Gangy's Gap

Late night drinks were forgotten as we headed home. Driving back there was little said but plenty of resolve.

Back In my bedroom our clothes were disassembled at an alarming pace. Finally we paused and stood naked at attention, facing one another. I stood there in only my toki and wedding ring. Claudia with her wedding rings. She reached up a held the toki.

"I have been waiting for this moment," She said breaking the silence.

"What do you want of me? Do you want me or have you returned because you were in a fix?" Was all I could reply. It was an expression of the tension that had built up within me. "I am not sure who you are."

"I didn't know you wanted me until you took me from Franklyn. Now I know you want me. I am your wife. I want to have a baby. I want to show you and our girls that I am a mother despite what you all must think of me. I want to prove myself as worthy of you all. "

I was taken completely off guard by the statement. I did not know whether I really wanted her. At the same time my erection soared but that was sexual. (Was it the stress she put on the word baby?) I grabbed her turned her round sharply and pushed her torso onto the bed.

She responded by rising onto tip toes and arching her arse to me; her beautiful arse; two beautiful globes. I pushed her further onto the bed. I felt my stupendously stiff appendage whack from leg to leg as I hastily mounted her. One hand parted her still wild bush revealing her gaping pink and juicy vagina. With the other hand I controlled the now flapping appendage effortlessly sliding it into the warm interior. Pushing her buttocks together to increase the friction I began to pound her. Pound her like I have never done before. I was pounding away six years of frustration. I raised myself, bang; raised myself, bang. Each thrust drove her into the mattress as Claudia exhaled and grunted with each shove. There was a sudden rush to my head and it seemed my whole being exploded inside her and I collapsed on top of her in emotional exhaustion. I lay there not removing my cock feeling our collective secretions warmly oozing around our shrinking genitals.

A long silence was broken by Claudia.

"Well I have never ever been fucked like that. I don't suppose I will ever be fucked like that again, at least by you."

"It was a fuck borne out of six years abstinence," I replied.

"I actually enjoyed it in a slightly frightening way."

"Why frightening?"

"Well it was uncharted waters for me with you. You are normally so gentle, now I think you have given me a bruised butt."

"I would never really hurt you."

"I know that, I guess I deserved a bit of punishment."

"Let's lay a while and begin again. You know you are the master of my cunt, now I want your gentle side."

"You need to unload a bit of baggage. Like I said I am not sure who you are. I need to know your story."

"What now?"

"I need at least a precis."

"Oh man, OK, Where do I start? I can tell you but it will not be easy. There is a lot of pain."

"Well first of all, I never understood...none of us understood why you had to leave. I privately blamed the trauma you must have felt from your experience at Arcadia."

"Maybe, I don't know whether it started there or at varsity. May be the experience fueled the idea but I saw my leaving as an intellectual initiative. It was not a personal thing about you. Up until that point I never blamed you for what happened at Arcadia but it affected what I thought about the relationship between men and women.

At the time I did feel I was trapped into the marriage, like I was not in control of my destiny. I guess I should not have thought that way, as we always had a plan. "

"There was a lot of debate going on at university. That was what was driving me intellectually. The feminist movement had a lot of different voices. We were a spectrum. I personally felt different from the others in the Women's studies department as I was searching for an objective basis for the Women's movement. All the literature and the debate seemed to be philosophically orientated or based on assumptions. They were talking moral constructs that seemed to be drawn out of thin air. No one was interested in my kind of doctorate."

"Some of the women there were lesbians and I started to explore my feelings toward other women. Julia was my obvious choice as I had convinced her to take the Women's studies paper in the first place and we had been the gang of two in the discussions we were having. We began to have intimate evenings. Over glasses of wine we would cuddle and just talk. Even kiss but nothing overtly sexual although it did begin to stir me a little."

"At that stage I never thought of it as cheating on you but in retrospect I guess it was."

"I needed to get my head straight on where I was going with the doctorate. I heard through the department of an all-women commune that had started in an old grand settler's station house called Iona. It had been a convent for some years but had been taken over by two of its ex-nuns and supported by a benefactor.

