My nose was wet.
‘What’s wrong with your nose?’
‘Nothing,’ I panted, ‘just a cold.’ I wiped it across her blouse as if pursuing a nipple, sniffed hard, then brought up my sticky-fingered hand and tried to staunch the snout with a sleeve before plunging the hand back down her stomach.
‘No, what is it? It tastes like blood!’
‘No, no, it isn’t, I promise. It’s not blood, it’s not.’
But it was. In my excitement, my blood pressure had risen to an intolerable level, my nose had started to bleed, and I’d covered her in blood. She hurried off to change her clothes and I never got another chance. I was depressed for weeks. After all these years, I had had one real, genuine, delicious opportunity— and my nose had failed me. My nose, for God’s sake … It was intolerable.
I was thirteen when eventually, the great day of penetration came—and I was prepared. The geography master, a cold, falsely enthusiastic young man, had recently got married. Someone had found out, I can’t remember who or how, that he’d bought, in bulk, a year or two’s supply of what we then called ‘rubber johnnies,’ condoms, rubbers. I suppose in this at least, his enthusiasm was genuine.
I was in the habit of burglary. I was always hungry and honed my burglatorial skills by repeatedly breaking into the kitchens at night using a semicircle of Perspex to spring the locks and catches. Then, with another boy, I robbed the clubhouse of the local golf course. I don’t know if the place had a secret alarm or if someone saw us, but suddenly we heard a siren and saw blue flashing lights approach. To make my escape, I had to scale a tall gate with spikes at the top and jump down the other side. As I jumped, the back of my sweater caught on one of the spikes and I hung ten feet up, suspended by my armpits. Luckily, the police went in through another gate and I was able to extricate myself before they got to me.
The contraceptives were liberated. Imagine the man’s embarrassment: how could he launch an investigation without admitting that he’d been robbed of not one, but hundreds of condoms? He stalked around glowering for a few days, but the theft was never mentioned. I kept a johnnie in my pocket at all times, a talisman of hope.
Because smoking was banned, it provided the perfect excuse for furtive encounters which often led to sex. ‘Want to come for a cigarette?’ enabled everyone to pretend that all they wanted to suck on was a cigarette. By this time, I carried a silver hip flask which I kept filled with whisky stolen from my mother, so I had two lures in my armoury of seductive tools. My favourite place for this consensual bait and switch was the groundsman’s shed, a wooden hut with a couple of fixed benches along the sides. The floor was littered with cigarette ends and it had a damp, sour smell. To me it was the most wonderfully dark and erotic place.
It was here that I invited sweet Sally.
We had been here before a couple of times, fumbling and kissing and negotiating. She was a short, swelling girl with long hair and plump lips and I think she was in love with me. She wanted to do it, she told me, but was afraid if we did I would not respect her.
On the great night, we didn’t even bother to smoke, but started to kiss and touch each other right away. She allowed me to undress her item by item (‘Just the sweater, Sally, please.’ ‘Take your bra off, just for a second, just one second, please.’) until, finally, she was completely naked, white and shivering in the chill of winter. There was enough light to make out her chubby figure and her pale, upturned face with its expression of embarrassed arousal. I embraced her. How warm she felt, how round and resiliently female. I took off my shirt and my trousers and embraced her again and kissed her. After so many years of rejection, a naked body was pressed against my naked body. After so many years, a girl wanted me as I wanted her. Because it was cold and my desire was so urgent, I kept my socks on, but Sally draped all our other clothes over a bench as I clumsily rolled the geography master’s condom down onto my penis.
Now she arranged herself on the bench and I got on top of her. She was afraid and asked me not to hurt her.
‘No, no, it won’t hurt. This is lovely,’ I said.
I put it in (actually, I think it put itself in) and then stayed still for a second, shocked by the hot, enveloping sensation.
And then I came.
I don’t even know if it was in there long enough to have taken her virginity, if it had not been taken already, but as far as I was concerned this counted. If she hadn’t lost hers, I’d certainly lost mine. I had been inside a woman. I was a man.
