I always think of getting to know Julian as like being let loose in a confectioner’s workshop. He had the kind of caramel skin that it is unfair for English people of Caucasian origin to own, given the climate they live in, and his honey-coloured hair flopped down over his eyebrows into rum and raisin eyes. I spent hours nibbling at his lips, which were large and impossibly plush, pale-pink and soft, like pillows of Turkish delight. Remembering my classmate Geoffrey Smethurst’s dichotomy of penis dimensions, I assumed that Julian’s was on the long and thin side of things. But it wasn’t revolting. At all. When you first touched it, it was mushroom-coloured and pliable as marzipan. And then, quite rapidly, not like that at all. One afternoon in Julian’s bedroom, when I had been playing with this marvellously changeable sweetmeat for quite some time, it alarmed me by making a warm puddle in the palm of my hand. The contents of the puddle were kind of gelatinous, and kind of creamy, but not even a bit like toothpaste. I wondered if there were any other major surprises still to come.
There were.
In a bordello-like cinema that had beanbags and couches in the place of seating banks, with my legs and tongue twisted around Julian’s matching parts, I began to shiver. But not the kind of shiver that puckers your skin into gooseflesh. In fact, not the kind of shiver I’d ever shivered before. It moved through my body, seeming to inject my bloodstream with some kind of magical cordial as it went. I was flooded with warmth, first in my pelvis, then in my stomach, and then somewhere dangerously close to my heart. I was sure that if I looked down at my wrists in the darkness, I would be able to see my veins picked out in pulsing blue light. What the hell was
that
? I wondered.
I thought that I could successfully conceal these newfound pleasures beneath winter clothes and a girlish manner. But now I suspect that those little blue lights, which began to pulse whenever I so much as thought of Julian, were visible to others in the small margin of flesh between my cuffs and the heels of my hands, and that they probably showed at the throat, too.
One morning during those days of getting to know Julian, I stood in the shower deciding that I had always accepted too readily the wisdom of Geoffrey Smethurst.
‘I mean, you’re
cute
, but you’ll never be exactly
sexy
,’ he’d told me once on the bus on the way home, as he compared me with our exquisite, buxom, part-Brazilian drama teacher.
Julian
thought I was sexy. He’d told me so. Although I doubted that I would share this with Geoffrey. If we ended up at university together, I would just give him the odd superior smile.
The shower was of the pathetic, drizzly English kind, in which you don’t exactly have to run around in order to get wet, but you do have to alternate your body parts under the water in order to stay mostly warm. I was doing this, and practising my superior smile, when I heard the bathroom door open. I knew that Judy would already be at the markets, buying the day’s provisions. Larry, I thought, would have left to go shooting with his brother. But here was the shape of him, including the peak of his hunting cap, visible through the thin membrane of the shower curtain. I stood very still, feeling triply naked, and soon I was cold everywhere.
‘Where are you going today?’ he asked.
‘Actually, I wasn’t planning to go anywhere,’ I said, the arms I wrapped around my chest making me feel no less exposed.
‘You’re not going out?’
I measured in my mind the metres between the end of the shower curtain and a big green towel hanging on its rack on the wall.
‘No, no, just staying around here,’ I said, trying to sound normal, and wondering why this seemed as if it were an important thing to do.
For what seemed like a long time he stood there, although I couldn’t hear anything except water trickling around my ears, not even the sound of him breathing.
Christmas wasn’t so much white as crystalline. Stretched across the narrow window of my bedroom at Larry and Judy’s house was a spider’s web threaded with sparkling beads of ice, and through it I could see the lawn frozen into spikes. Downstairs, there was a single, lonely present under the potted Christmas tree on the sideboard. It was for me.
‘Merry Christmas,’ said Judy, as I unwrapped the gift of a pair of lamb’s wool slippers. Guiltily. I was almost certain that she didn’t know about the gift I’d already received, the one I’d found at the end of my bed when I’d woken: a three-pack of Marks & Spencer underpants (white, embroidered, dainty) that wasn’t wrapped, but had a gift tag that read ‘FROM SANTA’ in Larry’s uptight capital letters. He had been in my room when I was asleep. Ick. I bundled the knickers into a discreet compartment of my suitcase in the hope that out of sight would soon transpose into out of mind.
