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Authors: Nikki Gemmell

With My Body (10 page)

BOOK: With My Body
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He didn’t
like
women, that was the most shocking lesson from it.

The affronted, luminous pain of the experience is like a bell of sadness inside you, pushing against your skin, as you stumble, dazed, into the late afternoon.

No idea where to go from it.

 

Lune will know none of it. You shut down, shamed, will never talk of it.

And the knowing, now, one other thing: you are too clever to love anything like that.

Furiously you wipe away the tears, lift your face high to a ravishing sunset. You’ve got a train to catch.

Lesson 43

The free, happy ignorance of maidenhood is gone forever

In your diary, late that raw, ranging night, you come across a scrap of something from Gabriel Garcia Marquez describing the loss of his virginity as a teenager—how it triggered a vital force within him.

The sense of celebration, the boldness, intrigues and angers you. You wonder if this feeling of empowerment is a particularly male phenomenon.
What
vital force? You’ve been shocked into silence; in the addled aftermath of this episode you’re experiencing a catastrophic loss of spark, of certainty. You can barely record the episode in your diary—the sheer, puny grubbiness of it. Once you felt so cheeky and curious, bold and sure; now, suddenly, you’re faltering. What happened back there? As soon as a man put his arm around you something was rubbed out; some inner certainty. Why the leakage of confidence, the capitulation, as you entered the realm of the sexual? Why did you nod and gush so pathetically, saying ‘yes please, a studio, wow,’ on that concourse?

Your bewilderment, over the lot of it.

 

You suspect a terrifying secret: that virginity and chastity by choice are the magic elixirs that can make a woman calm,
audacious, strong. You will have to find out. You don’t know how. The experiment feels almost derailed from the start. Love must be tracked, studied, dissected, yes of course, but you must never allow it to snap you in its strong jaws like a steel trap. No, the jagged pain of your father’s withholding has taught you the folly of that.

Lesson 44

Nature’s law undoubtedly is that our nearest ties should be those of blood

Several days with your grandmother.

You need her right now, the certainty of her powdery smell and flannelette sheets, her unconditional warmth. You’ve begged your father and he’s complied with phone calls arranging pick ups and train tickets; as if he senses something rattling within you that is beyond him and he’s more than happy to palm it off. Women’s business, all that emotional stuff—his mother will sort it out.

 

You have not told her anything. Does she sense … something? A changing, a turning.

Over her meat-and-three-veg dinner you talk school and careers and marriage and life, she asks if you’ve got a boyfriend and you shake your head and laugh and she nods—plenty of time, love, plenty of time—and tells you how good she was, once, at so much: maths and English, geography and athletics, but then as soon as a boy put his arms around her she was gone.

‘Just like that.’

She married young.

‘It was all I wanted, and it killed my ambition, every single
scrap of it. And my energy,’ she cackles. ‘Which was just bursting from me, once.’

You smile, wondering what she sees in you that has changed and why she is saying all this.

Later, as she’s tucking you into your bed with its electric blanket on and smoothing down the hair on your forehead, she adds, ‘There’s a strength about us women that scares men, I think. You keep your chin up, love. Get a degree; be a doctor or a lawyer. Make me proud. Your father too. You could be the first in the family to finish school, let alone university. Your dad left at fourteen to go down the pit, I left to go into service. Do it for us.’

You will not tell her what has happened, will never tell her, it would break her heart.

Lesson 45

To young people, the world is always a paradise

No idea where to go from it.

You shut down. For a couple of years. A spring coiled tight.

Waiting, for God knows what.

Lost.

IV

‘I could fancy a love for life here almost possible … ’
Emily Brontë,
Wuthering Heights

Lesson 46

When it comes to ‘each for herself’—when Miss This cannot be asked to a party for fear of meeting Madame That, or if they do meet, through all their smiling civility you perceive their backs are up, like two strange cats meeting at a parlour door—I say, this is the most lamentable of all results which the world effects on women

Summer holidays. Eight weeks ahead of thick heat, cicadas, bush-fire alerts.

Your stepmother is ignoring you. It is her one weapon, her only way to have power over you. With silence.

You are too different. You have city-awareness now. You will never lose yourself like she has done, and no matter how much she thinks she has won—when your father doesn’t show up to your speech days, when he never talks with the parents of your new friends, when he neglects to set foot in your world—you would never, ever want your stepmother’s life. The sourness of it, her closed heart. It is the one power you have over her.

The energy between you is wrong. You could never be her, she could never be you. It is never discussed, but you both know it.

 

Today she has designated a cleaning day, is buried in a flurry of activity. Sorting through her Tupperware boxes, rinsing and airing—she takes them to gatherings to scoop up leftover food. You can’t bear the bustling little world of domesticity she creates around her, crowding out any trace of your mother in this scrap of a house that was renovated by your parents long ago—working side by side, he told you once. And now, an obsessive accumulation of new and shiny possessions from daytime ads on the telly cluttering it up—newfangled mosquito zappers, wall-mounted can-openers, sewing tables, kitchen knife sets.

You have few possessions. Like it that way. Like to see the bones of these old valley houses and their heart, running hands along the old plaster walls like horses’ flanks, marvelling at the carpentry in dinky corner cabinets and the bread tins filled with concrete holding up porch roofs and the mouldings of pressed-tin ceilings and the beauty in deco bush flowers scattered in old bathroom tiles, like your own. Tiles now obscured by a stick-on plastic railing and a matching avocado towel set that you know you must keep straight.

So. Cleaning day. And you’re jumping on Peddly to get away from it all and smiling at the familiarity of that hard, worn saddle. Feel young again, out, shedding your city skin. You’re flinging your bike aside and walking thigh-deep in bleached grass, catching grasshoppers and feeling the dry flick of them inside the bauble of your palm before you free them to leap in a great springing arc of release, laughing, away from your stepmother’s narrow, silent, affronted little world.

