Breasts

I often dream of breasts. I understand that this is something to do with comfort, maternal care, a mother love, the comfort of milk, fulfillment of the desire to feed. None of these explanations can diminish the low groan in my groin when I think of breasts. The shape and the texture of them, the perfect weight, rested in your palm, the joy of a nipple twitching towards an erection. The ache in the back of my jaw when I remember that strange adult suckling that can overwhelm a girl. I see them nestled into someone's bra, the twin globes swelling towards my attention and I imagine lifting them out of the nest of cotton and silk.

I will not go to the Bath House. I will not be alone with the breasts that are so close in their pendulous exposure, that I could reach out and gently cradle. Sometimes when I am lost in the flesh on flesh, my own breast is close, hanging into the mouth of the man I am with. I lean and push my tongue into his mouth and there is my nipple and my tongue can touch it. My own breast a poor replacement for that of someone new, but with my eyes closed I can suck and I am sucked and the pure sexual surge of the shape and taste of a breast is an amazing thing.

In the light of day there is something a little disturbing about the idea of a breast. It nudges against the line between the adult and the child. It is a complicated place, an interface between the infant and the very adult world of sex. There are other parallels, the swallowing of ejaculate, the suckling on a penis and the milky white warmth at its conclusion.

She put her nipple in my mouth and made me taste it, the sour milk, the bitter sweetness and the sore cracked flesh of a breast that had once been soft and firm against my cheek.

Is there nothing that can be enjoyed without this underlayer of unsettledness? Is there no pure pleasure or purity of sadness or joy? Bitter sweet like her milk. Bitter sweet like the very act of sex, like the love I feel for my lover and for all the other potential lovers who are merely friends, for all the children who will one day grow up to be lovers, for the old and the infirm who long for the pure pleasure that their memory affords them.

There is nothing but a series of complications. I am suckling at the breast that is my life and swallow the bitter sweetness that is my share of it.

Assertive Jealousy

I shut the computer and he is gone. It is as simple as that. Of course there is the moment of regret, the empathy that is so constant. Not just a voice telling me that I should perhaps consider someone else’s feelings, but an actual jumping into the body of the other person, a haunting. I sit with my fingers resting gently on the silver surface of my laptop and I am there inside him in his quiet bedroom, with the little red light announcing that the conversation has been terminated. The girl is gone.

For a moment he / I am disappointed. We were having a conversation in a fashion and without her / me, I will be alone with an unfinished assignment and my music and a wakeful night. He / I stare at the little red light beside her / my name, Krissy Kneen and I am wishing she/ I would relent, open my computer and continue to chat over the internet, but it is only for a moment. Some other name pops up into my facebook-driven consciousness. A girl he knows/ I know. A quick ‘hello, how are you doing’ and the haunting is over. I, Krissy, myself, no longer regret the decision to shut down the conversation.

I am not unique in his world. I am unessential. I am also not in a position to compete with Jayne or Eve or Libby or whoever else the boy is otherwise engaged with. I am married. I am not particularly good looking. I am old enough to be his mother. I am old enough to have had sex with his mother. The boy is a kid. All the boys in my life are kids. I feel like a teacher on duty in the playground at a boys school. They jump around, excitedly, ‘look what’s happening, Miss,’ ‘Have you read this book, Miss?’ we converse, and I can fool myself into thinking that they are my peers, but I will never fool them. They ditch me at the first sign of a pretty face and I am left to my own resources.

He is my imaginary friend. I’m not certain how we started to converse so regularly on the Facebook chat. He contacted me one night. I was alone. Perhaps my husband was overseas or working late. I know I was in bed, warm in my pyjamas. I was looking up pornography, my vibrator nestled on the pillow beside me. Then this popping sound, a flashing from the facebook tab. I saw his name. A friend of a friend. We had met once before at a writer’s festival. He was vaguely funny, perhaps a little over-eager. I remembered the slightly nasal whine of his voice, a very distinctive comic lilt.

‘Hello’

A greeting from someone I barely knew.

‘Hello.’

A beginning.

He asked about books I was reading, books I had read, questions about writing, story, character. A very cleverly targeted set of questions. I could not end this kind of conversation. I slipped into a frequent chatting, looked for the little green light of him whenever I arrived home. I grew incrementally fond. The evenings when he was absent were interminable. I became incautious, divulged my insecurities to someone that I had barely met. There was always someone else on the other line to him. He chatted with several women at once. ‘A mirror’ he wrote and it was a comment intended for some other girl. I felt a snag of jealousy. I was not unique. I took my place in a long and varied queue. ‘She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever met’ he said ‘I’d forgotten how gorgeous she was’ ‘I have a date with her tomorrow’. I was diminished in the crowd. I sat with my computer closed and knew that he would be there, happily engaged in a chat with someone else. The jealousy fermented.

