Читать книгу Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play - Mark Brendon - Страница 23

I HAD—IN THE COURSE of a normal vanilla life—enjoyed just eight threesomes. In three of these, I had been one of two men with a girl. In the other five, I had been with two women. Oh, and there was a strange evening at my university where three female students asked their boyfriends—of whom I was one—to assist at a competition to establish which of them could come fastest. This led to inevitable protests that we males might have influenced the result, and so to exchanges of partners for non-penetrative sex.

Only one of those threesomes had been with people who thought of themselves as swingers.

I had also attended two wholesale orgies—one in Paris, when a student, and one more recently in Wimbledon, as the guest of an old friend. I was thirty-five, and Georgette had taken me along to observe. We separated at the door and went our own ways. I had sex with five women that night and fell passionately in love with each of them in turn. Three of them subsequently became friends and lovers.

Soon afterwards, however, I was in a long-term relationship, and—for all the interest that the experience had awoken in me—my swinging career was cut short.

Now, however, I was 47, divorced, and resuming where I had left off.

Our first swingers’ party was in London’s Docklands.

On the journey from the West Country, Lisa explained to me how swingers’ parties work. They are, it seemed, a cross between the disco parties of my teenage years and the drinks parties and receptions of adulthood.

As at drinks parties, swingers meet—singly or in couples—form short-lived groups which absorb others, fragment and reform, and chatter a lot about the weather, sport, their sex lives, the cost of living, their possessions, their children and the government.

As at the teenage party, where communication is generally limited to hair patting, sneering and preening followed by a bit of mutual gut wriggling, the intention of the whole business is manifest if largely unstated. At teenage parties the dance floor slowly empties as couple after couple retires into dark corners to slobber over one another, and to fondle one another’s crevices. Here too, couple after couple will drift off into the playrooms, remove their clothes and ‘play’.

‘Generally, you play with one another,’ explained Lisa, ‘and then others come and join you, or people playing on the bed or mattress beside you begin touching you and checking out your response. Maybe you like them and swap with them, or play as a foursome for a while. So, say you’ve got a girl sitting on a guy’s cock and the other girl’s sitting on his face and sucking the other guy or whatever. And then another couple is playing nearby, and one of you reaches out to stroke her or kiss him, and so it goes on…’

But few swingers spend an entire evening in the thick of the action. ‘You need a break—food, drink, a piss, even just a rest—so you go off into the social rooms again. And that’s the second way of meeting people you play with. You’re there—naked or just dressed in underwear or something—and you meet some people and like them, and one of you will say, “Shall we go and play?” so you all pile back in together and the whole thing starts all over again.

‘Of course, you may have no interest in the others playing around you. That’s cool,’ Lisa shrugged, ‘you just play with one another. Other people come along; you just shake your head, say “No, thanks.’”

Most couples, she told me—again as at drinks parties—attend as couples and won’t be separated. ‘Some couples will just stick together for the first hour or so then split up, just coming back from time to time to check that the other one’s OK…’

In many ways, then, the swingers’ party seemed to me to resemble the more conventional sort of ball, with fucking at last taking its rightful throne from that unconvincing pretender, dance. The chatter, the introductions, the proposals accepted or rejected, the ‘excuse me’s’, the set-piece communal dances, the timorous ‘wallflowers’—even the conga—all find their echoes in the modern orgy.

Lisa, a Georgette Heyer fan, liked this allusion. ‘Yeah. Quite fancy the idea of a fuck-card attached to my wrist: “May I have the honour of the 10.30 sixty-nine, or the midnight slow fuck?” “La, sir! But we barely know each other! Perhaps a well-lit blow-job would be more appropriate…” But yeah, basically, you’ve got the idea.’