Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play. Mark Brendon

my interpretation of a text in Acts and to explain some hitherto unsuspected meanings—probably unsuspected even by Jerry Garcia—in Dark Star. For a grizzled, bearded minister of God, he could certainly down the Bushmills and played a mean game of pool.

      At the time, during my year’s separation from my long-term girlfriend before I went into rehab, I was living near Bath. Somewhere in the evening Gordon Shavalar had leaned on my shoulder and told me, through hot fluffy breath, that I should look up his daughter who was mostly based down west these days.

      I had taken him at his word.

      Lisa and I had met six or seven months before I had enrolled at the clinic. We had at once been attracted.

      She was a laconic, luxuriant sort of girl with a slender, athletic but sensuous frame, ornate tattoos on her left shoulder and down her right upper arm, forearms taut and sinewy as a hare’s, and a funny little rag doll face which suddenly sprang into life with a happy smile or a mock-sardonic sneer.

      Clothes looked uncomfortable and ungainly on her. Remove them, and she moved with an imperious degree of self-possession and a childlike natural elegance. She did not draw in her little round stomach or extend a hand to protect herself as she shambled about naked or in bra and knickers. She clothed herself in nudity. She wore it beautifully. She was a very lovely animal to watch.

      And she was a lovely animal with whom to make love—for that, mysteriously, was what we had found ourselves doing.

      I don’t know how it happens, how first the caressing and kissing and fucking move into synch, so that ferocity and tenderness, hunger and savour, adult and child, human and beast, male and female all coexist and intermingle. Then suddenly, fear and need and all the horrors and vulnerability are also offered up for inspection and approval, are blessed, sanctioned and loved, and memories from before birth—and maybe from before language—emerge, are recognised and find their echoes. Then distinctions vanish and you gaze into her eyes, and something deep within her says ‘Yes’ and opens up to babies or to death, or to whatever acceptance may bring, and you are lost and home, all at once.

      Which is a crappy mess of an explanation, but, if I could express it any better, it would not be worth doing. And, oh, it was. It is.

      ‘God,’ she had said, ‘I really like that energy.’ I did not understand this, but since other women have said much the same thing and since the energy is mine, I accepted it without objection.

      And so she had stayed, sometimes for as long as four whole days. Then she would start to be brisk and dismissive as she created distance between us so that she could escape, because her independence and her solitude were more sacred to her than anything else.

      And for weeks after her departure, if I called her on her mobile, it was, ‘Yes. What was it?’ and I would find myself cut off if I so much as dared to try to chat companionably. On one occasion, she reiterated without the least prompting, ‘It’s not as if we made love or anything. I mean, yes, it’s good sex, but for fuck’s sake, man…’

      Sometimes she just fled so that she could be back in her wagon, with its little wood-burning stove and its bookcase with ropes anchoring each rank of books, and its tutus and flowery frocks hanging from the ceiling, and whips and giant patent fetish-boots tucked away beneath the bed.

      She would spend whole weeks just parked in a copse somewhere, smoking dope and chilling and ‘being real’.

      Sometimes she headed off with fellow-travellers to find a location for a rave or ‘free party’ out in the country and to send out the secret mobile phone messages that draw ‘cheesy quavers’ in from all over the country. I went to one of these with her—just two days and nights of drifting and dancing and sleeping, rough feasting and occasional, incidental fucking in the woods, all to the sounds of trance and techno and drum’n’bass. I liked everything except the sounds.

      Sometimes—for two or three months at a time, and for two or three days a week—she would take a job as a ‘working girl’ in a massage parlour.

      ‘Yeah, I’m proud of giving good value,’ she told me. ‘I can disconnect so it doesn’t touch me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t give them what they need.’

      Once I introduced her to a dear old friend, a paediatric sister at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. The two women got on well. They teased me relentlessly. They walked the dog a lot together. Tilly, my nurse friend, came to a conclusion that surprised her. ‘I don’t know if it’s genetic, or a product of upbringing and experience,’ she said, ‘a deficiency or an attribute, but she and I are the same. Loads of women say to me about my job, “How can you give so much to a dying child, then come in and find him gone and his bed occupied by another, and just keep on giving?” So I get accused of being heartless and unnatural in the same breath as I’m called an angel and a saint.

      ‘And Lisa does the same, and she’s accused of being unnatural too. She’s a carer and gets paid for it. She just has that ability—like me—to cut herself off in order to survive. It doesn’t make her any less sincere or valuable, and she gets called all sorts of unpleasant names too.

      ‘It’s a female thing, I think. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just conditioning, but the caring thing is always associated with females and so is the ability to disconnect. So in some of us, the two exist side by side. Maybe we’re more highly developed than other women. Maybe we’re less developed—throwbacks or something. Either way, I reckon the world should be bloody glad we exist…’

      Lisa had always told me (like a cross between Mary Poppins and Aslan, which is quite appropriate really), ‘One day, I’ll just be gone.’

      One day, six weeks before I went to the clinic, she was. Her mobile number was unobtainable.

      So what did I do? I, of course, got drunk, and damned her.

      But that clogged Mancunian voice awoke me at ten o’clock that gloomy, sober morning. ‘Hi, baby boy! How’s it going? You off the sauce now, darlin’? How was the Gulag, then?’

      ‘Lisa,’ I croaked, then sat up and cleared my throat. Rainwater was chuckling as it streamed from the gutter outside my window. ‘God, Lisa! How…? Hey, how are you?’

      ‘I’m OK. Saw your mate Tim in Ashburton the other day. He told me where you were…’

      ‘You just evaporated last time,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d gone for good.’

      ‘Always told you, didn’t I? I come and go…’

      ‘Oh, come, darling, come! Where’d you get to? Where are you now?’

      ‘Could be with you in an hour, actually,’ she said. ‘Be really nice to see you…Yeah, go on. Shitty day. Give me directions and get the coffee pot on…’

      I whooped as I laid down the receiver.

      It took Lisa just half an hour to have the fire lit in the sitting-room and to be in her usual state of undress in a red lacy bra and knickers.

      If there was contrivance or sexual intent there, it was carried lightly. She knew that I enjoyed watching her. She enjoyed being watched and the sensations and the freedom of nakedness.

      She lay open, her limbs petals to a flower in full bloom. Her head and shoulders were raised on brocade cushions. One knee was raised, the other hooked and sagging off the sofa. Her left hand lolled at the scarlet, lacy escarpment at her groin. Her right held a joint on which she drew deep.

      She had looked around the house and pronounced it ‘OK’. She had become quite excited about the still intact water-heating copper in the pantry. She had been in Avignon, she said, for the Festival, and had then wandered on down into Italy, but had not yet been ready to set off on her long discussed ‘big trip’ to Romania (where she hoped to buy a patch of land), and on through the Russias.

      She had returned just two weeks earlier, and had already found a massage parlour in Taunton where she now worked for a couple of days a week. She was also busy organising a huge late-summer rave, somewhere in the