Raven (13 page)

Increasingly I felt that the big-bellied, baggage-laden oldsters on the dating site simply couldn't compete with these tempting young men. It was like looking into a cake-shop window and seeing all the scrumptious little cupcakes with their colourful swirly tops. Why on earth would you choose the boring old Victoria sponge?

*

Another young man, 29-year-old Harry, had been messaging me for weeks. I didn't know where he was from but his writing didn't impress me.

HARRY: How are you? You look pretty and have nice profile. I like to meet you and know more you. Let me know. I move to London recently and looking for love and fun.

ME: Thanks for your message but I might be a bit old for you. [Ha!]

HARRY: Age is not a barrier just it is a number. I am relatively attracted for relatively older women.

His looks were agreeable enough, and the reason I started ignoring his messages and hoping he would go away was not primarily because of his abuse of the English language. It was because, according to his profile, he was a mere five foot five inches tall. There were so many tantalising tall guys out there, why would I go out with a munchkin? I realised that I was being mean and that at five foot four I'm hardly an Amazon myself. Well, too bad. I saw it as a buyer's market and didn't want to waste my time. Life was too short. And so was he.

The old softie was becoming a bit of a bitch. But you can get away with that on the internet.

*

My old friend and fellow journo Andy Nott and I are having one of our infrequent catch-ups on the blower. He lives in Chester and I rarely go
oop
north, while Andy, a died-in-the-wool Mancunian, doesn't often venture to the soft underbelly of the south.

Andy, who is 58, was for many years the chief crime correspondent of the Manchester Evening News. His days were spent hanging out in sleazy dives with his bad-ass contacts – both coppers and crims – following up leads on high-octane news stories about gangland hits and drug busts. But these days he lives a sedate life of semi-retirement, tending his small garden.

Divorced several years ago, Andy has become more or less resigned to being single. He has said that at his age he shudders at the thought of going to singles' events, ‘entering a room full of strangers and hoping to link up with one of them'. But now he tells me that a few months earlier his solicitous sister signed him up to a regional dating website. She had been urging him to do it for a long time but he always refused, so in the end she took matters into her own hands and the next thing he knew it was a done deal. For easy dating purposes, this site's members all lived within a reasonable radius of Andy's home. And it boasted hordes of northern lasses.

‘So how's it working out? Meet anyone yet?' I ask.

He makes a sound like air escaping from a radiator. ‘You've got no idea,' he says in a jaded tone. ‘Every so often the site sends me an email with pictures of my latest “matches”. These are women they reckon are most compatible with me, using some stupid computerised matching system they have.'

‘And? Are none of the women any good?'

‘
Good?
Listen, you know when I was crime correspondent I'd spend my time with murderers and psychopaths and gangsters who'd slit your throat in a heartbeat. But I swear to you, none of them were as scary as the women whose mugshots I see on that dating site. Some remind me of serial killers, and others, Jesus, others don't even look like women. They could easily be dodgy blokes in drag. It's all so depressing. And these are supposed to be the
compatible
ones. Who do they think I am? The Yorkshire Ripper?'

‘Just keep at it, Andy. You need to be more proactive. Don't let a computer do the choosing,
you
do it. I'm sure there are some attractive ladies on there, too.'

‘Yeah,' he says. ‘Fat chance.' Then he makes that radiator sound again.

*

Every three weeks or so I had a visit from Pup. I always enjoyed seeing him. And by no means only because of our amazing compatibility in bed, which in view of the age gap was little short of miraculous. I liked him a lot as a person and I think it was mutual. He had become a genuine friend, or so it seemed. I've no idea why he never inquired about my dating activities or even if I was still on the site, and neither did I ask him why he had de-activated his account (something I noticed one day whilst attempting to click on his profile) or whether he had met any nice girls lately. We never discussed any of those things, curiously enough. It was as if when we got together we inhabited a separate little world in which all those outside considerations were irrelevant. Or perhaps too awkward to bring up.

Sometimes I pondered whether, many years hence, when Pup was my age and I was, most probably, already registered on that misty dating site in the sky, he would recollect our times together – those dreamy days and nights he had spent in bed with a woman almost forty years his senior. Would he look back on them with affection? Would they remain his secret to the end of his life and make him smile to himself, in quiet moments when no one else was around?

Another thought which occasionally struck me and made
me
smile to myself, was that a year earlier, forlorn and despondent in the wake of the split from my partner, I had believed that if I were ever again to indulge in pleasures of the flesh with desirable young men, I would actually have to pay money for it. How naïve I had been.

Not, I hasten to add, that I was entirely unfamiliar with the act of paying for sex. Has that grabbed your attention? Allow me to explain.

