In My Skin (2 page)

The smile that I give when I talk about it now is, I can feel, nostalgic, provocative. A brightness comes into my eyes. And, I’m told, a hard look too.

I WAS A SENSITIVE LITTLE girl, but perhaps not more than most. Sometimes the world was too big; other times, far too small. It took a long time to nudge out the right space in it.

My family was simple and close: two parents and a younger sister. We grew up in a nice suburb of Melbourne, in a large and comfortable old house, though the front lawn was a disgrace and the weatherboards flaked a little. We had two old lemon trees in the backyard. My sister and I used to ‘paint’ the boards with the hose, darkening the colour for just a moment. My parents were too busy with their books and work, and with raising us, to bother much about the dandelions in the lawn. Inside the big house we had all the warmth we needed. The place was cluttered, full of cracked treasures, odd objects in boxes, the smell of casserole.

My father was a scientist, bearded and genial, who gathered my sister and me into his arms and told us magical stories. Busy with a career in the community and education, my mother often seemed to me sterner, but at parties I sheltered behind her slim hip to watch the other children. Quick to hug and kiss me, she made sure I knew that I was always cherished.

It was the seventies. My mother taught me that men are not to be feared, that women are strong, that a person could become anything she wished, as long as she did it with passion and a good heart. My father showed me this also. I knew only kind men.

My parents bought me books: on cavemen, on gods, on unicorns, on deserts and beasts and adventures. Stories of forest paths and brave princesses. I grew up in a house insulated with books. They covered every wall; and as I was timid, they were my gentlest friends. From their pages I took dreams of a magical island, safely moated and quiet under a humming sun.

With some friends, my mother established a small alternative primary school. The fathers had beards, the women short hair and clean faces. There the dozen or so students were encouraged to develop their own interests without too many boundaries. Free to read all day if I chose, or to play with my friends, I grew up loving alternately the haven of solitude and the solace of a group. My soft little voice was often lost in the furore of the yard. When my friends played ‘horses’, I was a lone mare tossing my mane on the other side of the playground until they fetched me back. Sometimes it was easier to sit in a warm place and read.

When I was about nine, there was a day on which we were all to make cubby houses. Someone had donated cardboard boxes used for delivering fridges: sturdy, roomy boxes. There were parents of the children there, but my mother was in a meeting with the owners of the church building the school leased. I was feeling miserable. The clatter of the room was too loud.

‘Pair up, and you can decorate your cubby house,’ we were encouraged. Everyone else coupled up and started getting thick paintbrushes and polystyrene off-cuts from the craft table, cutting doorways and windows, painting flowerboxes under the ‘sills’ and fluorescent trees against the ‘walls’. The room was filled with the sound of happy children talking and planning. I looked at them, and didn’t want to join. There seemed something foolish about the bother.

I found a box for myself. With a Stanley knife, I cut a low entrance. I jostled open the flap I’d made, and got in.

Inside, it was ochre-shadowed and warm. The cardboard muffled the noise of the other children; I curled up, chin to knees, crossed arms holding myself. My breath came back warm at my face. I grew drowsy with the silence and the peace.

I thought of gods in their grottoes, as I’d read in my mythology books. Safe caves, secret glades. Centaurs and nymphs, curled up in the roots of ancient trees. My face was damp with breath. It was so quiet in there. I thought I would never get out of this box where I could be me, alone, hardly anyone at all.

‘Where’s Kate? She—Kate? Are you in there?’ Concerned voices outside, hollow thumps on the fragile wall. ‘Are you coming out? Do you want some crayons? You haven’t decorated!’

I sat there in my cocoon, besieged, becoming more and more resentful and furious.
Don’t make me come out.
The voices went away; returned.

‘Well, if you’re just going to
sulk
—’

I clambered out, embarrassed and murderous, already realising that sometimes escape is not popular, that it needs to be more furtive. My mother and I had arguments, shrieking at each other down the hall, slamming doors. What did she, what did everyone, want from me? My dark brows under the blonde fringe drew down in rage. In dumb fury I poured libations of bitter dregs from my father’s wine bottle, murmuring something confused to ancient gods I almost believed in. On those days Athena, my goddess, loved not only wisdom but war.

