Fishing for Stars (10 page)

We waded ashore, the water not much above Anna’s knees. The sou’-westerly had almost dropped away and the humidity, always present at this time of the year, was somewhat alleviated by an offshore breeze.

I quickly collected sufficient driftwood for a small fire. The tinder was somewhat damp from the receding tide and so I removed my shirt and used it to flap the curl of smoke to fire, casting it aside as the kindling licked into flame. I boiled the billy and tossed in a couple of tablespoons of coffee from a jar, then pouring the dark liquid into two tin mugs stirred in a generous portion of sweetened condensed milk. ‘Nothing nicer than this after a good dinner,’ I said, the moonlight so bright that I could see the blue rim of the white enamel mug and the steam rising from the surface of the coffee as I handed it to Anna. ‘Careful, it’s very hot,’ I cautioned. Reaching for my own cup, I placed it on the sand and sat on my haunches facing her.

Anna blew at the lip of the mug and then took a tiny, cautious sip, drawing back. ‘Hmm, hot . . . delicious,’ she announced. She looked at me through the steam rising from the surface of the mug. ‘We must do this more often.’

‘Anna, there is something . . .’ I began.

Her expression was immediately cautious. ‘Something? What is it, Nicholas?’

‘Please understand it is for your own good,’ I stammered.

‘What?’ she asked sharply, lowering the mug. ‘What is for
mijn
own good?’

‘Coming clean, the heroin, your addiction.’ I was making a hopeless mess of explaining.

Anna glared at me. ‘So?’

‘So, well, we are not going home tonight. We’ll be at sea six weeks, then you’ll be cured . . . clean.’

‘You bastard! You fucking bastard!’ I managed to jerk my face away just as the scalding hot coffee hit. There followed a moment when I felt nothing and then an excruciating pain spread across my chest and the side of my neck. I jumped to my feet, rushed across the narrow beach and dived into the shallow water.

When I emerged, I turned and stood facing the beach, water dripping from my hair and body. Anna had reached the shoreline and was stepping into the water holding my own mug of coffee. In the bright moonlight I could see the rage in her eyes and the curl to her lips. ‘Come, there is more, you bastard!’ she snarled, then furiously splashing towards me she hurled the contents of my mug at me, the coffee splashing harmlessly into the surf a foot or so short of where I stood.

‘Anna! Anna! Please,’ I cried, arms spread wide, palms open as I started to walk towards her.

‘Dog shit!’ she screamed and hurled the empty mug at me.

I rushed forward and grabbed her. Lifting her out of the water, I held her tightly against my scalded chest. She managed to get one arm loose and I felt her long fingernails rake the side of my face and down across the section of burned skin on my neck. The pain was so intense I gasped and for a moment lost it. ‘You bitch!’ I yelled furiously, then lifted her across my shoulder and ran splashing onto the beach. I couldn’t think what to do next except perhaps to hurl her angrily onto the wet sand. But then suddenly I started to laugh, and carrying her towards a coral rock worn smooth from the constant pounding of the tide, I sat down and placed Anna across my knee. Holding her down with one hand, with the flat of the other I gave her a damn good spanking. She jerked, cried out, then realising she couldn’t escape my grasp, she started to whimper and moan with each whack, but when she let out an anguished cry I immediately stopped spanking and removed my restraining hand. It was to be the first and last time I would ever raise my hand in anger to a woman.

Anna lifted herself from my knee, sobbing and panting. I was surprised to see that her beautiful blue eyes were no longer angry, her expression seemed contrite, almost loving. ‘Oh, Nicholas, you are bleeding!’ she cried. ‘Your beautiful face!’

‘It’s not my face, woman! It’s my bloody neck and chest!’ I yelled, attempting to show that I was still upset.

‘Oh, Nicholas, you are hurt so very bad. We must go home, to the hospital. There is a hospital,
ja
? You showed me when we were going out from the harbour, the British Hospital.’ While she was attentive and sympathetic as she examined the burns to my skin, she appeared to take no responsibility or show any regret for her action.

