by Coote, Cathy
I felt a little bit silly for you, listening to those honest revelations. I smirked with my brain.
‘My love,’ I said, tightening my grip with every limb. You shuddered against me, the ancient horror re-awoken.
‘My love.’ I said it convincingly.
I said it, conveying, There is nothing more I can say, but my love, my love.
Holding this new, childed man, my mind ticked over rapturously with the fresh possibilities before me. The whole of you encircled by the whole of me. My spirit sang with a powerful ecstasy as you wept.
‘What did he do?’ My voice dripped with honeyed concern. I had to know specifics.
These were the most difficult words you'd ever had to utter. ‘He never actually … y'know.’
I see. Penetration did not take place. ‘Oh, darling,’ I wailed under my breath.
I called you ‘my darling’ or ‘my love’ with difficulty, like an honest man obliged to lie. The sweet names tried to stick in my throat, because you spoke them with such sincerity. But I forced them out. I had to.
‘He made me hold … it.’
Hand jobs. That's it? ‘Oh, my baby.’ My hands tightened on your sides, squeezing reassurance and support.
You choked it out. ‘He said I had to … in my mouth.’
Oh, darling, you were incoherent. Your tears soaked my shoulder. I was delirious. I was enchanted.
‘My love,’ I said. It was a litany, a mantra of false succour. ‘My love. My love. My love.’
With racking sobs and fists contracting violently, like heartbeats, against my shoulders, you gave your pain to me. It trickled down over my skin. It came in wheezing at my ears. It fluttered desperately through my pupils. I took it and I shaped it to my pleasure.
I'm damned for that. My love.
We both fell asleep.
I shouldn't have had the duvet pulled up over myself. I always have weird dreams when I'm too hot.
It wasn't really a dream. More of an idea with a soundtrack.
The thumping on the door went through my head, the thud thud thud of a deliberate fist on hardwood. Inside this dream, this sweaty sleeping idea, a long thin line of panic spouted between my stomach and my head. I knew I was in trouble.
Thud thud thud, and it's me he's after.
Thud thud thud, and there's nowhere to hide.
And the idea that floated like a cloud of steam into my mind was this: it's my uncle out there, banging on the door. It's my uncle, gone to seed and smashing bottles. It's my uncle, come to claim me back for childhood and powerlessness.
Thud thud thud, on the wooden door.
It took me ages to wake up, even after I realised I was asleep and dreaming. I had to try and shake dead limbs, open sleeping eyes, think with a numb mind. I slipped in and out of the idea, trying to shrug it off. It lay all along me, pinning me to the bed so I couldn't move.
Finally some twitch of mine flicked the duvet off my upper body, and I woke up to a rush of cold air and silence.
You were sound asleep.
I sat up and put the bedlamp on. All my skin was pink and flushed and traced with creases to show how I'd lain. My hair stuck to the side of my face.
I sat very still and waited for the idea to dissipate completely.
I hardly ever thought about my uncle these days. As far as I knew, he'd never made an effort to contact me. I was glad about that. I couldn't think of anything worse than having to speak to him, trying to address my convoluted self to that unasailable simplicity and worthiness. Trying to answer his elementary question: why?
I thought of him, crumpled at the kitchen table where I saw him last.
I don't doubt I've left some shadow on him: a bad taste in his mouth, a nervous twitch. I imagine he thinks of me when he reads the awful newspaper in the evening, and knows the world to be spinning too fast, skew-whiff.
You were edgy when you woke. At dinner, you talked and laughed with a slight manic intensity, eating barely a morsel.
You got up three times in the night after we went back to bed, pacing the house on mysterious errands. You sat up next to me, bedlamp blazing, reading instead of sleeping.
At midnight, I woke. Your eyes bored into the paper with furious concentration.
I put my hand on your knee. I kissed your side, at the spot where the skin stretched taut over your hip bone, showing delicate latticeworked veins.