Then it was time to leave the little alternative school. At a state high school I faltered. I withdrew behind my long hair, lowered my face. I could never quite understand what my new friends saw in me, gauche, try-hard, blushing with my gummy smile. But they took me in, and taught me to be welcomed, and though I looked in horror on their early experiments with drinking and smoking, I remained, hovering, on the rowdy fringe of teenage conspiracy. I was the one to bring glasses of water to tired, drunken friends, to call the taxi home. Being out was exciting but I loved going home.

There were my piano, my books, the sweet frail light that slipped down the hall in the afternoons, the familiar scorn of my little sister. My bedroom, where I could curl up and dream, and sometimes cry, and vanish. Inside me, that was where I found peace.

My schoolfriends were mostly girls, with sharp haircuts and a blade of sophistication in their talk. Sometimes I was forgotten, but other times we stayed over at someone’s house, having baths together, giggling and talking secrets. I didn’t say much, but I beamed shyly at them all, so glad to be included.

I was sixteen and no one had kissed me. Then seventeen, and finishing school. Matilda, Camille, Joey, they were all having sex by then. Short-sighted, I hated to wear glasses; perhaps a boy had smiled at me, but I didn’t know. I touched myself sometimes, but it seemed silly. I didn’t like the idea of men’s bodies. I had a crush on a girl at school. The whole idea of sex was frightening. But I was miserable to be left out of the chance at it. It began to embarrass me; I waited.

To me, my body was revolting: I pawed at the flesh on my hips, at my unnecessary breasts, with frustration, and hid it all beneath too-large clothes, wallowing around, wishing I were invisible. I dreaded having someone see me naked, see me up close. I couldn’t bear my body. And so I cherished my mind.

School was over, and as I waited to begin university I took a weekend job in a local bookshop. My new boss said kindly, ‘You’re shy, aren’t you? It’ll do you good. You’ll have to talk to people.’ I was almost too shy to admit it was true. But I learned to love my job, and to chat with customers, telling them what to read, laughing with them, finding confidence.

I’d expected university to be a haven, but amid the poised elite at Melbourne University I tottered to classes, where I kept my mouth shut and resented everyone for their confidence. Studying archaeology, classics and literature was a natural choice, it was my dream. I sat in the classics library in a dusty shaft of sunlight, fingering texts in ancient Greek, deciphering them. I was going to be an archaeologist who read Virginia Woolf in a tent. I had classes in fashionable cultural studies theory about sexuality and feminist irony. Now I wore a camouflage of black clothes and conceit. I avoided the gaze of other students. I wanted to be like them; I didn’t like them. I loved the learning, but even that wasn’t what I expected. Archaeology was dry and dusty. I wasn’t quite as smart as I’d thought I was.

The friends from school were still around; they all moved into inner-city sharehouses together, while I stayed at home in the suburbs. My foothold on a social life was slipping in this muddle of loneliness and doubt.

I would hear my little sister and her boyfriend, giggling and smoking pot in her bedroom. I passed the closed door, and went to my room. I sat, forlorn in my black clothes, listening to The Cure, reading
Titus Groan
by candlelight, hating the cliché I was. Nineteen years old and feeling middle-aged.

Will was the first boy I kissed and the first boy who made love to me. I met him skulking at a party. As bashful as I was, as enthralled by fancy and fantasy, he gave me a precious year. Confessions. Poetry. Saturated kisses in dim afternoon rooms. I uncovered my body to him and somehow, now, it became beautiful. He gave me white roses because I loved them. I thought I’d found perfection, my twin, my mate. His pale body was beautiful, not frightening; it melted under my mouth, under the skimming of my palms. Through our long dyed-black fringes we smiled mischievously at each other. I told him everything. I was in love.

He was the first boy to break my heart. The girl he left me for had green hair, a nose ring and a crazed sort of charm. She was wild and bold. She was everything I was not; there was nothing I could do to fight for him. There was just me now, foolish and devastated. It was as if the world had broken.

