Probation officer #15: Demure girl

Ana came back to the probation office the next day. She wore a dress, blue with white lace, and demure at the knees and neck. It would be her church dress. At first I thought it was in response to the fact that I’d told her, the day before, that of course I wanted to fuck her.

But she talked to me more directly than she had before. She listened, as far as I could tell, when I talked, and answered me when I asked her questions. She still didn’t look at me, but she looked at the floor at my feet instead of at the far side of the room. She was being respectful. The church dress was another sign.

Being angry with her the day before, by the river, seemed to have worked. I’df become an authority figure, or as close as I was going to get. She needed an authority figure just then, if she was going to stay out of prison, so I kept myself gruff and scary through most of that interview. 

Probation officer #14: Teasing the gods

I’d given Ana a special kind of power, when she realised that I was horny for her but wasn’t going to fuck her.

Not as long as she was my client was my caveat, but I don’t think  she understood that. She’d finally noticed that I existed, that I was only about her age, and that I seemed actually to be on her side, but she didn’t think about me much more than that.

And I wanted her, but wouldn’t take her. That made it safe for her to play a game she enjoyed. She teased the gods. She took risks, and defied luck or fate to smack her down. With me she’d found a an authority figure, a very small god, who wouldn’t smack her down.

Probation officer #12: Every man in his humour

Bogie sneak-checking Claude Rains's ass. You can avoid a world of trouble if you just wear a trench coat at all times.

Bogart sneak-checking Claude Rains’s ass. Tumescence not shown. Tip! You can avoid a world of embarrassment if you just wear a trench coat and never take it off.

Ana looked at me in disbelief. I seemed to be only reasonably stupid. But what I’d just said was amazingly stupid. I met her gaze, poker-faced. She considered, and eventually her mouth quirked. Then she fell forward, resting a hand on my thigh, laughing and catching her breath.

“Oh man. Aue, oh man. You.” She laughed some more. That was probably about other things I’d done or said. “Yeah, you’re my first probation officer. Are they all weird as you?”

“Probably,” I lied. “The others mostly hide it better.”

“Hey, what’s your name?”

“Jaime.” It wasn’t the first time I’d told her my name.

‘Okay Jaime.” It was the first time she’d used it. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

Probation officer #11: The stiffie apology

I said, “Christ, I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t be – . Anyway, there are things you need to tell me, about what’s going on with you and the cops.” 

Ana shook her head. 

So it seemed I’d lost whatever trust I’d managed to build up. Whatever she’d been close to telling me before she’d started crying, she wasn’t close now. “And there are things I need to tell you. No, I mean about cops. There are ways of talking to cops, and acting around them, that makes it much harder for them to arrest you. I wanted to talk about that. Yeah. I’m sorry.” 

Ana was still staring at me. She shook her head again. “I didn’t think you were even human. And it turns out you’re weird.”

I wondered how the hell she’d known I’d been thinking about spanking her when I’d got hard. I blushed. I could feel the heat in my face. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry.” 

“You’re still saying sorry. That’s so weird.” 

Probation officers

Probation officers

“Well. I’m really, really not supposed to get turned on by, well, clients.”

“You wanna fuck me?”

I hesitated. First because of course I wanted to fuck Ana. I knew it’d be a terrible idea, but the temptation was nearly irresistible.

Then I hesitated some more because if it really was an invitation she’d have said, “You wanna fuck?” She wasn’t inviting me: she was asking to see what I’d say.

“Yes, of course I do. Definitely. God yes, of course I do. And I can’t. Or I won’t, or whatever it is. Sorry. If I’d met you at a party or something, it’d be different. But I’m working, for you. I’m not supposed to be … Ah, I mean you’re a client.”

She breathed out. That was something like the right answer. “Okay, I’m a client and you’re a probation officer. And you’re weird.”  

Not probation officers.

Not probation officers.

“I’m an idiot, anyway.” I ought to have meant getting an erection was idiotic. But part of me thought that telling Ana I wouldn’t fuck her was stupid. Oh well. 

“No-one’s ever apologised to me for having a stiffie before.”

“I’m your first probation officer, then?”

Probation officer #10: still going on about tears and erections

I’ve left this story for a while, while I wrote about tears.

But there I was, a junior probation officer, 23 years old to my client Ana’s 18 years, and Ana was soaking my shirt with tears, dribble and all those other effluvia. I had my arm around her shoulders, and she turned her head this way and that while she wailed, as though she wanted to rub her nose on my buttons. We were parked by the river like a courting couple, because I was a very stupid 23 year old probation officer, and I’d thought we needed to talk privately.

Career-wise, I was a dead man, probably. This is a dead man's chest joke.

Career-wise, I was a dead man, probably. This is a dead man’s chest joke.

I’d been squeezing and relaxing Ana’s shoulders and talking soothing nonsense, as you do with a baby. I remembered the way women lightly smack the bottoms of babies when they hold them, which seems to be a way of reassuring them that everything is okay. That brought back the incredibly vivid fantasy I’d had only half an hour before, of what it would be like to put Ana over my knee, get those shorts down and spank her till she promised to behave.

