Pisstory Pt. 03: Further on the Road

I'd been six days on the road on what I'd thought would be an odyssey of self-discovery, hitch-hiking round France visiting old friends, meeting new and interesting people and -- I hoped -- having lots of dirty and uncomplicated sex with willing, imaginative women. It had started so well. I'd renewed an old friendship with a guy I'd known four years before, had two nights of incredible sex with his sister, who'd carried a torch for me all that time, then found myself accidentally falling in love with her and being run out of town by her shotgun-wielding father when he discovered what we'd been doing. OK, so perhaps that last bit was an exaggeration, but it might not have been if I hadn't escaped first.

Forty-eight hours that changed my life. Alana and I were pulled together by her devotion to me and a shared obsession with each other's body fluids, losing our mutual virginity in the process. I was hit by 'le coup de foudre' -- the thunderbolt the French use as a metaphor for sudden, uncontrollable love -- and then it all turned to shit. Twenty-four hours later I was without a roof, standing by the side of a road with my thumb in the air, cursing the heavens and generally feeling sorry for myself. The heavens responded to my execrations by starting to rain.

"Thank you so much, God" I muttered as I pulled my coat around me. Then I realised that I'd been so absorbed in furious contemplation of my misfortunes that I'd been standing there for ten minutes without a single car having passed on the way to the highway, never mind stopping to offer me a lift. And as that bore down on me, a diesel-engined police Renault rumbled to a halt by my side.

"Military service?" the cop who rolled the window down said.

"Yeah." I might as well play the short-hair sympathy card. I had little else left.

"There's been a big crash on the highway just south of here. We've been putting out the diversion signs. Get in -- we'll give you a lift to where the traffic's coming off to follow the new route."

That was unexpectedly heartening from a member of the almost-universally despised Gendarmerie, and it even crossed my mind that it might be a trap. But if I refused it might go worse for me, and to tell the truth I was in such a foul mood that I didn't really care. At least they still thought I was a national serviceman.

I clambered into the car, which U-turned and took me back on the ring road to a spot where a steady stream of traffic was pouring down a minor route indicated by yellow signs. A single traffic officer stood there paying little attention to what was going on.

"There. You guys are doing a good job for our country. Keep those foreign sexual perverts out of our lives. Vive la France!" the police driver said, shaking my hand. His companion pressed a packet of cigarettes on me.

"Merci" I said, and attempted what I hoped was a decent imitation of a French army salute

My first lift was a lunatic test-driving a new Citroen van. At various points he would ask me me to hold the steering wheel steady while he made handwritten notes about the vehicle's performance.

"It'd be easier if we were on the autoroute instead of these bastard country roads, but I've got to do it anyway, so just yell if you see any sharp bends."

I was terrified, but at least it stopped me thinking about Alana.

And yet everything that happened I found myself wanting to tell her about. Even now, forty years later, I often interrupt a voice in my head which is trying to relate to her some odd, engaging, or moving story I've heard or been involved with and which I think would interest her.

We were together for only two days. How is that possible?

The van-driving lunatic eventually had mercy and set me down in some obscure village on the diversion route. It was a relief not to have to fear for my life, and by the time it happened I was ravenously hungry, not having eaten since the previous lunchtime -- and even then only a 'croque monsieur' toasted sandwich at Henri's bar. I ordered a steak at a restaurant in the town square, having first ascertained that my remaining francs would cover the bill. The wine automatically provided with the food helped me relax and be thoughtful, and I started considering exactly what had happened with Alana.

There was no doubt that I loved her. If she'd spent four years developing her passion for me, I told myself that the two days over which this had actually been realised was both an indication of my own emotional illiteracy, and a glorious revelation of what was actually possible when two right people not only met each other but acted on their instincts -- unconventional, distasteful to the common run of people, and splendidly dirty as these might be. Alana was a revelation to me. Surely, at some stage in the not-too-distant future we could be together again. It wasn't unreasonable.

This was the bargaining stage of bereavement.

When I left the restaurant I realised the fundamental flaw in having been dropped in a backwater: there was no way of telling which vehicles on the road outside were trying to get to the southbound highway, and less incentive in a narrow local lane to pull over to pick up an increasingly dishevelled-looking hitch-hiker, military haircut or not.