I have a husband. I have a life, a love and no reason to be jealous of his bevy of young attractive women. I have no particular interest in the man, the boy, and yet I struggled with the realisation that I had no special place in his life.

‘I would kiss her’ he said, ‘she is pretty’.

I slapped the laptop closed after a particularly hurtful rave about the attractiveness of someone I had met and felt quite jealous of. My jealousy. My burning jealousy. The acid of it eating in to the lining of my stomach, an ulcerous emotion.

Beauty

I am beautiful.

People never see this, and I must admit that I have not encouraged them to notice. I am too busy noticing the various lovelinesses of my friends. I avoid catching my eye n the mirror. When I see my own reflection I wonder how they will see me, and anticipate the worst. But I am beautiful. I am a clock with a complexity of wheels and cogs making slow ticking circles inside. I am a surprise, a lucky dip of opposing ideas all moving in tandom, multi-directional. I have added to myself with time. I was once raw edged and uncomplicated. Now I am something more than this. I have grown into the kind of beauty that is never simple or obvious.

People do not see this. People do not look.

I lurk in my invisibility, in my drag-queen veneer, all faux-woman. I am a mask of overt sexuality, a caricature. I am my behaviour.

Writing a memoir is like pearl-diving. I come up to take breath and my hands are mud and my life is all cut open and spilled out but for a moment here, now, I have found the pearl that I suspected might have been there all the time. Sooner or later it will slip through my fingers. The oyster will snap shut, all ugly grey shell and questionable reputation. But for now, for once, for a brief moment I have found it, and I know that despite what they may think, I am beautiful.

A memoir chapter without much sex part 4

There is no way to know how long I have been lying, here, minutes, maybe hours. I wake to the sound of cars, less of them now, the rush hour long gone. How long? There is pain. It is the kind of pain that is a physical shearing away of my skin. I feel it in my scalp, waves of it, washing over me. I am in an ocean of the stuff and it is difficult to breath but I do, small shuddering breaths. So, I have fallen. I may have broken something, my foot, or my leg or my back. There is the possibility that I have snapped my spine. I certainly feel as if it will be impossible to move. With difficulty I reach down towards my body. I am in my pyjamas and it feels as if I have wet myself. I touch the damp fabric and the pain is something new and all consuming. My hand is wet but not with urine. There is blood, so much of it. I peel down my pyjama pants and there is blood on my thighs. My first thought is of sex. I have destroyed the possibility of pleasure. Somehow I had slipped and caught the edge of the speaker box in my crotch and now there will be no orgasms. Even now, in the pain, I think about life without the relief of an orgasm. If this is the case then I would rather be dead. I wonder if I could somehow develop the ability to have non-clitoral orgasms, the fabled vaginal ones that I have read about. I wonder about reconstructions, plastic surgery, a stitching up of ruined flesh and the softer skin taken from the back of my neck or my elbow. I lie awake in the pain for what seems like a mess of days. Somehow, eventually I will have to move. My elbows act like knees. I drag myself along the ground like someone participating in army manoeuvres. I kamakaze crawl. I but up against the door and here it is like a mountain, something to be conquered. Somehow I manage to drag myself to my knees without fainting. I stretch for the door handle and somehow, miraculously, it is in my hand. The door is open. I am sprawled in the corridor and there is no one about and there is the lift at the other end and I must crawl to it. I think of ants dragging twigs that are hundreds of times larger than themselves. I think of maggots, hatched and wriggling, seemingly on the spot, babies burning their skin on carpet, grunting their frustration, edging towards tears.
She screams when she sees me. The lift doors open and she screams. It must seem that I have been attacked, stabbed. She sees the blood and she shrieks. I relax into her panicked care. She pulls me into the lift and we are somehow in the lobby. I am kneeled beside, I am tended to. I sink into the hurt and the embarrassment of it all. They ask me what happened and I am not sure how to say that I was sleeping in the top of a cupboard without sounding like a freak. I am a freak. The ambulence drivers glance at each other and I know that it must be bad. I am thinking – I will never have sex ever again. I will never have an orgasm. I will die now. Must die. They give me pain killers and I become drowsy and it still hurts, but I am distanced from it.
In the hospital the doctors come in packs, a (collective noun) of doctors who look but don’t touch. There is a swelling that has grown to the size of a cricket ball and it is a purple black canker.
The same question. “How did this happen?”
I invent a complex story about spring cleaning, the same fall described in detail but with a different prologue. I know that they can feel the lie. I do not lie. This is a new thing for me, this invention, this half truth. They know that there is something amiss and so they hold me, feeding me pain killers, trooping through the ward and lifting the pristine pastel blue of the hospital dress, telling me to spread my legs as if I could have clamped them together in my present state. It occurs to me that they imagine I have been abused. One nurse asks me about my living situation, my boyfriend.
“I fell out of a cupboard” I tell them again and again and it must sound like ‘I ran into the door’ or ‘I slipped down the stairs’. It is a lie in it’s unlikeliness.
I ask them if I can leave. It has been three days and I am missing university. They keep me under observation but they do very little. When a week is up the release me into the world. I have enough money for a cab fare but I will have no money for phone calls home or bus fares or food when I am there.
I hobble to university on crutches. I sleep in the bottom of the cupboard with the speaker box murmuring a classical lullaby. Bach. I have a sudden longing for my grandfather and his piano and I take the tape out of the machine and replace it with a mix tape of songs of sadness and longing. Love is A Stranger of A Different Kind, Ground Control To Major Tom. It calms me to know that I am not alone in my disconnectedness.
Time passes. The bruising fades, the swelling eases back to a kind of normalcy. I masturbate carefully in my cupboard nest. No response at first, but slowly my body responds to my touch. A gentle orgasm. A slow return to form. The orgasms ease the loneliness a little. I abandon the crutches. I find myself restless in the evenings and I leave the confines of my student prison and wander the streets of Spring Hill. The houses are beautiful. The beautiful people in them have city lives full of excitement and families and friends. Everyone is busy doing something of importance it seems. I glimpse them through half drawn curtains. I pass them spilling out from the doorways of pubs. I get to know the street walkers by sight. I venture to the edges of parks. I stand under the glow of street lights and am bathed in otherworldiness. There are mad people pacing and talking to themselves and wandering in endless circles down streets, up streets, around streets. I pass the same man several times and suddenly realise that from his perspective it may be me who is mad and aimless. I sit in my lonely grey room with the flowers sagging under the weight of days, petals dropping in time to the rythmless strains of early Pink Floyd. I become restless too quickly and I am back to walking. Time passes and passes and passes some more.

