Affection (7 page)

I looked toward my sister. She was still scowling into her copy of
The Fountainhead
. She had heard the exchange but, unlike me, refused to be curious. Their business had nothing to do with her. She was an island separated from us by the bristling of her back.

“All right,” my mother conceded. “Tomorrow night.”

My grandmother warned, “It might be something wrong. A mistake.”

“Ah! Ah! Ah!” My aunt glanced toward my sister and me, both of us pretending to be engrossed in our novels.

“I'm not saying,” my grandmother said. “I just mean not to count your eggs.”

“Chickens,” my aunt corrected her.

 

 

Chickens, eggs, crème de menthe. This is how I came to realize that the win was not a little one at all. First-division lotto, which meant there was no trip to the rocks to buy Sepik art. There were no scones with strawberry jam. Instead there was a promise of something entirely more grand.

“We are going to move to Dragonhall,” they told me. “But it is a secret. Don't tell them at school. If they know you are leaving they might stop caring about you in class. They might fail you because they are jealous. Don't tell your teachers until we are all packed and ready to get on the plane.”

“Where is Dragonhall?” I asked them.

They pointed to the map, somewhere in Queensland, a place
near the ocean, a fly-spot labeled Bororen with the blue of the sea less than a finger reach away.

“This is our Disneyland,” my grandmother told me. “Dragonhall because my name, Dragitsa, means dragon.”

“No,” Sheila corrected. “It means Charlotte, Lotty. A female version of Charles.”

“Yes, Charlie; but it is also like a dragon, my family's symbol had a dragon.”

“A dragon on the top of it,” my aunt confirmed.

“Dragon-hall. You want to go to Dragonhall?”

Of course I wanted to go to Dragonhall. I wanted to go away from a school where I was harassed by older kids and abandoned by my sister. I wanted to stop being afraid that the man who raped a neighbor and carved his initials in her skin might climb in through my bedroom window and carve his name in me. I wanted to live in a place that was like Disneyland only better.

I went to bed early and slept without the nightmares that always plagued me. Instead I dreamed of chocolate frogs, gingerbread forests, and measureless caverns dripping with stalactites. The promise of Dragonhall.

Paul is there again. Most people put their own image on their Facebook page but he has a piece of art. A house, balanced on a mountainous peak, a wash of a storm brewing. I have come to associate the picture that stands in for him with pleasure. I smile when I see it and when I am anxious I close my eyes and there is his house behind them like a reassurance. I know it is silly, but I associate our chats with a feeling of contentment and his picture is enough to evoke this feeling. He chats to me about books and styles of writing.

I have started a blog, I tell him, because I am jealous of Christopher's “Furious Horses,” writing a new story every day.

What is it called?

“Furious Vaginas.”

Hahaha, he says and then it seems he is gone. A silence which I punctuate with question marks at intervals.

I like that it isn't about sex. He is back again.

Isn't it?

No, he says. It seems to be about other things.

I ask him to send me some of his work. I have heard that his writing is good but I am not sure that I have read any of it. We talk about Nicholson Baker as he gathers things together to send as a file. Paul multitasks like a demon. This, more than anything, marks him as a member of the next generation. I know that I am far too old for him. I am from a different era.

Vox
is about us, I say. You and me.

Ah, but I never talk about sex.

But I do.

Therefore
Vox
is about you, but not about us, exactly.

You will talk about sex one day, I tell him. I will have an influence on you.

When you talk about sex, Paul says, you are not actually talking about sex.

And so of course I answer, When you talk about other things you are always talking about sex but in an oblique way.

And then the file comes down. I click over to my Gmail and they are there, Paul's stories. A little paperclip and beneath it three small files. I open them. A new message from Paul makes a little popping
sound, but I ignore it. He will know I am reading. His stories are good, clever. One of them is funny and it makes me smile. It is not until I open the third one that I feel my heart engaging. This story goes on too long. There is a moment when I feel my chest expanding, my heart opening up to him, my eyes pricking with tears, and then the story moves on a little, like a train that has overshot the station, leaving the passengers stranded with no platform to step down onto. I switch to chat and tell him this and he immediately starts to fix the thing. He sends me an amendment, which seems better.

I can't believe you went and changed it just like that.

Why wouldn't I if it makes it better?

I don't know, because you are a young person. Young people are precious about their work.

I like to edit, he tells me. I like to make things better.

I like you, is my reply. I like you very much. I like your stories. If you ever write a novel I might develop a crush on you.

I am not sure I will write a novel. I may be a short story writer. I like short stories.

Ah well, then you will never have my unwanted romantic attentions.

This is a risk I will have to take, Paul tells me, and I laugh. He makes me smile and he makes me laugh.

