He was driving a station wagon towards a lonely beach in Florida—an immense arc of untrodden white sand sloping down to the warm, sapphire-blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. His name was Adrian Sherd. His friends in the car with him were Jayne and Marilyn and Susan. They were going on a picnic together.

They were almost at the beach when Jayne said, ‘Oh damn! I’ve left my bathers behind. Has anyone got a spare pair?’

No one had. Jayne was very disappointed.

The sea came into view. The women gasped at the beauty of it under the cloudless sky. Jayne said, ‘I can’t resist that glorious water. I’m going to have my swim anyway.’

‘Will you swim in your scanties and brassiere?’ asked Marilyn.

‘No. The saltwater would ruin them.’

Sherd pretended not to be listening. But his stomach was weak with excitement.

‘You mean you’ll swim in the—?’ Susan began.

Jayne tossed back her long dark hair and glanced at Sherd. ‘Why not? Adrian won’t be shocked—will you, Adrian?’

‘Of course not. I’ve always believed the human body is nothing to be ashamed of.’

The grass above the sand was lush and green like a lawn. Sherd and Jayne spread out the picnic lunch. The other two hung back and whispered together.

Susan came over and spoke. ‘It won’t be fair for Jayne if she goes swimming with nothing on and Adrian is allowed to peer at her all day. Adrian will have to strip off too. That’s a fair exchange.’

They all looked at Sherd. He said, ‘That wouldn’t be fair either. Susan and Marilyn will see me in the raw without having to take their own bathers off.’

Jayne agreed with Sherd that the only fair thing would be for all four of them to leave their bathers off. But Susan and Marilyn refused.

After lunch Susan and Marilyn went into the trees and came back wearing their twopiece bathers. Jayne and Sherd waited until the others were in the water. Then they slipped out of their clothes with their backs turned to each other and ran down the sand staring straight ahead of them.

In the water Jayne dived and splashed so much that it was some time before Sherd saw even the tops of her breasts. At first he thought she was teasing him. Then he realised he was behaving so calmly and naturally himself that she didn’t know how anxious he was to see her.

Jayne ran out of the water at last and Sherd followed her back to the car. She stood side-on to him and dried herself, bending and twisting her flawless body to meet the towel.

Sherd couldn’t pretend any longer that he saw this sort of thing every day. He stood in front of her and admired her. Then, while she sat beside him with only a towel draped round her shoulders, he made a long speech praising every part of her body in turn. And when she still made no effort to cover herself, he was moved to confess the real reason why he had brought them to the lonely beach.

Jayne was not alarmed. She even smiled a little as though she might have suspected already what was in his mind.

Susan and Marilyn came out of the water and went behind the trees to change. They both stared hard at Sherd as they passed.

Jayne said, ‘I still think it’s unfair, those two seeing you in the nude and hiding their own bodies. I’m sure you’d like to look at them, wouldn’t you?’

She bent her lovely compassionate face close to his and said, ‘Listen, Adrian. I’ve got a plan.’

After this, events happened so fast that he barely had time to enjoy them properly. Jayne tiptoed up behind the other two women. Sherd followed, trembling. Jayne tore the towels away from their naked bodies, pushed Susan into the car and locked the door. Marilyn squealed and tried to cover herself with her hands, but Jayne grabbed her arms from behind and held her for Adrian to admire. Then, while Marilyn walked around swearing and looking for her clothes, Jayne dragged Susan out of the car and showed her to Adrian.

Adrian lost control of himself. He looked just once more at Jayne. Her eyes met his. She seemed to know what he was going to do. She couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed that he preferred another’s charms to her own. But she saw he was overcome by his passions.

Jayne leaned back resignedly against the car and watched. Even Susan forgot to cover herself, and watched too. And the two of them stood smiling provocatively while he grappled with Marilyn’s naked body and finally subdued her and copulated with her.

Next morning Adrian Sherd was sitting in the Form Four classroom in St Carthage’s College in Swindon, a southeastern suburb of Melbourne.

The day started with forty minutes of Christian Doctrine. The brother in charge was taking them through one of the Gospels. A boy would read a few lines and then the brother would start a discussion. ‘It will pay us to look very closely at this parable, boys. Robert Carmody, what do you think it means?’

Adrian Sherd had a sheet of paper hidden under his Gospel and a packet of coloured pencils on the seat beside him. He was looking for a way to make the Christian Doctrine period pass more quickly. Instead of drawing his usual map of America showing the main railways and places of interest, he decided to sketch a rough plan of his classroom. He drew twenty-nine rectangles for the desks and marked in each rectangle the initials of the two boys who sat there.

He thought of several ways of decorating his sketch. Because it was a Christian Doctrine period, he chose a spiritual colour scheme. He took a yellow pencil and drew little spears of light radiating outwards from the boys whose souls were in the state of grace.

Adrian awarded his golden rays to about twenty boys. These fellows spent all their lunch hour bowling at the cricket nets or playing handball against the side of the school. Most of them were crazy about some hobby—stamp collecting or chemistry sets or model railways. They talked freely to the brothers out of the classroom. And they made a show of turning their backs and walking away from anyone who started to tell a dirty joke.

Next Adrian edged with black the initials of the boys who were in the state of mortal sin. He started with himself and his three friends, Michael Cornthwaite, Stan Seskis and Terry O’Mullane. The four of them admitted they were sex maniacs. Every day they met beside the handball courts. Someone would tell a new dirty joke or discuss the sex appeal of a film star or interpret an adult conversation he had overheard or simply report that he had done it the night before.

Adrian blackened the initials of other fellows who were not friends of his but had let slip something that betrayed them. Once, for instance, Adrian had overheard a quiet boy named Gourlay telling a joke to his friend.

GOURLAY: Every night after cricket practice I pull a muscle.

FRIEND: After practice? How come?

GOURLAY: Oh, it happens when I’m lying in bed with nothing to do before I go to sleep.

Adrian marked both Gourlay and his friend in black—the friend because of the guilty way he had laughed at Gourlay’s joke.

He took only a few minutes to colour all the mortal sinners. There were about a dozen. This still left nearly thirty boys unmarked. Adrian puzzled over some of these. They were well grown with pimply faces and they shaved every second or third day. They had been seen to smile at dirty jokes and they always looked bored during Christian Doctrine periods. Adrian would have liked to colour them black to boost the numbers of his own group, but he had no definite evidence that they were habitual sinners.

In the end he put a pale grey shadow over the initials of all the remaining boys as a sign that their souls were discoloured by venial sins.

The Christian Doctrine period was still not finished. Adrian drew a yellow cloud above his chart to represent heaven. Down below he drew a black tunnel leading to hell. There was room at each side of his page for more of the universe, so he put a grey zone at one side for purgatory and a green zone opposite for limbo.

He sat back and admired his work. The colours around the initials indicated clearly where each boy’s soul would go if the world ended suddenly that morning before any of them could get to confession or even murmur an act of perfect contrition.

None of them could go to limbo, of course, because that was a place of perfect natural happiness reserved for the souls of babies who had died before baptism or adult pagans who had never been baptised but had lived sinless lives according to their lights. But Adrian had included limbo in his chart because it had always attracted him. A brother had once said that some theologians believed limbo might be the earth itself after the General Judgement. They meant that, after the end of the world, God would remake the whole planet as a place of perfect natural happiness.

Sometimes when Adrian realised how unlikely it was that he would get to heaven, he would willingly have traded his right to heaven for safe conduct to limbo. But because he had been baptised he had to choose between heaven and hell.

He slipped his chart into his desk and looked around the room at the fellows he had marked with black. They were an odd assortment, with not much in common apart from the sin that enslaved them. They even differed in the way they committed their secret sin.

Cornthwaite only did it in total darkness—usually late at night with a pillow over his head. He claimed that the sight of it disgusted him. His inspiration was always the same—the memory of a few afternoons with his twelve-year-old cousin Patricia when her parents were out of the house. The girl’s parents had told Cornthwaite afterwards that he needn’t bother coming to the house again.

Adrian often asked Cornthwaite what he had done to the girl. But Cornthwaite would only say it was nothing like people imagined and he didn’t want bastards like Sherd even thinking dirty thoughts about his young cousin.

O’Mullane preferred to do it in broad daylight. He swore he didn’t need to think of women or girls. He got his excitement from the feel of whichever lubricant he was using. He was always experimenting with butter or hair oil or soap or his mother’s cosmetics. Sometimes he stung or burnt himself and had to give up doing it for a few days.

Seskis only used film stars. He didn’t care whether they wore bathing suits or street clothes so long as their lips were red and moist. He sometimes went to an afternoon show in a theatre in Melbourne where he could sit in an empty row and do it quietly through a hole in the lining of his trousers pocket while some woman parted her lips close to the camera.

Ullathorne looked at National Geographic magazines with pictures of bare-breasted women from remote parts of the world. He had once offered to lend Adrian one of his best magazines. Adrian admired some bare-breasted girls from the island of Yap until he read in a caption under a photo that Yap women sometimes had spiders and scorpions living in their voluminous grass skirts.

Froude used a set of photographs. The man who came to his house to teach him violin used to slip a photo into Froude’s pocket after each lesson. Each photo showed a different boy standing or sitting or lying down naked with his penis erect. The boys were all about thirteen or fourteen years old. Froude had no idea who they were. He had asked his music teacher and been told he would find out in good time.

Adrian had seen some of Froude’s photos. They were so clear and well lit that he told Froude to ask the music teacher if he had any similar pictures of girls or women.

Purcell used the nude scene from the film Ecstasy starring Hedy Lamarr when she was very young. He had read about the film in an old copy of Pix magazine and torn out the picture of Hedy Lamarr floating on her back in a murky river. He admitted it was hard to make out Hedy’s breasts in the photo, and the rest of her body was out of sight under the water. But he said he got a colossal thrill just from having a picture of one of the only nude films ever made.

The other habitual sinners were mostly unimaginative fellows who simply made up adventures about themselves and some of the girls they knew. Adrian considered himself luckier than any of them, because he used the whole of the USA for his love life.

The Christian Doctrine period ended at last and the class stood and recited the Prayer Between Lessons. The boys in mortal sin looked no less devout than the others. Perhaps they believed, like Adrian, that one day they would find a cure that really worked.

Adrian and his friends sometimes discussed cures for their habit. One day Seskis had turned up at school with the story of a novel cure.

SESKIS: I was reading this little booklet my father gave me. It was full of advice to young men and it said to avoid irritation and stimulation during the night you should wash and soap well around the genitals in the bath or shower.

CORNTHWAITE: Whoever wrote that must be crazy. Did you try it?

SESKIS: Two or three times in the bath. I soaped the thing until I couldn’t see it for suds and bubbles. It stood up the whole time and nearly drove me mad. So I had to finish it off right there in the bath.

O’MULLANE: Like the time a priest told me in confession not to eat hot spicy foods for tea or supper. So I only had a slice of toast and a glass of milk for tea to see what happened. Next thing I woke up starving in the night and had to do it to put myself back to sleep.

SHERD: Sometimes I think the only cure is to get married as soon as you’re old enough. But I reckon I could stop it now if I had to sleep in a room with someone else so they’d hear the mattress squeaking if I did anything at night.

O’MULLANE: Bullshit. When our parish tennis club went to Bendigo for the big Catholic Easter Tournament, Casamento and me and two big bastards were in bunks in this little room. One of the big bastards tried to get us all to throw two shillings on the floor and make it a race to do it over the edge of the bunks. Winner takes all.

CORNTHWAITE: Filthy bastards.

O’MULLANE: Of course the one who wanted the race was the bastard they call Horse from the size of his tool. He would have won by a mile.

SHERD: Tell the truth and say you were too embarrassed to do it with other people in the room. It proves what I said about my cure for it.

O’MULLANE: I would have backed myself with any money against bastards my own size.

CORNTHWAITE: The only cure is to get hold of a tart and do the real thing to her. O’Mullane will end up a homo the way he’s going. And Sherd will still be looking for a cure when he’s a dirty old bachelor.

After school each day Adrian Sherd walked from St Carthage’s College half a mile along the Swindon Road tramline to Swindon railway station. Then he travelled five miles by electric train to his own suburb of Accrington.

From the Accrington station Adrian walked nearly a mile along a dirt track beside the main road. It was 1953, and outer suburbs like Accrington had few made roads or footpaths. He passed factories whose names were familiar—PLASDIP PRODUCTS, WOBURN COMPONENTS, AUSTRALIAN CARD CLOTHING, EZIFOLD FURNITURE—but whose products were a mystery to him.

Adrian’s street, Riviera Grove, was a chain of waterholes between clumps of manuka and wattle scrub. Each winter, builders and delivery men drove their trucks over the low scrub, looking for a safe route, but the only people in the street who owned a car left it parked each night on the main road, two hundred yards from their house.

On one side of the Sherds’ house was a dense stand of tea-tree scrub thirty feet tall with only one narrow track winding into it. On the other side was the wooden frame of a house and behind it the fibrocement bungalow, twenty feet by ten, where the New Australian Andy Horvath lived with his wife and small son and mother-in-law.

The Sherds’ house was a two-year-old double-fronted weatherboard, painted cream with dark-green trimmings. It had a lawn with borders of geraniums and pelargoniums at the front, but the backyard was nearly all native grass and watsonia lilies. Along the back fence was a fowl run with a shed of palings at one end. Near one of the side fences was a weatherboard lavatory (cream with a dark-green door) with a trapdoor at the back where the night man dragged out the pan each week and shoved an empty pan in. Sometimes the pan filled up a few days before the night man’s visit. Then Adrian’s father would dig a deep hole in the fowl run and empty half the pan into it. He did it furtively after dark while Adrian held a torch for him.

On the opposite side of the yard was a fibrocement shed with a cement floor and a small louvre window at one end. One half of the shed was filled with bags of fowl feed, garden tools and odd pieces of broken furniture. The other half was left clear. Leaning against one wall of the shed was a plywood door left over after the Sherds’ house had been built. A model-railway layout was screwed onto one side of the door. It was a Hornby Clockwork layout—a main track with a loop and two sidings.

The Sherds’ house had three bedrooms, a lounge, a kitchen, a bathroom and a laundry. The kitchen floor was covered with linoleum. All the other floors were polished boards. The lounge room had an open fireplace, two armchairs and a couch of faded floral-patterned velvet, and a small bookcase. The kitchen had a wood stove and a small electric cooker with a hotplate and a griller. There was an ice chest in a corner and a mantel radio over the fireplace. The table and chairs were wooden.

The only other pieces of furniture were the beds and wardrobes and dressing tables—a walnut-veneer suite in the front bedroom and oddments in the boys’ rooms. Adrian’s two younger brothers slept in the middle bedroom. Adrian had the back bedroom, which was called the sleepout because it had louvre windows.

As soon as Adrian got home from school he had to take off his school suit to save it from wear. Then he put on the only other clothes he had—the shirt and trousers and jumper that had been his previous school uniform but were now too patched for school.

Adrian’s young brothers had been home from school for an hour already. (They travelled a mile and a half by bus to Our Lady of Good Counsel’s parish school.) Adrian found and cleaned their school shoes as well as his own. He filled the woodbox in the kitchen with split logs that his father had left under a sheet of corrugated iron behind the lavatory. He filled a cardboard box in the laundry with briquettes for the hot-water system. Then he split kindling wood and stacked it on the kitchen hearth for his mother to use next morning. If his father was still not home, Adrian fed the fowls and collected the eggs.

Sometimes before tea Adrian climbed over the side fence and looked around in the tea-tree scrub. He visited a bull-ants’ nest and tapped a stick near the entrance. The ants came storming out to look for the enemy. Adrian dropped leaves and twigs on them to tease them.

There were possums’ nests high up in the branches of the tea-tree. Adrian knew the possums were hiding inside, but he had never been able to scare them out. The tea-tree had no branches strong enough for climbing, and the sticks that he threw got tangled in the twigs and foliage.

When Adrian had first discovered the ants and possums he decided to observe their habits like a scientist. For a few days he kept a diary describing the ants’ habits and drew maps to show how far they travelled from their nest. He thought of becoming a famous naturalist and talking on the radio like Crosbie Morrison with his program, Wild Life. He even planned to dig away the side of the ants’ nest and put a sheet of glass inside so he could study them in their tunnels. But he didn’t know where to buy glass and he found he couldn’t dig a hole with straight sides anyway.

If he walked on through the scrub he came to the Gaffneys’ side fence. The Sherds knew very little about the few other households in Riviera Grove. They were all what Adrian’s parents called young couples, with two or three small children. Adrian sometimes saw a mother in gumboots pushing a load of kids in a pram through the muddy street or chasing a child that had waded too far into a puddle. One day he had spied on Mrs Gaffney through a hole in her fence. She was wearing something that he knew was called a playsuit and hanging out nappies on the line. He had a good view of her face and legs but he decided it was useless to compare her with any film star or pin-up girl.

After he had set the table for tea, Adrian read the sporting pages of the Argus and then glanced through the front pages for the cheesecake picture that was always somewhere among the important news. It was usually a photograph of a young woman in bathers leaning far forward and smiling at the camera.

If the woman was an American film star he studied her carefully. He was always looking for photogenic starlets to play small roles in his American adventures.

If she was only a young Australian woman he read the caption (‘Attractive Julie Starr found Melbourne’s autumn sunshine yesterday too tempting to resist. The breeze was chilly but Julie, a telephonist aged eighteen, braved the shallows at Elwood in her lunch hour and brought back memories of summer’) and spent a few minutes trying to work out the size and shape of her breasts. Then he folded up the paper and forgot about her. He wanted no Melbourne typists and telephonists on his American journeys. He would feel uncomfortable if he saw on the train one morning some woman who had shared his American secrets only the night before.

When tea was over Adrian stacked up the dishes and washed them for his brothers to dry and put away. At six-thirty he turned on the wireless to 3KZ. For half an hour while he finished the dishes or played Ludo or Snakes and Ladders with his brothers, he heard the latest hit tunes, interrupted only by brief advertisements for films showing at Hoyts Suburban Theatres.

