Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (63 page)

You used to swim laps, several times a week, and then you went to church, evensong, on a Sunday night; and then you sat and typed, in a room that catalogued a relationship once.

The feeling at the end of each activity the same: a cleansing, a serenity. That you have done something solid. Good. Right. Seizing the alone, and lit with it.

No longer feeling you are the rubbed-away housewife with absolutely nothing to contribute, the little woman being pushed to the side of her own life. Here, anonymously, you are the pulsing beating glittering centre of it. Secretly, deliciously.

It feels good. To have found a voice.

To be honest, at last.

It is Friday. You are staying late. You have told your father you’re at your friend’s house again; not sure why you want to be here this night, alone, can’t explain it, even to yourself. But it is a Friday, a weekend is ahead, when people pay visits to their country places …

Perhaps.

You couldn’t bear it.

But what if …?

Just in case, you’ve parked your car at the back of the house, near the bike shed, so as not to spook anyone arriving late.

A little after ten o’clock you hear what you have been waiting for, dreading, anticipating. A car. As you knew you would. A beam of light through the trees, twisting and turning as the road to this house twists and turns, every bend you know so well, and you rise in a rush from his desk like a schoolgirl caught in the headmaster’s office. You run outside, drink up the air,
the sexy pungent air of this night, waiting on the verandah, in the shadows. Your heart pounding.

The moment you have been waiting for.

Your entire adult life.

It is Julian.

You pull back in the darkness, behind a pillar, he does not see you.

Physically, he is much changed. Thickened, with completely grey and receding hair. Shorter, yes, you’re sure. He stops to light a cigarette. Tiredness has dragged down his eyes, dulled his glow. So, a small-of-stature, balding, middle-aged man now, with all the anonymity that comes with that. As if his life has become one huge sigh, of regret. It is in his stance. His face. The way he drags on his cigarette. You always think men age more startlingly than women and he is the proof.

You galvanise yourself, take a deep breath, this has to be done. You step forward, emboldened. He starts in shock, a hand grabbing a verandah post to steady himself.

‘Hello you,’ you say low, strong, warm.

He knows instantly who you are.

‘Where is he?’ you ask before he can say anything. He steps back down the steps, looks around, bewildered, panicked, can’t quite believe you’re here.

‘D–don’t you know?’

You shake your head.

It must be something then, in your face, your bitten lip, suddenly, something haunted, because he comes forward and takes you gently by the arm and he sits you on the top step. Quite changed, all of a sudden. Fatherly, authoritative. Asking about your life – England, work, your kids, husband – leeching from you two and a half decades of experience. Telling you all the while about his divorces, his five children, the crazy maintenance arrangements, his job as a high-end property consultant but it never pays enough – two broken marriages and school fees have seen to that – the constant poverty, the ex-wives, the shifting from place to place.

‘The one constant – the one true friend in it all – has been Tol.’

You look at him.

He nods.

Then he tells you a story.

Of a man who fell in love.

With a teenage girl.

Who asked him once if she could be taught about life.

And so he did. After much resisting, reluctance.

He moulded this rough, raw, scrap of a bush kid, with eyes as knowing as a cat’s. Shaped her, learnt from her, cherished her, marvelled at her. Grew to love her, oh yes. He taught her to understand the artist’s life; to give him space. It was perfect, it worked. He would never hurt her, he was so afraid of hurting her. He would always be generous to her. His aim was to empower her. A new woman for a new world – so strong and aware that no other man would ever want her, would be afraid of her so she would be his, forever, trapped. As he was.

‘He was a writer,’ Julian chuckles ruefully, ‘with a novelist’s eye for the narratives of life.’

‘Was? What do you mean
was
?’

Julian brushes aside the question.

The transformation was recorded, in the most beautiful prose, at his desk. You see, by coming into his life this sparky, demanding, stroppy country kid had unlocked him – with her hunger for experience and her enormous curiosity – and miraculously, he was able to write again. He was freed. The words came strong, in a way they never had in his life.

Because of you.

His muse.

On an afternoon of sullen sky a car drove up. A man stepped out. A valley man. Tol knew it instantly; it was the gait, the shoulders, the face. He also knew exactly who he was – the imprint was clear on his face. You shrink back on the step and shut your eyes, can’t bear to hear what’s coming next. Before Tol could say anything the man strode up to him and in one enormous fell swoop, punched him hard across the temple before a word had been exchanged.

‘It wasn’t …’ Dread in your voice.

‘Yes.’

You had been seen. That last day you came here. By Colin, your father’s old mining mate, who used to look at you with leery, rheumy drinker’s eyes. His car had a puncture and his spare tyre was shot and he was walking back into Beddy and he had caught a glimpse of the schoolgirl – the la-di-da convent girl now, Miss Goody Two Shoes who never gave him the time
of day anymore – slipping from a gate he’d never given a second glance. Until that afternoon.

And so on that final day – after you came home and shut yourself in your room in splendid shock and exhilaration and release – your father left your house and slipped through Tol’s wire gate.

To investigate.

As soon as he saw Tol’s face – the awareness, the defensiveness – he knew exactly what had been going on.

The first blow was so savage it knocked Tol unconscious. He lay in the dust as your father crashed and banged his way through Woondala’s rooms, bluntly, ferociously, with no respect. In Tol’s study he found a manuscript.

The reckless honesty.

The filth.

His daughter, through all of it.

Tol was coming to, reeling in the dirt, trying to get up. Your father came out roaring. With his heavy work boots he kicked Tol in the head and the back and the stomach and he stamped on his hands. Both of them. Stamped and stamped until all the fingers were a bloody, flattened, jellied mess. Stamped out words, stamped out writing, stamped out creativity – all that airy-fairy, namby-pamby good-for-nothing patheticness – stamped out everything he didn’t like about this country and this world and this life; everything he couldn’t believe existed in his daughter. His
daughter
, for Christ’s sake.

An act of extreme and unremitting violence.

Tol was unconscious again, from the brutality of the assault.

Then your father went back through the study and took away every word that was in it. The typewritten manuscript, the only copy that existed; every book, quote, diary, notebook, every narrative arc and worksheet. Because of course Tol had a hopeless memory and wrote everything down, he had told you that once and you had learnt from it.

Your father filled the tray of his ute. Every word. Every stinky rotten filthy perverted word from this godforsaken shithole of a place.

Everything, except several scraps of sentences glued to a wall.

Because he couldn’t get them off.

The only words left in this entire place.

‘I still have …’

‘That little housewife’s book. I know. Tol told me. It’s the only book Woondala has left.’

You both pause in the dark. Julian puts an arm around your shoulder.

‘Treasure it,’ he says soft.

Your father left this place. His last words? As Tol was stirring in agony in the bloodied dirt. You shut your eyes, don’t want to hear them, must.

‘Try taking this to the police, you cunt. Just fucking try.’

Because of course Tol couldn’t. You were a schoolgirl. He knew the risks.

‘But you know what?’ Julian shakes his head. ‘It’s such a crazy thing … Tol said that as your father was doing it all, as he was ruining all his work, life, opus, there was something about the man that he admired, that he couldn’t condemn.’

‘What?’

‘The love. He did it out of love. For his daughter. His blood. He was literally beside himself, driven mad. It was the only way he could express it. He wept over and over as he was stomping on Tol, “Give her a chance. Let her finish school, you dirty fucker … give her a life. A
chance
…”’

You’re weeping now. Julian squeezes your shoulder tight, holding in your sobs.

‘And Tol knew that your father was right. He got the gate locked.’ A pause. ‘And for years he kept it locked.’

‘Why?’

He looks at you as if it is obvious.

‘To give you a chance.’