I was hurting like hell and knew just by looking down at my chest that I was badly burned across most of it. I could feel the skin on my neck starting to tighten. ‘Come, let’s go home,’ I announced quietly. Then, attempting a grin, I turned to Anna and pointed to the outcrop of jungle. ‘From now on this will be named Coffee Scald Island.’
Anna had defeated me. We would try many more times to beat her addiction, but she was destined, despite almost yearly visits to clinics in Switzerland and the Betty Ford Clinic in America, to chase the dragon for the remainder of her life. She was the most disciplined person I would ever know, her strength of character and determination as an opponent were legendary, her independence often infuriating, but in this one thing she was a slave to the dragon.
What’s more, while she was attentive and loving during the week she remained on the island while I was treated for second-degree burns, she never apologised or ever mentioned the incident directly again. My chest and neck healed well but a small white scar that refused to suntan remains on my neck from the scratch to remind me every morning as I shaved that I was in love with a damaged, dangerous and unpredictable woman.
Oh yes, and one more thing. In the months that followed Anna started to visit Beautiful Bay for a week each month but we still did not make love. I confess I was growing impatient. ‘Give me a little more time please, darling,’ she would plead.
The first few times we’d gone to bed together I had attempted to caress her. I’m a big bloke with big hands, but I was not inexperienced in the art of pleasuring a woman and I don’t believe I was clumsy or rough. But instead of the warm welcome with which these preliminary explorations had been received from partners in the past, there had been with Anna a compulsive tightening and flinching away and great emotional distress. It was obvious that I was having quite the opposite effect from the one I had come to expect. Anna had not resisted me; the spasms brought on when I touched her vulva, let alone her clitoris or vagina, appeared to be totally beyond her control.
On the third occasion my forefinger had gone exploring the situation had ended in tears. ‘Anna, what is it? Am I hurting you?’
‘No, Nicholas . . . it’s . . . it’s . . .’ She broke into fresh sobs.
‘It’s what, darling?’ I persisted gently.
‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ she howled, her abject misery almost palpable. ‘Oh, Nicholas, I want always to please you so much! Only you, I have kept myself for you and now . . . I . . . I . . . am no goed!’
‘Sshh, sweetheart, it will happen, give it time, you’ve been through a lot, darling.’
But it didn’t. It was obviously psychological and beyond her control. Eventually I was forced to give up.
In every other way except penetration Anna proved wonderful – her hands were magic instruments, her mouth generous and she would leave me sated while never allowing me to reciprocate. I could kiss her and fondle her breasts and try in every other way I knew to satisfy her without being allowed to go near the forbidden region I had termed, for the sake of my own sanity, the Grotto of Not.
The paradox was that while I was undoubtedly in the hands of an expert at pleasing a male, I still longed to consummate our relationship, to truly possess her and bring us to a mutual climax, in order, I told myself, to remove the terror I could see in her eyes.
As I had done with her heroin addiction, I set out to discover all I could about any psychological cause for Anna’s seemingly pathological fear of penetration. It should be remembered that this was at the beginning of the 1950s when psychiatric therapy was not as commonly used or symptoms as correctly diagnosed as perhaps they are today. Furthermore, in those days the stigma of mental illness made a visit to a psychiatrist almost unthinkable.
I went to Melbourne University Medical School, where I contacted a psychiatrist named Dr Denmeade, a man in his mid-forties who had qualified in medicine here and then taken his psychiatry degree and practised in the United States, recently returning to take an associate professorship at Melbourne University.
I learned from him that Anna’s condition, or what might have been her condition, had a name. It was termed vaginismus and is defined as the involuntary spasm of the pelvic floor muscles surrounding the vaginal opening. This involuntary contraction occurs in anticipation when a partner attempts to penetrate or even in some cases touch the vagina.
Professor Denmeade pointed out that unconsummated marriage is probably a condition as old as human existence, the first recorded diagnosis of vaginismus being in the eleventh century. ‘It is common in arranged marriages and in women who have been sexually assaulted in childhood or brutally raped. It is the vagina in panic,’ he went on to explain, ‘where typical intercourse becomes physically impossible. This is estimated to occur in up to fifteen per cent of the female population,’ he’d concluded.
