The First Stone by Helen Garner

Author:Helen Garner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2009-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

One curious detail kept surfacing, in the many accounts I heard of the Smoko in question: a woman who took off her top in the Junior Common Room and danced bare-breasted.

The first man who reported it to me described it bluntly as ‘clearly not a sexual act. It was “I am a woman and a woman’s been elected”. It was obviously a political act.’ As a veteran of the feminist social milieux of the seventies, I didn’t find this outrageous or even particularly strange. In fact it struck me as spirited and flamboyant, if somewhat rash. I simply made a note of it and passed on. But the little story kept popping up. I was not permitted to forget it. What was its status as testimony? Rumour, gossip, fact? I didn’t know how to evaluate it, or what it meant. But up it came of its own accord, like an urban myth, over and over, from almost every quarter, whether hostile to the complainants or friendly, whenever college people spoke to me about the Smoko. I never brought it up: it was always offered to me, laid down on the table in front of me like a mysterious tarot card. Those who claimed to have seen the bare-breasted dancer with their own eyes would present the story coolly, without making anything of it, as if merely adding atmosphere to their account of the evening. Others who had only heard it round the traps tended to raise it as if it proved something, although exactly what I could not determine.

I had a friend in Ormond, to whom I reported the rumour. At first he refused to believe it. Then, as I came back again and again with it, he stuck doggedly to his guns. ‘No no no. I do not believe it. It can’t be true. Perhaps someone was just dancing about triumphantly – perhaps she looked topless. Perhaps someone who was really drunk thought they saw someone topless in the distance, and told somebody else about it. It must be a collective hallucination. You’ve got to realise that colleges are extraordinary hotbeds of the most circumstantial gossip.’ After about the seventh reported sighting he was still obstinately maintaining denial. At the tenth resurgence he began to waver. He said, in the tone of somebody lost in realms of cloudy fantasy, ‘Well . . . I suppose that nearly everyone there that night was blind drunk . . . if it did happen, it suggests some sort of . . . Walpurgisnacht.’

But what fascinated and amused me most about this resilient little factoid was that the older the man who was discussing it with me, the more rapidly he would skid from plain statement into lurid embroidery. ‘Danced topless’ would become ‘danced topless on a table’, then ‘danced naked on a table’, then ‘danced newd on a table’. Each time I witnessed this slither into prurience, it was completely unconscious. When I drew the speaker’s attention to his slip, his face would go blank with surprise and embarrassment.

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