Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (11 page)

The guy who chatted to me in the club that night was tall, dark-haired, handsome and well-dressed. As I later learned, he had a ‘thing’ for designer label clothes, although, then and now, that is the last thing in the world likely to impress me. Having little money myself for most of my childhood, I couldn’t understand the appeal of wasting £50 and upwards on a T-shirt. He was about my own age, a little older than my neglectful boyfriend, and things soon got a little out of hand as we danced. After a few more drinks I ended up doing something I’d never done before or since: I had drunken sex with him in a toilet cubicle. It was not the most memorable sex of my life and all I can really remember is people laughing, whooping and hollering encouragement outside the door. It made quite a commotion until suddenly the bouncers cottoned on that something untoward was underway and duly kicked us out of the club. It was not quite a one-night stand; I did see him a few more times but the affair came to a crashing halt one evening when, out of the blue, he decided to bite my bum in bed. It was not a gentle love-bite; this was a full-blown bite on my arse-cheeks that had me yelling in pain. It was the end of a not-so-beautiful friendship.

In the meantime, Tom and I had endured a painful true-confessions evening when he admitted various lies to me and I came clean about my nightclub fling. I hadn’t intended to hurt him so much but I am both a terrible liar and terrible at
keeping secrets from anyone. It was a little selfish, I know, but if I have a guilty conscience then I always have to ease it by telling the truth. I felt so hard done by because of the way he had refused to take me out but I felt bad because he just looked destroyed from the moment the words left my mouth. Understandably, he said he couldn’t be with me anymore and although we tried to struggle on together for a while, it was clearly the end of our relationship. I was sorry to lose him but such childhood romances do have their natural time span and this one’s time had come.

There was a bittersweet postscript to my long friendship with Tom. Despite our later problems he had been my first love and the first man to awaken my sexual desires. He had helped shape the fetish and domination interests which have lasted throughout my life. I’d had boyfriends after him, but nobody special and then, more than three years later, I heard he had asked a friend how I was. I couldn’t resist giving him a call. The result was a second, six-week-long, fling of ‘sex-with-your-ex’ which was exciting and fun. With new experiences under my belt I also realised that he was not the best-endowed man in the world and that his cock, which once had been the centre of my world, was distinctly smaller than others I had known. Of course, being the kind lady that I am, I kept that opinion very much to myself and, to be fair to him, the size of his penis didn’t stop me wanting to jump all over him again. We had a lot of conversation to catch up on and I felt our renewed friendship was worthwhile and strong. It was not, however to last.

Our second-time around relationship came to an unhappy halt on a Valentine’s Day when Tom turned up at my door
armed with the requisite chocolates and flowers. As the evening wore on a minor disagreement suddenly turned into a serious row and he announced that he no longer wanted to see me. The shock and my anger made me lose my normal ladylike demeanour: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I demanded. ‘You’ve brought me Valentine flowers, manufactured a row from a tiny problem and then you tell me you don’t want to be with me any longer. What the fuck is this about?’

A sudden explanation entered my mind: ‘Is this just getting back at me for what fucking happened three years ago? Did I really hurt you that much? Is that what this is?’ Despite Tom’s persistent denials, I still found it hard to believe that a man could arrive at my door with chocolates and flowers and split up with me immediately afterwards because of the smallest of disagreements. It felt messed-up and wrong and the rejection upset me deeply. We never spoke again.

My first break-up with Tom was to have ramifications far beyond the temporary heartbreak and loss of my first serious boyfriend. For a couple of years my relationship with my grandparents had been easier because of my friendship with a boy they had liked, a boy from what they believed to have been a respectable family. My grandmother in particular had stopped worrying about me being out late or not letting her know where I had been because she assumed that I was in the ‘
in locus parentis
’ care of Tom’s mother. The irony is that while she believed my moral welfare was being safeguarded by Tom’s mum, I was spending entire nights introducing her son to my very own brand of kinky and dominant sex.

