“Hello,” I try to answer brightly. It’s Heels. She wants to know if everything is all right at home. Yes, I answer. What am I doing? she asks. Watching TV? Yes. She says they quite like the business they’ve seen. They’re excited in fact. They want to sit down with a cup of tea somewhere nice and discuss the proposition. They’ll be home in a short while. Have some ham from the fridge to make a sandwich if I’m hungry.
The sweet pain, the itching, shaking and stiffness have eased. The fucking and mouthing people keep flashing before my mind’s eye but I turn my mind’s eye the other way by concentrating on washing the makeup from my real eyes and my lips, using a nail brush and soap to scrub until my lips taste of the metallic tang of blood. I hang the handbag on its hook, fold the headscarf away, return the jewellery. I sweat so much I wish I could shower but I mustn’t see my body naked like the fucking and mouthing people. I mustn’t see my cocko or touch it even though I want to touch it and want to let my mind’s eye glimpse the remembered photographs. I want my real eyes to look at the real photographs once again. I must somehow let the magazine lie at the bottom of the drawer and cover it with socks and handkerchiefs, and I must do it with my mind’s eye and my real eyes closed.
INVITE A NICE FRIEND TO STAY the night by all means. What a good idea if I’m studying for exams. But Glenn Shivington says he cannot accept the invitation. He has polio, or is in danger of getting polio, it isn’t entirely clear which. He sleeps with his legs in braces, his ankles are manacled to the bed-end. He isn’t allowed to sleep at my place or anyone else’s for that matter because he can’t spend a night away from his braces and manacles, and what an effort it would be to transport them anywhere. I will have to stay at his place instead.
Polio? Can you catch polio from him? Heels wonders. “I don’t want you around people with polio. Should a child in that condition even be at school spreading disease?” She’ll have to make enquiries. She doesn’t like this polio business one bit. She’ll have a cigarette on it. She’ll pour a glass from the cask and have a sit-down with a cigarette and ponder this one and ring the doctor. Mind you, what do doctors know, she mutters. Have they fixed her varicose veins? Look at them. They’ll get where they’ll show even through dark stockings.
Yes you can go to Glenn Shivington’s because you’ve had the whatever-they-call-it that stops it, says the doctor. But go on one condition: that you come here to your mother and give her a big kiss for being such a good mother and protecting you from polio. There’s the boy.
There are rules about being at Glenn Shivington’s house which isn’t a house but a flat in a Randwick khaki block like our stopover home but darker because it’s close up against another khaki block and its windows cannot get the sun, and even if they did the blinds are kept closed always. His father lives in a wheelchair because of polio. I try not to stare at his legs, which are hardly like legs at all but empty trousers bent up from his footrests. Sometimes he can become very angry, Glenn says. He yells for no reason and throws books against the walls. But mostly he stays in his study and reads because he used to be a teacher. Glenn’s mother when she talks, whispers to make less noise and not disturb his reading. I stay in Glenn’s room playing Monopoly and nattering, not studying one iota except practising to sit behind him during exams, reading over his shoulder or glimpsing his answers if sitting side by side.
Has he ever gone through his parent’s things? Has he ever had a peep at what’s under their socks and smalls. No never, Glenn replies. “What chance would I have? My father never leaves the flat except to go to the doctor.” What does he think he’d find if he did look? He doesn’t know. He’s never considered it. I’ve looked beneath my parent’s socks and smalls, I tell him. There was a magazine full of fucking and mouthing people. I even put on my mother’s makeup and mink coat and wrapped a scarf into a turban and paraded in her mirror. Hasn’t he ever done that? No. He asks what it’s like to put on makeup. He watches his mother put her face on but she won’t let him touch her things. She says it’s not for boys, and besides, she has no jewellery except a wedding ring which she only removes for the dishes. He hates being a boy. I ask him if he’s really a Sniff. No, he says like a protest and points at me that if I want to wear makeup then I must be a Sniff myself. But I only wore makeup for something to do, I protest back. Just like when I practised pick-pocketing— it was something to do. I’m not a Sniff. Glenn says he doesn’t know what he is. He doesn’t believe for one minute that I’m a pickpocket or have ever known pickpockets, but if I put on makeup then that’s the behaviour of a Sniff. He’s sniggering how he wouldn’t like to see me in makeup because he imagines I’d look ugly with my blunt, chubby features. He’d prefer to look at me as the real boy I am, not as some girl-boy.
