Emily Maguire is an Australian novelist, essayist and English teacher. Her articles and essays on sex, religion, culture and literature have been published in newspapers and journals including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Griffith Review and The Observer. Her darkly erotic first novel, Taming the Beast, has been translated into ten languages and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She lives in Sydney.
Serpent’s Tail also publishes The Gospel According to Luke.
Praise for Taming the Beast
‘A hard-hitting debut about modern adolescence’ The List
‘The Australian novelist eschews the obvious child abuse narrative for a more complex look at the nature of violence and sex in this emotional rollercoaster’ Herald
‘In short, this might not be the novel to recommend to your primmer friends. But it’s far too well-written to be discarded as shock-smut’ Arena
‘If you are seeking weight loss, this novel will give you far better results than any Atkins/South Beach/Cabbage Soup diet… By the end of Taming the Beast – through which I forgot to eat – I felt terrified, feverish, and green at the gills. And utterly awed’ Big Issue in the North
‘A disturbing and dark examination of obsessive love, with ferocious, unflinching sex and troubling, intense and bloody violence’ Bookmunch
‘Like Susanna Moore’s In the Cut and Barbara Gowdy’s We So Seldom Look on Love, this is an uncompromising look at sex, desire and unrequited love… Carefully narrated, this is a brilliant meditation on sex and power’ City Life
‘I was very impressed by Taming the Beast… Without being prurient, Maguire heads into extraordinarily dark psychosexual territory, withholding any easy answers’ Matt Thorne, Independent
‘This book explores the affect of the affair and its long-term implications through the woman’s eyes’ Australian Times
‘It’s a bleak, uneasy book, albeit powerfully written. It is also shockingly compelling’ Observer Magazine
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library on request.
The right of Emily Maguire to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 2004 Emily Maguire
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or manual, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
First published in Australia in 2004 by Brandl & Schlesinger
First published in the UK in 2005 by Serpent’s Tail
First published in this five-star edition in 2007 by Serpent’s Tail an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
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Sarah Clark felt like a freak for two and a half years. It started when she received a leather-bound copy of Othello for her twelfth birthday and ended when her English teacher showed her exactly what was meant by the beast with two backs.
In between, she read every one of Shakespeare’s plays and then moved on to his sonnets, before discovering Marlowe, Donne, Pope and Marvell. With peers who read nothing but TV Week and parents who were inclined towards the Financial Review, Sarah was forced to conceal her literary leanings. She hid poetry anthologies under her bed and read Emma by torchlight, the way boys her age read Playboy. For the first two years of high school, she came top of her English class without opening a single school book. It wasn’t necessary since the curriculum consisted of a few familiar texts, plus comic strips and newspaper clippings.
Then on the first day of the third year of high school, Sarah met Mr Carr. He was unlike any teacher she had ever encountered. For the entire forty minutes of his first class he spoke about why Yeats was relevant to Australian teenagers in the year 1995. In the second class, Sarah put up her hand to make a comment on something he had said about Hamlet. When he called on her to speak, she started and could not stop. She stayed in his classroom all through lunch, and when she re-emerged into the sunlight and the condescending stares of the schoolyard cliques, she was utterly changed.
Mr Carr began an active campaign to keep Sarah’s love of learning alive. To prevent boredom, he brought her books of his own from home and gave her a note that allowed her to access the senior section of the library. Every novel and play and poem was discussed in depth. She had never received a better compliment than when he told her that he knew she would love a particular piece because it was his favourite too.
While Mr Carr was shaping Sarah’s mind, her body was changing of its own accord. Small, painful breasts appeared overnight, as did ridiculously placed hair. She kept waking up in the middle of the night to find her blankets tossed to the floor and her hands tangled up in her pyjamas. Whenever the School Captain, a lanky blond boy named Alex, walked past, Sarah had an inexplicable urge to press her thighs together. She started to daydream about how to become more beautiful.
One day in June, Mr Carr asked Sarah’s advice on how to make Shakespeare more exciting for the class. The sonnets studied so far had failed to ignite a spark of enthusiasm in anyone except Sarah, and he thought she could help identify where he was going wrong. The problem, as Mr Carr saw it, was that many of the sonnets dealt with themes that couldn’t be understood by your average fourteen year old kid. Sarah told him that the average fourteen year old understood plenty about love and lust and longing; it was the language that put them off. After all, she said, every second song on the radio dealt with the same themes as old William, albeit with more grunting and less wit.
He laughed a throaty laugh and reached across the space that separated them. His hot, damp hand settled on her bare knee. Sarah noticed, all at once, that his forehead was shiny and the blinds were lowered and the door was closed and her heart was racing. She didn’t move or speak. Breathing was all she could manage.
Mr Carr leant forward in his chair and moved his hand to Sarah’s shoulder, then let it slide until it rested on one of her never before touched, brand new breasts. She felt like she might cry, but she also felt a sick kind of excitement. She sat very still with her arms at her sides and watched as he stroked and kneaded her breasts through the cheap polyester. His gold wedding band caught the light, and she wanted to reach out and touch it, but didn’t. He was saying her name over and over, so that it no longer sounded like her name at all, but like one those mantras that Buddhists used to go into a trance.
Sarahohsarahohsarahohsarhohsarah.
