Authors: Nikki Gemmell
With My Body (31 page)
In his typewriter: the sheet of paper you scrawled
yes
on once in gleeful blobs and scratches. When you finally had him caught. That moment of knowing, in your exuberant script.
Beside it: the very first souvenir, the scrap of checked cloth from a cut-away shirt, still with its tractor treads of grease. From your grandfather’s drill, long lost.
Now, here. All of it.
You spin around, in bewilderment, the old tobacco tin in your hand. A tear splashing on the scurried surface, varnishing it up.
A shrine …
To a girl, once. Long gone.
You sit gingerly on the hard, worn saddle of your bike. Trying to work it all out. Your fingers fit perfectly into the handlebars worn into a smoothness on their undersides. A whole other narrative—a whole other book—in all this.
The other side. Of a secret life.
A man you know nothing of.
The greatest blessing of all external blessings is to be able to lean your heart against another heart, faithful, tender, true and tried, and record with a thankfulness that years deepen instead of diminishing, ‘I have got a friend!’
A museum of you.
Nothing else in the bareness. An emptiness that is beautifully clean, swept.
Tended
.
You gasp. Everything here is kept, as opposed to removed and you weep at that for it is the exact reverse of your father’s house; it is the way you always wanted, dreamt of your childhood world being preserved—everything of your mother’s stark in it, vivid and cherished, highlighted by the absence of everything else. But of course it never was, all of that was tossed out in the indifferent vigour of the new marriage.
As it should be, perhaps. As life goes on.
But this.
One searing summer, thrown into stark relief. As if it was all that mattered in the end. A secret place in the wilderness, washed by its beautiful light. Commemorating a moment in time when you were both haunted together.
Both
of you. That is clear, from this, and your hands are now at your mouth, in shock.
Her own sphere cannot contain her
You ring your father on the iPhone—you’re with an old friend you’ve run into, you have a lot of catching up to do. He’s fine with that, the kids are tops, they loved the rodeo—wouldn’t get off the bucking bronco, had three goes each, are covered in ice cream and dirt.
‘As little boys should be, mate,’ you laugh.
You stay in Woondala deep into that swirling evening, roaming the rooms, lying on the couch and the mattress and then belly down on the floorboards of the verandah, listening to the bush settle into its quiet, trying to work it all out. You’d stay longer if you could but the blankets on the bed are musty, the sheets are stained by too much living, too long ago. And this is a ghost house, a dead house. You’d always felt it would be a different entity entirely, at night.
In two days you go back, and then again.
Drawn to his study, the vivid core of him, then.
You begin to write.
It feels right. At his desk. On his chair. Your little volume beside you, combing through all the words with the perspective of a middle-aged woman who’s lived a crammed life since. Writing to understand, to work it all out.
There is a solitude which gradually grows into the best blessing of our lives
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.
After marriage, for either party to desire a dearer or closer friend than the other, is a state of things so inconceivably deplorable that it will not bear discussion
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.
Nature as well as custom has instituted this habit of 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.
The involuntary thrill that we call ‘feeling happy’ does come and startle into vague, mysterious hope our poor, wondering heart
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.
No one can hold the reins of family government for ever so brief a time, without feeling what a difficult position it is: how great its need of self-control as the very first means of controlling others
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.
Do not harden or brutalise the child, and make them virtually disbelieve in love and goodness for the remainder of their existence
‘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.’
I think I was not quite correct about such a thing
Your world detonating.
With knowing. Realigning.
You had always thought your father didn’t love you anymore. Had always thought your stepmother had won, that you had lost that particular battle from the moment she arrived in your life. Had always thought he never cared enough about your study, work, life; it was why he never went to speech nights or father—daughter dances, to formals and school masses.
