slapped Patti on her arm. ‘That’s enough of that language,’ she muttered tersely. Patti apologised. ‘I just get so upset sometimes,’ she told us. Pru rested a comforting hand on Patti’s leg and finished her thinking for her. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘the Gregorys and Donnas have never really understood sex. I think they see it as a kind of violence. In the Cross I am sure it often is. But not in our bedroom. Not in a loving bedroom. No matter what we do.’
Patti nodded her head in agreement. She concluded, ‘Gregory and Donna over-simplify sex. They think that it can be tamed with prayer, controlled with strength of will and faith. But all this self-denial is so misguided. God gave you a prick, Simon, so why not use it! Just don’t hurt anyone. That’s where the sin is. The sin lies in hurting the ones who have shared themselves with you, not in hurting some God who surely has bigger things on his mind than which hole you choose to put your pecker into.’ Pru gave Patti another cross look but didn’t pull her up on the swearing. They offered me another glass of brandy but I’d had my share. I asked why, if they felt that way, they had stayed with the church. Pru shrugged as if it was obvious. ‘Because we love God,’ she told me.
We chatted quietly for a little longer and then I made my excuses and strolled home. As I left, Patti passed me a handful of crumbed cutlets wrapped in aluminium foil ‘in case you get hungry’. Strolling home I reflected that my life at that time was dominated by women. I was with the Kings Cross working girls most days and most nights. I counselled dozens of frustrated, depressed, unfulfilled wives in my role as preacher-cum-marriage guidance counsellor. There were my two lovers. And Patti and Pru. Women of all ages and backgrounds. Those with lax moral standards and the prudes. Straight and gay. There is something about all of them. An elusive, defining characteristic. It’s hard to pin down but it occurs to me now, without any sense of crudity, that it is their cunts. It is their boobs. It’s their big hips and bottoms. It’s their soft bellies, their nipples and their thighs. And it is a keen awareness of these things. My body, my man’s body, is a pale uncomplicated thing. My cock is an after-thought. It hangs between my legs or it stiffens. Urine and semen. Simple. But Mary and Faith and Eve and all the others seem to have a much more complicated relationship with their bodies. Their vaginas grow moist for lovers. Nipples stiffen at the touch. And they can cramp and bleed and betray as well. And the parts of their bodies that do these things can flick from sex toys to baby factories in the space of an ejaculation! And so my impression now is that, for the most part, the women that I knew were more comfortable with the primitiveness of the human body. And so it is rare, I think, to find a woman describing sex, as Gregory commonly did, as disgusting. And so I wondered at Donna, who used to find in these things such cause for horror.
* * *
Evie had her views on sex too, which is hardly surprising. One late afternoon, traffic growling past outside, she sat opposite me in The Mission focussing on the chocolate bar placed on the table between us. It had been there for ten minutes while she chatted away agitatedly. I could tell that something was up. She wanted to talk that evening, seemed worn out when she was normally so full of energy. Finally, she confessed that she just didn’t want to do it that evening. She shrugged and sighed, ‘Sometimes I feel I just can’t fuck another man.’ I knew better than to say what I was thinking. I knew better than to tell her then don’t, just stop. She would have just given me that look and shaken her head in wonder. Instead I asked her, ‘So how do you do it?’ Evie answered me readily enough. She explained matter-of-factly that she did it in all of the positions. I smiled at the confusion. ‘No,’ I said patiently, ‘I mean how do you do it, night after night, with men you don’t know.’ Evie laughed. I thought that she had twigged to the misunderstanding but I was wrong. She explained, with the hint of a blush and a lowered voice, ‘Well, actually, I think I find it easier than some girls because, just between you and me, I have a pretty big fanny.’ She wasn’t joking: there was a total misconnection. My question went to her spirit and her soul, the complex relations between her thoughts and actions. But Evie seemed only capable of interpreting my question in terms of her body. How do you do sex? She should have just said, ‘With my body.’ And everything else? ‘With me.’
* * *
A passionate love gone stale, a painful break-up, neediness then despair. Yes, God got me on the rebound.
My relationship with Allison was a long garbled conversation at cross purposes, full of misunderstandings and unintended offence. It was five years of saying sorry and stumbling on in a state of confusion, not sure why she was angry, why I was upset, where it would all end up. There’s no joy in looking back on a formative five-year period of your life and seeing that you can really fuck another person up just by being yourself. In fact, being the best that you can ever be! And yet interleaved with the pain and sorrow I guess we found room to be in love with each other.
What on earth convinced us to go to India for a holiday to patch up our troubled relationship? It’s beyond me. Three and a half weeks beating away carpet sellers and tourist touts with my empty wallet. Tears and more tears and desperate, harrowing, love-making under slowly spinning ceiling fans. And me looking into her face, lying there below me, and seeing it set, and her jaw tensed, and her eyes screwed shut tight, trying to find something in me and in herself that was worth the pain and the heartache. The emotion in our relationship was never more potent and visceral than in those hours of sex and after-sex holding. We knew it was dying. We were merely waiting for the cancer to run its course.
We ended up in Pushkar, a Hindu holy city in Rajasthan. A romantic location, ghats stepping down to a picturesque lake and two tall jagged mountains looming over it all. Pilgrims would come to the lake and bathe in its cleansing waters. Westerners would unsuspectingly drink the same water in their tea later over dinner in restaurants, too cheap to buy the bottled variety. A serene, magical, dysenteric place. The full stop on that clumsy five-year conversation. We had slept together in the afternoon. I don’t know why. Afterwards she rolled on her side and willed herself to nap. I rose and dressed and told her I was going for a walk. She made a little sound in her throat to say that she had heard me but she didn’t open her eyes. I looked back at her from the door. Her shapely bottom, her boobs cradled in the crook of her bent arms and her eyes closed to make me disappear all the faster.
With a heavy heart I strolled down to the lake’s edge, past the cow with the genetic deformity (a floppy ill-formed fifth leg growing out of the back of its head, hoof and all, and his owner touting photos for a dollar), and found a quiet spot to sit and think. I had the ghat I had chosen all to myself except for an old Indian man in rags sitting about 15 metres away. As I walked to the water’s edge and took a seat on the steps he called out to me in slow, drawled but perfect Indian-English, ‘Will you give me some thing?’ His beggar’s cry had the tone of suffering and anguish. He gave voice to my own feelings of loss and need. But I ignored him. Over three weeks in India you become hardened to this stuff. In the mood I was in he’d need another leg growing out of his head before I gave him any money. A reflective minute gazing across the rippling lake’s surface. ‘Pleeeeease, sir. Will you give me something?’ My friend again. I ignored him again. Then every thirty seconds for the next couple of minutes he’d try again. ‘Please, sir. Something’. Then silence for ten long and peaceful minutes. A young pilgrim walked down the steps of the next ghat and stripped to his cotton underpants. He walked into the glassy cool water up to his navel and, letting his knees give beneath him, he slipped vertically down into the water, his head disappearing and reappearing again as he stood upright. He did this four times in quick succession, held out his cupped palms, muttered a prayer and turned solemnly before walking back up the steps and out of the water. I watched the whole performance as if it were for my benefit and I looked across at the old beggar who had done the same thing. The pilgrim dried himself and dressed and left us alone. Another five minutes silence then suddenly the old beggar’s plaintive voice again. ‘For God’s sake,’ he cried, ‘Do something!’ I did. I left the lake’s edge and walked back to the hotel, to Allison, where we agreed to end it. Allison cried and hugged me but there was relief in her tears,
