Authors: Nikki Gemmell
With My Body (26 page)
From that day this girl never was dependent upon any human being
Your father looks up from his tea and chocolate biscuit as you enter the house. As if he knows, as if he can smell something on you. Change, perhaps, as simple as that. Bruises are pluming on your thighs and your upper arms but he cannot see them; you do not know what he senses but it is some subtle thing, perhaps a ripening, a readiness, just that.
‘How old are you again?’ he asks absently.
He always teases you with this, on the birthdays he invariably forgets or ignores, to toughen you up, to get your indignant reminder. He asks you now like he can’t believe you’re growing so fast; he needs affirmation of how young you really are.
You just roll your eyes and smile the disbelieving, mock-disgusted smile that you always give him at this question then retreat to your room—have to, suddenly an uncontrollable trembling in your legs. Have to rip away your clothes to examine the vivid map on your skin, the imprint of what went on: the bruise on your left breast, deep and angry, the strange colours dancing up. No idea how it got there. The savagery of the lovemaking, all over, an elbow, or a chin, a knee. Embedded.
Your nipples shrivel like dried grapes at the thought. The tingling between your legs, at all of it.
Wanting it, all over again.
But you must wait. Tol would want that. Restraint … and release.
‘To love’ is by no means the sole verb in the grammar of life
Over the coming days you sleep and sleep, gulping up rest, burrowing deep into your lovely bed. Outside your father is burning off and the smoke wends its way through your clothes like the smell of a lover and you turn and smile, scrunching your body in its pyjamas as you repair, and rest. There is a prickling in your cotton pants as the hair starts to grow back; the itch of it, the grate. For three days you can barely get out of bed at all and your father comes to the door of your room and stares, perplexed. Unable to ask, unable to articulate. The great clotted silence of the Australian male, you know it so well—from him, from Tol. So apart yet so similar, the two men in your life, who cannot properly talk out their thoughts except in writing or in work, as they’re distracted, as they teach.
Sometimes your father comes back and strokes your cheek as he used to once, long ago, before stepmothers and boarding schools, before any of that, when it was just him and you, untugged, pure and solid and known and quiet. In the silence of the gesture you hug your glow to your chest and let the stillness seep in, vast and rich.
When he’s gone you roll over. Wonder what on earth’s next. With Tol. So much you want to do and have done; so much you want to do to him, to find out.
It is his turn next. What’s in his head, what he really, deeply wants.
Let’s see how far we can take this …
With knowledge comes generosity. You have learnt that.
Work is a natural and most holy necessity
Day four. You go back. Whole.
The gate is locked.
It has never been locked, except for those weekends when he’s away or has guests and it is not a weekend now, it is a Monday, your heart is thudding, no, this can’t be.
The shock of it. The disbelief. You shake the gates and shake them but cannot get in. Stunned. You sit slumped by the road, waiting, churning, for goodness knows what. Sit there, a great spanner twisting your heart. You sit there deep into that afternoon, into dusk.
He doesn’t arrive. He doesn’t leave. There is no letter, no jar, no scrap of a note.
Nothing
. You are swamped by loneliness. The chill of the truth, now, of bereavement. So, this is how he will whisper through your blood for the rest of your life—of course—by abandonment.
By silence.
The most torturous experience of the lot.
On that long afternoon you see your whole life ahead of you … You will live, now, the worst kind of life: within a question.
Over those waiting baffled hours you interrogate the last couple of months, everything that happened, but they
stubbornly refuse to yield any answer. You gorge and gnaw on everything that went on inside these gates until you feel ill with it; every sign, signal, every conversation scrap. Everything thrown into confusion by these firmly shut gates. You do not know anything about him, why he did what he did, what he turned you into or why. You are just less when you should be more, so much more.
Why has love done this?
Kindliness, unselfishness, charity, come to us by nature: but I wish I could see more of my fellow souls practising what is far more difficult—common justice, especially towards one another
You wheel your bike home as dark comes crowding in.
Keening.
So. A new existence now. An ice pick crashed into the underbelly of your life.
That night a rush to words. Feverishly galloping the writing into your little book. It’s all you’ve got now.
Your honesty.
That you gave him.
The sacred, solemn gift of it.
That he has abused most monstrously.
It is safest, on the whole, to treat people as better than they are, than to check all hope and paralyse all aspiration
Every day you go back.
Every day the gate is locked.
Inexplicably padlocked.
You know him. He would never be so uncaring. Destructive. Cruel. It doesn’t feel right. You
know
him.
You don’t know him.
Newly alone, eyes glazed, stumbling through your days. You feel quarried. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Can you bear the truth? You don’t think so.
His cold pleasure, it doesn’t make sense.
I feel like you help me to live.
His words are re-written in your book, your heart tells you they were the truth. But every day now, cycling home in shock, every day now, disbelieving, as you turn from the padlocked gate. Like the lion’s victim who is anaesthetised before the kill, a strange, floating calm carries you on, gets you through your days. The love, the God-given love for him still so big and strong and pushing and pulsing under all the bewilderment;
the love that is Grand Canyon vast, that you do not know what to do with. Now.
I want to stay forever in your life.
He wrote that once, on his back page, and you know now that ‘to stay’ means as torment, affliction, weight. How could you be so deluded.