Once Tom was off the scene, however, family relationships
spiralled rapidly downhill. Life at home with my grandparents turned into a nightmare for all of us. Many years later, some years before they died, I apologised to them with all my heart for the heartache I had caused them as a teenager. I had never stopped loving them and had always understood that they loved me deeply. They in turn apologised for the sometimes clumsy way they had tried to raise a rebellious granddaughter, both of us recognising that none of us had been trying to hurt the other; it was just a situation tailor-made for confrontation. I like to think that by then we had both come to terms with what had happened in my teenage years. I loved them then and still to this day miss them with all of my heart.

The truth is that I never set out to be naughty but, in my search for teenage independence, I hit the brick wall of a serious generation gap. My grandparents’ expectations of what I should and should not be doing were wildly outdated when compared to those of my peers. Speaking now to my birth-mother, long after the deaths both of my grandparents, she admits how poorly equipped they were to handle the situation. I was nothing like an angel, but many of our rows at the time sprang from their complete lack of understanding that teenagers are hard-wired to push against the barriers as they grow older.

My granddad tried to stay out of most of our confrontations but my grandmother and I had a lot of screaming rows, like mega-screaming rows, pretty much always over me not being home. I used to go to school in the week, but then at the weekend I would go out clubbing. And I was working, I had a job in a chemists and I would go out on a Saturday night and then come home on the Sunday. If I said to my grandmother,
‘Oh, I am going to be out till late tonight,’ she would have one stock reaction: ‘Where are you going to be, who are you seeing, where is the phone number? I need to ring them.’

‘No, no, no you are not embarrassing me like that… and ringing everybody all the time, Sorry. And no, I’m not telling you where I’ll be because I’m not having you turn up there.’

By this time I’d passed my sixteenth birthday but was still being told that I had to obey a 7pm curfew each night. I was a stubborn young woman and the more they tried to be strict, the more they tried to interfere in my life, the more stubborn I became. One constant bone of contention was the privacy I could expect in the house. My grandmother would tell me she did not want me ‘out walking the streets’, but then would deny my privacy at home. It was impossible to have a private phone call without them overhearing or asking who I was speaking to and if I brought somebody home, she would constantly walk into my room.

‘You are so over the top,’ I would say. ‘Every five minutes I get, do you want a cup of tea? Do you want this or do you want that? If I want a cup of tea I’ll come down and get one, or ask you. You’re using just use any excuse possible to get into my room and invade my privacy. I’m here, sitting in the house, you know where I am, and you’re still on my case.’

Quite often when we had screaming rows they would end with my stomping out of the house and slamming the door, or I would just stay upstairs and stick my music up full blast, just to piss them off. I know it was bad behaviour but it was born from frustration, total frustration. A lot of the time I wasn’t even doing anything particularly naughty. Sometimes it would be nothing other than hanging around in the local park with
friends but I would still get the third-degree when I got home. I no longer had a boyfriend and although I was seeing guys occasionally, I was always immensely careful not to get pregnant. There were odd occasions, few and far between, when like all teenagers, I would get horribly drunk with friends, but because I had very little money, drinking and drugs didn’t figure much in my life. Yet nothing I could say would persuade my grandmother to cut me any slack.

There were times when my birth-mother would try to act as a peacemaker and tell me to behave. I’m sure that my grandmother would plead for her help because after some particularly horrendous argument, Ellen would come on the phone to talk to me. She would frequently lay a guilt trip on me in an effort to change my attitude: ‘Your grandparents aren’t going to be here forever; you have to try and get along with them. They are doing the best they can, you know, they are a different generation, you have to understand that one day they will be gone and you will feel bad for not getting on with them.’ It was all very well her coming the heavy parent over the phone; it might have had more effect had she been there in person.

