Taming the Beast (2 page)

‘It seems silly, I know.’

‘It
is
silly. I wish I lived in the middle ages. I’d have my own damn village by now.’

Mr Carr laughed. ‘Yes, and except for the leprosy and bad breath and illiteracy I’m sure you’d be very happy.’

Sarah felt herself growing hot. Hot because she was embarrassed by his laughing at her. Also, hot because of the way he was touching her thigh. His hand was as big as two of hers; it covered a lot of skin with every stroke. She kissed his wrinkle again, then his forehead, then his lips.

‘Sarah…’

‘So society doesn’t approve. We won’t tell them.’

‘Sarah…’

‘Yesterday was the best day of my whole life. I felt like Pip does after he first goes to Miss Havisham’s house. Yesterday made great changes in me; it forged the first link in the chain which will bind me. I need to find out what my chain will be. Thorns or flowers. Iron or gold.’

Mr Carr withdrew his hand from her thighs and stood up. He went to the window and opened the blind. He looked out on the empty quadrangle, shaking his head. ‘In sixteen years of teaching I have never come across a student even half as clever as you. And only rarely have I seen one as beautiful.’ He snapped the blind shut and turned back to face her. ‘No one can know.’

‘I know. That’s okay.’

‘No one can even suspect.’

She couldn’t stop smiling. She went to him and pressed her face to his chest. ‘We’ll be careful.’ She ran her hands over his back, feeling how big he was, how solid. ‘Careful and happy.’

He hugged her hard, as though he was afraid, as though he thought clinging to her would save him. She reached up and stroked his face. She kissed the curly blonde hair at the V of his shirt, and he moaned and said her name
ohSarah
.

‘What do I call you?’ She asked his collarbone. ‘Can I call you Daniel?’

‘No. You can’t get in the habit. If you call me that in class…’

‘Okay, that’s okay.’ She untucked his shirt and ran her hand across his belly. The skin there was so soft; if it wasn’t for the coarse hair down the centre, it could have been the belly of a child. His skin was so soft it could almost have been her own.

Mr Carr and Sarah arranged to meet after school at the petrol station around the corner. From there he drove to Toongabbie Creek, keeping both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road, talking about poetry in such a way that she wished they would never reach their destination. But then when the car was parked beside the creek, hidden from the road by paperbarks and scrub, Mr Carr did things to her that made words superfluous. Fucking was poetry unbound.

At sunset, he drove her home, stopping at the end of her street and warning her not to kiss him, just in case.

‘I don’t want to go,’ Sarah said.

He patted her hand. ‘It’s after six. Your mother will be worried.’

Sarah snorted. Her mother, who spent seventy hours a week at the university and the rest of the time in her home office, would not notice if Sarah stayed out all night. Sarah’s father worked even longer hours than his wife and barely knew he had a second daughter. Her sister, though, had no life and so noticed everything.

Sure enough, Kelly, who at seventeen was already middle-aged, pounced as soon as Sarah walked through the front door.

‘I was studying,’ Sarah said, because if there was one thing Kelly enjoyed more than nagging Sarah about her whereabouts, it was nagging Sarah about studying. But then Kelly wanted to know what she was studying and where she was doing it and with whom and why couldn’t it be done in Sarah’s room which their parents had equipped with a corner desk, a study lamp, an ergonomic chair, a computer and well-stocked bookshelves?

‘Mind your own beeswax,’ Sarah said, pushing past her sister.

‘You know you’re not allowed to have a boyfriend.’

‘So?’

Kelly rolled her eyes. ‘So, if you’re meeting a boy after school and Mum finds out–’

‘How would Mum find out unless someone tells her?’

‘So there is something to tell?’

‘Like I’d tell you.’

Kelly looked hurt. ‘I’d tell you.’

‘Like you’d have anything to tell.’

‘You’re such a bitch.’

‘Takes one to know one,’ Sarah said, and went to her room to think about Mr Carr until dinner time.

