Innocents

by Coote, Cathy

  My love, you have exorcised fouler demons from me than you can possibly imagine.

  I'm tiptoeing around this subject, aren't I? Teasing you with fleeting references, whispered insinuations. Just the way I used to powder your face with filmy kisses, arousing you with the excruciating airiness of my touch.

  Here, then. Feel the terrible solidity of the truth.

  I drew my own pornography—carefully, carefully, it was my life's work—and stored it in the bottom drawer of my desk.

  What a filthy, skulking creature I was! I coasted along through the corridors of the school, stealing images and transmuting them. With my mind, I peered under blouses and up skirts. I peeled away the uniforms to poke at what was underneath.

  My perverse gallery, at the time that I met you, filled three sketchbooks and two-thirds of a fourth.

  In retrospect, I suppose the pictures were not pornography, but something worse. Pornography suggests a desire to ogle, to leer, but all the same, it is only looking. My gallery was a gallery of depraved erotica, of props in a vicious saga. The black-and-white sketches were palmcards in my technicolour inner monologue.

  I constantly told myself instalments of the same story. The drawings were stills of the most climactic moments. Scene by scene, I humiliated, commanded, penetrated. I laid my classmates on their backs and I spread their legs and sent hard cold objects into their most secret recesses. I oversaw their torture. I whipped them, kicked them, spat into their faces.

  The central theme of each scene was the same: I was in control.

  I don't mean I was some ridiculous Madam Lash character saying ‘Lick my boots.’

  I didn't appear, as such, at all. I wasn't there in person, exactly, with my physical characteristics. It was more like watching a person-eye-view movie. I was an abstract controlling force, giving orders as if from behind an opaque screen.

  An important thing I've just realised is that I was never, ever, ever involved sexually, myself. It was all about the sexual humiliation of the victims. But it had nothing to do with my physical arousal.

  I didn't masturbate.

  Or rather, my masturbatory activities were centred on the biggest and most responsive organ of all the erogenous zones—my mind. I'd lie on my bed, my chin resting on my folded hands. The sketchbooks would be flung wantonly before me, open at select images. I'd look, and look, and look, becoming drunk on physical details, until I could close my eyes and see the figures moving—coloured now, living, breathing, animated—in a perverse home movie.

  Oh how can I begin to show you the contours of my perversion? Your exploration destroyed these lands, darling. Your touch tore them like cobwebs. They dissolved fizzing under your spittle.

  I still have maps.

  The geography is precise and vast. Closing my eyes I find myself outside the gates of my old primary school, St Luke's. The courtyard led into the Science labs at St Mary's, the school where I met you. Out one door there was the school gym. Through another door lay an oval, any oval. Past the oval, trees. Past the trees, a swimming pool. Cartoon blue water, sunk in concrete and confined by a high wire fence. I know every inch of this.

  By the light, it is late afternoon. They are nearby, always. By the twisting in my stomach, they are just now being formed. I'll stroll my bodyless presence out onto the oval and see who's being made.

  What kind of mind is this? It gives me golems to use as lovers. Here they come, in answer to my impatient summons. They're sulky but obedient. Obedient to my sulky will.

  This nervous creature my soul presses up against my eyelids, leering.

  I'm violently thrilled. It seems like a licentious oversight, a cosmic loophole, even in this spectral land, that I'm allowed to. That no-one can stop me from—

  I yoke a golem. She's all body. I don't see her eyes. I see breasts, cunt, wrists and ankles. Sometimes a mouth.

  Open, I cry.

  I need to, I cry.

  I'm going to, I cry.

  And there is nothing she can do.

  And that's why.

  Appendages to my estate sometimes came and went. I remember that, after we went to the beach one year for Christmas, months of my stories were set in a huge, rambling towerblock filled with empty, self-contained apartments like the one we stayed in.