I ended up following the diversion signs myself until I got to the N162 again. Two more rides took me to Angers.

By this stage of the afternoon the light was rapidly failing. It had stopped raining, and in the newly-cleared sky the sun was attempting to compensate for an overcast day by setting in a bright orange ball, which reflected, dazzlingly in places, off the damp surface of the road. Early evening rush-hour had begun, and there was a steady stream of passing cars, most of whose drivers had no interest in a solitary hitcher who looked as though he might just have escaped from an institution.

Then at a set of traffic lights one of them leaned across his passenger seat and wound down the window.

"Get in" he said. I didn't need to be told twice.

The lights changed and we moved off. The usual question was asked.

"No" I said "I'm English. I'm visiting people I know in France and don't have much money so I'm hitch-hiking."

He reached his right hand across and shook mine.

"I was a prisoner of war. The English liberated me. As far as I'm concerned you're my friend, and if I can help you in any way I will."

For some reason I found this incredibly moving. The Second World War had been over for about 35 years now, but I knew what a huge impact it had made on my parents' generation. He was perhaps a little older than my father, but it wasn't entirely out of the question that Dad had been one of the British troops who'd freed him and his comrades from their POW camp after D-Day.

"My father was a soldier too" I said.

His name was Georges, he lived the other side of the city centre, was a widower and shared a house with his grown-up daughter -- unmarried, independently-minded, "but not so as she'd abandon her old pa in his dotage." Hearing that I was hoping to get to Blois that night made up his mind.

"Impossible. Even if the weather weren't so crappy it'd take hours. You can stay at mine tonight, have a meal and sleep on the couch. It's perfectly comfortable."

He smiled and waved his hand in the air in a kind of 'you know what I mean' gesture.

"I've slept there from time to time when I've had a drink too many. In the morning I'll drive you to a good place for lifts. You look like you could do with a decent steak and a good night's sleep. Come on!"

I was too tired to argue or do that English thing where you pretend to refuse kindness because it's really too much to expect, old chap, and I'll be all right, honestly. His gratitude to my Dad's generation of Englishmen convinced me he was genuine, and he was right, I desperately needed to sleep properly. I didn't often get to eat steak twice in one day either.

Also, I needed to talk to somebody. Georges' fatherly or grandfatherly demeanour invited confidences, so when he asked me how I'd come to be there I told him.

Reality as it happens is messy, interrupted, patchy, coloured by all manner of previous half-remembered experiences and misunderstandings, prejudices and things you simply don't know. The way I told the story of myself and Alana was that we had first met when we were 16, she had fallen in love with me straight away, we'd lost touch, then I'd found her again and realised exactly what I'd been missing and sworn undying love for her. Whereupon her parents, for whatever reason (I hinted it might be because they didn't like English people) had forbidden her from seeing me and driven me off with threats of violence. That was a much tidier version than the one I was still trying to put together in my head and my notebook, it skated over the timescales, and it made no mention of golden showers, stained underwear, or any other messy details which might have got in the way of a sympathetic reception.

Georges nodded sagely as he steered the car.

"There used to be a lot of stories like that when I was a young man" he said. "In some ways they're a cliché, but then again, a cliché is often just a truism. Did you want to marry your girl?"

That threw me. We'd never had time even to discuss such a thing. I had to admit that to Georges.

"Well, for me the test of whether she's worth pursuing is whether or not you think you could live with her forever. It's not infallible, but it's a good general rule. I lost my wife ten years ago, and I'll never remarry. I keep advising my daughter to find someone she feels that way about, but I know you can't force it. Ah, here we are. Home."

It was a small, unpretentious house on the outskirts of the city, square, grey-painted, set in a small walled garden with some kind of fruit tree in it. Georges showed me briefly round the neat ground floor, none of its furniture less than twenty years old, all immaculately cared for.

"Marielle keeps me tidy. She starts and finishes work late, but she's always got time to keep things clean. She's a good girl."

He led me to the kitchen and served me a large tumbler of rough red wine.

