‘Did you do that to her?’
‘What?’
‘You did do that to her, didn’t you?’
‘Do what?’
‘I know what it looks like when a man hits a woman. I know exactly what it looks like. And it looks like that.’
‘Mum.’
‘I can’t. I just can’t,’ she said, standing up at the table and taking away his still-full plate and mine. She tipped our meat and vegetables into the pedal bin and let the lid fall. She was standing over it, sob-breathing and gulping, as we left the house. In the dark of the driveway, I felt ashamed.
The wolf has teeth.
It was true that his top incisors sloped inward a little, making his canines appear quite prominent; but it was not these that bit. It was the clean and white-painted right angle of the edge of our bedroom door. I hammered into it fast, a dervish, whirling. My brow-bone fractured on impact. Skin split and out poured unexpectedly dark blood. It streaked down the white paint as I slid to the floor.
I had gone home, to my parents’ house, for a weekend. I had rattled northwards, out of the city, in my little old Mini, but not without fear of what I would find when I returned. This time, it was tequila instead of gin. And this time, my hands were up, quickly, in a flimsy block between my face and his chest. I felt adrenalin gush to my hands and feet as he grabbed me, tightly, and held me by both wrists.
‘Why did you even bother to come back?’
‘I have no idea,’ I screamed, my pulse hammering.
‘You love them more than you’ve ever loved me.’
‘Of course I do, you stupid fuck.’
He pulled me towards him and then pushed. I left his grip in a fast, hard spin, a dance move out of control, and collected the door with my face.
In the second moment of impact it was me that was stationary and the object that was moving. It was a needle, coming right towards my eye. Slowly, slowly, leaving plenty of time for the apprehension of pain.
‘Close your eyes,’ the nurse said from out of white space.
But I couldn’t. I could only think of aqueous and vitreous humour, the liquid and the jelly that made my eyeball a globe, and how, if the needle slipped, they might leak out and my eyeball would be just a slimy white casing like a fish skin tossed in the scuppers.
It didn’t slip. It just numbed my skin so that when the second needle came, towing its lengths of black thread, I could feel only the tugging as the nurse quilted the skin between my eyebrows. When he had finished, he let me sit up so I could look at myself in a mirror.
The wound would heal and, over time, fade into a pale crescent scar. One time, much later on, I would colour the moon-shaped mark blue and call myself a maiden of Avalon. But now it was an ugly gash of puckered skin and knotted twine marking the midpoint of eye sockets stained magenta and purple. My forehead was swollen and misshapen. The fine crack revealed by the X-ray was concealed beneath my swollen forehead, but in the mirror I could see the unmissable sign of ownership. A brand.
I was not allowed to leave the hospital until I had seen the domestic violence counsellor. She was not much older than I was, and her long hair was held back with a polka-dot bandana. She wore her wrong-side-of-the-tracks accent like a badge of pride, saying ‘arks’ for ‘ask’ and ‘was’ for ‘were’. But it was a dialect of blunt truth and I could not evade its meanings, no matter how delicately I danced around them with pretty words.
‘He’ll bash you again,’ she said.
I argued that I knew how to avoid it now. If I could just keep my mouth shut at the right moment. If I didn’t provoke him when he’d been drinking. She looked at me wearily, and I began to hear myself. After I had been silent for a time, she looked at her watch and said that I could go.
‘You’ll have to have someone pick you up, but. Your mum, maybe?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, who was you going to call then?’
I didn’t know. Beyond the yellowed curtain of the Emergency Department cubicle there were people milling about, but none of them belonged to me. I was alone. I had been delivered to the hospital by policemen (called to our house by the pizza cook), and one of them had sat in the back of the car with me and held his handkerchief to my bleeding face.
‘Must be someone.’
There was only one person. I was cold and shivering and all I wanted was him. I wanted to kiss him on his lips, and then to drive my teeth into them, furious with love for him, and draw blood. But instead I took a taxi to the home of a friend who wouldn’t scold.
