Catching Up (Part 5)

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My route home took me through relatively undamaged areas that were free of roadblocks and time-consuming diversions. My elderly neighbour Fred Curtis was out mowing his front lawn and gave me a cheery wave as I turned into my driveway. He stopped his labours and came over. My heart sank – Fred could be very talkative and hard to get away from; but he had always been a good neighbour and very kind to me, so I owed it to him to be sociable. Besides, I’d left a spare set of my house keys with him, just in case, so I needed to get them back from him. “Been a few more aftershocks while you were away,” he told me. “Some of yer crockery fell onto the floor, an’ I swept it up. I hope there’s been no other damage.” I had already noticed fresh cracks in the concrete driveway, and Fred’s news made me apprehensive about what I might see when I got inside. “What’s the water situation?” I asked. “We still gotta boil any from the tap before drinkin’ it,” he said glumly. “But they had ten-litre containers o’ spring water in the supermarket, so I gotcha a couple before they ran out. Ya’ll find ’em in yer kitchen.” “Bless you, Fred.” I gave him a quick hug and a peck on the cheek, then turned to unpack my stuff from the car. Once alone in my house, I was tempted to open Fenella’s email message straight away; but I can be self-disciplined sometimes, and this time I wanted to ensure that I would be able to spend as much time as necessary to read and ponder about what Fenella had written, without the distraction of outstanding major chores waiting to be done. First I went on a tour of inspection to see what if any new damage had occurred. After sweeping up my broken crockery, Fred had left the debris on a piece of newspaper on my kitchen table so that I could see what had been broken; it was just a cup and saucer, a glass and a couple of plates that I had left to dry on the bench beside the sink. elvankent escort Elsewhere, apart from some small cosmetic cracks in wall plastering, everything seemed to be intact. Maintaining my self-discipline, I unpacked, put the clothes I had worn into the washing basket, laid out the clothes I’d need for my return to work the next day, fixed myself a lunch of tuna and lettuce salad sandwiches and a beer, took a chicken casserole and a pottle of cooked rice out of the freezer to thaw for my evening meal, then at last sat down with my tablet to read what Fenella had written. What I found began with a story that appalled me – a tale of bigotry and sexual abuse, though not abuse of the kind that conventionally goes by that name. Fenella had been the only child of intensely religious parents for whom expressions like “the world, the flesh and the Devil”, “sins of the flesh” and “burning in hell” actually meant something concrete. They were active members of an evangelical church congregation that, while not a cult, was nonetheless very tightly knit. In spite of what her parents and their co-religionists sought to inculcate into their kids, Fenella and her friends in the church community seemed to develop a healthy curiosity about sex and awareness of its pleasurable possibilities, together with sufficient smarts to hide their erotic explorations from parents and others who would disapprove. By the time they were thirteen, Fenella and two girlfriends in particular, Helen and Liz, had formed a tight triangle of passionate friendship and surreptitious lesbian experimentation. Unfortunately, unbeknown to the other two, Helen had begun to keep a diary in which she recorded their activities and pleasures in very explicit detail. Worse, she had started taking it to school with her, where it was found in her desk by another girl in their class, Valerie, emek escort bayan who had become jealous at being excluded by the trio. Valerie not only stole the diary; she also took to gleefully sharing its contents with her own friends. It was not long before knowledge of the diary spread to adults in the church community. Valerie’s parents confiscated it and handed it to the church leadership. The ensuing scandal traumatized Fenella and left an impact that lasted for years thereafter. She was stigmatized as the ringleader of the three, as the source of her friends’ “corruption”. In addition, her parents, having been pilloried as being responsible for allowing their daughter to fall into ways of “abominable sin”, visited on her the full weight of their anger at being thus shamed. On pain of ostracism, they were ordered to submit her to treatment by a pair of self-proclaimed “therapists” who professed to be able to “cure unnatural fleshly desires”. The “treatment” went on for two years, and all Fenella wrote about it was: “I can’t begin to describe what they did to me”. (I broke down in tears of rage and anguish and had to stop reading at this point. It was nearly half an hour before I felt calm enough to be able to continue.) What brought Fenella’s ordeal by “therapy” to an end was her parents’ death in a car crash, and her subsequent adoption by her mother’s older brother John Hazelhurst and his wife Amy. They shared none of her parents’ beliefs or attitudes, and had been increasingly concerned about what was being done to her. They were a caring and loving couple, about whom she wrote with fondness and gratitude, and they did what they could to undo the damage that had been done to her still-growing sexual self, but the scars had already run deep beyond their ability to bring healing. Had her parents lived, they would probably have done Escort eryaman all they could to “protect” her from a university education. John and Amy recognized and treasured her potential for academic brilliance and made considerable sacrifices to ensure that she had every opportunity to develop it. By the time our paths crossed, the intervening few years had done little to repair and untwist her injured and conflict-ridden sexuality. She longed for female sexual contact, yet the prospect of it revived the trauma of those early teen years and drove her to shrink back, just as she had suddenly frozen when my caresses crossed a threshold of intimacy beyond which, despite intense desire, she could not bear to go. I can’t, she had moaned, I wish I could… Now I could see why. Oh my poor darling Fen…! (Here again I had to stop reading again for a while and take a dose of one of my customary cures in times of emotional turmoil. I drew my bedroom curtains, lay down on the bed and, with eyes closed, let the music of J S Bach imprint its sweetness and its magisterial order on my soul. By the time I had finished listening to his Concerto for Two Violins, the long-remembered pain of Fenella’s rejection of me had been soothed if not completely healed by the balm of understanding.) After staying on to complete a linguistics MA at Massey University, Fenella went to Paris for five years on a doctoral scholarship at the Sorbonne, where she researched the life and work of an obscure socialist poet who had been active in the French Resistance but had ended up, after a period in the ghastly farce of the “model” concentration camp of Theresienstadt, in one of the last batches of Jews to be gassed at Auschwitz. Her sex life during that time continued to be a struggle against the legacy her parents had left her – attempts to satisfy her naturally strong sexual appetite with men alternating with tentative encounters with women that always stopped short of consummation – but one in which she made some gains, emerging with a determination to free herself from the shackles of her past. One of the people Fenella got to know in the course of her studies played a significant part in her struggle.

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