3
They quickly grew frustrated with the cramped back seat of Mr Carr’s Falcon and with the time wasted in driving and parking, and so met instead at the school. The classroom was too risky, Mr Carr said, but he had scoped out the school and come up with a number of alternative meeting places.
There was the English department book room, which was never used after hours and could be locked, but which was on the same floor as the staff room, so lovemaking had to be silent. The Agricultural storeroom was a safer bet, since it was a tin shed separated from the permanent school buildings by the student vegetable plots, but it was airless and filled with fertiliser, and the stink clung to their bodies for hours afterwards. The boy’s P.E. locker room was perfect – set well apart from the main buildings, lockable and with tiled floors which would announce any intruders early enough for Sarah and Mr Carr to flee through the back exit – but it was in use for after school sport every day except Monday. There was also the canteen (empty every afternoon but difficult to get to without being seen by half a dozen teachers and students) and the auditorium (as long as they were gone before five-thirty when dance classes were held).
Each day as they were parting, Mr Carr would tell Sarah where to be the next afternoon. Some days he was in a rush because he had a meeting, often he was late and twice he did not turn up at all. He left his phone turned on so he would know if someone was looking for him, and several times he had to leave half-way through fucking her, because another teacher rang and said they were on their way to the library or staffroom or wherever it was he said he was.
Some days, the door was locked and Mr Carr’s trousers off before Sarah had even put down her school bag. Other days he kept her sitting at his feet for hours while he lectured her on poetry, not touching her at all until it was time for her to leave, when he would beg her for five more minutes. If she agreed, which she almost always did, he would kiss her tenderly and make love to her. The one time she said no, that she had to get home, he looked at her with wet, wide eyes as though she had hit him. Then he slapped her, hard, and called her a tease and a time waster. He pushed her to her knees, unzipped his pants and with one hand on the back of her head and the other up against the locker room wall, he fucked her mouth until he came.
She slumped against the cold tiles, eyes and scalp stinging, trying not to choke or vomit. He zipped up his trousers and nudged her with his foot. ‘Well, off you go, Sarah. I know you’re in a big hurry to get home. Run along, now.’
Sarah grabbed his legs and pulled herself to a standing position. She removed a checked handkerchief from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, raised it to her lips, spat out the sour stuff in her mouth, refolded the handkerchief and replaced it in his pocket.
‘Disgusting,’ she told him, because it was, but she couldn’t sleep that night with wishing she had kept the handkerchief.
For two hours each weekday, Sarah Clark ceased to exist. Afterwards, she could never identify the exact moment it happened, but always there was the crossing over, the melting, the absorption. There was no border where her body ended and Mr Carr’s began. Mr Carr explained that this was what Shakespeare meant by ‘the beast with two backs.’ When two people were completely bound in the expression of love, they ceased to be separate individuals and became one creature. The act of passion, when properly performed, created an organism larger than the sum of its parts; it created a beast with two backs, but one soul. Sarah knew it was no metaphor: if anyone were to stumble across their secret meeting place between three and five each day, they would not see a girl and her teacher making illegal, impossible love. They would see only a bucking, screaming two-headed monster. A dumb creature with no awareness of a world outside of itself. With no desire except to become more itself and less everything else.
For the other twenty-two hours a day, and through the interminable, school-less weekends, Sarah felt more separate than ever, as if the edges of her body were thicker than they had been previously, as if she disturbed the air when she moved through it. When she ran barefoot to the bathroom each morning, she felt every fibre of the carpet as it was flattened under her feet. Biting into her morning toast, she could feel the tiny grooves on the thin edge of each tooth as they serrated the bread. She could feel every individual taste bud being awakened by the strawberry jam. The stimulation was so intense that she couldn’t eat more than half a slice.
Brushing her hair, cleaning her teeth, washing herself in the shower – everything felt like masturbation. She fastened her bra thinking the skin on my back is smoother than my face. She poked at herself saying this is my finger, these are my ribs. She woke in the night because someone was touching the inside of her thighs; a stranger’s fingers were pulling on her nipples. An old man touched the small of her back when she was getting onto the bus and she shuddered as though he had stuck his whole hand inside her, as though he had taken a piece of her soul.
Her body was always hot. Her underpants always damp. Every night, her hair needed washing and her legs needed shaving. Her knees were sore more often than not, and small bruises appeared, faded, reappeared on the insides of her thighs and wrists. Sometimes, there were bite marks on her buttocks or the back of her neck. She felt taller and stronger and walked with longer strides. She glowed and could not believe that everyone who looked at her didn’t know.
‘No one can know,’ Mr Carr said every day, before, after, sometimes during, their love making. Sometimes he softened the message, saying he wished he could tell the world how happy he was, what bliss he had found, and that he dreamed of a world where true passion would be celebrated not punished; other times he was stern, threatening even, telling her that if anyone found out, he would lose his job and maybe even go to jail. ‘Just think about that next time you get the urge to gossip to your friends.’
‘I don’t gossip,’ Sarah told him, which was true, but it was also true that she was driven to tell someone about what was happening. She was compelled to say it aloud – I love him – and have someone hear it and know it was true.
