Читать книгу He Is Mine and I Have No Other - Rebecca O'Connor - Страница 11

First class that morning was pastoral care.

‘And Lani, would you like to draw around Josephine please?’ says Sister Anne, handing me a lump of blue chalk.

I went beetroot and nearly tripped over myself. Josephine was lying on a large sheet of paper in the middle of the floor, her scrawny body twitching with embarrassment. The desks and chairs were stacked up against the walls, and the rest of the girls standing around her. I crouched down on my hunkers first, then onto my knees, and drew a vague outline. I didn’t want to have to touch any part of her, not even her clothes – especially not in front of all those other girls. I didn’t even know what we were supposed to be doing, but I’d have looked stupid if I asked then.

‘You can get up now, Josephine,’ Sister Anne shrilled when I’d finished.

Josephine was given a hand up by one of the girls. Some of the others sniggered into their sleeves. She left a blurred white shadow on the ground behind her. It made it look like she was fat.

‘Now, we need a name for her. What will we call her?’

Betty, someone said, then Genevieve, Dolores – until finally Mar shouted ‘Ezmerelda!’ and everyone turned to look at her. She grinned at me. All heads nodded eagerly: Ezmerelda it was. Sister Anne was working us into a right frenzy. There was nothing we liked better than this sort of feckless exercise, a good forty-five minutes of light relief from the deathly boredom of maths or Irish.

I tried to ignore Josephine, but felt compelled to watch her all the same. I had that exact feeling I’d had in primary school when we were all paraded in our underwear in front of the district nurse. The boys had to show the nurse inside their pants, so that she could make sure everything was in order. I remember feeling my nipples stiff as little apple pips through my cotton vest. Then the prick of the booster injection on my forearm.

One girl was called up to draw Ezmerelda’s face. She did so with such avid attention to detail that it got on Sister Anne’s nerves.

‘Now, Claire, you needn’t worry too much. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just so we get an idea,’ she said.

Then she took the blue chalk herself and went on: ‘Now, where would I find the breasts?’

She scanned the room, and went back to Claire.

‘Claire?’

Claire pointed.

‘Yes, that’s right. Very good. Silly question, I know!’

And she drew two little eggs, sunny side up. Claire blushed right to the roots of her hair, and so did Josephine.

Sister Anne outlined the arms and legs.

‘And what do we find here?’ she asked, pointing somewhere roughly around the armpit.

‘Hair?’ someone croaked, just as the silence was getting too much.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said.

And she drew a little bush either side of each sunny egg.

And on she went, until she got to the vagina, the womb, the fallopian tubes, which looked like a girl skipping, the way she drew them.

It turned out that this lesson was not about sex. We knew about that already. It was about the smell of the sex, and how important it was to wash and deodorise those areas where hair had recently sprouted. I wondered, as Sister Anne said the Hail Mary at the end of class, if she ever looked at herself, naked, after a bath.