by Meg Bignell
And this is where things went a bit peculiar. The ‘wetness’, instead of adding to things in a lubricating kind of way, made subsequent penile-vaginal contact a little, er, squeaky. Suddenly it was like we were trying to have sex in the bath – watery. But aren’t vaginal secretions during sex supposed to have a viscosity that reduces friction? How did water get down there? I can only deduce that a bit of wee came out. Quite a lot of wee. I’d put off doing wees pre-sex because after my bladder infection I am conscious that a wee is essential as soon as possible post-sex in order to flush out potential bladder bugs. So I might have had quite a full bladder.
Hugh was evidently pleased with the wee. His breathing got raspy and his movements more pressing. Thankfully, because I think I got aroused again and produced some moisture of the appropriate texture, we were able to move beyond the squeakiness to orgasm, both of us. But still, as I sat on the loo afterwards for the flush-out wee, I did feel very discomfited.
This morning I stripped the bed and before I put the sheets in the machine I sniffed them for wee smells. I couldn’t find any, but my investigations were cut short by Eloise walking in and seeing me sniffing the sheets. ‘What are you doing, Mum?’ she asked. Fair question. I told her I thought we’d been eating too many curries lately and that I could smell them on the sheets. ‘It’s the garam masala. It comes out of your skin,’ I said, like a bonkers person. She looked at me as such and walked on.
I’m very glad I didn’t say it was the cumin.
So what do I do about this, then? The wee thing? Just hope it doesn’t happen again? Write to Dr Folds? Dear Dr Folds, is it okay to use wee as a vaginal lubricant?
Maybe it wasn’t wee. Maybe one’s natural lubricants get thinner with age, much like the skin on the back of one’s hand. Another sexual mystery. Will they ever cease?
WEDNESDAY 31st MAY
No time for Dr Folds or sex, or writing about not having sex; week from hell upon me. No time for anything but bills and chores and bores and getting things that were on top of me off me (not Hugh, obviously). I feel all fuzzy in the head with my Too Much Things to Do List. (‘Mummy, you have too much things to do,’ said Mary-Lou when I was talking to myself in the car this morning.) It would be quicker to get through a Things NOT to Do List.
All of Hugh’s work crew are coming to dinner on Friday, along with Expeditioner April and Scary Katrina. I’ve also asked some extra friends of ours. I’m serving chicken from the CWA cookery book. People love those old-fashioned classic recipes. *Mustn’t forget ground ginger.
SATURDAY 3rd JUNE
Oh, God, the dinner party was terrrrrrible. I was terrible. I just couldn’t enjoy myself. It was as though I was on the outside, peering in at things, and everything looked plastic and pretend. I couldn’t think of items to contribute to the conversation, I was overly worried about the food, I felt dowdy and fussy and dumb and embarrassing. The CWA ladies would be ashamed.
I mean, it went just like any normal dinner party – laughs, gossip, politics, talk of pink salt and schools and broken washing machines; someone drinking too much and getting shouty about the council. Everyone was so excited about the new electrical direction of Parks Forensic Engineering. But I wasn’t on the inside with them all and their excitement. I was out, sullen and grumpled like someone’s crabby old aunt.
I was tired, I think; it’s been a long week. The women had offered to bring things and I declined but they still did. There was an heirloom carrot salad with truffle oil, for God’s sake. ‘Oh, I just whipped it up from leftovers in the fridge.’ It made my jubilee chicken look like chicken à la frump. And how did I miss the ankle boot memo? Even April had them on, and she’s meant to be the outdoorsy type. I’ve only ever seen her in those terrible sports sandals. Also, she joined in on the discussion about pepper grinders, so she’s normal as well as forging all sorts of pathways for women.
I know I’m showing my insecurities but all I could think was how ridiculous we are. Women pound their linens in the Ganges and milk their house cows while we grizzle about inefficient appliances and gush over cherry blossom print. People create vaccines and prosthetic limbs while we’re worrying about how to cook quail eggs. It’s just bullshit. I wish Ria had been there; she would have marched in and applied acid to everyone’s veneers, and Hugh might have seen through them all and they would have left in their huffs and the three of us could have got pissed and laughed our heads off like we used to.
