Innocents (2 page)

‘Dob her in!’

‘Yeah, tell on her!’

But she wasn't leaving; she was breathing. Her face thrust close to her friend's, she hissed a guttural ‘
Haaaaaaah!
’

The crusty woman shook her head, still laughing, and waved her hand before her nose.

‘Her breath prob'ly
stinks
,’ decided Rachel, with easy hypocrisy. She smoked Marlboros behind the bus shelter every morning before school, instead of having breakfast.

‘Smells like Kelly's underwear!’ suggested Kara, giggling.

Laura squealed: ‘Oh, you're foul!’

‘That's
disgusting
,’ ruled Sally.

‘I
know
!’ I said.

Then the bell went, and we straggled up the hill for English.

Walking through the corridors, I followed the loud voices and the laughter of the others. I was one little fish in an enormous shoal, changing direction effortlessly at the slightest twitch of the leader's tail. I blended in perfectly, as usual. No-one suspected a thing.

I can't remember if I even knew we were getting a new teacher. Everyone said Mrs Bohringer had run off with Mr Russell who was head of Maths and they'd both been fired. I'd heard that Lucy Hinds' sister Kerry had seen them kissing in the supplies room. It was a scandal. I giggled along with it. But I don't think I seriously believed it was true.

Anyway, I wasn't expecting to see you standing, hands clasped gently in front of you, behind the teacher's desk.

In we all trooped and sat down.

You had chalked your name on the board in huge white letters. I think you stammered slightly when you introduced yourself. You wore a tweed suit that was too big for you, in the most expensive and well-tailored way imaginable. I've always liked your taste in clothes, darling. There's a faint sort of mad-professor quality that goes with your bedraggled hair. I don't think you mean to look like that; it's just an accident of your wardrobe and distraction. I suppose that's what's so charming.

I didn't pay you the slightest attention.

I just sat at my desk, up the back by the window, reading a book, through the whole lesson. You didn't tell me to stop. I assumed you hadn't seen me.

The book was
If This Is a Man
, by Primo Levi.

I know you've read it, though we've never discussed it. It's on the bookshelf in the study. It's hardcover and some of the passages are underlined in passionate biro, presumably by you. I'm sure it's the sort of book you'd love, come to think of it. I'm sure it's one of your special ones.

It's about the Holocaust. It's about concentration camps and the fetid depths of man's inhumanity to man. I often used to read books like that.

I read them because I needed to confront myself, head-on, with what I was. Poor Primo, trapped without hope of escape in the very lowest circle of hell, keeps popping up with remembered scraps of poetry and resolutions to shave every day, no matter what, to preserve his human dignity. As you read, of course, you're completely on his side, cursing the Germans, cursing their cruelty. You can't understand where it comes from, all that violence, that will to subjugate.

You droned on, my darling, about iambic pentameter. You made a few well-worn jokes. You called Shakespeare
Bill
. No-one laughed. My friends slumped, chins on elbows, lethargic hands scribbling away on pencil cases.

Did you see something in my face, even then? Did your eyes, skimming across that legion of indifferent faces, stop for a second and linger on mine?

I find it difficult to believe. In those days, I counted myself lucky to look so uninteresting.

When I considered my looks, which was rarely, I thought myself distressingly bland. Eyes just seemed to slide off my face. All my features were too even to excite the vision. In the bathroom, in the mornings, before I'd wiped all the sleep from my eyes, my face was a ghastly white blur which fizzled out in the ill-defined, pastel-yellow halo of my hair. My straining eyes could not even see themselves.

My body was small and neat, which was good for my purposes. A spy needs firstly to avoid looking like a spy. A successful traitor, even more than a loyal subject, must appear to conform. I was saved from obesity, crustiness, overtallness. I was therefore saved the accusing, conspiratorial glares that were thrown about regarding Anita, that girl with the infant dreadlocks, the broad shoulders, the nose-ring that teachers continually growled at her to take out.

As we all filed out at the end of class, you stood beside the door.

‘Good book?’ you asked me as I passed.

I can't remember what I answered. I think I ignored you.

