Our three-storey terrace house was on the seafront. My mother had bought it with her partner, the man she had moved to Adelaide for, in an attempt to set up a home with him. He, however, chose to live with us only half the time. When my mother was away for work, his daughter stayed with us, cooking vegetarian meals and taking me out to exhibitions on the back of her motorbike.
She was out that night and Michael and I watched television together, the conversation awkward, until at about ten o’clock, I took him up to the spare room. He asked me if I was on the pill, and when I said that I wasn’t, he rummaged in the pocket of his jeans for a condom, and I realised, without a doubt, that this was it, this was the moment I was going to have sex for the first time.
It hurt, we said very little to each other, and then it was over. I told him I was going to my room to sleep; the strangeness of our physical proximity coupled with a complete lack of any other closeness was too much for me. As I closed the door behind me, he called out, and for one foolish moment, I thought he was going to ask me to stay with him.
‘You haven’t got a radio, have you?’
I was perplexed.
‘Just wanted to check the cricket score.’
And I went and found one for him.
For a brief period, what had passed between us was the subject of gossip. Other boys at the school showed a leery-eyed interest in me, the girls looked at me quizzically, and amidst the curiosity that we’d generated, Michael and I ignored each other. He didn’t speak to me and I didn’t speak to him. He didn’t look at me and I didn’t look at him. I was hurt and angry, ‘used’, my girlfriends said, and I agreed with them. I cried about him a couple of times, but I remember being aware that my tears didn’t feel entirely real. I was playing a part. Used girls should be devastated, and that involved occasionally sobbing to your friends. I suppose I was also upset over the crashing of my fantasies. I wasn’t going to be his girlfriend; I wasn’t going to be popular. But inside I wasn’t rocked by his sudden lack of interest in me. It was what I’d expected.
When I finished school, I went straight to university. As for Michael, he deferred, enrolling to study law a year after I had already begun. I rarely thought of him by then, and the few times that we passed each other in the corridor, we never acknowledged one another. He completed his degree and stayed in South Australia, and I left the state before finishing mine.
I never heard any news of Michael Brown in the intervening years, and I never asked for any. I was surprised when I saw his name on the organising committee for the twenty-year school reunion, and I wondered idly at the fact that he had stayed involved with the school. I hadn’t been back for any of the other reunions, but twenty years is a long time, and I was curious. I booked my flight from Sydney.
The night was held in a function room above a pub that had been done up to boast a bistro and a cocktail lounge. At the top of the stairs, we each received a name-tag, before stepping into a crush that made moving from the hall to the larger rooms difficult. Straight ahead, behind, left and right; the greetings were frenzied. People I had known as teenagers now looked and talked like their parents. A mass of changed but familiar faces exchanged details of marriages, children and jobs. Women sipped on white wine and men clutched a glass of red. There were a few divorcees, only one lesbian, and a handful of people who had made a fortune in advertising or information technology.
When Michael Brown stood on the podium to welcome everyone, I didn’t recognise him. He was thinner than I remembered, and there was a sharp intensity to his face that was new. I had found myself in the front, and I stepped back. To my dismay, I felt as though I was sixteen once more, avoiding meeting his eyes at all costs, but wanting him to notice me, to be aware of me, and, most importantly, to be impressed by how I’d changed.
It was, I told myself, ridiculous. I was thirty-six, and it was time we spoke to each other. ‘Have you talked?’ my friends asked as they had once asked me all those years ago at school. But this time I took a deep breath and went over.
‘Michael,’ I asked, ‘how are you?’
And there was, I believe, the faintest smile on each of our faces as we finally looked at each other.
He was a lawyer now, defending doctors in medical malpractice suits, living alone, with ‘one dependent – a cranky old cat’, a line that seemed designed to confirm the fact that he was single, a state of affairs that could be altered by the right woman – should she exist.
He, like many of the others in the room, had read the book my mother published shortly after we left Adelaide, recounting the turbulence of our family life, and my brother’s struggle with mental illness during my school years. He hadn’t known – none of them had. It must have been hard for me, he said. He’d borrowed the first novel I wrote more than a decade after I had left university and returned to Sydney. The book was set in Adelaide and portrayed the town with a bleakness that was probably more of a reflection of how I had felt living in that city than of the city itself. It was a town that would always be coloured by Jonathan, his madness worsening shortly after he had left Sydney, following us to South Australia only a few months after we had arrived there. Michael said he remembered my house, the one by the beach, opposite the jetty that had been photographed for the cover of my book, and I wondered for a moment when he’d been there; and then I remembered, surprised that I had momentarily forgotten such a detail. Our eyes met for a beat too long and for one instant, the possibility of referring to what had never been discussed opened up in front of me.
But the moment passed. We were interrupted by someone else, a drunken middle-aged woman who had once been a friend, and who clutched at me and told me that we had to talk. ‘Just getting a drink,’ I said to both of them, ‘and then I’ll be right back.’
But lost in the mass of people, I never found my way over to him again.
