I think the scene must have been brewing in my head for all those years. I saw it when I was eighteen and by the time I worked it out I was thirty-eight. I was in the passenger seat heading across the Story Bridge when the penny finally dropped. He was an amputee. Of course. He was an amputee. Why didn't I realise that twenty years ago? I turned to my husband and tried to explain, but he just shook his head and asked me why I had been watching that kind of thing when I was eighteen in the first place.
promotion
When I was eighteen we watched pornography together because we could. We'd rent the hard stuff from some video stores; you just had to ask them. It was always my job to ask because the boys were too embarrassed. It made them feel like perverts. They said that it was different for girls. It wouldn't look like I was dirty. I would just be liberal-minded, brave and bold and unrepressed. Still, every time I went up to the counter, the man there looked me up and down and it was clear he thought I might be a pervert — just one that he might contemplate fucking if the lights were off and he were drunk enough.
We watched the videos in the dark, because that's what you were supposed to do. We sat there with cups of tea, three of us, sometimes four. We watched, and when it was over we stomped around the flat for a minute or two before slouching off to our respective bedrooms. Sometimes we snickered at the terrible attempts at comedy — the one with the fireman, the one with the doctor, the one with the tradesman and the plumbing problem.
This one night, someone lifted himself up from out of the couch, knelt by the VCR and pressed rewind. We watched it again.
"You've got to be kidding me."
We pressed rewind and watched the video again.
And again. But each time we watched it we saw the same thing, a man with his arm buried up to the elbow in a girl who looked less than comfortable. She whimpered, and grimaced and winced.
Measuring the hypothetical length of his arm, we silently calculated the position of his fist, somewhere up near her stomach.
"How is such a thing even possible?"
We pressed rewind and watched the video again.
I'd been collecting pornography since I was twelve and someone had a photograph of a woman with a carrot in her vagina.
It was the day of the school swimming carnival. I never participated in sport, bringing notes from my mother to make sure I'd be exempt. But I've always loved to swim. I swim very slowly, but I can swim for hours at a time without tiring. I love the breathy rhythm of it, the way the surface of the water creeps above your ears, obliterating the world.
