Chapter Twenty Nine

 

 

Q. Did you place the advertisement in the magazine?

A. Oh yes. Annie worded it so carefully, ‘submissive lady (over 18) wishes to find a Master, provide details of training on offer with photo. ALA’ which of course was a lie, she had no intention of answering all the letters. But in the end we did answer them, because of the ridiculous letters we had gave us so much amusement - we spent hours concocting replies!

Q. What sort of letters were they?

A. Oh, slagging us off, or rather, ‘she’ - she wasn’t a lady, but a slag or a whore for offering herself in that way, someone else wrote saying how he would never touch her but direct someone to do it - sheer nonsense. They thought they were being big tough dominant men, but all they did was make us laugh.

Q. Where there any Annie was really interest in?

A. An odd way of phrasing the question, we were supposed to be doing this together, and yet - you’re right, it was Annie who read the replies first, and who picked out the ones we would later respond to positively. Have I come over that weak?

Q. Not really, but how did you feel about that?

A. About Annie doing all the choosing? I’ve got so used to that over the years I hardly notice any more. Why do I keep using the present tense about my sister?

Q. What was happening in the family at this time?

A. Mother and Father were spending more and more time away from home. Not sure if it was us, might have been, Mother was really bothered by our attitude to sex and AIDS and everything, hated being made to think about us as women. I’m sure she was jealous, she began to spend more time at beauty salons having facials, wax treatments, she played less golf and spent more time in a gym working out, improving her health, she said. A new wardrobe of clothes arrived, younger looking than before, and to be honest, too young for her age and figure. She began to look slightly ridiculous wearing short skirts and higher heels.

I must tell you about this. There was a dinner party one night for some clients of Father’s, real posh guys. Mother laid on the whole bit, the candles and the best food, best wine from the cellar, the whole lot as I said. Annie and I were asked to please wear our best cocktail dresses, and Annie, out of some kind of spite, put our hair up in great curls and we put on our make-up, just that tiny bit too much that makes the difference between being demure and being startling. You know where the line is, you must have seen it! and neither of us showed our faces until the guests arrived.

Then we walked down the stairs together. The look on everyone’s faces was a treat - it was all we could do not to giggle, Annie nearly burst with suppressed hysteria. We had matching red dresses, silky, very sleek, very tight, our hair up in swirls and curls, our make-up was moss green eye shadow, blusher and vivid red lipstick and we both painted our nails an identical shade of red. Add black high heeled shoes and seamed stockings and the men nearly burst out of their trousers just looking at us. It was no surprise to us to know Father scored a direct hit with the company after that, and got all sorts of commissions and cash out of it, but it was down to us. All through dinner they could hardly take their eyes off us. Mother, delicate in her pale blue and silver couldn’t hold a candle to us. And she knew it and she resented it. It was also no surprise to find it was the last of the dinner parties at home with us present. It was like an open declaration of war, but nothing was ever said.

Q. This must have pleased Annie.

A. It did. Since we had been told they weren’t our natural parents, I realised she was fast falling out of love with them, if ever she loved our parents in the first place, which I doubt. She somehow went from perhaps just living with them as you do, ‘oh that’s our parents’ sort of attitude to actively stirring them up. But she wasn’t entirely satisfied even with them.