Probation Officer #98: The navel and the cunt

I pushed Sa’afia so she tumbled back, falling on pillows, her eyes still on me. Air rushed out where she landed. She put her arms above her head and said, “whoo.” 

But if she stretches, the crease disappears.

But if she stretches, the crease disappears.

I said, “You didn’t want to hear about your belly button before. Too late to ask now. Anyway, it was that crease I liked. And it’s gone.” I kissed where it used to be.

Then I kissed lower. Sa’afia sighed, after a while, and rested her hand on the back of my head. She was wet, and she pushed her cunt into my face and wriggled until she was comfortable. She felt it was important that I had access. Tongue access, lip access, tip of my nose access.

Such a helpful girl.

A minute or two later she rubbed her inner thighs against the stubble on my face, as affection and because she liked the roughness.

The hand on the back of my head pressed down, and then toyed with my hair and then ceased to do anything coherent. She was breathing hard. 

If I pinched her nipples, I knew, she would come. She smelled ready, and there was an edge, a sense of precipice, to her breathing. She scratched her thighs on my face. I liked her thighs. I was in a good place. Then I considered the way she was using my face to hurt herself. I thought about that for a second. I didn’t pinch her nipples. 

Probation Officer #97: The navel

I sat up on Sa’afia’s bed, watching her swallow the last of her tea. I’d drunk mine, but she’d been talking about Ana’s father and the cops. It explained why the cops hated him, and that they were, as I’d thought, trying to get at him through his daughter. She  finished her tea and her story, and put the cup down. She said, at last, “So?”

Eventually I said, “Thank you. That’s incredibly helpful.”

“But what do you think?”

belly1“I think that crease in your tummy, just below your belly button, is just fucking beautiful. Incredibly beautiful. Amazing. Fuckable.”

Sa’afia gave me the full eye-roll. “Don’t make me wonder what I even see in you. What do you think about Ana’s tama?” 

I looked at the sheets between us.

“Y’know, I thought I was cynical but I’m actually shocked. I mean, the cops here, they can be fascists. No, they are fascists, literally. They’ll frame people if they think they’re guilty but they can’t prove it. They’ll bash up protestors just on principle. And they’ll beat up suspects if they can’t get a conviction, just to punish them. Like that.” 

Sa’afia nodded patiently. 

“But y’know, I didn’t really think the cops – . No, I don’t mean ‘cops’, and I don’t mean LA cops; I just mean, the guys in this precinct, that’s all. I didn’t think when they break the law it’d be over money.” 

“You think money’s trivial, don’t you?” 

“Oh, look, I know it’s not. I wouldn’t be a parole officer if they didn’t pay me.” Sa’afia glanced at me. She was thinking that I could do something that paid better. It was true, but she let it pass.“But yeah, the local cops, they’ll never be friends of mine. But I know them a bit. They’re fascists, but if you’d asked me, seriously, I’d have said they weren’t corrupt. I’m just surprised they threw away so much self-respect for so … little. That’s all.”

Sa’afia said, “Oh, bless.” She reached over and touched my mouth. “I hope you’re not so naive you’ll just get Ana in worse trouble now. She’s not going to be happy with me anyway, that I’ve told you about this.”

navel“Well, she won’t find out from me. Or the cops. And yeah, I can be naive, but I do know how to do some things. I won’t use this unless I know what I’m doing and what the outcome will be.”

Sa’afia looked at me. “Maybe. You might know some things. Maybe. So what were you saying about my belly button?”

Knickerless puzzle #3

Tom Stoppard once told an interviewer that he tended to get plot ideas from unusual things he saw that made him wonder how they had happened. He gave as an example the time he saw a man in a suburban street, with his face covered in shaving foam, chasing a goose.

Then he tried to work out the steps that must have led to that moment. There would have been a series of ordinary, mundane events and decisions that made sense at the time, that came together to make something out of the ordinary. 

Stairs are a thing, in bdsm, aren't they?

Stairs are a thing, in bdsm, aren’t they?

I’m not going to write a play about a knickerless woman running down stairs, or running upstairs with her ass covered. Because a girl flashing her ass at a room isn’t all that astonishing. She was a pretty girl, in an ordinary girl going to music school kind of way. Actually, she looked a lot like the young Pink. I mean the singer. I was glad I happened to look up when she passed.

But there are things I haven’t worked out. Where did she come from, the place where she wasn’t wearing any knickers? If she didn’t mind being knickerless, why did she hurry to get more clothes on? If she did mind, why did she skip down the side of the stairs nearest the audience? If she’d been on the other side of the stairs she’d have been next to a wall, and no-one would have noticed. 

So I haven’t worked out a backstory that fits. 

