Pictures of naked women loom large in the imagination of a 15-year-old boy growing up on a farm, with a complete absence of females in his life except for his mother, his dog, a hundred or so dairy cows (oh, those big brown eyes) and his slightly older cousin, Heather, who in her infrequent visits from Melbourne had him wrapped around her little finger and who once ate a year’s worth of lollies and chocolates that he had been diligenty squirreling away for no purpose that can now be recalled.
Of course, for a boy such as this, pictures of naked women were as elusive as the idea of them was all-consuming. Hence, the day that persons unknown, but whom this boy perceived to be the Good Fairy of Dirty Magazines, dumped a large heap of periodicals, with names like Penthouse and Oui, at the start of the long dirt road that led to his parents’ farm was a day for rejoicing.
Or so he thought.
Convincing himself, contrary to what was fairly obviously the case, that his parents wouldn’t have noticed this large pile of colourful papers, even as they proceeded to blow around in the otherwise pristine rural landscape, fortuitously lying open (at least in his imagination) at pictures of enticing nudity, he commenced to hatch a plan to retrieve them for himself before they were too damaged by weather and car tyres, but more importantly Before Someone Else Did.
Physical fitness, he decided, would be the cloak beneath which this daylight raid might best be concealed. “I need to train for the school cross-country run”, he said, one day after school. This, in fact, was not a totally outlandish notion. Long-distance running was one of the few sporting events in which he demonstrated any talent or potential whatsoever (although he found negotiating the barbed-wire fences that always seemed to appear in at least one place on the courses set by the school a challenge of a different order), and he had a pedigree of sorts: his cousin Murray, who had attended the school some years previously, held (and perhaps even still does) the record for the event.
“Drive me up to almost the end of the road and I will run home”, he said to his mother. Note, especially, the use of “almost”, as if this would be enough to distance him from the coincidental disappearance of the magazines, on the off chance that his parents had in fact noticed them at all in the first place and would also notice their disappearance. He felt entirely confident they would never make that connection. All he had to do was run around the bend in the road to where it met the main road from Fish Creek to Meeniyan, surreptitiously gather up the magazines, and run home with them under one arm, striding out majestically in the unlikely but not impossible event of his meeting any cars, tractors or other passing humanity along the way.
At some point along the run home, his over-developed guilty conscience switched itself on, and for the first time the reality of what he was doing crept to the front of his thinking. He would be, if not killed, severely chastised and ritually degraded, perhaps even removed from his (neglible) social world, if he were to be found out. This also caused him to realise that he had failed to think through the completion of his plan, beyond the act of picking up the magazines and running home with them. Where would he put them? When would he look at them? Would he grow hair on the palm of his hands through the mere act of turning the pages? Would his eyesight become even worse than it was, through the deep and profound act of gazing at the skin-filled images? Had he, in fact, made a stupid mistake?
He contemplated turning around and running back to where the magazines had been, and skilfully, like a master flower arranger, scattering them in a naturalistic manner so that nobody would ever think they had been touched. But that would triple the length of his journey, which, aside from being more exercise than he thought he could handle, would most likely give rise to other complications, such as the impending nightfall and his mother’s inclination to panic whenever he was more than five minutes later than she expected him to be.
So he pressed on. He knew that nobody ever used the overgrown track that continued straight on from where the road did a sharp and steep right-hand turn past the truncated cream can that served as the mailbox and went up the hill to his parents’ house. So he determined to find a suitable hiding place there, and come back for them at a later date. Like the next day. An old wombat burrow beneath a fallen tree did the job nicely, and provided some shelter from the weather. He could also camouflage the hole with other sticks, leaves and things. All would be well. He jogged smartly up the hill and, breathless, collapsed on his bed.
This gave him time to think about what he had done, and particularly about what might be inside the magazines. In fact, he could think about nothing else. As he understood it, there were likely to be not just pictures of things he had never seen, but also stories about men and women doing things that seemed so unlikely, they couldn’t possibly be true. It was the hint of the exotic, the lure of the unknown. But with that came the guilt. He couldn’t concentrate on his homework. He couldn’t get to sleep that night. He would have to confess to his crime and face the punishment. He had been such a fool. And yet perhaps he could just spend a few hours pawing over the magazines before he gave them up. If someone else didn’t find them first. Had he hidden them well enough?
In this way the night was passed. In the morning, as is the way of these things, a more optimistic mood found him. Everything would be alright. That day at school he kept the secret to himself, which was a major struggle. How much cache would he have been able to get from the simple sentence “I’ve got 20 girly mags”? Nevertheless, by the time the school bus had dropped him off that night, curtains of doubt had once again started to fall. He was in a torment that was only heightened by his lack of sleep.
As the day reached a close, he could stand it no more. He knew what he would have to do, no matter how much it hurt. He stood in the kitchen doorway. He probably looked very pale. “Mum, I’ve done a bad thing”, he said. He then went through the whole story, making it plain that he hadn’t actually looked at any of the magazines. “Let’s go and get them”, his mother said. “And we’ll burn them.” So they walked down the hill, past the mailbox, and uncovered the illicit treasures. Then they carried them back up the hill. His mother lit a fire in the incinerator and, as the flames were taking hold, took the time to flick through a couple of the magazines before throwing them in, making sure to keep them away from where he might see what was on the pages, but making clear her disapproval of the contents by making peculiar little noises. They threw them onto the fire, one by one, and watched them burn. It took a long time because of the density of all that paper, and the dampness they had collected during their time outdoors. Neither of them said anything. They didn’t need to. His humiliation was complete.