Snapping the book shut, you wanted to know, ‘Am I keeping you awake? Do you want me to read downstairs?’
A periwinkle clinging to your side, I deepened my kiss, drawing my arm around your waist.
In the crook of my elbow I felt you stirring. Looking up, I saw your eyes were closed, your face haggard, hollow-eyed, grey with anxiety.
I hypnotised you with my eyes.
At that moment, in that place, all the world seemed like an extension of my logical, scheming mind. All events and people were like chess pieces I set down where I chose.
I wanted you as you had been that afternoon—craven, reduced, abased. And with a tear and a swish of limbs through bedlinen, you were.
We reassumed our position of the afternoon. I took you into me. As you took up that familiar attitude, I asked in your ear, ‘Is that better?’
Melodramatically husky, you confided, ‘I feel very safe, here.’
I liked being your refuge, the only port in the storm. I put my hands on your slim flanks and told you, ‘I feel safe, too.’
Uncle Clarry never turned up again.
I was disappointed. Protected by my knowledge of what he was, I could have fought him off endlessly. I daydreamed, for a little while, about coming home and finding him in the house, bailing you up against the wall. I'd force him off, trip him up, kick his fat face.
Then I'd gather you to me. I'd swallow you whole. I'd absorb you into my bloodstream, and you'd circle around inside me, endlessly.
Ruthlessly, I invented confidences of my own. I rejoiced at the strange blindness that let you take them in exchange for yours, like Monopoly money for real gold.
I lay in the submissive emotional position, curled against your chest with your reassuring arm around my waist, your hand on my head.
‘I have dreams sometimes,’ I said.
‘You can tell me.’
‘They're horrible.’
‘It's all right.’ Your big eyes promised to stand between me and any great horror.
‘I dream … that there's a thing in bed with me.’ A pause, so you could wonder: What thing? I made my breath come heavily, squinting my eyes with the effort of speech.
‘It's all burned,’ I explained, squeezing your hand convulsively. ‘All blackened.’
Another pause. You were intent, silent, your lips parted in concentration. You were willing me to be healed from this awful psychic scar. I was delighted.
I went on. ‘I notice—just gradually—that this thing … it's like, a big lump of melted plastic. All dripping. Shrivelled. It's awful. It's my mother.’ I turned my face into your chest. I was crying real tears. I didn't feel anything. I don't know how I did that. Sometimes I surprise myself.
‘Oh, darling,’ you said, your hand on my head. You were quivering with the force of what I'd told you. ‘Oh, my darling!’
You were enthralled. You were mine.
I pushed my advantage. ‘And I wonder … like, I wish I knew … I can't remember the … crash …’ I sniffed away the tears briskly, like someone well used to facing ingrained grief with stoicism. I was rewarded with that melting look, that flowing compassion of yours. ‘But I wish I knew what was going through her mind as it happened.’
You spoke gently, the way that parents do when coating some truth in illusion to make it palatable to young children. ‘She must have worried about you. She must have thought that she loved you very much and that she hoped someone would look after you.’
I found this thought distasteful. I hate feeling pity for people's vulnerability, their patheticness. It's too much of a liability. Ther
e are so many pathetic people.
I suppose she wasn't to know what I would be like. All babies are the same. But something in me thought irritably, More fool her.
‘Oh, that's beautiful!’ I exclaimed with sincerity. I angled my head upwards and kissed your thumb, smiling up at you from between your fingers. ‘And now I've got you.’
I used to watch you sleep, every night.
I've always slept lightly. I always wake up at least two or three times in a night. Much more of late. I'm nearly completely insomniac.
But I loved waking up in the night when it meant I could watch you when you were alseep.
When you were awake you often moved jerkily. It could be quite frustrating. I'd have you in my sights, in some perfect pose, at an ideal viewing distance, with the light just right and your expression just exactly what I needed. And then you'd suddenly shift, shrug, scratch, sneeze; and the image would dissipate jaggedly away.
