* * *
*
The town where I grew up was a pretty typical Australian Country town - one school, one general store cum post office and two pubs, the posh one where the commercial travelers stayed and the other one where the men went to drink beer after a day of bringing the hay or other hot, dry pursuits.
My name is Abigail. I have three younger brothers - Benjamin, Christopher and Daniel. I once asked my mother what she would name her 27th child. She just looked at me oddly and carried on with what she was doing.
From as early as I can remember I was going to get out of town as soon as possible.
In the mean time there was the endless round of waiting for the school bus to take me to school, where I did as little as possible, helping Father in the dairy and Mother in the kitchen, homework, hand feeding the sheep in the dry season and in the wet season getting the pregnant ewes back onto their feet when they foolishly lay down.
I escaped sooner than I anticipated but to a place which was, in my view, much worse - I went to boarding school.
The town where I lived boasted an Area School - primary and secondary grades together - but the academic standards did not meet the expectations of my parents, so at the age of twelve I was sent away to school.
Boarding school was hell for the whole five years that I was there. I never fitted in, being extremely bad at all forms of competitive sport. The school which I attended regularly won all the sporting trophies and in the whole time that I was there I never made voluntary contact with a ball.
As an escape - since I could not yet escape physically - I turned to fiction. The school had a well-stocked, if somewhat dated, library and I discovered the works of Raphael Sabitini, Rider Haggard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Georgette Heyer.
The adventures of Captain Blood, Alain Quartermain and Sherlock Holmes kept me happy for hours at a time. Homework was abandoned for the joys of a book on my knees under the desk, making my daily existence even more difficult as I tried to cover up my deficiencies. However, it was Georgette Heyer who showed me the way to a better life. I would be swept off my feet by a rich and handsome duke who would fall in love with me - on sight - when he came to the school to give a talk to the students on The Influence of Christianity on Modern democracy - or some such subject.
I would be the envy of my fellow students as who carried me off in his Rolls Royce for Sunday Lunch - always going, as required by the school rules, to the staff room to be presented to the duty mistress. The duty mistress would also be overwhelmed with envy.
As soon as I had ended my schooling, with full academic honors, I would marry him in the local cathedral and live happily ever after.
My first real-life romance was a great let-down after that. He was sixteen and so was old enough to drive his father’s car. We went to a drive-in theatre and what with the fogging of the windscreen and the unending struggle for my virtue I did not get to see much of the film.
Sex was obviously not going to be like it was in books. It was an uncomfortable saga of too many arms and legs and nowhere to put them and far too many hands in the wrong places. Cars were out. There had to be a better way. There was.
I lost my virginity a year later, after discovering horizontal and vertical, neither of which was possible in a mini. His name was David and he was going to be a doctor - that is to say that he was going to study medicine after the holidays.
I was spending the Christmas holidays with an aunt in the city having finally left school. I had barely passed but by having passed the right subjects I had managed to matriculate, so I was off to the university as well.
I first saw him on the beach. He was tall and bronzed and on his own so I put my things down next to his and spreading my towel I proceeded to oil myself all over.
Although I say so myself, I have filled out quite nicely over the last few years and with my long curly hair I was attracting a fair few glances. David certainly noticed me.
I am descended from a long line of beautiful women, the men in my mother’s family having only one requirement in a wife - to be outstandingly beautiful. I am the culmination of many generations and am not being vain when I say that I measure up to, and probably surpass, the best of them.
I am 175cm tall with long curly auburn hair, green eyes and I somehow managed to avoid the pale, freckly skin which usually accompanies such colouring. I’m slim in all the right places and rounded in the rest. My facial features are good - straight nose, bee-sting mouth and my eyes are bigger than even I deserve. To cap it all off I have gorgeous long legs and very elegant feet.
It was not long before David had moved his things across to join mine. Over the next week we spent a lot of time together which is how I eventually found myself naked in the dark with only David to keep me warm. I suspect that he was as inexperienced as I was but neither of us was going to let on about that. We were in the sand hills - more convenient than a car and therefore we were more successful but it is amazing how much sand can get into so many places.
My affair with David limped on through our first few months at university, more, I suspect because we were each other’s security blankets while we found our feet in a strange environment.
I was doing an arts degree, majoring in library studies and he was, as previously mentioned, doing medicine. Eventually he was grabbed by a physiotherapy student and I thankfully transferred my attention to Hugh, who was doing Law.
At this time I was living in college which hampered my style not at all. We all had illegally cut keys and were thus able to stay out until all hours of the night. This had the obvious result that I staggered through my course - never actually failing but never doing more than passing and always faintly surprised at my results.
Hugh passed out of my life at the end of my first year when he failed his exams once too often and moved on to sell life insurance.
It was at this time that my immediate heritage came to the fore. I realized in my first year that there are 26 fortnights in a year and blood will obviously out because at the end of that year I made a new Year’s resolution to work my way through from Alan to Zachariah, giving each man two weeks of my life.
This was an interesting challenge for while, although I was not very popular among my girl-friends. I found it much easier to borrow their men for a couple of weeks than to slot new ones in according to their order in my scheme. I finally gave up after Lester, having realized that I would be looking for Uriah, Yusef and Xavier just when I was sitting for my exams, which could have taken up more time than even I felt that I could afford, those names not being as common as Michael or Peter.
Eventually, I actually graduated as a fully qualified librarian. Books, not men, were going to be my life from then on.
I had problems finding a job and in the meantime tried my hand at various things - the most enjoyable and lucrative of which was barmaiding. An endless stream of oddballs paraded past me and I started to realise, for the first time in my life, the diversity of character and behavior which people exhibit.
This came to an end when I finally found a job in my own field. It was as Assistant Librarian in the Mental Health Services Library. Although it was a “proper” job I was somewhat dismayed at the prospect of a lifetime parade of oddballs as psychiatric patients wandered through. I soon discovered that the psychiatric patients are not interested in the whys and wherefores of their various illnesses. The oddballs who came through were their doctors - the psychiatrists.
Psychiatrists are a very odd bunch indeed. The reason that they are attracted to that particular field is that they all have problems which they hope to solve by learning to understand them. This it not true. What they do is learn to justify them.
We had a lot of psychiatrists coming through, especially the male variety. At that time I was going through a phase where the bottoms of my skirts almost reached to my necklines - I figured that it was good for business - it certainly brought them in.
I was sharing a house, an assistant librarian’s salary not being adequate for solitary living, with Justin who was very beautiful and very gay. It was a carefully considered decision on our parts - we both had an eye on each other’s cast-offs.
Justin did not have as much luck as I did - closet gays are much happier to be seen out with a girl than heteros are to be seen with a gay guy.
Gay men are so relaxing to go out with - like putting on a pair of comfortable slippers and I always got to see the film.
I needed a peaceful and uncomplicated haven at this time as I was regularly going out with various of the psychiatrists who wandered through my library and my life. They were a mess! Talk about caring for the carer. I had done my apprenticeship on normal, simple, uncomplicated students. The men whom I saw now were anything but simple, none of them was normal and all of them were complicated. The ideas which they came up with were amazing - I had never realized that human beings could be so inventive.
I began to read books on normal and abnormal sex and did what I could to unscrew the twisted minds and habits of my men.
Eventually I enrolled in a psychology course and passes with honours since for the first time in my life I found that my studies enhanced my practical knowledge.
My thesis was on the Abnormal Behavior Manifested by Homosexual Blackheart Finches. I am now in great demand working as a sex therapist and busy myself lecturing, writing books and keeping my hand in with the practical aspects of my speciality.
FOOTNOTE:
Dr Abigail Bennett-Chalmers-Douglas
Author of :