Both Sides of the Moon

by Duff, Alan

  I am the picture drawings, the crude obscene depictions of lonely wish and hope on every public toilet wall in every public toilet mind. I am a telephone number turned up at the time my pitiful hope appointed — someone will always turn up, eventually or inevitably. Love and lust are out there and in here, our kind’s mind, waiting and wanting, so much, to happen.

  This is the picture of what the boy’s mother did to the man; look at him, a dark straining of urgent meat going in and out that opening into that head that cave mouth, and soon the hand (my mother’s hand, the same picture of); soon he will ask if that feels better and I will have no answer, what answer is there?

  I am my mother, my hand is yanking on his terrible blood-engorged stump of meat; this is obscene, it is altogether terrible in itself if one can disengage his soul, his sensibility from the act and take the act itself for itself.

  Of sweetness and a blinding light, exploding all around us in that darkness with spillover park lamplight like a moon coating over us; it is next a revulsion of facial bristles pushing into my face, trying to consume me in kiss as it gushes down there into and all over my hand, everywhere. I’m in a dream being smothered in sperm, I’m drowning in mother’s period blood, I’m swimming in someone else’s liquid desire, I’m a public toilet boy welcome to the club, no fee, just tithe on your soul, boy. Tithe on your deepest person. (Oh Jimmy, what have you done?)

  Get away, pull away, they could be your own father’s morning unshaven bristles giving you a surprise nuzzle of special good morning affection (oh, good morning, Dad! Do it again). His tongue could be a mother’s but I am rejecting it, as she has done me. This is over now. He’s shot all over me and I, presumably, the same mess somewhere, whenever it ended, over him; how I hate him, and myself worse, what have I done to myself? I’ve got to go, get out of here.

  But he’s stronger. He pulls me back down — hard — on to that park bench, this must be a place of planned contemplation for the daylight park-goers, feel the carved initials on your fingers, of desperate identities wanting immortality, feel his fingers hurting and clutching at your hurting flaccid meat, please, no more (no more).

  You liked that didn’t you, kid, I knew you would, I said you would, we can do this again, we can do it all the time, you and me, just me and you, kid, our secret, eh, my name’s Dan, you’ll get to like Dan, boy, my nickname’s Juice, you can call me Juicy, you’re pretty juicy yourself. Let’s just sit here for a while and then we can do it again.

  My, the stars are out bright and clear tonight, aren’t they, kid? Aren’t they, Jimmy? Nice name that: Jimmy. It suits. (Suits what?) Jimminy Cricket, that’s you. Skinny legs, nice and lean but got it where it counts. Just sit here, enjoy the stars.

  You take much notice of stars, Jimmy? Yeah, yeah I do. (Lots. They used to promise me there was always hope. They used to urge me never to stop questioning. So why didn’t I question this? And why don’t I just jump up and run away and never come back?)

  I’m feeling it come on again, kid. He gropes for me. Come on now, come on, for Juicy; you’re mature, you’re big, you’re full grown for your age, I was right all along, wasn’t I? I picked you, kid. Come on now, bring it up again for me, bring it up. Take me, take me back, kid, oh, I’m so glad this happened, I been waiting a little while now, I only got it occasionally, and they weren’t right, you know?

  (Yeah, I know. Best hand and mouth boy-fucks are vulnerable ones. Vulnerable beings second most attractive, behind confident beings, everyone behind them, far behind, they get everything, do confident ones. But vulnerable ones pick up next best, plain bored housewife, starving determined homo man — going down on him, making him grow again, against his will, his want to escape from here now, let him have made his mistake, put it down to his, Dan’s, lucky experience, let him keep it, me, in his memory treasures; he can pull me out of his treasure box and savour me as he does it to himself and claims me back in his thoughts, his desperate, unloving, consuming, boy-overwhelming thoughts.)

  You’d think he’d be satisfied, you’d think his own meat would be knowing the same pain. But admit soon the pain is dulling, it’s changing to that tingling, re-stimulated sweetness, this shouldn’t be allowed, self-loathing acts like this cannot be permitted pleasurability.