But Hugh was on the inside with all of them, looking like he fitted right in, and he does. He always fits. I, with my blurred edges and raggedy nails, just don’t. I wore spotty tights. Have I changed, or has he? Am I just calling bullshit on myself while everyone goes on being genuine? I mean, they are making the world a safer place by identifying errors and ensuring they don’t happen again. I spent an hour and a half trying to get a fairy wren out of the house yesterday.
Why am I feeling like this? Why did my eyes sting when at one a.m. Hugh put the placemats away and said, ‘She’s a really top bird, that Amanda. I like her.’ Amanda is the mechanical engineer’s wife and she is the very essence of what we all avoided like the plague at uni. She has plumped-up lips and wears skinny jeans like they’re tracksuit bottoms. She was the one on about cherry print and quail. Which are normal things to talk about, I suppose.
Tristan and Isolde is raging at me from Valda’s house. Perhaps I should assign Wagnerian leitmotifs to my daily rituals. I might find myself less muddled. I blame Dr Folds and the Sparkle Project. It’s made me overanalyse things. For God’s sake, it’s meant to be about love and sex and passion and fun. I haven’t even properly put any specific strategies into practice.
I’ll feel better tomorrow; I think I just need a good sleep.
PS I just got my period – I’M NOT MENTAL!! JUST HORMONAL. Thank God for that and how can PMS go for a whole week? How unfair is it that we have to suffer such severe emotional flux for the sake of a bit of uterine lining. Absolute design fault that should by now have evolved the hell away.
PPS Amanda mentioned that April, Hugh’s new electrical engineer, is possibly gay. Amanda is the sort of person who feels the need to mention these things. I’m pointing it out only because I was actually a tiny bit worried that with April being so brilliant and all, Hugh might develop a thing for her. So perhaps there are no worries there. He wouldn’t have a thing for her, though; with all that overzealous nodding she does. So irritating. And she wears culottes. She also wears an iron ring on her little finger, which is what Canadian engineers do when they graduate, as a reminder to put integrity before ego as they work. Interesting fact.
TUESDAY 6th JUNE
Such bad timing, that dinner party. Just when I was already tied up in knots over whether or not Hugh and I are truly compatible. Not to mention the second-worst case of PMS in history. (The first is that British woman who murdered her mother and had her sentence reduced to manslaughter due to raging PMS.)
What a difference a few days make to hormone levels. Today, without oestrogen clouding my view, I can see that Hugh and I of course have differences – normal ones, reconcilable ones. There was something called the Pauli Exclusion Principle in astronomy – certain particles cannot be at the same place at the same time with the same energy, or else things would go crashing through floors. We are necessarily different. (And how I managed to keep that in my brain all these years and extract it now I’ll never know.)
I’m going to take us back to our beginnings again. The present (at present) is frankly not as pleasant. Where were we? Ah, friends.
Hobart, 1994
The friends thing took a turn when Hugh and I were eating lunch in the cafeteria. There was a student – an older bloke, mature age – sitting at the table next to us on his own, talking to himself. I don’t remember us acknowledging him; there were all sorts around uni, we didn’t judge. But after a little while, his talking turned to shouts and he stood up. He was wearing a long dark coat, much like the scary student from The Breakfast C
lub. Judd Nelson? We watched. He wasn’t arguing with anyone – perhaps just himself – but he started throwing stuff around the room: drink bottles, plates, chairs. People were ducking out of the way. The throwing things was accompanied by a primal sort of roar. That’s what chilled me most; there was anger and despair in that roar, of the kind that can’t be contained. I’d heard it in music before but this was upscale, forte and very, very live.
