Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (13 page)

The one thing he did take advantage of, however, was my fledgling business skills and my ability to type. I had done business studies and sociology at school and my boss was studying part-time for an MSc which meant he was grateful for help in typing out his essays. He paid me extra to type for him but then gradually began accepting my input on various aspects of his studies that related to my own schoolwork. It
caused some jealousy with some of the other employees because he would sometimes leave them doing the hard-labour gardening work while I worked with him on whatever essay he was preparing that week. I couldn’t really understand their resentment; they knew I was surviving hand-to-mouth on my own and yet they still begrudged me trying to better myself and earn a little more cash in my hand.

It was an attitude I had never come across before but, oddly-enough, one I was soon to encounter from a radically different source. The trained and highly-paid pharmacist in the chemist shop where I worked part-time seemed to delight in belittling my own ambitions to get to university. By my standards, he was seriously wealthy, with a large home in a posh London suburb and children attending a fee-paying public school. He obviously thought of me as nothing but a ‘shop-girl’ and openly laughed when I said I was studying to get to uni. ‘You haven’t got the qualifications,’ he teased. ‘You’ll never get to university, so why are you looking through all of these books. You may as well accept your lot in life and stop dreaming.’ When I tried to tell him I had eight GCSEs and was studying for four A-levels, he brushed me aside. ‘Look to what you can get and be happy with that,’ he advised.

We clashed on a lot of things, not least the fact that he was so mean he tried to charge me for using too many tissues from a box when I arrived at work with a heavy cold. He paid me just £2.25 an hour but would want to deduct wages if I turned up even a few moments late. Now I was determined to speak up for myself.

‘Listen,’ I told him angrily. ‘If it’s anyone that’s going to amount to anything, it’s going to be
me
– not your kids. They’ve
got everything on a plate, the background and the education because they get it all from you; they’ve never had to fight or work hard or anything. My parents don’t have a penny – but I’ll tell you now, one day I’m going to walk back into your shop and show you my certificates.’

It was, of course, the sort of empty threat we all make in anger but years later, I did find myself walking past the same shop and was sorely tempted to run back home, grab my degree papers, stick them under his nose and say: ‘See? Fuck you. You were wrong.’

Despite our arguments, my boss’s dismissive comments probably helped by spurring me on to even greater efforts to cope with my over-busy life. I also believe that he did slowly develop a grudging respect for me. One day, not long before I left for good, he admitted he had considered firing me for speaking out about his kids.

‘The truth is, I fucking can’t stand you because you give me mouth,’ he said. ‘But I can’t fault your work; you’re honest and you’re a hard worker and that’s the only reason I didn’t sack you then, and wouldn’t sack you now.’

The necessity to work hard at both school and in several jobs meant that I had no time for much fun – or for boys. I had become virtually celibate, which was an odd thing because whenever I did have a boyfriend it had been me that had taken the lead in the bedroom. In the right circumstances I was the one who made the advances, hunted men down and generally ended up getting the guy on his back; one friend laughingly described me once as ‘a lust-bucket; a bubbling bucket of lust.’ Now I was living like a nun.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who has worked for the past two decades in the adult industry, there are a number of relatively common sexual games that I have never got round to playing. In some cases it is simply because the activity does not appeal to me; in others, life has just never taken me in that particular direction. So I have never been to a ‘swingers’ party, never partner-swapped, never had a bisexual relationship, never really been to any amateur ‘orgy’. And my only attempt, so far, at a ‘threesome’ proved to be something on an unmitigated disaster. When I use the word threesome, I should stress that I am talking of a male, male, female variety – a man sandwich – rather than most men’s fantasy of two women with one guy. Not being at all bisexual, although happy to play that part for professional purposes, the idea of another woman and I competing over a man holds no appeal whatsoever.

My threesome ‘fail’ came not long after a new man moved into the upstairs room above my flat. I wasn’t involved in any sort of romantic relationship at the time and was too tired to have any interest in finding one, but my new neighbour, Simon, seemed pleasant enough. Living in the same small house, we slowly got to know each other a little better. He was really into smoking weed, as cannabis was known then, and we shared a little one night. I can’t quite remember exactly how that transformed into us sleeping together but it seems to have been our only mutual interest. We both knew, however, that our friendship was never going to be the love-match of our lives; it was never going to get serious. Not long afterwards though, Simon moved in with me, mainly because he was always finding it hard to pay the rent and by moving into my bed he could give up his room upstairs and cut his
living expenses. The downside was that we couldn’t let the landlord know of our new, shared sleeping arrangements. Simon virtually gave up using the front entrance and it became a common sight to see him hopping in and out of my ground floor bedroom window at all hours of the day or night.

We were only together for a couple of months and, truth was, Simon was clearly a bit of an oddball from the start. On one occasion he took me to meet his mother who lived on a council estate nearby and I was surprised to find that she was smoking puff as well during the whole time we were there. I also knew that he was always poking around in my things when I was out at work. I had a small desk in the corner and things on the shelves would have been moved slightly, or he would ask me questions about people whom I knew he could never have met and could only ever have known about from pictures he must have seen by flicking through the photos albums that I kept in a box in my wardrobe. So, there were some odd signs there but when I confronted him about it he told me I was being paranoid.

