Affection Page 8

  “Be good girl. Don’t do what I would do.”

  “Don’t do what she wouldn’t do,” Sheila corrected. My aunt and my grandmother. I would never again be as close to them as I was at that moment, and I knew this as I hugged them. When I turned to my mother she was crying.

  “I love you,” I told her. “I’ll miss you.”

  And it was true.

  A PLAN

  Brisbane 2008

  By the time I am forty I will have my first novel published. By the time I am forty I will have lost weight. By the time I am forty I will have developed a calm wisdom and will spend a large part of every day helping younger people to find that wisdom, too. I will have abandoned my sudden inexplicable flashes of jealousy, and I will have become beautiful. I will achieve these goals.

  If I have not achieved these goals then I will climb to the top of the Story Bridge. I will drink a bottle of champagne by myself, knowing that it was not from want of trying. I will step over the rails and hang there, enjoying the beauty of the lights of the city reflected in the river. At the end of the drop there will be the relief of knowing that I will not have to struggle so hard anymore. I will not be scrambling like a rat in a wheel, desperate to keep myself up and away from the terrible bottoming out that will be back and back and back again.

  At the bottom of things I am unkind to myself. I will fall onto the water as if it were concrete, and when the weight of me drags this body under the surface the undertow will be gentle and I will be carried quietly away from myself.

  “It’s like I am setting myself up,” I tell the counselor as she sits and closes her eyes. I wonder if she might be bored and nodding into a deep sleep. “I choose someone who will not be attracted to me and I develop this obsession so that they can tell me I am unattractive and cannot be loved.”

  She opens her eyes. She is tired but she is awake.

  “Ah,” she says. “So maybe this is not about sex at all.”

  I am not following her. I am tired and harried and confused. “But it is about sex,” I tell her. “I always want to have sex with them. I dream I am having sex.”

  She looks at her watch.

  “Same time next week?”

  Another week and then another and then I will be forty.

  I hear about someone I know just a little who has taken his own life on his fortieth birthday. Quietly slipped away to a place where he will no longer be in pain. I am overcome by a wave of jealous anger. How can I follow through with my plan now? Now I will seem derivative. I read about the suicide of David Foster Wallace and everyone is sad, it seems, except me.

  “Maybe he was just fed up,” I tell Christopher.

  I watch him bend to retrieve the cash from the safe and find that I am no longer overwhelmed by that sudden rush of lust. I am both relieved and disappointed. The sink is still overflowing and I haven’t found another bucket to catch the water. I feel it spill onto the floor and am overwhelmingly sad. I realize that although I have cruised through my little infatuations, it has been a long time since anyone showed any interest in me. I stare tiredly into the mirror and quite frankly, I can see their point.

  I was sitting in a pub the other day and a man came up to me. He was a short man, inoffensive. He was wearing a yellow reflective jacket like a tradie or a cyclist. He was old—my age, I reminded myself, which is old. I looked up from my book, bleary eyed, emerging from a good story well told.

  “Can I sit here?”

  There were seats everywhere. The bar was almost empty but there were a few other girls, prettier girls, girls younger than me and he had picked me out because I looked old and single and perhaps lonely.

  “I mean, is this seat taken? Do you mind if I sit here?”

  He looked fine. Not mentally ill or drunk or high on anything as far as I could tell. He wanted to sit with me and chat, just a quiet conversation after work. No one has tried to pick me up in years. I am tempted to say that no one has ever tried to pick me up, but that would be wrong. There was one boy who asked me on a date and there were those two drunken men who chased me at 2:00 AM one night. I suppose that was a come-on of sorts. But really, in the scheme of things, there has been no one interested.

  This one was interested. Tentative. Interested. I looked at him, mole blind from the book, a little sad from the one glass of wine drunk too quickly.

  If I were single now, there would be no men plucked from my furtive fantasies, no wild affairs with those young men I fall in lust with slowly, one at a time. If I were single those same young men would not sit and have a beer with me after work. I could perhaps go back to my life of casual sex and one-night stands. There would be some pleasure in it I suppose.

