I was working as a psychiatric nurse, in some place out in the country. The job had an alarming side, or two sides.

On the one hand, some of the patients would kill you if you gave them a chance. They were always looking for that chance, in a focussed way. You, the nurse, are thinking about other patients, about the hot nurse in the other ward, and so on. So you sometimes got close to getting killed, when they made their attempt.

There was a blind guy, for example, of immense strength, and he’d always know where you were. Unless you backtracked extremely quietly, to get out of range. Then he’d grab something like an armchair, raise it high and bring it down on the spot you’d just stepped silently back from. He could do that in one movement, terrifyingly fast, because he was, as I said, immensely strong.

On the other hand, Barbara, who was also a nurse, once spilled some of the medication she was issuing to patients onto her uniform, which was mostly polyester. And the polyester started to dissolve! I was desperate for a chance to see through her uniform – hey, I was seventeen years old – but somehow that wasn’t sexy. Not even when I put her under a tap, in case any of it got on her skin.

She was twenty, which I thought was an utterly insurmountable age gap, so I’d never set my sights on her. But later she and I were hanging out in my room, and I put on Dark Side of the Moon. When we got the opening piano chords of “Great Gig on the Sky”, she said, “That girl sounds like I do, when I’m fucking.” 

I was seventeen, as I said, and my sexual history was just four girls long at that time. It should have been longer because I was a pretty boy, not that I knew that. But I had a real fear of making an Unwanted Advance, so I often held back until I was certain, when in reality I’d been signalled so hard that the girl would decide that I must not be interested. I’d missed a lot of offers.

Anyway, I decided that might be an offer, so I put an arm round her, and she leaned in to me. We sat together, listening to music and pretending that was what we were focussed on. From that moment in this story (except for about five minutes of it), I have an erection.

When Clare Torry comes in and sings, Barbs kissed me, and I kissed her back. Then we were writhing around on the floor. Barbs undid my pants, kissed my cock, and then took it in her mouth. She was the first girl who’d done that, and it was incandescently pleasurable, of course, but also an enormous relief to me.

That is, I’d been in the company of feminist friends who talked a lot about cocks as if they were nasty things, a kind of horror that men inflicted on women. And because it was obvious that sexism and patriarchy were utterly unfair and unpleasant things, I’d started to think maybe they were right about that too. So as well as the sexual pleasure, Barbs also moved me emotionally, because of the acceptance of it: she must actually really like my cock!

If I’d told her all that, she’d have thought I was nuts, I was sure, so instead I just babbled about how wonderful she was. Then, when Clare Torry was winding down, I came and she swallowed. That was amazing to me too, because my come was a body product that I tended to think of negatively.

If there wasn’t a girl, and usually there wasn’t, then I’d splat it into tissue paper, and then flush it down the toilet. So it can’t be good.

This was the first time a girl had swallowed my come, taken it into herself, and it was the first time it occurred to me that my come is a sort of essence of me, and if the girl is fond of me then she may like my come, too.

Anyway, that was at the end of Great Gig in the Sky. We got off the floor and onto my bed, where I took my clothes off and then Barbs’s. And we breathed each other’s breath, except when I was kissing her tits, and eventually I said, “That was… amazing. But you didn’t sound at all like Clare Torry.”

Barbs frowned. “Oh, she’s the girl – Wailing girl? Well, I was sort of fucking you, but you weren’t fucking me. You want those noises, you need to fuck me.” 

So I put on Side 1 again. And learned that at seventeen my recovery time was: Speak to me (1′ 07″), Breathe in the air (2′ 50″), plus about a minute into “On the Run”.

But I managed to not come until she had, during “Great Gig”, and I can report that she told the truth. 

“Knowledge is good.”