The first time I saw a naked girl

It was 2003, perhaps in the summer holiday between junior and secondary school. I hadn’t started masturbating, but my hormones were definitely kicking in because I remember regular erections and sometimes waking in the night from particularly intense wet dreams.

At this point in my life, my mother and father were separated. I lived with my mum and my step-sister, but I used to spend the school holidays with my father. Dad lived in Wales with his brother, Neil. Neil was around a decade younger than Dad, about twenty-five, but he has always looked younger than his years. Neil was on the dole, rode a motorbike, smoked funky-smelling roll-ups and regularly brought different girls back to the flat. Naturally, I looked up to him in wide-eyed awe and wanted to be like him when I grew up.

On his bedroom wall, Neil had a calendar of naked women. Looking back, it was pretty tame: a nude woman posing for each month of the year. I remember that they all had incredibly large breasts and thick pubic hair. I recall standing in Neil’s room whilst he rolled his cigarettes, staring at the pictures and leafing through the months; I remember leaning forward and peering at their bushes, striving to find any clues as to what lay beneath. I liked looking at the pictures – they gave me a confusing, tingling, craving sensation that I yearned to elevate into something more, though I didn’t know how. My dick would be hard in my pants.

Neil would watch me, smiling as he prepared his smokes. He’d say things like “August is a good month” or “November’s got massive knockers” or “I’d love to bury my face in March’s minge”.

One morning I was sat with Neil in the tiny living room reading some of Dad’s old Tintin comics. Neil was drinking lager and flicking through a magazine. “You like the nudie girls, right?” he asked me. It took me aback. We had barely spoken since Dad had left for work – Neil had never been one to exchange pleasantries or make unnecessary conversation – and I don’t think I actually understood exactly what he meant. “The nudie girls,” he repeated. “Look at this.” And he passed me his magazine.

It was better than the calendar. The women still had enormous breasts, but they didn’t have any pubic hair. My dick started to swell in my underpants as I stared at the neat creases between their legs, at their tidy, hairline cracks. “You like pussy, right?” Neil asked me with a smile. “You’re a man after my own heart.” (That was the first time I’d heard the word; now, whenever I hear or read the word pussy, I immediately recall those airbrushed models in that magazine in the smoky living room of Dad’s flat.)

I was mesmerised. Neil told me to come with him to his bedroom – I vividly recall that I was still carrying my Tintin comic as I followed him down the hallway – and he dragged out a pile of magazines from under his bed. “Hey Martin,” he said, “don’t tell your Dad I’ve got these.” I promised, on my life, and I sat and picked through them, stroking the glossy images with my finger, marvelling at the big breasts and tidy slits – at all that “pussy” – whilst Neil nipped out to the corner shop for more lager. (That was the only time I got to see those magazines. Several days later when Neil was out, I crept into his room, and they were gone.)

Neil seemed to have a lot of different girlfriends. I recall only one of them in any detail. They were pretty interchangeable: young, anorexically thin, wild curly hair, too much eyeshadow, nose- or lip-piercings, strong-smelling perfume. The girl I remember didn’t have any piercings, but otherwise fitted the stereotype. She was sixteen.

I know she was sixteen because Dad had a blazing row with Neil about it in the kitchen whilst I was eating my dinner, and it’s the first time I ever heard Dad swear. “What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?” he yelled at Neil. “She’s sixteen! She’s a fucking schoolgirl, Neil! You’re asking for trouble!”

I ate my beans on toast solemnly, watching my father holler hysterically whilst my uncle leaned against the counter, dragging on a joint, occasionally rolling his eyes. “She’s old enough to know what she’s doing,” Neil said when Dad paused momentarily for breath, “and she’s good at it too.”