SIGNS

(Early in 2006 ASSTR declared a competition to pay homage to a one-time regular contributor who wrote many stories under the name ‘Deirdre’.  The challenge was to take a story by Deirdre as a base for a story of one’s own in some shape or form.  ‘Signs’ was my response to that challenge, here preceded by the Deirdre story that inspired it – “Brother”)

Brother
by deirdre, 9/27/94
My jaw dropped. It couldn't be! I come home from college to visit and this! How could Mom not see it?
Stacy and Jeff. I'd seen the way Stacy did things with Jeff. The way she'd hand him things. And take them from him. Sharing significant looks but without a word. I'd seen that at school. They were *doing it*! It was plain as the nose on their faces.
My younger brother and sister. I had to school myself not to stare at them. And Mom, seemingly not noticing a thing! How could she miss it?
That night I was back in my old room. I couldn't get my mind off it. What could I do? I looked up and Stacy was in the room with me. She was looking at me--I wanted to wipe that knowing smile off her face. I just stared at her.
"Why don't you say it?" she asked, "Think I don't know what you're thinking?"
I couldn't believe she'd bring up the subject! Well, it was broached now. "Stacy! How could you *do* that?"
"You *see* what a *hunk* he is. He could pick you up as if you were a child." She was right: Jeff had really filled out. "You couldn't resist him for a second if he tried. Or have you gotten *other* kinds of ideas from that college?"
Her smile was so wicked. She approached me and stood above me as I sat on the bed. No, I didn't have her *other* ideas! She looked down at me over her chest--she was four inches taller than me and *much* bigger--I felt like a child next to her. "Well?" she asked quietly and put her hand under my chin. I leaned back to draw away but it wasn't enough to escape her. I was so afraid of what she'd do next. But she just grinned and turned around and walked out.
I was left alone. Stacy and Jeff! And Stacy! She was so forward, so self- assured! What had she done to Jeff?
I awoke. It was still night. "Wake up," came a whisper. It was Jeff! By my bed! He turned on a small light by my bed. "Stacy said you want me," he went on. He pulled my cover off, sat on the edge of the bed, leaned over and took hold of my shoulder. He was so strong and I was so afraid.
He paused and looked at me. "She lied, didn't she?" he said. Suddenly he seemed so sweet. "Don't worry, I don't want to *rape* you." He carefully covered me up and kissed me on the forehead. Then he stood up and turned to leave.
My hand. It shot out and grabbed his wrist. Staying him. He turned and looked back down at me. He looked so serious. I was so scared.
He sat down. "Don't worry," he said, "we won't actually do it." He uncovered me again. He slipped his hand under the hem of my nightgown-- on my leg. Softly he slid it up. Soon my nightgown was bunched up in front and his hand was there. He fingered me. Slowly, more and more. My breath started getting rough and I breathed larger and larger breaths. He looked down at me with the most loving smile.
I didn't know *what* my body was doing. Was I writhing too much? I didn't care. I mustn't scream though. He didn't stop... just went on and on.
And looked down on me as he sat there.
It was too much. I came. More and more--I couldn't believe it. He was so good--Stacy must have taught him. What did she *do* to him?
He kissed me again on the forehead and he was gone. I lay there and dreamed about it.
He smiled at me the next day but then I was going back to school. The next time I was home he had a girlfriend. He got me alone and told me that he was faithful to her. I was glad about him and Stacy but I couldn't help thinking about the night when he came to me.
That was years ago--now he's faithful to his wife. Completely. I still look at him sometimes and he still sometimes does little things for me without asking. And I see his wife noticing--how she tries to hide the shock and fear. And I know exactly what she feels but I can't talk to her. No matter what I said, she would feel worse. If she only knew how lucky she is.
(Copyright Information Held By Author)

***************************************************************************** 

Stacy

Have you seen that story by your sister before, Stacy?

No.

Can you understand now that the police are suspicious her death might not have been the accident it appears?  What do you suppose would happen to your career were that to be published?  Or perhaps she was blackmailing you or your brother with it?

They can’t think we killed her?

It’s a possibility they have to consider.  A woman, not very well described but which could have been you was seen leaving her apartment block that evening and none of the other resident say she had been their guest.  On the other hand the Coroner has asked me to form an opinion as to Deirdre’s state of mind with a view to considering whether it might have been suicide.  Do you think it might have been?

No.  She would never have killed herself.

Are you willing to help me build a picture of the woman she was?

Yes, of course.

Would you like the opportunity to read the story again?

No.

Is it complete fiction?

No.

Something like that happened?

Yes.

You can recall it?

Yes.

I am only concerned with trying the ascertain the reasons for Deirdre’s death.  Neither you nor your brother are on trial here.  Complete confidentiality applies to anything you say to me save for what I feel I need to reveal to the Coroner with regard to his investigation.  And I am sure he in his turn will treat everything with the utmost discretion except as it pertains to his judgment.   I seek only the truth, and to understand.  Do you accept that?

Yes.

Good.  So which parts of the story are true, and which fiction?

It’s pretty much as I remember it. I don’t know what happened when Jeff was in Dee’s bedroom, of course.  Only what he told me afterwards.

But your sister’s allegations concerning you and your brother are correct?

Yes.

Would you be surprised to learn that Deirdre was still a virgin when she died, her hymen intact?

Yes.  A bit.  I know she wasn’t big on sex, but never to have done it at all…  That’s … hard to understand.

Were you surprised to read that it appears she’d never had intercourse with your brother?

No.  I’m still very *close* to Jeff and he’d have told me if they had.  After that night we decided she just had a thing about incest and couldn’t, so Jeff never pushed it.  He’d have done it had she wanted him to and he says it was like she enjoyed scaring herself with it so they’d fiddle about with some heavy foreplay - I guess that’s what Dee means by “does little things for me” in that last paragraph - but he always knew she didn’t want him to go all the way and she seemed happier if he didn’t, ah, take things in that direction.  Jeff found it a little unnerving - said she was like a kid on the high board for the first time who keeps creeping up to the edge but whose nerve keeps failing, and he often wished they would do it and have done with it, but it never happened.

Did you not talk about it to Deirdre?  After all, Jeff was brother to both of you.

Never.  Not after that night.  She was my sister but we were not that close.  Five years is a lot when you’re kids, and anyway Jeff was always between us.   And not just in age.  He was a bit like a bone between two dogs.  When I was just a little kid he was my hero - you know, big, brave and strong, all that stuff.  Hell, he was fun.  He did fun things the way boys did, and if I wanted to do those fun things I had to get him to agree to take me with him so Mom would let me go.  So I had to be nice to him to make him want to take me along.

Dee was always coming the big sister, tho’.   She thought *she* should be looking after me, not Jeff.  Didn’t like it that I’d rather be out playing with the boys than playing at dolls with her.   Maybe she was a bit jealous.  She’d had no option but to grow up doing what girls are supposed to, I think.   And she wanted Jeff, too, tho’ not in a sex way, I’d say.  She wanted him to be a *real* brother for her, protect her from creepy-crawlies, be a shoulder to cry on, fetch and carry for her.  I remember when she was thirteen or so she had a thing about knights and dragons and maidens in distress.  All the books and videos.   Jeff was only ten or eleven, but he was already almost as tall as her and a lot stronger and I think she wanted him to be her St. George.

Are you saying Jeff wasn’t a *real* brother to you because a *real* brother would not have had sex with you?

No.  My brother and I screwed, yeah, but he was still a real brother to me.  But those knights in the stories, protecting a maiden’s honour?   All romance and no sex.  That kind’a crap.  That was what Dee wanted, I guess.  

Do you think Deirdre decided Jeff could not be a *real* brother to her because of what he was doing with you?

I don’t think she knew.  I honestly don’t think she knew, until that night. Looking back at it now, tho’, I guess we must have been giving all the signs.  Kids – and we were still just kids when we started, don’t forget, I was thirteen and Jeff fifteen – aren’t very good at hiding signs of things when we don’t realise there are signs to be seen.  I just knew Jeff made me feel like a woman – hell, when he screwed me it blew my mind – and I was so grateful to him for it I’d ‘a done anything for him and wanted him to know it.  I just didn’t realise it could be so obvious.  Now I can see it all around me with other people’s kids and often it’s the parents that are blindest.  But I think that’s often because they don’t want to see.  It’s hard to credit, now, that Dee took so long to catch on.

Did *your* parents not want to see you and your brother?

Oh I’m sure Mom did know ‘bout Jeff and me, but she never said anything – apart from telling me early on what I needed to know to avoid getting pregnant but in a general kind of way and that’s the kind of thing every Mom tells her daughter sooner or later, isn’t it?  Obviously she didn’t know until after it had begun when of course it was too late, so what was she to do?  Coming down hard on us then wouldn’t have made me a virgin again, and would just have screwed up the family, and anyway she doted on Jeff.  He couldn’t do anything wrong in her eyes, even to screwing his little sister I guess, and maybe she saw it wasn’t doing me any harm….  I dunno.

Your father?

Oh, he’d gone.  Great bust up years before.  When I was only five.  I mean, we exchanged Christmas cards and things, and met him in an airport lounge occasionally, but he wasn’t family.  He’d played around on Mom, that was why the divorce, and she never forgave him.

So how did the sex part of your relationship with your brother begin?

It just kinda’ happened.  Like I said, I wanted Jeff to take me places with him. Most girls learn sooner or later that the way to a guy’s heart is through his prick, and my brother was the first guy I needed to work that trick on.  Once he was old enough to start wondering about girls, I was a girl he could easily get alone to find out on.  And I didn’t mind.  It was part of the fun.  It felt nice when he found out about me, and when I found out what I could do for his prick it made me feel ten feet tall – little ol’ me able to make it grow so powerful and as stiff as a bone.  It was even scary, but in a nice tummy-tickling kind’a way and when I could make it squirt stuff he told me made babies, it made me feel that I, me, mattered.  I wasn’t just the kid sister he had to tote about any more.  He was my big brother, but I more than earned my place with him

As he found out more and more about sex he’d pass it on to me and we’d do it, or at least try to do it, until one day he was there inside me, stroking himself up and down inside me and I felt that all my Christmases had come at once.

Were you fully aware of what you and he had done?  Not only sexual intercourse, but incest as well?

Oh yeah.  I knew about incest.   It was usually fathers going to jail for screwing their daughters, but I knew it covered brothers and sisters as well.  But brothers didn’t seem to get caught as you never heard of one being sent to jail for it.

Given that, how did you feel about it?

Hell, I was over the moon.  I remember thinking I was only just thirteen but I’d done *it* and I knew in my heart that my big sister who was eighteen hadn’t.  I just knew she hadn’t.  I knew she hadn’t with Jeff ‘cos he’d told me that they’d never done anything like sex, and I knew from the gossip at school that all the boys thought of her as just a prick-teaser.  The couple of boys she’d actually gone out with said she hardly let them get their hands into her knickers - so Jeff said - and she never had a boy-friend for very long, I guess because they quickly found out that they’d get nowhere with her.

But I’d done it with Jeff.  When he was inside me, humping up and down on me, my big brother was mine.  All mine.  And even when he wasn’t he was still mine, not Dee’s, because he’d possessed me, gone all the way with me, not her, and I guess that was what she saw and why she didn’t like it.  'Sibling rivalry' you’d probably call it, and she’d lost out.

After that initial intercourse with your brother though, when you had the experience and knew what you were capable of in that direction, did you not begin to think about enjoying it with boys other than your own brother?  Perhaps even that your brother was no longer a necessary part of the equation?

Well, once I’d done it with Jeff there were a couple of other guys I let do it, but only if Jeff said it was OK.  He didn’t want me becoming the school bike and kept me on a tight-rein, but I didn’t mind.  There was a gang of us, boys and a few girls, and we kept it to ourselves.  Easier that way, and a lot more fun ‘cos you know them all and trust them.  “Cos if they blow the whistle on you, you can blow it on them. They knew about Jeff and me, of course.  Hell, they even watched us doing it.  But most of the other girls were sisters, too, and screwed with their brothers in the gang as well as the other guys.  No-one thought anything wrong in it - brothers and sisters doing it – because we all did.   It was just sex-for-sex’s-sake.

But I liked it ‘specially with Jeff.  I don’t know if he felt like it, but I always thought it was different and somehow special when we did it.  It’s hard to say, but I think he was a different guy when he was in me than with other girls, because I was his sister.  It *felt* different to me.  When we did it at home, just us two, it was usually because I came onto him.  He was getting enough, from older and prettier girls than me who weren’t his sister, not to always have it on his mind the way most guys do, but I couldn’t get enough of him and he was usually willing to oblige.  

The incident Deirdre writes about.  You say you recall it?

Yeah I remember it, when she came home from college and realised, at long last, that me and Jeff were screwing.  She was always trying so hard to be grown-up.  I guess it comes of being the oldest.    Always having to look after us 'younger ones'.  Having to set an example. She went on and on about her flat and the girls she shared with, the societies she’d joined, the coffee-bars she went to.  It was all so clean and wholesome, and I was sure it was just for Mom’s benefit, to let Mom know her little girl had grown up and could be trusted.

So the first time I got her alone I asked her about guys, - you know, sister-to-sister secrets stuff - and thinking she might tell me all the *naughty* bits she hadn’t told Mom, but she went all stiff and distant like I’d touched on something taboo, and she announced that she hadn’t gone to college for *that* kind of thing, like it was all beneath her and I was still a kid for asking.

But I wasn’t a kid any more.  I knew all about guys and their pricks, and what their pricks felt like in my cunt, my mouth, my ass.  I knew that even as a fourteen-year-old girl I was the equal of any three seventeen-year-old football-playing hunks when it came to sex.  I was sure that whatever my big sister had got up to with guys at college I had already been there, done that, and could talk with her about it woman to woman.  So to be treated like a kid again by her really got up my ass!

And for the first time I wondered about my big sister still being a virgin.  From her reaction I was sure she was.  I hadn’t really thought about it before because, well, I’d assumed it was just Deirdre being Deirdre.  I mean, I knew I was *supposed* to still be a virgin and even pretended to be one for Mom just as she pretended I still was, and I certainly knew I was not *supposed* to let my own brother screw me, let alone encourage him do it. Yeah, I even did think of myself as a bit of slut but it didn’t bother me as I couldn’t see any reason why it should.  Until then I’d just sort of supposed that Deirdre had had all the same opportunities and temptations to be a slut but, being more *proper*, and maybe stronger-willed than me, and maybe trying harder to please Mom, had just said ‘no’ when I said ‘hell, yes’. 

But that was when I wondered for the first time if there wasn’t more to it than that.  Hell, even Mom asked her about guys and had seemed surprised when Deirdre had said she hadn’t had enough free time to meet any.  I’m sure Mom wouldn’t have been upset to learn that Deirdre had gotten herself screwed senseless for the whole of her first semester.  When I went away Mom kind’a hinted to me that that’s what she’d done, and maybe she was hoping it would help wean me off my brother.   I mean, Dee was eighteen, petite and gorgeous.  As long as she was sensible about it – and ‘sensible’ was the one thing everyone agreed she was - and didn’t let herself get knocked-up Mom wouldn’t have cared less, I’m sure.  Her little girl had grown up, and getting themselves screwed senseless when they first leave home is what normal grown-up girls do.

So I thought about it a lot.  Was it that she was scared of sex?  Being the oldest she’d been brought up more strictly than me and Jeff, had more responsibility put on her.  Was she inhibited and afraid of breaking what she still thought were the rules?  Or did she prefer girls over boys?  I was old enough to know a little about that, and had found out for myself that another girl’s fingers and tongue could be a lot more skilful than any boy’s, but a girl didn’t have a prick and that, for me, had always been what I really wanted.  Or was she still *saving* herself for her Prince the way the princesses in those books she’d loved years before did?  I couldn’t really get her at all.

Then I saw from the way she looked at me that she’d cottoned-on to the fact Jeff and I were screwing.  I certainly didn’t tell her and Jeff told me he hadn’t, and she didn’t catch us at it so it must have been the way she says – she just saw the *signs*.

Do you know what she meant by *signs*?

I guess so. I’d seen it at school, too.  Brothers and sisters who were a little too *close*, and perhaps trying a little too hard not to show it.  We’d even invited some into our little gang.  I guess teachers are often aware of it, too, but decide it’s none of their business.  Too complicated.  Too dangerous to get involved in.  I suppose others saw it in Jeff and me but at the time I don’t think it occurred to us to look for it in ourselves even when we saw it in others.  At that age you don’t, do you?

Not consciously, perhaps, but as the  parental discovery of an incestuous relationship – or even a purely sexual one for a thirteen-year-old – is a potentially threatening situation which most children are instinctively aware of, there will be an subconscious drive to conceal it.  As good acting requires both awareness and experience it is rare for a child, lacking both, to carry it off successfully.

Yeah.  I guess.  So when I saw the signs in Deirdre, the way she looked at him not knowing the tip of her tongue was just between her lips, or hung around him, or laughed a little too much when he said something funny. I thought she’d gotten Jeff to screw her as well, and when he said he hadn’t I was surprised.  That’s when I realised she must have guessed we were doing it, and that she was jealous of me.  And wanted to…  I don’t know.  Share him, I suppose.  Not let me have all of him.

The way Deirdre tells it you were pretty much challenging her to claim her share.  Were you?

I guess so.  Then again, no.  It wasn’t a matter of ‘shares’.  Jeff screwing Dee wouldn’t have bothered me at all.  He would always be my brother.  She couldn’t take him away from me like she could, say, a husband or even a boyfriend.  I’d maybe have got a bit piqued had I suddenly felt in need of a screw and she’d already have snaffled him for one but, well, there’s sharing and sharing, hey, and I’d shared Jeff before like that.  Anyway she’d be away at college most of the time so I knew I’d have him pretty much to myself for a couple more years.

Were you serious about your sister being a lesbian?  I’m assuming that’s what you meant when you accused her of having picked up *other* ideas.

I guess so, yes.  But I was only fourteen so I don’t suppose I really understood.  I knew girl-girl sex, but didn’t really understand the whole ‘gay’ thing.  To me girl on girl was something you only did for an occasional change, or if there weren’t enough guys to go around.  I guess I was accusing her of settling for second-best because she was scared of *the real thing*.

And now?

Was my sister a card-carrying lesbian?  No.  Not a card-carrying one, anyway.  Even lesbians don’t often have intact hymens, I’d a’ thought.  And no, I don’t think she was a repressed one, either.  What I saw in her eyes when she looked at Jeff was a girl longing for a prick to press her button and a good long, honest screw to blow her mind.

I thought at first she was being stupid.  If she wanted Jeff to screw her, all she had to do was ask.  I mean, he was always a bit in awe of her, big sister and all that, and I was surprised when he said he hadn’t noticed the signs like I had, but if she’d said something or even dropped a big enough hint he’d have given her his best, and loved it.  When Jeff told me she hadn’t I decided she must have some kind of hang-up about it – about sex with your own brother – and that’s when I challenged her about it.

That’s the incident she describes in the story?

Yeah.

What exactly were you accusing her of ‘thinking’ about you?  What were you challenging her to say to you?

Oh, I can’t really remember now.   I’m not sure I really had anything particular in mind.  It was just the way she looked at me, like I’d farted in church.

If your sister’s account is accurate you both knew you were talking about your incest even though the fact you were having sex with Jeff hadn’t been mentioned or even, from your sister’s point of view,  confirmed.  How did you know, as you obviously did, that when she asked “how could you *do* that?” she was talking about incest with your brother rather than just having sex with any other boy?

I don’t know.  I can’t remember, now.  I can’t remember word for word what was said but yeah, I know it was my having sex with Jeff that upset her much more than my just having sex, tho’ I don’t think she’d have approved of that either.

But “how could you *do* that?” suggests to me that she was asking how you could want to undertake something unpleasant, distasteful.  Something not being forced on you but which you had chosen to do.  Someone with an aversion to mice watching me play with one might ask me that question in that way.  Do you think it was it the physical act of intercourse, with penetration, vaginal lubrication, semen, sweat, the gasping and groaning and groping etc. she found distasteful, or the fact that the penis doing the penetrating, the semen, the groping hands,  etc. were your own brother’s?

Well, both I suppose.

Do you think she would have found penetration, semen, groping, etc. from a boy other than your brother as being less objectionable?

I guess so.

So have you any idea why the fact it was your own brother’s semen should make it seem *more* objectionable to her?

I don’t know.  I can’t say.  That’s your field really, isn’t it?

Yes, but I can only work with what I learn of the particular situation   You are yourself clearly aware that many girls are totally untroubled by what is generally regarded as one of the last taboos in the West and quite happily have sex with their brothers – or even their fathers, come to that.  Yet there are also many who still seem to regard the taboo as the expression of a natural or supernatural law and view incest is therefore unnatural and a perversion – that it’s inherently vile - as seems to have been the case with Deirdre.  However it’s rare to find two girls in the same family, one with each opposite view so clearly adopted.  Have you any idea how this situation could have arisen?

No.  I’ve never thought about it.  I mean, Deirdre was just Deirdre.  I’d come home with mud all over me and frogs in my pockets.  Dee treated mud the way she’d treat steaming hot shit, and loathed slimy things.

Semen is slimy.  So would her genitals have been, during sex.

Yeah, well, maybe.  It might have been the slime and the sweat that put her off sex, but I know she hated it that I’d had sex with my brother.

Because you had and she hadn’t?

Maybe.

It’s what she seems to think you were suggesting, if her account is accurate.

It was pretty much as she describes it.  I came right out with it, that I knew she knew Jeff and me were screwing, that it was fantastic, that it was stupid to have hang-ups about it and that she ought to do it herself. When she still wouldn’t talk about it or even admit to me – or herself – that she wanted to I gave up in disgust and sikked Jeff onto her.  I knew she wanted it, and thought maybe if he went to her she’d give in to him so she could tell herself she was doing it for his sake, if she needed to fool herself.  But she didn’t, so Jeff said.

There is a discrepancy here.  We’ve established, have we not, that your sister asked you how you could allow your own brother to have sexual intercourse with you in a way that reveals she clearly thought of it as a particularly unpleasant, even nasty, physical act, and probably immoral too, and expected you to also regard it that way. “How could you *do* that?”  Yet you seem certain she was keen to commit the same unpleasant, even nasty physical and immoral act with your brother.  

Yeah, you’re right.  I hadn’t looked at it like that.  But she was hot for him.  I’m certain she was.  I saw all the signs.  And what about what she says happened later, with Jeff?  What does she say?  Yeah, it’s here.  “I lay there and dreamed about it”.  About Jeff fingering her at least, if not screwing her.  I mean, it was her own brother’s fingers in her fanny she was dreaming about.  Why not his prick?

You said a moment ago you told your sister “that it was stupid to have hang-ups about it.”  I assume “it” refers to incest rather than simple intercourse.  Your sister makes no mention of that.

No, well, I can’t remember exactly who said what.  I’m sure there was a bit more than she says, a little more talking, but she obviously wrote this a lot later so her memory’s going to be a bit suspect, too.   I mean it reads like a story, like fiction, not a letter or a diary entry or something personal.  Does anyone know why she did write it?

No.  It was found on the hard-drive of the desktop computer in her apartment.  To me this reads like the kind of thing a therapist would set as an exercise.  Writing about a real event as though it were fiction, although it’s more usual in the third-person.  It can be a way of getting someone to recall a painful or traumatic event in greater detail than they would normally want to.  That would be my best guess, and why I think this particular episode was of huge significance to Deirdre.  

Oh, shit.  But it was years ago.  You don’t think I…..

Her problems were hers.  Anyway we’re not looking for anyone to blame, here.  This is all about understanding your sister, and what happened.  I do not believe she would ask or want any more of you, Jeff or anyone.  Just understanding.

Yes.  Thank you.

So obviously anything she left unsaid might indeed be significant.  Finding what the author could not include even in a fictionalised account can be a key.  How sure are you that you accused your sister of having a *hang-up* specifically about incest?

Oh, pretty sure.  Don’t forget I was only fourteen and she was eighteen, maybe even nineteen, so it was pretty hard for me to stand up to her.  I mean, she knew so much more than me.  But I remember being angry at the way she was looking down at me for doing something she wanted to do herself – there, I’ve said it again but I know she did – and I was a bit scared, too.  I’d seen what happened to kids, brothers and sisters, caught screwing by the wrong people.  You know, ‘care and protection’ and all that crap, and I wouldn’t have put it beyond Deirdre to blow the whistle on us ‘for our own sakes’.  So I was probably a bit aggressive and hostile, too.

And all this business about me being ‘bigger’ than her.  Yeah, I was taller but that was because she was five-foot nothing in her stockings, and she could look as sexy as hell.  I could have got her into films – not just my kind of films – easily.  She was “elfin”, I heard a guy say once, and he was right.  She was the kind of perfect woman in miniature that could rule a kingdom with ease, like Elizabeth the First.  Hell, she did it with that business of hers.  She could dominate a room full of hard-bitten businessmen.  I’d seen it.  It’s like she kind’a wants to paint herself as weak and helpless here, and I guess because I was so angry and scared I’d gained the upper hand, but if she had stuck to her guns and rammed it home that screwing with your own brother was sick, I think I’d have caved in pretty quickly.

Is that because you really do believe, in your heart of hearts, that screwing with your own brother is sick?

No.  I’ve asked myself over and over with my brother’s prick squelching and slurping in me, with his slimy semen sliding around inside me, his sweat on my breasts and the taste of my cunt in his kiss, if what we were doing was wrong and why it should be wrong if it was, and for any reason why we shouldn’t be doing it  But I’ve never found an answer that made sense to me.  Oh, yeah, there’s the recessive gene business, but you can reinforce genius genes as well, can’t you?  Anyway we’ve never done it to make a baby, and did all we could to make sure we didn’t make one.  So no.  I’ve never been able to make screwing my brother ‘sick’ and still for the life of me don’t see why it should be.

But back when I was only fourteen there was no way I could have been so sure of that.   It didn’t *feel* sick when we did it, and it didn’t *look* sick when I watched other brothers and sisters do it.  In fact you probably wouldn’t have known they were brother and sister if you hadn’t been told.  They were just a boy and a girl doing what boys and girls were meant to do. And love to do more than anything else in the world, if they’re normal.  But that didn’t mean it *wasn’t* sick.  There was still a hell of a lot I didn’t understand about the world and it worried me that my sister, who knew so much more about it than I did and who I knew wanted very much to feel Jeff’s prick in her, was fighting it so hard.  It was like she knew something I didn’t

I dunno.  Looking back at it now, maybe I was forcing the issue for my own sake.  Either my big sister would cave in and let Jeff screw her, which would mean it wasn’t really sick but just a parents’ conspiracy to keep their kids out of each other’s pants after all, or she’d let me into the great grown-up secret as to why it really was sick and why she was refusing to do it herself and repelled by me doing it.  Only I don’t remember thinking like that at the time.

That may indeed have been one of your motivations.  Provoking confrontations over boundaries is a means by which children often test their validity, although they are usually aware of the more immediate issues, like why they can’t watch that particular video at that particular time.  Reading Deirdre’s account, tho’, she didn’t do any sticking to her guns or ramming home of anything.  In fact she was the one who capitulated, pretty much without a fight.  Did it happen the way she says?  You standing over her, capturing her head and restraining her attempt at ‘escape’?  Did you put her to the question, and then walk away before she answered?

I remember her sitting on the bed and me standing over her, yes.  I don’t remember holding her under the chin, but it would have been easy.  Her head was level with my waist. And yeah, I remember I had the last word, and walking away feeling….   Yeah, feeling good.  I think I did say “Well?”, like she says.

That’s a pretty spectacular victory for a fourteen-year-old girl to achieve over her eighteen-year-old sister, don’t you think?

Yeah, I guess it is.

Did you win many arguments with her?

Hell no.

So why did you win this one?

I guess because it mattered to me.

You don’t think the fact that she’d just discovered her ‘younger brother and sister’ were committing incest mattered to Deirdre?

Well, yes.  I think it did.

So why did you win this one?

I don’t know.  I cared more than she did?  I was more scared of losing?  

Losing this one scared Deirdre a very great deal.  She says so.  So, what was the question the victor imposed on the vanquished?  “Well?”  “Well” what?

Oh, I don’t know, now.  I guess something like, “will you think about it?”

