The Berlin Incindent

Wow, it's been a while. Sorry about that - much more doing, much less writing about, but truth be told I prefer it that way so I'm not THAT sorry. Still, I've peen promising this story so here it is, in all the detail I remember. Every word the truth.

Berlin was weird.


I always felt that, not drinking, I'd missed the whole 'mad night out in a foreign city' thing. Hand on heart, I planned the Berlin weekend for entirely different reasons, but there was a boy there I had unfinished business with. That is to say, for huge amounts of kink, experimentation and general messing about, I'd never had actual sex with him. In fact, I was still in the rather uncomfortable situation of only ever having had sex with one guy (sort of, that serves for argument's sake) and felt an immediate need to break the claim my ex of six years had over my sexual experience.

So, yes, I'd wanted to have sex with him. I'd dithered and delayed and missed my chance - so I thought - when he moved back to Berlin in the summer and had met other people, moved on, dismissed all of it to dream-like memory

But I was going to Berlin, for just one night. Could I say no to one more night of dancing, laughing, and whatever the night brought, with him? Like so many happy memories from London? not a chance. so despite a migraine, a post-migraine panic attack and having been awake for 38 hours, I bade my mother goodnight and meandered off to get the u-bahn, dressed to the nines. (For the record, my mother doesn't let me walk to the shops in my hometown alone, Christ only knows what was going on in her head to let me 'meet a guy I know, back in time for breakfast!' in Berlin...)

Not sure why I was surprised when he turned up, on time as always. Tall, skinny, femininely gorgeous as always, strutting down the platform in jeans tucked into knee-high boots, gloves, belted-coat and scarf, all black, laying starkly against his pale skin, the sweep of blonde hair, the bright blue eyes lined with kohl and mascara. for the same record, my own black coat covered a floor length but thigh-slit PVC skirt and a red vinyl corset top, and for a while we just stood there, in the tube station ,drinking in the strangely effortless attraction that had always crackled between us, however unlikely we were. All the pleasantries and small talk were somewhere between breathy and entirely breathless, just context for the tone of voice to tell each other what we actually wanted to say

We took a walk by the river, chatted in a way we hadn't managed since a weird London weekend when a mutual friend had ended up dead and everyone else hugely shaken. Time was a healer, and the distance even moreso. He was home, and I was there to enjoy just one night of the city he loved.

It was just us, too, which made it all so easy. None of the bitchy hangers-on he'd acquired in the London clubs, no drugs, no one particular friend who runs around licking people.

We started at Boheme Noir, a notorious yearly fetish event with some of the most bizarre cabaret I've ever encountered. Flashes that spring to mind now include a guy doing hula hoop with glowing things inside a giant bubble, a weird live-sex thing about faeries, fire and a woman in a business suit sitting on an actual stuffed alligator

We danced, we drank red bull, we laughed at a montage about boobs in horror movies and sang johnny cash songs and acquired a friend who was wearing a judge's wig. To say the night had taken on a hallucinatory feel doesn't even nearly cut it.

From there we moved to KitKat, still where the original was and apparently famous for being the most hedonistic club in Europe. It's unmarked, a doorway behind a gate down the side of a building, with a bell I was too scared to push. We arrived at three or so, when entry cover should have been the unfriendly side of thirty Euros but we were young and beautiful - we smiled at them and they signed us in, checked our coats and waved us on. Apparently the dress code is fetish or naked, enforced to the extent that if you turn up in street or club clothes they hand you a sort of tie dyed sarong thing and make you strip. You then get the German equivalent of "towel skirt!" shouted at you by the regulars.

KitKat was all sorts of crazy, neon and swirly with sculptures and sex gear and too many levels and side rooms. Without a firm arm around my waist I'd have been lost in seconds, and I'm not sure I'd have wanted to be found. suddenly I have a sweet drink and a lollipop, I'm dancing happily to music which is far more pulse than tune amidst the naked and the bizarre, everyone as at home as everyone else, people talking and meeting, dancing and kissing, a timeless freedom within which i feel that the norms of outside... of my outside, not theirs, from what I've seen of this city... are truly forgotten.