A couple of decades earlier, during my single-mum period, when I was sowing wild oats with gay abandon (attention: play on words) I had an urge to experiment in the Sapphic sphere. I revealed this secret ambition to a close friend of mine, much to his titillation, and he offered to buy me, as a birthday present, an hour with a classy call girl of his acquaintance. ‘As long as you tell me all about it afterwards,' he said, ‘so I can get the full vicarious thrill,' and I promised I would.

So my generous friend paid £250 for an hour of the blonde, buxom Penelope's time. And along with my first bicycle, at the age of seven, it was right up there in the top rank of my most memorable ever birthday presents.

Penelope was kind and patient as she showed me the ropes. She showed me the handcuffs and face masks, too, but I declined them all. I was only interested in the standard girl-on-girl stuff.

Naturally I was self-conscious at first, feeling like a callow newcomer in the porn industry. But I soon entered into the spirit. Although I always suspected that Penelope faked her orgasm, as it seemed a little too pat and well-timed. I guess that's the problem with tarts. Sincerity. Not that I haven't faked the odd one myself, admittedly. But that was merely as a courtesy, not to encourage repeat custom.

I had one other Sapphic adventure, several weeks later. Another friend of mine, a long-time user of the services of prostitutes, told me about a friendly Soho brothel he frequented, which boasted a diverse selection of lovelies. I reckoned that as I had now sampled a Diana Dors type, it would be churlish of me to forego the delights of some dusky lady, too. So I booked an hour's slot with a diminutive girl of indeterminate Southeast Asian origin, with a thick mane of silky, dark hair.

She was pretty and smiley, as she carefully counted out the notes I gave her before pronouncing that I was, in truth, quite the most alluring creature she had had the pleasure of entertaining in many a long month.

We did the business, which was more relaxed now that I had been inducted into the fold and was no longer a total novice. That took the first thirty minutes. Then, in the second half of our playtime, the journalist kicked in. As we lay beside each other, chatting and fiddling ever more absent-mindedly with each other's hair and boobs, I asked about her work, which intrigued me.

She said she had a regular client who was a lesbian, a brawny, butch woman who ‘fucked her just like a man, with a huge dildo'. Where's the fun in that? I wondered. Then my little lady of the night recounted an unusual episode with one of her male clients, an attractive married man in his thirties: ‘One night he brought his wife along to watch. She was very pregnant, maybe seven, eight months, and as he fucked me she looked on and played with herself.' I found this story both shocking and oddly stimulating. It stayed with me and in time was added to my store of secret kinky scenarios, to be wheeled out as and when required.

And with that, my lesbian explorations came to a close. I always knew that that stuff wasn't for me. But the empirical research was ever so much fun.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I have never had an addictive personality. Never did drugs (not even in the sixties, when everyone I knew was high most of the time), could always go for weeks without alcohol if I chose to, managed to give up smoking without much bother, and gambling never appealed. But the dating thing…that was different. That, I could see, was becoming an addiction. And by dating, of course, I don't mean spending the evening in a wine bar, chewing the rag with some old codger, I mean getting intimate with seductive young men whose faces and physiques are pleasing to the eye. Once you've discovered that enchantment, how do you give it up?

Perhaps in vaguely similar circumstances Oscar Wilde had observed that ‘where your life leads you, you must go'. Well, in the year 2013, this was where my life had led me. And whenever I was in danger of asking myself: what the hell am I doing? I would remind myself that I was my own greatest project and the project was coming along nicely, thank you.

Meeting desirable young men had proved to be surprisingly easy online. Then all at once it became a whole lot easier.

One day I was leafing through the paper and my attention was grabbed by an article about a new game in town, an alternative to internet dating. Quick, simple – and free. Called Tinder, it was a mobile phone app which used its subscriber's Facebook profiles to access a few relevant details about them – first name, age, photos, location, interests – in order to match them with potentially compatible people within a specified geographical radius. You are provided with a flowing gallery of candidates, and on the basis of their photos, you can either pass on them with a ‘no' or give them the thumbs up with a ‘yes' – and all with a swift swipe of the screen. In other words, do you find them hot or not? When two subscribers mutually swipe ‘yes' to each other they can open a conversation via the app and see where it leads. It all remains anonymous until such time as you both decide to take the contact further, moving on to other forms of communication and ultimately, perhaps, a get-together.

Ostensibly, Tinder was designed to help you meet new people for the purposes of ‘dating, friendship or networking'. In reality it was a facilitator of casual sexual encounters amongst individuals who fancied each other…or thought they might. Its big advantage over internet dating sites was that no one could contact you unless you had indicated that you favoured them, and equally, if you fancied someone who didn't like you, they would never know, thus removing the embarrassment of rejection. It put you in control.

It sounded like a congenial arrangement. Why not give it a whirl?