In the late morning — washed, and dressed in borrowed clothes -– I went back to the apartment behind the pizza shop. He was sleeping. I sat beside him for a while, on the edge of our bed, watching dream-tremors flit through the muscles under the skin of his face. Gelfling, plump as a cushion in the crook of his knees, fixed me with one yellow and disdainful eye, as if she knew my decision already.
The wolf has a heart.
And there were times, during the year of my lesson in wolf anatomy, when I was close enough to see it. Just a glimpse of it, beating red and slick inside the dark fur. I have to think hard, now, to remember how it looked. But I did see it. I’m sure that I did.
COMMITMENT
The Depthlessness of Soup
Sitting across the table from one another, at about ten past eight on the evening of the second anniversary of the day that they’d met, Paula and Will were like a pair of dangerously inflated balloons. Each of them had something important to say to the other, and the words that would make up these important somethings were already in their lungs, clinging like horseback riders to molecules of oxygen, impatiently awaiting a chance to escape. So preoccupied were Paula and Will by the sensation of mounting pressure within their chests that neither of them actually saw the waitress. The soup, a consommé, appeared simply to land — in wide, white bowls — on the table before them.
Perhaps it was the rising vapours of the soup that alerted the waiting words to the fact that an opportunity was nigh. Or perhaps it was the crusty warm scent of the bread rolls on the side plates. But in any case, by the time Paula and Will took up their spoons, words were jockeying in their mouths, swelling out their cheeks. Paula and Will each parted their lips in order to take a shallow sip of air, and the trapped and pent-up words took their chance, making a headlong, hurdy-gurdy rush for the big outside world.
The crucial question is, of course, whose words would get there first? But in order to answer this question, we must consider the events that took place in the lives of Paula and Will in the week leading up to the anniversary dinner, and also some elementary facts of physics.
1. What Will did in the week leading up to the anniversary He took Wednesday afternoon off work and drove across town, through the industrial suburbs with their workshops and warehouses, to the home of Paula’s father, who no longer lived with Paula’s mother. She had quite dispassionately up and left him a few days after the youngest of their four daughters finished school, and then, once the paperwork was in order, married a quiet and gentle bachelor with notably short legs. Will thought it was rather as if she had simply decided that at her stage of life one was better off with a dachshund than an alsatian.
Paula’s father was not the sort of man Will could ever imagine himself being able to hug, but he hoped to be able to conclude today’s conversation with a warm handshake, perhaps even one of the sincere, two-handed variety. That’s if Paula’s father was at home. Will had decided not to ring first, because Paula’s father might have asked what he wanted to see him about, and that would have been awkward. It was not a conversation he wanted to have over the phone.
The house was a charmless red brick square, out the front of which was a cemented yard with a few circular sinkholes that were home to straggly and untended rosebushes. Will didn’t bother to ring the doorbell, just followed the sound of an idling engine around the side of the house to the garage in the backyard. Here Paula’s father stood between the nostrils,
and beneath the raised sky-blue hood, of his 1955 Holden FJ.
As he crossed the yard, Will felt in his pocket for the box containing the ring that he had on Monday collected from the jeweller. Paula’s father wasn’t exactly the type to appreciate the subtleties of the design, but a diamond that size was expensive in anyone’s language. Will might not even show it, but it was there, as a prop, in case he needed a graphic demonstration of just how serious he was.
Standing a few metres behind Paula’s dad, Will coughed, but not loudly enough to be heard over the engine. He coughed again, louder this time, but still Paula’s father remained intent on the FJ’s whirring mechanics. Will tuned in for a moment to the melody of the engine, and even he — who had scarcely more than a postage stamp’s worth of knowledge on the subject of car engines — could tell that it was singing off-key. The irregular revs gathered into a crescendo. There was a muffled explosion, and then silence.
