Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

He got back to his mother and aunt and saw a strange woman in onepiece tartan bathers standing between them. When she turned round it was only his cousin Bernadette, who was no older than he was. He had taken no notice of her in her ordinary clothes. Her face was nothing much to look at and she always had her young sisters hanging round her. Now he saw that her thighs were as big and heavy as her mother’s, and her breasts were a much more interesting shape.

Mrs Sherd and her sister Francie told all their children to swim in the shallow water until they were sent for. Francie said, ‘We’re going to sit down and have a good rest and we don’t want any kids hanging round us.’

Adrian walked down into the sea and sat down. He kept his bathers underwater to hide the stub between his legs and looked around for his cousin Bernadette. She was nowhere in the water, or on the sand. He looked back at the pavilion. She was sitting in her tartan bathers beside the two women. She must have decided she wasn’t one of the children any more.

Adrian was angry. He had to splash around in the shallows with his brothers and young cousins while Bernadette sat gossiping with the women. Yet he had romped with film stars on scenic beaches in America while Bernadette looked as though she had never even had a boyfriend.

He spent his time in the water making elaborate plans for his trip to the coast of northern California that evening. Bernadette would have looked at him differently if she could have known his true strength — in a few hours he was going to wear out three film stars one after the other.

At teatime Bernadette made a point of helping the women serve the food. Adrian stayed where his mother had told him to wait with the other children. When Bernadette came near him he pulled his shoulders back and drew himself up to his full height. He wanted her to realise he was taller and more powerfully built than she was. But she kept her eyes lowered and he had to sit down and cross his legs in case she noticed the insignificant wrinkle in the front of his bathing trunks.

While his cousin served the food she had to stand very close to Adrian. Two or three times she leaned across him so that her breasts were almost under his nose. Adrian thought he might as well glance at her body. Perhaps some detail of it would come in handy in America when he couldn’t visualise one of his film stars as accurately as he needed.

Adrian pretended to be busy with his bread and butter and hard-boiled egg while he inspected Bernadette at close range. It was the nearest he had ever been to a full-grown Australian female body in a bathing suit, but he was far from impressed.

The skin between her throat and breasts had been burnt a little by the sun. It was a raw flesh-pink colour instead of the uniform golden-cream he preferred in a beautiful woman. There was even a small brown mole on the very slope where one of her breasts began, which automatically disqualified her from perfection.

Whenever she walked, her thighs and calves turned out to be full of muscles. Even the slightest movement made one or other of the muscles tense or slacken. It was impossible for Adrian to tell whether the legs were shapely because she never once kept them in an artistic pose.

He risked a quick glance between her legs and saw something that shocked him. When she passed close by him again he looked a second time. He was not mistaken. High up inside her leg where the white of her thigh met the tartan fabric of her bathers, a single dark brown hair, perhaps an inch long, lay curled against her skin.

He could not tell whether the hair had sprouted from the thigh itself or whether he was looking at the end of it only, and its roots were somewhere in the mysterious territory beneath her bathers. But it didn’t really matter. Either way, the coarse coiled hair made nonsense of any claim she had to beauty. He could call to mind a whole gallery of beautiful legs. They were all motionless and symmetrical and as smooth as the finest marble.

After tea Adrian had to go back to the changing shed to put his clothes on. On the way to the shed he tried to remind himself of the trip to Big Sur that would make up for his miserable day at Mordialloc. But all his staring at his cousin had made him restless and tense. He thought he would probably never make it to California.

In the changing shed he gave in quickly. He locked himself in one of the toilet cubicles and set to work. He did not even close his eyes — he was in Mordialloc, beside Port Phillip Bay, Victoria, Australia all the while. But he resisted with all his strength the images of blemished skin and bunched calf-muscles and hairy thighs that urged themselves on him. He would not betray all the beauty of America for the sake of his lumpish cousin.

He looked all round him, staring at the walls in the twilight. Something white caught his eye. Of all the women he knew, in America and Australia, only Miss Kathleen Mahoney was with him at the end. He leaned his head against the soothing shapes of the letters of her name.

One morning late in the year Brother Cyprian announced to the class, ‘After your exams we’ll be having a Father Dreyfus at the school one night to show a film and give a talk and answer any of your questions on the subject of sex education.’

The brother read from a paper on his desk: ‘The film has been shown to Catholic boys in secondary forms all over Australia. It shows in a perfectly clear and simple fashion all those matters which boys are often anxious to know but unfortunately are sometimes unwilling to find out from parents and teachers.

‘The film offers the whole wonderful story of human reproduction from the moment of fertilisation to the hour of birth and illustrates clearly the workings of the human body both male and female.’

Brother Cyprian looked over the boys’ heads at the back wall and said, ‘All boys are urged to come to this film but of course there’s no compulsion. Father Dreyfus is a man worth coming miles to hear on any subject. He’s led an extraordinary life. He was in a Nazi concentration camp during the war. He rides a motorbike. He’s what you might call a man’s man.’

Adrian Sherd thought this was the best news he had heard all year. He tried to catch the eye of Cornthwaite or Seskis or O’Mullane to share his excitement. But they were all staring ahead as though there was nothing they needed to learn from any travelling priest and his famous film.

Adrian remembered the brother’s words, ‘from the moment of fertilisation’. He was going to see the most daring film ever made. At the very least he expected a statue or a painting of a man and woman doing it — a famous work of art that had been kept out of sight for centuries in some gallery in Europe. Yet if such a statue or painting existed it would have been the work of a pagan artist, and this was to be a Catholic film.

Perhaps he would see a married couple making a lump under the blankets of their bed. But Brother Cyprian had said, ‘a perfectly clear and simple fashion.’ The blankets would have to be thrown back to show the organs at work. The couple, of course, would be hooded or masked to protect them from embarrassment.

But surely this was too much to hope for. No film in all history had ever shown the act itself. Anyone, even a priest, would be arrested just for having it in his possession, let alone showing it to an audience. Adrian could only wait and count the days until he actually saw the film.

On the night of the film every boy in the class turned up. When Brother Cyprian blew his whistle to call them inside, they loitered and went on talking as though they weren’t at all anxious to see whatever the priest had to show.

Father Dreyfus had a thick black beard — an unheard-of thing for a priest. He was sitting on top of the front desk with his hands in his pockets and his legs crossed. On all the other desks there were pencils and pieces of paper. The priest invited the boys to write down any questions they had about sex and marriage and said he would try to answer them before he showed his film.