‘Fellatio.’
She thought he said something like, ‘Hell’s art below’. She wriggled and held her head away from him to catch it.
‘Sorry?’ she whispered, striving to hear.
‘Fellatio,’ he whispered urgently and at the same time somehow twisted her and the bed clothes.
He was pushing her head down.
For goshsakes. She felt close to tears, and angry as well because she didn’t know what was going on. He was so unfeeling – expecting her to know all the words. And she was angry because she’d got mixed up with someone like him.
He stopped pushing her and moved so that his head went down. Oh no. She knew what he was after now. And the words came back to her. She remembered the lesson. For a twirling moment she didn’t know what to do. She felt his moving tongue. It tingled. But then she smelt his backside. For goshsakes, he was almost suffocating her. She couldn’t do it. His cock loomed before her eyes.
She couldn’t. She moved her head away for air and just hung on.
His tongue went on. She rested her head against his leg and let him. She hadn’t felt it before and it was all right. She guessed. But she wasn’t going to do what he wanted. She felt she’d be sick if she did. And what if he went on and finished … in her mouth. Oh lordy.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said, turning his head up at her, out of breath.
She didn’t say anything. She just looked through the hairs of his legs at the wardrobe.
‘Don’t you like cunnilingus?’
She just hung there.
‘Say something,’ he said to her, as though she’d passed out.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Me tonguing you. Don’t you like it?’
She turned her head away and looked at the pillow instead. Not knowing where to look. ‘Yes, kind of.’
‘Why don’t you suck me?’
She couldn’t say anything. She shut her eyes. Why hadn’t he said ‘sucking’ in the first place. Not that it would have made any difference. She remembered how he’d told her about the words. He thought you had to use the ‘right’ words all the time, for goshsakes. Now they were in this stupid position. And she didn’t like what he had just done to her that much. No, that was a lie – she rather wished he’d go on. But she’d go without if it meant she had to do it to him.
‘Why don’t you?’ he asked.
She opened her eyes and realised he was still there. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said, tears forming, just in case she needed them. She was angry because she had a right to say no but he never let her. And furthermore there they were, upside down talking to each other. She felt ridiculous. As well as angry. And embarrassed.
‘But it’s beautiful.’
Charming.
‘I don’t mind you doing it to me but I don’t like the idea of doing it to you. It’s selfish but it’s the living truth,’ she said, looking up his thigh at him.
‘You’re inhibited, that’s all,’ he said.
She could tell he was getting ready to educate her.
‘No,’ she said, whatever he meant, ‘I don’t like it.’
He squirmed around and back up, dragging off the bed clothes. She pulled them back over her. For protection. Some protection.
‘By “inhibited”, I mean,’ he said, ‘you think it’s dirty and wrong,’ he said patiently. Smirking because he’d found another word to push her nose in. Sometimes she wished he would just go on and be angry and get it over with instead of going on with his overwhelming sort of patience.
‘How am I supposed to know all the words?’ she said crankily.
‘I don’t expect you to “know all the words”,’ he said, with his patience coming over black like a storm. Hi ho Silver. ‘But I expect you to ask me when you don’t. Anyhow we’ve discussed fellatio and cunnilingus before.’
‘I didn’t remember,’ she said, ‘and it didn’t seem the right time to ask – you upside down and all.’ She could almost giggle, if he wasn’t so serious about it all. ‘And anyhow, I don’t like doing it.’
‘That’s because you’re inhibited – i-n-h-i-b-i-t-e-d – however, we’ll soon change that.’
She had a picture of him putting electric shocks through her head. He was the sort who’d do something like that. Just to get her to suck his cock.
‘I gather you don’t feel it’s “right” to talk while we’re fucking either?’ he asked.
‘I don’t like that word for what we do.’ He knew that but he always used it.
‘It’s a good Anglo-Saxon word.’
He always said that too.
‘I don’t care where it comes from. I don’t like it.’ She always said something like that. Now that was over.