He wants to know if I might be able to steal some makeup from Heels for him. I could consider it part of the cheating agreement between us. He makes me promise I will—just an eyeliner and lipstick will do. I shake on it, my squeezing man-grip against his thin, loose fingers.
I’ll sleep tonight on an inflated lilo on the floor beside Glenn’s iron-framed bed. His leg braces are screwed to the bed-end like steel chains with steel splints reaching up to his knees. Leather straps bind the splints in place. He must sleep on his back because his feet are locked in such a way that they can only point upwards. He says there’s not much pain in lying this way though the steel sometimes creates a stretching sensation and makes him dream of walking on stilts a mile above other people, stilts that break and he falls but never hits the ground.
His mother calls him a brave boy and kisses his toes as she ties and clips him into bed like a prisoner for the night. The lights go off. There is static in my eyes from the sudden dark: the room returns to view dimly.
“Tell me what you saw,” Glenn says.
“Saw where?”
“The magazines. The magazines.”
What he wants are descriptions of the fucking and mouthing people. What do they look like with no clothes, with cocks (not cocko: cocko is a child’s word, he says), cocks and cunts showing? Is it like when you stand in the mirror or look down in your underpants and your cock’s gone stiff? Yes, it’s like that, I say, but their cocks are much bigger with veins everywhere and hair.
“How many stiffies have you ever had?” he asks. I’ve had a few stiffies, I say, but not many. He wants to know when I have them. Waking up? He has them when he wakes up in the morning, he says. Same here, I say. But the ones I’ve been having recently are different from the stiffies I’ve had before. The other ones before just went away after a while. I’d wait a few seconds over the toilet bowl for my cock to be soft enough to piss and it went soft. But the new ones over the past month are different. How are they different? he wants to know. Is it that the stiffies stay stiff and your balls ache and make you feel sick? That’s what they’re like for him. Same here, I say.
He asks if I’ve ever woken up and it’s all wet—my stomach, my pyjamas—like a half-piss. I don’t want to answer that and instead ask, Have you? He replies, Yes, and then I say, Same here. His pyjamas dry hard as cardboard. Same here. And it’s salty and smells like paint and detergent. He’s sure he knows in his sleep exactly the moment the wet spurts out of him because he can feel himself waking up, but he doesn’t quite wake up, doesn’t want to wake up at that moment. He likes to lay there with his insides tickling and dream of touching his cock and of someone else touching his cock and him doing it to them, touching them, until his cock pulses and spurts in his dreams exactly at the same time as he’s waking up in the wet in real life. He’s started keeping his handkerchief under his pillow to wipe it up. He’s found that if he unmanacles himself and gets out of bed straightaway after he’s wiped himself up and washes the wet off with water the handkerchief doesn’t go like cardboard. But getting to the bathroom without trailing the detergent smell behind him or letting the wet drip onto the carpet and leaving a cardboard patch is the problem. He finds it best to let it dry while still in bed and roll his p
yjamas and handkerchief up and place it down the bottom of the washing basket for his mother. But that’s happening every morning now. His mother must know something is wrong.
He asks me, “Do you ever bring it on yourself?” He means by rubbing my cock.
“No.”
“Bullshit.”
“Do you?”
“Once. Twice.”
“Really?”
“Lots of times.”
Sometimes he feels so itchy inside himself that he has to run into the toilet and rub himself till he empties out. Sometimes he does it straight into his handkerchief. “Don’t you?”
“I’ve just started.” I started a few weeks ago but stopped for fear of wasting away. Everyone would know what I’m doing if they saw I was wasting away. No matter how I itch and desperately want the itch and pulsing to go on and on, I don’t rub my cock.
“I’m not wasting away,” says Glenn. “Who told you you waste away?”
I don’t know, I’ve just heard it said. Perhaps it was Winks who said it to someone and I overheard.
