Last night I went out for jazz and at the bar a man nibbling on the rim of his beer said thoughtfully, You are doing such a great job tonight. I said, Thanks! Then: Great job at what? Airily he said, Oh — just being yourself. When we all left he was standing at the far side of the suddenly bright room, waving goodbye with both hands. The music was like god.
Tag: sex
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Ghanagain
The grandiose way of telling this would be to say, I am flying back to Ghana for the premiere of a film in which I played a small role. The truth is, I fell in love. This happened before I ever went there, and on the first night of my first visit, in January, we met. He picked me up at the airport and I thought, how terrible if I couldn’t find him among all the brown faces whose country was new to me. We had talked so much by email and had spoken of our whole lives. He said he loved me. I said, you can’t say that until we meet.
He sent me flowers and chocolates and wine, which arrived at my door in Berlin while I was in Morocco, and died. The florist lady was so touched by our story she allowed me to visit and pick out a fresh bouquet, choosing out all the blossoms I liked best. By video I showed him. “I love orchids and I love roses.” I showed him the field flowers I had chosen from her big vases: valueless to some people, but beautiful.
We lay down together. We’d still not kissed. I looked at him and he looked at me. Three nights later when he texted to say, I’ve come home, I ran barefoot down the alleyway to unlock the big security gate and flung myself against its bars. And he grabbed me and dragged me to him and we kissed passionately between the curls of steel, and I felt as though I had come home.
My first morning in Africa, because Morocco is different, he said I don’t want you to go out on your own. Wait for me. No fear, I said, no way: I’ve been travelling independently since I was fifteen. This was further back for me than for him. I went walking and at the end of the day and after furious adventures I came home, finding my way and proud to find it. Outside a two-storey building which stood out, a woman said, “Are you American?”
I crossed the road to shake her hand. “No, I’m Australian, this is my first day, it’s so beautiful!”
“Do you think you could fake an American accent?”
“I dunno,” I said, “quite likely not well.”
“Would you like to screen test for a film we’re making? We’ve hunted all round Accra for the right white lady.”
I went in and she took me through a room full of people in headphones. I can’t act, so I just tried to imagine how this character might feel. The director came down, who had written the film, and spoke to me about what he wanted. “It’s an American woman, a bit older, and she’s flirting with a Ghanaian man online. And she knows that he’s scamming her but she doesn’t care, she’s bored or… maybe a bit lonely.”
I stuck out my foot. “My sandal and your microphone – they look like they’re cousins.”
My hairy goatskin sandals from Morocco and the furry windsock on a big boom mic made them laugh. “So what brings you to Ghana?”
I said, “You’re not going to believe this…”
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kink shaming
On the one hand, consensual sex is nobody else’s business. On the other, I feel sad for this person (surely a woman). I feel suspicious of her dominant/exploiting partner (surely a man). Sexual play is one thing. But if she is dependent on it, I start to feel like there are healthier ways for people to admit they need comfort and cosseting.
As a friend who is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and is working with her own inner child has said, she cannot imagine a more damaging thing to do to your wounded inner self.
I want to say a little more about this. Like many oldest sisters I grew up caring for my little brothers and, in some ways, taking responsibility to parent the woundedness exhibited by both parents. I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to be little. I have a hunger for it. I’ve been 6’2″ since the age of 12 (and shy), and people attribute to me a lot of authority. It’s been so interesting to learn to own all of that and be unashamed and to teach myself, rather laboriously, to be able to say to my partner, I need to be comforted and babied, I need to be little, do you have the energy for that?
It took me so much courage in adulthood to learn to finally be little. Asking for such indulgence and comfort and parenting straight out feels, to me, so much more enabling than other options I see people using. No blame to them, everyone is doing what they can. And again I emphasise that I am not speaking of individual people’s enabled choices for sexual play. But I’ve had damaged friends and exes who indulge themselves in tantrums, breakdowns, manipulations etc that demand cosseting and patient parental style understanding – which as a partner I will gladly give, only it feels so much more respectful to be asked for it clearly and outright. To be able to do this takes real work. I actually enjoy the sense of agency and grounded balance I have when aware and present for my own vulnerability and not trying to do something which would be so alien to my nature – dress up and protect that aching frailty by pretending it is sexy, hot, kinky, or hip.
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that I fight
The battle to take seriously my own life and prospects, and to treat myself well, is the great absorbing struggle of my life. After fifty or a hundred rapes, before which I had never kissed and been kissed; after being savagely beaten and thrashed by my parents one of whom is now dead for daring to leave that first relationship, a year later – this struggle absorbs more of my energy than I can tell. In Ghana I am free and scintillate, I roam the countryside of this strange and wildly interesting city. People greet me and I call back. I am smiling from my soul. But even here my lover and I must attend constantly the vigil of ensuring that I never provide myself to him as a service.
Occasionally I do and he catches me out.
Are you sure, he asks, and I lie, Yes. Am I hurting you, as we press ourselves into each other like metal into sand and heat into metal. No, I lie, and he stops still to look at me narrowly. This narrow suspicious glance in my case is a necessary feeler of love.
When Judge Rosemarie Aquilina dropped aside the pleading, exonorous letter serial rapist Larry Nassar had written to the Court, when she told him his self-pity was nothing compared with the pleasure he took in these immature women’s forming bodies, let alone the pain and anguish he has caused them which inhibits still their talent-stained lives – I could relate. I waited months, until yesterday, to expose myself to parts of the footage and reportage, waiting til I could bear it. I watched the testimony of a young Olympian who told him from the stand, “I will not take my life. I am taking it back.” And on the couch in our rental in Accra I crumpled forward and clutched my hand around my so long sore heart and cried out and cried.
