Ana said, “I’m having a lot of trouble sleeping.” She sat with one leg bent so that her foot was tucked in her lap. She stared at her bent knee, twitching the hem of her skirt. 

I said, “How come?”

I knew what her fingers were doing to her skirt, so I fixed my gaze on her throat. I could look at her eyes, but when I’d stared at them long enough for it to become odd, I’d glance at her collarbones. No lower. Delicate collarbones, gold brown.  

She said, “I can’t stop thinking. I try to sleep but I have thoughts. They won’t leave me alone.”

I said, still guilelessly, “what kind of thoughts?”

“Well,” Ana looked me in the eyes. “You know.”

I frowned. I didn’t see where this was going.

“I try to make myself too tired to think. I don’t wear, you know, pyjamas in bed. I touch myself. I stroke my, you know. I lie back and put my head under the pillow in case I make any noise. Do you think that’s wrong?” 

“Um, Ana, I don’t think you should…” I was going to say, “tell me this sort of thing”, but I stopped. I wasn’t sure I should tell a client not to tell me anything.

Maybe she should talk to me about masturbation if it troubled her. What if I was her only source of advice? Ana had watched while I hesitated. She said, “You do think it’s wrong!” She sounded stricken. 

“No, of course not. It’s not wrong at all. I didn’t mean that.” 

“You thought I shouldn’t talk to you about it!” 

“No, of course not. It’s nothing embarrassing,” I was blushing ferociously, of course. “Everybody wanks.” Ana looked at me. I said, “Even probation officers.” 

“Then I’m glad we can talk about it,” said Ana. “I trust you.” And while I took that in, she wriggled, then lifted her other leg, a process I refused to let myself watch, until she sat, cross-legged in her chair, facing me. She smiled triumphantly.

I’d also said that Ana was only just beginning to understand that she was beautiful. That was true, but it presents me as a man of the world, observing Ana benignly from some secure vantage point in my own life. And that was bullshit. At 23, I was five years older than Ana, but except in having some knowledge about how the institutions of power worked I was hardly any more worldly.

We were both faking sophistication as hard as we could. We each saw through the other, more or less, and neither of us saw through ourselves. One thing I had no idea of was that Ana could be attracted to me. Like her, I was good-looking and had little understanding that this was so.

This was lucky, because if I’d known I’d probably have been vain about it, and that would have cancelled out my advantage. Instead, I found that girls sometimes worked their way into my bed without much effort on my part, and while I liked that, it puzzled me. It didn’t seem to be something I had any control over.

When I tried to charm a girl into bed I seemed to be less successful than when I just let her make the running. At some time, she’d put her face near mine and wait. I’d understand that I should kiss her, and I’d take the lead from there. My unawareness could be irritating but it could also be endearing. Ana liked me better, and fancied me more, than I realised.

So the games she began made no sense to me. But they were highly entertaining, and sexually interesting, to her.  

I’ve said Ana had power. Basically, that was a stupid thing to say. The only powers she had derived from me. From my politics, such as they were, and my cock.

My determination never to use the institutional powers I had over her was something I applied to all my clients, and not just her. I never terminated anyone’s probation. I’d chase them if they didn’t show up to appointments, and try to convince them that probation was actually useful. It wasn’t a way to get respect, but I never felt that my preference for being respected was all that important. 

Still, she only had the choice of turning up or not, of talking to me or not, because I allowed it. If I had different politics, Ana’s experience of probation would have been much more like being in jail. So her freedom from the most restrictive forms of probation wasn’t really freedom. It was subject to my opinions. At least it wasn’t arbitrary, but it was patronage.

Similarly, I’d taught her to be less vulnerable to police harassment. I could only do that because I could move safely among police officers, and knew the things that they were drawn towards and the things that frustrated them. She got that small piece of knowledge and power from me. Still, at least I couldn’t take it back. She had that knowledge for good, and she’d seen that it worked.

The other power was that she was beautiful, and that I was in unwilling lust with her. But that wasn’t something she’d asked for, particularly. It didn’t do her much practical good. Perhaps, after my adolescent, tumescent stupidity in that van, I’d taken extra care to be actually useful. Over-compensation can have its uses.