Young?
A weight like a chain attached to a safe is pulling you down, down into the inky depths; and you cannot untangle yourself.
But you collect yourself, always, as Beddy looms into sight; plumped with tears but walking tall and nonchalant through the front door of your house. If you were pricked by a pin the howling would come raging tumbling tearing out in a great torrent but you cannot do that, you have to hold it all in—as you study at the dining table, as you peel the potatoes, as you clear out the garage, as you hand across the hammer and the screwdriver and the wrench.
Every day a Sunday expanse of loneliness and emptiness. Every day.
As for resting your heart upon such a person, you might as well rest it upon a burning rock or a broken reed
Wailing in the rare alone in this tiny, suffocating house. Wanting, wildly, crawling on your knees; madly cramming your face when everyone’s out and you’re alone, stuffing yourself full of chocolate, biscuits, ice cream; forgetting for an instant the power of slim. Your skin loses its glow and its freshness, he has destroyed your equilibrium. Too big in you, all of it. Your love like black market currency now—vast riches but nowhere legitimate to deposit it. You fear his hesitancy, hate it. His cowardice. His cruelty. His silence. His motive. Grubby with it.
As you hunch over your textbooks, seeing but not seeing, keening under your breath, your father stops at the door and shakes his head, looking at your hands gripping your skull in frustration, your knuckles white, and he murmurs that he wishes for you an ordinary life, that’s all. A solid, ordinary, happy life.
Then he walks off, leaving you to it, all your books. The weight of study, that he has never known in his life.
The dream. Crazed by it. The gate is open, you have stayed and slept beside him, there is the stilling calm of skin to skin, of luxurious hours, of certainty; the feel of his hip, his tender earlobe, the back of his neck. Your bodies softly, rightly, moulding into each other then falling into slumber—what he
always dreamt of, just one night, where true love lies, beyond words, beyond sex. He is kissing you in sleep and murmuring how good it is to have you with him then he wakes, boy-startled, a face of light, and smiles to see you there. That moment of vulnerability, of truth; you tuck it into the pocket of your heart, to always have, to always be able to slip out.
Crazed by it.
My heart is now shrouded like a cloth drawn over the dead.
You write in your notebook, can’t haul yourself out.
The only soundtrack in your house, besides the ticking clock, is the talkback radio and once, in the morning, in response to the strident tones of a shock jock is a woman’s steadying voice, all the wisdom of all the ages of all the women of the world in it.
‘God gave us the gift of suffering,’ she says calmly, matter-of-fact, as if her life is lived by this understanding, this truth. Yes. You have to learn. From her, from her voice. From other women.
To dive into the world with grace.
You have to start.
Because you know now that you feel too much. And you will be cursed by this fragility your entire life. Raw, skinned, with a huge open heart and what a combination to set forth into the real world with.
And him. The opposite, of course. What has happened has taught you that.
The authority of removal, absence, lack.
How
dare
he.
Kittens and boys—the former being the least troublesome of the two
A cold that lingers for days. Your body crying. Eyes scratchy with tears and hurt. You wrap yourself in defensiveness. Inside, a quivering core of self-hatred, shock, doubt. He has stolen your confidence. Strength. Spark. The lack of him has become enormous, larger than anything that ever existed between you, fizzing and spitting like an insect caught perpetually in a trap.
Your stepmother comes into your room without knocking, doesn’t tolerate sickness well, is rarely sick herself. Throws a letter onto your bed.
‘The drama teacher again.’ Walks out.
You snatch it up.
Do you dare open it? Your breath hovers at it. The type you know so well. You put it down, can’t bear any more hurt, it will fell you, this.
Our time is up. I have to leave now.
You must live your life. I cannot stop you living it.
I have faith in you to do great things.
I will always love you. I will never forget.
Tol xxx
That’s it.
It
. Not even his name handwritten, not even the solace of that. Your twisting heart, you clutch your chest, the paper drops on the bed.
You don’t get it. Just this. After
everything
that went on, after you bared yourself.
Then the anger comes.
Is he afraid of women? Is this his revenge? You thought you had a friendship as much as anything else. Is he one of those men who saps a woman’s self-esteem—by reducing, depleting, chipping away at. It never even veered into sourness or stalemate, just abrupt end. Blown out like a candle. The worst kind of love, because you have no explanation, no closure. Certainly not from this letter.
So, it will never let you go now. The only thing known in your life at this point. And now you are so ashamed at what you did, what he made you do. Did he record it, photograph it, will he write of it?
You pick up the letter and slip it into the back of the notebook that you will never write in again. You are on your own ship now, the good ship heartbreak, lonely at the wheel and not knowing where you are steering to. The storm is endless, the skies iron; when will the clouds break?
When?
In passion that has failed is a seed of insanity.
The last entry, from yesterday. Ten days since the padlocked gate. Outside your night is softly spitting tears. The sky is crying and you cry with it, you weep, silently, so no one hears, of course.
It feels so long since you were young.
‘illum absens absentem auditque uidetque’
(him not there not there, she hears him, she sees him)
Virgil,
The Aeneid
She has opened a gate of misery so wide that one almost shrinks from entering it
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.
