Affection

by Krissy Kneen

  I bought pointy black shoes like some of the boys and listened to Bauhaus.

  James made the trip down from Gladstone to visit me and although I missed the evenings playing Dungeons & Dragons, the thought of sex was more immediate. James and I touched and kissed and petted but he still refused to have sex with me. “For your own good,” he said, and I never knew what he meant by that.

  He left me to masturbate by myself, I shut myself in my room and drew the curtains and spent hours at it, coming and then resting and then coming again.

  Then I had a dream about Evan.

  I liked him. Many wouldn’t, but I did. He had an awkward sense of humor. Sometimes it didn’t seem like he was telling a joke, but hours later I would repeat something he’d said and find the humor in it. He talked a lot about computers, which were then new to the world. Some of us had them, huge boxy things with barely any memory. I printed my assignments out on a dot matrix printer and watched the paper catch and feed out all askew.

  I still liked my typewriter with the two-line memory and the automatic corrective action that seemed to make the words vanish off the page with just the press of a key. He preferred my computer. He liked talking about old Star Trek episodes. He liked Mr. Spock and I liked McCoy and we agreed that explained the difference between us. Still, we were fond of each other. He made me cups of tea and didn’t even ask the other gamers if they wanted one. I sometimes put a weedy flower in the keyhole of his dorm room because I knew that no one ever brought him flowers.

  I dreamed that we were in the bath together playing D&D. There were other people in the room, the whole gothic, geeky, overnourished, undersunned bunch of them. All of them with their little painted figures of magic users and dwarfs and rangers. Someone was rolling the multisided die and it was skittering loudly on the tiled floor. No one seemed to mind that Evan and I were naked in the bath. No one seemed to mind when I ducked down under the water to suck on his penis, an impulse I found odd even in the dream since I had never wanted even to touch him before this. I liked him. He was fond of me. There was a kind of familial easiness between us that we appreciated, but I had never even thought about his body under his pointy boots and his black trench coat.

  In the dream there were these little dives under the surface of the water. There was this held-breath suckling as if I were a child and his penis rose like a nipple in front of me. I tasted his pearly pre-come and it was sweet as milk. I would rise up for air and someone would tell me to roll the dice and I would ask them to roll it for me. A twenty-sided die, which is almost a sphere, juddering across the hard surface.

  “You’ve been stabbed in the arm by an orc,” the dream-nerd Evan told me and I shrugged, took a deep breath, and went down to nuzzle at the orange fur dusting his balls like peach fuzz.

  It was a strange dream. Unexpected. I sat opposite him in the common room and we had our little metal figurines in front of us and there was the Dungeon Master’s screen between us and I found myself blushing.

  He stood and went out to the kitchen and came back with two cups of tea. One for him. One for me. No one seemed to notice. This was what he always did. I was the only girl that played and I suppose he did this out of a sense of chivalry. He put the cup of tea down in front of me and smiled and I wondered if his pubic hair really was the same color as his beard.

  EVAN

  I had sex with Evan because I wanted a ticket to the movies. I have to be honest about this.

  He won tickets to the preview of Little Shop of Horrors. I imagined sitting in the cinema and my nostrils filled with the scent of popcorn, a comforting chocolate Malteser kind of smell, childhood and heavy petting and Sunday afternoon all rolled into a plush red seat. I thought about that movie all through dinner. I dreamed it, fantasized the ending. I even found myself wondering about the characters during Cultural Studies. I wanted to go. I opened my wallet and counted the money there, almost enough for a bus ticket. I wanted Evan’s extra ticket and so I seduced him one afternoon.

  It was his first time. It crossed my mind that a virginity was probably worth more than the cost of a ticket to the movies and I felt a little guilty, but I liked him. I liked the way he shuddered nervously and became very quiet, looking up at me as if I were an angel, deflowering him in a halo of heavenly light. I liked the way he was made, the compact muscles and the strong curve of his legs. I liked the way he waited for me to show him where and how and the way he listened when I told him what to do and why to do it. I liked his studiousness, his bookishness. I liked the way he came too quickly but was quite prepared to come again before too long.

  Afterward he glanced up at me briefly, gratefully. He seemed surprised to be here with me at all. And there was that shy penis, hiding in its foreskin. A strange new piece of male anatomy that I had never seen before. He shuddered when I sucked on it. He seemed to feel every small movement of my tongue. He eased my head away when I became too eager in my attentions. His tender shy penis, a pleasant surprise hiding beneath the horror show of eighties clothing.

  I felt a nibble of regret. I had stuck with James for quite a while but I wanted sex, and he wouldn’t give it to me and he wouldn’t move to Brisbane and so that was the end of it. I settled back down onto the new thing, this D&D playing computer programmer who brought me cups of tea in his little crocheted slings, and it felt okay.

  Later, in the fading afternoon, I asked him about the ticket, but he had already promised it to his friend. I watched them leave for the movies together. I stayed at home and drank tea and wondered, until they returned home gloriously happy and showed me the prize that had been hidden under their theater seat. They were best friends. I liked that he had stuck with his promise to his best friend.

