EDUCATING LOUISE
Six months after laying her sister to rest, Louise makes a startling discovery about Cathy's brief and torrid affair with one of Sigrid's friends. The night they both discover that the world is a much smaller place there is a tectonic shift in their relationship as passion ignites, but then fate deals a mutual friend a cruel blow.
Sex. It's a simple three letter word but for centuries, thanks to the influence of religion it has been a four letter word. And yet without sex the human race would not have existed. Never has anything been so universally practised and so strictly controlled. My mother's only advice about sex when we were old enough was to 'read the bible.' I've read the bible half a dozen times and found no instruction and so I experimented with boys, eventually. I might have been the oldest child but it was Cathy who lost her virginity first at the age of eighteen.
I was nineteen before I got with a guy, Tommy. He was not very experienced. He initially had a thing for Cathy but she was going out with his mate and so I became next in line. I suppose that should have told me something because the afternoon we got naked in his bedroom was a quick and dirty affair after a chicken and champagne breakfast out at Ringwood Lake.
Foreplay was two cans of beer and a bit of a feel, the afterglow was the cigarette and a feeling that I'd missed something. Wasn't I supposed to feel better? Our next few attempts became a little better but I always got the feeling that he was distracted. After sex he just wanted to nod off and I'd lie there stroking myself, wondering what the hell I was doing with him.
He actually caught me touching myself and pushed my hand away.
"Quit doing that. Sheilas don't masturbate."
The fling ended after that. I can't call it a relationship because we only had sex twice over a three week period. I stopped answering his calls and he found someone else.
Over the years sex got marginally better but I guess I was affected by that miserable first attempt and my mother's constant sermons on immorality. There was one man, Gerry, the only married man I ever slept with, who really opened my eyes to sex. He was separated from his wife at the time and we got together for six weeks before he went back to her. I knew it would probably end like that. For all his faults though, Gerry never lied to me and I loved him for it. But he did take time to give me a glimpse into normal love making and at last I understood what Cathy had been talking about. I was twenty two years old at the time.
She was the only source of information about sex for me. More so than I, she rebelled against our mother in a very open fashion, moving in with one guy when she was nineteen before embarking on a series of affairs over the next few years whilst living either with me or different girlfriends. Two women she rented a room off were lesbians living in a house out in Kilsyth and by then I'd signed a mortgage agreement for my house in Croydon.
Suffice it to say, I had the basics well in hand by the time I started my weekly sessions with Agnetha, but like many women I still had questions and she became my sex therapist. To sit there asking questions that had seemed so silly or just plain crude was amazing. I felt as if I'd entered into a new world, one that had different rules. Up was down and left was right. She loaned me books on erotic massage, tantric sex and her favourite book. The Joy of Sex. The copy she gave me was a spare one and I still have it today. I devoured these books at home and slowly but surely I began to awaken as hidden desires started stirring.
It was slow at first. Masturbation had been forbidden and while I'd long ago accepted it was okay, it still felt weird until Agnetha took me through the routine, not physically of course! But one night she gave me a present, a dildo and a bottle of oil.
"When you feel ready, use it."
I used it that Sunday night and had just about achieved sexual climax when the phone rang and I instinctively picked it up.
"Hello?"
"Louise? Are you okay? You sound out of breath?"
My hand froze on the dildo.
"Sigrid, I um, I had to run for the phone."
"No you didn't, you answered on the second ring."
I closed my eyes and gathered my strength.
"Okay, okay, Agnetha gave me a dildo."
"Oh, okay," she chuckled, "you want me to call you back?"
"No, it's okay, what's up?"
"I was wondering if you wanted to go on a mystery flight? A friend of mine I haven't seen in nearly a year just dropped in. She's just broken up with her girlfriend for the last time and had two tickets for a mystery flight. She just gave them to me. It's for next Saturday."
"Oh," I sat up slowly and looked down at myself, "and you don't want to go with her?"
"Not happening, babe," she chuckled, "it's complicated. She and I were involved and I'm not going down that road with her again."
"Okay, sure, I'd love to."