Sarah and Kelly were not allowed to have boyfriends because it would interfere with their academic development. When they started university they would be allowed to date, but nothing serious, nothing too time consuming. Women could not afford to be distracted by romance until they had established themselves in their careers. This did not bother Kelly, who was going to be a lawyer in a few years, and marry another lawyer when she was thirty and give birth to two future lawyers when she was thirty-two and thirty-five. She would not put herself in a position which could lead anyone to accuse her of depending on a man. Like their mother, Kelly would marry based on compatibility of life goals, which all intelligent people understood was the only way to ensure a marriage lasted beyond the honeymoon.

Sarah did not see what any of this had to do with her. She was fourteen years old with clear skin and shiny brown hair down to the middle of her back. She had read more books than anyone she had ever met, could speak French fluently and Japanese haltingly.
She had had sexual intercourse three times, had experienced orgasm twice, and was so in love and loved that her head swam whenever she tried to think about anything else. That was okay; she didn’t need to think about anything else anyway. Average thoughts were for average people. Which she was not. Which she would never be.

They quickly grew frustrated with the cramped back seat of Mr Carr’s Falcon and with the time wasted in driving and parking, and so met instead at the school. The classroom was too risky, Mr Carr said, but he had scoped out the school and come up with a number of alternative meeting places.

There was the English department book room, which was never used after hours and could be locked, but which was on the same floor as the staff room, so lovemaking had to be silent. The Agricultural storeroom was a safer bet, since it was a tin shed separated from the permanent school buildings by the student vegetable plots, but it was airless and filled with fertiliser, and the stink clung to their bodies for hours afterwards. The boy’s P.E. locker room was perfect – set well apart from the main buildings, lockable and with tiled floors which would announce any intruders early enough for Sarah and Mr Carr to flee through the back exit – but it was in use for after school sport every day except Monday. There was also the canteen (empty every afternoon but difficult to get to without being seen by half a dozen teachers and students) and the auditorium (as long as they were gone before five-thirty when dance classes were held).

Each day as they were parting, Mr Carr would tell Sarah where to be the next afternoon. Some days he was in a rush because he had a meeting, often he was late and twice he did not turn up at all. He left his phone turned on so he would know if someone was looking for him, and several times he had to leave half-way through fucking her, because another teacher rang and said they were on their way to the library or staffroom or wherever it was he said he was.

Some days, the door was locked and Mr Carr’s trousers off before Sarah had even put down her school bag. Other days he kept her sitting at his feet for hours while he lectured her on poetry, not touching her at all until it was time for her to leave, when he would beg her for five more minutes. If she agreed, which she almost always did, he would kiss her tenderly and make love to her. The one time she said no, that she had to get home, he looked at her with wet, wide eyes as though she had hit him. Then he slapped her, hard, and called her a tease and a time waster. He pushed her to her knees, unzipped his pants and with one hand on the back of her head and the other up against the locker room wall, he fucked her mouth until he came.

She slumped against the cold tiles, eyes and scalp stinging, trying not to choke or vomit. He zipped up his trousers and nudged her with his foot. ‘Well, off you go, Sarah. I know you’re in a big hurry to get home. Run along, now.’

Sarah grabbed his legs and pulled herself to a standing position. She removed a checked handkerchief from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, raised it to her lips, spat out the sour stuff in her mouth, refolded the handkerchief and replaced it in his pocket.

‘Disgusting,’ she told him, because it was, but she couldn’t sleep that night with wishing she had kept the handkerchief.

For two hours each weekday, Sarah Clark ceased to exist. Afterwards, she could never identify the exact moment it happened, but always there was the crossing over, the melting, the absorption. There was no border where her body ended and Mr Carr’s began. Mr Carr explained that this was what Shakespeare meant by ‘the beast with two backs.’ When two people were completely bound in the expression of love, they ceased to be separate individuals and became one creature. The act of passion, when properly performed,
created an organism larger than the sum of its parts; it created a beast with two backs, but one soul. Sarah knew it was no metaphor: if anyone were to stumble across their secret meeting place between three and five each day, they would not see a girl and her teacher making illegal, impossible love. They would see only a bucking, screaming two-headed monster. A dumb creature with no awareness of a world outside of itself. With no desire except to become more itself and less everything else.

