Creepy and Maud (6 page)

Maud is my metallic-tasting belly blow. I thought I loved her with as much love as I had in me before she drew me the picture (and that’s a lot of love—it’s not like I’m busy loving anyone or anything else). But since the drawing, I feel really different. My love has become painful. All of a sudden I have a new understanding of, and sympathy for, Owen Liddell. His belief was overrun by his expectations. Poor bastard.

They teach belief at my school. They teach belief as if it’s a reality. Not a bad class, actually. It’s not academically challenging; you don’t have to think in
there. In fact, thinking is actively discouraged. It’s called Religious Studies, but of course it’s not a study of religion at all. I don’t care. I quite like it. Maud gets in trouble in that class a lot. Her one hundred words describing her experience of God, for example.

We all had to do it. Easiest hundred words we ever had to write. We all knew exactly what was expected of us. Maud handed in an almost blank page. She’d written ‘My Experience of God’ at the top of the page. The rest was blank. Everyone thought she was taking the piss. I thought it was the most creative and honest thing I’d ever seen. That was her mistake. You don’t get creative or, worse, honest in Religious Studies. She’s been punished, of course. They don’t call it punishment at our school, though. They call it ‘an opportunity for reflection’. Maud has been made to stand at the front of chapel every day for a week and deliver the reading. She has a small voice and a couple of times has had to start again because the teachers at the back couldn’t hear her. It’s like something out of a Brontë novel. I don’t know how she feels about it. Her face is inscrutable.

Our chapel is very modern. No high arches of echoic stone, no polished floorboards or frescoes on flaky rendering. I don’t know about anyone else, but if I’m going to have a good experience in chapel, I at least want a frigging stained-glass window. We have bright
white painted walls with felt wall hangings depicting scenes from the Bible. Felt. They’re not even stitched; they’re glued. All these little pieces of garish felt glued onto a garish felt background, some lifting in places like a junior-school collage. One of Paul’s legs has peeled right away: an amputee on the road to Damascus. Jesus and Lazarus look like characters from
South Park.
There are no shadows or dark colours for God to hide in.

Of course, we have a chaplain. Only member of staff allowed to touch the students. Which is somewhat ironic, if you ask me. He’s never touched me. But I’ve seen him holding someone’s hand, saying a prayer. The chaplain works very closely with the school counsellor. I wonder if he’s ever touched Maud. Maud doesn’t like to be touched. Maud prefers being smacked to being touched.

I don’t know many people who do like being touched, but most people will tolerate it. I don’t like it but something inside me tells me to endure it. Good manners? The feeling that objecting to the touching will draw even more attention? Something worse than attention, even—scrutiny, perhaps? Mum touches me sometimes. Her hand caressing the back of my hair as she walks by me feels like a mugging. I have to grit my teeth. I want to shout, ‘Too late!’ I want to put Dobie Squires on her. I wonder if I will feel this anger when
other people touch me. It’s an anger that makes me tired. She touches me to make sure I’m still real and to tell me she is real, too. There’s no belief in it.

I watch Limo-Lionel stroke Maud’s cheek and she screams. He puts his hand out very slowly and touches the side of her face with his fingertips. Gently, tenderly, even. She screams so fucking loud that I drop the binoculars. By the time I recover, she is standing in the same position with her eyes shut tight and her face screwed into a rigid fist. Limo-Li has left the room. It’s as if her scream has made him evaporate, or shattered him into pieces too small to see. Maud is a burning bush, an oracle. I think: That’s my anger. Over there in her room, raising the pressure in my eyeballs, twinkling in the synapses of my brain, my hatred of being touched in her body. I know that’s what I think because I write it down. And I wonder what would happen if we touched each other. Would we repulse each other like charged magnets held south to south, or would we short each other out and curl together like the knuckles of bone in the spine of a sleeping cat? Maud doesn’t open her eyes even after Limo-Lionel leaves the room. She keeps them closed for a while. I screw my face shut, too, so I can see the same colours she is seeing.

I held my eyes shut longer than she did that day. I held them shut for so long that when I opened them again, she was on her bed and my sight of her was obscured by that sticky lack of focus you get from wringing your eyes out behind closed lids. She was lying in much the same position as the figure in her drawing, except I knew from previous watching that she was plucking at her pubes. I think it dawned on me then. She hadn’t drawn a wank
panel at all. She had drawn herself, hurting herself. And there it was again. Understanding followed by the thought: I wish I didn’t know that.

We started talking to each other soon after that. Not in the usual way. There is nothing usual about it. It is exceptional, just as it should be. It didn’t seem mad at all, at the time. It seemed perfectly logical. More than logical. It seemed natural. But I see now that it was quite mad and there was no way it could be anything but mad. It started with me writing a question on a piece of paper and sticking it in my window, facing out. The question was:
Why did you scream?

Maud stood for a long time, looking at my question. It never occurred to me that she wouldn’t answer. Well, it occurred to me for just a second. But once she put her glasses on, I knew I was in. Everything slowed down then: I could hear Dobie Squires baring his teeth somewhere in the house and Mum having a go at Dad. Limo-Li was in his backyard, throwing hibiscus cuttings over the fence onto the roof of our shed. That hairless cat sidled across the fence capping in front of me and skidded down the side, all grace and nakedness. And Maud stuck the frontispiece of
Alice in Wonderland
in her window with her response. It was like our first touch.

