One lie that I had never believed was my mother’s favourite lie: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This consolation was aimed more at herself, the Ugly Duckling’s mother, I sensed, than at me. I pretended to agree — at first. Later I bent my lack of belief into intellectual arguments. What was female beauty, what were its essences? Was it a mere convention, as I argued to her? An arbitrary fashion? If so, was there an era in the past, or some lost tribe in the present where even my appearance would meet the criteria of beauty? Where my bony proportions might define the criteria? Tribes could be found to prove anything — where was mine? In what lost valley?
I teased her without mercy. In private I feared it was more simple, more absolute, than this. Surely the notion of beauty was nothing more than a form of nostalgia, a harking after the perfections and proportions of girlhood. The perfect, unwrinkled skin. The lush hair. The anatomical proportions, the doll proportions, the soft-toy proportions that all mammal young seem to share: big head, big possum eyes, small thimble nose.
If so, what exactly was Scanlon beholding that night? Clearly he wasn’t seeking someone younger, some doll or soft-toy simulacrum: he was seeking someone older.
My orphan theory came back to me: was he looking for his mother?
Perhaps. But here was the measure of my new serenity: so what? It made the events of the previous night no less real. I’d come to believe over the years that all human love was pathological in a sense: born of different types of insecurity. Why should ours be different?
I cleared away our shared breakfast things — coffeepot, toast, cereal bowls — after he had left, still musing. I remembered a case from the Assault Clinic Roster, years before: an eighty-year-old widow raped by a teenage boy. Afterwards the boy had sat down at the kitchen table and asked his victim for a glass of milk. And Weet-bix. He had also asked — innocently, it seemed — if he could visit again.
To have been a fly on the wall! Not watching the cruel act itself, but the aftermath. The sudden adjustments. To have watched that little-boy face, to have attempted to read the confusion of thoughts beneath. Or the absence of thoughts. And to have watched her, to have overheard the replies of this cool-headed widow, surprisingly unruffled.
I had dawdled over my slides and smears as she dressed after the examination, wanting to know more.
‘So what did you do?’
She was pulling on her clothes with care. The usual damage had been magnified by age: human skin becomes parchment-like, easily torn and bruised, with age.
‘What did I do when, dear?’
‘When the … rapist asked for breakfast. What did you do? If you don’t mind me asking.’
Such questions were not my business. Anything beyond actual rape mechanics, beyond photographing the bruises and suturing the lacerations and preparing the forensic specimens, was not my business.
Her reply was sane, and matter-of-fact: ‘I poured out a glass of milk, dear. And as the boy sat there in the kitchen drinking his milk I rang the police.’
‘He stayed while you rang?’
‘He seemed to feel at home. Safe. And I was finding him someplace to go.’
I snorted: ‘Jail?’
‘I felt sorry for him, dear. I think he just wanted to be told what to do. Police, lawyers, I don’t think it mattered deep down. He sat there talking to me until the police arrived as if he had known me for years.’
‘About what?’
But I could guess. The Orphanage. The Broken Home. The Abuse. The Poverty. Pick a cliché’, any cliché’.
Excuses, excuses? Or ameliorating conditions, mitigating circumstances? Are we all innocent, until proven guilty? No: innocent, until proven innocent? As terrible as that rape was, I couldn’t at the time see how the relationship this milk-drinking boy was trying to build with his victim was more pathological than many of the marriages I knew. Sour grapes? My colleagues’ marriages mostly seemed glued together by blood, sweat and tears, by semen and pain; a faulty weld forced on couples by chemical forces and psychological imperatives beyond their control.
Or else they were business arrangements. Child-rearing arrangements, dead in the heart.
Of course I would have cheerfully castrated that teenage rapist, given half a chance. I stress cheerfully, not vengefully. I would have castrated him for his own good; I would have castrated him out of sympathy, out of whatever wobbly trace I had in me of this thing called love.
Or its subspecies, mother love.