  It is to my shame that the continued suffering, the ongoing subjugation of my victims, was necessary to my scenarios. The bits of stories I have written down are examples only. In reality I continued them from day to day, like a soap opera.

  Of course, there were certain taboos.

  No blood, including menstrual blood. The skin was never broken. No permanent injury. Nothing which might scar or break a limb.

  None of my victims was ever cut when I whipped them. Bruises, on the other hand, were permissible. They did not bleed from the vagina when I raped them. Sometimes there was the nebulous idea of administering a kind of drug which would force them to orgasm against their wills. In this way, an act which, psychologically, constituted a rape, betrayed none of the physiological signs of one.

  There was no death. I instinctively loathe the idea of sex-murders, of cannibalism, dismemberment, autoerotic asphyxiation. I feel the same bewilderment and disgust when I read about madmen who kill prostitutes or rentboys, keeping the bodies in pieces in fridges. I feel no camaraderie with such men.

  These thoughts that swam like fish through the oceans of my consciousness flap disgustingly about, here on paper. I'm frightened that, instead of looming hugely dark and terrible, as they seem to me, they will be laughable. I'm worried that I'll find myself in the same category as the skulking middle-aged men who open their trenchcoats to schoolgirls in train stations. The girls are meant to scream in terror before the sinister power of the erection, but invariably they shriek with laughter, hissing hysterically to one another: ‘Gross!’

  *

  I was addicted.

  I couldn't sleep if I didn't.

  Afterwards, in the silence of the sleeping house, my scalding mind a little cooler, it might be possible to read a book or listen to a CD. But before—no chance.

  There were nights that I tried to restrain myself. Every week brought a new resolution, a moment of stoicism, when I raised myself through sheer determination, up out of the power of my corrupt and dangerous mind.

  I would stay downstairs watching television, talking nothings with my aunt, cooking, folding the laundry, until I was sent to bed. Dragging my feet, I'd trudge up the stairs, and spend far longer in the bathroom than was necessary.

  Once in my room, I'd turn on the radio for company. Searching my mind for innocuous images, I'd make pencil sketches of landscapes, or fish, or trees. If I could set myself an absorbing enough task, I'd manage to maintain a fierce interest in it until two or three in the morning. Then I'd sink into bed, exhausted, and let sleep claim me.

  This never worked for more than one night.

  By morning, I'd be tense as a cat. If my aunt or uncle spoke to me at breakfast, I wanted to spit at them over the cornflakes. If, in the crowded corridors of the school, anyone brushed me as they passed, I'd jolt with the shock of it.

  My skin crackled with electric sparks. My chest grew tighter and tighter all day. My fingernails would start to dig painfully into my palms. Some small humiliation—an inability to answer a question in class, or a passing sarcasm from Rachel—‘Nice hair’—would set me off.

  A cold fury would build, aided and abetted by an acute awareness of the sensuousness of my surroundings: in the classroom, the polished wood of the chairs; outside, the wind against my cheek; everywhere, the very motion of my body against the air as I walked.

  The simple act of breathing became charged with an unbearable eroticism.

  All afternoon my stomach would twist and turn with anticipation. I tried not to leer—I tried not to be seen to leer—at the short tartan hemlines of the thronging child-women around me. My eyes took in the forms of the girls, smooth legs slim waists small breasts, and set them to da
ncing in my mind.

  Walking home along the road reserve, I had no eyes for the swaying trees on the pathside prairies around me. I was shivering on some level beneath my skin, with a kind of premonition of what was to come.

  As soon as I got home, I'd race up the stairs to my bedroom and lock myself in.

  I paced my room, striding five steps across, or four from the door to the desk, in an agony of restlessness. I turned the music up too loud, trying to make it shout my frustrations for me.

  I burned with bleary hatreds.

  I swore and swore at the girls in my class. I assembled them in front of me, and for once they were silent; they could not reply.

  I spat at the parade of thighs arses bellies breasts, and hid my head under the blanket. But the darkness only seemed to encourage my macabre menagerie. They came dancing on relentlessly, flaunting themselves, begging me to step in, announce my presence, take control.