Glenn itches so much he was on a bus once, he says, and his cock went stiff and he couldn’t help it and his pants stuck out so far with the shape of his cock that he had to put his school bag over the problem to get off the bus. Same here. But the bag rubbed against it and made the stiffie worse. He had to let the wet go into his pants while he was sitting there with the bus making the feeling worse-better at every bump. Same here. He’s had to walk down the street with his bag over his crotch to cover the wet spot. Same here. He’s sure the hot weather and a rocking bus always make him stiff. The hot weather makes his cock looser and warmer. Same here. His trick before getting on a bus is to rub himself and spurt out a good load into the toilet at home to stop him getting excited on the trip.
Every time I rub my cock I pray an apology to God. But Glenn doesn’t believe God exists. His father can’t understand how on earth a God that is supposed to be loving and decent would give anyone polio. “Do you know the answer to that?”
Glenn asks me.
“No.”
“God probably does it too, rubs his cock.”
“You can’t say that.”
“God’s probably rubbing his cock so much he’s too wasted away to bother about polio and do any good in the world.”
How can he utter such mockeries of God and not suffer a punishment either from the heavens or within his own body, a great pain or seizure tuned to respond automatically to God-mocking words or thoughts?
Glenn then asks if I’m stiff now this second. I answer No but he sits up in his bed and peers at my silhouette. I lift up my knees to cover my stiffie. He confesses that he’s stiff—it’s all this cock talk. I can look at his cock if I like, he says. No, I say, I don’t want to, though I would like to compare his cock’s shape to mine, its size, degree of hardness. To cross into another person’s privacy of genitals. He asks if he can look at me, my stiff cock.
No.
I can hear the quick chafing of him rubbing his cock and pausing. Rubbing and pausing.
“Look at this.” His voice is unsteady from his rubbing motion.
I sit up and crane for a glimpse. His cock points towards his stomach like a long finger. I lie back down and rub my own cock.
“Are you doing it?” he asks out of breath.
“Yes.”
He sits up. My feet trample my sheet and blanket down so he can see me.
I stand beside his bed. We watch each other rubbing. His hand reaches out to take my cock in his fingers, lightly, tentative, as if stroking an animal for the first time. This action doesn’t shock me, it’s the obvious, the right action for that moment. I bend down and touch his cock, grip it, rub it. It’s skinnier than mine. Narrower at the top. Its bow in the middle is more pronounced. An electric throb moves through my insides because here are fingers that are not my own, skin that is not my skin touching me down there, exploring the private ridge and the stem as if molding a shape from plasticine.
He gasps. His leg-braces chink on the bed-end from a spasm. A splash heavy as a summer rain-drop lands on the back of my hand and wrist. I stop rubbing to feel his cock pulse the wet out of him.
Now me—an itch and chill from the soles of my feet to my scalp, a shivering. I hear plops on the carpet. My limbs are suddenly weak.
Glenn’s slimy wet is already drying across my skin tight as a band-aid. He dips his fingertips in one of my splashes that landed on his arm. He tastes it on the tip of his tongue then tastes his own splash. They’re both just as salty as each other, he says, urging me to taste for myself. I do. He’s right. He lets me have his handkerchief to dab the carpet clean. “I’m going to sleep. My body’s dead,” he yawns.
Same here.
What am I to think of God now? I can say my sorry-prayers and have my slate made clean over and over, but how disappointing that becomes. God is disappointing, a weak ruler of the world, another adult I can trick, a parent too easy to get around, one too soft to dish out punishment. Even worse, one who tries to get into my good books by letting me get away with Glenn Shivington touching my cock and me touching his. Guilt is soft too, it barely leaves a bruise inside me anymore, barely an ache to register some sorrow. I have lost respect for God. I say it out loud: “I’ve lost respect for you, God.” Nothing happens. Nothing strikes me down. What controls me if God doesn’t? The new itch that controls my body? The bliss of bringing on the wet?