And very disappointing. It was a beautiful glossy
colour plate. Alice was gazing up into a rich verdant tree, speaking to the Cheshire Cat. She was leaning forward slightly, clasping her hands behind her back with a quizzical expression, lips slightly parted. The Cheshire Cat was fat and orange and soft. Maud had written something in the tree but I couldn’t read it. Not even with the binoculars. I responded:

—Use darker pen can’t see that

Our first touch. How fucking romantic. Trouble was, Limo-Li had absconded with all her drawing materials. That tiny turd of charcoal she had was down to a nub. I watched her rummaging about, opening and closing drawers, until she found something that would show up on top of Alice. Purple lipstick. She wrote in slanting block letters. And she wrote:

—BETTER?

I gave her the thumbs-up and immediately regretted it. The thumbs-up: so Merrill. Then I stuck my original question back on the window.

—Why did you scream?

—BECAUSE I AM MAD

(No contraction of ‘I’ and ‘am’. I notice things like that.)

—What are you mad about?

—NOTHING I JUST MAD

—Angry mad? Sad mad? Crazy mad?

—YES

—I like mad

—WHY?

—Mad is alive

—I AM NOT ALIVE

—You are alive

Each lipstick communiqué had left an imprint on her bedroom window. Her own words in reverse. Patchy, greasy purple hieroglyphs. Maud leaned forward and rubbed at the marks with her thumb, leaving wispy daubs on the glass. It looked as if dozens of tiny winged creatures had been pinned out on the pane for observation. I wrote:

—Windex

And she gave me the thumbs-up.

My
Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM)
defines ‘mad’ as ‘mentally deranged; insane; senseless; foolish; angry; resentful; wildly enthusiastic (about) or fond (of); extremely excited or confused; frantic; temporarily overpowered by violent reactions, emotions etc.; unusually ferocious; with great energy, enthusiasm or haste.’ There’s also a reference to rabies that I don’t think is circumstantially appropriate. But all the rest is. She describes me. Just by being mad, Maud puts me on, like a piece of clothing or purple lipstick. By being mad, she is a thing I have drunk down
like Alice’s potion, becoming smaller and smaller until she is a tiny pulse in my stomach, a flicker in my lungs. I’m on her and she’s in me. Or as Maud would say it: I am on her and she is in me. It feels good.

We see each other at school the following week. We don’t speak to each other. It is understood. She doesn’t look at me while I am looking at her, so I can only assume she is looking at me when I am looking somewhere else. It is exciting to be furtive. It is required. This, after all, is not our venue. We have our own place in the space between windows.

My conversations with Maud usually last as long as her lipstick does. She has an enormous collection of lipstick, for someone who never wears it. She says her mum always buys her make-up for her birthdays. She says her mum always buys birthday presents for the daughter who lives in her head instead of the one who lives in her house.

—Ask for cash next time

—MUM SAYS THERE NO PLEASURE IN THAT FOR HER

—Fuck we wouldn’t want to deny her

—NANNA GAVE ME CASH AND I DID THIS

Maud lifts her T-shirt then to show me her bellybutton piercing. I’ve seen it before but not like this. Not with this stark consent. She pulls her T-shirt up hard and fast, like a flasher, and holds it bunched at the under-curve of her breasts. Her belly is whiter than I thought and so soft looking. Where mine is sunken, hers pops out a bit, a little fleshy swelling that disappears into her shorts. It’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. She has an innie bellybutton pierced on the lower lip. A gold sleeper.

—Nice does it get in the way?

—IN THE WAY OF WHAT?

—Anything?

—YOU WANT TO TOUCH IT?

—No

—LIAR

It’s true that I might be lying. I’m not sure. ‘No’ seems like the polite thing to say, but I reckon if I was in the room with her and she asked me, I might have touched her bellybutton ring. I wonder if it is warm to the touch. I wonder if the heat of her body is conducted through the gold like a little electric current.

I’ve never been keen on piercings for myself. I thought about getting one ear done, but apparently there is a gay side. I’m not sure of the etiquette, but I’ve heard that one side of your head is gay and if you get that ear
pierced you’re making some sort of statement about your sexuality. Not that there’s anything wrong with gay. Whatever floats your boat. I would just rather not make inadvertent statements about what floats mine. To avoid confusion, I suppose I could get both ears pierced, but that has a big whiff of pirate about it, if you ask me. The only other places left to us guys are the eyebrow and the tongue. Unless you want to go further south. I wonder if pirates are pierced south of the equator. That actually seems like something a pirate would do.

Maud fingers the sleeper a little bit, gives it a little tug. I feel my eyes wince. Then she rolls her T-shirt back into place and leans forward, her palms resting on the windowsill. I pick up the binoculars again. She isn’t looking at me, she is looking down. At the backs of her hands, maybe? Then she picks up that same question and, without looking at it or me, slaps it up against her window.

—YOU WANT TO TOUCH IT?

I can’t decide if this repetition of the question is confrontational or desperate. Or both, or neither. All I know is that it makes me uncomfortable. The way Maud leans against the windowpane, the way her shoulders slump inwards as if she’s been pierced in the chest by something sharp, the way her face is obscured by a tent of hair. I want to see her eyes. I need to see her eyes,
to work out what to say back to her. What if I don’t respond the way she wants? What if I don’t respond at all? Is this our first stalemate? Will this same question keep appearing again and again like that uneaten dinner my mother told me would be placed in front of me, meal after meal, until the plate was clean? (I was seven and it was tripe, for god’s sake!) Is this question Maud’s tripe?