by Sara Banerji
The slow pace with which Mr Parson removed his shirt, his tie, his braces, his vest, carefully folding each item and laying it on a chair before progressing to the next, caused the watching children to become almost faint with anticipation.
When Mr Parson began to unbutton the front of his trousers, Sissy and George became terribly excited. But when he drew off the trousers he had a pair of baggy pants on underneath. Wearing these, the guest crossed the linoleum, leaving warm footprints on the polish. He stirred his finger in the water and raised a knee, and the children thought he intended to get in still wearing his pants. But then he turned so that he faced the children, gave a tug at the tape, and the flop of interlock fell to his ankles like a statue being unveiled. The children stared amazed, repelled, fascinated, at the huge wrinkled dangling collection, surrounded by wiry dark hair, that came into view.
Mr Parson raised his arms above his head in a luxurious stretch and began to hum ‘Lily Marlene’, swaying his hips back and forth in time, while the long thing hanging in front swung like a limp, pink cucumber; then, presenting the children with a pair of dented white buttocks specked with black hair, he had stepped into the bath.
Sissy and George had had to stay squashed on the linen while Mr Parson finished his bath, dried, dressed again, and went away. During the wait, they got several amazing glimpses of new angles of his sexual apparatus.
‘We called a room after him because we liked him,’ they explained innocently to their bewildered mother.
Elizabeth would say, ‘Clean the Bat Bedroom, would you, Mrs Lovage,’ – a bat had once got loose in here – or, ‘I think I left my embroidery in the Dog Room,’ – the family spaniel had died noisily and messily in there-finding it easier to refer to them like this than speak of the third bedroom on the front on the second floor, or the last room along the corridor on the top floor, for the old names had been lost when the decorations changed. Also, Elizabeth could say to those who criticised her for her uneducated children, ‘They have given names to all the rooms, which shows they have strong imaginations which would probably have been knocked out of them if they’d been sent to school.’
The Petal Bedroom, according to George and Sissy, had been named for the fronded stucco moulding on the ceiling. ‘Which shows they appreciate beauty and have ideas,’ said Elizabeth optimistically, though she secretly did not think that the ceiling mouldings looked like the petals of flowers. Actually, neither did the children. They had thought this up on the spur of the moment, unable to tell their mother the true reason.
One day in here, Sissy, with a scream of shock, had caught sight of two pink lobes emerging from the pout between her legs.
‘I used to see them inside, but they never stuck out like that before,’ said George. ‘Perhaps your bath was too hot and the top pouches have shrunk.’
George and Sissy pulled at the white outer mount until the poor thing turned pink and sore but no matter how hard they tugged, the lobes protruded.
‘I don’t like it,’ mourned Sissy. ‘I want those horrid red things to go back inside.’
She sounded so sad that George said kindly, if a bit untruthfully, ‘They look like the petals of red peonies.’ Then he leant forwards and touched the newly emerged petals with a gentle finger.
‘They liked that,’ said Sissy with a shiver of delight.
‘I think it’s like a bud opening, Sis,’ he told her. ‘You are about to bloom. Most likely you’ll get more petals as time goes on.’
The lobes never went back but a few months later, in this same bedroom, George discovered the first whiskers of pubic hair growing on the outer set of Sissy’s petals. Sissy was aghast.
‘I’ll end up like Mr Parson, with a huge mop of frizzy hair like a scouring pad.’ Examining the strong bright strands in their mother’s hand mirror, which George had thoughtfully purloined for her, she said, ‘Perhaps I’ll get a dangling thing too.’
‘Only men have those,’ George told her doubtfully.
‘Are you sure?’ She was only partly consoled; George on occasion having been known to be wrong. After all, no more petals had appeared.
‘It is called the “Hairy Petal Bedroom” from now on,’ said George.
‘Very well,’ said Mrs Lovage, scouring, her eyes screwed up against her ciggy smoke. She was accustomed to the occasional changes in the names of rooms and not curious about the reason, not expecting it to be of any interest.
