Joan Makes History (5 page)

I was a woman now, and ripe for history: or if not history, at least some muddle of flesh against flesh. But that bald father of mine was always too strong for me, guarding me against my own flesh, recognising its hunger, and behind his guarding I remained, reluctantly, virgin territory.

Father knew when I was expected to be intelligent on a bench at the university, taking notes and having my mind improved by the great men of the past.
Hurry, Joan!
He would stand at my door, watching as I dawdled in front of my reflection in the mirror, and in his anxiety his mouth would form the slippery old words of another country.
Hurry, you will be late, the philosophy is at nine o'clock.
So under his scrutiny I would tie my hair up in a scarf and hurry out past Mother smiling her baffled smile, watching her tall daughter swinging her book bag in a dangerous sort of way.

After the lecture I could never be sure that I would not see his gleaming head among so much unruliness of young hair, and have him take me by the elbow, practising his best English, saying rather more loudly than necessary in his desire that everyone should recognise his grasp of idiom:
Come on Joan, we will have some bites to eat, I know this part of town like the back of my head.
I would be willing to hurry away with him because, although I loved to be stared at and be the centre of some sort of spectacle, I liked the spectacle to be of my own making.

He knew, of course, that I had dealings with young men in the lecture halls and libraries, but he dismissed with a shrug those he saw. At home, when he spoke seriously after dinner of my future, he did not speak of purity, or incorruptible vessels, and even less of respect or virtue.
They have no prospects, Joan,
he said.
We came here, your mother and I, leaving our home, only for the prospects.
He relished the whole idea, swirling the whisky and ice in his glass and placing a tweed elbow carefully on the arm of his chair, but I did not relish what he had in mind for me.
I am my own prospect,
I told him, and heard my voice loud and nasal, as foreign as possible from the smooth outlandish English of which he was so pathetically proud. He laughed, thinking me a girl of spirit who would make a fine fiery wife and an electric exclaiming kind of mother when the time was right, and he cared only that I should remain intact.

In the meantime, he could not care much that I cut my hair off in a way that outraged the pink-faced wearers of broderie anglaise, and dyed it every different colour that the frowning chemist could offer me, so the unintended final result was a sort of shot green: he did not even care very much that the scarf I tied around my head, making my mother smile nostalgically, did duty later as a blouse, tied precariously around my flat chest. Father was still too foreign to know just how eccentric all that seemed, here in the land of the Angles and Saxons with their pinks and mauves and polka dots, and Mother could not see me either, lost as she was in her dreams of somewhere else altogether.

She smiled gold at me and drifted into soft-eyed memories.
Forests,
she said wistfully.
Trees, with leaves, and mountains everywhere and water on black rocks.
Mother's mouth became thin, squeezed, lemony, suppressing longing for her native land.
And the snow!
she sighed, but Father had a short fuse when it came to waxing lyrical about snow.
Fiddlesticks!
he exclaimed. The English word set the ornaments rocking, and my mother's mouth lost its lemony look as she remembered she was in a new country now, one in which bald men became wealthy and plain girls got educations.

When Father did not appear at the university to whisk me away, I passed what he would have called
the times of day
with the people I was beginning to know. The place seemed full of gormless girls like those I had been to school with, who turned the pages of their books only by the corners, and sat down the front of the lecture halls in their practical cardigans. There were young men, too, just as flabby of spirit, who looked startled if you spoke to them, and frowned in the library at the way my bold soles sounded on the floor.

But Lilian, for example, was not one of the gormless ones. Lil was a gigantic person of some boldness, who could be persuaded to laugh with me at the cardigans, and although she looked aghast at what she was doing, was only one step behind me when I took a short chilly stroll among the draped corpses of the medical building. Oh, what a pleasure to have a companion who was also a person of possibilities! Lilian was from some sort of nice home in a leafy suburb by the water, with a respectable father, a ladylike mother and a lifeless brother. But she was transcending such beginnings: she was a fit companion for a woman with a future.

There was an old rowing boat at her house in which Lil and I pushed off towards Chile and to other adventures. With Lil on
one oar and me on the other, so the boat was all lopsided in the water, we did not get very far towards the El Dorados of the Americas, but we indulged other kinds of exploration. That cold green water, into the depths of which I stared until I was dizzy, enticed me to some kind of madness: I felt myself drawn down into it in a kind of swoon. The dazzle of sun on the water and the rude cries of the gulls heated an excitement within me until I seemed about to burst.
Oh Lil, I must plunge in!
I cried, and while she stared, I stripped the garments from my body and in skinny fleshless nudity I dived in.

I gasped at the cold and at the pulse that throbbed between my legs, and was confused into wanting to weep and shout at once, so powerful and strange was this feeling buried in the centre of myself. It was a kind of delirium, and even when I climbed back into the boat I was still filled with ecstasy like an itch. Lil stared and I was moved to crave the creamy vastness of her body: I fell on her soft mounds and bunches, stripping the clothes from her, consumed with a craving to feel my flesh against another's, to join skin with skin. She struggled, the boat tipped and sloshed, she cried
No! No!
in a feeble unconvincing way, and even as I cried back
Yes!
and wrestled with buttons, I was impatient at her coyness. Where was the spirit to match my own, that could stand naked, shameless and throbbing under a yellow sun, and lust for more?

Lil revealed at last was a pleasure.
Ah Lil,
I said,
this is more like it,
for, free of the ugly rucked-up straining-at-seams clothes into which she forced her flesh, she was a mountainous beauty, her flesh bunched in warm rolls around her person like another layer of clothing. Her body, when I lay beside it in the boat, moved me to tears and to touch its enormous warmth, and Lil
was silent beside me, her face turned away up at the sun, her eyes closed as if pretending she was not really there.