One of his hands slipped inside her shirt, under her bra, and she was shocked by the thrill she got when his fingers caught hold of her left nipple and squeezed. Ohsarah. He moved forward, right to the edge of the chair, his head lowered to her chest, his shins pressed hard against hers. She had to bite down on her lip to stop herself from laughing. How strange that a smart and accomplished man could be reduced to such an undignified state just by touching her breasts!
Mr Carr stopped chanting her name, and the room was silent except for his rasping breath and the rustle of her shirt as he unbuttoned it. Then Sarah felt his tongue sweep across her nipple; she let out a surprised gasp. This excited Mr Carr even more, and his head all but disappeared into her half open shirt as he fell to his knees in front of her. A giggle escaped her, which Mr Carr obviously interpreted as encouragement. OhSarahohSarahohohohohsobeautifulSarahoh.
He pushed her legs open and knelt between them, his head still buried in her chest but his hands pushing up her scratchy pleated skirt. Sarah tried to remember which underpants she had put on that morning. She hoped it was not the pair with little ducks. If Mr Carr saw little ducks on her underwear he would think she was a child, and then he would stop. But he couldn’t see her underwear anyway, because his mouth was still latched onto her nipple as if he was a hungry baby and she was a mother with heavy, milk filled breasts, instead of a girl with hardly enough to fill a training bra.
She liked the way it felt, the sucking. It was gentler and more rhythmic than she had expected. In the movies it all looked so frantic and out of control. Not that Sarah had anything to compare it to, but he seemed good at what he was doing: sucking her nipple and stroking her through her underwear in perfect time. Stroke and suck, stroke and suck.
The tempo changed when he plunged his hot, unexpected hand into her underpants. He seemed to be searching for something, his hands moving quickly, stroking and pressing one hidden spot after another and then moving on. Sarah thought she knew what he was trying to find and wondered why he was having so much trouble. She considered telling him that he had missed it, but found that she did not have any words to describe what it was he had passed over, or what it was that she expected him to do when he found it.
But then a flash of heat shot through her body, and she cried out in surprise as her hips bucked upwards. She felt the flash of heat again, followed by another and another as he continued pressing the secret spot, and she could not stop the noise that rose in her throat from escaping as she felt herself dissolving into his hand.
Mr Carr pulled away abruptly, gasping for air. OhSarah wrong this is so wrong oh Sarah ohsarahsowrongohsarahoh.
This was the best Sarah had ever felt. Ever. She wondered what to do to make him keep going. Then she realised her hands had been by her sides the whole time. She placed them on his stooped shoulders, holding him back, and he looked up, his face creased with need and guilt at that need. She slid from her chair, so she was on her knees in front of him, and slowly unzipped his trousers. She felt removed from herself, watching these stranger’s hands reach in and take hold of this odd, hard, hot thing. It was as if all reason had left her and the part of her that was just instinct and heat had taken over.
Mr Carr groaned and his chant became frenzied and fast, not even distinguishable as language anymore, just a low desperate growl. He pushed her hand away, and for a second she thought he was angry, but then he said OhGodohGodohGod and fell on her. The pain tore through her, and she had to shove her fist into her mouth to stop from crying out. Then the pain stopped, and she felt warm and calm. Mr Carr was looking into her eyes, grunting at her. She touched his face and hair; he grimaced and moved faster. Then with one last, louder grunt, he rolled off her, leaving a warm, sticky mess.
The entire incident had taken less than ten minutes. As she buttoned her shirt, she could hear kids yelling outside the window, the sound of a netball whistle, a car engine turning over. She took a tissue from the box on his desk and wiped away the stuff trickling down her thighs. Mr Carr watched her while fat tears slid down his red cheeks. Sarah finished her clean up, and then she went to him and wiped his face.
‘It’s okay,’ she told him. ‘You don’t have to feel bad.’
‘I don’t feel bad, Sarah. That’s the tragedy.’
Because he was older and her teacher and married with children, Mr Carr could absolutely not allow a repeat of yesterday’s incident. ‘Oh,’ said Sarah, who had thought the point of her staying back after school again was so that yesterday’s incident could be repeated. The way he had kissed her as soon as the door was locked, the way he had run his fingers through her hair while he asked her how she was, the way he had begun to stroke her thigh as soon as they sat down, all seemed to confirm her initial assumption.
‘I don’t care about that stuff. I just feel happy being with you.’
‘Oh, Sarah…’ He squeezed her thigh. ‘I wish being happy with each other was enough, but it isn’t. I would lose my job, my kids. I could go to jail. The law doesn’t care how happy we feel. You’re fourteen years old, and according to the law you aren’t capable of recognising what makes you happy.’
‘Well, the law is wrong.’ Sarah did what she had been thinking of doing ever since they sat down: she leant forward and kissed the crease between his eyebrows. ‘It’s insulting to assume I don’t know what I want. You know for most of history girls my age were expected to be married and popping out babies. It’s ridiculous to think that five hundred years ago I would be considered capable of raising a family, but now I’m not even allowed to decide if I like a guy or not.’
‘It seems silly, I know.’
‘It is silly. I wish I lived in the middle ages. I’d have my own damn village by now.’
