Affection (4 page)

Hello? Do you remember me?

I glance at the little pop-out box at the bottom of my Facebook page. Paul. A friend of Christopher's? I met him once at a writers' festival dinner.

I didn't know there was a chat function in Facebook.

Ah. Well there is.

The popping sound it makes is disconcerting.

Would you like me to stop talking to you?

No, actually, I am very happy to talk to you. I am having trouble sleeping.

I chat to Paul for an hour. We talk about writers and books and art. He seems to know a lot about things I am interested in. I try to remember his face and have a vague impression of someone short and perhaps a little brash; I can't picture him exactly.

I sit up in bed. I am beginning to enjoy the banter. When the battery is low I move to the lounge room where I can plug in. I am so far away from sleep by now. When Paul says he should go to bed I feel vaguely disappointed.

This is how it begins, unexpectedly. This Paul is now someone I know from the Internet more than real life; I didn't really take much notice of him at that dinner. I was distracted by a writer whose book I had quite enjoyed.

The next night, unsettled in my lonely bed, I look out for him, switching between Internet pornography and Facebook, where I will be able to see if he has come online. I am disappointed that he does not. I chat with someone else briefly, and without the same kind of connection. I find that I miss him; that I was looking forward to another conversation.

Strange how I hook into this thing with him so quickly. I turn over our conversation of the night before and his voice in my head sounds like my voice. Already, right up front, he feels like family to me.

There was a period I remember when I thought I would give birth to a creature that was half-dog, half-human. I dreamed it in those dark moments before wakefulness when reality is a meniscus of light at the very top of a deep well. I dreamed the thing was pink, squirmy, baby color, but with a fine coating of fur and black eyes and a long penis stretching the length of its belly and ending in a bright red worm that retracted its head when the creature breathed. In the dream I held the thing at arm's length, the hideous proof of what I had done.

What had I done? I sift back through the wrack of memory to find the moment.

Here is a small child at the top of the back stairs. It is hot and she—I; it is my memory after all—I have come here because this place is one of the few safe places in the whole of the house and
garden. This tiny corner of the world makes me invisible. My mother, standing at the sink, can strain and stand on tiptoe but she will never see more than my shoes and only then if I choose to stretch my legs down to the second step.

It is hot and the dog is panting. It is a young dog, new to my house and more quick to play than the skittish saluki or the tetchy sheepdog or our labrador, who sleeps on my bed and presses her nose into my lap when I am crying.

Because of the extraordinary heat the new dog is calm for once. He is perched with his haunches pressed into my hip. I stroke his sleek fur, short and clean and gingerish. On this day he cannot settle. He sits and pants, shifting, stands and pants. I watch him, remembering all the times I have felt this way, itchy with heat, distracted by potential games but lacking the energy to chase them. I pat the inside of the dog's thigh, lean but meaty, like something that could be torn from a corpse and gnawed on. I am always thinking this kind of thing, although I know that I should not be. In a Dr. Seuss story I learned that I should only think of fluffy things or else I might just “thunk up a glunk.” I simultaneously want, and also do not want, to thunk up a glunk.

The dog stands and shifts and his meat-bone thigh is at little-girl height and his penis is right here, panting in time to his breaths. The little red worm of it is slipping in and out of its velvety sheath.

I watch it.

Glunk, I think, don't thunk a glunk.

At school yesterday someone made a joke about moms and dads sleeping in the same bed and wearing no pajamas. Everyone laughed. I didn't.

“My mom and dad never slept in the same bed,” I said, although I didn't really remember my dad sleeping in the same house as us at all.

“But they must have at some time.”

“No.”

“At least once.”

“No.”

And then the joke turned nasty, the little nip of giggles directed straight at me. Kiddie mirth like piranhas, I knew that this must be like the Santa Claus thing and that they would ultimately prove they were right and I was wrong.

The act, apparently, involved a dad putting his thing in and then some kind of white stuff and then a baby.

Here, on this hot concrete step, I look over at the new dog and its wormy thing and there is indeed some white stuff, just like they said there would be.

I am in this spot where no one can possibly observe me. If I were sitting anywhere else I would never do it but I am here, and so I will.

I touch it, the thing, and when I touch it, a drop of milk oozes onto my finger and I pull aside my knickers quickly and make it go where the kids at school have told me it should go.

The idea of a baby, half-dog, half-child, began to gestate in my imagination. There were weeks of secret nightmare births, of being followed by wolf-howls and padding shadows. I opened my legs in front of a mirror, checking for any signs of a bestial pregnancy, thinking that one day I might reach inside myself and feel the embryonic row of canines growing in a soft-furred skull.

I look back into the pit of my childhood and it is all sex and terror and art. I played branding and handball and I could throw and catch like a boy, but I was not a boy. I was not to play with the boys. I was coddled in the safe haven of my grandmother's house on Duckmallois Avenue, where men were wolves and strangers were to be treated like witches. Smile at them, nod, and then back quickly away.

