by Denise Scott
‘What’s Modess, Mum?’
‘Never you mind.’
Being forewarned, I couldn’t wait to get my period, and so when, at fourteen years of age, there was still no sign, I prayed. Now, I’m not saying it was a religious miracle, but I am saying that not too long afterwards I got my first period, at a home mass down the street at the Thomases’ house. There was a crowd of us squashed into their tiny lounge room; with the nine Thomas kids plus neighbours there must have been thirty of us. A huge statue of Mary had been borrowed from the local church for the event. The priest stood in front of the TV and conducted the service. Of course, neither of my parents were there.
Later that evening, back at home, I was getting undressed when I saw it—the tiny spot of pale blood on my white cotton underpants. I let out a whoop of joy, threw on my dressing gown and ran into my parents’ bedroom. As usual, Mum was reading; Dad was snoring.
‘I’ve got it, Mum! My period! I’ve finally got it!’
‘Good for you.’
I went to my drawer, where a Modess belt and packet of pads had sat in readiness for two years. That night when I was in bed I thanked God for answering my prayer. Who would have thought? My very own version of the stigmata.
* * *
It wasn’t too long after becoming a woman in the menstrual sense that I got my first boyfriend. His name was Tommy. I was in year nine at Our Lady of Mercy College and was one of the first in my year to have a steady boyfriend.
One lunchtime soon after Tommy and I became an item I found myself all on my Pat Malone in the schoolyard. I was mystified. What the hell was going on? I was usually quite popular. But on this day no-one was coming near me. Everyone was well and truly keeping their distance, staring at me and whispering behind their hands. Well, they weren’t really whispering—the word ‘slut’ was pretty audible.
At first I was shocked. I’d only recently read The Scarlet Letter and to be honest most of it had gone right over my head, but my heart did ache for that poor woman being made to walk through the town with the letter ‘A’ for adulterer pinned to her rags. And now here was I walking around the school being ostracised by my own friends, labelled a slut. However, unlike the woman in The Scarlet Letter, I was thrilled to bits about the whole business. I was only just fourteen and had the whole school talking about me. Fancy everyone believing I was capable of any sort of sexual behaviour, yet alone assuming I was a loose hussy.
Even the nuns were swept up in the drama. I went into the year nine cloakroom, where there were two rows of fifty school blazers all squashed together on coat hangers. As I got something out of my bag I heard a noise behind me. I swung around, astonished to see Sister Mary Martha’s head pop up from among the blazers. She had obviously been hiding out there, hoping to pounce on whomever she caught in the act of God knows what—smoking or talking dirty or even a bit of lesbian action.
(This wasn’t an unrealistic pursuit. After all, there was one out-and-proud lesbian in my year, and she used to play guitar and sing ‘I wanna be free’, which caused many of the girls to swoon and scream and cry as though she was Davy Jones from The Monkees, and naturally that led some to wonder if they were in love with Davy, who was being channelled through this girl, or with the girl herself, and whether they were therefore lesbian. So many questions at such a young age.)
Sister Mary Martha beckoned me with her finger. ‘Is it true you have a boyfriend?’
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘Is he a nice boy?’
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘Do your parents know about him?’
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘Do you kiss?’
‘Um, well, yes, Sister, sort of.’
‘What sort of kissing?’
‘Um, oh, you know, the normal sort … Our lips … touch … sort of.’
‘Do you do more than kiss?’
‘No, Sister.’
That was true. Tommy had tried to take things further, his hands enthusiastically finding their way into my underpants, but I suspect the fact that I had been wearing a Modess pad the size of a phone book at the time hadn’t been quite what he was expecting and he’d quickly abandoned ship.
Not surprisingly, my mother had a very strict policy regarding sex: while her daughters lived under her roof they were not to have it. Not that she ever gave voice to this rule. She couldn’t, because in doing so she would have had to come perilously close to talking about sex, possibly even have to say the word. I don’t know how I knew this rule; I just did. It was as though I picked it up by means of osmosis, and at that stage of my life I was totally fine with it because I didn’t want to have sex. I had no interest in it. This was helped by the fact that I wasn’t really attracted to Tommy. I just liked the idea of having a boyfriend.