  That night I came into his bedroom and taught him things. He smelled a bit like chocolate, and there was a kernel of popcorn caught in the cuff of his jeans.

  I longed for the cinema all through the long slow fucking. He was a nice man, quiet, and with the kind of eyes that could be cold or blazing if you caught them in a particular light. He was intelligent and had a nice body. I had flirted with him as I flirted with any of them, intermittently and without much commitment, but he was almost my favorite. I liked the short boy with curly hair who used to bang his forehead against the wall whenever his computer wasn’t working, too. There was not much between them, the fire-eyed boy and the boy with mild Aspergers. It could have gone either way.

  Except for that ticket to the movies.

  SHARE HOUSE

  When we moved out of Raymont Lodge I bought a bed. A bed and sheets. I had an image in my head of silk sheets, thick and heavy, sheets that you could wrap your naked flesh in and have pleasure just from the shrouding. The synthetic satin was a concession to my poor financial status. The sheets were cheap but they were a bright red and they looked beautiful and felt quite nice until the polyester started to sweat.

  A bed was more difficult. I wanted something large, some king-size wonder of engineering. I wanted a bed you could spend months on. A virtual boat of a bed made for languid fucking, pillows like marshmallows, smelling faintly of expensive perfume.

  I decided on a waterbed on someone else’s recommendation and the glitz of porno-chic appealed to me. There was an excessiveness that suited. I imagined a thousand liquid nights and the delight of a back and forth rocking, a boat tied to shore but still caught by a gentle tide, tugging me toward a boundless ocean.

  We filled the bed and lay down, and an icy cold caught me in the kidneys. I shivered. The thing would take twenty-four hours to warm up. I was determined to have sex on it despite this, but the positioning was impossible. If you lay on your back there was the issue of the cold. If you knelt there was the impossibility of the waves, each little thrust caught on a tide and magnified in a series of ever-larger ripples. It made us laugh and tumble over onto our sides, in which position we took to shivering. We put on sweaters, coats, socks. We made a woolly bundle of our bodies leaving peepholes in the layers through which
to touch each other. We spent a joyous time experimenting with the oceanic roll of waves. There was much laughter, but at the end of it all we climbed down onto the carpet, shedding our layers of winter woollies on the way and burned our knees on the old short pile. We lay on the postcoital carpet and I dragged the satin sheets off the bed and they were too hot and made me sweat.

  I woke and rolled over onto the hard ache of the space beside him and I told him about my disappointment in the sheets and the fact that I had probably spent everything I had on a king-size bed that I couldn’t fuck in.

  “We’ll fuck on the floor.”

  He pulled me to him and he had the most beautiful clear blue eyes, full of a need for me to like him. I did. I lay on the floor beside my waterbed and shut my eyes tight and I hugged him and wondered if I had finally come home.

  There were a few of us in the house. A motley bunch of Dungeons & Dragons players, a goth, the Asperger’s boy. We all gathered at our house on weekends and pulled our little metal figures from their drawstring bags. We set up the screen and rolled the dice, but I was already tiring of the routine.

  Sometimes the boys would come over to watch pornography. You could rent the hard stuff from some video stores, you just had to ask them. It was always my job to ask because the boys were too embarrassed. It made them feel like perverts. They said it was different for girls. It wouldn’t look like I was dirty, I would just be liberal minded. Brave and bold and unrepressed. Still, every time I went up to the counter the man there looked me up and down and it was clear he thought I might well be a pervert; and one that he might contemplate fucking if the lights were off and he was drunk enough.

  We watched the pornography in the dark because that’s what you were supposed to do. We sat there with cups of tea, three of us, sometimes four. We watched and when it was over we stomped around the flat for a minute or two before slouching off to our respective bedrooms. Sometimes we snickered at the terrible attempts at comedy—the one with the fireman, the one with the doctor, the one with the tradesman and the plumbing problem.

  One night someone lifted himself up from out of the couch and knelt by the video player and pressed rewind. We watched it again.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  And again. But each time we watched it we saw the same thing, a man with his entire fist buried in a girl up to the elbow. She looked less than comfortable. She whimpered and grimaced and winced. Measuring the potential length of his arm, we silently calculated the position of his fist. Somewhere up near her stomach.

  “How is such a thing even possible?”

  In the spirit of scientific enquiry we pressed rewind and watched the video again.

  I remembered the scene later, during several failed attempts at a similar scenario. “How did he even get his knuckle through in the first place? ” My snickering dislodged Evan’s slippery fist yet again.

  We had used most of a tube of KY and he had small hands, delicately tapered fingers. I thought perhaps that we might manage it with a little persistence. We came back to the idea repeatedly. I thought about the scene from the porno. The sweaty gasps, half pain, half pleasure. I wondered if the process was damaging her in some way. The close shot showed his elbow, slick with lube, protruding from the slick mouth of her vagina. There was a little bit of movement, perhaps a centimeter, as the man braced himself against the table and put the weight of his shoulder behind the process. We didn’t see the entry or what might have been the gory retreat, his limb pulled in excruciating inches from the livid mess of her. We saw his elbow pushing in and out a fraction. We saw a pained close shot of her face, teetering on the line between pleasure and regret.

