I am being encouraged to build on my friendships, and I tell Nancy that my friends are being very supportive, because this is what she wants to hear. If she hears what she wants to hear, it is a measure of her success, which, in turn, is a measure of mine. But I do not tell my friends anything. What would I say that would not break the rules? We do not tell each other the truth. We use each other for cover.
When Saz and I got caught cheating on an end-of-term test, she almost opened a vein. She did not mean to. She was terrified of the consequences, others said. I say, any excuse will do. Anyway, she took to herself in the toilets with a broken make-up mirror. Bec found her, stole twenty-five dollars out of her purse, and walked away. That is friendship. Saz was eventually rediscovered by a hysterical Year 8 girl, who fell over running for the nurse’s office and broke two front teeth. I just took the fail and the talking to and went home and had a drink. Maybe the only person who was really punished that day was that Year 8 girl.
I was punished for what I wrote in my diary once. I cannot remember what I had written but I remember being told it was ‘very disappointing’, and then I was slapped. Mum would not even speak to me. I felt bad for her because I had hurt her. My thoughts had hurt her. I had thought something and it had fallen out of my head and done damage. It never occurred to me that she should not have been snooping in my diary in the first place. Pun-ished-for-my-thoughts. What to do when you are not allowed to think? Think in code. Think in codas. Do not think.
Coda: If she hears what she wants to hear, it is a measure of her success, which, in turn, is a measure of mine.
SIX
Through-a-Glass-Dark-ly
I never know the right thing to say or think and sometimes I forget where I am and say things I should not. Or say things I would not if I took a minute to step outside my own head. I like it in here. In my head, I mean. It is other people who are worried about what is going on in there. I have decided not to come out of my head. If they want me, they can come in. I guess that is what Nancy is for.
My life is lived through a glass darkly. Creepy’s mum has a dark glass of red wine sitting on the toilet windowsill. I can see it from here. She keeps a cask in her laundry cupboard that either no one knows about or they choose to ignore. I have seen her get it out and milk it, with darting eyes and a sweaty jaw. Poor lady. She gets the whole cat-pant thing going—I have seen Sylvia do it when Dad is about. Fight or flight. Creepy’s mum need not worry. She never gets caught. I never knew she took her wine into the loo until I saw the glass tucked behind the little curtain at the window there. The wine is the colour of blood. When the sunlight hits the glass, it creates a shimmer like a lady’s fascinator—like a Gorgon behind spider web. I live my life through a glass darkly, waiting for the light to fascinate me.
My nanna told me about Gorgons. I was very little, and the idea of wings of gold and a belt of serpents scared and excited me. This is why people do not look at me or, when they do, they see me as if I am a reflection. Maybe it is me holding up the mirror. I am safest behind glass. Like my bedroom window. Creepy and I are both protected by the window but we have to be careful: our security is diluted by the space between. Sometimes I long to shut the curtains on Creepy to defend myself, or him, or both of us. Sometimes I watch him and wish he would turn to stone.
He is always reading and he writes on the pages of his books. I wonder what marks he leaves on the pages. I imagine him to be succinct. Yes and no and why, and perhaps he cross-references, too, because I have seen him throw down the book he is reading and grab another and rifle through it in a keyed-up sort of way. He is most graceful with his books. It is when he is most present: the light hits him differently and he is suddenly all gangling elegance.
His reading excludes me. I do not like to read. Reading confuses me. I think I am the kind of person who would really enjoy reading, if I were capable of it. It must be like living in your head with other people there as well. Like company you can turn on and off at will. Like real friends, maybe.
I am not stupid. I can see the words and I can read them, and the sentences go by and the paragraphs build up, layer after layer, but then something weird happens. It is as if I get saturated. I get to a point where all the words and sentences and paragraphs that made perfect sense going in start to bang into one another and get muddled, and then it just lodges there in a headachy mess. A fat wad of unsolvable words that might as well be a foreign language. I drank a glass of milk once and then had to be sick. When I vomited it up, even though the milk had only been inside me a little while, it came out all lumpy and sour. That is what happens when I read: words go in and sit and curdle.
So when I watch him read, I am sort of jealous. I like that he wrote me a quote from a book and put it in the window. Yesterday he wrote another one: ‘My instincts are all against a woman being too frank and at her ease with me,’ and then he told me it was by someone called Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I smiled because I knew he was saying how much he liked me. I smiled because it was funny, too, given the situation.
I am not frank or at ease. People think I am frank but what they mistake for frankness is just uncertainty. Nanna once said that uncertainty looks a lot like frankness to the untrained eye. ‘Watch out for anyone who begins a sentence with “I have to be honest...”, or “I must be frank...”, because you’re about to take a bullet!’ She was right. Nancy says ‘I have to be honest’ a lot.
My mum and dad are very frank with each other. You would be frank if you were a disappointed person. You would have to be. You would hold on tight to all that disappointment and use it to gouge your way through the day—gloom a weapon and a friend. And you would be honest with everyone but yourself, and any hesitation you felt about impaling people with opinion and candour would be turned to stone by the little Gorgon inside.