It’s clear to me now that much of the reason why my grandparents tried to be so strict with me was that they had already brought up one daughter, my birth-mother, who had gone off the rails in spectacular fashion by getting pregnant at such a young age. Although they never discussed it with me directly, I think my grandmother in particular must deep down have felt guilty that she had allowed that to happen. The outcome was that they tried to correct what they saw as their earlier mistakes by keeping an even closer control over me. I
would constantly say: ‘Don’t worry, I am not that stupid to have a child, so don’t worry about that.’ The truth was that I had never planned on having kids, didn’t want to get married, wasn’t interested in children at all. So I used to throw that at them all of the time. ‘I am not the same as your daughter, do not think I am going to have a child, I have no intention of having a child; the last thing on earth I want is to have a child.’ They never talked to me about the trauma of the time when their daughter got pregnant. It was a subject that was impossible for us to have ever discussed. I could never raise the issue with them because anything that even hinted about me not being their ‘real’ daughter was terrifying for them to talk about. It was almost as though an open admission that I did have a birth-mother would somehow take me away from being their child. Because I loved them so much, it was the one thing I could never do to them.

The irony is, my birth-mother was only too happy to talk about it whenever I saw her whilst I was growing up through my teenage years. She would often tell me how she would never have left me with anybody else other than my grandparents… blah, blah, blah… that she knew they would love and care for me… blah, blah, blah. It reached a point where I used to hate seeing her sometimes because I wasn’t interested in hearing her story but she clearly had a need to tell me all of the time and bring the subject up on every possible occasion I would be thinking: ‘I don’t want to know, you don’t have to bring it up every time, I am not interested, I don’t want to talk about it.’

Partly for that reason, I never built a strong relationship with my birth-mother, and a blazing family row one
Christmas in my early teens led to a long-term break with Eileen – a row that stopped the two of us communicating with each other for years. According to a survey, a typical British family has an average of five domestic rows between the time when the kids wake up to see if Santa has been and the end of the Queen’s afternoon address to her nation. Unfortunately, my family was no exception to the rule.

As is often the way with Christmas, the dispute began with the smallest and silliest of ‘words’ and rapidly escalated from a border skirmish to all-out thermo-nuclear war. After a traditional lunch, with traditional quantities of booze for all the adults, I was playing a light-hearted game of cards with my grandfather and my birth-mother’s husband. After losing the fifth hand in a row I foolishly made what was meant to be nothing more than a joke that ‘someone is cheating around here. Who’s hiding all the cards?’ The effect on the winning high-roller, my birth-mother’s husband, was startling. He jumped to his feet and started shouting at me. ‘How dare you say something like that,’ he screamed. As he yelled into my face, I at first tried to say it had been merely a bit of banter but then soon ended up giving him as good a tirade of swear words as I was getting in return. Both of us were becoming more heated by the second but I was still astonished when he suddenly leaned over and pushed me backwards against my chair. I rocked from the unexpected shove but managed to keep my balance and stay on my feet. I may not have been physically hurt but my teenage pride had taken a battering, and my tongue went into overdrive: ‘How dare you, how fucking dare you push me like that; who the fuck do you think you are?’

I was in full, admittedly foul-mouthed flow when he suddenly pushed me again, so hard this time that I fell over the chair and went sprawling on the floor. Now incandescent with rage, I was cursing like the proverbial trooper when my birth-mother rushed into the room to see what was causing such chaos and commotion. The remains of the day and our always-strained relationship might still been salvaged if she had just been willing to listen to my side of the story, but that was never an option. She was only interested in the fact that I was swearing at her husband, not that he had knocked me over in a silly row about a game of cards… not interested in what I had to say at all.

Already angry and upset, it was easy for much of my rage to instantly transfer to my birth-mother. ‘How fucking dare you.’ I thought, ‘It’s unbelievable. I make a joke and he behaves like that and puts his hands on me, and all she’s interested in is the language I’m using.’ I was so disappointed in her, so disappointed that she was more interested in the language I was using in retaliation than in the fact that her husband had sent me flying across the room. I no longer remember how the row ended that day, whether I left or they left, but the result was the same either way; I could not help but feel rejected once again by the one woman I might have hoped would stand up by my side. My real mother and I had nothing more to say to each other. Even in retrospect, I find it impossible to judge now how much hidden resentment from the past events of my childhood fed into my feelings that day and over the year or more that followed. Perhaps the row was another nail in the coffin. All I know is that I felt so betrayed that it caused a long-lasting rift.