The day I spent with my hand on Justine Plunkett’s c*nt

Dame Justine Plunkett is something of a national treasure, part of the British landscape, everyone’s seen her films, hard-lived women we all recognised. She’ been showered with oscars and tonys., is friends with everyone from Kevin Spacey to Nelson Mandela. Who’d believe that I once spent the day with my hand on Dame Justine’s cunt.

I never got far with my attempted acting career, I had enthusiasm but no genuine talent, I could articulate but not exactly act. The sole highlight of my brief career was that film I made with Dame Justine, plain Justine as she was then.

I got the part because I knew the director, Don Donald, I went to school with him in fact. “Terrence,” he said, “I want you to play yourself. Do you think you could manage that?”

At the time Justine was a nobody, as was Don. Who’d have thought a career in Hollywood would result from his little indie flicks based around the lives of (and often featuring) his friends. Now he’s making films like Aliens Versus the Flowerpot Men, in 3-D and Predator versus the Smurfs.

As for Justine, well she was clearly a star, even then, even though this was her first acting job. She had a presence, even when you’d rehearsed a scene with her a dozen times you’d still hang on her every word at the next reading. We knew that she was just passing through our lives onto somewhere special. I plodded through the script as best as I could, somehow doubting that I was the best person to play myself.

We all knew each other, the crew and cast were all friends of Don from film school or college, or just people who hung around the same streets we did. The only exception was Justine, but she soon became one of us. The film took just over two weeks to shoot, we rattled through every scene at breakneck speed, small cast, small crew and even smaller budget. The only exception was the nude scene, the one which involved me holding my hand on Justine’s cunt. That took forever, an entire day to shoot a scene that took just a minute of screen time. It was supposed to take a morning, but we kept getting the giggles. When a technical problem was explained as “There’s a hair in the gate,” we both found it tremendously amusing and it was almost an hour before either of us could get a full sentence out without the giggles intervening.

Though were nude, on the bed, with my hand over her cunt the whole time, it wasn’t actually a sex scene. It was a post coital scene, a scene where the two main characters shared deep and dark secrets, a pivotal moment in the film where the viewer learns key truths. No matter how many times we fluffed our lines or laughed in appropriately there wasn’t a second of the scene that could be lost, we just had to shoot it again and again.

We were both tense at the start of the day’s filming, the whole crew was tense, nobody had shot a nude scene before. Justine was the only woman on set that day and had ten sets of male eyes on her at all times, nothing to hide herself behind bar a flimsy script and my hand. She immediately set us all at ease with a few dirty jokes, which I won’t repeat here, and this obscene banter continued in the form of references to my todger every few minutes.

One line I remember was just after I’d put my hand into position and we were waiting while the camera and lighting men argued about some technicality or other, she poked my penis, which thanks to the tension and the lights and the ten men watching me had remained thankfully non-alert. “Ten minutes you’ve been lying with your hand on my cunt and you’re still Mr Floppy, what does it take to make you hard?”

My big secret, the one I tell nobody, is that while I was Mr Floppy, too nervous for an erection, she was as moist as a bank holiday Monday. “Don’t tell anyone,” she whispered, as I put my hand in place. More impressively it remained moist all day, in fact it was positively wet by the end of the shoot.

I saw an interview with Dame Justine a few years ago in which she claimed that she’d never appeared naked on screen. “My bush is yet to make an appearance,” she said. This is technically true, because my hand was in place her genitals never actually made an appearance. Bush isn’t the right word though, even in those days, when your average cunt was as hairy as Bill Oddie, she shaved downstairs. She was Brazilian before the term was even thought of.

Just as the final shot was taken, while my hand was still in place waiting for Don to confirm we could get dressed, she leant her mouth to my ear and whispered “If you come to my room at 12.23 a.m. we can do this for real.” By this point I felt like the little dutch boy with his finger in the dam, as her fanny was positively flowing, so I didn’t doubt that the offer was genuine.

Seconds after that Don said “I’m happy with that, scenes over, for goodness sake Terrence get your hand off that girl’s cunt,” and the crew turned away, embarrassed for the first time, so that Justine could get dressed.

“I hope you’re going to wash your hands,” Justine said to me, “you don’t where they’ve been.”

I didn’t wash my hands, even though my left hand absolutely reeked of her. Because it reeked of her. At the first opportunity I returned to my room, undressed, crept into my bed and, with my left hand welded to my nose, masturbated furiously.

You might wonder why I masturbated when I had the opportunity of the real thing later that night. The truth is I didn’t go, had no intention of going. Why is hard to explain. There was no doubt at all that I wanted to have sex with her, how could I not, you’ve seen what she looked like in those early days, and I’d spent a day lying next to her naked body. And I knew she was genuine, yes she’s a great actress but not even Meg Ryan could fake a wet fanny.

It wasn’t even the oddness of the offer. Justine had that sort of sense of humour, she’d seduce you, but only at 12.23 a.m. precisely, it had to be on her terms.

The real reason I didn’t go was that I knew I’d fall hopelessly in love with her if I did. It was bad enough spending two weeks of intense film-making with her, lead man to her lead lady. If we’d shared a bed it would have gone to my head, I’d probably have never looked at another woman as long as I lived.

Or would I? Maybe it would have been fine. Maybe it would have led to something, maybe Justine liked me more than I thought, maybe she wanted something more than a warm hand on her entrance. Maybe we’d have become one of the few successful showbiz marriages, together fifty years, me there in the background whilst she met the Queen, Nelson Mandella, Radiohead.

Maybe, just maybe, it was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.