Drawing is a different kind of honesty. I think I am good at it. The drawing, not the honesty. When I draw, it is like that dark glass I see through clears just a little bit, and then some more, and then some more. The lines I put on the paper are like knives that cut through the bog in my head. All the little pieces of me come together, as if I am drawing a net and gathering myself into it. The net is not a trap, it is good; it puts me together in one place. I draw myself sometimes and when I look at the drawings it is not bad or ugly or scary that I see. It is not the Gorgon. But then, when the drawing is done, the glass darkens and I hardly recognise myself.
Like I said, sometimes I draw myself, but mostly I draw other people. No one knows that. I have the drawings folded small and hidden under a bit of lino in my doll’s house. It is like the people I draw live in there—my little restricted environment. Maybe I have caught little pieces of them, the people I draw, the way photographs can capture a soul. Maybe the more I draw them, the more power I take from them. When I get time, I must draw Nancy.
I draw people the way they look through-the-glass-dark-ly. Some of them are beautiful and some of them are not. I draw Creepy, but I would never tell him, or show him. From time to time, when I’m feeling sad, I draw myself reflected in his window, superimposed on him like a ghost, or a paper doll’s dress, with my gold wings and serpent belt. So he is looking at me and I am looking back at myself.
I draw my mum’s face (she’s very pretty) and my dad’s hands. I draw them morphed together like one creature, face and hands and nothing else, because that is what I see. My mother’s face with just a soupçon of happiness wrapped tight in her frankness; my dad’s hands walloping out the sides of her head like Bullwinkle ears. Soupçon is French. It is a good word in the mouth. You have to say it like you have a mouth full of something. I like French. I used to like French.
Coda: I wait for the light to fascinate me.
SEVEN
The difference between Despair
And Fear—is like the One
Between the instant of a Wreck
And when the Wreck has been—
—Emily Dickinson, ‘305’ (1862)
Som
etimes I try to imagine what my parents were like when they were young. I know they were once young and at that time they had some sort of feeling for each other. This fascinates me. If it really was love, how long did that last? How long before they no longer wanted to be in the same photograph? Five years? Five minutes? Is there a little bit left in there somewhere? A smidgeon of kind feelings smeared like the skid marks I often see in Merrill’s whitey-tighties, the greasy remnant of a more solid but now long removed reality? Okay, that’s pretty disgusting. But as far as similes go, it seems appropriate to me. Years ago, Mum used to scrub those skiddies with a nailbrush slathered in Sard. She doesn’t do that anymore. She just drops the soiled undies in with the rest of the wash. You might think this bothers me, but it doesn’t. One way or another, I’m going to end up with Dad’s shit all over me. This way it’s just on my clothes.
How does a man get to the point in a relationship where he no longer believes he has to wipe his butt? I saw his butt once. He was shaving naked. I walked into the bathroom and there was Merrill in all his born glory, razor in his hand, glazed look on his face, and a veritable pelt peeking out from between his butt cheeks. It looked like he’d sat on a guinea pig. Poor Mum. Bet Dad always walked out of the bedroom backwards when he was with his mistress. If he even had a mistress. Shaving his bits is just the sort of thing Dad would do to get Mum’s attention.
If I assume they did love each other once, that thought does more than fascinate me. It scares me a bit. Does everyone who loves end up training the family pet to be an attack dog? Stories about love hardly ever end up this way. A part of me still believes in the happy ending, in spite of everything. Maybe that’s just because I’m currently in love myself. Maybe things will be different for me when the wreck has been.
Maybe it’s not love at all that’s the culprit. Maybe it’s marriage. Maybe all those stories of love end with ‘and they lived happily ever after’ because no one can taunt their imagination into steering love’s ship away from the rocks. Steering love’s ship. That’s awful. The shit stain simile was much better. I mean, we’re not meant to be with just one person for the rest of our lives. Men are biochemically and genetically programmed to spread their seed, to seek out new partners in order to propagate the species. Aren’t we? That’s what Mrs Webster told us in Human Biology, anyway. She didn’t last long at our school.
I love Maud but I would never tell her. It’s more than a secret, it’s a war wound. It’s deep and bloody and rotting from inattention and age. Besides, I’ve seen what declared love becomes. How it evolves.
Mrs Webster also told us that we are still evolving and that the next thing that will most likely happen to us as a species is the recession of our chins. We don’t need them, she said. If that’s true, then Owen Liddell is the most evolved person in our school. He has one of those E.M. Forster chins that start at the lower gum line and then just slope away to meet the larynx. Nothing there. Owen Liddell is also the most in-love guy at our school and a larger-than-life lesson to all the rest of us to keep our mouths shut when it comes to love. I’ve seen what declared love becomes.