Adrian always made a show of being busy at something else while hit tunes were playing. If his parents had thought he was listening to the words they might have switched the wireless off or even banned him from hearing the program again. Too many of the hit tunes were love songs about kisses like wine or memories of charms or touches that thrilled.

But Adrian was not really interested in the words. Nearly every night on 3KZ he heard a few short passages of music that seemed to describe the landscape of America. The opening notes of a romantic ballad might have just the right blend of vagueness and loneliness to suggest the Great Plains states. Or the last hectic chorus of a Mitch Miller record might put him in mind of the sensual Deep South where it was always summer.

The wireless was switched off again at seven. No one wanted to hear the news or the serials and musical programs that followed it. Mr Sherd went to bed early to finish one of the stack of books that his wife borrowed each week from the library behind the children’s-wear shop in Accrington (Romance, Crime, Historical Romance, New Titles). Mrs Sherd sat by the kitchen stove knitting. Adrian’s brothers played with their Meccano set or traced through lunch-wrap paper some pictures from the small stack of old National Geographic magazines in the lounge room. Adrian began his homework.

The house was quiet. There was rarely the sound of a car or truck in Riviera Grove or the streets around it. Every half-hour an electric train passed along the line between Melbourne and Coroke. It was nearly a mile from the Sherds’ house, but on windless nights they heard clearly the rattling of the bogeys and the whining of the motor. As the noise died away, Adrian’s brothers called out ‘Up!’ or ‘Down!’ and argued over which way the train had been heading.

Adrian worked at his homework until nearly ten o’clock. Every day at school three or four boys were strapped for not doing their homework. Their excuses astonished Adrian. They had gone out, or started listening to the wireless and forgotten the time, or been told by their parents to sit up and talk to the visitors. Or they had been sent to bed because there was a party going on at their house.

In the two years since the Sherds had moved to Accrington, they had almost never gone out after dark. And Adrian could not remember anyone visiting them at night. The boys who had other things to do instead of homework came from the suburbs close to Swindon—places with made roads and footpaths and front gardens full of shrubs. The suburbs had dignified names such as Luton and Glen Iris and Woodstock. Adrian imagined the houses in these suburbs full of merry laughter every night of the week.

When his homework was finished Adrian went out for a few minutes to the back shed. He switched on the light and lowered his model railway track to the floor. On the wood beneath the tracks was a faint pencilled outline of the United States of America. Adrian wound up his clockwork engine. He lowered it onto the rails near New York City and hooked two passenger coaches behind it. The train sped south-west towards Texas then around past California to Idaho and on across the prairies to the Great Lakes. At Chicago there was a set of points. Adrian switched them so that the train travelled first around the perimeter of the country (Pennsylvania, New York state, New England and back to New York City) and then, on each alternate lap, down through the Midwest and the Ozarks to rejoin the main line near Florida.

After four or five laps of the track the train slowed down and came to a stop. Adrian noted carefully the exact place where its journey ended. Then he put the engine and coaches away and went back to the house and got ready for bed.

The map in Adrian’s shed was crudely drawn. The proportions of America were all wrong. The country had been twisted out of shape to make its most beautiful landscapes no more than stages in an endless journey. But Adrian knew his map by heart. Each few inches of railway track gave access to some picturesque scene from American films or magazines. No matter where the train might stop, it brought him to familiar country.

Nearly every night Adrian made an American journey and found himself in some pleasant part of the American outdoors. Sometimes he was content to wander there alone. But usually he went in search of American women. There were dozens to choose from. He had seen their pictures in Australian newspapers and magazines. Some of them he had even watched in films. And all of them were just as beautiful as he had imagined them.

In the weeks before the coronation of the new Queen, Adrian and his mother made a scrapbook out of cuttings from the Argus and the Australian Women’s Weekly. On the night when the coronation was broadcast direct from London, the Sherds sat round the wireless with the scrapbook open on the kitchen table. They followed the exact route of the procession on a large map of London. When the commentator described the scene in Westminster Abbey they tried to find each of the places mentioned on a labelled diagram, although some of the Protestant terms like transept and nave confused them a little.

When nothing much was happening in the abbey, Adrian feasted on the choicest items in the scrapbook—the coloured illustrations of the crown jewels and Her Majesty’s robes and regalia. They were the most beautiful things he had ever seen. He delighted in every sumptuous fold of the robes and every winking highlight of the jewels. Then, to appreciate their splendour still more, he compared them with other things he had once thought beautiful.

A few years before, when he was an altar boy, he used to stare each morning at the patterns on the back of the priest’s chasuble. There was one with the shape of a lamb outlined in amber-coloured stones on a background of white. The lamb held in its upraised foreleg a silver staff with a golden scroll unfurled at the top. The whole design was topped by the disc of an enormous Host with rays beaming from it and the letters IHS across it in beads the colour of blood.

Adrian had once asked the priest after mass whether the stones and beads on the chasuble were proper jewels. The priest had looked a little apologetic and said no, the parish wasn’t wealthy enough for that. They were (he paused) semi-precious stones. Adrian was not at all disappointed. Any sort of precious stones appealed to him.

On coronation night Adrian studied the picture in the Argus of Her Majesty’s robe and saw that no chasuble could rival it.

The solemn ceremony of the coronation itself was too much for Adrian to visualise with only the wireless broadcast to help him. But two days later when the Argus published its full-colour souvenir supplement, he saw the scene in the abbey in all its splendour. He compared all that magnificence with two scenes that he had once thought would never be surpassed for beauty.

Years before, he had watched a film about the Arabian Nights. It was the first Technicolor film he had seen. Evelyn Keyes was a princess guarded by black slaves in her father’s palace. Cornel Wilde was the man who fell in love with her and tried to elope with her. At one point in the film, the slaves were carrying Evelyn Keyes through the streets of Baghdad in a sedan chair. She was inside her private compartment, concealed by thick purple and gold drapery. Cornel Wilde stopped the slaves and tried to fight them. Evelyn Keyes peeped out for a few seconds and smiled shyly at him.

Adrian never forgot that brief glimpse of her. She was dressed in pastel-coloured satins. A white silk veil covered part of her face, but anyone could see she was breathtakingly beautiful. Her complexion was a radiant pinkish-gold, and the gorgeously coloured fabrics around her set it off to perfection.

In one of his adventures, Mandrake the Magician (in the comic strip at the back of the Women’s Weekly) found a race of people like Ancient Romans living on the far side of the moon. When they were ready for sleep at night, the Moonlings climbed onto filmy envelopes inflated with a special light gas. All night long the handsome moon-dwellers, in long white robes, sprawled on their transparent cushions and wafted from room to room of their spacious houses.

But the glamour of Evelyn Keyes could not match the simple beauty of the young Queen, and the Moonlings on their floating beds were not half so graceful and dignified as the lords and ladies of England in Westminster Abbey.

For a few days after the coronation, Adrian was restless and agitated. Picking his way through the puddles in his street or carving railway sidings and points into his wooden ruler in school, he thought how little pageantry there was in his life. At night he stared at the coloured souvenir pictures and wondered how to bring the splendour of the coronation to Accrington.

One night when he arrived with Lauren and Rita and Linda in the Bluegrass Country of Kentucky, the women started to whisper and smile together. He realised they were planning a little surprise for him.

They told him to wait while they went behind some bushes. Lauren and Linda came back first. They wore brief twopiece bathing suits that dazzled him. The fabric was cloth-of-gold studded with semi-precious copies of all the emeralds and rubies and diamonds in the crown jewels.

Behind them came Rita, draped in a replica of the coronation robe itself. And when the other two lifted her train he saw just enough to tell him that under the extravagant ermine-tipped robe she was stark naked.

Some mornings when Adrian Sherd stood in the bathroom waiting for the hot water to come through the pipes and fingering the latest pimples on his face, he remembered his American journey of the previous night and wondered if he was going mad.

Each night his adventures became a little more outrageous. On his first trips to America he had walked for hours hand in hand with film stars through scenic landscapes. He had undressed them and gone the whole way with them afterwards but always politely and considerately. But as the American countryside became more familiar he found he needed more than one woman to excite him. Instead of admiring the scenery he had begun to spend his time talking coarsely to the women and encouraging them to join in all kinds of obscene games.

Some of these games seemed so absurd afterwards that Adrian decided only a lunatic could have invented them. He could not imagine any men or women in real life doing such things together.

He thought of his own parents. Every night they left their bedroom door ajar to prove they had nothing to hide. And Mrs Sherd always bolted the bathroom door when she went to have a bath so that not even her husband could look in at her.

In all the backyards around Riviera Grove there was no place where a couple could even sunbathe together unobserved. And in most of the houses there were young children running round all day. Perhaps the parents waited for the children to go to sleep and then frolicked together late at night. But from what Adrian heard of their conversations in the local bus, it seemed they had no time for fun.

The men worked on their houses and gardens. ‘I stayed up till all hours last night trying to put up an extra cupboard in the laundry,’ a man would say.

The women were often sick. ‘Bev’s still in hospital. Her mother’s stopping with us to mind the nippers.’

Even their annual holidays were innocent. ‘Our in-laws lent us their caravan at Safety Beach. It’s a bit of a madhouse with the two of us and the three littlies all in bunks, but it’s worth it for their sakes.’

Adrian divided Melbourne into three regions—slums, garden suburbs and outer suburbs. The slums were all the inner suburbs where the houses were joined together and had no front gardens. East Melbourne, Richmond, Carlton—Adrian was not at all curious about the people who lived in these slums. They were criminals or dirty and poor, and he couldn’t bear to think of their pale grubby skin naked or sticking out of bathing suits.

The garden suburbs formed a great arc around the east and south-east of Melbourne. Swindon, where Adrian went to school, was in the heart of them, and most of the boys at his school lived in leafy streets. The people of the garden suburbs had full-grown trees brushing against their windows. They spread a tablecloth before every meal and poured their tomato sauce from little glass jugs. The women always wore stockings when they went shopping.

Most of the houses and gardens in these suburbs were ideal for sexual games, but Adrian doubted if they were ever used for that purpose. The people of the garden suburbs were too dignified and serious. The men sat with suits on all day in offices or banks and brought home important papers to work on after tea. The women looked so sternly at schoolboys and schoolgirls giggling together on the Swindon Road trams that Adrian thought they would have slapped their husbands’ faces at the very mention of lewd games.

The outer suburbs were the ones that Adrian knew best. Whenever he tried to imagine the city of Melbourne as a whole, he saw it shaped like a great star with the outer suburbs its distinctive arms. Their miles of pinkish-brown tiled roofs reached far out into the farmlands and market gardens and bush or scrub as a sign that the modern age had come to Australia.

When Adrian read in the newspaper about a typical Melbourne family, he saw their white or cream weatherboard house in a treeless yard surrounded by fences of neatly sawn palings. From articles and cartoons in the Argus he had learned a lot about these people, but nothing to suggest they did the things he was interested in.

The women of the outer suburbs were not beautiful (although occasionally one was described as attractive or vivacious). They wore dressing gowns all morning, and frilly aprons over their clothes for the rest of the day. They wore their hair in curlers under scarves knotted above the forehead. When they talked over their back fences it was mostly about their husbands’ stupid habits.

The husbands still had sexual thoughts occasionally. They liked to stare at pictures of film stars or beauty contestants. But the wives apparently were sick of sex (perhaps because they had too many children or because they had run out of ideas to make it interesting). They were always snatching the pictures from their husbands’ hands. On the beach in summer a wife would bury her husband’s head in the sand or chain his feet to an umbrella to keep him from following some beautiful young woman.

Adrian was reassured to learn that some husbands dreamed (like himself) of doing things with film stars and bathing beauties. But he would have liked to know that someone in Melbourne was actually making his dreams come true.

The little that Adrian learned from the radio was more confusing than helpful. Sometimes he heard in a radio play a conversation like this.

YOUNG WIFE: I saw the doctor today.

HUSBAND (only half-listening): Oh?

YOUNG WIFE: He told me…(a pause)…I’m going to have a baby.

HUSBAND (amazed): What? You’re joking! It can’t be!

Adrian had even watched a scene like this in an American film. He could only conclude that many husbands fathered their children while they were dozing off late at night, or even in their sleep. Or perhaps what they did with their wives was so dull and perfunctory that they forgot about it soon afterwards. Either way it was more evidence that the kind of sexual activity Adrian preferred was not common in real life.

Even after watching an American film, Adrian still thought he might have been a very rare kind of sex maniac. The men and women in films seemed to want nothing more than to fall in love. They struggled against misfortunes and risked their lives only for the joy of holding each other and declaring their love. At the end of each film Adrian stared at the heroine. She closed her eyes and leaned back in a kind of swoon. All that her lover could do was to support her in his arms and kiss her tenderly. She was in no condition to play American sex games.

Adrian read books by R. L. Stevenson, D. K. Broster, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Kingsley, Alexandre Dumas and Ion L. Idriess. But he never expected to find in literature any proof that grown men and women behaved as he and his women friends did in America. Somewhere in the Vatican was an Index of Banned Books. Some of these books might have told him what he wanted to know. But it was impossible that any of them would ever fall into his hands. And even if they did, he would probably not dare to read them, since the penalty was automatic excommunication.

But an innocent-looking library book eventually proved to Adrian that at least some adults enjoyed the pleasures that he devised on his American journeys.

Adrian borrowed books from a children’s library run by a women’s committee of the Liberal Party over a shop in Swindon Road. (There was no library at St Carthage’s College.) One afternoon he was looking through the books on the few shelves marked Australia.

In a book by Ion L. Idriess Adrian found a picture of a naked man lolling on the ground against a backdrop of tropical vegetation while his eight wives (naked except for tiny skirts between their legs) waited to do his bidding. The man was Parajoulta, King of the Blue Mud Bay tribe in the Northern Territory. Although he and his wives were Aborigines, there was a look in his eye that cheered Adrian.

The people of Accrington and the outer suburbs might have thought Adrian was crazy if they could have seen him with his women beside some beach or trout stream in America. But King Parajoulta would probably have understood. He sometimes played the very same games in the lush groves around Blue Mud Bay.

On the first Thursday of every month Adrian’s form walked by twos from St Carthage’s College to the Swindon parish church. First Thursday was confession day for the hundreds of boys at the college. The four confessionals built into the walls of the church were not enough. Extra priests sat in comfortable chairs just inside the altar rails and heard confessions with their heads bowed and their eyes averted from the boys kneeling at their elbows.

Adrian always chose the longest queue and knelt down to wait with his face in his hands as though he was examining his conscience.

The examination of conscience was supposed to be a long careful search for all the sins committed since your last confession. Adrian’s Sunday Missal had a list of questions to assist the penitent in his examination. Adrian often read the questions to cheer himself up. He might have been a great sinner but at least he had never believed in fortune tellers or consulted them; gone to places of worship belonging to other denominations; sworn oaths in slight or trivial matters; talked, gazed or laughed in church; oppressed anyone; been guilty of lascivious dressing or painting.

Adrian had no need to examine his conscience. There was only one kind of mortal sin that he committed. All he had to do before confession was to work out his total for the month. For this he had a simple formula. ‘Let x be the number of days since my last confession.

‘Then the total of sins (for weekends, public holidays or days of unusual excitement).’

Yet he could never bring himself to confess this total. He could have admitted easily that he had lied twenty times or lost his temper fifty times or disobeyed his parents a hundred times. But he had never been brave enough to walk into confession and say, ‘It is one month since my last confession, Father, and I accuse myself of committing an impure action by myself sixteen times.’

To reduce his total to a more respectable size Adrian used his knowledge of moral theology. The three conditions necessary for mortal sin were grave matter, full knowledge and full consent. In his case the matter was certainly grave. And he could hardly deny that he knew exactly what he was doing when he sinned. (Some of his American adventures lasted for nearly half an hour.) But did he always consent fully to what took place?

Any act of consent must be performed by the Will. Sometimes just before a trip to America, Adrian caught sight of his Will. It appeared as a crusader in armour with his sword upraised—the same crusader that Adrian had seen as a child in advertisements for Hearns Bronchitis Mixture. The Will was struggling against a pack of little imps with bald grinning heads and spidery limbs. These were the Passions. (In the old advertisements the crusader had worn the word Hearns on his breast and the imps had been labelled Catarrh, Influenza, Tonsilitis, Sore Throat and Cough.) The battle took place in some vague arena in the region of Adrian Sherd’s soul. The Passions were always too many and too strong for the Will, and the last thing that Adrian saw before he arrived in America was the crusader going down beneath the exultant imps.

But the important thing was that he had gone down fighting. The Will had offered some resistance to the Passions. Adrian had not gone to America with the full consent of his Will.

In the last moments before entering the confessional Adrian tried to estimate how many times he had seen this vision of his Will. He arrived at a figure, subtracted it from his gross total and confessed to a net total of six or seven mortal sins of impurity.

Adrian often wondered how the other regular sinners got through their confessions. He questioned them discreetly whenever he could.

Cornthwaite never confessed impure actions—only impure thoughts. He tried to convince Adrian that the thought was the essential part of any sin, and therefore the only part that had to be confessed and forgiven.

Seskis had a trick of faltering in the middle of his confession as though he couldn’t find the right words to describe his sin. The priest usually took him for a first offender and treated him lightly.

O’Mullane sometimes told the priest that his sins happened late at night when he didn’t know whether he was asleep or awake. But one priest cross-examined him and got him confused and then refused him absolution for trying to tell a lie to the Holy Ghost. O’Mullane was so scared that he gave up the sin altogether for nearly a month.

Carolan used to confess just four sins each month, although he might have committed ten or twelve in that time. He kept a careful record of the unconfessed sins and swore he would confess every one of them before he died. He intended to wipe them out four at a time each month after he had finally given up the habit.

A fellow named Di Nuzzo boasted one day that a certain priest in his parish never asked any questions or made any comment no matter how many sins of impurity you confessed.

Di Nuzzo said, ‘I’ll never go to any other priest again until I’m married. You just tell him your monthly total and he sighs a bit and gives you your penance.’

