Affection Read online

  Emily’s musical was The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It took Marilyn’s primping and preening and amplified it. I watched under the covers in the dark and there was the heat of Emily’s body so close to mine and sometimes she reached out to me and held me by the shoulders and mouthed the words of a song, a love song, a sex song, and it was all I could do not to touch her in return.

  At some point she stopped the tape and made me stand and taught me the dance steps to a particular song and it was all about hips and tits and a slow pelvic grinding. Perhaps I didn’t care about the clarinet boy. Perhaps I didn’t need to suffer from an unrequited longing.

  When the film was over, she slipped in her Video Hits tape and turned the volume down so the pop songs became lullabies. We lay side by side and she edged closer to me.

  “If I were gay I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. I would be out and proud.”

  “Yes,” I told her. “If I liked women I would kiss them in public.”

  “Hold hands at school.”

  “I’d tell my family without any angst.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t tell my brother,” she said, “but I’d go live with the girl I loved. And I’d have a wedding. I’d have a Rocky Horror wedding and everyone would wear fishnet stockings.”

  We laughed and we settled more comfortably onto the mattress and I heard her breathing soften into tiredness, and I forced my breath to keep pace with hers. Her hand was between our bodies and I could feel the heat of her fingers almost touching my thigh. I shifted my leg slightly and there was the brush of her fingertips. I imagined that she must be awake, too. I could feel the thud of my heart and the thunder of it should be rocking the mattress. It was certainly shaking my body. My leg would be trembling to the rhythm of it. She would feel it through the tip of her fingers. I reached out the palm of my hand till I could feel the heat off her chest, not close enough to touch her, but close enough to hold her body heat. I clamped my thighs together as my stomach succumbed to that wonderful weightless surge that I associate with desire.

  It took most of the night for me to move my finger in slow increments toward her pajama top, and when it was within reach, I touched it. Not hard enough to feel the body beneath, but I could feel the fabric, and the sensation energized me. I was high with it, wakeful. I opened my eyes occasionally, imagining that sooner or later I would find that her eyes were open, too. I played out the scene, a sustained stare, a leaning into each other, a kiss. A fumbling under each other’s pajama tops.

  “If I were gay I would slip my finger inside you,” I would say, slipping my finger inside her.

  “If I were gay I would lick your breast.” Licking my breast.

  The scenario was played out in every possible way and ended each time with us lying in each other’s arms, covered in sweat, fingers entwined.

  The morning found us at arm’s length. Her fingers still barely grazing my thigh, my fingers almost touching her breast. I was stiff and sore and exhausted from such a wakeful night. She opened her eyes and stretched and turned and I felt a surge of regret. When she stood and asked if there was coffee I felt the cold morning air slide in under the blankets.

  “Yes. Coffee would be good,” I said.

  LEAVING

  My sister was a stranger by then.

  She had worked for a while in the corner store but she returned home and shut her door and stayed there with the curtains drawn and Pink Floyd turned up loud. Sometimes when I passed her in the corridor she glared at me with such hatred that I began to wonder if she would be likely to kill me in my sleep. I imagined waking up with a pillow over my face and no chance to shout for help.

  On better days she would venture out and sit in front of a video and perhaps even speak to me. I was careful with my conversations because she was prone to sudden rages. She would shriek and throw things and then, as if a switch had been thrown, she would suddenly power down. All signs of life gone. She would sit in complete silence, her eyes shut or open, and I would tiptoe around her, worried, but cautious as well, in case I somehow reactivated her.

  Her friend from school made the long trip up north to visit and for a while I could see my sister again. The smart playful girl who was fond of setting challenges and forcing you to participate.

  When he left I saw the life draining out of her. She took her paints into her bedroom and concentrated on making intricate dark pictures of buff knights and vampire women. Sex oozing out of the images. She would have to leave. I knew she would have to leave.

  She applied for university without telling anyone.

  I emerged from a restless Christmas break, thin from a regime of starvation, tanned from days of walking back and forth along the access road, and when I glanced into my sister’s room I noticed the difference immediately. She was packed and ready to leave us.

  The idea of leaving home was complicated. My aunt never had left home. My mother, in the brief time that she had tried to venture away from the nest, had barely settled. She’d spent most evenings at my grandmother’s, walking between houses with her children in tow. My grandmother exerted an incredible pull, like some vast astrological body, dragging everything in the universe toward her. My mother was sucked back into her orbit but once there she was kept at arm’s length, punished for her small foray out into the world, never again to be accepted back into the idea of home.

  Karen would go, and then she would be gone. My mother spent her evenings in tears. She knew the price you had to pay for leaving home. Maybe Karen could do her degree through distance education; she could send her assignments by mail. These were the options that could save her from the ultimate sin of leaving.

  My sister used the glamour of a university degree to slip away. My mother had graduated from teachers’ college. My aunt went to tech. Karen would be the first person in the family to be awarded a Bachelor of Arts.

