Creepy and Maud

by Dianne Touchell

  It isn’t even a good drawing. I’ve seen it, you see. Everybody has now. The one thing this scandal guaranteed was that that little bookshop full of dark corners and badly drawn graphic novels sold out of How to Draw Graphic Novels in two days. I’d like to believe it was out of some sort of camaraderie that everyone rushed out to buy the book, but I know it was just to see the wank panel. That’s what everyone called it. The wank panel. You had to buy the book to see the wank panel because the book was shrink-wrapped. Still, I’m sure the proprietors of the shop found some copies hidden in the back, torn from their wrapping and very badly thumbed.

  Things have moved quickly since Maud’s transgression. Limo-Li has been called to the school. As bad as possession of the wank panel was, it’s Maud’s own drawings that have caused the biggest problem. All sorts of agendas have come into play. Maud has inadvertently justified the school’s position on graphic novels by proving just how corrupting they are. The school board invested in a stack of memos (in colour), circulated and posted home, warning that possession of pornographic material is now an expulsion offence. The P & F lobbied the council to try and force bookshops selling offensive material (bit vague that; no definition of ‘offensive’ was ever circulated) to keep it out of the reach of children (after all, look how well that worked with cigarettes!). The school counsellor has booked Maud in for two sessions a week to try and ascertain the depths of corruption they are dealing with and, undoubtedly, whether medication would help. (I’m just guessing about the medication bit but it would be a nice touch, wouldn’t it?) The English Department was asked to review its teaching novels and has removed several from the curriculum including Beloved and Ulysses. It’s been riotous. Every adult in the school has gone into some sort of bowdlerising hysteria.

  I watch tonight after Limo-Lionel comes back from his summons to the school. I watch him take every pencil and piece of paper he can find out of Maud’s room. He doesn’t speak to her. He doesn’t hit her. Who knows what depths of humiliation he has been made to endure at the hands of the school administration. I can only hope that they were great depths. Fathoms. Great yawning abysses of testicle-sweating humiliation. The gathering of Maud’s artistic accoutrements takes about five minutes. He is as measured and composed as I have ever seen him. I actually think he looks intensely sad. But it could be me who is sad. I’m not sure.

  After he leaves her room, Maud goes to the shelf and gets down that big shiny copy of Alice in Wonderland. She sits at her little table and opens it. At first I think she is reading it but then I see her hand sashay across the page in front of her. I can’t quite make out what she is using to draw with. It looks like a tiny black turd. Please let it be a piece of charcoal. She moves fast, her fingers fluttering and dawdling like a dancer’s legs, lashing here, smudging there, fluid and sinuous. Precision given way to grace.

  She draws a naked woman, prone, legs slightly apart. One hand rests on the belly, the other lower. The figure is all movement, for all its stillness, with wells of shadow polishing the curves of her face and hips. The face and hips are full. It is such a simple drawing, but it is kind and beautiful. It is drawn on the titlepage of that very expensive looking Alice in Wonderland, so the feet, slight but detailed, stretch over the publisher’s mark at the bottom of the page. I’m not sure but I think it’s Chatto & Windus.

  I suppose you’re wondering how I know all this. I know because Maud tears that very expensive titlepage out of the book and sticks it in her window, facing out. I move right out of cover with the binoculars, right up to the window, so I can look at her drawing, look at her.

  And she can see me looking.

  NINE

  Win-dow-to-the-Soul

  He watches me through binoculars. He sees me closer than I have ever seen myself. Sometimes I sit as close to the mirror as I can get and look at the fine down on my face and the darkened pores of my brows (little craters hiding ingrown hairs) and know that he can see all of me. But he still looks. It is a terrible, exciting thing, this closeness. I pull to get closer to it, little by little. Each small pain a redemption. And when I start to feel numb, I pull from somewhere else. My eyes get smaller and smaller until I am sitting so close to the mirror that my breath washes back at me and I can smell the grease on my own face.

  My nanna told me that the eyes are the window to the soul. Win-dow-to-the-soul. That is a fat five with big vowels, and when you say it your lips are mostly pursed, like for kissing. She says I have beautiful eyes. My mum looks sad when she looks in my eyes. I suppose she sees my soul, too. I cannot see Creepy’s eyes behind those big binoculars. I draw him with them, except only with the lenses, so those big black circles become eyes so wide they spill off the sides of his white face. Big as black planets.

  Soon my eyes will become so small that my soul will be trapped, and even those big binoculars will not be able to find me. So I draw the only part of me that is still alive and worth looking at. The part Creepy likes.

  Of course, that is the part that got me into so much trouble. I did not feel anything while I listened to them calling me dirty. Well, they did not use that word. I wish they had. They used words like indecent and corrupt and pornographic. I think I should have felt something, but I seemed to be all squashed out of the room by everyone else’s feelings. Dad’s embarrassment was as big as a tree and cast a wizened shadow over everyone, as only a very old, very big tree can. I wanted to get home and draw that tree as soon as possible. I could tell my mum felt just a little bit sick. Her face was inscrutable but she clenched her hands, and her pretty blouse was dark with sweat under the arms. I felt sorry for her. I so wanted to tell her she did not have to worry, but, given that she likes to, I could not take away from her the one thing she is capable of feeling.

