Читать книгу Things Even González Can't Fix - Christy Chilimigras - Страница 11

CHAPTER 5

Fuck the Birds and the Bees

It is on the same veranda, the one where my head would later swirl in My Father’s crack pipe dreams, floating me up-up-up and away from my innocence, that I first learnt about the birds and the bees. In that one moment, I feel I should be grateful that where there is usually ‘pee-pee’, there was now ‘penis’. That where parents forever ruin the deliciousness and carelessness of an edible ‘cookie’, there was ‘vagina’. But having been on the receiving end of the PENIS-VAGINA conversation with My Father, I believe I would have preferred being put off cookies for the rest of my life. Perhaps there is a reason parents are reduced to nervous schoolchildren, their vocabulary abandoning them on the way down when it comes to conversations about S.E.X.

Protector & Soul and I sit opposite My Father on the veranda. He on a metal-legged chair with a turquoise vinyl finish, its seat hard and cracking under the weight of so many years and so many asses. My sister and I on a sunken couch that tries to swallow us whole into its brownness. Caged budgies chirp, balancing on ill-placed metal safes that serve as storage units, containing still more biscuit tins. I am six years old. My bony knees are scabbed, jungle gyms having bested me at break time. Tiger’s knees are also scabbed, although hers more proudly so as she squared up to a fight in the Grade 3 playground. And so during the next half-hour, our defeated and defiant kneecaps become a view as demanding of our attention as Table Mountain.

‘The man takes his penis, which has gotten really hard, and puts it into a vagina.’

The edges of our biltong scabs rise to meet our horror.

‘Then he thrusts and thrusts and it should feel really good.’

Doesn’t Brandon have a friend who eats his scabs?

Huh, that’s so gross.

‘Don’t look so scared, Mouse. People love having sex.’

The sun screaming. Be a child. Be a child.

My insides screaming the same.

This must be what all parents tell their children. I wonder if the girls at school know about this feel-good thing: S.E.X.

Maybe a day or a week later, during a visit to the pharmacy with My Father, I notice the flavoured condoms hanging from metal rods on a display case.

‘Daddy, why are these condoms flavoured?’

Not, ‘What are condoms?’ No, rather, ‘Why are they flavoured?’

‘They’re flavoured because of this thing called a blow job. When a man puts his penis in a woman’s mouth, that’s a blow job. They’re flavoured so that the blow job tastes nice so women don’t complain about giving them.’

That’s so considerate, to make this thing called a blow job taste nice.

In Grade 1, the teachers and I are not the greatest of friends. I am an odd child. A nervous child. A lively and then abruptly deathly child. In preschool I develop a habit I carry through with me to primary school, which makes it impossible for me to blend in to the decorated walls. I suck on my top lip. With conviction. Suck and suck until it bruises. A brown, purple throbbing moustache beneath my actual little sprouting moustache. Suck and suck and suck until my bruise is dry and cracking, up high enough to almost tickle my nose. I cry and cry and cry if I happen to misplace my lip ice. Once located, I draw the tubed Vaseline thickly onto my face. Bottom lip. Thin top lip. Bruise, bruise, bruise, back and forth I cake my cracking brown, sucked-dry, bruised lip with a sticky sheen. See how it glimmers, how it glows. The teachers beg me to stop. I go home and Old Lass begs me to stop. But I suck and suck and suck and then look in the mirror and cry at the bruised child looking back at me.

Apart from the warzone that’s my under-nose, I carry other stubborn tendencies with me through the school hallways. Crayons: check. Books: check. Insistence on wearing my white school socks inside out: check.

My Grade 1 teacher screams at me to put them on correctly. Her otherwise fair face glowing irritably and pinkly from under a shaggy blonde bob. She looks at my act of defiance as an opportunity to make an example out of me. Sit on the cold floor outside of the classroom and don’t come in until you’ve fixed your socks.

One day after Old Lass is made aware of her insubordinate child’s refusal to be normal down to her very toes, my mother asks me why I won’t just wear my socks the right side out. ‘It feels like there are stones in my shoes when I wear my socks the normal way,’ I tell her.

‘What do you mean stones in your shoes? There are no stones in your shoes – and certainly not because of how you wear your socks.’

I pull off my school shoe, sock seams glaring at us, and touch my finger down on the sides of the stitching where toes are kept. I show my mother how the little worm seams grate my baby toes if worn as they should be. Old Lass, my mom, understands me. She tells me to ignore the teachers and wear my socks however I want to. She’ll explain my discomfort to them.

