by Coote, Cathy
Your leg under my head seemed to be the only solid thing in a vaporous universe. An overwhelming fear of being left alone again, to wander through twisted corridors of my psyche, rose up in me. I felt shivery. I tasted bile.
You shrugged sadly. ‘They all know.’
A strange lightness flooded all my limbs. ‘Okay.’ I jumped to my feet. ‘That's okay. I'll go.’
And then I stood before you, weeping shamelessly.
They were real tears, believe it or not. I really was distraught. But you see how only the most enormous catastrophes could force me to show you anything honest. And even this display of truth was for reasons of my own. For even then, in the most extreme moment of despair, there was some voice in me, somewhere, monitoring the game of You and I. Threatened with your disappearance, it whispered to me that I had nothing to lose, that I might as well gamble with the truth and see if it worked to my advantage.
It just shows what a strange, alien creature I am! Real tears were worked into the fabric of my deception in a matter of seconds. They were just another tool.
Those sharp tears burnt my cheeks. I thought my chest would burst. I stood there, uselessly, crying loudly like a toddler. I wrung my hands, weaving strange incoherent exhortations in the air.
And all the while I watched you from behind the heat of my hysteria, alert for your reaction.
At first, stunned into silence by my barefaced tantrum, you sat shocked, completely still. The newspaper lay in a sad forgotten heap at your feet. The expression on your face was the same one you wore when watching something appalling, like graphic violence against children on the news—some image abhorrent but mesmerising. You were aghast.
Then, suddenly, you were by my side, your big solid arms restraining my little flailing ones. My body was sunk somewhere in the soft folds of your shirt.
Starkly, you looked down at me. There was panic on your face, as though you'd broken something precious. I kept crying, just to be sure.
‘Hey, hey, hey,’ you comforted me, speaking too rapidly, contorted with frantic tenderness. I was reminded suddenly of the cat you ran over, and the way you had touched its crushed body—wretchedly, but bound by a duty too powerful to ignore.
You clutched me to you so tightly I could hardly breathe.
‘You're not going anywhere!’ you insisted fiercely into my ear.
I crossed my fingers in superstitious thanks, light-headed with relief.
Guilt made you treat me like an invalid; a sick child. You lay me on the couch and dressed me in the pink pyjamas you'd bought me. You brought a blanket from upstairs and tucked it in around me. You spoon-fed me ice-cream, crooning nonsense songs under your breath.
I was filled with the elation of the narrow escapee; the woman who climbs out of the car wreckage unhurt. My powers over you seemed twice as great for their brush with oblivion.
‘Kiss me!’ I ordered you extravagantly. Obediently, you bent your head to my lips. I pressed my cold sweet chocolate-flavoured tongue against yours. I felt tears slide out of you and over my forehead.
The next day—Sunday—we went house-hunting.
I stood in a hallway, hands on hips, glancing up the stairs.
I sized the place up. The stairs would be good for clattering hurriedly up and down when I needed to seem madcap. And I liked the overstatedness, the melodrama, of the place. The ceilings were expressively high. The doorways arched meaningfully. There were plenty of dramatic, shadowy places, strange recesses to plunge into. The polished wood shone dully. The darkness of the interiors made my skin look paler—this meant I would draw the eye more easily. The echoes added significance to every word, every movement.
‘This'll do.’
‘What?’ You blinked in surprise. ‘This's the first place we've seen! We've only just walked in!’
The big-haired agent jingled the keys seductively. ‘You haven't seen upstairs, yet.’ She clipped upwards, heels snapping at the bare floors.
We followed.
Christmas-cake plaster ceilings, slightly peeling. Lumpy paint on white banisters. Wallpaper like a Chinese restaurant; furry designs on satiny backgrounds, in red and gold. The floors were the best thing of all: dark wooden boards, polished till they shone like brown ice. The mahogany and the thick curtains made me think of theatres.
We stood in the centre of the main bedroom.
‘It'll be freezing in winter,’ you hissed.
‘Easy to care for,’ advised the agent knowingly. ‘No shampooing. They don't have to be replaced like carpets.’
