Free Being a Girl by Chloë Thurlow

had found him remotely fit with his stained teeth and overgrown Adam’s apple, but hemust have had a robust and energetic tongue. I watched it, long and pink and healthy as it moved in and out of Mother like the feeler of some enormous insect stabbing at ants or dipping for sap in the hollow of a tree. They kept going for ages, sighing and slurping, their bodies moving mechanically like a primitive machine. I was frozen like a statue in the park, my eyes glued to this terrible, extraordinary thing I was seeing.
    The boy sank to his knees and pushed Mummy’s thighs wider apart, his sweaty hands leaving muddy streaks on her ivory skin. Her bottom lifted from the potting table and when the red shoe clinging to her toes fell and clattered with a bang to the floor I involuntarily let out the breath I’d been holding in an anxious gasp. I’m quite certain Mummy heard me, but she was too far gone by this time and starting shrieking. It was the first time I’d heard a grown woman having an orgasm and it sounded like she was having a baby.
    I crept away and never mentioned this shameful episode to my mother, although it came often into my mind. It was hard to believe I had seen her pristine white bottom on the dirty potting table surface, her £200-a-pair silk knickers hooked in the heel of her shoe, her pubic mount perfectly shaved and gaping over a thirsting mouth. I still find it hard to believe that she truly wanted to have sex with the gardener with the hot sun blazing through the greenhouse roof. What Mummy craved was the gardener, a boy of twenty, wanting to have sex with her. For Mother, being a great beauty was her
raison d’être
, an end in itself, and I suppose as she turned forty she would require a revolving door of East European handymen to confirm this axiom.
    I glanced at Mummy across the table. Behind her was a tall graceful palm in a black ceramic pot, its fronds gently shadowing the side of her face. The waiter was still looming over Binky, peering through the cigarette smoke at the pale moons of her girlish breasts like an inquisitor analysing evidence of witchcraft. He was dressed as a bishop in a long white cassock and stood on a white square like a chameleon in camouflage. The Jewel Royale had a chequered floor and the staff were attired as chessmen, bishops, knights, the Maître D, an old queen, dressed as a king. Binky was enjoying the attention and as I studied her studying the menu I realised that my sister was just like Mummy. She wanted every man she met to fancy the pants off her but, in spite of our adventures on the Isle of Skye, she really wanted to keep her pants on.
    I was different.
    I was . . .?
    A complete tart, according to Binky.
    A ‘good girl’ the Laird had said, as I had stood there absurdly proud with a tanned bottom and his sperm oozing from me.
    Since my return from Scotland there had been a certain spring in my step, a twinkle in my eye, a vague new confidence. I had been a tourist. Now I had taken the journey. I felt serene, contented, in what the nuns at school would have called a state of grace. The world was my oyster. I was still waiting to hear whether I had got a place at Cambridge but, if I didn’t, I would take this small failure philosophically. I would have a gap year and go and stay with Daddy so I could work on my French and ruin his love life.
    It was so much easier being a grown-up. I had come to see that virginity wasn’t so much a precious commodity, a prize a Geisha sells in order to pay forher education, but a terrible burden, a responsibility thrust on women, unasked for and unwanted, and one we are challenged to guard at risk of becoming outcasts of the clan. It was all so mediaeval. Virginity is like having a faint shadowy moustache, sort of sexy on certain Spanish women, but better not there at all. Virginity is for girls in storybooks, secret adventures and pony club.
    I was a woman now.
    I liked saying this