Affection Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  BOUND

  SEX ADDICTION - Brisbane 2008

  CHILDHOOD - Blacktown 1970

  THE BOOKSHOP - Brisbane 2008

  PAPIER-MCHÉ - Blacktown 1977

  THIS THING WITH PAUL - Brisbane 2008

  BESTIAL - Blacktown 1978

  FALLING IN LOVE WITH YOUR FRIENDS - Brisbane 2008

  THE FIRST CENSORSHIP - Blacktown 1981

  THE FIRST PORNOGRAPHY

  COUNSELED - Brisbane 2008

  WINNING LOTTO - Blacktown 1982

  THIS THING WITH PAUL 2 - Brisbane 2008

  MOVING ON - Blacktown 1983

  HETEROSEXUAL AND MONOGAMOUS - Brisbane 2008

  DRAGONHALL - Bororen 1983

  SCHOOL AGAIN

  CRUSH

  LEAVING

  ABANDONING THE HYMEN

  GONE

  A PLAN - Brisbane 2008

  THE SAFETY OF CUPBOARDS - Brisbane 1987

  DRAG AND THE DRAMA QUEEN - Brisbane 2008

  UNIVERSITY - Brisbane 1987

  RAYMONT LODGE

  EVAN

  SHARE HOUSE

  RESTLESS

  BECOMING CATHERINE DENEUVE - Brisbane 2008

  BREAKUP SEX - Brisbane 1989

  THE ARCHITECT

  MEETING IN REAL LIFE - Brisbane 2008

  CAUTIONARY TALES - Brisbane 1989

  1. Paying Your Own Way

  2. Excessive Alcohol Consumption

  3. Letting Them Sleep Over

  4. Misdirected Emotions

  5. No Spitting on a First Date

  PILLION - Brisbane 2008

  RICHARD - Brisbane 1989

  PILLION 2 - Brisbane 2008

  THE PRIZE - Brisbane 1989

  LAURA

  THE VIRGIN

  I NEED TO TALK ABOUT FRANK’S PENIS

  MEETING BRIAN

  PILLION 3 - Brisbane 2008

  CRACKS - Brisbane 1989

  MOVING HOUSE

  NOT TALKING ABOUT THE SPA BATH - Brisbane 2008

  SPRING HILL - Brisbane 1990

  THREE GIRLS AND AN APOLOGY

  THE GIRL I ONCE LOVED

  THE STRAIGHT GIRL

  PICNIC IN A VACANT LOT

  ON THE TABLE

  LOSING OUR JOBS

  THE INTERVIEW

  BRIAN AGAIN

  MANTRA - Brisbane 2008

  BALLOONS - Brisbane 1990

  THE LONGING - Brisbane 2008

  PARK - Brisbane 1990

  THE TOILET BLOCK

  NIGHTMARE - Brisbane 2008

  RAIN - Brisbane 1991

  THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SECURITY

  CHAPTER FORTY - Brisbane 2008

  ST. JAMES STREET - Brisbane 1990

  SEX, LOVE, AND INTIMACY - Brisbane 2008

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Acknowledgements

  Selected Titles from Seal Press

  Copyright Page

  BOUND

  Richard tied me to a pole because I asked him to. He used duct tape and he secured my wrists with it. The mattress was within reach but only close enough to rest my head on. He tied a sock around my face; I could still see if I opened my eyes and squinted. The floor was concrete and I felt the chill bite of it in my knees. He had tied my hands low, and I could stand but not straighten. Kneeling was best, my head resting on the pillow of my bound palms. My back arched up, my bottom raised. I knew where this was leading.

  There was something strangely domestic about the morning. He filled the sink and I could hear the clatter of plates in the soapy water. Upstairs a similar scene was in progress, our landlady washing her own dishes, a domestic parallel minus the girl tied to the pole in the middle of the room.

  I imagined that he would look up from the dishes and watch me. I wondered if I looked ridiculous in submission, if he was grinning with the humor of it all. Perhaps he watched impassively, clocking the time by the fading heat of the water. I heard him empty the sink and fill it again. Time passing. The slow drip of dishes drying. The television upstairs chattering about nothing to no one.

  My skin became my eyes. I felt the fingers growing out of my back, wriggling like an anemone, my tentacles of awareness picking out small changes in the breeze and temperature. If someone had photographed me like this there would have been a hazy outline. Kirlian photography would have captured the little bubble of awareness that enveloped me. I thought about the boy upstairs, Richard’s previous lover. The boy upstairs watching football on television as his mother did the dishes, and in the downstairs parallel universe my lover—his ex-lover—and me, tied to the pole.

  I grew restless. I wanted to call him over to me. I wanted his hands and his body and some relief from this stretching out of my skin. I imagine that he spent an age over the drying because he wanted me to enjoy my time of longing, but I am not sure I enjoyed the long minutes of waiting. When he came to me finally, I could have ripped the duct tape off the pole and finished in a second but I did nothing. Said nothing.

