Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (17 page)

how to get rid of bad smells without and bad tempers within

Cole can’t stay away, almost every night he whispers for you to wake and nudges your legs apart. You like sexy sex, he says, after an evening when he’s bitten your flesh and bruised you in lovemaking as if he’s trying to brand you, when he’s flipped you over and fucked you belly down with your legs clamped together by his. Sexy sex, you murmur, with your arm resting in the dip of his stomach as he lies on his side, with your fingers strumming the hairs on his belly. His penis has returned to its milky, vulnerable softness, tender and spent and limp.

Sexy sex, and your fingers, suddenly, stop their strum.

Theo used to say that, you say.

A silence, for a moment, as taut as a wire.

I’ve never slept with her, he says, I’ve told you that.

She’s the only one who uses that phrase.

That doesn’t mean I’ve slept with her, Lovely, and Cole’s suddenly laughing and tickling, it’s all a joke, now that the sex is back, now that you’ve softened into being a couple again. She was always saying things like that, you know what she’s like.

So you’ve seen her? Your voice is high and light.

Once or twice, yes. For a drink, now and then. And you know what, Lovely? We always end up talking about you, nothing else. She misses you a lot.

Well, I don’t miss her. One bit.

She’s trying for a baby.

Yours, you ask.

Let’s just forget this, he says,
please.

Sleep that night like cobwebs, in thin strands.

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A wild Saturday of rain, it’s flung at the window like furious pebbles.

Cole pushes you on to the bed and flips you over and licks behind your knees and makes you squeal and kisses you and then turns you again and he enters you with a strange intent and as he moves within you there’s a fluttering of tenderness; it builds, it becomes almost unbearable, it’s more tender than he’s ever moved in you before and God knows where it’s come from but it’s uncoiling something between you and you whisper in his ear, just breath, let’s make a baby, for this, this will wipe everything out. To begin afresh, God, please, that.

Now?

I’ve thrown out the pill. We need to start.

How many years are there left, he jokes.

None. Come on.

To purge in one stroke, to distract. To punish Gabriel, to stun him out of your life. And to scare Theo off, perhaps. You gasp, delighted, at the soft spurt and after it Cole and you are laughing like newly weds because you’ve both come to a decision, the most magnificent, surely, in all of life. You loop your legs above your head, tall into the air and your toes touch the wall behind you, spilling the sperm down. You make happiness come, Cole says when you drop your legs down.

Hmm, you say, your head somewhere else.

It’s so weird, Cole chuckles over a cup of late-night tea, I found myself falling in love with you again just as we were breaking apart. You murmur hmm, and smile, and pick a thread of lint from his jumper. You’re bemused: perhaps you’ll now disappear again into the quiet life, refreshed and compliant, never needing another hit. But you wonder if those weekday afternoons in a city flat can ever slip docilely into reverie, if the whole experience can be obediently shut away in a box labelled Strictly Unrepeatable; with Gabriel, or anyone else.

You want a child; it’s the only desire, at the moment, that’s clear-cut. You are thirty-six. You need to start.

when a woman expects her confinement, she should look with more than ordinary care to the general condition of her home. the drains should be tested

Your palm rests on your belly. You feel nothing. You have no idea if it’s worked.

Perhaps as a mother you’ll be off limits to Gabriel, the good Catholic boy that he is, you’ll be nullified, out of bounds. The phone calls have stopped but there’s a prickling in the back of your neck sometimes now; you feel watched. You feel sure he’s hovering, somewhere close. You never linger any more by the window. Sometimes when you’re out you’ll snap round, to catch someone out.

He obsessed about a woman once, he told you that. He loved her too much.

Would you really want someone who loves too much? How can you measure love, or indeed distinguish it, you
wonder, distinguish it from infatuation, curiosity, crush? You’d always dreamed of being firmly at the centre of a man’s life, but now it doesn’t feel right. It’s like being locked in an airless, windowless room.

And there’s a taxi driver out there with your name and address. Or a woman with a grubby shirt, who knows you in a way that no one else does, and how you hate that. What on earth made you think that just because you fantasise about a woman you’d want it in real life?

