My Hundred Lovers (3 page)

My mother liked babies but she did not like the children they grew into. I was the eldest of three, with a younger brother and sister, and we recognised early that our mother did not want us. She was narcissistically self-absorbed, given to great howling speeches about how our father had wrecked her life.

Once, in winter, we came home from school to find the door locked. We could see our mother through the curtains, slumped in front of the television, drunk, dressed in a cocktail dress. She was wearing a turban.

Soon I found the comfort of my fingers. If a lover might be defined as one who loves, then I fell in love with my fingers, or perhaps my fingers fell in love with me.

My fingers are not beautiful. My hands are small like my mother's and even now that I am fully grown they are no larger than a child's. They have a certain fine-boned quality to them. My fingers are not long and elegant like a pianist's fingers but somewhat short with knobbly knuckles.

These same unlovely fingers led me to the rosy-tipped clitoris hidden in the folds of those other lips. Many times since I have witnessed the fat seeking fingers of baby girls, as unschooled as grubs, chance upon that rosy pulse.

The main incident you need to know about my childhood happened when I was nine. My mother had been drinking and my father had disappeared, as usual, to take a girl out for a drink or a fuck.

I surmise that when my mother finally heard my father's car tyres crunching over the newly laid red gravel of the driveway she raced into the kitchen and took the biggest knife she could find from the drawer. She then ran upstairs and dragged me from my dreaming bed to the top of the stairs so that when my father opened the front door he was confronted by the sight of my mother holding the tip of the knife against my throat.

‘If you take another step I'll slit her throat,' she said.

‘Ah . . . sweetheart,' my father replied. ‘Listen . . .'

‘Don't you sweetheart me,' said my mother.

My father tiptoed backwards out the door, leaving me at the mercy of the knife in my mother's trembling fingers. Fortunately for me, the moment my father closed the door my mother collapsed on the stairs, the knife falling.

When the knife was at my throat I left my body. That is to say, some part of me detached itself from my own skin. You might suppose that at the moment I left my body, I began my long quest to reunite myself with it.

SIX
Grass

SOON THE BABY MOVES FROM
the pram to a blanket spread on the grass, and then rolls off the blanket and learns to stand upright.

The feel of grass beneath her feet is one of her earliest bodily memories. The baby does not weigh much and her feet are soft and unused, as silky and slippery as the ears of a freshly washed dog. The grass feels light beneath her feet, springy.

When the baby sits down, naked, because it is summer and the day is hot and she is not wearing a nappy, she feels for the first time the delicious half-ticklish, half-spiky feel of grass against her bottom, and smells the cut-open scent of it.

Grass smells like earth, like summer, like joy, and she tries to catch tiny blades of it in her fist, and to stuff it into her mouth. She longs to eat it, to have it inside herself, to
be
the grass, the blade, the smell of ripeness.

Once, grown, the woman is walking in a field near her house in Fanjeaux, France. It is a polished autumn morning and she notices that the tip of every single blade of grass holds a perfect dewdrop.

She gets down on her haunches to look more closely: everywhere she looks there are hundreds of shining, translucent orbs, spectral fruit, delicate, trembling.

She remembers too the feel of the wild, unnamed grasses she once lay on outside a stone house in the village of Soisy-sur-École, in the woods near Fontainebleau. It was early spring, and the winter had been harsh, and on this particular morning the sun came out with such violence she was shocked to discover that she had lived for so long behind the moon.

She did not walk out into the loving sun so much as rush into it and fall upon the grass in a swoon.

She lay on her back in a starfish shape, her wintery feet freed from shoes, her hands outstretched into the rhapsody of grass. Blades curled up between her fingers and weaved about her earlobes. It seemed to have grown overnight.

Turning her head her eyes were level with it so that the grass and the woman were as one, and she saw for the first time intricate white flowers, no bigger than her smallest fingernail, growing from the grass. She understood that the flowers, the racing grass, the root-world beneath, the whole of the natural world existed because of the nourishment of sunshine, falling leaves and water.

The world cracked open, in her eyes, in her ears, in her lungs: down on the ground, amid the sprouting grass and the earth's iceberg depths, she heard shackled nature growing, trying to revert to what it wanted to be.

SEVEN
The seventh lover

IT IS OFTEN TRUE THAT
the prettiest of children grow into the plainest of adults, and the plainest of children emerge beautiful. In time I shed my freakish newborn hirsuteness, but kept a fine down on my arms and legs, in the manner of certain Greek or Turkish women. I have never needed to wax or bleach my moustache but now, occasionally, I pluck a stray wiry black hair from my chin. take after my father. Sadly, I have never been beautiful.

What I am instead is what the French call
jolie laide
; that is, pretty and ugly, or unconventionally attractive. For a long time the thing that saved my face from obscurity was my mouth. It is my father's mouth, sensuous and plump, the upper lip full and well drawn. My front teeth are slightly prominent and once a lover, intending to compliment me, said my mouth frequently appeared enticingly open, ready, like a porn star's.

I grew into my adult face early. For years I looked older than I was, so that at sixteen I could pass for twenty, at twenty I could pass for twenty-six or twenty-seven. Fortuitously, sometime around my early thirties, I began to look younger than my age. This was a genetic fluke: after I lost my husband, when I was thirty-five, I took lovers ten years younger than myself and not one of them thought to ask how old I was.

Now the succulence of my pornographic mouth has left me. My lips, like my grandmother's, have left me. I am shameless about the violence of my physical ruin.

I have always had a well-developed musculature, an accident of birth, inherited from my mother. Before she took to drinking, my mother had been a swimming champion, at a national level, one of those doomed athletes who are good but not good enough. She did not make the team to represent her country at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games and so failed to reach international ranking.

I am no swimmer but I have my mother's aquatic limbs. At seven years of age my calves were honed like a diver's, and my thighs naturally sculpted. When I was dressed in a bathing costume or a pink ballet leotard, adults remarked that I had the physique of a gymnast. In ballet class, standing in front of the mirror practising my pliés at the barre, I first noticed the graceful scoop of my back and the plump rise of my buttocks.

Whenever anyone complimented me on the pleasing symmetry of my limbs I never thanked them. It seemed to me that this would be like expecting a thankyou from a tree, which had as much to do with the business of its appearance as I did. My mother did not take kindly to such compliments either, since the graceful ability of the body was exclusively her domain. ‘You're all right, Deborah,' she said once, ‘but you're nothing out of the box. I was exquisite when I was your age.'

The hairy girl has one other distinguishing feature. She first learns that it is a distinguishing feature the summer she turns seven, when she happens to walk naked past her mother who is lying in the bath, smoking.

‘I don't remember my inner lips being so exposed when I was a girl,' her mother says.

‘What?'

‘Your inner lips. Normally the big outer lips cover the inner ones.'

The girl looks down at herself. ‘What's wrong with them?'

The mother takes a drag of her cigarette and a long roll of ash drops into the water. ‘Bugger,' she says, sitting up and placing the cigarette in the ashtray at the end of the bath. ‘Perhaps they'll grow with the rest of you. I can't remember if they do or not.'

The girl is frightened she has done this to herself. Recently she has changed her masturbation technique: she has taken to lying on her stomach with her two index fingers on either side of what she has just learnt are her inner lips. Perhaps she has stretched them?

For years she believes she is the cause of her physical deformity.

That seven-year-old girl with the honed calves and the stretched inner lips, how did she know about desire? How did she find out that it spread up from that secret pulse, up and out through the inner lips and the outer, up through the fingers, the breath, and out into the world through the open mouth?

How did she come to be breathing so hot and so closely in a closed box with her brother?