At home the next day I made a list of all the things I would need to buy in order to make the film. I started with the video equipment, searching the net to find the best deals I could get. I logged onto Which? and checked their reviews of audio-visual recording equipment, and spoke to a couple of experts in shops, all to make sure the equipment I bought would be the best of the best.
Video cameras x 6. I already had my parent's expensive camcorder, and Anna had one as well, we would only need four others. These cost £400 each though.
20 multipacks of recording tape. 80 tapes in all, for over 120 hours of material. (£80)
Audio recording equipment, including lapel mics, three boom mics, and cables to track these back to the camcorder. (£500)
Brackets for wall mounting. (£50)
Video editing software. (£99)
Standing lights, scented candles, etc. (£200+)
Total price: at least £2489
This was going to be more expensive than I bargained for; how was I going to afford all this? I decided to worry about that later. I would find the money. Even if it meant taking a loan and then prostituting myself to get the money back. That last thought sparked a whole other fantasy that I had to curtail in order to complete the other lists.
Next came the list of all the sexier things we would need. All the lubricants, condoms and sex toys, not to mention the porn we might watch for 'inspiration.'
Condoms. (Box of 48) £15
Lubricant (5 tubes) £10
Sex Toys:
3 Dildos of varying sizes. £20
3 Vibrators. A Rampant Rabbit, a sleek metallic bullet, and a long thin flexible one. £50
Anal beads. £10
3 Butt plugs £20
3 Cock rings £10
A strap-on harness and dildo. £50
A two way dildo for lesbian play. £40
'How to' sex books for men and women. £50
A selection of porn movies. £50
Total Price: £325
The longer I spent browsing the thousands of products on the internet, the more worked up I became. I read reviews and customer feedback, endlessly amazed by the breadth of products available. They all looked good too. After a week of browsing, I placed the order, and sat back to await the delivery, keeping my fingers crossed that my parents wouldn't open the package when it arrived. They didn't, and I spent a glorious evening examining them in my room.
The final list was for all the things I would need to do before August to ensure we would all be ready to make the movie when the time came. This included such practicalities as going on the pill, and making sure Anna and Natalie did too, lingerie shopping, purchasing train tickets, scouting a wooded location for the outdoor sex scenes, and, last but not least, getting a job to afford it all!
The first of these were achieved with minimal fuss. A trip to the doctors for each of us, followed by a group trip to La Senza. The train tickets I bought online, and handed to everyone personally to make sure they knew this was really going to happen.
I asked John and Owen to do the scouting, and received an email a few days later with pictures of their location half an hour walk from their house, at the bottom of a ravine which had once been dynamited and was now disused and difficult to get to. Perfect.
All that was left was getting a job. I distributed my CV, phoned around shops, and asked my parents if they had any contacts. I came home each day with sore feet, desperate for anything anyone would give me. In the end my dreams came true and I was offered a full-time position in a bookshop, to begin immediately once I finished my A-Levels in June. I did the maths in my head: nine weeks of fulltime work, paying £5.05 an hour, would be over £1700 in total. Added to my £2000 of savings, that gave me over £3500 to spend on equipment, which would be just about enough. Now I had to wait.
The summer flew by. I managed to find time in between masturbating to revise, and felt I had done well enough in my exams. Every day from then on I worked in the bookshop, finding it more satisfying than I imagined. Even the sore feet were proof of a job well done. From day one my new colleagues made me feel right at home. I found there was no better way to great a colleague in the morning than by asking what they had read the night before, or what their favourite books were. Shopwork was all about teamwork: whereas in an office everyone works in their own independent silo with their own desk and their own computer, in the bookshop we shared a working environment and could see everything each other did. But rather than creating an atomised, Big Brother Is Watching You atmosphere, it broke down that fear of failure and enabled us to help each other. I've had many jobs since and, that bookshop remains the best of the lot.
Bookselling also provided various opportunities to licentiousness. I invented games where I would act innocent and toy with the purvey old men who came in to ogle the erotic photography books. On one occasion a young man came in and asked if we had any copies of the Karma Sutra. When I showed him where to find it he grabbed it from my hand and nearly ran to the till to purchase it with a giant smile plastered across his face. I managed to offer a sly 'enjoy your purchase' as I gave him the receipt. No doubt he was off to try it all out, and that thought left me wet for the entire day.