  There was no other way into oblivion. There was no other way to buy peace.

  *

  Not quite the ‘earthbound, perplexed angel’ you describe in the journal you left behind, am I?

  Yes, darling, I knew about your little shrine to me, stashed in a desk-drawer.

  In that tabernacle I recognised three of my essays, a ruler I thought I'd lost, and a page of abstract sketches and doodled phrases another teacher once confiscated from me. There was also a copy of a class photograph from the year before, where I sat with the other short girls in the front row, my hands folded in my lap.

  In that austere, black and red hardcover notebook, you gave vent to your earliest passions, scrawling formless longings, bits of thoughts, speculations. It's the patchwork that results from a dizzying obsession.

  How I can ever have managed to appear ‘like a stray angel, whining divinely at the door’ to you, I can't imagine. I think of myself as having been furtive, catlike, selfishly cunning.

  ‘Always gazing, entranced, at nobler dimensions than this one’ is more plausible. Burdened with my secret, I went through the motions of life distracted. At school, I was often in trouble for not taking enough notice in class. Seized with a sudden paroxysm, I would scribble obscure notes to myself, or make uninterpretable diagrams, whatever the situation. My other teachers were not impressed.

  You're convinced I was ‘dainty’. I know I was just small.

  There are also photocopies of a kind of official case-history in this drawer. I suppose it was on file at St Mary's. It details my orphaned status. On the back, you've written: ‘a dispossessed darling, all silent and alone … whatever does she think all day?’

  Reading that wakes a dreadful retching feeling in my stomach.

  I'm thinking now of a different drawerful of oddments, connected with a different obsession. It was in the bottom left drawer of the pine desk that stood against the window of my bedroom, back in my aunt and uncle's house. That was where I used to keep my little stash of pictures.

  I've done a sketch like the ones that used to fill those books in my bottom drawer. I have to shock myself into an understanding of what I was. It's too easy to gloss things over with words. I've tacked it up on the wall, a foot from my face.

  I still can't believe it's anything to do with me.

  The pencil sketch shows a girl. Her long hair hangs over her face as she bends her head, looking down. She is without clothes or background props—her body floats in the white space of the page.

  She has—I can't believe that the phrases exist in my language, in any language, to write such a thing impassively!—she has a one finger up her vagina. The rest of her fingers are splayed out over her crotch. With her other hand, she holds a breast.

  It doesn't excite me, although the figure came easily to my mind and I drew without hesitation. There are echoes of arousal—my heart quickens imperceptibly, my eyes linger—but it is a remembered desire, like the phantom passion of an impotent man.

  Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.

  I know you're not a voyeur, darling. You're too kind a man to be titillated by something that's brought me so much misery. I know that, even now, you're probably shaking your head, muttering, ‘You don't have to tell me all this.’

  Please bear with me. I have to confess everything.

  Darling, I was a better person then. At least in those days nothing impinged on the world. I went about, bubbling and boiling, but I was bordered off, a kingdom in myself. That degeneracy seems strict and noble, compared with what I became.

  I was effortlessly amphibious, strolling calmly about the surface world of school playgrounds, shopping trips with my aunt, school discos … and then, once I was alone, plunging into the submerged depths of my psyche.

  I can honestly say that I had no idea about the turmoil bubbling away behind your wistful jokes and concern about my essays. I didn't really notice you, at first, what with my distracted state of mind.

  Your interest in my schoolwork was like so much background noise.

  Lots of teachers knew I was clever. My aunt, if she hasn't thrown them out, has shoeboxes full of my old report cards, all saying how much potential I had, if only I would apply myself; or how intelligent I obviously was, except for my irritating tendency to daydream in class.

  It's strange, to think that, while I was worrying about another realm of existence, just steering myself through our conversations in the same way I negotiated playground politics, you were busy falling in love with a phantom.