"No worries," she replied, "well I'd love to chat longer but you go back to your new friend, I have to jump into the shower and iron my uniform for work tomorrow."
I sat staring at the dildo for a few minutes after she hung up with a stupid grin on my face.
Fuck that felt good!
The mystery flight was one of those brilliant concepts in the days before cheaper air fares. You got your tickets and just turned up at the airport and checked in. If you got there early, you wound up in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane or Perth but if you were late the choices were poorer and who wants to go to a shithole like Canberra? Fortunately Sigrid had done this before and we got a flight to Sydney, which basically meant a fifty minute flight and the whole day in Sydney.
It was one of those casual dressed down days. She wore a white shirt, jeans, and a jacket. I wore a blue and white striped shirt and jeans and due to Melbourne's 'four seasons in one day' climate, we both wore jackets on the way to the airport. By the time we'd been in Sydney for an hour we took off our jackets and headed to where all tourists go.
Kings Cross. Where else?
Sydney Harbour Bridge is just a bloody bridge, and nowhere near as long as Melbourne's Westgate Bridge and the Opera House up close is soot stained. The Cross on the other hand had cafés, shops, the fountain and of course the strip clubs, with bouncers out the front trying to shepherd people inside. Of course once you get your foot over the threshold you have to pay. Thankfully, Sigrid knew the tactic and artfully guided me away from a big Maori bouncer outside the Pink Pussycat and into a café down the road and it was there she finally told me about the woman who gave her the tickets.
"Her name is Wendy and we lived together for two weeks after she broke up with her partner, Toni, but then she got back with Toni and it ended," her eyes shifted as I sat bolt upright.
I knew those names, as I mentioned earlier, Cathy had lived with a lesbian couple but it was only when Sigrid mentioned Wendy and Toni in the same sentence that I made the connection.
"What?" Sigrid peered at me over the rim of her cappuccino, "you look like you just saw a ghost."
"Maybe I just heard of a ghost, Cathy lived with a lesbian couple, Wendy and Toni, they rented a house out in Kilsyth, just off Durham Road."
"Jesus," Sigrid looked away for a moment, "it's a small world. When did she live there?"
"Five years ago, no, five and a half years ago."
"That's about the time Wendy and I hooked up," she replied, "I never met Cathy but I did go around there once for a smoke. We must have missed each other like ships in the night," Sigrid looked at her cappuccino.
"Did Cathy ever talk about being with a woman?"
"No," I shook my head, "Cathy was straight although she certainly had gay friends."
"Wendy came around to where I was living in Box Hill with two other women and it all came out that night. Her girlfriend had fucked their housemate and so we put her up on the couch for two nights, but then she and I had a few drinks and a smoke and fell into my bed. It was doomed from the start, it was a classic rebound thing. We were only together for about two weeks and it ended when she got back together with Toni."
"I should check her diaries. She left a heap of diaries and she wrote about everything. If I had the inclination and thought it might help someone I'd get some writer to put it into a book."
We headed over to The Rocks after that and then down to Circular Quay before jumping on a train to Manly because I had it in my head to get on the Manly ferry. Only an Aussie understands that strange urge, it comes from the line of a song by Australian Crawl titled
Reckless.
I remember the song was going over in my head as the ferry cut through the water. Cathy was certainly reckless and if my suspicions were right, she'd indeed crossed over years before and never mentioned a thing about it to me. It bothered me though. Not the fact that she might have had sex with a woman but because she hadn't told me. There was no way in the world I'd have rejected her for something as trivial as that.
On the way back from the airport that night we grabbed a takeaway pizza from the pizza parlour in Croydon and settled down at my house with pizza, garlic bread, glasses of Coke and Cathy's diaries and we found it soon enough. Toni's mystery lover had, as we suspected been my sister. Wendy and Toni might have been officially separated for two weeks but the affair had gone on for a good six weeks before their secret was uncovered. It was rich in detail, Cathy was always a good writer but with this account she'd outdone herself. She'd not just written about her feelings but also the things they'd done together. After I'd read the final page I actually said that it could easily be turned into an erotic novel.
"You'd have to change the names of course," Sigrid cracked a grin.
