The Best Australian Stories (35 page)

None of this was savoury, but the finger prodding was the worst, and it probably became more ardent once reports and feelings came of what was happening to captured boys over in the girls' dorm. I know for sure that things were happening over there because I too had my turn. And it was much the same routine. Dragged. By force of numbers. Swimmers removed. Furious kicking. A burning desperation to escape. Legs finally spread and pinned. A mass of hands covering my mouth. A couple of hands touching me, lifting my penis, grabbing my balls, one or more girls saying that I should be let go and then another girl saying ‘Soon' before she grabbed my penis and performed a frantic and uneducated wank … lots of excited laughter, me wrenching my head to the side, buckling my back and seeing through a gap in the surrounding tangle of legs Tania laying face down on her bed, weeping, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt scrunched over her head. A last quick-fire pull on my dick and I'm released, like a slingshot. Fired out of the room. My involvement over. The numbers dwindling. The mania cooling. No one speaking of it later.

That the year level overall calmed after this – or was embarrassed, or scarred, or both, and so either scared itself back to more normal eleven-year-old behaviour or drove its behaviour underground – that the group calmed is true, but that Tania and I thereafter attached ourselves to one another far more is the greater truth that I recall.

To say, though, that our innocence was taken or severed that manic afternoon at the school camp and that on returning, with us going off by ourselves more after that – and, eventually, making love – to say that this was our way of somehow returning a feeling of ownership to our innocence – to say this is nonsense, adult rationalisation. We were not adults. We were eleven years old. Lying out the back of the school oval. Down near where, some years before, an ambitious teacher had begun to build a cricket scoreboard – a huge scoreboard, made from power poles and railway sleepers. It had never made it beyond a vague frame that now served mostly as a perch for seagulls. We'd lie beneath this scoreboard in the rough-mown onion grass. The grass given this name not because it was onion but because if you pulled a tuft of it out, there was a bulb at the end. The first time I'd noticed this I was lying in it with a group of other boys, and one of us lay face down and as a laugh started pretending to fuck the ground, singing ‘Come On Baby Light My Fire' as he did so. As I laughed I pulled up some grass and there at the end was a bulb.

But when Tania and I were lying under the scoreboard, we were the only ones there and we knew it. We'd started the French kissing thing earlier in the year along with so many others, and we'd kept doing it two or three days each week since – by ourselves now. If anyone else still did it, they didn't say. In the weeks after that Monbulk camp Tania and I would lie beneath the scoreboard and talk, as if marvelling, as if scared, of the hair that was growing between our legs and the changes we were feeling, and while we never showed each other these changes I know that more than once just talking about it made my penis erect. In fact if Tania hadn't suggested that we might fuck, I would've gone on thinking that that's where the main excitement lay; in talking.

But Tania did suggest it. Just as autumn began to hold and the ground began to cool. We were lying on our backs and she just said, ‘Do you think you'll want to fuck me one day?'

To which I said, ‘Fuck you?'

To which she said, softer, ‘Yeah.'

‘What?' I said.

‘Fuck,' she said; ‘me,' she half-smiled.

That's as far as that conversation went, and for the next few months it didn't go out of my head but neither did it fester. The weather turned colder and wetter and lying on the oval fell away. So that the after-school norm through winter consisted of me riding my little blue bike about ten minutes to her house. She lived in a house – there was a name we used for houses like hers, the name Railway House. This meant it looked identical to hundreds in the area built for workers at the nearby railway yard. We lived in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and although I never thought of it then, these suburbs were work suburbs, suburbs where trains and tracks were fixed and forged, where refineries took in crude oil and pumped out thick black smoke, where the city's meat stocks were slaughtered and their skins dried, where manufacturing took place. Tania's family lived in a Railway House, which was green weatherboard and small and rudimentary, except that hers was smaller than most; it was divided in two. It was opposite a rail track, and sometimes we'd play over at the track together, grabbing heavy railway stones and lobbing them like they were grenades at passenger trains and locomotives passing through. This was unusual though. Most of the time she'd come out carrying a chunk of bread and a long, thin stick of spicy meat. She'd straddle the bar of my bike, and sit on the edge of the pointy seat, facing me, pressed up against me; she'd feed me, and feed herself. She loved me then, as I loved her, and while Tania was a brazen girl, I also thought then as I think now that she was just an eleven-year-old who was committed to what was happening between us. I made her happy, and she made me happy, and although fucking her wasn't what it was about, I knew that I wanted to be as close to her as possible as much as possible, and that sitting on my bike with legs touching, eating sausages and bread and talking, kissing occasionally, was as fine as my life then or after would ever feel.

