The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour

Author:Belle de Jour [Belle de Jour]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Crónica, Memorias, Sexualidad
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 2005-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

dimanche, le 8 février

So: it is the mid-eighties. Sometimes in the summer my mother leaves me with a Jewish youth group on weekdays. Usually we hang around a community centre, playing board games or being forced into strange sports of which no one knows the rules, like korfball. Sometimes we take trips.

One time we go to the beach in two minibuses. It’s not a warm day, but the beach is a treat (we are told) so we mustn’t waste the day (we are also told). A teacher at school once brought back a bleached starfish from her holidays abroad, so I spend the day walking barefoot up and down the shore looking for one. Of course there are none. Some other girls are sitting cross-legged in shallow water, pretending to shampoo their hair with sand. They ask me to join them but I don’t. It looks too cold.

We are brushed down obsessively by the leaders before being allowed back in the buses. But there is still sand in everything when we come back, so the adults order the girls into one room and the boys into another to change out of their swimsuits and shake out their towels. Between the two rooms is a cloakroom-cum-corridor, and the boys don’t realise that two older girls are watching them change.

I didn’t get to look. Not from want of trying: the older girls were tall enough to block the view, and wouldn’t let anyone else near. They described what they saw (inaccurately, I later realise). For years after I believed the male member has a spiralling ridge going down it, the physical equivalent of the verb ‘to screw’.

There is a popular song all the older girls like, and they argue about who loves the singer most, whose name would sound best with his. His protestations of asexuality are meaningless to them. No, not meaningless: they make him harder to win. He is as separate from the boys around us as a person can be. He is beautiful, antique, otherworldly and from Manchester — and if we know anything, it’s that Manchester is far cooler than where we are.

In my first flat after university, I am unpacking dishes in the kitchen when the song comes on the radio. It is the first time I have heard it without a chorus of twelve-year-olds singing along.

That summer of the youth group was also the summer my parents’ friends start to call me ‘the little Alice’. As in, through the looking glass. ‘Where is the little Alice?’ they ask, and I run from wherever I am, happy to impress. I am brought out at gatherings to impress with feats of memorisation. They keep me in the room, a parlour game: come watch this ur-adult. I know they’re patronising me by speaking this way, but at the same time I am pleased because I can talk back to them in their own language. One friend of the family refuses to dine at our table if not seated next to me.

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