I had a couple of tubes of paraffin-based salve on board, but realised the burns covered my neck and most of my chest. The ointment, if it helped at all, wouldn’t last me two days. I’d treated a few burns on board our salvage vessels where crew had been injured in the engine room. You did the best you could at the time but got them to the nearest port where there was a mission clinic or hospital. A bad burn in the tropics festers quickly and can lead to the direst consequences. I recall on one occasion I had watched helplessly while a young boy, a member of the crew from Pentecost Island, died as a result of burns received when a valve in the boiler room had broken and we were three days out from the nearest port.

I was hurting like hell and knew just by looking down at my chest that I was badly burned across most of it. I could feel the skin on my neck starting to tighten. ‘Come, let’s go home,’ I announced quietly. Then, attempting a grin, I turned to Anna and pointed to the outcrop of jungle. ‘From now on this will be named Coffee Scald Island.’

Anna had defeated me. We would try many more times to beat her addiction, but she was destined, despite almost yearly visits to clinics in Switzerland and the Betty Ford Clinic in America, to chase the dragon
for the remainder of her life. She was the most disciplined person I would ever know, her strength of character and determination as an opponent were legendary, her independence often infuriating, but in this one thing she was a slave to the dragon.

What’s more, while she was attentive and loving during the week she remained on the island while I was treated for second-degree burns, she never apologised or ever mentioned the incident directly again. My chest and neck healed well but a small white scar that refused to suntan remains on my neck from the scratch to remind me every morning as I shaved that I was in love with a damaged, dangerous and unpredictable woman.

Oh yes, and one more thing. In the months that followed Anna started to visit Beautiful Bay for a week each month but we still did not make love. I confess I was growing impatient. ‘Give me a little more time please, darling,’ she would plead.

The first few times we’d gone to bed together I had attempted to caress her. I’m a big bloke with big hands, but I was not inexperienced in the art of pleasuring a woman and I don’t believe I was clumsy or rough. But instead of the warm welcome with which these preliminary explorations had been received from partners in the past, there had been with Anna a compulsive tightening and flinching away and great emotional distress. It was obvious that I was having quite the opposite effect from the one I had come to expect. Anna had not resisted me; the spasms brought on when I touched her vulva, let alone her clitoris or vagina, appeared to be totally beyond her control.

On the third occasion my forefinger had gone exploring the situation had ended in tears. ‘Anna, what is it? Am I hurting you?’

‘No, Nicholas . . . it’s . . . it’s . . .’ She broke into fresh sobs.

‘It’s what, darling?’ I persisted gently.

‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ she howled, her abject misery almost palpable. ‘Oh, Nicholas, I want always to please you so much! Only you, I have kept myself for you and now . . . I . . . I . . . am no
goed
!’

‘
Sshh
, sweetheart, it will happen, give it time, you’ve been through a lot, darling.’

But it didn’t. It was obviously psychological and beyond her control. Eventually I was forced to give up.

In every other way except penetration Anna proved wonderful –  her hands were magic instruments, her mouth generous and she would leave me sated while never allowing me to reciprocate. I could kiss her and fondle her breasts and try in every other way I knew to satisfy her without being allowed to go near the forbidden region I had termed, for the sake of my own sanity, the
Grotto of Not
.

The paradox was that while I was undoubtedly in the hands of an expert at pleasing a male, I still longed to consummate our relationship, to truly possess her and bring us to a mutual climax, in order, I told myself, to remove the terror I could see in her eyes.

As I had done with her heroin addiction, I set out to discover all I could about any psychological cause for Anna’s seemingly pathological fear of penetration. It should be remembered that this was at the beginning of the 1950s when psychiatric therapy was not as commonly used or symptoms as correctly diagnosed as perhaps they are today. Furthermore, in those days the stigma of mental illness made a visit to a psychiatrist almost unthinkable.

