Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (24 page)

Meanwhile, in time – quite a lot of time actually – my birth-mother
recovered from the shock of learning about my lifestyle and stopped crying every time we spoke. I had to do a lot of re-education of all my family, teaching them the difference between my work as a dominatrix and the work of a prostitute. Some of them got it, some of them didn’t, but I did my best to smooth over the ruffled feathers. Explaining the contents of my internet website helped a little – but these were not great conversations to have.

In 1992, Her Majesty the Queen famously declared the year had been an
annus horribilis
when, among other calamities, fire destroyed part of Windsor Castle. Well, please excuse my language but, in my more down-to-earth world, I think of this period of my life as having come up against an
anus
horribilis, thanks to my toe-rag, wank-stain of a partner who right-royally shafted my arse that year. He brought me pain, unhappiness and caused me to shed a lot of tears. And yet, he and my treacherous girlfriend did me a favour. After years of a loveless relationship, full of the fear of exposure, I was finally free; my family now knew what I did; I wasn’t ashamed of my job; and a life finally free of worry was stretching out before me.

CHAPTER 23

FINDING MY FATHER

I
might finally have been free of my unwanted partner but I was still suffering from the after effects of months of emotional turmoil.

Relations with my birth-mother were still traumatic and my beloved nan and granddad had gone. I had financial worries because of the legacy left by my unfaithful and unreliable former other half. He had promised to take care of the repayments on his own car, but never actually paid a penny. Because I had helped him fund the vehicle I found myself getting demands for overdue payments for a car I didn’t own. In the end I had no choice but to tell the company to repossess it. That added to the outstanding bill and ruined my own credit rating for a while. We had recently moved into a house and Frank had left building work undone all over the property. He had charged me for doing the work but never completed the project.

It was a pretty dark time. I had lost a lot of weight and was having dreams about suicide; not that I would ever do it, but it seemed to be a way of my mind subconsciously coping with what I had been through. I kept dreaming I was going into my own dungeon, now built in the garage, and hanging myself. My dreams would play through different scenarios as though my mind were exploring different ways that events would unfold. And always at the end of each one I would end up throwing a rope around my neck and stringing myself up from the rafters. Fortunately I had no such feelings when I was awake, in fact I had few feelings at all; I was just numb. In this slightly surreal state of mind, when things were racing around in my head and I had nobody to talk to, a new idea crystallised in my mind: I would find my real father.

I had never known anything about my real father. My grandmother had destroyed my birth certificate, although I still do not know to this day if his name appears on the official record of my birth. The immediate catalyst for setting out on my search had been finding an old toy whilst clearing out my late grandparents’ house. After my birth-mother left home, I had been their only child, the only one they might have bought presents for, and there in the attic was a toy I’d never seen before – an unused, pristine-condition, skateboard. It was hard to imagine my wheezing old granddad or grandmother being secret skate-boarding enthusiasts and so the discovery was a puzzle.

When I asked my birth-mother about it, a few tantalising facts emerged about my father. Apparently he kept in touch
with me for almost a year, but my grandparents had discouraged him from maintaining any contact. The skateboard had been his present to me when I was very young; a present totally inappropriate for my age. Eileen said that she could remember it being around the house for a few days but that it had then suddenly vanished. She was shocked to see it again, having been convinced that my grandparents had destroyed it and any other links with my father. Apparently she had also given them lots of things like the name tags from my wrist when I was born and my first baby bootees, but my nan had preferred to destroy all traces of my earliest days. It was not the first time that Eileen had told me things about my father and she had always told me I could ask her whatever I wished. But I had always felt uncomfortable thinking about him in any way; perhaps all a part of my childish desire to bury the slight puzzles and oddities of my life in a way that allowed me never to look at the truth. Now that my grandparents were gone, perhaps it was time to find the man who had sired me?

I honestly can’t remember exactly how I got in contact. I knew that his parents had lived almost opposite my grandparents’ home and so I probably just looked them up in the phone book. By chance he was living in his parents’ old home because his mother had recently been taken into care. So it was just coincidence that when I phoned the house he was there and he picked up the phone.

‘Hello, is that Gordon?’

‘Yes,’ he replied.

‘It’s Miranda here, your daughter’

‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I never ever
thought they’d told you who I was. I can’t believe that you’ve phoned me.’

In the conversation that followed he did pretty much all of the talking. He told me that he’d often wanted to contact me but hadn’t known if I would know who he was. He was happy that I called, very happy. He suggested that we meet and I agreed, purely because I was intrigued to find out what he was like. Even so, I was reserved and a little cautious because it all felt far too late in my life for this to be happening. The one thing that I was certain of is that I was not seeking somebody to replace my grandparents but I’d already decided before I made the call that we would have to meet. I simply needed to satisfy the curiosity about him that had been there for much of my life. As soon as I’d discovered in my childhood that his parents lived over the road I’d wondered if he or they ever thought about me or watched me out and about in the street. I had all these things in my head thinking: ‘Has he sat there and watched me grow up; have I ever spoken to him and not realised?’ I wondered if he had ever seen me out with my friends, or on nights when I might have been having a laugh and a drink in the pub. I would never have known if he was watching me because I would never have known who to look for, if that makes sense.

I finally met my father in a near-empty pub. He got us both a drink and we sat down together and chatted. Again, he did most of the talking because I didn’t really have any burning questions to ask him. I was just curious and wanted to draw a line under a few things that had always puzzled me. He, on the other hand, had lots that he wanted to say to me. I think he had a lot of guilt inside him because he seemed bursting
with enthusiasm to plead his case that he had really wanted to see me but had always been warned away.

