Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

Not many boys wrote down questions. Adrian tried to think of something to oblige the priest but he heard a familiar cough from the back of the room and remembered that Brother Cyprian was somewhere behind him in the shadows fiddling with the projector. If the brother saw him writing out a question he might think Adrian was preoccupied with sexual matters.

The priest read out the questions from the slips of paper and answered each one briefly. Most of the questions seemed childish to Adrian. He could have answered them himself with all the information he had got from Cornthwaite and his friends during the past two years.

There was only one really interesting question. Someone had asked what advice he ought to give to his best friend who hadn’t been to confession for nearly a year because he was too scared to confess all the sins of impurity he committed by himself.

This was the first time that Adrian had ever heard the sin of self-abuse discussed in public. Priests and brothers often made vague references to it, but no one had ever mentioned it so boldly as the anonymous author of the question.

Adrian didn’t hear the first part of the priest’s answer. He was too busy trying to work out who had asked the question. The story about the best friend sounded unlikely. The questioner himself was the fellow who had a year’s worth of sins on his soul.

All over the room, other boys were puzzling over the same matter. Adrian studied the faint turnings of heads and the surreptitious glances. Suspicion seemed to fall on Noonan, a big dull fellow. Adrian remembered Noonan getting up from his seat outside the confessional one First Thursday and leaving the church as though he wanted to be sick. It was a good trick. He could have practised it month after month while his total of sins mounted up.

After answering Noonan’s question the priest said, ‘Only the other day I was reading an American book on psychology. Young people and their problems. That sort of thing. I was very surprised to see some figures relating to the sin we’re talking about. According to the book, over ninety per cent of boys have experimented with masturbation before they’re eighteen years old. Of course these figures wouldn’t apply to Catholic boys but it certainly makes you stop and think.’

After he had got over the shock of hearing the word ‘masturbation’ spoken by a priest (and in his own classroom), Adrian wondered what the figures implied. Perhaps he and Cornthwaite and the others wouldn’t have felt so unusual if they had been lucky enough to grow up in America. Ninety per cent seemed a high figure at first, but of course American boys were subject to much fiercer temptations than Australians. Many of them had probably seen in the flesh the women that Adrian only saw in pictures.

When the priest had answered all their questions he told a boy to turn out the lights. Then he said to Brother Cyprian, ‘Let her roll,’ and the projector started.

It was an old, worn film. The sound crackled and boomed, and every few minutes a cloud of grey blobs and streaks fell across the screen like a sudden squall of rain. An overgrown child with long trousers and a bow-tie was asking his parents how he had come into the world. The people were all Americans. It was obvious from the way they smiled and patted each other and held themselves stiffly that they weren’t even proper actors. They belonged to the mysterious multitude that Adrian had never seen in films — the Catholic American families who lived in a pagan land but still kept up the struggle to save their souls.

The parents said the usual things about God’s wonderful work, and then the real stars of the film appeared. A close-up of the male reproductive organs filled the screen. Adrian was sure they belonged to a real person. Whoever he was, he had exceptional self-control. He stayed completely relaxed while the camera was only inches away from his cock and balls.

A few more diagrams appeared. It rained hard all over the screen again. Adrian prayed for the rain to clear before the female organs and the moment of fertilisation came on the screen.

The rain died down, and she stood before them at last. Only it wasn’t really a she. Adrian almost groaned aloud. The swindlers had made a sort of dressmaker’s dummy and sliced it off just above the navel. The thing swung round noiselessly on a swivel to show its genital organs. Adrian half-expected it to topple forward like the corpses in films that were propped up in chairs until someone turned them round to see why they wouldn’t talk.

The female thing stayed on the screen for perhaps ten seconds. Even while he was straining to fix it in his mind forever, Adrian was aware that all of the fifty and more heads around him were suddenly motionless — all except one. Just behind Adrian, at the back of the room, Brother Cyprian jerked his head around and stared into a dark corner when the thighs and belly started turning towards him. Adrian understood — the brother was under a vow of chastity, and for him the thing on the screen was an occasion of sin.

Between its legs the creature had a low bald mound with a suggestion of a cleft or fissure along its middle. Adrian cursed the people who made the dummy or statue or whatever it was for putting the mound or whatever it was so far down between the legs that its finer details were hidden. He was trying to imagine how the legs and the object between them would look walking towards him or stepping out of a bathing suit or lying down in an attitude of surrender, when they faded from the screen.

A huge diagram appeared. Adrian knew it like the back of his hand. It was the female reproductive system. He hardly bothered to listen while the commentator’s voice explained what happened in the ovaries and oviducts and Fallopian tubes. Over the years he had found many sketches and diagrams and charts and sectional reliefs of the inside of a female body — but not one lifelike illustration of the outside.

He was trying to imagine the whole diagram enclosed in skin and packed away between two thighs, when he noticed something odd in the lowest part of the screen. A swarm of bees or a flight of tiny arrows was drifting through the lowest tube. It could even have been the grey rain in the film suddenly reversing and going back up the screen. But then the commentator announced what was really happening.

They were watching the moment of fertilisation. This was what Adrian and all his class had come from miles around to see. But it was nothing like real life. An army of little sperm-men was invading the diagram. The commentator got excited. He thought there was nothing so marvellous as the long journey of these tiny creatures. Adrian didn’t care what happened to the little bastards now that the film had turned out to be a fraud.

The sperm cells were thinning out and growing weaker. The boys of Form Four at St Carthage’s were still staring at the screen. They didn’t seem to realise they had been cheated. Adrian stretched himself in his seat and wondered how the scene had been filmed.

Was it just an animated diagram like a cartoon? Or did the filmmakers pay some lunatic to shoot his stuff into a hollow tube inside the dressmaker’s dummy? Or did they put a tiny camera inside a female organ so that Adrian and his class and even Father Dreyfus and Brother Cyprian were all sitting in the dark inside a woman’s body while some huge fellow outside was doing her for all he was worth but none of them knew what was going on?

One day in December Stan Seskis told his friends he had read somewhere that a normal man should be able to have relations with a woman once every twenty-four hours unless he was ill or abnormal or something. Seskis said he had proved the truth of this by doing it to himself for ten nights on end and he was glad to know he was as good as any normal man.