  But I ease back, I could be a woman, my mother to my father to her other man and men, spread-eagling myself and herself, take me now, take me again, man. Worry about it later, the consequences inside. Later back home in the dark, listening to your brothers’ unhomosexual, un-public toilet dreamings, to their purer breaths, to their dreamscape moanings, to their innocence still intact, I know they’re trying to escape too, but not the route I took.

  I’m experienced now, I know what to do, to grab him back, his one-act old-hand partner in the duet on our lamplit moonlight-coated stage, give it to me now, give it back, backwards and forwards, the slish of each other, such a familiar sound, I’ve heard it outside bedroom windows, I’ve seen it shadow-silhouetted on sitting-room floors and sofas and couches, slish-slish-slish, ohh! slish-slish-slish-slish! What’ll happen? Will it climax dry, where will more come from, how can it make itself anew so fast? No, it’ll be a geyser with all the same noise and coming sound but no eruption, but do it now, do it to him and receive it back.

  All right I liked it, I liked it, I like it, Dan — You do? Oh, kid! Slishslishslishslishslish, hand-stroke in the moonlight, it’s right above us, a three-quarter ball of pale yellow, a sexy smile in the white-peppered sky, take me now, man, I’m a spread-eagled boyslut, just like my mother, just like and as bad and maybe lost as my mamma. I’m sorry, someone, I’m sorry, God, if there is one. I am what I am. Everyone and everything is what it is, how can it help it, how can a boy help the time and circumstances he was born in — and made mistake. Or discovery.

  I’m in his grip, I’m taken, I’m not sorry now, I can’t be, I’m just another sexual geyser getting ready to erupt, I’m rushing up from my own boiling below, from my inner raging, we’re one now, I think and I kind of hope; a unity, a come-together coming together, may as well since we’re here, at the same place, the same time, the same deed, under the same moon, this is the bright lit side, even though in the dark; we’re a living throbbing pumping pencil sketch under the moonlight the lamplight … God. God! (God, God!) Good. So good. No other place to be. Rather be nowhere else but here, in this place in time. Come now. Come now, come, come, boy, come, man — Oh! (Oh!)

  Found more fluidy wet within me, within him, it is a miracle of making anew, these wasted babies, this wasted child, these two erupted wasted children, boys they would have been, two lost boys coming into the world to find it under moonlight, cradled in each a hand, a father’s hand, good first morning, child (oh, good morning back, are you my daddy? Are you are a good daddy?) Of course I am, if you don’t ask of your beginning, child. I’m a good daddy, I’ll be a good daddy. This doesn’t count. Not how you’re born, how you were conceived. I’ll love you the same, probably better, baby boy, my child. I’ll find you a mother, and she’ll love you, I promise you you’ll get love. We’ll consume and engulf and swallow you with our love. We’ll give you a permanent coating of lovelight, we will, we will, we will —).

  I better go now, Juice. (Ma. Don’t kiss me.) He’s all played out anyway. Sure, kid. You’d better go, you’ll get into trouble, right, for being out so late. Yeah, I will. Be seeing you. Yeah, kid, and soon. Give me a date, a day, a time. Write it on the wall, initial it in code, our code: J to D. Nine on the ninth. What if others read it, what if someone else breaks the code? What if they do? The more the merrier, right, kid? Oh, I don’t know about that.

  I don’t want anyone knowing, this is, you know (terrible. It’s horrible. It’s truth near unbearable, now it is, now I’m all played out, but only of semen, of spunk, of white sticky fluid I and he can’t see) … I won’t tell anyone. This is our secret. And if someone else turns up I’ll know not to give it away — except if he’s handsome like you, kid! You wouldn’t begr
udge me then, would you? Hey, we could do it, three, together.

  Ugly with two boy beauties, lucky Dan, lucky lucky Juice. Lucky lucky man, to be covered in two boys’ semen. Maybe he’d be between us, a hand each, two boy-lovelies spread-eagled in the starlight, the different smile of the moon. You wouldn’t begrudge me that, would you, kid? No. No, guess not. (Guess not.) The other person might be who I was searching for. We might find each other afterward, glad of the introduction. Ask each other’s names, under another starlight. Ask each other’s troubles, sit there bathing in his words, he in my returned kind, oh he’s as vulnerable I’m as vulnerable, we’ve found each other.

