Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

Adrian blackened the initials of other fellows who were not friends of his but had let slip something that betrayed them. Once, for instance, Adrian had overheard a quiet boy named Gourlay telling a joke to his friend.

GOURLAY: Every night after cricket practice I pull a muscle.

FRIEND: After practice? How come?

GOURLAY: Oh, it happens when I’m lying in bed with nothing to do before I go to sleep.

Adrian marked both Gourlay and his friend in black — the friend because of the guilty way he had laughed at Gourlay’s joke.

He took only a few minutes to colour all the mortal sinners. There were about a dozen. This still left nearly thirty boys unmarked. Adrian puzzled over some of these. They were well grown with pimply faces and they shaved every second or third day. They had been seen to smile at dirty jokes and they always looked bored during Christian Doctrine periods. Adrian would have liked to colour them black to boost the numbers of his own group, but he had no definite evidence that they were habitual sinners.

In the end he put a pale grey shadow over the initials of all the remaining boys as a sign that their souls were discoloured by venial sins.

The Christian Doctrine period was still not finished. Adrian drew a yellow cloud above his chart to represent heaven. Down below he drew a black tunnel leading to hell. There was room at each side of his page for more of the universe, so he put a grey zone at one side for purgatory and a green zone opposite for limbo.

He sat back and admired his work. The colours around the initials indicated clearly where each boy’s soul would go if the world ended suddenly that morning before any of them could get to confession or even murmur an act of perfect contrition.

None of them could go to limbo, of course, because that was a place of perfect natural happiness reserved for the souls of babies who had died before baptism or adult pagans who had never been baptised but had lived sinless lives according to their lights. But Adrian had included limbo in his chart because it had always attracted him. A brother had once said that some theologians believed limbo might be the earth itself after the General Judgement. They meant that, after the end of the world, God would remake the whole planet as a place of perfect natural happiness.

Sometimes when Adrian realised how unlikely it was that he would get to heaven, he would willingly have traded his right to heaven for safe conduct to limbo. But because he had been baptised he had to choose between heaven and hell.

He slipped his chart into his desk and looked around the room at the fellows he had marked with black. They were an odd assortment, with not much in common apart from the sin that enslaved them. They even differed in the way they committed their secret sin.

Cornthwaite only did it in total darkness — usually late at night with a pillow over his head. He claimed that the sight of it disgusted him. His inspiration was always the same — the memory of a few afternoons with his twelve-year-old cousin Patricia when her parents were out of the house. The girl’s parents had told Cornthwaite afterwards that he needn’t bother coming to the house again.

Adrian often asked Cornthwaite what he had done to the girl. But Cornthwaite would only say it was nothing like people imagined and he didn’t want bastards like Sherd even thinking dirty thoughts about his young cousin.

O’Mullane preferred to do it in broad daylight. He swore he didn’t need to think of women or girls. He got his excitement from the feel of whichever lubricant he was using. He was always experimenting with butter or hair oil or soap or his mother’s cosmetics. Sometimes he stung or burnt himself and had to give up doing it for a few days.

Seskis only used film stars. He didn’t care whether they wore bathing suits or street clothes so long as their lips were red and moist. He sometimes went to an afternoon show in a theatre in Melbourne where he could sit in an empty row and do it quietly through a hole in the lining of his trousers pocket while some woman parted her lips close to the camera.

Ullathorne looked at National Geographic magazines with pictures of bare-breasted women from remote parts of the world. He had once offered to lend Adrian one of his best magazines. Adrian admired some bare breasted girls from the island of Yap until he read in a caption under a photo that Yap women sometimes had spiders and scorpions living in their voluminous grass skirts.

Froude used a set of photographs. The man who came to his house to teach him violin used to slip a photo into Froude’s pocket after each lesson. Each photo showed a different boy standing or sitting or lying down naked with his penis erect. The boys were all about thirteen or fourteen years old. Froude had no idea who they were. He had asked his music teacher and been told he would find out in good time.

Adrian had seen some of Froude’s photos. They were so clear and well lit that he told Fronde to ask the music teacher if he had any similar pictures of girls or women.

Purcell used the nude scene from the film Ecstasy starring Hedy Lamarr when she was very young. He had read about the film in an old copy of Pix magazine and torn out the picture of Hedy Lamarr floating on her back in a murky river. He admitted it was hard to make out Hedy’s breasts in the photo, and the rest of her body was out of sight under the water. But he said he got a colossal thrill just from having a picture of one of the only nude films ever made.

The other habitual sinners were mostly unimaginative fellows who simply made up adventures about themselves and some of the girls they knew. Adrian considered himself luckier than any of them, because he used the whole of the U.S.A. for his love-life.

The Christian Doctrine period ended at last and the class stood and recited the Prayer Between Lessons. The boys in mortal sin looked no less devout than the others. Perhaps they believed, like Adrian, that one day they would find a cure that really worked.

Adrian and his friends sometimes discussed cures for their habit. One day Seskis had turned up at school with the story of a novel cure.

SESKIS: I was reading this little booklet my father gave me. It was full of advice to young men and it said to avoid irritation and stimulation during the night you should wash and soap well around the genitals in the bath or shower.

CORNTHWAITE: Whoever wrote that must be crazy. Did you try it?

SESKIS: Two or three times in the bath. I soaped the thing until I couldn’t see it for suds and bubbles. It stood up the whole time and nearly drove me mad. So I had to finish it off right there in the bath.

O’MULLANE: Like the time a priest told me in confession not to eat hot spicy foods for tea or supper. So I only had a slice of toast and a glass of milk for tea to see what happened. Next thing I woke up starving in the night and had to do it to put myself back to sleep.

SHERD: Sometimes I think the only cure is to get married as soon as you’re old enough. But I reckon I could stop it now if I had to sleep in a room with someone else so they’d hear the mattress squeaking if I did anything at night.

O’MULLANE: Bullshit. When our parish tennis club went to Bendigo for the big Catholic Easter Tournament, Casamento and me and two big bastards were in bunks in this little room. One of the big bastards tried to get us all to throw two shillings on the floor and make it a race to do it over the edge of the bunks. Winner takes all.

CORNTHWAITE: Filthy bastards.

O’MULLANE: Of course the one who wanted the race was the bastard they call Horse from the size of his tool. He would have won by a mile.

SHERD: Tell the truth and say you were too embarrassed to do it with other people in the room. It proves what I said about my cure for it.