She thought about telling Jess, whom she had known longer than anyone else in the world outside of her family. Jess had lived in the two-story mock Tudor house next door to Sarah’s two-story mock Tudor house since the girls were four years old. Their parents played tennis together and went to all the same dinner parties. Sarah and Jess were friends not because they liked each other excessively, but because the circumstances of their lives meant that to not be friends would require a pointed decision which neither of them had ever felt enough dislike of the other to make. But even if they’d known each other a hundred years, Sarah would not tell Jess about Mr Carr. Jess giggled when she heard the word ‘penis’ and screwed up her face on ‘vagina’. She was bored by poetry and thought Mr Carr was a drag for making them learn it.
Jess was Sarah’s oldest friend, but her best friend was Jamie Wilkes whom she had only known for two and a half years. They met on the first day of high school, in the first class of the day, which was Geography. The students were seated alphabetically in a classroom laid out like a horseshoe, which meant that Clark was directly opposite Wilkes, both of them second from the front of the room, with only Burton and Yates ahead of them. The teacher told them to stare straight ahead while the assignments for the year were distributed. So for ten minutes, Jamie and Sarah had to look across the classroom at each other. Jamie kept looking away – down at his desk or over his shoulder – but his gaze always returned to Sarah’s. She smiled at him; he looked down, then up, and smiled back. When the assignments had been distributed, the teacher told them they would work in pairs to complete the first task. Knowing no one, Sarah raised her eyebrows at Jamie, who turned red and nodded. They found they worked well together and had the same sense of humour. Also, being short, skinny and asthmatic, Jamie was a natural ally to undeveloped, bookish Sarah. They hung out together on the fringes of their class and were happy there.
Jamie was sensitive to the sun, the wind, pollen and grass. The
other thing he was sensitive to was Sarah. He monitored her every breath and mood, and so now that all her breaths and moods were for and about Mr Carr, Jamie knew something was up with her.
‘Are you sick?’ he asked her when she got to school on the Tuesday of the sixth week of her affair with Mr Carr.
‘Never better.’ It was true. Yesterday afternoon Mr Carr had read to her from Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. He told her that Donne’s love poems were inspired by his teenaged student whom he later eloped with. ‘Imagine,’ he said to Sarah, unbuttoning her shirt, ‘if Donne had not loved his young student.’ He removed her shirt and bra and covered both her breasts with his hands. ‘What a loss to Western culture. What a tragic, tragic loss that would have been.’
‘You’re all flushed,’ Jamie said. ‘Like when you had that fever at camp last year. Your eyes are all bloodshot too. I really think you should go–’
‘I’m fine!’ Sarah laughed. ‘You’re such a nana.’
‘Jess said you haven’t been walking home with her lately. She thinks you’re pissed off at her.’
‘She’s such a drama queen. I’ve been staying back a bit. Studying in the library.’
‘Why don’t you just go home and study?’
Sarah ignored him. She mentally rehearsed the Thomas Carew poem she had memorised last night. She was going to recite it to Mr Carr this afternoon. It was called The Rapture, and she hoped it would send him into one. There was a bit in it she was sure was talking about a clitoris, and a whole lot of stuff about fluids and elixirs which made her think about the mess her underwear was in when she got home each day.
‘I think you’re hiding something, Miss Clark.’ Jamie used the fake-confident voice that he used to tell his older brother to get out of his room or he’d kick his head in. ‘I think maybe you’re staying back after school to meet up with someone.’
Her heart beat faster. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe because you spend the last hour of every day playing with your hair. And you check your watch every twenty seconds and then bolt for the door as soon as the bell rings.’
‘I do not.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You retied your plait four times in half an hour yesterday afternoon.’
Mr Carr liked to play with her hair. He sometimes used her ponytail as a sort of lead, pulling her head where he wanted it to go, or if she had plaits either side he used them like reins. Yesterday he had wrapped her single plait around his cock, then released her hair and had her drag its length over his body.
‘Ha! You’re blushing. Why won’t you tell me? I thought we were friends?’
‘Jamie, we are, it’s just…’ She checked to make sure no one was in earshot. ‘No one can know, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m serious. There will be major, major trouble if anyone finds out. Going to gaol kind of trouble.’
Jamie laughed. ‘You call Jess a drama queen! Why would anyone go to gaol for–’ He blinked. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘Because I’m underage and he’s a teacher.’ Her smile was unstoppable, even though she knew this moment should be a serious one.
‘What? You’re kidding?’ He blinked fast. ‘You are kidding?’
‘No. I’ve been meeting Mr Carr every day after school. I’m having an affair with him.’
Jamie blinked at her for a few more seconds. Then he shook his head and punched her shoulder. ‘Bitch,’ he said. ‘You had me going there for a second.’