I don’t want to be a friend of Glenn Shivington. There can be no friendship with him any more than there could be friendship with a girl I have done private things with. I have done private things with him that I would do with a girl. I could never, after that, have something so slight as a friendship with such a girl. There would be too great a bond between us for mere friendship. I’ve no feeling of that great kind for Glenn. I only feel embarrassment that he has this secret of our rubbing cocks and comparing the salt taste of the wet. I never want to speak to him again or hear his voice near me or have him brush against me.
He wants to do it again with me, the rubbing. I want to pretend it never happened but he says that when he thinks about our rubbing cocks it makes him excited. He asks me if talking about it as he’s doing now makes me excited.
“No,” I say. We’re lined up for the mini-bottles of milk handed out before school starts.
Why won’t I speak to him? he wants to know. He asks if it’s because talking to him gives me a stiff. “No,” I sneer.
“Leave me alone.”
He keeps following me, across the playground to the cricket nets to watch the batsman with one pad on, the cork ball’s wide V down the concrete pitch from the bowler. In class I refuse him a seat beside me. He passes me a note through a chain of hands. I tear the note to confetti for the bin. Another note is passed. “Everybody does it,” the note says. I tear it, chew it into spitball mince for sticking under the desk. Another note: “I’ve done it with others before. I’ve done it with Bryce Howe and Ross Quilter.” Bryce Howe is sitting in the row over from me. Does he look like someone who would have rubbed cocks with Glenn Shivington? His father’s an electrician. Ross Quilter mocks Glenn Shivington behind his back for being a conch and up himself.
As soon as class is dismissed I fling my bag over my shoulder for carrying, deliberately clipping Glenn’s head in the process. He shouldn’t bandy people’s names about, I tell him. He shouldn’t have told me or anyone else about Bryan Howe and Ross Quilter. Is that what he’s going to do with me? I threaten to hurt him, kill him if he bandies my name about. But he doesn’t believe I’d kill him. He doesn’t take a step backwards or display the terror I hope for. I’ll have to hit him again with my bag to show him I’m not bluffing. I do. I’ll have to strike the side of his face with the point of my elbow. I do. He makes a fist, ready to fight me. His thumb is tucked inside his fingers, the fist of someone not used to making a fist. I tell him again I’ll hurt him, kill him but it’s a hollow threat met with his defiant gaze and amateur f
ists.
Next class, another note. It reads like a homework essay. It accuses me of being an Ancient Greek. Me, Bryan Howe and Ross Quilter. Ancient Greeks practised their cocks on boys before they were ready for girls. If I don’t believe him he has the books that say so at home. The Ancient Greeks were aristocrats, say the books. I however, and the two others, are just boys who can’t yet find girls to rub their cocks because they are off with older boys. Even if they weren’t, I’d be too shy to lay a finger on them or know what to do with a finger.
I no longer want to cheat on my exams with him. I certainly won’t be stealing makeup on his behalf.
I don’t score enough marks for Sydney High but I score twentieth in the grade just the same.
On the last day of primary school Glenn Shivington hands me a letter marked “love letter”. I throw it back at him and walk off but he picks it up and runs after me and will not go away until I take it from him and read. The letter says he wants to kill himself. He wants to do this because I hate him and therefore he hates himself. I tell him that nobody kills themselves and I tear his letter in half and flick it into his face. I tell him that I don’t care if he does kill himself. He says he intends doing it this afternoon. He’s going to jump in front of the three-thirty bus.
“I’ll make sure I’m there to watch.”
“I love the idea of you being the last person to see me alive.”
I say I don’t want to give him the pleasure of that and won’t watch. He won’t kill himself in that case, he says.
“Don’t then. Who cares!”
THE NEW BUSINESS IS A STORE in Rose Bay North. Yes, a liquor store though that’s hardly a hotel. There’s no drinking on the premises for one thing. There’s wine tasting, with cheese, which is not drinking, it’s tasting. Such a with it thing to do, says Heels. And I will not be exposed to riff-raff and horis and phone boxes. If Heritage had one Sir Thomas, then it’s safe to assume Rose Bay North has dozens. Perhaps not Rose Bay North itself, which Heels herself admits is not so exclusive. But Rose Bay proper. And Vaucluse, which is just down the road and is considered upper crust with a capital U.
Hoi Polloi Page 12