Adrian envied Di Nuzzo until the day when the priest was transferred to another parish. On the first Saturday of every month Di Nuzzo had to ride his bike nearly five miles to East St Kilda just to have an easy confession. Two years later, when Di Nuzzo had left school, Adrian saw him one Saturday morning in the city waiting for a West Coburg tram.

Di Nuzzo grinned and said, ‘It had to happen. They’ve posted him to a new parish on the far side of Melbourne. I have to take a bus for two miles from the tram terminus. But I’m saving up to buy a motorbike.’

On the first Thursday of every month, when he came out of the confessional, Adrian knelt in front of Our Lady’s altar and prayed for the gift of Holy Purity. Then he said a special prayer of thanksgiving to God for preserving his life during the past month while his soul had been in a state of mortal sin. (If he had died suddenly during that time he would have spent eternity in hell.)

For most of that day he told himself he had finished with impurity. He even kept away from Cornthwaite and his friends in the school ground. But when he arrived home he saw his model railroad leaning against the wall in the shed. He whispered the names of landscapes he had still not explored—Great Smoky Mountains, Sun Valley, Grand Rapids—and he knew he would soon go back to America.

But he was not free to go back yet. On the following Sunday morning he would be at mass with his family. His parents would know that he had been to confession on the Thursday. They would expect him to go to communion with them. If he did not go, they would know for certain that some time between Thursday and Sunday he had committed a mortal sin. His father would start asking questions. If Mr Sherd even suspected the truth about the American journey, Adrian would die of shame or run away from home.

For the sake of his future, Adrian had to avoid mortal sin from Thursday until Sunday morning. And it was not enough just to stay away from America. Any impure thought, if he wilfully entertained it, was a mortal sin. Such thoughts could appear in his mind at any hour of the day or night. It would be a desperate struggle.

The Thursday night was the easiest. Adrian needed a rest. The last few nights before his monthly confession usually wore him out. On those nights he knew he would not be visiting America again for some time, and he tried to enjoy every minute in the country as though it was his last.

On Friday at school he kept away again from Cornthwaite and the others. For as long as Adrian was in the state of grace, his former friends were what the church called bad companions.

On Friday night he did all his weekend homework and stayed up as late as possible to tire himself. In bed he remembered the advice a priest had once given him in confession: ‘Take your pleasure from good and holy things.’

He closed his eyes and thought of good and holy landscapes. He saw the vineyards on the hills of Italy, where ninety-nine per cent of the people were Catholics. He crossed the golden plateaus of Spain, the only country in the world where the Communists had been fought and beaten to a standstill. The whole of Latin America was safe to explore, but he usually fell asleep before he reached there.

On Saturday morning he read the sporting section of the Argus but was careful not to open the other pages. They were sure to have some picture that would torment him all day.

After lunch he went for a ride on his father’s old bike to tire himself out. He chose a route with plenty of hills and made sure he would have to ride the last few miles into the wind. On the steepest climbs, when he could hardly keep the pedals moving, he hissed to the rhythm of his straining thighs, ‘Chastise the body. Chastise the body.’

There were still temptations even in the bleakest suburbs. Sometimes he saw the backs of a woman’s thighs as she bent forward in her garden, or the shapes of her breasts bouncing under her sweater as she pushed a mower. When this happened he slowed down and waited for a glimpse of the woman’s face. It was nearly always so plain that he was glad to forget all about her.

He came home exhausted and had a shower before tea. (On other Saturdays he had a bath late at night. He lay back with his organ submerged and thought foul thoughts to make it break the surface like the periscope of a submarine.) The taps in the shower recess were so hard to regulate that he had no time to stand still. He came out shivering with cold. His organ was a wrinkled stub. He flicked the towel at it and whispered, ‘Bring the body into subjection.’

After tea he listened to the London Stores Show on the wireless to hear the football results. Then he played a game of football he had invented. He arranged thirty-six coloured scraps of paper on the table for men and threw dice to decide the path of the ball. He played the game until nearly midnight. Then he went to bed and thought about football until he fell asleep.

On Sunday morning the Sherd family caught the bus to nine o’clock mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel’s, Accrington. The people in the bus were nearly always the same from week to week. They even sat in the same seats. A young woman sat opposite the Sherds. Most Sundays Adrian took no notice of her. She had a pasty face and a dumpy figure. But on the first Sunday of each month the sight of her legs gave him no peace.

Adrian believed in the devil. It could only have been the devil who arranged for a pair of legs to lie in wait for him on the first Sunday of the month when he was within an hour of reaching the altar rails without sinning. To defeat this last temptation he recited over and over to himself from the Prayers after Mass, ‘Thrust Satan down into hell and with him the other wicked spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls.’

He never looked at the legs for more than a second at a time. And he never looked anywhere near them when his parents or the young woman’s parents or the woman herself or any other passenger might have caught him at it. Sometimes he only saw the legs once or twice on the whole trip. But he knew by heart every curve and undulation on them, the freckles on the lower parts of the kneecaps, the mole on one shin, the tension of the stockings over the ankle bones.

The legs talked to him. They whispered that he still had to wait more than an hour until he was safe at the altar rails. They urged him to close his eyes during the sermon and visualise them in all their naked beauty and wilfully consent to enjoy the pleasure he got.

When he still resisted them they became more shameless. They kicked their heels high like dancers in an American musical. They even bared the first few inches of their thighs and reminded him that there was much more to see farther up in the shadows under their skirt. Or if he did not fancy them, they said, would he prefer some of the legs he would see during mass? The church would be full of legs. He would only have to drop his missal on the floor and bend his head down to retrieve it and there, under the seat in front of him, would be calves and ankles of all shapes to feast on.

Adrian never surrendered to the legs. Instead he made a pact with them. He promised that on that very Sunday night he would meet them in America and do whatever they asked of him. In return they were to leave him in peace until he had been to communion. The legs were always as good as their word. As soon as the pact was made they stopped bothering him and stroked and preened themselves discreetly out of his view.

During mass Adrian relaxed for the first time in days. He went to communion with his head high. On the bus trip home the legs caused no trouble. He found he could last for several minutes without looking at them. But before he left the bus he always nodded casually to them as a sign that he would observe the pact.

Only once had Adrian tried to break the terms of his agreement. He had made an unusually devout communion and on the bus after mass he was thinking what a pity it was that his soul would be soiled again so soon. He began to pray for the strength to resist the legs in future.

Across the narrow aisle of the bus the legs drew themselves up into a fighting posture. They warned him they would come to his bed that night and tempt him as he had never been tempted before. They would strip themselves and perform such tricks in front of his eyes that he would never sleep again until he had yielded to them.

Adrian knew they could do it. Already their anger had made them more attractive than ever. He apologised to them and hoped he hadn’t made too big a fool of himself in front of them.

Whenever Adrian’s friends started talking about sex, he had to use his wits to keep them from guessing his most embarrassing secret. This secret bothered him every day of his life. He was sure no other young man in Melbourne had such an absurd thing to hide.

Adrian didn’t like to put his secret into simple words—it humiliated him so much. But it was simple nevertheless: he had never seen the external genital apparatus of a human female.

When Adrian was nine years old and a pupil of St Margaret Mary’s School in a western suburb of Melbourne, some of the boys in his grade formed a secret society. They met among the oleanders in a little park near the school. Their aim was to persuade girls to visit the park and pull down their pants in full view of the society.

Adrian applied many times to join this society and was eventually admitted on probation. On the afternoon of his first meeting, the society was expecting six or seven girls but only two turned up. One of them refused even to lift her skirt—even after the boys of the society had all offered to take out their cocks and give her a good look. The other girl (Dorothy McEncroe—Adrian would always remember her, although she was a scrawny little thing) tucked her school tunic under her chin and lowered her pants for perhaps five seconds.

As a probationary member of the society Adrian had been forced to stand at the back of the little group of boys. At the very moment, when McEncroe’s pants were sliding down the last few inches of her belly, the boys in front of Adrian began to jostle each other for a better view. Adrian clawed at them like a madman. He was small and light for his age and he could not shift them. He got down on his hands and knees and wriggled between their legs. He pushed his head into the inner circle just as the dark-blue pleats of the uniform of St Margaret Mary’s School fell back into place over Dorothy McEncroe’s thighs.

Adrian never had a second chance to inspect Dorothy McEncroe or any other girl at that school. A few days after the meeting, the parish priest visited all the upper grades to warn them against loitering in the park after school. The secret society was disbanded and Dorothy McEncroe walked home every night with a group of girls and pulled faces at any boy who tried to talk to her.

As he grew older, Adrian tried other ways of learning about women and girls.

One wet afternoon at St Margaret Mary’s the children in Grade Seven were allowed to do free reading from the library—a glass-fronted cupboard in the corner. Adrian took down a volume of the encyclopedia from the top shelf. The book seemed mostly about art and sculpture, and many of the pictures and statues were naked. Adrian turned the pages rapidly. There were cocks and balls and breasts everywhere. He was sure he would find what he wanted among all that bare skin. His knees began to tremble. It was the afternoon under the oleanders again. But this time there was no one to block his view, and the woman he was about to see would have no pants or tunic within reach.

The girl behind him (Clare Buckley—he had cursed her a thousand times since) jumped to her feet.

‘Please, Sister. Adrian Sherd’s trying to read that book you told us not to borrow from the top shelf.’

The room was suddenly silent. Adrian heard the whistling of the nun’s robes. She was beside him before he could even close the book. But she spared him.

‘There is nothing either good or bad in art,’ she said to the class. ‘Adrian must have been away when I told you all not to bother yourselves about this book. We’ll put it away for safekeeping just the same.’

She carried the book back to her own desk. Adrian never saw it again in the library.

In later years Adrian sometimes came across other books about art with pictures of naked men and women. But whereas the men had neat little balls and stubby uncircumcised cocks resting comfortably and unashamed between their legs, the women had nothing but smooth skin or marble fading away into the shadows where their thighs met. Adrian suspected a conspiracy among artists and sculptors to preserve the secrets of women from boys like himself.

He thought how unfair it was that girls could learn all about men from pictures and statues while boys could search for years in libraries or art galleries and still be ignorant about women. He almost wept for the injustice of it.

In his first months at St Carthage’s College, Adrian learned a little more from an unexpected source. Every Wednesday the boys went for sport to some playing fields near the East Swindon tram terminus. Under the changing rooms was a lavatory with its walls covered in scribble. Some of the messages and stories were illustrated. Even here, most of the pictures were of men’s and boys’ organs, but Adrian sometimes found a sketch of a naked female.

From these crude drawings he pieced together an image of something that was oval in shape and bisected by a vertical line. He practised drawing this shape until it came easily to him, but he found it impossible to imagine such an odd thing between two smooth graceful thighs.

When Adrian first joined the little group around Cornthwaite, Seskis and O’Mullane, he listened to the names they used for the thing he was looking for. Cunt, twat, hole, ring, snatch, crack—when he heard these words he nodded or smiled like someone who had used them familiarly all his life. But long afterwards he brooded over them, hoping they might yield a clear image of the thing they named.

Adrian’s friends knew there were certain magazines full of information and pictures about sex. They knew the names of some of them—Man, Man Junior, Men Only, Lilliput and Health and Sunshine. They believed that non-Catholic newsagents kept the magazines hidden under their counters or in back rooms.

Cornthwaite often boasted that he could get any of the filthy magazines. All he had to do was ask a big bastard in his parish tennis club to walk into his local newsagent and ask for one. Adrian begged him to buy a Health and Sunshine. He had heard this was the one with the most daring pictures. They were rumoured to show everything. But Cornthwaite never remembered to get him one.

One afternoon in a barber’s shop in Swindon Road, Adrian found a Man Junior among the magazines lying about for customers to read. He was desperate to see inside it, but he was wearing his school uniform and he couldn’t bring St Carthage’s into disrepute by reading a smutty magazine in public.

He kept his eyes on the barber and his assistant and moved along the seat until he was sitting on the Man Junior. Then he bent forward and slipped the magazine down behind his legs and into his Gladstone bag. It was the first time he had ever stolen something of value, but he was sure the magazine was worth less than the amount necessary to make the theft a mortal sin.

Adrian looked through his Man Junior in one of the cubicles in the toilet on Swindon railway station. He saw plenty of naked women, but every one of them had something (a beach ball, a bucket and spade, a fluffy dog, a trailing vine, a leopard’s skin or simply her own upraised leg) concealing the place he had waited so long to see. It all looked so casual—as though the big ball had just bounced past, or the dog had happened to stroll up and greet the woman an instant before the camera clicked. But Adrian was sure it was done deliberately. The smiles of the women angered him. They pretended to be brazen temptresses, but at the last moment they draped fronds of greenery across themselves or hid behind their pet dogs.

It was not safe to take the whole magazine home. Adrian tore out the three most attractive pictures and hid them in the lining of his bag. That evening he searched through his brother’s Boys’ Wonder Book. He had remembered an article entitled ‘An Easy-to-make Periscope’. He found the article and made a note of the materials needed for the periscope.

Next day at school he talked to a boy who was crazy about science. Adrian said he had just thought up a brilliant idea to help the Americans spy on the Russians but he wanted to be sure it would work. The idea was to take pictures of the walls around the Kremlin or any other place the Americans wanted to see into. Then American scientists could aim powerful periscopes at the photographs to see what was behind the walls.

The boy told Adrian it was the stupidest idea he had ever heard. He started to explain something about light rays but Adrian told him not to bother. Adrian was glad he hadn’t hinted at what he really wanted to do with a periscope.

Adrian gave his three Man Junior pictures to Ullathorne, who collected bare-breasted women. He handed over the pictures in a back lane in Swindon, well away from St Carthage’s. It was well known that a boy had been expelled from the college after a brother had found dirty magazines in his bag.

One Friday, a few weeks later, Cornthwaite told Adrian that if he liked to turn up at Caulfield Racecourse on the following Sunday, he might meet a certain fellow from Cornthwaite’s parish who often sold second-hand copies of his big brother’s dirty magazines.

Adrian said he would only come if the fellow was likely to have some copies of Health and Sunshine. It was too far to ride his bike five miles to Caulfield just to buy Man or Man Junior.

Cornthwaite said the fellow could sell you any magazine you liked to name.

Sunday afternoon was cold and windy but Adrian didn’t want to miss the chance to get Health and Sunshine. He had the wind in his face all the way to Caulfield, and the trip took longer than he had expected.

The racecourse was a favourite meeting place for the boys from Cornthwaite’s suburb. Adrian found Cornthwaite and a few others racing on their bikes in and out among the bookmakers’ stands in the deserted betting ring. Cornthwaite said the fellow with the magazines had sold out and gone home long before. He offered Adrian a few pages torn from a magazine and said, ‘I bought a Health and Sunshine myself. But then Laurie D’Arcy turned up and I sold it to him for a profit. But I saved you the best picture from it.’

Adrian took the ragged pages and offered to pay Cornthwaite for all his trouble. Cornthwaite said he wouldn’t take any money but he hoped Adrian would stop bothering him about pictures for the rest of his life.

Adrian took his picture to a seat in the grandstand and sat down to examine it. It was a black-and-white photograph of a naked woman walking towards him under an archway of trees. And this time there was nothing between him and the thing that his parents and teachers, the men who painted the Old Masters, the women who posed for Man Junior, and even Dorothy McEncroe at St Margaret Mary’s School years before had kept hidden from him.

The woman in Health and Sunshine strode boldly forward. Her hands swung by her sides. As calmly as he could, Adrian looked into the hollow between her thighs.

His first thought was that Health and Sunshine was a fraud like Man Junior. The place was full of shadow. The woman had somehow managed to shield her secrets from the light. Even without a beach ball or a leopard’s skin she had still foiled him.

But then he realised it was an accident. The shadows came from the branch of a tree above the woman. The whole scene was mottled with shadows from the trees overhead. And there was something visible in the shadows between her legs. In the dull light under the roof of the grandstand he could not make it out clearly, but he was not beaten yet.

He took the picture out into the daylight and looked closely at it. He was even more convinced that a shape of some kind was concealed among the shadows, although it would take much longer to make out its finer details.

Adrian put the picture inside his shirt and stepped onto his bike. All the way home he was frightened of having an accident. He saw a crowd of doctors and nurses undoing his shirt on the operating table and discovering a page from Health and Sunshine over his heart. If they knew he was a Catholic they might tell the hospital chaplain, who would discuss the whole matter with his parents around his bedside after he regained consciousness.

He arrived home safely and smuggled the picture into the bottom of his schoolbag. Next morning he took the last six shillings from his tin of pocket money. On the way to school he bought a reading glass in a newsagent’s shop in Swindon Road. He told the man that he wanted the most powerful glass he could get for his money because he had to inspect some rare postage stamps.

The picture was still hidden in his bag. After school that day he hurried to the toilet cubicle on the Swindon station. He held the reading glass in every possible position over the picture. He moved his head slowly up and down and cocked it at different angles. The trouble was that the glass magnified all the tiny dots in the picture. He was still sure there was something between the woman’s legs but the glass only made it more mysterious.

He remembered the story a brother had told about the scientists who searched for the indivisible particle that all matter in the universe was made of. The harder they searched for it, the more it seemed to be made up of smaller particles that danced in front of their eyes.

Adrian put the reading glass in his bag and crumpled up his pattern of dancing dots and left it behind in the toilet.

The next time he went to the barber he read an article in Pix magazine about the trade in negro slaves that still flourished in certain Arab countries. There was a market in the Yemen where young black women were being sold openly for forty pounds each at the present day. The girls were paraded before intending buyers like so many cattle, and when a likely purchaser showed some interest, the vendor would fling back the gaudy robe from a girl’s dusky limbs and display every one of her assets for close inspection.

Adrian knew exactly what this last sentence meant. The Yemen was not too far from Australia. When he left school and started work he would soon save up forty pounds plus his fares. As soon as he turned twenty-one he would travel to the Yemen and visit the slave market and buy one of the young women.

Or he need not even buy one. He could simply rattle some money in his pocket to look like a customer, and wait until a gaudy robe was flung back. And if one of the girl’s thighs blocked his view or a shadow fell across her, he would pretend to be a very cautious customer who insisted on seeing every detail of the goods he was interested in.

