In Which Dodie rediscovers Innocence; and Innocence acquires a new fame from past endeavours.
Dodie had been away from Wonderground for so long on her travels which had taken her as far as her stamina and savings allowed her. She had seen so many different countries and districts, and had met so many different people. And frequently made love to them. She'd accumulated possessions and had them stolen. She'd lain for days in foreign hospitals and frequently been so intoxicated or drugged up that she'd lost all knowledge and recollection of normal time and space. But in all her wanderings, one of the moments she'd treasured most was the occasion when she had sex with Innocence on the glacier. Such a perfect location! And Innocence such a mistress of the art of sex! Dodie had come and come and come again - her cries of passion bouncing off the mountains and threatening to set off avalanches. In fact, so impressed was she by her moment of passion that before the last drop of Innocence's semen dripped out of her vagina, she went to a tattooist to have the name Innocence embellished on her left buttock.
So when she heard that Innocence was living in Wonderground, Dodie headed to the address she'd been given expecting to meet her and also Mouse, who she'd heard was Innocence's current lover (The lucky girl!). She rang the doorbell and stood nervously in the porch in a padded nylon jacket and huge trainers. Otherwise she wore nothing at all, except a paraphernalia of studs and rings piercing her body and skin at various points, and with a head which unlike her crotch or underarms was completely shaved bare. At last, the door opened and she saw a slightly startled Innocence who was dressed in only a silk dressing gown.
"Hi!" Dodie announced herself as self-confidently as possible. "I'm back home!"
Innocence looked at Dodie a little blearily. Although it was mid-afternoon, she'd clearly just been asleep, and finding it a little difficult to focus her eyes. Dodie was relieved to find that she remembered her after all these months. Perhaps our lovemaking had been as memorable for her as it was for me, Dodie hoped.
"O hello, Dodie!" Innocence said with a warm and welcoming smile. "You better come in!"
Dodie's heart began beating uncontrollably as she followed the beautiful Innocence into the living room where she was introduced to Kedi and Chastity who were eating dinner and listening to a compact disc. Kedi was wearing nothing as usual and actually recognised Dodie from several years before. Chastity was wearing a very tight dress which fit as tight against her body as a dress could do, but was too short to cover her shaven vagina. Her hair was straight with a geometric cut and fell just short of her shoulders.
"So, where've you been?" asked Kedi, whose English had clearly improved a great deal over the years. "Mouse told me that you were travelling the world."
"As much of the world as I could manage," admitted Dodie, aware that her travels had been with substantially less purpose and direction than even that description gave. She was carrying a heavy rucksack on her back and a plastic bag, and was pleased to divest herself of these and leave them in the hallway. She was surprised by the relative luxury of the girls' home. She imagined that it would be much the same as the homes she used to live in, with overflowing ashtrays, scattered empty wine bottles and clothes scattered about. Here was somewhat considerable comfort, with tasteful fittings and sumptuous thick pile carpets and new simple and commodious furniture. There were stereos, computers, videos, microwaves and everything. This was clearly not a place of poverty. She felt a little nervous as she took off her padded jacket, under which she was wearing a sleeveless singlet that barely pretended to hide her tiny little breasts. The house didn't have the smell she'd become so accustomed to: of unflushed toilets, unscrubbed beer-stained linoleum and hashish-stained wallpaper.
However, her feeling of feeling an inferior outsider diminished as she began recounting her exploits across the continents, the people she'd met, the cultures she'd observed and her more amusing adventures. "It's a real fucking weird world out there!" she exclaimed, scratching the long hairs of her crotch. "It's all fucking weird shit, the lot of it." She then produced a half pound of best hashish, from which she crumbled a few grains into cigarette papers and disinterred cigarettes, and with this stimulus and several bottles of wine, the conversation continued for several more hours and Dodie didn't find herself exhausting her supply of anecdotes or opinions.