Think about having sex with Jeff?  Or consider the functionality of the legal and social prohibition on consensual non-procreational carnal relations between siblings in a secular society?

Well certainly not the second, if I even understand it.  But she couldn’t come to a decision on the first without considering the second, could she?

Had *you* considered the second when deciding whether to have sex with your brother?

Hell no.  I was only thirteen.  I wouldn’t have understood a word of it.  

So you didn’t have a view on the validity of the taboo on incest when you first had to decide whether or not to let your brother have sex with you.  For you it was just a question of ‘sex or not’.   For Deirdre it was ‘incest or not’.  Wouldn’t you agree?

I’m not sure I follow.

For you at thirteen, just deciding whether or not to have sex was such a huge step that the fact it would also be incest hardly came into the picture.  For an eighteen-year-old girl like Deirdre ‘sex’ is next to nothing.  Even an eighteen-year-old virgin can choose to have sex pretty much whenever she wants, no questions asked, no parents to hood-wink, no sniggering about it behind the bike sheds. It’s practically a given, in modern society.  For an eighteen-year-old girl it can be deciding whether or not to commit incest that is the huge step to take. Not deciding whether or not to have sex.

Yeah.  I see that.   I guess it was harder for Dee than I thought.

So the question is, why had your sister clearly come to the conclusion that to have sex with your own brother was something especially distasteful?  “How could you *do* that?” speaks to me of a sense of revulsion.  What had made her decide that incest was revolting,  disgusting, rather than just something well-brought-up people didn’t do like drinking red wine with a flute glass?

I don’t know.  I really, really don’t know. 

The most likely source of a visceral response to incest such as Deirdre seems to have had would be memories a severe over-reaction by parents to a quite innocent but ‘incestuous’ act by a child – an eight-year-old boy discovering that his six-year-old sister was ‘different’ and having a look.  Or an eight-year-old girl feeling her father’s penis while climbing into his lap.  

I can’t remember anything like that.  Anyway, Mom hardly reacted severely when she knew Jeff and I were screwing.

True, if she really did know.  Perhaps your father earlier?

I don’t really remember him.  But I don’t think he ever beat us.  Mom still loathes him and will rake up against him every offence he ever committed, but she’s never mentioned that.

Hellfire-and-damnation preachers in church?

No.  We weren’t churchy.

The experience of a friend being severely punished for an incestuous, or perceived incestuous act or relationship?

Possibly.  She had different friends to us.  Older.  But I never heard of it if it happening.

It remains a puzzle, then, for the moment.  Tell me, having put her to the question why didn’t you wait for an answer?  

Oh, I don’t know.  It was so long ago.  Maybe I thought I’d done enough.  Made my point.

You had her on the ropes.  She was practically cowering at your feet, according to her. She writes, “I was so afraid of what she'd do next.”  What was she afraid you would do?  Not of what you might do.  What you would do.

I can’t imagine.  I really can’t.

No?  Can you remember how you felt at that moment?

Oh, I’d felt pretty good.  I’d been so angry, but I’d won and I wasn’t angry any more.  I felt…  I felt…  

Ten feet tall?

Yeah.

Remember what else you told me had made you feel ten feet tall?  Being a little girl with the power to draw an ejaculation from your big brother.  Being able to get him to surrender his penis - the essence and expression of his maleness which you being female could only experience indirectly - into your hands and to take control of him through it.  You knew he was trying to hold his ejaculation back as you stroked it and played with it, that he wanted to make the wonderful sensations last as long as possible and delay his orgasm, but ultimately he couldn’t prevent you making him come.

Is that bad?

It is power, Stacy.  Power over another.  Whether it is good or bad depends on what you do with it.

I was only doing what he wanted.  He thought it was pretty good.

“The way to a guy’s heart is through his prick”, I remember you saying.

Yeah.  OK.  But what’s that got to do with that time with Deirdre?  I wasn’t after her prick.  Or her heart.

I suspect you *were* after her heart tho’ not for the same end as your brother’s, and you felt ten feet tall for the same reason.   You’d gained control and power over her.  Your big sister was in your hands just as much as your big brother had been when you masturbated him.  She was as helpless to stop you doing what she feared you were going to as he had been to stop you from making him ejaculate.  She knew that.  And she would only have been frightened like that if there was something you had gained the power to do, or make her do, which she at that moment knew would hurt her.  Hurt her a lot.

Shit.  What was it?

You tell me.

I don’t know, I tell ya’!  I mean yeah, I’d been angry but that had gone. She knew that.  She says so.  She says I spoke quietly.  Anyway we’d had some real blazing rows before but we’d never hit each other.  She can’t have thought I was going to hit her.  I don’t know what she was scared I might do.

May we speculate?  Lift a few stones and see what crawls out from beneath?

I’m not sure I like the sound of that.

We’re doing this for Deidre.  All she is now is what your memory makes her.  Do you think she would rather be her true self or just what you think she was?

OK.  Put like that.

Perhaps she feared you were going to take her somewhere.  Somewhere she didn’t want to go.  Go back to that night but this time you’re Deirdre, sitting on the bed, and I’m you, looming over you, your chin caught in my hand stopping you ducking the question.  One rule.  You will tell the truth.  You can wriggle and evade but you can’t lie because you know the truth matters to you more than anything else.  You are at a crossroads in your life and if you don’t find or accept the truth now the rest of your life will forever be a lie.  You know this. Yes?

Yes.

Well?  Are you going to let Jeff have sex with you?  

No.  I can’t.

Can’t or won’t?

Can’t.

Why?  Something wrong with you?  Can’t you open you legs wide enough to let a guy lie between them, slim, firm and powerful, his thighs tight against yours forcing you wider to accept him.  Is your cunt, built big enough for a baby, not big enough to accept your little brother’s prick throbbing and eager to reach into your womb and quicken it, yet still soft enough to wrap around it and squeeze it and cling to it until it’s done its job and you and it are spent and soothed and glowing with life and peace?

No, it’s not that.  It’s…  I can’t.  I think of those things and I crunch up inside.  My cunt shrivels up and I feel like the bone grows like a shield across its front, closing it.

But Dee, it’s that guy you saw at College that day, remember?  Your eyes met and that hot flush swept through you before you could think and a great tingling wave burst in your cunt like hot champagne making you feel so good you almost fainted with pleasure, and you even wet your knickers before you could stop it.  Well, he’s here beside your bed, naked and powerful, his prick throbbing to make that hot, pink champagne explosion in your cunt again, but he’s tender, too.  He doesn’t want to hurt you.  You know he’ll be gentle and careful, and work it in slowly if you’re worried about the pain.  He’s yours to command and he’s waiting for you to say yes , do it.  He’s waiting, Dee, for you to say yes, make me a woman, or no, go away, I can’t.  He’s waiting, Dee, what do you say?

Yes, oh I’m scared, but yes.  Make me a woman.

He’s come down to you, Dee, a man’s weight on your breasts.  You can feel his heart beating though them, fast and excited as his blood burns with desire to fill you, his arms tight around you, his breath shuddering in your ear as all the stars in the Universe crowd into in his prick to explode into a Big Bang of creation inside you, but he’s not there yet.  He waits at the entrance to your body, waiting for you to say yes, yes,  and open yourself to him like a rose to the sun, or no I can’t do it.  I can’t shift the block.  He’s waiting, Dee, quivering with desire and his own need and he can’t wait for ever so what is it?  Breath in his ear, Dee, I’m open and yearning or  I’m frozen and closed. One or the other.

I’m open, open like the rose.

You feel his prick pressing, Dee, and the pain melt away.  You’re open to him and empty with nothing between you and fulfilment, the champagne explosion, the Universe inside you; nothing but the moment it’s going take to slide into you and fill you, not just a prick in your cunt but a Man in your Woman, completing you, making you whole.  A moment away, that’s all - just for an effortless slide of fullness into the emptiness inside you -  but the golden light changes, a tiny shift of shadows, and it’s not the guy from college on your breasts any more but your brother who loves you as only a brother can and yearns to fill you and fulfil  you and knows and understands and feels your pain because your pain is his just as his life is yours.  His prick aches for you, he burns for you because he feels your emptiness and wants to fill it and support you and protect you until you wish to fill it with another when he will relinquish you with love and pass you on, whole and laughing with joy to that other, and he’s waiting Dee, waiting for you to say yes, fill me with joy, or no, you’re my brother.  Jeff’s pressing gently, Dee, pressing gently.  Are you open or closed?

Shit.  Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

Feeling better, Stacy?

Shit, I’m still shaking.  Shit, that was scary.  What did you do to me?  I need a shower.  Shit, don’t ever do that to me again.

Take your time.

Shit, that was….  Like I *was* Dee.  Jesus, how I wanted to feel that guy inside me, like my cunt was burning for him.  I was scared but I could have done it.  Me, scared of a prick!  Yet I was, but I wanted to.  I so wanted to.  And I could have let it inside me, while it was him.  But the moment it was Jeff pushing…  Everything just clamped up.  Like cramps.  Like a brick of ice in my cunt.  I mean, Jeez…  I’ve let some scum-balls screw me on set, guys who gave me the creeps,  been fucked in front of the camera’s by guys I wouldn’t get into a lift alone with any other time and had no trouble taking their pricks in my cunt and faking it, but that….   *Was* I Dee?  I mean had she…   Shit, you’re supposed to be a psychologist, not a fucking spiritualist.

No, that wasn’t Dee.  It was just you being Deirdre.  Don’t forget you are an actress, and a good one I hear.    You were sisters.  You shared a lot of life together and you had a lot more in common than you know.  A lot of empathy each for the other. You knew her a lot better than you realise – what she felt, how she thought, how she would react - and she you.  Which is why I would be surprised if she hadn’t picked up on your relationship with Jeff much, much earlier.  My guess would be that she did, but blocked it.  She had to, because for some reason she couldn’t allow herself to feel what you were feeling when you were with Jeff.  That feeling would have hurt her unbearably, which she had to prevent by anaesthetising that area.  Which would have left her numb to the possibility of other relationships, all other relationships including boys, and maybe why you weren’t close as sisters.  Don’t forget, according to Deirdre’s account it was your decision to force the issue – to bring it out into the open between you.  Had it not been for the signs she didn’t know she was giving out, just as you were unaware of the signs of your incest with Jeff which triggered this confrontation which *you*provoked, she would probably have lived in misery with the knowledge for years or until some other crisis occurred.  What we have to try to determine is what had happened to make her lift the block and accept the pain that resulted when she had to face the knowledge it unstopped.

Don’t forget this is just speculation not science,  but if what you felt just now was right your sister had a block against all intercourse, not just incest.  But the inhibitions regarding incest were far, far stronger.  All incest is sex, but not all sex is incest.  A block against sex will include incest automatically but even the most powerful block against incest should not block non-incestuous sex. Your sister had a block against sex but her block against incest was far more powerful, almost as though it were a totally different animal.  She had the strength and ability to overcome the block against sex had she chosen to do so, which means it was largely psychological and could be overcome just by thought, but the block against incest was so deep it was subconscious and expressed itself physically, with actual muscular spasms and perhaps vaginismus.  That is significant.  I’m sure they are linked, but the disparity in a situation such as Deirdre’s is unusual.  I’m surprised, too, that a girl such as Deirdre according to the picture I am building up of her had not already taken steps to overcome the sex block.  With a sympathetic guy like the one from college I created she could have done it fairly easily without threatening to trigger the incest block at all, and she would certainly have been aware of that.  Yet she hadn’t.  And then again, according to what she wrote she was able later that same night to not only overcome the sex-block - and with your brother - but take the incest-block right down to the wire, too.   I can’t see it yet, but the reason for that is important, I’m sure.  When did you last see your brother naked?

You what?

What did you just see in your mind?  The truth, don’t forget.

Jeff coming out of the shower, all damp, towelling his hair, prick half-droopy like it is when I’ve made it happy.

What did you feel?  The truth, don’t forget.

A little champagne fizz in my cunt and a strong desire to jump on him and screw him to death on the shower-room floor.

So you happy you’re one-hundred per cent Stacy again?

Yeah, you bastard.

Ready to move on?

No.  But I owe it to Dee, don’t I?

Your call.

OK.  Go on.

We were looking for things you had the power to require your sister to think, do or say the very possibility of which frightened her so much she still remembered it ten years later.  Do you credit now that one of those things might simply have been just the thought of having sex with your brother herself?  She had been appalled at the thought of *you* having sex with Jeff.  Any time her thoughts even approached the possibility that *she* might have sex with him I suspect she would have killed them stone dead.  But you now had the power to force her to contemplate that possibility.  Can you understand now why that might frighten her?

Terrify her, more like, if she really would feel what I did.

I strongly suspect she would.  If you read her story again you’ll see that although it refers to Jeff ‘wanting’ her, and the prospect of his ‘raping’ her she never once introduces even a fantasy of his actually having normal intercourse with her.  Even ten years later, she still can’t let herself do that.

But I’m sure she wanted him to.  I saw all the signs.  I mean, she must have imagined sex with him.  She looked at him as though she was imagining him humping her at that very moment.

Perhaps.  I can be wrong, sometimes.  But how does that square with what you’ve just experienced of your sister’s reaction to the idea of having sex with Jeff.

Point taken.  So how do you explain it?

I can’t.  Yet.  If you tell me you felt that your sister felt like she was having sex when she looked at your brother I believe you.  It will have been empathy at work.  It worked the other way when your sister felt what she received from you when you looking at Jeff.  You having sex with him.  We know what she felt about that.  “How could you *do* that?”  To her it was like watching you eat shit, or something equally obnoxious.  There is a huge dichotomy here I’m only at the start of resolving, but my very unscientific gut-feeling is that when we solve it we might have a handle on what was in your sister’s mind as she stood on that balcony.

I would like to look at something else your sister thought you might do with your power which could have deeply frightened her.  To do that you will need to *be* her again, and you asked me not to do that to you.  Moreover this time the fantasy I will need to create will include you, and as I have been unable so far to psycho-analyse my male ego totally out of existence I fear I will be unable to prevent myself having a personal sexual response to the fantasy, given that you are sitting there in front me in the flesh – something my maleness has been unable to ignore for some time.  I feel I must seek your consent to such an intimacy beforehand, and in the light of that as well as your expressed wish not to *be* Dee again I am reluctant to proceed.

Intimacy?  Doc, I’m a porn star.  What the hell would I be worried about *intimacy* for?  Want me to strip?  Watch me fuck myself that little statuette on the shelf?  Sure.  Just ask.  It’s nothing to me.  Water off a duck’s back.  I’d have a harder job working that photocopier.  Hell, I like you.  You’re the brainiest guy I’ve met in years.  You’re so clever you frighten me.  And I trust you utterly, one-hundred-and-ten percent.  But if the sneakiest little thought has stuck its head up in the back of your mind saying, “I wonder what it’s like to screw the real Stacy Stevens,” please feel free to find out.  I shall be quite happy to co-operate with any desires you would normally feel inhibited from, ah, seeking to fulfil. Is that proper psycho-speak? It would actually be real, real nice to screw a guy with brains for a change, and some manners.  I would, honestly, enjoy it.  And I’d have forgotten all about it before I was back at my car.  

Thank you, Stacy.  I would enjoy sex with you very much.  Unfortunately there are problems.  One, of course, is that my wife would probably not approve were I to tell her and I have no wish to deceive her.    Another is that my profession most certainly wouldn’t approve.  Although you are not my patient I owed you a duty of fidelity from the moment you sat in that chair and which now attaches to you for life and beyond, and precious as the experience of sex with you would be to me, I cannot value it more highly than my career.  Thirdly and not insignificantly that wretched male ego of mine would make me all too aware that neither my penis nor my performance would compare with those of the younger and far more athletic partners to whom I am sure you are accustomed, and while I have absolutely no doubt that you would be unconcerned by this, I fear me I would be all too aware of it during the act and be diminished in my own eyes.

Another, and for me insurmountable problem with accepting your offer is that we both know perfectly well there is no *real* Stacy Stevens.  She is a ghost of light and electrons haunting DVDs and video-tape cassettes.  The woman whose secret places I would be uncovering, whose eyes I would be looking into in the hope of seeing her soul rather than my own face, whose flesh would be receiving my substance in its innermost recesses, would be Miss Stacy Bartlett who, to the extent that I know her at all, is a fourteen-year-old girl still struggling to define her sexuality and reconcile the deep love she feels for her brother and which she chooses to express by giving him the gift of sex in addition to her friendship and trust, and the joy she receives in return for that gift, with a powerful sense that what she is doing is wrong and that joy tainted because society says it is yet gives no reason.   

So I deeply appreciate the offer and know it is made it in the spirit of a genuine gift, as perhaps the only thing you believe you possess and are able to bestow I would actually value .  You are wrong about that.  While I would value it, you have a great many other things to offer apart from sex any man worthy of you would also value, and you must never, never forget that.  Moreover, the only sex really worth having with you is sex like the sex you give your brother, given with love and your whole heart as well.  You did not offer me that, and neither should you for I have not the right to it he has.

Lastly, Stacy, I’m not asking you to trust me with fucking your body.  I’m asking you to trust me with fucking your mind.

Well, that put me in my place.

Well, you might also like to contemplate my observation previously about children provoking confrontations over boundaries.  This a boundary for very good reasons and I ask you to respect it because you are old and intelligent enough understand what and why it is.  You are not a child to have to test them by confrontation.  It was also childish to call me ‘doc’.

OK.  OK.  You’ve made your point.  Now you’re making me *feel* like a child.  

Stacy, you are feeling threatened and frightened, just as your sister was as she sat on her bed that night.  Your first experience as her was very shocking and unpleasant and now I’ve asked you to do it again.  You have always known your sister had a dark and pain-filled shadow which you did not, but you locked this away in your subconscious because if she who at least knew its name could not face it how could you?  Now I am asking you to face it  and it is natural that you fear it.  It is also natural to react to fearful situations by regressing to childhood when, if you were fortunate, you experienced comfort and security.  You received a high degree of safety and security experiencing sex in your brother’s arms and so have an unconscious response to a threatening situation by seeking safety and security experiencing sex, ideally in the arms of your brother but if is he not available in the arms of a substitute.  This is totally understandable, but in a beautiful twenty-five-year-old woman is also very undesirable if not downright dangerous for her.  *Have* I made my point?

Yes.  I understand.  I’ve done some - things – that seemed OK at the time but which I regretted and sometimes caused me grief afterwards, and you’ve helped me understand why I did them.  Thanks for the lesson.

Are you ready?

Yes.

Deirdre tells us almost nothing of the setting for this drama.  It is night, home, her old bedroom and it contains a bed and a small light beside it.   Let us enlarge on this.  What time of night?

Oh, bed-time.  I’d gone up about ten and heard Dee come up a few minutes later and go to her room.  I’d been waiting for her, I was angry and wanted to get it off my chest, but when it came to it I chickened out and remained in my room arguing with myself.  I even got ready for bed.  Part of me was telling me not to do it, that it would only make it worse, but another part wanted to clear the air.  To put Dee out of her misery.  I heard Jeff come up a while later and decided to go to him instead.  To talk about Dee.  We hadn’t really had a chance to since she’d got back from college, and about that I knew she knew…  So after a couple of minutes for him to get into bed I went into the hall towards his room, but Dee’s door was open a fraction and I saw her and knew I had to do it there and then.

You each had your own bedroom?  That’s three.  Plus Mom?  Sisters often have to share a bedroom.  Sisters often like sharing a bedroom.

There were three bedrooms upstairs, so we could have one each.  The attic had been turned into a bedroom, too.  That was Mom’s.

How long had you lived there?

Ha.  That’s, ah..  That’s an odd one.  We’d just moved there, but had lived there before.

Explain?

When Mom and Dad married her people gave them a house.  Mom’s people are quite wealthy.  Own half the town, in fact.  Mom and Dad didn’t own the house.  It was a trust or something.  Rent was 10 cents a week.  So that’s where they lived until the divorce.  But after it because Dad’s job was in town and Mom wanted to be as far from him as possible we gave up the house and moved right across the country, and the house was let.  When Dad was killed, tho’, Mom moved us back.  She wanted to be near her folks, and us to be near them, and she wanted Dee to go to her old college.  And they got the old house back for us.  Kicked the tenants somewhere else.

Your father is dead?

Yes.  He was killed in a car smash about a year before this happened.   Mom didn’t even tell us until after the funeral, so we wouldn’t have to worry whether or not to go.

Oh, I see.  So when Deirdre writes that she was back in her old room that night…

Yes, she was.  For the first time, too.  Mom didn’t move us back until the vacation.  She wanted Dee to finish her last year at High School without disruption,  and get her exams.  Then she sent Dee off for a month in Spain while we actually moved back.  The last tenants had left a bit of a mess and Mom wanted it all redecorated, and Dee’s room wasn’t ready when she got back from Spain so she was out in the annex until she went to College.  So yeah, that would have been her first night back in her old room since, oh, eight or nine years gone.

That’s very interesting.  So how much like her old room was it?

Oh, I don’t know.  Don’t forget I was only five when we’d left before.

Of course  So you’d been away what, nine years.  Half her life?

Guess so.

Describe the room for me.  You’re sitting on the bed.  Was it her old bed?

I suppose so.  We’d shifted with all our furniture, both times.

What’s on it?

Dee’s counterpane.  The one she’d always had.

Going how far back?

Oh, a long way.  I mean, it had fairies on it.  Like the one in that Disney movie, what was it?

Tinkerbell?  ‘Peter Pan’?

Maybe.

So it was a kid’s counterpane.  A little girl’s one?

Yeah.

Think it odd that your grown-up sister should still have it?

Not really.  I mean, Dee did very good at school and read some heavy stuff – Hemingway, that kind of thing – but in some ways she never grew up.

Explain?

Oh, I can’t.  It’s just… Well she could be childish, sometimes, and …  I mean, like she never really gave up dolls, thinking they had feelings,  that kind of thing.  Like throwing them away would hurt them.

OK. Is the bed in a corner, or the middle of the wall?

In the corner.

Where’s the window?

Wall facing the foot of the bed.

The door?

In the wall opposite the bed.

So the bed was placed as far from the door as possible, and with the best view of it?  And in the security of a corner?  It could only be approached from one direction?

Uh, yeah.  Guess it would be.

What about this light Jeff switched on?

On her bedside table.

So he would have had to cross the room in darkness in order to switch it on?

Yes, he would.   Maybe there was some light from the hallway.

Given that he was hoping to be spending an enjoyable half-an-hour in bed with his big sister, is it likely he would have left the hall light on and the door open with your Mom just upstairs?

No, put like that.

What about the window.  Drapes drawn?

Yes.

Much light coming through them, from street-standards maybe?

No.  It didn’t look out at the street.

Read Deirdre’s story.  “I awoke. It was still night. "Wake up," came a whisper. It was Jeff! By my bed! He turned on a small light by my bed.”  So she woke out of sleep to a whisper from someone standing by her bed in what sounds like pretty complete darkness.  Someone who speaks before turning on the light.  Every girl’s nightmare,  I would have thought.

Yeah, but it seems she knew it was Jeff.

How?

I don’t know.  You’ll have to ask him.  I wasn’t there.

I will.  It occurs to me, though, that one explanation would be that she was pretty much expecting Jeff.  As if she knew you would send him to her.

Possible, I suppose.

Was there any lock or bolt on the door?

I don’t think so.  There wasn’t on mine.

A chair she could lodge under the handle?

There was a chair at her dressing-table, yeah.

So even if she had been only half-expecting you to send Jeff to her she didn’t do what she could easily have done to keep him out?

Looks like it, yes.

So in fact she might have wanted him to come in?

I guess so.

When you left did you close the door behind you?

Yeah.  Yeah, I’m pretty sure I did.  I remember I was pleased I felt so calm and controlled, closing it gently ‘til it clicked shut rather than slamming it. 

Anything else on the bedside table?

Her clock, and a book I think.

She had a dressing table and chair.  Mirror on it?

Yes, usual thing.

Any other furniture?  Wardrobe, chest of drawers?

Yes, as a unit on the wall beside the bed.

Anything on the walls?  Decorations?

Her pictures.

Oh?

She’d had them at our last place.  Posters, really.

Pop-stars, that kind of thing?

Oh no, not Deirdre.  Pictures of knights and dragons, that kind of thing.

You mean prints?

Yes, prints not posters.

Can you describe them?

Heavens, it’s ten years ago.  Does it matter?

If she’d brought them from her last home they obviously meant something to her, and thus say something about her.  Yet I wonder why she hadn’t taken them with her to College.

Well, there was a knight with a sword and shield facing a monster, you know the kind of thing.  It was on a beach, and the monster was coming out of the waves.

No girl?

Yeah, in the corner.  Behind the knight.  She’s on the ground, looking up.  Not wearing very much and that’s in shreds.  And she’s in chains.  Quite sexy, really.  Might suggest it to my producer.

Sounds like Perseus and Andromeda, although Perseus was ancient Greek rather than a medieval knight.   Not that that mattered to the Victorians.

Victorians?

They loved that kind of thing, too.  The women of antiquity didn’t wear crinolines and high necks so you were allowed to paint them with their tits hanging out, for the sake of authenticity.  It was the soft porn of the day.  Any more?

Yeah.   A girl in the sea, in big curling waves.  There’s land, a cliff, and a house I think, yeah, a house behind her.  But she’s despairing.  She’s going to drown herself.

Arthur Rackham’s ‘Undine’.  She’s not going to drown herself.  She’s returning to where she came from.

You’re kidding me.  You recognised it from that?

Not entirely.  She still had it, in her bedroom in her apartment.  The Perseus and Andromeda wasn’t.  Interesting.

Interesting?

Well, perhaps.   Undine was a water spirit who was promised a human soul while a man loved her.  She found a man to love her and so gained a soul, but when he was unfaithful to her lost it again and had to return to the sea.  Essentially it’s about loneliness, commitment, and the consequences of unfaithfulness.

And the other one?

Andromeda, a virgin, has been chained to a rock on the shore as an offering to a sea-monster which has been ravaging the island, so it will go away.  Perseus happens along at the right time, kills the monster and carries Andromeda off.  Marries her, in fact.  In legend their line becomes the Persians.  So it’s about sacrifice, rescue and new starts.  Can you remember any more?

Oh yes,  I liked this one.   A girl and a unicorn.    She’s standing by its head, a great white, powerful horse with a long twisting horn that could spear her in a moment, but it’s bowing to her.  Sexy as hell, but I don’t do animals.  That’s all about virginity, right?

Yes.  And Power.  The virgin has the power to command the Unicorn, but she loses it with her virginity. Thus the virgin’s power is only to command a power offered as a compensation and reward for foregoing sex.   She still had that one, too.  Any more?

There was one with knights on horses.  A castle in the background looking like something out of Disneyland, but I can’t remember very much about it.

Was there one with a girl about to ride her horse into a fire?

No, and I’m sure I would have remembered that.  Why?

She had it in her apartment.  The immolation of Brunnehilde, who takes the Old Order of Gods down with her.  A story of love, betrayal and endings.  It’s the reverse of the Perseus / Andromeda story and another possible ending to it.  As indeed is the Undine story, if you equate the soul with sexuality.

Heavy stuff.

Powerful stuff, if you buy into it.  Anything else in the room?

No.  No wait.  Yes.  Oscar.

Oscar?

Yeah, it was a damn great teddy-bear.  Must’ve been over three-foot tall, standing up.  Was sat down, tho’.  On the foot of her bed.  Would have been looking up at her all night.  Gave me the creeps.

That was still in her bedroom, too.  In a chair.  Gave you the creeps?

Damn thing was bigger than me, ‘til I was about eight.  Dee used to sleep with it in her bed but I wouldn’t have wanted it in the same room.

When did she get it?

Always had it, as far as I can remember.  Hell, I remember it being bigger than her.  I don’t think she could shift it on her own then.

Any idea who bought it for her?

No, or when.  Could have been Gran-pops.  He doted on her.

Why did it give you the creeps, though?  I would have thought you were more likely to be jealous of it.

No, I didn’t like it.  It looked friendly but I kinda’ felt that if you let it get too close it would hurt you.  Stupid.  It was just a stuffed bear.

Oscar.  A male name.  And she slept with it?

Oh, come on.  I used to undress a doll called Barbie.  Does that make me a lesbian?

But you wouldn’t have slept with this bear?

No. 