Later in the evening, I overheard my friend, Louise, talking to Jen, the wild girl of our form. ‘You were always the sexy one,’ Louise told her, and Jen, still sexy in a halter-neck top with bleached blonde hair and one discreet tattoo, had laughed uncomfortably. ‘You know what I mean,’ Louise said.
‘I didn’t do sex,’ Jen replied, and I was surprised by the strangeness of the phrase, and by how completely straitlaced our year had been. Even the bad girls didn’t put out.
But I had.
Teenage girls often lack confidence. Many find it difficult to say no. I would never describe what happened with Michael as an act that was forced upon me, but I know that it was the first step I took along a line I followed for some years, a line that attempted to mark the division between simply denying what I wanted and accepting what I actively didn’t want. One night, when I was only just out of school, I found myself drunk and alone on an oval with someone I didn’t know well. He started kissing me and I made a couple of feeble attempts to stop him. When it became clear he wanted to have sex, I said no, several times. But each time I tried to walk away, he pulled me back. In the end I gave in. I didn’t feel I was in physical danger; I wasn’t concerned for my safety. I simply found it easier to deny what I wanted than to pursue it actively by leaving.
I returned to the party in tears, too ashamed to try to explain what had happened when people asked me what was wrong. I wanted to go home, and as soon as I could get a ride out of there, I left.
Later I wondered how he had perceived the situation. Perhaps if I’d said no more clearly and more often, he would have given up. But what was it that had stopped me from pushing that a little further, from removing myself from the situation? If there was a battle of needs, without question I felt that mine should be subjugated.
Some weeks after that night, I was out with a group of friends. We were going from party to party, drinking more heavily as we descended on each house. He was with a group of boys, crushing tinnies and throwing them off the front porch into the darkness of the surrounding scrub. It was time to move on; directions were given to get to the next place, and the older boys
with cars took passengers. He had his father’s Holden, and was the last to leave.
‘I don’t think she’d come with me,’ I overheard him reply when someone suggested he should give me a lift. He looked down at the ground as he spoke.
I knew then that he had realised I hadn’t wanted to have sex with him, and that we were both aware a line had been crossed. But I also knew he wasn’t the only one to blame. I, too, had played a part.
Shortly after I lost my virginity, my mother gave me an article about respecting and valuing oneself. She told me that when she was young, she was always so grateful to anyone who showed an interest in her that she convinced herself that she liked him in return. She told me this because she’d wanted to help me have the courage to choose for myself, to assert myself. She had changed. I could too. This was what she was saying by speaking of the person she had once been in the past tense. But a small part of me had judged her as I’d listened, her relationship with my father always making me too aware of the continuing presence of the girl she used to be pushing through the skin of the woman she was now.
The fact that my mother was a feminist had instilled certain beliefs in me. I expected to work and to be responsible for myself financially. But I still did not feel that my own desires should have equal weight with a man’s. I had absorbed my mother’s success, her ideological beliefs, and her years of appeasing my father in equal measures. It was not until many years later that I realised how contradictory her two selves were, the strong feminist at odds with the woman who took so long to leave my father. It took even longer for me to understand that such a contradiction was not unique to her; we are all capable of holding many selves in argument with each other.
The feminism that had crept into my education was not so straightforward either. Because I was bright, I was encouraged to apply for medicine, although I didn’t want to do this. It was a time when female students who did well were pushed into the sciences. Whenever I feebly protested that I was more interested in the arts, no one listened. It would be a ridiculous waste of my talents.
In my final year, I told the careers counsellor I wanted to be an interior designer, and she looked at me in horror. She was a physics teacher who had little patience with adolescents, regularly throwing chalk across the classroom whenever anyone spoke, her aim always deadly. Her gaze was withering – ‘You want to run around with a bunch of homosexuals choosing furniture colours?’ – and she pointed at my academic record.
Eventually we reached a compromise, putting law down as my first choice for university entry, despite the fact that I had absolutely no desire to be a lawyer.
The rules that I was being asked to comply with were supposedly there for my benefit, to ensure that girls were on an equal footing with boys. But there was something wrong with their blanket application. No one believed that a girl could actually make up her own mind about what she wanted, all girls had to be told what was good for them.
All that I was at sixteen then came into collision with Michael Brown; he was a boy of my own age, who had been in several of my classes, but I had no idea who he was. He, too, may have been a virgin. If the wild girls didn’t put out, who did? Boys like him were expected to lose their virginity early. Perhaps he felt it was something he had to do, quickly; perhaps he couldn’t believe his luck when he drunkenly stumbled upon someone willing to have sex with him. Our lack of any other form of connection may have meant nothing to him. I may have been no more than a means to an end, or maybe our failure to relate also made him feel uncomfortable, compounding the difficulty we already had in talking to such an extent that it was simply easier for both of us to ignore each other. I didn’t know, and I will probably never know.