  If Evan’s knuckles were just a little slimmer I might have some sense of what this could be like. We failed every time. The effort of it, the straining, and the image reflected back at me when he held up a little mirror, tipped me over the edge and after that I had no interest in continuing the experiment.

  It was only years later, traveling across the Story Bridge, imagining what I would be cooking for a dinner party, that I realized he was an amputee. This must have been the trick to it. From a lifetime’s worth of strange questions lodged in my brain and puzzled over by my subconscious, this conundrum was answered, suddenly and without provocation. He must have been an amputee. We never saw his fist enter her or retreat. All we saw was this small movement, this in and out of his elbow.

  Well, we were young and naïve and, although we knew they were rare, odd things like the whole-forearm fisting scene still seemed like a possibility.

  Sometimes Evan gave me things. One was perhaps the most romantic present anyone had ever given me. When I unwrapped it I found something he had made himself, put time and effort into. Some kind of battery thing that whirred and jiggled when you flicked a switch, and then gaffer tape holding the jeweled green handle of a screwdriver in place.

  I wasn’t certain when I first opened the wrapping. I was all, “Oh, thanks” without really understanding, until he turned it on and it started to buzz and the green end bounced quickly back and forth.

  I knew about vibrators. I had seen them in porn but I had never actually met one in real life. Now I did. A homemade thing constructed with a little skill and a lot of tenderness. A little Tonya Todman perhaps, but I was pleased with it.

  Evan unwrapped me in turn, and there was a click of plastic on bone when the new toy rattled against my pubis. He pressed the screwdriver end inside me and the sound of it was muffled by his hand, the various folds and clutches of flesh. I could feel the shudder of it echo out toward my skin. A little twitching, and I was quick to distance myself from the situation, talking myself down, because it would all be over if I jumped off too quickly.

  My skin was twitchy tingly. I dragged his head toward me and kissed his open mouth and whispered love into him.

  It was difficult to stay removed from my body, the vibrations called me back into myself. I wanted it to last, but of course it didn’t and I tripped into the disappointment of an early conclusion.

  RESTLESS

  Evan finished university while I was struggling into second year. He found a good job, and a job meant money which was something I seemed to have less and less of. He went out to pubs with our friends who had also started to earn a wage. They went to movies that I could not afford. I found myself excluded from any aspect of his life that related to recreation. In the evenings he watched television with our flatmate. I could hear their laughter as I hunched over my assignments and my novel in progress. I began to look at other people. Passing strangers aroused me.

  We fucked regularly, but it had become something he did to placate me. I wanted sex and therefore he roused himself from whatever else he was doing and gave me sex. The hollowness of the act echoed. “You always want sex. Sometimes it’s okay not to have sex.”

  But it was true, I did always want sex, and sometimes I saw it everywhere. I remember one bus journey particularly. A group of schoolgirls, all giggly and blond and fine tanned skin from a bottle, their uniforms too short at the waist and the little indentations of their belly buttons marring the perfectly flat surface of their stomachs. I was barely older than them: in my early twenties, but they were teenagers as I had never been a teenager.

  You could smell them, the high school smell of cheap perfume and sweat and heat. The heat was something else, I could feel it through my knees, which were closer to them. When the bus lurched and one of them fell toward my lap there was heat in there, too. I wanted them to be naked. I wanted this more than anything in that moment. I was appalled at myself, but I wanted it. They were ripe. They were peach fuzz and perfect sweet flesh. I wanted to bite down into them before the flesh was spoiled by their slow trudge toward death.

  I became a monster in that moment of longing. They would look at me if they knew and curl their lips back in disgust. They would look at my flesh, which was never beautiful, and smell my damp earth muskiness and make hideous squealing noises in disgust.
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br />   I started to walk again. It would happen in the evenings, when the boys were settled down to bad American TV. I would hear them laugh as I shut the door behind me and they would barely notice I was gone. I would walk and then sometimes I would be overtaken by a wave of panic and I would run, as if something was chasing me. Sometimes I thought something was actually chasing me. Sometimes I heard it behind me and I glanced around and it was nothing but traffic.

  I had felt this before. I remembered my days at the Country Women’s Association and I remembered, also, a nostalgic scene in our backyard, waiting for Dragonhall to be built. I remember telling my sister about it—something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong. I don’t see the point anymore. I can’t find a good enough reason to keep going. I had felt this before and therefore I would feel this again, and the day-to-day of it all was not enough to keep me trudging on.

  I stopped at a chemist thinking I would buy sleeping pills, but I didn’t know what to ask for. I pointed to the largest packet of extra strength aspirin and paid for it with the last of my Austudy money. I half-walked, half-ran back to our home.

  The boys barely glanced up from the television screen. I slunk through to the bathroom and I heard them laughing and I was invisible. I took the whole packet of tablets because I thought that might do it. I could go to sleep then and the strange sense of panic would be gone. I lay on our waterbed and it was the rocking I think, the rocking and an odd dizziness. I was up as quickly as I could struggle out of the sagging bladder of the bed and vomiting into the toilet, a little onto the floor and there were tablets in it. A scatter of half-dissolved tablets all over the tiles.