Remember the empathy thing?  You *felt* something different about this bear to what your sister did.  There was a reason for that.

Oh? What?

I’ve no idea.  I want to go back to that bedroom.  Dee’s sitting on the bed.  What is she wearing?

Bra and panties.

Wait.  You said you were on your way to Jeff’s room when you saw your sister through her door, which was ajar.  And she was sitting on her bed in her bra and panties?  So anyone, including Jeff, could have seen her.  Was that usual behaviour for her?

No.  I wouldn’t have said so.  You think she was dangling herself for Jeff?

It’s a possibility.  Although you haven’t issued your challenge to her yet, we know she’s admitted your incest with your brother to herself.  It might have jolted her into becoming pro-active.  You say Jeff hadn’t seen the signs she was giving out that she ‘wanted’ him.  Perhaps she’d come to the same conclusion and decided to be a bit more blatant, without actually hanging a sign around her neck.

Could be.

And what are you wearing?

Just a gown.  

From the story it seems she didn’t get up.  Stayed sat on the bed all the time.

Yes.  I just walked up to the bed and looked down at her looking up at me.

That’s curious.  Someone sitting is usually going to feel in an inferior position to someone standing.  It’s why some jurisdictions require policemen to remain seated during interviews.  Standing over someone is oppressive.  Even if you were naturally taller than she you would have been at much less of an advantage had she stood.  I wonder why she didn’t.  It’s like she never even tried to face up to you.  And I wonder why she writes that you looked down at her over your *chest* rather than your breasts.  And she doesn’t say you were much *taller*, rather you were much *bigger*.  She may have been diminutive, but although you’re tall no-one could call you big-framed or heavily-built and at fourteen you wouldn’t have finished growing.  I wouldn’t call you big-breasted, either, yet to me that’s what I read Deirdre as saying.  That you were looking down at her over an impressive bosom, like a school-ma’m.  I’ve seen ‘photos of her and she looked nicely in proportion just as, if I may say, you do.   

Yeah.  I wondered about that.  I was taller, but she could be a hell-cat despite her size.

Do you think she might have been jealous of your breasts?  Because they were bigger?

I don’t know why, if she was.  Sure hers were small, but so was she.  Bigger tits would have made her look busty, but I don’t think she ever flaunted what she had let alone hankering for more.

“I felt like a child next to her” , she says next.  Why?  She was almost nineteen.  You were fourteen.  No-one could have thought she *looked* like a child next to you even if you were taller.  But she *felt* like a child.  Because you were not a virgin and were therefore a woman, while she was a virgin and not yet a woman?

I guess so.  She knew a lot more than me, had done a lot more than me.  But I knew what it was like to be screwed and she didn’t.

I suspect it was more a matter of power.  You had assumed your sexual power over men while she hadn’t.  But she must have been acutely aware of that to have felt diminished by it.  Yet if she felt it that strongly why hadn’t she done something about it, with some gentle hunk from College if not earlier?

Maybe she didn’t trust them to be gentle.

There may be a lot in that.  So, Dee, your little sister’s holding you by the chin and though you’re leaning away you can’t escape her because she’s come with you and is leaning over you.  You’re so afraid of what she could do, has the power to do.  She’s a woman, has known a man’s great weight on her, pressing her soft body to the bed, impossible to escape from as his penis, that powerful, urgent, throbbing projection where you have nothing but emptiness, reaches deep inside her, stabbing into her, squirting the hot slime inside her.  She has known this, yet she is here leaning over you, still her true self, outwardly unmarked, undamaged.  She is no-longer virgin yet only the Unicorn would know that by looking at her for there are no outwards signs, no marks on the forehead left by the fire of sex, no blemish on her innocent skin as sex boils in her blood.  She has done what you cannot imagine doing.  Younger that you in years she has passed through the pain and the flame and knows what lies beyond them as you do not.  She is woman and you still the little child.

And she leans forward still, your little sister the woman, and you cannot escape.  She comes closer and you have nowhere to go as her lips brush yours, her soft breath fills your mouth, her other hand on your cheek.  Her mouth on yours more firmly, pressing you back still further, down onto the bed, the tip of her tongue exploring your lips, the hand on your chin gone now, gone to your throat caressing it, the other hand now holding your head, fingers entwined in your hair. And your hands, Dee, your hands are free at your sides buried in the folds of Stacy’s gown as it has fallen open, her breasts as she leans over you hang down from her body, soft and round as her hand on your throat slides between your bodies gently down into the valley between your breasts and eases under the cloth of your bra to cup you in her fingers pressing and squeezing, thumb playing with your nipple and striking sparks from it like flint from a stone.  Stacy’s breasts, Dee, just lift your hands and they are there for you to fondle and weigh, to gently squeeze and feel her firm femininity squeeze gently back.  Her nipples, Dee, desire your touch, those twin buttons which with her clitoris as the third make up the triangle of the female now only inches away from merging with the triangle that is you, the three tingling points that contain your heart and womb and all the mystery that is Woman.  Her breasts, Dee, your little sister’s soft breasts now almost pressed to yours as her tongue parts your lips and seeks out yours and her hand on your breast caresses it and squeezes it.  Her breasts need your hands to hold them, Dee. Will you lift them to her and lift her,  or lie still.

I’ll lift them.  And lift them.

And what do you feel?

Warm softness, so gentle.  Such smoothness. Such fullness.

And at their peaks?

Like pebbles, small pebbles, in discs of velvet. Pink velvet.  So beautiful.

Are yours not as beautiful?

Yes, I can feel them now as her fingers trace them, pick them out.  I had not known they were so beautiful.

Then why hide them?  Disguise them?  Is it not right you should walk down the street with them naked? Proudly displaying their beauty for all to see.  For all to see you, the woman proud of her breasts?

No, I couldn’t.

Couldn’t, or shouldn’t?

Shouldn’t.  I could, but the eyes of others on them…  I shouldn’t.

Whose eyes are they for, then?  Whose eyes alone is their beauty for?

I can’t…  It is empty.

Is it Jeff?

Jeff could see them.  They could be beautiful for him.  But it wouldn’t be right.

Because he is your brother?

Yes.  No.  It would not be *right*.

OK.  It wouldn’t be right.  Stacy’s lifted the bra from your breasts now, freeing them and freeing you. Her hand caresses one and then the other as her tongue toys with yours, teasing it and inviting it to play, her breath filling your lungs, her fingers tight in your hair as her breasts fill your hands heavy with their softness and promise like sweet pears on a tree.  But her hand leaves your breasts now, tracing down across your ribs as you feel her tension growing and the sex in her blood beginning to burn.  You can feel the invisible path laid across the skin of your stomach and through the tangle of hair beneath it, the path that her hand is on that leads into the valley between your legs, that hidden, secret cleft in your body which begins in the hair and plunges downwards and deeper into your centre, the virgin flesh no-one has touched but you where the little flame lives, sometimes glowing softly and quiet and at others flickering and jumping with a promise of excitement, threatening but never quite catching the fuse to the great explosion that lies in wait to detonate and sear your flesh with joy and ecstasy.  Your little sister’s fingers walk that path, Dee, and know how to fan the little flame until it lights the fuse that will set the great explosion rocking through you.  Will you lie and let them walk it to that little flame?

No, not Stacy’s fingers.  I love her, but it wouldn’t be right.

Does it matter whose fingers do it, Dee?  Any fingers can light the fuse.  Even your fingers can light the fuse.  The explosion is the same, and is yours alone.  And once the fuse is lit and begins burning up, brighter and hotter, starting the tremors in your body that will surge and build, cascading from your toes to your scalp, once all that starts and the fuse is lit unstoppably, you will not know whose fingers they are, Dee. You will not care.  So does it matter?  Why not Stacy?

It isn’t right.  Not Stacy.

Because she’s a girl?

No.

What, then?

It should be her on the bed, the gown fallen from her body, her breasts standing up, her stomach rising and falling.  My shadow on her, my lips not pressing but gentle, my hand stroking her hair as my hand follows that secret path on her skin across her stomach, pushing through the short tight curls between her legs and delving into that cleft, opening it for my fingers to unpack the lips and rolls within and toy with them.  It should be me.

Why should it be you?

She’s my little sister and I love her, but can never show it so she understands.

Yours aren’t the first fingers to explore that cleft, her secret place.  Jeff’s fingers have, too.  Your brother’s fingers have woken your little sister already and his penis, thick and red-headed, has plunged into that secret place to fire her as your fingers cannot, and no part of you can.  Might not Stacy prefer Jeff’s fingers to yours, and his penis as you have none.

Yes.  Yes, he can do to her what I cannot.  Yet what I can do I should.  Because I feel, because I know, what burns in her, what my touch on that little knot in her secret place can do,  I can take her where Jeff can’t.

And where she can take you.

Yes, yes, one day.  But I must take her first. Oh my God, oh shit, Oh, oh, oh.

Stacy?

Sweet Jesus. Oh shit.

When you’re ready, Stacy.

Shit, you weren’t joking when you talked about fucking my mind.  Boy, that one nearly blew the top off my head and you weren’t touching me.  Even I wasn’t touching me.  Shit, if I could do *that* for real for the camera’s…  I’m fucking soaked.  Just sitting here.  Oh boy, they’re still coming.

Would you like a break to recover yourself?

Sounds like a fucking good idea.

OK.  We’ll take ten.

[ A fifteen minute break for Miss Bartlett to recover her composure.]

How do you feel?

Shattered.  What was that all about?

Did you ever had sex with Deirdre?

No.  It never occurred to me.  I never would have thought she’d permit it, anyway.

I don’t think she would have.  Permitted it, that is.  What just happened in your fantasy is what I think would have happened that night had you taken the initiative and given her no choice.  

Yes, but she responded.  And how!

No, that was you.  Your orgasm.  It was your orgasm as Stacy being administered to you and by you as Deirdre so you knew exactly what buttons to press on yourself.  But in your mind it was someone else doing the pressing.  It was probably the perfect clitoral orgasm.

Was it ever!  If I could bottle that…   But if she wouldn’t have permitted it, why didn’t she push me away?

She wanted to do it.  She loved you and wanted to hold you as a sister and a lover.  She wanted to give you the perfect orgasm as the perfect gift but in her role as big sister she didn’t think she should touch you sexually.  When you took the choice away from her, though - when you took the initiative – she didn’t have to worry that she was abusing her role as big sister and could jump on the train.

It’s interesting, though.  Given the choice of lying there and letting your – Stacy’s – fingers bring her to orgasm you thought Deirdre would refuse and instead take over the sex session.  In fact you took over and I actually lost control of the fantasy.  You as Stacy decided that had something like that actually occurred Deirdre would tried to retake her big sister role, and as Stacy and despite your overwhelming victory over her only moments before, you surrendered it to her and went back to being little sister again.  Your empathy told you that Deirdre would have felt it wrong that her little sister should be the one to take her to orgasm first.  It is the big sister’s role to first introduce the little sister to orgasm and only then can little sister return the favour.

I get it.  So what did we learn from all that.

That you were right.  Your sister had no homosexual leanings.

It was all about that?

Our purpose, if you recall, is to try to discover what Deirdre was so afraid you would do in those moments following her abject surrender over your incest with Jeff. “I was so afraid of what she'd do next,“ she wrote. One possibility I considered was that she feared you might completely rob her of her ‘big sister’ role.  I think that role was important to her and if she thought you would no longer ‘look up’ to her she would have been deeply hurt and more than a little lost.  In fact she would have lost her ‘place’ in the family.  In the fantasy we just played out she made an attempt to regain the big sister position you had just ‘dethroned’ her from and was successful because you allowed her to resume it by letting her take control of your ‘first’ sex session.  That it never actually occurred does not, I think, detract from the underlying message.  By actually turning and leaving the room at this point rather than rubbing in your victory, perhaps by sexually seducing her, you allowed her to resume that role except in so far as your now-established right to screw with your brother.

Another possibility I needed to exclude was that she was indeed a lesbian who had refused to acknowledge it to herself until, perhaps, she could neither deny it nor live with it any longer

Yes.  OK.  But she seemed pretty keen on the girl / girl stuff to me.

Are you a lesbian?

No way.

Empathy again.  Good actress as you are I suggest you could no more imagine what sex is *like* for a lesbian than you could imagine what it is like for a man.  Your empathy told you that your sister’s response to girl / girl sex would be what you were familiar with.  Had it been a lesbian response you would have been baffled as it would not have made sense to you.

OK.  I’ll believe you. I agree that I can’t imagine what it feels like to have a prick.

Nor me a vaginal orgasm.  I’d like to explore how you feel Deirdre would have reacted to another scenario, to something else you’d gained the power to impose on her.  You OK with that?

Yeah.  It wasn’t so bad last time, when I understood.  I mean I could still kind’a feel her inside me,  pulling the strings, but I knew it wasn’t her.  Just a script she’d written, really.

Well, hang on to that because here we go.  You’re sitting on the bed and Stacy’s just demanded, “Well?”.  You don’t know what to say.  Let Jeff have sex with you?  Sure he’s growing into a good-looking boy.  He’s strong, laughs a lot, can fix your car. You know he’d do anything for you, fight to defend you if you needed it.  You know, too, that he’s fascinated by your breasts and would love to see them, to touch them with reverence, even worship.  You know he admires your legs because you’ve seen him looking at them, and known he was wondering about what lay between them, tried to imagine the triangle of hair of your pussy, tried to visualise that you his sister has the same groove in her flesh between her legs that all other girls have and which he’s seen and touched on them.  He knows you have a vagina because you’re a girl, and thinking about a vagina in any girl, even his big sister, makes his penis grow hard and stiff, and tingle with the need to fill it.  Even his  big sister’s.  You know this but you know you need not fear this desire for he would never act on it without your consent and you will never consent because the thought of his penis in your vagina makes you go cold and tight and blocked.

Your wondering how to explain this to Stacy so she’d understand that you can’t but she doesn’t wait.  She releases your head and straightens up, so tall, so powerful in her sex.  “Jeff”, she calls and he slips into the room around the door and closes it behind him.  He is naked, his prick rearing before him and throbbing with its urgency as he looks at you there in your bra and panties.  

“Come here, Jeff”, Stacy orders with her gown hanging open and her breasts and sex exposed uncaring to him and he crosses the room, his stiff prick bouncing to each step and the wrinkled bag beneath it hanging and swaying in that space where you have nothing.  “Look,” says Stacy, stepping back away from you and taking Jeff’s prick in her hand.  “It’s just a prick, the same as any boy’s.  Nothing special ‘cos it’s your brother’s”.  She points it at you, her fingers lightly clasping the shaft, the bulging head straining to bursting with the power it contains, its little mouth wanting to suck you in and spit you out with nerve-searing pleasure.  Stacy strokes it with her fingertips and it jumps at them like a pleased puppy, wanting more.  

“Go on, touch it,” she says.  “Forget that it’s Jeff’s.”  You want to forget, but you can’t.  How could this thing belong to your brother? How could the little boy with his trousers wet from sitting in a puddle now possess such throbbing awesome power in his thighs.  “Touch it”, Stacy orders, and you cannot deny her for you know she knows you desire to possess this thing. With a lingering touch, a touch of love and farewell, and a promise, she releases it to point hungering at you, bobbing to the beat of the boy’ s heart.

Can you touch it?  To harness its power to your command.  It is the horn of the Unicorn, Dee, bowing to you, but also a spike that could pierce you at the toss of its head if you betray it with desire.  Piercing your skin and running through you in pain and blood to have you hanging impaled on it alive and aware of the thing inside you killing the life of the virgin.  Can you touch it, Dee?  Or is this horn, the spike of your brother, too frightening?

No.  I can’t touch it.

Stacy takes it in her hand again, holding her big brother by the prick.  All his strength in her hand, her fingers stroking it and it beats with his life in her gentle clasp.  Do you envy Stacy, Dee, so small at his side?  She has the power to command not the wild thing, the Unicorn, but the tame thing, the stallion with the Unicorn’s power broken to her will.  Do you envy her?

Yes, yes.  Oh yes.

Then reach out and take it from her.  Feel its strength against your palm, its urgency in your fingers.  It is your brother’s, but he is man and it is every man’s while it is his skin against yours.  Can you not take your little brother’s penis in your fingers, Dee, and hold man in your hand?

No.    It will spit the white slime at me, on my face and my hair.  

Then point it away.

No.  Not on the bed, or the walls, or the floor.

Then into your mouth?  Where it’s hidden and secret?

NO. NO.  Not Jeff, though I love him.  Not with Jeff.

Then with who, Dee? Whose white slime can you take in mouth to keep hidden and secret?

No-one.  There’s no-one.

OK, Dee, Stacy says you don’t have to.  See, she’s shucked off her gown.  She’s sat on the bed beside you drawing Jeff towards her by his prick.  She’s parting her legs and pulls him between them then lies back at your side so near you can touch her, opening herself to her big brother, raising herself to him so he can kneel between her thighs and point his prick at her body.   He’s moving forward, Dee, closing the distance, his horn’s going to spear her and she’s guiding it into place, but you know that.  She wants him to spear her, she’s opening more, her legs as wide as she can get them as he shuffles between them, driving the point of his prick towards the gash between her legs.  Can you watch it, Dee, can you watch your little brother’s prick spear your little sister or do you want to look away?

No, I can watch.  I shouldn’t, but I can watch.

Have you seen it before, Dee?  Seen the red bulge press into the cleft in the hair and then disappear into it, the thick-veined shaft following, disappearing to into the flesh and body of the girl?  Have you seen how her lips cling to it and suck at it greedily, opening up for it and letting it inside her?  Welcoming it

No.

Can you feel it, Dee, as though it was inside *you*, moving deeper inside *you*?

No.  I feel something, but it is not that thing inside me.

Can you hear it, Dee, as it slides in and out of your sister, your brother’s prick pumping like a heart inside her?  And can you hear her, Dee, gasping and panting as it reams her with ecstasy and your brother’s breath grunting as he rams his flesh against hers, and the bed creaking at each impact and bumping softly on the wall?

No.  I don’t want to hear it.

Can you smell it, Dee, Stacy’s hot sex-oil coating her brother’s prick as it slides in and out of her, smell Jeff’s sweat as his strong muscles burn with the work to keep up the rhythm as it slips back and forward to each stoke of his back, can you smell it, Dee?

No.  It isn’t right.

Isn’t right?

It shouldn’t *be*.

Can you feel the bed bouncing, Dee?  Bouncing as he pounds her, her breasts on her chest bouncing in time to it and the shockwaves rippling across her taut stomach as Jeff’s hairs punch against the little pad beneath his sister’s hairs, feel his exertion as he drives himself as deep as he can inside her, and deeper still, reaching inside her to where her fire burns and she opens herself wider as wide as she can, and clings to him pulling, her fingernails digging, pulling him closer and wanting him deeper. Can you feel all that, Dee?

Yes.  Yes, I can feel it, and it hurts.

Now it all comes together as they come together, her womb sucking and squeezing as he pulses and spasms inside her, shooting the hot white slime even deeper into the secret darkness of her womb, her body writhing and squirming around the spear deep inside her, the hot sex smell sweet and thick with the smell of the sweat dripping from Jeff’s brow and rolling down his back, his groaning and panting, her squealing as the eruptions of orgasm rock her and the bed quivers as she shudders and quakes in response.  Brother and sister, scaling the heights.  Well, Dee?  You went with them as far as they could take you.  Could you take Stacy’s place and go the rest of the way yourself?

No, she couldn’t.  Dee couldn’t.  But I can, you bastard.  Oh, SHIT, I can feel it.  Oh, GOD, and another.  Shit, I feel like jelly.  Ooohhh, CHRIST, how did you do that?  You bastard, I’ve wet my pants again.  That’s TWICE you’ve made me come in half-an-hour.

You are a most remarkable subject, Stacy.  Have you studied method acting?

Some.

Your embodiment of your sister was quite amazing.  The empathy will have helped, of course, but I’ve never met anyone able to adopt an intellectual and emotional identification with their subject so easily and deftly.

Poor Dee.  I kind’a forget what this is all about.  I mean, we didn’t have much to do with each other, and it’s hard to accept she’s dead.  I’ll never see her again.

We’ll take five.  I’ll get you a glass of water.

[ A five minute break for Miss Bartlett to recover her composure.]

Ready?

OK.

That last session threw up some interesting questions.  Deirdre refused to touch Jeff’s penis out of fear it was going to ejaculate over her.  Any idea what that was about?

No.  I don’t think she was scared of his prick, like it was a weapon or something.  I felt that she wanted to hold it; holding it would have made her feel good, but the idea of it cumming over her, she didn’t like that at all.  It even made her feel a little sick.  When you suggested taking it into her mouth I felt like gagging.  OK, I can think of a lot of nicer things to have in my mouth than a guy’s cum, but I don’t react to it like that.

I’d guess she must have been on the receiving end of some at some time or other.  And found it a very unpleasant experience.

Yeah.  Actually there was something.  Mom mentioned it, not very long ago when we were talking about Deirdre.  When she was nine or ten some pervert cornered her and a few other kids in the schoolyard.  Afterwards they found semen on her clothes, so he must have jerked off over her.  I guess that could be pretty traumatic.

Yes, it can.  And the aftermath, being questioned by strangers, medical examination, parents worrying themselves sick.  While I wouldn’t say the original event was trivial, the aftermath can blow it up into something even more appalling in a child’s mind.  If she was shocked, and disgusted by the pervert’s semen in the first place, the reaction of her guardians can make it seem like a foul disease he was trying to give her.  Perhaps your Mom might be able to tell me more.   It might explain her reaction.

She didn’t seem to like the physical side of sex, either.  The slime and the sweat and grunting and banging.  If you’ve never experienced it, it can take the shine off the experience at first.  I would have expected it, given her aversion to intercourse, yet she was oddly unaffected by the mere sight of penetration as though that was OK.  I would imagine she had visualised intercourse, but never ‘smelt’ it, or realised the exertion involved.

Yeah.  I don’t suppose she ever saw one of my films.  She certainly never talked about my career.

Probably not.  I suspect she would have deliberately have avoided anything sexually arousing.  Nevertheless although she didn’t like it, she didn’t respond to the sight of you having sex with your brother very strongly, it seemed to me.  She didn’t have a “Stacy! How could you *do* that?” moment.   Of course this is *after* your victory, so you’ve had to build into your model how she would have reacted to that, which is to accept that you not only *could* do it, you wanted to and it blew your mind when you did..

As it was ‘Stacy’s’ orgasm you experienced at the end you obviously weren’t able to dissociate yourself entirely from what you yourself would have been feeling in that situation, but are you able to describe what would have been going in inside Deirdre as she watched you and Jeff have sex?  You said that she felt something, but not Jeff’s penis, inside her.

Yeah, that was odd.  It felt nice, down under my stomach where my orgasms live, but it wasn’t one.  It was…   Oh, I don’t know.  Like what you feel when you settle down to watch film you’ve been looking forward to, or watch a match when you want your team to win but kind’a know they might lose, which would be awful so maybe you don’t want to watch it after all in case they do?  Know what I mean?

Anticipation?

Yeah, I guess so.

Anything else?

Yes.  I kept seeing…  kept thinking of that poster.  The one with the girl in the waves?

‘Undine in the Danube’?

Yeah.  Now that I understand what it’s about - its story - I can kind’a understand why Dee had it.  It made her feel sad, and she felt sad when she watched Jeff and me.   Even when she thought about Jeff and me.   Why should it – us screwing - make her feel sad?

I don’t know, but it’s a very interesting observation.  Although you’d have meant well and only intended to show her how fantastic it was, and how silly it was to have hang-ups about it, I would have expected using your power to force Dee to actually watch you and you brother having sex would have been almost as devastating for her as was forcing her to imagine Jeff actually having sex with her.  But it wasn’t.  I’m puzzled and will need to think about this.  Can you think of anything else I need to think about, or take into account?   Do you know of any reason she might have chosen to jump that night?

No.  I can’t.  I know she wasn’t happy.  She buried herself too much in that business of hers.  It wasn’t healthy.  But I never thought it was so bad.  Do you think… she did jump?

I really can’t say, yet.  I need to speak to the others, follow up some lines of thought, complete my picture of her.   But we’ve gone way over time because working with you has been a quite remarkable experience.  Quite remarkable.  Can we push on?  When did you next see Deirdre after you left her room?

The next morning.

How was she towards you?

Still a bit big-sisterish, but not so pushy about it.    But it was like she’d forgotten about Jeff and me.   She was different with him, too.   I mean, it wasn’t like she had the hots for him any more.  In fact, if I hadn’t known better I’d a’ said the signs were that they were screwing.  

You did know better?

Oh, yeah.  Jeff came to me when he left her that night and I knew they hadn’t before he said they hadn’t.  His prick told me.  And he gave me a real seeing-to with no messing around, like he’d been really worked up.  Boy, that was something.  But it was odd, him and Dee after that.

Odd?

Yeah.  Now you’ve made me think of it I guess they were a bit like that picture of the girl and the Unicorn.  I mean, it kind’a reeks of sex – the beautiful girl looking coy but you know she’s really hot and wet between the legs and longing for it like Deirdre seemed to be, and the wonderful horse you know is male with the great horn you know he wants to ram up her but can’t because she hasn’t said yes, which I guess was Jeff.

An interesting observation.  What about this business about Jeff being ‘faithful’ to his girlfriend?  That his idea or yours?

His.  He told me he thought she had a ‘thing’ about incest, that she thought it was wrong for brothers and sisters to risk having a baby because of all the problems that would cause.  You know, should they have an abortion, what should they tell the child if they kept it, that kind of thing.  And that she didn’t want to risk it for herself and was worried about me having to face up to it, if he got me pregnant.  So we should pretend to have stopped because he had a girl-friend he wanted to be faithful to.

Do you think that’s what it was?

No.  Oh, it was a part of it and she was right of course.  How would you feel finding out that your father was your uncle?  But these days that needn’t be a problem if you’re careful and she knew that.  But that wasn’t at the root of it with Dee?

And you still have no idea what was?

No.

Do you think she bought into the girlfriend thing?

No.  I wouldn’t have done.  

Her story reads as though she did.  “I was glad about him and Stacy”, she says.  “But I couldn't help thinking about the night when he came to me.”   We have that same dichotomy again.  She says she’s glad you’ve stopped having incest – presumably because she still thinks incest is a bad thing - but seems to wish she had incest with Jeff when she had the chance.  It’s hard to reconcile.

Yeah, it’s like she’s trying to have it both ways.

And as any psychologist will tell you, people with irreconcilable desires are in deep trouble.  It’s pure Freud.  What about Jeff being completely faithful to his wife?  You’ve kind’a told me that Jeff was being unfaithful to his wife, with you.

He might have told Deirdre he was completely faithful to Penny but he made no bones about screwing me.    Even on his wedding day.  I was one of the brides-maids and he said seeing me in white lace and satin turned him on!    I think it’s true, tho’, that he didn’t screw around after he married.  He was faithful to Penny that much.  Maybe he didn’t regard screwing his little sister as being unfaithful to his wife.  And because he wasn’t getting as much from Penny as he was before, especially when she was pregnant, he did arrange to screw me rather a lot.  

Are you saying his wife wasn’t much good in bed?

I think she was a bit of a disappointment to him, especially after the kids came along.  She was always a bit ‘proper’, if you know what I mean.  A lot like Deirdre, really, though she *looked* more like me.  Sometimes people thought *we* were the sisters, not me and Dee.  She certainly didn’t approve of me, though.

I think, tho’, that he probably told Deirdre about the faithfulness thing to try to get her to back off.   I don’t know if it is the *little things* she mentions but I know she enjoyed him bringing her off with his fingers and he was happy to oblige.  He’d probably have been happy to have screwed her senseless if she wanted – he said several times he thought that was what she needed, tho’ not necessarily from him – and maybe if they had it would have got it out of her system.  I remember him saying once that screwing Deirdre would be like screwing some prim maiden aunt rather than girl - like doing some old spinster a favour - and I think the idea turned him on, but it seems it’s right and they never did it after all.

But Deirdre couldn’t let it go.  Jeff and I were very discrete – I’d learned a lot by then and I tried hard not to let the signs show, so I always took boyfriends ‘round when Jeff and Penny had a party, and Jeff used to tussle my hair and pat me on the butt and call me ‘kid’ like I was still twelve or something.  But Dee was always on her own.  If she ever had a guy I never knew about it, and tho’ our paths rarely crossed I got news of her from Mom and Jeff, and I think they were a bit worried about her.