‘You motherfucking cunt of a fucking pox-headed arse-wipe,’ said Paula’s father slowly, distributing his emphasis equally among the words.
Will coughed, audibly now, and the man to whom he was about to apply for the position of son-in-law turned around with a fierce sort of a look that changed to one of total incomprehension.
‘Yes?’ he asked.
Will coughed again, this time just to clear his throat.
‘It’s Will …just in case you, um …’ ‘Something I can do for you?’
‘I, um …trouble with your car, I see.’
‘No shit, Sherlock.’
Vigorously, Paula’s father rubbed his filthy hands with an equally filthy rag.
‘I wanted to talk to you about Paula.’
‘Paula? Oh. Oh, right,’ he said, and Will could have sworn that he heard the small ker-tish of a penny dropping.
Just as soon as the said unit of currency had landed, though, Paula’s father tucked his rag into the pocket of his overalls and walked around to the side of the car and slid into the driver’s seat.
‘I’d like to marry her,’ Will said, but the last half of his sentence was drowned in the ineffectual churning of the starter motor.
‘What’s that?’ Paula’s father called through the open car door, then turned the key and planted his foot again.
‘I’d like to marry her!’ Will said, trying to shout over the staggered bursts of mechanical noise.
The car fell silent and Paula’s father hauled himself out from behind the wheel. Returning to the front of the car, he planted both hands on the edge of the engine well and peered into the workings.
‘I’d like to marry her,’ Will repeated, edging around to stand by the passenger-side headlight where he might catch the older man’s eye.
‘Fucking oath,’ said Paula’s father, but Will was almost certain that the curse pertained to the car and not to his inquiry.
‘So, is it okay? If I marry her?’
‘Who, Paula?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s it got to do with me?’
‘Well, you know, traditionally … I thought it would be polite, you know, the done sort of thing, to come, and ask …’
‘Been a long time since any of my bloody daughters listened to anything I had to say.’
‘So it’s okay with you then?’
Paula’s father looked up from the engine and Will felt, for the first time since he’d arrived, that he had his full attention.
‘Better ask Paula, mate. Reckon you’ll find that she’ll be the one to decide whether she’s going to marry you or not.’
2. What Paula did in the same week
She booked in for Thursday, in her lunch hour, even though she knew the timing meant that until Saturday night she would have to take showers in private and keep her pants on whenever Will was around. It wasn’t like they had sex every single night (they were past that stage) so she knew that she would manage to keep the surprise under wraps.
The salon was part of a day spa whose humid, belowground premises smelled of chlorine and Epsom salts. Although the receptionist invited her to take a seat while she waited, Paula preferred to stand. As she stood, she conducted — by way of surreptitious glances into a mirrored wall — an honest appraisal of her physical self. Once she had pushed back her shoulders, dropped her chin slightly and tilted her pelvis to minimise the profile of her tummy, she was fairly content with the look of her body. She was slightly thick through the middle, but that was just the way she was made, and there was nothing more she could do about it than she already did at the gym twice a week. Her clothes were perfectly respectable: tailored, colour coordinated. Much less attention-seeking than the only other client in the waiting room, a skinny girl in chunky red boots that made her look like Olive Oyl. Paula was, she knew, a slightly unimaginative dresser, but she had some time ago accepted that she was simply not like the artists and designers at the advertising agency where she worked, who could afford to get around in hipster jeans and crushed shirts and blue hair. A good personal assistant wanted to exude control and efficiency, and Paula knew that she did just that.
Recognising the mental leap she had just made, from body and clothing to character and competency, she gave her reflected self a disapproving look. Precisely how short, she wondered, was the shortcut from the fit of one’s skirt to the success of one’s career? She had taken Gender Studies at university and ought, therefore, to have known better than to take that route, she chided herself. And then continued on with her appraisal, regardless. It was healthy, she thought, to be fully aware of one’s own character traits, good and bad. She knew that her worst faults were irritability and a high susceptibility to PMT. But these weren’t really such terrible flaws. Certainly not the sort of things that would prevent a man from wanting to marry you, for instance. Generally, she was very good-humoured; she was well organised, persistent and — somewhat incongruously with her conservative dress style, she liked to think — an energetic and uninhibited sexual partner. And it was this last segment of her personality that had brought her to the salon in the first place.