One morning Brother Cyprian spent some of the Christian Doctrine period talking about dreams. The boys were unusually attentive. They could see he was nervous and embarrassed. While he talked he adjusted the pile of books on his desk, trying to make it symmetrical.

Brother Cyprian said: ‘At this time of your lives you might find yourself feeling a little sad and strange because you seem to be leaving behind a part of your life that was happy and simple. The reason for this is that you’re all growing from boys into young men. There are new mysteries to puzzle and bother you—things you never thought about a few years ago. And many of you no doubt are worried by the strange new dreams you might be having.’

Adrian Sherd recalled the strangest dream he had had lately. It had come to him after he had worn himself out with three consecutive nights in America. On the third of those nights he had gone with Rhonda and Doris and Debbie to the Badlands of South Dakota. The women were jaded and bored. To liven them up he got them to play the most depraved party games he could think of. The games turned into an orgy, with naked bodies rolling in the purple sage. Afterwards Adrian had fallen asleep exhausted and wondering what more America could possibly offer him.

Brother Cyprian was saying, ‘Chemicals and substances are being made inside your bodies ready for the day when you enter the adult world. These strange new substances help to put into your minds the images that might shock you while you’re asleep. Sometimes in your sleep you seem to be a different person doing things you’d never think of while you’re awake.’

The dream had come to Adrian on the same night after he had fallen asleep in South Dakota. He saw a dark-brown misty land on the horizon. It was England—a country he had never wanted to visit. (English film stars were too reserved and aloof. And except for Diana Dors they never appeared in bathing suits.) Something compelled him to cross damp treeless wolds towards a manor house or castle of grey stone. As he travelled he looked for places where a man might take his lady friends for a picnic. But all he saw were a few copses or spinneys so small or so close to roads and lanes that the picnickers could never have run naked or cried out obscene words without being seen or overheard.

If he had been awake he would have despised this landscape. But in his dream he longed to know it better. It seemed to promise a pleasure more satisfying than anything he had known in America.

The stone house was on a hill. He stood outside it searching for a door or a low window to look through. Behind him, he knew, was a view of miles of green fields dotted with darker-green trees and intersected by white lanes. If he could find a beautiful young woman, even an English woman, he would enjoy to the full whatever rare pleasures the landscape concealed.

Brother Cyprian said, ‘The important thing to remember is this. We can’t help what happens to us while we’re asleep. We’re fully responsible for what we do in the daytime, but in sleep there are chemicals and forces at work that we haven’t the slightest control over.’

Somewhere inside the house was a woman or a girl of his own age with a face so full of expression that a man could stare at it for hours. She was wearing a turtlenecked Fair Isle sweater (so bulky that he saw no sign of her breasts), a skirt of Harris tweed and sensible shoes. As soon as Adrian found a window into her room they would exchange glances full of meaning. Hers would tell him she was willing to agree to whatever he asked. And his would tell her he wanted no more than to walk beside her all afternoon through the English landscape. And even if they found themselves alone in some green field screened on all sides by tall hedgerows, he would ask no more than to clasp her fingertips or lightly touch her wrist where it gleamed like the finest English porcelain.

Brother Cyprian said, ‘So you see, we can’t commit a sin in our sleep. No matter what strange things we dream about, there’s no chance of us sinning.’

Adrian groped through thickets of ivy. Even the walls of the place were becoming harder to find. Inside somewhere, the woman was operating her expensive film projector. She was showing an audience of hundreds of well-dressed English gentlemen coloured films of all the landscapes she longed to wander through, and hinting to them what they must do to earn the right to escort her on summer afternoons.

Adrian stood on the beach below a towering cliff on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall. High above, on the Sussex Downs, a young couple promenaded on the smooth sward. He heard the intimate murmur of their voices but before he could make out their words he had to escape from the incoming tide. When he saw the vast green bulk of the whole Atlantic coming at him he woke in his sleepout at Accrington.

Brother Cyprian was near the end of his talk. ‘One of the most alarming things that might happen to us is to wake up in the middle of some strange dream. You might find your whole body disturbed and restless and all sorts of odd things happening. The only thing to do is to say a short prayer to Our Lady and ask her for the blessing of a dreamless sleep. Then close your eyes again and let things take their course.’

Adrian had been desperate to get back to sleep and try again to enjoy the pleasures of England. But of course had never seen anything like an English landscape again.

In the schoolyard at morning recess Cornthwaite said, ‘Did you get what Cyprian was raving about this morning—all that about naughty dreams?’

O’Mullane and Seskis and Sherd were not sure.

Cornthwaite said, ‘Wet dreams. That’s what it was. You bastards have never had that sort of dream because you’ve flogged yourselves silly every night of your lives since you were in short pants. If you go without it for a couple of weeks, one night you’ll dream the filthiest dream you’ve ever dreamed of. You’ll even shoot your bolt in your sleep if you don’t wake up in the middle of it.’

Adrian tried not to look surprised. It was the first time anyone had explained wet dreams to him. He had never had one—perhaps for the reason that Cornthwaite had suggested. He realised why the brother had been so embarrassed talking about dreams.

For nearly a week Adrian kept away from America. He was waiting for a filthy dream. If the dream was as good as Cornthwaite had claimed, Adrian might have to make an important decision. He would carefully compare the dream and the best of his American adventures. If the dream turned out to be more realistic and lifelike than his American journey, he might decide to get all his sexual pleasure in future from dreams.

But whenever he remembered the young woman and the innocent landscapes of England he wished for dreams that would never be contaminated by lust. He decided to resume his American journey. If he wore himself out in America night after night, there was always the chance that he might experience again the pure joy of a dream of England.

Some nights when Adrian was tired of visiting America he thought about the history of mankind.

While he lived in the Garden of Eden, Adam enjoyed perfect human happiness. If it occurred to him to look at a naked woman, he simply told Eve to stand still for a moment. And he never once suffered the misery of having an erection that he could not satisfy. Eve knew it was her duty to give in to him whenever he asked.

After he was driven out into the world, Adam still tried to live as he had in Eden. But now he suffered the trials of a human being. Eve wore clothes all day long and only let him near her when she wanted a child. Every day he had erections that came to nothing. Many a time he looked out across the plains of Mesopotamia and wished there was some other woman he could think about. But the world was still empty of people apart from himself and his family. Even in the vast continent of North America there was no human footprint from the green islands of Maine to the red-gold sandbanks of the Rio Grande.

But at least Adam could remember his pleasant life in Eden. His sons had no such consolation. They grew up in a world where the only females were their sisters and their mother—and they always kept their bodies carefully covered.

When the eldest son reached Adrian’s age he still hadn’t seen a naked female body. One hot afternoon he could stand it no longer. He hid among the bullrushes while Eve and her daughters went swimming in the Tigris. He only glanced at Eve—her breasts were long and flabby and her legs had varicose veins. But he looked hard at his sisters, even the young ones with no breasts.

When he was alone again, he formed his hand into the shape of the thing he had seen between their legs and became the first in human history to commit the solitary sin.

Although it was not recorded in the Bible, that was a black day for mankind. On that day God thought seriously of wiping out the little tribe of Man. Even in His infinite wisdom He hadn’t foreseen that a human would learn such an unnatural trick—enjoying by himself, when he was hardly more than a child, the pleasure that was intended for married men only.

The angels in heaven were revolted too. Lucifer’s sin of pride seemed clean and brave compared with the sight of the shuddering boy squirting his precious stuff into the limpid Tigris. Lucifer himself was delighted that Man had invented a new kind of sin—and one that was so easy to commit.

Luckily for mankind it was the first of many occasions when God’s mercy overcame His righteous anger. The son of Adam never knew how close he had come to being struck dead on the spot.

Perhaps God relented because He saw how little joy the poor fellow got out of it. There were no newspapers or magazines to excite his imagination. All he could think of was one of the same girls he saw every day in his ordinary household in dreary Mesopotamia.

Eventually the sons of Adam married their sisters, and their descendants spread through the Middle East and became the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians.

By now the young men were much better off than the sons of Adam. Few of them had to commit sins of impurity alone. People matured so early in the hot climate that a young fellow of Adrian’s age would be already married to a shapely brown-skinned wife.

If a young man couldn’t wait, even for the brief time between puberty and marriage, he still didn’t have to touch himself. There were slave girls in every city. If a young man fancied a certain slave girl he could ask his father to buy her and employ her in the house. If the young fellow was daring enough he would have her assigned to bathroom duties. She would fill his tub and fetch his towels on bath nights. Then he could arrange for the room to become so hot that the girl had to strip to the waist while she worked.

When the Jews settled in the Promised Land they were no less lustful than other peoples. Time after time God had to send a prophet to persuade them to repent. Even when the Bible did not name the sins of the Jews, it was easy to guess what they were. The weather in Palestine was always hot and the people often slept on top of their houses. The excitement of lying on the roof with hardly any clothes on, and hearing your neighbour’s wife just across the way tossing about under her sheet, would have kept a Jewish man awake half the night thinking of sex.

In Old Testament times the only young men who kept up the solitary habit were poor shepherd boys far from the cities and the slave girls. When fire and brimstone rained on Sodom and Gomorrah, there were lonely herd-keepers who watched from the stony hills around and didn’t know whether to be glad, because all the spoilt young bastards were being roasted alive with their wives and slave girls, or sorry, because they could never again peer down on the cities at dusk to watch the sexy games on the rooftops and catch a glimpse of some young woman they could remember afterwards in the desert.

By the time of Jesus, the Jews had become very reticent about sex. It was hard to judge how common or rare the solitary sin might have been in New Testament days. Jesus Himself never referred to it, but Adrian always hoped an Apocryphal Gospel or a Dead Sea Scroll would be found one day with the story of the Boy Taken in Self-Abuse.

The Scribes and Pharisees dragged him to Jesus and announced that they were going to stone him. Jesus invited the one without sin to cast the first stone. Then He started writing in the sand. One by one the old men looked down and read the dates and places of their boyhood sins and the names of the women they had used for inspiration. The boy read them too. And for years afterwards, instead of hanging his head in shame because the whole town knew about his secret sin, he remembered the pious old men who had tried it themselves in their youth and he looked the whole world in the face.

Adrian hummed or whistled his favourite hit tunes whenever he was alone, and especially at night when his parents had gone to bed with their library books and his young brothers were asleep. Sometimes he got up from his homework at the kitchen table and went into his room without turning on the light. He stared out of his window, trying to imagine the shape of the North American continent beyond the darkness that had settled over the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. He tried not to notice the lighted window in the house across the back fence where Mr and Mrs Lombard were still doing their tea dishes because it took them hours to scrub all their kids and put them to bed. He sang his favourite tunes softly until America appeared under its brilliant sunshine on the far side of the world.

The square-dancing craze was over. The women of America had stopped wearing shapeless checked blouses and cowboy hats that dangled behind their heads. They were crowded together on a riverbank listening to Johnny Ray sing ‘The Little White Cloud that Cried’. Johnny threw back his head in agony and gasped out the last long syllable of his smash hit. The women threw their arms round each other and sobbed. They would have done anything to make Johnny happy, but he only stood with his eyes closed and thought of the waters of the Potomac or the Shenandoah rushing past on their way to the sea, and of how lonely the American countryside seemed to someone with no sweetheart.

The women followed the river to the sea. By sundown they were all strolling along the boardwalk of a great city, dressed in off-the-shoulder evening frocks and white elbow-length gloves. From the farthest horizon, rosy with sunset, the sound of the fishing fleet, returning to port at last, reached the throng of women. Jo Stafford’s rendition of ‘Shrimp Boats’ came from loudspeakers all along the beach. When they knew their menfolk were coming, the women rushed into the lobby of the biggest luxury hotel in town. They pushed through the fronds of potted palms and crowded round the startled desk clerks and sang into their faces, ‘There’s dancing tonight.’

Rosemary Clooney grabbed the nearest bellhop boy and waltzed round the room with him while she sang ‘Tell Us Where the Good Times Are’. Each time she shouted the chorus she held him so close to her plunging neckline that her big bouncing breasts almost rubbed against his nose. The shy young man didn’t know where to look, and the crowd went wild.

By now the men had arrived and changed into their tuxedos. The happy couples crowded into an upstairs ballroom. Dean Martin sang ‘Kiss of Fire’ and everyone started to tango. When the song reached its climax, some of the more red-blooded men even tried to kiss their partners. But the women turned their heads aside because they knew what a kiss could do.

The crowd round the stage drew back and made way for Patti Page the Singing Rage with her version of ‘Doggie in the Window’. As she moved among the dancers, the mystery of who made the dog noises was solved at last. It was Patti herself, and she looked so fetching when she yelped that some of the men tried to fondle her like a cuddlesome puppy.

The Weavers burst into the room singing ‘The Gandy Dancers’ Ball’. Everyone started dancing like miners or lumberjacks in an old Western saloon. But some of the women looked nervous. They knew what wild things the gandy dancers did when they were excited by dancing and pretty faces.

When the dust had settled after the dance, Frankie Laine sang ‘Wild Goose’. A hush came over the room. Someone pulled back the velvet drapes to reveal a view of brightly lit skyscrapers. High up in the night sky, a flock of wild geese was passing over the city on their way to the Gulf of Mexico. The people listening to Frankie remembered the wide open spaces of America, far from the world of Show Business with its low-cut gowns and easy divorces. Between the big cities were rural landscapes where people were all in bed listening to the innocent music of wild geese honking in the night sky. When Frankie was finished, a few of the dancers were so moved that they walked out of their girlfriends’ lives and went back to the dear hearts and gentle people in their home towns.

Jo Stafford grabbed the mike again and sang the first bars of ‘Jumbalaya’. The dancers leaped to their feet. The words were puzzling, but everyone knew the song was something about Louisiana and the steamy tropical swamps where people wore shorts or bathers all day. To set the right mood for the song, Jo Stafford was wearing a grass skirt and a floral brassiere.

The tropical rhythm affected everyone. The dancing grew furious. At the end of each chorus, some of the men sang words that were rather risqué. Instead of the correct words ‘big fun’, they sang ‘big bums’. And a few of the more shameless women giggled behind their hands and waggled their own bottoms.

As the song neared its end, more people behaved suggestively or sniggered over double entendres. They forgot about the rest of America in the darkness all round them. They couldn’t have cared less about the thousands of Catholic parents trying to shield their children from the dangers of blue songs and films. They forgot everything except the sight of Jo Stafford swishing her grass skirt higher and higher in time with the wild pagan music and the off-colour words.

But nothing really evil happened. After a few minutes the song that had seemed to promise a lustful orgy came suddenly to an end.

Someone pulled back the drapes again. The cold grey light of dawn was spreading over the sky. The couples clasped hands and gathered at the windows while Eddie Fisher sang ‘Turn Back the Hands of Time’.

The men were all vaguely dissatisfied (like Adrian Sherd after he had listened to three Hit Parades on Sunday evening). All night they had heard about kisses that thrilled, kisses of fire, lips of wine, and charms they would die for. But now it was time to go home and they had done no more than dance the night away.

While the men were stealing a goodnight kiss from their girlfriends in the lobbies of their apartment buildings or on the porches of their frame houses, some of them might have found themselves humming a different kind of music.

It was not really hit music, although it often made the Hit Parade for a few weeks. When Adrian Sherd heard it he remembered that not everyone spent their evenings dancing in nightclubs or folding charms in their arms. It was sad, lonely music—the theme from Moulin Rouge, or The Story of Three Loves or Limelight—and it seemed to come from countries very different from America.

When the people going home in America heard this music they wondered if there was some other kind of happiness that they had never found—and would never find as long as they spent their nights holding their loved ones dangerously near and tasting their lips.

One Monday morning Adrian’s friends asked him what he had done over the weekend. All he could tell them was that he had listened to the Hit Parades on the wireless. Seskis and Cornthwaite laughed and said they were always too busy to sit and listen to music.

But O’Mullane said, ‘The Hit Parade came in handy for me one night. I was lying out in my bungalow trying to think of an excuse to do it to myself and I heard this colossal song with Perry Como and a chorus of young tarts in the background. They were singing, “Play me a hurtin’ tune” over and over again. I beat time to the music while I did it. The last few lines nearly made my head drop off. I’m going to buy the record and use it again some day.’

Every few months, on a Sunday afternoon, Mrs Sherd took her three sons to visit her sister, Miss Kathleen Bracken.

Adrian knew his Aunt Kath would have entered a convent when she was young if one of her legs had not been shorter than the other. Adrian’s mother called her a living saint because she went to daily mass in all weathers with her big boot clumping along the footpath.

Miss Bracken lived alone in a little single-fronted weatherboard house in Hawthorn. While his brothers ate green loquats or figs from the two trees in the backyard, Adrian admired his aunt’s front room.

Inside the door, near the light switch, was a holy-water stoup in the shape of an angel holding a bowl against its breast. Whenever Aunt Kath walked past it she dipped her finger in the bowl and blessed herself. Adrian did the same.

There were three altars in the room: one each for the Sacred Heart, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour and St Joseph. Each altar had a statue of coloured plaster with a fairy light burning in front of it (red for the Sacred Heart, blue for Our Lady and orange for St Joseph) and a vase of flowers. On certain feast days Aunt Kath burned a candle in front of the appropriate altar—a blessed candle obtained from the church on the feast of the Purification of Our Lady.

On a cabinet beneath a picture of Our Lady appearing to St Bernadette Soubirous was a flask of Lourdes water. Aunt Kath sprinkled a few drops on her wrists and temples when she felt off-colour. One day when Adrian’s youngest brother ran a long splinter under his fingernail, she dipped the finger in the flask before she poked at it with a needle.

Adrian liked to ask his aunt about little-known religious orders or puzzling rituals and ceremonies or obscure points of Catholic doctrine. It was his aunt who told him always to burn old broken rosary beads rather than throw them away (so they wouldn’t end up lying next to some dirty piece of garbage or be picked up by non-Catholics who would only make a mockery of them). She showed him leaflets about an order of nuns who dedicated their lives to converting the Jews, and another order who worked exclusively with African lepers. She knew all about the ceremony of Tenebrae, in which the lights in the church were put out one by one. And one Sunday afternoon she took Adrian and his mother to a churching for a woman who had recently had a baby.