For the other twenty-two hours a day, and through the interminable, school-less weekends, Sarah felt more separate than ever, as if the edges of her body were thicker than they had been previously, as if she disturbed the air when she moved through it. When she ran barefoot to the bathroom each morning, she felt every fibre of the carpet as it was flattened under her feet. Biting into her morning toast, she could feel the tiny grooves on the thin edge of each tooth as they serrated the bread. She could feel every individual taste bud being awakened by the strawberry jam. The stimulation was so intense that she couldn’t eat more than half a slice.

Brushing her hair, cleaning her teeth, washing herself in the shower – everything felt like masturbation. She fastened her bra thinking
the skin on my back is smoother than my face
. She poked at herself saying
this is my finger, these are my ribs
. She woke in the night because someone was touching the inside of her thighs; a stranger’s fingers were pulling on her nipples. An old man touched the small of her back when she was getting onto the bus and she shuddered as though he had stuck his whole hand inside her, as though he had taken a piece of her soul.

Her body was always hot. Her underpants always damp. Every night, her hair needed washing and her legs needed shaving. Her knees were sore more often than not, and small bruises appeared,
faded, reappeared on the insides of her thighs and wrists. Sometimes, there were bite marks on her buttocks or the back of her neck. She felt taller and stronger and walked with longer strides. She glowed and could not believe that everyone who looked at her didn’t
know
.

‘No one can know,’ Mr Carr said every day, before, after, sometimes during, their love making. Sometimes he softened the message, saying he wished he could tell the world how happy he was, what bliss he had found, and that he dreamed of a world where true passion would be celebrated not punished; other times he was stern, threatening even, telling her that if anyone found out, he would lose his job and maybe even go to jail. ‘Just think about that next time you get the urge to gossip to your friends.’

‘I don’t gossip,’ Sarah told him, which was true, but it was also true that she was driven to tell someone about what was happening. She was compelled to say it aloud –
I love him
– and have someone hear it and know it was true.

She thought about telling Jess, whom she had known longer than anyone else in the world outside of her family. Jess had lived in the two-story mock Tudor house next door to Sarah’s two-story mock Tudor house since the girls were four years old. Their parents played tennis together and went to all the same dinner parties. Sarah and Jess were friends not because they liked each other excessively, but because the circumstances of their lives meant that to
not
be friends would require a pointed decision which neither of them had ever felt enough dislike of the other to make. But even if they’d known each other a hundred years, Sarah would not tell Jess about Mr Carr. Jess giggled when she heard the word ‘penis’ and screwed up her face on ‘vagina’. She was bored by poetry and thought Mr Carr was a drag for making them learn it.

Jess was Sarah’s oldest friend, but her best friend was Jamie Wilkes whom she had only known for two and a half years. They met on the first day of high school, in the first class of the day, which was Geography. The students were seated alphabetically in a classroom laid out like a horseshoe, which meant that Clark was directly opposite Wilkes, both of them second from the front of the room, with only Burton and Yates ahead of them. The teacher told them to stare straight ahead while the assignments for the year were distributed. So for ten minutes, Jamie and Sarah had to look across the classroom at each other. Jamie kept looking away – down at his desk or over his shoulder – but his gaze always returned to Sarah’s. She smiled at him; he looked down, then up, and smiled back. When the assignments had been distributed, the teacher told them they would work in pairs to complete the first task. Knowing no one, Sarah raised her eyebrows at Jamie, who turned red and nodded. They found they worked well together and had the same sense of humour. Also, being short, skinny and asthmatic, Jamie was a natural ally to undeveloped, bookish Sarah. They hung out together on the fringes of their class and were happy there.

Jamie was sensitive to the sun, the wind, pollen and grass. The other thing he was sensitive to was Sarah. He monitored her every breath and mood, and so now that all her breaths and moods were for and about Mr Carr, Jamie knew something was up with her.