Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

‘Our men have a few other tricks up their sleeves too, only I’m not free to tell you about them at the moment. Let’s just say I think you’ll find these bare limbs and exaggerated bosoms will soon be disappearing from our streets and homes. And when they do we’ll have the Catholic men of Melbourne to thank for it.’

Adrian Sherd was almost certain that the priest was talking about the Argus , which was delivered to the Sherds’ house every morning because Mr Sherd said it was the best paper for racing and football. Most of the women that Adrian took with him on his American journey had first appeared to him in the pages of the Argus. The poses they struck to excite him (leaning back against a rock with hands on hips and legs wide apart, or bending forward to expose the deep cleavage at the top of their bathers) came straight from the films section of the Saturday Argus.

If the Catholic men persuaded Mr Sherd to stop buying the Argus , Adrian would have no chance to meet new women. It was different for Cornthwaite and his friends who were allowed out to films any night of the week. They had all the beautiful women in the world to choose from. But Adrian depended on the Argus to introduce him to new faces and breasts and legs. Without it he would have to live on his memories. Or he might even end up like those old perverts who got arrested for drilling holes in bathroom walls or women’s changing sheds at the beach.

Adrian talked to his friends afterwards. Stan Seskis said, ‘It’s the Argus all right, and my old man’s one of those that are going to clean it up. He buys it every day and draws big circles in red ink round all the pictures of the tarts. Then he cuts them all out and pastes them in a scrapbook and takes them to a meeting every week at Mr Moroney’s house.

‘And it’s not just pictures he collects. Sometimes he cuts out a story about some court case. He puts a red line under certain words that shouldn’t be seen in a family newspaper. I’ll bet none of you bastards know what a criminal assault really means.’

No one knew. Seskis told them. ‘It’s the same thing as rape. And if you read the Argus carefully every day, in the end you’ll find a story about a criminal assault. And if you use your imagination you can work out just how the bastard raped the tart.’

Adrian decided to prepare for the day when the Argus had to stop printing the pictures he needed. Every morning in the train between Accrington and Swindon he looked around for young women who could eventually take over from his film stars and beauty queens. It was nearly a week before he found a face and figure to compare with the Argus women. He picked out a young married woman so carefully groomed that she must have worked in a chemist’s shop or a hairdresser’s salon. He studied her closely without anyone noticing him. That night he invited her to join him and two friends on a trip through the piney woods of Georgia. She came along cheerfully but Adrian soon wished she had stayed at home.

Adrian could not relax with her. Whenever he met her eyes he remembered he would have to face her on the train next morning. She would be dressed in her ordinary clothes again (in Georgia she wore candy-striped shorts and a polka-dot blouse) and he would be wearing the grey suit and maroon cap of St Carthage’s College. It would be hard pretending that nothing had happened between them on the previous night.

There was another difficulty. Jayne and Marilyn and Susan and their many friends always had the same look about them — a wide-eyed half-smile with lips slightly parted. The new woman had an irritating way of changing her expression. She seemed to be thinking too much.

Worse still, Adrian realised when he saw her in Georgia that her breasts had no fixed shape. Each of the other women had a pair as firm and inflexible as a statue’s. But the new girl’s lolled and bounced on her chest so that he could never be sure what size and shape they were.

When the afternoon reached its climax Adrian gave up trying to fit the new girl into Georgia and deserted her for his old favourites.

Next morning the young woman was in her usual place in the train. Her face was stern and haughty and her breasts had almost disappeared under the folds of her cardigan. When the train crossed the high viaducts approaching Swindon, the morning sunlight came through the windows. The carriage was suddenly bright and warm like a clearing in the piney woods. Adrian looked down from where he was standing and saw a picture in someone’s Argus. It’s title was ‘Why Wait Till Summer?’ and it showed a girl in twopiece bathers on the deck of a yacht. She had a smile that showed she was eager to please, and her breasts were a shape that could be memorised at a glance.

Adrian looked from the picture to the girl in the corner. Her seat was still in shadow. She looked grey and insubstantial.

In school that morning Adrian thought of writing an anonymous letter to the editor of the Argus praising pictures like ‘Why Wait Till Summer?’ and wondered if it would help to save the pictures from the Catholic men.

One very hot Saturday morning Adrian Sherd was staring at a picture of the Pacific coast near Big Sur. He hadn’t been to America for several days, and he was planning a sensational extravaganza for that very night with four or perhaps even five women against a backdrop of mighty cliffs and redwood forests.

His mother came into the room and said she had been down to the phone box talking to his Aunt Francie and now Adrian and his brothers and mother and Aunt Francie and her four kids were going on the bus to Mordialloc beach for a picnic.

The Sherds went to the beach only once or twice a year. Adrian had never learned to swim properly. He usually sat in the shallows and let the waves knock him around, or dug moats and canals at the water’s edge while the sun burned his pale skin crimson. At mealtime he sat at a grimy picnic bench with a damp shirt sticking to his skin and his bathers full of grit. His young brothers and cousins jostled him to get at the food, and he shrank back from the tomato seeds dribbling down their chins or the orange pips they spat carelessly around them.

On the long bus trip to Mordialloc, Adrian decided to make the day pass more quickly by observing women on the beach. He might see something (a shoulder strap slipping, or a roll of flesh escaping from a tight bathing suit just below the buttocks) that could be fitted into his adventures at Big Sur to make them more realistic.

The two families reached Mordialloc in the hottest part of the afternoon. They were going to stay at the beach until dark. The women and the oldest children carried baskets and string-bags packed with cold corned beef, lettuce leaves, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, jars of fruit salad and slices of bread-and-butter, all wrapped in damp tea-towels.

Adrian put on his bathers in the changing shed. He looked into the toilet cubicles and shower room to read the writing on the walls. Most of it had been whitewashed only recently. The boldest inscription was in a toilet cubicle. It read simply: MISS KATHLEEN MAHONEY YOU BEAUT. There was no illustration.

Adrian pitied the young man who had written those words. He was some larrikin who knew nothing about life in America. All he could use to excite himself was some girl he had lusted after in his own suburb. And Kathleen Mahoney was a good Catholic name. The girl had probably never looked twice at the uncouth bastard who scrawled her name in toilets.

If Adrian had had the time, he would have scratched out the inscription. But just then he found something much more important to worry about.

Even though the day was hot, his cock had shrivelled up to the size of a boy’s while he was undressing. It was too small to dangle properly. When he pulled on his bathers it made a tiny pathetic lump that was clearly visible in the cloth between his legs. He walked out of the changing shed with small careful steps so his miserable button wouldn’t be too obvious.