Mr Carr laughed. ‘Yes, and except for the leprosy and bad breath and illiteracy I’m sure you’d be very happy.’
Sarah felt herself growing hot. Hot because she was embarrassed by his laughing at her. Also, hot because of the way he was touching her thigh. His hand was as big as two of hers; it covered a lot of skin with every stroke. She kissed his wrinkle again, then his forehead, then his lips.
‘Sarah…’
‘So society doesn’t approve. We won’t tell them.’
‘Sarah…’
‘Yesterday was the best day of my whole life. I felt like Pip does after he first goes to Miss Havisham’s house. Yesterday made great changes in me; it forged the first link in the chain which will bind me. I need to find out what my chain will be. Thorns or flowers. Iron or gold.’
Mr Carr withdrew his hand from her thighs and stood up. He went to the window and opened the blind. He looked out on the empty quadrangle, shaking his head. ‘In sixteen years of teaching I have never come across a student even half as clever as you. And only rarely have I seen one as beautiful.’ He snapped the blind shut and turned back to face her. ‘No one can know.’
‘I know. That’s okay.’
‘No one can even suspect.’
She couldn’t stop smiling. She went to him and pressed her face to his chest. ‘We’ll be careful.’ She ran her hands over his back, feeling how big he was, how solid. ‘Careful and happy.’
He hugged her hard, as though he was afraid, as though he thought clinging to her would save him. She reached up and stroked his face. She kissed the curly blonde hair at the V of his shirt, and he moaned and said her name ohSarah.
‘What do I call you?’ She asked his collarbone. ‘Can I call you Daniel?’
‘No. You can’t get in the habit. If you call me that in class…’
‘Okay, that’s okay.’ She untucked his shirt and ran her hand across his belly. The skin there was so soft; if it wasn’t for the coarse hair down the centre, it could have been the belly of a child. His skin was so soft it could almost have been her own.
Mr Carr and Sarah arranged to meet after school at the petrol station around the corner. From there he drove to Toongabbie Creek, keeping both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road, talking about poetry in such a way that she wished they would never reach their destination. But then when the car was parked beside the creek, hidden from the road by paperbarks and scrub, Mr Carr did things to her that made words superfluous. Fucking was poetry unbound.
At sunset, he drove her home, stopping at the end of her street and warning her not to kiss him, just in case.
‘I don’t want to go,’ Sarah said.
He patted her hand. ‘It’s after six. Your mother will be worried.’
Sarah snorted. Her mother, who spent seventy hours a week at the university and the rest of the time in her home office, would not notice if Sarah stayed out all night. Sarah’s father worked even longer hours than his wife and barely knew he had a second daughter. Her sister, though, had no life and so noticed everything.
Sure enough, Kelly, who at seventeen was already middle-aged, pounced as soon as Sarah walked through the front door.
‘I was studying,’ Sarah said, because if there was one thing Kelly enjoyed more than nagging Sarah about her whereabouts, it was nagging Sarah about studying. But then Kelly wanted to know what she was studying and where she was doing it and with whom and why couldn’t it be done in Sarah’s room which their parents had equipped with a corner desk, a study lamp, an ergonomic chair, a computer and well-stocked bookshelves?
‘Mind your own beeswax,’ Sarah said, pushing past her sister.
‘You know you’re not allowed to have a boyfriend.’
‘So?’
Kelly rolled her eyes. ‘So, if you’re meeting a boy after school and Mum finds out–’
‘How would Mum find out unless someone tells her?’
‘So there is something to tell?’
‘Like I’d tell you.’
Kelly looked hurt. ‘I’d tell you.’
‘Like you’d have anything to tell.’
‘You’re such a bitch.’
‘Takes one to know one,’ Sarah said, and went to her room to think about Mr Carr until dinner time.
Sarah and Kelly were not allowed to have boyfriends because it would interfere with their academic development. When they started university they would be allowed to date, but nothing serious, nothing too time consuming. Women could not afford to be distracted by romance until they had established themselves in their careers. This did not bother Kelly, who was going to be a lawyer in a few years, and marry another lawyer when she was thirty and give birth to two future lawyers when she was thirty-two and thirty-five. She would not put herself in a position which could lead anyone to accuse her of depending on a man. Like their mother, Kelly would marry based on compatibility of life goals, which all intelligent people understood was the only way to ensure a marriage lasted beyond the honeymoon.
Sarah did not see what any of this had to do with her. She was fourteen years old with clear skin and shiny brown hair down to the middle of her back. She had read more books than anyone she had ever met, could speak French fluently and Japanese haltingly. She had had sexual intercourse three times, had experienced orgasm twice, and was so in love and loved that her head swam whenever she tried to think about anything else. That was okay; she didn’t need to think about anything else anyway. Average thoughts were for average people. Which she was not. Which she would never be.
They quickly grew frustrated with the cramped back seat of Mr Carr’s Falcon and with the time wasted in driving and parking, and so met instead at the school. The classroom was too risky, Mr Carr said, but he had scoped out the school and come up with a number of alternative meeting places.