I downloaded Tinder that evening, as I sprawled on my bed, the customary props around me, listening to Classic FM. Before long the app had taken what it needed off my Facebook page and my account was up and running. But when I looked at it I was horrified to see that it showed my actual age – a fortnight earlier I had turned sixty-one. It hadn't occurred to me that with this system I couldn't fudge my date of birth. Facebook knew
exactly
when I was born, even if that information wasn't visible to the public. Well that's a killer, I thought. No one will ‘yes' a sexagenarian, sexy or not.

I really began to squirm when I realised, on surveying the stream of male faces presented for my delectation – each with their name and age attached – that these guys were almost all in their twenties, with some in their thirties and a very tiny number (desperate middle-aged specimens) older than that. But even the oldest I saw were a decade younger than me. It appeared as if I might be the most senior citizen, man or woman, on Tinder. A dubious claim to fame.

But I remained curious (and largely undaunted), so I proceeded to swipe ‘yes' to some of the more appealing young Tinder candidates.

Over the next couple of hours, to my astonishment, I received a number of notifications from Tinder to say that I had been ‘matched' with users who had seen me and given me a ‘yes' in return. Bloody hell. You mean these twenty-something men didn't necessarily equate sixty-plus with decrepitude?

This had tremendous implications. It meant I would no longer have to fiddle the numbers (or as Pup would have said, the
noombers
). No more ducking and diving when asked how old my sons were, or being cagey about the ages of my grandchildren, at times even hiding their toys away behind closed doors so as to avoid the matter altogether. In short, in a curious way, the very anonymity of Tinder would allow me to be more myself. What a wonderful relief.

*

The Tinder door opened onto a whole new realm of young men, the really young ones, from the generation that didn't believe in paying for anything. Joining a dating site cost money and anyway, why struggle to compose a coherent profile narrative, why upload photos and list your favourite films, songs and books, and describe in detail your ideal date, when you can simply download an app to serve you up an instant smorgasbord of willing totties at no cost or effort to you?

Within a few days I had a small stable of fledgling studs ready and willing to play. Most were not long out of university. The youngest, at nineteen, was not long out of school.

This is an amalgamation of my various opening conversations with Tinder Boys:

TB: Hey. You look hot. Can't believe you're 61.

ME: Hello. Neither can I!

TB: So you like young guys?

ME: Yes, I do. Cute ones like you.

TB: Well I love older women.

ME: Why is that?

TB: Always had a fantasy about them. They make me really horny.

ME: Would your friends be shocked?

TB: No. They know I get massively turned on by older women. I'm getting hard now just thinking about it.

ME: Have you been with older women before?

TB: No. I'd love you to show me how it's done.

ME: You're a very naughty boy.

TB: Yes, I am…are you a naughty girl?

Pretty soon they would request a more revealing picture of me than the demure ones they had seen on Tinder, and I would send them my Marks and Spencer lingerie shot, which was always good for moving things along. And they in turn sent me DIY mobile-phone shots of themselves, sometimes showing rippling muscles down to the waist, but sometimes just a close-up of their erect penis. That always made me groan. Nothing looks more ridiculous than an outsize, disembodied dick. But you couldn't really take offence. They were only rascally boys showing off their wares. And anyway, sexual posturing was what Tinder was all about. And I was a kind of remote, electronic recipient for their raunchy fantasies, which I might, or might not, one day bring to fruition. But they had nothing to lose by all this bawdy badinage and exhibitionism. And neither had I.

A few of the boys got knocked out in the first round of messaging. There was, for instance, the one who preferred ‘rough' sex. ‘How rough?' I wanted to know. ‘Plenty of biting and scratching,' came the answer. It sounded painful; less like sex than a fight between alley cats. Then there was the S&M aficionado who aimed to get all Fifty Shades of Grey on me, but as must be abundantly clear by now, I am far more M&S than S&M, so that was him dispatched back into cyberspace. (He was a lawyer, by the way, which somehow made sense…) But it was all huge fun, and wasn't that the point?

One of these young lovelies asked whether I was ‘posh'.

‘Rah-ther,' I answered.

‘Brilliant! I love that! I'm imagining you to be a very posh housewife – very confident, very sexy and very kinky.'

‘A housewife? Steady on!'

Which he countered with: ‘Hey, this is my fantasy, not yours!' I had to chuckle.

*

It was the night of my first-ever Tinder tryst. Tom, a northern boy of twenty-one who had recently graduated from a redbrick university, was coming up from town, where he was doing an intern job at a financial institution, to meet me at my customary local rendezvous spot. He had already informed me that he couldn't stay long because his flatmate had locked himself out of their pad in Balham or Clapham or somewhere on the other side of London, so he would have to return before it got too late in order to let him in.

Kids, eh?

I was sitting on a barstool at The Bells when the tall, dark and dishy Tom, in a smart suit and tie, walked through the door.
Ding dong.
It struck me as apposite in more ways than one to quote the catchphrase of the dulcet-toned Leslie Phillips.

