Affection

by Krissy Kneen

  I have started a blog, I tell him, because I am jealous of Christopher’s “Furious Horses,” writing a new story every day.

  What is it called?

  “Furious Vaginas.”

  Hahaha, he says and then it seems he is gone. A silence which I punctuate with question marks at intervals.

  I like that it isn’t about sex. He is back again.

  Isn’t it?

  No, he says. It seems to be about other things.

  I ask him to send me some of his work. I have heard that his writing is good but I am not sure that I have read any of it. We talk about Nicholson Baker as he gathers things together to send as a file. Paul multitasks like a demon. This, more than anything, marks him as a member of the next generation. I know that I am far too old for him. I am from a different era.

  Vox is about us, I say. You and me.

  Ah, but I never talk about sex.

  But I do.

  Therefore Vox is about you, but not about us, exactly.

  You will talk about sex one day, I tell him. I will have an influence on you.

  When you talk about sex, Paul says, you are not actually talking about sex.

  And so of course I answer, When you talk about other things you are always talking about sex but in an oblique way.

  And then the file comes down. I click over to my Gmail and they are there, Paul’s stories. A little paperclip and beneath it three small files. I open them. A new message from Paul makes a little popping sound, but I ignore it. He will know I am reading. His stories are good, clever. One of them is funny and it makes me smile. It is not until I open the third one that I feel my heart engaging. This story goes on too long. There is a moment when I feel my chest expanding, my heart opening up to him, my eyes pricking with tears, and then the story moves on a little, like a train that has overshot the station, leaving the passengers stranded with no platform to step down onto. I switch to chat and tell him this and he immediately starts to fix the thing. He sends me an amendment, which seems better.

  I can’t believe you went and changed it just like that.

  Why wouldn’t I if it makes it better?

  I don’t know, because you are a young person. Young people are precious about their work.

  I like to edit, he tells me. I like to make things better.

  I like you, is my reply. I like you very much. I like your stories. If you ever write a novel I might develop a crush on you.

  I am not sure I will write a novel. I may be a short story writer. I like short stories.

  Ah well, then you will never have my unwanted romantic attentions.

  This is a risk I will have to take, Paul tells me, and I laugh. He makes me smile and he makes me laugh.

  When Paul signs off for the night I go back into his Facebook page just to look at the little house perched precariously in the storm. It is a beautiful image, painted by a friend of his. I like the painting on its own merits but I also now associate it with our conversations. Looking at it, I feel a liquid rush. I become unsettled. I know that I’ll have to masturbate or I will never sleep.

  Oh, so now I have become sexually attracted to an image that stands in for a person that I can only vaguely remember in real life. The physical representation of Paul is that image. I lie on the couch and watch it as I place my hand quietly between my legs, and the release is quick and violent. When it is done there is still the picture on the screen and I really can’t remember what he looks like in real life. When I close my eyes there is a little house on a hill and I must not concentrate on it too closely because I can already feel the warmth of desire rising up in me for a second time, and if I give in to this I will never get to bed.

  My boy is sleeping on his side and the light on his face is a real and beautiful thing. Strange to be able to masturbate over someone else’s profile picture and not feel my love and desire for my husband at all diminished.

  I know better than to wake him with my caresses at this point. He will be tired and irritable. I lie beside him and I am wide awake and he smells like hot dough, baking, and I want to take him into my mouth. My desire for it is difficult to ignore. As I wonder vaguely if I should get up and release the pent-up energy discreetly in the lounge room, I find that I am yawning. I turn over onto my side and leap desperately for a wave of sleep.

  MOVING ON

  Blacktown 1983

  Something crashed outside. There were muffled voices. The kitchen was being packed away. The ancient boxes of jelly and custard with their out-of-date faces grinning on the packets, the tins so old they had lost their labels, the more recent purchases of tomatoes, beans, rice. All of this was being transferred to boxes. We would ferret around in these, piecing together our makeshift meals while the kitchen was being painted. The house was a mess of boxes and baskets. There was always someone running one way or the other. We were moving to Dragonhall and although we were exhausted by the weight of packing there was a playful joy in the air.

