Joan Makes History (14 page)

I woke up at nights listening to my heart beating. It was anxious, even if I was not: it knew enough to know it would not beat forever, that each beat was one less from its quota, from my life. I lay counting and making vague funneling plans that ended in deltas of possibilities, morasses of variables.

When they talked about me, what would they say I had made of my life?
Everything ahead of her,
the hypocritical ones might agree, and shake their heads. I, too, shook my head and even on occasion moaned to smother the sound of my impatient heart, too busy ticking my life away for my liking.
That Joan,
I heard them say, and wanted them to say it with a laugh, or admiration, or awe.
Ah, that Joan!
Perhaps then they would be proud of having known me in my early, green-haired phases, when they had not wanted to be seen with me.
But I am to make history,
I had to remind myself, and sat up against the close darkness of the little room where I lay alone, stifled by the thudding of the tireless machine in my chest. There were nights when I listened and waited for it to slow, give a last few flickering beats, and stop. Then I would be freed from the heavy weight of destiny that lay upon me.

I was the only one now watching my destiny. I was hidden
like a seed buried in its furrow: Duncan could not have found me, since I did not wish to be found, and had taken so many zigzagged turnings and backtrackings in my journey away from him in the Agricultural Hall. No, I was on my own now, every bond snapped. It was just me, Joan, alone with my glorious future.

I made history in a teashop for a while, where no one knew I was Joan who was making history, but where I was just Joan who was a bit on the slow side and inclined to forget which table had wanted the scones. How I loathed myself, walking between the tables, asking in a voice still trying to be dainty, although becoming more desperate as the minutes passed with the scones becoming harder:
What party was it ordered the scones?

There was an Elsie there who guessed at sad and sentimental pasts for me:
Oh men, they are not to be trusted, are they love?
Elsie would hint as we cut crusts off bread together, and I would agree, but give her no further satisfaction, and her lips would go thin as she pressed the bread hard, gouging with her knife until she would think of another approach, and say with a sigh and a histrionic hand in the small of her back:
Little joys the kiddies are, but they break your heart as well, don't they, Joan?
Again I would agree, whipping my knife through the scone dough in the way I was learning, but giving her nothing more, just
Oh, my word yes,
and if I was feeling in a teasing mood a sigh or two that might speak volumes, or might not. Elsie's lips would go thin again, and I would watch her thinking behind her eyes, and she would shrug at last at the French toast she was arranging, and I could imagine her arranging the words for her Alf at home. He was a man who liked a good crisp snag, she often confided, with a spud or two:
Alf, there is some sad story there,
I could imagine her saying,
but of course I am not one to pry, as you know, Alf.

I thought of joining the circus when it came through, and I went and gasped with the rest as the unlikely-looking woman in spangles grinned a terrible weary grin at us while hanging by her ankle from a strap. But I could not remember that any history had ever been made in a circus.

Was it time to return to the fold of the family, back to bald Father and gold-toothed Mother, and live from the generosity of that bald man, and stand for Parliament? My tireless heart beat faster at the thought:
Me, Joan, a Member of Parliament,
and in the end, of course, when the silver was streaking through my hair in a distinguished and trustworthy way, I would be Prime Minister. On the day of my ordination or whatever it was that happened to Prime Ministers, the hairless man in the front row would embarrass everyone mightily by allowing shining tears to run down his face, and might even exclaim aloud in some barbaric tongue at the moment of investiture, so that the red-frocked beadles, or whoever they were, would exchange glances, wondering if the baldy was some sort of reffo ratbag who had sneaked in past the guards and would now have to be removed, preferably without making physical contact with his no doubt garlic-smelling person.

But the thought of returning to the fold of my family brought on a great weariness.
Dear Mother and Father,
I wrote at last, and travelled miles to post in a part of the city I never normally went.
I am well and happy. I am following my prospects for a while and do not wish to be found just now, but I will let you know from time to time how I am getting on. Your loving daughter, Joan:
except that when I first wrote this letter, in a moment of abstraction I wrote
Your laughing daughter, Joan,
and had to write it out again.

Because, you see, I could not face the tiresome questions, the
endless planning and debating, the recriminations, the puzzlement, the demands to know what would happen next. I did not know what would happen next, and did not wish to have to answer any such questions.

Then, on a day of small fluffy clouds and a frivolous breeze in the trees of the park, my destiny was unfolded to me. A small striped lizard stopped in a crevice of bark, and I saw the flickering pulse beat in its neck and its tiny eye watching me. To this meek and watchful striped small lizard I announced on that golden morning:
I will be a man.

A smug duck quacked at me but I was not deterred.
Jack,
I said in a forthright way, and thrust out my hand.
The name's Jack.
The lizard gulped and vanished around the corner of the trunk and a few leaves applauded overhead with a dry respectful sound. It was done, I was Jack, a woman of destiny.

Pants altered my heart. The soul of Joan had always been above the frivolous distinctions of sex, as my domed father had known when he had provided me with encyclopedias and sets of black pens: all the same, pants changed everything. I stood for hours in front of the mirror in my room, turning this way and that to snare every facet of Joan in pants and a homemade short-back-and-sides.

Are you curious about the mechanics of being a man: the details of garments, the means of disguise? Such difficulties passed quickly. I have always been flat of chest, narrow of face and plain: I must tell you I made a handsome man. And because I had not yet discovered love, there were no sordid problems of darkened rooms and dildoes.

