She ran her fingers across her lips, thin, feathered at the edges, lipstick-free (she, who always wore lipstick!). ‘These aren’t the ones,’ she said.
I want to record the lips, the fingers, the belly, the tongue, before I forget they are mine.
FOUR
Sunshine
IN SPRING THE TRAPPED MOTHER put the baby in the pram in the garden. She parked the pram under a graceful purply-blue Sydney jacaranda, because she wanted a nutmeg-brown baby.
In this manner, the baby in the pram looked up to see a tenuous, flickering world. She saw the sky, the swaying trees, the blossoms rippling. The sun! Sunshine sparkled across her eyes and when she closed them, the sun was still visible, a tentacled light exploding outwards, a dance of warmth and brilliance, weightless.
This was the feeling of the loving sun on her newborn skin, as warm as a hand.
FIVE
My fingers
THE NIGHT I WAS BORN my mother cried. I was coated in fine dark hair and had a faint moustache and sideburns. My father’s first remark when he saw me is recorded thus: ‘I think she’s the one who should be smoking the cigar.’ The hair would soon fall out but my horrified mother did not know that. She was a famous beauty and I was not so much a disappointment as a disgrace.
While my mother was in labour my father was off screwing an old girlfriend. This is sad but true (just because something is a cliché does not mean—unfortunately—that it did not happen). When my father arrived at the hospital to make the crack about the cigar he had not bothered to shower. He leant over to kiss my mother and she smelt the unmistakeable scent of the female sex part.
She told me this story only once, when she was drunk. I do not know if she cried that night because of the ugliness of the baby, physical exhaustion following childbirth, or the unmistakeable scent of the female sex part.
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?
Can it be true that the box had a lid, like a coffin? The girl thinks it does, a lid on two squeaky hinges, and when the lid is closed there is total darkness. There is nothing but the close breathing mouth of her brother, whose fingers are trying to find out the difference between a boy and a girl.
The first boy’s fingers to touch that secret pulse are her brother’s.
Have you ever noticed how many people marry someone who looks like their brother or sister, like a missing member of their family, no doubt unconsciously influenced by what is known as genetic sexual attraction?
Let that boy, my brother Paul, count as my seventh lover.
EIGHT
The first girl I loved
THE FIRST GIRL I LOVED had the whitest skin, as pale as an invalid’s, and once, while playing leapfrog, she forgot to keep leaping but instead sat breathing with her legs spread upon my back.
I felt the pant of her breath on my neck, the race of her heart.
I felt the throb of her clitoris against the arch of my spine.
Neither of us moved.
I could have stayed like that for the rest of my life.
Nina Payne.
Nina Payne.
The whites of your eyes were white-blue like a newborn infant’s.
Your upper gums showed when you smiled, glistening, moist.
I was jealous of your fringe. It rested against the high white dome of your forehead where I wished my lips could be.
Nina Payne’s bedroom was at the back of her house. It was an old person’s house, with old-fashioned, faded carpets and pink china figurines and a photograph of her father in a slouch hat and an army uniform. An only child, Nina Payne had elderly parents, at least as old as Nana Elsie.
We sometimes made cubbyhouses together. Mrs Payne let us take the good chairs from the dining room and blankets from the linen press into Nina Payne’s girlish bedroom.
We holed ourselves up in our house in the dark and lay with our bodies pressed together, toe to toe.
We practised kissing, using our tongues, curling them deliciously around and around. Our tongues were entwined at their roots and once Nina Payne broke away, lifted up her long, swan-like neck and let out a moan.
I had never heard a sound like it before.
Immediately I wanted to hear it again.
The girl knew she was the boss of Nina Payne. Nina Payne was docile, practically mute, and the girl with the strange inner lips was the one who directed the play. She arranged when they would meet, at what time and at which house. The girl made her friend pretend to be a nurse while she lay in the dark of the cubbyhouse and made Nina Payne run her fingers over her body inch by inch to check for disease.
She made Nina Payne take off her underpants and walk around the yard in her dress, while the girl lay on the ground and looked up. She made Nina Payne sit with her legs apart so that she could see for herself whether she had a distinguishing feature like hers.
Nina Payne’s vagina was pale, only slightly rosier than the rest of her.
The girl would have stuck her finger in except that her friend stood up and ran away.
In lying down with Nina Payne, in sucking her tongue and her strange, supine lips, the girl may indeed have been seeking the maternal body.
There was so much space between her mother and herself.
NINE
Object-sexualist
PERHAPS YOU HAVE HEARD OF the Swedish woman who took as her lover the Berlin Wall. Eija-Ritta Berliner-Mauer, known as Mrs Berlin Wall since she married her lover on 17 June 1979, describes herself as an object-sexualist. By this Mrs Berlin Wall means that she is emotionally and sexually attracted to objects, and believes them to have souls, feelings and desires. As an animist, she thinks all objects are living: ‘If one can see objects as living things, it is also pretty close to be able to fall in love with them.’
Eija-Ritta Berliner-Mauer lives quietly in a village in Sweden, surrounded by objects she has fallen in love with. The central figure in her life remains her now-broken husband.
Many people speak of loving houses—a particular house in which they were happy, or one in which they spent their wondrous first years. Some people speak of loving gardens, the contours of which are as familiar as a beloved face.
I once loved the jasmine that covered the side of the house in Sydney where I grew up, which every spring burst into starry blossom.
Brick.
Wall.
House.
The lover as object.
It is a private matter between the object lover and ourselves to know if the object lover loves us back.
I have not seen Berlinmuren, the film about Eija-Ritta Berliner-Mauer by the Norwegian artist Lars Laumann. I do not speak Swedish or Norwegian and my German is basic so the only words in the German reviews of the film I could make out were: ‘sex with the Berlin Wall’. When I close my eyes I see a thin, greying woman with her arms outspread, capturing nothing. Perhaps she engages in the gentle art of frotting any surviving bricks she owns, or maybe she mounts them.
In my mind’s eye, the house in which Mrs Berlin Wall dwells looks like a cottage in a fairytale, deep in a dark Swedish forest. It has smoke coming from a
chimney and I see her at the window, sitting at a long blond-wood table, the surface of which is adorned with bricks and barbed wire. Throughout the house are framed photographs of her retired husband in his vigorous prime.
In the bedroom, on the sheets and on the pillow, is a scattering of clay, dark, ruddy, smeared like blood. It is here, in the night, that Eija-Ritta communes most deeply with the object of her affections. In granting life to an inanimate object I imagine she is the very epitome of an intellectual; that is, giving breath to an idea—in this case to some sublime idea of division, of partition, of wallness. It seems to me that Mrs Berlin Wall’s devotion is an act more of mental life than of bodily life, but then again I am not there when her open mouth turns to the smear of dark clay beside her on the pillow and her love is suddenly made flesh.
It is true that I, too, have taken objects as my lovers: a car, a garden, a house. Longing for a house once entered my bloodstream like lust and for seven summers I rushed to this house, my heart wild in my chest, and I could hardly wait for my feet to touch its cool white tiles.
TEN, ELEVEN, TWELVE
Cheese—Chocolate—Croissants
UNLIKE MRS BERLIN WALL, HOWEVER, I could never marry an object that did not pulse with blood, or did not require light or rain in order to live. I might have an affair with a house, but I could never marry one. I could never marry anything without a mouth.
My mouth is the opening into myself, the principal portal of the body: the teeth, the gums, the fleshy slope of the throat, the glistening entrance into the dark depths below. The myriad tastebuds of the tongue which, when I was young, I imagined resembled the buds on the frangipani tree outside our house.