I was slapping my sneakered feet against the floor, clunking out a tap-dance. ‘They're pretty,’ I said. My body was reflected dully, a white smear trapped beneath the varnish. Hands on hips, I peered down at this submerged self. ‘I like them.’
‘My sister,’ confided the agent, ‘lives in a place just like this.’
‘Does she?’ you murmured politely, playing the game.
‘Up the road,’ the agent insisted, flashing fingernails like red plastic rose petals, as she gestured out the wide window.
‘Fuck it!’ I insisted. ‘The roof works. The floor works. That's all we need.’ I wanted the place badly. It was just perfect.
You continued with the standard, ambiguous, house-hunter's patter: ‘Well—er—I think we should … I mean, we ought to shop around a bit more.’ You glanced doubtfully around. ‘It'll need a lot of work.’ You ran a hand over the splintered paint that clung to the banister.
‘Work?’ I said. ‘It's fine how it is.’
‘It has to be perfect!’
‘We'll take it,’ I said. ‘I hate shopping.’
It was more than a week until we could move in, but the spell of the new place hovered over the old one. Your house now felt thin and insubstantial, like faded sixties colour TV.
On the couch, you took me on your knee and nuzzled my shoulder-blades. Now that you'd committed yourself, you wanted praise for your enormous act of generosity.
‘Do you like that suburb?’ you wanted to know.
‘Yeah. The buildings are older.’
‘It's nearer to the city, too,’ you reminded me.
‘Yep.’
‘You'll like that. You can go and buy silly clothes every weekend.’
I stretched out my leg in its above-the-knee black sock, pointing the toe provocatively. Under my hip, I felt you go hard in an instant.
‘They're not silly,’ I said.
You went to school for half an hour on Monday morning, clutching your letter of resignation and the news that I was leaving.
By the time you came back, with a bootful of cardboard boxes, I had already started sweeping your books off the shelf and piling them neatly on the floor.
You couldn't quite believe yourself. There was a kind of recklessness on you. It was cute. You were like a schoolgirl underlining a rude word in the dictionary.
You tried to explain. ‘It's one of those defining moments. I mean, when you just throw away everything, because it's incompatible with the one thing you really want.’ You made expansive gestures in the air with your long arms. ‘I've never done anything like this before!’
‘I'm glad you haven't made a habit of it,’ I replied dryly.
You caught my eye, and barked with laughter.
‘I disgust myself,’ you wrote in your diary. ‘It's perverted. It's unnatural. Anyone would agree that it's wrong. But, so help me God, I can't overcome it.’
I never cease to be amazed at the way you castigated yourself about your feelings for me. I know it isn't really the done thing for a man in his mid-thirties to fancy a schoolgirl. But the way you beat yourself up about such an innocent, justifiable passion! When I was a freak, I just lived with it like a handicap; like an affliction.
You made jokes about being a dirty old man, a pervert.
‘I should be locked up!’ you'd say, or, ‘They send people like me to prison. You know that, don't you?’
I tied my hair in two plaits over my ears, like
a little schoolgirl. I skipped into the kitchen, tossing my head to show them off.
You looked up from the teacups you were wrapping in newspaper. ‘Don't!’ you begged. ‘They'll put me away!’
Pretending to be offended, I pouted. ‘Don't you like them?’
Scrunching the paper away, you came and stood behind me. Kissing the back of my neck, one hand on my hip, you said, ‘Oh, my darling, I like them too much. That's the trouble.’
I turned and kissed you briefly on the mouth. You tasted of toast, and something else. Cabbage? You hadn't brushed your teeth yet. ‘I could wear a school uniform again,’ I teased, stroking at the hair on your temple.
‘Oh, don't!’ Laughing, you smiled at me indulgently.
‘And white knee socks.’
‘Mmmm!’
A gooey smile spread across your face, and you whispered, ‘I like you just the way you are, you little, silly…’
‘Oh come on! If you're going to have an affair with a teenage girl—’ I took a quick acrid pleasure in declaring my state so plainly to your face, ‘… you might as well do it properly.’
