Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls

by Danielle Wood

  ‘Christ, your fucking snatch is tight!’

  I looked down to the opening in his fly, and understood that when my mother had told me about sex, she had omitted a rather important fact.

  My mother is a nurse and she most emphatically does not believe in the use of silly words for body parts. She has this much in common with le Vicomte de Valmont, who advised young Cécile that in lovemaking, as in every science, it was important to call things by their proper names. In Sister Pat Little’s view, ‘wee-wee’ is the most idiotic of the euphemisms for vagina, and when I was a child I was expressly forbidden to use it. Her insistence on correct anatomical terms was to have repercussions for the elderly groundsman at our school who didn’t know where to look when I, aged five and dressed in my kindergarten smock, informed him that I had fallen over and hurt my vagina.

  I recall stopping off once during a long drive, at a set of public conveniences on the side of the highway. The women’s toilet block was full of the sound of trickling streams against metal and the wailing of a small girl who was making it known, between wails, that it hurt ‘down there’.

  ‘Does Aunt Mary hurt, darling?’ asked an older woman, prim tones hushed.

  ‘For God’s sake — it’s called a VAGINA!’ my mother called out from within the safe confines of her cubicle. She would never have been so confrontational at the basin, I am certain.

  Sex education occurred so early in the Little household that I have no clear recollection of it. To my mother, sexual intercourse was a fact, a bodily thing just like eating or having bowel movements. So secure was I in the knowledge that the penis went into the vagina that I had never stopped to wonder how, precisely. I had been exposed to a small range of floppy penises (not willies, not doodles, not dicks, but penises) in the course of a normal childhood. I’d had baths with my brother and seen his little bald worm of a penis. I’d seen my dad’s larger and woollier arrangement. I’d even seen my grandfather’s penis hanging over his big baggy sac. But that night, on a jetty in one of the better riverside suburbs, I encountered a penis doing something I had never seen a penis do before. It was sticking straight up, and its underside was all covered in veins. (Later, I would find my mother’s sex education to be inadequate in the face of sperm as well. She had told me that it was a ‘white, sticky substance’. Well, toothpaste is a white, sticky substance, and while I didn’t exactly expect semen to come in various permutations of mint flavouring, I was surprised when it turned out to be an egg-whitish sort of muck.)

  No four-poster bed, no chintzy curtains, no Vicomte slithering Latin delicacies into my ear. Instead, I was being deflowered by a jumble of Gerard Hyphen-Wilson’s fingers and his sticky-up penis, one or the other or some combination of which caused a sudden splitting pain that made me squeal and pull at a hank of his hair in fury.

  ‘Bitch!’ he yelled. On top of me, he was red in the face and one of his pimples had burst, sending a little river of pus down one cheek.

  ‘It’s no good anyway, you’re too fucking tight,’ he complained, rolling off.

  He manoeuvred my sluggish body until I was sitting alongside him on the side of the jetty. I remember watching one of my patent leather pumps falling off my foot and floating away on the current, and the wobbly sensation that I was about to follow it. But then, Gerard’s fat fingers were pressing small indentations into my scalp, and his purple-faced penis was just centimetres from my nose.

  ‘So, what are you like at giving head?’ he asked. As I said, Gerard Hyphen-Wilson had no Latin.

  I now wish that I’d had the prescience to answer: ‘Well, since I’m fourteen and I’ve never even heard the expression “giving head” before, let’s just assume I’m fairly crap at it, whatever it is.’ My response at the time, however, was significantly less articulate, being more of a gurgling sound in the back of my throat. Gerard was pushing my face towards his penis. What did he want to do? Stick it up my nose?

  It was at this point that intervention came from a most unexpected source: Rene Pogel himself. Master Hyphen-Wilson thought he had Monsieur Pogel firmly on his side, but there can be too much Rene for a small-framed girl. My dinner of lobster thermidor and trifle, marinated in a frothy green soup of créme de menthe and beer, erupted from my mouth to cover the straining penis of Gerard Hyphen-Wilson, which was, suddenly, not straining so hard.

