Knowing it is there

So you smell it and you know it is there. Under the bed. A cliche, but really in this tiny room room there is no other place to hide.

There are two options open to you now.  Back away. Close the door. Leave the room to return - when? Each time you return now you will not know what it was or where it will be hiding next. There will be a fear of every opening drawer, curtains, sheets, dreams.

It is here now. You know because of the smell of it. That wild armpit of sweat and fight and urine, that loamy brew of mould and gut and egg. So from its smell you know it is here now and it is bad. A smell like running, fast, away, and yet you take one step closer, another.

The bedspread is cold and harsh on the fingertips, cheap fibres, a whore's curtain. And to know you will have to lift it. You will have to see.

walls

Lying in bed. Breathing. The throb of your own heart in your temple, a chill in the air. Colder than it should be and even when you pull the blankets up to your chin there is no warmth in them. Your breathing is loud. Perhaps your sinuses are blocked. A cold coming on. You sniff. Clear, cold air, but when you breath again you are out of sync, a double breath. It is as if someone were in bed beside you. You pull the blanket back and it is cold, cold but no one there and nothing but the strange syncopation. You hold your breath, stop the sound of the air wheezing through your own lungs. Your pulse throbs and yes, there is still the intake, the exhale, breath, not yours but someone else in the room. You turn your head toward the sound. Your heartbeat is so loud it almost obliterates it but it is there. Where. You squint in the almost dark and it is then that you notice that the wall beside the bed is unquiet. A tiny movement, in, a shift and swelling out.

Things that scare you. Shadows

Once when I was younger I drank the punch that did not have alcohol in it. I was trying not to mix my drinks. I drank the fruit punch which I didn't realise had mushrooms in it. Later that night.

The shadow followed me. My shadow I thought, but then when I stopped and turned I saw it hovering on a nearby hedge. I was between my shadow and a streetlight. I did not move, but it did. It saw me watching. It darted away. My heart was beating too loudly. My skin was clammy. I was afraid and yet here was a thing that couldn't be imagined. Here was a piece of night torn free and running  through the puddles of light. Fight or flight. After a moment of hesitation I followed, running through the streets of the suburb running, just a tiny bit behind the echo of myself, running until the dark shape turned to me and melted into the first traces of morning. A moment when all the warmth is sucked out of the night by a hungry sun.

Horrors, beginning, arousal, bees

My next book looks at horror. The things that really frighten us. So here is a space to explore this for a while. Nightmares, fears, the things that truly reach down into the darkness of the soul.

Last night in a fevered wakefulness I understood that sex and fear were the same. It wasn't about them being similar. It was an understanding of how the two states were the same thing differently interpreted. I was frightened by an image that was there every time I closed my eyes and yet when I opened my eyes the same state could be interpreted as arousal. It was a simple looking and un-looking. Still unable to sleep I wrote down the image that continued to disturb me.

There is a man swaying outside her window covered in bees. His whole head is alive with them. He shivers with wings. He moves and some of them, fat, sated, fall off him and land with a soft wet sound like spilled honey on the floor. When she opens her eyes there is just the sound of the ocean and the sway of shadow as a tree is taken by a str.ay breeze. When she closes them the man is back. Even wakeful, closed eyed, he is there and so she must not close her eyes or he will climb through the half closed window and the bees will drip onto the floor inside. She lies as still as she can and listens to a thousand wings beat, light and fast as her heart.

Sex Positive / Negative

I am not a good person.

There are good people in this industry. They are often talked about. She is the nicest writer in Australia. He is the loveliest writer and therefore he deserves this accolade or that. I like them too. I like the nice writers and I try to find time to have dinner with them, breakfast, hang with them at the bar. To be near them is to make myself like them in some way. If I am seen in their company I will become a nice person too.

I am not a nice person.  I am furious. I burn. I can feel my anger eating away at the lining of my stomach, it forms a hard knot in my shoulders and stops the blood flow and gives me a migraine. The anger feeds my flesh and I swell to furious proportions. This is who I am. I look at the shiny happy people and I feel tarnished.

These are the facts: I am from a poor family, from a bad school, from the kind of mad genetic pool that has a tendency to lock themselves away from the rest of the world. I am destined to return to the place I have come from and because of this I am angry.

I have just read Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott and I know that my sex bookclub will hate it.  Here we have a cause and effect. Abuse leads to a longing for self abuse. Abuse as a key to one man's need to be hit, to be told he is nothing. The strong smart women in my bookclub will say that S & M has nothing to do with abuse. Rope play and smacking are a choice, and a positive choice that is all about the line between pain and pleasure. I understand this. I can see how a person from a good home and a good school can lay out their choices and make informed decisions. I am educated. I am married to a man who has always been comfortably middle class. I am protected from my own nature. I am free to chose.