I got up and we stood and kissed some more, me still in my socks, and then I pulled off the condom and we hurried back into our clothes before other smokers and fornicators came visiting. I kept the rubber in my hand and when I was fully dressed, surreptitiously pocketed it. We walked back towards the school. She held my left hand. The sticky rubber lay cradled in my right. I’m sure I made promises along the way. I’m sure that one of them was never to speak of what had happened.
As soon as we parted, I started to run. When I got to the dormitory all the other boys were there, doing their homework, getting ready for bed, lounging around in their childish pyjamas and reading Guns and Ammo and Exchange & Mart. I burst in the door, pulled the loaded condom from my pocket, and held it dangling above my head.
‘There!’ I yelled. ‘I did it! I did it!’
Sex had been my main preoccupation since I was five years old, vague at first, just a strong, indefinable urge, but defining rapidly toward this, this intercourse, this putting yourself inside someone—and what a thing it was when finally achieved. The perfection of it and the relief! It was not only possible, but just as good as advertised. My bragging was a crude betrayal, but I couldn’t help it. I had been kept waiting so long and I was so happy; and when I lay in bed that night and thought of Sally, it was with tenderness and gratitude. She had allowed me inside her. I had been inside her! Inside!
This pathetically brief moment of connection stretched out and became a permanent repudiation of my sense of alienation, of ugliness and difference. It was as if we’d left earth and floated in space, rolling in the darkness, indivisible in our desire. It was a moment of such intense and complete involvement I could never again think of myself as being entirely alone.
Soon after this, my eczema began to fade, retreating first to my hands, then to a final colony between my fingers before, within a year or so, disappearing completely, never to return.
My report for that term read, ‘Matthew has developed a very superior attitude toward his work and his classmates. He can be pleasant when he wants to but is more often inclined to be “cocky and difficult.” ’ I had lost my faith in God before the age of ten, now here I was, not yet fifteen and already risen to communion of another kind. Of course I was cocky. Yes, it was a grand thing, this fucking, communion, no question about it.
Unfortunately, my next attempt at such communion would get me thrown out.
Ever since I arrived at the school three years before, I’d had my eye on Nina. With an upturned nose and light brown hair, she was pretty and coquettish. The word ‘pert’ comes to mind. Nina and I had gone out once or twice for walks, but there had been no romance. In fact, I always felt she didn’t like me. She was a teacher’s daughter; my anti-authoritarianism compounded the awkwardness of her position. Tonight, however, was the last night of the summer term and I was fourteen.
She approached me with a couple of her friends and started to flirt, sweetly, but with an odd determination. She made a joking challenge. I responded in kind. It was as if she’d made up her mind to dispense with her virginity and had chosen me to take it. Perhaps she had been teased for being a good girl and had decided her survival depended on doing something bad with someone bad.
We started walking. I was amazed, in shock but not unprepared: one of the geography master’s aging condoms nestled optimistically in my pocket.
It was a warm evening, still light. We went past the tennis courts, past the hut where I had lost my virginity with Sally almost
a year before, and found a place among some bushes on the other side. We lay down and I kissed her. Soon clothes bunched at her ankles and rode up around her narrow waist. I touched her and she touched me. I was hard and she was wet. I rolled on the condom, put the tip of my penis just inside her—and came.
We got dressed and walked back together. I remember wondering if I’d ever learn not to come so quickly. I’d stolen a copy of the Kama Sutra from a local bookstore (in fact several copies, the rest of which I’d sold above market price) and studied it, but when push came to shove, I came. She was subdued but not unfriendly. We parted company. I didn’t brag about this one. By now I knew more was expected of me and I felt ashamed. Sally was a sweet girl and wanted silence. Who knew what this girl would want?
Late that night there was a knock on the door of my dormitory. A girl named Ginny was calling for me. I went out into the corridor.
‘You brute,’ she said, her eyes slits of teenage indignation.