 

 

My grandfather sat in the dark and listened to music on old 78s. Bach mostly, but some Beethoven, Puccini. Sometimes the music rose too loud and sharp to be borne without flinching. It was dynamic. There was a whole vast landscape inside it, stepped out by the runs of notes and cavernous silences. He let me sit in his favorite chair. It was a hard red globe and it spun when you kicked your feet against the floor. I sat and listened to his music even though I liked other music better. David Bowie, Kate Bush,
Dark Side of the Moon
, which my aunt listened to with her head resting on a pillow between the speakers. When she sat like that her bottom was left high and exposed to my grandmother's passing slaps and pinches.

Still, there was something subversive about my grandfather's music. The rest of my family hated his classical recordings. He was forced to play them in his room and preferred to do so in the dark. When my grandmother trotted past the door we heard her muttering complaints about the noise—“like a funeral”—and we grinned together without speaking.

He stuffed a pipe with tobacco and lit it, puffing hard to make embers glow. The smell of Dr. Pat was a pleasant one, rich and dark like the music. When the record came to the end of its groove he let me lift the needle, flip the heavy Bakelite, turn it. When I was younger still, he would supervise the turning of the record, holding the arm of the needle with me in case I dropped it, hovering nearby to catch the record if it slipped through my fingers. I turned fourteen, and I could be trusted as the rest of the family would not trust me.

His room smelled of chemicals, sharp and bitter. Behind us in the dark there were tables and benches and rows of synthetic rope strung across the corner from which to hang the drying prints. When he drew the curtains and pressed the Velcro down we succumbed to impenetrable blackness. He kept the black shades parted when we listened to music and when I raised my fingertips I could see them wriggling in the gloom.

Sometimes when he was at work I would sneak into his room, touch the covers of his records and hear the music resonating in my skull. In the dark, I would shuffle under the table where he developed
his photographs and masturbate to the sound of Bach, the shut-up secretive smell of his den in my nostrils. Once he came home before I had finished. He knew I was there, my hand hidden under my skirt, but he pretended that he didn't. He shuffled some papers, lit his pipe, and then retreated, leaving me to finish in peace. I wondered if this was what he did here, too. I felt a kind of camaraderie with him because I knew that he must long for some kind of physical contact. He slept in a separate room, leaving my aunt and my grandmother their chaste twin beds.

 

 

Duckmallois Avenue was a reasonably pretty street, trying to hold its head up in a downtrodden area with a terrible reputation. Duckmallois Avenue turned its weatherboard back on rapes and murders, hung pretty floral blinds to shutter out the more insidious misdemeanors occurring in the neighbors' bedrooms. The lawns were tightly cropped inside picket fences, knee high and glistening with fresh paint. In some gardens there were roses, in others there were pretty annuals planted, tended, uprooted, replaced by seasonal bulbs and winter blooms. There was a German woman with an eye for garden ornaments, and a Greek family with pretty daughters, and older residents; no renters, no harried huddles of housing commission residences.

There were children, too, young boys who cruised slowly past on BMX bikes, stopping outside the heavy tangle of shrubs that made
our house like no other on the street. Sometimes they slipped off the seats of their bicycles and crouched low to peer into the gloom. I knew that they were trying to catch a glimpse of us. Sometimes they threw stones that could not penetrate the thorny tangle. Sometimes they called out names. They thought that my grandmother was a witch, or perhaps that we were some kind of religious order. They had seen the two young girls, my sister and me, hurried from the car and into the house. They knew that we were not allowed to play on the street or in the little park just around the corner. They knew that we were a crowd of women, and if they had seen my grandfather skulking in the garden at twilight they did not mention it. Their curses were always female: witches, whores, harpies, sluts.

Inside our garden it was cooler than out there in the world. It was always dark and damp and there were special places; the branches low enough to climb on, the patches of tender leaves and the little purple violets that smelled sweet as clouds when you pressed your cheek into the leaf litter and breathed in hard.

I was not allowed out except for when I was walked to school by my mother or when we all went out together to the shops or to the movies. Sometimes they let me walk our pet ferret on a lead, but I was always accompanied by one of the adults. There were frequent family visits to the library and rare treats, journeys to the museum or the gallery. It was a goal of sorts, but I was not bothered beyond a slight sense of regret when other kids gathered for parties or school
camp or when they talked about sleepovers, staying up all night playing games. I sensed instinctively that I would be out of place at the parties or sleepovers anyway. On camps I might spend my time alone. I read constantly, and when I was not reading or sneaking off to indulge myself in the pleasures of my newly swelling flesh, I helped the adults with their work or played games with my sister, arguing till mealtime.

My sister was three years older than me and she had just discovered Ayn Rand. Fat American novels that helped her to bully her way into a life of self-interest and capitalism. I had become obsessed by the Russian revolution, perhaps as a direct reaction to her change of style. I changed the pecking order on the chessboard, refusing to play unless the object was to protect every last pawn, killing off the aristocracy one by one. My sister called me Commie and Pinko. There was a cold war brewing in the darkest places of our garden fortress and I suspected that her armory was better stocked than mine.