A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  Adrian took the ragged pages and offered to pay Cornthwaite for all his trouble. Cornthwaite said he wouldn’t take any money but he hoped Adrian would stop bothering him about pictures for the rest of his life.

  Adrian took his picture to a seat in the grandstand and sat down to examine it. It was a black-and-white photograph of a naked woman walking towards him under an archway of trees. And this time there was nothing between him and the thing that his parents and teachers, the men who painted the Old Masters, the women who posed for Man Junior, and even Dorothy McEncroe at St Margaret Mary’s School years before had kept hidden from him.

  The woman in Health and Sunshine strode boldly forward. Her hands swung by her sides. As calmly as he could, Adrian looked into the hollow between her thighs.

  His first thought was that Health and Sunshine was a fraud like Man Junior. The place was full of shadow. The woman had somehow managed to shield her secrets from the light. Even without a beach ball or a leopard’s skin she had still foiled him.

  But then he realised it was an accident. The shadows came from the branch of a tree above the woman. The whole scene was mottled with shadows from the trees overhead. And there was something visible in the shadows between her legs. In the dull light under the roof of the grandstand he could not make it out clearly, but he was not beaten yet.

  He took the picture out into the daylight and looked closely at it. He was even more convinced that a shape of some kind was concealed among the shadows, although it would take much longer to make out its finer details.

  Adrian put the picture inside his shirt and stepped onto his bike. All the way home he was frightened of having an accident. He saw a crowd of doctors and nurses undoing his shirt on the operating table and discovering a page from Health and Sunshine over his heart. If they knew he was a Catholic they might tell the hospital chaplain, who would discuss the whole matter with his parents around his bedside after he regained consciousness.

  He arrived home safely and smuggled the picture into the bottom of his schoolbag. Next morning he took the last six shillings from his tin of pocket money. On the way to school he bought a reading glass in a newsagent’s shop in Swindon Road. He told the man that he wanted the most powerful glass he could get for his money because he had to inspect some rare postage stamps.

  The picture was still hidden in his bag. After school that day he hurried to the toilet cubicle on the Swindon station. He held the reading glass in every possible position over the picture. He moved his head slowly up and down and cocked it at different angles. The trouble was that the glass magnified all the tiny dots in the picture. He was still sure there was something between the woman’s legs but the glass only made it more mysterious.

  He remembered the story a brother had told about the scientists who searched for the indivisible particle that all matter in the universe was made of. The harder they searched for it, the more it seemed to be made up of smaller particles that danced in front of their eyes.

  Adrian put the reading glass in his bag and crumpled up his pattern of dancing dots and left it behind in the toilet.

  The next time he went to the barber he read an article in Pix magazine about the trade in negro slaves that still flourished in certain Arab countries. There was a market in the Yemen where young black women were being sold openly for forty pounds each at the present day. The girls were paraded before intending buyers like so many cattle, and when a likely purchaser showed some interest, the vendor would fling back the gaudy robe from a girl’s dusky limbs and display every one of her assets for close inspection.

  Adrian knew exactly what this last sentence meant. The Yemen was not too far from Australia. When he left school and started work he would soon save up forty pounds plus his fares. As soon as he turned twenty-one he would travel to the Yemen and visit the slave market and buy one of the young women.

  Or he need not even buy one. He could simply rattle some money in his pocket to look like a customer, and wait until a gaudy robe was flung back. And if one of the girl’s thighs blocked his view or a shadow fell across her, he would pretend to be a very cautious customer who insisted on seeing every detail of the goods he was interested in.

  One morning Brother Cyprian spent some of the Christian Doctrine period talking about dreams. The boys were unusually attentive. They could see he was nervous and embarrassed. While he talked he adjusted the pile of books on his desk, trying to make it symmetrical.

  Brother Cyprian said: ‘At this time of your lives you might find yourself feeling a little sad and strange because you seem to be leaving behind a part of your life that was happy and simple. The reason for this is that you’re all growing from boys into young men. There are new mysteries to puzzle and bother you—things you never thought about a few years ago. And many of you no doubt are worried by the strange new dreams you might be having.’