However, I couldn’t be certain I was on the right track because Anna was emphatic that she wouldn’t see the professor, and no amount of persuasion could convince her. ‘I am not mad or psychotic, so why do you want me to see this professor, Nicholas?’
‘Well, it may help, darling. He may be able to explain why this happens to you. Don’t you think its worth a try?’
‘Agh . . . It’s all mumbo-jumbo, those guys are nuts!’ she exclaimed. I argued further but got nowhere, Anna stubbornly resisting any attempts to get her to the professor.
On one occasion I’d even said, ‘Are you secretly frightened of a cure?’
‘What do you mean by that?’ she’d replied dismissively.
‘Well, sometimes I feel that by giving yourself to me something will change in you.’
Anna laughed; it was a clumsily put question. ‘Don’t talk crap, Nicholas!’ She had risen and abruptly left the room. I recall feeling at the time that I’d nevertheless touched on something.
Anna, while seeming to enjoy my advances in bed and my caresses above the waist, still involuntarily resisted even the slightest dalliance below it. The Grotto of Not was effectively out of bounds.
While I had been prepared to kidnap her in an attempt to cure her heroin addiction, I certainly wasn’t going to attempt to overcome her fear of intercourse by forcing myself into her.
That I didn’t persist may well be a sign of weakness on my part, but on every occasion I had attempted the preliminaries, it had ended in copious tears. Our closeness was being placed in jeopardy and, I told myself, love isn’t only about a well-dipped dick bringing her to a climax. Anna was otherwise doing everything in her power to please me and took obvious delight in doing so. Sometimes the smaller picture becomes the more valuable in the gallery of human experience. Or so I attempted to convince myself.
Had I known at the time about Anna’s three years of conditioning by Konoe Akira, which ultimately led her to the absolute conviction that the loss of her virginity meant the destruction of her perfection, her intellect and aesthetic appeal, I would have been much closer to understanding her fears.
The carefully inculcated sexual complex the nefarious Japanese colonel had planted in Anna’s mind meant that no man could be permitted to enter her. She had already killed to defend this absolute belief. The blood and horror of killing Takahashi when he’d attempted to force her to disobey her master’s instructions seemed the perfect reinforcement needed to bring about the condition of vaginismus.
Professor Denmeade stressed that it was the patient herself who must effect the cure with the help of a practised psychiatrist, and until Anna was willing to embrace both factors, acceptance and treatment, it was unlikely that she would recover from her deeply entrenched fear of male penetration. ‘But she will still be capable of enjoying clitoral stimulation,’ he concluded.
I then explained that Anna had also resisted my attempts at clitoral stimulation. Denmeade then suggested this might be an additional psychological factor and until Anna was willing to undertake therapy her rejection of my attempts to touch her was also likely to be permanent.
‘Have you trie
d oral sex?’ he asked. ‘It may well be that your finger represents the male phallus while your tongue doesn’t.’
I hadn’t, and while today this would seem a curious omission, I should point out that in the early fifties most women thought of oral sex as somehow perverted, almost never performed out of marriage, and even within only under duress.
If women avoided fellatio, it was absolutely taboo for any decent, self-respecting middle-class male to engage in cunnilingus. This was the preserve of heavily pomaded gigolos with dark sideburns and pencil moustaches who spoke with thick Spanish accents. Putting it into crude male parlance, a cock was clean, a woman’s fanny wasn’t. This was a belief held not only by males but also by many women at the time.
I was fairly sure that Anna, despite her background as a captive of the Japanese and as a comfort woman in the Nest of the Swallows, would not have experienced a male using his mouth to bring her to climax. She may well never have climaxed to a Japanese soldier during penile penetration either.
But, of course, this was all speculation on my part. All I possessed was a smattering of knowledge concerning her captivity; what had actually happened to her I was yet to learn. I had no idea, for instance, that Anna was still a virgin. While she had told me she’d kept herself for me, that I would be the first, I had taken this to mean the first lover she would accept of her own free will.
