The Bent Bits Are the Best Bits

Jax Jacki Brown

‘Would you rather be deaf or blind?’

I hate this game. Can’t she tell?

I know where it’s going, and its headed straight for me and my body. I stare at the ground as I walk, watch my right foot drag with every step, careful where I put my sticks so I don’t slip up in front of her. The ends of my sticks make a small thunk sound as I press them into the grass – right, left, right – as we slowly walk beside each other.

My toes have calluses on the tops of them from years of being pulled along the ground. The palms of my hands and my knees are callused too, from crawling everywhere, through bush tracks, over rocks, across sand. Most of the time I don’t feel ashamed. I like being near to the land, knowing it close up, seeing the things others miss, feeling it with my hands, knees and toes, all at once – three parts of me where others only give their feet.

I know everyone thinks I should feel ashamed. Walking is considered better than crawling. Walking gets me praised by Mum for showing how straight I can be. Dad calls me his ‘little trooper’.

Eight-year-olds shouldn’t crawl. ‘Only babies crawl’ – that’s what Chris, my brother’s friend, says. It’s his mum who is beside me now, so I must keep walking even though this part of the track is the best bit for crawling.

There is a small muddy creek. It’s two and a half cripple steps or three crawls wide. My dad has built a little bridge over it, but the wood is dark and always burning from the sun, so I prefer to crawl or walk through the creek instead. I love feeling the cool water, the way my stick ends are sucked into the black mud so when I pull them free they make a popping sound.

Frogs live here. I’ve caught them with my brother, captured them in buckets and carried them to our shack. We put them on the big windows in the front room and watch their feet suction onto the glass, climbing up, up, trying to get away.

‘Do you ever wish you could walk, be normal . . . that you weren’t handicapped?’

My whole body flinches at her question. I really want to sit down but I am determined – that’s what they tell me. I don’t give up. That’s a good thing, right?

It will take me years to know my limits, to learn to rest when I need to, to stop pushing myself. To tell people to fuck off.

She smells of cigarettes and sunscreen – and secrets. I want to tell her I know some of hers, some things that she is so scared will spill out she gets migraines from the pressure of holding them inside. I know she has one vagina flap longer than the other – Mum told me. She’s done some sex thing with the man she’s having an affair with, and that’s stretched it. I imagine it, that long flap, tucked up inside her swimmers, a small bulge on one side. Does it chafe as she walks, slowly, beside me?

I want to ask how her flap is going. What does she tell her husband, who drinks too much VB and yells at my father for being a ‘fucking dole-bludging hippy’? How does she explain how her flap came to be? Does she feel ashamed of it? Or does she secretly feel proud? Does she pull it to make it grow? Does she wish she could just let it out?

*

‘Are you a boy or a girl?’

‘I . . . don’t know. What do you think I am?’

‘You’re a girrrl . . . are you? Why’s your hair so short?’

‘I like it. Mum shaved it for me. Wanna feel it? It’s all smooth.’

‘You’re weird. Girls have long hair, don’t you know?’

We paddle on our boogie boards in the still, warm water of the lagoon and don’t say anything for a bit. There are lice in my cozzie and sometimes they bite my crotch. They particularly like the crotch.

Not many kids are allowed to swim here: just me and my brother and sometimes other kids when their parents are too drunk to care.

It’s full of piss. Actual man piss. The clubhouse runs beside it and on a ‘clubby night’, when they are having a ‘do’, all the blokes duck around the side of the club and piss into this water. Mum says it’s good for our immune system. ‘Just try not to drink it, okay?’

‘Where’s your parents?’ I ask.

‘My mum’s gone.’

She breathes in hard. ‘And my dad . . . he shot himself in the head . . . my brother found him . . . that’s why he’s so angry.’

‘Your brother is real scary. He chased us with a knife yesterday, just for going near your place, there was blood on it.’

‘It was only tomato sauce, not real blood,’ she says.

*

I am bleeding. Bleeding in my undies. In my grandpa’s outdoor toilet that smells of old dog and mildew. My belly and my thighs ache.

I get home and tell Mum that I must have hurt myself somehow. Mum gets all excited and says, ‘No, it’s just your period, you’re becoming a woman now.’

