'being Sian' - Meeting James

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‘Being Sian’ Meeting James The first time I saw James, I was watching T.V in the communal rooms. The walls were a bland pale yellow, clinical and unhomely. I was lonely and bored, and James intrigued me, sitting there with his face glued towards the television, eyes for no-one except the programme he was watching so intently. ‘This one is going to be hard to catch’ I thought, and I made it my mission to get him into my heart as soon as possible. As for my pants, that was a different thing altogether, even though my heart soared to the sky when I happened to walk down the stairwell a few days later, and we kissed. His lips barely moved, yet they fully touched mine, exciting my desire more. He wasn’t the first man I’d wanted since my stay there, but he was new. Now, James’s cold flat face seemed much more preferable. He was older and more mature than Ray, yet still sexy, young and desirable. It pleased me that I had to chase this man harder to catch him fully. I found it a welcome change to Ray’s teenage desperate clinginess. Yet why was it I could not ‘go the whole way’ with James now? I had no problem letting Ray into my pants, four months earlier. It had been a few weeks since we started dating, but I refused to do more in our bed than allow mutual masturbation. I just could not let him inside me. The strict religious morals I’d been mentally raped with as I grew up, seemed to overtake me now, I even began to feel guilty about it. This never surfaced with Ray, perhaps because I never cared about him. One day I lay in the bed with James, aroused by his fingertips between my legs as he used friction to excite me, as I soared with a numbing ecstasy.

3 Suddenly a voice outside my ground floor hostel room shattered the mood. “Sian your mum’s here.” Warned Timmy, from outside the half open window. I barely had time to pull on my knickers again, when the door flew open and there she stood, in a cold fit of anger, without knocking first. Through my anger I realised that I must have carelessly left the door on the latch. However, I showed nothing of my inner rage now as I was more concerned with pacifying my mother, heart pounding with my sexual guilt. “You didn’t ring me! Who’s this?!” She demanded, her eyes black and hostile. I could almost visualize the terror spreading to James’ penis, shrinking it into nothingness, like she had managed to do to our session. Not waiting for a reply, she continued: “Get over ‘ere, I wanna word with you!” So I left James on the bed with a sinking heart and walked away with my mother. After that there were several incidents where she would burst in on me as I lay in bed with a boyfriend. She would shout abuse, call me ‘a slag’ for ‘not being married’, and then turn her rage onto him. ‘You’ve turned her into a whore, why haven’t you married her?’ As she spat it out, it occurred to me that the reason was, because no man would want a crazy bitch like her for a mother-in-law. In fact, no relationship I had lasted very long. When they were introduced to my mother, she killed it off. She would wilt any rising penis with her glare. I’m surprised that I was ever conceived. Perhaps my father put a bag over her face. My poor brother John got the guilt trips too. I felt more sorry for him, because he had the much hated penis, between his legs every single day. When she targeted him about ‘that little slut’, (his girlfriend) it seemed as if her eyes burned through his trousers like hateful lasers, wishing it to

4 drop off, so that ‘you’ll have nothing to fuck her with now’. She never actually said these words, but I could hear them in my head. It was very clear in her flashing eyes, and the implications in her tone of voice, and the direction of her despising eyes as she glared fear into him. My mother resented his pretty girlfriend, Lola. She was slender and beautiful, with long sleek brown hair, and a perfect little figure. She should have been a model. She was so good looking, she’d have driven a lesbian mad. She had a lovely chiselled face, and a perfect nose. She was definitely very sexy. I thought John was very lucky to have got her. All I ever heard was my mother’s deep, threatening voice booming through the walls next door, as me and Lola stood motionless, holding our breath, soaking up the bad vibes like unwilling victims to my mother’s insanity. We didn’t have to hear the words to understand what was being flung at John’s head. ‘Why haven’t you married her?’ A short silence. ‘What is it? D’you have doubts? You should leave her. If you don’t know, leave her. Otherwise, marry her.’ A low rumble of John’s reply. When he emerged from the lion’s den, his tall body and bony shoulders would fly through the doorway in a repressed rage. ‘C’mon Lola! We’re going.’ Yet he would reappear, months later, to beg and plead for mother to change her attitude, which was like asking a storm to stop. He never seemed to give up trying.

5 I think all of this had an effect on me. I fought against the censorship, both from her and the cult she forced onto us since we were born, but deep below the surface, I felt shame. Each time I had an orgasm, I felt a guilty satisfaction from the illicit deed. Shame followed straight away, particularly after masturbation, which I seemed to do a lot of. Masturbation was reluctantly brought up at a cult ‘meeting’. It was banned, obviously, but the reasoning behind it was strange. They concluded that it was sinful, despite admitting that no scripture on the subject could be found in the Bible. Yet, going by the ‘regulations’ on sex in general, it was decided that masturbation was also ungodly. A misuse of one’s body, it was an insult to God, who gave us sexuality for procreation. Therefore it was ‘cheating the system’. I wondered how anyone could adhere to every single banned act, and not go crazy. You couldn’t touch anyone if you weren’t married, you couldn’t touch your wife if you were. Foreplay was considered to be wrong, if done to the extent of climax- but who was going to ‘draw the line’? Imagine, the guy frigging his wife, after spending an hour trying to find her clitoris, and now she’s delighted that he has, he says to her in the heat of orgasm; ‘Oh, I can’t let you come, God gets a thrill from watching you lay here frustrated. If you finish yourself off ‘coz I’m not allowed to, you’ll be committing a sin instead of me.’ Despite this ridiculous brainwashing, I still managed to enjoy myself from time to time, whenever I stopped worrying about it. I tried to ignore the niggling beneath the surface, behind the heavy curtains. The cult said that this ‘feeling’ was our conscience warning us not to commit sin. Personally, I thought it was the smell of their bullshit.

copyright@emmasharn2009