Weirdly, for such a conservative woman, my mother seemed perfectly cool with the notion of me having a boyfriend. Then again, she didn’t know that Tommy’s dad was an unemployed, abusive alcoholic and that his mother (so the rumour went) was a prostitute, and that Tommy’s seventeen-year-old brother was getting married to his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, who was having his baby. The reason Mum didn’t know any of this stuff was because, as already mentioned, she rarely asked questions, so while she never literally rocked back and forth on a chair with her hands over both ears, saying, ‘I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know,’ she certainly had a vibe about her that suggested she really and truly didn’t want to know.
This ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you’ philosophy proved quite advantageous in my adolescent years.
I didn’t know that much about Tommy myself apart from the aforementioned and the fact that he’d left school, worked at the local grocer’s and chain-smoked Marlboro cigarettes. I also knew that after seven or so months of ‘going together’ I was on the verge of dropping him when, lo and behold, Tommy appeared on the front page of our local paper. The headline: ‘Boy, 14, shoots at police.’
It was a terrible shock. Tommy had told me he was fifteen.
He and a few friends had stolen a car and fired shots at the police. Tommy got six months in Turana, the youth detention centre. Of course, I couldn’t drop him under those circumstances; it would have been too cruel. Besides, now that he was a crim I found him more attractive. In the meantime, if my mum was fazed by any of this, she sure as hell didn’t show it.
And so, there I was at fourteen years of age, heading off on my own every Sunday after mass, armed with Marlboro cigarettes and packets of Marella Jubes, on the train to Parkville to visit my man in the clink, like some mini Judy Moran (although admittedly it is hard to picture a mini Judy Moran).
During the week we wrote romantic love letters that we’d smuggle to one another across the visitors table. At one stage Tommy even asked me to marry him, but I told him I thought I’d better finish year nine first. Besides, deep down I knew I was more in love with drama than with Tommy.
Brutally, I dropped him two weeks before his release. He broke down and cried, spluttering that he’d never love anyone else as much as he loved me. Yeah, well, whatever, kid. Life was tough and cruel, and the truth was I’d been unfaithful to him.
I’d been to a party and pashed someone else, and to this day I thank God I did, because that person, would you believe—God knows, I hardly can—grew up to be the drummer from AC/DC! I wish there were more to this story, but that’s it. I’ve never seen Phil Rudd since (apart from when he’s onstage), but I often retell the story, at dinner parties especially. I like to think Phil does the same.
Of course, at the time of the aforementioned pash I had no idea that Phil (notice I don’t use his surname, as though we were, and for that matter still are, best friends) was destined for international fame, but the kissing session with him was significant because I didn’t want it to end. I guess what I’m trying to say is—how do I put this delicately?—I felt, shall we say, that Mr Long Way to the Top If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll made me feel a little bit se
xual. And, truth be told, I liked it—so much so, and this is an embarrassing admission, I gave up all ‘pleasures of the flesh’ activities for Lent. I also gave up choc-mint sundae biscuits—not so much for Jesus but in the hope it would help get rid of the pimples on my chin. It was a long forty days and forty nights in the desert, let me tell you.
Not long after the Tommy business I took a sort of vow. I promised myself—and, for what it was worth, I also promised Jesus—that I wouldn’t have sex until I met the man with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life. It was your basic ‘chastity until marriage’ vow without the having to get married bit. By the age of fifteen I knew I didn’t want to get married—it was way too conservative, too ‘normal’, too suburban. In other words, it was too much like my mother.
* * *
It was 1971, and Eltham had become the place for arty hippie parents and their arty hippie teenage kids. There were mudbrick houses and boys who wore tights and girls who wore headbands, and drugs and sex were all the go. It was all so exotic for a straight-laced Catholic girl from a brick-clad war service home in Greensborough.