Cole is the one constant. Does every relationship define another, drag into the light the previous one? It’s curious how your time with Gabriel has now reinforced your feelings for your husband, soldered you to his dependability and quiet.

the desire for offspring, for whose sake the mother is even prepared to sacrifice a part of her very life, is the noblest of our purely human passions

You make happiness come, Cole repeats, his belly at your back as you scrub the pans after a Sunday roast. You smile, say nothing. Out in the world there are babies everywhere, pushchairs, pregnant bellies, slings. A man at a party jokes that he travels home at lunchtime just to smell his newborn son’s head, it’s the most powerful, non-erotic human experience, he tells you, pancakes and vanilla and skin.

Uh huh, you nod, and step back.

You read an article by Germaine Greer, that with motherhood women willingly endure a catastrophic decline in their quality of life. You read a scrap from Sylvia Plath’s journal, that she would feel more of a prisoner as an older, tense, cynical career girl than as a richly creative wife and
mother who’s always growing intellectually. Did she believe this? Do you?

You have no idea what’s ahead.

You want a child as an eradication of everything you’ve done over the past few months. You feel like you’re willing a baby to have someone to love consumingly in your life, to fill it up. You’ve heard the horror stories, that it’ll be difficult even to find time for the toilet with a baby around, to have a shower or answer the phone, that in labour you could be ripped from vagina to anus, that making love after birth is like throwing a sausage down the Channel Tunnel, that some men hate being with women who’ve been stretched.

All you know is that with a child your life will swing like an ocean liner changing its course. Which is for the best.

the act of reproduction is the highest and least selfish of our physical functions

Five weeks after Cole and you have made love on a Saturday morning more tenderly than you’ve ever made love before, you vomit into the toilet beside him as he’s brushing his teeth, it comes heaving upon you in seconds. And the next day in a cafe, reading but not, you’re so nauseated after a sip of water that you have to rush to the pavement and throw up into the gutter. Something’s drawing on your energy in a way it’s never been drawn upon before. Cole tells you to buy a pregnancy kit but you want to wait until the weekend, when he’s home and you’re both relaxed: you want some sanctity to the event. It can’t be done at night, it needs the morning when the hormones are strongest, the packet tells you that.

You bombard the plastic stick with your urine, you piss
hot and strong. Two stripes. You shake the stick, they will not be shaken out.

So, confirmed.

It’s worked, it’s not meant to work so quickly. Women of your age are always taking months, or despairing years now, or forever.

There’s a great spreading warmth as you cup your belly in the palm of your hand. Well, hello, my little one, tummytucked, firm in the world, hello. You walk out of the bathroom and Cole’s nodding and smiling and enfolding you in his arms, so tight, it hurts, and tears are pricking the eyes of you both.

So, to be wiped, cleansed, to start afresh. You hope.

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You call your mother with the baby news. She’s not as joyful as you’d expected, there’s a tone in her voice; it’s a shock to you. You wonder what, if anything, you’ve done to irritate her. Perhaps she feels the baby will be limiting, that she’s still waiting for you to have a bigger life. Perhaps she fears her own ageing. Can’t stand the thought of being called gran. Doesn’t want a child all over again, messing up her comfortable world and forcing her to babysit. You sometimes got the feeling, as a teenager, that she was a little too eager to expel you from the nest: she encouraged you often to get your own place and, when you did, could barely contain her annoyance if you returned to wash clothes or use her sewing machine.

The relationship is always like this, up and down, best
friends one day and not speaking the next. She asks how you’re feeling. She says she vomited for the entire nine months. She says that having a child will settle you.

Oh, really?

You don’t ask what she means by that, don’t want to set her off. Generally you live in terror of each other, of the hurt you can both inflict. Something changed when Cole firmed in your life. Your mother knows where your jugular is and sometimes, viciously, goes for it, as if hurting you is a way of holding you. She used to do it, occasionally, when you were child. Like when your report card announced
lacking in initiative
and you’d had to ask, as an eight-year-old, what the strange word meant, and she’d reminded you throughout your childhood and teenage years and with your teaching career and your marriage choice.