  The first and only pick-up. This possibly nice man who is possibly the same age as me or maybe a little older.

  I refuse politely. I have my book to finish, my good story well told. I have a second glass of wine to consume it with. I have my fruitless infatuations with people half the age that I am now. I have my secret masturbatory fantasies. I have a husband, shielding me from the harsh glare of reality, from the horrible potential of quietly following this man, who is as old and sad as I am, back to his lonely bed.

  He doesn’t insist. He excuses himself politely and I watch out of the corner of my eye as he stands at the bar and quietly finishes his beer and walks out and away, rejected. Dejected.

  And my heart breaks just a little, for his sake, but mostly for my own.

  THE SAFETY OF CUPBOARDS

  Brisbane 1987

  I stood under a streetlight in the middle of the throng, clutching my map. I was in Brisbane, the Queen Street Mall, and there were people everywhere. There were groups of them, giggling couples holding hands, rangy tribes of teenagers hooting to each other across a sea of heads. My coat still held a hint of popcorn and Maltesers in its folds, the scent of the cinema. Strange to be standing in the dark, when I had entered the cinema in the glare of daylight: my first day in the city. I was alone and out in the world.

  Alone. I had never been alone like this. I stood at the bus stop and realized I had never bought a ticket for myself. I had never read a timetable. I had never sat in the movies without someone beside me. I turned the map over in my hands, matching my direction against the street signs. I had never had to follow a map before. I had been ferried from home to school to the shops and home again. I had never been responsible for my own direction. Now I was free. Free to go anywhere. I was free.

  In fact, I was going to the Country Women’s Association hostel my mother had arranged for me. Eventually I found the street and walked it.

  The building was old and tall, impressive in the way that hospitals or homes for the mentally ill are impressive. There was a dining area on the ground floor. Girls were sitting in groups, girls eating or watching television. Girls laughing and whispering and glancing up at me, the stranger in their midst. They could smell my difference. They heard it in my accent and saw it written on my sallow skin. They nodded to me in the elevator but I noticed how the conversation suddenly fell away. I heard the sound of it start up when I slunk down the corridor to my room. My room was gray and small, a desk sunk into one corner, a bed skulking in another. The wall-to-ceiling cupboard was finished in a wood veneer, the warmest thing in the place.

  I lay on the bed and the springs creaked. There was a sign in the lobby warning that men, including members of the family, were not allowed past the dining room. The creaking springs seemed like a secondary alarm. No tossing or turning or petting of any kind. I imagined they wouldn’t expect the girls to put the springs to the test with each other. The CWA did not anticipate the idea of love between girls, or else they shrugged it off.

  I lay on the bed and listened to the steady creak in time to my breathing. I switched the bedside light on. Gray shadows slicing geometric shapes out of a gray room, monochrome. Gray on gray on gray. A deafening palette blended out of white and black. I pulled the novel out from under my pillow and tried to read. Black writing
on white paper. Black and white and all of it gray.

  I pulled the duvet off the bed and opened the door of the cupboard. A small cramped space, but large enough for me to make a nest. It was dark in the cupboard, and safe, and the wood was fast against the wall, no creaking springs. I wriggled out of my pajamas. I touched myself for comfort and it was comforting, but briefly. When I was finished there was still the gray room outside and the sounds of the city and the first night alone. First night ever alone.

  I dragged the oversized speaker box toward the cupboard. It was an easy thing to climb up onto the box. I had to drag myself up on tiptoe, balancing against the cupboard door. I hooked my arms through the upper reaches of the door frame and heaved myself up, scrabbling awkwardly on the lip of the top shelf.

  When I was finally up there it was cozier than the bottom of the cupboard. There were pillows and extra blankets. I was safe, and suddenly terribly tired. I cried from tiredness, soft tears with no force behind them. I missed my family. I missed my home, my jail. I was finally free and I wished I was not. I longed for chains and rules and the smother of love. I pressed my face against the pillow. There was no air, and there I was hoping that I might drown in this tiny space above the cupboard. And slowly, breath by shallow breath, I fell asleep.