Or, because fantasy is a slippery thing, it became about what it would be like to spank her until she was wriggling about, her light-brown little bottom tinged with red warmth, her thighs parted and her cunt petite but open and glazed with yearning, until she had my cock where we wanted it. 

I shook my head again, and thought intently about the ear structure of the African elephant, which usually stopped erections in their tracks. Ana was still crying into my shirt, though the volume had muted, and she seemed more relaxed. 

I could think again. I’d meant to talk to her about the police harassment, and that it was clearly intended to get her into jail. Eventually some judge was going to look at her charge sheet, and not notice the quality of what was on there: only the width. We’d come here to talk about that, about how to stop it. I more or less a professional again, and not just a young man with dom tendencies and an incredibly pretty and exasperating girl. I was proud of getting myself back under control, and that I’d managed to kill the erection before Ana could have noticed.

I said, because it was time to call her back to the world, “Ana? Ana, are you okay?”

Ana said nothing, and didn’t move. I waited, and her shoulder twitched. Her face was still pressed against me. She shook a little, and I expected more sobs. Eventually I realised she was laughing. Giggling. “Aue. Oh man.”

“What? Are you okay?”

I thought you'd like a picture of the new headquarters of the Chinese People's Daily.

I thought you’d like a picture of the new headquarters of the Chinese People’s Daily. No really. It is.

More giggles. She was still in my shirt, not looking at me. “You had a rere.”

“What?”

“Rere ure. You had a stiffie.” She said it in singsong, like a child’s taunt. “You got me out of the copshop, and you got a stiffie.”

“Oh.” I thought about other jobs I could do, after being fired from this one. “Oh.”

Probation officer #9

Ana said, “Well, it’s…” After a minute, maybe longer, she said, “It’s.”

I said, “Ana? It’s … what?”

And that was that. She made a honking noise and the tears welled and spilled freely down her face. She closed her eyes so tight it seemed to screw up her entire face, and she opened her mouth wide and wailed like a baby. 

I said, “Um,” and then, “um, Ana, hey…” 

Tears on my shirt

Tears in my shirt

So Ana turned around, still blind, and banged her head into my chest. Her tears kept coming, soaking through my shirt onto my skin. I’d already been as unprofessional as I could manage, so it was a bit late to be worried about the rules on touching my clients. I put my arm around her shoulders and rocked her gently. I said, “oh now, oh now, it’s okay to cry, you’re all right, you’re okay, oh now.”

And so on. Things you might say to a baby, where the words don’t really matter. I had no idea what to do. I’d started out being incredibly stupid. With Ana chastely wetting my shirt, I was none the wiser.

Probation officer #8

That’s the magic of shouting and saying “fuck” a lot. I had Ana’s attention. It was probably the first time. So I pulled out the wad of paper the desk sergeant had given me when I’d signed for her release. 

The five sheets of paper were her charge list. Not her criminal record, but a police list of all the things they’d ever charged her with, including charges that hadn’t gone to court, or where she’d been found not guilty. The charges, all of them, were just nonsense. She’d been arrested for taking a short-cut across a railway track. She’d been arrested for littering. She’d been arrested for obscene language. Someone really hated her. A cop, or someone with cop connections. 

I held these papers under Ana’s nose. “Look at this shit. No, look at it, Ana, bloody well look at it. These charges, they’re all bullshit things. It says here you got arrested for, what is it, for being unlawfully on premises. And the premises turn out to be the Sonsang plant. How do you get arrested for being in the front yard of a factory?”

She didn’t understand what I meant. I was angry, so I must be angry at her. So she tried to deflect by looking ashamed. “It was after hours. I had a friend worked there. I was looking for her.”

I doubted that that was the whole story, but I didn’t care. I’ve been a lot of places I didn’t have a clear legal right to be. And I hope so have you. I said, “This … stuff from the cops. You whole criminal record, it’s bullshit, isn’t it? You’ve never committed a real crime in your life. Have you?”

tearsShe sniffed.

“Or if you have, they never caught you. Look, Ana, I don’t know what’s going on here.   No-one gets arrested for this sort of thing. Except you. You do.”

Ana turned her head away. I caught the last bit of what she said: “… being Samoan in public.”

“Yeah, I thought that. But it’s too specific. It’s about you. There was that cop who pulled you in for swearing, because you didn’t fuck him.”

“Greg. Greg Curnow.” There was contempt and anger in her voice. 

“Yeah. Curnow’s an arsehole. But these arrests, this shit started back before you met Curnow. What’s going on, Ana? Is there some cop who hates your Dad, or what the fuck is it?”

Ana didn’t answer. But her eyes were glistening like deep brown rock-pools and they spilled over, tears running down her face. I hadn’t spanked her, but I’d made her cry.

Probation officer #7

I had no right to spank Ana, and it wasn’t my place even to be thinking about it. But I did have every right to be angry with her. She would be going back to court, with her brand new criminal offence. The charge was stupid, and no-one would have taken it to court if it wasn’t that a local cop felt annoyed because she hadn’t flirted with him. But the shoplifting made her arrest record another item longer. It put her back in danger of jail. Also, I’d told the judge she was very unlikely to reoffend, and she’d lasted six weeks. This stupid incident had  weakened my credibility with the judge, and that would affect other clients. 