"This is what I suggest" he said later, presenting me with a plate of fried steak, chips and green beans. "We'll eat, then I'll buy you a beer in the corner bar. I'm playing cards with some of my old army buddies, and they'll be glad to meet the son of an English soldier who was in the War. God Save The Queen!"

I was exhausted, but the food and the wine and my host's general enthusiasm worked together to revive me. Georges dragged a heavy old sleeping bag out of a storage cupboard and threw it onto the sofa in his living room. Then we went out for a drink.

It literally was a bar on the corner of his street. It was quiet, and for the whole evening hardly anybody came in except me, Georges, and his three friends Armand, Louis, and Xavier, all of them the same age as him and all, as military veterans, happy to shake the hand of a young descendant of old allies. They drank anisette and insisted on paying for all my drinks. I stuck to beer. They also all smoked copiously, as they played a peculiarly complicated-looking card game whose rules I had no idea about and no inclination, in my addled state, to learn.

They occasionally talked about politics, and it swiftly became apparent that they were all socialists, disparaging the conservative government of President Giscard d'Estaing. When I mentioned that the recent socialist government in Britain hadn't exactly been a major success, they looked confused, but deferred to my local knowledge.

I'd noticed that whenever he went to the toilet Georges made a point of stopping at the bar to talk to the woman managing it, a dark-haired thirtysomething with loose black curls, largeish breasts in a low-cut black silk top, wearing a pencil skirt that stretched over the contours of her pear-shaped bottom without leaving much room for speculation. She seemed to be chainsmoking most of the time. As I got drunker I began to focus on her cleavage, her quick, black eyes, and her small mouth made up with a dark lipstick that smeared over each successive Disque Bleu as she smoked it.

I wondered if she was Georges' mistress. I knew enough about stereotypes of French men not to rule that out, and at the same time felt slightly ashamed for feeling attracted to the woman myself.

At a certain point in the evening I'd had enough beer to insist, when the next round came up, on paying for it myself. I swayed to the zinc counter, greeted "Ma'moiselle", ordered the drinks, and reached in my pocket for the money. The pack of cigarettes the police officer had given me earlier came out before my wallet.

"Want a cig?" I said to the barmaid, feeling a bit silly. I hadn't smoked since I was about 14. It had to be the worst chat-up line possible.

She took one.

"Can I buy you a drink?" I had no idea why I was doing this. Until about two hours previously I would have been horrified at the thought that my thwarted true love for Alana would enable me to behave like this, but as William Shakespeare and my first lover Emma had concurred two years before, drink provokes lechery.

"I'll have a coffee, thanks." She slid the remainder of the matchbook she'd just used across to me.

When we left the bar a couple of drinks later, Georges went across and spoke to the barmaid. I imagined he was apologising for my behaviour, on the grounds that I was drunk, or disappointed in love, or English, or whatever. She seemed a good deal too cheerful in response for any of these notions, but again I wondered if she and Georges were not lovers and just arranging their next assignation.

"My daughter Marielle" Georges said as we walked out of the door. "Thought I'd better warn her you'll be sleeping on the couch when she gets home. I'm completely wiped out and I don't want her calling the cops to report an intruder!"

I'd been sound asleep in the ancient sleeping bag, which both felt and smelt like it might have dated from Georges' time in the prisoner of war camp, when I heard movement close by and snapped awake.

There were no shutters on the windows of the living room where I lay. Marielle stood in front of me backlit by the moon.

"You're awake?" she said. "Do you want something to drink?"

"Please."

I was still half drunk, but beginning to dehydrate. A glass of water would have been a good idea.

She headed off to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. I didn't know that more booze was a good idea, but I was happy to go with the flow. I moved my feet up the sofa where I'd been lying and she sat down. The smell of her sweat began to arouse me. I tried to fight down the sensation as I first sipped, then gulped at the wine, telling myself Alana was still out there, still wanting me, that I had to find a way back to her, not betray her. Then I gave up on that too.

Marielle was a good ten years older than me, physically unlike either of the girls I'd previously had sex with, unwashed and smelling of stale tobacco. My cock rose, disgracefully, to her presence.