Go. GO!

 

At three o’clock you return.

You hear her footsteps thudding through the house towards you. Furious. You shut your eyes. What have you done now? There’s always something to vex her and usually she doesn’t say, it’s just in the thud of her step, her contained fury when you’re in her space.

She has found your diary.

Which was under your bed, still in your school bag. She has gone into your bedroom, your private place, and dug it out. And read it of course, you know instantly. It’s on her face. You have never seen her so incensed, tight, repulsed.

‘Get out, you …
thing
… you. I don’t want you here. Your words, your filth, in my house.’

‘It’s
my
place as much as yours. I lived here long before
you
.’

You try snatching the book back but the sturdy girl with her big country thighs has it firm.

‘Give it back,’ you scream—because it’s your words, your truth, everything that has happened in your life. ‘You spoil
everything
.’ Clawing your hair in frustration, can’t make this right, win, can’t think fast enough. Your tears in that moment are from years of competitiveness and exhaustion and bafflement—you’re his
daughter
, you were a child, you do not understand the jealousy; what you have with your father is a blood tie, a given, a totally different relationship to hers. But you can’t speak properly, can’t get it out, are clotted before her, as clotted as your father. The only place you can talk is in your diary.

Which she’s got.

With everything recorded in it.

That she has done.

The relationship between the three of you is all about the gift
of attention, and your father cannot bestow it upon two women at once. And she will win, always. She is an adult and you are not, she knows how to do it; to demand and punish. To withhold what he wants.

 

You both know that when your father comes back the two of you will be quiet and he will know none of this, the explosive fury between females. That is the code of you both, the only common code you adhere to; this is women’s business.

She spits on your diary in contempt. Has no intention of giving it back. Stomps inside with a slap of the screen door. You hear your words being flung across the room in disgust.

And then quiet.

The only power in her life. A withholding.

Lesson 47

Only be honest. No falsehoods, no concealments of any kind.

But something new.

What honesty can do. The power of it.

She has opened your words and she has read them. All the little incidents over the years, all the hurts, cruelties, vulnerabilities; all the disobedience and confusion and longing and touch. The truth has been forensically trapped. Your meticulous record. And she has been incensed by it.

You smile.

Lesson 48

The most of women are, in their youth at least, decidedly ‘adjective’. Few of them have had the chance of becoming a ‘noun substantive’—they have been accustomed all their lives to be governed, if not guarded; protected

You run far from her world of Tupperware boxes and spotless surfaces, run and run in your bib-and-brace overalls cut off at the knees and your flannelette shirt; dirt girl, sun girl, strong in it. You find your old bush shelter, still there, just, and curl into it.

Stilled by the bubble of the creek. Its insistent coolness. You shut your eyes as the talking water soothes you down; you’ll get your book back, you’ll find it, she’s not so smart.

You jerk up.

Smoke. On the breeze.

Fire.

With a pounding heart you rush back.

She has stoked up the incinerator in its rusty metal drum, is ripping apart your diary’s spine and feeding great chunks of it to the flames as methodically as she feeds clothes to the washing machine.

Noooooooooooo!

Too late. She flings the last chunk of your words into the furnace and turns, and looks at you, saying nothing but everything in her face. She has won. She is burning them because she never wants your father to find the meticulous chronicle of her unkindness. And you know that if you tell him about her cruelty, she will tell him about Central Station.

So. Caught.

Magnificently.

You leap on Peddly, barefoot, the sharp ridges on the pedals press hard into your bare feet but you need that, need the pain to blot everything else out and you spin and ride away from her, faster and faster, away from the claustrophobia; the enormous swamping of hate.

You won’t be hurrying back. Teaching them, teaching
her
.

Forcing them to care. To notice. Finally, please.

By absence.
Your
withholding.

Lesson 49

Does ever any man or woman remember the feeling of being ‘whipped’—as a child—the fierce anger, the insupportable ignominy, the longing for revenge?

Gulping your shock, pushing your bike down dirt roads, further and further away from her, down fire trails scarcely used and barely noticing what you’re doing, where you’re going. Wiping away furious tears as you pedal by a tall wire fence you’ve barely noticed in the past, an anonymous, official-looking barrier hiding away some old mine you’ve never given a second thought to; but stopping, this time, skidding in the dirt.

Its double gate is open. The sturdy chain always locking it hangs limp.

‘B.M.C.’ declares a sign on the gate: the Something Mining Company. Of course. So what.

‘No Trespassers. No Shooters.’

Right. But you’re not a trespasser, you’re an observer; you’re not going to steal or destroy anything. It’s just that in all your life this gate has never been ajar and you can’t
not
do this. You feel the old sizzle of curiosity revving up. A mine of your own, an enormous playground to colonise, hide away in, to fall down a shaft and be rescued by your father, after several days in an agony
of unknowing; his arms in a furious embrace of relief and love and torment.

Imagine her face at that.

Maybe there’s a rusty tower you can climb, a queen surveying the roof of her world; maybe a metal cage that sinks to the hot, drippy bowels of the earth; an abandoned office with a typewriter and forgotten safe. Mine records in meticulous ink, faded photographs, mysterious pulleys and rail tracks. Who knows what’s in there. A washroom containing lockers with forgotten treasures—penknives and hard hats, tin cribs and cap lamps. You once snuck near the washroom of your father’s mine and caught the men with their shirts hanging off their waists as they prepared to slough away the black dust from the bowels of the earth; the torsos and taut flesh, so different to the men of the city, so different to Mr Cooper with his softness, round shoulders, paleness, city sweat. You are addicted to the unknown, love not knowing what to expect.

BOOK: With My Body
12.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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