Lunch, held in the formal dining room and attended by Judy’s parents and Larry’s aged mother, involved a Royal Worcester dinner service, two pheasants with chestnut stuffing, and an entire vegetable patch roasted to perfection.
‘You are so lucky, Lawrence,’ said his mother from beneath her orange crepe-paper hat. ‘Judy is the most superb cook.’
‘Why do you think I married her?’ he asked, carving into the voluminous breast of a bird.
Nobody laughed or smiled. Maybe it wasn’t even meant to be a joke.
It was on Christmas night, at Julian’s place, while his parents were safely turkey-and-red-wine replete in their part of the house and his younger sisters asleep, that I got the present I really wanted.
‘Have you done this before?’ Julian asked me after a couple of moist hours of petting, his naked and caramel-skinned body poised for entry.
‘Technically, yes. Effectively, no. What about you?’
‘Not even technically, I’m afraid,’ he said, trying to coordinate himself to hang onto the base of the condom and find the right spot at the same time.
‘Oh no,’ I said, catching sight of the time on his wristwatch. ‘It’s already midnight.’
‘Mmmm?’
‘I’m supposed to be back by now.’
‘Oh, you want to go?’ he asked, disappointed but polite as ever, as he pulled away.
‘No, no,’ I said, taking matters into my own hands.
‘You should go.’
‘Shhh,’ I said, kissing his Turkish delight lips.
‘What will you tell Larry?’
‘I will tell him the truth.’
‘You will not.’
‘I will. I will tell him the honest-to-goodness, absolute truth.’
‘What?’
‘I will tell him,’ I said, ‘that I was out in the woods, picking flowers.’
Three hours beyond my curfew, light in the head and sticky between the legs, I stood on the footpath outside Larry and Judy’s. Avoiding the dead giveaway of the white gravel path, I crossed over the grass and went quietly through the garage — past the place where the Christmas pheasants had bled onto the floor — and around to the French doors that led into the living room. Slowly, slowly, slowly, I pushed down on the handle and eased the door open into the muffling thickness of the drawn curtains within. Quietly, I slipped through the gap in the curtains to find Larry, sitting in his pyjamas, dressing-gown and slippers, waiting up for me. The lights in the room were dimmed. Someone like Carly Simon sang a smoky song through the speakers of the stereo.
‘I can just imagine what you’ve been up to,’ Larry said.
As he came towards me, I backed away, and soon he was between me and the door I’d just come through. His owlish face, normally quite waxy and pallid, was flushed as if he’d drunk too much port.
‘While you are here in my house, I am responsible for you, and I cannot have you out behaving like a wanton little slut,’ he said, with a disturbing amount of relish.
‘I am not having this conversation with you,’ I replied, trying to keep my voice steady even though I was shaking and could feel my pulse everywhere, even in the tips of my ears.
‘I am in
loco parentis
here, and I have no intention of sending you home to your father pregnant,’ he hissed.
‘Well you are completely
loco
if you think that I’m going to let you talk to me like this. My
father
doesn’t talk to me like this.’
‘What you need, you smart-mouthed little tart, is a good —’ He lunged at me. ‘— spanking.’
But I was too quick for him. I was up the stairs and behind the locked door of my room before he could catch me.
I was safe. But trapped, since even if I’d been prepared to find a way down from the upper-storey window, its double-glazed security panels opened out only a few inches. I could hear, out in the hallway, the sound of Larry placing a call on his rotary dial telephone. He was dialling an awful lot of numbers, and I realised that because of the time difference, it was not an even slightly unreasonable hour at which to ring my parents. He would catch them on the back deck, eating sandwiches full of leftover ham, while they listened on the radio to the Boxing Day test.
‘Nymphomania,’ I heard Larry tell my mother (another word I would not have been familiar with if it had not been for Geoffrey Smethurst), and ‘inappropriate behaviour’, along with ‘might need to get some professional help’. None of which bothered me half as much as when I heard him say ‘and the odd bit of cash has gone missing out of Judith’s purse, too’.
