.

  We were both screaming, ‘Get off… get off us’ and the guys still sitting in the car were shouting ‘Come on, come on, get her in quick’. It was total chaos and getting noisier by the second but, amazingly, no other cars or pedestrians stopped to come to our aid. In the end our attacker realised that his friends were not going to help and, without them, he wasn’t going to win. He swore wildly at me, released his grip and jumped into the car as it sped off.

  It had been the closest of calls, we were both shaking with the shock but thankfully we were both unharmed. We had not walked far from our school gates and there was a payphone right there so we
decided to call the police. We had the car registration number and knew exactly what the guys had looked like, especially the younger one who had been the most dangerous. It was the one and only time that I have had to dial 999, and it was a complete waste of time: nobody answered the emergency call. Hardly able to believe it, I dialled the operator and blurted out that I needed to speak to the police. There was a short pause and then the operator was apologising profusely: ‘I’m sorry caller; I just cannot get a reply from the police service.’ In the confusion that followed, the operator offered to take down our details: ‘I’ll get someone to contact you as soon as I can.’ The last thing that Jennifer and I wanted, however, was to have the police turning up on our doorsteps: my parents would never have let us out again! I instantly hung up the phone and we hurried back home. To this day I regret that my emergency call was not answered. That young guy had been determined to get us into that car, his older friends had been anxious to get their hands on us, and I just hope that nothing ever happened to other women because they were not caught that day. The attempted abduction should have been salutary lesson to Jennifer and me but at the age of 13 we all believe we are untouchable and immortal.