These decades later, I still have no income. Having topped every class I took from the age of four to eighteen, when in the final semester of university and throes of this awful year of cumulative hell I dropped from my flock and barely passed, I have no career. The money I’ve lived on comes from waitressing, fifteen years of waitressing, which I was good at; and from sporadic coaching in which fellow writers tell me I have inspired them, and pay me for an hour; and from a stunning single purchase of property which I renovated and lived in, dividing the bank interest with a series of housemates I invariably chose for their resemblance to the abusive family who loved me as best as they could.
The waitressing was mostly in a fine Paddington BYO which required me to carry seven full plates of food at once, and taught me to open a bottle of Moet after I dropped the first one, and to carry out twenty-one champagne flutes between my fingers and lay them out on the table one by one, shining and polished. It exposed me to the old man who pressed his face up against my breasts when I stretched across the table to set down his friend’s plate. It put me in the path of the stranger who stuck a fork in my arse as I bent over the table as though I had been a bird in an oven. Was I done?
In Berlin, as a friend has only recently pointed out to me, I struggle some days to get myself off the couch. Leaving my apartment is a daily heroism. I am shy and exceedingly sensitive to start with. The performance instinct which is a lion dancing in me and roaring has been silenced externally for several years. Instead I practice dealing with bus drivers. If some random barkeep is rude to me I feel the talons of self-silence cage round me and I become a mouse, limp in the sailing claws of this bigger predator, playing dead lest he kill me, trapped in the freeze.
The amount of energy this perpetually renewed struggle costs me is mortifying to tell. The spectre in myself of being someone who is de facto preoccupied with her own past, or at least, stained by it, humiliates me when I long with all my heart only to face the day, this day – the only day, and build all its fruits.
My brother, who though he has three children mines coal, has told me when I tried to discuss this perennial battle, “There’s something wrong with your personality, that’s why you can’t sustain a decent relationship and you have no friends, that’s why you don’t have a job.” An aunt who discovered – or invented – God told me, when I timidly brought up the topic of her sister’s, my mother’s, rage, “It’s you. I sometimes think you are possessed by the devil.” I was so irritating as a child, that same brother assured me, that our parents had no choice to get violent with me.
My mother, who once called me ‘a failure as a human being’, also supports my daily life. Fear of publicly shaming her – a shame that seems unearnt – and of hurting my family has long kept me silent. Having run out of my own miracle earnings, much of which I spent on unnecessary medical procedures whose invasive humiliations I was convinced were crucial for my health, I am living outright upon her, in her seventies – how dare I? – while I labour to complete some saleable work, or to get some business started. Some days, the labour focuses still on finding the wellbeing to bother to feed myself. You see I have not always eaten every day. I find trouble keeping my little home clean and combing my own hair. Every now and then I have to take the nail scissors to it and cut out all the little knots.
Meanwhile I write and make photographs every day, I draw and make assemblage and small films. I give all my work away for free and the album I made, lassoing twenty-eight musicians in New York and Melbourne, is still unreleased except online. I play my album to the jazz impresario who in the 50s brought Shirley Bassey to Melbourne, and my heart clutches when he says, “In my opinion, you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.” I finger the dusty piano I have lugged from Brisbane to Adelaide, and from Adelaide to Melbourne, and Melbourne back to Brisbane and now across the seas to Berlin. I cannot bring myself to touch it, I never sing, I have forgotten how to play my own songs on my own guitar. When I think about money, I panic and flail. It is almost not possible for me to believe my work has value, and that anyone would ever pay for it.
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out of nowhere
My dad trained me to be raped, by minor and persistent infringements which he would not withdraw or desist in, no matter how I protested. He taught me saying No had no importance. I had no sovereignty over my body. For he would still cup my butt in his hand, rove his eye over my breast and comment on it. This started when I went into puberty and in later years the family made the excuse that he had done it to all of us: but not my brothers, no. Or, they said, he had always done it, as a mark of his harmless affection. But I remembered. It started when I grew hair and curves. It never happened when we were children.
I was – I am – spirited, and fought back. When I told him to stop he looked invariably surprised and injured. “Oh, but darling, it’s only a bit of fun.” He would say, “I’m only tormenting you, pet.” I tried carrying my breakfast into another room when he sprawled at the table with pubic hair showing through the loose fly of his pyjamas. I tried sewing up the fly of his pyjamas in a scarlet thread. Right into his seventies he used to call me and my mother “my two girlfriends.” No amount of rage on my part could ever get him to let this go. In my teens I tried again and again to talk to my mother, who kept insisting I had a ‘dirty mind.’
Dad used to come in at night to ‘say goodnight’ – always to me, never to the boys – and would fall asleep on my bed. When a boy at university when I was 17 started raping me regularly, these attentions from my father, creepily, stopped. It was like he had handed me over. After nearly a year I found the courage when this boy’s violence intensified to overcome the shame and tell my mother. I begged her not to tell Dad. They broke through the flimsy lock I had begged for on my bedroom door and beat the crap out of me. Calling me a slut and a tart. They stripped the sheets off me while I cowered. In the bed where I’d passed out from sexual pain so many times one held me down while the other walloped. Next day a neighbour my own age crept round, she had waited til Mum went out. Was I ok? she asked. She described how she had listened in agony, thinking she ought to call the police. She said, very quietly, “I thought they were going to kill you.”
