Literary Riff: based on Genesis.
‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow though shalt bring forth children’ – Genesis.
I remember the exact moment when I realized that the differences between boys and girls were so extreme that my friendships would never be the same again. There had been rumours all the way throughout primary seven of, ‘The Talk’ the one where they tell us what periods were all about and how not to have a baby. We sectioned off away from the boys, who teased us enormously, sneering over each and every one of our inevitably bloody futures. I had knots in my stomach as Mrs Deek rolled out T.V. and popped a video in the player.
‘WHAT IS A PERIOD? ‘, It bellowed.
I felt more solidarity to my female classmates after that. That for better or worse, today, tomorrow or in a few years, we were all (more or less) going to bleed. We knew it was going to happen.
Some girls didn’t feel the same way. Although we didn’t really understand it, a period meant sexuality, and sexuality was bad. One girl tried on a pad when she didn’t need one yet at our youth club to see what it was like. Another girl in our class caught her buying it, and spread the rumour that she was a, ‘dirty slut’ because she’d started her period. After that, we whispered the word ‘period,’ and took pinkie swears not to tell anyone if we were discussing anything vaguely in the realm of gender anatomy.
The boys that I was friends with told me they liked me better before I realized I was girl and slowly stopped inviting me to play video games and eat pizza with them after school.
In high school we learned all about how not to get pregnant, why condoms were important and how our lives would be over regardless if we had an abortion or kept these hypothetical children they were warning us about, until pregnancy became a fear.
I remember the first time that I ever let a boy touch me. It was warm outside and my arms were freckling. I was wearing ripped up, baggy, denim trousers that I’d had since I was 13, slung low so the waist band of my girl boxers were showing. It read, ‘I love boys pants’ and had apples and cherries printed on it.
I skipped school to sneak around the town with him, stealing kisses in corners of car parks, reading comics in the library, clicking together in the shadows.
We were lying on the grass together in front of a petrified tree. His hand walked across my stomach, and carefully disappeared beneath the fabric. We hadn’t been kissing, or talking and although I knew I should have felt some stirring in my bones or hear blood rushing to my head, I didn’t. I kept still and silent.
He put my trembling palm on top of a hard lump under his trousers, I felt it swell and quiver like a snake. My eyes grew to the size of the moon and sweat immediately pooled below my nose. I shrugged away, saying that it all hurt too much. He smiled and hugged me tightly. We lay on our backs under the shade of the tree for a little while longer, and we didn’t talk about the incident again.
When you’re a teenager, friends become your family. Parents never had much of an idea about anything, but your friends always know whether you’d want them to or not. That was the way it was. Sometimes my mum would comment if a name sprang up more than once,
‘What’s so and so like?’ and it would always be met with a quiet hum of consideration or a poorly executed lie.
If I had lived with dad, he would have made me switch my phone off at night and ask meet anyone who sounded slightly masculine, but he moved out before Hurricane Hormone arrived. It was your friends you spoke you to, that was always the way it was.
My best friend was first on the pill. Kate started menstruating two years before I met her, way before my body had even considered growing hair. She wore low cut shirts to school, and sometimes she rested her breasts on the table while she was talking. Her boyfriend had his hair cut in such a way that it looked like a mushroom was sprouting from his head. I knew him from primary school; he’d pushed me off my roller blades when I was six.
I had been kissing a beautiful boy on Friday nights in the underpass near my house. He was 16, with dark eyes and skin like rice paper. When he kissed me he always put his hands in the indents of my hips and slowly fluttered his fingers like moth wings. The first time I ever saw him I flipped and never quite got back on my feet.
One day before school Kate and I met at the tunnel where all the smoker kids hung out. The younger ones stood in little clouds together, hawking and spitting next to our shoes, while the older ones tried to sell off their half smoked ‘snout’. We went to the other side of the tunnel and hid ourselves behind a shallow wall. Under her rain coat she pulled out a white paper bag,
‘I got loads when I went to get the pill’ and she thrust it into my hand.
I opened it up to see a rainbow of condoms, different sizes, thickness, flavours, wrappers.
‘Do they come in different colours?’ I asked
‘Colours? They’re all in different wrappers, so do they come in different colours’
She looked at me with her mouth half open and her eyebrow cocked, ‘Jesus. Just put them in your bag, hurry up!’
She lost her virginity that weekend. I quietly held on to mine for another month.
She didn’t really talk about it much and said when I lost mine I’d understand why. It was just something that people did; like eating dinner, and now it was done she could get on with other things like apply for uni.