‘You know I was told not to go anywhere near,’ he kept saying. ‘I made attempts to contact you but everything was shut down from your grandparents’ end. I kept being told they wanted zero contact, what could I do?’

I didn’t tell him at the time but I was thinking how weak, how very weak and feeble he sounded.

‘Why didn’t you argue back?’ I was thinking. ‘You say you wanted me to know you, but you never really tried at all. How could you have just stood back and let them defeat you like that; how could you be so incredibly weak?’

The only thing stopping me from speaking out was that I knew he had been very young at the time and had problems of his own. I had learned enough from Eileen to know that he had never really been suitable parent material and was always letting her down whilst they were together.

He told me of his travels to other countries where he had lived for much of his life and, over the course of a three-hour meeting he asked me repeatedly about my life and my career. I lied and told him that I worked as a beauty therapist, my stock reply for anyone who wanted to know how I earned my living. He kept on asking whether I thought I was a ‘pioneer’ or a ‘settler’: did I like to explore the world and avoid a nine-to-five existence, or was I happy to be normal and put down strong roots? I think he was proud to think of himself as a pioneer who travelled the world and didn’t live a dull and predictable life and wanted to know if I was a chip off the old block. I
so
wanted to tell him how unusual and non-nine-to-five my own life truly was, but I didn’t have the heart to shock
him. Instead I told him that yes, I loved exploring the world but ultimately I needed my own home, a stable base. He had no need to know that I was a busy and increasingly successful dominatrix –
that
knowledge could come later. We parted amicably enough and I agreed to meet him again. He was looking after his mother’s old house whilst she was in care and wanted me to go over and meet his wife and family. I gathered that he had a step-daughter, his wife’s daughter, whom he had helped to raise.

In due course I did meet his family and couldn’t help but think: ‘He’s had time to help raise another man’s daughter – but no time ever for his own.’

Even so, I asked him to visit my house. I decided that it was time for honesty to prevail and that I should tell him the truth about my dominatrix career. That meeting was possibly never destined to go well: he was a born-again Christian.

With my real father sitting in my house, I told him some of the tragic events that had overtaken me in the past few months. My grandparents’ death, my partner’s betrayal and the fact that my birth-mother would not now stop crying because she had been told I was a prostitute. It was, I suppose, a lot to take in at one time and I could see that he was shocked.

‘Of course, I’m not a prostitute but I do work in the sex industry,’ I said. I explained that things were a bit strained within what was left of my family environment because of this explosion of information coming out unexpectedly. I knew by then that he considered himself to be a born-again Christian with strong religious beliefs but I wasn’t quite prepared for his reaction.

‘Oh, I sense a great darkness around you, there are dark forces surrounding you,’ he intoned. ‘You have got choices in life and I see that you are going to the dark side.’

I could feel myself getting annoyed as he wombled on about ‘dark forces’ as though I was somehow in the grip of demonic possession. He seemed to be suggesting that he really should keep his distance because of the darkness around me. And I thought, ‘Well yeah, I am feeling a bit dark at the moment – probably because I just lost my grandfather, my partner, things aren’t really going too well in my family because of what the arsewipe told them and so, yeah, I may be coming across as a little bit pessimistic but, you know what, that’s not really surprising, is it?’

I couldn’t keep my darker thoughts about him out of my head any longer. I was thinking: ‘Fuck off, fuck off, you weirdo, right now back to Australia’. What I actually said to him was: ‘Screw you; who are you to judge me in any way. How dare you say things like that? Who the fuck are you to stand there, someone who hasn’t seen me in like 21 years, and you’re telling me that I am surrounded by dark forces? I’m not fucking interested!’

As you can probably tell, I was actually pretty annoyed by that stage. A bloody born-again Christian was the last thing I needed in my life right then!

‘How can you preach about fucking forgiveness as a Christian and then tell me this after you have not even been bothered with me for how many years? Fuck off.’

The resultant row was short, sharp and nasty with the upshot being that I told him exactly where he could stick his Christian beliefs and that once he’d done that he should never contact me again.

That’s been pretty much the last contact I ever had with my real father. He did write to me afterwards with what seemed to be an apology, saying that he had been affected by his mother’s illness and that it had been a shock to see me and learn of my work. ‘Things were said in the heat of the moment,’ he said, ‘but I would like to contact you again.’

I sent an email back saying: ‘Thank you for your apology; I can accept it but I can’t really forgive how you made me feel at what you must have known was the worst time of my life. So you are not going to meet me again. Please don’t contact me again. I’ve no interest in knowing you.’

I could accept that he probably had his own issues to cope with at the time we met but he was supposed to be the mature, responsible adult and he handled it all so badly. He said all the wrong things to me after he had years to think of all the right things to say.

‘I really don’t need somebody else putting me down right now,’ I thought. ‘The last thing I need is to feel rejected by somebody else in my life.’

We’ve never spoken since.

CHAPTER 24

SORRY GUYS… SIZE MATTERS

I
had bought the most expensive, luxury lingerie especially for the occasion and I knew that I was looking good. I was dressed only in a black bra and sheer black panties, standing by the bed in an anonymous hotel room and waiting for sex on demand.

Displaying himself naked in front of me was a handsome hunk of a man: tall, dark-haired, muscular, exceptionally well-endowed and sporting an erection fit to burst. I was feeling horny, excited, moist, and as nervous as a virgin schoolgirl on her first date. The reason for the butterflies flapping around in my tummy was not just the prospect of imminent intercourse with a male body most women would die for. It was the fact that this was no ordinary date and, until a few moments earlier in the hotel bar, I had never met the guy who was about to fuck me.