On the odd occasion I did see Jeff and Dee together, tho’, she was still putting out those signs like she owned him.  She look at him fondly, as they say, which means looking forward to their next screw.  I knew Penny had seen it too and wasn’t happy about it, and Jeff knew it too ‘cos I’d told him, but he said Dee was his sister and Penny would have to take his word that he wasn’t screwing her, and put up with her being a bit odd.

You’re confident Penny never suspected you and Jeff?

Pretty much.  I mean, she always looked at me as though I was something the cat had dragged in, but she never looked at me the way she looked at Dee.

OK.  We’ll leave it there.   You really have been most helpful, Miss Bartlett.  

Jeff

Deirdre called her story “Brother” which suggests it is either about you or dedicated to you, and writes that you slept with your younger sister but not with her.

That’s right.  I never fucked with Deirdre.  It’s also correct that I frequently fucked with Stacy.

Can you explain why?

“Why?  Is that “Why did I never fuck Deirdre?”, or “Why did I fuck with Stacy?”?

Both are important questions.

Both, eh?  OK.  Get a kick out of this, do you?

No.  I’m hoping to uncover and help you understand what might underlie a very sad and tragic event.

Yeah, right.  Sorry.  But this isn’t easy to talk about, you understand.

Yes, I understand.  I also do not judge.  

Stacy, then.  She was my kid sister, two years younger.  I had power over her and used it.  Abused it.  I had my hand in her knickers when she was ten and she was jerking me off at eleven.  I was fucking her when she was twelve.

She told me she was thirteen the first time intercourse occurred.

No, she could only have been twelve ‘cos I hadn’t turned fourteen the first time I got all the way into her – and that’s a *first time* everyone remembers, the way you’re supposed to remember where you were when Kennedy was shot only I hadn’t been born then - and I remember she wasn’t even big enough for a training bra.  I think it hurt her quite a bit, those first few times, so maybe she prefers to forget them.

Are you saying you raped her?

Depends what you mean by *rape*.  I don’t remember that she ever tried to fight me off but got screwed anyway, or for that matter ever really dug in her heels and said ‘no’, and I hope I wouldn’t have gone so far as to *rape* her if she had, but there were plenty of times – ‘specially at first – when I don’t think she wanted to be screwed but opened her legs for me because I said I’d only take her to the movies or something if she did.  I guess that’s a kind of rape.

How often did intercourse occur?

I don’t know.  Probably three or four times a week for the first few months.  I’d just discovered sex and was well and truly hooked.  Stacy was all I had for sex then, and I was at her like a fucking rabbit.

There is clearly considerable anger in you.

Yeah, I’m angry.   She was my little kid sister and I treated her worse than a whore.

I gained the impression she was far from unwilling.  She talked of a school ‘gang’ devoted to sex in which siblings played a major part and in which I suspect she was a ‘leading light’, a role I would have said she relished.

The gang?  She mentioned that?  We’d been screwing a few months.  No, a bit more.  Maybe almost year. Stace was certainly thirteen by then and we had a pretty slick act.   I was coming up on fifteen and like most boys that age was permanently horny.  I guess Stace knew that if we had even half a chance I’d want to be in her and so didn’t waste time being innocent or coy or playing hard-to-get.  She’d get her pants down or knickers off, and arrange herself for me as best she could without me saying a word.  And always had plenty of tissues up her sleeve for cleaning herself off afterwards.

Go on.  The gang?

Older brother of a friend of mine asked if I was screwing my sister.  Don’t know if he saw these *signs* everyone else but me seems to see or if it was just a lucky shot.  But he was screwing their sister and suggested we screwed each other’s.  I fancied his – she was a bit older than Stace and had real tits – and Stace said ‘why not’ when I put it to her, so we shacked up, and drew a few more in over the next year or so.  Hell, that was something else!  Six or eight of us up in some kid’s bedroom pretending to be watching TV or something innocent and the kid’s mom getting dinner downstairs in the kitchen while we humped our own or each other’s sisters right over her head.  

The kid’s mom being sometimes your own mother?

I don’t know if Mom knew for sure about us or only suspected.  We sure as hell tried not to get caught out.  Maybe she found stains on Stacy’s sheets or her knickers, and suspected.  Maybe she was suspicious and just didn’t want to know for sure, like some guys who think their wife is cheating on them.  It’s easier that way.  We were nearly caught in the act by her a couple of times.  Maybe she did catch us at it but didn’t let us see her so we never knew she knew.  Dunno.  Not long after we started, tho’, she sat me down and gave me a spiel about *responsible sex*.  Said she wouldn’t ask me to make promises I wouldn’t be able to keep but did make me promise to always wear a condom if there was any risk of getting ‘the girl’ pregnant.  Even gave me a couple of packets there and then and told me there’d always be a few in a drawer she’d keep topped up, no questions asked.  It was still a while before Stace had her first period, but once she did Mom had her on the pill.   Dunno’ what she said to Stace about sex.  Stace never mentioned it.

Would you say Stacy ever felt any internal conflict regarding your sexual activity?

No.  I don’t think she ever had any ‘trouble’ with our sex – with me being her brother an’ that.  Hell, look at her now!  Porn star to the stars.  Poor kid never had a chance.  She was screwing for an audience when she was thirteen.  I’d been nailing her to the mattress for a year before she was old enough for it to even occur to her that a girl ought to have the right to say no, especially to her own brother. 

But you clearly feel guilty about the fact you slept with your sister.  When did you first become aware of this guilt?

*First* feel guilty?  Hell, I felt guilty the first time.  Poor kid.  She was always tall.  That’s one of the reasons the directors love her.  She’s taller than most of the guys they get to screw her.  Now she’s tall and slim like a dream, with breasts than turn every man into a baby wanting to go to sleep on them, but she looked like one of those damn Cabbage-patch dolls at twelve – great round innocent eyes and arms and legs like sticks you could break with a tennis-ball.  Damn near vanished if she turned sideways on.  Lying on my bed without a hair on her body below her neck, all teeth, ribs and angles with her legs as wide as she could get them and a hole into her I could barely get a finger in, and me her own brother twice her weight, prick like a carrot and trying to push it up her.  Do you think I didn’t think, “Hell, I shouldn’t be doing this.”?  But my prick didn’t care.  It was howling to be satisfied and the only way to satisfy it was to wrap it in that little hole, and it didn’t give a damn that it was my kid sister’s.

So she, my kid sister, let herself be hurt so that I could feel that fantastic sensation, and think of other things for a few hours.  Shit, what could I do to repay her for that?  What wouldn’t I do for her?   When it got good for her as well and we could share it, I wanted to do it for her to make her feel as good as she’d made me feel those first times.  Even when I didn’t need her any more, when I could get all the sex I wanted without turning to my sister for it, I gave her the best sex I could and adored her because I still owed her.  

So yeah, I feel guilty that I had sex with my little sister - but only because I took advantage of her and didn’t give her the real choice she deserved.  But I’m not ashamed I had sex with my sister.  In fact once we started doing it because she chose to be screwed by her brother rather than buying his attention with it, I reckon the best sex I’ve ever had was with her and I’ll keep screwing her as long as she wants me to.

So the guilt relates not to the fact of incest but to your perceived abuse of power, which could have expressed itself in any number of other ways.  This could be easily dealt with a little therapy, which I would advise, but it strays from the purpose of this investigation.  However, having talked to Stacy I suspect you would not have ‘abused your power’ over your kid sister, as you perceive it, had she decided not to play along with you.  There was a point of compulsion beyond which you would have chosen not to go and it would have been reached very soon,  That you didn’t reach it was, in my view, Stacy’s decision.  Why do you think she chose to play along with you?

I dunno.  You’ll have to ask her that.  I did try to stop, thinking she might not like it because I was her brother.  That was long before Dee found out.  But she said she didn’t want to stop, and that made it even better for me because although I still felt guilty about what we’d done I didn’t have to feel so guilty about what we were doing.  She knew she could stop it any time, if she wanted.   I mean, she sure as Hell doesn’t *need* me for sex now.  She gets paid more than most people dare dream of, for having sex whenever she wants.  So if she rings me up and says ‘hey, let’s get together for a screw,” I’ll drop whatever I’m doing to be there for her.

She clearly harbours no resentment against you for what you describe as a brutal introduction to sex.

I suppose.   She says she’s no regrets and loves what she’s doing, but I know things would have been different for her had I left her alone to make her own choices about sex.  I just don’t know if they would have been better.

And your other sister, Deirdre?  Were you sexually attracted to her?

Sure. I thought about screwing her when I was a horny fifteen-year-old.  I thought about screwing my big sister the way I thought about screwing Mom.  I mean, yeah.  I knew it was theoretically possible.  But I also knew the chances of it actually happening were zilch.

So you’d made no attempt on or approach to her before the events described by Deirdre in her story?

No.  Well, you see Dee was kind of ‘Deputy Mom’ to us.  The marriage fell apart and Dad walked out when I was seven and I didn’t really know what was going on.  But Dee did.  She was ten and understood a whole lot more.  Mom relied a lot on her, too, to look after us when she wasn’t there – she had to pick up the pieces and put her life back together.   So Dee was more like Mom than a big sister.  Even when I started fiddling with Stace, and certainly once I’d begun fucking her, we were as careful to stop Dee finding out as we were Mom, ‘cos we saw that that as almost the same thing.

But of course whereas Mom was old and wise enough to find or figure out what was going on – I reckon – Dee wasn’t and Mom sure as Hell had no reason to tell her.  So yeah, I’ve only just seen it, but I guess when Dee did twig what was going on she might have felt kind’a *betrayed* by Mom.  She’d kind’a sided with Mom against her brother and sister when she really ought to have been one of us,  but Mom hadn’t let her in on one hell of a family secret and that left her where?  Right outside everything.

I suspect there is a lot of truth in that.

So until that night Stacy set me up, although I’d peeked at Dee in the shower the way I’d peeked at Mom, I’d no more thought I could put my hand in her knickers and get away with it than I’d imagined Mom would have let me feel her up.

Stacy described Deirdre as a ‘prick-teaser’?

Yeah, she had a reputation at school.  She’d teamed up with a couple of other girls and they kept themselves to themselves.  She had a couple of boy-friends because, well, I guess because she felt that she had to, but none lasted.  One, who I knew quite well, said she’d let him put his hand down her knickers and feel her up, but she didn’t respond in any way and when he eventually put her hand on his prick because she hadn’t done it herself, she was up and away so fast she tore her knickers on his watch-strap.

Were you not puzzled by this vast difference in the sexual mores of your two sisters?

No, I didn’t think it strange.  Not then.   Dee was quiet, clever and always thinking.  I’d tangled with a couple of girls like that, and lost.  I was even a little proud of her – it was like she thought she was too good for the kind of guys she was having to mix with at our school, and I thought she was too.  I mean, even had I not been her brother I’d’a stood no chance with her.  And I was only fifteen to her eighteen.  Girls that age only look at 20-year-olds.  I knew that.

Nevertheless you were prepared to act on Stacy’s suggestion that Deirdre wanted have sex with you.  Did that come completely out of the blue?

It sure did.  

So how accurate is Deirdre’s record of that night?

That was pretty much as I remember it, tho’ not exactly.  I was just dozing off when Stace slipped into my bed.   I didn’t know she’d just left Dee’s room after their ‘chat’.  She popped into my bed pretty often, but never stayed the whole night.  We were both pretty sure Mom knew and seemed to have decided not to ‘interfere’ but we still didn’t want to push the envelope too far.  I hadn’t had her – I hadn’t had anyone – for a few days so was pretty horny and she played with me for a bit but normally we’d screw and then talk if we needed to but that night she stopped it going too far and wanted to talk instead.

She bitched a bit about Dee still treating her like a kid – I was sixteen and it was in the Fall, so she’d have been fourteen but she’d developed nicely and tho’ she was as tall as me she was - what do they call her now? - yeah, ‘willowy’.  Other guys, older than me and with flash auto’s, were starting to take notice and she’d begun to notice them noticing, and I knew she was wanting to start spreading her wings,  but she was still pretty much looking to me for everything, and I was giving her as much of it as I could and loving it.

Then she said Dee knew we were screwing and had tried to chew her out for it, and asked if I’d told her.  She’d seen ‘signs’, she reckoned.  She claimed it was the way Dee’d looked at us, like she wanted to rub herself all over me and put Stace out with the rubbish, she said.

I hadn’t noticed and was doubtful, but Stace was sure.  And as she’d picked out a couple just by the ‘signs’ who’d joined the gang and fucked each other like newly-weds, I listened.

Were you not alarmed by the news Deirdre was aware what was going on?

I wasn’t really worried.  By that time I was sure Dee wasn’t going to go running to Mom with tales like that.  I was even kind’a excited that Deirdre would even think about me having sex, though if she laid into me in private for having it off with my kid sister I knew I’d feel bad because anything she said about it would be true and I wouldn’t have a good answer, and I’d feel about nine-years-old again.

But Stace said she was sure it was because she, Dee, had the hots for me, and that I should go and give it to her ‘cos then, well, Dee would be one of us  and anyway couldn’t get mad at Stace for screwing me when she’d done it with me too.

What do you suppose she meant, “one of us?”

One of us kids, I suppose, rather than a live-in aunt.  Only it’s hard to think of us as children.  Dee certainly wasn’t.

You don’t think she thought Deirdre might join your gang?

Hell no.  Stacy could never have thought that.  I mean, yeah maybe, just maybe, Dee would let me screw her, but with another boy?  No way, Hose.

Doesn’t that strike you as odd?  The Deirdre you describe comes across as a very ‘moral’ girl, reluctant to let boys touch her private parts and powerfully disinclined to touch theirs, still a virgin at almost nineteen.  A girl like that is the last you would expect to commit incest.

Yeah, I guess so.  At the time, tho’, it made a kind’a sense.  Or seemed to.

Wouldn’t you have though Stacy, being a girl, would be even more aware of this dichotomy?

Yeah. Maybe.  Hell, I didn’t know what was going on inside Stacy’s head most of the time.

Did she suggest at any point that she felt Deirdre *needed* it?  That you’d be helping her if you forced her through it - being cruel to be kind, kind of thing?

Yeah.  Something like that.  Dee wanted to do it with me but had a kind of hang-up about doing it with her brother, but if I pushed and took the responsibility she’d find out it was OK.  That kind of thing.

And you believed that?

I knew there was a lot that needed thinking about, and with my prick pumped up and raring to go next to a warm, soft, naked, very sexy girl, sister or not, it was damn hard to think at all.  

Did it not occur to you that Stacy might have been using you in some plot to get revenge on Deirdre for the way she’d been treating her?  That this whole business of her having the ‘hots’ for you might just be to wind you up and get you to, well,  embarrass her by groping her or something?

No, I never thought Stacy might have been making it up to cause trouble.  She was never malicious, or deceitful – not in a cunning way.  I’d never understood their relationship as sisters, her and Dee.  Mainly, I suppose, because they never acted like sisters.  They were like, well, by the time Dee left for college they were like enemies with a truce.  Wary but polite.  Stace had grown up enough – got enough confidence – not to be bossed about by her but Dee still wanted to be in charge of her – look after her.  I know that just before she left for college she sat Stace down and gave her a long talk about sex, about not being too quick to get into it.  How Stace kept a straight face I don’t know.   She was already into it, and how!  I knew Stace was pretty riled by Dee’s still treating her like a kid – and hell, in some ways she still was - but she’d never have responded to it by cooking up some convoluted revenge like getting me to try seducing her when she knew Dee wouldn’t have it.  That would just have landed me in even deeper shit.  No, Stacy is the sort that will take so much and then snap, and when she does she goes straight for the jugular.

Did Deirdre ever talk to you about sex?  Ever touch you?

Me?  No.  She’d pretty much given up on me.  She nagged me about my hair, changing my shirts, all the things Mom did, but more than Mom most times.  Touch?  Yeah, but only to straighten me up, adjust my tie, that kind’a thing.  And if she was pleased she’d peck me on the cheek.  Like I said.  Deputy Mom.

Did you think Deirdre might have been jealous?

Jealous?  What, of Stacy and me?  Of Stacy’s being screwed by me?  I don’t remember Stace suggesting that.   But like I said, it was damn hard to think at all let alone go in for the kind of psycho-babble you guy’s love.   I’ll bet you analyse each wriggle and groan of any girl you’re screwing for some deep meaning.

I try not to.

OK, I apologise.  I guess I can see why all this is relevant, but I don’t like it one little bit.

You’ve told me nothing yet which has been anything other than the actions of a perfectly normal, basically kind, compassionate, sexual human being.  And in that capacity you accepted your little sister’s assurance that you’d being doing your big sister a favour if you went and had sex with her, even if she seemed reluctant?

Something like that, yeah.

And on that basis you left your bed and Stacy, and made your way to Deirdre’s room?

Yeah.

What were you thinking?

Thinking?  Hell, it was ten years ago.  I can remember what happened, what I saw, even how I felt, very clearly.  Setting out to discover if your stunner of a big sister is willing to have sex with you is a pretty memorable adventure for a sixteen-year-old boy.  But exactly what I was thinking?  Gimme a break!

Let me  put it like this.  How cautious were you?  How confident were you that Stacy was right and that your expedition would have a successful conclusion?

OK.  Yeah.  I did think Stace might be right.  I hadn’t seen the *signs* Stace talked about but I didn’t find it totally unbelievable that Dee would want to have sex with me and I was keen as Hell to find out if she did.  And yet, that’s not it really  I think even then I couldn’t really accept what Stacy was saying.  That Dee *wanted* me to have sex with her?  In fact I’m sure that didn’t make any kind’a sense even then.  Like I said she was eighteen – pretty close to nineteen by then - gorgeous and every inch a woman, and one that I knew had pretty firm views about sex.  I was only just sixteen, still half a kid, scruffy and not very bright, and her brother.  Why the hell should she *want* to have sex with me?

That sounds very reasonable thinking.  But you still went.

Yeah.  Thinking back on it now I’m sure what was in my mind was the idea that Dee would let me have sex with her if *I* wanted it, and that this was what Stace was saying.  

Having discussed this with Stacy I’m happy in my own mind that not only did she honestly believe she had seen the signs she described, they were in fact there.  I also suspect you had seen them too, but as your conscious mind could not believe Deirdre would want to have sex with you were only aware of them subconsciously.  However this made Stacy’s suggestion far more acceptable to you than ‘common sense’ would allow.

You think Deirdre really did want to have sex with me that night?

No.  Your own conclusion is probably correct.  Deirdre would consent to sex if *you* wanted it, not because she did.

So, OK.  What are you saying? She didn’t *want* to have sex with me, but she was just willing to let me have sex with her – maybe even take her cherry.  That doesn’t make any sense.  You didn’t know Deirdre.   Hell, if girls start letting guys have sex with them just because they know the guy wants to…  No, there’s always got to be some reason, even if it’s just that she wants to as well.  If she doesn’t want to but still lets him…  she’s after something else.

Wanna say something?

No.  I think you’re doing fine without me.

You’re saying Dee was willing to let me have sex with her even though she would have hated it, because she wanted something else?   It must have been pretty important to her, then.  Shit.  It seems obvious now, but that night I never got past the first part.  That my other sister might be willing to let me have sex with her.  That was as far as my prick needed to think to haul me into her bedroom and I just went with it. So what the hell was worth that much to her that she’d let me?

Meaningful silence, hey?  I take that to mean you don’t know and want me to work it out for you.  OK.  I guess it might be important.  But as of now I don’t know the answer.  

At the moment neither do I, but you’re more likely to know the answer than I am.  So let’s go on.  You’re creeping into your big sister’s bedroom.   I take it there was no risk of meeting your mother in the hallway?  Or had she already gone to bed?

She’d gone up while Stacy was in my bed.  Obviously she never looked in on me.  On either of us.  In case of what she might find.

OK, so you enter Deirdre’s bedroom.  Was her door open or closed?

Er, it was open.  Ajar.  I guess that was how Stacy had left it.

Perhaps.  OK, go on.

Deirdre doesn’t mention that I was naked.  I slept naked – it was a lot easier that way when Stacy dropped by – and, well, I’d bumped into Mom a couple of times in the hallway in the morning and, yeah, it gave me a kind’a thrill to think of Mom looking at me naked and seeing that I wasn’t a little boy any more.  You’re a shrink so you know all about that, hey?   If she’d been shocked or something I’d not’ve let it happen again but she just said ‘Morning, Jeff’ and got to the bathroom first so I didn’t stop doing it.  If she’d started wandering around the house naked as well…. But she didn’t, so we don’t need to go that way, right?

Right.

And of course I had a boner of the first-degree plus on.  Stacy on her own could give me a first-degree one, but now I was in my big sister’s bedroom with my big sister in bed in it, and it was kind’a like my prick thought it ought to be even bigger for her.  And I was a bit nervous too, and that added its whack.  It was either going to be burying itself in its big sister’s fanny – and boy hadn’t it ever dreamed of doing that – or I was going to be trying to explain what it was doing in her bedroom, to her and very probably to Mom as well.  And that with my kid sister in my bed next door.  So yeah, I was kind’a excited, and maybe a bit tense.

I did wonder about just sliding into Dee’s bed as Stace did with me, but then decided that if she was asleep she might scream the house down before discovering it was me.  Or even after discovering it was me.  So I chickened out and just whispered and turned the light on, like she says.

I don’t know if we said exactly those things or how soon afterwards she wrote it all down, but it happened pretty much as she describes.   She didn’t seem upset I was naked and seemed fascinated by my boner.  I knew she was trying not to, but her eyes kept flicking to it.  I can credit it was the first one she had actually seen ‘in the flesh’ as it were.  

Do you think it frightened her?

No, I don’t remember thinking she was scared of - or by - it.  And I was watching her reactions like a hawk so I’m sure I would have noticed had she shown anything like that.  It was like she wanted to pretend it wasn’t there, like meeting a guy you know’s wife’s just left him and not wanting to talk about it even tho’ it’s really all there is to talk about.

Did you say the words Deirdre ascribes to you?  That you were there at Stacy’s suggestion rather than because you wanted to be?

Yeah, I think so.

Did you not think Deirdre might find that a little ‘cowardly’ of you, shifting the blame to your little sister if it all went wrong.  Would it not have been more manly to have said you were there because *you* fancied her and was wondering if she’d have sex with you?  How many girls at a party would fall into bed with you if you only went to them because your little sister had suggested it?

OK, that’s true.  But hell, I was only sixteen and if Stacy had been wrong, creeping naked into my big sister’s bedroom like that could have caused big trouble.  I mean, it could have been no different to Mom turning over in bed to find me standing there with my prick twitching at her.  She’d have skinned me.

I can understand that.  My point is that by suggesting to Deirdre that you were not there because you had the hots for her and that you wanted to screw her so much you were willing to risk the kind of trouble you were talking about, that in fact you were only there because your little sister had suggested it, is hardly going to make her think you were so burning with lust that you might rape her if she didn’t surrender.

I guess so.

And you pulled the covers off her, sat on the bed and took her by the shoulder?

Yeah.  I remember she was wearing a little cotton nightie that didn’t hide much, and hell, she looked sexy.

“He paused and looked at me.”  Paused from doing what?

I dunno.  Getting into bed with her?

Had you begun to do that?

No.  I was sitting on the edge of the bed leaning over her.  She says that.

You’d leaned over her and taken her shoulder and then, as she saw it, paused.  What did she think you were going to do?

God, I don’t know.  I don’t remember.

Wouldn’t you agree that the most likely explanation is that you were going to hold her down for a kiss, restraining her if she tried to wriggle away from it.

Yeah, I guess so. 

“He paused and looked at me.”  I would have thought you would have been looking at her from the moment you pulled back the covers and exposed her yet this suggests a change in you.  As though you suddenly looked at *her* rather than the young woman’s body in the little cotton nightie under your nose.   “He was so strong and I was so afraid.”  Were you aware of her fear?  

I….  Yeah, there was something.  But it wasn’t fear.  She didn’t look frightened.  It was… something else.

Do you think it was your strength she was afraid of, or something else?

How should I know?

How long was this *pause* before you spoke? Did you have to think about it, or did you know immediately that Stacy had lied to you about Deirdre wanting you, even secretly?

Pretty much immediately, but I don’t think I used the word ‘lied’ because that would suggest Stace had been deliberately dishonest and I didn’t think then and I don’t think now that she had been.   She’d been wrong about something, tho’.  I think I said something like “but she was wrong, wasn’t she?” or “but I think she was mistaken.”  

Are you sure about that?  

Yeah, I’m absolutely sure.  I didn’t use the word ‘lied’.   Is that significant?  A ‘Freudian slip’?  Dee accusing Stacy of being malicious when I’m damn sure she wasn’t.  No, Stacy wouldn’t have sent me in there all primed to screw Dee if she hadn’t genuinely thought Dee was up for it.  Christ, think it through.  Stacy knew our big sister knew we were screwing.  The *last* thing she’d fucking do is anything she thought might provoke our big sister into running to Mom with that tale.  I mean, we were pretty confident Mom already knew and was turning a blind eye but she could hardly keep in turning it with our prim and proper big sister jumping up and down and yelling about it, eh?  Even a whisper of something like that would’ve had had the Child Protection people down on Mom like a ton of bricks.  And I’d have said one of the things most likely to get Dee running screeching to Mom was the sight of her brother sneaking up on her with his prick throbbing with evil intent.

No, I know my reaction at the time was that Stacy was wrong but I would never, ever have accused her lying.  I don’t know why Dee should have written that I did, especially as I’m damn sure she never intended that to be read by anyone except herself.  You’re the shrink.  You tell me.

I’ve no answer yet.  I’ll need to think about it.

Well think about it, then.    That’s your job.

Agreed.  Did you go on to reassure Deirdre that you weren’t going to *rape* her?

’Rape’?  I don’t know.  I don’t think I actually said ‘rape’, but I’m not as sure about that as I am that I never said ‘lied’.  

*Could* you have raped her?  I mean, if you had wanted to?

Of course.  I could have raped her if I’d really wanted to.  I was bigger and stronger.  And yeah, I was pretty wound up.  But that kind of rape never crossed my mind, I swear.  I mean, for Christ sake she was my sister.  We weren’t exactly bosom buddies, but I loved her.  She was family.  If any other guy had raped her like that I’d have killed him, given half a chance.  Besides I had Stace waiting in my bed next door only too willing to help me unwind.  It wasn’t like Dee was all I had.

And anyway it was hardly practical.  One scream or even some bumping about would have had Mom looking in to investigate, and while she might have been prepared to live with me and my little sister banging away with each other because we both wanted to,  there was no way she’d have put up with me raping either of my sisters, or any other girl come to that.  

And even if I’d successfully raped Dee that night, was I expecting her to sit down at table for breakfast the next morning with just a happy ‘Good morning, Jeff”?

No, I can’t remember now exactly but I think I said something along the lines that if she didn’t want me like Stace said she did I wasn’t going to force myself on her.   I guess she could have taken that as meaning I wasn’t going to rape her, but all I meant was that what she said, went.  I wasn’t going to press myself on her or make a nuisance of myself if she said no, even if Stace thought I should do.

I guess you think that was significant, too?  Putting words into my mouth and intentions into my head that weren’t there?  Why the Hell should she do that? 

Possibly to justify her own reactions. According to her account she hadn’t actually said anything, up to this point. 

No, she hadn’t said a word.  In fact she didn’t say a single thing all the time I was there.  

So she hadn’t said, “No, Jeff” even though it was pretty obvious what you were there for.  Wasn’t that as good as her saying “yes, Jeff”?

Not at all .  OK, she didn’t actually say ‘no’ to me.  Not in words.  But tho’ I was only sixteen I’d learned enough to read a girl’s body language pretty well, I reckon.  I knew the signs.  I like to think I knew when her tongue was saying ‘no’ but her body was saying ‘maybe’, but if she said ‘no’ and her body did too I always took it that ‘no’ as final.

But wasn’t that what Stacy had suggested?  That she might say no but mean yes?