In an alarmingly quiet fashion, because I was still registering that this was a dangerous situation, Hugh took my hand. He took my hand! But I felt only a millisecond of rush because at the very same moment, I was hit in the face by a glass. It smashed on impact. To add insult to injury, quite literally, I tried to dodge the blow and smacked my head into the wall. I don’t remember the next bit but Hugh tells me that he picked me up and made for the door, then ran (I hope he was carrying me like a princess and not a sack of spuds) until he found us a place to hide. My memory has that place as a bit of hedged garden, with a lawn, trees and perhaps roses. But he says it was a bit of cleared pine bark and some ferns. Anyway, in the garden he laid me down and I looked at him. There was blood on his shirt and for a horrible moment I thought he was hurt. I gasped and put my hand on the large patch of blood. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, pulling his handkerchief out of his pocket and pressing it gently to my cheek. I hadn’t even realised that the skin was broken. ‘Not too bad.’ His dear face was lined with worry. ‘What’s my name?’ he asked.
‘Hugh Parks,’ I said.
‘And yours?’
‘Susannah Parks. I mean, Susannah Mackay.’ Ooooooops. Rewind, rewind, I thought, mortification outdoing fear of facial disfigurement or further harm from psychopath still at large.
Hugh smiled. ‘That’ll do,’ he said and kissed my head, stroked my hair, kissed my lips, then kissed them again. I felt a tear come then, which might have been a fear-tear or a relief-tear but most likely a happy-tear. It was followed by a silly little whimper. He cradled my head and kissed me again, whispering, ‘It’s okay. You’re safe. We’re safe.’
I clutched at his arms and held them and felt dizzy with the overwhelm of it all.
My nose has got that pre-tears fizz about it. The man in the long coat injured eight people that day. One of them was hit over the head with a chair. It took three security men and four police with guns to stop his rampage. We could hear people screaming. But even so, there in the shrubbery with my head in Hugh’s hands and his beautiful eyes wide for me, I have never felt so safe.
And then I lost consciousness, which is SUCH a shame because I completely missed the most poignant moment of my life.
The next bit I remember was waking in a hospital bed to find my parents beside me and no Hugh and I was breathless with having been cheated of my happy ending. They said I had lost consciousness due to concussion but I knew better. It was the over-beat of a desperate heart. Percussion concussion.
Hugh had apparently travelled with me in the ambulance and then gone home. He came back to visit the following day. Hannah came with him. She brought flowers, said that the word for flower in Japanese is ‘hana’ and then there was one of those awkward silences that come before people say they should go when they don’t have to. I couldn’t look at Hugh but the monitor showed my heart-rate increase. And we all knew. Except Dad, but that doesn’t mean anything – he once didn’t notice that Mum had left him for a morning until she came back at lunchtime with her suitcase in her hand. Hannah and Hugh’s visit lasted about four minutes. Mum eyeballed me as they left and then said, ‘Goodness, Zannah. The air is thick with feeling. I can barely breathe.’
Dad said, ‘You muppet,’ to the footy on the telly, and Mum said, ‘Exactly.’
Later she gave me a lecture about being assertive, the same one I’d heard time and time again since I was capable of memories. She suggested I ask him out. I said, ‘But he’s with Hannah. That would be mean. And I wouldn’t know what to wear.’
She responded with, ‘No knickers.’
Dad heard that bit. The two of them laughed all the way through the final quarter.
I was out of hospital by that afternoon, my cheek stitched up, my head mildly aching, and my heart in agony. I never found out what provoked the man in the long coat’s fury and despair, but Ria and I imagined up theories.
‘He probably just calculated his uni debt,’ said Ria. ‘Or a computer lost his thesis.’
‘Or perhaps he lost his ultimate heart’s desire.’ I sighed. ‘Perhaps he’d been dreaming about it forever and had a tantalising taste of it, then had it taken away again.’
Ria got under the bed and said, ‘Go on, throw chairs. I’m safe.’
Five days later, Hugh knocked on my door and politely asked if he could come in. I’d been trying to phone him in a normal sort of friendly way – ostensibly to thank him for saving me from a madman but really to pop a gauge on the wall of the ‘friendship’ and try to fill the torment of silence. His asking permission to come in was not normal. Usually he would just rock on in with a ‘Hey-ho’ (We’re talking early nineties here; ‘yolo’ wasn’t a thing then) so we were back in strange territory. I think I offered him a hot drink. He declined. And then he said, ‘Hannah and I have broken up.’ I resisted the urge to change my offer to champagne (and wet my knickers) and sort of just stared. He looked back with concern and said, ‘How’s your face?’