  My grandfather was separate from this activity. He was responsible for his own room. There were boxes leaning up against the cupboard but he had made no effort to assemble them. His enlarger still crouched in its corner, the trays for developer and fixative were still laid out side by side.

  The night before we left I listened to Bach with him, squinting through the dark to catch some glimmer of change, but he was impassive. I wondered if anyone had even told him that we were moving. He had taken to eating his meals in his room in the dark, with the music turned up loud enough to obliterate any trace of the women of the house. He listened to the news in the morning and again at midday and before dinner. He shuffled out, stiff with too much sitting, to shower and shave and sometimes he wandered into the forest of our front yard to stand with the hose turned on the ferns and the river oaks and the pots of herbs bordering the porch.

  He had separated himself from the others. When they spoke to each other it was to convey some practical information: “Do you want porridge or toast for breakfast?” “We are all going down to the shops, lock the door if you go outside.” “Please can you turn that racket down, I can’t even think with your violins blazing.” If they had spoken to him about the move to Queensland, then it was when I wasn’t in the house. I couldn’t tell if he was as excited about the move as the rest of us. It seemed that he would grow roots, hunkering down when we were disentangling ourselves from Blacktown.

  Nonetheless, we would be leaving. One bag for each person, carry-on luggage. Mine was mostly books and a few scant changes of clothing; my pajamas, which I was wearing now and would stuff into the bag when it was morning. The next time I wore them I would be there. There was still cleaning to be done and I helped as much as I could, but there was a point when tempers flared and the cleaning turned to bickering and the dogs, sensing that there was some major change encroaching, stayed in their corners whimpering. The great dane rose and paced and was shouted at and settled momentarily before rising again. I kissed them all goodnight, received an affectionate slap from my grandmother and squeezed past boxes, past places in the corridor where a younger version of myself saw phantom children scampering and the place where my sister held me down and tickled me till I urinated on the floorboards, and the far end of the corridor where our games of Minotaur would end with me crouched and weeping in the dark as my sister loomed over me and growled low in her throat like an angry wolf.

  When I reached my aunt’s study, where we would be sleeping amongst the boxes and the stacked furniture, I felt I had run the gauntlet. I was restless, ready to move forward into an adventure.

  “If you tell them, I’ll kill you.”

  I did not see my sister at first. She was hunkered down behind wrapped paintings, squeezed together with packaging tape. I could see the faint glow of blue light and when I stepped over piles of boxes to the mattress on the floor that we would be sharing, I realized that the television was there. She had peeled back the cardboard from the front and slung a blanket over it, tenting herself close up t
o the faint hum of the volume turned down low. It was against the rules to watch the TV unsupervised, particularly after dark when we might catch a glimpse of something scandalous.

  “I’ll let you watch if you promise not to tell your family.”

  She had taken to calling them that—your mother, your aunt—as if they were unrelated to her, extracting herself from their fierce familial hug.

  When I crawled onto the mattress with her I felt my heart pounding. One glance at the screen and I was ready to brave the punishment alongside my sister because there, in the tantalizing veiled light, was David Bowie. This, then, must be the film that I had read about and never seen. The Man Who Fell to Earth.

  “Have I missed much? ”

  “No. Just started.”

  We settled down together, unlikely conspirators given our checkered history. From what I had read this film would be much worse than PG, which was the only rating that we were allowed to watch. This was at least an R rating in its uncut form.

  Bowie bounced naked and there was his penis. I had never seen a human penis before. This tiny wormy thing, this little piece of ropey flesh was what all the fuss was about. I was incredulous and yet aroused, mostly by the covert nature of the viewing. When the penis disappeared from the screen I longed to see it again. A penis in the flesh, not just the vague representations in art, little lumps of stone at the crux of sculptures, startling overstatements on the walls of Egyptian tombs. This was a human penis and it was like nothing I could have anticipated. It was way past my bedtime and I was glued to the screen. Drug use, violence, sex.