Elizabeth, however, looked up from her paper and said encouragingly, ‘How pretty, dears,’ and she imagined these two children looking up into the ceiling and, like Leonardo da Vinci, getting inspiration. ‘What did you see?’
‘Hairs!’ said George, while Sissy went red and kept silent. Later, Elizabeth went up to the room and stared and stared into the ceiling, trying, without success, to see hairy petals there.
Ever since they could remember, George and Sissy had had a fierce curiosity for each other’s bodies, peering and peeping into every aperture and probing with fingers and even toes. George had blistered Sissy’s lips holding a match to see her tonsils. Sissy had once woken, yelling, to find George trying to push a pencil into the hole from which, he imagined, urine issued. They had used a torch and, on one occasion, a candle to try to look into each other’s bottom holes, ordering each other, ‘Keep it open, can’t you! I didn’t get a chance to see anything.’ But the children found they could not control the action of those little pursed up anti-mouths, and all they ever got was one tantalising glimpse of something rosily shining before the brown starfish shape closed again. The anatomical areas where they differed were obviously the most interesting and, as their bodies matured, they took to going to bed early on long bright summer nights to search for new developments.
Each had always enjoyed watching the other pee. George boasted that he was best, being able to control the jet, but was privately fascinated by Sissy’s squatting posture and the strange petalled places from which the urine emerged. He would crouch with his head almost on the floor when Sissy was on the lavatory so that he could watch every detail of this opening up and pouring out from the secret parts of Sissy’s body.
For some reason which they were later unable to explain, they had formed the impression early on in life that their sexual differences were random features liable to alteration. Each was under the impression that he or she might wake one morning wearing the paraphernalia of the other for, to them, their male and femaleness was an integral part of their identity and personality, and unconnected with physical details.
The only two adults with whom they came into any close contact were Mrs Lovage and Elizabeth. The former would have been quite ready, if Elizabeth required it, to dispel false notions, but Elizabeth, to whom Mrs L’s loyalties lay, was deeply sensitive and would not have been able to bring herself to discuss anything gross like sexual parts with her innocent children.
Oddly, the sight of Mr Parson’s body had the effect of increasing the children’s bewilderment for, at that stage, neither connected Mr Parson’s great organ with George’s thin one, which stood out bouncily and was unornamented with hair.
For a long time Mr Parson’s body seemed quite different from anything Sissy and George had ever seen, then one day George passed a stallion standing in a field and noticed that the horse’s penis looked just like Mr Parson’s, though it was shinier. Suddenly enlightened, Sissy and George told each other that Mr Parson had been in the process of turning into a horse.
‘And we might too,’ George said to Sissy, making Sissy mutter anxiously, ‘I’d rather be something completely different.’
‘Yes, it must be smack smack smack when Mr Parson runs,’ agreed George.
‘Unless he’s grown a sheath for it by now. Like the horse,’ said Sissy.
‘You’ll probably get one too, if you turn into a horse,’ George said. ‘And then it won’t bounce.’
Sissy, glancing at her smooth belly skin, had cried, ‘But I don’t want a great thing like that stuck on my tum
my! I don’t! I don’t!’
Sissy and George would be seized with curiosity about each other’s maturing bodies with an unpredictable abruptness, and would sometimes be compelled, when it happened in the day, to plunge into one of the dark ammonia-smelling stables, or into some distant bedroom, and remove their clothes.
Then George would prowl with fingers and with lips through Sissy’s cool heavy body, hunting among the folds and crevices for new swellings, fluids, smells, hairs.
Once, Sissy, examining George’s descending testicles, gently stroked them.
George had an erection.
Sissy gazed amazed, admiring, and whispered, ‘What does it feel like?’
‘Touch it,’ commanded George, who was shaking with excitement and glory. Nothing Sissy had could match that.
Later, he discovered that Sissy had little erections too, her nipples standing up smartly when he put his lips round them.
These erections, little and big, delighted brother and sister who, thereafter, gave up such mundane parts as bottom holes and tonsils and devoted their attention to mobile anatomical details.