"Damn!" she said, leaning forward and putting her glass down on the floor. She untucked her blouse from her skirt, and before I could take in what she was doing, began unbuttoning it.

"Help me" she said, as she pulled her arms out of the garment and dropped it beside her. She indicated the fastening of her bra.

"This bastard thing's suffocating me. Unfasten it."

'I must be dreaming' I thought, 'So it's OK.'

I unhooked the strap and slid both hands round to cup her tits. They were much larger than either Emma's or Alana's. Her nipples were large, hard, and erect.

"Wait a minute" she said, turning her face to me. "Doesn't a girl get a kiss before she gets fucked?"

Her breath was smoky with black tobacco, sour with the wine. Her tongue felt wide and languorous compared to my other girls' quick little ones. I started imagining what it would feel like moving slowly round the tip of my cock.

I moved my right hand down to her hip and unzipped her skirt, amazed to be able to do so in one clean movement. She wriggled out of it. I moved my hand up the inside of her thigh and rested it on the crotch of her high-legged black lace knickers. There was no resistance, and the fabric was already hot and damp.

"One moment" said Marielle, picking up her glass and draining it in one, "I need to piss."

Before I could censor myself I heard my voice say "Don't dry yourself, then."

She looked back at me as she stood, eyebrows arched, naked except for the soaked black pants.

"It's like that is it? Don't worry. I'll save you some."

She moved quickly to the door, left it open as she turned on the light in the downstairs bathroom, left that open too. I unzipped the sleeping bag and gripped my cock hard, wanking myself slowly as I listened to her pissing.

The light went off. She reappeared in the doorway, moonlit, stark naked now, her knickers dangling from her hand. Her tits were pale and firm. She had a thick black bush between her legs. The smells of sweat, cunt and piss preceded her.

I had the sleeping bag fully unzipped by now and was masturbating openly.

"Don't cum too soon" she said. "I want your spunk in me. Here -- a present, to remember me by."

She dropped the knickers on my chest, climbed onto the couch, and straddled my face. I let go of my shaft for fear of shooting off there and then. The smell of her cunt was dark and earthy, little beads of piss clung onto her pubic hair, she lowered herself onto my mouth.

A couple of years later I saw in an art journal a high-quality reproduction of Gustave Courbet's painting 'The Origin of the World', which had just been acquired by the Orsay Museum. It's simply a vivid, energetically executed, close-up portrait of a vulva -- possibly that of one of Courbet's mistresses -- surrounded by a lush forest of dark hair. It instantly became one of my favourite works, taking me straight back to the near-choking scent of Marielle's cunt and armpits, the peaty tang of urine that I licked from inside her cunt lips, the sudden jet of hot, strong piss that she squirted across my tongue and down my throat.

"Lick me!" she ordered as the pulse of her urine dribbled to a stop. I found her swollen clit, held it lightly between my teeth, and began running my tongue back and forth across it. Through the veil of pubic hair I could see her above me, watching intently as I worked on her and she squeezed and tugged at her nipples as though trying to twist them off. Her juices soaked my face. Then she came, without warning, a quick tide of her ejaculate spurting into my astonished mouth.

"Now it's your turn to cum in me" she said, turning round on the sofa so that her head was resting in the arm and her arse stuck into the air. "From behind."

The fact that her father was only a few feet from us didn't seem to have bothered her.

"Oh, he sleeps like a dead man" she said when I mentioned it. "Now, your cock in my cunt -- fast!"

Moonlight is great mood lighting for dirty sex. Her damp cunt glistened, and her lips seemed somehow to stretch out of the shadows each time I pulled my prick half out of her before thrusting it back in as hard as I could. She smelt indescribably filthy, a stimulant only added to by the wetness I'd smeared across her buttocks and the sight of the dark hole of her arse between them. As I started to cum I pushed my entire right middle finger into it. I could feel her wettening again, then my cock burst and pumped blast after blast of hot spunk into her.

It was almost as though I couldn't stop cumming. There must have been six or seven spasms before she said "Fuck me in the mouth" and I managed to get out of her cunt, now dripping with my sperm and her own cum, and between her other lips without, I hoped, splashing the upholstery of the couch.