Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (51 page)

It is the weekend. Two days – two churning days – of waiting ahead. You’re like a horse straining at the starting gate, kicking out strong in your box.

You drive past Woondala with your father.

The gates are locked.
Locked
.

Your head whips back.

‘What’s up? You alright?’

‘Nothin’.’

But your groin. Squeezing in want as it bears down on the car seat. Still feeling those slices of satin lingering, teasing, electrifying; long after they’ve gone.

‘I need your notebook.’ First thing he says.

‘Why?’

‘I have to write something down.’ He smiles. ‘One last time.’

‘But it’s all
my
notes now.’ You hold it protectively at your chest. ‘I don’t want you seeing it anymore. Anyone …’

He laughs. ‘Give me my page,
you
. I’m not looking at anything else. Trust me.’

Reluctantly you hand it across; he turns obediently to the back.

‘Just one more thing, alright. To mark the next stage, to frame it.’ He looks up; a roguish smile.

‘I think we can improve on that.’

You bite your lip.

A nervousness has stumbled into your love.

‘But do you really love me?’

The guarantee that is needed to proceed.

‘Yes yes, come on.’

You’re holding back. ‘Sometimes, I don’t know, I think you’re too clever to love anyone. That your type only ever love
so
much.’ You squint and pinch your fingers as if they’re holding a pair of tweezers.

Because he has learnt survival and you have not. Because you fear it.

‘Do you love me, Tol, as much as I love you?’

He hesitates.

‘I don’t know.’ Sincere. Honest. Matter-of-fact.

You stop. Look around. In something like panic. You’ve been colonising his world ever since you set eyes on him and you’re still not convinced that he likes it, enough; are never sure.

‘I could make this such a beautiful home.’ You smile, testing, a game, turning to a wall and sweeping your hand across it.

He doesn’t reply.

‘I
said
–’ you repeat, louder.

He doesn’t reply. He’s making you feel soiled, suddenly, with his silence.

You snap away. Cut the session short.

The piracy of indifference, and you will not stand for it.

Furiously you cycle home, the light dappling the dirt road in zebra shadows like strobe lighting flicking across your eyes as you wonder how this all ends – it won’t, it must.

Feeling as vulnerable as a fontanelle, suddenly, with all this.

For four days you do not go back.

Riddled with frustration, hesitation, doubt; shielding yourself against future hurt. You can’t give him what he wants because you’re not sure he’ll ever give you the equivalent in return. He wants so much from you: your deepest thoughts, your truth; but you don’t have his and suspect you never will. You are not an instrument by which he will work things out here, you will not let him hone his skills on you for something – some
one
– else. Someone in the past or the future or even, God forbid, the present. Who exactly is in the city, waiting, that he’s always running back to? Who’s in his other life?

Everywhere, now, little barriers are shooting up.

You try to focus on your school work, finally; you’re nearing the end of the holidays and the study’s banking up. You’ve been existing in a golden morass of sex that is slowing you, killing your thinking, you’ve got nothing done. The pleasures of Woondala have been making you weak, interfering with your focus and calm; it’s like a magic spell
binding you, swamping you now, snatching your ambition and your strength.

Him, too. You can tell. This is for the best, this being apart, yes. Because something is falling away – sometimes, recently, he hasn’t been looking out on the verandah near enough for you; sometimes you’ve had to wait too long after throwing a pebble at his study window, until finally he emerges as if dragged from his desk.

You, the intrusion.

He’s been lamenting recently that he’s not getting enough done, he’s too distracted, this second book is so difficult; it’s like extracting blood from a stone. Lamenting that he wrote his first book with such an arrogance and an innocence, never knowing if it would be published, but now he has the weight of expectation on him and it’s clogging him up. Lamenting his fear, the writer’s fear, that the urge to think rarely strikes the contented; that he needs the hunger or he will stop.

The wolf-ranginess of the alone. You fear it, that it is deep in him, and it will always win out.

You wrote the passage down recently while you were waiting for him, flipping through the books by his bed and coming
across it. You felt a little whine of frustration blundering between you in that moment, which is growing, now, in this time apart.

Will he break you?

But then. A great surging within you, you can’t help it, you must go back, can’t not; shuddering deep inside as you cycle up his driveway on the afternoon of day four with one very beautiful art deco tea cup wrapped in newspaper in a Woolworths bag – from your grandmother, she lost the saucer decades ago and says you can have it, to find a match.

You flit by something glinting in the sunshine. Stop, turn your bike around.

A jar, suspended on a single thread of wire wrapped around its neck.

Inside, a note. On red paper so fragile you could almost eat it, melt it on your tongue.

The smile plumes inside you like ink through water. Affirmation – and isn’t that, in the end, what we all want. His writing voice is like a hand reaching inside you and holding
your heart and never letting it go. You place the jar back onto its knot of a bark hook and walk on with your bicycle, the slip of paper in your overalls, spreading its warmth like a heated stone tucked into a pocket in the deepest of winters.

Another jar.

Another note.

Green this time, as fragile as the last.

Another, further on.

Another. A scrawl on a eucalyptus leaf.

And gouged deep in the bark of the Scribbly Gum it hangs upon:

All of it wrapping you in a gigantic yes.

You drop your bike, you break into a run.

He is waiting on the verandah, sitting on the top step, staring out, as if he has been doing this for four days and nothing else. He calls out your name when he sees you and there is all the loneliness of the world in that cry and you rush up and hesitantly you feel him, like rare china, scarcely believing.

It is as if he will break with your touch.