My Hundred Lovers (9 page)

Such a girl might start to dream of weaving her own rug on which to fly away. Such a girl might not yet know that it is not only in fables that running away leads inevitably back to the source of our dread.

For now, all the girl knows is that she feels safer walking away from the house with the mother and father, the sister and brother, the cat and the dog, than walking towards it. She does not like to bring friends home in case her mother is drunk and wearing a turban, or else not drunk but plunged into one of her moods, sarcastic, bitter, watchful.

‘You're not very clever, are you?' she said to the girl one afternoon, as her brother Paul tried to teach the girl how to play poker, which she could not fathom, especially knowing that her mother was watching.

The mother, June, was not able to control herself like other people. She could not hold her tongue, keep the peace or understand that discretion was the better part of valour. Whatever she felt spilt out from her, whole, without pause or refinement. Her emotions were cartoonishly big, without fences or boundaries.

The day arrived when the girl brought her lover home. She was sixteen, about to turn seventeen, in love with her deflowerer, Jonathan Jamieson, he of the wounded, dark-lashed brown eyes and the caramel-coloured skin, the singer of songs, the first boy who loved her. He was kind and steady, and held her gently, and for as long as she was able the girl resisted bringing Jonathan Jamieson home, being fearful of the turban, the father on his magic carpet, the sister who was more beautiful than her.

But fear should evoke our gratitude for its ability to reveal us to ourselves. Fear reveals the things we love, and without it to tell us what it is we find most precious, we might never know what we love at all.

Over the years the mother had devised a series of cunning etiquette tests. It is not true that Australia is classless, and the mother enjoyed nothing better than setting tabletop traps. She would lay out soup spoons and dessert spoons and fish forks and meat forks and salad forks and arcane pickle knives, and sit back to see if a guest floundered or swam.

When Jonathan sat down next to the girl at the dining table, she nudged him and nodded towards his napkin. He looked at her napkin spread out on her lap, and quickly placed his own upon his knees.

‘A glass of wine, Jonathan?' the mother asked. ‘I think young people should be educated to drink properly, don't you?' She indicated to the father to pour him a glass.

‘He doesn't like it,' the girl said.

‘I'll try some,' he said, giving her a gentle kick under the table.

The mother stood up to bring in the first course, walking a little crookedly into the kitchen.

‘Cigarette?' offered the father from the opposite end of the table.

‘No thanks. I don't smoke,' said Jonathan.

‘I'll have one,' said Jane, who was twelve, a bud flowered. She was already taller than the girl, with strong, adult features, vivid and disconcerting.

The father tossed the cigarette packet and a box of matches down towards Jane's end of the table.

‘I'll have one too,' said Paul, and before long they were a little puffing family, the dining room hung with smoke, the brightness of the sun banished.

The mother reappeared bearing a tray. On each plate was the perfect head of a globe artichoke, as unbreachable as a pine cone, a culinary assault course. The girl felt something inside herself drop. It might have been the collapse of the last remaining hope that her mother would show mercy.

Jonathan picked up his knife and fork.

‘Best use your fingers, sweetheart,' the mother said.

Jonathan Jamieson sobbed when the girl gave him up for the shadow lover and all the cruel lovers to come.

She was not troubled by the fact that she was a cruel lover herself, for she was a romantic girl who believed that somewhere there was a lover she would one day reach, a perfect lover she did not yet know but whom she would recognise at once.

THIRTY-ONE
The flowered bud, wrestled

WHO WOULD GUESS THAT WRESTLING
a flowered bud to the floor would feel so ecstatic? Jane and I were always arguing, every morning at breakfast, every morning on the way to school, every afternoon when we got home. Our mother regularly grabbed us by the scruffs of our necks and threw us out the door, locking it behind us. ‘Come back when you can be civil to each other,' she shouted, which might have been amusing in other circumstances. Did our mother even know what civility was?

One afternoon I heard Jane on the phone, when I wished to use the phone to call my deflowerer. She was fourteen, with bigger bosoms than me.

‘So, like, I said to him, like, what do you mean? What do you think's going on?'

I listened to her for as long as I could, then I went to stand in front of her. In those days we had a hallstand next to the front door, with a little seat on it. The style, I think, was called ‘colonial', and our newly built house was furnished in reproduction colonial style. Jane was sitting there on our reproduction colonial hallstand, crossing her long tanned legs, which she admired as she spoke.

‘Hang up now,' I said. ‘I've got to call Jonathan.'