I lived with my aunt and uncle in a drab brown house that backed onto the road reserve.

They were decent people. Decent enough, anyway, to take me in and care for me from the age of four, paying my school fees and driving me to endless games of netball. They were also decent enough not to have had any other children to rival me when the chocolate biscuits were being distributed.

My uncle was a thin man, with a thin moustache and thinning hair. He came from Queensland. He dressed like a Queensland primary-school headmaster. Striped short-sleeved shirt and ill-matching tie. Shorts—the formal sort, belted. Socks pulled
right
up and folded over just below the knees.

He never said much over dinner. He watched cricket. He smelt of stale sweat on Saturdays when he came in from mowing our lacklustre, sunbleached lawn.

He was a nice man. He gave me pocket money if I asked for it, and picked me up at 10 p.m. from school discos, asking dryly, ‘Did you pull?’

I always said, ‘No!’ as though the idea disgusted me, and he always replied, ‘Next time, love,’ as though he were commiserating me.

My aunt was flabby and pathetic, with a turkey-chin and small sunken eyes. She draped her big body in floral fatlady dresses. She babbled insincere bitchings about the women she worked with. She ate and ate and ate. I often found chocolate wrappers in the bathtub. She was like a large passionless sponge.

I won't say I never saw my aunt in tears, or that no emotion at all was ever expressed in that household. It's just that it all came at inappropriate moments.

She could say, ‘Your Mummy's gone to Heaven’ (stupid, banal phrase!—it makes my blood boil to think of her using it), ‘You'll be coming to live with us now,’ but her tone was as workaday as the lino that covered our kitchen floor. Her
delivery
was all wrong.

On the other hand, one afternoon when my uncle came home from the shops with the wrong sort of biscuits—caramel Tim-Tams instead of normal ones—I saw the tears come coursing down her cheeks. I thought they'd never stop. Her dimpled chin shook and wobbled as earthquakes of emotion passed through her.

‘It's such a
simple thing
!’ she wept, her big face flushed a passionate red.

I stood in the kitchen doorway—I must have been about twelve—and watched her grieve like the Mother of Christ after the Crucifixion, her heavy head bowed down over the biscuits, her hands over her eyes.

My uncle, trying to apologise—and to hide his frustration at the embarrassing tides of emotion pouring out of his wife—also proved himself to have more than just the one bland, everyday face.

‘I'm sorry,’ he said, silhouetted against the bright white window. He reached out a hand and laid it, in a futile gesture of comfort, on my aunt's heaving shoulder. He held himself like a Hollywood actor at a moment of high crisis, speaking in short, significant sentences. ‘I'm really sorry.’

It would be comforting to think that some of the blame for my perversity could be unloaded onto my aunt and uncle.

It is true that there was always a feeling in that house … not of active resentment, so much as of being slightly put-upon, of having an extra chore to perform, one more thing to do, one more bill to pay. There were a lot of short sharp sighs, especially from my aunt.

Even the most saintly child—if she was sensitive and intelligent—would have found it difficult to be happy in that household. The unhappiness, for me, all centres on small details: my uncle's pockmarked cheeks, his trouser-shorts, the faded orange-and-yellow linoleum on the kitchen floor. My aunt's big, cheap floral frocks drying inexorably on the clothesline.

But for anyone with any powers of reason to deny their own responsibility for their situation is just silly. For all I know, my own parents may have exuded just that air of workaday stodginess, and I'd still be what I am.

This remembering is so strange! It's like trying to think back over last night's dreams at five in the afternoon.

When I think of those days, I think of myself bobbing up and down in an ocean of mundanity, all soaked and sozzled with it. I think of my fat aunt hunched over a carton of ice-cream at the kitchen table. Such a commonplace, everyday gluttony. Such an understandable craving.

It will be hard to look at the pages ahead. I will cover each completed line as I write, so that I don't have to look back on them. Even scrawled in this exercise book, for no-one's eyes but yours, they will parade my shame.

First of all, darling, I have to make it clear that
I am not what I was
. I am no longer afflicted by the visions I'm about to describe.