He loved to talk about my sex life and ask me about everything I had done in the past and any games that I might like to try in the future. I suppose we were both just putting out feelers to see how this new relationship might work. He said he was interested in getting into my head and discovering what, sexually, would work for me. One night I mentioned that I had never been involved in a threesome but that I might be up for it – if the second guy was interesting enough. Shortly afterwards he brought a friend round to the flat and it was clear exactly what was on both of their minds. Simon and I ended up making love while his friend was still the in the
room watching and then the friend moved onto our bed and tried to join in. I was starting to think that this might be fun but then it all went a little pear-shaped. I was up for playing, Simon was still keen but his friend’s nerves let him down. It was soon clear that there were never going to be two erections available in my bed that night and that nothing much was ever going to happen. As threesomes go it was all a bit of a failure.

Oddly enough, after encouraging me to have sex with another man, Simon gradually grew more and more jealous and started to accuse me, wrongly, of ‘eyeing up’ his friends. His obsession culminated in a violent shouting row during which he pushed me across the room. Furious at being physically attacked, I did some shouting of my own and he pushed me again before screaming: ‘You want to hit me don’t you. Come on then, hit me!’ So I did.

My punch to his face hurt my knuckles but also hurt Simon. His teeth pushed into his lip and he started bleeding but it didn’t stop him fighting. Throwing himself at me, Simon grabbed hold of my shoulders and then bit my face, just below my right eye. I could not believe what he had done. I think the violence of biting me shocked Simon as well and he just turned and ran from the room. I was left in a state of shock. It was the first time that I had ever been attacked in that way. After cleaning myself up a little I realised that he could return to the flat at any time and that for safety’s sake, and to try and prevent him attacking another woman like that, I really ought to tell the police what had happened. The upshot was that I did go to the local police station and reported the assault. They took down all the details, called in a photographer and took pictures of my swollen black eye. The police at that time,
however, consistently failed to take much interest in what they saw as ‘domestic violence’ and so, although they did question him about the assault, no charges were ever laid. They said that the photographs and records would be kept on file in case he ever attacked me again but he never bothered me after that night.

Although I was not really scared of him coming back, I was left in a slight state of shock. For the next week or so I was trying to work with bruises and a highly visible black eye and, although I had my friend Sharon in the building, I had nobody really close that I could talk to.

There are times in life when you need the comfort and reassurance that only your closest family can offer and, for me, that was not an option. Although I had become reconciled with my grandparents after the bitterness surrounding my departure from their house, I knew that I couldn’t turn up on their door with my face looking battered and bruised. After moving out of their home I found that I could always pop round for a chat, they would cook me dinner, be happy to see me and even sometimes insist that I stay overnight. I loved them and they loved me; we just could not live together. They were always anxious about me, they were now old and somewhat frail and I didn’t want to burden them with my troubles. On top of that, I had at that time completely lost touch with my birth-mother following the angry words that had been spoken during our horrendous row, a situation compounded by not having a phone.

Meantime, although I tried my best to get to school each day it was probably inevitable that with my erratic lifestyle, my
studies would suffer. Plain exhaustion and the strain of travelling so far each day was taking its toll. Sometimes I simply didn’t have the money to pay for my bus fare, and if I had been staying on the sofa with friends I’d often get woken in the early hours when they came home from all-night clubbing. Soon I was being bombarded with complaints from teachers. In desperation I fixed up a meeting at school to explain that I was no longer living at home and that things were difficult but, with the exception of just one of the teachers, nobody much seemed to care. Still I persevered as best I could, getting to classes whenever possible, completing assignments and handing in essays for all of my subjects: Media Studies, English, English Literature and Geography. It was the pick-and-mix of subjects that I hoped would offer a reasonable chance of fulfilling an ambition to work in television, newspapers or films when I finally graduated from whichever university would accept me.

I knew my teachers were unhappy, but what came next was a devastating blow, right out of the blue. As I stepped up my workload in preparation for taking my A-Level examinations, I was called to a meeting. With no consultation, and seemingly with no right of appeal, I was told that the school would not be entering me for the exams in three of my subjects. My Media Studies teacher was the only one who had stood up for me and insisted that the examination should go ahead; the others had refused exam entry, presumably scared that I would fail and lower their all-important percentage pass-rates and cost them school league table places.

I was overflowing with anger. It was a terrible betrayal, I was working so hard, and they all knew I was, to all intents
and purposes, homeless. To make their cowardice worse, nobody had even told me that much of my work had been pointless because they had not entered me for the exams. I was left crying in the classroom where my Media Studies teacher was the only one who tried to comfort me. He was the unsung hero who constantly encouraged me to persevere with my plans for university even though his colleagues had all written me off. The only remaining possibility was for me to pay the fee to enter the examinations without the backing of the school. Living hand-to-mouth on poor wages from multiple part-time jobs meant that it was never going to be a realistic option. Throughout my school life I had always come near to the top of the class. I knew I had the ability to rapidly absorb and regurgitate information in order to sail through earlier examinations with far less preparation than I had completed for these: but nothing I said made any difference and in the end I sat just one of my four intended subjects.

I passed Media Studies with an A but my hopes of becoming the first person within my family to attend a university was fast fading to a distant dream. It was one of my scariest moments: the idea of not completing my education, of being stuck in a dead-end job – everything I had striven so hard to avoid, was in danger of becoming my future after all.

Not, I resolved, if I had anything to do with it.

Finding my way into university at first seemed impossible but I set about contacting every possible college that might accept me. Eventually I found one of the newer universities offering an HND course, with the option of staying on an extra year and earning a full degree. My set of GCSEs and my solitary A-level
would be enough to get me in the door, which left only two problems: the need to find somewhere new to live within striking distance of the university campus and finding the money to survive for three more years of study.