‘It’s Paula, is it?’
An elfin creature, her dead-straight hair coloured in several shades of pale blonde, padded across the tiles of the reception area in her tiny white-plush slippers.
‘I’m Mary-Joy. This way, please,’ she said, and Paula caught both the hint of an accent and the quick silver flash of a cross bouncing against Mary-Joy’s tanned throat.
‘Your first time for this, is it?’ asked Mary-Joy, as she led the way in her slippered feet down a gleaming corridor.
‘Uh-huh,’ Paula answered.
‘So you’re a bit nervous, is it?’ she said, and this last ‘is it?’ was sufficient for Paula to place the accent as South African.
Mary-Joy showed Paula into a room that was full of lavender fumes from an oil burner, and had a towel-covered bed in its centre.
‘Now take off all your bottom things and just lie down on the bed. Pull up the sheet if you like. I’ll be back in a minute and we’ll start.’
Paula put her shoes neatly together on the seat of the chair provided, and over the top of them layered her pantyhose, underpants and skirt. Before she left the office, she’d gone into the toilets and wiped herself thoroughly with a KFC refresher towelette, but now she felt nervous all over again about discharges or smears. She plucked a few tissues from a box on a glass shelf and had another go, then tucked the used tissues into the toe of one of her shoes. She hoisted herself up onto the bed and covered her lower half with a thin floral sheet. Mary-Joy was so precisely on time when she returned with a pot of warmed wax and a selection of spatulas, that Paula couldn’t help but wonder if there was a peephole in one of the walls.
‘Is this going to hurt really a lot?’ Paula asked. ‘Or just a lot?’
‘Oh, it’s not so comfortable, but it’ll be worth it in the end,’ Mary-Joy soothed, whisking away the sheet. ‘Now, can you tuck your knees up for me? That’s it, bend them like that, and can you just hold them there,
right against your tummy? I’ll be as gentle as I can.’
A Word from Rosie Little on:
Pubic Hairstyling
Let’s consider for a moment the vocabulary that was at the disposal of Paula and MaryJoy as Paula lay back in a pose she’d not adopted since she was a toddler in the midst of a nappy change. The procedure Paula was about to experience is, of course, most often called the Brazilian. Some of its most famed practitioners are the J Sisters, the Brazilian-born siblings (Janea, Jocely, Jonice, Joyce, Judséia, Juracy, and Jussara) who have really made a name for themselves waxing the living daylights out of the New Yorkers who visit them in their West 57th Street parlour. In French-speaking countries, however, you might instead request an epile complet. And in at least some boutiques, the style is called the Sphinx in honour of a breed of hairless Egyptian cat. Some say that there are actually two styles, the crucial difference being that in the case of the Brazilian a ‘landing strip’ of hair remains, while the Sphinx leaves nothing at all in its wake.
Just in case you needed proof that up-selling has infiltrated every last nook and cranny of the marketplace, I can tell you that pubic hairstyling does not now end with some kind of soothing ointment being applied to redraw pudendal skin. You can have your ‘landing strip’ shaped, curled, spiked or coloured, and you can have applied to your bare skin, in special water-resistant stickers, little Alice in Wonderland-inspired messages like FUCK ME. Although you do have to wonder about the intelligence of partners who need a landing strip and instructions too.
It was not the Brazilian itself, however, that most significantly influenced the events of the night of Paula and Will’s anniversary dinner, but the shriek-punctuated conversation that took place between Paula and Mary-Joy at the time it was being performed.
Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls Page 9