When Sissy was twelve she woke with a tummy ache, and found her bed stained with blood. George crawled among the bedding on hands and knees, searching her thighs for a wound, before coming to the conclusion that, though he could not find it in the bed, it must have come from a decapitated mouse he had had in his pocket the night before.
Sissy, scared, became cross. ‘Why on earth do you have to go to bed with a dead mouse?’ but later she found her knickers stained with blood and, for hours after the discovery, sat rigid, trembling, legs clamped together to keep the blood in, afraid she was going to die.
Mrs Lovage found blood on the sheets and provided Sissy with sanitary towels, telling her, ‘All women get it, ducky. It comes every month and is called “the curse”. It’s a sign you’re growing up. You don’t have to worry about it.’
George looked at Sissy in a new way after that, wondering what else was going to change about her. ‘I mean, how can she say you don’t have to worry about a curse,’ he whispered.
He hated to be different from her and was relieved, soon after, to get off his bike and find streaks of blood across the seat. ‘I’ve got it too.’
‘Mrs Lovage said only women got it,’ objected Sissy, but all the same she was comforted because she had not liked being different in such a disgusting and painful way. George eventually found a little bleeding scratch on his skin, making Sissy say sadly, ‘I think you just cut yourself, Georgie,’ and even though George insisted, ‘I’ve got the curse like you, Sissy,’ neither of them believed it.
After that, though Sissy bled every month, George never did again.
Mrs Lovage said to Elizabeth, ‘You should have told her about the curse, ducks. I always think girls should be told or it comes as a shock.’
But Elizabeth only shuddered at her little child having something so gross and physical.
‘Anyway, don’t worry, ducky. I’ve given her the towels, shown her how to put them on, and told her all about it.’
‘Mrs L, you are an angel,’ cried Elizabeth gratefully.
Chapter 5
Elizabeth had hardly noticed the deterioration of the garden until one day Mrs Lovage said, ‘You should get someone to come and do it, ducky. Trees are taking over, and it’ll cost you a bomb to get them cut down if you leave it too long. Why don’t you go and ask for one of those Eyeties at the prisoner-of-war camp to come and work for you. Several people in the village have got them. They’re ever so lazy, but better than nothing.’
Filled with a new optimism, Elizabeth set off on her bike.
The officer in charge of the prisoner-of-war camp speedily agreed to provide Elizabeth with a strong young man to work in the garden for four hours a day.
‘His name is Bruno and he knows no English.’
‘I speak a little Italian,’ said Elizabeth softly. She felt exhilarated as she cycled home. It was summer, the sun shone and she sang, ‘Let him go or let him tarry,’ loudly, not caring that a boy and a girl, kissing among the cow-parsley on the verge, unburied themselves for a moment to smile at her contemptuously.
‘Let him sink or let him swim,’ sang Elizabeth, as she freewheeled down the drive. The thought of a strong young man, without English and called Bruno, coming to help her filled her with joy.
‘I’d of thought that’s a dog’s name,’ mumbled the insular Sissy.
‘That shows you don’t know much,’ retorted Elizabeth, then looked quickly away before Sissy had time to sneer, ‘I wonder why?’
Although the camp officer had told her that it was inadvisable to fraternise with the prisoners, on Bruno’s first morning Elizabeth invited him into the kitchen to join her and Mrs Lovage for a cup of tea and a cigarette. Bruno smiled, showing a lot of large white teeth, drank his tea noisily, helped himself to two of Mrs Lovage’s Woodbines, and smashed a cup while helpfully trying to clear the table.
Mrs Lovage grumbled for the rest of the day. ‘You shouldn’t of done it, mum,’ she said. She only called Elizabeth that when she was cross. ‘You know they warned you not to, and those wops are just like animals when it comes down to it. I should know because Mr Lovage was in the merchant navy and he’s been everywhere.’
After that, Elizabeth, who found it utterly draining to have people cross with her, sent Sissy out with Bruno’s mug of tea. That morning, for some reason that she could not identify, she felt irritated with Mrs Lovage’s flattering company.
