Affection (8 page)

“Have I missed much? ”

“No. Just started.”

We settled down together, unlikely conspirators given our checkered history. From what I had read this film would be much worse than PG, which was the only rating that we were allowed to watch. This was at least an R rating in its uncut form.

Bowie bounced naked and there was his penis. I had never seen a human penis before. This tiny wormy thing, this little piece of ropey flesh was what all the fuss was about. I was incredulous and yet aroused, mostly by the covert nature of the viewing. When the penis disappeared from the screen I longed to see it again. A penis in the flesh, not just the vague representations in art, little lumps of
stone at the crux of sculptures, startling overstatements on the walls of Egyptian tombs. This was a human penis and it was like nothing I could have anticipated. It was way past my bedtime and I was glued to the screen. Drug use, violence, sex.

There was a sound in the corridor. We snapped the television off and listened, trembling under the covers, until we heard the toilet flushing and whoever it was walked back to the lounge room and shut the door. We giggled, sisters suddenly, and I wished I had been brave enough to do this before, join my sister on her adventures, break the rules and laugh and never once care that I might be caught.

I had my own secrets, of course. I hid objects in my bedroom that were long and thin enough to engage in sexual experimentation: candles, pencils, things with rubbery textures, costume jewelry, necklaces that could be inserted and removed stone by stone.

The only door that could be locked inside the house was the bathroom and so I would smuggle my toys in there hidden amongst my clothing. I was fond of long baths. I had a repertoire of lascivious images borrowed from the banned books and I took them out and turned them over in my memory until they were worn thin and smooth. I learned to hurry toward my silent orgasms. I practiced till I could come quickly and often, in the same way that other teenagers practiced smoking: hurried puffs, and all the evidence removed before anyone chanced by.

Here in the quiet moments, when the film had played out its
terrible conclusion, I was tempted to share my secret with my sister. I was obsessed by sex. I wanted to tell her I touched myself; a lot, several times a day. I wanted to ask my sister if she did the same, and if there was someone out there in the world that she thought about when she did it. I wanted to know if there was anyone she loved that she would be leaving behind.

But we had been assigned a double mattress on the floor and I was afraid that my confession would shatter the tenuous collegiality. I turned my back to her and said goodnight and waited to hear her fall asleep. Instead she sighed and tossed restlessly for a while before turning toward me.

“I don't want to go to Queensland,” she said, less than a whisper, just breath and the shape of the words on her quiet lips. “I won't stay there for long.”

I shifted onto my back, afraid to look at her in case she raised the barriers once more.

“I'm eighteen next year,” she told me. “Hicksville, backwater, country bumpkins. I'll work for a year and then I'll take off.”

“Where will you go?”

“Anywhere. Away.”

She settled down with her back toward me and I was careful not to touch her skin under the blankets. In normal circumstances she would never share a bed with me but this was different. One more night and we would be gone.

I could smell the weedy scent of river oaks, chill air, the sound of my family working late into the morning, scrubbing cupboards and painting skirting boards. Occasionally there would be a little tinkle of laughter; sometimes a yelp as one dog or another was tripped over or stood on.

I could smell the constant stream of tobacco smoke, one cigarette after another. My sister's breath weighed heavy with sleep. The sunlight began to seep into the sky and I wasn't ready for a new day.

The movers would be arriving in a matter of hours. Perhaps they had already packed the pots and pans and I would have to face the day without a coffee.

I closed my eyes and tried to force myself to sleep, but I was held at arm's length from oblivion by a fluttering that was half my own excitement, half my sister's foreboding and when the door was flung open, “Krissy, Karen, better get up now,” I was already too exhausted to lift my head.

I am folding my husband's clothes into vaguely neat piles when I remember the night we met. Strange how memory works, the scent of the washing powder, which hasn't dissolved completely and clings to the crotch of his jeans in little white clumps. I turn the sleeves over a shirt, trying to replicate Anthony's obsessive neatness, and I am transported to the chaos of my flat and the sight of a man crawling through the window.

He woke my husband, who was not my husband yet. I blinked at his beautiful face and couldn't, in fact, remember his name. I thought it might be Andrew but I was too shy to try it out in case I was mistaken.

The man was my neighbor but Andrew wasn't to know that. A short man, the neighbor, barely five foot two, round and with a lot of hair. You could see the hair poking out from the top of the towel
wrapped around his waist. A shirt of hair clothing his entire upper body, and the hair on his head kept long, cascading down his back in a ponytail. My neighbor hefted himself up through the window and hit the floor with a thud, and my husband woke.

We both glanced up at the man climbing through my window with only a towel wrapped around his waist.

“Oh,” he said, and, “sorry. I didn't realize . . .” and he left by the door, pulling it gently shut behind him.

“I have never slept with him,” I told my husband. I measured people in this way at the time, dividing them up into lovers and ex-lovers, potential lovers and those I would not sleep with. Scant few. My neighbor included.