Spring came. The ground warmed up, and pretty soon we were back lying out beneath that scoreboard on the onion grass. Tania's mum worked in a bakery and her German-speaking dad at the railway, my mum as a valuer's clerk and my dad in the office down at the wool-store. Between 3.30 p.m. when school finished and 5.30 when the first of our parents arrived home, we kept up our regime of kissing, though we talked more than we kissed, and as the weather turned warmer again and shorts and T-shirts returned, we talked more of puberty and what it was doing, and it was only then – as Tania started bringing salami sandwiches and the season's first ripe tomatoes, which we munched whole, like apples – that we both actually took our shorts off and showed the other what so many of our classmates had seen of us earlier in the year. Tania had distinct little breasts and a fine but distinct mat of soft pubic hair – mostly laid flat but just starting to curl. My penis was nothing impressive, but on the occasions when I now touched myself at night, instead of the touching ending with a slight zinging in my penis that made touching it further uncomfortable, a tiny amount of fluid now crept out.

On the first of December, the first day of summer in our grade six year, with the school day over and the end of the school year approaching, Tania and I walked from class and across the netball courts, past the canteen with the burst of sticky cola splattered beneath the windows, and out onto the cricket oval. The whole school was dispersing and other kids were around – Rocco was there, the kid who'd helped start it all with the French kissing earlier in the year. I remember looking over at him and making to wave, my other arm moving around the tiny waist of Tania, and seeing him absent-mindedly bend and pick up a stone, step forward, and with an intense flick of the wrist fling the stone at a flock of seagulls who'd come in on the afternoon breeze, the same gulls that sat on the scoreboard. That the stone hit one of the gulls was a fluke. A piece of sheer, brutal speed. Power. It's remarkable what an eleven-year-old can do, if he or she has a flare for it.

The gull flapped to the ground. There was blood. There was flapping and squawking. There were gulls circling overhead.

Tania and I ran to the gull. Picked it up. One of its wings torn so badly, we could easily have pried it free. Blood spreading out across the white-grey feathers. The frightening speed of it. Here. Then gone. Dead. It died. As we held it.

That this was the event that immediately preceded Tania and me fucking – we were shaken, we were crying – means that we would never have fucked that day without it, and probably never would have.

We walked to the scoreboard at the rear of the oval. We said nothing. We lay on the onion grass. Slight sunburn on my forehead, picked out by the afternoon sun. Blood of the gull still on my hands. Tania moving close to me. Our arms moving together. Hugging. Pressing. Crying. For an hour. More. A boy and a girl. Eleven years old.

I remember my cock going hard against her, and my reaction to pull my hips back, so that she wouldn't notice – and Tania's to grab me tighter, back towards her.

I remember Tania opening her eyes and looking at me. Brilliant green. Looking into her eyes and seeing the reflection of a sole seagull still circling overhead, squawking.

I remember Tania's hand reaching down and pushing my shorts down. Her crying, as a sob escaped, as she grabbed me. Me knowing then that I wanted it. Whatever it was. Tania and me. On.

Happy people are ignorant people, or can seem that way, because they don't plough the same fields that discontent people do. I was a happy child. My fields were free, gently breezed, sunny. I knew nothing of sex. Not the mechanics of it. If it wasn't for Tania, who was happy with me but was not happy at home, I'd have kissed her too hard and pressed into her too much, too fast, and everything would've been different, and worse, and ultimately unsuccessful.