On a day of parched, rough northerlies I sat at my window, scraped raw with hurt. I smoked my first cigarette and scratched my skin idly with a blunt knife. How nice I’d been, how stupid. Rage and humiliation blew their hot winds inwards. Slice, slice, just softly. I’d been so
open
. I learned the satisfaction of metal against skin and sealed myself up.

Soon after, aged twenty-one, I went to Europe for six months’ backpacking. Roaming the strange streets, I learned self-sufficiency. I tested my courage, my ability to survive; there were hard and lonely times when I wept on twilit roadsides, far from home. It toughened me. I sat at a window in a hostel in dusty boots and old clothes. Past the faded green shutters lay the grandiose city of Rome. The notebook in my hand was full of observations, quotations, pale pencil sketches of art I’d seen. I read Casanova’s memoirs, and Byron, and Tacitus. Here no one knew me, no one observed. Alone, I was dreaming and at peace; like a maiden in a tower.

I sat in a piazza, drinking strong espresso, raising my face to the sunshine with a little smile of accomplishment at being there, at being an adult in the world. When I got back to Melbourne to go on with my studies, I had a new stride. It was the early nineties. Before I left, Nirvana had broken into the music scene, and now everything was a roar of energy.

‘Can I have some?’ I asked my friend, who was smoking a joint at a party. The marijuana dizzied me, lent me solace. The doze of it wasn’t as frightening as I’d feared. It was warm.

‘I’ll have some,’ I said to a friend pouring vodka at another party. And bought myself a bottle the next day. I feared losing control in front of others; I drank it alone.

‘Sure, I’ll move in with you,’ I said to Matilda, my friend from school, who had a spare room in St Kilda. And finally it all began. At twenty-one I splashed into a new life, full of friends and music and bravado.

St Kilda was famous for its art deco flats and glossy cafés and bars, its well-loved old pubs; the foreshore, the craft market, the seaside kiosks; the ferals and the beautiful people; the strange characters and the bland crowds of tourists. At that time it was still cheap enough for students to live there, in tattered but elegant old flats in leafy streets, around the corner from the main street and the beach and the parks and each other. On weekends people came in from all over town, to drink, swim and loiter at shop windows in Acland Street; at night the place had certain streets where girls wore very little, even in winter, and there were cars going around and around. St Kilda was full of artists, bohemians, rich people, music, sex and drugs.

Suddenly I was in the middle of things. There were late nights staggering home from the pub, days of bumping into my friends in the street and going off for long afternoons of coffee and pool. Parties where I knew everyone. I was kissed up against walls, missed classes because I was in bed with a lanky, dreadlocked boy. We all had our noses pierced.

My happy group of friends breezed around the suburb. I smoked pot again. Something in me wanted to know, to conquer. I liked the dreaminess, the way it elucidated my thoughts. Then cigarettes as well. It seemed like progress, to be able to loosen my stern grip on myself. I liked to keep a cask of wine beside my bed. Before a rock gig, we all snorted speed, and I felt excitement flutter up through my belly. I learned to play bass guitar and found myself on a pub stage with a couple of friends, hammering out heavy sounds of glory. I thought,
I never imagined I’d be this brave.

There was a body on my bed, a series of bodies, fervent young men clambering towards orgasm, my face making the right expressions, my mind blank. It wasn’t bad sex but I valued the kisses, the lying together quietly afterwards. I wasn’t in it for the pleasure. I didn’t think my dull flesh could find it like this. Will and I had had pleasure, but he was gone. Now it was all about the glow of victory, about the scent on my skin afterwards, about manifesting something like desirability.

In sex, the edge of the world brimmed at the edge of me. I took the world into my own body, right inside my flesh. It gasped appreciation, and then I put it out again and my body remained immaculate. I learned this.

I wasn’t sure why I had these affairs, except that I wanted to please and be seen to please. They were lovely boys, with their mouths tasting iron with nervousness but, still shamed by my body’s appetites, I could not tell them what might make it sing. Those boys wouldn’t stay, they weren’t for keeps. In the morning when they left I waved goodbye bravely at the front door.