Innocents (11 page)

‘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.

I said, with false bravery, ‘So it's not genetic, then.’

You stroked my hair with the flat of your hand. ‘Oh, my darling.’

Toads are unpleasant. Their poisonous backs and dangerous secretions might make you sick. Contact with one might cast a pall over an otherwise pleasant day. Finding one in the bathroom might, in a sensitive mind, render the place unclean.

But spiders—spiders are small and scurrying. They come in through cracks and under doors. They squeeze into unattended nooks and set up business there.

I told you: ‘I always used to be scared that I'd wake up and find a spider in my ear. When I was little.’ Burrowing in. Finding things out. Reading my mind.

Pulling aside my shirt, kissing my collarbone, you looked up at me with wide sincere eyes, and promised, ‘I won't let the spiders get you.’

You'd say,
‘I don't know what it is about you, but…’

But
I woke most mornings to find you, slumberous still, pulling me to you, your poor sheet-warmed body desperate, straining for release. I took you willingly. You awoke starving, like a hungry baby that comes nuzzling for milk. You
ate
me, gnawing on my shoulder, leaving red marks that I wore proudly, like amulets or ritual scars.

You would raise yourself on straight arms and come to consciousness through me. Sometimes you drove too hard, your eyes half-drooping still with sleep, the back of your throat rumbling automatic praises of my body. This visceral need, this subconscious desire, was sweet music to me. The pain was nothing at all.

An old friend gave you an office job.

‘It's for a furniture company,’ you told me. ‘I'm going to count sofas for a living.’

‘Won't you be bored?’ I asked in concern, stroking your hair as you lay on the couch.

‘I expect so.’

I made my eyes huge. ‘Won't you be sad, not teaching?’

‘Probably,’ you replied. ‘But it's worth it.’

And you smiled at me fondly.

Objects were supremely important to me.

I wasn't just charmingly untidy, for example. I was charmingly untidy with a draftsman's precision. I left dirty socks and half-eaten apples at almost mathematically determined locations.

The way I left my books on the desk could shout volumes about my character, my moods, my preoccupations. Closed and neatly piled for tight-lipped irritation. Open, sprawling, chaotic, for childishness and distractability. Built up into intricate towers for creativity, a complex mind at play.

I was the architect of our surroundings, constantly redesigning, arranging, aligning.

It's taken years of living and eternities of suffering for me to really see the poetry of details, of truly accidental conflagrations of things. To look at your desk here, while pausing from writing this confession, and see: a computer, with a NO SMOKING sticker on the side, though you don't smoke; and the keyboard, with the dark fleck of something immovable, the ghost of sandwiches past, over the 9; and the mouse with its tail all tangled with the cord that connects the keyboard with the screen; and next to these an untidy fan of books, of which the only legible titles are Little Deaths and Concise English Dictionary—the former being contemporary fiction, new, shiny and smart; the latter being thoroughly degraded with years of flicking, with scribbles on the cover, with the cover half-scraped away in places, with the spine flapping. To see all these bare details parading flat and real before me, and feel a thrill of truth, time- lessness, perfection.