But asleep, you were much better. I could stare unreservedly, because you couldn't see me.
I savoured your face the most, the thing I could least afford to stare at too hard when you were awake. The curve of your nose, the hollows of your eyes, the tiny holes your beard squeezed itself out of. And the expressions! Naked, open, unguarded. Delicious. You'd dream anxiety and your face would pinch and crumple like a toddler's. You'd dream something funny and smile beamishly at the air. And your movements became slow and irregular with the heaviness of sleep. Your whole body was diffuse in the lamplight, like some Impressionist character all made of splodges.
I miss you terribly.
I lounge about in your dressing-gown, sometimes. It's too long for me. It trails on the floor behind me, and I have to gather the hems in my hands as I go down the stairs. I sit on the couch, drinking red wine from one of your long-stemmed glasses. I don't know if they're officially the correct glasses for wine, but they suit my purposes. I remind myself of an ancient, forgotten diva, who, denied the stage and love affairs with foreign royalty, employs her thwarted theatrical tendencies in kicking the cat and bullying the servants.
What do I miss? I miss losing myself in you. I was like the diva in her prime then, performing her most celebrated role, so passionately involved in her part that she lost herself entirely; or afterwards, whisked between lovers, received princes in boudoirs hung with red exotic drapery and studded with silver candlesticks.
I miss the blueness of the night-time bedroom and the bigness of the curtainless window and the silvered incandescence of your skin and mine. I miss the animal warmth of your body beside mine.
I remember (this breaks my heart) one morning—or several, everything blurs—when I woke before you did. You snored gently, your hands curled under your head, your hair arrayed in dishevelled kiss-curls over your forehead.
I made a sudden movement. You woke abruptly. Your eyes opened, and you saw my face opposite yours. You mumbled something incoherent. Your voice still had sleep in it. Out your arms stretched, like a reflex. Insistently, inarguably, you encircled me, pulled me to you, like an enormous baby searching single-mindedly for milk.
You were swollen with the necessity of immediate love-making, irrational with it; still groggy. You cleared your throat. ‘Oh …’ you said, as if beginning to explain: Oh, by the way. ‘Um …’ Nodding downwards, you indicated your dilemma, turning towards me unfeignedly big, pleading, hungry eyes.
I took you into me without a word.
‘Oh, you're a dream,’ you said between your teeth, as the convulsions of orgasm shook you (carnal, uncontrollable convulsions, like vomiting or shivering). ‘You're a dream. You're a dream.’
Y
ou always rang from work as soon as I got home. I knew to expect these calls. They unfailingly came ten or fifteen minutes after I walked in the door, suggesting that you watched the clock over your desk, waiting for me to finish school. That was a good sign. I approved of that.
I used the fact, once or twice, for emotional mileage.
We sat coiled on the couch, watching the evening news.
‘You always call me when I come home,’ I commented.
‘I get worried.’
‘I'm not gonna die.’ I shifted position—oh, how subtle I was!—so that you were forced to re-locate your hand further down my leg.
‘You didn't answer once,’ you said.
‘I was having coffee!’
I'd been invited along after school with some acquaintances. It was one of those awkward, ‘everyone standing here is going so we can't not invite you’ things. I sat and sipped politely in a cafe for an hour. I spent the whole time wondering what you'd think when I didn't pick up the phone.
You hand tightened on my ankle. You said, ‘I thought, That's it. She's gone.’
I waited tensely for those calls. Often, I sat right next to the telephone, just watching it. I always let you ring half a dozen times before I picked up the receiver. Then I tried to sound busy with something else while I spoke to you.
Usually, of course, I was busy. After school was snooping time.
I was a careful, thorough sleuth. I knew the importance of small clues—what you were reading; little things you mentioned; tiny, unconscious gestures.