  When we get home, my dad kicks our cat, Sylvia, across the lawn, then blusters into my room and takes away my paper and my pencils. He misses my little stubs of charcoal, though. I hide them in my doll’s house. They are smooth, and shiny as jewels. I use the charcoal to draw my tree-dad. He is wild and restrained at the same time. The way angry disappointment really is. I like to draw with charcoal because there is no going back, no rubbing out. If you make a mistake, you just chafe at it with your fingertip until the fault becomes a downy shadow, like it was always meant to be there. And your fingers go black like frostbite. And I wonder: would it not be good if in real life, exposure smoothed away mistakes and made them just a part of the background that looks like it was always meant to be there?

  I do not show Creepy the drawing of my tree-dad. Instead I draw myself. For him.

  I am a disappointment. My parents love me but they are disappointed. It is in their looks at me and at one another. It is in Dad’s treatment of Sylvia. I try not to think about it too much. I roll my little jewel charcoals in my warm fingers and the dust that settles over the picture of my tree-dad reminds me of his face. Dark and changeable. The face that creases his whole body into a curlicue of disappointment just before he kicks Sylvia. Just before he slaps me and screams, ‘What were you thinking?’ And I reply, ‘Thinking is not best,’ and for a moment I think he might cry. Thin-king-is-not-best. Thin-king-is-not-best.

  But if you do not think, you do not have a position, and if you do not have a position you adopt other people’s. That is what Nancy says and that is what I do. I am a chimera. I was myself for such a short time that I cannot remember me. The little piece that is me has been swallowed up now by all the grafting; I am Rapunzel’s castle in the brambles. I will take on the thoughts, beliefs, characteristics of whomever I most want to please. I have no personality. Insert what you want and it will become me until someone else more important, or more pushy, usurps you. It takes a lot of work and energy to adapt so completely and so often. Darwin himself would write a book about me. Darwin would think me a miracle, not a disappointment.

  I should not complain, really. Nancy is okay. I want to please her. I have already started grafting. Nancy has pretty hair and teeth. Sometimes I
do not listen to her at all; I just look at her hair and teeth. This works because when you look at someone’s head, they think you are paying attention.

  The thing Nancy most wants to talk about is my hair and teeth. I cannot. It is too private. She knows I am eating my hair, too. The day she saw some hair stuck between my teeth, she put the mittens on me. I cannot draw with mittens on. Do they not know that? Do they not care? I am Tom Kitten now, banished upstairs with imaginary measles whenever we have company. I wear the mittens dutifully because it pleases Nancy. It pleases Mum and Dad, too. Sometimes, though, I take the mittens off and it feels good, like a forbidden thing. Like prohibition, or going down there on a boy.

  Nancy already talks about what can be done about the patches that will not grow back. Sometimes I see a little frown on her (a little frown that reaches her hair and teeth) when she sees a patch that must look freshly pulled. I think she knows I am slipping the mittens off in private and going at it with a furtiveness that gives renewed pleasure to what was dangerously close to becoming plain habit. But she does not say anything. Just that tweaky frown and talk of restyling and hairpieces and hats and scarves, as if I am a cancer patient. Perhaps I am. Perhaps the cancer is that little bit of me still in here. I pull to comfort her, that little me. They put mittens on me to stop me pull. Without comfort, the little cancer that is me will shrivel up and pass away like one of those failure-to-thrive babies, and then the work will be done.

  I am not indifferent to all this. Dad had a rosebush in the front yard he tried to graft several times. The grafts just kept dying (Mum said it was just dormant). The lady at Bunnings said it had a genetic predisposition to die back if clipped with a pruner. Or by a pruner, one of the two. I feel sad about being clipped back but I suppose it is necessary. I just worry that by the time they cut back the brambles and get to the castle, Rapunzel will be gone. Not rescued, but shrivelled up and passed away.

  Coda: There is no going back, no rubbing out.

  TEN

  Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

  —Philip K. Dick, ‘How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’ (1978)

  A wise man once said he never let his schooling interfere with his education. Hang on, that wasn’t a wise man, it was Mark Twain. So a boring man said it. I always believed schooling was for the gleaning of knowledge. I stopped believing in that a long time ago. But school hasn’t gone away. Ergo, school is just a reality. And reality is highly overrated.

  I’ve also stopped believing in love, my parents, God, heart-tick approved meals at McDonald’s and democracy, and they haven’t gone away, either. Simple realities. Simple tortuous realities. They don’t go away; my only hope is to get as far away from them myself as I can. You’d think that if you stopped believing in something, it would just evaporate, dissolve into the atmosphere. I don’t mean physically, I mean all your expectations about it. If you can bring a fairy back to life by clapping your hands, for fuck’s sake, surely you can destroy expectations by turning your back on the thing that caused them. But I’ve found that when belief in something is removed, it leaves a big hole where that thing once was, like having a tooth pulled. You know how you can never stop worrying the wound with your tongue, even though it tastes like metal and aches like a belly blow? That’s how I feel about love, and God, and all the biggies.