  I woke into a predawn moment, entombed. It was cold and cramped and one of my legs was numb.

  I could hear the traffic, the oceanic swell, and I knew that I was not at home. First night away from home. I was homesick for the press of dogs around my knees, warm damp fur bodies, the smell of caged birds, the crushing love of my family.

  I had survived the night and took a fierce pride in it. I shifted awkwardly and shook my foot; felt the painful prickle of blood rushing back. Despite the general family consensus that I would have difficulty surviving in the world, I was still here. I had seen a movie by myself. I had walked home. I had rested, after a fashion.

  I shrugged the night off, swinging my legs out so that I was hanging off the high ledge of the cupboard like a terracotta angel, and I realized then how far it would be to the floor.

  The speaker box was there beneath me. It was just a matter of turning in this cramped place, bracing myself in the structure of the cupboard with my arms, elbows splayed, then lowering myself onto the tall rectangle of wood. From there, it was a simple thing to slip onto the floor.

  I sat on the precarious ledge for what seemed like a long time. The sound of traffic filled out. Tide coming in, commuters rising, showering, dressing. There was a peal of laughter from somewhere down the corridor. Girls gathered, running toward the lift and down to breakfast in the communal dining place where boys were allowed but not encouraged, and I was stranded.

  I would find pictures, I thought. I would hang them above my desk and day by day they would spread across the walls, creeping over toward the bed and into my dreams. I would pick flowers. I would have no money to buy flowers, but I would pluck them from fence lines and pop them into a water bottle on the desk. I would search for flowers with a scent, jasmine, mock orange, to bring some pleasure to a lifeless space. I would fill the room with music to dispel the ache of emptiness. And, more important, I would find bodies to touch mine. I would be naked with someone new. I would provide my flesh with a distraction.

  But first I had to climb down out of the cupboard.

  In my particular family folklore, the one that families invent for you, I am clumsy and I am vague. I have barely a toe on the earth and the rest of me is lost to the atmosphere. “That’s Krissy,” they would say when I spilled a tepid puddle from a cup of tea or forgot my sentence halfway though. And it was with this fabled clumsiness that I executed a halting turn, edging my bottom toward the perilous drop. There was nowhere to lodge my fingers. I hooked my elbows around the door frame. There was nothing to do that would lessen the risk of plummeting. I took slow sure breaths. I would have one chance at this dismount. I tightened the muscles in my arms and this was my support. I crawled to the very edge and then there was the clean jerk of my body falling, but I was safe, held up by my arms. I searched about for the edge of the speaker box and my probing foot set it to listing back and forth, a precarious balance. I could feel the shudder in my arms and the slow burn of effort. I was light. I was as slight as I had ever been, thinned down by a stubborn refusal to eat. I was light, but there was no muscle to hold me there. I rested a toe on the speaker box. I would have to let go and there would be a small fall in this, but I would be perched in safety. I could visualize the result. I held my breath and let go.

  The speaker box slipped and I fell. Felt a flash of pain. Then nothing.

  I woke to the sound of cars, fewer of them now, the rush hour long gone. How long? There was still pain. I felt it in my scalp, waves of it, washing over me. I was in an ocean of the stuff and it was difficult to breathe, but I did, small shuddering breaths. So I had fallen. Had I broken something? My leg or my back? Perhaps I had snapped my spine. I certainly felt as if it would be impossible to move. With difficulty I reached down my body. I was wet, it felt as if I had wet myself. I touched the damp fabric at my crotch and the pain exploded, new and all consuming. My hand came away damp, but not with urine.

  There was blood ; I peeled down my pajama pants and there was so much blood there on my thighs. Somehow when I slipped I had caught the edge of the speaker box in my crotch. My vulva was horribly torn, my clitoris swollen to the size of a small orange.