Whenever his aunt was talking, Adrian thought of her mind as a huge volume, like the book that the priest used at mass, with ornate red binding and pages edged with thick gilt. Silk ribbons hung out of the pages to mark the important places.

‘Why aren’t Catholics allowed to be cremated?’ he asked her.

She took hold of the dangling violet (or scarlet or green) ribbon and parted the gilt edging at the section containing the answer.

‘At one time, certain heretics or atheists used to have themselves cremated to show that their bodies couldn’t be resurrected after death. So the Holy Father issued a decree so that no Catholic would appear to be siding with the heretics.’

In a drawer in the front room Aunt Kath had a collection of relics of saints, each in a silk-lined box labelled CYMA or ROLEX or OMEGA. The relics were tiny chips of bone or fragments of cloth housed behind glass in silver or gilt lockets.

When Adrian had been younger he used to enjoy visiting his aunt. But after he had begun his visits to America he felt he was polluting her house, and especially the front room. He still read her magazines (The Messenger of Our Lady, The Annals of The Sacred Heart, The Monstrance, The Far East) but he kept away from her altars and relics. He was frightened of committing a sacrilege by touching them with his hands—the same hands that only a few hours before had been dabbling in filth.

One day when he had at least a dozen sins on his soul, his aunt showed him a new relic she had just received from Italy. She unpacked it from a box stuffed with tissue paper.

‘Actually there are two of them,’ she said. ‘And I want you to have one.’

Adrian knew she prayed every morning that he would become a priest. Fortunately God saw to it that no prayers ever went to waste. His aunt’s prayers would probably be used to lead some other more worthy boy to the priesthood.

She lifted out two tiny envelopes and held one up to the light. Adrian saw a dark patch in one corner.

His aunt said, ‘They’re only third-class relics—I’ve told you about the different classes of relics—but they were jolly hard to come by.’

She put one envelope in Adrian’s hand. ‘It’s from his tomb,’ she said. ‘Dust from the tomb of St Gabriel of the Sorrowing Virgin. St Gabriel had an extraordinary love for Holy Purity. He’s the ideal patron for young people to pray to today when there’s so much temptation about.’

Adrian tried to look as though it had never occurred to him to pray to any saint for purity because it came naturally to him.

All the way home with the relic in his pocket, Adrian wondered how much the saints in heaven knew about the sins of people on earth. Did God in his mercy keep all the holy virgins and the innocent saints like St Gabriel from knowing about the foul sins of impurity committed every day? Or was the news of each sin broadcast all over heaven as soon as it was committed? (‘News Flash: Adrian Sherd, Catholic boy of Accrington, Melbourne, Australia, abused himself at 10.55 this evening.’) There were people already in heaven who knew him. (‘Yes, he was my grandson, I’m sorry to say,’ says old Mr Bracken.) If Adrian managed to break the habit at last and get to heaven in the end, he would have to hide from his relatives.

But then there was the General Judgement. Even if no one in heaven had heard of his sins before then, every person who had lived on earth since Adam would learn about them on Judgement Day.

Adrian Sherd walked up to the platform between two stern angels. The crowd of spectators reached beyond the horizon in every direction. But even the farthest soul in the crowd heard his name when it was broadcast over the loudspeakers.

Towering above the platform was a huge indicator like the scoreboard at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Beside each of the Ten Commandments was an instrument like the speedo in a car. The crowd gasped when the digits started tumbling over to show Sherd’s score for the Sixth Commandment. The blurred numerals whirled into the hundreds. Somewhere in the crowd his Aunt Kathleen shrieked with horror. This was the boy she had wanted to be a priest, the boy she had once enrolled in the Archconfraternity of the Divine Child, the hypocrite whose filthy hands had touched the sacred dust from St Gabriel’s tomb.

Brother Methodius told the Latin class one morning that the Romans in the great days of the Republic reached the highest level of culture and virtue that a pagan civilisation could possibly attain. Many of their greatest and wisest citizens were hardly distinguishable from Christian gentlemen.

Adrian Sherd did not believe the brother. He knew that one people did not conquer another just to give them paved roads or a new legal system. Adrian knew what power was for. If the citizens of Melbourne had made him their dictator he would have gone straight to a mannequins’ school and ordered all the women to undress.

The Romans were no different from himself. Among the back pages of his Latin textbook was a story entitled ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’. (Adrian had waited all year for his Latin class to reach this story. But they progressed so slowly through the textbook that he suspected Brother Methodius of deliberately holding them back to avoid the embarrassing story.) Adrian often studied the illustration above the story and even tried to translate the Latin text on his own. Of course it was all watered down to make it suitable for schoolboys. The Roman soldiers only led the women away by their wrists. And even the Latin word rapio was translated in the vocabulary at the back of the book as ‘seize, snatch up, carry away’. But Adrian was not deceived.

Whenever he read the story of a battle, Adrian barracked for the enemies of Rome. He had no sympathy for Roman boys of his own age. As soon as they started wearing the toga of manhood they could do whatever they liked with their father’s slaves. But the young men of Capua or Tarentum or Veii had troubles like his. When they crept out as scouts towards the suburbs of Rome they saw young Publius or Flaccus enjoying himself in his orchard or courtyard with some young woman captured from a tribe like their own. But of course their own people were not strong enough to capture slaves.

But when the Roman legions finally invested their city, the young fellows saw every night, from the tops of their threatened walls, the goings-on in the Romans’ comfortable camp. How many of them must have abused themselves for the last time when they lay down briefly between turns on watch and then fallen in battle next morning—killed by the very fellows whose pleasures they had envied so often.

As city after city was conquered in Italy and Gaul and Germany, everyone had the chance to own slaves. The only people who still kept up the habit of solitary sin were the slaves themselves. Some of them did it thinking of the flaxen-haired maidens they had once known on the banks of the Rhine and would never see again. Others did it peeping around the marble columns at the bare-armed Roman matrons teaching their daughters to spin and weave.

And then came Adrian’s hero, a man sworn to destroy Rome and avenge the raped slave girls and wretched self-abusers.

Hannibal himself came from a lustful land. (It was later to be the home of the Great St Augustine, a sex maniac in his youth, but destined to be the holy Bishop of Hippo and a worthy patron saint for boys struggling to break the habit of impurity.) But as a young man, the Carthaginian had turned his back on all the pagan delights of North Africa. He spent the rest of his life wandering round the countryside of Italy, far from the luxuries of the cities.

It was probably a blessing that he was one-eyed. When he led his army to the gates of Rome he would have seen only dimly from his siege-towers the beauty of the women inside the walls that he would never breach. Not that anything would have tempted him to give up his ascetic way of life. It was clear from his superhuman courage and endurance that he was the absolute master of his passions.

After the defeat of Hannibal, the Romans did what they liked all over the civilised world. The only citizens who refused to join in the orgies were the early Christians, huddled by candlelight in their catacombs deep under Rome. Sometimes they could hardly hear the priest’s words during mass for the squeals and grunts coming from overhead as a burly patrician subdued a slave girl in his triclinium, or chased her naked into the pool in his atrium. It was no wonder the Christians preached against slavery.

Outside the Pax Romana were the primitive tribes on the Baltic coast or in the darkest Balkans who could only afford one wife each. When Latin writers described these people as barbarians or hinted at their savage practices, they were probably referring to the habit of self-abuse, which the Romans themselves would have all but forgotten.

But the barbarians had their day at last. When the Goths and Vandals sacked Rome, the lucky ones who got there first leaped on the stately Roman matrons and even the trembling Christian virgins with all the ferocity of men who had been shut out for centuries from the delights of the Empire. Those who were still hurrying towards Rome saw the flames rising over the Seven Hills and sinned by themselves one last time at the thought of what must have been happening in the Eternal City (and what they would soon be enjoying themselves).

During the Dark Ages, bestial tribesmen from Central Asia roamed around Italy, grabbing the ex-slave girls and orphaned patrician girls who were still wandering bewildered beneath the cypresses on the grass-grown Appian Way. Those who missed out on the women abused themselves in front of the shameless murals and mosaics in the crumbling villas or, if they could read, over the scandalous novels and poems of the corrupt last days of the Empire.

But as time passed, some people were sickened by the sexual excesses. Pious men and women went into the desert and lonely places to found monasteries and convents. The Christian way of life was gradually established in the lands once ruled by the Romans. And the sex maniacs, like the wolves and bears and wild boars of Europe, had to flee into the swamps of Lithuania and the glens of Albania and go back to their furtive habits of old.

Once a month the College Chaplain, Father Lacey, strolled down from the local presbytery to talk to Adrian’s class.

The chaplain was a tired man with white hair. The only time Adrian had gone to him in confession, Father Lacey had said sadly, ‘For the love of God, can’t you use some self-control, son?’ and then announced the penance and rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes.

One day Father Lacey said to the class, ‘The other day I happened to read an Australian Catholic Truth Society pamphlet. It was written by a famous American Jesuit for young people in America, and I couldn’t help thinking how much better off we are in Australia than the Americans—morally, I mean. No doubt there are many fine Catholics in America. There are wonderful men among the American clergy. Monsignor Fulton Sheen, Cardinal Cushing, Father Peyton the Rosary Priest—they’re not afraid to denounce immorality or Communism. But decent Americans must be nearly swamped sometimes with temptations against purity.

‘One of the things the pamphlet was discussing was what the Americans call petting. Now, this word “petting” was something I’d never come across before. I still think it sounds more like something you do to your dog or cat. Anyway, from what this priest was saying it seems that one of the gravest problems in America today is the petting that goes on amongst young people.

‘It’s hard to believe, but apparently American fathers and mothers allow their children to stay out half the night in cars and parks and on street corners. And these young flappers and hobbledehoys (because that’s all they are at their age—they’re still wet behind the ears, so to speak), well, naturally they face enormous temptations when they’re alone in these places together. And boys, it’s all so wrong. You know as well as I do that these things are for married people exclusively.

‘Go back for a moment to the Middle Ages, to the great days of the church. In those days the whole of the civilised world observed the commandments of God and his church. There were no problems of courtship and company-keeping then. This petting that’s worrying the people of America hadn’t been heard of. Of course the young people of both sexes had the chance to meet each other and look each other over before marriage. They had their dances and balls in those days too. But it was all good wholesome fun. The young ladies were all chaperoned and watched over by their God-fearing parents. And the parents in their wisdom saw to it that no two young people had the opportunity to be alone together where they might face temptations that were too strong for them.

‘Those were the days when knights sang about pure love. And it was pure. If a young man fell in love with a young woman he might wear her colours into battle or write a poem to her, but he certainly didn’t hang around with her in dark doorways on the way home from the pictures.

‘Young fellows of your age would probably be off to fight the Turks under the banner of Our Lady. That’s who your lady would be. It was the Age of Our Blessed Lady. It’s no coincidence that the period of history when men were bravest and most chivalrous and most honourable in the way they behaved towards the fair sex—that age was also the greatest age in history for devotion to Our Lady.

‘But to get back to America again. There’s another expression I’ve heard and I suppose some of you must have too. It’s a cheap, vulgar expression if ever there was one—sex appeal. The way some Americans behave, you’d think it was all that mattered when a man was thinking of marriage. As long as the woman has sex appeal, she’s sure to make a good wife.

‘Well, we can see the result of all this in the divorce courts. I suppose even at your age you’ve read about some of these Hollywood stars getting married—he for the fifth time and she for the third. Think of it. America has gone mad over this thing called sex appeal. But I shouldn’t say that. We know there are thousands of good Catholics in America—people in the fine old Catholic cities like Boston and Chicago struggling to bring up their children away from all the madness in the pagan parts of the country. And I’m happy to say there are even a few good Catholics in Hollywood itself.

‘I was reading the other day in a Catholic magazine about the film star Maureen O’Sullivan. You’ve probably watched her if you go to the pictures occasionally. Well, in the midst of all the temptations of Hollywood, that woman is still an outstanding Catholic mother. She’s been married all her life to a good Catholic man and they’ve brought up six or seven fine young children. So it can be done. And don’t forget Bing Crosby either—a decent Catholic father who’s never had his head turned by Hollywood. But how rare these people are.

‘Boys, whenever I think about Hollywood and what it’s doing to the world I’m glad I’m an old man. I honestly don’t know how I’d save my soul if I had to grow up with all the temptations facing you young fellows today. In my time we had nothing like the films and books and even the newspapers that you fellows have to fight against. Today I suppose there’s not one of you who doesn’t go to the pictures now and then and give the paganism of Hollywood a chance to infect you.

‘“Ah, but I only watch harmless films for general exhibition,” you’re saying to yourselves. Well, I sometimes wonder if there’s any such thing as a harmless film. Did you ever stop to think what sort of lives these actors and actresses lead outside their films? Did you know for instance that nearly every young woman film star has to surrender her body to the director or the producer or whoever he is before she gets the part of the leading lady? And these are the sort of people that the young men and women of today are supposed to have for their heroes and heroines.’

While the chaplain went on to talk about Our Lady again, Adrian thought hard about the film stars he met on his American journeys. If Father Lacey was right about Hollywood, some of these women might have been through unspeakable agonies when they were younger. For all Adrian knew, Jayne with her innocent smile or Marilyn with her serene gaze might have spent her younger days with her eyes shut tight and her mouth clamped to stop herself from screaming while some pot-bellied Cecil B. DeMille ran his sweaty hands over her naked skin.

The women had never mentioned those things to Adrian for fear of spoiling the fun of their outings together. They were generous courageous creatures. He should have spent more time getting to know their life stories instead of treating them as beautiful playthings. In future he would encourage them to share their old painful secrets with him. They would soon realise that nothing they could tell him about Hollywood would shock him.

Adrian’s teachers often said that the name ‘Dark Ages’ was misleading and unjust. Protestant historians used the name to imply that the centuries when the church was at the height of its influence were a time of ignorance and misery. In fact, as all fair-minded historians agreed, Europe in the so-called Dark Ages was more peaceful and contented than it had ever been since. And the countryside was dotted with monasteries that were centres of learning. Catholics should get into the habit of using the term ‘Middle Ages’ to cover the whole period from the end of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt (or Reformation, as it was sometimes called).

Adrian was certain he would never have become a slave to sins of impurity if he had lived in the Middle Ages. A boy in those days grew up in a simple two-roomed cottage and slept in the same room as his parents and brothers and sisters. He fell asleep hearing the calm breathing of his family round him and the comfortable noises of the cows and horses in the byre through the wall. If his parents wanted to have another baby they waited until their children were all sound asleep before they did anything about it. In a home like this there was no opportunity for a boy to sin in his bed without being discovered.

The luckiest boys went off to monasteries as soon as they reached puberty. In a monastery a boy had so many beautiful things to inspire him that he soon forgot about women. Every day as he walked in procession along the cloisters, he glimpsed through the narrow gothic windows the rolling hillsides covered with fruitful vines or grazing cattle. Every morning he saw the ordained monks each bent over his private altar in the shadowy nooks behind the high altar of the monastery chapel. When the sunlight flashed from the bulky silver of the chalices, and the folds of the elaborate vestments hissed against each other, he knew he would never wish for a greater pleasure than to say mass alone like that each day.

If a boy stayed at home he still had fewer temptations than a modern boy, because he was hardly ever alone. The whole village worked together all day in the fields. And the itinerant Franciscan and Dominican friars wandering up and down the roads of Europe kept a sharp lookout for young fellows mooning around in copses or thickets.

For centuries, Europe was hardly troubled by sex. Her most imaginative young men devoted all their energy to making gold and silver ornaments or stained-glass windows or religious paintings or illuminated parchments.

Historians were right when they said the Modern Age began with the Renaissance. Nude paintings and statues began to appear, even in the most fervently Catholic countries. And many of the female nudes were almost as attractive as twentieth-century film stars.

A young man of the Renaissance would have had many of the sexual problems that bothered Adrian Sherd. Even in those days, artists and sculptors had discovered the tricks that were used by photographers for Health and Sunshine magazine. The female statues had smooth marble between their legs and the women in the paintings stood in tantalising poses that did not quite reveal all.

The generation that grew up during the sexual excitement of the Renaissance became more and more resentful of the church’s strict attitude to impurity. These were the people responsible for the Protestant Revolt.

The most important changes made by the Protestants were to remove two institutions which had been a nuisance to the sexually lax. They abolished the celibacy of the clergy and the sacrament of confession.

Martin Luther himself was a priest. Why was he so anxious to do away with the vow of celibacy? Because he himself wanted to marry. And why was he in such a hurry to get married? Adrian had heard many times from priests and brothers that Luther was an unhappy tormented man who should never have become a priest in the first place. It was common knowledge that he was a glutton and used foul language. It wasn’t hard to imagine such a man having terrible battles against impure temptations. The woman he eventually married was an ex-nun. What if he had known her, or at least caught sight of her, while he was still a Catholic priest? Was it possible that all his troubles with the church first started when he realised he couldn’t stop thinking about a certain pretty woman?

Adrian had arrived at an explanation for the Protestant Revolt. He believed it was quite likely that the whole thing had been started by a priest who was tempted beyond his endurance to commit a sin of impurity by himself. Adrian found it almost too shocking to think about. He would never have repeated it to anyone, not even a Protestant, because it reflected on the sacred office of the priesthood.

It was a fateful day in the history of impurity when the Protestant leaders decided that it was no longer necessary to go to confession to have your sins forgiven. In drab cities all over northern Germany young men suddenly realised that what they thought about in bed at night need never be revealed to another living soul. They could do what they liked all week and still stand up on Sunday and sing hymns at the tops of their voices and look the minister in the eye.

The doctrine of predestination was all that a young man could wish for. Once he knew he was one of the elect, he could sin every night of his life and still be saved. If Adrian Sherd could have been born in Geneva in the great days of Calvinism he would have found religion a pleasure instead of the worry it was to him in twentieth-century Australia.

