Rebellious Daughters (14 page)

Our first real date, in March, was to the musical
Godspell
. Perhaps Paul took me out of guilt because three years earlier he had persuaded my mother I was too young for the raunchier
Hair
. Then, in April, we went to hear the flamenco guitarist Paco Pena at Sydney Town Hall. ‘Had great time, held hands! Terribly confused about my feelings.' There are no more mentions of Paul's possible ‘queerness'. By the end of the month he kissed me and I learnt not to choke him with my tongue. In May he said he loved me and I slid easily into thinking of us as a couple. ‘I want to see Paul all the time but I must, MUST remain independent! And not lose my other friends.'

We had accelerated into a relationship but the age
gap between us still mattered. In some ways I was still a shy child while Paul was a man out in the world of adults. He retreated and began going out with a dark-haired girl of 17; after I first spotted them in the street together, I sat crying in Mum's new red Mini outside the local library. She had never seen me upset about a boy before.

Part of the problem – and perhaps the reason my mother had not been alarmed by our closeness – was that I had no intention yet of having sex. Though my body was hungry, the rest of me was not ready. My first orgasm, at 14, had thrilled and terrified me as I lay alone in a fourposter bed, on a country holiday with my father's family. Now there was no pressure from Paul, too polite and too sensible to tangle with an underage girl, but a young man in the easy 70's must have had sex on his mind. Winter brought a cool silence between us, broken only by family occasions, as he seemed serious about his girlfriend and I tried to convince myself I didn't care. At the same time, I had to endure my mother's sexual heat so I felt doubly dumped. Trying to be stoical I wrote, ‘Sick of Mum and Mike, but I have no right or real reason to be. God, I need someone (Paul!?).'

September 19, my birthday: ‘Sweet 16. Age of Consent!' I suspected a few of my classmates were having sex, with one boyfriend or more, but I was in no rush to lose my virginity for its own sake. That month
I also wondered why I had wanted Paul so much, and then he won my heart again by convincing my aunt and uncle to take in a timid German shepherd that had been left at the vet's surgery where he worked part-time. I wanted a dog, too.

As study leave for my School Certificate exams began in October, my panic about passing broke out in strange ways. Too little work and more outings than necessary. Hysterics over a flamboyant Indian dress I bought and then hated. A fierce cold that forced me to apply for a sickness appeal on my science paper. By Paul's 21st birthday in November, he was seeing another, older girl, and I punished myself by lurking at his birthday party until 1am on the morning of my art history exam. Still I wrote, ‘God I want him'.

On a Sunday when the temperature hit 31 degrees, my fury at my mother boiled over. I wanted her to stay home in solidarity with me as I prepared for my final exam in Latin, but she announced she was going out to lunch with Mike. I never resented her absence when she was at work, but I collapsed in tears over this crucial test of her loyalty. ‘I feel so bloody selfish, but so confused. Mum upset too.' My misery did not change her mind and on her way out she left me at my aunt and uncle's place, where I wept over my Latin books all afternoon.

At the end of the school year, I was one of four girls
who received a form prize for good work, and then I was free to go to the beach with friends, and photography classes with my aunt. There were concerts and parties and a boy who ‘I talked to for ages; he shows great intuition and is easy to talk to and I really like him'. But the disappointment was fleeting when I found out he had kissed my friend. I started my first holiday job at a shop that supplied handmade luxuries to society matrons, and within days a cocky young New Zealander called James came in selling scarves and asked me out to lunch. We went to a floating restaurant on the harbour and, to the amusement of the shop ladies, I returned to work with pink cheeks and a red rose. That summer I lay in a hammock kissing James and smoking cigarettes to a soundtrack of David Bowie and Elton John.

Paul was at our family Christmas lunch – ‘he drives me wild! Oh God!' – but he was still dating another girl and I was on my own. New Year's Eve was a joyful impromptu party at home with my friend Virginia and three boys we invited to join us for cheap bottles of Cold Duck and innocent banter. Mum had been out at a party too. As 1974 dawned, she tiptoed through the front gate carrying her shoes while Virginia and I slipped out to twirl blissfully through the honeysuckle-scented streets and imagine the future.

I remember my last two years at school in snapshots of
unfurling maturity. At school, I continued my anxious but steady academic progress, became a prefect, head of my house, and editor of the school magazine, pronouncing on the need for education to adapt to girls' expanding potential.

At home, Mike moved in and I spent more time away. His relationship with Mum had become a volatile blend of passion, arguments and jealousy, fuelled by his sexual wanderings and her insecurity. She did not tell me until many years later that she was jealous of me too. I had no sexual interest in Mike and he showed no interest in me but poor Mum, still vibrantly lovely in her forties, felt vulnerable against a temptress in a khaki school uniform.

Although I went out with other boys, none of them challenged my love for Paul, and gradually he returned to me. Our feelings steadied and deepened, and while I remained tentative about sex, Paul urged me forward. One afternoon, as he dropped me at home, he leaned out the window of his Volkswagen Beetle and teased me with his smile. ‘Go on,' he coaxed and revved the rattling engine up the street. I knew I had to talk to Mum about contraception.

Time alone with her was scarce now that Mike was living with us. Watching television with them one night, I wrote a note on a square of paper and slid it into her hand: ‘Dear Mum, I would like to go on the Pill because 1) it would help my skin, 2) it would regulate my periods,
3) for contraception.' The last point was in smaller writing than the others, but Mum got the message and laughed. Before long she took me to our family doctor, a pleasant, conservative man who explained that the additional hormones could harm my still-developing body. Mum was grateful, I suppose. But I pushed on and Paul's sister-in-law gave me the name of a woman doctor who prescribed the Pill without questions.

