THE AMSTERDAM ORGY PART TWO
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THE AMSTERDAM ORGY PART TWO
Nothing much to report since last time. Stuck in the interminable hell of hospital. A mixture of boredom and trauma. Many fruitful and fruitless discussions with Isabella about whether I should stay here and make use of the good physiotherapy and get as strong and well as I can, or whether we should start making our way back to London where Isabella will have to live in alone in my house while I find a new rehab hospital.
I miss my city and my friends. The kids come and visit me every weekend. A good friend has just flown from London for lunch and then went straight back home; another friend who lives locally has passed by. Although Isabella is here all day and without her support I would be in deep shit, I still feel the need to see more people. Mainly as a distraction from my dark mood and situation, but also to keep in touch with the outside world. Being in hospital, as most of you know, is like being in a space\time capsule, cut off from the outside world which has moved on without me as if I were already dead. I am feeling morbid and require cheering up.
I thought I would finish up the Amsterdam orgy story. It is being typed not by Isabella but by my youngest son Kier who is twenty-four. He is a little freaked by the idea of writing this down but here goes anyway:
Iris came into the hotel room with her boyfriend who was younger than me but not that much younger. He was around forty and seemed to be the same size as I am – not tall and a bit stocky - but a shabbier version of me, with shaggy grey hair and a beard. I think his name was Hans.
He didn’t speak much English but the three of us sat at the table and chatted in a desultory way and smoked a joint. Most of the excitement I had felt earlier had disappeared and I was at a loss as to what to do or say. I wondered if the orgy idea was dead and we would end up going out to dinner or something equally dull. Fortunately Iris said she was keen that we get on with it. She had done what I requested which was to bring a friend round for a threesome and that was what we were going to have.
She took off her clothes and I quickly did the same, thinking, “Fuck it, why lose this opportunity to have some fun in Amsterdam while I’m here?” She and I got on the bed and started to make out.
Hans was wearing a long black overcoat which he didn’t remove for the whole of the proceedings. Iris explained to me as we started to have sex that Hans liked to watch. She asked me if I minded but what could I say but no? So while she and I energetically made out he sat there on the end of the bed watching. I couldn’t help constantly glancing up at this enigmatic figure in a black overcoat but he said nothing and showed no emotion. At one point she asked him if he wanted to join in but he just shook his head. I was rather relieved.
At one point we decided we were hungry so Hans ordered some food. When room service arrived Hans held up a blanket while the waiter pushed the food trolley into the room. Iris stopped to eat while Hans sat there gloomily watching his girlfriend naked with another man eating sushi. Perhaps this was some kind of punishment or masochistic kink. But if this was his thing he didn’t seem to enjoy it so much. I didn’t have the impression they had done this before.
After a couple of hours Iris got dressed and the two of them left. I opened the window, looked out at the city and smoked another joint. I had had a great and memorable - if not weird time - and was keen to see Iris again since she was coming to London.
A couple of weeks later Iris and I arranged to meet in the Portobello Road. I had taken my youngest son to school in the morning and we were going to see each other around lunch time. I wanted to ask her about what exactly had happened with Hans in Amsterdam. I wondered if they were still together.
But that day London was in chaos. The tubes had stopped and the buses weren’t running. People said there had been a power outrage and the city had shut down. Others were saying some kind of atrocity had taken place but nobody knew the details. People seemed to be milling around the streets aimlessly. I saw people sitting on benches looking devastated. The area resounded with police, ambulance and fire engine sirens. The date was the 7th of July 2005 which became notorious for the ‘7\7’ bombings. Fifty six people were killed in four separate suicide attacks. Iris and I didn’t manage to meet up and I never saw her again.
THE AMSTERDAM ORGY PART TWO
Naturally, God will laugh when you tell him your plans (and perhaps also pick at the stigmata scabs that always appear around late March/April) but you should make them anyway, because your future is logistically very complicated. Being away from England for a prolonged period of time may have an impact on how much of the NHS you are able to access, free of charge, upon your return to home soil. I don't know what the current rules are, or whether any dispensation is given to people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves resident abroad for a lengthy period. Then there is the issue of whether your current hospital is better equipped to meet your evolving rehabilitation needs than whatever is available in London, and also factors such as cost, since you are obviously in this for the long haul. I am sorry if this comes across as depressing, but facing up to basic realities is what lays the foundations for the best possible recovery. One thing that is very evident: Your mental health, which will also play a very important role in your recovery, will be improved greatly by your return to England, and by being around friends and family, who will no longer have to get on a plane to visit you, or endure a hazardous journey on foot, across the Alps.
I am going to relate to you my own first experience of group sex. You may take it as an amusing anecdote, as a sort of thinly-stretched allegory for the pagan traditions of Easter, or as cue to scroll down as fast as you can, or even turn off your computer.
There is a wide-eyed school of magical thinking, that has gained a footing online, which states that your life will improve immeasurably when you start saying 'Yes' to things. Those of us who have seen a bit too much of the world (and who are now on the look-out for moisturising lotions that might take a couple of hundreds yards off a thousand-yard stare) will tell you that there are probably a great many more occasions where your circumstances will be improved by saying 'go away', or perhaps something stronger.
