He turns me over and I look at the wall, his hands gripping either side of my buttocks. I do not recognize his grunts. This is not the way I remember it. The wallpaper is the colour of butter with blue fleur-de-lys printed on it. I have decided not to let him come inside me, because the morning-after pill makes me very sick for weeks and I have an essay due in a fortnight. The decision should make me feel modern and empowered. In the fifties women had no such choices, but I don’t feel like a member of some sisterhood. I have never felt more alone. That’s another cliché: lonely whilst engaging in one of life’s most intimate acts. I am ashamed of myself.
I haven’t been able to think about my grandfather’s death since it happened, but now I can’t help it. My grandmother opening the door to me, her old body lit with grief. ‘We were trying to contact you, Cassandra. We couldn’t contact you.’ She said my name over and over, as though I were the only one who understood, as though I were the only one who could bring him back. She was wrong on both counts.
I couldn’t conceive of the sort of grief that poured from her. She clung to me and wept loudly, with no shame. How, at her age, did she have the energy for such grief? How, after so much loss, did she have the courage to rage like that? How on earth could she possibly still believe that life should be fair? The effort it must take to love like that, all these years, on and on – how is that possible? She roared in my ear and I had an image of her as a girl, giving birth to each of her lost babies, a roar full of power and submission. I thought of her in prison, dividing the newspaper-toilet-paper between her fellow inmates, her jaw clenched against the stench, waiting patiently to be acquitted, confident – even then, amongst all that chaos – that truth meant something. Her discovering my mother’s body in that bed while I still stood staring at the window. The silence. The scream that never came. The scene she never made. And her hands that night, younger then, shaking a little, passing me my hot chocolate and saying, ‘Life can be very difficult’, as though that fact were acceptable.
That was a misunderstanding on my part. She never accepted it. I knew that when I heard her cry for my grandfather. She didn’t say ‘No no no.’ she knew by now that those words couldn’t change anything. She must have believed, stupidly, that in the end there would be peace for her, and happiness. As she clung to me I suddenly felt how small she had become. She had always seemed to me like a large woman, sturdy, with well-set hips, someone who could lift me in her arms even now. She clung to me and wailed and shook and I could feel the ribs in her back and I was proud of her for having the courage to rage. I had never felt such love. For that reason I wanted her to cry in my arms forever.
When I can’t stand it any more I pull away and finish him off with my mouth. The taste of my own pussy is sweet and tangy like melon – then I open up my throat and take him deep; tongue all over his balls the way he used to like it.
fifteen
You are glad your strange mood has cleared. Silly Helen, worried about your lips thinning, your pelvis loosening. How could you worry about things like that when you are loved? Isn’t this what youth is for?
You’re a hotty. The way he says it, so silly, so boyish. The demands he makes are so simple. Be pretty and good-humoured. That’s all it takes to be loved. It floods you with warmth. You grin, spin around on a heel, look back over your shoulder at him. You see yourself now like a slow shot from a film: your face and hair lit white by the morning sunlight, your eyes, the round of your bum – your perfect little ass, that’s what he calls it – visible under the frivolous pink skirt, and his desire, the desire of the audience, waiting for you as you skip away to your lecture.
‘Body and brains,’ Oisín would say, ‘What a fox!’ Going to college is a big deal where he comes from. They think it’s for clever people.
You are a little late for the lecture as it is but you pick up a latte in the Arts Block anyway. No one notices if you are late for these lectures. It’s a large lecture hall.
The lecturer is young and good-looking and cocky. By the time you arrive there is a projection already on the wall: THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX. There it is: that image of yourself as light and beautiful tripped up already, that sense of failure gripping you by the throat. He is given, this lecturer, to setting the whole class a psychological test that they take themselves, and then telling them what the result means about them. You invariably come out as small-minded, conformist, stupid, and always a typical product of a typical middle-class youth. You are trying to enter quietly. The door thuds closed, muted by that felt stuff that lines the walls. Two heads turn and then face back to the projection. You are looked at and ignored at the same time, and you feel how silly you must look, Helen, in this short diaphanous skirt, like the clothes of a fairy, or someone beautiful.
You want Oisín, who doesn’t care if you are stupid or whether you think outside the box, who likes you in frilly things, who thinks you are wacky because you take cinnamon in your latte, and prefer your pancakes with just butter, or pull down his jocks in an alley and give him a blow job right there. As soon as you are with him again you won’t care about things like this. ‘You’re a loco lady!’ he will say, crossing his eyes and spinning a finger beside his temple, ‘Can’t think outside the box, eh? We’ll have to do something about that. I have just the cure …’
The exercise has already been done and the lecturer is giving the result. It is literally about thinking outside the box. There are nine dots beneath the lettering, making up a rectangle. They form a box. That’s what you immediately think of, a box, because that’s one of the words on the wall. The task was to connect all the dots by drawing four straight lines and never taking the pencil off the page. The lecturer shows the class what should have been done: it’s a triangle with a line through the middle. It is very easy to do, but only by going outside the confines of the nine dots, only by ceasing to think of the rectangle as central, by not assuming certain rules. The ‘box’ is not a box at all; the space around it is a free-for-all. He asks how many students got it right, and four of them lift their hands.