There was the English department book room, which was never used after hours and could be locked, but which was on the same floor as the staff room, so lovemaking had to be silent. The Agricultural storeroom was a safer bet, since it was a tin shed separated from the permanent school buildings by the student vegetable plots, but it was airless and filled with fertiliser, and the stink clung to their bodies for hours afterwards. The boy’s P.E. locker room was perfect – set well apart from the main buildings, lockable and with tiled floors which would announce any intruders early enough for Sarah and Mr Carr to flee through the back exit – but it was in use for after school sport every day except Monday. There was also the canteen (empty every afternoon but difficult to get to without being seen by half a dozen teachers and students) and the auditorium (as long as they were gone before five-thirty when dance classes were held).
Each day as they were parting, Mr Carr would tell Sarah where to be the next afternoon. Some days he was in a rush because he had a meeting, often he was late and twice he did not turn up at all. He left his phone turned on so he would know if someone was looking for him, and several times he had to leave half-way through fucking her, because another teacher rang and said they were on their way to the library or staffroom or wherever it was he said he was.
Some days, the door was locked and Mr Carr’s trousers off before Sarah had even put down her school bag. Other days he kept her sitting at his feet for hours while he lectured her on poetry, not touching her at all until it was time for her to leave, when he would beg her for five more minutes. If she agreed, which she almost always did, he would kiss her tenderly and make love to her. The one time she said no, that she had to get home, he looked at her with wet, wide eyes as though she had hit him. Then he slapped her, hard, and called her a tease and a time waster. He pushed her to her knees, unzipped his pants and with one hand on the back of her head and the other up against the locker room wall, he fucked her mouth until he came.
She slumped against the cold tiles, eyes and scalp stinging, trying not to choke or vomit. He zipped up his trousers and nudged her with his foot. ‘Well, off you go, Sarah. I know you’re in a big hurry to get home. Run along, now.’
Sarah grabbed his legs and pulled herself to a standing position. She removed a checked handkerchief from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, raised it to her lips, spat out the sour stuff in her mouth, refolded the handkerchief and replaced it in his pocket.
‘Disgusting,’ she told him, because it was, but she couldn’t sleep that night with wishing she had kept the handkerchief.
For two hours each weekday, Sarah Clark ceased to exist. Afterwards, she could never identify the exact moment it happened, but always there was the crossing over, the melting, the absorption. There was no border where her body ended and Mr Carr’s began. Mr Carr explained that this was what Shakespeare meant by ‘the beast with two backs.’ When two people were completely bound in the expression of love, they ceased to be separate individuals and became one creature. The act of passion, when properly performed, created an organism larger than the sum of its parts; it created a beast with two backs, but one soul. Sarah knew it was no metaphor: if anyone were to stumble across their secret meeting place between three and five each day, they would not see a girl and her teacher making illegal, impossible love. They would see only a bucking, screaming two-headed monster. A dumb creature with no awareness of a world outside of itself. With no desire except to become more itself and less everything else.
For the other twenty-two hours a day, and through the interminable, school-less weekends, Sarah felt more separate than ever, as if the edges of her body were thicker than they had been previously, as if she disturbed the air when she moved through it. When she ran barefoot to the bathroom each morning, she felt every fibre of the carpet as it was flattened under her feet. Biting into her morning toast, she could feel the tiny grooves on the thin edge of each tooth as they serrated the bread. She could feel every individual taste bud being awakened by the strawberry jam. The stimulation was so intense that she couldn’t eat more than half a slice.
Brushing her hair, cleaning her teeth, washing herself in the shower – everything felt like masturbation. She fastened her bra thinking the skin on my back is smoother than my face. She poked at herself saying this is my finger, these are my ribs. She woke in the night because someone was touching the inside of her thighs; a stranger’s fingers were pulling on her nipples. An old man touched the small of her back when she was getting onto the bus and she shuddered as though he had stuck his whole hand inside her, as though he had taken a piece of her soul.
Her body was always hot. Her underpants always damp. Every night, her hair needed washing and her legs needed shaving. Her knees were sore more often than not, and small bruises appeared, faded, reappeared on the insides of her thighs and wrists. Sometimes, there were bite marks on her buttocks or the back of her neck. She felt taller and stronger and walked with longer strides. She glowed and could not believe that everyone who looked at her didn’t know.
‘No one can know,’ Mr Carr said every day, before, after, sometimes during, their love making. Sometimes he softened the message, saying he wished he could tell the world how happy he was, what bliss he had found, and that he dreamed of a world where true passion would be celebrated not punished; other times he was stern, threatening even, telling her that if anyone found out, he would lose his job and maybe even go to jail. ‘Just think about that next time you get the urge to gossip to your friends.’
‘I don’t gossip,’ Sarah told him, which was true, but it was also true that she was driven to tell someone about what was happening. She was compelled to say it aloud – I love him – and have someone hear it and know it was true.
She thought about telling Jess, whom she had known longer than anyone else in the world outside of her family. Jess had lived in the two-story mock Tudor house next door to Sarah’s two-story mock Tudor house since the girls were four years old. Their parents played tennis together and went to all the same dinner parties. Sarah and Jess were friends not because they liked each other excessively, but because the circumstances of their lives meant that to not be friends would require a pointed decision which neither of them had ever felt enough dislike of the other to make. But even if they’d known each other a hundred years, Sarah would not tell Jess about Mr Carr. Jess giggled when she heard the word ‘penis’ and screwed up her face on ‘vagina’. She was bored by poetry and thought Mr Carr was a drag for making them learn it.