  In the first few weeks, you were just another of the obstacles I had to navigate every day. Once, you called me back after class to discuss an essay.

  As we all came strutting past, you singled me out, beckoning casually. I stopped by your desk. You were looking straight at my midriff. You toyed with a pencil, trying to seem bored, duty-bound. I turned my gaze out the window, the one that showed into the corridor, and looked at the reflections of empty desks. You must have been acutely conscious of the way I leaned forward, resting my stomach on the worn wood of the desk. It wasn't deliberate, though.

  The last stragglers went out the door and turned down the corridor, their voices dying swiftly away.

  ‘Right,’ you said, professionally. You pulled out your prop—my essay—from under a sheaf of papers.

  ‘Right,’ I said. I came and stood behind you, and to one side, leaning over, regarding the essay. I was thinking about leather bindings and the delicate wrists of schoolgirls.

  You pointed things out with your pen. ‘You're trying to make a very sophisticated point here,’ you told me. ‘But you've got to make sure your text is sophisticated enough to carry it across.’

  I was only half in your world. I was barking orders at my prisoners. Orders to kneel. Orders to lie down. ‘Oh, okay,’ I said, politely. I know I said it exactly as if I couldn't give a damn.

  ‘You need to be more conscious of what each paragraph is meant to convey.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Orders to submit. I smiled the special smile I kept for admonishments from teachers and my aunt and uncle: bright and competent.

  ‘It has to consist of a series of points which lead to an inevitable conclusion.’

  ‘Oh, all right. Sure.’

  You looked me in the eyes, leaning back in your seat. ‘You don't care, do you?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said airily.

  Then I shifted uncomfortably, aware that I hadn't concentrated enough on my defences. I covered my embarrassment with a smile that was at once knowing and ingratiating. My private perversions itched at my mind.

  You said, ‘Well, you'd best go to lunch then.’

  I went to lunch.

  Like a low-pitched noise gradually rising in intensity, however, your presence in the world began to assert itself.

  You lived near me. Like me, you preferred to walk home, at least when you didn't have too many teaching materials to carry.

  I used to make my way home from school along a dirt path which cut through the road reserve that ran along behind my aunt and uncle's house. I like
d the sense of solitude. It was like being in the bush. You could hear the cars on the highway, but you couldn't see them. There were no houses in view—both sides of the path were walled with thick, tangled bushes. They were virulent, introduced species, engaged in the gradual green wrestle of choking out the native plants.

  Usually, of course, my thoughts were brimming frantically with ideas for tonight's session.

  I was imagining a new picture to add to my collection.

  That's why I started when you called, ‘Hello there!’

  I turned to face you.

  You stood, a picture of apology, under a scarecrowish eucalyptus sapling. ‘I didn't mean to scare you,’ you said, palms forward, begging pardon. ‘Sorry.’

  I remembered myself, and answered with chummy sarcasm, ‘No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to jump.’

  That made you chuckle.

  ‘Do you live around here?’ I asked, as we fell into a rhythm, walking side by side.

  ‘I've moved in on Johnson Avenue. It's at the end of the path, and right, a few blocks.’ Your face was spotted red with exertion.

  Silence. Afterwards, in your red and black journal, you wrote in thick black ink, ‘Idiot! Why didn't you talk to her properly? She was bored.’

  I wasn't bored, of course, but distracted, thinking of the pencilled shapes of waists and thighs.

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said, noncommittally. My courteous face was armour against intrusion. My manners were a martial art.

  ‘Where do you live, then?’

  ‘Just down here.’ I nodded forwards, towards the gateway to my backyard.

  ‘Do you?’

  I nodded, thinking of my sketchbooks.

  Searching earnestly around for another topic of conversation, you told me, ‘You know, your essay on Blake was very good.’

  ‘Thanks.’ We reached the tree behind which was the gate into my backyard. I stopped. ‘This is where I get off.’