Maybe but that wasn’t the message I was getting then, I’m certain.  Had I thought she was saying ‘no’ but meaning ‘yes’ I’d have done more, I’m sure.  I mean, I wanted to so much.  She wasn’t wearing a sexy nightie or anything - that would have been a real surprise - but she was wearing a short, flimsy cotton thing that didn’t leave much to the imagination.  And she was nineteen, or very near.  I’d never had a girl anything like that old, then.  Maybe sixteen, tops.  Hell, to me my big sister was a woman and I’d never had a woman, just girls.  My prick wanted her so much it hurt but to the rest of me she was still Deputy Mom, and if Mom said “hop” I just asked “how high?”

Any hint of a green light and I’d have been in there like a rabbit, but I saw the signs were saying a very clear ‘no’.  The way she was trying to ignore my erection which clearly wanted her.  No girl with an itch in her fanny and yearning for a prick to scratch it would have ignored - or tried to ignore - one so coldly.  There’d have been some reaction as her body said ‘yes’ and imagined it being scratched even if she was ‘saying’ no, but with Dee there was nothing.

And when I pulled the covers back, exposing her.  She must have seen me staring at her breasts, known the cotton was showing up her nipples and not hiding much.  Her nightie had ridden up her legs nearly to her fanny, too, but she didn’t try to cover herself, nor do the little things to draw attention to it or her tits, either, like a girl does when she’s interested.  There was, like, nothing.   

“It was….  It was….  Hell, you’re forcing me to put into words what only I felt without thinking about.  OK.  It seemed to me she was saying, “yes, you’re a boy and have a great prick and I’m a girl with tingling nipples under this cotton and a hot secret fanny, but because you’re my brother and I’m your sister those things don’t exist for us.  Brothers and sisters don’t have sex.”  She wasn’t saying that brothers and sisters shouldn’t screw each other.  She was saying that *sex* should not even exist for brothers and sisters.  Does that make sense?

Yes.

“OK.  Good.  Well, that was the message I got, like walking into a brick wall.  And part of me said she was right.  The part of me that never forgot my twelve-year-old kid sister lying on my bed watching me undress and wondering how she was ever going to take her big brother’s big prick in her tiny cunt, but bracing herself to do it anyway, told me that my job was to love these two girls and guard them with my life if necessary, without wanting to touch a hair on their heads.  And that Stacy should have grown to be what she was, a beautiful, lively fourteen-year-old girl, with my protection allowing her to make all her own choices about who she had sex with, and when.

Are you sure that was the message you got then, and not an ‘ understanding’ you came to when thinking about it later?  When you were older perhaps and wiser?

No.  That was the message I got, and why I carefully covered her up again and kissed her on the forehead like a father.  I wanted her to know I’d got it.  And I got up ready to slink from the room like a whipped dog.

And?

She stopped me, like she says.  It was the first time she had moved apart from her eyes, and her head a little.  She caught my wrist just as I turned away.  Yeah, I looked down at her.  I was utterly baffled.  I had absolutely no idea why she had done that.  I just knew that I was way, way out of my depth.

She writes about this moment, “I was so scared.”  Did you know this?

Scared?  No, I didn’t get any hint of that, if she was.  Hell, what had she got to be scared of?  She must have known I wasn’t going to touch her.  All I could think was that she was going to talk to me about Stace.  About me and Stace.  About me betraying Stace.  So I sat down on the bed again, ready to promise her anything.

When did she let go of your wrist?

Oh, let me think about that.  Yeah, I’m pretty sure she didn’t let go of my wrist until I’d sat down. 

Did she pull you back to the bed?  Perhaps just a gentle invitation?

 No.   She just held me, stopping me moving away.  And then she let her arm lie on top of the covers, next to my bare ass but not touching me.  

Your sure?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure.

How accurate is her account of what happened next?

Let me read it again.  Yeah, I guess that was pretty much it, but it’s what she doesn’t say that matters.  This makes it sound as though I knew she’d just lie there and so got straight down to feeling her up, but I didn’t.  I sat there for a long while, waiting for her to speak.  At first, when she didn’t, I supposed she was just having trouble finding the right words, or wondering what to say to me, how to talk about me screwing our kid sister.  I knew well enough that she had trouble even with ordinary sex.   I mean even talking about it.   I’d seen her ignore it, and even leave, if a group of kids started talking about it at school.  I’d seen her look away from the TV if there’d been a bit of sex on it, like it embarrassed her.  I just assumed she had taken up the Deputy Mom role and was trying to work out what a real Mom twice her age would – or should -  do if she found out that two of her kids were screwing each other, and I could understand she was having difficulty with that.

It was a long, long time – or certainly seemed so – before I realised that she wasn’t going to say anything.  That she was just waiting.  And that I had to puzzle it out.

Shit, it seemed like hours before the penny dropped.  Me sitting there cringing at the memories of my kid sister bleeding ‘cos I’d tried to have sex with her, and her telling me I could try again tomorrow if I wanted.  And my big sister just waiting for me to grow up, her hair spread on the pillow and her big eyes taking my soul apart.

And then, suddenly, I knew.  I was sure I did.  I knew what she was waiting for.  It wasn’t for me to grovel, or to beg forgiveness for what I’d done with Stacy.  I didn’t owe that to Deirdre.  I owed it to Stacy.  It was…  It was… Oh, shit.  I can’t describe what it was.  I just *knew* what it was.  

And it was…?

Yeah, yeah.  I know it’s probably important.  It’s just…  I’ve never thought about it like this, putting it into words.  It was in my guts, not my head.  Ok, give me a chance to put it together.

It was that I suddenly realised Stace had been right all along.  I knew that Dee really, really wouldn’t stop me from having sex with her if that was what I wanted.  Yeah, there and then, or any fucking time.  She wasn’t encouraging me.  *She* didn’t want it.  But if *I* wanted it, she was there.  All the way.  She’d made nineteen and was still a virgin – yeah, Stace was sure of it, and I thought so too – but she wouldn’t stop me from popping her cherry if I wanted to.  Her fucking nobody of a kid brother.

Why the change?  A moment before, according to her, sex didn’t exist for brother and sister.  Now she’s saying, “If you want to fuck me, go for it”.

Jesus Christ, I don’t know why.  You’re the fucking shrink.  I just knew I was way, way out of my depth.  

That’s when I told her I wasn’t going to do it.  Fuck her, that is.  I knew she didn’t want me to, but would allow me to if I wanted.  Shit. That was like being hit by a truck.  My body saw my hands opening her legs up and her letting me.  I felt myself lying between her knees and my prick felt itself sliding into her as she lay there quietly, accepting it.  A  truck?  Christ, it was like being hit by a fucking nuclear bomb.

That was what my body imagined doing.   But my heart….  Shit, I sound like some woman’s magazine.  In my heart I knew it was a test.  If I was still that fourteen-year-old kid who’d forced his prick into his twelve-year-old sister’s cunt even thought it hurt her like hell and he knew she wasn’t ready, I’d do it to my nineteen-year-old big sister too, even though I knew she didn’t want me to either.  But if I’d seen…   If I’d understood…  If I’d grown up enough…  I wouldn’t do it because I’d learned that taking sex is shit.  Being given sex is what blows your mind.  

Fairly advanced sex-education for a sixteen-year-old boy?

Yeah.  That was why I told her I wasn’t going to fuck her.  OK, that wasn’t what I actually said.  How does she put it?  “"Don't worry," he said, "we won't actually do it."”  Yeah, it was something like that.   I wanted her to know I’d grown up, and that I wasn’t the selfish, careless bastard who for his own pleasure had screwed his twelve-year-old kid sister ‘til she bled, any more.  Even if I’d only grown up like that since I’d been in that room.

She doesn’t mention it, but I remember she smiled.  Just a little one.  But it was enough.  I’d passed the test.   It was all over and we could start again.  But shit, she’d put herself on the line.  

You think she would not have objected had you decided to “do it” anyway?

No, I’m sure she wouldn’t have stopped me.  Wouldn’t have shoved her hand down there between us at the last moment, risking have to fight me off and Mom looking in.  She’d have gone through with it.  I saw the relief in her eyes.

And, of course that’s why she wrote that she’d been scared.  Earlier.  Christ, I’m so stupid.  When she stopped me from leaving she knew she was inviting me to screw her, or to choose not to.   It was up to me.  I’m damn sure she wasn’t on the pill, and she hadn’t taken any precautions as she hadn’t known I’d be coming.  And I didn’t have a condom with me – I still used Mom’s supply with other girls who needed it, but I hadn’t used one with Stace for years and just hadn’t thought of going for one before going to Dee’s room.  And I was so hot there was no way I’d have stopped to go down for one once we’d started.  Christ, she knew all that.  Unprotected sex with her own brother.  That’s what she’d put herself up for if…  if…  If she’d got it wrong, I suppose.  Or if I ….   If I failed the test.  But why?  For Christ sake, why?  I don’t understand.  

We can only speculate.

Speculate!  Isn’t everything you mumbo-jumbo shrinks do speculation?  She’s dead, for Christ’s sake, so I can’t ask her now.  Give me a reason.  That’s all I want.  I’ve got to understand.

You’re right.  We can’t ask her now.  Wait we can do is try to understand her, and while I believe I’m beginning to I’ve a way to go yet.

OK, I’ll wait.  But you’d better come up with something good.  Something that makes sense.  You fucking cold-hearted bastards can’t just go poking about it people’s secret lives, raking up this sort of stuff, just for your own fucking entertainment.  Dear Christ, Dee!  Why?  Why?

Would you like a break?

Just give me a moment.

OK.  When she smiled – that little smile – she…. opened …. herself to me again.  She didn’t move.  Didn’t say anything.  But the signs….    You’re right.  It wasn’t “brothers and sisters don’t have sex” any more, the way it had been before.  It was… oh, shit, I’m no good at words…  it was… Hell, it was something like “I’m yours and you’re mine because we’re brother and sister.  We don’t give and take sex, because my sex is already yours and yours is mine to do with as we wish, but there’s love and trust as well and I can’t put it into words because if you haven’t felt it, you can’t begin to understand.

Do you have a sister?  Do you have the slightest idea what I’m talking about?

Every family has its own dynamic and it is your family we are considering here.

Bastard!

Would you prefer to terminate the session?

No, no. Not now.  I’d like to shove that fucking stupid bow-tie down your fucking throat, but we can’t leave it like this.  I need to know.  To understand.  And you’re supposed to be the fucking expert.

I am ‘supposed’ to be.  But I am not omnipotent.  Through study and, I like to think, a certain sympathy I can help people come to a better understanding of themselves and why they think the way they do, but I don’t have all the answers.  

OK.  So you know what happens next.  It’s all in that piece my sister wrote privately  and that’s probably been all round this fucking office and is going to appear in your next fucking book.  I’ll try to make it simple for you, in the hope you’ll understand.

Thank you.

All her signs had changed.  Everything had changed.  Let me make this really, really clear.  I knew I could still have sex with Dee if I wanted to.  She still wouldn’t have stopped me had I opened her legs, climbed between them and forced my prick into her.  It was still open to me to do that.  She would even have assisted me.  And she wouldn’t have said a word.  To anybody.  More, if I wanted to screw her there and then, *she* wanted me to screw her there and then.   If I wanted to be the first to screw her – to claim her cherry – *she* wanted me to be the first and claim her cherry.   If I was willing to take the risk of getting her pregnant with her brother’s child, *she* was willing to take the risk of becoming pregnant with her brother’s child.  Why? Because she was my sister and loved me so much she wanted what I wanted even when she didn’t want it herself.  That’s what the signs said.  And because I was her brother and loved her the way a brother should, and because I knew that she didn’t want me to have sex with her, I didn’t want to have sex with her either.  Which is why we never had sex, OK?

Would you not describe what you did do as sex?

Well, OK.  Never had intercourse.   What happened next was part of what had just happened.  I knew she still didn’t want me to have intercourse.  That mattered to her.  Whether it was the pregnancy thing, or the virginity thing, or the incest thing, I don’t know.  She just didn’t want my prick in her.  But anything short of that didn’t matter.  I knew she’d have no objection to me touching her in her most secret, private, sensitive, place.  Her fanny was my fanny.  Make sense?

Yes.

More, I knew she *wanted* me to go there.  Perhaps she wanted to prove I’d understood it all and confirm it.  Perhaps she wanted to seal something between us – not the ultimate intimacy of intercourse but the next best thing.  Perhaps she really, deeply, did want to know what a guy’s fingers felt like there, and I was the only guy she trusted enough to allow to go there.  Probably all of those things.  But because I was her brother and loved her, and knew that she wanted me to go there, I wanted to go there too.

So when I folded the sheets down again and lifted her nightdress up to her stomach exposing the patch of hair between her legs and her fanny in it she didn’t move a muscle.  She didn’t blush, or look away so as she wouldn’t see me looking at it.  Why should she?  She’d given it to me, with all her heart.

So I touched it carefully.  Tenderly.  Because it was fucking precious to me.  Not the hairs and skin of her fanny, ‘cos they’re all much the same in the dark, but the fact this one had been given to me.  Me.  I parted its lips and explored what lay within, and woke my big sister with all the skill I had.  I see she wondered what Stacy had taught me.  Stacy had given me four years of full, unobstructed access to these magical folds and rolls of woman, and hours of feedback as to what a million different pressures and rhythms, stroking and tweaking by finger, lip, tongue and teeth could cause them to feel, and I gave all that back to my other sister in those ten or so minutes.

I found out for sure she was still a virgin.  I could only get the tip of my finger into her but because she knew I knew she didn’t want me to squeeze through it or break it, she trusted me not to and didn’t say anything or do anything to warn me off.  And I didn’t. I just sat and used all the skill at my fingertips to bring my older sister to orgasm because she had given me permission to.

I had to be careful ‘cos she didn’t get wet like girls usually do.  I guess that was because she was still a virgin and, well, the wetness was all inside her and couldn’t get out through that little hole.  I had to lick my finger to work on her clit and be careful not to make it sore by rubbing but that was different, too, and kind’a nice.

She didn’t touch you?

No.  She wriggled, quite a lot, the way girls do when they come, but didn’t move on her own, if you know what I mean.

She doesn’t mention you going down on her.  Did you?

No.

Did you consider it?

I thought of it.  I like it.  But I kind’a thought she didn’t want it.

So you denied yourself that pleasure.  Did you touch her breasts?  She wouldn’t have minded that, surely?

No, I didn’t.  It seemed… I dunno.  Didn’t seem right.

And you didn’t touch yourself?  Just a gentle stroking, perhaps, as you looked down at your fingers working in the fanny of your fantastic big sister?

You’re sick, you know that? No, I wasn’t getting anything out of it sex-wise.  That didn’t matter.  I was getting something else, something almost as incredible, even more incredible in a different way.  Deirdre had given herself to me.  My stunning, grown-up nineteen-year-old sister, a woman already out in the world, had put herself literally in the hands of her awkward, gawky sixteen-year-old brother still living at home with his Mom making all the decisions for him.  The button of her clit as I played with it was like the nuclear button given to a school-boy by the President.  “Here, son.  You know what this is.  What it can do.  I’m trusting you to use it responsibly.”  That was what my big sister had given me with her clit.  Can you comprehend that?

I think so.

“Well I hope you really do, because it’s fucking important.  She took a lot of care of herself, did Dee.  She loathed untidiness. Not looking her best.  She was always fighting with Stace over it because Stace was a lot more easy going.  Didn’t care so much about what she looked like.  She knew she didn’t really need to.  But Dee was always trying to smarten her up.  Make her more ladylike.  And I drove her to distraction.  And she hated mess.  Fastidious.  That was Dee.  Yet here she was, writhing out of control - well, out of her own control anyway.  I was playing her clit like a violin – and she hated not being in control of herself.  I could smell her sex, pungent and animal, and she’d have hated that.  My fingers were sticky with the spit I’d had to use to get a bit of friction and I guess a bit of grease had leaked out of her cunt, and she’d usually rush to the bathroom of she got any mess on her hands or legs.  Her legs were wide open, giving me maximum access to her fanny and for all the things it is, a girl’s fanny isn’t the prettiest part of her, especially when it’s all pink, flushed and swollen for sex, and she knew it was right under her eyes.  I even saw her arse-hole and she knew I could see it even though I knew from Stace that’s she’d refused to let a woman doctor check her there when she had a problem of some sort.  Her hair, both on her head and her fanny, was wild and tousled.  In fact it was a bit surprising to me she didn’t shave down there.  She was a million miles from the usual Deirdre I knew – everyone knew – yet she was exposing it all to me.  Jesus, it was like a freaking nun doing a striptease and a pole dance in the Vatican.  That’s what she was trusting me with.  Her real self.

I gave her orgasm after orgasm.  Stace had taught me how to do that.  And I felt each one as though it was my own.  I’d shaped it, created it and given it to her like a gift and I enjoyed it with her.  Enjoyed it because she did.  I knew when she’d had enough and brought her down gently because Stace had taught me how to do that, too.  When at last she was just lying there quivering and glowing and utterly spent, I tidied her up a bit but didn’t clean her up – didn’t wipe her fanny ‘cos I knew she wouldn’t want that - tucked her up, kissed her like she was a baby I’d just rocked to sleep and left her.  Yeah, just like she wrote.  I didn’t say anything, ‘cos everything had already been said.  And she hadn’t said a word.

And then?

I went straight back to Stacy.  I knew I smelled of Dee’s sex and needed a shower but it was too late for that.  Too late at night, I mean.  Stace and I usually needed a shower too, afterwards, but we didn’t get one.  I mean, maybe Mom would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep thinking, “ah, that’s the kids having a shower after sex together,” but like I think I said, we didn’t like pushing the envelope.

Stace was awake and waiting, and she didn’t look disappointed like she’d been waiting for some row from Dee’s room and her to rush out screaming rape.  I’d been gone maybe a half-hour but she must have known immediately I hadn’t screwed Dee as my prick was still bone hard, and as dry as a bone.  She must have smelled Dee’s sex on me, tho’.  I’ll swear she genuinely wanted to know what had happened.

I’m not arguing.  What did you tell her about what had happened?

I told her Dee hadn’t wanted to have sex with me, and that I thought Dee had a big hang-up about pricks and penetration she’d have to get over on her own.  But I said she had been up for a little naughtiness and had let me have a little finger – there’d have been no denying that anyway – and that I didn’t think there’d be any more trouble about me screwing Stace.  As long as she wanted me to.

So she showed me how much she wanted me to.  And because she wanted to and I wanted to, and I knew she wanted to and she knew I wanted to, it was great.  Fantastic.  Even though she was my kid sister.

Did you tell Stacy about the things you’d learned about sex, and about yourself,  from Deirdre?

No, I didn’t go into any of that “Voyage of Personal Discovery” stuff.  Christ, I didn’t understand half of it.  Trying to explain it to you has helped me understand some of it, but I still don’t understand half of it.  I’m hoping you can tell me, and why what happened still happened.  But something had changed.  Stace wasn’t any longer just my kid sister who I was fond of and used for sex.  I loved her, and thought how lucky I was that this incredible creature should want my prick in her, and to do such wonderful things to it.  And loved her even more because she did.  Oh, yes, and because she was my sister.

And how had Deirdre changed?

She was a bit different, next day.  A bit warmer. Or she seemed so.  Maybe it was just because I noticed more.  She backed off Stace a bit, too.  I thought, you know, that now we’d broken the ice we’d slowly work on it, but she was straight back off to college even if she really didn’t need to.  But I assumed that was just her priorities.

And her next visit home?  Faithful to your girlfriend?

That was just a front.  Well, she was a real enough girlfriend, I enjoyed her company and we had great screwing.  But I didn’t stop screwing Stace as well, when she wanted it.  But yeah, we agreed a little lie to Dee.  Really to make her think that I’d stopped screwing Stacy.  Well, screwing her all the time, anyway.  We were a bit vague about it. We thought it might make it easier on Dee if she thought that, and that if I had a regular girlfriend to screw she wouldn’t feel under any pressure to let me take that *last* step.

But we pretty much went our own ways in the years after that.  I never stopped screwing Stacy.  Still do.  But only as and when.  We don’t, you know, have a hide-away anywhere, or regular appointments.   I didn’t see Dee very often.  It was rare she and I would be at home together, and I never really had the kind of place on my own where she could have come and stayed the night, that kind of thing.  Not like Stacy!   When we were together and Stacy wasn’t Dee could be really bright and bushy-tailed and, yeah, if I snuck into her room she’d never throw me out.  I guess that’s what she means by my doing *little things* for her.  She could orgasm for hours under my finger and tongue but because of the ‘faithful to girlfriend’ myth – this reads as though she really believed it, but I mean, Christ, who is faithful to his ‘girlfriend’ – she didn’t seem to feel that I was being unnatural in not pushing her to intercourse, tho’ God knows I wanted to, sometimes.  But I don’t ever remember her sneaking into my room.  And if Stace was there, I never even tried with Dee.  

So she would accept oral sex from you?

Yeah, and she made an effort with my prick.  I taught her to jack me off because she insisted, like a girl insisting she’s got to learn how to pick up a spider.  When I ejaculated, tho’, she squeaked and snatched her hand away, and she was shuddering as she looked at a smear of semen on her fingers.  I could feel how badly she wanted to wash them, and how hard she was having to work not to wipe them clean on the sheets.  She did get a little easier about it but oral?  There is no way she could have done that.  I know she didn’t like me going down on her and only allowed it because I wanted to do it.

You know, I don’t think she ever masturbated.  I mean, hell, we never talked about it.  I just got the feeling she didn’t.  She wouldn’t.  She couldn’t.  When she just got too wrought up she came to me and I relieved her.  Odd that, the reference to my doing ‘little things’ for her without asking.  Was she expecting me to turn up and say “Hello, Sis.  Do you need me to give you an orgasm?”  Yet I suppose that’s what it became.  And it became the problem.  Even after I married she’d turn up at the house unannounced or after a ‘phone call, and I’d see the signs.  ‘Course I could hardly creep into her room during the night but we made an opportunity for me to give her a ‘seeing to’ – in the car, most often - and I wouldn’t see her again for months.  She was pretty high-powered by then, of course.  Always brought something damn expensive for the house, or Penny, or the kids when they came along.

How often did this occur?

Oh, Maybe I’d go six months without seeing her, then twice in a fortnight.  All she wanted was to stand, or lie, or sit, with my fingers just making those orgasms in her fanny.  She was so different afterwards.  Meek.  Apologetic.  Promised never to do it again  If we could she’d offer to jerk me off and sometimes I even let her because she was so keen, so eager to give me something back.  But I got her to stop promising not to come again, because it only made it worse.  I mean, she tried but she couldn’t, and the longer she left it the more she was wound up when she arrived and the wilder were her orgasms – sometimes I only had to touch her and she exploded.

Deirdre was sure your wife knew, and maybe even thought worse.

Yeah, Penny bristled.  Even I could see that Dee was giving off signals that weren’t ‘sisterly’. Stacy could hide them – she’s a fantastic actress - but I thought Dee wasn’t aware it was obvious, until I saw this.  I just made damn sure that I was never with Dee in a position where we could really have got down to it, and made sure Penny knew it.  She skirted around it a couple of times – you know, me and my sister – but I told her about the boys she’d never had, and her ‘shyness’ about sex as a kid, and of course she never had a man in tow or expressed any interest in them to Penny, and I think Penny did write her off as frigid, maybe with an unnatural but unfulfilled interest in her brother.  More like an Aunt and favourite nephew, really.

It came to a head once.  Dee had been a bit over the top and Penny tried to make me finish it.  Get Dee to stop visiting and never see her again, but I made it clear to Penny that if it came to it my family, and in particular my sisters, were more important to me than she was.  So after that she put up with it.

So I don’t know.  It wasn’t long after a visit that I heard the news about her, but it had been a pretty ordinary visit.  We only had a forty-minute window while Penny went to pick the kids up from school and I always allowed twenty for a safety margin and to wash up – sex smell clings like hell – but I blew her mind in fifteen with some clever finger work ‘tho I say so myself, and she seemed content when she left.  She was still intact.  Was she after…   You know.

Yes, she was.  So you hadn’t had any confrontations with her?  Hadn’t tried to end it, for the sake of your marriage?

No.  I think Penny thought it was worse than it really was, but I wasn’t playing about with other women.  She knew that.  

And if Deirdre had threatened to ‘go public’ with this story?  Would you have stopped her?

No, she wouldn’t have.  I’m sure of it.  She’s had have to have really hated us to do that, and I know she didn’t.

OK.  Thank you.

That it?

Unless you have something to add?

No.  Nothing.

Mom

That was a copy of Deirdre’s short story which she called “Brother”, Mrs. Bartlett, and obviously it contains matters I need to talk to you about.  Would you like to read it again?

No.  Thank you.

Does reading it cause you pain?

What do you think.

I would think that at present anything reminding you of Deirdre would cause you pain, and something especially intimate she herself created revealing her thoughts about you would be additionally painful, particularly if it was critical.  I also think you know what lay behind my question and chose to avoid it, but I can be more clinical if necessary.  You are, in any case, here voluntarily and may terminate this session at any time.  

I know the police think Stacy or Jeff, or maybe both of them, might have pushed Deirdre off that balcony, and now I can guess they might think it was to stop her revealing this.  I know they didn’t,  and I’ll do whatever it takes to convince them and you of that fact.

It is a possibility they have to consider, Mrs. Bartlett.  This story was on the hard-drive of Deirdre’s desktop PC.  Were this ‘story’ to become public knowledge I have no doubt it would put Jeff’s marriage under a great deal of strain, to put it mildly, and inevitably have an impact on his children, and while the impact it would have on Stacy’s present career is perhaps debatable, publicity such is this in the kind of media that would make the most of it would certainly close down any prospects she might have of moving into more conventional fields of acting at any time in the future.  Moreover despite her somewhat blasé attitude towards the views of others regarding her personal morality I believe what would undoubtedly be very sordid and seamy exposure of her personal life involving both her brother and you but made ‘newsworthy’ by her involvement would cause her deep distress for the pain it would inevitably cause you.

However having now spoken to them both I am convinced neither could ever have even considered acting against their sister in this or any violent way order to protect themselves even had they known disclosure was imminent.  And I shall attempt to persuade the police of that view.

Mrs. Bartlett, I believe both Jeff and Stacy loved Deirdre every bit as much as they loved each other, and would have continued to do so even had she destroyed everything else they held dear.   However I do not believe Deirdre ever contemplated doing that,  as her love for them was in its own way as strong and true.  An equally possible scenario in my view is that Deirdre wrote this story as a kind of personal catharsis.  However this still does not explain to me why she did what she did, even after having spoken to Jeff and Stacy, but I believe there is still light to be shed on her life, thoughts and feelings to which you may, perhaps innocently, hold the key.

So I will ask you again, Mrs. Bartlett.  Aside from the quite understandable pain any reminder of Deirdre’s life will bring you now and of course until the day you die, is reading this story particularly painful for you?

Yes.

Broken down, the story reveals the fact that Jeff and Stacy were committing incest, Deirdre believed either that you had not become aware of this or had chosen to ignore it and clearly thought both possibilities blameworthy, that she did not object to and indeed subsequently had what I suggest were ‘sweet dreams’  about an indecent act she permitted her brother to perform on her, that a limited sexual relationship did ensue between Deirdre and Jeff, and that most recently she seems to have been prepared to destabilise her brother’s marriage by allowing and even encouraging your daughter-in-law to believe in an incestuous relationship which didn’t actually exist.  Can you think of anything I’ve missed?

No.

Then let us analyse these separate threads of the story.  Both Jeff and Stacy expressed to me the view that you were aware of their incest but elected not to interfere.  Is this correct?

Do you have to use that word?  It is so ugly.

Incest? It is technically correct, unless of course they were not actually related by blood.  Were either of them adopted?

No.

Then I have a problem.  My discipline regards itself as a science, although admittedly not all agree it is justified, and precision is a prerequisite of all science.  What word would you prefer we used to refer to their relationship?

How about *love*?

I would prefer not to adopt that as a euphemism.  I have no doubt Jeff and Stacy loved each other but as I am sure you would agree, Mrs. Bartlett, sex is not an essential ingredient of love.  After all, I might ask you if you loved Jeff?

Yes.  Of course.  And I did not have sex with him, if that’s what you’re getting at.

It is a rather difficult suggestion I would have felt bound to have raised at some point in this discussion and I am glad we have been able to dispose of it promptly and neatly.  