  Of course it is easy to snigger, these years later, at that shrivelling penis coated in masticated seafood and liquor. But at the time, as Gerard Hyphen-Wilson’s school mates scrambled out of the boatshed to see what all the shouting was about, I was hardly a picture of ha-ha, so-there composure. While he jumped about like an angry puppy, brushing the muck off his thighs, whining, ‘Slag! The fucking little slag spewed on me’, I was still flat on the boards emptying my stomach in small, violent bursts that clouded the water below. And this was the glorious image of my defloration that I was left to ponder the next day and for the long, long remainder of my high school career.

  I wish you could see the various issues of teen magazines containing warm and euphemistic be-friends-first, always-wear-a-condom, it-might-hurt-a-teensy-bit accounts of the ideal first fuck, whose margins I filled with the ananymatic insults I might hurl at Master Hyphen-Wilson the next time I had the displeasure to see his leery face. Elohesra! and Reknaw! and Trevrep! I scribbled. Impotently, as it turned out. For I simply continued on my way — my basket lighter by one cherry — and never crossed his path again.

  TRUTH

  Elephantiasis

  elephantiasis

  A chronic form of filariasis, due to lymphatic obstruction, characterised by enormous enlargement of the parts affected Macquarie Dictionary

  My cousin Meredith has elephantiasis. To say this is not to imply that she is fat, though, coincidentally, she is. Not just a little overweight, but quite fat. Meredith has the kind of body that means shopping for clothes in the Big is Beautiful section; that entails judging carefully the width of chairs with arms. Hers is the kind of flesh that feels, sliding over it in supermarkets, in doctors’ waiting rooms or worse, the Family Planning Clinic, the averting glances of whip-thin girls with blonde ponytails and long necks with which to flick them.

  It’s not only Meredith that has elephantiasis. Her villa unit — one of a set of brick and tile triplets nestled on a landscaped block — has elephantiasis also. In the lounge room, the suite is piled with plump cushions embroidered, cross-stitched, latch-hooked, printed and painted with elephants. Others are simply in the shape of elephants. Sentinel to the hearth are two mahogany elephants, which, by virtue of timber that is unrefined and almost hairy, bears a family resemblance to their ancestor, the woolly mammoth. The mantelpiece holds a passing parade of jade, serpentine, onyx, ebony and marble elephants. Elephants have even made it into the bathroom, where the plastic bodies of Babar and Celeste are filled with bubble bath. In the kitchen, the fridge door flutters with no fewer than six fliers (the one that arrived by chance in Meredith’s own post augmented by five others passed on by thoughtful friends), all seeking donations to help an unfortunate Thai elephant, the victim of a landmine explosion, in need of a prosthetic foot. Each of the fliers is attached to the fridge with a separate elephant-shaped fridge magnet.

  Meredith wonders at how quickly the elephant effect gained momentum. The first elephant, a palm-sized figurine carved in ivory-pale wood, was from no-one of particular consequence. The giver had sat next to Meredith in a personal development seminar, perhaps five years ago. She was a woman with raspy greying hair and a long crooked body which she was always shifting in her chair, as if simply sitting caused her pain in her bones. The woman mentioned she was planning a holiday to Africa, and Meredith — outside in the car park after the seminar was over — gave her a blow-up neck pillow for the plane journey. Meredith had found the pillow uncomfortable, and so it had been lying, deflated, in the boot of her car for months.

  The second elephant was a soft toy, pale grey and plush. It was also a thankyou gift, this
time from a neighbour whose plumes of agapanthus Meredith watered while the neighbour was away nursing her sick mother. To this day Meredith does not know whether the neighbour chose the soft toy in response to the wooden African elephant on the (then relatively uncluttered) mantelpiece, or whether it was a purely coincidental choice. In any case, after that the elephantiasis spread like a virus to birthdays and Christmases, even to Easter, as friends, family and colleagues were seized by the thematic simplicity of it all.

  white elephant

  An annoyingly useless possession

  Macquarie Dictionary

  The truth is that Meredith does not even like elephants, and never did particularly. Before they took over her life, Meredith had for elephants no special feelings. Now that the elephantiasis is advanced, her house a shrine to the order Proboscidea, she resents them. Perhaps, she thinks sometimes, the elephantiasis was a punishment for an act of bad faith: giving away a travel pillow that she already knew to be uncomfortable. She feels, however, that the punishment has gone far enough, since it is now her entire existence that is stretched out of shape, swollen up and distorted with elephants.

