My Hundred Lovers Read Online Free Page A

shiver.

FIFTEEN

Giggling

    SHE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO remember the night that her sister was born but her body remembers her father gathering them up, the girl and her brother, and a long, flickering, dreamlike drive through deserted Sydney streets.
    In the week her sister Jane was born the local creek flooded and her mother and the new baby could not come home because the carpet was wet. The girl remembers feeling cold on the way to the hospital, a new unpleasant feeling she could not name twisting up her guts, for the body is always first to get the news.
    She was a beauty, was Jane. My mother, June, came from a long line of beauties. Milky Irish beauties for the most part, rosy-lipped and white of skin and teeth. June was one, and her mother Elsie too. Nana Elsie was so beautiful as a small child that one day as she was playing in the garden of the house where she lived in Orange, New South Wales, a rich childless couple stopped and begged to adopt her. And in her youth Nana Elsie’s mother Lil, my great-grandmother, was famous for being the most beautiful girl in Orange. Lil was the daughter of Joseph, an Irishman who owned the finest hotel in town. We called her Super Nan to distinguish her from Nana Elsie.
    Jane belonged: pale, translucent skin, blue eyes, grey at the centre, like a Siamese cat’s. Grown, her face carried the secret blueprint of beauty, in that its symmetry matched that composite face used in tests by advertisers and market researchers and university students to find out which particular human face is considered the loveliest. Jane’s face was mathematically correct: oval, with the right symmetry between forehead, eyebrow and cheekbone, between mouth and jaw.
    The girl’s body knew something was up. She stood shivering in the rain, looking up at the hospital room where her mother and the new baby were sleeping. ‘Look, up there!’ said her father. ‘Mummy’s up there. Wave!’
    It was night. It was raining. The hospital was closed to visitors and, anyway, in those days hospitals did not let children visit new babies because of germs.
    They stood shivering in the rain, waving at the darkened building, at the mother they could not see, at an invisible baby with a beautiful face somewhere inside. June and Jane, mother and daughter, so alike even their names were distinguished by only a single letter: June, Jane, tick and tock, the beginning and the end.
    When Jane grew up she had golden curls, like a girl in a story. She wore them in two pretty plaits and when the girl was eight she cut off one of her sister’s golden plaits: snip.
    She should have been ashamed of herself.
    She was old enough to know better.
    She was, perhaps, prefiguring the future. You might say that, in a modest way, she was avenging her coming self.
    The sister grew up to possess the most magnificent giggle you have ever heard, the kind you wanted to cause for the pleasure of hearing it.
    Jane’s giggle was like a rinse of sun, an unexpected present, and had the effect of making you happy. Getting Jane down on the bed and seeing her collapse her beautiful neck in order to escape the fingers trying to reach her most tickly spot was a joy beyond words. The hot pant of her breath, the flushed face, the giggling in her which set up an answering giggle in you so that before long all your insides were shaken up, exultant, and there was nothing but the happiness of flopping back exhausted on the bed, the giggling having pumped everything noxious from you and rinsed you clean. You should have known that one day you would wish to cut the giggle from her throat.

SIXTEEN

The dog who loved me

    NOT JUST ANY DOG, a prince among dogs. A chocolate labrador, a silky short-haired gun dog with a chocolate-coloured nose to match his coat, name of Rhett.
    At first an unruly puppy, lurking under tables, nipping childish toes. Little pointed shark-like teeth, razor sharp, soon to fall out, and the more you squealed,