‘What?’
‘Nina’s crying. How could you do that?’
‘She wanted me to. It hardly …’
‘Pah!’
And she walked off. Another hour passed and then the same girl was at the door again.
‘You’re in big trouble. She’s bleeding and she’s going to see her mum and dad.’
‘No!’
‘Yes! You rapist.’
The next morning at assembly, the usual hymns were sung and announcements made. So and so was off to Oxford. The first eleven won the … I glanced at Nina’s father. His lips were tight, he did not look my way, and neither Nina nor her mother were in the hall. The headmaster, Harris, a radical vegetarian with a settlement of boils on his neck, droned on, then stopped. I looked up at him and it seemed as if his whole head was beginning to shake.
‘ … and lastly I’d like to see Matthew Chapman in my office right now.’
He stared at me and I at him and yes, his head was shaking.
The shaking continued in his office. He tried to act ‘disappointed’ and ‘concerned’ but in fact he was simply furious. The mother was down at the hospital having her daughter checked, but the father was here, the angriest pacifist you ever saw, unable even to look at me. I was certainly out of the school, Harris told me, but it could also be a matter for the police. I was to return with my mother or father in half an hour to hear the results of the examination.
I ran outside. My mother stood beside her red Mini Minor, the trunk already open to receive my luggage. She waved cheerily as I approached. My parents were never censorious in any conventional way (‘Tory’ was a far more offensive four-letter word to them than ‘fuck’), so I gave it to her immediately and without euphemism:
‘Listen, I sort of fucked the housemaster’s daughter and now she’s saying it’s rape and she’s down the hospital being checked.’
Clare looked quickly around, saw a gap in a nearby hedge, plunged through it, and disappeared. When I caught up with her, she already had a cigarette in her mouth.
‘Here, have one of these,’ she said. ‘Let’s think about this.’
‘It wasn’t rape,’ I promised her, as she lit my cigarette. ‘It was barely … I only just got the end in, I swear.’
‘I went to school with that Harris,’ she mused. ‘An extreeeemely priggish little chap even then. I think I’d better call your father.’
Cecil was duly called and before long the three of us were back in Harris’ office. The atmosphere was sombre and threatening. The doctor had confirmed damage to the hymen.
‘The question is, whether or not her parents want to call the police,’ Harris said.
‘How old is the girl?’ asked my father.
The parents were consulted. She was a year older than I.
‘It seems to me,’ said my father, ‘that it’s a question of whether we want to call the police or not. She’s past the age of consent, Matthew isn’t.’
I remember a long silence during which a smirk irresistibly took possession of my lips. I tried to resist because I liked Nina’s father very much, a really good man, but the headmaster was another matter. He was a sanctimonious, overbearing, second-generation vegetarian. I looked up into his eyes. He turned away.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘nonetheless, I think Matthew should leave the school.’
And so I did.
I got in the car with my father. Up to this point, I had not been close to him. I loved him because he was my father and admired him because he was so incredibly intelligent, but I didn’t really know him. He was too abrupt, too distant, too busy. In thirty seconds this would change. We drove in silence. I waited for his rebuke. Finally, without looking at me, he spoke.
‘Anything I might say to you, you will already have thought of.’
‘Yes,’ I said and we never spoke of it again.
He was right. It was very simple. This was one of the most liberal schools in the country. To get kicked out required some doing and no other school would now be eager to take me. Shocking though the whole incident had been, there was a certain victory in it. I had literally fucked myself out of an education.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mth4U
When I get back to the Magnolia House from my visit with Kurt Wise up at Bryan College, Gloria is up in her den watching Pippi Longstocking on TV. A lethargy seems to have seeped into her, which even her indomitable optimism cannot fight off.
It’s been hot and humid all day. Now it’s evening, but still light. I drive down to the river where there’s a boat ramp and a half-sunken dock and go for a swim. The water is streaked with hot and cold and there’s a skin of broken leaves on the surface. I stroke lazily out into the wide bulge of the river and then lie on my back and stare at the sky before swimming back.