When I finally lost mine to the boy with dark eyes, nothing really happened. I hadn’t really known what to do. After being turned around, moved about, stood up and sat down to find a position that was good enough for him, I only felt aware how naked I was in front of another person. Afterwards I curled up like a shrimp; feeling like a petal had been plucked from me. I lay, staring at the back of someone who felt like a complete stranger.
I met Kate the next day and told her I knew what she meant.
I went on the pill a year later. It was the week before Christmas and we were both afraid we might be pregnant. I asked Kate to come in the room with me; she held my hand and I rolled my thumb along the ridge of her finger. Our faces burned red asking questions like,
‘Can you really get pregnant if they don’t do it in you’ and my big question mark:
‘Can you get pregnant if you start period the next day?’ – We weren’t pregnant, just terribly misinformed. The nurse was a stout woman, whose cheeks wobbled a little when irritated, which in this instance happened a lot. She answered our questions with a tone of disbelief and eventually asked where we’d gotten our sex education from.
Geary happened because the boy with dark eyes broke my heart. Geary liked to tell girls they were beautiful, I know this because he had been whispering it in my friends’ ear all night before she eventually got fed up with him. She burst in on us and flew into a frenzy because she claimed him first. Her breath smelled of vodka and cigarettes. He didn’t say anything at the time, but brought up when I’d bumped into him at a night club a few years later. He said he wondered how my body had changed since then. He never got to find out.
James with the first person I’d known with a kid. He became a dad at 23 and watched his then girlfriend birth a little human that he helped create. He told me she was so badly torn that she had to stay in the hospital for a week. She didn’t like me much, but I thought she was a super hero.
He would hold me like he would his daughter, tucked into his arms with my legs dangling like a rag doll. Whenever I tried to say something about it he would run a finger lightly across my eyelids and whisper, ‘shh’ until he thought I was subdued enough.
We were walking together after having a fight. It was the first time I had ever tried to blunt my sharp tongue, to be a little quieter, to take up less space in the hope of being desired just that little bit more. He took my hand and said, with a detectable hint of surprise in his voice,
‘I actually had a really nice day.’ I carefully stretched my lips at him into an ersatz smile. He patted me on the head and said, ‘Good girl,’
I looked at him incredulously and replied, ‘Aye, alright dad’
He made an arch of disgust with his mouth and his eyebrows flew up almost into his hairline. He said I had issues.
Dave was all long hair and rock and roll. He would appear every now and then in my twenties, always in the cross road at the end of a relationship where, completely depleted of energy and any stitch of my own identity, he would find me inevitably wailing into my pillow, ‘who am I?’
He was always on something. Life plus, I would call it. Life plus drugs. Life plus alcohol. Life plus obsession with new records/clothes/women. He took that one foot I’d have left on the ground and swept it away from me in haze of his vices, which I’d willingly adopt for a night. He was fast. I’d already have tasted his tongue in the first minute of the record playing. He held a little paper bomb in front of me and asked, ‘wanna go on a trip?’ I was never that into drugs when I was teenager, but his eyes were like honey and his lips were peach pink.
When I was 25 I was mad about Tate. I loved his body. You’re never really sure what to expect. It’s a game of chance when the lights go off. I trickled my fingers across his stomach and came across a familiar, softness indented on his right hand side, a small scar. I slid down his body and kissed him on his silver slither.He didn’t as much as flutter but his eyes were strangely bright in the dark.
They always thought you owed them something, and you’re never quite equipped with the tools to chisel away at their persuasions. As a teenager you don’t feel strong enough in your conviction when you say no. Maybe’s leave a gap, something they can wriggle into, wriggle next to you, try to wriggle right up inside of you. They all want to know you now, because you’ve got boobs under that top, because you wanted to wear a skirt, because you fancied a chat.
I always kept my eyes closed at their half open mouths. Their thick saliva flowing into my mouth, and their hot breath in my ear. They all had things in common. Eventually the moan of one would lead into the whimper of another, and you couldn’t remember who's freckle you liked so much on that earlobe.
You don’t try to explain it, not in hushed voices at sleepovers or drinking wine with the girls; after they’ve nuzzled you, bit you and lapped up every inch of you, you start to feel adrift in something unknown.
They all had that in common – when they were finished between your legs they would look at you as if they were surprised that you’re still there. You’re different now, the potential is gone, and they fucked that away.
You wonder how long you can keep it all up. You’re almost past your twenties and you don’t want to have children. You’ve never wanted to have children, ever since the secret of womanhood was passed on to you, ever since you let the first boy touch you – you just knew. You take your pill with pride, but they always want something.