For years afterwards every time my father visited he would bring with him stored up stories of women who, supposedly, had concocted malicious fictions about rape as a way of destroying the careers of blameless men.
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late night lemons
Late night supermarket in Berlin’s wild west. Two pretty girls in their pretty outfits are queuing ahead of me, they have high arses and high heels and high ponies, their hair spilling from the crowns of their heads. The blonde one rolls her three bottles away slightly from my lumpy ginger root and my mesh bag of greenish lemons.
A cheap, everyday discounter supermarket. They had organic lemons cheaper than the poisoned. Yay, Germany.
“We’re just buying these three bottles of wine,” she tells the cashier.
“I wouldn’t have assumed anything different,” he says, primly, and shoots her a mischievous look. He is round as a pumpkin and his face splits into creases when he smiles. I suck in my breath, exaggerating, and start waving my stiff-legged fingers in front of my face. I am blowing on them to convey this is a bad burn. “Oh,” I say, “das tut weh.”
That hurts. The girls are laughing. The cashier’s laughing. I’m laughing. We are laughing. They’re on their way out, I’ve been drawing and I’m on my way home, he’s just finishing his shift, and there’s room for us all in this sudden identically contagious grace of soft exhilaration. The brown-haired girl pretends to protest her complexity. “Or,” she says, rolling her hand over the lemons in their bright yellow mesh – “this could be all ours. Wine for tonight. And all this – is for the hangover.”
“The hangover,” he chortles. ‘Hangover’ in German is Kater: tomcat. “You’ve thought of everything!” His hands are suspended like kangaroo paws above the till keys.
We are partly laughing from love, partly laughing out of mirth. It occurred to me today as I was cycling to wonder why we burst out laughing yet burst into tears. Like the laughter is that which results from perspective, which puts us in touch with the wider greater world. The grief comes with acknowledging and unbarriering what is within.
“Just come to me in the morning,” I tell the two girls, “and I’ll sort you out. I’ve got the ingredients.”
They are smiling at me and their smiles are full of love. I’m smiling, too. “Where do you live?” It is hard to say why every sentence seems funnier than the last. When they’ve gone, intact in their miasma of beauty, the cashier and I face each other. You can buy a tiny bottle of schnapps at this checkout for fifty cents. We part, laughing a little still, and I carry my sack of citrus and my club-footed creature of ginger, the fruits and the root, and stash them in the bicycle basket and fling my leg over in its short flared woollen skirt. The nights are colder now but still fresh and all the dark roadside trees along the park seem to be reaching for me all the way home. Around me and above me the soft cold Berlin night. The passage of other bicycles, whose lights are not kaput like mine. The leaves which hurtle down between us without a sound and the wordless veering we make to give each other room.
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May Day, May Day
Two people made fuck, out on the concreted area in front of the apartments. I recognised the act by her cries. He had her sprawled over a car bonnet with his hand around her throat, and for a few minutes I watched clenching my fists. Were those cries of despair? Is she ok? Do I need to rescue this woman from rape?
But then she got up and staggered before him for a minute and lifted away her skirts on either side like a ladybird’s tissuey inner wings. The pale curves of her bottom and thighs were perfect with youth, like two slices of soft long pears from a can. She presented to him her hindquarters and bent herself forward with yearning. He drew her back into his lap and then, skewered, she twisted herself round to kiss. Now and again someone walked past them and they simply froze in place, his place just now being immemorial. A couple of girls strolled by with their cell phones lighted and I feared a filming, an aggression, a posting which would attempt to shame, but the girl walking just ahead lifted her phone and continued a conversation without, apparently, noticing the two there who were holding down the fort. He lifted her jumper to cup her breast. It is cold. They rearranged themselves again and she spread herself on her back on the shiny car, her legs like searchlights. Next morning I went down to buy bread, because we are Germans now, and passed the chalked square for a parked car where they had set each other alight. The big sprawling dark car was gone and in its place a tiny blue and silver rechargeable, as though the yelping congress in the night had already borne its fruit.
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to her hinge
Just found a line in a notebook which I wrote, on July 15 last year, and I’ve no idea what I might have meant by it. ‘In the mornings/we are proud of his everyday miracle together.’ Is it about sex? I guess it must be. My relationship was in the throes of some difficulties and a page later on July 20 I find, ‘his insignificant other.’ Then a cry from the heart, not mine, but which I wrote down after it came from the mouth that had applied itself to another woman’s hinge: “My beautiful Cathoel.”
Even then, I was glad of the possessive.
To be possessed, whilst remaining free and sovereign: isn’t this the essence of sexual love.
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why I blame myself for being raped (hint: not because it’s my fault)
All my life I have been me. I didn’t realise it at first. Presumably, as we say of infants, I was an extension of the everything, was my mother, I was the flitting shadows of the leaves that made up the sky overhead. I was as wide as the ends of the world, as far as I could hear and see: I extended that far, from my drowsy solid wakeful little base in this body, a foot-long version of this body. I was the basis of everything that is. I was its essence.
Now, they say, presumably, still I am all that; only I might need LSD or enlightenment, meditation to tell me.
Childhood grew out of infancy. Adolescence sprouted – helped along, in my case, by the pills my mother gave me through a doctor on Wickham Terrace. The steep, repressive residency of illness in Brisbane was lined with psychiatrists. Specialists there had known my grandmother, a widow since birth. They would cock their heads and say wistfully, “You must be Audrey Jorss’s granddaughter.” We had just landed from Jakarta and were reeling in the grassy dry suburbs.
