Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (57 page)

You emerge into the light as if from a coma, a sleep of a thousand years, a death. Your girl-face is gone.

The anger, still. That you were a lover before you were entirely a person. A lover before you were a woman and something is wrong with the natural order of that. Perhaps he has gone back to his Cecilia, perhaps she was in the room that final afternoon; it was all for her, a porn movie sprung to glary life.

Now the shame washes through you as stately as hemlock, shutting you down. Retracting from everyone and everything. You wrap yourself in black, forget to wash your hair, ugly yourself up.

His plaything. His doll.

How
dare
he.

Oh yes. Anger, now, sludgy-black through all your days. At his weakness, his cowardice, his selfishness – alone in his tower, unable to face life. Such a little man.

How
dare
he.

You go back to school, plough yourself into work. You have the gift of an excellent memory; it sees you through. You do not consider yourself especially clever, you can just recall so much, fool everyone.

As the anger congeals it hardens into aspic. But you have a life to live and so you must. Apart. Alone. Doubt and rage still there but it is as if a layer of skin has been peeled from your eyes. The desolation is wolfish, jagged, hurting. This is a stepping stone to the new – your next love will be more owned, more adult.

You are growing up.

You see Tol now. His running life. No woman’s to have or hold. See the essential loneliness of the soul; he demanded it and he has infected you with it. But you don’t like the solitude anymore – he has made you lonely in it, for the first time in your life.

And he has robbed you of your youth.

You pass your Higher School Certificate. Triumphantly.

The pride in your father’s eyes that he cannot articulate – he recognises that education is the way out. The only way out for his daughter; the only way to escape the life of his wife and all the women around him.

‘I support you in whatever you do,’ he tells you quietly on the day the letter arrives. But you know what he wants. There will not be poetry in grimy attics or acting courses or novels by the sea; none of that is a proper, solid, paying life. You are the first in the family to ever finish school let alone university and you have no choice. It will be a prestigious profession, law or medicine, at one of the nation’s top universities. You cannot let him down. It is unspoken, of course.

What has characterised the relationship between your father and yourself as your teenage years gathered pace: silence, absence, a pulling apart. Perhaps he has sensed you slipping away yourself, that you don’t need him anymore, and it’s his way of connecting – barbing you, hooking you, in the only way he can.

Through withdrawal and silence, the hurt of that.

But you smile now with the release of forgiveness. It is time to pay back all that love, so awkward and unspoken; but constant, like an underground river deep through you; nourishing, replenishing.

Everything Tol isn’t.

Sydney, now you’re an adult, feels like a rangy dog in the back of a ute, pacing, cagy, unwilling to rest. The loneliest place you have ever lived in your life and sitting in your local café you are like a blind person, all senses reeling. At the relentless traffic – sirens and accelerations and buses braking with a great squeal – at radio jabber, car fumes, crashing tea cups, clattering cutlery. You understand now where Tol was coming from: yes, this city is too noisy to write in, too aggressive to ever find calm. The exhaustion of just getting by in it.

You walk onto the university campus on your first day feeling completely out of your depth. Old, already. But with no idea who you are. You have to find out. You only know you want to be in London by the time you’re twenty-five, New York by thirty.

And always, your soaring heart when you board the train for home. For your quiet. Your air. Your hurting sky. His too. On the train speeding you home you squeeze your eyes on tears as you take his earlobe in your lips, his vulnerable, creased softness; you know him like a landscape you have played in endlessly, want to enfold his body into yours as the train clacks you on, want to wrap your limbs around the foetal curve of
his back, and hold, just that. Want. Want. Want. As the train propels you deeper and deeper into a secret world of memory – your land, your sky, your learning.

The gate is always locked.

Every time you cycle back. Just in case, just to check.

The weeds grow over it, the scrub grows tall, the land reclaims as it will always reclaim everything, eventually, in this place that is not meant for humans, that will always draw you back.

And then the mornings. Every morning, in your old childhood bed, just before wakefulness. The aching stab of wanting him to touch your cunt, a whisper of a touch and the thrum spreading through your body, from your explosive core, and you are burning with it and you jerk into waking, into emptiness.

For so long you wander, desolate and alone, in the bleak borderlands of the soul. Head down, flinching people off. No touch. Never that. Nothing physical with anyone, couldn’t bear it, the disappointment. All you have to anchor you is work.

Those rogue Saturday nights when you haven’t been able to organise going out. Those endless New Year’s Eves by yourself, raw with the alone, in your bedsit. Those keen questions at Christmas from grandparents and aunts:
when are you getting a boyfriend, love? When are you going to settle down? Are you happy? Is anything wrong?

He has sullied your idea of passion. You have lost all sense of love as rescue. You are becoming desiccated and crabby without love, can feel the sourness. Cross and short with people, losing grace. Once, the more sex you had the more you wanted; now the less you have the less you want until desire has stopped, entirely.

For years, the flatlands.

For years, the soft patter of rain, from your heart.

A dinner party. In raffish lovely seedy Darlinghurst – Darling it Hurts in local parlance. The intense curiosity of the boy opposite. Firing questions, rat tat tat, drinking you up. You lean back and smile a crooked smile at his enthusiasm, feel so old within it. You used to be him once, vivid with curiosity, eating up life.

‘So, do you have a boyfriend?’ He’s asking playfully, greedily. ‘Have you ever had one?’

You bite your lip. He thinks you’ve never had one. Good grief. Because there’s something so closed about you now, demure, shut off, in your fifties cardigan and dress.

You are twenty-two. Something snaps in you.

Once, you were a collator of experiences.

Once, you were conducting a grand and most exhilarating experiment.

You smile at him, a new smile.

Ready to begin again. Just like that. To unlock the more dangerous side of yourself, to take her out, to drink his enthusiasm up.

You cross your legs, wet.