My Hundred Lovers (7 page)

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 journalists, 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