“Okay Kathy.”

And I laughed. “I don't remember your name either.”

“You will,” he said.

It sounded like a line. “Ah. Will I.”

“Yes. You won't be able to get rid of me.”

I shuffled up to sitting, pulled the pillow comfortably behind my back.

“Andrew,” I said.

“Anthony.”

“Anthony, then. I am not heterosexual or monogamous.”

He nodded. “I understand, but you will be while you are with me.”

“And will I be with you?”

“Yes.”

“Really? For how long?”

“Long enough.”

He kissed me then, and it was nice. Kissing wasn't a thing I prided myself on, but there was a tenderness behind this kiss and I drank it down. I felt like coffee and a cigarette but a kiss would do. We were disturbed by the shudder of the window being opened again and another man, another neighbor, spidered his way over the sill.

“Oh,” he said, but he tiptoed into the room regardless, reached for a guitar that was resting against a wall, nodded, waved and scrambled out through the window once more, all jangly strings and echoing wood.

“I've slept with him,” I told my husband.

“Heterosexual and monogamous, Kathy.”

“Krissy.”

He kissed me. I liked it. I didn't believe him then, but now, eighteen years later, I wonder how he knew.

I stood on the floor and looked out through the bones of the unfinished house. The walls would go up tomorrow but they had laid the floor first, which made no sense to me. It looked like a dance floor, polished wood running straight and shiny from one side of the house to the other, still open to the elements. I stood on the polished boards and imagined the tracks of kangaroos bouncing over the floorboards, brown snakes propelling their sinewy bodies over the slithery surface, cane toads, hundreds of them, congregating in what would become my bedroom.

It was like two houses conjoined. Our side of the house had three bedrooms, one each for my mother, my sister, and me. Their side of the house had three bedrooms, for my aunt, my grandfather, and my grandmother. There were two doors between the divided camps
and we could lock them, separating into our natural divisions. In the middle, a shared space the size of a lounge room. No man's land. A room to be fought over, just like the place where my grandmother was born. There had always been a divide in the family, and here it had been drawn out, the differences between us made explicit by the pattern of the rooms.

Dragonhall itself would be on the adjacent property. My grandmother stepped us through it, walking through the jaws of the dragon into the entryway where you would pay your money, buy your gifts. Beyond this there were rooms set up with different tableaux. Fairytales in one part. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, Puck and the Fairy Mountain, the Little Match Girl. Then the real life. Dinosaurs, Egyptian mythology. They seemed to have abandoned the idea of the chocolate lake and the little train for children to ride from room to room. Scaled down, it still seemed that Dragonhall would be a proud monument to their years of work.

For the moment they had built a Besser Brick shed and all the models were stored in this. There were damages. My grandmother pulled Alice out of a box. Alice had appeared in libraries across the western suburbs, peering out from behind a giant mushroom at the riot of a tea party gone wrong. The plates upended, the guests asleep in coffee cups. A mother nursing a pig in a baby suit, a rabbit checking his watch. Now I saw how her fingers had been bent, the surface layer of plaster cracked, the paint chipped and peeling. I
touched her damaged face, brushing aside the wave of sandy blond hair. Real human hair, from the head of a school friend of mine who had told me she was cutting her long blond ponytail off. (I had been distraught, pretty girls should never lose their hair. My own hair was a harsh and scratchy mat of dark curls and I stroked the softness of these locks and wished I could exchange my hair for hers.) I had told my family the story and my grandmother was ready with an offer for the soon-to-be-abandoned hair. Alice looked beautiful wearing my friend's hair tied back from her face by a blue band of silk.

Now I touched her shattered cheek and stroked her hair. I remembered the transaction, a scalp paid for in full, but I could barely remember my friend at all.

 

 

I walked through the grounds of the schoolyard, such a little place, a few portable classrooms, a permanent building, a little stretch of asphalt for the kids to play on. The school only held classes up to grade ten. I noticed the bored teenagers clustered around the park, sneaking cans of beer under their sweaters. They scowled at me distrustfully. New kid, city kid, fat kid. It reminded me of the kids at Blacktown, watchful creatures waiting for their opportunity to strike.

My mother told me that most of them just dropped out after grade ten. There were jobs on their parents' farms. Plenty of work to be done. I noticed the groups of older boys, their predatory glances as they leaned together on the balcony of the pub.

I sat in the middle of our yard and there was something settling over me that I couldn't shake, a sense of dread, a tight feeling in my chest, a howling loneliness like wind through a gutted building. We were all crammed into a little space and there was no time for privacy. There was always someone waiting for the bathroom. There was my sister on a twin mattress on the floor. There were dogs edging me out of my blankets. I had no space and no alone time and my body was edgy from lack of release.

My sister found me sitting amongst the dry grasses. She noticed the mood I was in, and I was surprised when she chose to sit beside me as if we were friends.

“What's up?”