A memoir chapter without much sex part 3

And so I wake in a pre-dawn moment and I am entombed. It is cold and cramped and there is a numbness in one of my legs. I can hear the traffic, the oceanic swell, and in this way I know that I am not at home. First night away from home. I am homesick for the press of dogs around my knees, warm dampfur bodies, the smell of birds, the smother love of my family, peering through the window to make sure that I have somehow survived another night.
I have survived the night. There is a fierce pride in this. I shift and shake my foot and feel the painful prickle of blood rush back into parched veins. Despite the general family consensus that I would have difficulty surviving in the world, I am still here. I have seen a movie by myself. I have walked home. I have rested after a fashion. I shrug the night off, swing my legs out so that I am hanging off the high ledge of the cupboard like a terracotta angel. It is then that I realise how far it is to the floor.
The speaker box is there beneath me. It is a simple matter of turning in this cramped place, clinging to the structure of the cupboard with my arms, elbows splayed, then lowering myslelf onto the tall rectangle of wood. From there it is a simple thing to slip onto the floor.
I sit on the precarious ledge for what seems like a long time. The sound of traffic fills out. Tide coming in. commuters rising, showering, dressing. There is a sudden peel of laughter from somewhere down the corridor. Girls gathering, running towards the lift and down to breakfast in the communal dining place where boys are allowed but not encouraged. I am stranded and alone with this. The room lightens by increments. Black turns grey then lighter grey. There is nothing beautiful. There is a small square blue-tacked to the wall above my desk. I can’t make out the picture from my eerie but I know the image in my heart. A dirty, wind-harried child leans out through a rail towards a sea-breeze. She is a sepia traveller, now grown old perhaps, dead, the legacy of her children and her children’s children spreading out from this photogrph of migration like a sad stain. But at this moment there is still the possibility of a new life. There is still a kind of resigned hope in her gaze. Life might not turn out quite like she expected. There may be an easiness somewhere on the distant horizon. She peers towards the ocean and there is some hope.
I will find more pictures. I will hang them above my desk and day by day they will spread across the walls, creaming over towards the bed and into my dreams. I will pick flowers. I will have no money to buy flowers, but I will pluck them from fencelines and pop them into a water bottle on the desk. I will search for flowers with a scent, jasmine, mock orange, all of my favourite smells to bring some pleasure to a lifeless space. I will fill the room with music to dispel the ache of emptiness. And, more importantly. I will find bodies to touch mine. I will be naked with someone new. I will provide my flesh with a distraction.
But first I must climb down out of the cupboard. First things first.
There is a family folklore, the kind that families invent for you. In this story I am clumsy. I am vague. I have barely a toe on the earth and the rest of me is lost to the atmosphere. “That’s Krissy” they say when I spill tepid liquid out of a cup of tea. “Typical Krissy” when I forget my sentence half way though. It is with this fabled clumsiness that I execute a halting turn edging my bottom towards the perilous drop. There is nowhere to lodge my fingers. I hook my elbows around the door frame. There is nothing to do that will lesson the risk of a plummet. I take slow sure breaths. I will have one chance at this dismount. I tighten the muscles in my arms and this is my support. I crawl to the very edge and then there is the clean jerk of my body falling, but I am safe. I am held up by my arms. I search about for a foothold, feel the edge of the speaker box and my probing sets it to listing back and forth, a precarious balance. I can feel the judder in my arms and the slow burn of effort. I am light. I am as slight as I have ever been, thinned down by a stubborn refusal to eat. I am light, but there is no muscle to hold me here for long. I rest a toe on the speaker box. I will have to let go and there will be a small fall in this, but I will be perched in saftely. I can visualise the result. I hold my breath and then I let go.