Tom was diffident at first – which I put down to his northern roots – but began to loosen up once he was holding a beer in his hand and we had eased ourselves down onto a leather settee to get to know each other. There wasn't more than six inches between us, but most women wouldn't mind losing their personal space to a bloke like Tom.

After forty-five minutes or so we decided not to order a second round at The Bells but have a drink back at my place. The problem of the locked-out flatmate became somewhat less urgent, as Tom texted him to say he should find something to do and stay out for a while – a nifty solution of my own devising.

I made Tom a sandwich back at my place because I know how hungry young men always are (in all senses of the word), but before he had finished it we started kissing and after a few highly satisfactory minutes of that, we moved upstairs to ‘accelerate matters between us' as Charles might have put it.

Tom had had the same girlfriend throughout most of his time at university. She was a nice girl, he told me, but the relationship had run its course and was over now. He was ready to move on to more advanced studies. He had never been with an older woman but (as per usual) it had been a long-standing dream of his and if he hadn't been so northern he would doubtless have appeared more thrilled about the fact that it was finally coming true.

After the orthodox stuff I initiated him into the same practice I had taught Little Pup and for the first time Tom seemed genuinely excited. He loved this new game. Now his imagination was unbound. ‘Hey wanna do a threesome sometime?' he murmured as he peered down at me, propped on an elbow, and smoothed back his damp hair.

I laughed. ‘You planning to bring a mate along?'

‘I meant with another girl.'

‘I think I'd prefer to have your undivided attention.' Then I pulled his face close to mine and said ‘Come here, my little cupcake,' before kissing his cute, grinning mouth.

Tom left at nine o'clock to take the tube down south, so as to let his hapless flatmate back into their pad. I, meanwhile, threw on my old dressing gown and flopped onto the sofa to watch The Borgias. I was thoroughly engrossed in the medieval mayhem when I got a Tinder message from another of my matches, 28-year-old Jon. According to the app he lived only a mile away. Initially, Jon was wary and insisted on verifying my identity. I gave him my surname so that he could check out my full Facebook profile and after that he was reassured.

‘I'd like to come over,' he messaged. ‘You up for that?'

‘What, now? In the middle of The Borgias?'

‘Oh, you'd rather watch TV. So disappointing.'

I thought about this for a moment. It was 10.30 and I was slouching around in my dressing gown, hair awry. Upstairs the bed was still a mess from my frolics with Tom and there were condom wrappers and tissues on the floor. But what the hell. This is the Raven we're talking about. And Jon's photos
were
captivating, which was why I had ‘yessed' him. ‘How soon can you be here?'

‘Twenty minutes.'

‘See you then.'

Ha – a booty call!

I whipped around and put everything into order, including myself – slinky dress, stylish sandals, tidied hair and fresh make-up.

When Jon emerged out of the darkness onto my front steps, I was drawn to him right away. He looked raffish, with uncombed locks lying over the collar of a loose, casual shirt. He wasn't conventionally handsome (there was little about him that was conventional) but he had palpable appeal. I might even go so far as to call it magnetism.

As per the accepted procedure, we sat for a while as though at a job interview. He told me he worked for a recording company but his real passion was music and he was a part-time disc jockey. I told him about the louche DJ from Liverpool I'd had a relationship with in the nineties and he knew of him. Instant connection. We chatted easily, as though we had already been friends, and moved so naturally into intimacy it seemed almost preordained.

Where Tom had been an attractive, likeable boy who had entered our association in a commendable spirit of higher education, Jon was already a skilful lover whose every move and touch exuded finesse. He was a grown-up, unafraid to show real affection, and I felt almost drunk with pleasure. I loved everything that he did and every minute that we were entwined, looking into each other's eyes, rather too much. Because to my alarm I could feel it stirring long dormant emotions, and therein lay the prospect of pain. Sparking off that sort of fire with a Tinder match would be such a bad idea.

Jon left sometime after midnight and I went to sleep drained, sated, still flushed from all the love-making and thankfully too tired to think.

*

My next encounter was with Jake, a six foot three inch-tall, blond, rugby-playing 22-year-old, who lived with his family in South Kensington. He was so well-constructed that I would defy any red-blooded woman not to drool over the photo of him in swimming trunks served up on Tinder. Public school-educated and with courtly manners, he was not the type to send a picture of his penis. He didn't have to. I had already seen it in my dreams.

He came over late one evening after working out at the gym, as he did five times a week. I opened the door and there he stood in all his mouth-watering glory, like the statue of David. Only this David was warm and alive and as I was shortly to discover
,
far better endowed.

Jake, with his green eyes and open, friendly face, was so direct, so uncomplicated, he really brought home to me how much I valued these young men for their lack of neuroses. After this, how could I bear to face the wearisome hang-ups and emotional handicaps of middle-aged men? No, I mused, Jake and his kind might well spoil me for good.