She discussed her sexual encounters with shepherds in the distant mountains of the equator and their curious predilection for making love to sheep, which took on almost a religious significance. She discussed the unsavoury political character of dictatorships that severely limited freedom of speech, despite appearing so liberal in other respects - particularly with regard to sex and drugs. She talked about the way she suffered sexual and racial taunts, and the more frequent times when her appearance had clashed with the attitudes of authority. She talked of the drugs she'd taken. The sex she'd had. The times she'd been beaten, had stuff stolen, intimately searched by border patrols, been sick. The religions, ideologies and wars she'd found out about. The so many ways she felt her horizons had been uneradicably altered by her experiences. "I wouldn't have had one slightest change to all that's happened to me!" she boasted, knowing this to be quite different to what she felt on innumerable occasions.
It was inevitable that Dodie and Innocence should end up fucking, which they started doing before Kedi or Chastity had retired to their own beds. The lovemaking was all that Dodie remembered and more. And in the midst of it Dodie confessed the strength of her affection for Innocence, how she never wanted to be parted from her, how she thought about her every day, how she had been so impressed as to get a tattoo to celebrate her love. She held Innocence close to her body - she didn't want an inch of space between them - and cried unaccustomed tears of joy at the thought of staying with her and making love with her again and again.
Innocence was clearly both flattered and a little put out by Dodie's protestations of love, but she appeared to have no objection to having Dodie share her bed for the conceivable future. She clearly enjoyed Dodie's devotion to her penis which she would hold and put again and again into her mouth or vagina, to stimulate it when it was not aroused and to satisfy it when it was. Dodie had the feeling that Innocence was carrying the weight of some unhappiness around with her, but she wasn't at all sure why.
At first she thought it was to do with Mouse's departure to follow her career, but she came to realise that their love had never been particularly exclusive. She wondered if the departure of Null, who had provided the means for the girls' luxury, might be the cause. But that didn't seem to be the full reason for her sadness, either. There was clearly something that Innocence wanted in life which just living with her sister and her sister's lover in comfort and relative luxury didn't fully satisfy. Dodie hoped that her arrival as Innocence's new lover might in some way bring more joy into Innocence's life, but that somehow didn't seem the whole solution.
Dodie's stated opinions for Innocence's dissatisfaction narrowed on her ambiguous status as a woman with a penis - and how her sexual identity was compromised and its socio-political and socio-economic significances thereof. She argued long and hard that what Innocence manifested was the unease of sexuality in a tightly sexual stereotyped society. Dodie's inner feelings, however, were that these stated reasons reflected more her own character and attitudes and probably not a great deal of Innocence's.
Innocence was quite excited when the film Forbidden Love, - as was entitled the film she'd been filmed in while she'd been living in Brook, - was finally released, and she was able to go with Dodie to see it in the cinema. It seemed to her that almost all the film footage that had been taken of her and certainly all her modest dialogue had been included in the final cut, and she appeared more prominently in the film cast listing than she'd expected. Indeed, a picture of her was even included in the poster, with her penis fully erect, which it had never been in the filming. Dodie was pleased for her lover, who seemed much more excited by her modest film success than she'd ever expected.
Innocence was even more thrilled when she got a phone call from a small circulation magazine, Fuck Films Today, asking to interview her to which she unhesitatingly agreed. The whole idea of fame clearly gave her considerable satisfaction, even though it was a magazine Dodie had never heard of, and neither had the other girls. Dodie bought a copy for Innocence to read, which was more difficult than she'd anticipated as most newsagents hadn't heard of the magazine either. It was a rather cheaply produced magazine on not particularly good quality paper, and featured long articles about obscure fuck films, with pictures of the stars. However, this didn't trouble Innocence who eagerly looked for photographs of the unlikely named Nancy Titbits, who was the woman who had phoned her up and was going to interview her.
Nancy looked just like her photographs when she appeared at Innocence's flat with Paul, the photographer, and all their recording and film equipment. She had short cropped hair, was almost painfully thin with a tiny nose in a round face, wearing a baggy tee-shirt emblazoned with the magazine's name and a very brief pair of shorts. The photographer wore very baggy and bedraggled trousers and jumper, and long hair that fell over his face and didn't appear to have been washed for several days.