At the time, I had a Saturday morning job at Butterworth’s Newsagency, where I earnt the princely sum of two dollars. Every Saturday, as soon as I finished work, I headed straight next door to the Indian flea market, one of the first of its kind to open in Melbourne. I was forever putting something on lay-by—a 1940s black jacket with gold bead trim, a 1920s silk shawl with fringing around the edges, and my favourite: a calf-length, red-and-blue embroidered skirt from India. My mother had taught me to embroider as a child, so during those lazy, crazy, hippie, let’s-make-love-not-war days, I was able to put that skill to use, embroidering my jeans and t-shirts with mushrooms, gnomes, flowers and peace signs.
My mother rarely commented on Julie’s or my clothes, allowing us total freedom to wear pretty much whatever we wanted. The only occasion I recall Mum putting her foot down about an article of clothing was when she banned Julie from wearing a maxi dress that was covered in a swirling, psychedelic abstract pattern that upon closer inspection revealed naked breasts, including nipples.
Tragically, our mother’s lack of fashion policing meant that on more than one occasion I left the house wearing a poncho I had made myself by simply cutting a hole in the middle of a tablecloth and sticking my head through it.
There were also hand-knitted bathers. I kid you not. My mother had taught me to knit as a child, and I was good at it, and for some reason when I was fifteen I chose to spend six months knitting myself a one-piece bathing suit. It was a beautiful blue colour with a halter-neck design, in rib stitch, using a fine-ply wool. Without bragging—just stating the facts—I had a great body back then, and the bathers looked fantastic … until they got wet. Who knew wool absorbed so much water and became so heavy? The bathers stretched to the point that the crotch actually hit the ground.
My hair was long, almost to my waist, and blonde, as I’ve mentioned. Miraculously, it had become blonder since I’d begun using a product called Sun-In. I used to straighten my hair by kneeling down and spreading it out along the ironing board, covering it with a paper bag and ironing it.
As much as I loved the hippie, natural look, being fair haired and of pallid, almost dappled-mauve complexion, my face cried out for assistance in the form of cosmetics. I loved wearing eyeliner, false lashes, a touch of Avon blush stick (purchased from Uncle Frank), white Starlet lipstick and nail polish from Coles.
* * *
I was on the cusp of turning sixteen when I met Robbie Buckle. We first set eyes on one another at a dance at Eltham High School. The dance was called Bushbeat, and it was held on the last Friday of every month. It was wild. At that stage of my life it was what I lived for, planned for, continuously fantasised about.
We Catholic girls, with our often ill-deserved reputation for being loose and easy, were more than welcome at the Eltham High dance. There was always a live band playing, including Frame, with its handsome, fresh-faced singer Shirley Strachan, who of course went on to be the frontman for Skyhooks.
We met on the dance floor. I was wearing Lee cords, desert boots and an embroidered t-shirt. Robbie was wearing jeans and an old army shirt and khaki runners purchased from the army disposal store. He was beautiful. He had long, blond, corn-silk hair. (And don’t think I’m unaware that ‘corn-silk’ sounds soppy and pathetic and, well, corny. I just aim to tell things how they are, and corn-silk is the term that springs to mind.) He had extraordinary eyes of a Paul Newman blue. (Note to younger readers: for Paul Newman, substitute Brad Pitt.) And he had dimples. Gorgeous dimples.
Like everyone else we were dancing with a classic hippie attitude, just feeling the music and moving, man, and at some point we jigged into one another’s orbit and instead of continuing to jig past one another we hovered on the spot, jigging around one another in some kind of primitive, sexual mating ritual.
(At this point I must take the opportunity, on behalf of all baby boomers, to apologise to all gen Xers and gen Yers and all who come after them. We are so sorry for turning our backs on the waltz, barn dance and Pride of Erin. To think we were the ones responsible for introducing the no-rules, no-partners, completely free-form travesty we dared to call dancing—although, come to think of it, my father had done something similar years earlier. As for hippie dancing, did we think it was attractive? Sexy? Exciting? It may well have been all those things when we were young, but these days go to any sixtieth birthday party and witness a room full of greyhaired, paunch-bellied conservatives jigging to Daddy Cool’s ‘Eagle Rock’ and I defy you to come up with a more tragic image—unless of course it’s witnessing the same group ‘doing the bus stop’.)