You turned your head on one side, bent forward gently, took my bottom lip between your lips, released it. Holding me round the waist with one arm, round the shoulders with another, you kissed me so delicately that I might have been a bomb that any slightest sudden motion would detonate.
‘I am doing it properly,’ you murmured.
Later, in bed, you reassured me, ‘You're welcome to get old, y'know. You can become thirty-five tomorrow, if you like.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I don't give a damn how old you are. I'm not a fetishist. I mean, I'm not a paedophile.’ You closed your eyes in irritation at your falterings. ‘I mean, this is corny, but it's you.’ Squeezing my hand, you repeated, ‘I don't give a damn how old you are.’
But I didn't really approve of that.
I leant half out of bed, reaching for the glass of water you always left for me on my bedside table. I was allowing you to look at the curve of my back and my buttocks. When I turned back, you looked all shy and bashful. I knew that you'd been ogling me. ‘It's nice that I'm how I am, though,’ I prompted. ‘Isn't it?’
‘Yes,’ you agreed, going red.
That was better.
*
Your awkwardness was like a rare jewel. It refracted your desire into a gorgeous rainbow.
I remember when you came into the bathroom while I was showering.
Flinging open the door, you strode in, targeting the toilet, then—‘Oh, I'm sorry!’
I pushed aside the curtain.
I stood before you, sleek and naked, and shouted through the steam, ‘What? Why are you sorry?’
Blushing a gentleman's blush, you said, ‘I've, um. Walked in …’ In your shirt and tie and suit-trousers, you looked hellishly stiff and uncomfortable.
‘Don't be sorry, stupid!’ I reached two skinny soapy arms out and flung them round your neck, nestling my warm dripping head in your shoulder. And you said nothing about your wet shirt. I felt you grin, heard you exhale as you shook your head, saying with your body, ‘I can't believe my luck.’.
From the first, you were aware of cliché.
When these tritenesses caught your attention, you did not treat them with the intense scorn natural to children of my generation. You smiled at them indulgently.
On the day we moved into our new house, I cut my foot on a sharp stone on the front path.
I came inside dripping blood, and called you. ‘Darling?’ God, I loved saying that! ‘Have we got band-aids?’
You clattered down the stairs, wiping your dusty hands on your dusty shirt.
‘What's happened?’ You saw the rusty brown trail across the floor. ‘Oh, you're bleeding! Show me!’ Lifting me bodily onto the kitchen table, you held the foot in one hand, turning the sole to your face.
You were more dismayed than I. ‘Poor darling!’
‘Doesn't hurt that much.’ As a little girl—five years before—my legs had been all over scratches and bruises. I treated the matter with a child's academic indifference. ‘I just need a band-aid or something.’
‘Don't move. I'll find the first-aid box.’ Rushing back up the stairs, two at a time, you vanished into a series of rustlings. Before I had time to become bored or uncomfortable, you returned, bringing the whole hamper-sized plastic chest with its melodramatic red cross on the lid.
You readied a stack of bandages on the table beside me. ‘Does that hurt?’ you asked, dabbing disinfectant, peering at my cut with alarm.
‘A bit. It's not that bad!’
And then you seemed to see yourself, kneeling on the cold white linoleum, gripping my damaged child's foot with proprietorial tenderness, brandishing the open bottle of Dettol like a weapon. ‘Look at me! God, what am I like?’
I shook my head at you. ‘You idiot,’ I said, for something to say.
‘I'll be painting your toenails next, and warning you to keep away from the no-good neighbourhood boys.’ You smiled quietly at your own obsession.
I saw that you had outgrown the adolescent need to distance yourself—with sarcasm, bitterness, insincerity—from the embarrassment of sentiment. You did not release my foot when you saw the weakness, the ludicrousness, it revealed in you. Instead, you bent your head, and planted a kiss on the white grubby toes.
*
You went out and bought rugs to cover the floorboards.
While you were gone, I ran from room to room, barefoot. The cold boards smacked against my soles. They made me want to run tiptoe.