Such delights were enough pleasure for some days, but there were others when I was seized by a hunger nothing could satisfy, and I crammed my mouth with my fist and fingers till I was almost sick, and was choked with impatience at Lil and her soft flesh. For I knew, as that gleaming father of mine knew, that it was a man I wanted, and a man I would have, for women of destiny will not be held back by fathers, no matter how gleaming and urbane.

It was with Lil that I met Duncan, in a lecture hall stifling with dullness, where history was being spoken of but would never be made. I saw at once that Duncan was not one of the gormless ones, and I shook his hand across Lil's lap so hard I could feel the bones and the callouses on his palms. While the man in tweed down below us kept losing his place in his notes, the three of us enjoyed a few whispered bits of disrespect about Napoleon and other subjects, and when at last the man in tweed closed his notes and we were free, Duncan stayed with us. He stayed with us on a bench under a tree, and I stayed, and in the end we outstayed Lil, who went off with many backward glances and waves while Duncan and I shifted closer on the bench to fill up the gap she had left.
Bye-bye Lil,
Duncan called, and
See you tomorrow Lil,
I called, and we watched her enormous bottom as she walked away across the quadrangle: then he and I got down to the business of knowing each other, for we had taken a bit of a fancy at first glance.

Duncan, I discovered, was a secretive roisterer: not a man of aplomb at all, rather diffident and bumbling, but also a man of knowing ways with sly fingers in the interstices between flesh
and fabric.
It is us country blokes,
he said when I wondered at his boldness.
Seen a lot of the birds and the bees and all that.
Duncan would have been a rounders player of primness and flat pink face if he had had the misfortune to be born a woman, because he was a member of the pallid race that had invaded this country, and was the heir to unthinkable numbers of acres and cows somewhere in the dry inland. But he was no jelly of a man, as so many of the privileged ones seemed to be: together we had many bold adventures of a small kind.

With Duncan, I drank tea in cafes down by the wharves, where sailors in pairs glumly ate burnt chops: sometimes foreign sailors, with pompoms on their caps, or with flesh as dark and wrinkled as a patient weather-furrowed rock. I loved the black gleam of such outlandish skin, and I wondered if my destiny was to give myself over to the caresses of such a one.

Or we would wander the streets of the Chinese, where the air smelled of cabbage and mice, and wafts of incense from inside dark private doorways, and we were the tallest people in the street. I did not lust after the hollow-chested Chinese youths as I did after the muscular black ones, but was excited to be here, where every closed shopfront could hide an opium den or a harem of slaves, or melancholy lepers hiding from the light. Anything was possible here, even in the food, which was unrecognisable shreds and bits of things: it could have been dog or rat or stewed rope, but I liked it, and knew I was happy when I saw myself reflected in a fly-specked mirror with Chinese writing around the sides, being deft with chopsticks and coquettish with this brave youth Duncan, to whom I was approaching more and more closely, emboldened by him as he was emboldened by me.

Joan, you are returned late,
Mother would exclaim at me in an
agitated way, showing those gold teeth of hers in her fear.
He is waiting for you,
and there behind her in the living-room I would see the dome of my father's cranium as he waited to hear me explain what I had done that had made me late, and with whom. I did not go into details of young men or Chinese streets or wild-eyed sailors, knowing that Father would not value any of these as I did, and could not be expected to understand that I had a destiny to uncover, although he understood that young men were what I was fancying.

Something had to be said now to explain my absences, which were longer and longer, and at times of day that might have been suggestive, had any suspicions suggested themselves to him. It was one of my jobs to forestall the suggestion of any such suspicion, and my solution was the one that generations of deceivers have used.

Necessity was the mother of the lie.
I have been studying in the library, Father,
I would tell him, or more cunningly:
Elise Cunningham invited me home for tea, Father.
Father nodded in a satisfied way, for he read the society pages like the Bible of this new land, and knew that Elise Cunningham
came from money,
and even better that her family was
on the land
in a big way, and best of all that Elise Cunningham had brothers of an appropriate age to be
prospects
for his daughter. He did not know, and I was not going to tell him, that Elise Cunningham thought Joan Redman might be
a little on the grubby side,
and most certainly that this outlandish girl with yellow skin and green hair and an outrageous scarf tied around her flat chest, was not anyone she would ever consider inviting home to tea.

Lilian was the best lie of all, because she was the truth. Father could nod in approval, hearing of Lilian's wealthy and respectable
family, the position of the Singers in society, and the fact, and in this case it was a fact, that Lilian Singer, person of prospects and possessed of a brother, had invited his daughter Joan home to tea and to take a turn on the harbour in the boat. When Father's skull gleamed in a suspicious way in his chair and his eyes became small in their intensity, and proof was needed, Lilian could be brought along as large and indubitable proof that I was not, in this instance, lying.

Father did not know, and I was not going to tell him, that Lilian's father, although so respectable when you described his position in the world, was a man of crazed tiny eyes and gigantic hoarse voice listing facts and figures, her mother was an imbecile with the vapours, who could barely gather enough grey matter to remember her daughter's name, and Lilian's brother was a poor spindly damp boy in glasses who seemed nervous of his own feet and hands.

Father knew none of this, and could have
wool put across his eyes,
as he would have said. He was the innocent, and what I felt for him was pity, seeing him believe me, but also something like fear. There was a power in my lies that seemed larger than the words I was handing him, as if I was dealing with an explosive that might take my head off if I became too confident. But my own manifest destiny was too important, so each day I handed him a few new gaudy lies and spread myself wider afield. The invention of the lie proved to be one of the great labour-saving devices, and freed me to get on with my destiny.