But it wasn't. It was Tania. It was me. There was the onion grass and the frame of an unfinished scoreboard, and through the scoreboard there was sky. In a couple of weeks primary school would be over, we'd be little again in a big school, our plans suddenly smaller and the expectations higher. We'd lose friends. We'd lose touch. We'd lose the freedom of people believing we couldn't think for ourselves, when all the while we could – and for a lot of the day, were magically allowed to. In a little over a week, Tania and I would try to make love again, and it would not feel right even before we realised we were being watched. Being watched, that destruction that we all long for, would be our tragedy. People would be informed. I'd be blamed, and counselled, and Tania would be pulled from school, robbed of her last sentimental days of primary school and later sent along the railway line to a secondary school far away from me. We would fight for each other for a few months, then lose contact for years. At nineteen years of age, Tania – I'd hear – would become a policewoman, and on my rounds as a mediocre local journalist I'd make it so that I'd drive past her parents' railway house – there'd be no sign of her, and I'm not sure what kind of sign I was seeking anyway.

But that day beneath the scoreboard with the smell of a dead bird on our hands and of salami sandwiches somewhere nearby, we knew none of this. We were upset. Crying. Tania wriggling her shorts off as she lay on top of me. Her mouth on mine. Our eyes open, fixed at one another – staring so hard. As much as anything, it was then a matter of vibrating together, into one another, a conveyor belt of trembling desire. Forward. So that truly, I did not know that I was fully inside her until she eventually moved back a little, lifting a little, so that my cock slid out then pushed back into her – I then realised that I'd been inside her for some time, that we'd just kept pushing on, that pushing was penetration but it was the sliding that was sex – the slipping, the motion, the falling – that we were fully together as we reached into the depths of this great, and inconspicuous, pleasure.

And while to a significant extent I regret that we did this – of course I do, not the least because the wrenching of Tania away from me leaves a hole that has been built around, but will always remain – I also think this: so young, so secret, inside Tania, doing something I'd not yet even lusted for, I never had, and never have again, felt so unleashed.

The Book of Howard H

Luke Davies

Jean Had the Knowledge

For a while they gave me Ritalin tablets and for a while I felt really good. This was around '61, when I was having big problems trying to hold TWA together. On certain days my stress levels would rise. The nervous anxiety embodied itself in the feeling that I was about to be overwhelmed. That I would, quite simply, quite spontaneously, collapse. The doctors were worried I might implode and thought Ritalin would help me focus on all the memos and deal permutations sure to emerge as the whole TWA buyback unfolded. It had been a long time since I'd had the thought I might lose everything. My consciousness was made heavy by exhaustion. By now Codeine and Morphine and Valium and Seconal and Librium were like trusted friends. You have to be careful when a new friend is introduced into the mix. It can upset the balance. But I thought we all got along just famously.

It is all just a glory. There is no sense of cause and effect. Ritalin doesn't rush right through you in that ecstasy of urgency the way an injection does. But some hours later you find yourself beatifically propelled into the Onrush of Life and the Clarity of Things and the Purpose of Purposes. And there is just no stopping you. And the fact that not only is life sublimely good but that you can, methodically, efficiently, with speed but not haste, get all your tasks done, is a strong thick
smell
before it's anything else, anything felt, heard, thought, abstracted, processed.

And it all streams out of me, like light. Memo after memo, I rule my world.

And for a while you don't know it's the drugs, the new friends working things out among themselves.

The last time I'd had speed this good, I was making
Hell's Angels
, running a million over budget (this was 1928) and it shouldered some of the weight for me. It was the solution to problems of budget and focus and overload and it helped me maintain control over a bucking project since control, ultimately, is all there is. The problem was this damned stuff is so good you take more (why wouldn't you if it works so well?) and nobody tells you that eventually it'll tilt your axis. There were portals opening from my brain to the universe, there was such clarity in the light and the shape of clouds, my breathing was magnificent. There was a crispness to existence. You feel that all engines will run forever.