In the Protestant half of Europe, the Middle Ages were swept away forever. In Italy, Spain, Poland and the other Catholic countries, things were much the same as before except that many a young man must have wanted to migrate to a Protestant land.

When the Catholics and Protestants reached the New World, it was easy to see which religion was easier to live under.

At the beginning of the Modern Age, a young Spaniard no older than Adrian stood beside the Rio Grande and looked north-east across unexplored territory. The plains before him stretched away through Texas and Kansas and on to Nebraska and far Iowa. It should have been a stirring sight, but the young Spaniard was deeply troubled. He foresaw all the afternoons when he would stand alone by clear streams among miles of waving grasses and remember girls and women he had seen in old Castile and feel the overpowering urge to commit a sin of impurity. By the time he had explored the American prairies he might have had a hundred sins on his soul. When he got back to a Spanish city he would have to go to confession. It was a terrifying prospect.

At the same time, a young English gentleman looked westwards from a hilltop in Virginia. He was eager to explore all he could of the great continent before him. He would be a long time alone in the forests and prairies, but he knew a trick to cheer himself up at night. While he did it he would remember the pretty young ladies he used to admire each Sunday in his little parish church in Devon. Or he could look forward to the day when he arrived back in England and shook hands with the minister and sat down in his old family pew and looked round to choose one of the young ladies for his wife.

Late one Sunday afternoon Adrian was lying on his bed in his room at the back of the house. The sky outside his window was full of high grey clouds. A strong wind thumped the outside of the house and rattled a piece of timber somewhere in the wall. Adrian’s mother and his youngest brother were away visiting one of his aunts. His father was dragging a plank backwards and forwards across the backyard trying to level the sandy soil before he sowed it with lawn seed. Adrian’s younger brother was on the path at the side of the house, bouncing a tennis ball against the chimney.

Next door, Andy Horvath and his wife and two or three other couples were having some kind of party in the bungalow behind the Horvaths’ half-built house. At about three o’clock they had started singing foreign songs and they were still going strong. There was one song they kept coming back to. Adrian had heard it three or four times already. The way they sang the chorus made the hair prickle on the back of his neck. It was sad and savage and hopeless.

Adrian thought of all the quiet backyards stretching away for miles in every direction. Then he thought of America.

He went outside to the shed and sent his passenger train around the track. It stopped in the Catskill Mountains. He went back inside to his bed and pulled a rug over himself and thought about the green mountains of New York state.

Sherd grabbed Gene and Ann and Kim firmly by their wrists and bundled them into his car. He told them they were going to the Catskills just for the hell of it. Soon they were among steep hillsides where shady forests alternated with lush green meadows. Sherd stopped the car beside a lofty waterfall that hung like a veil of silver over a secluded glade.

He didn’t waste time with idle chatter or a picnic lunch. As soon as they reached the little glade he told the women to get undressed. For some reason Gene and Ann and Kim wanted to tease him. They ran a little way into the trees and stood laughing at him.

But Sherd had come to the Catskills to save himself from being bored to death. He was in no mood to be trifled with. He ran after them. As they ran and stumbled ahead of him he had glimpses of their pink thighs and white undies that made him crazy with desire.

He caught the three of them in a meadow where the grass was waist-high and thick with wildflowers. He behaved like the strong silent type. He stripped all three of them. Then he flung himself on the woman of his choice and took his pleasure roughly and without a word of thanks. Afterwards he lay where he was and watched the meadows in the Catskills turning slowly from green to grey.

Mr Sherd came in from the backyard and said he’d call it a day because the sand was blowing all over him. Then Adrian’s brother came inside and asked Adrian to play miniature cricket on the path and guess which way his spinners would turn. Adrian agreed to play for ten minutes and no more.

He stood at one end of the path while his brother bowled underarm spinners with a tennis ball. When his ten minutes of cricket were over he sat down and listened.

The Hungarians were still singing in their bungalow. They were starting again on their favourite song. Adrian guessed it was about far-off mountains and forests. He tried to memorise the tune. They started off shouting it, but something stopped them when they reached the chorus. Adrian ran over and pressed his ear against a hole in the fence. He could hear the separate voices of each man and woman trying to pick up the song again. They were making noises like sobs, as though they couldn’t sing for crying.

At school next morning O’Mullane could hardly wait to tell his friends about his adventure on the Sunday afternoon. He said, ‘I was watching the tennis on the courts near the racecourse and having dog fights on my bike with Laurie D’Arcy when I saw one of the strappers from Neville Byrne’s stables—the one they call Macka—standing behind the pine trees smoushing this tart. She had red hair. I kept my eye on them and I saw Macka trying to get her into one of those old sheds behind the six-furlongs barrier. Well, he got her there at last and I said to D’Arcy we’d better be in this.

‘So we sneaked up and peeped into the shed. Macka had her in a corner leaning back over a rail. He was still smoushing her and getting a handful at the same time under her jumper.’ Adrian said, ‘Was she putting up a fight against him?’ O’Mullane said, ‘Search me. Old Macka put a half nelson on her. He’s a tough little bastard. She could have stopped him easily enough if she’d really tried, I suppose. She kept saying, “Not here, Bernie! Not here, Bernie!” Anyway, she got away from him in the end and ran down a little hill into that long grass near the big iron fence. But Macka caught up with her and pushed her over or she dragged him down or they both fell over but anyway they ended up on top of each other and the last thing we saw was old Macka going for all he was worth.’

Adrian said, ‘You mean he was doing her? Out there in the grass beside the racecourse?’

O’Mullane said, ‘What do you reckon? But listen to the end of the story. I was sure I’d seen the tart somewhere before and Laurie D’Arcy said the same. After tea that night D’Arcy came round to my place and said he could show her to me right then. So he took me over to the Yarram Road shops and there she was serving in the milk bar with an apron on over the same clothes she was wearing with Macka. She said, “Yes, boys. What’ll you have?” I said half out loud, “The same as Macka got,” and I reckon she almost heard me.’

For the rest of the day Adrian felt sorry for himself for having to spend his Sunday lying on his bed dreaming of the Catskills while O’Mullane was having a real adventure at Caulfield Racecourse.

That afternoon he left his train at Caulfield and walked across the racecourse to the paddock that O’Mullane had described. He walked quickly across it, looking for a place where the grass was flattened, but there was nothing to tell him where the strapper and the girl had been. He stood where the grass was tallest and looked all round. The place was really only a large yard. It was not even private—a footpath ran close by, and one end of the yard was the wire fence of the public tennis courts.

Adrian hurried out of the racecourse and down to the little shopping centre in Yarram Road. He went into the milk bar. A young woman with red hair came out through the curtained doorway and said, ‘Yes, please?’ He looked down to avoid her eyes and asked for two packets of PK chewing gum. He stared at her furtively while she served him. She was nothing like a film star but she was pretty in her own way. What surprised him most was how ordinary she looked for a girl in a story. He could see the pores in her cheeks and the freckles on the backs of her hands. And when she handed him his change and he stared at her apron, he saw the vague shape of her breasts rise and fall as she breathed.

He got out of the shop as fast as he could. The story of Macka and the girl was preposterous. He could not believe that on an ordinary dull Sunday afternoon, while he was lying on his bed listening to the wind and the rowdy New Australians next door, a girl with freckles on her wrists and no make-up on her face walked out of her sleepy milk bar and rolled round in the grass on Caulfield Racecourse with some strapper.

O’Mullane must have made up the whole story—perhaps because he was bored too. And it was a pretty poor story compared with what happened in the Catskills.

When he was younger, Adrian Sherd used to wish he had been born the eldest son of an English country gentleman in the eighteenth or nineteenth century and gone to one of the great public schools.

At school he would have read the classics in his private study and played cricket or rugger every afternoon. In his holidays he would have ridden across the broad acres he was going to inherit from his father. The tenants would have tipped their caps to the young master and told him where to find birds’ nests and badgers’ setts.

But after he had gone to St Carthage’s College and learned from Cornthwaite and his friends what women were for, he realised there was something missing from the life of the young English gentleman.

When the son of the manor visited his neighbours, he could never meet the daughter of the house alone. Her nanny or governess or music teacher was always with her. The young fellow stood beside the harpsichord and turned the pages of her music, but the neck of her dress was too high for him to see anything.

Sometimes in his own house he followed the maid into the pantry to look up under her dress when she climbed to the highest shelf. But he always heard a discreet cough behind him and turned round to see the butler looking at him severely.

On his rides across his father’s estates he saw plenty of girls—the daughters of yeomen and labourers and gamekeepers. But the English climate was so bad that they were always rugged up in spencers and mufflers. He wasted a lot of time dreaming of the warm weather when he might surprise a young woman bathing in a stream after a hard day’s work in the harvest. And he realised why so many English poets praised the springtime.

At school it was painful to read stories of the pagan Greeks and Romans and their sunny Mediterranean lands while snow covered the quadrangle, and the only female in the building was the elderly Matron with her mustard plasters and camphorated oil. He was reduced to dreaming of a day when one of his chums would receive a party of visitors. The chum might invite him to take his sister’s arm and do a turn of the garden path.

In the nineteenth century, when things were worst for young Englishmen (the women with iron hoops in their clothes and long leather boots and collars up to their chins), they heard about a land where people dressed less formally because it was summer for six months of the year. It was no wonder that so many of them flocked to Australia.

But if the young Englishman had a hard time, it was harder still for the poor Irish lad. Adrian Sherd had no doubt that in all the history of the world the worst possible place for a young man was Ireland after St Patrick had converted it to the Catholic faith.

To begin with, the country was overcrowded. Watchful old men sat outside every cottage door and pious old women in black shawls passed to and fro along every country lane. A young man trying to spy on a girl or catch her alone in a quiet place was nearly always reported to the parish priest.

Even the landscape was against the young Irishman. There were no dells or dingles or forests or prairies in Ireland. The country was mostly bare stony fields and peat bogs. When a young fellow finally grew so desperate that he had to do it to himself, the only place he could go was behind the largest stone on some hillside. Many a time the stone was not even big enough to hide him properly and he had to lie with his legs drawn up or crouch like a hare against the grass while he relieved himself as best he could. If he forgot himself in his excitement and let his twitching legs protrude from behind the stone, he was sure to be observed by some gossiping jarvey on the nearest road.

It was almost certainly this problem that drove the early Irish explorers out into the Atlantic. They were looking for the Western Isles or O Brasil, Isle of the Blest—some uninhabited place where a young man and his girlfriend or a man and his wife or just a young man by himself could get away on their own whenever he felt like it. If the Irish had reached America, as Adrian Sherd’s father claimed they had, it would have been the perfect land for them. They certainly deserved it, after all the misery they had put up with at home.

But there was one thing that helped the young Irishman in his trouble. The women of Ireland practised the virtues of modesty and chastity like no other women in history. Thousands of them spent their formative years as Children of Mary. They imitated Our Lady so faithfully that they ended up looking like Madonnas with their white complexions and their dark eyes demurely downcast. Thanks to the exemplary virtues of Irish womanhood, the young Irishman was never tormented by the sight of bare legs or daring swimsuits. In fact, Adrian suspected that with priests and parents watching them closely, and the women of Ireland so careful not to tempt them, many young Irishmen might have avoided sins of impurity altogether.

When Adrian was still at primary school he used to go every year to the St Patrick’s Night concert in his local town hall. One of the items was always ‘Eileen Aroon’ sung by a choir of girls from Star of the Sea Convent, North Essendon. When the girls came to the words ‘Truth is a fixed star’, Adrian was always so inspired by the unearthly beauty of the melody and the innocent upturned faces with their rounded pink lips where no foul young man had ever planted an impure kiss, that he looked up past the blazing chandeliers of the town hall, out over the north-western suburbs of Melbourne and across the thistles and basalt rocks of the plains beyond, towards the dark sky over Ireland. There were fixed stars shining over Ireland—the stars in the dark-blue mantle of Our Lady, who was still guarding the daughters of that holy country as she had for centuries past.

The last time Adrian had seen the concert (in the year before he began at St Carthage’s) he was so moved that he made a vow never to think an impure thought about any girl with an Irish-looking face or an Irish-sounding name.

Adrian had kept his vow faithfully. None of the hundreds of females he had used for his pleasure had been Irish types. But he often wondered how he would have survived in the Ireland of his ancestors, where the only girls he ever saw would have been Irish colleens. Probably he would have emigrated as his ancestors had done. He hoped he would have had the sense to head for America instead of Australia.

On some afternoons Adrian Sherd caught a tram instead of walking down Swindon Road from St Carthage’s to the Swindon railway station. The tram was always crowded with boys from Eastern Hill Grammar School and Canterbury Ladies’ College. Adrian knew that these schools were two of the oldest and wealthiest in Melbourne. He felt very ignorant not even knowing where they were among the miles of garden suburbs beyond Swindon.

Whenever he looked at the Eastern Hill boys Adrian felt awkward and grubby. He held his Gladstone bag in front of his knees to hide the shiny domes in his trouser legs. He remembered all the brothers’ talk about St Carthage’s being a fine old school with a reputation for turning out Catholic doctors and barristers and professional men. It was bullshit. The Eastern Hill boys never saw Adrian, even when he was crowded so close that his sweaty maroon cap was only inches from their faces. When the tram lurched and he fell among them, the superb voices kept up their banter while one of the fellows brushed Adrian away like some kind of insect.

After a few weeks on the trams Adrian learned to stand unobtrusively near these young gentlemen, keeping his back to them but listening carefully.

One Eastern Hill fellow went to a party every Saturday night. The parties were in strange places that Adrian had never heard of—Blairgowrie, Portsea, Mt Eliza. At Blairgowrie the fellow had met a girl called Sandy and taken her home and crashed on with her. He said he was going to ring her up and ask her out to a party at Judy’s place in Beaumaris. Judy’s parents were to be in Sydney for the weekend. The party would be a riot.

The fellow went on talking, but Adrian couldn’t take any more. He wanted to sit down in a quiet place and try to comprehend the incredible story he had just heard. But then the fellow told his friends he must move along the tram and win Lois. Adrian had to watch.

The fellow walked purposefully up the tram and leaned over a group of Canterbury girls. A girl with shapely legs and large innocent eyes gazed up into his face. They talked. She nodded and smiled. The fellow said something funny. He let it slide out of the corner of his mouth. The girl leaned back and showed the full length of her white throat and laughed. The fellow stood back and admired his work. Then he said goodbye and walked back to his friends.

They took the whole thing quite calmly. One of them said, ‘Are you going to ask her out?’

The party-goer said, ‘I don’t really know. She’s a nice kid. She’d be lots of fun. I think her parents make her study most weekends. I might wait and take her out to some quiet party not too far from her home.’ The others were gentlemen enough to drop the subject.

It was some weeks before Adrian dared to stand near the Canterbury girls. He didn’t want to offend them with the sight of his pimply face and crumpled suit and the Catholic emblems on his pocket and cap.

There were four Canterbury girls who were always huddled at one end of the tram. Whenever Adrian sneaked a look at them they were chattering or smiling with their gloved hands pressed daintily to their lips. They spoke so confidentially to each other that he guessed they were talking about boys. Each day for a week he stood a little nearer to their seats, always keeping his back to the girls. He hoped to learn something that even the Eastern Hill boys didn’t know.

When he finally stood within earshot of them he was shocked to hear them talking the whole time about clothes—the ones they wore last weekend, the shops where they bought them, the alterations they had to make before they could wear them, the way they creased or crumpled after wearing and what they were going to wear next weekend.

Adrian was disappointed at first, but he worked out later that the girls only worried about clothes because they wanted to look beautiful when they went to parties with the Eastern Hill fellows.

As Adrian got to know the Eastern Hill men better, he discovered that some of them weren’t perfect. There was one chap who was on the training list for the first eighteen in the public-schools football competition. One day on the tram he was limping. He told his friends the story of the torn ligaments in his knee. Each time he said the word ‘torn’ he winced ever so faintly. It was the first time that Adrian had caught an Eastern Hill fellow doing what the boys at St Carthage’s did so often. It was called putting on an act.

But when an Eastern Hill man put on an act it really worked. The fellow with the injured knee limped up to a group of Canterbury girls and told his story again. Each time he winced, the concern in the girls’ faces made Adrian almost wince himself.

Sometimes a Canterbury girl put on an act too. One day Adrian heard some girls talking about a debate. They thought their own side should have won. The topic of the debate had been ‘That the introduction of television will do more harm than good’. At St Carthage’s any boy who tried to talk about schoolwork outside the classroom would have been howled down, but the girls in the tram chattered eagerly about the effect of television on family life and reading and juvenile delinquency.

Then a girl who was angry that her side had lost the debate said, ‘Illogical. The opposition’s case was utterly illogical.’ The big words embarrassed Adrian. The girl was putting on an act.

Some Eastern Hill boys joined the girls. A tall fellow with a voice like a radio announcer’s said, ‘What are you so excited about, Carolyn?’

Adrian listened hard. The Eastern Hill boys never discussed schoolwork on the tram. What would the fellow say when he realised the girls were only talking about a debate?

Carolyn explained exactly why the opposition’s case had been weak. When she was finished, the tall fellow said, ‘I quite agree with you,’ and looked genuinely troubled. Carolyn smiled. She was very grateful for the fellow’s sympathy.

Late in the year the elms around the tram stop at the Swindon town hall were thick with green leaves. When Adrian boarded the tram after school the sun was still high in the sky. In the non-smoking compartment the wooden shutters covered the windows, and the Canterbury girls sat in a rich summery twilight. After Adrian left the tram it turned sharply in the direction of St Kilda and the sea. He always watched the tram out of sight and wondered whether the young men and women still on board could smell salt in the evening breeze.

The Eastern Hill fellows had begun to talk about the holidays. They were all going away somewhere. Some of them said they would try to catch up with each other on New Year’s Eve, but God knew what they might be up to that night. The way they chuckled about New Year’s Eve was not quite gentlemanly.

The girls were going away too. They were talking about beachwear and party frocks. Adrian wished he could warn them to be careful of their friends from Eastern Hill on New Year’s Eve.

