by Krissy Kneen
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 pre
ssed 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.
FALLING IN LOVE WITH YOUR FRIENDS
Brisbane 2008
I watch Christopher work and I am overwhelmed by my affection for him. He is tall and gentle-faced and when he bends to child-height there is nothing but affection as he takes the book out of the toddler’s hand and waits patiently for the release of coins from his sweaty palms.
It is impossible to separate the urgency of this feeling from the urgency that fills me in the moments before an orgasm. It is all liquid pleasure and, dare I say it, love. I might be in love. I might be falling in love. I have somehow overstepped my vow of friendship and fallen into a place where my hard shell has dissolved. I am all soft-bodied mollusc. I am oyster and in this moment I would lay myself in his palm to be swallowed whole.
This is a pattern that I recognize. There is always someone who can charm me out of my brittle protection, always a friend for whom I have unconditional love.
Just one friend at any one time, a kind of monogamous extramarital obsession. There is no language for me to explain the way I feel for Christopher as he wraps the book in a paper bag and passes it to the boy, solemn, respectful. I fall in love a little bit even though I said I wouldn’t do that anymore. I can’t help noticing his quiet dignity, his kindness. His subtle humor and, forced to stand so close in such a cramped workspace, there is the flesh as well, constantly brushing against mine. I try to love without lust but there is always lust. So, lust then, and a great heaped serving of love. Now there is this melancholy brew for me to drink down, slowly, on a day drawn out.
I am certain that this is only a fleeting wave of lust and soon, in a matter of days or weeks or months, I will transfer this affection to someone new. I am reminded of my conversation with Paul the other night on the Internet, the sudden intimacy, the wave of familial love, and something else, some unnameable emotion.
Sex addiction. Katherine was right. This is all about sex, because on top of the lust there is still the love I feel and will feel for him that will go on, even when this unwanted desire has moved off and onto someone new.
“You have to stop falling in love with your friends,” my husband tells me. He has been watching me hop from one obsession to another for the eighteen years of our relationship.
“If I am a tap, and you are a sink,” I tell him, “it is like I am locked on. A full-force gush of emotion and you are filled up with it, but there is too much. It is spilling out onto the floor. It is like I need to hold one bucket after another under the overflow. When the bucket is full I exchange it with another bucket.”
I am pleased with my metaphor but he just shakes his head. “Well, you should stop falling in love with your friends. You’ll chase them away,” he tells me, voice of reason that he has always been.
“I am not monogamous and I am not heterosexual,” I told my husband on the night we met.
I was sitting in a girl’s lap. I liked her well enough. I had slept with her before in that easy way I used to enjoy. I would have slept with her again that night if I hadn’t noticed Anthony. He was sitting on the floor, leaning against a wall. His deep green sweater was the exact color of the ocean at dusk. I noticed how blue his eyes were. His long hair pulled back and tied in a ponytail, the chiseled perfection of his cheeks.
I stopped kissing the girl. I switched from vodka to water. There was another drug present in the room and I felt myself turn toward it. I basked in the glow of potential sex. I hopped from one group to another, chatting briefly, moving ever closer to my target. Anthony was alone. He sat with a beer warming between his fists and smiled quietly, watching the crowd grow drunk and bleary-eyed. He was beautiful. I had never before seen anyone quite as beautiful. I sat beside him quickly, before I could change my mind, and clicked my glass against his beer bottle as if we were old friends. I breathed through the erratic thudding of my heart, the exquisite tumble-turns low in my belly. I caught a whiff of his aftershave and a hint of soap. We talked about mutual friends, films, documentaries we had both enjoyed. We talked until we were amongst the last to leave. Maybe I would stay, sleep in a corner on the floor. Maybe he would stay, too, or maybe he would leave. Yes, I should leave. I said that I would walk home and so he offered me a lift.
“I am not heterosexual or monogamous,” I told him, the sun climbing up over the silhouette of the city.
“You will be both of those things when you are with me.” His prediction. And up until now I have proved him right with the slow torture of my abstinence, squirming with the fleeting possibility of other entanglements, struggling to contain the force of my love for one friend after another.
At the end of Christopher’s shift we say goodbye and barely glance at each other. My heart breaks just a little for the string of people I have lusted after in this slow, sad way, love danced in time to the monotonous beat of the daily grind. Everything in its right place, except this little fragment of misplaced emotion that I have picked up like lint and curled into my hand with no place to rest it.
THE FIRST CENSORSHIP
Blacktown 1981
My sister gave me a book by Marion Zimmer Bradley for my birthday. It was set on a distant world, in a place far, far away, just like in a fairytale. I liked her books very much; I had been wanting to read this one for months. It would complete my collection, the collected works of Marion Zimmer Bradley.
There was a cake my grandmother had made and a little Princess Leia figure on top of it, her white robe sinking into the icing. There were thirteen candles, one of which had been placed too close to the action figure, and I watched as her face began to blister and blacken. My mother smothered the plastic girl in white icing and I washed her and vowed to love her more because of her disfigurement.
I opened my presents and they were mostly books that I had coveted. I would read them all, but first I would read the book my sister gave me because I had been longing for the final Marion Zimmer Bradley for so long.
Someone had cut some of the pages out.
My mother saw me notice them and was quick to explain. “Just one bit that is adults only.”
I counted the numbers on the bottom of the pages. I could feel my rage percolating inside me. There was the biley hiss of it just below the boil.
“It doesn’t affect the flow of the story. There was just no need for that sex stuff.”
That sex stuff.
I noticed the tight-lipped anger of my sister. This was her present to me and it had been hacked into, desecrated by the censors. I thought of all the books my sister had stolen from the library and passed to me in the dead of night. Banned books, bo
oks with love, kissing; sometimes more. I thought about the note I had to take to my English teacher excusing me from reading the set text because of the unsuitable content, and how my sister passed me an illicit copy of 1984 that I read using a flashlight under the covers late at night. An odd parallel between Orwell’s world and my own.
We weren’t allowed to visit any of our friends at their houses. We weren’t allowed to get mail without my mother reading it. My mother was protecting us, I knew this. But I wasn’t sure exactly what from.
I read that book late into the night. When I came to the missing pages I closed the book and imagined things that I had never seen written even in the banned books snuck to me by my sister after dark. I knitted in all the darkest possibilities, casting a spell to bind together the empty fragments of the missing pages. I thought about the worst things possible, the rapes and the ravaging, the fondling of the dead and the dying. I didn’t flinch from any possibility in my imagination. I closed my eyes and pulled the covers over my head and I let myself stray into all the forbidden places that were unavailable to me in the sunlight world of my family’s fairytale.
THE FIRST PORNOGRAPHY
It was hot the day of the school swimming carnival, a languid summer day smelling slightly acidic like the juice of an ant squashed between your fingertips, and I was signed up for the 200 meters.
I have always loved to swim. I swim very slowly but I can swim for hours at a time without tiring. I love the breathy rhythm of it, the way the surface of the water creeps above your ears, obliterating the world.