  He examined me. I felt his hands still dripping with dishwashing liquid, lifting, pulling, separating. Of course I knew how this would end, but still there was the little shivery thrill as he traced the ridge of bone arcing down from the center of my back, slipping his finger over, but not into, my anus, and hooking it into my vagina, testing the viscosity there.

  I thought of dissection tables, dead things tied down, paws and legs splayed, bellies exposed to the glare of fluorescent light. The fact that this aroused me was perhaps a problem. The erotic appeal of the medical experiment had become a recurring theme.

  It was the idea of him watching me like that, the openness, the vulnerability. There was no question that he would penetrate me eventually, but he took his time. The joy is not knowing exactly when, and exactly where. The joy is the anticipation. A moment of breath on the skin, a sense of exposure, a vulnerability. Someone watching or not watching; never knowing which. I remember the hot cold of the afternoon and the disappointment of the inevitable ending. The sound of his ex-boyfriend turning off the television at the moment of his orgasm, a sudden silence and the slight, pleasurable pain of his withdrawal. The normalcy of a Sunday morning creeping into afternoon.

  I will always remember this, perhaps. I remember it now.

  And that was just the sex part.

  SEX ADDICTION

  Brisbane 2008

  “Sex addict?” I laugh. “I’m not a sex addict.”

  Katherine raises an eyebrow. I have known her since I was eighteen. She is the friend who has stuck by me longest. I look at her gorgeous luminous face and I wonder why we have never slept together, not once in all these years. She sips at her coffee and watches me and I feel myself unpicked ; and when I am seamless there is nothing left of me but sex. I have been pathologized.

  I picture an ape, furiously masturbating in its enclosure; I can feel the ugly monkey suit itching against my skin and for a brief moment I am repelled and also aroused by the image. I am used to this sudden rush of desire, the narcotic effect of the idea of sex, a prickly spread of it like ecstasy trickling through my body.

  I am made of sex, I feed on the thought of it. I call myself Queer because there is no other word I know to describe this state of being indiscriminately sexual. Now Katherine has made new words for me to worry over. Sex addict. An addiction.

  I would like to tell her that I’m not addicted, that I could stop any time. It would be a joke and it would also be untrue.

  A young Asian man walks into the café and I glance at him and register his feminine beauty. Again the rush of pleasure. That comforting settling low in my belly. There was a time when I would have made some kind of contact with this man, slipped over to his table, engaged in some light flirtation; heavier
if he responded. There was a time when we might have ended up in bed together.

  “If I am an addict then I have got it under control.”

  “How many times a day do you think about sex?”

  Almost constantly.

  “How often do you masturbate? ”

  I sigh. She knows that I can never stay alone in the house if I am to get any work done at all. She knows that I struggle not to look up pornography on the Internet. She knows me almost as well as I know myself.

  “Heaps of people think about sex as much as I do. Men. I am just a man trapped inside a woman’s body.” A throwaway line, and she laughs.

  “Teenage boys, perhaps. You are going to be forty this year.”

  I shrug.

  “How many shrinks does it take to change a lightbulb?”

  “Well yes.” She smiles at the old joke that has lasted between us through all the years. “There is the question of whether the lightbulb wants to change.”

  I hold her delicate fingers and smile, and I think about how deeply she could reach inside me with those elegant hands. A wriggling fish of thought, fleeting, gone in a second, but there will be another and another, whole schools of thought flashing across my consciousness. The constant distractions of a sexual world as wonderful and varied as the ocean, a world I could drown myself in and die happy.

  “I don’t think I’m a sex addict.” I check my watch. Just enough time to catch a bus to work.

  We stand and hug and there is her willowy body pressed against mine for just a moment. I rarely hug. Hugs are an open doorway to a flaring in my body and I remove myself from these kinds of intimate gestures. No hugging, no kisses on the cheek, no holding hands unless I feel safe enough with the person I am touching.

  I hug Katherine, my oldest friend, who has just now pinned me with her observation.

  “You take care,” she tells me, and she means it. She always wishes me well. I watch her walking away from me, graceful, slender, the line of her perfect breasts under a tight sweater, and that liquid surge pumps through my brain. I am, of course, not a sex addict, but as I watch her walk away from me, feeding on my lust as if it were a Lindt ball dissolving under my tongue, I pause, and I wonder.

  CHILDHOOD

  Blacktown 1970

  The wonderful thing about felt pictures is the way you can rub them on your upper lip and they feel like comfort. They are simple shapes cut out of bright colors. The felt sticks to itself with a satisfying grab. If you get very close all the colors blend into each other and the shapes disappear. A horse is no longer a horse. A house is not a house.

