My Hundred Lovers
A GIRL WHO HAS FELT the knife against her throat and imagined that upon her tongue blooms a thousand flowers naturally falls in love with her father.
The girl’s father is a charismatic and glamorous figure to her, and she quickly takes his side over her mother’s. She is perhaps obeying some deep unconscious impulse to win the father from the mother, since the mother is her rival for his love. It is not uncommon for a girl to try out her emerging sexuality on her father, but when that father is a man compulsively driven to seduce as many women as possible, this may prove a fatal introduction.
Her father never tries to seduce the girl in a literal sense, but he seduces her into a world of sexually incontinent, feckless men, so that for many years the only men she finds attractive will betray her.
The afternoon Sharon from the office calls her father at home the girl instinctively knows to lie when her mother asks who is on the phone. ‘It’s Nina,’ she says.
‘Haven’t you just said goodbye to her?’ her mother remarks. ‘I don’t know what you girls find to talk about.’
It is true that the girl speaks to Nina Payne at recess and at lunchtime and then talks to her all the way home. She speaks to her on the telephone every afternoon, too. But the days have long passed since Nina Payne was the girl’s sexual slave and they never talk about that time. They never talk either about whether Nina Payne is better-looking than the girl, or whether the girl is better-looking than Nina Payne, although this is the true subject that concerns them. They are squaring up to their futures, trying to find out what each girl carries in her basket.
When her father gets home, the girl waits until her mother has left the room before she tells him Sharon called. He is mixing himself a martini, his new favourite drink, and before him on the coffee table are some brochures for the new hotel he is going to take them to in New York.
‘What did she want?’ her father asks.
‘Guess,’ she replies.
Her father looks up from the business of ice cubes and silver tongs (it is the days of cocktail shakers and ice-cube holders). It seems to her that he looks at her properly for the first time in her life. She feels dazzled, singled out, special. She is twelve years old.
He sips his drink and lights another cigarette.
Then he smiles.
Soon after this the girl happens to catch sight of her father and Sharon sitting together in a parked car not far from the travel agency. She is walking Rhett, who is taking his time investigating the bouquet of urine left against a fence by some previous dog. While waiting for Rhett to finish his sniffing, the girl chances to look into the car containing her father and his girlfriend.
Sharon is crying and her father ineffectually tries to make her stop. He leans across from the driver’s seat to stroke her golden hair (straight from the bottle) and in doing so sees the girl. He nods at her before gesturing that she should move on: Nick off, this gesture says.
The girl yanks the lead. ‘Come on, Rhett. Come on, boy.’
It is not until three days later, when her father is driving the girl to Nina’s house, that they speak about what she saw.
‘About the other day,’ her father says. ‘Don’t jump to conclusions.’
She doesn’t say anything.
‘You don’t know anything about the complications of life,’ he says.
The girl looks out the window. For some time she has been practising keeping her expression as impassive as possible, so that not a single trace of anything she keeps inside can be found upon her face. After a while she leans over and switches on the radio.
‘Life’s more mysterious than you could possibly imagine, Debs,’ her father says. ‘Remember that.’
She has not forgotten.
TWENTY-ONE
I slept with the man who slept with the girl who slept with the man who slept with the girl who slept with Bob Dylan
Does this mean Bob and I are connected?
TWENTY-TWO
A lover’s kiss
A KISS CAN BE POTENT.
In the legend of the frog prince, the prince’s kiss represents the discovery of selfhood. The kiss symbolises the transition to maturity, a maiden’s readiness for marriage.
Once, in London on New Year’s Eve, traffic prevented me from being at the party where I was supposed to be. At midnight I found myself alone in the back of a black cab, caught in a traffic jam.
We were stuck in Westminster, right beside Big Ben, when I heard the bells start up. Suddenly I wanted to hear them with my unwrapped ears, to hear time being counted out as we passed through it. I leant over and tapped on the screen separating me from the taxi driver.
‘Can you wind the window down, please, so I can hear the bells?’
‘It’s bloody freezing,’ he said, but lowered the windows so the thrilling air rushed in, bearing with it the complicated, pealing sound of time passing.
I turned my face up to the icy air, to the bells, to the gold of the clock tower lit up against the black winter night, and as midnight struck a beautiful stranger leant into the taxi and kissed me.
TWENTY-THREE
The beery-mouthed lover
EVERY SUMMER THE GIRL AND her family travelled north from Sydney to visit the father’s widowed mother, Dorothy, a stiff-backed Methodist who had turned out two boys, one as stiff-backed as herself, the other their spoilt, ruined father. The father was the younger son, in love with his mother, who could not resist her youngest son’s charms.
As they drove north the air grew damp with heat, sweet with the smell of vegetable decay. They drove with the windows down, on roads that were not yet proper highways, and outside were strangler figs and mango trees and mosquitoes and the peppery scent of lantana. They drove for two days and a night, and in that night the cane fields on either side burnt, flames against the black, birds and snakes and rats flying and shrieking as they fled the crackling hell.
When they stopped to cross dark rivers on flat-bottomed barges, the girl and her brother and sister were allowed out into the tropical air. Their mother remained slumped in the front seat of the hot, dispirited car, a damp cloth across her forehead.