Lacking in initiative. You hang up the phone and have to chuckle, wondering what she’d say now. You’ve been chuckling a lot lately; your mother can still hurt but not as much. For the baby inside you is flooding you with joy, is evening you out.

there are plenty of indoor games, such as romps, acting charades and so on

But sometimes you feel a slipping, usually in the morning, around the time Gabriel used to ring. A haunting, like a war veteran’s missing limb. When you need it back, the vividness of that time of the teaching.

Want, again, unfurls under your skin.

There was nothing resigned in those afternoons you both swallowed in one gulp like an oyster slurp. There was a lesson near the end, the one before you walked out, when he was holding your toes and saying he didn’t want to lose you for sex
was
you to him, you embodied it. The honesty of it was dumping you like a wave on the hard sand and you’d stumbled and laughed that it was impossible, how could a relationship ever work and anyway, all women had this in them, not just you, all he had to do
was find a way to unlock it in every woman he was with. To listen. To ask. To learn. There was a whole world out there and he was shutting down as you spoke and nodding, yes, of course and he was kissing you, softly, yes, tremulously, yes, as if, suddenly, he had no right to kiss you at all.

And now in the morning, around the time Gabriel would ring, you waver, you wonder if you’d been too harsh. During that penultimate lesson, as you said goodbye, you’d held his head in your hands and knew that you were already, then, beginning to let go; even though you couldn’t bear the thought of it happening just yet.

the mother’s moral unfitness is to be greatly deplored

At seven weeks old the baby makes you vomit on the pavement outside the post office and then outside the news agency and there’s no time even for the gutter; like a dog with its posts you mark your haunts. But it’s joyous sickness, if there can be such a thing, for it’s telling you that the baby’s strong within you.

It’s changing you already. You crave fresh meat and rice cakes and raw vegetables, fruit and milk. It drags you from your ruby wines and limpid cheeses, your peanut butter and pates. It spoils your taste for chocolate, the canny thing. It urges you to the freezer, to trays of ice cubes which you consume in frenzies of furious crunch.

And now we are three, Cole says softly, wondrously, one night in the close dark. Yes, you reply, yes, thinking of the
strange motivation for this child, its frantic, panicky kickstart into life. Thinking of Theo. You wonder if she fell pregnant as quickly as you; if she’s been flooded with the happy hormones, too. It feels strange, in a way, to be embarking on this journey without her close.

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Someone hangs up the phone on the answering machine so all that’s recorded is a click, and after being exasperated once too often you answer. Silence, on the other end, and the receiver is put down.

You don’t want games, you have no time for them any more, you have something else in your life.

Then another letter arrives. It’s hand delivered, there’s no postmark. You’re not even sure you want to open it; you hold the envelope by a corner like a detective with a forensic specimen, you toy with just throwing it out.

It’s me. I can’t do this any more, I’m sorry. I wish we’d had a chance to talk.

That’s it. You crumple it into the bin. Return to your pregnancy book.

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You sprawl on the couch in the living room, ripely alone.

Cole lies asleep in the bedroom.

He doesn’t want to be intimate any more, he’s afraid of harming the baby now you’re showing, he’s repulsed by the thought of making love to a pregnant woman. That Demi Moore, on the cover of
Vanity Fair,
it was disgusting, he’s said.

So, the lounge room, by yourself, and your fingers float down between your legs, they circle and tease and dip inside and tremors flutter in your stomach and then your fingers move faster and deeper and the tremors sharpen, they shoot upwards into your belly and your chest and you can hardly breathe; you grab at the rug and come like you’ve never come before, for the pregnancy is making
you more sensitive than you’ve ever been, it’s tuning you as finely as a concert grand.

You expected a life made stodgy by fat ankles and smocks and bloat. But as the child brews in its vat you’re thrumming with life and with want, it’s a halo of energy around you and you never anticipated that.

Cole stirs. Come to bed, he cries out, get some sleep.