Your furniture huddled in the centre of each room. The uncluttered air was sensuous against my skin. I giggled to myself and it echoed. I wished you'd been there to hear it.
I made myself inconsistent, temperamental, coquettish.
When you saw me seducing you, you saw me as see-through, clumsy, infantile. You grinned with love for my babyishness, my vulnerability. When I bought lipstick it was far too red. I applied it perfectly, then made nervous kissing faces at you. Laughing, tender tears in your eyes, you melted away completely. I wove this strange false innocence around me, just for you to violate.
It was easy. Little girls have always made fools of doting men, haven't they?
I lived through your need for me.
I could never be so crude as to ask, ‘Do you want me?’
No, I had subtler ways and more cunning to make you declare yourself.
The coldness of my behaviours, the manipulation, is only apparent now, in retrospect. At the time, I acted so hard that I seemed to become my own myth. I lived the part so deeply that sometimes, for hours on end, I was able to forget my corrupt self and live wholly in your perception of me. I giggled like a little girl, and managed sometimes to feel a little girl's unself-conscious, extravagant mirth.
I schemed every moment to waken your need for me. All the other businesses of living—the eating, the dressing, the reading of books—were just so much punctuation between the moments when I had you, when you were in my power.
It was as though I had a set of surveyor's equipment in my mind, with dials and knobs all aligned to show the world as you saw it. I'd pose myself, then step back and look at myself through your eyes, squinting carefully as I calculated what you could see and how it must make you feel.
I gave myself to you with relief. Relief, I mean, to be rid of myself, to pass that squalling burden into other hands.
I was a phantom.
I was an exoskeleton whose living, vital inhabitant had departed. My personality was all spread out, as thinly as possible, over the interior surfaces of my body. It was desperate to escape; or at least to pretend to blend with my skin and leave the inside a gaping hollow.
I wanted to be of the exterior, not the interior. I was like some mythical snake which, instead of shedding its skin, might expand to fill a larger one.
‘I'm possessed,’ you told me. ‘I don't know what it is about you, but…’
I knew what it was about you. I understood that you'd suffered as only a natural idealist can suffer when brought up—smack!—against the cold glassy surface of reality. I saw the gentle bookish boy you must have been, made old with tedium, wasted effort, unacknowledged kindnesses. I saw the tired, struggling righteousness of you. You were starving for want of love. You were a delicate, civilised changeling, raised among barbarians and apemen.
I found out all about you, snooping through drawers and opening shoeboxes full of letters. Every day, I added to my database. Your actions and your records were filed away in my mind and carefully cross-referenced.
You'd been married; I think when you were much younger. There was a photograph of her face, and a stack of letters, in a drawer. She had short hair, sprayed stiff, and a thin prim mouth. She'd left you for someone else. You didn't talk about her, except in uncomfortable monosyllables when the course of an anecdote left you no choice. The whole thing stank of betrayal.
Carefully, you reached for details about my life.
‘What can you remember about your mother?’
‘I know she was scared of cane toads.’
I knew this because my uncle had told me. I couldn't remember anything. My life began when, as a snotty four-year-old, I stood chewing my knuckles in a modern brick church in my aunt's fat arms.
‘Are you scared of cane toads?’
I'd seen them dotting the sides of roads in Queensland, where drivers had swerved to hit them. In an ancient great-uncle's outside toilet, I'd been startled by a row of them, squatting malevolently along the windowsill. ‘They seem … yucky. All mushy. I wouldn't want to touch one. But I am scared of spiders.’
‘Are you?’ You had that funny half-smile on your face. You were grieving for my motherlessness.
That sympathy was cheap. It lay close to the surface and was easy to get. I didn't feel it for myself. You might as well have grieved for my small feet or my need for oxygen. I never knew any other condition.
I am an orphan, but I've never cried to think I have no mother. It all seems like a myth, a beforelife constructed to explain the here-and-now. There was a picture of my parents in the living room at my aunt and uncle's house. It was a big one, framed on the wall. I didn't really like going in there: my parents seemed too much like malign gods who might find ways to punish or betray me.