When people say a hothouse flower they mean protected. Spoilt, and preserved from spoiling, because beauty makes girls more deserving. A hothouse shields flowers from wind, and the rain, but affords all of the sun: through glass. I was hothoused in the sense of force-ripened, and pushed into bloom. Artificial puberty was supposed to mature the body so I would at last stop from growing. They don’t talk about that theory anymore. And though it made no sense I felt for years afterwards because it had been sudden, that my figure was formed on the progesterone and oestrogen the doctor gave me in little white pills and which I swallowed every morning, only because it did not occur to me to flush them.
Bus drivers wouldn’t believe I wasn’t sixteen, but I was twelve. I was far too tall already, a fact strangers never tired of pointing out to me. Beauty sprang. I didn’t know about this. Every week my mother brought home news of some comment, to impress it on me. People remarked on my appearance not just to note but to interpret it, and to impose. The principal of the infants’ school, outside Sydney, when I was four, had told my mother: “That girl will be Prime Minister one day. Just look at that determined chin.” So many people asked Are you a model that after the year of rapes ended I had a badge printed: Yes. I’m a model. The pills hadn’t worked, I’d unwound to the same height predicted by the doctor who had measured my wrist bone by X-ray, at 12: I was, I am six foot two. I was trying to become harder, tougher. Obscurity was forever out of my reach, I was public property, and the shyness was savage.
Newly adolescent, I was beautiful in a way that had long made men lean over fences towards me, call after me yearningly, insult me in the street. To Indonesian men when I was ten, eleven, twelve, I looked adult, because of my height. And because I was white I looked American, and American girls were easy: I was getting explicit and frightening suggestions long before I’d begun to bleed. I used to feel like some property of theirs that was being passed from hand to hand, the chiefest hand my father’s, his was nearest and he liked to make fun of the budding breasts commissioned by his wife; and when the music stopped like pass-the-parcel I would be unwrapped, slowly I hoped and perhaps even lovingly, I would be discovered, I’d be naked, I would be safe.
It didn’t happen that way. Not in any way at all.
I can’t always say it. The R word. I say “there’s a word? that rhymes with… cassette tape?” I say, “attacked.” If I need to be sure to be absolutely clear I’ll say, “When I say attacked: I mean in my own body, by a man.” I wrote teenaged poems after this happened which featured sex as a kind of horror film. I was the white-bellied fish gasping on the spear, the vessel of sacred fluids with its cork yanked out who now slowly bled out her essence all over the filthy seamed pavement. Trying to accustom myself, I described the rapist as “my lover”. He was my first lover, though he never loved me.
I’ve had other women hide behind me when a neighbouring junkie approached us with a knife. I’ve had men hide behind me, more than once. Many people imagine a tall, strong woman does not need protection, or comfort, or support. But I know the sword slides just as easy, and just as hard, between my ribs as any other woman’s here.
What happened was this. I spoke Indonesian and French. We lived on Java, where the suffusing sense of engagement with the beckoning world, the community of trees thrusting at our windows and the red volcanic soil were overpowering and intensely near. My natural spiritual landscape. I began to bloom, and to explore. I taught myself to play the gamelan instrument angklung and composed long, complex pieces which I would memorise and perform, roping in my brothers to play keys and drums. We made a film. I invented a language. At our international school we were allowed to go barefoot and lounge on cushions. “Write me a story,” the teacher said, when I finished the term’s work in Maths and in English in the first weeks of term, every term. “A book of stories.” I was floating in my own world, truly mine. I owned myself, I loved my days. Then we moved ‘back’ to Brisbane, a sprawling sub-tropical town where only my father had ever lived; we knew our cousins, our angry grandmother, and her terrifying companion, a woman impossible to please.
In our new life we went to a new school. A religious school, Lutheran, Germanic. It was like Catholicism, the terror, the guilt, but without any female influence. Rinsed clean of us: no Mary, no saints. They taught no Bahasa Indonesia and no French. I caught up on the German class. We learned the difference between Sie and du, and our teacher looked pitying when I asked, which you would you use for grandparents: the familiar? or the formal. In my final year at school our parents went travelling round Europe. They left us in the care of some woman who had had an affair with a friend of my dad’s. Having helped him to break up his home, she now had no place to stay. This qualified her to look after my parents’ three teenagers. We came home from school on our first afternoon. She had set out glasses of juice. From now on, no afternoon tea, she said: you must wait until dinner. We clashed. My brothers are growing boys, I said. Mummy always feeds us when we come home from school; the boys need to eat. She was so incensed by my colossal nerve and by the ensuing argument that she threw me out of the house. I spent a couple of weeks in boarding school. At the end of the year I won a scholarship to the Goethe Institut in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. On a train platform in Munich I felt faint and fell over, and crawled on my hands and knees endlessly to the cold locker room. I sat crouched on some concrete steps woozy and thinking: they’re going to assume I’m on drugs. I wasn’t sure what ‘on drugs’ meant, but mistrusted my pallor and sweaty, sudden weakness. A lady came up to me at length in her kindness and offered to fetch the Red Cross. I couldn’t stand, and a cheerful man in uniform wheeled me across the station. I’d become vegetarian in boarding school when a country student told me how animals were killed, after a class trip to the abattoir. “I think maybe I need some iron or protein,” I explained, earnestly. “We’ll fix you up with a good meal,” he said, “and then send you on your way,” before wrapping the blood pressure cuff round my arm and I pitched forward and blacked out into roaring space. His colleague rushed in from outside. She was as white as that wall! “Sie war blass, wie die Wand!” They took me to hospital in an ambulance. I lived in intensive care five weeks and was given sixteen bags of good Germans’ blood. Had the Red Cross nurses sent me on my way, the doctors told me, I’d have finished my bleeding to death within a couple more hours.
