Joan Makes History by Kate Grenville Page B

sun, her eyes closed as if pretending she was not really there.
    Such delights were enough pleasure for some days, but there were others when I was seized by a hunger nothing could satisfy, and I crammed my mouth with my fist and fingers till I was almost sick, and was choked with impatience at Lil and her soft flesh. For I knew, as that gleaming father of mine knew, that it was a man I wanted, and a man I would have, for women of destiny will not be held back by fathers, no matter how gleaming and urbane.
    It was with Lil that I met Duncan, in a lecture hall stifling with dullness, where history was being spoken of but would never be made. I saw at once that Duncan was not one of the gormless ones, and I shook his hand across Lil’s lap so hard I could feel the bones and the callouses on his palms. While the man in tweed down below us kept losing his place in his notes, the three of us enjoyed a few whispered bits of disrespect about Napoleon and other subjects, and when at last the man in tweed closed his notes and we were free, Duncan stayed with us. He stayed with us on a bench under a tree, and I stayed, and in the end we outstayed Lil, who went off with many backward glances and waves while Duncan and I shifted closer on the bench to fill up the gap she had left. Bye-bye Lil, Duncan called, and See you tomorrow Lil, I called, and we watched her enormous bottom as she walked away across the quadrangle: then he and I got down to the business of knowing each other, for we had taken a bit of a fancy at first glance.
    Duncan, I discovered, was a secretive roisterer: not a man of aplomb at all, rather diffident and bumbling, but also a man of knowing ways with sly fingers in the interstices between fleshand fabric. It is us country blokes, he said when I wondered at his boldness. Seen a lot of the birds and the bees and all that. Duncan would have been a rounders player of primness and flat pink face if he had had the misfortune to be born a woman, because he was a member of the pallid race that had invaded this country, and was the heir to unthinkable numbers of acres and cows somewhere in the dry inland. But he was no jelly of a man, as so many of the privileged ones seemed to be: together we had many bold adventures of a small kind.
    With Duncan, I drank tea in cafes down by the wharves, where sailors in pairs glumly ate burnt chops: sometimes foreign sailors, with pompoms on their caps, or with flesh as dark and wrinkled as a patient weather-furrowed rock. I loved the black gleam of such outlandish skin, and I wondered if my destiny was to give myself over to the caresses of such a one.
    Or we would wander the streets of the Chinese, where the air smelled of cabbage and mice, and wafts of incense from inside dark private doorways, and we were the tallest people in the street. I did not lust after the hollow-chested Chinese youths as I did after the muscular black ones, but was excited to be here, where every closed shopfront could hide an opium den or a harem of slaves, or melancholy lepers hiding from the light. Anything was possible here, even in the food, which was unrecognisable shreds and bits of things: it could have been dog or rat or stewed rope, but I liked it, and knew I was happy when I saw myself reflected in a fly-specked mirror with Chinese writing around the sides, being deft with chopsticks and coquettish with this brave youth Duncan, to whom I was approaching more and more closely, emboldened by him as he was emboldened by me.
    Joan, you are returned late, Mother would exclaim at me in anagitated way, showing those gold teeth of hers in her fear. He is waiting for you, and there behind her in the living-room I would see the dome of my father’s cranium as he waited to hear me explain what I had done that had made me late, and with whom. I did not go into details of young men or Chinese streets or wild-eyed sailors, knowing that Father would not value any of these as I did, and could not be expected