Maeve: Hi, I’m Maeve Marsden, and you’re listening to Queerstories. By day, Frances Lockie is a public servant turned corporate sellout clinging desperately to the vestiges of her soul by working on human services projects. By night, she is a mouthy dork who has strong opinions about pro wrestling, One Direction, and sex playlists. Her first crush was Joey McIntyre from New Kids on the Block, and she performed this story at Giant Dwarf in Sydney.
Frances: He slid a hand to the supple warmth of Lisa’s breast. His fingers closed around it, exerting possessive and intensely sensual little pleasures. A shaft of pure pleasure exploded through her stomach and spread to her thighs.
“I want you so badly,” he said thickly.
“Let me kiss you, Kane,” her voice husky with her yearning for him.
“Soon. I need to touch you all over, make certain I haven’t forgotten anything. I’ve missed you these last three weeks.”
“I’ve missed you too,” she protested.
“No other man?”
She shook her head, unable to speak as his mouth closed over the throbbing arteries in her neck with intense passion. It seemed that he wanted to draw on her life blood or revel in its wildly pulsating response to his fierce hunger for her.
Lisa swayed against him, inviting the tightening of his arms around her, saving his strength as he pressed her closer to him, his hands moving restlessly, yearningly over the swelling sensitivity of her breasts.
This is a story about my mother.
My mum is from Palembang, a city in southern Sumatra in Indonesia. She met my white Australian father over there and moved here after getting hitched. It was 1978 – not long after the end of the White Australia Policy – and she had a baby in tow (my big sister).
She didn’t really know the language.
She knew no one except my father.
She absolutely wasn’t briefed on the culture in Australia in the late 70s. She used to tell me that, after landing in Sydney, she asked my dad what they would eat for lunch, and when he replied “…sandwiches?”, she almost burst into tears.
If it were me in that situation, isolated and alone, I would probably fall into an anxious heap. My head would be spinning with all the ways in which everything could go wrong. I am cursed with a noisy brain and have had to train myself to operate in spite of it.
But this is the amazing thing about my mother – she literally never thinks ahead.
Move to an entirely new country with a baby? Cool!
Settle in the Central Coast, an almost entirely white area, in an assimilation era? Cool!
Raise three children almost single-handedly because your husband has a 3 hour commute every day? OK!
She just exists in the moment, in a way that I never can. It’s an extremely vexing quality in ways I explore with my therapist, but I absolutely cannot fault it as a coping mechanism.
My mother was raised in the 50s in a relatively strict Christian household (one of, like, five Protestant families in Indonesia). She went to a Catholic school and to this day thinks nuns are mean. Because of this upbringing, she has a fairly inconsistent approach to sex.
Growing up, sex was absolutely not something to be talked about openly. Even now, it’s something that can only be alluded to or talked about in euphemism. Like, I know that I am her youngest, but I’m now in my mid-30s yet still just saying a word like ‘scrotum’ immediately prompts an “EH FRAN! DON’T BE RUDE.” (If you’re wondering how ‘scrotum’ comes up in conversation with my mother, it is because I say it purely to get that response.)
So, as a child, the sex talk was always going to be a disaster. Information was never going to be just offered. I think when I was around 10, I straight up asked my mum what sex was, and she just squawked out “it’s intercourse” and then literally ran into the laundry and shut the door behind her. She had to physically flee from this conversation with her child.
So far so uptight. But here’s the thing: this woman is clearly a massive hornbag. My mother has the most intense collection of Mills and Boon romance novels that I have ever seen. If you’re unfamiliar with the artform (which include the wacky adventures of Kane, and Lisa, and her swollen breasts), Mills and Boon are helpfully colour coded: blue is a sweet romance, while red indicates a sexy romance. My mother’s collection is overwhelmingly red.
A neighbour put her onto them not long after she moved to the area. Though apparently back in the day the quality was not as high: “those older book were so boring”. When she told me this, I was like ‘why, because they weren’t getting it on fast enough?” and she gave me an extremely sheepish look and then cackled her head off.
Mum would churn through so many editions that she used to keep a small notebook in her purse with the numbers of the books that she had read, so when she went to Gosford Book Exchange to refresh her collection, she wouldn’t accidentally buy the same one twice. Which would be an extremely easy thing to do, given some of the titles in my mum’s collection are:
- The Desert Sheik’s Captive Wife
- The Spanish Billionaire’s Pregnant Wife
- The Italian’s Defiant Mistress
- The Mistress Wife.
Throughout my childhood, I remember her leaving them around the house – usually with some swarthy man and coquettish girl next door on the cover – cracked open to the last page she was reading. Despite being an extremely nosy person who loves snooping, I don’t remember ever sneaking a good look at them. I think there may have been one time where she spotted me picking one up and quickly barked “DON’T READ THAT”; and I, a small human in constant fear of being smacked with one of her slippers, did as I was told.
The collection now takes up a whole bookshelf in one of our old childhood rooms, consolidated there after we all moved out. It stands apart from the rest of the home furnishings which (from conversations with my friends) appear to be quite typical of migrant women of a certain age: souvenir teaspoons hanging on the wall, a display cabinet of crystal glasses that never hold liquid, various Christian iconography, a shrine to her granddaughter. A family home.
Yet tucked away in the front room, away from any visitors, this small display of who she really is. Someone who is so familiar.
It’s in my queer identity that I’ve been able to claim the dormant hornbag side of me. In queerness, I was able to find a different path, full of yearning and want, and find happiness in my own bodice ripper with various Lisas and Kanes. I don’t think Mum knows about my queerness – not explicitly ANYWAY – but I think she sees the effects; the physical markers of finally feeling more like myself than I ever have.
Seeing this side of her makes me realise in a different time or a different circumstance, I could so easily be my mother. And I wonder what my token would be, my item that would hold in it the promise of an identity that exists outside of marriage and children and a life of Christian respectability.
Who I have become is so far from how she was raised, which I think makes her quite proud. Her child, mouthy and inappropriate, representing the freedom that can fit in a bookshelf in a spare room.
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