Always keep your disaster kit stocked: first aid, torches, laptop batteries, bikini, tinned food, matches, wine

Always keep your disaster kit stocked: first aid, torches, laptop batteries, bikini, tinned food, matches, wine

It’s like that girl who was out by the seaside during Hurricane Sandy, dancing happily in a bikini with an umbrella, in the middle of 100-mph winds. Newscasters were talking grimly about the disaster, and she got into the news footage, clearly having a whale of a time while the newscasters just pretended she wasn’t there. 

I still wonder what in the world was going on there, and I guess I’ll never know.

Same with this girl. Not important, but puzzling. 

Knickerless puzzle #2

The knickerless girl disappeared into the green room. It wasn’t the green room that the cast and orchestra were using, but the green room for a different auditorium. That night it was being used by the students working behind the bar. 

So I forgot about the knickerless girl and went back to the conversation about how much of the wanker the director was.

Kind of like this.

Kind of like this.

But a few minutes later the girl ran out of the green room and sprinted up the stairs as if she was later than the white rabbit. She’d got changed in those few minutes, into a little mini skirt with leggings underneath. Her prim maiden aunt, if she had one, wouldn’t have been remotely shocked by the view she provided. 

But I was shocked. Usually I can work out what is likely to have been happening, when people do unusual things. Even if I’m wrong, the story I work out makes some kind of sense. But I couldn’t come up with any story about the girl’s two stair dashes, one knickerless and one modest, that made any sense at all. 

 

Update on snakes: I went back this morning. The snake was out, probably hunting. I picked up the spade, and – very carefully – kept on digging up the old compost heap. When it comes back from hunting, it’ll have to find somewhere else to hide. I’ve warned the neighbours that it’s around, and possibly looking for a new home. 

The fear

I’m interrupting this story because I just hit an extremely fast, aggressive and venomous snake with a spade. That might sound like a foolhardy idea, but the fact is that it wasn’t an idea at all. I didn’t know the snake was there when I brought the spade down.

It was a very blunt spade, that I was using to collect soil from an old compost heap. I’m building up an area of level ground, which I’m going to hold in place with a retaining wall. So it was no sort of a weapon for dealing with something fast and angry, with enough venom to kill a couple of hundred of me with a single strike. It’s one of the dozen or so most dangerous animals in the world, and it was sleeping under grass clippings and dried leaves. It introduced itself, after I’d hit it, by hissing and starting to uncoil. 

I don’t know if you’ve ever wondered what you’d do, if you ever found yourself within a third of a metre of something deadly and angry. 

I had two thoughts. The first was that I could hit it again, harder, followed by the knowledge that I’d never be able to kill it before it had bitten me at least once. If you don’t get treated you die in about 20 minutes to half an hour. The second thought was the expression “mad as a cut snake.” I don’t know a lot about snakes, but I knew that these snakes in particular aren’t known for their forgiving natures. If I wasn’t able to kill it, I should retreat. 

I did. I said, “aaa-yah,” which is apparently a sound I make when I’m genuinely scared (I haven’t heard it before, I don’t think), and I backed away. Then I dropped the spade and ran. These things are aggressive, and they will pursue someone or something that’s pissed them off.

Luckily the ground, going uphill, isn’t the sort of ground that snakes like much. Lots of tree roots to drag themselves over. So I tripped over one of those tree roots, because I had slippery rubber gardening boots on. it struck at my boots, fortunately, so they were good enough for one thing.

And I got up at very high speed, and I got myself out of harm’s way. I haven’t been back to that part of the garden yet. I may have a glass of whisky. 

Knickerless puzzle #1

The reason I’ve been talking about knickers is that a few nights ago I was at a university music department, watching a student performance of Don Giovanni.

It wasn’t a bad evening, and no-one was actually terrible. But there were no great voices that night, or singing actors in the making. I don’t think anyone in that production is ever going to be a star. The only one I’d have actually thrown tomatoes at, though, if I’d had them, was the director. That night’s Don Giovanni was set in a brothel in fascist Italy, and in that context a hell of a lot of the events, and the characters’ motives, made no sense at all.

But something odd happened in the interval. I was with a woman who was telling me that she was going to kill the next director who up-dated a Mozart opera to Nazi Germany, mafia gangs in America, Thatcher’s Britain, or had the singers come on-stage in their everyday clothes because this opera is timeless, really, isn’t it? It’s about today, really? 

And I said, “Yeah. Or they set it in the time it was written, because the composer was really writing for his own time. Which means Victorian gear for most operas. God, I’m so bored with that. And Victorian dresses are probably the worst clothes women have ever worn in the history of humanity so far. And – ”

lessI stopped because there was movement overhead. A wide staircase led down into the floor we were on, and the girl I was with had taken her drink to the wall under the edge of the stairs. I was facing her. 