  We’d sit there awkward in our mutual loneliness, two lost youths on a park bench in an open grotto. This wouldn’t be his first either. Ask him: You done it before? Have you? Have you? I asked first. But can’t answer each other. Might break the spell. Feel and hear the creep of each other’s hands, oh let it happen let it be. We’re not homos, we’re loves trying to find self and selves. And now we have. Oh. Oh, God. Slish-slish-slish, it’s really happening, we won’t want to be anywhere else than here. This place. Where love is. Love slishing in the dark, searing its name in our light-filled sky, what we are clutching and moving on to. Our babies will erupt soon, we’ll give them love, won’t we, Daddy? won’t we, Mummy? They have to be loved, do babies. Someone has to love them completely. We will. We will. I (we) promise, child(ren). Your parents promise.

  A promise made under the stars, the moon up there smiling, a little bothered frown there too, down on us, two boys, two young men, two lovers under the moonlight, even though we haven’t met, it’s formed from an idea, a lustful hope, a rejection of the reality of Dan. But if it happened (and it will and did) we are two loves meeting, conjoining. Loved. Loving. Meet again soon, write it somewhere in code, secret, our code. Do it one more time again? Again. Yes, again, love. Love slishing in the dark. Self-loathing with this funny smile on its face.

  17

  Dan’s image, and mine, is haunting me. But life goes on. That’s the taxi mum’s called beeping outside. Right after the post with the child welfare benefit times the four of us. Three of whom she’s grabbed to take to Auntie Girlie’s, Warren’s not home.

  Stop off on the way, cash the coupons at a dairy where she does business, convert government child money for our mother into the big unentitled gambling benefit. On these guilty days, it makes her feel better to have us along, me and my brothers. (We’re getting more distant to each other. It must be our means of survival. Brian’s two years younger, Ian a year and a bit older. I’ve hardly thought of them in the last I don’t know how long. We’ve made our own separate worlds, better that way, insulate you more, keep hurt from hurting you. Easier not to talk, you might hear the echo, see the mirror the same as what’s slowly breaking your brothers the same.)

  Dad’s at work, we’re on school holiday, the money will be spent, the damage done before he comes home to find out from Warren that she’s cashed the welfare coupons — again. When she keeps promising the last was her last.

  Any other day, when she isn’t with a touch of guilt on this matter, Warren would have home base covered, Warren would be the parent his mother isn’t — Oh, he doesn’t mind, is what she says of another loading of her responsibility on to him. Same as when she’s attacking our father: it’s Warren’s duty to get in and protect us, try and get us out of the room, except she has this crazy insistence that we are so solely concerned with justice, with who is truly in the right and who’s in the wrong, she half the time screams that we better not leave the room or we’re just running away from the truth, which is our father goaded and humiliated her into this state with his sarcasm, his use of words, when he knows quite well they rile her do words, his words.

  She’s stopped mid-attack and demanded Warren bring us back into the room to witness a confession from our father, and if there’s none coming then we’ll know with our own eyes and ears that she is in the right. And she’ll stand there for a long, trembling, self-righteous, mortally hurt moment, and then decide there is only one thing she can do, must do, does do: she attacks him again.

  Warren’s been a score of times in between her and one of her fighting sisters, a card-player opponent; he’s been called upon in front of his friends, there’ve been outbreaks in front of his girlfriends, yet he’s carried it, he’s never once struck Mum or screamed at her that her behaviour is madness and it’s killing him and us. From, I don’t know, maybe age eight, he’s been asked to perform a man — oh! (I should have seen the death in his eyes sometime back then — I am ashamed I didn’t, ashamed that I must have been wallowing in myself, my own woes, not to see what was happening to my big brother.) Oh, he’ll be all right. They all say that do the mother sisters of the card schools, the drinking schools, that their designated child of adult responsibility doesn’t mind; meaning if they all say it then it must be true. Meaning that if it is true then it can’t matter and that’s why it’s done: because-it-doesn’t-matter.

  It must have its origins from the warrior days, when children were the shared responsibility of all. It must be why. It must be.