I think, What if I don’t want to become a woman? What if I want to be a person, or a boy with short hair? I don’t say this out loud. My parents didn’t cope when I started writing ‘I want a dick, love Jack’ on all the Christmas and birthday cards to our family. I keep it inside.

Mum gets a bag of old white nappies, cut up and now used as rags, down from a hook in the laundry and shows me how to fold them over and put them inside my undies. It feels so big and bulky down there.

That afternoon, Dad takes me to my physio, where my body is pulled and stretched. It hurts, really hurts, but I never ask them to stop. I think to myself, I’m good, and if I try hard enough I’ll become normal. I imagine myself above myself, looking down. From up here, I am safe. I can endure whatever they decide to do, whatever they declare is in my ‘best interests’. This body is not mine. I will grow into something else.

Carla, the physio, gives me a present to remind me of how ‘straight and tall’ I can be if I just keep trying. If I keep giving my body over to the pain, I will become straighter, right? A little statue of an emperor penguin with his ‘shoulders back, and legs straight, Jacki,’ Carla says in her thick Polish accent. I hate her, but I push this hate down into myself.

I am exiled from my body. It will take years to come home.

*

She pushes me in my new wheelchair up the ramp and I loll my head into her breasts for the briefest of moments, letting the back of my head touch her through her red school jumper. She doesn’t notice, or she thinks it’s an accident. I’m nervous and sweaty. I feel like this all the time around her recently. I can’t look her in the eyes anymore, and I don’t know what to say when she asks me what I think about Daniel, the boy all the Year 8 girls seem to have a crush on. She keeps bugging me to ask out Mathew, the only other person in our school in a wheelchair, but I don’t like him like that, and he really doesn’t like me, not even as a mate, he’s made that clear.

At night I lie awake and imagine her on top of me, kissing me, her thick curly hair falling in my face. I imagine touching her breasts lightly. I feel my naturally tense muscles tighten further as I touch myself. I don’t know what our bodies would do together beyond this naked making out. My special school had no sex ed classes and our high school health classes don’t talk about girls getting together.

Mum called me into her bedroom a few months ago and said it would take a ‘special kind of man’ to love me. ‘If you ever get into bed with a man,’ she said, ‘make sure he has a condom on at all times.’ I imagine a disembodied cock sliding across a bed towards me, limp condom drooping off its tip, threatening to fall off.

*

I’m immobilised. I can’t move. I don’t know how I am going to get up and make it to the car to head home. I’m trying really hard not to look at her breasts but they are so close to her face and I’m trying to avoid looking at her lips. so I keep looking down . . . Why do breasts have to be so close to faces? And why do I always have to be at breast height in this wheelchair? It’s a cruel trick.

I shouldn’t have had any puffs on this joint. Damn it! I was just trying to be cool, to relax so I could talk to her, but now there are big gaps between what she says and me trying to find words to respond and she is so close to me . . . and so damn beautiful . . . she’s showing me her stoner artwork and wanting to know about my art, but my mouth is so dry and my hands are so sweaty . . . and I . . . don’t know what to say and I’m sure if I speak I’ll just say ‘I want you.’

Mum and Dad come and pick me up and I talk about her all the way home, about how cool she is, and how rad her artwork is. Mum says, ‘It’s good you have a friend, darling, you seem to really like her.’ I blush and fall silent. I try to stop the shaking in my legs, pressing down hard on my knees, Mum can read my body in a way that others can’t; she knows shaking legs means I’m feeling emotional. I hope she doesn’t work out why.

*

It’s dawn. I can see the light around the edges of the thick motel blind. I’m wearing my blue winter PJs, the ones Mum got me for Christmas with the tiny sheep on them that say ‘baaah, bedtime’ in big black font.

I roll over and can see her silhouette; she is turned away from me, lying on her side, snoring softly. I wiggle over until I am almost touching her, almost spooning her. ‘Are you awake?’ I whisper into the centimetre of air between me and her neck. Nothing. I reach up and run a finger over her shoulder and down her back to where her tank top starts. This. This is the bravest, most exhilarating thing I have ever done. She stirs, and I ask again softly, ‘Are you awake?’ ‘I am now,’ she says, and I slide my arm around her and stroke her belly.