At the end of Grade 1, the teachers decide that, going into the next year, I’ll be best suited to the remedial class. Known as the ‘Pilot Class’, twelve children are crammed into a small, makeshift classroom hidden at the back of the school library. I adore this place. It has a low ceiling and a round bay window that looks out over a dark path lined with trees, preventing light from flooding our remedial existence. It feels like the safest space in the world, vowels drawn beautifully in chalk along the walls, over and over again by our new teacher, Mrs Carty. When I think of her now, standing in that classroom, she is ancient. I don’t know if this is true, or whether my youth propped a fresh, 60-year-old woman onto the last legs of her life, but to me, she was ancient. Ancient and kind and scary and smoky. Each morning as we Pilot Class kids arrive into the belly of the library, Mrs Carty checks our lunchboxes. Anything with MSG or sugar is thrown out. I suspect I am the only child in the class who isn’t on medication for some sort of attention deficit disorder, and so we are prohibited from artificial energy for fear that we’ll vibrate through the roof, before shooting down again and suffering through the same school year multiple times in an effort to reach the same level as the ‘normal’ kids. Once our chips and smuggled biscuits are thrown out, while the hundred-or-so other Grade 2s begin the first lesson of the day, myself, a girl I’ll call Shirley and the ten boys who make up the Pilot Class follow Mrs Carty to the main sports field, each child clutching their own activity toy of choice. The boys usually with a soccer ball each. Me armed with a skipping rope. Mrs Carty takes a seat at the bottom of the concrete grandstands, leaves swaying above her, while she lights a long cigarette. Inhaling deeply, she exhales into a whistle and off we go. The twelve most special and fucked-up kids running around the field chasing a ball or hopping over a rope, a supreme attempt at ridding us of any extra energy before commencing with our lessons on the A-E-I-O-Us.

I’m pretty sure it’s during this two-year remedial period of my life that the fighter in me is established. In Grade 3, the Pilot Class, which is still made up of me, Shirley, and the ten boys, grows a fraction bigger with the arrival of a few devastated children who are dropped from the mass of regular students into our ranks. As the class grows, so our library refuge can no longer contain us, Mrs Carty, and the bins overflowing with crunchy contraband. We are moved into a god-awful classroom on a generic corridor, lined with more boring classrooms, all bursting with the nasty children who yell, ‘You’re going to fail’ at us as we walk past them on our way to the tuck shop.

I suppose Shirley and I, being the only two girls in a world full of boys, could have bonded. But the bullying we suffer at the hands of the mainstream kids has soured us. In the afternoons we go home and sob in the arms of our parents about how mean the ‘other’ children are to us because we are ‘special’, and the next morning we arrive back at school and unleash all of our childish nastiness on Shirley. At such a young age, her acne-riddled face welts and blisters for weeks at a time, whiteheads littering her lovely, dark face as her braids, decorated with colourful beads, work overtime to draw the attention of others up-up-and-away from her face. And so I chant along with the boys, ‘Shirley the pizza face with toppings on top,’ while secretly pulling strands of hair from my ponytail over my bruised top lip.

Some of these boys and their skinny ankles are still deeply etched into my mind. There was Calvin-Sexy-Legs, whose big sister had died. I remember being moved that he and his family would still visit her favourite restaurant every year on her birthday. I giggle and choke now on the guilt at having sexualised a seven-year-old boy by referring to him as ‘sexy legs’. There was David T. A tiny boy whose white skin would boil into red patches on summer days, causing a mottled appearance that would melt away and then angrily rise again after a fingertip would press down on it, before turning blue at the arrival of winter. There was Shane, who had secured the role of Peter Rabbit in the end-of-year play we were putting on (I wailed, Old Lass holding me, over the injustice that the mainstream kids had been allocated Cinderella for their own play while we were stuck with fucking Peter Rabbit). Shane had landed the lead role on a Friday morning, and I’d spent the rest of the day fuming – with myself mostly, for not having been brave enough to audition in the first place. By the time the final bell rung and little chairs were lifted onto little desks, I felt a fiery certainty that if I didn’t act now, I’d forever regret it. As Mrs Carty began to bid us weirdoes goodbye, I shot up my hand and bellowed, ‘Mrs Carty, I would like to audition for the role of Peter Rabbit.’ Shane was peeved, man. He was especially peeved when Mrs Carty’s mouth twitched into a knowing smile before telling me to go right ahead.

Right there next to my desk, with the seat of my chair level with my nervous head, I stood as tall as I could, breaking my back with a pride and posture it had never before experienced, plastering the most surprised expression I could muster onto my face, before flinging my skinny arm around to point at my ass, and saying, ‘What’s that? Whatever is it for?’ Indeed, Peter Rabbit had just discovered his tail for the first time.

Mrs Carty clapped her hands together, just once, declaring, ‘And Christy will play the role of Peter Rabbit.’

If you’re feeling sorry for Shane, don’t. He went on to spy and see me naked on a Grade 7 tour through a crack in the curtains, so … fuck Shane.

And then there was Lualan. That little asshole and I were the frontrunners in the comprehension activities that dear, cloudy Mrs Carty would have us do every day. The comprehensions were divided into categories based on difficulty, each category colour coded. Purple to some might represent ‘sexual frustration’, but to me, when I see purple, specifically dark purple, all I see is victory at having beaten Lualan to the finish line.

My elation was sorely short-lived, however, when December arrived and news broke that my days in the Pilot Class were coming to an end. Most of us, myself and Shirley included, had passed the year and were now allowed to fraternise with the enemy in the mainstream classes going into the next year, while others, namely Lualan, were held back to repeat Grade 3. Instead of being disappointed that my comprehension companion would no longer be around to challenge me, I quickly felt my dark purple pride dissipate. Who cares if I beat Lualan at comprehensions if he’s so stupid they held him back a year?