Ambition Read Online Free PDF Page A

you.’
    He slid down the bed, peeled off her tights and parted her legs.
    She sighed inwardly. Oh, no, on top of her other troubles, Matthew had chosen this moment to be Good In Bed. She had heard of a time before the Seventies when women were always complaining to
each other about how Bad In Bed men were – and Bad In Bed, it always transpired, was polite English for a refusal to contemplate cunnilingus. Oh, ignorant bliss.
    Then suddenly it was the Seventies and, ever since Susan Street could remember, men were launching themselves like ground-to-air missiles at your groin with their tongues hanging out the second
after they’d first shaken hands with you. Some sort of mass, subliminal brainwashing seemed to have convinced them that a quick lick won them instant promotion to the Demon Lover league and
elevated their victim to the realms of convulsive ecstasy.
    How shocked they’d be if they knew how bored most girls were by it! And the ones who really liked it usually became lesbians – because when you got down to it, or went down to it, no
one knew better than a girl what a girl liked.
    Her mind wandered as he got stuck in. That was the one good thing about cunnilingus: like ironing, it freed your mind to dwell on higher things.
    Just a small corner of her consciousness remained tethered to the bed, and there she felt just a faint irritation; the physical equivalent of hearing a fly buzzing to get out against a closed
window on a hot summer’s day when you were laid up in traction and couldn’t move a muscle to free it. Neither heaven nor hell but one long, annoying limbo, that’s what the act had
become. She fought the temptation to swat at his eager little head, as if he was that poor pesky fly.
    Cunnilingus is the waiting-room of sex, she decided, and felt a flash of nostalgia for those days she had never known, when men thought it was disgusting. Men who were Bad In Bed were no bother:
two minutes’ acting, five minutes’ reassurance and you could go on to do something more fun. Men who were Good In Bed were another matter: five hours’ acting, two hours’
rave reviews and by then they were ready to go again. People made a fuss about Bruce Springsteen doing four hours on stage – big deal! The level of showmanship and stamina a modern girl
needed nightly in the sack made him look like a two-minute wonder.
    She wondered once more just why she kept Matthew on in there when he could be out sticking his tongue up some deserving and grateful girl. And she knew that it was because once you had a man
these days, you hung on to him until something better came along. You didn’t just throw the paddle out of the boat and leave yourself up the creek waiting for something else to float by.
Because the chances were it wouldn’t.
    Susan knew that there wasn’t officially a man shortage; she had run a survey in the paper only two weeks previously which told her that there was actually a glut of young men in the
developed countries of the West, an extra one million in the USA alone. The trouble was that half of them were called Jasper – and the other half weren’t good enough. There wasn’t
a
man
shortage, but there was a Superman shortage.
    Ingrid Irving had a theory that there had been a war that no one had told them about, in which all the heterosexual men under forty, over six foot and earning more than fifty K a year had been
wiped out. ‘They used this weapon which was sort of a very sophisticated version of the neutron bomb,’ explained Ingrid. ‘You know – that left buildings standing but wiped
out people. Well,
this
bomb – the Talent-Taker – wiped out all the hunks and left the jerks standing. The sort of men that used to be called 4F: fags, failures, fatsos and
freaks.’
    Women, unlike men, were raised on the pornography of perfection; first pop stars, then romantic fiction heroes. The higher they climbed, and the more they were told they could have it all, the
less inclined to