  Adrian Sherd recalled the strangest dream he had had lately. It had come to him after he had worn himself out with three consecutive nights in America. On the third of those nights he had gone with Rhonda and Doris and Debbie to the Badlands of South Dakota. The women were jaded and bored. To liven them up he got them to play the most depraved party games he could think of. The games turned into an orgy, with naked bodies rolling in the purple sage. Afterwards Adrian had fallen asleep exhausted and wondering what more America could possibly offer him.

  Brother Cyprian was saying, ‘Chemicals and substances are being made inside your bodies ready for the day when you enter the adult world. These strange new substances help to put into your minds the images that might shock you while you’re asleep. Sometimes in your sleep you seem to be a different person doing things you’d never think of while you’re awake.’

  The dream had come to Adrian on the same night after he had fallen asleep in South Dakota. He saw a dark-brown misty land on the horizon. It was England—a country he had never wanted to visit. (English film stars were too reserved and aloof. And except for Diana Dors they never appeared in bathing suits.) Something compelled him to cross damp treeless wolds towards a manor house or castle of grey stone. As he travelled he looked for places where a man might take his lady friends for a picnic. But all he saw were a few copses or spinneys so small or so close to roads and lanes that the picnickers could never have run naked or cried out obscene words without being seen or overheard.

  If he had been awake he would have despised this landscape. But in his dream he longed to know it better. It seemed to promise a pleasure more satisfying than anything he had known in America.

  The stone house was on a hill. He stood outside it searching for a door or a low window to look through. Behind him, he knew, was a view of miles of green fields dotted with darker-green trees and intersected by white lanes. If he could find a beautiful young woman, even an English woman, he would enjoy to the full whatever rare pleasures the landscape concealed.

  Brother Cyprian said, ‘The important thing to remember is this. We can’t help what happens to us while we’re asleep. We’re fully responsible for what we do in the daytime, but in sleep there are chemicals and forces at work that we haven’t the slightest control over.’

  Somewhere inside the house was a woman or a girl of his own age with a face so full of expression that a man could stare at it for hours. She was wearing a turtlenecked Fair Isle sweater (so bulky that he saw no sign of her breasts), a skirt of Harris tweed and sensible shoes. As soon as Adrian found a window into her room they would exchange glances full of meaning. Hers would tell him she was willing to agree to whatever he asked. And his would tell her he wanted no more than to walk beside her all afternoon through the English landscape. And even if they found themselves alone in some green field screened on all sides by tall hedgerows, he would ask no more than to clasp her fingertips or lightly touch her wrist where it gleamed like the finest English porcelain.

  Brother Cyprian said, ‘So you see, we can’t commit a sin in our sleep. No matter what strange things we dream about, there’s no chan
ce of us sinning.’

  Adrian groped through thickets of ivy. Even the walls of the place were becoming harder to find. Inside somewhere, the woman was operating her expensive film projector. She was showing an audience of hundreds of well-dressed English gentlemen coloured films of all the landscapes she longed to wander through, and hinting to them what they must do to earn the right to escort her on summer afternoons.

  Adrian stood on the beach below a towering cliff on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall. High above, on the Sussex Downs, a young couple promenaded on the smooth sward. He heard the intimate murmur of their voices but before he could make out their words he had to escape from the incoming tide. When he saw the vast green bulk of the whole Atlantic coming at him he woke in his sleepout at Accrington.

  Brother Cyprian was near the end of his talk. ‘One of the most alarming things that might happen to us is to wake up in the middle of some strange dream. You might find your whole body disturbed and restless and all sorts of odd things happening. The only thing to do is to say a short prayer to Our Lady and ask her for the blessing of a dreamless sleep. Then close your eyes again and let things take their course.’