As a comfort woman, I incorrectly surmised that she had been raped daily, that in her mind she couldn’t yet separate the loving act from the brutal one and hence the involuntary vaginal resistance. I convinced myself that with time, gentle handling, love, patience, tenderness and trust, I would eventually prevail.
I truly loved Anna; moreover, in a much more basic way, I craved a mutual sexual experience and the sense of sharing that comes with two lovers coupling, being as one, generous with the sheer joy of knowing and exploring each other’s bodies.
But I was getting absolutely nowhere. Anna rejected my tongue as she had my finger, sobbing as she tried to accept me, but failing, her tears and her flinching expressing the depth of her distress. ‘Please, a little more time, darling,’ followed as usual.
After the fourth time she had rejected cunnilingus I finally lost patience. ‘Christ, Anna! How long is a little more time? Don’t say that! I’m sick of hearing it! Fucking sick and tired of hearing . . . Please, a little more time, darling,’ I cruelly mimicked.
‘Oh, Nicholas, I am so sorry. Maybe I can go away. I am no goed,’ she said tearfully. Anna, so strong in most things, trembled like a child.
Despite my frustration and eagerness for the ultimate satisfaction of possessing her, I felt a right bastard for being so impatient. If I’d known what the Nips had done to her in captivity I’d have gone out and killed a few more of the little yellow bastards.
I also couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving me a second time. ‘Anna, I love you!’ was all I could manage just then and even this was said with a lack of gallantry or graciousness.
Anna continued to care, to leave me physically satisfied, and her tenderness went some way to appeasing my ardent desire to please her sufficiently to at least bring her to a spontaneous orgasm. As the weeks merged into months it became apparent to me that she was damaged, possibly beyond recovery.
I hadn’t ever thought of finding the ultimate pleasure I sought from another woman, even though in moments of stress Anna had begged me to do so. ‘Nicholas, I understand, we can still be together!’ Then one evening sitting on the verandah watching the moon coming up over Beautiful Bay and enjoying a glass of what had now become Anna’s favourite champagne, she turned to me and said, ‘Nicholas, do you remember the first night, when we sailed to the small island in the moonlight?’
‘Anna!’ I exclaimed, jabbing my forefinger to indicate my neck. ‘You mean I’m supposed to forget?’
‘No, not the coffee! What happened next.’
Was there no end to this woman’s lack of remorse? For a moment I thought to chasten her further. But her gorgeous smile and show of wide blue eyes was all it took to forgive her clumsy question. Despite myself, I was forced to chuckle, recalling Anna across my knee, her wet shorts stretched tight across her dear little bottom. Whack! Whack! Whack! ‘You got what was coming to you, Madam Butterfly, a damn good spanking.’
She pointed across the bay to the glorious, impossibly big moon. If there had been a string attached to it I would have described it as dangling just above the arched rim of the ocean. ‘Tonight it is a full moon, Nicholas. Would you do it again, please, darling,’ she asked softly, eyes demurely downcast. Then she looked up and grinned wickedly. ‘I haven’t had a decent orgasm since that night.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘Dat you, Nick? Dat cockamamie nigger, he’s costin’ us all our profits! You gotta pull him into line! We ain’t in the fuckin’ soul-counting business. We in the fuckin’ scrap-metal business. No more tithe fer da Pope; he got plenty already!’
Kevin Judge, Brisbane
THE DECADE FROM 1950 to 1960 may be described as a slow walk down to the village garden for the various islands in the Pacific. Some periods are like this; you think you’re making progress but it’s basically more of the same, each year much like the one preceding it. However, in the early 1960s there seemed to be a new sense of urgency and the people of the Pacific took their first true leap forward into the modern era.
Having employed a lot of islanders in our war-surplus scrap reclamation, we were well accepted by the locals. We were also on good terms with the colonial administration and the churches, for similar reasons. Different churches predominated in different areas – Catholic, Anglican and Seventh Day Adventists, known commonly as the SDAs, who ran the best schools. The Mormons, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, arrived on the scene a little later.