We get tired, retire to the chill out room to roll about on inflatable furniture, beneath an angel statue which is missing its genitalia ("It's hole-y! see? Holy?" laughs a cheerful German guy who looks like a musketeer).

We meet, make friends with and both alternately make out with a truly breathtaking boy of about our age who's wearing startling bright blue contact lenses, and it takes me an hour or so to work out that's not something which usually happens. Nor, I suppose, was laying intertwined with them both, although favouring the company I'd arrived with, absently talking to an Italian guy and translating because he spoke English but no German, whilst watching someone on the other side of the chill out area being fisted by a procession of people, none of whom I'm convinced she knew. I don't call that chilling out, really.

Suddenly, or maybe over hours, who knows? the mood changed. At once I'm alone with my... date? Is that the word? and wordlessly, the decision is made. On what could be - but isn't - our last meet up, I'm giving that voice that chimed up in my head the first time I ever set eyes on him the answer it's always wanted. Hand in hand, we shun a number of more logically appropriate places because they're overcrowded, too cold, too noisy. We spot a caged seating area, twelve feet or so above the dancefloor and awkwardly scramble up the narrow blocks that lead to it, all decision making and forethought required already over with.

So, what I've spent arguably a couple of hours or a couple of years trying to second guess happens there and then, behind bars and with an audience of a packed, sweating dancefloor of hundreds and a working bar, if i look one way, and throbbing total darkness if I look the other, underneath black-lit neon swirls and glowing ethereally violet under blacklights. He reads my hesitation but I push the nerves away: now is right, this is all so right in its utter wrongness.

It hurts. It hurts so fucking much, and even if my mind is totally ready for the actual milestone, my body is nowhere near ready for the physical necessities but all I can think, with a determined smiles as the pain slices as high as it's going to, is 'there. I am myself again now.I can do this because I want to.' And I do want to, and soon it becomes enjoyable for both of us. I still wouldn't by any stretch describe it as fundamentally good sex: he is held back by nerves and I am kept in check by discomfort and inexperience, but we soon regain our old dynamic of roughness, nails and teeth and I hope, if any of those watching from the level below (and they ARE watching) commit an image to memory, it is of me astride him, head back half because I'd thrown it there in abandon, half because he's yanked it there with his hand in my hair, his teeth sunk firmly into my neck and our chests pressed together.

We waited a while, after, in case we got heckled or applauded or something, I'm not sure, and then mostly fell down the padded step-blocks we'd used to ascend to wander off and get drinks. We laughed and chatted again, back to our easy company, until I realised that it was light outside and that, being November, this meant I had likely missed breakfast and had half an hour's journey across central Berlin for an earful from my mother and a day of sightseeing. we said our goodbyes, I think he called out 'see you in London'; I didn't turn round.

Winter morning sunshine is a funny sort of light to be delirious in, it doesn't help the lucidity when you've been awake for forty something hours. It was all in danger of becoming one of those things I merely imagined I'd done: after all, it played back in my head like something I'd read about, not something that happened to real people, least of all me. I quickly text one or two safe people, confessing the brief details, subconsciously pleading for absolution. I was cold, dizzy, tired and hungry. The sex had left me bleeding, i was conspicuously hiding a plastic outfit under a coat. it wasn't a nice time to be trudging around a strange city on my own. Still, i made it to the hotel in time for a shower (at which point I found feathers and glitter down my bra, always signs of a good night) and immediately took back to the street in jeans, t-shirt, a hoodie and a clean face.


Weirdly, at something like 11 am, I was blatantly propositioned by a middle aged guy, just randomly in the street. I had a moment of sheer mortification - the word 'slut' seemed to be lipstick-ed onto my forehead, or he could still smell the night on me through the hotel soap and the Chanel No. 5. Maybe he'd been there, maybe I wasn't as anonymous as I felt in the country I consider my home-from-home. Maybe it was just like every other time that's happened to me, magnified by the perceived enormity of what I'd done.

So... so what? I drank hot chocolate, stayed awake for another fifteen hours before a brief sleep and going back to work. I analysed, and was baffled, and recount the story occasionally to those who are easily shocked by my less-scandalous behaviour, purely to amuse myself.

I've never regretted it for a second.