‘All right.’ He smiled – to himself, of course, ‘“Making love” – you don’t like talking while we “make love”.’
She twisted away from him. The bastard. She rolled away.
‘Now, now,’ he said, putting on his soft voice, ‘don’t get all temperamental.’
‘Leave me alone,’ she said, moving right to the edge of the bed, looking down at the floor and its dust.
‘Now,’ he said, putting a hand on her. She shrugged it off.
Why didn’t she just jump out of bed and go away? He was just a bad habit.
He turned her around and pulled her to him. Her instincts told her he’d softened. He was best when he treated her like a poor little country girl. It was when he was ‘educating’ her that he was a bastard.
‘I like you to say,’ she sobbed, ‘loving things to me but not to talk about words – while we’re making love.’
‘All right,’ he said softly, ‘all right.’
He was being soft with her because he hadn’t finished his sex. She knew that.
She felt him growing hard and knew what would happen. But she was exasperated.
He rolled on top of her and went into her. She held on while he jerked away.
Sometimes she frantically wanted to be told and was driven to distraction when he wouldn’t. But at other times she didn’t want to hear at all and would cover her ears and made a loud blurting noise.
She held on to him and heard him panting like it was about to finish and she panted too although she wasn’t really with it. He pulled out and she felt him coming on her stomach – sort of moaning away.
He lay back off her. Slightly out of breath.
She had only to rub his thighs with her feet to make him come like a shot.
‘You have an orgasm?’ he panted.
She nodded. He always asked that. It made him happy for her to say yes.
‘Good,’ he said, like a doctor, ‘good.’
She’d passed.
‘Why do you bother with a girl like me?’ she said, rolling on to her stomach to wipe off the mess and then snuggling up to him. ‘I don’t know anything.’
‘You’re unformed,’ he said, ‘a peasant girl, that’s why.’
‘You don’t love me, though,’ she said sadly, wondering how he thought it was a compliment to call her a ‘peasant girl’. Probably had something to do with him being a Trotskyist. Trotsky-snotsky.
‘Love has too much bourgeois content,’ he said, lying back with his eyes shut.
Of course it would. There’d have to be something wrong with it. Lordy.
‘I said you didn’t have to marry me,’ she said, petulantly thinking she wouldn’t marry him in a hundred years.
‘We’ll have to give you a progressive morality,’ he said, eyes still shut.
You’ll give me nothing, she thought.
‘I keep telling you that anything which is pleasurable is “proper”.’
Did he ever, only about forty hundred times.
‘Well, I don’t like the idea of doing what you wanted me to do before.’
‘That’s because you feel it’s dirty – morally and hygienically.’
‘Well, it’s both,’ she said.
‘It’s no dirtier than your mouth,’ he said, chuckling, ‘probably a damn sight cleaner.’
‘Pooh to you,’ she said, ‘my mouth’s clean,’ and a few seconds later added, ‘I use Listerine.’
He chuckled louder.
‘You’re laughing at me,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m laughing at the absurdity of our commercialised values.’
Some joke.
‘I could never be angry with you,’ he said, patting her.
That was a lie. Sometimes he went into a rage over the most simple things. But she knew he saw himself as a calm and reasonable man. Probably was to his friends. Not to his woman.
He reached for the book on the bedside table. Yuck. She knew it was Trotsky-snotsky. He was reading a chapter to her every time she stayed at his flat. Her mind always went away somewhere else when he was reading to her. She could never answer his questions. But she reached over to her bag and got her glasses. She didn’t have to read but she felt it helped if she wore the glasses.
He began, “‘Three days before that Stalin had announced at that same conference his readiness to live down differences with Teretelli on the basis of Zimmerwald-Kienthal – that is, on the basis of Kautskyanism. ‘I hear that in Russia there is a trend towards consolidation,’ said Lenin, ‘consolidation with the defensists – that is a betrayal of socialism.’” You see,’ he said, ‘it’s beginning to get interesting.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘simply fantastic.’ She moved in the bed to a more upright position. He read on.
