‘So?’ I stubbornly reiterated.
‘Where there is eleven, or any odd number, there will dissatisfaction be,’ she pronounced with infinite patience and just a hint of martyrdom. She was, you will remember, the most famous widow in the land. ‘One of that number is doomed to have no mate. Which do you suppose it is?’
This was a test of my burgeoning maturity and wisdom, I felt sure. Some ominous decision pended on my reply. I was used to the entire armoury of Damocles suspended above my head, every moment of the day. Hilde liked to set intellectual traps for me, with the penance of my being sent away if I failed them. Traps and testings were sprung from every niche of the domestic environment: What does one do with spilt sugar? Where does the Spirit of the Hearth sleep? It was all very wearing.
I stared at the swans gliding seemingly purposelessly in a neat V formation. They seemed to be identical. ‘I have no idea,’ I breathed, giving myself up to her scorn.
‘Quite right,’ she murmured, shielding her eyes as she gazed at their spectacle. ‘Dissatisfaction is a difficult thing to locate at first glance. You were wise not to hazard a guess. I suggest you stay here until dawn before you divine your true opinion of which of the eleven is the—shall we say—odd one out. I’m heading home for a rendezvous with the archbishop and will send him in the car for you tomorrow at dawn. If your answer does not tally with mine, I shall have you sent to St Tuoni’s School for Errant Girls, and you will not be allowed to return to your dear departed father’s house until, at least, my death. Good night, my dear.’
Stunned, I watched her traipse her soggy way back across the colour-bleached headland. Then I found a rock and sat on it as the horizon’s curtains began to gather in darkening folds, the light hushing into anonymity like a theatre audience as the performance seems ready to begin. And I watched the eleven swans still circling the bay.
In Australia it was once believed that the black swans had been people. People who, when menaced by flood, learned to grow feathers—and extra long, supple necks, presumably to enable them to see round the future’s corner for further natural disasters.
But people become swans for all sorts of reasons. The Valkyries disguised themselves—oh, dear, this is complicated—as swan-maidens; that is, women who had turned themselves into swans, in order to enable the warriors whose military successes they had invisibly controlled while up in the ether, to fall in love with them. A lovely display of wiles and power, I think: the Valkyrie laying down her wings by the poolside while she bathes, allowing the warrior to think he has come upon her by chance. Perhaps the masochistic dear thinks he has found another Diana; anticipates being torn to shreds by her hounds. But she has led him, as she led him unwittingly into battle, to fall at her feet and believe he has the upper hand simply because he has possession of her wings—her false wings. The Valkyrie’s wings are optional accessories.
So it was these thoughts I turned over, with the water-smoothed pebbles between my toes, sitting among the reeds on the bank. I admit I entertained the odd Leda-inspired fantasy. What if the dissatisfied swan, the ‘odd one out’, popped down earthwards, brought his brute-blood to bear upon… But I was getting too old for that kind of speculation. Violation fantasies held none of the appeal that they might have in my earlier, politically less informed days. Looking back, I really don’t know what I had been dreaming about. But, like the Valkyrie’s wings, none of our dreams are natural, are they? They are accessories bought for us by other hands, stocking fillers that we have to walk around with in the waking dream of our lives. And we wonder why we feel foot-bound, why we hobble, when we wear these Christmas stockings and think them roller-skates.
My brothers, before they went, supplied me with all sorts of impedimenta. Impedimenta for the feet… high-heeled shoes, my mother’s, my ‘real’ mother’s shoes, which were left in the cupboard underneath the marble staircase. Red stilettos fished out of the drab garbage one day by my youngest brother. My brothers tortured me, I think it fair to say. Yes, there were eleven of them, and in their attic room I stood in the centre of the gapless circle they made and I had to parade naked in those shoes.
Their impedimenta were mental accoutrements, the bric-a-brac of their fantasies that hindered our waking lives in our chilly, motherless home like overfilled backpacks hamper an army’s progress.
I had an army of brothers, an alert rank of male peers, their bodies and faces seemingly identical, impersonal, intent on merely the violation of myself. I was the other, I was the strange one. When they stood in their circle, who defied their difference with her very different being?
And downstairs paced my stepmother Hilde, holding at bay our father, who in turn believed himself master of her. He thought he had her Valkyrie wings locked in the armoury. But he didn’t. She held the keys; especially the keys to the attic where, one by one, my brothers stretched across and pestled sputum and spunk into me.
But I was merely the cabaret; a diversion. I was the healthy reclamation of their appetites; my gender symbolised the recuperation of their heterosexuality for, when I was lifeless, limp, a tattered rag that bled and disgusted them on that wooden floor the colour of gruyere cheese… they would return to the task in hand and fuck each other, as one swift and efficient body of men.
When the sun came down and it was almost dark, the swans alighted on the beach, a little distance from me. And, indeed, they shed their feathers, for at night my stepmother’s magic could hold no