On the bank of the river is a pastor from Knoxville and his wife and two grandchildren aged maybe two and three. As I’m drying myself, the older of the two boys, who is soaked in his clothes from walking out on the sunken dock, falls to the ground and gets himself dirty. The pastor takes him by one hand, lifts him up, and dangles him in the water to clean him off. There’s nothing intentionally brutal about it and the kid hangs there uncomplaining, but there’s an ignorance in it, a kind of jovial ignorance.
He tells me he and his son-in-law, who is choir director in a local church (‘He’s so musical you put a piece of sheet music in front of him and he’ll jes play it’) belong to a Pentecostal division of the church where people speak in tongues.
‘It doesn’t happen every time, but we like it when it does ’cause it means we’ve been visited by the Lord,’ he tells me as I dry myself. The Pentecostal services, he says, are more ‘uplifting’ than the Baptist ones. ‘We have singing and we stand up and wave our hands around.’
They ask me what I’m doing down here and I tell them I’m writing a book about Dayton and the Scopes Trial. When the pastor’s wife asks me when my book will be in the libraries, I say, ‘Well, in a year or so, God willing.’
The place is definitely getting to me.
When I arrived I was afraid because of my preconceptions about the rural South. As a neurotic city-dweller from the North, I feared the overt violence of the redneck with a banjo in one hand and a pistol in the other. The ceaseless friendliness has lulled me, but in another way, I’m more disturbed. The depth and pervasiveness of religious faith is overwhelming. Everyone believes absolutely, and seemingly without question, that God exists, that prayers work, and miracles happen.
I feel adrift. It makes me uneasy. What I find disturbing is not so much the belief in God, but the habit of credulity which it engenders. If they can believe in God—who never shows his face—simply because it makes them feel good, what else might they be persuaded to believe in? What is the difference between religious evangelism and political propaganda? Might one prepare you for the other? Was it not, after all, credulity as much as ‘evil’ (whatever that is) which made the attempted extermination of the Jews possible? To quote from Diary of a Man in De
spair, the wartime recollections of German aristocrat Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, ‘This people, only yesterday so intelligent and discriminating, seems to have been overcome by a disease of the mind. They now believe everything they are told, provided it is done with sufficient aplomb.’
But were they in fact so discriminating before the rise of Hitler, or did they merely confine their lack of discrimination to the more common absurdities of the Church? What if down here in the South, where babbling hysterics are instantly assumed to be speaking with the voice of God, someone stated ‘with sufficient aplomb’ that Englishmen with short hair are emissaries of the Devil and ought to be shot? Impossible to sell such an idea? Why? Because it’s unreasonable? How would that get in the way of anything? As the New Agers say when you dispute one of their unfounded beliefs, ‘Don’t be so closeminded.’
I decide to have dinner with Gloria. She’ll keep me safe no matter what. I find her in her den, still watching TV. The cut-off scrubs, however, have been replaced by a dark blue satin nightie from Victoria’s Secret. I hesitate a moment, wondering after all about my safety, and then suggest Ayola’s. She agrees. I go downstairs. She gets dressed.
At Ayola’s she begins to cheer up. Tomorrow is Saturday and I say I’ll spend the day with her and help in whatever way I can. Sunday she’s leaving and so am I, although of course I’ll be back in a few weeks for the great re-enactment. I’ve already bought my tickets and booked a room at the Best Western.
We return to the Magnolia House and go upstairs to the den. Gloria switches on her computer.
She has met about a dozen men through AOL. I get the impression that two of these encounters resulted in more than a handshake. Some of the men drove hundreds of miles to see her. One even flew his own light aircraft into Dayton to have lunch with her. Most are nice ‘as all get out,’ but few are as they describe themselves. A man who said he was tall and cute with a full head of hair turned out to be, as Gloria puts it, ‘a bald butterball of approximately five feet six.’
Trials of the Monkey Page 20