A new projection is put up. You take this opportunity, while the lecturer is standing admiring his slide, to sit down quickly. Your bare legs seem inappropriate suddenly. You’re not even wearing tights. You sit with your knees slightly apart and feel how near to naked you are.
The lecture is hard to follow. It’s about how there are always rules created by society, how language shapes our thoughts and we cannot think beyond language, how we are products of this language, even our morality, even our rebellion. You are not sure how it all fits together, or how it fits with the box exercise. Perhaps it is just for his own amusement that the lecturer gives you those exercises.
You thought this was a psychology lecture, but the word ‘postmodern’ keeps coming up, ‘the postmodern era’ and ‘Derrida’. They are phrases from your critical theory class, from the English course. Derrida? You understand the theories of all these people, once you can get over the bad translations, Cassandra says, they’re really not that complicated. But you can never remember who thought what. Wasn’t Saussure the one with all that language-creates-meaning stuff? Derrida and différance. What does that mean again? Usually you wouldn’t bother trying to follow the lecture. You would take notes and figure it out later, or ask Cassandra, but you have vowed to make more of an effort in college from now on. You glance at the foolscap of the boy beside you because he’s writing fervently and you assume he’s following this, but he is actually drawing eyes all over the page. If you can just figure out what Derrida is about you’ll be back on track. There’s that book Oisín lent you to help with the essay. The boy sees you slip it out of your bag, and snorts disparagingly. It is a shameful thing to have that book, A Very Short Introduction to Critical Theory. It is akin to being caught with York Notes in your bag. A Dummies Guide to University.
You open it on your desk, scanning the index for Derrida’s name. Didn’t he have a first name, this Derrida?
‘Excuse me,�
�� the lecturer is thrilled. He has been expecting this. He is ready to show his authority.
‘Please don’t read a book during a lecture. It’s rude. It’s insulting. If you find me that uninteresting you can leave.’
He doesn’t pause long enough for you to explain. He goes on and on and you gape at him. You can feel your face reddening. The boy beside you has stopped drawing eyes. He is staring ahead so as not to embarrass you any further. You are grateful for that. Your eyes are stinging but the lecturer goes on: ‘… I don’t take a roll call so you don’t need to come unless you are interested in listening. I would like if you left now.’
The lack of any name adds to the humiliation. He doesn’t know your name, of course, there are too many of you and it is not that sort of lecture, but it humiliates you, that implication that you are not Helen, but you. You plural and singular. ‘You’ means nothing. All it means is ‘Not me’.
You expect him to carry on with the lecture now, but he doesn’t. He keeps looking at you. The only escape from his gaze is to get up and leave. You don’t bother packing your bag, you just tuck the foolscap and the book under your arm and grab it by the handle. When you stand up you can feel the exposure of your knees again. As you leave he resumes the lecture.
Outside the door you stick in your earphones and head straight for your room. When you are wearing your earphones you don’t meet the eyes of the people you pass. Cassandra says it’s anti-social, but it’s a way of making the overcrowding bearable, a way of creating invisible space.
You don’t know what you feel like listening to so you select ‘shuffle’ and listen to whatever the iPod chooses to play.
Oh girl look at yourself what have you done? What have you become? – a woman’s voice, singing high, excited and free, percussions bashing in the background and an electric guitar. It’s The Cardigans. You don’t remember downloading that. The lyrics seem quite fitting to your current disgrace.
You will resist the temptation to call Oisín and meet him early. He is already sure that you are too eager. What was it he said yesterday? Something irritating. You were going down on him. You’re very good at it now. You said, ‘God, baby I love you, I love your perfect fat cock,’ partly because it was true, and partly because you have heard more than once that what men really want is for their penis to be idolized, and because the words ‘fat’, ‘hot’ and ‘big’ all have the effect of boosting his arousal instantly. He bent down like a benevolent lord, his face contorted by pleasure and pity, saddened by some mortal’s foolishness: ‘Save some love for yourself, baby.’
Save some love for yourself? You laughed at him but now you wish you had stood up off your knees and looked at him straight, so that he could see who you really were, not a fool besotted with him.
‘Oisín,’ you should have said, ‘please don’t speak to me like that, as though I am a child. It’s not as though I don’t have choices. I choose to love you. To love: that is worth something to me. You make your choices, I’ll make mine.’
Why didn’t you say that? He doesn’t see that part of you, the part that is strong and open-eyed. Or is it really there, that part? Maybe it’s just a fantasy of yours, that noble Helen, seizing life, throwing herself into the fire of love. Perhaps you are just what he sees, Helen.
You go back to your room and get into bed with A Very Short Introduction To Critical Theory. You will find out who Derrida was; you will not be disheartened.