I caught the plane home the day after the reunion, and as I closed my eyes in an attempt to sleep, I had Michael Brown on my mind. I wished I’d been a little drunker the night before, and I indulged in imagining the conversations we might have had: me asking him why he’d slept with me, and why he’d never talked to me again. I would have liked a nice neat narrative resolution. Even more than that, I would like to have graced my sixteen-year-old self with the words she never had at the time.
A week later, I received a parcel in the post. It was a booklet, paragraphs written by people in my year; brief histories of what they had been doing over the last two decades. I read a few and then turned to where Michael’s should have been to find that he hadn’t written anything.
The surprise was on one of the last pages. As I skimmed through an entry written by Tom Wiseman, one of Michael’s best friends, I saw my name and I stopped. His list of school recollections covered parties, tuckshop food, romances and counselling Michael Brown as to why I would never agree to go out with him.
My immediate response was one of sadness for my sixteen-year-old self as I considered the fact that I may have misread the entire situation.
But moments later I heard my own doubts – Tom Wiseman was just making a cruel joke, he had never counselled Michael Brown about me, he was still laughing about the fact that Michael had slept with me. I closed the booklet quickly.
The harshness with which I was looking at myself felt too familiar. It took me many years to realise that I’d been misguided in chasing absolutes, all the time failing to see that change is a layering. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to peel it back and find everything I’d covered still throbbing and alive. Of course she was there; a sixteen-year-old girl, less often seen but still present, and all too capable of making herself heard.
GETTING IN THE BOAT
THE FIRST PERSON MY MOTHER FELL IN LOVE WITH WAS a Greek man, called Aristides, whom she met in Venice. He was older than she. He lived in Athens and she lived in London. But it wasn’t just age and geography that kept them apart.
She attempted to explain the dynamics to me. ‘When he was in love with me, I wasn’t in love with him and when I was in love with him, he wasn’t in love with me.’
He was the man my mother might have married, and as a child I held up her stories about Aristides as the definition of romantic love: riddled with obstacles and impossible to maintain.
Her relationship with my father also had its romance. He was married when they met. They lived in different countries. He proposed to her by telegram, with the simple words: Will you marry me? She replied immediately, unaware that he had not yet told his first wife that their marriage was over. She also didn’t know that he had proposed to another woman at the same time. My mother, who got there first, won the prize.
My father was a romantic. Passionate in his temper and in his infatuations. I believe he adored my mother when he first fell in love, but this adoration involved an idealisation that was unsustainable. By the time I was born, it had long since burnt out, leaving his anger to fire alone, ferocious flare-ups followed by a depression that would last for weeks.
As a child I merged these tales of my parents’ pasts with fairy stories, creating a heady picture of what it was to fall in love. I wasn’t sure what happened once you stopped falling, when the romance was over. I had seen what had become of my parents, and I had read the books, all of which referred to mutual, happy love – relegated to the last line of the story, it was a state that was never examined in detail, an unknown territory that you were expected to find without a guide.
But first there was the act of falling in love, of expressing that love; an act that required daring. Asking another person to take you inevitably involves the risk that you will be rejected. Having the capacity to deal with this requires a surety of the self, a core that is strong, smooth and complete. Building this core takes time. It takes longer for some of us than others. In my case, the delays were numerous. Each time you venture out into the world on your own, each time you take a risk and come back alive, a little more is added. We all face various obstacles in our attempts to grow. For me, the main one was dealing with Jonathan.
As his illness progressed, I began to shut down. He was in and out of hospital, he went to jail, he
lived in squats, and it seemed he was constantly in need of rescue from the brink of death. I had been told he had schizophrenia, but there were times when I didn’t believe this, when I thought it was just a convenient label for someone who had always been bad and difficult. He was a terrifying living embodiment of all that could go wrong if you took too many drugs, if you drank too much when you were young, if you disobeyed your parents, if you moved even one inch outside the tightly drawn confines of good behaviour.
It was not a way of living that could be sustained. He ended up on the streets, eventually dying in his early twenties. After so many years of fear, sorrow, anger and pain, there was a strange, silent emptiness. This was life without the drama and I did not know what to make of it.
It took some time before I began to trust that this calm was more than just a brief respite. I began to open the door, just occasionally, and smell the sweetness of the air. I was hesitant and careful in taking each step, but I was changing. I moved back to Sydney and finished studying law. I made new friends. I rented a room in a share house with people I didn’t know, I went out to places alone; slowly, I began to enjoy myself.
It was when I took the last and largest step – giving up a full-time job to write – that I began to truly build my own sense of self. I was daring to do something I had always wanted to do, and it was exciting. From Monday to Wednesday, I went to work as a lawyer, answering telephone queries at a legal centre, and on Thursday and Friday I stayed at home, typing at my desk by the window. Halfway through the first draft of that first novel, I knew I was in love with Andrew. I had met him some time earlier, through friends. I had secretly loved him from the start, not daring to admit it to myself. As we talked, went to films together, sought each other out at parties, I began to imagine I could, perhaps, take the risk. I could let him know.
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