I was released into the care of a family in Mainz my parents tracked down through the school. They’d been teachers there. Within a week I had started bleeding again, internally. No one ever established why, and for a long time I feared a recurrence. Another round of intensive care, and learning medical German, and swelling very slowly on bags of others’ blood, like a tick.
Should I begin to bleed again, the eight hour legs of a flight home to Brisbane were too long, I could die on the flight. The airports with decent hospitals – said the German doctors – in those days were too far apart. My father came over to take charge of me, like an artwork. He signed a waiver for the airline. We got back to Brisbane out of snowy January into the blaring humidity of high summer. University was about to start. My friends had scattered. I was sixteen. On our first day we filed into the great hall that’s now a gallery and sat in rigid alphabetical. I imagine it’s now a gallery because students are kept up to date by text message, there’s no student body at all. In my student body I sat in the J row, right behind the Fs. Behind this boy. This man. His eyes hidden behind a fringe. He was my age but seemed like a king. His mask for the terrors of late adolescence was so much darker than mine.
I fell in love and we dated. I had the hope, the fantasy, that one day he might kiss me. No one ever had. I was a year or two younger than other students and the clique I fell in with, this boy’s friends, liked to tell smutty jokes whose punchline was: she doesn’t get it. The pressure chamber of Lutheran school, where we had to be a metre from the nearest boy, exploded into terrorising open slather in the courtyard. There was the boy, his hair hiding his face. Like my mother, he was fascinatingly hard to please. And I loved him. I kept telling myself so. He was so much cooler than I would ever be. One afternoon when my mother wasn’t home I invited him, like a twelve year old girl, to come study at our place. We sat on my bed side by side. I fetched juice. I had lured him there, wanting him to kiss me. He did. Then he pushed me over. Such weight, such pain.
I have lived all my life in this body, my only home. I learn from babyhood: this is me. Other people, no matter how horrible or cruel, are outside me – I can move away from them, I can leave. That’s them. I learn to define myself, choosing what I want to be close to and what I need to avoid. Now someone I have chosen has invaded me. They’re here in my borders, inside. To pass out from the pain is like nothing compared with the psychic rage and flailing that is left to me when the world looks so different. A rape, let alone very many rapes, brings the cruelty and injustice of the world into my body, where I live.
Rape entangles the self and the other. I said, You’re hurting me. Enmeshed with the enemy, you become one creature. You’re sharing my body. You are not you. Not sovereign. You are one beast with the beast. Pronouns blur and boundaries slide. You’re interlocked. This hurts, and it’s happening from within, like an eerie prank call from inside your own house.
The first assault was thirty years ago this month. Why was I so filled with tears and why was I not sleeping. I only slowly recognised the month, the year. An anniversary. I am older than I ever imagined I’d be: I always thought I’d die young, and I have. Part of me has stayed trapped in the unraped state which was my dreaming, sovereign and benign in my body and in my own mind, the soul of the stars that looked down on me, arranging all my days to be filled with what I needed: to work hard and study; to write; and keep writing; to knuckle down learning to make music, make art, swimming endless laps up and down the pool that my brothers and I had started to dig, in our ambitious impatience, as soon as the spot had been marked out.
Once I realised, so slowly, that three decades had passed and I was still grieving my lost self, my freedom, I decided to talk to an analyst. Did you have some part in what happened, he said. I felt my heart narrow and close. If only the vaginal canal could squeeze like that, had those trapdoors. Defensively I began to theorise, or perhaps to lecture. People tell us it’s our fault, because we’re female, I said, or wore this, or went there or drank that. He said, blandly, it’s not fair to blame women for whatever they were wearing. His response felt to me vague, and far too allowing. I felt myself filling up with fury: with might. In a steely rage I spoke out, between my teeth, I spoke with great certainty and an incorruptible distaste: I felt my deep deep power, I felt myself rising up. Only later did I realise the delicacy and the skill in this release. Nuns get raped, I said, tiny babies get raped. Women get raped in uniforms, in hospital gowns. My voice broke with furious pride. There is no outfit you can choose, I told him, that is rape-proofing. If there was, we would all be wearing it, every single fucking day, and that’s how you would know. As though reflecting on something I’d taught him, he said: yes… it is very unfair to blame women. For being attacked. And I started to wonder for the first time: how can I stop being so unjust to myself.
In German my heart travels in a basket, breast basket they call it: der Brustkorb. In English it is carried not like lilies before a bicycle but like some wild animal trapped who now cannot escape, nor be reached. The rib cage. Peeled away from Adam’s white bone.
If you’ve never experienced rape it is impossible to imagine the rupture. I’ve never heard a person who’s lived through rape use the word metaphorically. It is literal. We do not rape landscapes, forests, communities, the ocean. It’s an ugly word for a vicious and profound theft. Theft of self. A colonising, on the point of the gun that’s a knife.