Yet on those nights when my agitation turns to self-loathing, when my natural inclination towards entropy eclipses all the things I have learned since I have been free, I wonder about my decisions, my cravings for sex which suddenly, inexplicably tip over from the pleasurable to the self-destructive. My first reaction is that of suspicion. I think badly of people. I long to lash out. I want to take that person who doesn't want me and force them to look at me naked. Want me. I want to smash their face into my flesh till they know they are mistaken. Want me. Want me. Want me now.

So I let the urge pass because I am educated. Because I know better. Because I am settled and have some of the things that a safe middle-class life can gift to a person. But I do not fit in this life, in this skin, in this class. When I run out of distractions I remember who I am. I remember where I have come from and where I will return to when I let go of my safe nice partner and am reclaimed by the wilderness of my childhood.

I remember the kind of fucking that was meant to unsettle my safe foothold on the world. I remember the drug of sex, the dangerous pit of it filled with joy and poison and harm and the extremes of pleasure. I open that snake pit and peer inside and I wonder if one day I will unbalance again and fall.

Tampa

I have just finished Tampa by Alyssa Nutting and I feel I need to weigh in on this one. Firstly this is a book that was banned by several Australian bookshops who refuse to stock or order it for customers. Okay. I have to ask why? Sure it is a book about pedophilia but it is a book that SUPPORTS the idea that pedophilia is evil and only damages people.

Despite some rather nice writing, this book paints a picture of a two dimensional monster, a sexual predator with no other aspect to her personality other than her pedophilic tendencies. We see nothing of Celeste that does not directly relate to her incessant striving to seduce teenaged boys.

Now, the really disturbing thing about Lolita is that our narrator, Humbert Humbert, is likeable. He is an intellectual giant with a great sense of humour and also a degree of self analysis. He is more than just a cartoon cutout of a serial offender.  This, more than anything, is what makes Lolita great. How can we like this man despite what he has done?

Celeste on the other hand is nothing apart from this one aspect of her life. Even her obsession with her looks and weight are solely about her obsession with teens. The teens are also cardboard cutouts. The adults are even flatter. All this would make me dismiss this book if it weren't for the saving fact that the sex scenes are arousing and therefore the reader must double think their own arousal.  This is the key to the book. Tampa is sexually explicit, pornographic, one-handed reading, and yet if you are reading it one handed, you will also need to question your own hard line (and I assume here that you have one) on pedophilia.

Nutting has done a brave thing here. Even thinking about writing about this subject is enough to get people angry. We live in a society where this one act is the final taboo that we can not even discuss without hysteria. For this reason it is certainly a subject I wish to tackle in my own writing.

I have, in fact, written my older woman/ teenaged boy novel but no one has been bold enough to publish it yet, because my characters are more complex than simple sexual monsters/ innocent victims.  My characters find more than just damage in the relationship. They find comfort and grow from the experience.  I was very tentative in writing that book and although my woman was 40, my boy was 15 and on the cusp of being legal.  It would be interesting to see a reaction to my take on the subject which, I suspect, would be more vitriolic than the reaction Nutting has gotten.

Nutting is supporting the accepted line on this issue by making her pedophile a vile, evil, character. Nothing new to see here folks. But look instead to your reaction as a reader, your arousal at the pornographic sections and your reaction to being aroused by these acts. This is the thing of interest in the book and for this reason I will recommend readers to the text.

Still, Lolita is unsurpassed. Nabokov has given us complexity while Nutting has simplified things for us. Humbert still haunts me where I have shrugged off Celeste in an evening. There is still a conversation to be had about this subject but we have only just begun to face up to that.

What women want

I am reading a book about women and sex and it is affirming. This book singles out research that supports the idea that women are voracious and omnivorous when it comes to sex. They are aroused by almost any sign of sexuality, gay, straight or bestial, they tire of a partner quickly and are ready to have sex again almost as soon as they have uncoupled from a partner.

Of course this kind of research appeals to me. Like everyone I just want scientific evidence to support the little known fact that I am not abnormal, I am just like everybody else.  Societal values, this book suggests, stop women from following their true natures. I am denying my true nature. 

Sometimes, often, when I am enveloped by sadness, I know it is because I have abandoned the fulfilment of lust for the fulfilment of love.

I send out random feelers of lust to every passing warm body, heat seeking, sniffing out the possibility of sex.  

I know I am happy, but in the same way that I acknowledge humour - 'that's funny', I say, without so much as smiling whilst those around me are laughing and clinging to their guts.

I am happy. I know I am happy but the happiness of the love I want is a taught membrane over the cavernous gulf of voracious, indiscriminate lust. I finish, uncouple, and feel that warm contentment that comes with orgasm, but it is never long before that gulf opens wide and I am peering down into my disappointment. "I am so happy." I say, but my face makes a lie of it. 

I am. I am happy. I have the best in the world, but there are always more. And this book underlines a certain longing.