Jess was Sarah’s oldest friend, but her best friend was Jamie Wilkes whom she had only known for two and a half years. They met on the first day of high school, in the first class of the day, which was Geography. The students were seated alphabetically in a classroom laid out like a horseshoe, which meant that Clark was directly opposite Wilkes, both of them second from the front of the room, with only Burton and Yates ahead of them. The teacher told them to stare straight ahead while the assignments for the year were distributed. So for ten minutes, Jamie and Sarah had to look across the classroom at each other. Jamie kept looking away – down at his desk or over his shoulder – but his gaze always returned to Sarah’s. She smiled at him; he looked down, then up, and smiled back. When the assignments had been distributed, the teacher told them they would work in pairs to complete the first task. Knowing no one, Sarah raised her eyebrows at Jamie, who turned red and nodded. They found they worked well together and had the same sense of humour. Also, being short, skinny and asthmatic, Jamie was a natural ally to undeveloped, bookish Sarah. They hung out together on the fringes of their class and were happy there.
Jamie was sensitive to the sun, the wind, pollen and grass. The other thing he was sensitive to was Sarah. He monitored her every breath and mood, and so now that all her breaths and moods were for and about Mr Carr, Jamie knew something was up with her.
‘Are you sick?’ he asked her when she got to school on the Tuesday of the sixth week of her affair with Mr Carr.
‘Never better.’ It was true. Yesterday afternoon Mr Carr had read to her from Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. He told her that Donne’s love poems were inspired by his teenaged student whom he later eloped with. ‘Imagine,’ he said to Sarah, unbuttoning her shirt, ‘if Donne had not loved his young student.’ He removed her shirt and bra and covered both her breasts with his hands. ‘What a loss to Western culture. What a tragic, tragic loss that would have been.’
‘You’re all flushed,’ Jamie said. ‘Like when you had that fever at camp last year. Your eyes are all bloodshot too. I really think you should go–’
‘I’m fine!’ Sarah laughed. ‘You’re such a nana.’
‘Jess said you haven’t been walking home with her lately. She thinks you’re pissed off at her.’
‘She’s such a drama queen. I’ve been staying back a bit. Studying in the library.’
‘Why don’t you just go home and study?’
Sarah ignored him. She mentally rehearsed the Thomas Carew poem she had memorised last night. She was going to recite it to Mr Carr this afternoon. It was called The Rapture, and she hoped it would send him into one. There was a bit in it she was sure was talking about a clitoris, and a whole lot of stuff about fluids and elixirs which made her think about the mess her underwear was in when she got home each day.
‘I think you’re hiding something, Miss Clark.’ Jamie used the fake-confident voice that he used to tell his older brother to get out of his room or he’d kick his head in. ‘I think maybe you’re staying back after school to meet up with someone.’
Her heart beat faster. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe because you spend the last hour of every day playing with your hair. And you check your watch every twenty seconds and then bolt for the door as soon as the bell rings.’
‘I do not.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You retied your plait four times in half an hour yesterday afternoon.’
Mr Carr liked to play with her hair. He sometimes used her ponytail as a sort of lead, pulling her head where he wanted it to go, or if she had plaits either side he used them like reins. Yesterday he had wrapped her single plait around his cock, then released her hair and had her drag its length over his body.
‘Ha! You’re blushing. Why won’t you tell me? I thought we were friends?’
‘Jamie, we are, it’s just…’ She checked to make sure no one was in earshot. ‘No one can know, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m serious. There will be major, major trouble if anyone finds out. Going to gaol kind of trouble.’
Jamie laughed. ‘You call Jess a drama queen! Why would anyone go to gaol for–’ He blinked. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘Because I’m underage and he’s a teacher.’ Her smile was unstoppable, even though she knew this moment should be a serious one.
‘What? You’re kidding?’ He blinked fast. ‘You are kidding?’
‘No. I’ve been meeting Mr Carr every day after school. I’m having an affair with him.’
Jamie blinked at her for a few more seconds. Then he shook his head and punched her shoulder. ‘Bitch,’ he said. ‘You had me going there for a second.’
While Mr Carr continued to warn Sarah against revealing their secret, he flirted – thrillingly! – with self-exposure. One time, he had the office messenger deliver an envelope to her during second period Maths. On the outside it said: Public Speaking Competition Entry Form. Inside, the note said: Your face, contorted in agonising pleasure, just appeared in my mind unbidden. I am trapped behind my desk, burning. Another note, dropped onto her desk during English class, while she was deep in thought, her pen hanging from between her lips, said O, how I wish I was that ballpoint pen. Sometimes, passing her in the hallways, he brushed her arse or breasts or mouthed words obscene or romantic or both.
When their affair was two months old, Sarah gave a presentation to the class about Emily Dickinson: a poet whom she knew Mr Carr believed should be expunged from the canon. Sarah took this as a personal insult and was determined to change his mind. While her classmates dozed up the back of the room, passed notes or covertly listened to the Walkmans hidden in their pencil cases, Sarah passionately argued Emily Dickinson’s significance. Mr Carr listened intently, interrupting now and then to clarify a point or ask a question. ‘I’m not sure about your claim that Dickinson was comical. Can we have an example?’