He had told her he was a Trotskyist and talked to her about progressive economics and anti-bureaucratisation. She often said ‘anti-bureaucratisation’ to herself to make sure she still remembered it. She rather liked the word. He’d given her another book, The Ecstasy of Owen Muir, which she was supposed to read at home. That was a little better.
He stopped reading. ‘You don’t appear to be listening.’ How could he know?
‘I was.’
‘Tell me the last thing I read.’
‘Anti-bureaucratisation.’
‘What?! I didn’t even mention the word.’
She slid down in the bed and turned away. ‘I’m not interested,’ she said.
‘Well you bloodywell should be,’ he said. She knew he would be glaring at her.
‘I know!’ she said brightly, as if remembering, ‘you were reading about the apparatchiki.’ That was another word she’d learnt because she liked it.
‘Bullshit,’ he said, putting aside the book, ‘you wouldn’t know a bloody thing about the apparatchiki.’
She sat up and in a voice she believed to be cultured she said, ‘The new generation of apparatchiki is increasingly technical-minded, involved intimately in problems of production, of organisation, and …’ she became lost, she screwed up her face, ‘oh, I know, and in administration. And something else, they rise to power through the secretarial … hierarchy. And their opportunities for foreign travel are limited. God knows why.’
‘Well,’ he said, somewhat surprised, ‘at least you’ve learned something.’ He seemed a little dazed.
That was from the earlier days when they’d just met. She’d learned that off by heart. But already she was forgetting it. God knew what it all meant. And he was impressed. Would you believe it?
‘You’ll be a good worker for the revolution yet,’ he said.
She snuggled into him. She’d rather be made love to than read to. ‘We’ll skip the reading for today,’ he said.
‘Good,’ she said, moving her leg over his.
‘Time for a shower,’ he said, rolling from the bed.
The trouble was he put all his energies into other things, she thought.
She lay there for a while. She really wanted just to collapse there in the bed and sleep for the rest of the morning. But he never allowed that.
‘Come and have a shower,’ he called from the bathroom.
‘No, it’s all right,’ she said, getting up. She wiped herself between the legs with a kleenex tissue. Most of it had wiped off on the sheets anyhow. He was thing about showers. He had too many. Baths had always been a chore with her. She remembered gathering wood chips and corn cobs for the chip heater in the washhouse at the back of their house at Coolamon. You had to have a bath before dark or take a torch because it had no electric light. At night possums dragged the branches of the tree on the corrugated iron roof. She used to wait until dark because then the kids from next door didn’t come and spy on you through the cracks. Barry was supposed to keep the box full of corn cobs and chips but by the time she came to have her bath most times the box was empty. She’d have to scratch outside in the dark. She remembered how the dirt smelled. It smelled stronger at night.
‘Come on,’ he yelled.
She jumped. She’d been back out there on the Riverina plains on one of those hot nights with everything smelling hot. A big hot moon making the plains … too much. You could see clear across the plains, leaping the fences with your eyes, and you could smell the wheat, the sheep shit, and the fruit trees near the house. It would be so still, with a radio, or a voice shouting, or a dog whining somewhere. Sometimes she’d just stand there with her arms full of wood.
‘Come on,’ he called again, ‘you’ll stink.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘You’ll smell of fucking.’
That word again. It reminded her of the pub. Walking past it as a little girl, say to get sugar at the shop. It would be the only place in town really lit up and sometimes she’d hear the word as she passed.
‘I don’t mind smelling of you,’ she said, which wasn’t true because she used powder to cover any smell.
He came from the shower dripping and pulled her towards the bathroom. Her knees came together as she tried to pull away – squealing and laughing.
‘Into the shower,’ he ordered, laughing but dead serious.