But that night at Bushbeat Robbie and I had no such concerns; we were tearing up the dance floor, our bodies, though at least 10 metres apart, moving as one.
Robbie asked me if I wanted to go outside.
I said yes.
We sat cross-legged on the ground under a gum tree and held hands and gazed into one another’s eyes. No, we didn’t gaze. We drowned in one another’s eyes, and that was when I began to fall hopelessly, sickeningly, in big fat love.
And then came another first: an electrifying moment in which time stood still, clocks stopped ticking, my heart stopped beating and birds stopped singing … (Not that they actually had been singing; it was after all late at night. But had it been dawn they would have ceased chirruping for sure. Anyway, enough about birdlife. You get the drift.) And then, that exquisite moment when time kick-starts again, and ever so slowly and gracefully and lovingly you head towards one another for that first kiss … Oh, his lips, they looked so soft and tender, and then just as our mouths had touched Robbie turned his head to the side and spewed.
I admit it took me by surprise. I hadn’t even realised he was drunk. But I pashed him anyway. Who cared if his mouth was full of vomit? Not me. As the saying goes, ‘Love conquers all.’ Besides, I didn’t know if I’d ever get another chance, so I didn’t want to waste the opportunity.
But I did get another chance. Robbie and I became an item, and I often stayed at his house overnight, sleeping in Robbie’s single bed while he stayed on the couch in the lounge room. At least, that was what I told my mother, and she went along with it. And to some degree it was the truth. Robbie did stay on the couch until his parents went to bed, and then he would sneak back into his room and crawl into bed with me and … well … nothing.
When I say ‘nothing’, I mean we did stuff, but we did not have sex.
Ever.
Not only did I remain a virgin; I also managed to remain ignorant of what a penis looked like, a truly remarkable achievement given Robbie’s commitment to the task of enlightening me.
God knows, I wanted to have sex with Robbie Buckle. But I wouldn’t do it. At the time I told myself I was honouring my vow of chastity to Jesus, but in truth I didn’t give that vow any thought whatsoever, because although I was a devoted Catholic I never believed that Jesus was against
sex before marriage. I’d always assumed Jesus couldn’t care less about sex, especially where, how and when Denise Scott lost her cherry. Why would he be interested? He had so many other things to worry about: African famines, world wars, not to mention the slow and steady march of communism. The real reason I didn’t have sex with Robbie was because of my mother’s hard and fast rule—it was not allowed to happen while I lived under her roof. I realise plenty of mothers of that generation had that same rule and plenty of their daughters simply ignored it. Not me. I’m not sure exactly what made my mother so powerful. She never raised her voice, never spelt out rules, never threatened us with punishment, and yet we never disobeyed her. It was as though she ruled by stealth.
I suppose I was scared of her.
I consoled myself—or rather kidded myself—that not having sex with Robbie had its advantages. Well, it had one advantage. Robbie had had sex with lots of girls, and I told myself that if I stayed a virgin as opposed to being ‘loose’ like some of his previous girlfriends his love and respect for me would escalate. It was a risky strategy that failed miserably.
Tragically, at sixteen I was still doing calisthenics
One evening, a couple of months after we had got together, Robbie rang me. Our phone sat on the servery, which meant there was no such thing as a private phone conversation in our house. So when Robbie said, ‘Hi, Scotty. I’m just ringin’ to let ya know I’m droppin’ ya,’ all I could say under the circumstances, with my entire family listening in, was, ‘Oh, okay, see ya then.’
My heart was broken. I was shattered—sick with sorrow and grief. I stopped wearing make-up. I pulled my long hair back into a tight, unflattering ponytail. And—this may be hard to believe but is absolutely true—I started wearing my school uniform on weekends. It was a horrible sky-blue, kneelength dress guaranteed to bring an adolescent girl’s mood right down. I hated wearing it on weekdays, so why, post-break-up, did I start wearing it on the weekends as well? I suppose I was so depressed I was incapable of making a decision about what else to wear. Besides, what was the point? There was no reason to look good any more, no reason to make an effort, no reason to care.