  Adrian had been desperate to get back to sleep and try again to enjoy the pleasures of England. But of course had never seen anything like an English landscape again.

  In the schoolyard at morning recess Cornthwaite said, ‘Did you get what Cyprian was raving about this morning—all that about naughty dreams?’

  O’Mullane and Seskis and Sherd were not sure.

  Cornthwaite said, ‘Wet dreams. That’s what it was. You bastards have never had that sort of dream because you’ve flogged yourselves silly every night of your lives since you were in short pants. If you go without it for a couple of weeks, one night you’ll dream the filthiest dream you’ve ever dreamed of. You’ll even shoot your bolt in your sleep if you don’t wake up in the middle of it.’

  Adrian tried not to look surprised. It was the first time anyone had explained wet dreams to him. He had never had one—perhaps for the reason that Cornthwaite had suggested. He realised why the brother had been so embarrassed talking about dreams.

  For nearly a week Adrian kept away from America. He was waiting for a filthy dream. If the dream was as good as Cornthwaite had claimed, Adrian might have to make an important decision. He would carefully compare the dream and the best of his American adventures. If the dream turned out to be more realistic and lifelike than his American journey, he might decide to get all his sexual pleasure in future from dreams.

  But whenever he remembered the young woman and the innocent landscapes of England he wished for dreams that would never be contaminated by lust. He decided to resume his American journey. If he wore himself out in America night after night, there was always the chance that he might experience again the pure joy of a dream of England.

  Some nights when Adrian was tired of visiting America he thought about the history of mankind.

  While he lived in the Garden of Eden, Adam enjoyed perfect human happiness. If it occurred to him to look at a naked woman, he simply told Eve to stand still for a moment. And he never once suffered the misery of having an erection that he could not satisfy. Eve knew it was her duty to give in to him whenever he asked.

  After he was driven out into the world, Adam still tried to live as he had in Eden. But now he suffered the trials of a human being. Eve wore clothes all day long and only let him near her when she wanted a child. Every day he had erections that came to nothing. Many a time he looked out across the plains of Mesopotamia and wished there was some other woman he could think about. But the world was still empty of people apart from himself and his family. Even in the vast continent of North America there was no human footprint from the green islands of Maine to the red-gold sandbanks of the Rio Grande.

  But at least Adam could remember his pleasant life in Eden. His sons had no such consolation. They grew up in a world where the only females were their sisters and their mother—and they always kept their bodies carefully covered.

  When the eldest son reached Adrian’s age he still hadn’t seen a naked female body. One hot afternoon he could stand it no longer. He hid among the bullrushes while Eve and her daughters went swimming in the Tigris. He only glanced at Eve—her breasts were long and flabby and her legs had varicose veins. But he looked hard at his sisters, even the young ones with no breasts.

  When he was alone again, he formed his hand into the shape of the thing he had seen between their legs and became the first in human history to commit the solitary sin.

  Although it was not recorded in the Bible, that was a black day for mankind. On that day God thought seriously of wiping out the little tribe of Man. Even in His infinite wisdom He hadn’t foreseen that a human would learn such an unnatural trick—enjoying by himself, when he was hardly more than a child, the pleasure that was intended for married men only.

  The angels in heaven were revolted too. Lucifer’s sin of pride seemed clean and brave compared with the sight of the shuddering boy squirting his precious stuff into the limpid Tigris. Lucifer himself was delighted that Man had invented a new kind of sin—and one that was so easy to commit.

  Luckily for mankind it was the first of many occasions when God’s mercy overcame His righteous anger. The son of Adam never knew how close he had come to being struck dead on the spot.

  Perhaps God relented because He saw how little joy the poor fellow got out of it. There were no newspapers or magazines to excite his imagination. All he could think of was one of the same girls he saw every day in his ordinary household in dreary Mesopotamia.

  Eventually the sons of Adam married their sisters, and their descendants spread through the Middle East and became the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians.