  I have become obsessive about felt pictures. I lie on the scratchy carpet, pushing my body down against the short pile. The television is on, Playschool or Mr. Squiggle or Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men or some other burble of music and rhyme. My hips press against the carpet and the delightful pressure of a full bladder, full of milk no doubt, a lovely innocent pressure and the feel of sunlight burning a window shape on my calves. Red horse, orange horse, yellow, all of a palette. I save the blues and greens for the other corner of the felt board. I hoard fish and crabs and grass and green houses for the cool color end of things. I am sleepy and the colors blend into each other. They blend into the throb of my bladder and when I cross my legs over each other there is an even greater pleasure. I can hear my mother clattering through the washing up.

  Color. I see color. I feel heat and pressure and the edges of everything become indistinct. I hover at the edge of a thought. Perhaps I will fall asleep midhorse. I arrange the horses one next to another next to another. All the orange horses. Perhaps I will just let go, urinate ecstatically on the scratchy carpet. The pressure builds, my eyelids droop, I see orange and red and there is a smell to it, a burnt caramel sweetness and I breathe in deeply, wondering what it could be.

  When I fall over the edge I am surprised. Pleased. It is as if I have succumbed to color. I am filled with it, and full of the idea of smell. My skin is burning with all kinds of blue. The down on the back of my neck is sweet as honey. My body pulses in the aftermath of this transformation.

  This was my first orgasm. I can name it now. I can relive it. But back then, at the beginning of things, there was no line between the colors and the heat and the scent. After this moment I fell in love with the process of making pictures with felt. I came back to this activity again and again and again and again. Felt pictures first and then, when my mother thought I was old enough, oil paints meted out onto the upturned lid of a margarine container.

  “Not too much linseed oil.”

  The oil thinned the color, made it slick and shiny, thin on the canvas. The oil painting was something we did together, my mother and I. My sister was too fiercely independent to sit and listen to instruction. She was naturally talented. She painted horses and dragons and princesses. She made paper dolls for me to play with and the most elaborate dresses painted on cartridge paper. Little paper tabs to fold over the bare shoulders of the beautiful paper women.

  I painted till my body hummed with color. I pressed my knees together and breathed in the heady scent of turpentine till my head began to spin. I didn’t know about sex but I knew that I should never tell about the thing the colors did to my body. I lay under a blanket and turned the thick glossy pages of an art book. Chagall blue, my favorite color in the world, and my fist pressed firmly against my pubis. Blue and pleasure, that was all there was to the world until my sister ripped the blanket from my body and left me exposed to the bare gray light of the day.

  “I know what you’re doing,” she chanted. “I know, I know, I know.”

  But I didn’t know.

  No one spoke to me about masturbation. I didn’t know that what I did had anything to do with sex. I didn’t know that people touched each other to make this happen without the smell of paint and the vision of color.

  My house was sexless. There were five industrious women, and my grandfather hiding invisible in his room. My grandmother sat above us like a queen bee and the rest of the women listened and obeyed. My father was absent. My sister says I should remember the presence of my father, but it is gone as if the short time he was with me in childhood has been erased. That part of the tape was exposed to a magnet or the sun.

  When I discovered the physical way of achieving orgasm, the full knowledge that certain pressures of my fingers would produce such an overwhelmingly pleasurable result, I could not stop doing it. I became an expert at it, finding places that would be private, times when I could sneak away and would not be missed.

  Bath times, quick trips to the toilet, and in the evenings, drowsy from the day.

  I shared a room with my sister and I practiced staying awake till I was certain that she would be asleep. I was stealthy as a ninja, one finger rubbing so gently that the bed wouldn’t even creak. On the weekend I could sometimes find a quiet spot, private, secluded. There was a crawl space beside the house, overgrown with jasmine and gated by two gardenia bushes pressing their branches together. This was my favorite place, the summer scent, perfumes clamoring, the fat buzz of bees droning sleepy in my ear.

  I pulled down my shirt, exposing my shoulders to the scratch of leaves and the finger creep of a lazy breeze. I imagined I was naked. I hadn’t even taken my knickers all the way off. I pulled them to one side and they were a damp obstruction to be worked around. There would be grass in my hair, twin plaits, all that wiriness pulled tight. My skirt would suck the damp from the soil. I would be in disarray when I pushed my way back into the world, blinking at the slap of sunlight. There was no other human being in my imaginings. There was just the sense of all the elements settling on my flesh. The scent alone whispered love. White flowers, sharp and sweeter than honey, a drugged haze of scent pulling me down. There was the Chagall blue behind my closed eyelids. When my mother called I was a long way away, drifting toward a precipice without hurry. With the sound of her voice I was rushing, scared by the possibility of discovery. The fear was a kind of excitement, hurr
ying toward a quick, barely satisfying climax. I dug my fingers into the soil, masking the smell of my juices with earthworm castings and loamy grit.