I was taken by the romance of the name "Iona" and fantasized it as a place of retreat and learning. The fact was that I did not think through what an isolated place with virtually no resources would really give me."

"I concocted a plan to convince Julia to go with me."

At that point Claudia began to cry.

She settled a bit.

"How long did you think you would be there?"

"Oh... Initially, a couple of months; maybe six months."

"Bloody hell! Were you still there after 2 years, because I got a visit from James and..."

With that Claudia began sobbing

"Oh shit," I said, "I'll shut up and let you explain."

Eventually she steeled her herself and continued.

"Well to cut a long story short, we got there. It was in the middle of nowhere. It turned out to be a semi religious boot camp, but we decided to give it a go."

"They thought we were lesbians so gave us a bedroom with a double bed all to ourselves. They actually were not too happy having more lesbians as there were another couple there and the Nuns were more into chastity."

"Weirdly Julia and I tried to be lesbians. I discovered that I was probably bisexual, but I think Julia always hated the sex but just did it to humour me. Toward the end, our intimate life sadly reflected our own before I left you."

"Initially we would caress and French kiss. We progressed to fingering and oral sex but although I was enjoying it, Julia was never giving me much satisfaction and I doubt I ever got an orgasm out of her."

"I never twigged to the seriousness of the situation until the end." Claudia began to sniff but composed herself.

"Iona was really a retreat and was really about hard work. They kept us busy the whole time. The place was off the grid. We had to produce our own food and keep a farm viable. There had to be a return on the investment. I don't think it really ever paid. Would you believe I got to be a bee keeper and a potter, as well as looking after a flock of goats. We would be dog tired at the end of the day but we had to work 7 days. We did get the odd holiday but Julia and I never left the farm. We also did get some time for meditation. I tried to plot or think my way around doing this damn doctorate but had no resources. We were just marking time and time started to fly until..."

Julia began gasping as though she was beginning to hyperventilated then blurted out, "I woke up and she wasn't in the bed one morning. Later when I walked into the potting shed I found her hanging from the rafters." Claudia wasn't crying with this announcement but she grabbed me and buried her head in my chest uttering "Hold me please; I have to say this."

"I found out later that a new Woman who had arrived had seen an article in a women's magazine where James had remarried after gaining a divorce from Julia for desertion. The woman had announced this to Julia with some glee thinking Julia would be pleased. Julia never told me. Our communication had dropped to the level that Julia never told me her thoughts like she once did.

The worst thing is, I was the one who fucking killed her. I fucking ruined her life. I took her away from her husband. She never wanted to leave James. I was the one with the mission and we had been there over two years and achieved fuck all and now she was dead." With that Claudia was bawling her heart out; her tears were freely funning down my chest. All I could do was mutter "Oh my dear; god. Oh no. "Julia, as Claudia's friend, had once been dear to me. I remembered her as woman of great hopes and was dying to have her own family.

I began to cry myself. The tragedy was huge I just could not fathom it.

I ventured finally; "Nobody, even her own family knows that she has died. We had always been thinking she would reappear. James had been searching for her but the women's studies department would not divulge where she was."

"Nobody there would know where we were. There were a couple of students that would know but I guess they were no longer with the department."

"Where is Julia Buried?"

"At Iona."

"Her death obviously has not been registered and that would be illegal."

Claudia replied, "I wouldn't know; the Nuns looked after that stuff. I had broken down. I was totally distraught."

"Why didn't they send you back here?"

"I don't know. I was a coward. I was totally ashamed and never asked to come back. The commune broke up as a result. I guess it was the last straw as I don't think it was paying anyway. A couple of women from Auckland took me under their wing and took me there. I had a dream that I could salvage something in Julia's memory by picking up my Doctorate at the Auckland Varsity."