You’re not being hit, but stabbed. This is an assault from within. Have you checked the children yet? You’re connected, psychically, physically, to your attacker in an overwhelming helplessness that alone defines the piercing hot word overwhelm, the word overpower. This with someone who has claimed to love me and care about me, or at least to long for me and want me – they are now of me, they’re inside my borders, they’re inside my skin. The boyfriend who is now a violent stranger is now my lover. I fight to fight him off. He is stronger. That makes me weak. However I plead and rage, my words are nothing. My strength is nothing. I am overcome, frightened, weakened, dismayed. My ferocity is drowned by shock. I cannot catch what’s happening. It happens so fast, happens so many times. Every thrust is a fresh rape. Wait, I haven’t caught up, stop, wait. He is stronger than me and does not doubt himself. He has occupied another whole person, king of the world, shitting in their nest. He is willing to vanquish them – vanquish me – for a fleeting pleasure when I will pay the cost of this occupancy all my life. I pay for his orgasm with my life and carry its echoes in my red walls. Pay with my freedom and sleep. Decades later I jump out of a deep sleep suddenly and slam into the wall, a stone wall in a stone house in another state, in the south, and carry the stain on my bruised nose for weeks as though some man has walloped me. This boy is at this moment at his cruelest and he is in my citadel with me, he’s tunnelled in under my walls. And I did this with him, this to myself, like my brother who used to take my other brother’s hand and punch him in the head with it, saying Stop hitting yourself. When I look out from myself from now on it seems the whole world has changed. I am filling up with someone else’s blood, a stranger’s capital. Crouched on the steps I am in danger today of bleeding to death from within. I’m a long way from home and I’m white as the wall. Strap me down.
-
falling, and small, and very far away
I had an email from my partner’s new lover. It was my fault, I wrote to her first. This exchange happened last Saturday night, about three or four hours after he first told me. I’m falling in love with another woman. I could do nothing but feel it, I braced myself and grieved. Threw him out of my house. Held myself and ached. There seemed nothing to discuss – if he’s in love, then it’s over. On Sunday a stream of forlorn calls came in. Four, five, six calls in a row, none of which I picked up. Emails, one after the other: Please no. Don’t just cut me out of your life like this. Is it really all worth so little to you?
That one, I answered. “Actually I think that’s my line.” I had found a resurrection in a certain short-term supply of wry dry humour, an emergency stash I’d kept under my seat but had never thought to have to use in this context. Fit your own mask first before assisting others. The fifth call I picked up because its disguised number seemed to me to herald a call back from my close friend in Denmark, who earlier that morning had been listening patiently. But instead it was… I don’t know what to call him. To say my partner seems now ridiculous and cruel. It was the guy I used to know. His voice sounded falling and small and very far away, as though he had tumbled down a well in some distant galaxy and didn’t have anybody to haul him out. “Hullo,” he said, two hollow syllables, like Eeyore. “Oh,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to you. Sorry.” I hung up.
Meanwhile I had worked out at last who this person was and I decided to write to her. It wasn’t because I needed to stir the hornets. It was for comfort, to make it real, for my bewilderment. I had this slippery tipping feeling like in the snow, when you’re climbing a hill. There’s the pain, and there are moments of a surf-like salty emphasis where you can’t be sure which way is up. My instinct is to open out the emotion, but lance the drama. I wrote to her as quietly as I could. “Hi, Name of Woman. I’m Cathoel, the guy I used to know’s partner.” I said, he’s just told me the two of you are in love and you want to be together. I am reeling. I’m struggling to understand, I can’t grasp it. It would be a great kindness if you would be willing to meet me, some day, maybe… just have a coffee, or something.
Within ten minutes she had written back. Yes, very gladly, she’d love to meet. There was so much to say, how about tomorrow night. Or the night after that.
A little, warning ping went off deep in my reptile brain but I stumbled on. “Ok, I think so, thanks. That’s kind of soon… do you mind if I let you know later, let the dust settle, see how I am feeling.” Her profile photo was glamorous but abstract and she wanted to meet at the park. Maybe we could both carry a red carnation, I said, so we can recognise each other. Because that, at least, would be amusing.
Next morning another email from Name of Woman. Long, impassioned, faintly accusing. She didn’t think she could now meet me, after all. She had seen the story I wrote about my experience, about his news, about how we were broken, about how I was hurt. Did I really feel entitled to violate his privacy? Sure, she could understand I felt terribly wounded and wanted to lash out in turn. But, Cathoel, she wrote: people get hurt.
All curiosity, all desire to meet her, dissolved. I could feel it fizzing out of me leaving the dry sand behind. As I started to type I was asking myself one of those good-instinct questions: why am I bothering to answer. Hi, Name of Woman. Fair enough, no problem. I can understand your feeling. I said I had written out of my own turmoil and shock and that writing helps me to try and understand the world. I felt I had done it respectfully, anonymously, and certainly hadn’t done it to wound or punish anyone, “because that would be mean.” And by mean, I mean: lame. Her answer told me everything you could ever need to know about Name of Woman. “But, Cathoel, you’re forgetting. There is somebody you are hurting by publishing this story. You hurt me.”
I could feel myself physically rear back from the screen like it had farted, my chin tipping to the left, my brow crunching. Out loud I said, “How self-absorbed are you?” This of course was a foolish question and illustrates how stupid a smart person can be. I could instead have recounted. Let’s see. What do we know about this person, so far? She is married and she’s a mum. She’s gone out of her way to fan a heavy flirtation with a man who is already spoken for. The rest of the story I should have been able to tell, myself.
“And what about the people who read your writing?” she went on, gently as though admonishing me. Pointing out to me a moral lack I’d not myself had the sensitivity to see. “They are hurt. Because it’s such a painful tale.” I was feeling the pain by now, alright, but possibly not in the way Name of Woman meant. This was first thing in the morning, my first day of singledom, I was sleepy as well as rather clouded by heartache and had turned to my emails while barely awake. Hoping for some sort of shaft of light, Hollywood, Biblical: it had all been a dream, it never happened at all, he’s made a horrible mistake, he’s not going to see her again, he loves me. They had only met twice, both times in public. They hadn’t even kissed. How can that be ‘in love’? Somehow aside from the agony this whole thing felt mortifyingly lurid, improbable, a shlock production.
