Authors: Nikki Gemmell
With My Body (7 page)
She never teaches you what your father wanted, all that woman stuff he could not articulate. Your father never asks. He assumes everything is alright. You do not tell him. Your whole relationship is built on inarticulacy, it would not feel right to suddenly blurt. You are learning silence and watchfulness and the solace of a pen that speaks when you cannot, as an explosive combination is being brewed: frustration, anger, boundless curiosity—and enormous innocence.
When I go from home to home and see the sort of rule or misrule there, the countless evil influences, physical and spiritual, against which children have to struggle, I declare I often have to wonder that in the rising generation there should be any good men and women
Your bedroom is now the verandah at the back of the house with a roll-down canvas flap at night. It is not far away enough. You are no longer a part of the main house. It has not been done by pushing you out, it has been done by removal, by erasing everything that was secure and known in your past life. All the roaring absences now; the hidden photographs, the taken-down curtains, the painted-over marks of your mother’s on the kitchen door, as you stood up, grew tall, and then they stopped. Aged three years and eight months. The whole interior has become a ghost house to you; holding its breath for someone who will never come back. You still see it—searingly—as what it was. Not what it is now.
When it thunders in your back room you drop to the ground with your belly to the floorboards and hear the house
talk through the rumbling in your skin. You smell the earth opening out to the rain, opening wide, drinking it up, wider and wider the ground opens out, every pore of it, and you smile and breathe it in deep.
No respite, but the bush.
Every family is a little kingdom in itself: the members and followers of which are often as hard to manage as any of the turbulent governments whose discords convulse our world
By a shaded cleft of a creek you make a bush hut out of broken branches—widow makers, they’re known as locally—and great brooms of leaves; your home away from home, just for you. You love the cool smell of the water on the rock, the rich rust of the wet stone, the startling green of the ferns sucking from the restless stream. You love the clutter of vibrant life drawn to this secret tranquillity, the frogs, lizards, birds, wallabies if you’re very still. The land beyond it is bleached pale, the colour of the sheep that feed from it, but you’d never know within this.
You stay out later and later in your sanctuary. Are intrigued the first time you come home—after dinner, but before your father has returned from his shift—to see the worry lines creasing your stepmother’s face. It is the first time you have seen concern on her, with anything to do with you.
You learn, in that instant, the authority of removal.
You stay away longer and longer.
Then one day, after a big rain, the mosquitoes come. You need something to keep them away. There is only one thing in your world that is a length of fine netting, and you know exactly what room to find it in.
Never expect in the child a degree of perfection which one rarely finds even in a grown person
You never enter your father’s bedroom anymore. He no longer brushes your hair on a Sunday night, no one does. And the room is not his now, in any way; it’s been prettied up. It feels alien, forbidden, scrubbed; sanctified by something unknowable. But in it, now, is the only thing of hers you will ever want.
She is away, visiting her mother. When she is gone it is as if the house breathes out, with a sigh—your whole world unfurls and you can move freely in it. You won’t have long. You scrabble through her cupboard and rigidly ordered drawers; God, an entire life spent making things neat, what a waste. You find what you’re looking for in a leather suitcase under the bed.
A carefully folded veil, under a circle of dried roses.
Your mosquito net lasts through storms and winds and possums rampaging and the time you jumped away from a red-bellied black snake and crashed through it; lasts through days of you returning later and later until finally, one morning, she follows you; to work out where you are disappearing to all these God forsaken days, to work out what on earth is going on. And with a scream of rage she flurries upon your hidden place and drags
down her precious veil, now ingrained with grubbiness and torn beyond repair.
She gets you home by the hair, your long golden hair, and knees you in the back and now finally you see the strength of this hefty country lass, and you’re so slight; she knees you like she would a calf and grabs your mother’s old dressmaking scissors and hacks off all your hair, in great ragged clumps—as if this will be the only veil you will ever have in your life and she will destroy it, oh yes, and may it never grow back. So much hate in her, so much frustration at this stain in her life. Then she gets a bottle of black ink that your father uses for writing cheques and she tips it over your head so it runs down your face like black blood in huge streaks and screams, ‘Get out, get out, get out of my life,’ her voice naked, now, finally, with the one thing she has wanted ever since she came into this place.
That night, you gallop your hurt and your howl into your Snoopy diary, the only voice you have. Because you are becoming a woman in this claustrophobic place—you are learning not to let slip the roar of your true self, and your father, of course, will not be told any of this, what goes on between his two women. You are learning how it is to be female in this life.
Follow openly and fearlessly that same law which makes spring pass into summer, summer into autumn, and autumn into winter
Suddenly, boarding school. Just like that.
Cast adrift. Unwanted. Emotionally whipped.
But curious. About a new life, a new chance.
Curious as to how to expose your aching, open wound to the light; the wound that can only be sutured by one thing, the simplest thing of all. Love. The necessary verb: to rescue, bloom, protect. Aching for something, anything, to heal you and perhaps here in this new life you will find it.
Your convent school is in the city’s centre, its honey sandstone shadowed by buildings taller than it. Your father’s lucrative night shifts are paying for it—eleven and three-quarter hours, from 8 p.m., triple time. In the Big Smoke you’re still the kid from the bush, like a horse in a box kicking out, strong, if you are too long in it. City-logged. Every so often you can smell the bush when the breeze blows in from the south and you hold your head high to it. Above the pollution and the cram of the noise and the crush of the people you want to feel the dirt between your toes and in your
hair, you want to be strong with your land again, want silence and spareness, a place for your eyes to rest.