  I went back to school. I sat on the bus with Emily and spent my days mooning over the boy with the clarinet. I was voted school captain and I knew that I was a compromise. The teachers liked me because I was pleasant, honest, and compliant. The students chose me because I didn’t really care. They could smoke in the toilets and I wouldn’t report them. No one really hated me, but they didn’t like me either. I auditioned for the school musical and won the starring role. And then, one day, my sister left.

  I could have her room if I wanted it. It was larger than mine and painted a dark and moody purple. There were black sheets. She had left her collection of fantasy novels and I could read them, but I didn’t really want to. I wrote to her once but she didn’t reply. She called home dutifully but there was a distance in the conversations. Her answers were monosyllabic. I wondered how it would be to leave. I knew I would never be brave enough, but maybe I would.

  I stood on the stage and sang about love and kissed the leading boy and it was my first kiss. Out there in public, in front of an audience of several hundred, I reached up for his neck and he bent down to my height. He was six foot six, I was five foot one. It was a kind of visual comedy but for me it was real and powerful and I opened my mouth there on the stage. There was an exchange of tongues and when I pulled away I said my line, which was “I love you,” and he said “I love you, too.” We were performing, but we would repeat the kiss in private at the after-party. I would know that even then, without the audience, we were performing an act, but it was an act that I was excited by. I kissed my leading man and I went home singing with the force of the kiss and told my mother that I had been asked on a date—even though, in reality, I had asked him.

  ABANDONING THE HYMEN

  The brush I had been using was tiny, a few sable hairs bound together. Like underwear, paintbrushes are more expensive the smaller they are. I was making fiddly adjustments to a lead figurine of a man in a tunic with high boots and a sword at his hip, adjusting the color of his cape while we waited on my aunt so the game could begin. My mother spent the time re-reading the adventure we were about to go on. “Into the Spider Lands,” or something eq
ually appealing—these Dungeon modules were all the same. It was like reading a crime novel or a romance, a pattern that rarely wavered from its course. By now I felt I had outgrown these family adventures anyway, but tomorrow I would be losing my virginity and there was something comforting in the idea of gaming with my family.

  I blew on the little metal figure until the paint dried and told my mother how my first date was going to be conducted. She was going to drive me the hour it would take to get to Gladstone, then she would wait for me at a safe distance. I told her I was old enough.

  “Next year I will be gone,” I said, knowing suddenly that it was true and that it would be fine. “Next year I will go to university like my sister.”

  She cried, and I hated to see her cry, but I refused to budge. I refused to scramble back into the safe nest that my grandmother had made for us. I would go on my date and I would leave home and, out on my own, everything would be okay.

  Tim made me buy the condoms.

  “You’re the one who wants to have sex,” he told me. “You buy the condoms.” Which seemed only fair until I was standing at the counter with a packet of Durex in my hand. I thought the chemist could smell my hymen. I had that whiff of virginity about me. I wanted it to be the woman who served me, but of course it was the man, and I met his eyes as I handed him the packet. I stared directly into his eyes as if my heart wasn’t thudding out my panic. I didn’t even know what condoms looked like really. I didn’t really know what a penis would look like either.

  I had already felt his penis through his trousers. I had felt it in the cinema, my hand sneaking over the armrest, spilling popcorn into my own lap, shivery fingers into his. I touched it and learned that it was apparently of impossible dimensions. Even my longest fattest candle at home didn’t seem quite so long and thick. I had never anticipated putting something so big inside my body, but the hymen must be broken somehow. I made Tim pay half the money because surely that was fair and I stood at the counter and eyeballed the middle-aged man and silently dared him to ask me anything about my purchase of those condoms.

  “I bought the condoms,” I told him, looking up. He played basketball and hung around a group of boys who also played basketball. His best friend was even taller than he was, and sweeter, nicer to be around. This did not bother me. I had kissed my leading man and therefore I would sleep with him.

  Before our first kiss, the stage kiss, we had barely said a word to each other outside rehearsals. Tim liked to play sports. I liked to play the clarinet and Dungeons & Dragons. There was no possible subject for a conversation between us, and yet here we were, kissing, and the heat of that kiss traveled down into my stomach and settled there, butting against my hymen like a demon child desperate to be released from its cage.

  The plan was that we would have sex on the beach while my mother waited for me in the car, since I couldn’t travel anywhere without her. She would wait just within shouting distance, making sure that I could not get into any trouble. My mother knew that this was a date and that I was here with a boy. I had my one-piece bathing suit on under my jeans and T-shirt. He was wearing boardshorts. We would swim. I argued that I needed some small moment of privacy, just time alone to talk and perhaps hold hands. I’m not sure if I promised her that nothing would happen but I might have.

  I was determined to abandon my hymen on that beach in the light of day. I had a patterned towel because I knew there might be some blood. I had read about this, small drops of red on a wedding sheet, hung out for all the villagers to cheer over; rose petals of color on the virgin white panties of some fallen girl. I had the condoms in my pocket and I had purchased them without any assistance. Nothing, not even my own promises or the presence of my mother, was going to stop me from executing my task.