  There was a sound in the corridor. We snapped the television off and listened, trembling under the covers, until we heard the toilet flushing and whoever it was walked back to the lounge room and shut the door. We giggled, sisters suddenly, and I wished I had been brave enough to do this before, join my sister on her adventures, break the rules and laugh and never once care that I might be caught.

  I had my own secrets, of course. I hid objects in my bedroom that were long and thin enough to engage in sexual experimentation: candles, pencils, things with rubbery textures, costume jewelry, necklaces that could be inserted and removed stone by stone.

  The only door that could be locked inside the house was the bathroom and so I would smuggle my toys in there hidden amongst my clothing. I was fond of long baths. I had a repertoire of lascivious images borrowed from the banned books and I took them out and turned them over in my memory until they were worn thin and smooth. I learned to hurry toward my silent orgasms. I practiced till I could come quickly and often, in the same way that other teenagers practiced smoking: hurried puffs, and all the evidence removed before anyone chanced by.

  Here in the quiet moments, when the film had played out its terrible conclusion, I was tempted to share my secret with my sister. I was obsessed by sex. I wanted to tell her I touched myself; a lot, several times a day. I wanted to ask my sister if she did the same, and if there was someone out there in the world that she thought about when she did it. I wanted to know if there was anyone she loved that she would be leaving behind.

  But we had been assigned a double mattress on the floor and I was afraid that my confession would shatter the tenuous collegiality. I turned my back to her and said goodnight and waited to hear her fall asleep. Instead she sighed and tossed restlessly for a while before turning toward me.

  “I don’t want to go to Queensland,” she said, less than a whisper, just breath and the shape of the words on her quiet lips. “I won’t stay there for long.”

  I shifted onto my back, afraid to look at her in case she raised the barriers once more.

  “I’m eighteen next year,” she told me. “Hicksville, backwater, country bumpkins. I’ll work for a year and then I’ll take off.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Anywhere. Away.”

  She settled down with her back toward me and I was careful not to touch her skin under the blankets. In normal circumstances she would never share a bed with me but this was different. One more night and we would be gone.

  I could smell the weedy scent of river oaks, chill air, the sound of my family working late into the morning, scrubbing cupboards and painting skirting boards. Occasionally there would be a little tinkle of laughter; sometimes a yelp as one dog or another was tripped over or stood on.

  I could smell the constant stream of tobacco smoke, one cigarette after another. My sister’s breath weighed heavy with sleep. The sunlight began to seep into the sky and I wasn’t ready for a new day.

  The movers would be arriving in a matter of hours. Perhaps they had already packed the pots and pans and I would have to face the day without a coffee.

  I closed my eyes and tried to force myself to sleep, but I was held at arm’s length from oblivion by a fluttering that was half my own excitement, half my sister’s foreboding and when the door was flung open, “Krissy, Karen, better get up now,” I was already too exhausted to lift my head.

  HETEROSEXUAL AND MONOGAMOUS

  Brisbane 2008

  I am folding my husband’s clothes into vaguely neat piles when I remember the night we met. Strange how memory works, the scent of the washing powder, which hasn’t dissolved completely and clings to the crotch of his jeans in little white clumps. I turn the sleeves over a shirt, trying to replicate Anthony’s obsessive neatness, and I am transported to the chaos of my flat and the sight of a man crawling through the window.

  He woke my husband, who was not my husband yet. I blinked at his beautiful face and couldn’t, in fact, remember his name. I thought it might be Andrew but I was too shy to try it out in case I was mistaken.

  The man was my neighbor but Andrew wasn’t to know that. A short man, the neighbor, barely five foot two, round and with a lot of hair. You could see the hair poking out from the top of the towel wrapped around his waist. A shirt of hair clothing his entire upper body, and the hair on his head kept long, cascading down his back in a ponytail. My neighbor hefted himself up through the window and hit the floor with a thud, and my husband woke.

  We both glanced up at the man climbing through my window with only a towel wrapped around his waist.