  By now the young men were much better off than the sons of Adam. Few of them had to commit sins of impurity alone. People matured so early in the hot climate that a young fellow of Adrian’s age would be already married to a shapely brown-skinned wife.

  If a young man couldn’t wait, even for the brief time between puberty and marriage, he still didn’t have to touch himself. There were slave girls in every city. If a young man fancied a certain slave girl he could ask his father to buy her and employ her in the house. If the young fellow was daring enough he would have her assigned to bathroom duties. She would fill his tub and fetch his towels on bath nights. Then he could arrange for the room to become so hot that the girl had to strip to the waist while she worked.

  When the Jews settled in the Promised Land they were no less lustful than other peoples. Time after time God had to send a prophet to persuade them to repent. Even when the Bible did not name the sins of the Jews, it was easy to guess what they were. The weather in Palestine was always hot and the people often slept on top of their houses. The excitement of lying on the roof with hardly any clothes on, and hearing your neighbour’s wife just across the way tossing about under her sheet, would have kept a Jewish man awake half the night thinking of sex.

  In Old Testament times the only young men who kept up the solitary habit were poor shepherd boys far from the cities and the slave girls. When fire and brimstone rained on Sodom and Gomorrah, there were lonely herd-keepers who watched from the stony hills around and didn’t know whether to be glad, because all the spoilt young bastards were being roasted alive with their wives and slave girls, or sorry, because they could never again peer down on the cities at dusk to watch the sexy games on the rooftops and catch a glimpse of some young woman they could remember afterwards in the desert.

  By the time of Jesus, the Jews had become very reticent about sex. It was hard to judge how common or rare the solitary sin might have been in New Testament days. Jesus Himself never referred to it, but Adrian always hoped an Apocryphal Gospel or a Dead Sea Scroll would be found one day with the story of the Boy Taken in Self-Abuse.

  The Scribes and Pharisees dragged him to Jesus and announced that they were going to stone him. Jesus invited the one without sin to
cast the first stone. Then He started writing in the sand. One by one the old men looked down and read the dates and places of their boyhood sins and the names of the women they had used for inspiration. The boy read them too. And for years afterwards, instead of hanging his head in shame because the whole town knew about his secret sin, he remembered the pious old men who had tried it themselves in their youth and he looked the whole world in the face.

  Adrian hummed or whistled his favourite hit tunes whenever he was alone, and especially at night when his parents had gone to bed with their library books and his young brothers were asleep. Sometimes he got up from his homework at the kitchen table and went into his room without turning on the light. He stared out of his window, trying to imagine the shape of the North American continent beyond the darkness that had settled over the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. He tried not to notice the lighted window in the house across the back fence where Mr and Mrs Lombard were still doing their tea dishes because it took them hours to scrub all their kids and put them to bed. He sang his favourite tunes softly until America appeared under its brilliant sunshine on the far side of the world.

  The square-dancing craze was over. The women of America had stopped wearing shapeless checked blouses and cowboy hats that dangled behind their heads. They were crowded together on a riverbank listening to Johnny Ray sing ‘The Little White Cloud that Cried’. Johnny threw back his head in agony and gasped out the last long syllable of his smash hit. The women threw their arms round each other and sobbed. They would have done anything to make Johnny happy, but he only stood with his eyes closed and thought of the waters of the Potomac or the Shenandoah rushing past on their way to the sea, and of how lonely the American countryside seemed to someone with no sweetheart.

  The women followed the river to the sea. By sundown they were all strolling along the boardwalk of a great city, dressed in off-the-shoulder evening frocks and white elbow-length gloves. From the farthest horizon, rosy with sunset, the sound of the fishing fleet, returning to port at last, reached the throng of women. Jo Stafford’s rendition of ‘Shrimp Boats’ came from loudspeakers all along the beach. When they knew their menfolk were coming, the women rushed into the lobby of the biggest luxury hotel in town. They pushed through the fronds of potted palms and crowded round the startled desk clerks and sang into their faces, ‘There’s dancing tonight.’