He dressed and went to his study to prepare his lessons for school. She could see him sitting at his desk dressed in his Cuban army shirt he’d sent away for.
After she dressed she decided to stay and clean up his flat.
He came out to the kitchen as she was washing up.
Grinning, he said, ‘Making the place respectable?’
She wondered what was wrong this time.
‘You’re so middle class,’ he said.
‘But you said I was working class,’ she said.
‘Really you’re just a peasant – with middle class aspirations.’
She went on with what she was doing. Actually she liked being called middle class. But she wouldn’t tell him. Every time he accused her of being middle class he would think he was hurting her but she’d be secretly pleased.
‘Why do you have to make everything political?’ she said, resting, both hands in the hot washing up water.
‘Everything is political,’ he said quickly.
‘Yes, but can’t we just have a rest now and then?’
He kissed her on the side of her face. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I guess I’m pushing your political education too hard. No more politics today.’
‘I just remembered that I made an appointment for you to see Geoff – he’s the doctor you met at the meeting – remember?’
She listened to him say it, wondering about it, and then said, ‘Why?’
‘To get you on the Pill.’
She felt like falling head forward into the sink. He’d been on about this before. Why did they need the Pill. She’d been going to bed with him for three months and hadn’t got pregnant. He pulled out.
He came over to her and turned her around. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘I don’t want to,’ she said.
‘Surely you don’t object to the Pill?’
‘Leave me alone,’ she said, pushing away his hands, ‘stop trying to make me do things all the time.’
‘But for Christsakes this is only taking the Pill.’
‘I don’t like pills,’ she said stubbornly, ‘any sort of pills.’
‘But you don’t want to become pregnant,’ he said loudly. He was heading towards being angry.
‘I’m against pills,’ she said.
‘You can’t be “against pills”,’ he said.
‘I can be if I want to be.’
‘You can’t be,’ he screamed, ‘you can’t be “against pills”.’
She’d had enough. She left the dishes in the suds and pushed past him.
He followed her to the bedroom. ‘I just want to know,’ he said, with his bitingly quiet voice, ‘what special information you have about the Pill that medical science doesn’t.’
She felt trapped in the conversation. He kept putting words in front of her like road blocks. He often forced her to answer questions she didn’t want to answer or which were the wrong questions anyhow.
‘You only take pills if there is something wrong with you,’ she said, ‘and there is nothing wrong with me.’
‘Yes there is,’ he said, grabbing her again, ‘you’re likely to become pregnant, that’s what’s wrong.’
He’s going to shake me again, she thought.
‘There’s nothing wrong with that,’ she said. ‘That’s the way the body’s supposed to be.’
He went over to the wall and leaned against his arm, facing the wall. He’s despairing, she thought. Good. She started putting her things in her bag.
‘You’re being illogical,’ he said without turning away from the wall. She could tell he was ‘controlling himself’. He was worse when he was ‘controlling himself’.
‘I don’t like the idea of my insides being fooled about with,’ she said, a hairpin in her mouth. She brushed her hair, feeling fairly calm and very logical. But she knew she couldn’t win.
‘Don’t talk with hairpins in your mouth,’ he said irritably. She was surprised he could tell without looking.
‘The Pill has been thoroughly tested on Puerto Rican women for five years – thanks to capitalist drug companies and American foreign policy.’
‘It might be all right for the Puerto Ricans.’
She finished her hair and added, ‘Has anyone ever taken them all their life?’ She felt smug. ‘How do they know if they’re safe until they do?’
‘If we had to test everything for a lifetime we’d never use anything.’ He flopped on to the bed. ‘How are we going to have a good sex life if you don’t take the Pill?’
For once she seemed to be winning.
‘Didn’t people have good sex lives before the Pill?’
He didn’t reply. She sat down next to him on the bed.
‘I suppose you could have a diaphragm fitted,’ he said tiredly.
Oh my God, she thought, oh my God, what’s he going to have done to me now? She saw him and his friends holding her down on the bed and fitting something into her.