I was effectively my grandmother's carer for the final years of her life. During that time I didn't go out very much. When she died it came as a huge relief, even though I loved her a great deal; probably more than I have ever loved anyone, or ever will. Because she had been in physical decline for so long, and because I had made that journey with her, and had borne witness to her suffering, I made the wrong assumption that I had grieved for her while she was still alive. In hindsight that was something else. I also mourned her passing, though I did not interpret these feelings as grief until many years after the fact.
I was left alone in her house, which was falling into a state of disrepair and which remained unsold for a year. While turning out the drawers in her bedroom I came across a piecemeal stash of morphine tablets which I began taking. I was getting up at half-past five every morning to go swimming. I was reading a lot. I was pulling myself in a lot of extreme and contradictory directions.
I would often drive out to the ruin of a local castle. I had previously celebrated my 18th birthday party there, and had marked the occasion by vomiting whiskey and birthday cake in the direction of Canvey Island.
I remember being there once with a friend and standing inside the embracing, crab-claw ruin of the remaining tower. He was holding up my binoculars and attempting, unsuccessfully, to read the 19th century graffiti that had been carefully engraved into the arch of one of the inaccessible embrasures, on what would have been the second or third floor.
“I still can't read it,” he reported back.
“Erzsebet is a whore,” I suggested.
One afternoon in early July, I drove to the castle. It was the first day of the school summer holidays. When I arrived, there were a couple of police cars parked at the bottom of the lane. As I headed up the track towards the castle, I encountered small groups of teenagers who were walking in the opposite direction. They were all discussing some recent event in the hyperbolic manner that young people sometimes do when describing their own dramas; as if they have the power to unseat the world from its axis.
When I reached the castle, there was a large group of teenagers by the tower. The police were there and seemed to be conducting interviews. I sat on some foundations at the opposite end of the ruin. After a while the crowd dispersed. A man in his early thirties wandered over and asked me if I knew why the police were here. I told him that there had been a fight. He went away. A few minutes later he returned with a woman and asked me if I would have sex with his wife.
I said something that immediately betrayed my lack of familiarity with such arrangements:
“What, now?!”
They led me to a clearing, deep in some shrubbery, that they had obviously scouted-out beforehand. I lay down on a blanket with this man's wife and had sex with her, while he watched and masturbated.
I think it was a new experience for them. It was a new experience for me too.
My relationships prior to this had all been 'head first,' in the intellectual sense of those words. There was always a certain amount of highbrow foreplay before things got, in any way, physical. The problem with that approach is that an ardent, and also somewhat rehearsed, appraisal of the selected poems of Seamus Heaney might, with the right girl, open up the possibility of sex, but it is of absolutely no use at all in the bedroom. "Try silently reciting those verses that you can recall from 'The Tollund Man' while performing cunnilingus," said no-one ever, though Heaney may have appreciated the return to the oral tradition.
Leaning on an erudite image of yourself as a mode of attraction is all very well, but for the sex to be satisfying you have to dismantle that image and start again. Plus, as you grow older and more jaded that are obstacles and things to be discussed beforehand: "You appreciate that a lot of water has passed under the bridge – in fact, I may as well tell you now, there have been quite a few bridges. The bottom line is that I can no longer become aroused if you aren't dressed like Madame Cholet, from The Wombles." She may want to refer to you as 'Patrick,' after a grounds-keeper from some racy novel. You may have to envelope her in the waxy embrace of a Barbour jacket that has almost certainly been used as a bedroom prop before.
This may come as a tremendous surprise to people who live outside of the United Kingdom, but there is no such book as 'Debrett's Heraldry of Fucking' that might conceivably inform you of how to approach a sexual partner based on the symbolism in her family coat of arms: "I see the rampant lion indicates that I am to take you from behind, as was figuratively the case for your distant ancestors at the hands of the French, in the 1500s," etc. Remarkably, very few family mottos translate from Latin to 'take me roughly under the hawthorns,' or 'the safe word is cow parsley'.
I am making light of this, but in all seriousness, it is very hard return to return to an earnest discussion of Proust, where you were previously barely concealing your own ignorance, with someone who wiled away the afternoon hours sitting on your face. The dynamic has changed. The scholarly veneer has worn off like the finish on a cheap ring.
None of that was an issue with this couple. I understood that the woman wanted to be dominated by a strange man, and that her husband wanted to watch her being dominated. It was simple and satisfying sex, the way our forbearers did it, in the bushes, partly shielded from the beating glare of the sun, without the need for stirrups and riding crops.
I talked to one of my friends about it afterwards. He pointed out, rightly, that any number of bad things could have resulted from me following a strange couple into isolated undergrowth. I agreed with him that it was high-risk behaviour and that I probably should draw a line under it. Then I did it again because I was a flailing degenerate.
Dear Hanif, If you hadn't written this i would have thought it an unlikely story but there my education is widened yet again! At 78 I think I am sadly passed the stage when an orgy is on the cards...but hey, you never know..and at least I have an idea what it might be like! There, perhaps I make you laugh a little if its not too painful..at least a smile! X