Owen Liddell fell in love with Bella Hayman in Year 8. At first, he kept it to surreptitious glances and manoeuvring himself into proximity during classes. Then he started ingratiating himself with one of her ugly friends. Have you ever noticed how pretty girls do that? They always have one ugly one in the pack, usually the one who performs like an indentured servant out of pure gratitude at being admitted to the inner circle. Anyway, Owen started hanging around Hideous Helen (hey, that’s what everyone calls her, okay?) to try and get information about Bella, the object of his affection. Unfortunately, Hideous Helen misunderstood Owen’s objective and responded to his interest by falling in love with him herself. Girls can do that. They can fall in love with ugliness because apparently they look at our insides. I read that somewhere. Anyway, Owen really should have stopped with Hideous Helen. Let’s face it, she was a gift—the best he was ever going to do. But he didn’t cotton on. By Year 10, he was passing notes to Hideous Helen to pass to Beautiful Bella. Hideous Helen’s heart might have been breaking but she passed those notes along out of love for Owen. Whose chin continued to evolve the older he got.
You may well ask how I know the ins and outs of this little love triangle. I know because everyone knows. The whole thing came to a head in a smashing brouhaha on a school verandah one hot day towards the end of Year 10. Owen made his declaration of love. Those who were not present to witness the beginning of the event were soon drawn to the area by all the screaming. Yes, screaming.
Apparently Owen, dissatisfied with the speed of his campaign (and not taking into account Hideous Helen’s own agenda), decided to bail Bella up and declare his love. This could only have been made possible by the delusion of reciprocation brought on by years of unrequited pining and an IQ that matched his chin size. I give him points for bravery. By the time his heart and dignity were being crushed by the derision of Bella and her pack, he had lost all sense of reality. Went mad with grief. And why not? It happens all the time in books. I, and everyone else, watched Owen segue from despair to fear to (surprise!) anger as he was trounced by the worst weapon a girl has—laughter. Owen actually stood in the middle of the verandah and hollered, ‘Bella! Belllllllllaaaaaaa!’ as her skinny arse executed a haughty retreat. Owen didn’t come to school for three days after that. When he did next show up for home room, someone had written ‘Poor Bella’ in huge letters all over the whiteboard.
And Hideous Helen? The tragicomic anti-heroine of the tale? Last I heard, she’d got herpes in her mouth from a foreign exchange student everyone called The Teletubby. She really should have raised her standards.
As I said, I love Maud but I would never tell her.
EIGHT
My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers.
—Woody Allen
School is a strange land. Strange can be interesting. Or it can just be strange. I don’t mind having to go to school. It gives me something to do during the day. Maud’s there. And when you’re marginal, like me, it gives you the opportunity for observing some of the more obnoxious facets of human behaviour. You know, the ones you wouldn’t ordinarily see outside prison or parliament. And you know I like to watch.
I never get into trouble at school. The teachers think I’m creepy, as well. They’d never say that. Parent – teacher conferences (one of the few times my parents erect that united front) are full of phrases reserved for students the teachers don’t really know or care about. Things like ‘Consistent’ (translation: ‘Turns up’) and ‘Has potential’ (translation: ‘Turns up on time’). Most of them need a class photo in front of them to remind them of who I am. If I had siblings, if Mum and Dad had to go to more than one of these things, they’d realise that what’s said is not individualised. It’s just recycling. But they don’t get it and always come away feeling validated and vindicated. We always have pizza on parent – teacher conference night.
Maud gets into trouble at school a lot. And trouble at my school is public. Everyone hears about it. It’s like the French underground. I even heard about Audrey Foote getting her period in S & E. By the time she ran from the room, it looked like someone had slaughtered a goat in there. Or so I heard.
Maud’s biggest trouble at school has been over a book. I remain quietly impressed by this. It makes me wonder what other controversial reading material she must be hiding behind the doll’s house with the booze.
Our school has a total ban on graphic novels. They’re not even considered real books. There was a parent night about it. A meeting with the school board held after dark to discuss the infiltration of unsavoury materials and their effect on vulnerable developing adolescent minds. I’m not making that up. It was in the flyer. My parents didn’t go. If it’s not about them, they’re not interested.
I know Maud likes to draw. I watch her, mostly at night, sitting at a little table, drawing. I love to
watch her draw. It’s one of the only times she doesn’t pull and pluck. The little lamp she uses casts a pinkish glow through her hair. The light sinks like a blush down her face and into the paper in front of her. It’s solstice ritual, and she is the witch casting runes. She’s not a flamboyant artist. Her pencils (and she uses many) never scud across the paper in flourish, she never colours in splashy sweeps. It’s all very careful and precise. Her movements are small; everything about her seems small. I watch the shapes her pencil traces, study the interstices of shadow cast by her fingers and wrist, and try to imagine what it is that she draws with such intensity.
Before the day Maud’s drawings became public knowledge, it never occurred to me that my Titian sorceress might be drawing dirty pictures.
Maud took them to school slipped inside a book she’d bought at a bookshop in town. This particular bookshop is notorious for stocking literature that is guaranteed to end up on a flyer and be discussed at meetings between parents and the school board. The book is called How to Draw Graphic Novels. Technically, Maud was not breaking any rules, as the book is not a graphic novel in and of itself. It’s a reference book, really. But the school was not interested in technicalities when it discovered a panel towards the back, showing a woman masturbating.
Creepy and Maud Page 3