‘Don’t tell me you have objections to diaphragms too?’
She felt tears coming. It was too much for her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, beginning to cry, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ She cried, burying her head in the pillow.
‘You don’t know?’ He sounded truly amazed. It made her uneasy, as she cried. She hadn’t meant to amaze him. She didn’t know what to expect when he was amazed. Sometimes he shook her. Some of the longest lectures she’d ever had came after she had amazed him. She thought she had better keep on with the crying.
He reached over and put a hand on her shoulder.
‘Didn’t your parents tell you anything? Haven’t you read anything?’
She could just imagine her Old Man putting his shovel in the toolshed and sitting there in his blue singlet to tell her about ‘diaphragms’. Her mother would have had him on a charge. And as for her mother, she knew about ten words and ‘diaphragm’ wasn’t one of them. It nearly made her laugh but she kept on crying.
‘This is all so basic,’ he said. ‘I just assumed you knew. You weren’t a virgin when I met you.’
He made it sound as if she’d been on the streets. ‘I’ve only been to bed with two other men,’ she lied, crying. She’d slept with five or six men if you counted Kim. She felt frightened then for herself. Sex seemed to be getting out of control. Perhaps she was a whore. And she’d never really worried about becoming pregnant. Perhaps she couldn’t have babies. She began to sniffle, because she mightn’t be able to have babies, because he was getting at her, because she felt she was becoming a whore, because she didn’t know anything.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said softly. ‘Sex is nothing to be ashamed about or frightened of.’
‘You frighten me,’ she said, holding on to him. ‘And you make me feel ashamed.’
‘I don’t mean to,’ he said. Then he said, ‘You understand, don’t you? About becoming pregnant?’
She nodded, but felt wildly that he would ask her to explain it. She didn’t really know the words. She guessed, though, that she knew.
‘The diaphragm is made of rubber … a rubber disc … a round rubber disc which fits inside you and stops the sperms from reaching the egg.’
She shuddered. Rubber, disc, sperms and eggs. Gawd, was that what happened?
‘So you understand,’ he asked, turning her face towards him. She nodded and buried her face again in her arm.
‘The Pill, on the other hand, stops your periods and …’ he stopped, she didn’t look up. Then she sensed he didn’t really know how the Pill worked. It surprised her. But then she thought, good.
‘The Pill is more complicated … chemically,’ he said, clearing his throat.
‘You put the diaphragm in before fucking,’ he added.
Not in me, you don’t. She tried to imagine herself putting anything ‘in’. She wanted only to be taken to bed and for it all to happen in the dark without her having to worry about it.
‘What did your parents use?’
As if she’d know. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think they used French letters.’ She’d heard about French letters at school. A boy had shown her one on the end of a stick but she hadn’t known what was done with it.
Someone knocked on the door. She was relieved.
Drying her eyes, she made herself up. She tried to look as if she’d just arrived at the flat, hadn’t stayed overnight. She took as long as she could. She heard Kim talking to his friend Carl. What a drag. She closed her eyes for a second or two and then walked in.
‘Dell and I were just having a talk about contraception,’ Kim said. ‘It’s amazing – she knows nothing.’
Mentally she stabbed him with a kitchen knife.
‘It’s a bit late,’ Carl laughed.
She stabbed him too. He wore a Cuban army shirt like Kim’s. And long hair. She thought he really didn’t like women.
They were both smoking long thin cigars.
‘A perfect example of sexual taboo,’ Kim told Carl, tapping his cigar ash into the fireplace.
She said the word apparatchiki to herself. And then anti-bureaucratisation. They went on talking about the broad masses and progressivist education.
She said, for no particular reason, the word apparatchiki aloud; they both looked at her.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kim said. ‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
They went on. They asked her about sex life in Coolamon.
Sex life in Coolamon.