‘Queensland gives me a headache,’ she said.
The father sighed.
‘Why am I always surrounded by people sighing?’ the mother said.
Standing by the railing, watching the black river twisting as they passed over it, the world turned mysterious and scented, the sky strung with stars which seemed closer to heaven, and every now and then bats swung in fantastic triangular patterns across the darkness. The sky was black beyond blackness, depthless, immense, embracing more than the naked eye could measure.
In this entwined, strangled place the girl’s body bled for the first time. She awoke one morning in her grandmother’s starched-sheeted bed to feel wetness between her legs. Her fingers came up sticky, red, and in bringing her fingers into the light she stained the white sheets with streaks of virginal blood. When she stood up, she saw blood on the white sheet.
She tried to wash the sheets in the bathroom but the blood spilt out into a pink, flooding stain and she stood in a river of blood, tears and water until her mother knocked on the door to ask what was going on.
Her mother gave her a little cloth purse with two Modess sanitary napkins inside, first demonstrating how to hook the pad to the elastic belt.
‘When I was a girl we didn’t have pads and belts,’ she said. ‘We used plain old washers. We had to rinse them out.’ A tenderness flickered across her face. ‘You’re a woman now,’ she said. ‘Poor thing. Don’t worry about the mattress, it’ll dry in the sun.’
Coming out of the bathroom, they came across the father. ‘Deb’s little eggs have come down,’ the mother announced.
All day the drying mattress with its interlocked rings of stains rested against the steps of the back veranda.
In this entwined, strangled place they went to stay at a beach house belonging to friends of the parents. The friends were television jour
nalists, the father a famous face from the nightly news. The girl could hardly raise her eyes to look at him.
The journalists had two teenage daughters, older than the girl, nubile, bursting out of their tawny skins, with heavy eye make-up and Hawaiian-print bikinis tied at their hips. The older daughter had a deep, heavy bosom and looked like a grown woman. She immediately asked if she could do the girl’s make-up.
Afterwards, she insisted on parading the girl in front of the drunken adults, who were having a party on the deck overlooking the beach. When the girls joined them a cheer went up, wolf whistles, claps.
‘She’s hot to trot,’ said the man with the famous face. ‘What’s the bet she’s a real goer?’
‘Just like her dad,’ said the wife of the man with the famous face, kissing the girl’s father full on his sensuous lips.
The father did not smile but looked at the girl with a strange expression.
‘She looks like a slut,’ said the mother.
The girl looked down in an agony of embarrassment, trying to hide herself. She was wearing a Modess sanitary pad and was already anxious about how she was going to dispose of it. She believed everybody could see the pad beneath her clothes.
Her bones were too big for her, her legs ungainly, her arms as skinny as gnawed chicken bones. The finely honed calves and thighs once taken for those of a gymnast were no longer. She did not fit her own skin, as if overnight she had outgrown her child self but had not yet formed into someone new. But atop her awkward body was a face that eyeliner, false eyelashes, blusher and lipstick had transformed.
In this entwined, strangled place, boys came. Boyfriends of the tawny, bosomy girls, and other boys. On the beach at night, with the sound of the waves and faraway noiseless heaven, a fire was lit in the sand and couples paired off to lie on towels and blankets.
The girl shivered, afraid, alone, even though the night was peopled; the air dense with a thick moist heat which clung to her skin. She wanted to go inside to be with the other children. She had defied her mother and was still wearing make-up, except now the make-up felt like a mask, under which she was a frightened imposter. A slow, sluggish horror was growing in her, an animal fear, and the girl no longer wished to be a teenager. One of the boys, an older boy of seventeen or eighteen, came over and sat down next to her on the towel, passing her his bottle of beer. She took a swig and it hit the back of her throat, gaseous, sour.
‘I like you,’ the boy said, his voice swollen with emotion. Even as he finished speaking his beery mouth came towards her, resting slimily against her own. At the same time he pulled her hand down to the great boned thing in his trousers. His other hand dived painfully between her legs and he shouted, ‘Hey! She’s on the rag!’ The girl sprang up and ran back towards the house, her lungs bursting, all the while believing she was being chased like a runaway horse, was about to be brought down.
She was crying by the time she reached her brother and sister, who were inside watching television, eating Twisties and drinking Coca-Cola with the smaller children. Everyone looked up as she rushed in, gulping, tears ruining the beautiful mask. She ran past them to the bathroom where she slammed the door, locking it behind her.
She wanted to stay locked inside for the rest of her life, beyond the reach of the nameless thing outside.
TWENTY-FOUR
A horse
LET ME NOT FORGET THE autumn of the horse. That autumn when I begged and begged my mother to let me go riding, after falling in love with sitting with my legs spread wide, not wearing jodhpurs like the other girls but a pair of thin pants, the hard leather of the saddle and the motion of the warm horse between my legs, moving in the open air, unpeeling, while sitting up and passing through the trees.
TWENTY-FIVE
The first lover who entered my body
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.
TWENTY-SIX
The knee-trembler
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.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Nana Elsie
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 al
lowed 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. ‘Dad 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.
‘You’ve got a thing for your grandmother,’ the mother said. ‘You 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.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The music lover
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.