The movement that caught my eye turned out to be a girl skipping down the stairs in a sundress. I said, “if they like Victorian costumes so much…” But the dress flipped a bit, mid-skip, and flashed the undercurve of her bottom. A nice slim bottom, pale, apple-rounded. She was either wearing a thong, or nothing at all.

I continued, “they could dress them in – ” Another step and I caught a glimpse of labia. She was wearing nothing at all. She didn’t shave, or wax.

This took maybe three seconds, at the most. But it seemed to have gone on for a remarkably long time. The girl with me said, “dress them in what?”

I’d been going to say something about how Victorians liked to wear costumes from the Raj, and then there was the Japanese craze. So you could dress your cast like that. Anything to get away from brown and grey crinoline. I shook my head. “Nothing. Sorry, lost my train of thought.”

I know. What am I, fourteen? The story’s not quite over yet, though. 

Knickers!

Drawers

A pair of drawers

But the alternative words have their own problems. Drawers and bloomers are specific garments, and anyway they’ve passed into history. Drawers are fine for birching the maid in a Victorian role play, though a Victorian maid wouldn’t have worn them. Bloomers are for schoolgirl scenarios set no later than the 1960s.

“Underwear” reminds me of Calvin Klein, and I loathe everything about the man, the empire and his advertising.

And “underpants” isn’t a good word. I like to be as polymorphously perverse as I can, but in this context “underpants” makes me think of a woman wearing grubby grey y-fronts, and that’s not a sexy image. To me, I mean. I’m sure there’s a fan-club on the net somewhere for women wearing grubby y-fronts, and I’m not disputing their taste. 

That leaves “knickers”.

Mrs Slocombe's pussy jokes just wrote themselves. And they were crap at joke-writing.

Mrs Slocombe’s pussy jokes just wrote themselves. And they were crap at joke-writing.

It sounds like a word from an ancient British TV comedy, with a drunk live audience who go into hysterics every time someone said “pussy” or “bedpan”. And it rhymes with “vicars”, which is also English in an unsexy way.

But those associations are preserved in TV series that have reached Sirius and Alpha Centauri by now. And if the Sirians and Centaurians are putting up with “Are You Being Served” re-runs, then they’ve taken on the cultural burden. Their brave work allows me to forget that AYBS ever existed.

So “knickers” it is. Sexy women wear knickers, and I approve of that. Except when they don’t wear them and I approve even more.

Panties, for want of a better word

A single drawer

A single drawer

Maybe “panties” is an awkward word because it has an overtone of childishness. Panties, the word and not the item of clothing, seems to fit the world of little girls best, along with Hello Kitty and My Little Pony, and blaming the teddybear for finishing the milk.

Though My Little Pony is cool with me.

And so are littles, who create a submissive persona out of pink icing, sparkles and balloons and what you might call emotional lability, switching from tears to hand-clapping glee at the drop of a party hat. It can be exhausting but it’s also charming, and I’m always ready to help build a fort.

Still, “panties” isn’t an adult word. But the piece of clothing, on or off an adult woman, has huge sexual significance. Men know that if a woman wears them in front of them, there’s a good chance that sex is going to happen. If she takes them off or lets them be taken off (outside of ordinary domestic contexts), then sex is happening. There are fetishes about female underwear, but they don’t need a fetish. They’re the difference between sex and not-sex, and that means that they’re sexy in themselves. 

Never, ever, wear this tee-shirt if you want to get laid

Never, ever, wear this tee-shirt if you want to get laid

So it might be the little-girl overtones of the word “panties” that makes it sound a bit creepy to some women. I know a woman who says the word always reminds her of someone heavy breathing down a phone: “panties arrrfffffff uh-herck ahhhhh panties”, and so on.

It’s not as if the word actually gets in the way. In practice. If I’m doing something bdsm-y they don’t stay on long anyway, and I’m not likely to use any particular word. I just smack her arse and say, “get those off. Now.” That works fine.

Still, a better word wouldn’t be a bad thing. 

Panties

I’ve always thought the word “panties” is kind of awkward.

What hentai girls wear has to be called panties. But maybe that's part of the problem with the word.

What hentai girls wear has to be called panties. But maybe that’s part of the problem with the word.

If you’d asked me why it’s awkward, a few years ago, I’d have given a vaguely feminist answer: that it’s a word for the female equivalent of a male piece of clothing that shows that it’s the female version by adding a diminutive. The diminutive form means that the women’s item is more childish and more frivolous than the male equivalent. So I’d have questioned it for the same sort of reasons that I’d question the word “actress”. Or “poetess”.

But that’s not quite the problem, I think. 

Ah hell, I’m out of time again. Duties call. This blog is still alive, really, and so’s its writer. I’ll be back shortly.