If a man panics, he drowns. That was the first lesson I learned in my pants. I boarded the tram with a flourish, enjoying my
pants and being able to be graceless, and flung myself onto the wooden slats of the seat the way I had spent a lifetime watching men do. I made the bench shake, as they did, and I sat with my knees wide apart, addressing my serge crotch to the woman opposite in the way that I, as a pathetic flimsy bit of woman, had so often been addressed by the crotches of confident men.

By the time the conductress came around with her gaping bag of coppers I was making bold with my eyes at this woman and she was responding with a shiftiness of eye, a tucking and retucking of ankles under her, and her hands were gripping the handle of her shopping basket so tightly I could watch the blood blocked in her knuckles. Such pleasure I felt at her awkwardness! I could barely contain a laugh of joy: the joy of power, of which I had known so little until now. In this case the power was hardly satisfying, being achieved with so little struggle, and all I could feel was scorn for this flustered woman, gripping her basket as if to strangle it, and I knew now how all silly creatures in skirts and blushes were of no account to the creatures in the pants, who had the power.

Suddenly, though, another kind of woman was upon me, flinty of eye and parrot-like of voice as she stood with her soiled palm stretched towards me saying
Fares please
in a challenging sort of way. In my pleasure at sitting spreadeagled on the bench and hounding, in a beginner's small way, that woman opposite, I had forgotten about such details as the fare, and was thrown into the kind of fluster that I can only describe, with shame, as female.

Ah! I heard myself exclaim. Oh! So sorry,
I piped in an ingratiating way that made me cringe, and I fumbled and struggled with those pants, my enemy now, for I could not remember what I had done with my necessaries: without my woman's handbag I
was thrown into womanly confusion, and tried to dig into the pockets of those pants, and explored the pockets of the jacket, and at last came upon my purse: a shameful and womanly affair I had not yet had time or thought to replace. I pulled it out of a pocket and felt those flinty eyes stripping soul from flesh as this woman saw through me. Women, I saw, were the weakest beings when they came in the form of blushing persons with shopping bags, but the strongest when they stood swaying confidently with the lurching of a tram, their lips grown thin, their eyes horribly knowing.
There we are, sorry, thank you, yes, thanks very much,
I heard myself hatefully gushing as I handed over my sweaty coppers, and saw the contempt in her eyes, and felt myself blushing like an idiot girl at my placating puny words so that even the woman opposite, I saw out of the corner of my fevered eye, was craning round the conductress now to get a good look at me, for she too had seen and heard that this bold crotch-displaying man opposite was all wrong.

I paid my coppers and left the tram at the next stop, stepped down and stood shakily in the gutter waiting for the panic of shame and fear to pass. A car roared close to me so I stepped back, stumbled, nearly fell under its wheels, felt myself splaying, scrabbling at the gutter to save myself, heard a man yell out of the car at me,
Wake up to yourself, mate.
I sat on a bench designed for the restoration of quivery old ladies, not brash young men in new suits: I sat there for a long time, watching the trams rumble by, considering to what extent pants do not a man make.

I stayed long enough in Sydney to make the worst of my mistakes there, and I promised myself to leave it when I had made every kind of fool of myself a man could. It was a place to learn a few tricks and to equip myself in the right ways so
that I would have nothing, not a single handkerchief or turn of head, to shame me again.

At last, leaving mistakes behind like broken plates, I stepped on a train and went to marvellous Melbourne, where I could walk through streets even more confidently, knowing that here I would never pass a certain bald man in the street, frowning still for the loss of his daughter, frowning at the skinny young man in the blue suit, cross at him as at everyone for not being the apple of his brown eye, his daughter who had vanished.

The bit of history I chose to make as a man was humble, but in my pants I was making history by doing nothing more thrilling than simply existing. In Melbourne I was Jack, and everyone tipped Jack, the friendliest of the waiters at the hot chophouse called the Galaxy, perhaps because of the extensiveness of its collection of odours, out the back where the fat was poured into drums and the patrons pissed. The Galaxy knew nothing of the secret life of Jack, which was spent not in the arms of any woman, nor—as the bolder patrons assumed because of Jack's delicacy of figure and manner—in the arms of any furtive man-loving man, either. Jack spent her spare time walking the streets, never tiring of the way she could boldly meet the eye of anyone, man or woman, that she cared to: walking the streets and watching the trams, being idle, unashamed and bold in public in a way poor Joan, for all her bluster, had never been.

At last, though, the joy wore off. I could meet any eye I chose, and had met thousands of strangers' eyes now, and was the richer for the experience. I could loiter where I pleased, stare at all and sundry, have obscene conversations over beer about fictional debauches with peach-thighed girls, I could even stand facing a tree trunk and fiddle with my fly, pretending to be scandalously
relieving myself in a public place in broad daylight, with two young women not twenty yards away, turning scarlet and talking with a great deal of liveliness.

I could do all that, forbidden even to the boldest Joan, but I had come so far now from the terrible day on the tram that there were times, staring boldly into a face, or boldly pretending to adjust my private parts where I pretended they were hanging in the private darkness of those pants: there were times when all this lost its savour. No one really looked, no one stared or cared, I was just another man. Then I wanted to rip off my jacket and thrust what bosom I could at these potato-faced people who did not guess, and have them gasp and turn purple, fall at my feet dead of apoplexy and scandal, and to cry:
You fools, do you not see I am Joan, making history?

I was not slow now, but among the quickest between the tables, and it was second nature now to line six plates up along my arms, and remember who wanted his chop extra well done and who had been particular about no gravy. I forgot nothing, dropped nothing, was no longer a hopeless incompetent bungler with plates of scones no one wanted. There was a pleasure in becoming nothing more than a machine, the pleasure of directing the body and the brain, that was a pleasure like no other.