Did you really think Jeff and I…..?

No, Mrs. Bartlett, I didn’t really think Jeff and you.  Jeff himself raised and then dismissed the possibility not once but four times, and I am satisfied nothing actually occurred between you.  However I am also satisfied that Jeff, like most normal teenage boys, played with the possibility and even received some encouragement from both your apparent unconcern at his wandering naked, and perhaps rather provocatively, around the house and your lack of the expected parental response to his, ah, ‘physical relationship’ with his little sister.  I suggest it would have taken very little more - shall we say, ‘encouragement’? - on your behalf for a similar such relationship with you to have occurred and I suspect you knew this.  Can you honestly say you were not tempted?

Mrs Bartlett?

Yes.  I was tempted.  My husband left me when Jeff was seven but the marriage had effectively ended several years earlier, as my husband was getting all the sex he wanted outside of it.  I, on the other hand, was not.  Nor did I after the divorce as I had three children to bring up.  By the time Jeff started wandering around the house provocatively naked, as you put it, at fourteen I was a thirty-eight year-old woman who had not had sex for eight or nine years.  Forgive me if I responded to the sight of a naked and well-hung young man with thoughts of going to bed with him, and enjoyed those thoughts.

Thoughts of going to bed with a well-hung young man, or with your own son?

Can’t you leave it alone?  I knew what Jeff was thinking.  If I’d wanted to have sex with my son I would have done.

Why, then, did you not discourage him from wandering naked about the house?  You must have been aware he would regard it to some degree as an encouragement in his hopes.

Yes, I…   I liked looking at him, damn it.  He was my son.  My only son. He was the centre of my life.  To see him like that, a man, perfect, full of life, made my heart sing.  Satisfied?

And if he had taken that encouragement too far?  Slipped into your bed in the darkness one night?  Taken you into his arms by the kitchen sink, his hands claiming your breasts, body pressed against yours, stronger than you by far, hard and throbbing with his need?  What then, Mrs. Bartlett?

Mrs Bartlett?

Yes.

I’m sorry?

Yes, I would have let him.

Let him?  Merely *let* him, Mrs. Bartlett?

Mrs. Bartlett?

No.

No.  You would not have merely *let* him have sex with you.  You would have responded actively and eagerly, your needs and desires matching if not exceeding his, yes?

Yes.  But it didn’t happen. What has this got to do with Deirdre?

A very great deal, I suspect.  At this time your elder daughter was an eighteen-year old virgin with her own powerful sexual needs and desires, quite normal for a young woman.  Only *this* young woman who was committing a great many resources into denying those needs, was also subconsciously aware not only that her two younger siblings are revelling in joyous, unrestrained sex with each other but that her own mother, who was aware of it and permitting it,  was also wound tight with sexual desire for her own brother, with a strong possibility that this, too, could explode into actual sky-searing consummation at any time.  Where do you suppose this left Deirdre, Mrs. Bartlett?  Somewhat out in the cold, wouldn’t you say?  In fact feeling somewhat outside the family altogether?

Are you saying she knew?

I’m certain that at an unacknowledged level she did.  She will have been aware of the signs in you, but refused to *see* them at an conscious level for to do so would have been too painful to her.  After all, she was only refusing to recognise in you exactly the same ringing needs and burning desires she was refusing herself.

For Jeff?

Yes.  And no.  This is perhaps the central paradox of Deirdre which I am still seeking to unravel.  The resolution lies in understanding the story she left us.  She desired Jeff every bit as powerfully as you did, which is very curious.   Your desire for Jeff, if you’ll forgive me Mrs. Bartlett, was just a case of good old-fashioned lust and sexual frustration.  Following your experience of marriage you wanted to avoid any complications and commitments and merely concentrate on bringing up your children.  On the other hand casual sex and ‘one-night stands’ were abhorrent to you with the consequence that your opportunities for sex were limited out of existence.  It was merely Jeff the well-hung hunk your body yearned for, not Jeff your son.  Had the explosion happened….   We’ll never know.  My best guess is that you would have managed the afterwards more than competently, with just an acceptance that you’d broken a rule which when all is said and done doesn’t really amount to anything when intelligent and independently-minded people are involved.  After all, you’d already proved that with your handling of Jeff and Stacy’s, ah..

Incest?

Precisely.  On the other hand, Deirdre’s opportunities for sex especially once she was away from home at college were practically unlimited.  She had no need to lust after Jeff as the only available well-hung hunk.  For ‘normal’ girls of her age who experience it, incest with a brother is usually a case of the continuation of an already established relationship, as in Stacy’s case, or the ‘taking in hand’ of a loved younger brother for his sex education – something Jeff certainly had no need of.  It can also be part of a revolt against ‘the rules’ and ‘the establishment’ – incest is wrong, let’s do it – which is a motive I cannot ascribe to the girl I believe Deirdre was, or a conscious decision to ‘indulge’ in incest in an attempt to know again that sweet additional thrill of the secret and illicit which so often adds a very exciting extra dimension to our first experiences of under-age, no-one-must-know sex.  Which cannot have been the motivation in Deirdre’s case.

In short, Mrs. Bartlett, your desire for Jeff was quite normal, healthy and perfectly understandable in the circumstances.  Deirdre’s was not.  Yet I believe we need to understand it in order to understand her and what happened.

Yes.  I can see that.  Can’t you call me Bridget?

I would like to.  Let’s return to our analysis of Deirdre’s story.  You were, then, aware of the extent of the love between Jeff and Stacy and turned a blind eye?

Yes.

Were you aware at the time that they knew you knew?

I….  I thought they probably did but wasn’t sure.  They never… tested me on it.  Put me in a position of having to show my hand.  And, well, it seemed easier… to pretend.  To go so far as  to… openly accept it… seemed like the top of a slippery slope.  I… was afraid where it might lead.

Jeff might well have taken your open approval of a physical relationship by him with his little sister as a sign that you would not deny him one either.  Indeed, if you obviously saw nothing wrong with his committing incest with his little sister what possible grounds could you have for saying it would be wrong for him to commit incest with you?

Something like that, I suppose.   I don’t remember thinking it through that clearly.  It was more a gut thing.  

Nevertheless, did you never wonder if it might be better to sit them both down and show your hand?  And perhaps lay down a few rules?  Jeff told me of the supply of condoms you maintained and had very little doubt that you’d meant him to use them for Stacy’s protection.  However, you could gave worked with them and agreed a set of rules and measures that would have made the whole relationship safer for them, and you.  The need to even ritually hide it from you might have led them to take risks that could have resulted in its discovery by a less sympathetic party.

It was more than I could do to sit down with my children and encourage them to have sex with each other.  And it really isn’t correct to suggest that I approved of their..   them.   It was more a case of... tolerating it.

Which brings us, of course, to the $64,000 question.  Why *did* you tolerate it, Bridget?

I…  It took me by surprise.  No.  That’s not really true.  I guess I’d seen it coming but it started before I expected.  It surprised me and then… it was too late.  I knew…  something like it was on the cards.  When Stacy was ten she would do anything for Jeff.  He was twelve and sex kind’a – exploded – in him.  I saw it.  He became aware of sex.  One day, as it seemed, girls, female things,  meant nothing special to him.  The next day he couldn’t keep his eyes off them.  Is it always like that?  With boys?

There are no rules.  We are individuals.  Yet Jeff doesn’t sound unusual.

Ah.  Well, with Stacy practically hanging off him all the time it was obvious he would notice she was a girl – I mean notice in a sexual way – and the signs were there that they, ah, got up to a little naughtiness.  But she was only ten.  She looked a little older, she was tall, and I watched her carefully to see if, you know, maybe Jeff was pushing it too far.  But she was bright-eyed, bubbly and full of fun, and clearly adored him so I thought, well, if they were up to a bit of mischief it clearly wasn’t doing her any harm.  I mean, short of always keeping a brick wall between them, or threatening them with dire punishments and that ‘God knows everything’ nonsense, what can you do?

Earn their trust, so that they don’t feel the need to do things behind your back?

Yes.  I guess I failed, then.

Having talked with Jeff and Stacey at length I’m not of the opinion that you failed them.  I also believe we will discover that it would take a very harsh judge to find that you failed Deidre.   I’m afraid though, Bridget, that it does seem that you did not always make the perfect decision every time.  So how did you discover that intercourse had occurred between them before you were ready for it?

Oh, the signs.  Stacy was only twelve…

That’s what Jeff says, but Stacy says she was thirteen.

No, she was still twelve.  Their father was still alive when it happened and I remember he sent her a gift for her thirteenth birthday which was three or four weeks after… I knew for sure.  

Knew for sure?

I was pretty sure even before I… confirmed it.  There was something about Stacy’s poise, her confidence, the way Jeff was no-longer her almost God-like big brother but her equal, even her – bodyguard isn’t quite right, ‘protector’ would be better, if you know what I mean?

I believe so.  Go on.

And he,,, he seemed to have gone overnight from being fond of her and putting up with her to adoring her.  I guess it was a power thing.  Before he’d held all the power and she had to accept what he gave, but now she held the power.  You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to recognise that she had something he wanted, and had the power to give or withhold it, and to guess what that something might be.

But you nevertheless wanted to actually ‘confirm it’ before doing anything?  Surely sitting them down for a chat, perhaps individually, would have been enough to get a confession?

 I wanted to know for sure if I was going to tackle to Jeff about it.  I mean - to accuse him of doing it to Stacy if he wasn’t…    And Stacy was so happy.  I didn ‘t want anything to come between us…  turn her against me.  I was afraid that if I interfered…

You were afraid what might happen if you interfered, Bridget?

You see, their father was always trying to get them to live with him.  He’d remarried and they had her kids plus some of their’s but he wanted mine, too.  And I was afraid that, well, if I came down hard on Jeff, or embarrassed him, he might decide he’d prefer to go live with his father.  At fourteen I couldn’t really have stopped him.  And if their father got wind of what had been going on, Jeff and Stacy that is, well he could have – you know, unfit mother, that kind of thing.  I could have lost them all, and I didn’t want to risk that.

But you didn’t just turn a blind eye to the possibility they had become lovers?  You did take steps to confirm your suspicions?

Yes.

You actually wanted to watch them having intercourse?

That’s a rather crude and cruel way of putting it. You make me sound like some sort of Peeping Tom.  

Bridget, I put it to you that you *knew* perfectly well that Jeff and Stacy were having sex.  You didn’t need to *see* It to know it.  All the signs were there which they couldn’t hide or disguise from their mother.  Yet I suspect you went to some lengths to set up a situation where if they were having sex they actually would have sex, and you were able to spy on them doing so without their knowledge.  Is that not so?

Yes.  Yes, it is.   I was worried about two of my children.  What they were getting up to together.  What’s wrong with that?

Your attitude and your body language are telling me that it’s not that I’m making you sound like a Peeping Tom.  It’s that you felt that way yourself at the time.  You were ashamed then, as you are now, that you tricked Jeff and Stacy, and sneaked around deliberately so that you could spy on them.

No, I didn’t feel good about it.  What’s your point?

You didn’t need to do it, and you didn’t feel good about it.  So why did you do it?

 I don’t know what you’re getting at. 

Do you have a brother, Bridget?

Bridget?

Yes.

Younger or older?

Both.  I had two brothers, and was in the middle.

Do I have to ask the obvious question?

Bridget?

Because I fooled around with my brothers you think I’d encourage my own children to commit incest?

Clearly your experience of incest with your own brothers is going to affect your view of the validity of the taboo, and whether or not it should be enforced.  I suspect the reason you actually needed to watch Jeff and Stacy having sex was to ascertain whether or not Jeff was coercing Stacy or whether her participation was whole-hearted and voluntary.  This would suggest to me that your initial experience of incest with your own brother or brothers was involuntary and therefore unpleasant, and that perhaps a part of you hoped your mother would realise what was going on and come to your ‘rescue’.  However as you clearly didn’t see the need to ‘rescue’ Stacy I would assume you decided she was not being coerced.

Something like that.

Jeff told me that when you effectively assented to his having sex with his little sister by issuing the condoms and warning him not to get her pregnant you did so because you didn’t want to ask him to make any promises he couldn’t keep.  Did you really think your fourteen-year-old son had so little control over his base instincts that he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off his little sister if you made a stand over it?

I suppose, if I’d really talked to him about it…

But you chose not to.  

Yes.

Bridget, I’m still puzzled.  Please understand, you are not on trial here.  I have no problem with twelve-year-old girls having genuinely consensual sex.  Some girls are physically and mentally ready to begin discovering sex at that age and to deny them it can cause problems later on arising from repression and instilled guilt.  Nor do I have any problem with incest per se.  I do have to deal with the problems incest can cause when it collides with deeply held religious and/or moral views but the problem there is as much with the religion and morality as it is with the act of sex with a relative.  Some parents encourage their children to discover their sexuality with each other and, done wisely and lovingly, I believe this is an approach that has much in its favour.  But I don’t know where you’re coming from.  If your own experience of sex with your brothers was simply harmless, enjoyable fun for a young girl within the safety and security of the family unit I don’t understand why you didn’t just sit Jeff and Stacy down and say something like, “OK you guys, I know what’s going on and I don’t have a problem with it.  But for your sakes and mine we need a few rules to keep you safe.”  On the other hand if your experience of sex with your brothers was unpleasant and abusive it would for you merely have confirmed the justification on the incest taboo in which case you would have acted to quash it for your children’s sake for the same reason you would deny them drugs – “OK you guys, I know it seems wonderful and appealing, but you’re going to have to accept my ruling that it ain’t good for you ‘cos I know better.”

Indeed, I find myself as bemused as Deirdre clearly was when she had to admit to herself what was going on between Jeff and Stacy.  “And Mom, seemingly not noticing a thing! How could she miss it?” she writes.  This, to me, is a purely rhetorical question.  Deirdre knew you hadn’t missed it because you couldn’t miss it.  Yet why were you pretending to?  She couldn’t understand.  This suggests to me she would have expected you quite definitely not to approve, and as your eldest daughter I would have expected her views on sex to pretty much mirror yours.

So why, Bridget?

I’d seen them.

Sorry?

I’d seen Jeff and Stacy.  Together.  Making love.

I still don’t understand.

No.  You wouldn’t.  Stacy was a twelve-year-old girl.  Still a child, really.  Her breasts barely begun.  Just the first signs of her hair.  Pubic hair.  She was riding Jeff.  Straddling him.  Him inside her.  She was moving gently.  Drinking it in.  Like…  Oh, I don’t know.  A connoisseur.  Her face…  A gentle smile, like the Mona Lisa.  Like she knew something…   Even at that age she was having sex like I knew I’d never had it.  Like many women go a lifetime without having. 

You know what she does?  Yes, of course you do.  My daughter the porn star.  My friends who know…  How can I bear it, I see them wondering?  Being screwed by man after strange man in front of cameras, the crew and all the stage-hands, to be watched by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of sad little men masturbating to the sight of her.  How can I live with my daughter doing that?

I can live with my daughter doing that - I can love my daughter doing that – because I saw her as a twelve-year-old girl screwing herself on her brother’s prick and loving it, and loving him, and loving herself loving it and loving him.  Can you understand that?

I’m not sure I need to.  Your vehemence is sufficient to carry the day.  And don’t forget, I’ve met Stacy.  I can understand that in her case ‘sex-goddess’ isn’t just publicist’s hype.

Some parents see, or think they see in their children a special gift for tennis, or baseball, or maybe music, and encourage them with dreams of a Grand Slam, or the Superbowl, or Carnegie Hall.  I saw in my little girl a special gift for sex and, well, if she chose her brother to be her trainer and guide I sure as hell couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather have doing it.

A decision made easier because of your own experiences with your brothers?

Yes.  I could trust them.  Trust them not to go blabbing about me to their friends and mine.  Trust them to take a lot more care not to get me pregnant than they did their girlfriends sometimes.  Trust them to back off when I said ‘no’, because they knew they still had to live under the same roof as me.  Trust them not to get too clingy and possessive, ‘cos I was only their sister not their trophy.

So why not Deirdre and Jeff?

Maybe because she was seventeen, nearly eighteen, and he was only fifteen when it might, perhaps, have happened.

Maybe.  But Deirdre’s story tells me she had strong views on incest.  Stacy agrees with me that her sister’s, “How could you *do* that?” was an expression of disgust that Stacy was have sex with her brother, not just that she was having sex.  Where would she have picked up this abhorrence towards incest if not from you, Bridget?

I never talked to her about having sex with Jeff, one way or the other.   To her he was just her nuisance little brother, most of the time.   And anyway she was so sensible.  The thought of them having sex was… inconceivable.  But even if they had, I wouldn’t have interfered.

How much younger than you was your little brother?

Nearly three years, but…  If my older brother hadn’t…

If I were to ask you “How could you *do* that” with your little brother, what would you say?

Oh, it was kind’a cute.  I mean, he was always that little bit grateful, ‘cos I was older and boys don’t usually get to go with older girls.

Mom, “How could you *do* that” with Uncle John” or whoever?  Can’t you hear Deirdre asking that?

That’s not fair.

Bridget, it’s at the heart of Deirdre’s story.  Where the family configuration admits the possibility of sex between siblings – usually where there is a brother or brothers a few years older that a sister or sisters - the parents are invariably aware of it as a possibility and respond to it in some way.  Often it will involve the parents making the brother responsible in some way for the sister, trying to make incest a breach of trust.  Parents with a neurosis about incest will usually try to repress all signs of sexuality and if possible inculcate shame and guilt into any sexual awareness between siblings.  Enlightened parents will tread lightly, give a good theoretical grounding in sex just before it raises its head and if their kids practice and experiment on each other, just make sure they don’t get pregnant or too dependent on each other.

I’m hearing from you that you were reasonably relaxed about it, that you took quite reasonable and laudable steps merely to ensure that Stacy wasn’t being abused by her brother and that the relationship was genuinely consensual, that you committed incest with your own brothers and suffered no harm, that you were tempted to commit incest with your own son and were deterred far more by the complications this could cause to the family dynamic rather than any sense of wrongness or immorality, and would not have been unduly worried had Deirdre decided to have sex with Jeff.

Yet Deidre’s attitude even to simple sex, according to Stacy, was repressive and shameful.  Her attitude to incest, revealed by the story, I would classify as neurotic.  Where did she get this from if not from you?  And if not from you why was she so shocked and dismayed at your apparent acceptance of it?  Her emphasis of it in the story reads almost as though she regards it as a betrayal.  How could she be so different, both to you and to her sister?  What had happened to her?

Bridget, what had happened to Deirdre that hadn’t happened to Stacy?

Bridget?

Her damn father happened to her.

I had already begun to suspect something along those lines.  Bridget, if I’m to understand why she might have thrown herself off that balcony I need to know.

Isn’t that enough?  Her dirty creep of a father happened to her and she couldn’t live with the memory any more.  The piece of shit killed her as surely as he’d pushed her of that balcony himself.

He abused her.

Yes, the worthless piece of shit.

So did you marry this dirty creep because he was a worthless piece of shit?  Unusual choice, especially for a woman who is still very attractive and who, I understand from Stacy, was quite wealthy.

I didn’t know it then, of course.  He was a dream.  All the girls at college fancied him.

And you were flattered he chose you?  Bridget, you are not a naïve woman.

Yeah I knew he’d screwed around.  It was easy for him.  And yes, I was flattered he seemed to choose me, and a part of me knew he was attracted to my money.  But when I got pregnant…  And he promised to change…  I guess I wanted to believe him too much.

Pregnant with Deidre?

Yes.

But he didn’t change?

Oh, he was more discrete.  Tried to make me think I was special.  All the others were just flings.  It was just sex.  That he loved me.

And you kept on wanting to believe him?

Yes.  For Deirdre’s sake, then Jeff’s and Stacy’s.  Kids need a father.  And he seemed to dote on them, and them on him.

But in Deirdre’s case is went beyond doting?

Apparently.

You don’t know?

Yes I know, but I don’t know…

You don’t know if you were right about it?

I….

Bridget, the divorce wasn’t about his adultery, was it?  You’d been putting up with that for ten years because you had a home and your children and all was perfect suburbia on the surface.  The divorce was about Deirdre, wasn’t it?

Yes.

So what happened.

I caught them.  Deirdre and her father.  On her bed.  All I could see were her legs, sticking up beside his bare ass.  And her arms…  holding him.

She was what, ten?

Yes.

You know penetration never occurred.  Deirdre was still intact when she died. 

We know it now.  I didn’t know it then.  But he wasn’t humping her.  Just holding himself and rubbing his prick against her.

You said you caught them.  Does that mean you’d been hunting them?

I guess so.  Yes.  I’d..  She doted on him, and him on her.  Sometimes it seemed…  I don’t know.  Didn’t seem natural.  But at other times… it was just what it was supposed to be like.

And it held the family together?

Yes, damn it.

And things like Oscar?

Oscar?  Oh, than damn bear.  Yes.  Frank brought it home for Dee one day, out of the blue.  He’d won it in a draw.  She was eight.  Damn thing was almost as big as she was, but then, she was so small.  She wouldn’t sleep anywhere without it, after that.

So what changed?  Why did you go hunting?

Some pervert had exposed himself to Dee and some of her friends in the school-yard.  They were all interviewed by the police psychologist.  She told me that…  Deirdre had seemed…  rather more familiar with male masturbation… than a ten-year-old girl ought to be.  And there were traces of semen on her clothes.  She’d allowed him to get that close. And she tried to clean them off.  Pretended they weren’t there, at first.

And you couldn’t ignore it any longer?

Ignore it?  Yeah, I guess so.  I guess I needed to know.  But when I saw them together…  She was so small.  Defenceless.  That ugly great prick looking like it was going to split her in half.  I just… Saw red.

You were violent?  A tigress defending her cubs?

I… laid into him, yes.  I remember him lying beside the bed, naked, and I was kicking him and screaming at him…

And Deirdre?

She was just lying there on the bed.  Hadn’t moved, poor kid.  White as a sheet.  Great big eyes.

Do you remember mentioning the school-yard pervert?

What?  

Do you remember mentioning anything about the school-yard pervert when you were laying into him?  Comparing him with him, perhaps?

Hell, I don’t remember.  Yes, I think maybe I did.  Something about making his own daughter want to play the games of scum like that, perhaps.  Why?

I expect it was partly behind your anger.

Jesus, do you think I needed anything other than sight of my ten-year-old daughter naked on her back beneath her father?

I don’t know.  How old were you when it first happened to you?

What?

Bridget, you’re not a fool.  Neither am I.

Bridget?

Is it so obvious?

Only to middle-aged world-weary psychologists.  I know the signs because I’ve seen it all before.

Signs?

You clearly draw a much wider distinction than most people between father / daughter and brother / sister incest.  Your own incest with your brothers clearly had no adverse effect on you – you even enjoyed it, would be my assessment.  You remember it fondly as a time of special closeness and security and were happy that Jeff and Stacy were experiencing something similar.  Yet you were also uncomfortable about incest and tried to shy away from it when I mentioned it.  You didn’t want to *know* what was happening between Deirdre and her father as your knowing of it threatened the family unity more than the abuse itself at that stage, for you also had the option of accepting it as an extension of a loving relationship between Deirdre and her father just as your sleeping with Jeff would have been, and when it was forced on you your response was destructive and a loss of control rather than thoughtful, measured and constructive.  It all suggested to me that you saw father / daughter incest as something very different indeed from brother / sister incest.  But this is what Deidre picked up from you as applying to all incest and so was not only appalled to discover Jeff and Stacy doing *it*, but was confused by your acceptance of it and indeed your own desire for Jeff.

But it is different, isn’t it?  I mean, brothers and sisters are at least kind of equals, and girls have some chance to appeal to their mothers for protection from their brothers,  but a father and daughter?   What chance has she then?  She often can’t be sure her mother will choose to support her against her own husband.

Yes it is different, but not necessarily in a detrimental or harmful way as I would guess it was with you.  As a girl grows into her sexuality she is bound to become aware of it and measure its affects on her father’ maleness for he is the male in closest proximity to her holding the greatest power.  Too, he should be the male she should be able to trust most of all not to hurt or, indeed, to abuse her but instead to introduce and teach her about this vast and complex world of sex with her best interests at heart.

You sound as though you think all fathers….

No.  I don’t.  For the simple reason that far too many fathers today would not know when or how to let go.  Their role should be to prepare their daughters and then let them go, mature, skilled and confident in their sexuality, but when that time comes it is hard for a man to give up a young, lithe, beautiful – as all fathers think their daughters are even if they aren’t – and usually willing sex partner, and this is what can do the damage.  And what I fear would almost certainly have been the case with Deirdre and her father.   This is where the mother has a vital role in monitoring the whole relationship and can make sure the father does not become too ‘intense’ with the daughter but allows her sufficient freedom to spread her wings within the relationship, and fly away when she’s ready.  Similarly the father should be able to supervise his wife’s sexual education of their son while ensuring that the boy does not become too fixated on her, or perhaps too sexually confident too quickly.  I suspect it happens in far more families than anyone suspects and historically it has sometimes been the norm,  but our current society’s socio-religious taboo on incest effectively isolates every family and provides no guidance nor support, making it extraordinarily difficult for any family to bring off successfully.  As a consequence the results where it is attempted are all to often disastrous, which appears to feed back into the justification for the taboo in the first place.

I’m afraid that sounds too radical for me.

As would many things be which are accepted as the norm in other societies.  Human sacrifice, sacred prostitution, Pharaoh’s marrying their sisters, slavery, gladiatorial combat to the death, celibacy. Would you be happy to be a man’s third wife, and live with the other two? Many societies would, and some still do, regard the nuclear family as a radical departure from the norm.  All morality is relative, particularly the morality of incest.  So how old were you?

Fourteen.

I’m surprised.  When it’s pre-pubescent the primary motive is lust, usually at odds with love as in the case of Deirdre and her father.  When it starts after puberty it is more likely to be an expression of genuine love, although not always of course. 

Not in my case.  He found me in bed with my older brother.  As I was such a slut, he said, as to like having sex with my brother he was sure I’d have no objection to having sex with him.  He just used me.  He used to like watching my brothers do me, too.  They..  They didn’t realise.  They thought I enjoyed it.  The three of them.  I had to pretend…  

Because if you didn’t they’d turn against their father, doing serious damage to the family dynamic?

I guess so.  I just knew…  I’d have to put up with it for their sakes, and Mom’s.   She loved Dad.   Had she known, it would have destroyed her.

I suspect she did, but was taken in by your pretence, too.  You didn’t love your father enough to accept it, perhaps as wrong but understandable weakness on his part and forgivable?

No, I never really loved him.  I tried for Mom’s sake, but I couldn’t.

So you projected your revulsion at having to pretend to enjoy having sex with your father onto the relationship between Deirdre and her father.

I didn’t need to project anything.  She was a ten-year-old girl, for Christ’s sake.  A child.

So you threw him out?

Hell yes.  Out of the house and my life.  Told him if he didn’t agree to the divorce I’d tell the police what I’d just seen.

How did Deirdre take it?

She didn’t speak for days.  Just moved around and did… you know, the ordinary things.  I tried taking her to our doctor to see… if he’d damaged her, but she wouldn’t let herself be examined.  Just downright refused.  He referred me to a woman doctor, but she was a stranger and Deirdre… just said no.  But she seemed to get over it.  Come back to herself.  I tried to get her to talk about it but she wouldn’t.  If he sent her gifts I let her have them…  well, the ones for her birthday, anyway.  And Christmas.  Couldn’t withhold those.  But others I just threw out.  I couldn’t stop him getting access rights – not without saying why – but we moved away, as far as we could get from him, and I always made sure I was there if they did meet.

How was Deirdre on those occasions?

Very quiet.  Answer if she was spoken to.

Frightened?

No.  I wouldn’t say so.  She was just… kind’a polite, like he was a stranger she was wary of.

Without the physical examination I would guess you assumed penetration had occurred, and that she didn’t want anyone else to know.

Yes, I did.

She didn’t want anyone to know because her father had told her no-one was to know he had been inside her?

I guess so.

Didn’t that loyalty to her father worry you?

They were close.  That is, they had been.  And she took things like loyalty, keeping secrets, very seriously.  She’d always been that kind of girl.

Perhaps she’d been turned into that kind of girl.

Yes, I suppose so.

Could you ever get her to talk about it?