4
While Mr Carr continued to warn Sarah against revealing their secret, he flirted – thrillingly! – with self-exposure. One time, he had the office messenger deliver an envelope to her during second period Maths. On the outside it said: Public Speaking Competition Entry Form. Inside, the note said: Your face, contorted in agonising pleasure, just appeared in my mind unbidden. I am trapped behind my desk, burning. Another note, dropped onto her desk during English class, while she was deep in thought, her pen hanging from between her lips, said O, how I wish I was that ballpoint pen. Sometimes, passing her in the hallways, he brushed her arse or breasts or mouthed words obscene or romantic or both.
When their affair was two months old, Sarah gave a presentation to the class about Emily Dickinson: a poet whom she knew Mr Carr believed should be expunged from the canon. Sarah took this as a personal insult and was determined to change his mind. While her classmates dozed up the back of the room, passed notes or covertly listened to the Walkmans hidden in their pencil cases, Sarah passionately argued Emily Dickinson’s significance. Mr Carr listened intently, interrupting now and then to clarify a point or ask a question. ‘I’m not sure about your claim that Dickinson was comical. Can we have an example?’
‘Of course.’ Sarah looked him in the eye and recited Poem XI:
‘Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails
Assent and you are sane;
Demur, – you’re straightway dangerous
And handled with a chain.’
He slow-clapped her, smiling. ‘Very impressive, but perhaps wry would be a better word than comical?’ He leant forward in his chair. ‘And I hope you understand how provocative you’re being. Chains as a penalty for dissent? My, my, Sarah.’
Sarah felt her face growing hot. She looked away from him, out at the class, but no one – except Jamie, who was staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at an unseeing Mr Carr – seemed to have noticed his comment. They were not listening to nerdy Sarah Clark and boring Mr Carr debating some dead chick’s poetry; they didn’t realise they were witnessing foreplay.
Sarah finished her presentation with an anecdote: ‘Emily Dickinson once had her work rejected by an editor who criticised her unconventional use of punctuation, specifically her overuse of dashes. Her reply was to the point: “I am in danger, Sir.” Reading her poems today we can feel her racing heart, her quick breath, the hot blood rushing through her veins. We feel her urgency and it becomes ours.’
Mr Carr thanked her for her work and called on the next student to come forward, but after class he whispered for her to meet him at the petrol station now, and though they both had half a day of classes remaining, they fled to their old parking spot by the creek and Mr Carr told her that her speech had filled him with unbearable longing.
‘I never realised Emily Dickinson could be erotic,’ he said and Sarah told him that nothing had ever seemed erotic until he showed her that everything was.
The next afternoon in the canteen, Mr Carr was in a foul temper. He accused Sarah of purposely provoking him into the sort of risky behaviour which would get him fired. He called her manipulative and vicious, which made her cry. He told her she was ugly when she cried, and so she held her breath until she had control of herself. Feeling dizzy and ashamed, she pressed her ugly face into his chest and was weak with relief when he stroked her hair and told her he was sorry and that she was so beautiful he could hardly stand it.
‘It’s my wife,’ he said. ‘She called the office yesterday afternoon, and they told her I’d gone home sick. She cried half the night. I didn’t know what to say to her.’
Sarah lifted her head, stood on her toes and kissed his lips. She rubbed his back and kissed him behind his ears. ‘Yeah, I nearly got busted too. My stupid sister’s stupid friend saw me walking across the car park. I said I was going to get something out of Miss Wright’s car for her. Don’t think she believed me…’ Sarah kissed his Adam’s apple. ‘We better not leave like that again.’
‘Sooner or later, we will be found out.’
‘Maybe by then it won’t matter.’
He stepped back and looked down into her face. ‘How could it ever not matter? I love my wife, Sarah. I love my kids. Do you have any idea what knowing about us would do to them?’
Sarah froze. It had never occurred to her that he didn’t want what
she did. She had thought of his family as an obstacle, like her parents and her age. She had assumed all obstacles would be overcome, that love was an ever fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is not shaken. But if love was what he had for his wife, then Sarah was the tempest. She was the impediment which would not be admitted.
‘Are you dumping me?’
‘Am I dumping you?’ Mr Carr laughed. ‘God, what an expression.’
Sarah couldn’t help it; she began to cry again. ‘Why are you being so mean?’
‘Oh, precious.’ He folded her up in his arms. ‘It’s ridiculous to think of this, us, as the kind of adolescent romance that could be ended by dumping. As if we could stop this just by speaking a few little words. I wish it was that easy, truly. I wish I could say “it’s over” and it would be. You and I won’t stop needing each other until we’re both dead and buried.’
‘Until my quaint honour turns to dust?’
‘My God, you are remarkable.’ Mr Carr lifted her easily and sat her on the preparation bench. He parted her legs and stood between them, his hands and hers working together to undo his zipper, remove her underpants, push his trousers and jocks to his knees. ‘How is it possible that you always know exactly what to say? I’ve been such a grumpy, mean man and you, oh!’ He pushed inside her. ‘Oh, Sarah, I fear I’m going to wear your quaint honour into dust before your fifteenth birthday. Your poor little, oh, God, am I hurting you?’
‘No,’ she said, although he was.
‘I am, aren’t I?’ He moved faster. ‘Tell me, Sarah, please. I’m hurting you, yes?’