* * *
She was twelve when puberty struck. In fact it not only struck, it knocked her off her feet and sent her rolling down an embankment into a ditch. And, from time to time, she lay there in the ditch, contemplating the two soft, rounded protuberances growing at an alarming rate on her chest. They were topped with little pink knobs which were easily irritated, often tingled annoyingly, and popped out against the fabric of her school blouse. Eliza, while in the ditch, also considered other strange phenomena with which her new body presented her. Bleeding every month was bad enough. And hair, where previously she had been as smooth as a hard-boiled egg.
“Dad, what does ‘horny’ mean, exactly?”
Children rarely advise their parents in writing when they are planning to ask an awkward question and so Richard took a moment to catch up. “I assume you’re not talking about the rhinoceros?” he said, to buy himself some time.
“No, father, and I don’t mean the timbre of the brass section,” said Eliza tersely. She was not disposed to be amused.
He consulted his own version of the Concise Oxford, the one he kept stored in his cranium. “In the U.K. it means a person whom one considers to be sexually attractive.”
She looked puzzled.
“And in the U.S. and Australia,” he continued, “it means a feeling of lust or sexual arousal.”
“Ah,” she said, at last. “Confusing,” she added, and wandered off without explaining.
Definition #2 seemed the most appropriate. She had heard it on American TV shows and from older girls when she was in Australia. By the time Eliza was thirteen, “horny” was what she apparently was, most of the time. It was far, far worse than the other changes she was going through. Being a task-oriented child, she found it extremely inconvenient, as there was still schoolwork, and music, and keeping an eye on the running of the household. It made her irritable and argumentative with anyone who made demands, or expressed themselves fatuously.
Although it is written that all teenage girls must be easily embarrassed and blush like crazy whenever a pretty boy walks by, Eliza felt relieved that she was attending a girls’ school. At that age boys had little to recommend themselves to her, being skinny, spotty, awkward, boring and usually smelly. They behaved like performing baboons whenever she passed, and her tolerance, not high at the best of times, was at an all-time low. She had an adder’s tongue, she was not afraid to use it, and the boys learned to give her a wide berth.
Richard emerged from his self-preoccupied state long enough to take note of his daughter’s developmental stage, and her bad temper. He also noted that her body appeared to have passed adolescence, collected its two hundred quid, and gone straight to Mayfair and a 32C cup. Because he did not wish her to instruct herself with the aid of a spotty adolescent boy, he took her education in hand at this point and he did not mince words.
“Victoria, do you know what an orgasm is?” Victoria being the form of address which usually preceded a serious talk. Some people would struggle with multiple appellations, but Eliza found them useful in a predictive sense.
She considered the question. “I’ve looked it up in the dictionary, and I’ve listened to my friends giggling about it, but even so I can’t say I actually know what it is.” No doubt she would have Googled it, too, had that been an option at the time. She had a precise way of expressing herself, due to having read a lot of old books and theatre scripts. She also tended, disconcertingly at times, to answer the question and only the question, so coyness, hints and passive aggression were largely wasted on her.
“I thought not,” he said, turning to the one of the bookshelves in his study, where they were busy reorganising a huge literary collection together. Richard had amassed all kinds of books containing explicit drawings and photographs of people’s naughty bits, as though fearful that some dystopian oppressive regime led by morality crusaders would order a library-to-library search and a bonfire in Trafalgar Square. Eliza, of course, had looked at many of these over the years and, because they were not forbidden, she didn’t find them particularly titillating, although quite interesting. He drew out an old leather-bound volume and opened it.
“See this bit,” he said, pointing to the clitoris which was part of a beautifully drawn display of female genitalia, flanked on each side by a ceremonial velvet curtain. “I want you to go to your room, use a hand mirror if you need to, find it, and play with it until you know what an orgasm is. I’ll be out for the next couple of hours.” Richard was not given to self-justification, and he probably had no idea that his instructions would not have been considered by the school social worker to be purely educational. Luckily for Richard, Eliza had not crossed paths with this worthy Bolshevik of the caring professions.
Fast forward to Eliza, somewhat later, lying on her bed, the hand mirror abandoned, and her face flushed with the efforts of her research. “Sweet Jesus,” she said, her latest attempt at the sophisticated expletive, although I doubt if any traditional Christian deity had much to do with the deliciousness of her sensations. Richard could have added, and don’t overdo it, but he didn’t, so Eliza took it as carte blanche to have as many orgasms as she wanted; her temper improved enormously and spotty adolescents continued to hold no lure for her.
* * *
Eliza attended a violin master class twice a week, which made her late enough to qualify for a lift home with her father. Richard, apparently not sharing her belief that she was bullet-proof, refused to allow her to walk home through the park, especially as the days got shorter. So she took a bus in the opposite direction and waited until he had finished for the day. If it was raining, she was forced to mix in the hallways with the drama students, trying to pretend she was nothing to do with their teacher, as one does at that age. Parents, no matter how celebrated and beloved, are just parents and an inevitable source of embarrassment outside of the home.
On one such day, when it was fine and she was sitting on her favourite bench, minding her own business, one of the academy’s male students wandered over to speak to her, as happened frequently, to her irritation. She had not seen this one before, and although she gave him her haughtiest expression, he seemed impervious to the hint. She had to admit he was rather beautiful, and strangely familiar. He said hello, and he smiled. At that point she lost control of her heart rate, blood pressure, and hormones.
* * *
Meeting one’s childhood friend years later can sometimes be disappointing, or the friendship can pick up comfortably where it left off. For Eliza and Billy it was neither disappointing nor comfortable. Thereafter they met occasionally and, apparently, accidentally. Their exchanges were either overly polite or blatantly rude, but it didn’t matter because the words they spoke to each other were just amorphous sounds, background noise to the humming wires of sexual tension between them. In an effort to regain a sense of normalcy, they each tried to imagine the other as they had been previously. They each tried to feel about the other as they had before, but neither of them managed it. The children they had been were other people, who now felt as unfamiliar as an old black and white photograph.
Neither of them was easy about the other being the object of libidinous desires. Billy, particularly, was appalled at the gonadal turmoil wrought in him by a fourteen year old. As well he might be. He had heard some of the young men in the class referring to Eliza as “jailbait”, yet he found himself looking for her, and feeling bereft if she failed to show up. At other times he avoided her, and the locality in which the MacLeans lived, as though a quarantine had been declared due to an infectious disease. She was apparently immune to his charms, since he could see none of the coyness or obvious flirting of the other girls closer to his own age. She wore her age like a suit of mail where other young men were concerned. Some tried to chat her up as she waited, and she would just look at them pleasantly and say “fourteen”. The word spread and she was left alone.