I have you to thank for this. I owe you all my gratitude, and yet, naturally, I'm very reluctant to explain exactly why. How can I show you the hideous, clinical calculations whirring away beneath those lips that brushed your cheeks so lightly it made them itchy, whispered ticklishly in your ear, ‘Oh, I love you so much it's giving me a
stomach ache
!’ and made you blush?

My love, you have exorcised fouler demons from me than you can possibly imagine.

I'm tiptoeing around this subject, aren't I? Teasing you with fleeting references, whispered insinuations. Just the way I used to powder your face with filmy kisses, arousing you with the excruciating airiness of my touch.

Here, then. Feel the terrible solidity of the truth.

I drew my own pornography—carefully, carefully, it was my life's work—and stored it in the bottom drawer of my desk.

What a filthy, skulking creature I was! I coasted along through the corridors of the school, stealing images and transmuting them. With my mind, I peered under blouses and up skirts. I peeled away the uniforms to poke at what was underneath.

My perverse gallery, at the time that I met you, filled three sketchbooks and two-thirds of a fourth.

In retrospect, I suppose the pictures were not pornography, but something worse. Pornography suggests a desire to ogle, to leer, but all the same, it is only looking. My gallery was a gallery of depraved erotica, of props in a vicious saga. The black-and-white sketches were palmcards in my technicolour inner monologue.

I constantly told myself instalments of the same story. The drawings were stills of the most climactic moments. Scene by scene, I humiliated, commanded, penetrated. I laid my classmates on their backs and I spread their legs and sent hard cold objects into their most secret recesses. I oversaw their torture. I whipped them, kicked them, spat into their faces.

The central theme of each scene was the same:
I was in control
.

I don't mean I was some ridiculous Madam Lash character saying ‘Lick my boots.’

I didn't appear, as such, at all. I wasn't there in person, exactly, with my physical characteristics. It was more like watching a person-eye-view movie. I was an abstract controlling force, giving orders as if from behind an opaque screen.

An important thing I've just realised is that I was never, ever,
ever
involved sexually, myself. It was all about the sexual humiliation of the victims. But it had nothing to do with my physical arousal.

I didn't masturbate.

Or rather, my masturbatory activities were centred on the biggest and most responsive organ of all the erogenous zones—my mind. I'd lie on my bed, my chin resting on my folded hands. The sketchbooks would be flung wantonly before me, open at select images. I'd look, and look, and look, becoming drunk on physical details, until I could close my eyes and see the figures moving—coloured now, living, breathing, animated—in a perverse home movie.

Oh how can I begin to show you the contours of my perversion? Your exploration destroyed these lands, darling. Your touch tore them like cobwebs. They dissolved fizzing under your spittle.

I still have maps.

The geography is precise and vast. Closing my eyes I find myself outside the gates of my old primary school, St Luke's. The courtyard led into the Science labs at St Mary's, the school where I met you. Out one door there was the school gym. Through another door lay an oval, any oval. Past the oval, trees. Past the trees, a swimming pool. Cartoon blue water, sunk in concrete and confined by a high wire fence. I know every inch of this.

By the light, it is late afternoon. They are nearby, always. By the twisting in my stomach, they are just now being formed. I'll stroll my bodyless presence out onto the oval and see who's being made.

What kind of mind is this? It gives me golems to use as lovers. Here they come, in answer to my impatient summons. They're sulky but obedient. Obedient to my sulky will.

This nervous creature my soul presses up against my eyelids, leering.

I'm violently thrilled. It seems like a licentious oversight, a cosmic loophole, even in this spectral land, that I'm allowed to. That no-one can stop me from—

I yoke a golem. She's all body. I don't see her eyes. I see breasts, cunt, wrists and ankles. Sometimes a mouth.

Open, I cry.

I need to, I cry.

I'm going to, I cry.

And there is nothing she can do.

And that's why.

Appendages to my estate sometimes came and went. I remember that, after we went to the beach one year for Christmas, months of my stories were set in a huge, rambling towerblock filled with empty, self-contained apartments like the one we stayed in.