‘Stitches out tomorrow. How’s your heart?’ Something had steeled in me; I felt braver.
‘No stitches required,’ he said and then with a husky half-sigh, he walked towards me and was kissing me with such tenderness I thought I might cry again, only there wasn’t time because the tenderness turned quickly into something very effervescent and over-flowing and we were trying to stem its current, which meant that even breathing seemed an imposition.
If Coralie were commentating (bit of a creepy thought given that she’s Hugh’s [dead] grandmother), she might have said that this moment marked the end of the beginning of love. She might have said that from here on in was the middle part, when all the hard work really starts. And I might have reassured the man in the long coat that there are longer, more enduring hardships than the slippery-quick loss of something you didn’t really know.
But Coralie’s not here, and for the sake of the Sparkle Project and my historical recordings, I’m going to recount that Very First Time:
His arms were wrapped around me and his hands were under my clothes, in my hair, on my thighs. I felt a sway in my legs but his arms kept me upright. His kisses were gentle but fierce and even better than I’d imagined countless times. He paused for a moment, one hand cupping my face and the other low on my back, and looked into my eyes, searching left then right, left then right, because he was close enough to tell. There seemed to be something he wanted to say, but I kissed it away because I was afraid that words might tarnish the shine, and because I wanted him so terribly and it was time not to wait.
He let me take him into the bedroom, where I unbuttoned his shirt, and where I couldn’t decide whether to gaze at him or kiss him. So I did both, and the relief of not hiding, and finally fixing my eyes on him openly, was huge. He slipped my T-shirt over my head and took a moment to brush my stitched cheek. He whispered, ‘I’m sorry you got hurt. I’ll stop anyone hurting you again,’ and he touched away a tear that I didn’t know was there. He kissed my smile and breathed my sighs and felt my tongue with his. I swayed again, and this time he fell with me onto the bed. The smell of him that close was more than familiar; it was comfort. Soap and warmth and that mystery smell of a late summer afternoon. And a hint of home. We kept our eyes open and watched one another.
(Dr Folds would approve. He is a strong advocate for keeping eyes open during sex. At what point, I wonder, did we stop wanting to look at each other while making love? Was it when bits of our bodies started getting a bit wobbly? Or does he still watch and I don’t want to watch him watching the wobbles?)
He let me take the lead but he didn’t let me rus
h, which is what I wanted to do. He took some of the moments to take my hand, to brush the frenzy from my hair, to slow me down. He smiled at me and I was shy again, so I buried my face in his chest. He kissed my neck and whispered, ‘Susannah, don’t hide,’ then louder, ‘Susannah.’ So I looked up at him and he said, ‘I love your face.’ And then he kissed my face and my heart pounded again because he said the word ‘love’ and I was frantically searching for whether ‘I love your face’ meant the same thing as ‘I love you’, and because I had to bite my lips from saying, ‘Oh, but I love you, all of you,’ and other things that might have frightened him away. Thankfully the next kiss was on my mouth and by then I was no longer in control of my lips or my actions, because without thinking I had his jeans unbuttoned and my hand on his boxer shorts where I found his penis, heated and straining against the cotton.
(Dammit, that word is so mood destroying. But we can’t have cock, knob or stiffy et al.)
He slipped my shorts down then. My knickers went with them and soon we were both naked. Excruciatingly, he slowed me down again; rolled me beneath him and traced my skin with his fingers. From my lips, my neck, my breasts to my tummy stomach. Everything hummed with sensation. All this time I could feel the pressure of him on my thigh and had noted that his penis was substantial. My heart raced faster, matched by a steady thrill in my vagina between my legs. I took him in my hand and the hardness shocked me. He breathed into my neck, kissed my boobs breasts. I bit him lightly on the shoulder in a last-ditch attempt to resist, then guided him quickly to that slippery, wanting part of me that took him easily inside.