I scoured your possessions with a secret agent's calm meticulousness, every afternoon before you got home from work. Your clockwork, nine-to-six routine was very useful. It's good when your quarry has habits you can rely on.
I went through your filing cabinet gradually and systematically. Each day I read your letters, both private and official. I knew the dates and details of your divorce, as well as the anguish it had caused you.
The filing cabinet in the study was like an extension of your brain that I could open and rifle through at any time. You filed the acrid letters from your ex-wife under Miscellaneous.
There were only a limited number of letters, of course. But finding them was just the start. I read them over and over again. I touched them like talismans, for luck, whenever I was alone in the house. My eyes searched automatically through the columns of words, seeking anything useful, any new idea that they inspired.
I continued to read the occasional journal you kept in the school exercise book that lay in the top drawer of your desk, beneath a pile of ancient accounts. I used it to invent myself in the image you had of me. If you wrote that I was charmingly impulsive, I exaggerated my impulsiveness threefold, waving my hands in the air and talking too fast, as I demanded presents and explained crazy new ideas. If you said you were worried that I barely ate, I was careful not to let you see me snacking.
It was like researching an enemy country so as to build the most effective weapon for the terrain.
It was this thoroughness that led me to look for clues everywhere. Even under the mattress.
I'd never thought of looking there before, but one afternoon after I'd checked all your drawers mechanically, already knowing what I'd find, I ran my hand swiftly along between the mattress and the bed. I don't know why.
And there they were, in a crumpled manila envelope.
The telephone by the bed made me jump when it rang. I froze, as though I'd been caught stealing. I counted to ten under my breath, then answered it with the envelope in hand.
‘Hello?’
‘Hey, darling.’
‘Hello!’ Expertly, I caught the receiver under my chin, leaving my hands free to probe the envelope.
‘You got home all right, then?’
The word cunt caught my eye. I nearly fainted with surprise, but I kept my part up perfectly.
‘No. I got chased up a lamp post by a pack of rabid giraffes. It was terrible.’
I come into the room and she's touching herself, lying on the bed with her legs spread and one hand trailing down towards her cunt.
‘Don't be silly.’
‘Mmmm.’ I was astounded at what I'd found. I whinged, ‘When'll you be home? I'm hungry.’
You chuckled indulgently. ‘Are you? There's biscuits in the cupboard.’
/> ‘I'm hungry for stir-fry.’
‘I'll be there soon. About an hour. Go and watch “Heartbreak High”.’
‘Okay.’
‘I love you,’ you told me, and hung up.
I stared at the papers in my hand.
These were like gold. What a find!
I read them speedily, scientifically, but my fingers shook.
She fingers herself and says, ‘I was just thinking about you.’
I've still got them. I read them, occasionally. They make me guilty, but at least they remind me of you.
They're pornography, really.
That didn't shock me.
I'd read pornography—real, official pornography—before. It seemed stupid.
It was in a magazine that you had below your socks in a drawer. An ancient Hustler. You must have jerked off to it before you met me. I found it when we were still living in your old house. (Yes, darling, I was snooping even then.)
My first instinct had been to take offence, next time an opportunity presented itself. An unworldly girl could easily get away with being disgusted at what I'd found. It was ideal guilt-inducing material.
In an instant, I had formulated a plan: I would become silent and withdrawn. I'd fiddle with things, abstracted, anxious. You'd worry:
‘Baby? Baby?’
‘Hmmmm? Sorry—I …’ A shake of the head.
Then, when you, in desperation, sought for the problem, I would snivel a little, I thought, and confess what I'd found, turning big troubled eyes on you, inviting reassurance. That should be good for nights of anxious, careful lovemaking on your part.
But after a moment or two of flicking through this magazine, I abandoned this idea. I thought instead how sad it was that a man of such intense, desperate passions should find himself masturbating in front of cheap glossy paper. I experienced a surge of sympathy for you, darling, for the ordinariness of those old arousals, the loneliness of them.