And so it was that my adventure in the Mother Country was cut short. Although special dispensation was granted for me to have a stilted and supervised lunch with Julian before I was plunged, lily-white and lovesick, into the sudden, roasting, redbrick heat of a suburban Australian January. Mum and Dad took me to a counsellor who pronounced me quite normal, but it took a while, nonetheless, for the trace of suspicion to disappear from my parents’ faces when they looked at me with loving concern.
‘What exactly
happened
?’ my mother asked repeatedly during the weeks I spent indoors with the curtains drawn, oscillating between wilting and pining.
Everything, I wanted to say. But then, not really anything at all. There were no fingerprints. There was no evidence. Even the underpants looked innocent with their forget-me-not trim.
‘He does care about you, darling, he’s your godfather,’ she said.
‘Not anymore he’s not,’ was all I would say.
What had my parents seen in him, I wondered? What had been the basis of their friendship? I took down the baby-pink album from a high shelf in my parents’ den and found the images I was looking for on the third or fourth page of my life. There was a picture of me, my face a small, indistinct disc somewhere near the top of a smocked layette. There was a picture of my christening cake, shaped and intricately iced in the image of a baby’s pram. There were pictures of my parents, sometimes separately, but mostly standing together in matching purple outfits. And there was Larry, holding me out at arm’s length as he made his solemn C of E vow to keep me on the straight and narrow. I wanted to snatch my infant self away from him. How would I ever forgive my parents for not only inviting the bad fairy to my christening, but delivering me straight into his hands?
In fact it was only very recently that I did forgive them. Properly. And for that, we must thank my mother’s conversion to the scrapbooking craze. Pinking shears and cropping tools blazing, she took to my baby pictures, and then gave me the revamped collection for my birthday. Perhaps it was the new layout that made me see the photos of my christening differently. Or maybe it was simply the passing of time. Either way, by now the photos stirred up nothing more than curiosity. Which of the crimes my parents had committed on the day of my christening, I wondered, should be considered the more unforgivable? Appointing Larry Trebilcock as my godfather, or dressing the way they did for the occasion? It was even possible, I realised, that each of these lapses of judgment could be made explicable in the light of the other. For if you could choose to attend your baby daughter’s christening in a flared purple suit and a psychedelic black and magenta tie — with your facial hair trimmed, I might add, into the beard-but-no-moustache combination known as the Amish or Abe Lincoln style — then surely you could make dubious choices about friendships. And if you could imagine that you looked fetching in a purple crepe dress with a white ruffle around the edge of the bodice, it might also be possible for you to imagine that Larry Trebilcock was a good sort of a chap to be made responsible for a girl-child’s spiritual guidance. Amish beards once were the height of fashion.
Ergo
, Larry might once have seemed a good candidate to be godfather to one’s only daughter. Fashions change, after all.
O
n the day Justine moved in with Henri, he pushed the clothes in his wardrobe to one side to make room for hers. The wardrobe, with its oak-heavy doors closed, had looked to be an antique. But inside was a modern maze of shelving and compartments, all of which were filled with clothes that seemed to Justine to be weighty with quality. There were jumpers — black, cream, caramel and toffee — in softest alpaca, or else in thick-spun merino, densely cabled. There were jackets in supple suede and leather, and a woollen winter coat lined with black fur as luxuriant as a bear’s. The coat-hangers of dark polished timber looked expensive as well.
Justine had left behind everything but her nicest and most favourite things, but even these seemed tatty hanging in the wardrobe next to Henri’s clothes. Thinning patches showed in cheap cotton, as did the pilling on part-synthetic jumpers. She could see the unevenness of her hems and how her seams frayed for lack of finishing.
‘You don’t really wear this,’ Henri said without a question mark, singling out a beige cardigan.
‘I don’t?’
‘Jus
tine
.’
It was ribbed, tweedy, and made mostly out of real wool. It had been loose to start with, but was now stretched at the side seams from being hung on the line. It had a wide collar and knobbly buttons that Justine now saw, for the first time, were woven out of vinyl and not leather. Not that she would have cared even if she had noticed before. It was a cardigan for being relaxed and comfortable and having nothing important to do. It was a Sunday cardigan.