My Hundred Lovers (16 page)
That afternoon in the small bedroom in Balmain the light was blue. The curtains were cream and blew softly in the wind. There was a cry, far off, almost out of earshot. There was a man in my bed and I did not know how he got there.
EXCEPT FOR RARE AND EXTRAORDINARY
occasions, no-one knows if they are experiencing history's beginning or its end, if they have just lived through that critical moment when a seemingly inconsequential action tilts everything in an unheard-of direction. It is a well-known fact that private obstinacies take precedence over history.
Super Nan did not know when she kissed her husband goodbye that a stranger would return wishing to cut off her hair. She did not know she was living through the Great War. She was looking the other way, tying her shoelaces, and did not know what was approaching.
Super Nan did not know that she was living in the last days of the old world, when great ships still sailed the earth taking people away from their homelands forever. Her blind mother came from the village of Ahascragh, near Galway. She carried in her suitcase six goblets of the finest crystal, given to her mother by the wealthy Anglo-Irish family for whom she had worked, and which her late mother had bequeathed to her. Super Nan told me that during the journey from Ireland to Australia her mother grew watercress on a flannel so that she might have something fresh to eat. It took four months to make the crossing, and days before that to make the journey to Limerick from the house where she was born at 10 Church Avenue, Ahascragh. The house had a lemon tree in the back garden which Super Nan's mother had outlined with her fingers, inch by inch.
Super Nan saw the introduction of electricity, telephones and flushing toilets. She was there for the invention of aeroplanes and cars. In her allotted thousand months she birthed eleven children because she knew no alternative. When she was born the Wright brothers were pondering the mechanics of human flight. When she died women were on the pill and men were on the moon.
When Super Nan was a girl her Irish father, Joseph, told her stories about the bushranger Frank Gardiner, who long before had held up his carriage on the road to Orange. âI says to him, “It's a poor house here,” and Mr Gardiner dipped his hat and let us on our way,' her father said. He added that he was surprised to learn that the same man had later held up the gold escort. âHe did not appear the type,' her father said.
In 1891, the girl who would grow up into Super Nan did not know there were no more bushrangers. All she understood were her own personal obstinacies, which included a fear of bushrangers.
âAnyway, I was too scared to go to the dunny at night by myself,' she said. âI used to get my sisters to come.'
Maud, Aggie, Josephine, Mary and Ethel standing in a line, giggling, while their scaredy-cat youngest sister, Lil, tried to pee. She was terrified a bushranger would jump out on the way to the dunny and get her.
Aggie regularly snuck around the back of the dunny and whacked it with a large stick. Lil never failed to shoot out, her pants around her ankles, running for her life.
âYou'd think I'd learn, wouldn't you?' said Super Nan, giggling along with her giggling sisters, now ghosts.
Nana Elsie, Super Nan's beautiful daughter who would grow up to become my grandmother, did not know she was witnessing the birth of the atomic age. On the morning of 6 August 1945, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, she was a young woman arguing with her husband, Arthur, about his long-standing refusal to learn to dance. Art worked on the docks, a reserved occupation, and, anyway, he was a bit too old to be called up. He hated dancing.
Elsie and Arthur had been to a dance the night before and Elsie had danced with a handsome captain. That morning, as she cooked Art's eggs, their argument continued. Art glowered at her and Elsie said, âWhat am I supposed to do if you won't dance with me? Sit on my hands?'
At that moment, a few thousand miles to the north, husbands and wives were going up in smoke.
In November 1956 my mother did not know that the Cold War had just been invented. When she failed to reach selection for the Australian swimming team for the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games she sat home and sulked. There was something going on in the Suez Canal, a place she had never heard of and could not pinpoint on a map, and the USSR had invaded Hungary.
What relevance had this to her, June Gilmoreâa champion swimmer relegated again to second place? June knew she was a better all-round swimmer than Dawn Fraser, yet here she was, forced to spend weeks and weeks listening to everyone going on about Dawn's ruddy gold medals.
In the last weeks of 1956 June spent as much time as she could in her bedroom, imagining the moment when everyone would recognise the magnitude of their mistake.
As for me, I did not know that I was living in the dying days of the sexual revolution. I did not know I was experiencing those last reckless days before once again sex could kill you.
