The Best Australian Stories by Black Inc

Author:Black Inc.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC003000, LCO005000
ISBN: 9781921870163
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2011-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Onionskinny

Campbell Mattinson

There have been times when I’ve thought that the best thing about making love to an eleven-year-old was the pure secret joy of it, but the truth of it was that it was also a bloody, smelly affair that, like a drug, unnerved my life far longer than it intoxicated it.

How I ended up making love to an eleven-year-old is something I’m not entirely sure about, though another truth is that although I’ve not spoken to her for many years I hope Tania herself knows. I was eleven years old at the time too, if you’re curious to know, and what I do know is that it was in grade six of primary school, in the hot summer at the start of the year, when it all began to happen. What provoked it were two extraordinary events – and they still seem so – kicked off by a couple among us who somehow did the unusual thing of stepping beyond their years, in public. A particular boy and girl did this by leading a gaggle of us innocents down to the back of the wispy onion-grass cricket oval after school one day, where they promptly opened their mouths and kissed, really kissed, in one long, stunningly smooth and crowd-thrilling stretch.

I tell you, we all stood stunned.

If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it. I had never seen anybody do this. Not on TV. Not my mum and dad. Not like this. This was a girl named Julie and a boy new to the school, named Rocco, who I’d never taken much notice of other than that he had a killer throwing arm and had run me out at cricket once. Kissing. Deep. Long. Like adults. Better than adults. With such an intoxicating intensity that, looking on, it seemed as if as a group we’d suddenly discovered electricity.

Julie and Rocco put on a show like this most school nights for the next two weeks. Then their job, unwittingly, was done. Others followed – none with such clean execution, but all with more or less the same technique. Hands loosely on the other’s hips. Heads tilted. Mouths opened. Attached. Moving together. A crowd of boys and girls surrounding them, shifting constantly, constantly fixed.

Soon after this the entire year level headed to school camp in Monbulk, a place in the distant forested hills at the opposite side of our city best known for the summer berries grown there for the making of jam. Here, on the first day of this camp, the most extraordinary scene developed – so extraordinary in fact that it would lay out the fuse to the rest of my life.

Where the teachers were, I have no idea. But after an early afternoon of swimming and splashing in the pool, the whole group of year sixes moved out of the burning sun and into their dormitories – maybe the teachers could hear our riot and decided to let us wear ourselves out. Whatever. For the next two

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