He Texts me a Photo

 A friend texts me a photo he’s taken of his teenage son. They are holidaying in a tropical place, and in the photo the son is leaning back on a wooden bench, next to another young man about the same age. Two young men on a surfing holiday, tanned and bare-chested and bare-legged. all fresh muscle and latent energy. I can almost feel the heat coming off them, smell their sweat. They’re smiling at the camera.

I can’t look at the photo for long. Something coils and uncoils in me, a snake shifting in its hiding place, and I quickly scroll away.

The next day the photo re-surfaces in my mind, and now I’m curious. Why did I have to look away? Was it something about sex? A decade ago, I might have looked at those young torsos and felt desire, followed closely by shame, because back then I was already a middle-aged woman. I could have risked being labelled a cougar, eyeing off semi-naked young men. Faintly ridiculous. Mildly contemptible.

But looking at that photo, there was nothing sexual in my gaze. I’m in my sixties now. Desire hasn’t retreated, but it is rarely provoked by youth. Hair filigreed with silver - that’s what I like. Skin that has been lived in, through decades good and bad. Eyes that have seen all the things, not unlined eyes, hungering for all the new things. So, no, I did not fancy the man-child, nor his young friend.

Was it envy? The father has a son, and I do not. For seven years I was on a mission to bear a child. I wanted a daughter, but I would have been more than grateful for a boy-child. At forty I had to admit defeat. It took another twenty years to grind through that grief, but the grinding is mostly done now. I can watch parents and their children with a detachment that feels precious, hard-won. Any discomfort is more like a memory of pain than pain itself.

Envy is in there somewhere, but it’s not about parenthood. My unease about those semi-naked bodies is not about wanting to touch them. It’s about their ease in front of the camera. They way they take up space in the world with such confidence, such a lack of self-consciousness, even when they are nearly naked - because their bodies are safe. There is no barrier between what those young men want to do with their bodies in this world, and what they are allowed to do. Or none that they feel yet, as they lean back against that warm wood, knees splayed open, shoulders relaxed, eyes unwary, smiling at the machine that is capturing their young bodies for posterity.

Perhaps I also felt resentment, because when I was young I almost never felt that ease - that lack of self-consciousness, that safety inside my own skin - when I was out in the world, especially not when I was semi-naked. Or perhaps I never allowed it for myself, because it would have required letting go of the instinct for self-preservation.

And now the moments are unspooling in my memory, all those times that my body was shamed, frightened, coerced, disciplined and self-disciplined into submission.

The man who opened the door of my shower cubicle in a French caravan park and stared and stared at my unprotected flesh, ignoring my breathless protests. I had just turned fifteen.

The teenage boys at the local pool who pointed and laughed at the hair on my unshaven legs and armpits, calling me a furry. I was eighteen, but my fresh feminism was no match for their ancient disgust.

The man who blocked my way in a dimly lit alley, pulled out his cock and began tugging, a dreamy smile on his face, because he had no fear. It was my body that felt the fear, not knowing whether there was anyone nearby who would help me, if he came any closer. Not knowing whether anyone who came along might be more dangerous than this tugging man. I was twenty-one.

The man who introduced himself to me on an island off the coast of East Timor and followed me into the coral-jewelled sea and surfaced way too close to me, smiling and groaning, so I swam away from him as fast as I could. The same man who later spoke so aggressively to me in the thatched dining hut that I retreated to my room and locked the door. I was forty.

And every time, at every age, it seemed that somehow it must have been my fault, because I had not kept my body safe, or kept those men safe from my body. And always there was shame about my careless dangerous fleshly self.

Now, in my sixties, even though much of the shame has been washed away by the passing decades, there is still envy, still resentment, still grief, about the lost moments and hours and years during which I could have enjoyed the feel of warm wood against my bare back, the freedom of splayed knees, the sun beating down on my semi-naked flesh, the sweat seeping from my unshaven underarms, as I smiled into a camera, posing carelessly for posterity.