When Paul signs off for the night I go back into his Facebook page just to look at the little house perched precariously in the storm.
It is a beautiful image, painted by a friend of his. I like the painting on its own merits but I also now associate it with our conversations. Looking at it, I feel a liquid rush. I become unsettled. I know that I'll have to masturbate or I will never sleep.

Oh, so now I have become sexually attracted to an image that stands in for a person that I can only vaguely remember in real life. The physical representation of Paul is that image. I lie on the couch and watch it as I place my hand quietly between my legs, and the release is quick and violent. When it is done there is still the picture on the screen and I really can't remember what he looks like in real life. When I close my eyes there is a little house on a hill and I must not concentrate on it too closely because I can already feel the warmth of desire rising up in me for a second time, and if I give in to this I will never get to bed.

My boy is sleeping on his side and the light on his face is a real and beautiful thing. Strange to be able to masturbate over someone else's profile picture and not feel my love and desire for my husband at all diminished.

I know better than to wake him with my caresses at this point. He will be tired and irritable. I lie beside him and I am wide awake and he smells like hot dough, baking, and I want to take him into my mouth. My desire for it is difficult to ignore. As I wonder vaguely if I should get up and release the pent-up energy discreetly in the lounge room, I find that I am yawning. I turn over onto my side and leap desperately for a wave of sleep.

Something crashed outside. There were muffled voices. The kitchen was being packed away. The ancient boxes of jelly and custard with their out-of-date faces grinning on the packets, the tins so old they had lost their labels, the more recent purchases of tomatoes, beans, rice. All of this was being transferred to boxes. We would ferret around in these, piecing together our makeshift meals while the kitchen was being painted. The house was a mess of boxes and baskets. There was always someone running one way or the other. We were moving to Dragonhall and although we were exhausted by the weight of packing there was a playful joy in the air.

My grandfather was separate from this activity. He was responsible for his own room. There were boxes leaning up against the cupboard but he had made no effort to assemble them. His enlarger
still crouched in its corner, the trays for developer and fixative were still laid out side by side.

The night before we left I listened to Bach with him, squinting through the dark to catch some glimmer of change, but he was impassive. I wondered if anyone had even told him that we were moving. He had taken to eating his meals in his room in the dark, with the music turned up loud enough to obliterate any trace of the women of the house. He listened to the news in the morning and again at midday and before dinner. He shuffled out, stiff with too much sitting, to shower and shave and sometimes he wandered into the forest of our front yard to stand with the hose turned on the ferns and the river oaks and the pots of herbs bordering the porch.

He had separated himself from the others. When they spoke to each other it was to convey some practical information: “Do you want porridge or toast for breakfast?” “We are all going down to the shops, lock the door if you go outside.” “Please can you turn that racket down, I can't even think with your violins blazing.” If they had spoken to him about the move to Queensland, then it was when I wasn't in the house. I couldn't tell if he was as excited about the move as the rest of us. It seemed that he would grow roots, hunkering down when we were disentangling ourselves from Blacktown.

Nonetheless, we would be leaving. One bag for each person, carry-on luggage. Mine was mostly books and a few scant changes of clothing; my pajamas, which I was wearing now and would stuff
into the bag when it was morning. The next time I wore them I would be there. There was still cleaning to be done and I helped as much as I could, but there was a point when tempers flared and the cleaning turned to bickering and the dogs, sensing that there was some major change encroaching, stayed in their corners whimpering. The great dane rose and paced and was shouted at and settled momentarily before rising again. I kissed them all goodnight, received an affectionate slap from my grandmother and squeezed past boxes, past places in the corridor where a younger version of myself saw phantom children scampering and the place where my sister held me down and tickled me till I urinated on the floorboards, and the far end of the corridor where our games of Minotaur would end with me crouched and weeping in the dark as my sister loomed over me and growled low in her throat like an angry wolf.

When I reached my aunt's study, where we would be sleeping amongst the boxes and the stacked furniture, I felt I had run the gauntlet. I was restless, ready to move forward into an adventure.

“If you tell them, I'll kill you.”

I did not see my sister at first. She was hunkered down behind wrapped paintings, squeezed together with packaging tape. I could see the faint glow of blue light and when I stepped over piles of boxes to the mattress on the floor that we would be sharing, I realized that the television was there. She had peeled back the cardboard from the front and slung a blanket over it, tenting herself close up to the faint
hum of the volume turned down low. It was against the rules to watch the TV unsupervised, particularly after dark when we might catch a glimpse of something scandalous.

“I'll let you watch if you promise not to tell your family.”

She had taken to calling them that—your mother, your aunt—as if they were unrelated to her, extracting herself from their fierce familial hug.

When I crawled onto the mattress with her I felt my heart pounding. One glance at the screen and I was ready to brave the punishment alongside my sister because there, in the tantalizing veiled light, was David Bowie. This, then, must be the film that I had read about and never seen.
The Man Who Fell to Earth.