Free Life by Gwyneth Jones

preferred their own inner glow, afraid chemicals might flatten the libido. They would vanish into the anonymous crowd, groping each other insatiably.
    Ramone was very angry about Anna’s fall from single grace. She maintained that sex with a man was feeble and contemptible. Lesbian love-making was incomparably more valuable and more profound. When Anna pointed out that Ramone was at present fucking a male and shamelessly patriarchal drug-dealer geezer at least twice her age, Ramone said: that’s different. I’m not doing Frank for fun. I’m collecting life experience. When Anna said why couldn’t Ramone find herself an educational dyke-geezer girlfriend, Ramone curled her chimpanzee lip.
    “You don’t know how tough it is, being a feminist and a lesbian. Practically all the women on the scene put the same moves on you as if they were men. I’m not going to swallow their shit. Lesbianism could be brilliant. Unfortunately it’s a pathetic joke, a poor imitation of the male supremacist world like everything else women do.”
    Privately Anna wondered, could making love to a woman be so different? When she held Spence, wild with pleasure, gasping and trembling in her arms, as he begged her to suck more fiercely on his nipples, as she rubbed at his perineum, slid her fingers into his slippery rectum and kneaded the soft concavity where his testes, when he was in this mood, so easily slipped back behind the pubic bone, what was different then? She had heard that women are better partners because men are not multiorgasmic. Spence often seemed to reach peak after peak, in a cascade as extended as her own, before the final climax… Must be because he was so young. Of course there was his prick, which she would not want to be without. When they were in his room at Regis Passage she loved to lie naked, spine arched, heels under her and knees spread, and masturbate while Spence did the same. She kept her eyes closed so she would not know when, overcome by the sight of her cunt, he would fall, clutching her shoulders, and plunge his prick inside. She loved the moment when her whole body went into spasm, locking and seizing, madly pumping. It was like a merging of human and machine, without the paranoia of that idea; it was the pleasure of tennis and yoga glorified, pure movement in power, the delight of becoming completely physical. To be a machine is lovely. And everything else—the way the dance floors grew empty and uncertain in the early hours, the hot grubby sands, the smell of suntan oil, the wine they drank, the street sounds, the glittering sea that rocked at the end of every street and caught her body in its cool invigorating embrace in the late afternoons—all these were the adjuncts of this summer, which she would have possessed anyway, if she had settled for the pain and deceit of the kind of boyfriend-girlfriend affairs a nice girl was supposed to have, without ever knowing what was missing from the center: this rapture of a young animal, pure appetite without shame, without anxiety. She thanked the light of reason in her prayers. They said it couldn’t be done. But Anna had made up her mind to tackle sex in a fair and straightforward way, and things had turned out just fine.
    She understood how Spence felt about Rob and Daz. Daz Avritivendam was fabulously beautiful and intelligent and lovely in many ways, but nothing unconventional could survive in her vicinity. Daz and Rob were a couple, a transformation as obvious as a physical metamorphosis, and it grated. Anna had kept her distance from this coupledom, not because of Spence, but for her own reasons. She tried not to know it when the lovebirds started to fall out. But one day, after a London weekend that had obviously been a disaster, Daz asked Anna to come back to the house after the lunch session at work, instead of joining the others. As soon as she’d shut the door of their room behind them, she collapsed in tears.
    “Daz! What’s the