Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (23 page)

A
s Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest
famously noted: ‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’ In which case, I’m surely one of the more careless individuals around.

I’ve managed to lose, in the relationship sense, my birthmother, to never experience the love of a real father, and then to lose both adoptive parents when one died shortly after the other. To top it all, the death of my beloved grandfather was rapidly followed by splitting with Frank, my partner,
and
my best female friend – an inevitable consequence of discovering that they were not only shagging one another but also that he’d got her pregnant and offered to marry her. I think it is fair to say that this particular interlude was not the best time of my life!

Darkness descended on me in 2001 when my grandfather, the man I had always called ‘Dad’ and the only father figure I had ever known, was admitted to hospital. His chronic breathing problems had worsened but I and the rest of the family were confident that he would be treated and sent home, reinvigorated, for a new lease of life. That confidence was shaken when my grandmother went to visit and said she’d found dirt everywhere in his ward supposedly dedicated to the treatment of breathing disorders. ‘There’s dust on the floor and on almost every surface you touch,’ she told me. ‘How’s he going to survive in there?’ Dad had been in and out of hospital before, although he always preferred to have his essential steroid treatment from his local doctor at home. A return to hospital scared him, on the grounds that ‘once you go in there, you don’t come out’.

In the event, it was not my grandmother’s dust and dirt discovery that finished Granddad off, but an unrelated bug which he encountered during his enforced hospital stay. He had already been weak when he went in; then a bug which caused stomach cramps and diarrhoea accelerated his death. In his last days, my nan and other members of the family were taking it in turns to sit by his bedside and I wanted to be there as well. I had a sort of premonition that I would be with him when he died. Because of my particular line of late-night work it was easy for me to be there in the early hours when everyone else needed to sleep. That meant that there was perhaps a certain inevitability that I was there at the last. I was in mid-sentence, chatting away to him, when he suddenly took one big, gasping breath, as though he was going to sit up, and then died.

My grandmother was at home asleep when it happened and my grandmother believed that a figure had suddenly appeared in the doorway of her bedroom. ‘Johnny, is that you?’ she had asked, before realising that there was nobody there. When she told me about it later I realised that the time she thought she saw her mysterious visitor coincided precisely with the time that her husband died. I had lost one of the foundation rocks of my world. My granddad’s death affected me deeply and it soon became apparent that my grandmother was also unwell. I tried to help as best I could with the funeral arrangements and all of the chaos that descends on one’s life after bereavement, but other troubles were fast approaching: I suspected that I was about to lose both my partner and my closest girlfriend as well.

For some time I’d recognised that my long-term partner had been acting oddly. Our relationship had never been strong, had always been based on convenience rather than deep love and passion. Now, just a few weeks after Granddad’s death, it was falling apart at the seams. For years I had wanted to walk away from him, but had never been able to shake off his powerful hold over my life. I’d been terrified that my grandparents and the rest of the family might somehow hear about my secret life. My partner had never been slow to exploit my concerns and was forever warning that he would tell everyone about me if I were ever to leave him. He knew very well that I still felt guilty when I looked at my grandparents and was desperate for them never to learn the whole truth about me. I remember one occasion when we had a row and he got in his car and said he was going to tell my
nan that I was a prostitute. I was distraught and raced after him and saw him pull up outside of my grandparents’ house. I feared the worst when my man opened the door, but the arsehole was merely teaching me a lesson. ‘Hi Nan, how are you,’ he said, before walking away, leaving her puzzled by his sudden concern. Once you succumb to threats there is no easy way out, and so I had stayed in the relationship far longer than I should have done.

If I am brutally honest with myself, however, I have to recognise that there was also a different kind of fear operating to tie me into the relationship. I was worried about being lonely. He was a horrible man but if you say to me, ‘Why did you stay with him?’ the answer is that it was stupidity, the ignorance of youth and sometimes the feeling that ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t’. I just did not think anybody else would be interested in me. I worried that any people I would want to date would not want to date me because of my lifestyle choices. I could never quite introduce the subject of what I did to any new potential partner because… well… I just couldn’t do that. You have to remember that, even though this was less than two decades ago, there was a different moral compass; a very different world.

The crazy thing was that despite threatening me often to keep me by his side, I now suspected that he was the one who wanted to go. I knew he’d always fancied my closest girlfriend and now I suspected they were having an affair. My friend was short, fat, peroxide-blonde and uglier and older than me. She was also married but had told me often that she was unhappy and wanted to find somebody new. She claimed her husband
was a violent man with a drinking problem, and so I realised that my partner, for all his many faults, must, for her, have seemed a very good catch. Although I was still grieving for my granddad, I knew that I had to confront them.

‘Look, I know there’s something between you,’ I said. ‘Just be honest and tell me and we’ll sort it out.’

‘No, no,’ they insisted. ‘You’re not yourself, there’s something wrong with you; you’re just being paranoid.’

Despite their vehement and repeated denials, I could see that they were abnormally friendly. All of the signs were there. She was often at my house anyway, but now I realised how often they were together and alone whilst I was working, helping to pay his bills. As far as I was concerned, I felt that I had always been out of his league anyway, but I could see what was happening and that both of them were lying to my face, telling me that I was paranoid and trying to make me think I was going mad and having some kind of breakdown. When I asked them again, he got really aggressive and she started shouting her mouth off at me. In the middle of my grief, they actually had me thinking, ‘Am I actually that paranoid? Is it me; am I imagining things?’ Deep down, however, I knew that wasn’t true.