  I took his hand and plummeted. I ran down the beach and around the curve of ocean to where my mother wouldn’t see me disappearing into the scrubby strand with Tim the basketball player trailing from my hand like a huge kite. He caught the wind and dragged at me, but I tugged against him. There was very little time. In a matter of minutes my mother would be strolling along the sand, peering out into the ocean, looking for the little bobbing buoys of our heads.

  His penis was very large. That was my first and only thought. I watched it spring up from his boardshorts like a little white flag, marking a place in the center of his wiry pubic hair. I thought about golf. I knew he played golf.

  I checked my watch and undressed hurriedly, wrangled condoms. They seemed too small. I wrestled one out of its packet and it was a skinny limp skin. Shriveled, miserable.

  “Do they come in sizes?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know. How do I know?”

  “Didn’t you ask?”

  I thought of the old man behind the counter at the chemist, handed Tim the droop of latex, watched him scrabble with his ridiculous protrusion. Time was ticking on. My mother would be sitting on a bench pretending to read her book, watching the ocean and waiting for me to drift into view. He tried and failed to do anything useful with the condom; it dropped into the prickly grass at his feet.

  Only five condoms left now. The thought that I might return home still a virgin was intolerable.

  “Here, I’ll do it,” I said.

  I pulled another little rubber worm from the packet, and the hot sand scratched against my knees.

  Who was to know there would be so much blood?

  And it hurt. He looked down at me for a moment; he paused and asked if he should stop, but we pushed on. The condom seemed too tight and I had not yet learned about lubrication. I was dry and there was sand and we were running to a deadline. I had to check my watch from time to time and listen for the squeak of my mother’s feet on the sand.

  When the hymen broke it was a painful relief. The blood began to flow, which eased the chafing, but I didn’t even attempt an orgasm. The job was done: I was ready to down tools and head off to the pub for a beer. But the blood was everywhere and I wondered how I would be able to hide it. My white swimsuit would be ruined, the towel was a mess of sand and gore. Then Tim rolled the condom off and there was only half of it left. The rest had disappeared mysteriously somewhere inside me. Blood and semen then. I wanted to cry.

  “What if you get pregnant?” he groaned. “What if I’ve got the school captain pregnant?”

  I had a name. He knew it but he chose to see me as I had never seen myself, as a rank, the captain of the school that he attended. I looked at him then, this sports-playing giant of a boy. I was grateful for the removal of my hymen but suddenly, for the first time, I wondered if I should have waited for someone I cared about.

  “I won’t get pregnant.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ll get the morning after pill.”

  This seemed to satisfy him. He leaned over and kissed me. I accepted the kiss without pleasure. I was planning things, crossing them off an imaginary list. Get dressed, hide the towel drenched in blood, tell my mother I needed to go to the doctor. Tell her that I was old enough, that she didn’t have to come with me. Why did she always come in to the doctor with me? I had just turned eighteen and therefore I was a woman and I could see the doctor by myself. There would be a fight, it would end in tears. I would have to tell her outright. That’s what I should do.

  “Mother, I’ve just had sex and I need the morning after pill,” I would say. Just like that. Quick, and all the pain would be over, just like the breaking of the hymen.

  The boy was talking to me. I looked at him, tried to focus. I should listen to this tall and sporty boy who had just lost his own virginity to me. I should take an interest. I gazed at him, this boy I barely knew and didn’t particularly like, and nothing he said could be of interest to me. I closed my eyes and lay back in the sand, gathering my strength for our departure.

  GONE

  I knew I would miss the place terribly. I didn’t want to leave. I had made friends. There was Emily and the evenings we still spent bemoaning the fact that we
weren’t gay, lying next to each other, and me with my secret desire spilling over onto her side of the bed, my fingers touching her hip as she slept, my nostrils flaring toward that particularly delightful sleeping-girl smell.

  I would miss sharing meals with my grandmother and my aunt, the early mornings lazing at the breakfast table drinking the perfect pot of leaf tea. Eating freshly cooked bread hot from the oven.

  I would miss those infrequent moments with my grandfather at the piano, while my grandmother huffed and puffed and moaned about the noise hurting her head. I would miss the menagerie, all the animals that I helped to groom and care for.

  I would miss James, the new boy who had started to drive the long distance out to our property to spend afternoons with me playing video games and play-fighting and stealing stray moments to touch. He would leave with the scent of me on his fingers and on his lips. I would spend my evenings restlessly longing for his next visit, or for Emily, to talk to about his next visit.

  There was all of November, December, and January after the end of the school year and I spent my days writing a novel which I finished just before I had to leave for university. It was a story of unrequited love, of traveling, moving on, and leaving people behind. It was set on a strange planet where magic happens. There were echoes of Dragonhall in its pages although I could not see it then.

  I did not let them see me cry. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to cancel my enrollment or defer. I wanted to stay home, unchanging, to remain a part of the family. My grandmother hugged me stiffly. She rarely hugged and it seemed uncomfortable for her to do so. She was dry eyed and tight-lipped and I knew I was a disappointment.