‘Of course.’ Sarah looked him in the eye and recited Poem XI:
‘Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails
Assent and you are sane;
Demur, – you’re straightway dangerous
And handled with a chain.’
He slow-clapped her, smiling. ‘Very impressive, but perhaps wry would be a better word than comical?’ He leant forward in his chair. ‘And I hope you understand how provocative you’re being. Chains as a penalty for dissent? My, my, Sarah.’
Sarah felt her face growing hot. She looked away from him, out at the class, but no one – except Jamie, who was staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at an unseeing Mr Carr – seemed to have noticed his comment. They were not listening to nerdy Sarah Clark and boring Mr Carr debating some dead chick’s poetry; they didn’t realise they were witnessing foreplay.
Sarah finished her presentation with an anecdote: ‘Emily Dickinson once had her work rejected by an editor who criticised her unconventional use of punctuation, specifically her overuse of dashes. Her reply was to the point: “I am in danger, Sir.” Reading her poems today we can feel her racing heart, her quick breath, the hot blood rushing through her veins. We feel her urgency and it becomes ours.’
Mr Carr thanked her for her work and called on the next student to come forward, but after class he whispered for her to meet him at the petrol station now, and though they both had half a day of classes remaining, they fled to their old parking spot by the creek and Mr Carr told her that her speech had filled him with unbearable longing.
‘I never realised Emily Dickinson could be erotic,’ he said and Sarah told him that nothing had ever seemed erotic until he showed her that everything was.
The next afternoon in the canteen, Mr Carr was in a foul temper. He accused Sarah of purposely provoking him into the sort of risky behaviour which would get him fired. He called her manipulative and vicious, which made her cry. He told her she was ugly when she cried, and so she held her breath until she had control of herself. Feeling dizzy and ashamed, she pressed her ugly face into his chest and was weak with relief when he stroked her hair and told her he was sorry and that she was so beautiful he could hardly stand it.
‘It’s my wife,’ he said. ‘She called the office yesterday afternoon, and they told her I’d gone home sick. She cried half the night. I didn’t know what to say to her.’
Sarah lifted her head, stood on her toes and kissed his lips. She rubbed his back and kissed him behind his ears. ‘Yeah, I nearly got busted too. My stupid sister’s stupid friend saw me walking across the car park. I said I was going to get something out of Miss Wright’s car for her. Don’t think she believed me…’ Sarah kissed his Adam’s apple. ‘We better not leave like that again.’
‘Sooner or later, we will be found out.’
‘Maybe by then it won’t matter.’
He stepped back and looked down into her face. ‘How could it ever not matter? I love my wife, Sarah. I love my kids. Do you have any idea what knowing about us would do to them?’
Sarah froze. It had never occurred to her that he didn’t want what she did. She had thought of his family as an obstacle, like her parents and her age. She had assumed all obstacles would be overcome, that love was an ever fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is not shaken. But if love was what he had for his wife, then Sarah was the tempest. She was the impediment which would not be admitted.
‘Are you dumping me?’
‘Am I dumping you?’ Mr Carr laughed. ‘God, what an expression.’
Sarah couldn’t help it; she began to cry again. ‘Why are you being so mean?’
‘Oh, precious.’ He folded her up in his arms. ‘It’s ridiculous to think of this, us, as the kind of adolescent romance that could be ended by dumping. As if we could stop this just by speaking a few little words. I wish it was that easy, truly. I wish I could say “it’s over” and it would be. You and I won’t stop needing each other until we’re both dead and buried.’
‘Until my quaint honour turns to dust?’
‘My God, you are remarkable.’ Mr Carr lifted her easily and sat her on the preparation bench. He parted her legs and stood between them, his hands and hers working together to undo his zipper, remove her underpants, push his trousers and jocks to his knees. ‘How is it possible that you always know exactly what to say? I’ve been such a grumpy, mean man and you, oh!’ He pushed inside her. ‘Oh, Sarah, I fear I’m going to wear your quaint honour into dust before your fifteenth birthday. Your poor little, oh, God, am I hurting you?’
‘No,’ she said, although he was.
‘I am, aren’t I?’ He moved faster. ‘Tell me, Sarah, please. I’m hurting you, yes?’
‘Yes, it hurts. But I like it, Mr Carr, really.’
He groaned. He was finished. ‘Oh, my little Sarah. You always know what to say.’
‘Sarah?’ Jamie asked. It was Friday night and they were sprawled on Jamie’s living room couch. MTV was on, but neither of them was watching it. Sarah was reading Madame Bovary and Jamie was flicking through Rolling Stone.
‘Mmm?’ She did not look up. Jamie hadn’t said more than two words to her since the Emily Dickinson presentation yesterday. She wondered if he was finally going to ask her about it.
‘Wanna drink?’
She sighed. ‘Nah.’
Jamie left the room and came back with a can of coke and a bag of Doritos. He sat on the floor, opened his drink and took a swig, then opened his chips and crunched through a handful. ‘So,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You and Mr Carr are really…’
Sarah’s heart skipped. She closed her book and sat up. ‘Yeah. I told you.’
He nodded. ‘I thought… Um, so you… you kiss and stuff?’
