My Hundred Lovers (15 page)

Finally the day arrived when the Suspicious Wanderer could no longer command her own fat legs.

She was walking home when her fat legs stepped off a kerb seemingly of their own accord and she was thrown backwards onto the pavement by a car.

She was not hurt because the car had barely been moving, having just taken off at a green light. But the driver got out and screamed at her for ten minutes before the Suspicious Wanderer collapsed, shaking from shock.

Up until that moment the Suspicious Wanderer had not known she did not wish to die. She had believed herself in love with oblivion but in that shocking moment she understood she was in love only with escape and not that final dark place.

She stopped swallowing Valium and flawed, broken biscuits,
pouf
, just like that.

FIFTY-ONE
The hairdresser

IS THERE ANYTHING MORE CRIMINALLY
frivolous than having a hairdresser massage your scalp over a basin of warm sudsy water? Anything more indulgent than letting your body relax into the swoon of ministration under the hairdresser's healing hands? A few moments of ease in the quotidian days, with no other purpose than to soothe and pass fingers not your own through the strands of your dying hair.

FIFTY-TWO
The blind lover

HOW MANY BODIES I PLUNDERED,
how many mouths I kissed before I kissed the mouth of the prince! For uncertain reasons I needed to learn many lessons involving the tongue, the hands, the ears, the belly and the fallible heart.

The moment I laid my eyes on Stephen Porter's blind eyes I knew he would become my lover. Because of the many romantic stories I had heard Super Nan tell about her blind mother, Rose—who when she was sixteen bravely sailed by herself all the way from Limerick to Australia—I had always been fascinated by blind people.

I was still with the shadow lover, in the fifth and final year of my disappearance. I was back in my body, free of drugs and biscuits, but still, still, still not free of the shadow lover.

Stephen Porter was an Honours student, majoring in French, a tremulous young man with a guide dog and a white stick, who lived down the street from Ro. She knew him vaguely and introduced us one morning as we were getting into Claudette.

‘Deb's a Francophile, too,' Ro said. ‘Like you she conveniently forgets France's shameful role in collaborating with the Nazis. She thinks everyone was in the French resistance.'

Stephen Porter smiled at me. ‘Then we should get together, mate, and toast
la vie française
,' he said.

I watched him walk off, his white stick tapping the concrete. I was back in my body and wanted to test it.

After that first time, I met Stephen Porter several times walking down the street. He often had a small food stain on his T-shirt or a toothpaste smear around his mouth, because he had recently moved out of the family home into a house with some other students, thoughtless boys, who did not notice or care. He was frail-looking, a long-haired blond, with a fine wispy beard and an attractive way of speaking, very precise, with a slight lisp. Stephen Porter's face was vulnerable, sweet, and either his blindness had turned him gentle or else he was born that way.

When he first held me, it was with a surprising firmness. I looked into his blind eyes and he held my head between his hands and kissed me.

‘I'm no different to anyone else you know, mate,' he said. ‘I find girls hold very romantic views about blind men.'

‘I don't!' I said and he laughed, a giggly laugh that made me laugh too.

‘I know perfectly well where all your best bits are,' he said.

His eyes were a strange, indeterminate bluey-brown colour, and sometimes looked like everyone else's seeing eyes, except that one pupil was slightly larger than the other and occasionally wandered off to the outside edge of his eye. Sometimes, too, his eyes closed of their own accord, as if they were looking into the memory box inside his head. At other times his unseeing eyes looked straight into mine.

When Stephen Porter laid me on the bed it was with tenderness. He traced my form, a fingertip analysis of each curve, each crevice, each rise. His gentle mouth came to rest upon the mound between my legs, a soft suckling, bringing my own scent to my lips when he raised his head again to kiss me. My scent was caught in his moustache, a lingering fragrance. When I kissed his thin hairless chest the scent travelled with me, down to the pointed tip of his penis. We coupled gently, nuzzled, tender, arriving at our moment of sweetness in silence.

He took me to meet his family. Straight away I envied him them and wished they were mine, a measured, happy, musical family, who treated each other respectfully. The father was a metallurgist, and the mother worked with blind children, retraining after her second son was inexplicably born blind, his optic nerves having failed to develop. Sometimes they sang together around the piano, like a happy family in a children's story.

Stephen Porter's family refused to treat their blind son any differently to a sighted child. As a consequence he had repeatedly broken arms and legs, chipped a front tooth, and had given himself a white scar down the left side of his face in his quest to climb trees, shoot bows and arrows, and travel too fast on skateboards like other boys. He played the piano beautifully and the guitar badly, singing Leonard Cohen songs in his precise, high voice, transforming them entirely.