And yet here I was clutching my pillow like it was a person, drowning in my own saliva, grappling to gasp. The absurdity as well as the viciousness of the breach cut through my body again and again. I had an ache in my throat that would be there for four days. This person lacked the humanity to understand the situation she had helped him to create. Let them love each other, they deserve each other, let her leave her marriage.
I didn’t answer the email, decided not to answer again. But she didn’t like that. Within ten minutes the first reminder showed up. “Where are you now?” Sure, I thought, unbelievingly: why don’t you come over? Maybe you can give me a smiley face and a hug. While I was making tea a third message arrived. “Where are you? Can I see you?”
You can’t see me after all, but you must see me: I was beginning to lose track. The sudden spate of demands, the multiple unrequited emails, the purple emotionality: it felt so false, a mimicry of how you might speak to a hard-hearted lover who says abruptly, It’s over, and will not meet to discuss it. Recanting the whole story into my friend’s ear over Skype that evening I said, “If I said to you, ‘Where are you? Can I see you?’ – wouldn’t that come off as kind of… flaky? Desperate?” From Brisbane she said, “I am shivering. What on earth has he done, getting himself entangled with this person?”
Half an hour later I got an email from the guy I used to know. She had recruited him. “Name of Woman thinks the three of us should meet. What do you say? She is worried about you.” In German this phrase is, “she is making herself sorrows about you.” Easy solution, I thought, my lip curling. If you’re concerned about me, how about don’t mess with my boyfriend behind my back? I closed the computer and walked away. The urgency, the manipulative pressure, the attempts to control other people’s behaviour – the unctuous false sympathy. It was boring as well as outrageous. If you’ve read this far, though, I have to warn you: if all of this seems unbelievable now, it soon got far worse.
As a child I spent hours alone with a great joy, rummaging in the world, musing, dreaming, lighting on strong understandings that then lit me like honey. At ten I found the dusty old books up the back of the library and learned about witchcraft, my best friend and I practiced spells by tying knots in ropes and brewing up fearsome potions from the garden, at eleven I invented a religion one weekend at the beach and converted all our friends. All my life I’ve been translating for myself joyously, soberly, freely the musings that I hear in the trees, in running water, and with my face close to the ground. Petals at the gatepost, curtains at the doorway, the sober whispers of ceremony: as a teenager I felt that god must be like being in water, I would sink into the pool in our backyard and think about that, underwater, rain coppering the green water-surface sky. This day was a Sunday and Solstice, turn of the year. I am in Europe, the thieving place, that other dark continent. I search for the sense of a continuous culture, a blood known by me, in my bones, in my waters, the elusive thin feeling of a processional ancestry, going back generations, faint but audible, disappearing into the hills of the thunderous and fire-lit past.
I couldn’t bear to stay home by myself in the wreckage and just feel the loss of all that was now gone. During the day as the lost, lovelorn emails arrived from my – from the guy I used to know, don’t cut me out, I don’t want to lose you, was that all it was worth, a sense of self revived in me, probably through rage, and at seven I crept under the shower at last and tied up my hair in a spike and got dressed. It was still light outside as I left the house: the longest day of the year. My girlfriend and I had a huge German beer in the bold blue daylight of 8pm. The film her musician mate had crowdfunded was debuting for the second time in a narrow Kino at the back of the bar, all red velvet curtains and comfy 50s cinema seating, like a womb. A New Zealand woman sang plangent old songs, in Eastern European languages and tone, of unbearable, heartbreaking beauty and transliterated for us the lyrics: Now we go down into the dark.
We are happy, because we have light and the warmth.
But also we are sad: because we know the long darkness is coming, the days are growing shorter, we are going to have to work hard to harvest enough to get us through the miserable winter. She toasted the shy film maker, gloriously. In the audience we sang out and stamped our feet. The film was complex and evocative and followed a journey, into the kitchens and courtyards of some of eastern Europe’s female elders and their healing gifts, their frayed folk magic. Music, it was music all around. The crone in her stony kitchen in Greece stroked the head of the sweet film maker and crooned, What a good boy he is, he is a good boy. Afterwards she danced in her kitchen, threading an offering of some sacred substance she’d unwrapped from brown paper, singing roguishly, for him, forty years younger: My love loves another, o, my love does not love me.
Watching, I felt revive in me certain dark and numinous elements of my own self and our place in this webbed world. I got on the train home lit with my own love of the place, the dark, the swollen great everything. Then Monday morning, an email from the guy I used to know. “The only woman I want to talk with every day,” he wrote, “is you.” He reiterated that he didn’t want to be with her, he didn’t love her. Can we meet? I felt hesitant. I was angry. I felt mistrustful.
In Germany, official procedure is torturous. On a forest walk you will pass signs which in English would say, perhaps, Keep Off the Grass. In German they are like long, open letters which begin, “Dear Forest Wanderers and Forest Wanderesses. Please be advised…” When he and I were still us we had made a clotted string of appointments to do with my visa application, which entailed filling a three and a half page list of requirements, reports, business plans, health insurance, pension insurance for old age, income projections. I was to register my address, now I finally had my own place, with the Citizensresidentialaddressdetailsregisteroffice.