But still, and still, we can be complicated.  

The probation officer was white, educated, professional and, though he’d never mentioned it, he had the power to end her probation. Terminating her probation would automatically put her in jail. In that state, it wouldn’t even have to go in front of a judge.

The girl was brown, she hadn’t finished school and she didn’t have a job, and she couldn’t put him in jail. But she could make him feel like an ugly boy, tongue-tied and scruffy, with a look. She was becoming more conscious of her beauty, and her power. 

There are things that men do, when power has swung that way, to reclaim it. Some men try to be charming and seductive so that they are wanted in return. Some men turn mean.

The probation officer didn’t have those options. The girl was his client and he was supposed to be a professional. Even if he felt his professionalism had all the tensile strength, just then, of a moth-eaten hotel bathrobe. At least he’d made it clear that he wasn’t going to fuck her even if she wanted him to. He’d hoped that meant that sex was out of the way, now.

Of course he could never be right about that. He was a young, sexually active man, and only a few years older than the girl. He wasn’t undesirable. And he’d made it clear that he was safe.

He’d given her several projects, things to do about employment and education. She worked on those projects, but she added another one. She set about the sexual torture of her probation officer. 

But the demure look was a one-off. After that she would arrive at the probation office wearing shorts or little skirts with holes and rips and frayed patches, Hems flapped ineffectually about her upper thighs. Her tops showed off her tummy, and the upper, or sometimes the lower, slopes of her breasts.

The probation officer did not believe that men had any right to tell women what to wear. Unless the woman wanted the man to choose her clothes for her. He hadn’t experienced having that kind of power, yet. But he had a different kind of power over her, non-consensual with the backing of the state, and he firmly believed that that kind of power should not be used to tell women how to dress. In any case, she looked both sexy and beautiful, and why shouldn’t she? If he had trouble concentrating because his client was a sexy girl, that was his problem.

The girl listened when he talked, and when he asked her questions she tried to answer relevantly and informatively. She enrolled in courses to finish her schooling, which he used to convince the judge not to jail her over the shoplifting charge.

And the next time the cops had tried to harass her she’d applied his instructions: stood her ground and not run, told them the information they were legally entitled to, and then said the conversation was over. So she was no fun, from a police point of view, and after a few repeats the cops gave up and left her alone.

I think you dropped your pen. No, don’t get up …

So the girl was inclined to take her probation officer’s advice. The probation officer was pushing her into getting a part-time job. 

Though all this was happening there was another current in that office. Sometimes she crossed her legs, very slowly. Sometimes she let her knees loll apart, giving him a calculatedly negligent vistas of golden-brown inner thigh. She’d look up and find him pink-faced, staring at a spot just above her hair.

Or she would wear a loosely buttoned blouse, and find a reason to turn, giving him a small, perfect brown breast firmly held in a white bra to think about. She dropped things on the floor and searched for them, slowly. 

So after leaving the Ana story for nearly forty posts, while I told the Svitlana story, and a few other distractions, we’re back in a probation office. In that office is a man in his early twenties, and his client, an 18 year old girl.

He fancies that girl. She knows it. It’s obvious because he still gets tongue-tied in her presence in ways that a probation officer shouldn’t be, and girls – even very beautiful girls who haven’t yet realised just how powerful they are – can read that.

But even if she’d missed that, she could hardly have missed the time he’d pulled over when he was driving her home after collecting her from the police holding cells. He’d meant to talk to her angrily, to break through her indifference about her growing, if petty, criminal record. He hadn’t meant to get the erection that, in the close quarters of a Bedford van, she could hardly fail to notice.

But though he’d been ready to resign and go do some job he wasn’t an idiot at, she’d started taking him seriously after that. She decided he was a human being. And she was intrigued by the fact that he so obviously wanted her, and yet was determined to do nothing about it. 

The first time she came to see him after the Van Erection Incident, she’d been demure, and listened to him with great, slightly disconcerting respect. He suspected her parents had had something to do with that.