  Maud is my metallic-tasting belly blow. I thought I loved her with as much love as I had in me before she drew me the picture (and that’s a lot of love—it’s not like I’m busy loving anyone or anything else). But since the drawing, I feel really different. My love has become painful. All of a sudden I have a new understanding of, and sympathy for, Owen Liddell. His belief was overrun by his expectations. Poor bastard.

  They teach belief at my school. They teach belief as if it’s a reality. Not a bad class, actually. It’s not academically challenging; you don’t have to think in there. In fact, thinking is actively discouraged. It’s called Religious Studies, but of course it’s not a study of religion at all. I don’t care. I quite like it. Maud gets in trouble in that class a lot. Her one hundred words describing her experience of God, for example.

  We all had to do it. Easiest hundred words we ever had to write. We all knew exactly what was expected of us. Maud handed in an almost blank page. She’d written ‘My Experience of God’ at the top of the page. The rest was blank. Everyone thought she was taking the piss. I thought it was the most creative and honest thing I’d ever seen. That was her mistake. You don’t get creative or, worse, honest in Religious Studies. She’s been punished, of course. They don’t call it punishment at our school, though. They call it ‘an opportunity for reflection’. Maud has been made to stand at the front of chapel every day for a week and deliver the reading. She has a small voice and a couple of times has had to start again because the teachers at the back couldn’t hear her. It’s like something out of a Brontë novel. I don’t know how she feels about it. Her face is inscrutable.

  Our chapel is very modern. No high arches of echoic stone, no polished floorboards or frescoes on flaky rendering. I don’t know about anyone else, but if I’m going to have a good experience in chapel, I at least want a frigging stained-glass window. We have bright white painted walls with felt wall hangings depicting scenes from the Bible. Felt. They’re not even stitched; they’re glued. All these little pieces of garish felt glued onto a garish felt background, some lifting in places like a junior-school collage. One of Paul’s legs has peeled right away: an amputee on the road to Damascus. Jesus and Lazarus look like characters from South Park. There are no shadows or dark colours for God to hide in.

  Of course, we have a chaplain. Only member of staff allowed to touch the students. Which is somewhat ironic, if you ask me. He’s never touched me. But I’ve seen him holding someone’s hand, saying a prayer. The chaplain works very closely with the school counsellor. I wonder if he’s ever touched Maud. Maud doesn’t like to be touched. Maud prefers being smacked to being touched.

  I don’t know many people who do like being touched, but most people will tolerate it. I don’t like it but something inside me tells me to endure it. Good manners? The feeling that objecting to the touching will draw even more attention? Something worse than attention, even—scrutiny, perhaps? Mum touches me sometimes. Her hand caressing the back of my hair as she walks by me feels like a mugging. I have to grit my teeth. I want to shout, ‘Too late!’ I want to put Dobie Squires on her. I wonder if I will feel this anger when other people touch me. It’s an anger that makes me tired. She touches me to make sure I’m still real and to tell me she is real, too. There’s no belief in it.

  I watch Limo-Lionel stroke Maud’s cheek and she screams. He puts his hand out very slowly and touches the side of her face with his fingertips. Gently, tenderly, even. She screams so fucking loud that I drop the binoculars. By the time I recover, she is standing in the same position with her eyes shut tight and her face screwed into a rigid fist. Limo-Li has left the room. It’s as if her scream has made him evaporate, or shattered him into pieces too small to see. Maud is a burning bush, an oracle. I think: That’s my anger. Over there in her room, raising the pressure in my eyeballs, twinkling in the synapses of my brain, my hatred of being touched in her body. I know that’s what I think because I write it down. And I wonder what would happen if we touched each other. Would we repulse each other like charged magnets held south to south, or would we short each other out and curl together like the knuckles of bone in the spine of a sleeping cat? Maud doesn’t open her eyes even after Limo-Lionel leaves the room. She keeps them closed for a while. I screw my face shut, too, so I can see the same colours she is seeing.

  ELEVEN

  The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved...

  the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing,

  but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars
...

  —Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

  I held my eyes shut longer than she did that day. I held them shut for so long that when I opened them again, she was on her bed and my sight of her was obscured by that sticky lack of focus you get from wringing your eyes out behind closed lids. She was lying in much the same position as the figure in her drawing, except I knew from previous watching that she was plucking at her pubes. I think it dawned on me then. She hadn’t drawn a wank panel at all. She had drawn herself, hurting herself. And there it was again. Understanding followed by the thought: I wish I didn’t know that.

  We started talking to each other soon after that. Not in the usual way. There is nothing usual about it. It is exceptional, just as it should be. It didn’t seem mad at all, at the time. It seemed perfectly logical. More than logical. It seemed natural. But I see now that it was quite mad and there was no way it could be anything but mad. It started with me writing a question on a piece of paper and sticking it in my window, facing out. The question was: Why did you scream?