Want your father. The one person who gave you the gift of attention, once.
The one person who gave you the gift of touch, once.
Touch is taboo in this place. You are young ladies, at all times, no matter what. Eating a banana in public is sexually suggestive and will not be tolerated from girls of this establishment; school shoes must not be polished too highly lest the reflection of bright white cottontails be glimpsed too readily; surfaces of bath water must be encrusted with talcum powder so a glimpse of flesh is never caught under the cloudy surface. The only man you are allowed to adore is God.
The Thorn Birds
is eagerly, grubbily, passed around the class; Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins. You are growing up. Everywhere flesh, touch, skin, bodies changing, worlds expanding, nights churning.
You become best friends with Lune, the daughter of the French ambassador, the only one in the class whose parents are divorced. Lune loves her motherless little bush girl who knows nothing of this world—an outsider like herself. She teaches you about razors and tanning and tampons, French kisses and cigarettes, silk knickers and suspender belts. European-knowing, she teaches you about the power in a dirty smile, and the allure of confidence.
Have the moral courage to assert your dignity against the sneers of society
You have been shut away within high convent walls to address the wildness from the bush; to quieten you, dampen you, smooth you down. You are too large-spirited, singular, raw. You have become an embarrassment.
And yet, and yet, you are not convinced these women who rule over you are so disapproving. The nuns sense your difference, you are sure, that you will never be one of those ranks of girls they brisk out year after year armed with Daddy’s gold credit card and a D.J.’s account. There is something … carnal … about you. Non-conformist, untamed.
Hungry
. But for what, no one knows, including yourself. You’re like the parched earth in a drought waiting, waiting, for nourishment of some sort.
You see something in these nuns, the few of them left, that is strong, lit. They are an intriguing new breed of female in your life. They are doing exactly what they want to and have a great calmness because of it. Precious few women you know have that—certainly not any married ones, the mothers of school friends, the valley women you come across. There is something so courageous about the nuns’ strength in swimming against the stream. You think of your stepmother, riddled with jealousy and insecurity, threatened by a slip of
a girl half her size, made sour with it. These women at your school, in their resolutely interior world, are free of the world of men by choice and glow with it.
Can a married woman radiate serenity? You’ve never seen it in the wives of Beddy, in the brittle women you occasionally glimpse in
The Young and the Restless
and the harassed mothers at the school gate. Your Mother Superior is fifty-five years old and has a face unburdened by wrinkles and worries, kids and mortgages and debt. There is never make-up, never shadow; it is as if she has washed her face in the softness of a creek’s water her entire life. Washed it with grace.
The serenity of choice, and you are intrigued by it. The courage to be different.
To feel that you can or might be something, is often the first step towards becoming it
Your mother’s old boss, from her restaurant management days, invites you for tea. He is the only person you know in the Big Smoke outside of school. He grew up in the bush, like your mother did, and found a way out. He’s now mysteriously wealthy, has a sunken conversation pit and a Porsche.
In his high glass box hovering above the harbour he lifts up your hair—now grown back—and says wondrously that it is just like your mother’s, how about that. He likes to talk about her, was fond of her, always teasing, asking her to marry him. He says he always likes a woman with narrow shoulders and runs his fingers along your collarbone, to see if you’ll do, appraising you like a horse.
At his touch, your stomach feels as if it is being steamrollered.
You catch your breath. You step back.
He laughs.
You are not allowed to know, understand, exactly what this man now does; no one will tell you. All you perceive is that you are not like one of those women he employs and never will be; you will always be apart, removed, from that world. He says with a smile that you’re like a little bush filly he had as he was growing up, with some thoroughbred mixed in there
somewhere, wild and sweet and strong and untamed inside that ridiculous school uniform with its skirt too long and its Peter Pan collar and then he looks at you gravely and says he doesn’t want to see the wildness broken, ever, any of it, as he runs his fingers along your collarbone again; as your stomach churns again.
He makes you vividly aware of your teenage body.
Ripening.
The power of it.
The only way to make people good is to make them happy
A weekend at home. Your father picks you up from the train station, a legitimate drive that your stepmother has to allow. His fingertips stray absently to your earlobe, the old caress, and you shut your lids and feel the coming wet prickling in your eyes at the tenderness, so rare in your life, so ached for. Kindness will always crack you now, it is the legacy of your emotionally blunted childhood.
He doesn’t say he loves you. He just gives you his snippet of a touch. It is all you need, it is enough.
Your father’s philosophy of parenting has become: if you want a child to do well you ignore them, so the child will always be striving for attention. It is the rhythm of your boarding life.
‘Look at me. Say something. Notice.
Respond!
’
You have been screaming it to him silently your entire time away; it is why you do so well in your new school, determined, focused, competitive. It’s the only area of your life you can achieve in. Get right. You’ve always been a thinker, have always devoured anything you could get your hands on to read, being starved of words has worked. Your father doesn’t engage in any of it. Doesn’t read, doesn’t write. The few times you have caught him at it—writing a cheque or a shopping list—he takes careful pleasure in the beauty of the letters, each one strikingly
formed, every stroke a pattern, which betrays that he is still a relative beginner; he doesn’t do it much.
And now, in the car, on the way home, his touch. You lean into it. Then as soon as you arrive with a screech of the handbrake and walk into the house he clamps down, no longer shows you the vivid pulse of this love. Is formal, distant, uninterested; veering into coldness, a different person entirely. What is he afraid to show her? What has she threatened?