There followed a long silence. We lay in each other's arms. I hadn't known what to expect about Claudia's time away. What I had heard was horrifying and somehow I suspected there was more to come. There was also the dilemma about Julia's death. The authorities will need to be advised and there would be consequences from that. But there was also something which would have inevitable implications for our relationship if it was to survive. It was the first outright admission of Claudia's lesbianism. I had been in denial about the possibility that Claudia would cheat on me. The genie was now out of the bottle and that would cause me to contemplate every part of our relationship from the day we met. Despite our experience in Arcadia I had never had a strong inclination to be anything but monogamous. I no longer assumed Claudia's boundaries.

After a while Claudia stirred; I thought that she had gone to sleep but she'd been in quiet contemplation and indicated she wanted to continue with her tale.

It seems she arrived in Auckland and she was able to obtain digs straight away at a large old city mansion called 'Albion'. I noted that was fortuitous. She was hesitant to admit it initially, but it appears that she was in some kind of affair with one of the women she travelled there with and in fact she was moving in with her. She lived there for the entire time she was in Auckland.

It seems she had landed in the middle of a very radical fringe group of feminists. Many had left husbands. The atmosphere was misandrist. I asked if they were all lesbians. She said some were political lesbians and then explained that they had decided to reject men on principal.

I asked what their point was; were they withholding sex with men as a form of protest as in the play Lysistrata? Claudia could only say there were many different stories as women for why they would do that.

I asked Claudia how she identified as a lesbian.

"I told you bisexual, it's just that I had little or no contact with men in that period."

"Did you have just the one lesbian partner?"

Claudia's reply was not wholly convincing, looking down and avoiding my eyes she admitted just the one.

I let it slide and changed the subject.

"How did you get on with your doctorate?"

"There was no support for that approach. The group was very anti male. They believed that men's basic instincts were brutish. They took up the idea that 'all men were rapists.'"

"I didn't think any feminists really believed that."

Claudia replied, "As I said, there are many stories and that was theirs."

"And did you believe that?"

"Yes."

"Wow that was a shock," I angrily replied, "Do you think that I am a rapist then?"

"Not now, then yes."

"How can you possibly have thought that, considering tonight is the first time I have been anything less than gentle."

"I just zeroed in on the one shred of evidence I could muster."

"And what, pray tell, was that?"

"That night when you were fucking me my brother sodomized me. I was trying to stop it and you carried on and came in me."

"What the fuck. I was already inside you and was about to cum when he stuck his prick in your arse. he pushed me over the top. I could not help it and did not have time to think about it."

"It was the atmosphere I was in at Albion. It was all I had to hang my hat on. I do remember at the time when you came that I was resentful. Eventually at Albion, I began to think of you and my brother John as one. As I said, I did not leave you because of that, it was an idea I had at the time and I only believed evidence that would confirm it."

"I have to say I am amazed. A point in time so many years ago remembered and used against me. All these years a subliminal resentment surfaces to reinforce a bias."

My immediate thoughts about this and what I had seen in the destroyed photographs did not add up. The abuse from the others was horrific yet she picks on one minor incident involving me. Perhaps Mike was right after all and despite appearances in the photographs she chose what happened to her. I elected to say nothing.

"So, did you do anything at varsity?"

"Well I had helped set up a women's refuge. I got interested in the field of sexual violence and began taking papers in clinical psychology."

"Where did that go?"

"Nowhere really, I got a job working in a bookshop for most of the time. I did a lot of writing various articles for radical feminist literature."

"These were all your ideas you were writing about?"

"Yes and no; I was really writing on behalf of others."

"You are telling me you wrote stuff you didn't believe in."

"I suppose I did."

"Well, when and why did you come down this end of the island?"

"Oh that started when a woman arrived from Los Angeles. She was an evangelical researching a worldwide satanic conspiracy by men preying on children. She had proof of it appearing in American preschools. It was international and she was coming to warn us that it was already happening in New Zealand."

"What a fucking load of bollocks. You, the fucking scientific wonder kid sucked in by charlatans and snake oil merchants."

"Listen 'shit-for-brains,' I seemed to remember you hanging about with some individuals' intent on raping me."

She was invoking the spectre of Gangy's Gap.