I went to Melbourne University Medical School, where I contacted a psychiatrist named Dr Denmeade, a man in his mid-forties who had qualified in medicine here and then taken his psychiatry degree and practised in the United States, recently returning to take an associate professorship at Melbourne University.

I learned from him that Anna’s condition, or what
might
have been her condition, had a name. It was termed vaginismus and is defined as the involuntary spasm of the pelvic floor muscles surrounding the vaginal opening. This involuntary contraction occurs in anticipation when a partner attempts to penetrate or even in some cases touch the vagina.

Professor Denmeade pointed out that unconsummated marriage is probably a condition as old as human existence, the first recorded diagnosis of vaginismus being in the eleventh century. ‘It is common in arranged marriages and in women who have been sexually assaulted in childhood or brutally raped. It is the vagina in panic,’ he went on to explain, ‘where typical intercourse becomes physically impossible. This is estimated to occur in up to fifteen per cent of the female population,’ he’d concluded.

However, I couldn’t be certain I was on the right track because Anna was emphatic that she wouldn’t see the professor, and no amount of persuasion could convince her. ‘I am not mad or psychotic, so why do you want me to see this professor, Nicholas?’

‘Well, it may help, darling. He may be able to explain why this happens to you. Don’t you think its worth a try?’

‘
Agh
 . . . It’s all mumbo-jumbo, those guys are nuts!’ she exclaimed. I argued further but got nowhere, Anna stubbornly resisting any attempts to get her to the professor.

On one occasion I’d even said, ‘Are you secretly frightened of a cure?’

‘What do you mean by that?’ she’d replied dismissively.

‘Well, sometimes I feel that by giving yourself to me something will change in you.’

Anna laughed; it was a clumsily put question. ‘Don’t talk crap, Nicholas!’ She had risen and abruptly left the room. I recall feeling at the time that I’d nevertheless touched on something.

Anna, while seeming to enjoy my advances in bed and my caresses above the waist, still involuntarily resisted even the slightest dalliance below it. The
Grotto of Not
was effectively out of bounds.

While I had been prepared to kidnap her in an attempt to cure her heroin addiction, I certainly wasn’t going to attempt to overcome her fear of intercourse by forcing myself into her.

That I didn’t persist may well be a sign of weakness on my part, but on every occasion I had attempted the preliminaries, it had ended in copious tears. Our closeness was being placed in jeopardy and, I told myself, love isn’t only about a well-dipped dick bringing her to a climax. Anna was otherwise doing everything in her power to please me and took obvious delight in doing so. Sometimes the smaller picture becomes the more valuable in the gallery of human experience. Or so I attempted to convince myself.

Had I known at the time about Anna’s three years of conditioning by Konoe Akira, which ultimately led her to the absolute conviction that the loss of her virginity meant the destruction of her perfection, her intellect and aesthetic appeal, I would have been much closer to understanding her fears.

The carefully inculcated sexual complex the nefarious Japanese colonel had planted in Anna’s mind meant that no man could be permitted to enter her. She had already killed to defend this absolute belief. The blood and horror of killing Takahashi when he’d attempted to force her to disobey her master’s instructions seemed the perfect reinforcement needed to bring about the condition of vaginismus.

Professor Denmeade stressed that it was the patient herself who must effect the cure with the help of a practised psychiatrist, and until Anna was willing to embrace both factors, acceptance and treatment, it was unlikely that she would recover from her deeply entrenched fear of male penetration. ‘But she will still be capable of enjoying clitoral stimulation,’ he concluded.

I then explained that Anna had
also
resisted my attempts at clitoral stimulation. Denmeade then suggested this might be an additional psychological factor and until Anna was willing to undertake therapy her rejection of my attempts to touch her was also likely to be permanent.

‘Have you tried oral sex?’ he asked. ‘It may well be that your finger represents the male phallus while your tongue doesn’t.’

I hadn’t, and while today this would seem a curious omission, I should point out that in the early fifties most women thought of oral sex as somehow perverted, almost never performed out of marriage, and even within only under duress.