Porky by Deborah Moggach Page A

you’d started already!’
    I willed someone to come in, so she’d stop. But then, knowing Gwen, she might tell them too.
    â€˜You told your Mum?’ she asked.
    I nodded, truthfully, because I was sure Mum knew, though it hadn’t been mentioned. She’d taken me out shopping to buy my two bras, some months before, and had asked me, in the bright embarrassment of the changing room, if they’d told me about feminine hygiene at school. I’d nodded, untruthfully, and that had been that. She must have glimpsed me at home, as furtive as herself, but I knew she wouldn’t let on that she’d seen.
    â€˜You lucky thing!’ breathed Gwen.
    I stared at her. ‘What?’
    â€˜Don’t look so superior. Look at little me.’ She turned to the mirror and smoothed her cardigan flat. ‘Not a sausage.’
    She started bemoaning her fate then, so I began to relax.
    Dad was the one who touched my breasts, not me. I looked at myself for hours in the bath, and sideways, standing on my bed, but I never touched that area except when I adjusted my bra. I knew it was dreadfully wrong to fondle yourself, there or below; I knew this one rule and I kept to it, through all my confusions, because it became so important. It was the one thing I could do – rather, refrain from doing – myself.
    This soft, pink body that I had to carry around . . . I didn’t want to admit it was mine, yet it was. And it was the only one I’d ever have. At primary school we’d chanted a rhyme:
    It’s a strange, strange thing, as strange as can be,
    Everything Miss T eats, it becomes Miss T.
    Yet Dad, when he stroked my breasts, he called them ‘bubbies’. They didn’t belong to me, then.
    â€˜How’s them little bubbies?’ he’d murmur in that shaky voice. ‘They’re liking it, see? They’re liking it when I do this . . .’
    They weren’t mine. I never called them that; I never ever would. But I’d lock the muscle in my head, and let him. I didn’t stop him . . . I knew I wouldn’t.
    Then sometimes when I was alone, sitting in my bra and knickers, I’d wonder if the other girls felt just a bit like I did about my body. The trouble was, I’d gone too far now ever to find out. What I was doing was so deeply wrong that I’d never know; I’d lost track of Gwen and Co. One of the many casualties of all that happened was that I never knew how a teenager was supposed to feel.
    But then teenagers were meant to be mixed-up, weren’t they? My magazines said so. Perhaps I was getting confused about something that was quite normal. Looking back to when I was eleven and I’d slept with Dad those nights, I knew I’d felt anxious. But I’d also felt that surely there wasn’t anything to worry about, because he was my Dad and so he must know the right thing to do. If I couldn’t trust him, who on earth could I trust? It was all my fault that I was muddled. And later on, during the next couple of years, when things had become much worse, I still wondered if I wasn’t making a fuss about nothing. I still felt he must know.
    By then I’d visited Gwen’s home and seen how different it was to mine – I’ve told you about that, and how upsetting it was. But there were a lot of girls who might not be like Gwen – that was the point of school, wasn’t it, to meet all these different people when you’d never met any at home? Perhaps at Janet’s place, or Margot’s, I would glimpse some clue that would make me feel better.
    But I never did – I looked, all right, you can be sure of that. I never did, and I never knew them well enough to ask.
    I said before that realizing something’s wrong doesn’t come at the expected moment – when you’re doing the wrong thing, or even thereabouts. In my experience, anyway, it doesn’t. It happens during