Authors: Nikki Gemmell
With My Body (2 page)
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You begin.
It feels right. At his desk. On his chair. His typewriter is the only thing left of him in the room. The ink ribbon is fresh—the metal letters cut firm and deep—as if he has placed it for this moment, just for you. You start slow, clunking, getting used to the heft of the old way. Working laboriously on the beautiful, antique machine for if you make a mistake you can’t go back and you need these pages methodical, neat. You type with his old Victorian volume by your side, that he gave you once—
A Woman’s Thoughts About Women—
that logged within its folds all that happened in this place, that breathed life, once. You relive the dialogue of his handwriting and yours jotted in the margins and the back, don’t quite know what you’re going to do with all the work; at this stage you’re just collating, filching everything that’s needed from this notebook whose pages are bruised with age and grubbiness and life, luminous life: sweat and ink and rain spots; sap and dirt and ash; the grease from a bicycle and a silvery snail’s trail and a cicada wing, its fragile, leadlit tracery. You reap his words and yours and then the Victorian housewife’s, her lessons about life, her guiding voice. She will lead you through this.
Tell the truth and don’t be afraid of it
, she soothes. Yes.
Writing to understand.
And as you work you feel a presence, a hand in the small of your back, willing you on. Every person who’s ever loved and lost, every person who’s ever entered that exclusive club—heartbreak. Your little volume always beside you, the book you came here to bury, to have the earth of this valley receive as one day it will receive your own flesh, you are sure—lovingly, gratefully, because it is so, right, you are part of it.
But first this book must serve another purpose.
You feel strong, lit.
Whole.
Writing to work it all out.
You have never told anyone this. No one knows what you really think. It has always been extremely important to never let them know; to never show them the ugliness, brutality, magnificence, selfishness, glory; never give them a way in. It has always been important to maintain your equilibrium, your smile, your carapace at all times. You could not bear for anyone to see who you really are.
But now, finally, it is time. With knowing has come release. It has taken years to get to this point.
‘Even in sleep I know no respite’
Heloise d’Argenteuil
Let everything be plain, open and above-board.
Tell the truth and don’t be afraid of it.
You think about sleeping with every man you meet. You do not want to sleep with any of them. Couldn’t be bothered anymore. You are too tired, too cold. The cold has curled up in your bones like mould and you feel, in deepest winter, in this place that has cemented around you, that it will never be gouged out. You live in Gloucestershire. In a converted farmhouse with a ceiling made of coffin lids resting on thatchers’ ladders. It is never quite warm enough. There are snowdrops in February and bluebells in May and the wet black leaves of autumn then the naked branches of winter clawing at the sky, all around you, months and months of them with their wheeling birds lifting in alarm when you walk through the fields not paddocks; in this land of heaths and commons and moors, all the language that is not your language for you were not born in this place.
Your memories scream of the sun, of bush taut with sound and bleached earth. Of the woman you once were. She is barely recognisable now.
You do not know how to climb out, to gain traction with some kind of visibility, as a woman. To find a way to live audaciously. Again.
The house-mother! Where could you find a nobler title, a more sacred charge?
Your husband, Hugh, will be home late. Ten or so. This is not unusual. He works hard, as a GP, and you cherish that, the work ethic firm in him; he will not let his family down. There’s always something he has to do at the end of the day, paperwork, whatever.
It is good Hugh is home late, what you want. You seize those precious few hours between putting the children to bed and his homecoming for yourself. The soldering time. When you uncurl, recalibrate. Draw a bath and dream of being unclenched, of standing with your face to the sky in the hurting light, opening out your chest and filling up your bones with warmth. Becoming tall again, vivid-hearted, the woman you once were.
You have a good girl’s face. Young, still. But Hugh detected something underneath, early on he sniffed it out like a bloodhound. Something … unhinged … under the smile. Something coiled, waiting for release.
He’ll never find it. You have been locked away for so long and your husband does not have the combination and never will, now, has no idea what kind of combination is needed; he thinks all is basically fine with his marriage. You’ve both
reached a point of stopping in the relationship. Too busy, too swamped by everything else.
You are the good doctor’s wife. All wellies and Range Rovers, school runs and Sunday church and there is a part of you that your husband will never reach and that elusiveness used to addle him with desire; what went on, once, in your life.
‘Tell me your thoughts,’ he used to say. ‘What are you thinking?’ But you couldn’t let on, ever, didn’t want this good man scared off: he must never know the rawness of the underbelly of your past. This one was marriage material: respectability, kids, the rose-bowered cottage; nothing must jeopardise it.
The magnificence, ugliness, beauty, power, transcendence—when you were unlocked. That Hugh will never know, for you did not marry him for that; he cannot lay you bare like you were laid bare once.
Some men know how, but most don’t.
She is forever pursued by a host of vague adjectives, ‘proper’, ‘correct’, ‘genteel’, which hunt her to death like a pack of rabid hounds
Your children are just back from school. Outside is icy-white but it is frost, not snow, a brittle blanket of stillness that clamps down the world. The frost has not melted in the mewly light of the previous few days. The kids champ at the bit inside, they want to be out in the light, before it is gone; almost. You let them loose. They spill through the kitchen door, run. Storming into the crisp quiet, roaring it up; bullying the frost, its deathly stillness.
You smile as you stare through the window at your boys—so much life in them. Such shining, demanding, insistent personalities, all so different. You make another cup of tea, the last of the day or you won’t sleep; green tea because so many dear friends are getting ill now—three at the moment, with breast cancer. And with your mother’s history you have to be careful of that.