We had sex for the first time in Paul's double bed in his mother's house. To my mortification, next morning we found she had whisked away the blood-stained sheets in gracious silence. I was 16 and nine months, and part of me wished I had waited another three months, because 17 sounded less impatient. Clearly, though, neither of us was a wild child and we were blessed with broad-minded mothers who preferred to have us sleeping together at home rather than who knows where.

Still, I began to have some secrets from Mum. I didn't tell her about the Pill or the sex at first, and when she visited Paul's house and asked to see where I slept on the nights I stayed there, I held my breath and showed her the spare room where the bed was unconvincingly piled with chairs. Nor did I tell her that when she drove me to a friend's place to borrow a book on the way to a party I was really picking up a bag of marijuana for my first joint. (I felt so guilty about my lie that I confessed not long before she died, 40 years later, and the shock on
her face made me feel worse.) I never told her that once or twice I borrowed the vibrator buried in her drawer as a release from the combined sexual tension and exam anxiety that now throbbed constantly through my body.

Mum was calm when eventually I admitted I was sleeping with Paul, and she grew used to having us stay in my attic bedroom above hers. ‘I'm happy he was your first,' she said, as if she expected there would be others. To me, though, he was the only one. He certainly distracted me from whatever was happening downstairs, and I became more detached and tolerant of Mum's waywardness. When Mike left after a year of turmoil, Paul and I were there to comfort Mum, who felt betrayed and abandoned again. I might have been relieved that Mike was gone but, seeing her pain, I didn't say ‘I told you so'.

In my second year at university Paul and I moved into a rented house with our Irish setters. I was leaving Mum by increments: our cottage with a backyard bathroom was half a block from hers. Paul was working in advertising, I had a student allowance and part-time jobs in cafes, shops and a gym, and at first Mum paid my half of the 40 dollars rent. We lived between the two houses, an extended family that only dissolved after my 21st birthday, when Paul and I left to travel in Europe and work in London for a year.

To cut a long love story short, in the six years after our
return from England Paul and I shared four more Sydney homes and a changing cast of dogs and cats. While my friends lived with their parents or in group houses, we cooked dinners, renovated and prowled junk shops for furniture. We were natural best friends and lovers. I saw no need to marry but when Paul asked I nervously said yes, unable to picture life without him. At this news my mother admitted, after years of self-restraint, that she still worried Paul would one day realise he was gay and she did not want me to be left alone, especially if we had children. Sitting on my bed, she pleaded while I sobbed. Yet her resistance only made me more committed. I was 25 when we married and the world was shifting around us: it was another year before homosexuality was decriminalised in NSW, just as the AIDS tragedy was making headlines.

Even then, Paul and I were peeling away from each other: I was becoming a workaholic newspaper journalist among opinionated, rough-and-tumble types, not much interested in domesticity or children, while he was a homebody yearning to live in the country, surrounded by animals. We had been safe company for each other, stepping-stones to maturity. When we finally, sadly, tore apart two years into our marriage, I soon fell for another Paul, a very different man who remains my husband 30 years later. And Paul, my first Paul, eventually found love with another man, his own Paul, and their family of
dogs, goats and horses.

My mother was right, after all, but she, too, never said ‘I told you so'. Like her, I had to cut my own path to adulthood, with all its detours and dead ends, even though in some way I imitated my parents' too-early marriage and divorce. If I had children, I would advise them not to marry in their twenties, a time of rapid growth and change. But they probably wouldn't listen. Mum often told me how frightened she had been that her warning against marrying Paul would rupture our bond. Indeed, after that we loved each other no less but we lost some of our old intimacy. From then on, I was one of a couple that did not always have room for her, and she was alone.

My heart aches now that she is gone. I wish I had been kinder, that I could have let her enjoy her brief flare of passion, that I had trusted her love. I wish she had been less damaged by reckless men and enveloped by the love she deserved. But life is a long lesson and from this distance I prefer to look back with tenderness on those riotous years when we were adolescents together. And for both of us I say, no regrets.

WHO OWNS MY STORY?

REBECCA STARFORD

‘The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.' So proclaimed JP Donleavy, Irish-American author of the celebrated novel
The Ginger Man
, first published in 1955 and banned for obscenity in Ireland and the United States. The novel details the debauched sexual exploits of young Sebastian Dangerfield, a student of law at Trinity College, whose character is said to be inspired by Donleavy's experiences.

I have often returned to this quote as I reflect on my own recently published memoir
Bad Behaviour
, which is set predominantly during my adolescence. The memoir
explores the year I spent in a boarding school in the bush as a 14-year-old, and how my experiences both as being a bully and being bullied came to shape me as an adult. While mostly preoccupied with the relationships I had with other girls in my boarding house,
Bad Behaviour
also grapples with the changing shape of my relationship with my parents during that year as I felt increasingly lonely and isolated from them, and how, as an adult, I have fallen out with my mother as she struggles to accept me being gay.

I don't know if my book has upset my parents, or if it has, to cite Donleavy, made them drop dead with shame. I presume my mother has not read the book, though I have been told she has read a review of it, and I have not asked my dad because I don't wish to upset him, or cause more anxiety around my relationship with Mum.

I am aware how absurd it sounds: that I can't bring myself to ask my own father if he has read my first book, an object of great toil and even greater pride. But there you have it. This is what memoir can be: a scalpel to a sore.

In fact, this is what I like most about the Donleavy quote: how it reveals, simply and with a degree of sharp comedy, the risky nature of memoir writing. How it can take you all the way back to childhood, and how dangerous this expedition can be not only for you but also for your relationships with others
– especially your family.