My name is Kim. I am 53 years old, recently divorced and living in London with my wonderful daughter. I am writing about my sexual adventures, growing up in the 1980s as a way of making sense of my past and celebrating a glorious time when I was young and carefree. Between 1987 and 1989, I had some of the most gloriously uninhibited sex of my life. After that, came serious relationships, career commitments and, eventually, marriage and parenthood.
In 1987, I had an incredibly passionate fling with a man named Mike. I was 22; he was 24. At the time, we were both regular gym goers. I had been a dancer and athlete in my teens. I was slim, flat-chested and in great physical shape, but often got passed over for my bustier friends. Then came Mike.
Mike looked a little like a pop star (think INXS' Michael Hutchence for a point of reference). He was dark-haired, pretty-eyed, muscular, volatile and unpredictable, and blessed with the largest penis I had ever laid eyes on (to this day, I have never seen one larger).
He had an on-off girlfriend and was separated from her when he and I started sleeping together. Me? I was single, had been for a while and was flattered by his attention and extremely turned on by everything about him: his eyes, his hair, the way he laughed, his prick...
I did things in the bedroom with Mike I had never done with any boy before. He called me his "Little Tomboy"; I nicknamed him "Double Dick", as his penis was so big. The first time I saw it soft I thought it was a trick and he was wearing a prosthetic. It was almost as thick as my wrist and uncircumcised with a great fleshy foreskin. Our intense, boundary-pushing relationship peaked shortly before Mike and I split up with the time he and I pissed on each other. It was my one and only experience of water sports.
First, though, I need to explain who we were and the world we came from. Mike and I were both raised in what newspapers in Britain in the '80s called "a broken home". Unenlightened, yes, but that's what they called kids with divorced parents. My Italian father left when I was very young and he pinballed in and out of my life, but it was my mother who raised me.
When I was 18 she married my stepfather. He was a good man, and as reliable as my father had been unreliable. His wife had left him and his daughter Lisa came to live with us. Technically, then, Lisa is my step-sister, but I only ever think of her a sister.
Mike lived with his mother and various half-siblings at different times. His family set-up was, shall we say, confused, and I believe that gave him an independent streak from a young age. He was bright, though. When we met he was a junior engineer at the Rolls-Royce plant in West London. But he was music-mad and wanted to be in a rock band.
Mike and his mother lived on the Racecourse Estate in a London suburb called Northolt, a few miles from Heathrow Airport. 'The Racecourse' was a council estate comprised of a maze of low-rise maisonettes. It wasn't a great place to live, but it wasn't as bad as some estates in London. I'd had a schoolfriend who lived there and spent some time on the estate before I met Mike. That was where I first saw the woman I later discovered was his on-off girlfriend, Rebecca.
I was on my friend's balcony when I saw this astonishing-looking girl with two guys standing around a clapped-out Ford Capri with its bonnet up. I was 18, 19, and Rebecca must have been the same. She looked like a Spanish gypsy, with this mass of messy, curly black hair, halfway down her back. She was barefoot, and didn't appear to be wearing much more than a pair of knickers under a baggy 'Frankie Says...' T-shirt. (Those shirts were
all
the rage in the early 80s.) Even from where I was standing I could see she had big boobs and wasn't wearing a bra. Facially, she reminded me of the girl singer in an 80s pop group called Deacon Blue; but years later I saw a film called Pushing Tin with Angelina Jolie, and Jolie's character also reminded me of Rebecca.
My sister Lisa knew a few people on the Racecourse, and always said 'Gypsy Bex' - as they called Rebecca on the estate - was never that good-looking, but I was struck by how raw and sexual she looked. She had these wild, dark eyes, a sharp chin and a big slash of a mouth. She always looked, as one of my male friends crudely put it "like she'd just sucked someone off." And I knew what he meant.
Rebecca was laughing and joking and smoking - over the car engine, would you believe? - with two guys whom I later discovered were her older brothers. Those two were fairly notorious in the area; both were very rough and very good-looking, and were supposedly brilliant at martial arts. One went to prison later after a pub fight.