The dust of my childhood

Once the children have gone to sleep and I feel the sexual energy brewing, I go all sheepish, boyish, awkward, smiley. There's this fear - I'm not allowed to want to have sex.

When I was four or five, I lived in a secluded coastal town in outback Australia. This is true-blue, fair-dinkum aussi land. Catholic. Brim and firestone territory. I grew up believing in hell, burning on a stake for eternity, that kind of shit.

Still, a boy will always be a boy. I took interest in a younger girl across the road. One day, I played you-show-me-yours-if-I-show-you-mine behind the caravan in her parent's drive way. I remember the shame of mine. How does a boy end up with shame at such a young age?

Next I was gaimer. I took her under the sheets in my bed, put a plastic bag on each hand and went exploring. I don't remember anything visually. I just remember the fear, the noise of my brother running around and those plastic bags - what was that all about, was I playing doctor?

The next time I walked over to her place, the mother came out. She shouted at me. She told me that I'm disgusting. She told me that if I ever come close to her daughter again, she'll call the police. I ran across the road, hoping to take refuge at a friend's place, a fat boy from an obese Irish family. The fat mother came out and said that if she ever hears about me touching her daughters, I would get a huge walluping (and believe me, I was witness to the use of the fat father's thick belt hitting pristine flesh).

And so I stood in the middle of the pot-holed, red sanded street and the dust settled around me. Full of fear. The prison was down one end of the street. The Aboriginal shanty town was up the other end. On both sides were angry mothers who made me feel that there was something wrong with me. The idealism and religousness of my parents frightened me even more - hell was a small walk away. I had no where to go.

I have travelled the rest of my life with my child standing in the middle of that street. I still believe there is something perverted about wanting to enjoy a woman's flesh. I still believe that I'm a bad boy, in the Hitler kind of way. It's not true, my life has shown me that, but emotionally I'm still on that street feeling that I did something really wrong.