It was the athletics season at St Carthage’s. On House Sports day the weather was as hot as summer. Adrian noticed a strange girl watching the races with O’Mullane and Cornthwaite. Nobody introduced her properly but Adrian worked out that she was O’Mullane’s sister Monica from St Brigid’s College, the girls’ school along the street from St Carthage’s.

The boys from St Carthage’s rarely saw the girls from St Brigid’s. But on St Carthage’s sports day any St Brigid’s girl with a brother at St Carthage’s was allowed to miss the last period and visit the sports. (The girls had their own sports afternoon on the lawn behind their tall timber fence. Boys walking past heard them cheering politely but saw nothing.)

Adrian wasn’t brave enough to talk to O’Mullane’s sister but he wanted to impress her. He developed a limp. He explained to O’Mullane that his ligaments were probably torn somewhere. He sat down and ran his fingers along his calf and thigh muscles. The girl took no notice, but O’Mullane glared at him when his fingers moved above his knee.

Adrian tried to amuse the girl. He called out, ‘Come on, Tubby,’ to a plump boy struggling in a race. He told O’Mullane he would love to see some events at the sports set aside for the brothers—speed strapping contests, or sprint races with all competitors wearing soutanes. Monica O’Mullane looked at him but didn’t smile.

Cornthwaite went onto the arena and left his tracksuit behind. Adrian tied the legs of the tracksuit together. When Cornthwaite came back and tried to pull the suit on he fell with all his weight against Adrian. Adrian lost his balance and knocked O’Mullane against his sister. The girl dropped her gloves and program and had to pick them up herself.

No one laughed. Cornthwaite said loudly, ‘You pathetic idiot, Sherd.’

After the sports Adrian walked alone to the tram stop. He caught a tram much later than usual. He saw none of the young men and women he knew, but in one corner a strange fellow from Eastern Hill was chatting with a Canterbury girl as though they had been friends since childhood. Adrian heard part of a story the fellow was telling—something about him and his friends greasing the horizontal bar in the gym just before someone called Mr Fancy Pants started his workout. The girl thought it was the funniest story she had ever heard. As she laughed she almost leaned her head on the fellow’s shoulder.

Adrian Sherd knew very little about Australia. This might have been because he never saw any Australian films. As a child he had seen The Overlanders, but all he remembered about it was how strange the characters’ accents sounded.

Australian history was much less colourful than British or European or Bible history. The only part of it that interested Adrian was the period before Australia was properly explored.

In those days there was no reason for a man to go on being bored or unhappy in a city. Just across the Great Dividing Range were thousands of miles of temperate grasslands and open forest country where he could live as he pleased out of reach of curious neighbours and disapproving relatives.

Adrian had an old school atlas with a page of maps showing how Australia had been explored. In one of the first maps, the continent was coloured black except for a few yellow indentations on the eastern coast where the first settlements were. Adrian drew a much larger map with the same colour scheme, except that the dark inland was broken by tracts of a sensuous orange colour. They looked small on the map, but some of them were fifty miles across. They were the lost kingdoms of Australia, established in the early days by men after his own heart.

One fellow had chosen the lush plains of the Mitchell River near the Gulf of Carpentaria. On a low hill he had built a replica of the Temple of Solomon. The walls were hung with purple tapestries and the servants beat the time of day on copper gongs. The women went bare-breasted because the weather was always pleasantly warm.

Another man had chosen the park-like forests of the Victorian Wimmera. On the shores of Lake Albacutya he had set up a township copied from Baghdad in the days of Haroun Al Rashid. Each house had a fountain and a pool in a walled courtyard where the women were free to remove their veils.

In a valley of the Otway Ranges one man had a palace in which the walls were covered with copies of every obscene picture ever painted. A large tract in the Ord River district of Western Australia had been turned into Peru, with its own Inca and Brides of the Sun. Somewhere in Bass Strait was an island exactly like Tahiti before the Europeans found it.

Adrian had never seen any of the places in Australia where these palaces and cities might have been built. He had only been outside Melbourne two or three times. Those were the few brief holidays he had spent on his uncle’s farm at Orford, near Colac, in the Western District of Victoria.

The landscape at Orford was all low green hills. Every few hundred yards along the roads was a farmhouse of white weatherboards with a red roof. Near every farmhouse was a dairy and milking shed of creamy-grey stone, a stack of baled hay and a windbreak of huge old cypresses.

Adrian’s uncle and aunt had seven children. They played Ludo and Happy Families and Cap the Dunce for hours on the back veranda. Sometimes they read Captain Marvel and Cat-Man and Doll-Man comics in the lowest branches of the cypresses or tried to act stories from their comics around the woodheap and the haystack. Adrian asked them whether any parts of their district were still unexplored. They said they weren’t sure, but they climbed onto the cowyard fence with him to point out that their own farm was nothing but grass and barbed-wire fences.

Adrian stood on the highest rung of the fence and looked all round him. The only hopeful sign was the roof of a strange building behind a line of trees on a distant hill. The heat off the paddocks made ridges and shapes like battlements in the roof. If the right sort of men had been the first to find their way to the lonely parts of Australia, the building might have been a temple of the Sun God or a palace of pleasure.

But on the following Sunday Adrian went with all his uncle’s family to mass and found that the building on the hill was St Finbar’s church.

Not just the things that might have happened, but many important events that actually happened were missing from Australian history books. Adrian often thought about the early settlers. What did a man think when he sat down at night and realised he was the only human being for fifty miles around? If he was an Irishman he probably remembered that God and his guardian angel were watching over him. But what if he was a convict shepherd who had never been to church, or an English farmer who didn’t take his religion seriously?

Somewhere in Australia, in a warm sheltered valley overhung with wattles or in tall grass in the lee of an outcrop of boulders, there should have been a granite obelisk or a cairn of stones with an inscription such as:

NEAR THIS SPOT ON THE EVENING OF

27 DECEMBER 1791

ALFRED HENRY WAINWRIGHT AGED 19 YEARS

BECAME THE FIRST EUROPEAN

TO COMMIT AN ACT OF SELF-ABUSE

ON AUSTRALIAN SOIL

Of course the Aborigines had been in Australia for centuries before the white men, but no one would ever know their history. They had lived a carefree bestial existence. Some of them, like King Parajoulta of Blue Mud Bay with his eight wives, showed signs of imagination. But without books or films they had no inspiration to do unusual deeds.

Adrian knew he was right to complain about the dullness of Australian history when he found a certain illustrated article in People magazine. Far out beyond the prairies of America, in a place called Short Creek, Arizona, a reporter had discovered families of Mormons still practising polygamy. It seemed that when polygamy had been outlawed many years before, a few men who wanted to keep up the custom had found their way to a remote district and gone on living the life they wanted.

It was one more proof that Americans were more imaginative and adventurous than Australians. There were plains and mountain ranges in Australia where whole tribes of polygamists could have settled. But now there were churches like St Finbar’s, Orford, on the hilltops and people like Adrian’s cousins staring out across the plains.

Adrian studied the photos in People. The families of Short Creek were disappointing to look at. The women had plain, pinched faces with the rimless spectacles that so many Americans wore, and barefooted children hanging onto their cotton dresses. But behind the town of Short Creek, rising abruptly from where the dusty main street petered out, was an enormous mountain range—the sort of place where a tribe of pagans or a palace with a harem of a hundred rooms might be safe from discovery for many years yet.

•

One morning Father Lacey spoke to Adrian’s class about the Catholic Press.

He said, ‘I don’t have to remind you that here in Melbourne we have two excellent weekly papers, the Tribune and the Advocate, to give us the Catholic interpretation of the news. One of these papers should be in every Catholic home every week of the year to give you the sort of news you won’t read in the secular press. I know of several good Catholic families who read their Advocate or Tribune from cover to cover each week and don’t buy any of the secular newspapers. I’m happy to say those families are better informed about current affairs and the moral issues of modern life than most people who can’t do without their Sun and Herald and Sporting Globe.

‘You boys are perhaps too young to realise it, but I’m simply amazed sometimes at the stories and pictures they print in the daily newspapers. In my day it was unheard of, but nowadays you can visit nearly any Catholic home and see papers lying around in full view of the children with stories of hideous crimes and lurid pictures staring up at you. It’s one more sign that we’re slowly turning into a pagan society. And far too many Catholics take this sort of thing lying down.

‘There’s one Melbourne newspaper in particular that regularly prints suggestive pictures which are quite unnecessary and don’t have anything to do with the news of the day. I won’t name the paper, but some of you have probably noticed what I’m talking about. I hope your parents have, anyway.

‘This very morning for example I happened to notice a picture on one of their inside front pages. It was what they call a sweater girl. That’s something else by the way that’s crept into our modern pagan attitudes. I’m talking about the emphasis that some people nowadays put on the female bosom.

‘Now, we all know the human body is one of the most marvellous things that God created. And great artists for centuries have praised its beauty by painting it and making statues of it. But a true artist will tell you that you can’t make a great work of art if you emphasise one part of your subject matter out of all proportion to its importance. Any artist worth his salt knows that true beauty consists of fitting all the elements of a design into a harmonious whole.

‘I’ll speak quite frankly now. There are many famous and wonderful pictures of the naked female body with the bosom exposed—some of them are priceless treasures in the Vatican itself. But you’ll never find one of these masterpieces drawing attention to the bosom or making it appear larger than it really is.

‘But to get back to these newspaper pictures. I must say, I find it very sad to see a young woman being persuaded to stand up and pose in an awkward way to draw attention to the bosom that Almighty God gave her for a holy purpose—and all for the amusement of a few perverted men.

‘Now, this particular newspaper has been doing this sort of thing so often that we can safely say it’s all part of a deliberate plan to appeal to the lowest elements among its readers. The men who issue the instructions for these sort of pictures to be printed are sitting back smugly, imagining that all these sweater girls and bathing beauties are going to sell thousands of extra copies of their paper.

‘But that’s just where they’re wrong. Boys, I’ll let you into a little secret. There are large numbers of decent Catholic men right now who are working to make this paper clean up its pictures or else they’ll put it out of business.

‘Yes. That’s what I said. There are some of them who’ve formed a little group in this very parish of Swindon. This is real Catholic Action at work. No doubt some of your fathers are forming groups in your own parishes. The way these men are working is to bring these pictures of bosoms and underdressed women to the notice of their workmates and fellow parishioners and friends and point out how unnecessary they are in a daily newspaper. There’s no doubt that every decent person, whether they’re Catholics or non-Catholics, will object to these pictures leaping out at them over the breakfast table or on the tram to the office. And if every one of those people stops buying the paper concerned and writes a letter of complaint to the management we’ll soon get results.

‘Our men have a few other tricks up their sleeves too, only I’m not free to tell you about them at the moment. Let’s just say I think you’ll find these bare limbs and exaggerated bosoms will soon be disappearing from our streets and homes. And when they do we’ll have the Catholic men of Melbourne to thank for it.’

Adrian Sherd was almost certain that the priest was talking about the Argus, which was delivered to the Sherds’ house every morning because Mr Sherd said it was the best paper for racing and football. Most of the women that Adrian took with him on his American journeys had first appeared to him in the pages of the Argus. The poses they struck to excite him (leaning back against a rock with hands on hips and legs wide apart, or bending forward to expose the deep cleavage at the top of their bathers) came straight from the films section of the Saturday Argus.

If the Catholic men persuaded Mr Sherd to stop buying the Argus, Adrian would have no chance to meet new women. It was different for Cornthwaite and his friends, who were allowed out to films any night of the week. They had all the beautiful women in the world to choose from. But Adrian depended on the Argus to introduce him to new faces and breasts and legs. Without it he would have to live on his memories. Or he might even end up like those old perverts who got arrested for drilling holes in bathroom walls or women’s changing sheds at the beach.

Adrian talked to his friends afterwards. Stan Seskis said, ‘It’s the Argus all right, and my old man’s one of those that are going to clean it up. He buys it every day and draws big circles in red ink round all the pictures of the tarts. Then he cuts them all out and pastes them in a scrapbook and takes them to a meeting every week at Mr Moroney’s house.

‘And it’s not just pictures he collects. Sometimes he cuts out a story about some court case. He puts a red line under certain words that shouldn’t be seen in a family newspaper. I’ll bet none of you bastards know what a criminal assault really means.’

No one knew. Seskis told them. ‘It’s the same thing as rape. And if you read the Argus carefully every day, in the end you’ll find a story about a criminal assault. And if you use your imagination you can work out just how the bastard raped the tart.’

Adrian decided to prepare for the day when the Argus had to stop printing the pictures he needed. Every morning in the train between Accrington and Swindon he looked around for young women who could eventually take over from his film stars and beauty queens. It was nearly a week before he found a face and figure to compare with the Argus women. He picked out a young married woman so carefully groomed that she must have worked in a chemist’s shop or a hairdresser’s salon. He studied her closely without anyone noticing him. That night he invited her to join him and two friends on a trip through the piney woods of Georgia. She came along cheerfully but Adrian soon wished she had stayed at home.

Adrian could not relax with her. Whenever he met her eyes he remembered he would have to face her on the train next morning. She would be dressed in her ordinary clothes again (in Georgia she wore candy-striped shorts and a polka-dot blouse) and he would be wearing the grey suit and maroon cap of St Carthage’s College. It would be hard pretending that nothing had happened between them on the previous night.

There was another difficulty. Jayne and Marilyn and Susan and their many friends always had the same look about them—a wide-eyed half-smile with lips slightly parted. The new woman had an irritating way of changing her expression. She seemed to be thinking too much.

Worse still, Adrian realised when he saw her in Georgia that her breasts had no fixed shape. Each of the other women had a pair as firm and inflexible as a statue’s. But the new girl’s lolled and bounced on her chest so that he could never be sure what size and shape they were.

When the afternoon reached its climax Adrian gave up trying to fit the new girl into Georgia and deserted her for his old favourites.

Next morning the young woman was in her usual place in the train. Her face was stern and haughty and her breasts had almost disappeared under the folds of her cardigan. When the train crossed the high viaducts approaching Swindon, the morning sunlight came through the windows. The carriage was suddenly bright and warm like a clearing in the piney woods. Adrian looked down from where he was standing and saw a picture in someone’s Argus. It’s title was ‘Why Wait Till Summer?’ and it showed a girl in twopiece bathers on the deck of a yacht. She had a smile that showed she was eager to please, and her breasts were a shape that could be memorised at a glance.

Adrian looked from the picture to the girl in the corner. Her seat was still in shadow. She looked grey and insubstantial.

In school that morning Adrian thought of writing an anonymous letter to the editor of the Argus praising pictures like ‘Why Wait Till Summer?’ and wondered if it would help to save the pictures from the Catholic men.

One very hot Saturday morning Adrian Sherd was staring at a picture of the Pacific coast near Big Sur. He hadn’t been to America for several days, and he was planning a sensational extravaganza for that very night with four or perhaps even five women against a backdrop of mighty cliffs and redwood forests.

His mother came into the room and said she had been down to the phone box talking to his Aunt Francie and now Adrian and his brothers and mother and Aunt Francie and her four kids were going on the bus to Mordialloc beach for a picnic.

The Sherds went to the beach only once or twice a year. Adrian had never learned to swim properly. He usually sat in the shallows and let the waves knock him around, or dug moats and canals at the water’s edge while the sun burned his pale skin crimson. At mealtime he sat at a grimy picnic bench with a damp shirt sticking to his skin and his bathers full of grit. His young brothers and cousins jostled him to get at the food, and he shrank back from the tomato seeds dribbling down their chins or the orange pips they spat carelessly around them.

On the long bus trip to Mordialloc, Adrian decided to make the day pass more quickly by observing women on the beach. He might see something (a shoulder strap slipping, or a roll of flesh escaping from a tight bathing suit just below the buttocks) that could be fitted into his adventures at Big Sur to make them more realistic.

The two families reached Mordialloc in the hottest part of the afternoon. They were going to stay at the beach until dark. The women and the oldest children carried baskets and string bags packed with cold corned beef, lettuce leaves, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, jars of fruit salad, and slices of bread and butter, all wrapped in damp tea towels.

Adrian put on his bathers in the changing shed. He looked into the toilet cubicles and shower room to read the writing on the walls. Most of it had been whitewashed only recently. The boldest inscription was in a toilet cubicle. It read simply: MISS KATHLEEN MAHONEY YOU BEAUT. There was no illustration.

Adrian pitied the young man who had written those words. He was some larrikin who knew nothing about life in America. All he could use to excite himself was some girl he had lusted after in his own suburb. And Kathleen Mahoney was a good Catholic name. The girl had probably never looked twice at the uncouth bastard who scrawled her name in toilets.

If Adrian had had the time, he would have scratched out the inscription. But just then he found something much more important to worry about.

Even though the day was hot, his cock had shrivelled up to the size of a boy’s while he was undressing. It was too small to dangle properly. When he pulled on his bathers it made a tiny pathetic lump that was clearly visible in the cloth between his legs. He walked out of the changing shed with small careful steps so his miserable button wouldn’t be too obvious.

He got back to his mother and aunt and saw a strange woman in onepiece tartan bathers standing between them. When she turned round it was only his cousin Bernadette, who was no older than he was. He had taken no notice of her in her ordinary clothes. Her face was nothing much to look at and she always had her young sisters hanging round her. Now he saw that her thighs were as big and heavy as her mother’s, and her breasts were a much more interesting shape.

Mrs Sherd and her sister Francie told all their children to swim in the shallow water until they were sent for. Francie said, ‘We’re going to sit down and have a good rest and we don’t want any kids hanging round us.’

Adrian walked down into the sea and sat down. He kept his bathers underwater to hide the stub between his legs and looked around for his cousin Bernadette. She was nowhere in the water, or on the sand. He looked back at the pavilion. She was sitting in her tartan bathers beside the two women. She must have decided she wasn’t one of the children any more.

Adrian was angry. He had to splash around in the shallows with his brothers and young cousins while Bernadette sat gossiping with the women. Yet he had romped with film stars on scenic beaches in America while Bernadette looked as though she had never even had a boyfriend.