I lived in the last days of typewriters, hot metal presses, the Berlin Wall and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
I was there for the invention of computers, mobile phones and the internet. I was there for the invention of time travel, when anyone could fly in a jet from one side of the world to the other, sometimes arriving the same day they had left. The rich, the poor, the Irish, the Australians and the French: anyone with a passport and enough money could go.
Throughout, my knowledge of history was suspect. Like everyone, my sensibility was personal and I experienced history from the feet up. I was full of private obstinacies, history's bit player, always looking the wrong way. You'd think I'd learn, wouldn't you?
Nonetheless, here is the world, ceaseless.
Here is the world, going on.
Where is the sound of wicked Aggie whacking her stick against the dunny wall?
Where is that lost line of giggling sisters, each with a headful of memories?
Where is the scent of the lemon tree, once traced by vanished fingers, inch by inch?
A thousand months!
Mademoiselle Emilie Joubert, let me acknowledge your longing for the smell of baking bread and the lost sound of your father's whistle before I forget.
THE SKIN REMEMBERS THE SMALL
triangular scar high on the left hip, made upon it when the woman was twenty-four years old, a burn mark from ironing while naked.
She was ironing naked because she was twenty-four years old and she hardly ever got dressed, being newly in the grip of a passion for that dissolute lover.
At last she left the shadow lover. At last, after five blind years, she left that lover she could not see and who was possibly a figment of her imagination. At last she went to live with that dissolute lover. Out of the frying pan and into the fire!
She left the shadow lover and all the lovers lined in a row for the dissolute lover whose skin felt like home, whose body was an answered prayer, who felt like her own physical self in male form.
Skin of my skin, breath of my breath, if I were a man I'd be you.
She wrote these words on a scrap of paper and left it by the pillow one morning as he slept. But by the time she got out of the shower she thought better of it and screwed it up.
By then the Suspicious Wanderer knew her romantic streak was fatal. By then, even though she was composed of private obstinacies, she knew enough to keep them covered up.
The dissolute older lover was a Labor Party apparatchik whose louche behaviour would eventually cause him to fall into disgrace. He had bloodshot blue eyes starting to go to seed and his wrecked, handsome face was already on the cusp of dissolving.
Her new lover was not a shadow. He was knuckle, muscle, hair, the drip of sweat, the slick pink flesh of cheek inside an open mouth. His skin was always warm and gave off a sweet fragrance, like the skin of a baby. He had full, fleshy lips like her own. He loved her mouth, her porn-star lips, which he said always looked ready, open. Her lips seemed to have found their fellows and sometimes she lay with her new lover on their shared pillow for long, unbroken minutes, kissing with their kindred lips. Like her, he loved kissing.
She lived with her new lover inside an erotic swoon, sometimes forgetting to move the car forward when the traffic lights turned green because she was remembering a particular moment from the night before. She left saucepans too long on the stove, lost her concentration while ironing, and understood what it must be like to be a teenage boy with a permanent erection. Unlike the lover who fell in love with desire, unlike the shadow lover and all those other lovers in thrall to that brief joyous throb, to that most mysterious of human seconds upon which marriages, careers, religions and kingdoms rise and fall, the dissolute lover wanted to spend his whole life in those seconds.
She had never met anyone like him.
He was irresponsible. He was a madman. He was intoxicating.
He got drunk and swallowed, smoked or snorted any drug going.
âWhat on earth do you see in that arsehole?' asked Ro's boyfriend, Mick, after meeting him for the first time.
The Suspicious Wanderer could not have explained that once she had seen her new lover address a rally for Aboriginal land rights. He was eloquent, electric, sexy, and secretly, guiltily, she thought it was like being at a rock concert.
Remember Justine Gervais? Even the Suspicious Wanderer detected a pattern, a penchant for men and women with a political cause and a desire to burn at the stake.
The dissolute lover described himself, smiling, as a âsectarian leftist' and she guessed that this was intended as a joke. She did not know what it meant but laughed anyway.
âMost of them think I'm a Trotskyite mole,' he said.
Before the Suspicious Wanderer moved in with him, he woke Mick and Ro at three o'clock in the morning by turning up drunk with a vase of expensive orchids he had confiscated from the rich and which he intended to present to her. When he discovered that she wasn't home he kicked a hole in the front gate. The neighbours called the police.