Most of my time though I worked in the fiction section where, in-between helping customers purchase the latest celebrity-penned work of barely disguised biography, I found ways to sneak surreptitious readings of erotic classics. They were all there and I particularly loved Anais Nin's Delta of Venus, and Leopold von Sacher-Mach's Venus in Furs. But I read them all: Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and Tropic of Capricorn, John Cleland's Fanny Hill, The Story of O, and a couple of books by the Marquis de Sade.
Added to these, there was a bay full of Black Lace erotic novellas to browse, with all sorts of sexy adventures to work my way through. There was one story about a young secretary being forced to have sex with three union bosses at the same time in order to reach a settlement and avert strike action. It ended with the revelation that this had been the imagination of the secretary as she sat in the real, and very boring, union discussions. That one really turned me on. I felt I knew exactly what the narrator was feeling as she fantasised. I would often drift off into such a fantasy while shelving, only to be disturbed by a customer and blush, struggling to regain my composure while I directed them to the right section.
In the health section I even found books about women's sexual fantasies, which I read in quick snippets, while shelving. God, they were filthy! I was both delighted and impressed with the scope of fantasies by those of my gender. I was positively vanilla in comparison to some of them! I found myself staring at the women who purchased the books, trying to discern what wonderfully elicit thoughts went through their heads while they played with themselves or their partners. They were usually confident types, smartly dressed and well presented, who looked you in the eye as they handed over the books, daring you to show any sort of reaction. I was enthralled by them. I wanted to tell them that I loved those books too, and suggest another title they might enjoy, but couldn't bring myself to do so. I had to satisfy myself with fantasising that I caught them masturbating in the shop toilets, and had to help them out.
In this way the weeks passed quickly. Sometimes at night Ben and I would tease each other with skimpy clothes or challenge how far we would go in the movie. I remained worried about what would happen between us, and what that might mean in the future. Sometimes it kept me up at night and I'd trudge off to work with barely an hours sleep behind me.
Ben was a great big brother, always protective and friendly towards me, always willing to give me time if I needed it. I was terrified that this movie might change that. My fears were those of any girl about to lose her virginity with someone: what if, once we'd had sex, he lost respect for me and that closeness was broken beyond repair? If that happened with John, or even Owen, I could probably have coped. Natalie too. But what I would do if I lost my friendship with Anna or Ben I had no idea. I wanted to make each of them happy, though. I wanted to use my whole body to raise him to the heavens and then bring him back down, to make those fantasies of his come true, but when it came to the practicalities my skin turned cold. What I needed was to talk to him about it, to creep downstairs at night and work through the problem together. But I couldn't bring myself to do so.
And so the insomnia dragged on.
Anna and Natalie grew ever more friendly. I suspected that my controlling attitude to the movie's development had made them natural bedfellows and that they had started to share things with each other rather than with me. But that was okay. It had to be that way. I had removed myself into a fantasy world, and didn't want anything else to break in. When they stayed over I made it clear I didn't want any group masturbation, because I wanted it to be extra special come the summer, and when they probed for answers to the movie plot, I refused to budge. I was still writing the actual script, and it was proving difficult. I had a composite image in my head, complete with sights and sounds and squelching smells and tastes and touches. It was lit not by real light but the power of my imagination, and depended not on the independent input of five actors, but the unreasoning compliance of fictional characters. When I tried to put it down on paper I couldn't rectify these dichotomies. It was as though my imagination worked in luminescent hues, but I could only paint in watercolour. What I put on paper was but a pale reflection of what was in my mind.
What I was suffering, I now realise, were the old-as-time worries of the artist, the dark night of the soul. In my youthful arrogance I'd assumed I might be impervious to such problems and found the reality rather disappointing. Had it not been for the camaraderie of fellow writers at the bookshop, I might have found it even harder. In the end, I had to accept that erotic writing, unless much stylised, was never likely to be particularly ground-breaking. I would have to rely on the passions of the actors and imaginations of the viewers to turn a distinctly average script into that which resided in my mind.
When August arrived, I bought the audio-visual equipment with my wages and tested each and every item to make sure I knew how to use it. Ben, Anna, and Natalie helped, and we split them between us to ensure that my parents didn't notice the sudden influx of equipment.
A week before we were due to leave I got my hair cut, and bought new make-up and clothes. With every day that passed, I grew more excited. However the uncertainty continued, and finally, the night before we left I could take it no more. After lying awake for a couple of hours I got up and made my way to his bedroom. As usual, the light was on, flickering through the cracks in the door. I knocked lightly, and opened it up.