He spent his time in the water making elaborate plans for his trip to the coast of northern California that evening. Bernadette would have looked at him differently if she could have known his true strength—in a few hours he was going to wear out three film stars one after the other.

At teatime Bernadette made a point of helping the women serve the food. Adrian stayed where his mother had told him to wait with the other children. When Bernadette came near him he pulled his shoulders back and drew himself up to his full height. He wanted her to realise he was taller and more powerfully built than she was. But she kept her eyes lowered and he had to sit down and cross his legs in case she noticed the insignificant wrinkle in the front of his bathing trunks.

While his cousin served the food she had to stand very close to Adrian. Two or three times she leaned across him so that her breasts were almost under his nose. Adrian thought he might as well glance at her body. Perhaps some detail of it would come in handy in America when he couldn’t visualise one of his film stars as accurately as he needed.

Adrian pretended to be busy with his bread and butter and hard-boiled egg while he inspected Bernadette at close range. It was the nearest he had ever been to a full-grown Australian female body in a bathing suit, but he was far from impressed.

The skin between her throat and breasts had been burnt a little by the sun. It was a raw flesh-pink colour instead of the uniform golden-cream he preferred in a beautiful woman. There was even a small brown mole on the very slope where one of her breasts began, which automatically disqualified her from perfection.

Whenever she walked, her thighs and calves turned out to be full of muscles. Even the slightest movement made one or other of the muscles tense or slacken. It was impossible for Adrian to tell whether the legs were shapely because she never once kept them in an artistic pose.

He risked a quick glance between her legs and saw something that shocked him. When she passed close by him again he looked a second time. He was not mistaken. High up inside her leg where the white of her thigh met the tartan fabric of her bathers, a single dark-brown hair, perhaps an inch long, lay curled against her skin.

He could not tell whether the hair had sprouted from the thigh itself or whether he was looking at the end of it only, and its roots were somewhere in the mysterious territory beneath her bathers. But it didn’t really matter. Either way, the coarse coiled hair made nonsense of any claim she had to beauty. He could call to mind a whole gallery of beautiful legs. They were all motionless and symmetrical and as smooth as the finest marble.

After tea Adrian had to go back to the changing shed to put his clothes on. On the way to the shed he tried to remind himself of the trip to Big Sur that would make up for his miserable day at Mordialloc. But all his staring at his cousin had made him restless and tense. He thought he would probably never make it to California.

In the changing shed he gave in quickly. He locked himself in one of the toilet cubicles and set to work. He did not even close his eyes—he was in Mordialloc, beside Port Phillip Bay, Victoria, Australia, all the while. But he resisted with all his strength the images of blemished skin and bunched calf muscles and hairy thighs that urged themselves on him. He would not betray all the beauty of America for the sake of his lumpish cousin.

He looked all round him, staring at the walls in the twilight. Something white caught his eye. Of all the women he knew, in America and Australia, only Miss Kathleen Mahoney was with him at the end. He leaned his head against the soothing shapes of the letters of her name.

One morning late in the year Brother Cyprian announced to the class, ‘After your exams we’ll be having a Father Dreyfus at the school one night to show a film and give a talk and answer any of your questions on the subject of sex education.’

The brother read from a paper on his desk: ‘The film has been shown to Catholic boys in secondary forms all over Australia. It shows in a perfectly clear and simple fashion all those matters which boys are often anxious to know but unfortunately are sometimes unwilling to find out from parents and teachers.

‘The film offers the whole wonderful story of human reproduction from the moment of fertilisation to the hour of birth and illustrates clearly the workings of the human body both male and female.’

Brother Cyprian looked over the boys’ heads at the back wall and said, ‘All boys are urged to come to this film but of course there’s no compulsion. Father Dreyfus is a man worth coming miles to hear on any subject. He’s led an extraordinary life. He was in a Nazi concentration camp during the war. He rides a motorbike. He’s what you might call a man’s man.’

Adrian Sherd thought this was the best news he had heard all year. He tried to catch the eye of Cornthwaite or Seskis or O’Mullane to share his excitement. But they were all staring ahead as though there was nothing they needed to learn from any travelling priest and his famous film.

Adrian remembered the brother’s words, ‘from the moment of fertilisation’. He was going to see the most daring film ever made. At the very least he expected a statue or a painting of a man and woman doing it—a famous work of art that had been kept out of sight for centuries in some gallery in Europe. Yet if such a statue or painting existed it would have been the work of a pagan artist, and this was to be a Catholic film.

Perhaps he would see a married couple making a lump under the blankets of their bed. But Brother Cyprian had said, ‘a perfectly clear and simple fashion’. The blankets would have to be thrown back to show the organs at work. The couple, of course, would be hooded or masked to protect them from embarrassment.

But surely this was too much to hope for. No film in all history had ever shown the act itself. Anyone, even a priest, would be arrested just for having it in his possession, let alone showing it to an audience. Adrian could only wait and count the days until he actually saw the film.

On the night of the film every boy in the class turned up. When Brother Cyprian blew his whistle to call them inside, they loitered and went on talking as though they weren’t at all anxious to see whatever the priest had to show.

Father Dreyfus had a thick black beard—an unheard-of thing for a priest. He was sitting on top of the front desk with his hands in his pockets and his legs crossed. On all the other desks there were pencils and pieces of paper. The priest invited the boys to write down any questions they had about sex and marriage and said he would try to answer them before he showed his film.

Not many boys wrote down questions. Adrian tried to think of something to oblige the priest but he heard a familiar cough from the back of the room and remembered that Brother Cyprian was somewhere behind him in the shadows fiddling with the projector. If the brother saw him writing out a question he might think Adrian was preoccupied with sexual matters.

The priest read out the questions from the slips of paper and answered each one briefly. Most of the questions seemed childish to Adrian. He could have answered them himself with all the information he had got from Cornthwaite and his friends during the past two years.

There was only one really interesting question. Someone had asked what advice he ought to give to his best friend who hadn’t been to confession for nearly a year because he was too scared to confess all the sins of impurity he committed by himself.

This was the first time that Adrian had ever heard the sin of self-abuse discussed in public. Priests and brothers often made vague references to it, but no one had ever mentioned it so boldly as the anonymous author of the question.

Adrian didn’t hear the first part of the priest’s answer. He was too busy trying to work out who had asked the question. The story about the best friend sounded unlikely. The questioner himself was the fellow who had a year’s worth of sins on his soul.

All over the room, other boys were puzzling over the same matter. Adrian studied the faint turnings of heads and the surreptitious glances. Suspicion seemed to fall on Noonan, a big dull fellow. Adrian remembered Noonan getting up from his seat outside the confessional one First Thursday and leaving the church as though he wanted to be sick. It was a good trick. He could have practised it month after month while his total of sins mounted up.

After answering Noonan’s question the priest said, ‘Only the other day I was reading an American book on psychology. Young people and their problems. That sort of thing. I was very surprised to see some figures relating to the sin we’re talking about. According to the book, over ninety per cent of boys have experimented with masturbation before they’re eighteen years old. Of course these figures wouldn’t apply to Catholic boys but it certainly makes you stop and think.’

After he had got over the shock of hearing the word ‘masturbation’ spoken by a priest (and in his own classroom), Adrian wondered what the figures implied. Perhaps he and Cornthwaite and the others wouldn’t have felt so unusual if they had been lucky enough to grow up in America. Ninety per cent seemed a high figure at first, but of course American boys were subject to much fiercer temptations than Australians. Many of them had probably seen in the flesh the women that Adrian only saw in pictures.

When the priest had answered all their questions he told a boy to turn out the lights. Then he said to Brother Cyprian, ‘Let her roll,’ and the projector started.

It was an old, worn film. The sound crackled and boomed, and every few minutes a cloud of grey blobs and streaks fell across the screen like a sudden squall of rain. An overgrown child with long trousers and a bowtie was asking his parents how he had come into the world. The people were all Americans. It was obvious from the way they smiled and patted each other and held themselves stiffly that they weren’t even proper actors. They belonged to the mysterious multitude that Adrian had never seen in films—the Catholic American families who lived in a pagan land but still kept up the struggle to save their souls.

A few more diagrams appeared. It rained hard all over the screen again. Adrian prayed for the rain to clear before the female organs and the moment of fertilisation came on the screen.

The rain died down, and she stood before them at last. Only it wasn’t really a she. Adrian almost groaned aloud. The swindlers had made a sort of dressmaker’s dummy and sliced it off just above the navel. The thing swung round noiselessly on a swivel to show its genital organs. Adrian half-expected it to topple forward like the corpses in films that were propped up in chairs until someone turned them round to see why they wouldn’t talk.

The female thing stayed on the screen for perhaps ten seconds. Even while he was straining to fix it in his mind forever, Adrian was aware that all of the fifty and more heads around him were suddenly motionless—all except one. Just behind Adrian, at the back of the room, Brother Cyprian jerked his head around and stared into a dark corner when the thighs and belly started turning towards him. Adrian understood—the brother was under a vow of chastity, and for him the thing on the screen was an occasion of sin.

Between its legs the creature had a low bald mound with a suggestion of a cleft or fissure along its middle. Adrian cursed the people who made the dummy or statue or whatever it was for putting the mound or whatever it was so far down between the legs that its finer details were hidden. He was trying to imagine how the legs and the object between them would look walking towards him or stepping out of a bathing suit or lying down in an attitude of surrender, when they faded from the screen.

A huge diagram appeared. Adrian knew it like the back of his hand. It was the female reproductive system. He hardly bothered to listen while the commentator’s voice explained what happened in the ovaries and oviducts and Fallopian tubes. Over the years he had found many sketches and diagrams and charts and sectional reliefs of the inside of a female body—but not one lifelike illustration of the outside.

He was trying to imagine the whole diagram enclosed in skin and packed away between two thighs, when he noticed something odd in the lowest part of the screen. A swarm of bees or a flight of tiny arrows was drifting through the lowest tube. It could even have been the grey rain in the film suddenly reversing and going back up the screen. But then the commentator announced what was really happening.

They were watching the moment of fertilisation. This was what Adrian and all his class had come from miles around to see. But it was nothing like real life. An army of little sperm-men was invading the diagram. The commentator got excited. He thought there was nothing so marvellous as the long journey of these tiny creatures. Adrian didn’t care what happened to the little bastards now that the film had turned out to be a fraud.

The sperm cells were thinning out and growing weaker. The boys of Form Four at St Carthage’s were still staring at the screen. They didn’t seem to realise they had been cheated. Adrian stretched himself in his seat and wondered how the scene had been filmed.

Was it just an animated diagram like a cartoon? Or did the filmmakers pay some lunatic to shoot his stuff into a hollow tube inside the dressmaker’s dummy? Or did they put a tiny camera inside a female organ so that Adrian and his class and even Father Dreyfus and Brother Cyprian were all sitting in the dark inside a woman’s body while some huge fellow outside was doing her for all he was worth but none of them knew what was going on?

One day in December Stan Seskis told his friends he had read somewhere that a normal man should be able to have relations with a woman once every twenty-four hours unless he was ill or abnormal or something. Seskis said he had proved the truth of this by doing it to himself for ten nights on end and he was glad to know he was as good as any normal man.

Adrian Sherd had always been content to visit America three or four times a week. When he had tried it more frequently, his female companions always seemed listless and uncooperative and even the landscape was uninspiring. But he had to see whether Seskis was talking sense.

He reached a score of five consecutive nights. On the sixth night it was like torture. He arrived at a desert playground in Arizona. He was so jaded that he had brought two carloads of women with him instead of his usual two or three favourites. Jayne, Marilyn, Kim, Susan, Debbi, Zsa-Zsa—anyone who might come in useful was there.

He had to order them around like an army sergeant. He told one squad to strip off at once. A second squad had to take their clothes off slowly, dawdling over each item. Another group had to hide among the rocks and be ready to give in to him if he stumbled on them during the afternoon.

The fun and games dragged on for hours. The women began to complain. Sherd tried to think of some mad perversion that would bring everything to an end. The thing that finally did the trick was so absurd that he almost apologised to the women when it was over. He told them he didn’t want to see any of them for at least a week. Then he flung himself down in the shade of a giant cactus and fell asleep.

The next day was Sunday. Adrian rode his bike to seven o’clock mass instead of going with his family on the nine o’clock mass bus. He told his parents he preferred the early mass because it left him the rest of the day for mucking around. But in fact he was tired of staying in his seat while his parents and brothers looked curiously at him as they climbed past his knees on their way to communion. He thought his father would surely guess soon which sin it was that kept him away from communion for weeks on end.

It was the Third Sunday of Advent, the last Sunday before school broke up for the long summer holidays. Inside the church, Adrian joined his hands and bowed his head slightly and looked at the people around him. He knew it was no use trying to pray unless he had some intention of giving up his sin in future.

The sermon was about repentance in preparation for the great feast of Christmas. The priest said, ‘This is the season when we ought to remember all the ways we’ve offended Our Blessed Saviour during the past year.’

Some of the people near Adrian lowered their eyes and tried to look sorry for their sins. Adrian wished he could shout, ‘Hypocrites!’ in their faces. What did they know about sins? God saw into their hearts. He knew the year’s total of mortal sins for everyone in the church. According to the records kept in heaven, the worst sinner, by a margin of at least a hundred, was a young man in the back row. He was pale and weary, as well he might be. Young and slightly built though he was, he had outscored people twice his age. More remarkable still, he had restricted himself to breaking one commandment, whereas they had the whole ten to choose from.

At communion time Adrian sat up to let the sinless ones past. A young woman’s stocking brushed against his knee. The taut golden fabric shrank back from the drab grey of his school trousers. Adrian kept his eyes down. The champion sinner of Our Lady of Good Counsel’s parish for 1953 was not worthy to set eyes on a pure young woman approaching the communion rail.

While the long queues of communicants moved slowly towards the altar, Adrian opened his missal at the page headed ‘Making a Spiritual Communion’ and tried to look as if he was making one. If a person was not in a state of sin, but could not go to communion because he had eaten a meal or drunk a glass of water that morning, that person could unite himself in spirit with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. If the owner of the golden stockings noticed Adrian when she returned to her seat, she would probably see the heading on the page of his missal and think he hadn’t gone to communion because of a mouthful of water he swallowed while he was cleaning his teeth that morning.

The owner of the stockings turned out to be a girl in a school uniform. The skirt and tunic were a rich beige colour. On the tunic pocket was a snow-covered mountain peak against a bright blue sky. A circle of gold stars and a gold motto hung in the sky. It was the uniform of the Academy of Mount Carmel, in the suburb of Richmond. The girl seemed no older than Adrian, although he knew already that her legs were heavy and rounded like a woman’s.

Coming back from communion, the girl kept her eyes lowered. Her lashes were long and dark. She must have felt Adrian staring at her as she settled herself in her seat. She looked at him for less than a second. Then she knelt down and covered her face with her hands like all good Catholics after communion.

Adrian thought about the glance she had given him. She was utterly indifferent to him. If he had somehow reminded her that a few minutes earlier their legs had brushed together, she would have slapped his face. And if she could have seen the filthy state of his soul she would have got up and moved to another seat.

Adrian looked at the girl again. Her face was angelic. She had the kind of beauty that could inspire a man to do the impossible. He turned towards the altar and put his head in his hands. Slowly and dramatically he whispered a vow that would change his life: ‘For her sake I will leave America forever.’

Adrian had often knelt outside a confessional and prayed the words from the Act of Contrition, ‘And I firmly resolve, by the help of Thy grace, never to offend Thee again.’ He had always known (and God had known too) that before a week was over he would be back in America again with his film stars. But in the back seat of his parish church, within a few feet of the girl in the severely beautiful uniform of the Academy of Mount Carmel, he felt strong enough to keep his promise.

He conducted an experiment to prove it. He looked the girl over, from her ankles to her bowed head. Then he closed his eyes and summoned Jayne and Marilyn. He ordered them to dance naked in front of him and to shake their hips as suggestively as they knew how.

The experiment was a complete success. With his beige-clad angel beside him, the naked film stars looked obscene and revolting. Their hold over him was broken at last.

He tried one more experiment. It was an unpleasant one, but he had to do it—the fate of his soul for all eternity might depend on it. He stared at the girl’s jacket and tried to imagine himself taking it off. It would not budge. He looked at her skirt and thought of the white underwear just beneath it. His arms and hands were suddenly paralysed. The lust that had ruled over him night and day for more than a year, his mighty lust, had met its match.

Riding home on his bike after mass, Adrian sang a current hit song. It was called ‘Earth Angel’. He sang the words slowly and mournfully like a man pleading with a woman to end his long years of misery.

He made his plans for the future. That very night, and every night after that, he would fall asleep thinking of a girl in a beige school uniform with a pale haughty face and dark eyelashes. He would shelter in the aura of purity that surrounded her like an enormous halo. In that zone of sanctity no thought of sin would trouble him.

On the following Saturday he would go to confession and rid himself for the last time of the sin that had threatened to enslave him. Every afternoon until school broke up, he would catch a different train from Swindon to Accrington and try to meet up with his Earth Angel on her way home. When school started again in February he would catch her train and see her every day.

On the last Monday morning of the school year, the boys in Adrian’s form were all talking about the holidays. Stan Seskis explained to his friends a competition he had worked out in case they got bored in the long weeks away from school. All of them, Seskis, Cornthwaite, O’Mullane and Sherd, would keep a careful count of how many times they did it. They would be on their honour not to cheat, since they all lived in different suburbs and had no way of checking on each other. When they came back to school in February they would compare totals.

No one could think of a suitable prize for the winner, but they agreed the competition was a good idea. Adrian said nothing. Seskis asked him to rule up cards for them to mark their scores on.

Adrian had no intention of telling the others how his life had changed. He ruled up the scorecards during a free period in school. There were fifty blank squares on his own scorecard. When he returned to school there would still be no mark on them. He was sure of this. The women who had tempted him to sin in the past were only images in photographs. The woman who was going to save him now was a real flesh-and-blood creature. She lived in his own suburb. He had sat only a few feet from her in his parish church.

For too long he had been led astray by dreams of America. He was about to begin a new life in the real world of Australia.