We stay in that bed, in that room, for a week, watching midday cooking shows turned up loud and having sex softly and awkwardly.

When she has to go home to Sydney and I have to return home because my parents are getting back from holidays, she gives me the cassette tape she made for our week together and has a dozen red roses and chocolates delivered to my door. Mum comes into my room with them and says, ‘Well, you haven’t been seeing a man, because a man wouldn’t think to do this.’ I say, ‘No, it’s this girl I met online.’ Mum tells me not to make my life harder than it already is, and to not tell anyone because it’s probably just a phase. ‘Everyone’s experimented at some point, Jack.’

*

I’m in love with her from the first time she kisses me. We kissed for about five hours that night. She invites me over for dinner a few days later and we end up in her bed. When I eventually get the courage to remove my clothes, she says, ‘This is not what I was expecting . . .’ ‘What?’ I reply. ‘You . . . you carry yourself like you’re hiding something under your clothes, like you’re ashamed . . . but you’re beautiful, do you know that?’

I don’t know that. But I know she is beautiful, and I know I can’t disconnect from my body with her. She calls me into it, slowly and gently. I catch glimpses of myself under her hands and under her mouth, and I am not ‘wrong’ or ‘strange’ but desired, just as I am.

In the early hours of the morning she brings her guitar to bed, and in the soft candlelight plays me Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade into You’. ‘I want to hold the hand inside you’, and I know this night will stay with me for a lifetime.

Healing is found in this moment. Healing from all the shame that was placed on me and my body by all the doctors and therapists who treated me as fundamentally ‘wrong’ and needing to be ‘fixed’, who tried to push me closer to some elusive idea of ‘normal’, to unbend me, make me straighter. Those treatments were done to my body throughout my childhood in the name of ‘normalisation’ and my supposed ‘best interests’.

She holds me as we fall asleep, and healing finds me; it seeps into my muscles, whispering, ‘You are enough, you are whole.’

I find all the beautiful things our small town has to offer – flowers, chocolates, a hand-made waistcoat – and pile them on my bed for her, to say, ‘I love you, and thank you.’ But it is too much, too soon, and she says she doesn’t feel the same way back, and leaves.

I cannot listen to Mazzy Star for five years without aching.

*

I discover disability pride in books long before I find a disability-rights community in person. It finds me first in the small TAFE library, as I wheel past an even smaller LGBTIQA+ collection titled (I kid you not) ‘Deviance’. A book called Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction describes the disability rights movement and introduces me to the social model of disability, which argues that disability is not a personal problem but a social issue of entrenched systematic discrimination and exclusion of people with non-normative bodies and minds. This radical reframing of the ‘problem’ of disability not as a personal issue but as a political one transforms my thinking about myself and the world. Slowly I work through my internalised ableism and begin to seek out other people with disabilities – they are my people, and together we can advocate for change!

Queer sex and masturbation become a way to reconnect with my body, to breathe into it, and to fully experience it, to love it.

*

I am curled around my partner, her fingers lovingly tracing the bend of my legs. I am breathing in this moment, letting it settle into my muscle memory, letting healing find me.

I am calling my body home. I am reclaiming it. I am naming it as mine. Reconnection is found in these quite moments, pride nurtured.

There is lightning in my legs; big jolts like electricity run up me. I can feel them building before they strike. I love how my body moves, how my emotions and my muscles are intertwined, how I wear my feelings on the surface.

Our baby wriggles inside Anne’s belly in response to my jumps. Our little being will be here soon, and it feels like the most terrifying and hopeful thing I have ever done.

I lie my hand on our tiny moving human and think about all the things I want to teach her. I imagine her learning to say ‘My body, my choice!’ and the power of this –particularly if she happens to have a disability.

I feel a big spasm building in my left leg. I close my eyes and breathe myself into it, breathe my pride and politics and all that I know now, breathe it all into that electric feeling in my body. And as it moves, I send this energy back: back to that kid I was, who was taught only shame. I send pride, love, community. I tell her the bent bits are the best bits.

The baby kicks, Anne sleeps.