From the beginning Joe, who came from Chicago via Alabama and had been brought up in the Southern Baptist tradition, seemed to know exactly how to handle the various denominations promulgating their particular version of Christianity to the local people.
‘Brother Nick, it the same God, only He got Himself a house a different style in many neighbourhoods. They all want souls; they in the soul-countin’ busi-ness. So what we gotta do is bring dem souls, man!’ He’d clap his hands and laugh, ‘Then they gonna cooperate big time!’
It was clear to us that for the indigenous population of any island there were two main European authorities as well as the underlying tribal system, the most powerful of all: one was the colonial administration and the other was whichever church controlled the area where we worked. It became my job to deal with the various arms of the colonial administrations and Joe’s to deal with the churches. Both were important, but the denominations competing for souls were often more important to our daily operations than the sporadic visits of a district officer attempting to supervise the remote jungle areas where some of the largest dumps were located. Our profit margins depended on working salvage sites seven days a week and this brought us up against the Catholics, Methodists and Anglicans on Sunday and the Seventh Day Adventists (or SDAs) on Saturday.
Joe used the church or mission as a labour-recruiting centre, and a condition of employment was that the labourer’s children, should he have any, must attend the mission school. Joe would then reward every child with an Uncle Joe Scholarship. This involved the recipient being supplied with slate and stylus, textbooks, writing paper and pens, and if a school uniform of sorts was required, that too.
Joe explained. ‘The church dey know der neighbourhood and dey do the recruitin’. Naturally dey in the soul-countin’ business.’ He spread his arms. ‘But, hey, it don’t cost nuttin’ but peanuts to send dem village kids to mission school. An’ every worker don’t have fifteen children, so who’s countin’, man? The mission dey gonna see-lect only the best workers, ’cos dey don’t want their soul count to go tumblin’ down. If the worker he screw up on the job, then his kids don’t have no Uncle Joe Scholarship no more and the n
umbers drop at the school. Ever-one o’ dem young souls saved for Jesus gonna stay forever wid dem. So, you see ever-body they gonna win! The souls dey gonna be counted. The kids dey gonna get some itty bitty schoolin.’ And the workers dey gonna bust their sweet ass for yours truly or the Lord Jesus he gonna want to know why dey screw up.’ He’d laugh and show his large palms. ‘The ree-sult, we ain’t got no recruitment problems. We can work on Saturday and Sunday ’cos we got special dispensation. We ain’t got no bad labour relations. The Church, dey gonna take good care of us ’cos we labouring in da jungle for Jesus.’
As the sweetener for the SDAs, Joe Popkin would pay our workers a fixed daily rate then add a tenth as a tithe to the local mission. Joe got me to organise black school caps for the kids – boys and girls alike – with a white cross on the front. ‘Ever-body countin’ souls dey got the same cross for Jesus.’ On every island and every mission station Uncle Joe Scholarship kids could be identified, the cap amongst their proudest possessions. Years later, when some of these kids were grown men and women, you’d see them sitting in the congregation with their Uncle Joe Scholarship caps perched on their heads.
We would soon become responsible for the rudimentary education of two or three thousand island children, some among them no doubt future leaders in the governments they would eventually control.
Kevin Judge was our third partner. Chicago Irish, diminutive and fiery, he was the financial brain behind our war salvage business. He worked out of Brisbane, but would call me from time to time, steam practically hissing from the receiver at my end.
‘Dat you, Nick? Dat cockamamie nigger, he’s costin’ us all our profits! You gotta pull him into line! We ain’t in the fuckin’ soul-counting business. We in the fuckin’ scrap-metal business. No more tithe fer da Pope; he got plenty already! After what I bin through wid da Church I don’t owe dem fuckers nothin’! You tell Joe, you hear? No more numbers for Jesus! The only big numbers I wanna see are in the fuckin’ profit margin. What we got in the Uncle Joe Scholarship column is nuttin’ but a shitload o’ debt!’
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