Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

Adrian didn’t like to put his secret into simple words — it humiliated him so much. But it was simple nevertheless: he had never seen the external genital apparatus of a human female.

When Adrian was nine years old and a pupil of St Margaret Mary’s School in a western suburb of Melbourne, some of the boys in his grade formed a secret society. They met among the oleanders in a little park near the school. Their aim was to persuade girls to visit the park and pull down their pants in full view of the society.

Adrian applied many times to join this society and was eventually admitted on probation. On the afternoon of his first meeting, the society was expecting six or seven girls but only two turned up. One of them refused even to lift her skirt — even after the boys of the society had all offered to take out their cocks and give her a good look. The other girl (Dorothy McEncroe — Adrian would always remember her, although she was a scrawny little thing) tucked her school tunic under her chin and lowered her pants for perhaps five seconds.

As a probationary member of the society Adrian had been forced to stand at the back of the little group of boys. At the very moment, when McEncroe’s pants were sliding down the last few inches of her belly, the boys in front of Adrian began to jostle each other for a better view. Adrian clawed at them like a madman. He was small and light for his age and he could not shift them. He got down on his hands and knees and wriggled between their legs. He pushed his head into the inner circle just as the dark blue pleats of the uniform of St Margaret Mary’s School fell back into place over Dorothy McEncroe’s thighs.

Adrian never had a second chance to inspect Dorothy McEncroe or any other girl at that school. A few days after the meeting, the parish priest visited all the upper grades to warn them against loitering in the park after school. The secret society was disbanded and Dorothy McEncroe walked home every night with a group of girls and pulled faces at any boy who tried to talk to her.

As he grew older, Adrian tried other ways of learning about women and girls.

One wet afternoon at St Margaret Mary’s the children in Grade Seven were allowed to do free reading from the library — a glass-fronted cupboard in the corner. Adrian took down a volume of the encyclopedia from the top shelf. The book seemed mostly about art and sculpture, and many of the pictures and statues were naked. Adrian turned the pages rapidly. There were cocks and balls and breasts everywhere. He was sure he would find what he wanted among all that bare skin. His knees began to tremble. It was the afternoon under the oleanders again. But this time there was no one to block his view, and the woman he was about to see would have no pants or tunic within reach.

The girl behind him (Clare Buckley — he had cursed her a thousand times since) jumped to her feet.

‘Please, Sister. Adrian Sherd’s trying to read that book you told us not to borrow from the top shelf.’

The room was suddenly silent. Adrian heard the whistling of the nun’s robes. She was beside him before he could even close the book. But she spared him.

‘There is nothing either good or bad in art,’ she said to the class. ‘Adrian must have been away when I told you all not to bother yourselves about this book. We’ll put it away for safe-keeping just the same.’

She carried the book back to her own desk. Adrian never saw it again in the library.

In later years Adrian sometimes came across other books about art with pictures of naked men and women. But whereas the men had neat little balls and stubby uncircumcised cocks resting comfortably and unashamed between their legs the women had nothing but smooth skin or marble fading away into the shadows where their thighs met. Adrian suspected a conspiracy among artists and sculptors to preserve the secrets of women from boys like himself.

He thought how unfair it was that girls could learn all about men from pictures and statues while boys could search for years in libraries or art galleries and still be ignorant about women. He almost wept for the injustice of it.

In his first months at St Carthage’s College, Adrian learned a little more from an unexpected source. Every Wednesday the boys went for sport to some playing fields near the East Swindon tram terminus. Under the changing rooms was a lavatory with its walls covered in scribble. Some of the messages and stories were illustrated. Even here, most of the pictures were of men’s and boys’ organs, but Adrian sometimes found a sketch of a naked female.

From these crude drawings he pieced together an image of something that was oval in shape and bisected by a vertical line. He practised drawing this shape until it came easily to him, but he found it impossible to imagine such an odd thing between two smooth graceful thighs.

When Adrian first joined the little group around Cornthwaite, Seskis and O’Mullane, he listened to the names they used for the thing he was looking for. Cunt, twat, hole, ring, snatch, crack — when he heard these words he nodded or smiled like someone who had used them familiarly all his life. But long afterwards he brooded over them, hoping they might yield a clear image of the thing they named.

Adrian’s friends knew there were certain magazines full of information and pictures about sex. They knew the names of some of them— Man, Man Junior, Men Only, Lilliput and Health and Sunshine. They believed that non-Catholic newsagents kept the magazines hidden under their counters or in back rooms.

Cornthwaite often boasted that he could get any of the filthy magazines. All he had to do was ask a big bastard in his parish tennis club to walk into his local newsagent and ask for one. Adrian begged him to buy a Health and Sunshine. He had heard this was the one with the most daring pictures. They were rumoured to show everything. But Cornthwaite never remembered to get him one.

One afternoon in a barber’s shop in Swindon Road, Adrian found a Man Junior among the magazines lying about for customers to read. He was desperate to see inside it, but he was wearing his school uniform and he couldn’t bring St Carthage’s into disrepute by reading a smutty magazine in public.

He kept his eyes on the barber and his assistant and moved along the seat until he was sitting on the Man Junior. Then he bent forward and slipped the magazine down behind his legs and into his Gladstone bag. It was the first time he had ever stolen something of value, but he was sure the magazine was worth less than the amount necessary to make the theft a mortal sin.

Adrian looked through his Man Junior in one of the cubicles in the toilet on Swindon railway station. He saw plenty of naked women, but every one of them had something (a beach ball, a bucket and spade, a fluffy dog, a trailing vine, a leopard’s skin or simply her own upraised leg) concealing the place he had waited so long to see. It all looked so casual — as though the big ball had just bounced past, or the dog had happened to stroll up and greet the woman an instant before the camera clicked. But Adrian was sure it was done deliberately. The smiles of the women angered him. They pretended to be brazen temptresses, but at the last moment they draped fronds of greenery across themselves or hid behind their pet dogs.

It was not safe to take the whole magazine home. Adrian tore out the three most attractive pictures and hid them in the lining of his bag. That evening he searched through his brother’s Boys’ Wonder Book. He had remembered an article entitled An Easy-to-make Periscope. He found the article and made a note of the materials needed for the periscope.

Next day at school he talked to a boy who was crazy about science. Adrian said he had just thought up a brilliant idea to help the Americans spy on the Russians but he wanted to be sure it would work. The idea was to take pictures of the walls around the Kremlin or any other place the Americans wanted to see into. Then American scientists could aim powerful periscopes at the photographs to see what was behind the walls.