  Could she have halted the stampede? Yes, almost certainly. She could, at some point, have mentioned that she would prefer to collect butterflies. Or springboks. In her most soul-bare moments she knows why she did not, does not. And it’s not only because she is naturally conciliatory, and polite in a style that is grateful for a gift, no matter how awful. It’s because she knows that her friends, family and colleagues see this (imagined) fondness of hers for elephants as proof of her jolliness. It is evidence of her good-natured acceptance of her fatness. A huge joke against herself. There she is, an elephantine woman surrounding herself with familiars. And a jolly fat woman without jolliness is left, she understands, with only one adjective.

  A Word from Rosie Little on: Totemic Worship

  Gift shops thrive on people who have chosen — or, as in the case of Meredith, have had chosen for them — an animal totem. Perhaps it is a desire of the domesticated human to connect with an inner wildness that makes African safari animals such popular choices. Giraffes, lions and elephants are usually available as small carved wooden idols, keyrings, pencil cases with zippers down their backs, erasers, blown-glass trinkets and stuffed toys. Elephants, considered lucky, are more likely than the others to be found as tiny silver charms for a bracelet, tinkling against hearts, four-leaf clovers, horseshoes, money bags, and wishbones.

  The Howards, who reside at Castle Howard of Brideshead Revisited fame, collect hippopotamuses. I once saw the hippos displayed in the castle’s entrance portico, a frippery amid the ancient Greek statues, the overarching frescos, the great, heavy gilt of it all. In a glass cabinet are comic china hippopotamuses decked out for golfing, an elaborate Fabergé hippopotamus, and a group of serene grazing hippopotamuses etched into glass by a leading London artisan. Some of the hippopotamuses were given by the Howards to one another as anniversary gifts, while others have come from well-wishers who know the couple’s proclivity for the animals and have no doubt thought of the couple when they’ve stumbled across an unusual one. The Howards are pleased to say that one of their favourite hippos — a wooden carving with large ears — was purchased for one pound and fifty pence at an Oxfam store. But they regret that they cannot have on display, due to its limited shelf-life, the charming carved-potato hippopotamus that was once sent to them by an admirer.

  The memory of an elephant

  proverbial saying

  For Meredith, the single worst thing about being a primary school teacher is the last day of the school year. On that day the children arrive, all glowing with the joy of giving, presents for teacher in hand. Even the grottiest boys are coy and sweet with gift-wrapped anticipation. Among the presents Meredith receives there is always a mug with an elephant’s trunk as its handle. Some of these mugs are slip-cast with Dumbo-type elephants that have fat, pale-grey curves and pink inner ears. Others are of bone china, and bear more serious elephants with trunks finely ridged and delicate pale slivers for tusks. Usually, too, there is a cushion cover, lately in Indian-sari style with small circular mirrors blanket-stitched to the elephants’ pink and orange saddles.

  Meredith teaches at a private school, and there are newly moneyed parents who like to make expansive gestures of their gratitude. As a result her courtyard water feature (placed according to feng shui principles) is ringed by a conference of solemn pachyderms of plaster and sandstone, soapstone and granite.

  When Meredith was nine years old, the same age as the children she now teaches, her mother Rhona took her to the hospital to visit her Auntie Pat, who had just given birth to the baby Rosemary (yes, that would be me). On the way to the hospital Meredith and her mother stopped at a news-agency to buy a card. Meredith, a tall child without ankles and with dimples for knees, was allowed to choose. She was drawn to a small square card with a marshmallow-pink pig surrounded by tufts of green grass, sporting a green polka-dot bow between its peaked ears. It was a happy-looking pig, and Meredith thought that the arrival of a cousin was a happy sort of occasion. She picked out the card and gave it happily to her mother, who crossly shoved it back down into the card rack, dog-earing a corner of it.