You open it right on the page and a shock of adrenaline whooshes through you. It’s you and Oisín: you on top – his favourite position – your hands on his torso, your neck arched back in pleasure, and his beloved abdomen, the little curls on his chest and around his pubis, one strong arm in frame, a hand reaching for your breast. You can remember and anticipate that touch, warm, the way it makes you melt into sex. Your breasts are impressive, much better than you thought. In the darkness of the photo the nipples look brown. When did he take that? How did you not know? It was a morning. There is a crack of light bursting between the flimsy curtains, sending a thick yellow beam at the lens, cutting off your face with an explosion of light, splattering your shoulders with blue blotches. It was taken in his room. He should have told you he wanted a picture and not taken it in secret. You are glad there is some evidence of your youth. You follow the curve of your waist, your body stretched upwards as though in celebration, a swell in your thin abdomen where he is inside you, your labia.
It’s only then that you realize it is not your body. The vagina in the photo is waxed or shaven to some strange design. Bald with a little patch of hair like a Hitler moustache, the bare lips squashed outwards. There is a letter with the photo, written on pink paper and folded four times.
sixteen
When I get back to college I need company. I want the feeling of coming home. I can still taste Brian and my own cunt. I sit at the kitchen table and watch the fish. They are each floating at either edge of the bowl, releasing a bubble every now and then, darting suddenly, only to rest some more beneath the surface of the water, and push out another bubble or two. I don’t rinse my mouth.
Helen’s door isn’t locked. Her room is empty.
I lie on her bed which smells of sex and of Helen’s perfume and that grease she uses to separate her curls.
Her room has a dressing table, which mine doesn’t have. I look in her mirror and see how old I am now, at the age of twenty-one, and I realize that it’s too late to ever be young, and too late for me ever to get it right. I could spend my life untangling the past, unearthing the dead, moment by moment, but I will never find my way back to the start. Time will keep chugging ahead while I rummage in memory, and I will get older and older. On the dressing table there’s a letter in an envelope, addressed but not stamped. A German name – Petra – and a German address. I didn’t know she had a friend in Germany. The envelope has not been properly sealed.
Helen’s handwriting is perpendicular and unmistakably feminine with orbicular vowels and accurately placed dots. She wrote the letter with slow deliberation. What I don’t understand about the letter is the affection she has for the other woman, the sisterhood she has found in being fucked by the same man.
‘I know you didn’t know about me,’ she wrote, ‘I didn’t know about you either. I am writing to you because I know you will understand. You love him too, so I know you can understand …’
Helen is garrulous sometimes. I can’t let her post this. I could tell her that I found a letter on her dressing-table, addressed and enveloped, that I posted it for her. I could replace it with a sheet of blank foolscap, folded four times, and seal it so that she won’t know.
When Oisín comes in I’m still on Helen’s bed. He gets a fright when he sees me. I intimidate him. From the first time we were introduced I have known by his eyes and the way he takes his hands off Helen when I enter a room, that he is frightened of me. He glances at my nails. I had them done after meeting Brian. It was just a fancy because I didn’t want to go home yet. I told the girl to do whatever she liked. They are acrylic. Long, stupid-looking red things glued on in a nail bar. She drew Asian-style flowers on two of them with silver. The girl told me off for not using a cuticle cream, gave me a loyalty card and told me to come back in five weeks.
‘I had them done.’
‘Oh right. Do you know where Helen is?’
‘She has class till three. You can wait for her in my room if you like. How did you get in?’
‘Cahill was coming in.’
‘How are you, Oisín? We never talk …’
What Helen does not know, is how to see into people. I can read the way they tick. I know that what this boy wants, and what he thinks he wants, are two different things. What he thinks he wants is a virgin with angel curls, shocked by his virility, desperately passive, but what they want, boys like this, is for someone to smack them like their mammy never did. What they want, really, is leather trousers and a whip and someone to dress them down.
He deliberates a littl
e in Helen’s room before pushing my door, peering in and entering softly like a frightened puppy. Once I have him in my room I don’t bother with conversation any more. I press my new fake nails into his scalp, and nip his ear. Then I trace patterns on his back with them, slowly, lightly then harder, as though I want to pierce the skin. I lie him down and kneel on both shoulders and pull my thong to one side and tell him to push his tongue inside while I run my fingers from the base of his cock over the top, parting my fingers to simulate virgin pussy, and down the shaft again. The trick is to turn your hands around the shaft as you do it. Constant motion in two directions. That’s the trick. I take it down my throat once, just to show him I can deep-throat, gently tugging his balls, massaging the ridge behind. A lot of men don’t know that. It was Paul who told me. A lot of straight men don’t know the pleasure to be had from that line that runs from balls to asshole.
Then I stop. I rest my lips on the top and flick my tongue and purr, so he groans for me to take it and I won’t.
I spin around so I am straddling him, my neat, clipped pussy hovering above the quivering knob-end, and watch him writhing there, lips wet, wincing with arousal. I won’t let him yet. I wait till I’m about to come. I make him watch me touch myself but I don’t let his hands near his own red, pulsing cock. Every time he tries I grab his wrists and pin him, licking his nipples, tweaking them with my teeth, rubbing my cunt along the shaft until he’s whimpering with the pathetic helplessness of his own arousal.
This is not like fucking Helen. It is not like fucking the sweet, stupid German girl. He doesn’t feel powerful now.
Between Dog and Wolf Page 16