  My first panicked thought was of sex. I had destroyed the possibility of pleasure. I thought about life without the relief of an orgasm and knew I would rather be dead. I wondered if I could somehow develop the ability to have nonclitoral orgasms, the fabled vaginal ones that I had read about. I wondered about reconstructions, plastic surgery, a stitching-up of ruined flesh and the softer skin taken from the back of my neck or my elbow.

  I lay awake in the pain for what seemed like a mess of days. Somehow, eventually, I would have to move; and so I did. I dragged myself along the carpet as though it were an assault course. I kamikaze-crawled. I butted up against the door and there it was like a mountain, something to be conquered. Somehow I managed to drag myself to my knees without fainting. I stretched for the door handle and miraculously it was in my hand, and the door was open. I was sprawled in the corridor and there was no one about and there was the lift at the other end and I had to crawl to it. I imagined ants dragging twigs hundreds of times larger than themselves. I thought of maggots, hatched and wriggling, seemingly on the spot, babies burning their skin on carpet, grunting their frustration, edging toward tears.

  The elevator doors opened and the girl inside screamed. It must have looked as if I had been stabbed. She saw the blood and she shrieked. Then she pulled me into the elevator and I relaxed into her panicked care. We were somehow in the lobby. I was kneeled beside, I was tended to. I sank into the hurt and the embarrassment of it all. They asked me what happened and I was not sure how to say that I was sleeping in the top of a cupboard without sounding like a freak. I was a freak. The ambulance drivers glanced at each other and I knew that it must be bad. I was thinking—I will never have sex ever again. I will never have an orgasm. I will die now. Must die. They gave me painkillers and I became drowsy and it still hurt, but I was distanced from it.

  In the hospital the doctors came in packs and looked but didn’t touch. The swelling had grown to the size of a baseball, a purple black canker.

  The same question: “How did this happen?”

  I invented a complex story about spring-cleaning, the same fall described in detail but with a different prologue. I knew that they could feel the lie. I was unused to lying. This invention, this half truth, was a new thing for me. They knew there was something amiss and so they held me, feeding me painkillers, trooping through the ward and asking me to keep my legs spread (as if I could have clamped them together in my present state). It occurred to me that they believed I had been abused. One nurse asked me about my living situation, my boyfriend. I had no boyfrien
d, or no one currently in the same city as myself. I thought about James, the boy from Gladstone, who wrote to me and told me he would wait for me. He would always love me.

  “I fell out of a cupboard,” I told them again and again, and it must have sounded like “I ran into the door,” or “I slipped down the stairs.” It was a lie in its unlikeliness.

  When a week was up they released me into the world. I had enough money for a cab fare but I would have no money for phone calls home or bus fares or food when I got there.

  I hobbled to the hostel on crutches. I slept in the bottom of the cupboard with the speaker box murmuring a classical lullaby. Bach. I had a sudden longing for my grandfather and his piano and I took the tape out of the machine and replaced it with a mix tape, songs of sadness and longing. Love is a stranger of a different kind, ground control to Major Tom, Heathcliffe, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home.

  The bruising faded, the swelling eased back to a kind of normalcy. After a time I began to masturbate, carefully, in my cupboard nest. No response at first, but slowly my body responded to my touch. A gentle climax. A slow return to form. The orgasms eased the loneliness a little. I abandoned the crutches. I found myself restless in the evenings and I left the confines of my student prison to wander the streets of Spring Hill.

  The houses were beautiful. The beautiful people in them had city lives full of excitement and families and friends. Everyone was busy doing something of importance, it seemed. I glimpsed them through half-drawn curtains. I passed them spilling out from the doorways of pubs. I came to know the streetwalkers by sight. I ventured to the edges of parks. I stood under the glow of streetlights and was bathed in otherworldliness. There were mad people pacing and talking to themselves and wandering in endless circles down streets, up streets, around streets. I passed the same man several times and suddenly realized that from his perspective it might have been me who was mad and aimless. I sat in my lonely gray room with the flowers sagging under the weight of days, petals dropping in time to the rhythmless strains of early Pink Floyd. I became restless quickly and I was back to walking. Time passed and passed and passed some more.