‘No one in Coolamon worried about getting pregnant,’ she said, knowing that it wasn’t true. ‘Some girls got pregnant – they either got married or their mother took it or they had it put out for adoption. The nuns fixed it up.’
‘Hellish,’ said Carl.
She remembered a time then for no particular reason. It wasn’t the first time. Behind the Memorial Hall at the Showground. They’d been at a dance there. Johnny wanted a ‘smoke’. Ho ho. She remembered the smell of beer on him. He’d tried to push her down in the long grass. She’d sort of guessed what he wanted. She’d almost done it. But she’d been worried about grass stains on her good dress. Her Gran called it ‘being given a green gown’. She’d said no. He’d gone a little way off, leaned against the fowl pens and pissed. She remembered listening to the hissing on the ground. He’d come back, doing up his fly, saying, ‘That’s better.’ By then she’d worked out that she could pull her dress right up and the stains would be on the inside. But she’d thought he’d got over it. He hadn’t, and had another go at pushing her down into the grass. This time she had gone down, pulling up her dress as she did. He hadn’t taken her pants off – just gone in around them. It was all over very quickly and then they went back to the dance. She’d wiped herself with lavatory paper. She’d been frightened about grass stains but there hadn’t been any.
Perhaps she could go back to Coolamon and marry Harry, who had the Shell service station, or one of the Shepherd boys.
She tried to listen to Kim. He was saying, ‘Stalin presents no problem to me now. Wasn’t it Brecht who said it was a bad society which needed heroes?’
She swam away from them again.
Then Carl was leaving.
There was a silence after he left.
Kim was looking at her. Oh no. She flushed. Something was wrong. ‘I’d better finish the washing up,’ she said hurriedly.
‘You weren’t listening.’
More trouble.
‘I was.’
‘You didn’t listen,’ Kim said angrily. ‘We want to tape an interview with you for the paper.’
‘Oh, how nice,’ she said. Like hell.
‘A case history of sexual taboo.’
Pooh.
‘Kim,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I want to go on seeing you.’ And she rushed into the bedroom to get her bag.
He followed her. ‘You can’t avoid the issue.’
‘Go to hell.’
So, coldly, he said. ‘All right, go back to the quagmire.’
‘Thank you, Kim,’ she said, trying for sarcasm, ‘I’ll send back Owen Muir in the post.’
‘Keep it.’
She tried not to look at. him. He was heading for the study. She went around looking for her things. She hadn’t expected it all to happen just like that. She found herself hoping he’d come back in and coax her to stay or something. She fussed as long as she could. It looked as if he wasn’t so keen after all. She thought of going into the study and saying sorry, but didn’t. Whatthehell. She let herself out. She remembered the dishes in the sink and found herself almost going back to finish them. Crazy.
She walked out into the street, in the early afternoon. She swung her bag.
That was that. She hadn’t expected it to be like that.
A car pulled alongside her before she’d gone far. Without looking, she sensed there were boys in it.
‘Want a lift, darling?’
She kept on walking. The car drifted along beside her. She ignored them, half expecting Kim to come running down the street. She glanced into the car.
‘Come for a drive.’
Three, all with black hair, but not foreign. One of them was rather beaut looking. She looked away.
They said something else.
She looked at them again. They were grinning.
She kept walking. One had opened the door. She heard the car radio and it sounded good. She stopped, looked at them again, looked up the street to see if Kim was running after her, and then said, ‘Why not?’ She got in the back. The boy in the back shifted a few tools off the seat and dumped them on the floor.
‘There better not be grease on the seat,’ she said, looking at it and wiping her hand over it before sitting down.
‘You’ll be right,’ he said.
She flopped back in the seat. They roared off.
One said, ‘Beauty’.
‘Got a cigarette?’ she asked, for want of something to say.
The boy in the back already had his hand up her dress. She opened her legs to him as she leaned forward to take a cigarette from the boy in front.
‘Thanks,’ she said, as he lit it. The boy in the back already had his hand groping in under her pants.