No.  I tried, but it was clear she didn’t want to.  I did take her to a therapist when she was fourteen and, well, you know, not a child any more.  She said Deirdre hadn’t been very forthcoming but that she didn’t think any real damage had been done.  That it had been like a frightening game for her which she knew was behind her, that she might find it a little difficult to find her feet sexually and that she’d probably be shy of boys, of men, for a while, but when she found the right one she’d work it out.

So you weren’t worried when she didn’t bring boyfriends home?  That in fact you didn’t have to worry about her getting pregnant?

A bit, but she was studious and very intelligent.  The sort of girl that finds it hard to find a like-minded boy anyway.

You did talk to her about sex?

Yes, of course.  That she had the right to decided who she had sex with and when, and that she shouldn’t have sex before she had decided for herself that she wanted to.

And incest?  Did you talk to her about that?

Not… incest.  But that her father had used her,  taken advantage of her.  That it hadn’t been her fault.

When you decided not to interfere with Jeff and Stacy’s sex, did you take Deirdre into the equation?  Wonder how she would react if she found out?

Yes.  Of course.  But Deirdre was in her last year at High School and working hard for her exams, and Jeff and Stacy were being… discrete.  And it was only a few months before she was off to college.

Having read Deirdre’s story, is that the way you would have expected her to react?

Yes.  She wouldn’t have been happy that Jeff and Stacy were… having sex. She was a bit… prim and proper in that regard.  But if she’d come to me…  I don’t know.  Maybe it would have given me the opportunity to sit down with her and … put sex into proportion.  I knew she had kind’a ‘elevated’ it – that she was looking for it to be a bit ‘Romeo and Juliet’ rather than, well, earthy fun.  Before she left for college I gave her the ‘complete woman’s guide’ to contraception and STDs.  She can’t have been in any doubt that I was giving her the green light if she needed it. 

So when Jeff appeared in her bedroom, naked and erect immediately after her sister had challenged her to think about having sex with him what, before you read her story, would you have expected her reaction to be?

Tell him to get out.

But she didn’t.

No.  But she didn’t encourage him, either.

True.  It reads to me as if she was paralysed with indecision.

I guess so.

Was she often paralysed with indecision?

No.  But…  I’d say she was tempted, but her conscience was telling her that she shouldn’t.

So she left it up to Jeff to make the decision.  She wouldn’t encourage her brother to have intercourse with her, but wouldn’t stop him either.

I suppose.  Something like that.

How do you think she would have felt the next morning had Jeff had sex with her?  Would she have been able to look you in the face?

I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  She was almost nineteen.  A young woman.  She didn’t have to apologise to me for having sex.

With her own brother?

 I don’t think she would have wanted me to know, if that’s what you’re getting at.

I suppose it is.  There were things she would still have kept from you.

Yes.

Do you remember the night she writes about?

I remember her visit.  I knew she was…  unhappy.  But I put that down to all the changes.  New to college, that kind of thing.

Back in her old bedroom?

I did wonder about that.  All the memories.  I asked her if she wanted to go back into it or take another one, although that would have meant shifting one of the others.  She said it was OK.  I did notice she’d dug out the bear – Oscar – and her old counterpane.  And her old books and pictures.  But she was just launching out into the world for the first time.  It’s natural that you’d want to remind yourself of where you were leaving.

Yes, it is.  Did you know, or think,  she had become aware of Jeff and Stacy’s incest?

No.

Never?

No.

Stacy told me that in her view their relationship changed after this encounter and that she wasn’t ‘little sister’ to Deirdre’s ‘big sister’ any more.  You didn’t notice that?

I did notice a change,  but put it down to Deirdre’s leaving home, and Stacy’s growing up.

What about the tensions in Jeff’s marriage Deirdre seems to have been aware of, and done little to avoid being the cause of?

I didn’t know.  I did know there were tensions, but not that Deirdre was behind them.  There are tensions in every marriage.  They never raised them with me and, well, it was their marriage so I kept out of it.

Did you know Jeff is still screwing Stacy?

You don’t beat about the bush.  Yes, I know he is still seeing her.

What did you think of that?

Is this relevant?

We have not so much a love triangle here as a love quadrangle.  That makes it even harder to weigh what had been influencing who.  Perhaps you alone were aware of all four sides and your view of them was probably that of the closest outsider, and is therefore important.

I see.  OK, I was glad of it.  In her…  line of work, I felt that she needed someone rock-steady to rely on.  Emotionally.  And objective.  With nothing to consider but her best interests and well-being.  I’ve done my best, but I can’t think of anyone better than Jeff for that.

Did you get along with Jeff’s wife?  Penelope, isn’t it?

Yes.  Nice enough girl, clearly devoted to him.  Good mother.  I can’t say we get on well, but how many wives do with their mother-in-laws?

Stacy remarked that Penelope resembles her in some ways.  Do you think that, ah, significant?

She’s tall and blond.  In everything else she’s Stacy’s opposite.

Frigid?

No.   Well, I don’t think so.  Hell, I’ve never discussed Jeff’s sex-life in his marriage with him.  She just comes across as a bit prim and proper.   More like Deirdre, actually. Very correct.

Doesn’t mean she’s like that in bed.

True, but I really don’t know.

Did she ever sound you out on Jeff’s relationship with his sisters?

No.

Had it come right down to the wire and Jeff had to choose one, do you think Jeff would have committed himself to Stacy, Deirdre or his wife.

Penny, his wife.  For the children’s sake if nothing else.

And between Stacy and Deirdre.

Deirdre.

Why?

It might seem strange given their choices of career, but Deirdre was the more vulnerable.

No, I can understand that.  Do you think Deirdre killed herself?

No.

Accident wouldn’t be totally impossible, but highly unlikely.  She wasn’t drunk or on any drugs, and a thirty-six inch high railing is hard to trip over, especially when you’re only five foot two.  If Jeff and/or Stacy didn’t push her, who did?

I don’t know.  Just an ordinary burglar?

Possibly, though there was no evidence of a break-in or any disturbance at the apartment.  Nor of anything taken.  If there was any other person there she let them in, which brings us back to Jeff or Stacy, or both of them.

No.  I can’t believe that.  Not their own sister.

Not even to protect Jeff’s marriage?

No.  I won’t believe it.

Then we’re back with suicide as the likely verdict.

No…   She…  She would not have done that.  She never gave up on anything.  I know she wasn’t happy.  Had the depressions.  And the memories of her father…  I know if it hadn’t been for him she’d have been married, had children, and wouldn’t have been up in the apartment on her own.  So it wouldn’t have happened.   Couldn’t have. He ruined her life, and I let it happen.  I should have put a stop to it years earlier.  I tried to get her to talk about it but she’d never open up to me.  Not completely.  But I’m sure there wasn’t anything so bad… that it would make her do that.

Thank you.  You’ve been most helpful.  Is there anything else you think might help me?

No.  I can’t think of anything.   Have you reached…  any conclusion?

Not yet.  I’m going to have to give this some careful thought.  Allow me to show you out.

Analysis

I have been asked to advise the Police as to the possible state of mind of the deceased Miss Deirdre Bartlett at the time of her death following a fall from a balcony of her fourth-floor apartment, with particular reference as to whether or not this fall could have resulted purely from Miss Bartlett’s own deliberate and conscious actions.

At the time of her death Dierdre was 29-years-old, unmarried and by all accounts a successful businesswoman.  There appears to be no suggestion of any “business trouble” that might account for her action, if it was deliberate, nor have the police discovered any social or personal problems to which it might have been attributable.  There is no evidence in her apartment of any intruder or struggle and no signs of violence were found on her body.  She was in excellent health but, it has been ascertained, had been undergoing irregular therapy for mono-polar depression.  The only remarkable medical feature was the presence of an unusually robust and intact cribriform hymen indicating that she never experienced vaginal penetration.  While easily treatable by hymenotomy this condition would have made the initial introduction of any object into the vagina difficult and painful, with probable bleeding.  It is likely that several such penetrations would have been necessary to successfully create an aperture through which intromission by an erect penis would thereafter have been easy and comfortable for both parties.

My attention has been drawn to a word-processed text file on the hard-drive of the deceased’s desk-top computer which the system’s logs reveal had been created more than a year earlier and frequently accessed with many minor editions.  Although set in fictional form it appeared to refer to actual members of Deirdre’s own family and in particular accused her siblings of having engaged in an incestuous relationship.  As those siblings were themselves now engaged in successful careers or marriage which were potentially threatened by disclosures or even allegations of having engaged in incest as children or subsequently, it was considered necessary to ascertain if there was a possibility if either, or perhaps both, had felt sufficiently threatened to consider silencing the source.

However it must be emphasised that the police investigation never seriously pursued this line of enquiry and it is my professional opinion that there is no question whatever that either of Deirdre’s brother or sister could or would ever have considered harming her.

In order to pursue the matters alleged in the document I conducted interviews with the parties named in it, being Deirdre’s younger brother Jeff and her younger sister Stacy.  There were no other siblings.  I also interviewed the parties’ mother, Bridget.  The father is deceased.  In the light of the matters suggested by the document I obtained an assurance from the authorities that no prosecution would be taken against either Jeff or Stacy resulting from any admission by them of any act amounting to criminal incest either with each other or Deirdre up to and including the present time.   Further and in the light of the matters discussed in this report I must insist that it regarded a privileged communication the circulation of which is to be severely restricted.

The document referred to above, entitled “Brother, by Deirdre” is annexed to this report as attachment 1 and is therefore included in the shelter of privilege referred to previously.

We will never know when Deirdre’s father began grooming her for sex but extrapolating from Bridget’s description of an experienced and successful sexual predator it is unlikely to have been before Deirdre began exhibiting signs of sexual awareness, most likely sometime after she was five as he had clearly not attempted anything with Stacy although she was this age when the family break-up put her beyond his reach.  However it was almost certainly before she was eight as the bear Oscar was most likely a gift to her following an unsuccessful and, for her,  painful attempt at penetration.

In this respect he was not a paedophile in the truest sense as this implies a childlike innocence as to sexuality in the victim both as to himself or herself and the abuser.  Able to satisfy his sexual needs with his wife or other women Deirdre’s father would not have been sexually interested in his daughters as ‘children’, but once they became aware of their own sexuality as females and his sexuality as male, he would have responded by wishing to play on it, exploit it and ‘conquer’ it much as a mountaineer desires conquer a mountain ‘just because it is there’.

If typical, as I suspect he was, he would have embarked upon the seduction of his elder daughter as perhaps the ultimate challenge to his own sexuality.  The ultimate rationale and function of sexuality, of course, is to impregnate or be impregnated but for the successful sexual predator, who often comes to find it too easy to succeed in this, it can become the case that the hunt is as stimulating and pleasurable as the ‘kill’ – the seduction more of a challenge and therefore as rewarding that the consummation if not more so.  This is clearly the reason most women and successful males find the ‘wining and dining’ of a seduction as important as the conclusion in bed.

So, perhaps when she was as young as six, Deirdre’s father embarked upon her seduction quite deliberately as the ultimate quarry - his own daughter – in the face of the hardest of conditions – the disapproval of society, both in itself and which his daughter herself would undoubtedly become aware of as her knowledge of the world widened and deepened, and the undoubtedly hostile presence of the girl’s mother – and aware that the hunt would likely take as long as six or seven years before its conclusion with a myriad opportunities for a miscalculation or misstep along the way.  It may be likened in many ways to the desire of every driven mountaineer to attempt the ascent of Mt. Everest after years of training, planning and preparation, simply because it is the ultimate challenge.

In the end we know he was unsuccessful.  The child’s mother was alerted and came to Deirdre’s ‘rescue’.  What needs to be recognised is that up until that point her father’s campaign of seduction had been so successful that Deirdre almost certainly did not regard herself as being in need of rescue from anything, and in fact very likely regarded her ‘rescue’ by her mother as something else entirely.

It can only be speculation, but I think it likely that the bricks of the relationship will have been placed slowly, carefully and with great forethought and planning.  There will have been no clear ‘beginning’, just a gradual progression from innocent touching and the playing of innocent secret games, to genital fondling, nakedness and a far, far greater secret to be maintained.  Too he will have been exquisitely careful not to push it too far or too fast, making nothing of his penis at first and only slowly bringing her attention to its importance to him, and her power with respect to it.  It is possible to imagine perhaps two years elapsing since the ‘seduction’ began before any attempt at full penetration was made, and that only after he had made Deidre fully aware of the place and importance of intercourse in a ‘close’ and loving relationship.  Indeed it is likely he only attempted penetration with her full consent and, defeated by her unusually stout hymen, the bear Oscar was her reward for at least having given that consent.

So the game continued for another two years, probably with few and only half-determined further attempts at penetration ‘until she was older’.  Yet the man would have been ‘putty in the hands’ of the nine and ten year old girl as she masturbated him and revelled in her power for he would have been careful to have always sought her consent to doing it, never pushing her to it and thereby demonstrated how powerless she in fact was.  He would have served her, too, touching, stroking and playing with her as though intent only on giving her pleasure rather than using her to pleasure himself.  Undoubted, too, following that first unsuccessful attempt at penetration, will have been the emphasis the father with have given to his daughter’s virginity, linking it to the pain she experienced as he tried to enter her as an inevitable price to be paid for the gift, with the implication that as the cost to her was high so should the value of her virginity be, and not therefore to be lightly given away or squandered.

And of course, at that stage in her life what other man could the little girl conceive of as a fitting recipient of that great gift of her virginity than her father, for what other man did she know?

Thus almost certainly did Deirdre promise the gift of her virginity to her father, a gift he readily accepted yet in a sense made even more precious by saying to her, “only when *you* are ready to surrender it,” and so surrendered even more power to her within the relationship.

Perhaps they did make occasional attempts with her consent, but were beaten by her stout hymen.  It is in my mind unquestionable that the man did love the little girl in his fashion, perhaps love her even more for her consent, and for this reason did not persist in the face of the pain those attempts would have caused her.  Perhaps too, though, he feared the pain of penetration if he forced himself into her would imperil the precarious relationship, changing the little girl’s perception of him for the worse.  Perhaps, too, he was perceptive enough to realise that the eight, nine, ten-year-old girl who has been penetrated by a man and thus already experienced the womanhood of intercourse and impregnation, is unable to prevent herself giving those little, subtle signs that she is sexually older than her years.

Then came the disaster of their discovery by the mother.  In a few seconds of rage Deidre’s secret life was destroyed.  Worse if, as she believes she did, the mother made reference in her fury to the school-yard incident it will have been apparent to the young Deirdre that it was her inadvertent act that had brought the discovery about.  She was responsible for the disaster and the expulsion of her father from her life.  

Her paralysis of confusion is understandable is she sought to make sense of it.  Her father had done nothing to her she had not consented to.  She had enjoyed masturbating him, making her loved father feel good.  His hands on her body had felt good to her, and done no harm.   He had always withdrawn, denying himself, rather than cause her pain.  He had told her over and over that others, even her mother, would not understand, and he had been proved right.  Her mother spoke of abuse, of a misuse of power but she could see no abuse and it had seemed all the power had been hers.  Her mother told her that she had the right to consent to having sex when and with whom she chose, but she had already chosen.  

Deirdre accordingly entered puberty is a state of sexual limbo.  At a time when her peers were boldly or timidly entering the sexual arena according to their natures Deirdre, who had already received an extensive education in this area, was unable to progress any further as the man to whom she regarded herself as being ‘promised’, her father, was absent.  As a child she had been taken to the point of consummation perhaps many times by him, his penis pressed against her hymen with only a brief, painful, blood-springing thrust like that of a sword, required to complete and fulfil it.  She would have been aware of his tension, the power of his need to enter her and relieve himself of it.  She would have feared the pain, yet yearned to be on the far side of it when, as with Stacy’s later perception of her brother during intercourse, her father would be *hers*.  Yet his act of ‘mercy’ in not making the thrust and thus sparing her the pain also impressed her deeply, and the gratitude she felt towards him for ‘sparing’ her placed her, in her eyes, deeply in his debt.

This, I suggest, was the source of her fascination with the medieval romantic fiction of her early teens – the unfulfilled sexual tension between Lancelot and Guinevere sleeping with his sword between them, virginity as a high ideal to be defended by the male rather than given, lost forever and quietly grieved for, the maiden in her tower-room waiting, waiting, waiting for the one man who can overcome all the obstacles between them – the monsters, the riddles and the hedges of thorn - and carry her off just as Deirdre waited, waited, waited for her father to return and claim her virginity.  Against this background of knights and princesses it is hardly surprising that she found the adolescent groping of spotty schoolboys distasteful and rejected it in favour of an aloof and lonely purity.

Yet this distaste for the sexual fumbling of inexperienced adolescents hardly explains the depth of the block on even simple intercourse experienced by Stacy in the ‘boy from college’ episode and the fact that Deirdre never attempted to overcome it even as a mature woman, even though in my view she not only could have done so with a little work but was aware of this.  I believe the answer here again relates to the early sexual experiences with her father.  Although we only have one brief actual account of this to go on – that of her mother when she discovered them – it is surely the case that her father will have taught Deirdre to masturbate him at an early stage.  We can never know if oral sex actually occurred but the chances must high that it did, both fellatio and cunnilingus, and we do know that there was contact between the father’s penis and Deirdre’s genitals.  I suggest the mother is wrong when she says he was between her legs trying to penetrate her.  He had more than likely attempted penetration at least once previously but not persisted in the face of Deidre’s pain as her hymen resisted him, and was now patiently waiting for a sign from her, perhaps still a year or more in the future, that she was at willing to endure it to enable penetration to occur and instead merely used her genitals for mutual masturbation.    Indeed I would suggest the possibility that the ‘spontaneous’ gift of the toy bear Oscar to Deirdre to her father which Stacy remembered with pain and jealousy was a gift to his daughter following such an attempt in order to acknowledge and express remorse at the pain the attempt caused her which the three/four year-year-old Stacy empathised with but did not understand.  To some extent she also experienced her sister’s pain and the mixed relief/disappointment she felt when her father desisted,  but received no acknowledgement or reward.

My view must be that for the years from perhaps as little as five or six to their discovery at ten Deirdre became very familiar with her father’s semen, on her hands, body, genitals and tongue.  Clearly her father will have been most concerned not only to remove all traces of it from her but to prevent her inadvertently revealing awareness of it – and indeed it was just such a revealed awareness despite her attempts to remove the ‘evidence’ from her clothes although in relation to another man which brought the whole house tumbling down – but in doing so woke in her an irreconcilable dichotomy with regard to semen.  On the one hand she had to have been aware that the expression of his semen was the ‘high point’ and indeed purpose of her father’s interest in her – as with of the school-yard pervert - while at the same time he clearly had an intense need to eradicate all evidence that it ever existed, which is a reaction a child is most likely to relate to something ‘wrong’ or shameful which needs to be hidden or disguised.    One feature of semen of which Deirdre will undoubtedly have been acutely aware is its ‘sliminess’ which when added to the perfectly normal abhorrence of many little girls for slimy things, caused her to develop a loathing and even fear of it.  It was accordingly not fear of the pain the breaching of her hymen would cause her that led to her avoidance of penetration but the knowledge that this disgusting slimy stuff would be actually be deposited within her flesh yet out of reach of removal or thorough cleansing – an image to which she responded by seeking to shut off access to her vagina altogether through spasm.

Undoubtedly this repugnance bordering on phobia would have been present even had it been her father’s semen she was receiving but as he was ‘the one’ I believe she would have endured it and ‘suffered’ it for his sake and even perhaps experienced a perverse pleasure at this proof of her love, the sacrifice she made to prove herself worthy of him.

Then, in her sixteenth year, her father was killed, bringing to an end forever any hope of her rescue by him from her barred and doorless  tower of virginity.   Almost at the same time the sexual relationship between her younger brother and sister flared into life reflecting much of what her relationship with her father had been, would have been and in her eyes should have been. She knew once again the thrill of the illicit, the intimacy of the tight-shared secret, the stomach-thrilling excitement of the sex, the spiritual love of the family member welded to the heart-felt love of the sex-partner by the torch of shared orgasm.  This, which should have been hers, she saw and felt instead in her sister, and the anguish that it seemed lost to her forever was unbearable and managed only by a refusal to *see* it and a savage repression of all emotion.

This was a recipe for a host of mental disorders which, bar one, Deirdre seems almost amazingly to have avoided.  The one she didn’t, mono-polar depression, seems to have been chronic but not severe enough to have incapacitated her, a testament to her strength, intelligence and spirit.  In this she was perhaps aided by that romantic image of the lonely heroine steadfastly holding onto her virginity for her “true love” with which she was familiar.  Prominent in her apartment was a print of Brunnhilde embracing her immolation and it is easy to see how Deirdre would have identified with the Valkyrie’s fate.

I suspect the crisis which led directly to the night of which Deidre writes was triggered by her mother’s understandable but unfortunate decision to return to what had been the family home before the divorce.  With the girl’s father no longer a threat to them she could return to be near her own family and to send Deirdre to her own Alma Mata, but for Deirdre this was a disaster.  Perhaps the most poignant and telling line in her entire fictionalised account is when she writes:  “That night I was back in my old room.”  And not only her old room.  Her old life.

Here was the tower in which, innocent and joyous, she had dallied with her love before he had been torn from her by the unfair vicissitudes of the world, never to return.  Here was the secret place, her Grail castle in which as a child the dreadful secrets of the adult world had been revealed to her.  Here as a little girl she had encountered that mystery even adults often fail to solve or resolve – that unbreakable link between the sweet, sublime, out-of-this-world experience of orgasm and the ever-present sweat, slime and earthy grunting of sex.

The pain could no-longer be denied but its easing, that final consummation by first intercourse with her father, was impossible.  Yet a substitute was available – her brother, who was by now growing into his father’s place as the ‘man’ of the family.  Yet he was not ‘the one’ – not her father – and thus intercourse with him was as prohibited as with any other mere man, and even more so because he was the substitute, the shadow, the usurper of ‘the one’s’ position.

Thus my initial suspicion that Deirdre had a block or phobia about incest is, in fact, utterly wrong.  Instead she had a fixation with the *purest* form of incest – father and daughter, paralleled only by mother and son – which in fact excluded all other forms of intercourse as ‘lesser’ and unworthy.  The ‘sex’ Stacy experienced empathically from her sister as she regarded their brother was not, as Stacy thought, Deirdre imagining having sex with him.  She was imagining the unconsummated sex act with her father whose place at the table her brother had taken.  However, for Deirdre to actually have sex with Jeff would have been a far greater betrayal of her pure love for her father than sex with any other man would have been precisely because of that substitution – Hamlet’s anguish at his mother’s marrying with his uncle after his father’s death is the perfect parallel.

Here, then, is the heart of Deirdre’s conflict. While undoubtedly possessed of a normal young woman’s sexual desires she bore set against them the weight of the guilt, shame and quite likely self-disgust she had sensed in her father has he had hurriedly cleaned her up after a snatched session of sex with her.  With his sexual desires temporarily sated by masturbation onto her he was likely appalled by what he had just done.  Under such conditions it is not unlikely that Deirdre would have responded to her pre-pubescent confusion at his abrupt shift in persona following ejaculation by entirely separating out the physical and spiritual sides of sex, unlinking orgasm from semen in the male and, later, from vaginal secretion in the female.  If she masturbated at all it could surely only have been in the washed purity of the shower or a bath.  Thus her quest became one that would have been recognised by the medieval authors of Parsifal, for the transcendence of the spiritual over the physical, the experience of orgasmic love without sex.

This, then, is what lies behind her challenge to Stacy on the night of her ‘story’.  “Stacy! How could you *do* that?”  is not just a cry against her sister that echoes Hamlet’s complaint against his mother’s perceived incest, “in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty.”  It is a protest against her sister’s defiling of the pure object of her, Deirdre’s, love; of tainting it with her sweat and vaginal fluids and drawing from it the shameful and slimy semen of the physical boy. Even more it is a cry of protest at her sister’s betrayal of Deirdre’s love for her father by seducing the substitute object of it.  “For he is mine,” she could have added quite accurately, but hers in a way only she comprehended. When she saw her brother as her father and experienced imaginary sex with him it was precisely the kind of non-physical sex she now sought as her body reacted with sexual sensations but without all the sweat and slime of physical sex.

Yet she knew in her heart, too, that it was all an illusion, all smoke and mirrors like the shifting mirage of the Grail castle or the end of the rainbow no-one clothed in flesh can reach.  She had no defence, no words to even begin to explain to Stacy what she had meant for she barely understood it herself.  Yes, she did yearn for her brother, but not as her brother.  Yes, as Stacy claimed she could not have resisted him for a second if he tried for he would have been her father, returned after all this time to claim the virginity she promised him. Would he not have been Galahad  to her father’s Arthur, charged with bringing the King’s bride Guinevere to their wedding at Camelot even as each yearned for the other? Yet she knew that had it happened, had her brother torn from her with sweat and blood and slime the virginity that should have been surrendered to her father in some transcendent, blinding golden aura of ultimate consummation such as legend says surrounds the Grail itself, the illusion would have been destroyed for ever for her and the whole vast and beautiful edifice of the medieval romances in which she had buried herself, the unbearably sweet purity of chivalry and courtly love she had adopted as her guide would have been torn from her leaving her poor and weeping, clothed in rags and huddled in the ashes of the world she had made.  In this, perhaps, she would have been merely where the rest of us are.

This was surely what she was so afraid of as Stacy stood over her in that bedroom of her childhood.  The loss of all she was should her sister choose to destroy it by forcing her to step onto the rainbow bridge of fantasy bridging the chasm of cold reality.

It was a subliminal awareness of that chasm that Stacy recognised and so drew back from the brink, turning and walking away rather than delivering the coupe de grace. She was aware she had won her victory and that Jeff was hers.  Indeed in a sense Deirdre never challenged her for the boy and was certainly not competing for his affection.  She was waiting, waiting for the father in the son to claim the trophy of her virginity which he had won but which Jeff, ignorant of it, never would of his own volition.  Stacy had, though, won the victory she had sought which was the right to claim and own the sweat and semen of her brother.  Deirdre would much have preferred to pretend to these things did not exist at all but as she could not deny they did, Stacy could have them.

“What had she done to Jeff?” she asked herself in agony after her sister’s departure, well aware that although Jeff might have desired the incest it was Stacy’s decision to say ‘yes’ that had made it possible, and so it was Stacy that was ultimately responsible for the sweat, semen and vaginal fluids with which the object of her, Deirdre’s, desire was debased when they had sex, and so was dragging him down, as she saw it, into the mire of physicality.

Had Stacy left it there what might the outcome have been?  Deirdre was already an outsider to the family,  distanced from her mother by their original conflict over the father, her subliminal recognition of her mother’s sexual desire for the desired brother/father/son and now severed from her siblings by her pain at their joyous incest.  Had nothing more happened that night I suggest she would have rapidly split herself away from the family, with ever more brief and reluctant visits until they ceased altogether as her pain at Stacy’s enjoying what should have been hers and her mother’s own betrayal of her strictures on incest and desire for the brother became unbearable in their presence.

Perhaps with the unshakable love of an understanding and sympathetic man she could have overcome the block on intercourse yet her phobia regarding semen was created at such an impressionable age and went so deep so I doubt it could ever have been eradicated.  I suspect she would never have been able to achieve vaginal orgasm and while she might have been able to endure intercourse with Jeff or a man elected by her to her father/brother’s position she would never - and lacking her sister’s acting talent only too obviously never - have enjoyed it, probably fatally limiting any relationship.

More likely, aware of this, she would never have allowed any man other than her brother to even approach a sexual relationship, condemning herself to a life of aching loneliness and ever-gnawing but never satiable sexual desire.  This, perhaps, was what she recognised as she sat on the edge of the bed that night as her little sister turned away victorious.  “I was left alone”, she writes.  Not merely alone in her bedroom but alone in the world, for ever.

Yet Stacy did not leave it there.  She told me she felt sorry for her sister and wanted to do something.  On the surface she had done nothing more than establish her right to commit incest with her brother.  Her challenge, “Well?” to Deirdre was a declaration that it was up to Deirdre whether or not she engaged in intercourse with the brother and that Stacy would not interfere if she did, with the implication that she didn’t understand why Deirdre didn’t.  All she was asking from her big sister was the reciprocal right to screw with her brother without interference or the disapproving looks.  This she had won with, in fact, a complete reversal of the sister/sister dynamic that she hadn’t sought.  