‘Yeah.’
Jamie took another drink. ‘Have you done it with him?’
She nodded.
‘Fuck.’ Jamie stood up and kicked a bean bag. ‘Fuck, Sarah, this is… he must be forty!’
‘No. He’s only thirty-eight.’
‘He’s a teacher!’
‘We’re in love.’
Jamie sat down and picked up his magazine. After a while, Sarah returned to her novel. She felt let down by him, but wasn’t sure why. What did she expect? Congratulations? She tried to imagine how she would have felt if the situation was reversed, but the thought of Jamie doing to a woman the things that Mr Carr did to Sarah was just too bizarre. She would be surprised if Jamie had even heard of some of the stuff she did with Mr Carr. But then, she had never known about any of it before Mr Carr had taught her. A couple of months ago she was as innocent as Jamie; now she doubted that anything about sex could shock her.
‘Are you angry?’ she asked Jamie when she was leaving.
He shrugged. ‘Who else knows?’
‘Just you. You won’t tell anyone will you?’
He shook his head. Sarah thought she saw a tear forming in his left eye but he turned away before she could be sure. ‘Goodnight,’ he said, and closed the door, not offering to walk her home for the first time ever.
Sometimes he was so much the English teacher that it drove her crazy. While he was locking the change room door, she let slip that she had finished Madame Bovary last night, and now he wanted to waste precious alone time talking about it.
‘We can talk after.’
He smiled. ‘Anxious, aren’t you?’
Sarah shrugged her school bag off her shoulders. ‘The weekends are so long. By Monday afternoon I’m just so–’
‘Horny?’
She felt herself blush. It was the sort of word the girls who shared smokes in the toilet block used to describe the boys they drove around with on Saturday nights. Sarah did not think it was the proper word for what she felt.
‘It’s not that. I just miss you.’
‘So hurry up and sit down.’ He pointed to the stainless steel bench that ran through the centre of the room. ‘Talk to me.’ He sat himself at her feet, looking up at her. ‘I want to know what you thought of Emma Bovary.’
Sarah sighed. ‘I don’t know. I sort of hated her, especially how she treated her kid, but I felt sorry for her, too.’
‘Tell me why.’
‘Well, because she was searching for something amazing, for ecstasy. But her husband’s such a plodder, so she falls for the first guy who offers her a bit of excitement and he turns out to be a pig and then the next guy is this awful coward and it just seems the more she searches, the worse things get for her.’
‘And this makes her deserving of our sympathy?’
‘I just think it’s sad she never found what she was looking for.’
‘Do you think what she was looking for even exists?’
Sarah nudged him with her shoe. ‘Yes.’
He took hold of her foot. ‘And what makes you think you’re not as deluded as poor Emma?’
‘You do.’
Mr Carr frowned up at her. ‘Ah, Sarah,’ he said, and started to untie her shoelace.
‘You didn’t say if you missed me on the weekend.’
‘Didn’t I?’ He continued untying her shoelaces.
‘No.’
‘Do you want me to say it?’ Mr Carr slipped off her shoes and placed them on the floor beside him.
‘Only if it’s true.’
He removed her socks slowly, using both hands for each foot, then laid the socks on top of her shoes. ‘Of course I missed you, you silly little thing.’ He raised her left foot to his mouth and kissed each toe in turn. ‘It’s intolerable to be away from you for so long.’ He kissed the top of her foot and her ankle. ‘Excruciating.’
‘I don’t see why we can’t meet on the weekends. I’m sure I could–’
He stopped kissing his way up her shin. ‘I’m sure you could, Sarah, but I could not. I live in the grown-up world and grown-ups have responsibilities. Obligations to other people. I can’t just turn my back on my family because you’re having urges.’
Sarah bit her lip. She hated it when he used his teacher’s voice on her. More than that, she hated it when he talked about his family. She knew they were out there – sleeping in his bed, eating at his table, laughing at his sticking up hair first thing in the morning – but it made her chest hurt to think about them. She wished she’d never brought up the damn weekend.
‘I’m sorry.’ She reached for his face and ran her palm over his smooth forehead, then the invisible, scratchy hairs on his cheek and jaw. ‘I forget there are other people who need you. When I’m with you, I forget that there’s anything else in the world. Please don’t stop kissing my leg. I like that so much.’
‘She is all States, and all Princes, I. Nothing else is.’ He smiled without teeth and lowered his head. His lips touched down on her knee for the briefest moment and then he looked up again. ‘Source?’
‘Donne. Um, Sunne Rising?’
‘Good girl.’ He began to lick the inside of her thighs, pushing her skirt up little by little. He moved slowly. Unbearably so. She was almost in tears by the time he reached the top. He groaned into her crotch, pressing his face into her underwear for a moment, before pulling back.
‘Take your pants off. And your skirt.’
She stood and did as he asked, while he sat below her looking up between her legs.
‘Now lie on the bench. On your back with your–’ He pushed at the inside of her knees. ‘A leg on either side. Yes. Good girl.’
The steel was cold beneath her, but she didn’t complain. In a few minutes he would be inside her and she could be lying on broken glass for all she’d care.