I told him Super Nan's mother had been born blind, too, but no-one knew why.

‘It was a long time ago. In Ireland,' I said.

‘She was lucky she wasn't tossed into the nearest well for being a witch,' he said. ‘There has always been a lot of superstition about blind people.'

Not long before I slept with Stephen Porter for the last time, I asked him if he could imagine light.

‘I think of it as being cream and white,' he said.

‘But how can you imagine colour?' I asked. ‘How do you even know what cream and white is?'

‘Colour is just a concept I've picked up over the years. I think of dark as being green, or red, or black.'

I closed my eyes.

‘I see everything from the inside out,' Stephen said.

As I lay on the bed with my eyes closed I tried to imagine redness. How did anyone begin to picture colour without the help of the vibrant vegetable world?

I tried to dream my way inside Stephen's frail blond head, where he had memorised existence. ‘Most of us have gifts we never use, you know,' he said as we lay holding hands.

Stephen Porter remains one of the kindest, most thoughtful men I have ever met. I tried very hard to fall in love with him but I could not.

Lying on the bed holding hands with Stephen Porter I tried to feel what it must be like being him, not being able to see my own body, and how strange it was, since the outline of my body had come to represent the outline of myself. Lying with my eyes closed, the world dark, it seemed to me that my consciousness was situated within my physical self. How could a blind girl have had the courage to traverse the world by ship? Without being able to open my eyes and see where I was in space, where I began and ended, I felt as if I did not exist.

My eyes sprang open as the darkness pressed upon me.

‘You think it's like being dead,' Stephen said. I looked at him. He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, speaking softly. ‘What happens is that after a while all your other senses become more acute. Hearing. Smell. Touch. I don't have to look into someone's face to know what they are feeling; I just have to hear their voice.'

I did not speak.

‘I'm not talking in metaphors, mate,' he said.

My blind lover went away to teach. The Department of Education sent him to Orange, the town where Super Nan grew up and where Nana Elsie was born. I visited him twice. He taught farm boys and girls who did not care if French was the language of romance. He lived in a little flat above the main street and together we walked out of the town and along roads that cut through brown open land scattered with sheep.

We never decided not to see each other, or even spoke of it. I did not know how to be intimate except through my body, as if I believed that in opening the door of my lips or my sex I had opened the door to myself.

We let each other drift away, Stephen Porter and me, him with his metaphorical eyes that had memorised the world.

FIFTY-THREE
The boss lover

BEFORE LONG SHE IS PREGNANT.

She knows she is pregnant because her girlish pink nipples take on a rich dark hue and a strange brown line runs down her belly like a tattoo. The smell of eggs revolts her.

How did she get pregnant when like every girl in the whole world she is on the pill?

And who is the father?

The shadow lover?

Stephen Porter?

Surely not Leonardo della Francesca?

Ro accompanies her to the abortion clinic where the Suspicious Wanderer disgraces herself by sobbing as the act is performed by a kindly Chinese doctor wearing a wedding ring.

‘It's all right, sweetie,' coos Ro into her ear. The kindly Chinese doctor has let Ro stand in for all the absent fathers.

Afterwards, Ro buys her an extra-large slice of carrot cake with sticky cream-cheese icing from The Pudding Shop in Glebe. Ro keeps stroking her small hand as the Suspicious Wanderer continues to cry.

‘I'm such a fuckwit,' she says through her sobs.

‘I know you are,' says Ro. ‘Never mind.'

She is not supposed to have penetrative sex for two weeks after the abortion.

She is supposed to have the wit to say no to the plump man who wants to fuck her.

She is a feminist, a new type of woman, strong and independent, who will not birth eleven children and be at the mercy of a big fellow with a gun who cuts off her hair.

Then why is she letting the plump man into her post-abortion bed? He is not even her type, being too large, too loud, too
there
. He is a big-shot publisher, often in the news, and her occasional boss.

He says, ‘Oh, come on, Debbie, these things are just arbitrary dates. I promise I'll be gentle.'

And he is. He is gentle, certainly, but she is not engaged, let alone aroused, and would in fact prefer it if he were not there. She would prefer it if she could learn to say the word ‘no' instead of worrying about hurting a man's feelings or whether a man will cease to like her if she says it or refuse to give her another job. Oh, poor Suspicious Wanderer, so nice to all men!