Perhaps it was this reversal of the sister/sister dynamic that prompted her action.  Previously Deirdre had been senior by dint of being the eldest.  However Stacy’s greater experience of sex and power had won out over mere age.  Now Stacy was responsible for her powerless sister Deirdre and was without doubt dimly aware of the awful chasm on the brink of which she had left her ‘little’ sister – or at least felt something of Deirdre’s frightened reaction to it – knew she had to do something more.  With no more than a faint, muddled and uncomprehending sense of the disaster Stacy had brought down on her sister she decided on a course of action she was all too aware had the potential to be catastrophic.  She ‘sikked’ her brother onto their big sister.  Given all the circumstances it was an astonishingly brave, intuitive and mature thing for a fourteen-year-old girl to do.

To ‘sik’ derives from the Old English ‘sicca’, an encouragement to hunting dogs to seek out their prey but with overtones of releasing them at a fleeing target.  It is a revealing phrase for Stacy to have used.  It confirms that she had no illusions about the sister/brother dynamic she and Jeff comprised.  Through his prick she had captured her big brother’s heart to the extent that he barked when she said dog.  Jeff himself told me that he had considered sex with his big sister as monumental and unobtainable an object of desire as sex with his mother and Stacy would have been aware of this, yet it is clear she had no doubt that even had she said, ‘Mom wants to have sex with you.  Go get her,’  he would have charged like a faithful dog into a bush that could have contained either a rabbit or an angry bear.

This is all the more remarkable considering that both Stacy and Jeff referred to concerns that Deirdre was capable of ‘blowing the whistle’ on them, either forcing their mother to act in relation to their incest or even going over her head to the authorities.  Jeff even acknowledges that he recognised the possibility that a sexual advance by him to his big sister might precipitate just such a result.  Moreover he must have been aware that where an incestuous relationship between a sixteen-year-old boy and his fourteen-year-old sister comes to light there is rarely much investigation as to where the principle blame lies, it being considered a foregone conclusion. Yet accepting his little sister’s appraisal he obediently and with little argument set out on the task she sent him on like a bold knight in the days of yore setting out on a maiden’s quest.  That he was no doubt excited by the prospect that she might be right weighs little against the fact that, as Jeff himself says, if she was wrong he would be in even deeper shit. 

Stacy was taking a risk, too.  If Deirdre were provoked into blowing the whistle on them it would obviously have meant the end of a relationship with her brother she not only enjoyed as sex but as a partnership which, in its way, resembled a very intense affair.  Yet and despite her protestations she must also have been keenly aware that she risked losing Jeff to Deirdre.  She is probably correct that Jeff would always have been willing to screw her, but a sixteen-year-old boy is almost inevitably going to be drawn more towards the experience with sex with a fully-ripe, maturing nineteen-year-old woman than a still-developing, immature fourteen-year-old girl.  Magnanimity probably played a part - with her total victory secured she could afford to let the vanquished share in the spoils -  but she risked losing the total control of her brother’s heart she had gained through undisputed possession of his prick and to him becoming the little sister again.  That she still did it indicates to me not only a very deep love and care for her sister but both an awareness of the magnitude of the disaster she had inflicted on her and that, somehow, Jeff was the key to it.

Which brings us to the actions of Jeff that night, which are as remarkable and complex as anything we have yet considered.

Jeff admits he was nervous as he enters his big sister’s bedroom, naked and sexually aroused.  At one point he talks of his concern at the possibility of his having to explain why he is there both to Deirdre and in all likelihood also to their mother – which demonstrates that to him Deirdre has an authority over him far more like that of a mother than a sister.  And this with his little sister naked in his bed and presumably discoverable by them despite the fact he is aware it would come as no surprise to either of them.  He also refers to the possibility of Deirdre ‘screaming the house down’ at his presence even *after* realising who it was.

“I awoke. It was still night. "Wake up," came a whisper. It was Jeff! By my bed!”

This is the most crucial moment of the story, and its pivot point.  Despite her comprehensive defeat by her little sister Deirdre still has enough authority over her little brother to at least send him packing from the room with his tail between his legs, and more substantially to force a confrontation including Mom over her siblings’ incest.  Yet she does nothing.  Quite literally nothing.

How could Jeff fail to regard this a confirmation of his little sister’s assessment that Deirdre wanted him to have sex with her but did not want to admit to it?  There can have been little doubt in his big sister’s mind what he was after, naked and erect for her in her bedroom late at night.  Yes she does nothing, says nothing, as he uncovers her, takes possession of the bed and reaches across her to take her by the shoulder. Looming over and her dominating her.

“He was so strong and I was so afraid,” she writes.  Why was she afraid?

She surely knew physical strength was not the issue with Jeff, as Jeff himself conceded.  She knew her little brother was not about to *rape* her even before he said as much.  Not just because of the practical issues – the scream that would have brought the mother running, the facing of each other again over the breakfast table  – she was also aware he was not drunk, nor so sexually ‘wound-up’ that he had lost control.  She knew that a simple “no, Jeff” to this boy who loved her as a sister and looked up to her as a mother, would be enough to stop him in his tracks.  She knew all the strength in the sixteen-year-old hunk leaning over her was hers to command and would willingly spend itself in defending her should she need it.  What as there for her to be afraid of?

She was so afraid, I suggest, because it was no longer entirely Jeff sitting naked on her bed and leaning over her.  How often before in that very same bed in that very same room under that very same counterpane had she lain a little girl with her naked father waking her from sleep with a whisper and a sudden blaze of dim, shadow-edged light.  How often had he settled on the mattress next to her and pulled back the covers to reveal her little helpless body in its cotton nightgown.  How often - far, far stronger than the eight, nine, ten-year-old girl in the bed - had the man taken her by the shoulders, slipped the cotton from her skin and with his hands on her body and his rigid penis jerking and throbbing in hers begun on that long climb to ejaculation and orgasm taking her, eagerly and reluctantly, stimulated and frightened, with him for the ride.

“He was so strong and I was so afraid”, she writes because the boy beside her on the bed that night was clothed in memories of her father in that place – a man with the strength of a man who could not have been stopped by a simple ‘no’ nor indeed any amount of struggling, and who she had always been so, so afraid might not turn aside from that last agonising, bloody plunge of the sword that was his penis into her body.

Except that now she was ready for it.  She feared the pain of it and had a keen idea how much it would hurt for it had surely been stretched before to the point of excruciation.  Yet she was no-longer the nine-year-old child with the man between her legs.  She was a nineteen-year-old woman who knew the pain of defloration, the pain of menstruation, the pain of childbirth, was hers to be born and that she could bear it.

This, then, is the source of her paralysis.  Before, as a child impaled on the point of her father’s penis, it had been her pain he had sensed and seen and which had caused him to desist, to her vast relief and huge disappointment.  So for the act to be completed and the penis-sword to sheath itself in her body where it belonged she had to show none of the pain she knew there would be, and bear it without flinching.  She had in her mind no choice, the man was so strong, yet she had to pass through the pain he brought in order to know the joy that lay beyond it, that paradise beyond the wall of fire, and could only do it by being strong herself and she was so, so afraid not only of the pain but of being unable to pass through it, of failing the test now it is upon her.

So to Jeff.  A horny hunk, and below him on the bed his beautiful elder sister in a thin cotton nightgown, her breasts thrusting up beneath it, nipples outlined and perhaps even visible as dark circles through the white.  He has been told she wants him, yearns for him to penetrate and impregnate her but is held back from admitting it to him, and to herself, by a feeble, brittle chain of morality he can snap and free her from with a single thrust of his groin.  Her stomach rises and falls evenly with her breathing, the thin cotton curves down into the divide of her body over the slight rise of her pubis, perhaps slightly rumpled and rough over the patch of hair beneath, another dark patch of shadow under the cloth, and then ends revealing long, bare, smooth legs waiting to be parted.

It is the moment.  His intent is clear.  She has had her chance to stop him with a word, a simple gesture, and not taken it.  What else can this be but her consent?  Her consent to what he intends.  No, she will not help.  She will not encourage for that would be to sup from the cup of sin which is how she regards incest.  Yet neither will she resist for if he is willing to bear the burden of the guilt what guilt is hers for submitting to the desires of a loved young brother.  She has surrendered to him and is his absolutely, to do with as he desires.

How many horny sixteen-year-old boys, how many men, would refuse an offer like that?

"Don't worry, I don't want to *rape* you," he says instead.

Jeff is not sure he used the word ‘rape’.  I suspect he did.

Rape is sexual intercourse without consent, or with consent obtained by force, fear or fraud.   Jeff could not rape Deidre as a matter of law because he had her consent, freely given.  He had no need to use force apart from the violence needed to tear her hymen, and although she feared this she wanted the pain as does anyone wanting a aching tooth removed and it did not impinge on the validity of her consent to sexual intercourse.  Nor had Jeff gained that consent by fraud.  He was not pretending to be anyone other than her brother and though he had gained by association the consent  to intercourse she had long ago given to her father she knew it would be and had consented to her brother’s penis penetrating her in lieu of her father’s.

She was his for the taking as Stacy had told her.  Why did he not take her?

He told me himself.  “I knew she didn’t want me to, but would allow me to if I wanted.”  This is not rape at law.  Desire is not an essential ingredient of consent.  This is a wife granting sex to a husband out of duty, and so perhaps the basis of consent for more than half the acts of sex performed in any day.  It is the act of sex consented to as an act of love rather than lust.  Would any man, would any woman, have condemned Jeff had he had sex with his elder sister because she consented to it as an act of love?

But it was not enough for Jeff.  In his mind he had raped his little sister when she had opened her legs to him at aged twelve so that he would take her to the movies or the ball-game.  This was not rape in law either, but to Jeff even then it had been rape and he was not about to do it again.  The consent he required for intercourse was the joyous eagerness to share sex of his little sister’s consent, and he was getting no signs of that from his big sister.

Stacy had not lied when she’d told him his big sister wanted him.  She did, but in his eyes not enough.  He did not understand the turmoil in her soul but knew that like his little 12-year-old sister two years before the consent she was offering was not whole-hearted and so did not suffice.  It was a very mature, adult, even commendable decision.  And it was wrong.

“He carefully covered me up and kissed me on the forehead,”  Deirdre writes.  How many times, one wonders, had her father done that after their confusing, frightening, wonderful sex-sessions in that room ten years and more before.  “Then he stood up and turned to leave.”  How many times had her father done that, too, leaving her empty and unfulfilled, and believing that by not taking his penis into her as she knew he so desperately wanted her to, she had failed him.

“My hand. It shot out and grabbed his wrist.”  She did not reach out for him.  Her body did, of its own volition and outside her control, she suggests.  After a long, long, absence her love had returned but was leaving again, her virginity unclaimed.  Yet now she was ready to give it up, would never be more ready and if it did not happen now when would it?  She was ready to face the pain, the blood, the sweat, the slime of the semen inside her, the way a martyr was ready to face the agony of the stake and the fire because that only happened once while beyond it lay an eternity in Paradise.

Jeff’s taking her that night would not have set her free, but it would have been a huge first step on the road to that freedom.  Her brother’s penis breaking through her hymen would have also broken through her block against sex, for along with her virginity would have gone her purity and her childhood.  Maid no more she would be woman, baptised by sex into her new order of adulthood, her blood forever as tainted by the sexual desires simmering in it as it was by the menstruation she had been unable to deny for some time.  Freed from the chastity belt of her virginity she would have been able to open herself to the men she knew longed for her and choose a mate from among them.

And her Holy Grail of father-daughter incest for which she had kept herself pure, would also be achieved.  For in the son is the father, and the son’s penis penetrating her and claiming her would also be the father’s fulfilling the promise she had made with her heart if not with her lips.  This first penetration of me, this claiming of my virgin womb, is my most precious gift and I saved it for you, father.  I give it to you. 

Only by accepting Jeff as her father’s substitute could that gift be made.  Without such acceptance Stacy experienced Deirdre’s response to the idea of her brother’s penis penetrating her – a shield like bone blocking the entrance to her vagina.  Yet this shield is her virginity.  This is the gift she has promised her father and can give no-one else, and has not thought beyond.   Beyond this gift, virgin no more but woman, she could choose whether or not to allow her  brother’s penis to penetrate her just as she would choose any other man’s.  But can she make that gift to her brother the son in lieu of the father?

The king is dead.   Long live the King.  Her father is dead.  Does the son inherit his claims?  Deirdre initially decides he does not, her body crying out ‘no’ to the naked boy looming over her who has come for it – as it is her brother, not her father.  Yet the brother accepts her denial even though he has the strength to claim his father’s right against her will.  He bows to her will and turns to go, and through that gesture, that acceptance of her sovereignty, earns the right to claim the gift.

For his sister’s bed is Jeff’s Siege Perilous, her virgin body his Holy Grail which can only be won by recognising one’s unworthiness to possess it. 

Now her body cries ‘yes’, I am yours, but he does not take it.  He worships it, awed and reverent fingers carefully exploring it, knowing it in its fullness and readiness as even her father’s had not and like a bell sounded for the first time waking in her the woman’s responses the father never could for she was not, then, a woman.  But there he leaves it.  The Grail has found its Knight but he does not claim it as destiny demands.

This, then, is the tragedy.  Like the Percival of legend he fails to act when the Holy Grail is revealed to him and misses for ever the opportunity to heal not the Fisher King but his own sister.  Only he could do it but, believing himself unworthy, he invents first the story of his ‘faithfulness’ to his girlfriend – a concept of pure chivalry – and then takes a wife in order to bar himself from the too-precious Grail that is his sister’s promised and close-guarded virginity.

Thus it remains unresolved, the Grail burning and calling for its Knight to release it from its incarceration in the Siege Perilous while its Knight skirts it and toys with it but, misunderstanding, never steps forward to claim it.

Yet it is unresolved, not concluded.  Deirdre was there to be claimed yet the Grail cannot put itself forward.  It  can choose but must then wait for the chosen to accept it.  Why might she have come to the final conclusion that he never would and act to bring her wait to an end?  “That was years ago--now he's faithful to his wife. Completely.” she writes.  To seduce him herself would be to undermine that faithfulness she prizes.  The Grail can only be claimed by a Knight free of sin and so cannot induce its Knight to claim it though fraud or deception.  Yet only in the son is that father to whom her virginity was promised.  While the son is barred to her there is no other, no hope of release from her barren existence, no hope of relief from the burning sexual desires in her blood but that bar is not final.

Seeking her own understanding she writes it out – that one moment when had fate taken a different path her world would be different but in which her brother, her salvation, turned away from her.  Only by retreading that path but taking the different route and claiming her virginity could Jeff free her, yet to do so behind his wife’s back would be to corrupt him and so corrupt the Grail.  Jeff’s wife now stands in the place Stacy stood all those years before, but unlike Stacy she cannot be expected to say to her husband, ‘Your sister wants you, and I want you to have her.”  

Deirdre knows Jeff’s wife is aware of Deirdre’s desire to have him take her – she tries to hide the shock and fear.  The shock that a woman could desire her own brother so much that she would give up all other men for him, and the fear that the lure of the Grail might lure her husband away from her as the fruitless search for it had lured so many men away from their wives and families in legend.  Deirdre even understands this – she still cannot completely reconcile her own burning desire for the Holy Grail of incest with her father with what her mother and society tells her she should feel about it.  Only by performing the act and coming face to face with the monster will she truly understand it and thus tame or defeat her dragon.

And she cannot go to Jeff’s wife and beg her to let Deirdre have him even for just that one night for her Grail quest to be consummated in the blazing fire of sex as she knows instinctively that no other woman could understand her needs.

Yet surely waiting is still an option, that timeless wait of the Grail through the ages of men for the one with the right to claim it.  Her relationship with Jeff is merely a continuation of her relationship with her father – the unconsummated sex of touch and semi-satisfying masturbation, the furtive secret to be hugged to the heart and hidden, with always the hope that one day the Knight’s chains could fall away freeing him to claim his prize.  

No, on its own even the raging fires of her desire for the thrust of her brother’s penis into her flesh and her despair that it might never come would not be enough for the lessons of the stories of Arthur and his Knights, and the quest for the Grail, is one of destiny and hope.  With nothing more than has been so far revealed I do not believe Deirdre would have elected to end her quest by taking her own life.  There is something more, and there is still to be heard the voice of one player in this Tragedy.

Penny

Hello Mrs. Bartlett.  Please take a seat.  I was talking to ‘the other’ Mrs Bartlett not so long ago, your mother-in-law, and fear me this might get a little confusing.  May I call you Penelope?  Penny, perhaps?

Sure.  Penny.

Thank you.  You’ll know I’ve been asked to try to come to an opinion as to the state of mind of your sister-in-law Deirdre at the time of her death in order to assist the Coroner in determining whether she took her own life or whether foul play, as they still somewhat euphemistically call it, was involved.  You of course knew her and I’m hoping you might be able to shed some light on the matter.  You understand you are here voluntarily, are not obliged to answer any questions and are free to leave whenever you wish?

Yes.

Would you be surprised if the verdict was that Deirdre took her own life?

No.  Not entirely.  She was… Well, to be honest I thought she was a little unbalanced.  A bit too highly-strung.

Would you say you knew her well?

Not well, no.

But you saw her reasonably often?

Reasonably.

She visited your home?

Mostly.  We visited her apartment a couple of times, got together at Jeff’s Mom’s for some celebration or other.

Did she visit to see her brother, or her nephews and nieces?

Not the children, no.  She always brought things for them but I don’t think she really liked them.  Didn’t know how to handle them.  I think they were too young for her.  She wasn’t experienced with children,  and not the maternal type.

Did she call to see you at all?

No.  I don’t think she liked me very much, either.

Any idea why?

She…  I don’t think she liked anybody really.   She never spoke of friends, certainly not men-friends.  I think Jeff was the closest thing she had to a friend.  She was just too tied up with that business of hers.

How about her other sister, Stacy?  Would you have said there was any friendship there?

Not much.  But I didn’t see them together very often.  Only at family Christmases, that kind of thing.  They seemed to rub along together but I don’t think I ever saw them heads-together in a corner, like you’d expect sisters to.

Would you have said your husband was her friend?

He… He seemed to be.  She could be a bit of a nuisance sometimes, but he tolerated her.

Nuisance?

You know, turn up unannounced when she wasn’t expected.  Overstay her welcome.

She was family.

Yes, but she could easily afford to jet off for a weekend lying on a beach somewhere expensive for a week-end if she wanted a break.  She didn’t have to come to ours.

So why did she?

I…  I don’t know.  Maybe we were the closest thing she had to a family.

Doesn’t sound to me that ‘family atmosphere’ was something she wanted, if she didn’t like you and didn’t like the kids.

Maybe Jeff can tell you.

I asked.  Do you know what she and Jeff talked about?  Business?  Old times?

No, I…  I kept out of the way.

You let them be together?

Yes.  No.  What are you suggesting?

Suggesting?

You said that as though it was something improper.

Was it?

What, do you think they were screwing or something?  She was his sister.

They wouldn’t have been the first.

What makes you think they were screwing?

I didn’t think they were.  It was your suggestion.  Did you perhaps suspect they were?  Jeff did tell me you and he had rowed about her visits, you wanting to stop them.  Couldn’t you just have tolerated it, too, for the sake of family?

Yes, OK.  She did come on to Jeff a bit strongly sometimes.  Like I said, I think she was a bit unbalanced.

“come on to Jeff”?

Oh come on, you know the signs.  Hanging her tits out for him a bit, brushing her pussy against his hand.

Her own brother?

Well, I did say I thought she was a bit unbalanced.  I mean, having the hots for your own brother…

And do you think Jeff might have had the hots for her?

No, for Christ’s sake.

OK then, not the hots.  How about just willing to oblige?

Didn’t you ask Jeff all this?  What did he say?

Shrink-client confidentiality applies, I’m afraid.  I’m trying to ascertain what you thought in order to build a picture of what was in Deirdre’s mind.  If she had been aware you were thinking she had the hots for your husband, her brother, and she hadn’t – or even if she had – it would likely have affected her relationship with her brother as you were, of course, part of that dynamic.

Yes, she knew what I was thinking.

So you believe she did have the hots for her brother, and knew you were aware of it?

Yes.  I think she even wanted me to know.

That would break the mould.  Mistresses usually try to keep it all very quiet.  Ten-times more so, I would have thought, when incest was involved.

Well, she didn’t.

Even when incest was involved.  Why, do you suppose?

She wanted to break us up.  Get me to walk out on Jeff, I suppose, so she could have him to herself.

But you weren’t about the let her have him?

No.  He was my husband and the father of my children.  And I love him.

Even though he slept with his sister?

Penny, it seems to me that you’ve pretty much admitted it.

All right.  I knew that she and Jeff…  But he didn’t have the hots for her.  He just…  She needed it.  She didn’t have anyone else.  He was just doing her a favour.

You know this?  Did you discuss it with Jeff?

What, ask my husband if he was screwing his sister?  But the signs… I knew he’d had sex during the day sometimes, when he was supposed to be at his office.  Or out with the boys in the evening.  A woman knows.   But I know he never went with another woman, other than her.  He loved me, and only went with her because, well, like I say she was unbalanced and if he hadn’t taken pity on her…  well, maybe she’d have tipped over the edge earlier.   Didn’t Jeff explain it?

Jeff denied ever have had intercourse with Deirdre.

Did he?  Oh.  Well I guess…  I guess it’s not very easy for a guy to confess to sleeping with his sister.  I guess he wanted to protect her, too.

So what happened to tip Deirdre over the edge, then?  Had you tried to make Jeff choose between you and her, and he chose you?

No, I didn’t put it to Jeff like that.    He knew I wasn’t happy about it but, well… I just tried not to think about it.  For all our sakes.

Not easy, I would imagine, when you know that the man trying to make love to you isn’t performing at his best because he had sex with his own sister earlier in the day.

You’re damn right.

Do you think Jeff could have decided to end it off his own bat, because he realised you were unhappy about it?

Maybe.  Didn’t you ask him that?

Hardly, when he had assured me there wasn’t anything to end.

Oh.  Of course.

You see, this is my problem, Penny.  There was no sign of any note in Deirdre’s apartment.  The picture I have of Deirdre is that she was neat to the point of fastidiousness.  Loose ends were something she would have abhorred, and an unexplained suicide is a major loose end for those left behind.  Frankly I’m not at all comfortable with the idea that she would have taken her life without explaining why, and doing all she could to take full responsibility.  The police examined very closely the hard-drive on her PC.  They were looking for emails or anything relating to business difficulties, but they came across a little story Deirdre had written.  It reads like fiction but I’m satisfied the events it relates actually happened, and is about a small incident that happened when Deirdre and Jeff were little more than children, more than ten years ago now.  And, well, it describes Jeff in Deirdre’s bedroom, on her bed naked with her, and implies an incestuous relationship.  So naturally the police have to wonder if perhaps she was threatening Jeff with disclosure, blackmailing him by threatening to send to story to you or making it public.  And if perhaps Jeff pushed her off that balcony to prevent it.

No.

I have to admit it is a coherent scenario.  Can you be so sure it isn’t true?  Jeff acting to protect his marriage, to protect you?

No, you can’t believe that.  Jeff wouldn’t have hurt her.

Forced to chose between you and Deirdre, which way do you think he would have jumped?

He would never have left his children.

But left you?

I don’t know.  Had I tried to prise them apart…  It would have hurt her.  She was obviously so dependent on him.  And like I said, Jeff would never have hurt her.  So I had to accept it.

Lie back and think of England.

Sorry?

Oh, women in Victorian England were not supposed to enjoy sex.  They were supposed to just lie there and let themselves be made pregnant in order to breed sons for the Empire.  Lie back and think of England.  Like you were supposed to accept your brother having incest with his sister Deirdre during the day and then do his best for you with a floppy prick still sticky with her sex-oil on in the evening?

You make it sound…

Disgusting.

Yes.

Wasn’t it?

I…  Yes, it was hard sometimes.  Not to…  let it show.

Do you think you succeeded?

He can’t have been in any doubt that I didn’t like her, and of him being with her.  And I know he made an effort… not to make it too obvious when she was with us.  But I couldn’t keep tabs on him during the day.  I can’t imagine he wasn’t aware that I knew.  You must have asked him.

He knew you had your suspicions.

What about shrink-client confidentiality now?

This involves you.  What he tells me about himself and Deirdre doesn’t, not directly.  How did you get on with Stacy?

Stacy?

Did she call on you often?

No.  Not often.

Did you like her?

No.  I didn’t really want to.

Because of what she does?

Yes. 

It can be a hard thing for other women to deal with.  You didn’t like her around your children?

No.

Because you didn’t know where she’d been?  And with whom?

I guess so.  I mean, she is just a glorified call-girl.

I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.  How did Jeff get on with her?

Oh, they were like kids together.  Our kids loved her.

But she didn’t call often.

Too busy, I guess.

Did you ever talk to her about Jeff and Deirdre?

No.  I…   Well, I guess she’d have been on their side, maybe.   After all, considering the world she lives in, a little incest’s not going to bother her.

Maybe.  Do you think she knew what was going on between Jeff and Deirdre?

I don’t know.

Do you think she could not have known?  According to Deirdre’s little story Stacy knew that Jeff had snuck into her bedroom, and why.

I suppose if…  As kids…  She would probably have known.

Not very nice, the three of them with this secret.  And you kept out of it all, even though they knew you probably knew.  Does the thought of that upset you.

Yes, of course.  But its over now.

Yes.  Except, Penny, Deirdre’s story tells us that nothing very much happened in her bedroom that night, and that Jeff never had intercourse with her. Never.  Which is what Jeff says.  And I believe them both.  In fact we know it is true, because Deirdre was still virgo intacta, a virgin, when she died.  And in her story she laments the fact that Jeff was faithful to you.  Completely.  And that she wished you knew how lucky you were.

Penny?

You got it wrong, didn’t you?

You made a big mistake,  You’ve made a big, terrible mistake and you’re not going to be able to hide it and you’re not going to be able to live with it unless you face the truth and the consequences.

Penny, the police don’t know exactly when Deirdre died because her body wasn’t found until the morning.  But among the statements the police took from the other residents is a report of someone leaving the block during the evening.  A woman who might have been Stacy.  But a woman who also might have been you.

I don’t believe you meant to kill her.  What happened, Penny?

I just wanted to tell her to leave us alone.  Leave Jeff alone.  That it wasn’t right, him being her brother.  And them… Tell her to find a man like any other woman.  That if she didn’t I’d take the kids and leave Jeff, and let everyone know what had been going one, so that he wouldn’t be allowed within a mile of them.  She knew what that would do to him.

Go on.

She agreed.  She said she knew she had no right.  That Jeff belonged to me.  But she told me she wanted him so much.  Begged me to send him to her for just one night.  She said if I sent him it would be OK, whatever than means.  That if I told him she wanted him and sent him to her he would understand and she would be free.  Just one night and she promised to leave us alone, leave Jeff alone.  Like I said, she was unbalanced.

Go on.

Well, I mean… It was ridiculous.  Actually asking me to send my husband, her own brother, to her for a night of sex?   Expecting me to tell him that his sister wanted him to have sex with her and that it would be all right for him to go do it? How could anyone expect me to agree to that.  I told her to her face that it was worse than I’d thought, that I thought she was sick, that she was mental, and turned to go and she just…  She was crying and raging and begging and clawing at me and I just pushed her away.  But she was so small.  I pushed and she just wasn’t there.  She didn’t scream or anything. The door was open and she just went backwards onto the balcony and over the railing I…  I couldn’t do anything.  I didn’t mean it.  I didn’t mean to kill her.  I didn’t mean to hurt her.  She was so small, and I was frightened, I just pushed her away…

OK Penny.  I believe you.  I know it was an awful, tragic accident, although if it’s any consolation I don’t think Deidre would hold it against you.  In fact I think she might even say you’d done her a favour, and that she probably allowed it to happen.  Let herself go over the railings, and to a kind of peace.

You’re going to have to tell this all over again to the police, and I’m afraid the next few months are going to be very difficult for you.  For you, for Jeff and for Stacy.  I don’t know how it’s going to turn out and if I can help in any way I will.  Please don’t say any more.  I’m ending this interview and will have to call the police now.

 

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