She ignored me. ‘Like, it's not as if I even looked at him! Like,
really
.' She drawled the last word out as if it were a long piece of chewing gum on a string between her fingers.
Reeaally.
I couldn't stand it.

‘Hang up,' I repeated.

She ignored me.

‘If you don't hang up right this second, I'll hit you.'

She did not respond.

I thumped her in the head, not hard.

‘You bitch!' she shouted, leaping on me.

We were on the floor, wrestling, rolling over and over, scratching, pulling hair. Rhett raced up, barking, biting my assailant where he could, my dog, my champion, my hero.

‘Get off me!' she cried, to the dog or to me, I don't know which. For I was pummelling her hard now.

‘You fucking bitch!' Jane cried when she finally broke free, her hair hanging over her face, a red scratch down her flawless cheek.

To this day I can remember the satisfaction of that moment.

THIRTY-TWO
The shadow lover

CONSIDER THE URETHRA. HARDLY MORE
than an inch long, that workmanlike tube of transport leading from the sac of the bladder, discharging urine from the body. In women, a straightforward, simple device; in men, an anxious site which doubles as a venue for ejaculation.

Consider the urethra, linked to the female somatic nervous system, so that occasionally too much sex causes it too much excitement, making it retreat in shocked affront like a Victorian maiden, red, inflamed.

When the girl, now a young woman, turns nineteen she abandons Jonathan Jamieson with his caramel-coloured skin and takes a lover as mysterious as love.

For five long years she is jealous of a shadow, a dark, unknowable shape she cannot see.

The shadow lover is very clever, a PhD candidate who studied at Yale. Not many Australian students studied internationally in those days and among his friends he has a certain cachet. He has a name, a perfectly ordinary name, but to the romantic girl he is nameless, faceless, a superior, supernatural being of inhuman dimensions.

But wait! How did the girl travel so quickly from a tenderhearted deflowerer who held her with a kind and steady hold to a shadow lover too dark to see? How did she move through time, blink, blink, loved one minute and loveless the next?

Oh, those days. Those days in which jealousy was supposed to be dead. Those days in which you were supposed to share your lovers like a box of chocolates, and marriage and monogamy were considered vanquished.

The shadow lover swears to the loveless girl that he is seeing no-one else. He suggests, too, that she get psychiatric help because she is mad. She knows she is mad: on some nights, alone in her shared student house waiting for him to come, she scratches her fingernails up her legs, up her arms, up the body that he does not honour. Welts spring up, drops of blood.

Here is what the body knows: that misery causes the blood to grow sluggish, the breath to stink, the eyes to lose the capacity to register any face that is not his. Once, in the deepest period of her misery, her body loses its ability to wake up. Night after night her somatic nervous system tries to send her a message but every morning she awakes drenched in her own piss.

Sometimes the shadow lover says: ‘It doesn't mean anything.'

Sometimes he says: ‘Look, Deb, there are women and children dying in Rhodesia. Pol Pot is murdering his own people. Your little agonies are nothing.'

Sometimes he says: ‘I don't give a fuck what you think. I'll sleep with whoever I want.'

The romantic girl tries very hard not to focus on her little agonies but the whole world distorts itself into the dimensions of a shadow. She tries hypnotism and drinking and yoga and drugs and other lovers and consoling dreams of suicide. She tries thinking about Pol Pot's poor murdered souls but this only makes her feel more wretched and ashamed. Every face that is not his face is no face at all, and every room without him in it is empty.

Thirty years later, she cannot remember what the shadow lover looked like. She knows he is still alive because her friends sometimes come across him. He lectures on the American novel at a well-known university but the woman knows that even if she were to meet him face to face she would be unable to make him out.

The image beneath the glass was always obscured from her, even before the shadow lover became a memory, even before time's invisible transport moved him away, because certain lovers are, from the first, impossible to see.

THIRTY-THREE
Claudette

JUST BEFORE THE YOUNG WOMAN
meets the shadow lover she gets her first car. A certain Renault 12, white, name of Claudette, with a slight dent in the back bumper bar, which spins along roads with freedom in its engine. Its steering wheel is perfectly shaped, thin, hard, with little ridges, and her fingers feel happy wrapped around it. Unlike her trapped mother, unlike Super Nan with an enraged husband who happened to be a big fellow with a gun, unlike her sad relative Mademoiselle Joubert, the young woman can climb into her own car and drive away.