So on the Tuesday I said, why don’t you come out and have a coffee with me before my appointment. You can help me read the forms. He said, “Let’s melt this block of ice.” We spoke, by email, for the first time about his sense of frustration and how he always felt it wasn’t ok to talk with me about it, somehow. And he shared with me the screenshots of their two-week chain of emails. I thought, maybe we need to sit down and I will just really listen. I skimmed the emails and felt wryly disappointed, or do I mean relieved, at her badgering pace, cheesy emoticons, unrequited hugs, carefully littered suggestions. The next day I read them again, properly. She suggested they meet up and he was very keen. Clearly they had made a strong impression on each other. She wrote again, to pin him down to a time. He and I were still a couple then, and I knew nothing of this. Five times she said in her subsequent messages, we can just let it be spontaneous, I’m so spontaneous. I read this as a flag intended to advertise her sense of herself as sexually available and adventurous, like certain kinds of tattoo you see now on very young insecure women.
In between the proclamations of spontaneity were repeated attempts to lock him down to a solid plan: how about we walk our dogs one day? How about tomorrow at one? How about a bike ride? Or how about we meet down by the river and talk?
When I got to the cafe, locking my bike to his – actually, they’re both his bikes – he was inside, long-faced and remorseful. I thought, I have so loved you. Now I’ll never trust you again. I was sad at the ruin of something so fine and fruitful. In the early days we had fiery arguments as we began to shake down, to build a life we could share. We’d get furious, shout at each other, and then meet the next day, in a park, under trees, “come for a walk” he usually said, and the moment I spotted him in whatever crowded public place I always felt the smile breaking over my face however unwillingly, however angry I might have been, however angry I still was. Seeing him walking towards me with his hysterical dog (“he’s been sitting by the door all day”) I would see that same smile on him, spreading his cheeks back, an involuntary smile, a smile we shared. Goddamnit. Such a waste. But, maybe –
We ordered tea and he said, You can ask me anything you want, and I will answer. I said, almost at random, Are you still seeing her? He said, I have seen her one more time. I said, How was that. And he said: “Intimate.”
Forgive me. These words seem to me today almost sensual. I didn’t hear them, they’d have done no good, I long for someone – some guy – some man – to sidle up from somewhere and whisper them into my ear, those hot words: I want you, I miss you, I love you. And if this guy ever did it I would have to turn my head. They met on the Saturday night. That is, the moment he had freed himself and got shot of our sense of commitment. He was angry about the story. He was sad. But she wanted to go dancing. He “got dragged out into the night.” They fucked. But afterward he felt sad. “I was lying there wishing it was you beside me.” I turned away my head, burning with nausea. “I got asked what I was thinking and I had to lie,” he said, sadly, almost wistfully. Oh, the vile.
When liars lie, they always say the same thing about it. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” What this means, of course, is, “I didn’t want to hurt myself.” I started choking. Trying to speak. Asplutter. I couldn’t look at him, I couldn’t look away. “So – then… so, but why did you spend all of Sunday calling me? You called, like, eight times! Again and again! Sounding so sorry for yourself! Saying you – ” I sat up, staring. “And when she was claiming, so patronisingly, so falsely, to be worried about me – you mean she still had your juices inside her? What kind of people are you, anyway? It’s so fucking disgusting!” The fear and the rage made me savage. I was savage in an undertone because, hipsters, cafe. Like children who think they deserve abuse because it’s less destroying than seeing that mummy and daddy are cruel, I could feel myself slipping into the cardinal error women make in these cases: we blame the woman, to avoid the pain of blaming the beloved.
He tried to tell me it was I who broke it, or who made it all irreparable – because I wrote about it. He said he wanted to block her but was afraid of hurting her “more than she’s been hurt already.” He began to cry. Told me this hideous story of abuse, a sour history, from before her birth. I put up my hand to say No more. I got up and we both left the cafe. Outside in silence we unlocked our bikes. Unable to take it in, grasping for solids, I said, “What does your other friend Designer Guy say about all this?” The guy I used to know bowed his head. “He says I should be honest with everybody involved.” “What do you mean, honest with whom, what, you mean honest with me? Or – you mean… do you mean, be honest with her?” He said: also, her ex-lover. Her ex-lover? You mean apart from her husband? Yes, he said. Mutual Friend. Mutual Friend who introduced us had an affair with her a year ago.
We were cycling away from the cafe when I learned this, on a shuddering, cobblestoned street. The whole moral bankruptcy of the situation made me begin to howl out loud. I felt my gorge rising and had to howl and howl. “Ahhhh!” I said, “Ahhhh! I’m going to vomit! I feel sick!” The violent nausea so painful, unexpected. It felt like the sounds would maybe purge me, save me. “So – what, he just… handed her on to you, like she was a bowl of fruit? What the literal, actual, living fuck?” The stormy conversations we had had all day Monday by email seemed nostalgically innocent by contrast, silent movies instead of porn, almost sepia. He’d said what can I do to show you I was wrong. I’d said if he was serious, he could send me their emails. I wanted him to show himself which privacy he was loyal to. He had discussed with this woman, this stranger, our relationship. Now he said that in order to betray their conversations to a third person – me – he would have to abandon one of his chief principles: Privacy. He said he needs his freedom. Isn’t it interesting, I wrote back, how the principles that mean most to you are the most self-serving kind: your freedom, your privacy. Isn’t it telling, I told him, how the principles you’ve been willing to abandon so easily are the socialised ones: loyalty, trust and honour. Our privacy, our love, and the agreement we made in our sweet hearts when we decided to be monogamous, to become a couple, to be close in the night and to whisper to each other all the things that are so hard to say to strangers in the bewilderness of estrangement that is sometimes the world.