My Hundred Lovers (8 page)
WHEN NANA ELSIE WAS A
girl, just before motherhood claimed her, she kissed a boy in Orange. Orange is a fruit-growing district, rich in apples, pears and stone fruit such as cherries, peaches, apricots and plums. A high-up place where it sometimes snows in winter, Orange has the wrong climate for oranges.
Nana Elsie kissed the boy at the railway station, just before the train arrived to take him away. For a long while afterwards, she used to walk to the station and look with longing down the tracks.
Like Nana Elsie, I sometimes look back with longing. I think of the first lover who entered my body, how gently he held me, and how my life had left me unprepared for such a kind and steady hold.
THE FIRST TIME A STRANGER
reached into the girl's underpants and found the sliver of flesh at the centre of her, her knees folded in surprise.
At the time the girl was in Sydney, Australia, about to walk as many miles as she could for the flooded children of Bangladesh. Men were on the moon but certain citizens of North Vietnam were living in tunnels beneath the earth.
The girl was not yet walking though; she was standing up, pressed against a wall which formed part of St Ives High School, in what she would later learn was the classic knee-trembler position. Her dress was bunched up around her bum, her mouth was open, and if the boy whom she hardly knew had not held her up she might have fallen.
He was a big boy for fifteen, tall, with wide shoulders, and a dark rinse of hair across his upper lip which he would soon start to shave. He was offhand, cruel, not kind and steady, and he held her in a way she would come to know well, but which she felt for the first time in that moment: a larger body than her own encircling hers, engulfing her, yet at the same time empowering her. The way the boy stood over her, claiming her, placing one hand tight against her lower back, the other hand in her pants, running his fingers in light, feathery strokes over that sliver of flesh with its secret pulse, his tongue deep in her mouth, well, she suddenly understood the full nature of her femaleness.
She felt herself being unlocked.
She felt herself to be embodied, to be experiencing herself as a material thing, as a heart, a spine, a stomach, a womb, yet in the same second she knew herself to be dispossessed.
She was a daydream, a breath, nothing other than what the body wanted.
TICK-TOCK. TICK-TOCK. WHAT
else does the body know? What else does the breathing heart remember?
Like a daguerreotype, that beautiful, abandoned photographic process through which an image is produced on a thin copper plate with a highly polished silver coating, the past floats up, water-damaged, faded, obscured by curious markings.
A cloudy vapour shrouds an event here, a remark there, and brown and black rings blot out entire faces. In the 1850s, daguerreotypes were kept sealed beneath a piece of glass, and in the house of the stiff-backed Methodist grandmother there was a stained photograph of Mademoiselle Emilie Joubert, newly arrived in Australia, but the glass was gone. Most often it is not just the glass seal which has gone from our memories, but the images beneath them.
The body remembers. The body remembers happiness in a warm childhood bed, with her mother, her brother, her sister and the grandmother she loved best of all.
Sometimes Nana Elsie stayed for the weekend. After the father got up, the children and the grandmother joined the mother in the marital bed. The girl's mother cuddled her mother like a child, and everyone cuddled the person they were next to, a huddle of bodies, ankle against ankle, a fug of human breath. They cuddled like this for many years until one day the brother said he didn't want to cuddle anymore.
In that bed, Nana Elsie told them stories. She told them about the time she put a doll's eye up her nose and how the doctor got it out with a pair of especially long tweezers. She told them about her mother, Super Nan, whose husband had proved to be the jealous type. When he came back from the Great War to find yet another child (Super Nan had not known she was pregnant when he left) he refused to acknowledge paternity and kept her under lock and key. He burnt all her clothes and cut off her hair and she was only ever allowed out if accompanied by him or one of her eleven children. She finally escaped when her youngest child was five, and her husband went around looking for them with a gun. âDad was a big fellow, too,' Nana Elsie said.
Nana Elsie had a radiance about her person. The whites of her eyes were whiter than any the girl had ever seen. They were those luminous blue eyes you rarely see, deep-set, the kind that made you think they were
true
eyes, and that all other eyes were faulty copies of the real thing.
The girl had to hide her love for Nana Elsie from her mother. She had to pretend it was less ardent than it was.
âYou've got a thing for your grandmother,' the mother said. âYou only like her because she thinks everyone's wonderful. She's got her head in the sand.'
The girl wanted her head in the sand too. She wanted shared sand to fill her ears, her nose, her throat, to be swamped by the same lucky sand as Nana Elsie.
THE GIRL DISCOVERED HER EARS,
the sounds that poured into them, breathing and waves and birds and cicadas and shouting and criticism and admonishments and coos but, best of all, music. Music! How she loved it, its mysterious ability to alter mood, to slice the heart, a shimmering door to rapture. The Monkees were gone, but after them came The Beatles'
Abbey Road
, Neil Young's
Harvest
and Carole King's
Tapestry
played over and over. Music entered the bloodstream, more pure than any drug, intense, luminous. Music entered the air, dancing invisibly upon it before vanishing to some unreachable place, gone like the wind and the dead.
Once, not long after she met the lover she was going to marry, the lover she loved so much she feared she might die of astonished joy, the woman travelled in a car. She was sitting in the back of a rented car, driving from Paris to Normandy for the weekend. As the car slid along the road at dusk the Normandy sky of the painters rose up, a rinse of pink and grey and gold, the net of heaven. It was hot, the windows were open, and Miles Davis's âSo What' was playing
.
The hypnotising pulse of the music mirrored the metronomic beat of her pulse, the pump of her heart, everything in her that was set like a clock, everything rhythmic and moving and alive. The music soared through her, in her hair, in the coils of her ears, under her nails. Forever after, whenever she hears âSo What', she is young, free and soaring.
AS WELL AS A DOG
I also had a cat called Miss Meow. She was black and white, with large green eyes and a pearly pink nose, luscious, like a pink marshmallow. She resembled a pretty young girl, lipsticked and mascaraed. Miss Meow was elegant and fussy, and looked like she should be wearing a pair of fine shoes and a tiara.
Sometimes she would lick my arms with her thin, scratchy tongue. Her tongue had raised pink points on it but if you looked closely enough you could see they were actually bristles, like the neat row of bristles on a cheap plastic hairbrush. It is very hard to catch a cat's tongue between your fingers.
Miss Meow's tongue made a scraping sound against the fur of my arms. She licked thoroughly, judiciously. She licked me from my fingers to the inside of my forearm right up to my shoulder while I tried not to move, lying as still as I could bear.
THE GIRL TRAVELLED THE GLOBE
with her chaotic parents at a time when jet travel was exotic, and most people could only dream about it.
It seemed beyond the realms of possibility that she should travel so far. Sometimes, waking up in a hotel room and stealing out of bed to look out the window before anyone else was awake, the girl felt unspeakably happy because she was in an unknown place.