He knelt at her left side and took her hands. ‘I’m going to show you something, Sarah, and I want you to pay attention. When you’re feeling lonely–’ He took her left hand and placed it firmly between her legs. ‘When you’re missing me–’ He took up her right hand and positioned it over her clitoris. ‘This is what I want you to do.’
Sarah closed her eyes and let him move her. It was her hands, her fingers, but it was Mr Carr making her moan and shake. He kept control, nudging her to go further, move faster, make smaller circles. ‘You’re nearly there, darling,’ he told her and she started to tell him she wasn’t, but he shushed her. ‘I want you to clench your muscles really tight. Try and squash your fingers.’ Almost right away, she was coming, the clenching bringing on the waves, which made her muscles contract, which brought on more waves.
She sat up, and the blood returning to her head made the room spin. She closed her eyes until the dizziness stopped. When she opened them, she saw that Mr Carr was looking up at her with a toothless smile.
‘Well, I’d say that was a success.’
She touched his lips with her fingers. ‘What?’
‘You did a fine job. You don’t need me anymore.’
‘No.’ She rubbed her hands over his face and lips. She slid to the floor, kissed his lips and tasted herself. ‘I do need you. I need you. I need you.’
‘You managed pretty well with your own–’
‘Shut up! You think you’re so smart, but I know what you’re trying to do. It won’t work.’ Sarah was kissing him, wrestling with his trousers, pulling off her own sweaty shirt. ‘You can’t make me not miss you. Having a stupid orgasm is nothing. Okay? Nothing. God, you’re so stupid! I’m always, always on my own. I could have a thousand stupid orgasms a day if I wanted. But it would just make me more alone. Can’t you understand that? If I touch myself it reminds me that I’m not touching you. I don’t want to touch or be touched by anyone else. I need you. You! Okay, do you get it, you stupid old man?’
There was so much blood pounding in her head it was clouding her vision. She couldn’t see the expression on his face when he knocked her over, but the sound he made as he drove into her was frightening. Then there was no question of them not needing each other; they couldn’t seem to disentangle, couldn’t stop clutching and clawing, couldn’t not be one. By the time Mr Carr rolled off her, panting and gasping so badly that Sarah’s own heart began to flutter in fear for his, it was dark inside and out.
Sarah’s mother was in the front room when Sarah got home. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, without looking up from her book.
‘Jamie’s.’
‘Don’t lie to me, Sarah. Jamie called for you over an hour ago.’
Sarah’s legs and back ached. She needed a hot shower and a soft bed. She leant against the wall, as far away from her mother’s chair as she could get without leaving the room. ‘I was just hanging out with some friends. I lost track of the time. I’m sorry.’
‘Your sister tells me you’ve been coming home late for weeks.’
Sarah closed her eyes. Why the hell did her mother suddenly care what she was doing? Sarah would have killed for this much attention a year ago, but now she wanted to melt into the wall. She wanted to be invisible to everyone except him.
‘I’m sorry, Mum, but I don’t have anything else to tell you. I was with friends and I lost track of time. It won’t happen again.’
Her mother put down her book. ‘I know what’s happening here. You’re fourteen; you’re trying to assert your independence. You’re testing the limits of your personhood. That’s a perfectly healthy, natural impulse for someone in your age group.’
‘I’m not an age group, Mum.’
‘Of course you’re not. You’re Sarah Jane Clark. An individual. I see you.’ She smiled. ‘You’re an individual who needs to know where her boundaries are. So, let’s negotiate.’
She wished her mother could be normal, just yell for a couple of minutes and cut off her pocket money or something. Instead everything had to be done according to how The Research said it had to be done. Every parenting decision was made in line with Expert Opinion. The book her mother was reading was probably called ‘Professional Parenting.’ It probably instructed her to Empower your child by Negotiating rather than Demanding. Allow your child to own his or her behaviour.
It would go faster if she played along. ‘Okay, I would like to be allowed out until nine on week nights and twelve on weekends.’
A laugh. ‘The first rule of negotiating: Always ask for more than you expect. Right, I refuse that offer and propose that you come straight home from school every day. Weekends will be negotiated on a case by case basis depending on where you are going and with whom.’
‘I can’t come straight home every day. My English teacher is tutoring me after class.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m struggling a bit. I only got a B for my last assignment.’
Her mother nodded. ‘Fine. Study with your teacher, but be home by six-thirty.’
‘Can I go to bed now?’
‘In a minute. We need to decide on your punishment. Something commensurate. What’s fair, do you think?’
‘I thought negotiating boundaries was my punishment.’
‘How droll.’ She sighed. ‘Fine, I’ll decide. You’re grounded for a month. You’ll go to school and you’ll come home. For one month. Okay?’
‘Marvellous. I don’t want to go anywhere but school anyway.’
‘Yes, Sarah, I’m sure. Good night.’
Sarah began to move away, taking care to walk normally and to stay to the shadows. If her mother noticed her limping or, worse, the scratches on her throat, her life would be over. When she got to the doorway she snuck a peak at her mother, just to make sure she hadn’t noticed anything. She needn’t have worried; her mother was already reabsorbed in her book.
Sarah smiled when Mr Carr walked into the classroom. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and the tiny hairs she often felt on his face at the end of the day were visible. She might ask if she could pluck a hair out with her teeth, or maybe he would let her shave him.