  The card school’s the four sisters: Mum, Girlie, Lucy and Molly who’s come over from Pinevale. And there’ve a couple of others, two big women, dark as Negroes but not as suffering, who fancy their chances at taking these sister bitches to the cleaners. Or the very least, get drunk with them.

  So. Deal ’em up. And kids, here’s a few bob, go buy some lollies, get lost somewhere, don’t bug us; you get hungry buy some fish and chips, anything, now get the hell out of our sight. We got business to do.

  I claim Jack. My brothers find their own mates. We go our separate ways. We’re estranged anyway. Except to Warren. Fuckin’ house stinks of boiled meat and cabbage anyrate. What’ll we do? May as well go up to the abattoir.

  Walk up dusty road. I know he’s looking at me. Like we looked at Hohepa. My turn now. What’s wrong? he asks. Nothing, I say. (We all say nothing when we want to say so much. But how can I?) Nothing, Jack grins back. Nothing but something.

  Uncle Hamu loves his only son Jack. They couldn’t have any more kids. It’s why Jack could drive a car at age ten, because his daddy only had him to love. Jack never questions their mutual love, even when his daddy is drunk or upset or usually both with his wife and smacks her around and won’t stop till she actually demonstrates she’s shut-up, that she’s shut her fuckin’ mouth as she’s been told. Nearly all the fathers do that to their wives, except mine.

  Up that dusty road to the slaughter of animals; hear the bumblebees, the birds, flies buzz, smell the flowers and soon the hinting odour of death. (And inside, it’s a stain on my memory, the odour of him, Dan, his private being, his cock, his semen stain on my existence.) But now doomed animal presence. And us in witness.

  I see cattle with nostrils agape, taking in and snorting last minutes of air, hear their lowing, their dumb animal understanding that an end is adrift everywhere, they must be able to smell the spilled blood of their brethren and yet the single shots don’t panic them, they are slaves from Maori days of yore, inured, mostly, to fate and pain, to sensibility.

  A man prods the hairy rears with a metal rod, startles each one to turn enough to get it into the narrowed chute where a divide of metal is shoved across after it, and then the animal’s eyes start to bulge, great rolling whites trying to see where fate is coming from: it’s standing on the platform above, rolling a cigarette, taking his time to light it because he can see the chain is loaded up.

  Now he takes up his executioner’s weapon, the beast’s head right there, at his feet, and he keeps his smoke going in his mouth and sucks on it as he presses the firing apparatus and fires a rod into hard skull. And there’s a moment, not even a second, when the beast must be suspended between life and death before it falls in a sound of instant drop of weight, a great shuddering, crashing, alarming fall of life to the earth, the concrete-poured ground, pouring its being out and into the chan
nel already running thick over congealed black blood from ended lives.

  The beast slams kicking hooves against its solid-walled temporary coffin, two boys can see two eyes white with sight turned upward into its shattered skull; it is not a pretty sight, but nor are brawling mothers and their dignity bleeding out of them; it is same fucking awful and yet we’re grinning the same and our hearts are going faster.

  And a pair of men attach chains to ankles, and another presses an electric button to haul the still kicking, quivering creature along and up to a height for the line of muscled Maori and a few equally strong European men in white plastic aprons, and exchanging with each other all the time, laughing, teasing one another about things men do, sexual stuff mainly, and manly talk too, rugby, and who passed his Saturday test of manhood, and how pale the white men’s skins are and how dark the Maori men’s skins are back; there’s an edge there but it’s been going on for years, these are mates, joined, unified for a purpose — to reduce cattle and sheep to edible things and wearing things — and later to play their beloved rugby together.

  Labouring man is but muscled ball of not-much-thinking state, and that must be all right or why are they smiling and laughing so much?

  A beast’s weight of a thousand pounds and more hangs poised for the knifing hands who expertly slice and punch fists between hide and clinging membrane; they pull and punch and razor and snip to slip its hide off like a ceremony of removing a woman’s dress, revealing a silvery glistening of flesh barer, as blood continues to pour from its upside-down body to a floor awash with it, but under constant dilution from water hoses directed by an older war-veteran Maori who sings as constantly as the blood rains, in a voice that holds on to every note like a caress.