A memoir chapter without much sex part 2

The building was old and tall and impressive in the way that hospitals or homes for the mentally ill are impressive. There was a dining area on the ground floor. Girls sitting in groups, girls eating or watching television. Girls laughing and whispering and glancing up at me, the stranger in their midst. They could smell my difference. They heard it in my accent and saw it written on my sallow skin. Short, smart, fiery. They nodded to me in the lift but I noticed how the conversation suddenly fell away. I heard the sound of it start up when I slunk down the corridor to my room. My room was grey and small, a desk sunk into one corner, a bed skulking on another. The wall to ceiling cupboard was finished in a wood veneer, the warmest thing in the place.
I lay on the bed and the springs creaked. There was a sign in the lobby warning that men, including members of the family were not allowed past the dining room. The creaking springs seemed like a secondary alarm. No tossing or turning or petting of any kind. I imagined they wouldn’t expect the girls to put the springs to the test. The Country Women’s Association did not anticipate the idea of love between girls, or else they shrugged it off. I had been left in their care. Free but still imprisoned it seemed. I lay on the bed and listened to the steady creak in time to my breathing. I switched the bedside light on. Grey shadows slicing geometric shapes out of a grey room, monochrome. Grey on grey on grey. A deafening palate blended out of white and black. I pulled the novel out from under my pillow and tried to read. Black writing on white paper. Black and white and all of it grey.
I pulled the Doona off the bed and opened the door of the cupboard. Such a small cramped space but large enough for me to make a nest. Dark in the cupboard and safe, and the wood is fast against the wall, no creaking springs. I wriggle out of my pyjamas. I touch myself for comfort and I it is comforting, but brief. When I am finished there is still the grey room outside and the sounds of the city and the first night alone. First night ever alone. First night ever alone.
I drag the oversized speaker box towards the cupboard. It is an easy thing to climb up onto the box. I have to drag myself up on tip toe, balancing against the cupboard door. I hook my arms through the upper reaches of the cupboard and I drag myself up, scrabbling awkwardly on the lip of the upper shelf. When I am finally up there it is closer than the bottom of the cupboard. There are pillows up there and extra blankets. I am here and I am safe and suddenly terribly tired. I cry for tiredness. Soft tears with no force behind them. I miss my family. I miss my home, my gaol. I am finally free and yet I wish I was not free. I wish I could be captured again, held against my will. I long for chains and rules and the smother of love. I press my face against the pillow. There is no air, and here I am hoping that I might drown in this tiny space above the cupboard. And slowly, breath by shallow breath, I fall asleep.

A memoir chapter without much sex part 1

I was in the Queen Street Mall and there were people everywhere. There were groups of them, giggling couples holding hands, rangy tribes of teenagers hooting to each other across a sea of heads.

I stood in the middle of the throng clutching my map. My coat still held a fug of popcorn and malteezers in its folds. The scent of the cinema. Strange to be standing in the dark when I entered the cinema in the glare of my first day in the city. I am alone and out in the world. Alone. I have never been alone like this. I stood at the bus stop and I realised I had never bought a ticket for myself. I had never read a timetable. I had never sat in the movies without someone beside me. I glanced around at the unfamiliar shops, the people passing, the other lives so full of purpose. Other peoples lives. Nothing to do with my own and I knew now, at last, I was alone. I turned the map over in my hands, matching my direction against the street signs. I had never had to follow a map before. I had been ferried from home to school to the shops and home again. I had never been responsible for my own direction. Now I was free to go anywhere. I was free. I found the street and walked it. Such a long way really, so many unaccompanied steps. I was eighteen, and apart from my walks along the beach I had never walked such a long way alone before.