THE PSYCHO-DARLINGS. Perhaps by the visit of the psycho-darlings I came the closest to achieving my personal objectives, albeit only briefly. I had been to the shops on the Haarlemmerstraat and saw them sitting on the ground on a bridge near the bottom of the Herengracht, smoking cigarettes. They were Swedish, had arrived at the Christian Youth Hostel, seen “Jesus loves you” on the wall and walked straight out again. They had stopped to rest while trying to find somewhere else to stay; one was 15, the other 17. I invited them to the house and they stayed for two weeks.

PDF17 was short with brown hair and proud breasts while PDF15 had long black hair and was taller. They lived in different parts of Stockholm and generally only met when on holiday together. Towards the end of her stay PDF17 confessed to having had eight abortions, claiming that she became pregnant almost at the drop of a hat; her boyfriend in Stockholm would lend her to his friends. This I believed but the claims of the younger one, who was dominant, I did not. Shortly after she arrived she began to insist that she was a Stockholm prostitute, a claim which was undoubtedly inspired by my neighbours. In fact she was a virgin, and used PDF17 to help her remain so and corroborate her story, which was that she’d come to Amsterdam to have a holiday from sex. Ultimately I reasoned that whether this was true or not, the fact that the claim was made was indicative of a problem and I accepted it as such. They would sit up half the night talking and smoking cigarettes, which I could not match, so I would retire before them. After a week with no sex, during which time I was driven almost to distraction by PDF15’s compulsive signalling, things came to a head with the Dice Game.

PDF15 told how she had been discovered at the age of three in the bathroom of a man’s apartment. Virtually all she remembered was thinking at the time ‘Act normal.’ PDF15 went a long way towards confirming the association between dysfunctional signalling and child abuse; as I told her, the one thing which could be established with certainty from her scant memory of the event was that something abnormal had happened. This provided an explanation for her intense dysfunctional signalling; I would awake sometimes to be greeted with the sight of her open legs and white knickers. A similar condition had been observed in F19DAG.

Once during a heavy thunderstorm they ran up and down the street revelling in it, coming back into the house soaking wet with their blouses clinging to their breasts. This had thrown me into a state of acute neurosis, not knowing where to put myself. By this and other means my neighbours, both the ones who worked in the street in some way and those who lived there, all knew about my guests. During their stay the psycho-darlings repeatedly played a song by the subculture celebrity on the stereo. There were three complaints about noise and it was telling that all were from females: one who worked in coffeeshop CS1 and two who tended the brothels. It looked to them that I had finally got what I wanted and it seemed very much to me that this was a situation they could not tolerate, and they were doing their utmost to spoil it.

THE DICE GAME. After a week of the Psycho-Darlings avoiding sex and unsure of what to do one night I proposed that we play the Dice Game, as featured in the novel The Dice Man. Some time was spent drawing up the list and emphasis was placed on strict adherence to the outcome: “The Die never lies.” The list was as follows:

1. Go for a walk and perhaps to a bar or club
2. Visit somebody
3. Sex with the three of us
4. Sex with two of us
5. PDF15 and I would take LSD
6. Stay in

A plate was mounted on a vase on the kitchen table and the ritual begun. I asked if they were ready and they said “Yes.” The die was cast. It was a 3.

They complained, and wanted it thrown again, but I reiterated “The Die never lies.” For me it was the best possible outcome.

What followed was a crisis in our relationship because they, and PDF15 in particular, refused to conform to the decision of the die. We sat in the kitchen with me trying to rationalize the situation; several times I offered to make them tea, and every time they eagerly accepted because (I established later) they were terrified that I would throw them out in the middle of the night, and the provision of tea meant that they were safe at least for that duration. In the end a compromise was reached; PDF15 would remain intact and would not have to watch PDF17 and I in action but the latter had to supply sex on demand. PDF15 and I took the acid (she had wanted this all along) and the three of us went out on the town. In the morning, back at the house and coming down, I had sex with PDF17 while PDF15 pretended to be asleep. As our relationship settled down our habit became that PDF15 and I would share a chair and I would stroke her hair and fondle her, while PDF17 was my sexual release. The sex still wasn’t effortlessly obtained however.

They would spend 20 minutes putting on makeup for a trip to the supermarket. I tried to take them somewhere different every night but, perhaps surprisingly, we soon ran out of places to go. One night we were in BAR2, sitting around the barrel table there, with PDF17 beside me. It would have been evident that we were intimate. Then PDF17 went to the lavatory and PDF15 signalled for attention; I gave her a brief kiss on the lips in reassurance. In no way did I court attention, or seek to measure others’ reactions to us, but I caught a glimpse of another male’s eyes nearly popping out of his head when he realized that I was intimate not with one but both.

Once, to my chagrin, the two went off on the invitation of another male to some suburban town outside Amsterdam. When they arrived at his place he had turned nasty in some way and they left, hitch-hiking back to Amsterdam and into my arms. This was the only time we slept together properly, when I fell asleep with one on each shoulder. Another time PDF15 went out alone and returned saying that an attempt had been made to bundle her into a car.

The experience of the psycho-darlings led me to suspect that the high suicide rate in Scandinavia was due to females’ induction not of neurosis but of psychosis. They described how in Sweden someone could break down crying in the street and children would mock them for losing control of their emotions. After their stay I felt as if I had been not so much spoiled as mauled, although probably more so by their departure than by anything else.