Things came to a head when she asked me to write a reference for a new flat in order that she could leave her husband. Despite my suspicions I helped her out but then she was sketchy and evasive about to where exactly she was moving. The next thing was that Frank offered to help her move because she didn’t have a car. That’s just what he was supposedly doing one night when he stayed out late into the evening. I just thought, ‘Well, where the fuck is he? He hasn’t
come home and I’ve no idea where she’s living.’ So I got in my car and I took in a few streets, just following my nose as though some sort of instinct was directing me. Just a half-a-mile away I found Frank’s car parked outside of a block of flats.

They must have seen me draw up and park in the street because she and Frank suddenly appeared in the doorway together.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ I cried. ‘What are you doing here?’ I was upset, angry and in no mood to be pissed around any longer. There was an angry confrontation on the doorstep with him getting mad, her getting mad and me demanding some answers. Eventually, she let me into the house and dropped the bombshell I had never expected: ‘I’m pregnant… with Frank’s baby… we’re going to get married.’

It was a body blow made worse by the discussions Frank and I had often had about children. He had been married before and had had two kids with his wife. He always insisted that he didn’t want to even consider having more children for the moment, not least because I was having to constantly help him out financially by contributing to his child maintenance payments. He talked vaguely of the possibility of children in the future, but not until his first family had grown up and were no longer a financial liability. I had not really wanted children myself at that stage but I always thought my views might mellow in the future. Every time I had pressed him about it he had made it clear that kids were pretty much off the cards; one more thing to add to his long list of lies and deceit.

To suddenly be told that not only were they getting married but also that she was pregnant was a knife-wound to my heart; it really, really hurt.

‘How can you have hidden something like that?’ I said. ‘I’ve asked you over and over if you’re seeing Frank behind my back… and now you tell me you’re pregnant.’

‘We didn’t have a choice,’ she claimed. ‘You would have kicked Frank out and we didn’t have anywhere to go. We needed to get this flat first before we told you anything. Now we’re going to live together. We’re getting married, having the baby… blah, blah, blah.’

I could hardly listen to their explanations; I was devastated and had run out of things to say to try and make then see how much they had hurt me. Deeply upset, I headed home, leaving them alone in the flat I had helped them to rent and with the car I had helped him to buy because he couldn’t afford the repayments. I had barely got home when her husband phoned me.

He was upset too but had no idea of the truth of what had been happening. She had told him she wanted a divorce but had lied to him by saying that there was no other man involved. She had claimed she ‘wanted some space from him’ and needed to live on her own. The truth is that he had been due to inherit some family money and she had wanted the divorce to go through amicably in order that she could collect a share of the money that was coming to him.

The idea of her fooling both her husband and me was too much to bear; something snapped inside and pure, white-hot revenge poured out of me.

‘Just so you know,’ I said. ‘She’s not just leaving you, she’s moving in with Frank, she’s pregnant… it’s his child… they’re getting married – and this is where they’re living.’

I can’t defend myself by lying about the reasons why I did
it. Frank had taken the piss out of me; he’d been lying to me for years; he’d been leaching money from me for years. She was my best friend who had stolen my partner, had fucked him in my house, had lied through her teeth and got herself pregnant. On top of that, the man I knew as my dad had just died and they took advantage of my confusion to make their escape. How much worse could it get? What else could they possibly do to me? By the time he left I hadn’t loved him for years but being shafted like that still hurt me badly. My words now were pure revenge, a woman scorned, jealousy, sadness and rage all rolled into one vitriolic ball. You bet I told her husband all about it.

But there was no sweetness in getting my revenge, when my own life was turned upside down through someone leaking news of my professional lifestyle to my family. To say that the news didn’t go down well with my birth-mother is perhaps the understatement of the year. All I can remember about what proved to be a truly terrible few days was that she repeatedly called me up, bawling her eyes out, crying so much she couldn’t even speak. ‘What about your education,’ she gasped. ‘What about your degrees… you’ve got two degrees… are you still looking for work… how could you do this for a living?’

I tried to explain that I wasn’t actually guilty as charged: I had a website but it was for domination services, not for prostitution. Prostitutes have sex with men for money, I didn’t do that. I just bossed men around, beat them a little, humiliated them if that’s what they wanted; they never got to touch my body. But nothing that I said made the slightest
difference. She was just devastated. She had just lost her father and had then been hit with news about her daughter.

‘Oh Miranda… do you touch men’s willies?’ she sobbed: it seemed that was all she wanted to know.

The only saving grace was that between us all we somehow managed to keep the revelation from my grandmother’s ears. My family didn’t need to keep the secret much longer. Whether or not her husband’s death took away my nan’s will to live, it was not long afterwards that she succumbed to pancreatic cancer. Whereas my grandfather had passed away relatively peacefully, my nan didn’t have a good death. She had lost loads of weight and had become jaundiced before they admitted her to hospital. She lingered for weeks and I visited her regularly, doing silly things like painting her nails to try and keep her spirits up. But the cancer had by then spread to her lungs and there was no hope of recovery. Once again, because of my peculiar working hours, I was with her when she died. She had been begging for pain relief and was deeply distressed and trying to climb out of bed because she was in such discomfort. It was an awful experience to see her die that way. Even though I had long before moved out of their house, my nan and my grandfather were the only parents I had ever known and their deaths left a terrible void in my life. It was dreadful to have to go and help clean out their house – the little, unheated council house where I had spent my childhood, now empty and even more unloved without them. I was still in regular, close contact with my birth-mother but she was no substitute for my nan and granddad: I had lost my parents.