"I had hardly grown up."

"Yeah yeah, but it is the same herd mentality. You wanted to fit in, so did I. The bias is set in place so any evidence no matter how spurious is good evidence, and denial operates about everything else."

"And I suppose you were writing articles about this."

"Yep."

"So how did you end up down here?"

"There was a woman staying with us from Styx."

"Where's that?"

"Over the hill."

"Oh, that's a fair way away."

"They said they had proof that there were Satan worshipers operating at a local pre-school."

"So?"

"So I was sent to go back with them to investigate."

"What you? Special investigative journalist was sent to root out evil from a kindergarten? You believed this?"

"I suppose not really."

"Why did you go?"

Claudia seemed stuck for words and did not answer.

"So what happened?"

"The third worst experience of my life."

Claudia began to cry grabbing me again and pulling me to her.

Nowadays, I understand this was part of an extraordinary period of world-wide moral panic; in this case taken up by vengeful women perpetuating a misandrist myth. I wondered what sort of women would do this.

At the time I had never heard of it and was absolutely incredulous.

"Then what happened?"

"They had held me captive and systematically and sexually abused me for months until I managed to escape."

"What at Styx?"

"Yes actually it was down Styx Road in the country."

I was utterly astounded; behind this there had to be a very strange story. Where was Claudia at, to become victim of this?

"Who were these women?" I asked

"One Sharon was the leader, had been in prison for violent offenses, and then there was Mary and Cherylene. All three had a rough violent upbringing. They seemed to be a small lesbian gang. I think they just resented me for my privileged upbringing and I became their plaything."

"They knew you father was a lawyer?"

"Yes I guess they did."

"Why did you not go straight to the Police?"

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"I just can't."

"So why did you come here?"

"I wanted you, I wanted to come back home. It was all lies."

"Why me?"

"You were the only tangible goodness in my past. I realized that gentle you was the only one I could think of that had no other agenda but my welfare at heart."

"And letting you go was my big mistake. What about my indiscretion at Arcadia?"

"What you did there now seems very trivial alongside my experience with these people."

"What do you think of feminists now?"

"None of them were really feminists in my mind. None of them were rational. It was a radical fringe cult. Real feminists are working in the mainstream. They are the real pioneers.

I don't think that particular group did much for the cause of women. Do you know there were women who could have benefited from the Women's refuge but would not have anything to do with it because they were more afraid of that group?"

I lay there pondering. There were a lot of questions hanging. Her move to Styx Road with these women did not add up. How the hell did she get mixed up with violent criminal women? Why she then stuck with them was a mystery as well.

Then there was the infidelity. Under normal circumstances I would never take her back despite our experience at Arcadia but her story was extraordinary. That is, if true. Even then could she be trusted?

If our marriage was to be sustainable, counselling and probably psychological help was going to be necessary. I wondered about the possible role of trauma or depression in all this. Claudia had after all mentioned the break down at Iona.

"One last thing," I said, "What was that stunt you pulled on me with Joseph Franklyn anyway?"

"Well something worked, "Came the reply, "Look who I am with now."

Nice repost I think, but avoiding the issue none the less.

Claudia continued

"I had this idea for a play I thought he might help me with."

"And you could have helped him with the erection he obviously had," came my sarcastic reply. "If you had an idea for a play, aren't I the guy you should speak to first?"

Claudia looked at me blankly then buried her head in her hands

"So Sorry."

I cut her off and chose to ignore the obvious

"Then where did the idea of the play come from?"

"The idea was sparked by Romeo and Juliet that you had given Rachael a part in. I imagined two tribes representing misogyny and misandry, you get my drift."

"I like it," I reply, "Let's get stuck into it tomorrow."

The purpose helped dissipate the betrayal I had felt in her taking this to Franklyn. That issue would wait for another time. The whole episode was exhausting and now it was time for sleep.

Little was said after this as we both drifted off. My last thoughts were that Claudia's life needed new focus; a new purpose. Claudia's intelligence needed a mission. I made a mental note to contact my sister Miriam.