Out of the window she saw Sissy creeping across the weedy garden, slopping mug in hand, and her irritation increased.
She grumbled to Mrs Lovage, ‘I wish Sissy would stand up straight. I think rounded shoulders look awful. My mother used to make us walk with books on our heads to improve our posture.’
‘You could still make her do it,’ said Mrs Lovage, a tiny note of savagery in her tone.
Elizabeth shook her head and said, a little choke in her voice, ‘You can’t make Sissy do anything.’
Mrs Lovage patted Elizabeth comfortingly on the hand. ‘It’s the age, ducky. She’ll grow out of it, you’ll see.’
Elizabeth’s irritation was increased even further a moment later by the sight of George. He was creeping after Sissy like a … like a jackal, thought Elizabeth. Sneaking through the high grass, hunched with furtiveness, lacking both dignity and pride.
‘My children,’ mourned Elizabeth. ‘One coarse and shuffling, the other sneaky and obsequious.’ She had never imagined they would turn out so.
Sissy crept softly through the garden, revelling in herb smells as weeds got crushed by her sandals. Her nerves thrilled to the tickle of petals on her neck when she brushed against the trees. The sun on her arms felt like someone’s hot breath. Her body, her nervous system, felt, today, as though it had just been released from long imprisonment.
She heard George rustling in her wake, and even that did not annoy her, though she had particularly told him not to follow her. She would reprimand him later. For the moment she would savour her enjoyment.
She was filled with a sparkling anticipation as she carried the tea, now sprinkled with tiny flowers, to the Italian prisoner.
A movement of branches made her glance round, and Sissy saw her brother slinking like a pale panther through the bushes. She pretended not to see him. It was Sissy’s turn for secrets now and she wondered if George’s illicit fires had been as exciting as the thing that had happened to her yesterday, and might be going to happen to her again today.
For yesterday the Italian prisoner had kissed her.
He had thrust his tongue, which had been thick and muscular, right into her mouth and she had tasted the strong bitter taste of tobacco. He had gripped and almost hurt her, and she had been overwhelmed with sensations and with wild feral smells of man and sweat and Brylcreem.
After suffocating ages he had stopped kissing and, still holding her body against his, had bent down and looked into her face. He ha
d smiled and said, ‘Pretty lady, pretty lady, pretty lady,’ so that she thought these must be almost the only English words he knew, and that he was using them to express all sorts of other things.
Utterly weakened by the violence of her emotions, she had flopped weakly in his arms and had begun to tremble.
‘Pretty lady, pretty lady,’ murmured the Italian prisoner and he had softly stroked her face with his wide muddy fingers. As she lay across his thighs she had felt some part of his body stir against her buttocks. It was as though a fat strong animal was waking up inside his trousers.
The kiss, the thing that shifted under her, the man’s soft murmurings, the hoarse moans of pigeons overhead, the smells of summer and of man, had all blended together arid induced in Sissy a violent lethargy caused part by shock and part delight, so that even if her mother had burst upon her, weeping, in those moments, she would not have been able to get up. She knew George was watching from some hiding place, but she could not move.
She thought that whenever she heard pigeons from now on, or smelled lilac or apple blossom or Brylcreem, she would find herself living the kiss and having her face stroked again by a man who said, ‘Pretty lady, pretty lady.’
Bruno was chopping down the nettles round the looseboxes when Sissy arrived with the now tepid tea.
‘Ah! Pretty lady!’ he cried, straightening, and putting down the grass hook. He wiped his sweating face with his shirt-tail and, taking the cup from her, said ‘Grazie, pretty lady.’ He gave her a little bow.
Sissy felt a tremor rush through her, as though the shivering of the previous day was beginning again.
Bruno, clutching his mug, sat on the old stone mounting block and patted a place at his side. Crackling twigs at her back informed her that George was there, but she did not care. She sat down by the man and he put one arm round her shoulders. As he sipped his tea, the arm slid down and began to fondle her breast.
Sissy felt the shivering start to rise in earnest again.