  “Oh,” he said, and, “sorry. I didn’t realize . . .” and he left by the door, pulling it gently shut behind him.

  “I have never slept with him,” I told my husband. I measured people in this way at the time, dividing them up into lovers and ex-lovers, potential lovers and those I would not sleep with. Scant few. My neighbor included.

  “Okay Kathy.”

  And I laughed. “I don’t remember your name either.”

  “You will,” he said.

  It sounded like a line. “Ah. Will I.”

  “Yes. You won’t be able to get rid of me.”

  I shuffled up to sitting, pulled the pillow comfortably behind my back.

  “Andrew,” I said.

  “Anthony.”

  “Anthony, then. I am not heterosexual or monogamous.”

  He nodded. “I understand, but you will be while you are with me.”

  “And will I be with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really? For how long?”

  “Long enough.”

  He kissed me then, and it was nice. Kissing wasn’t a thing I prided myself on, but there was a tenderness behind this kiss and I drank it down. I felt like coffee and a cigarette but a kiss would do. We were disturbed by the shudder of the window being opened again and another man, another neighbor, spidered his way over the sill.

  “Oh,” he said, but he tiptoed into the room regardless, reached for a guitar that was resting against a wall, nodded, waved and scrambled out through the window once more, all jangly strings and echoing wood.

  “I’ve slept with him,” I told my husband.

  “Heterosexual and monogamous, Kathy.”

  “Krissy.”

  He kissed me. I liked it. I didn’t believe him then, but now, eighteen years later, I wonder how he knew.

>   DRAGONHALL

  Bororen 1983

  I stood on the floor and looked out through the bones of the unfinished house. The walls would go up tomorrow but they had laid the floor first, which made no sense to me. It looked like a dance floor, polished wood running straight and shiny from one side of the house to the other, still open to the elements. I stood on the polished boards and imagined the tracks of kangaroos bouncing over the floorboards, brown snakes propelling their sinewy bodies over the slithery surface, cane toads, hundreds of them, congregating in what would become my bedroom.

  It was like two houses conjoined. Our side of the house had three bedrooms, one each for my mother, my sister, and me. Their side of the house had three bedrooms, for my aunt, my grandfather, and my grandmother. There were two doors between the divided camps and we could lock them, separating into our natural divisions. In the middle, a shared space the size of a lounge room. No man’s land. A room to be fought over, just like the place where my grandmother was born. There had always been a divide in the family, and here it had been drawn out, the differences between us made explicit by the pattern of the rooms.

  Dragonhall itself would be on the adjacent property. My grandmother stepped us through it, walking through the jaws of the dragon into the entryway where you would pay your money, buy your gifts. Beyond this there were rooms set up with different tableaux. Fairytales in one part. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, Puck and the Fairy Mountain, the Little Match Girl. Then the real life. Dinosaurs, Egyptian mythology. They seemed to have abandoned the idea of the chocolate lake and the little train for children to ride from room to room. Scaled down, it still seemed that Dragonhall would be a proud monument to their years of work.

  For the moment they had built a Besser Brick shed and all the models were stored in this. There were damages. My grandmother pulled Alice out of a box. Alice had appeared in libraries across the western suburbs, peering out from behind a giant mushroom at the riot of a tea party gone wrong. The plates upended, the guests asleep in coffee cups. A mother nursing a pig in a baby suit, a rabbit checking his watch. Now I saw how her fingers had been bent, the surface layer of plaster cracked, the paint chipped and peeling. I touched her damaged face, brushing aside the wave of sandy blond hair. Real human hair, from the head of a school friend of mine who had told me she was cutting her long blond ponytail off. (I had been distraught, pretty girls should never lose their hair. My own hair was a harsh and scratchy mat of dark curls and I stroked the softness of these locks and wished I could exchange my hair for hers.) I had told my family the story and my grandmother was ready with an offer for the soon-to-be-abandoned hair. Alice looked beautiful wearing my friend’s hair tied back from her face by a blue band of silk.