You’re so tired, you have four boys if you count the one you’re married to and the exhaustion is now like an alien that’s nestled inside your body, sucking away all your energy. It’s an exhaustion that stretches over years, since your first child, Rexi, was born; the exhaustion of never being in control anymore, of never completely calling the shots. Once, long ago, as a single career woman, you
did. You dwelled within a white balloon of loveliness, in the city, loved your beautifully pressed, colour-ordered clothes and regular weekend sleep-ins, your overseas trips and crammed social life.
But now this. A tight little world of Mummyland, symbolised by a mountain of unsorted clothes on the floor at the end of the bed. You can get the clothes into the washing machine. You can get them out. You can arrange them over the radiators to dry. You can collect the dried clothes and put them in a heap ready for sorting. But you cannot, cannot, get the clothes back into their cupboards and drawers. Until that pile at the end of the bed becomes a volcano of frustration and accusation and despair; ever growing, ever depleting you. Until sometimes, alone, you are weeping and you barely know why, your hands clawed frozen at your cheeks. ‘I can’t do it.’ Sometimes you even say it to your children, horribly it slips out—‘It’s too hard, I can’t do this’—bewildering them.
You weren’t this woman, once; despised this type of woman, once.
You are lonely yet desperate for alone; it’s so hard to get away from your beloved Tigger-boys, to steal moments of blissful alone from everyone dependent upon you. You feel infected with sourness, have lost the sunshine in your soul. You do not like who you have become; someone reduced.
Yet you are so fortunate, have so much. You know this, despairingly. Cannot complain but are locked in your demanding little world of giving, giving, giving to everyone else, all the time; trapped.
Lost women
You have not slept with your husband since the birth of your third son two years ago. This doesn’t bother you. It is a relief. If it bothers Hugh he no longer expresses it. You’ve both stopped talking about your lack of a sex life, the joshing has gone, the teasing; he never talks about it now. He used to snuffle about, playful, trying to unlock his little librarian with her knee-length tweed skirts and demure shirts, unleash whatever it was that was underneath. Now, you suspect, he’s as exhausted as you.
Almost every night it’s musical beds, a different combination of child next to you with Hugh squeezed into various dipping mattresses. Recently you’ve been waking every night, around 3 a.m., hugely, violently. Roaming the house, banging the walls with clenched fists; harangued by sleeplessness, needing to reclaim yourself. Heart thudding, knowing you will not be able to sleep for several hours and then tomorrow will be no better and perhaps worse. Oh for a full, deep, rich sleep, with nothing to wake you the next day, no demands, squabbles, wants. Oh for that sated sleep of deeply satisfying sex. Tenderness, a shiver of a touch.
You love Hugh, of course, feel for him deeply, but would be happy to be celibate from now on. You look at some of the school dads around you and just know they’d be ‘dirt’—cheeky,
playful, a bit of rough—and it’s always the divorced ones; there’s something unfettered, loose, lighter about them. But you’d never do anything about it. Don’t need sex anymore. You wonder at the shine of those women who are man-free by choice: some widows and divorcees you’ve seen over the years, nuns, septuagenarians; those precious few who no longer seek out men and are strong with their decision and lit with it. You recognise that glow.
Unencumbered.
Men, for you, have fulfilled their purpose; you have children, are sated. Once, long ago, you were made tall and strong by the shock of someone who cherished women and was not afraid of them, who revered their bodies. Men like that are extremely rare and when a woman finds one she recognises profoundly the difference in the lovemaking and is forever changed; that man becomes a paragon by which all others are measured and you are lucky, so lucky, to have found it, once. You have girlfriends who never have.
That season of early autumn, which ought to be the most peaceful, abundant, safe and sacred time in a woman’s whole existence
A memory slicing through your life.
That you slip out every night like a billet-doux hidden in a pillowcase, that you’ve carried through all your adult years. A memory of exquisite shock: that your body was cherished once. Not used but thrummed into life. His touch—you are addled by the remembering even now, after all these years. His touch—sparking you awake, God in it. And his voice. Is that what we remember most potently, out of all the senses, long after someone has gone? You can still recall the exact way he spoke your name when he was deep inside you, moving almost imperceptibly, the nourishment of it. You have pocketed that voice in your memory long after the sharpness of his features has faded.
In no way did he want to reduce you; that above all you remember. His singular aim: to empower you, lift you, unlock you. Teach you to know your body, what it is capable of. How many men give women that gift?
Another country. Another life.
A world away from this one, now, sipping your green tea as you stare out the window at 4.30 p.m., your life ticking by, your
knuckles white around the mug. It’ll be teatime soon, followed by the pleading to get the homework done, the dragging from screens, the nagging to have showers, do teeth; all the plea-bargaining, negotiating, cajoling in your life, the relentless exhaustion of it.
Married women have cast their lot for good or ill, having realised in greater or lesser degree the natural destiny of our sex
Hugh and you are bound by an unspoken acknowledgement that you’ll never split—you’re in this together, for life. When you married him you were aching for love, something transporting; he was a friend who had you laughing deep into the night and so it would work, yes. You’ve always cherished his evenness. Were never uncomfortable with him, even in silence—the test of a true connection. You are so fortunate to have him, you know this, you must never forget it.
You do not like the way he kisses. Do not know how to tell him this, could never hurt him. It will not change. It’s gone on too long. It cannot be taught. How can you say to someone you love that they lack tenderness? It’s impossible to learn, to acquire. You could endure it pre-children, he offered so much else—filling up the glittery loneliness of yet another Saturday night by yourself, another New Year’s Eve; his sturdy, charming presence quelling all those awkward questions on Christmas Days and all the weddings and baby showers you were suddenly going to. Your saviour, you know it.