  ‘You can’t give a woman a card like that, Meredith! You might as well call her a pig!’

  This was one of a number of psychic slaps that Rhona was unwittingly to give her daughter. Meredith has never forgotten that incident in the newsagency, and as a result of it is always careful not to buy greeting cards with images that might be considered, even in any obscure or tangential way, inappropriate. And every year on the last day of school, after defeating the pit-deep dread that makes her want to vomit or at least call in sick, she takes herself reluctantly to work. She smiles and thanks sincerely each exuberant gift-giver. But she thinks, as she unwraps each parcel, ‘you might as well call me an elephant’.

  Elephants do not mate for life

  Elephant Information Repository

  For a time, Meredith had a boyfriend called Adrian Purdy. He was an information technology teacher at a high school adjacent to her primary school, and it is my strong suspicion that he never entirely discarded his teenage fascination with role-playing games. The internet filled the hole in his life which had opened when his old university mates moved on from Dungeons & Dragons to golf. Although he and Meredith were together for many years, Adrian continued to live with his mother. This was largely because his mother took the view that couples who lived together before they were married did not deserve wedding presents. They had not, she said, sacrificed anything.

  Jean Purdy had the long torso, short legs and lopsided gait that were, Adrian told Meredith, characteristic of female trolls. (Who were, Adrian told Meredith, the original ‘trollops’.) Meredith found it hard not to picture Jean — especially when she delivered her doubt-free treatises on everything from the sanctity of smacking children to the benefits of fibre, the cure for leaf-curl in lemon trees and the cheek of indigenous people expecting apologies for things done in their best interests — standing beneath a bridge, her skull knobbled with horns.

  Jean was as hard and defined as a stone, and she left Meredith feeling bruised. Jean was loud, while Meredith spoke as if she might diminish her size by keeping her voice small. Jean began dieting discussions with the prefix, ‘Now I hope you won’t mind me saying, but …’ And behind those words Meredith heard the tearing of fabric, the ripping away of her veil of invisibility. Jean might as well have been saying: Of course they notice, Meredith … rip … Do you really think anybody could be looking at you…rip … and not be thinking…fat…fat…FAT!

  After a while Meredith learned that when she heard ‘Now I hope you won’t mind me saying, but …’ it was time to go. Her body remained there — monumentally there — in Jean’s fussy Laura Ashley living room. But her mind departed the scene, leaving the soft flesh of the body to absorb the blows.

  What Jean Purdy’s son Adrian loved about
Meredith was her flesh. He loved every gram and kilogram of it, would not have cared if she put on more weight, just as long as she didn’t lose too much. It would be losing, he told her, too much of her self. She told me once, quietly, out the side of one of her chubby hands, that he could not stop himself, during lovemaking, from grasping at handfuls of her. Although she asked him, embarrassed, not to do it, he couldn’t help himself.

  Adrian Purdy’s hands, like the rest of him, were unnaturally pale. They were unworked hands, with fingernails as soft as flakes of mica. With those hands he kneaded her like a cat kneading a pillow into shape. On the rare occasion he stayed the night at her house, his body forming a pale fringe around her, his hands still plied her flesh in his sleep.

  Once, Meredith decided to tell Adrian the truth about the elephants. Although he had known her for several years, he had given her only a single elephant item: a jaffle-iron with a hard plastic lid in the shape of an elephant’s face. And it was while Meredith was using the jaffle-iron, after a morning in bed during which she had felt particularly close to him, that she realised it was the perfect moment to tell him. When he came out of the bathroom, she was going to say: Adrian, I love this jaffle-maker, I really do. But the truth is, I really HATE elephants. Isn’t that funny? And she would laugh, and he would laugh, and they would laugh together in that kitchen-shaped bubble of intimacy. As it happened, Adrian Purdy emerged from the bathroom looking fixated and nervous. His pale hair was neatly combed at the sides but springing up at the crown. He put on his suede jacket and asked Meredith if they could skip breakfast, since there was something important they had to do.