BOOK PREVIEW

HOSTS OF ANGELS

by AMELIA MAY KINGSTON

Hope was sitting on her bed, wrapped in her towelling dressing gown. She wore nothing else but a smile.

Her clit burned and her nipples stung. Her cunt was sore and her arse ached. She felt good.

Somewhere a trapped Puritan self was wondering how any of this could have happened. But none of her other personae were listening.

The investigative psychologist was fascinated by a whole new area of study.
The frustrated raver was smugly satisfied.
The mischievous imp was delighted with endless possibilities for novel new experiences.

The desireable woman was vindicated.
The creative artist was amused.

And what about the respectable pillar of the community?

She was bemused. But she was too intricately tied to a body that was more alive than it had been for years to do more than reassure herself that she was most interested in the socially therapeutic aspects of a novel lifestyle fast gaining popularity in a cyber-dominated world.

Someone needed to act as watchdog, she excused herself. Yet she was aware, with a certain frisson of satisfaction, that the self-appointed guardian was developing an insatiable appetite for aberrant behaviour.

How did it happen? How did she move from the self-controlled relict, resigned to life without a sexual partner, to this rampantly erotic animal, magnificent in her shameless enjoyment of the extremes of physical arousal.

After years of vanilla relationships that did no more than fan the embers of a banked up sexuality, until she ceased to look for more than a flickering glimmer of warmth, she was suddenly afire and going off like a rocket with more shattering orgasms in a month than she had previously enjoyed during the whole of her life.

And I am the woman who was supposed to be frigid, she thought. I am the woman who apologised for not being sexually attractive, for not radiating the right signals, for being unresponsive, hard to rouse or please, and being so fed up with the whole disappointing performance that I was reluctant to allow myself to feel anything at all.

All it took was a man who enjoyed a woman enjoying herself. All it needed was a man who revelled in his power to dominate her, to give her time, attention and the most exquisite physical sensations in return for her total surrender of self to his control.

Never mind the psychological explanations, the stories of abused, damaged and inadequate individuals who discharged their dysfunctional libidos in co-dependent fantasy.

This was mature, sophisticated play, between close, intelligent, trusting friends. It was honest. It was courageous and it was FUN!

**********

"I had resigned myself to being ill and alone: to being discarded, less than a woman; to growing old, to dissatisfaction and to relentless self-control." Hope was trying to explain herself to her friend.

"Now the future is full of delightful possibilities. I can be an adventurous, sexy woman for another lease of life, unashamed, unafraid and able to lose myself in the magic conjured up by the collaboration of two, or even more, minds and bodies seeking the ultimate in intimacy and mutual acceptance."

**********

“Okay,” said Irina. “So you had a bloody good bonk. And not before time. So what else is new?”

“It’s the whole idea. The whole scene. I started off with a set of preconceptions and I have had them all turned upside down.”

“Did you really? But I thought you set out from the premise that there is something wrong with the party line and you expected to find something new? Or was it that you wanted to propound a new philosophy without actually being affected by it in the least?”

“Irina, you are doing my brain. Of course I knew there was something wrong with what we were pedalling as the right way to do things. I just had not realised there was so much right with what we all accepted as wrong!”

“Suddenly it’s not wrong, because you enjoyed it?”

“No! Well, yes…. But that’s not it. Not entirely. Can I try to explain?”

“Go ahead, but don’t think I will give you an easy ride if I smell bullshit!”

“Look, there’s this bloke. He’s a good-looking ex-soldier, six foot two, size thirteen shoes, happily married, settled in his job, pillar of the community etc. etc.

“One day he admits to his wife that he would like to wear her panties during their foreplay. Wife is horrified, sees this as a threat to her own sexuality and marches him round to Relate. Relate takes party line and sends him to psychiatrist who decides to 'cure' him. Hospital establishes he has an extra female chromosome (Klinefelter's Syndrome) and psychiatric social worker counsels him to have the sex-change operation to turn him into a freak.

"How could he ever pass as a functional woman unless they cut him off at the knees? And why should he? He is a fully functional man with something extra. Why shouldn’t he enjoy it all? But no, that’s not the way we do it.

“Result: one marriage in ruins, two individuals devastated, with self-esteem in tatters. Wife no longer feels herself loved or desireable. Husband no longer feels himself a worthwhile human being. Depression and alienation all round. Word gets around. Job gone, home gone, misery rules, O.K.?”

“And Solomon would have judged differently?”

“I’ll say! Why didn’t the prat from Relate explain to the wife that wanting to wear her clothes was all part of her husband wanting to get close to her, to understand her, to be her, to feel like her, to know what it was like to be inside her skin?

"What better description is there of the intimacy that real love, cathexis, demands than two minds in one body without boundaries? It was not rejection of her as a woman but total acceptance of her as a part of himself. He needed that same acceptance from her.

“Then they discover he has an extra chromosome. Good, that makes him not only the sexually potent man she has shared her life with for the past six years, but also a sensitive and empathetic individual who could be her best girl-friend as well. The cream of all possible worlds, surely? She can’t have children either, so that gets rid of guilt on either side.

“But no. Vanilla society wants to punish him for daring to be different. We want to force him to choose which one he will be, not both. Being who he/she is, is not an option. He/she must commit suicide, murder one of his/her selves. How bloody barbaric can you get?

“What’s all this “Vanilla” stuff? Shorthand for an ice-cream pouf?”

“No. It’s the word the alternative community give to people who live conventional lives.”

“Oh, Lord, and I thought you did not go in for jargon. Obviously I was wrong. One romp and a climax and you are a card-carrying member of the new order, with a new vocabulary to match.”