So I needed to talk to her. The Probation Office was closed. I couldn’t talk at my place, or at her place. But the road to her place followed the river. I took another risk, and drove off the road at an old track I knew. Trucks went there to pick up shingle for the road, but it was a pretty spot if you drove on past the gravel piles, a little closer to the water.

Yeah, I'm relaxed. Why?

Yeah, I’m relaxed. Why?

I’d just had a sexual fantasy about her, and although I’d managed to suppress that set of thoughts, what I was doing now was stupid. I was so busy feeling righteous that it didn’t occur to me how going off-road and parking looked to her. I turned the van off and pulled the brake. Ana had one hand near the door handle. She was pretending to be relaxed but she was tensed and ready to run. I said, “Ana, for fuck’s sake, you’re going to listen to me.”

She decided the anger in my voice must mean I wasn’t going to try to fuck her. I was puzzled to see her relax when I shouted at her. I was being stupid.

I said, “Ana, you’re playing with the justice system like it’s, I don’t know, like it’s a cat. Like it’ll scratch your hand if you annoy it. But it can actually destroy you. It can fuck your life up. I mean, shop-lifting a fucking broach.”

“Hair clip. Like a butterfly.” 

“Whatever. You were being a fucking idiot. You’ve got to stop being a fucking idiot, right now.”

Probation officer #6

The call from the desk sergeant had come in after the Probation Office had closed. All the official Probation Service cars were out, so if i were going to collect Ana it’d have to be in my own transport. I had a British Bedford van, twice my age though better at starting in the morning.

The cops would laugh at me when I drove the van into their yard. If one of them was in the mood he could find a dozen reasons why it shouldn’t be allowed on the road, and why I should be charged, even arrested if they felt like it, for having driven it. So I’d have my prisoner, Ana, and I’d be stranded. It would be a good way to get me fired.

But it was a choice of taking that risk or leaving Ana locked up overnight. It turned out that the cops were happy enough to see me driving an old wreck. I’d given them a laugh. So they let me sign for Ana, then wait while a policewoman went and got her. This time she’d been charged with a real crime, more or less. She stolen a butterfly hair clip from a department store, and then run off.

When I led Ana out of the watchroom and into the police car park, she looked around for the car I’d have. She was incredulous when it turned to be the Bedford. She knew people with vehicles like that, and they weren’t involved in law enforcement.

So we sat side by side in our bucket seats until we were safely away from the police yard. She said, “thank you. I didn’t think anyone was coming to get me.” She smiled at me, for the first time ever. But I was angry with her.

Inappropriate.

Inappropriate.

In fact, I realised, I wanted to put Ana over my knee. I wanted to tell her she was a silly, self-destructive little brat, and tug down the little frayed jeans she wore. Then I’d smack her golden little bottom until she was kicking and crying. And then I might stroke her ass while she listened to me, though by the time I’d thought that far ahead, her fantasy self was naked, embarrassed and kind of excited.

That train of thought, and some of its ramifications, stayed in my mind for only about a second while I remembered that I was supposed to be some sort of professional. I shook my head and made a sound, “nnnh”, to clear that vision out. I wondered if she’d heard men make that sound before.

Anyway, the erection I was sporting had taken about a second to arrive, and it was taking longer to go away. I forced myself not to look to check if it was visible. 

Probation officer #5

So we had a slightly futile probation officer-client relationship. I’d try to talk to her, and she’d answer some of my questions as briefly as possible, looking at the floor on the far side of the room, in a tiny voice that involved almost no breath and no movement of her mouth. She had to repeat most things she said, because I never caught it the first time, but though that annoyed her she never spoke any louder.To keep things even, she didn’t listen to anything I said, either.

No, it's okay. I don't care what you were saying.

No, it’s okay. I don’t care what you were saying.

We went through the motions. I’d set her up with job interviews, and she’d turn up late to those interviews, sullen and uncooperative, and not get hired.

I’d give her brochures for job training, and she’d take them when I put them directly into her hand.

And she’d lose them.

I’d tell myself that this was her right, and that all she had to do, legally, was turn up once a week. I was – still am – fairly obsessive about keeping the coercive power of the state severely limited, so although I had some levers I could have used to make her take probation more seriously, I didn’t use them. You might think that a civil libertarian working as a probation officer is in the wrong job. Well, it was the right job, but it did make me almost permanently uncomfortable. 

Anyway, the shadow boxing between us had to end because I got a call from the local police station. At the time I didn’t realise just how deeply the local police despised me. But I was on the wrong side in all of my cases, and I didn’t like the cops enough to drink with them after the case, like the defence lawyers always did.

Even so, the desk sergeant sounded quite sympathetic, this one time. My client, Tiana Vainu’upo La’asaga, had been arrested. She was in one of their holding cells. If I wanted to come and get her, they’d release her into my custody. 

To be continued