With My Body

by Nikki Gemmell

  With My Body

  A Novel

  Nikki Gemmell

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  I

  Lesson 1

  Lesson 2

  Lesson 3

  Lesson 4

  Lesson 5

  Lesson 6

  Lesson 7

  Lesson 8

  Lesson 9

  Lesson 10

  Lesson 11

  Lesson 12

  Lesson 13

  Lesson 14

  Lesson 15

  Lesson 16

  Lesson 17

  Lesson 18

  II

  Lesson 19

  Lesson 20

  Lesson 21

  Lesson 22

  Lesson 23

  Lesson 24

  Lesson 25

  Lesson 26

  Lesson 27

  Lesson 28

  Lesson 29

  Lesson 30

  Lesson 31

  Lesson 32

  Lesson 33

  Lesson 34

  III

  Lesson 35

  Lesson 36

  Lesson 37

  Lesson 38

  Lesson 39

  Lesson 40

  Lesson 41

  Lesson 42

  Lesson 43

  Lesson 44

  Lesson 45

  IV

  Lesson 46

  Lesson 47

  Lesson 48

  Lesson 49

  Lesson 50

  Lesson 51

  Lesson 52

  Lesson 53

  Lesson 54

  Lesson 55

  Lesson 56

  Lesson 57

  Lesson 58

  Lesson 59

  Lesson 60

  Lesson 61

  Lesson 62

  Lesson 63

  Lesson 64

  Lesson 65

  Lesson 66

  Lesson 67

  Lesson 68

  Lesson 69

  V

  Lesson 70

  Lesson 71

  Lesson 72

  Lesson 73

  Lesson 74

  Lesson 75

  Lesson 76

  Lesson 77

  Lesson 78

  Lesson 79

  Lesson 80

  Lesson 81

  Lesson 82

  Lesson 83

  Lesson 84

  Lesson 85

  Lesson 86

  Lesson 87

  Lesson 88

  Lesson 89

  Lesson 90

  Lesson 91

  VI

  Lesson 92

  Lesson 93

  Lesson 94

  Lesson 95

  Lesson 96

  Lesson 97

  Lesson 98

  Lesson 99

  Lesson 100

  Lesson 101

  Lesson 102

  Lesson 103

  Lesson 104

  Lesson 105

  Lesson 106

  Lesson 107

  Lesson 108

  Lesson 109

  Lesson 110

  Lesson 111

  Lesson 112

  Lesson 113

  Lesson 114

  Lesson 115

  Lesson 116

  Lesson 117

  Lesson 118

  Lesson 119

  VII

  Lesson 120

  Lesson 121

  Lesson 122

  Lesson 123

  Lesson 124

  Lesson 125

  Lesson 126

  Lesson 127

  Lesson 128

  Lesson 129

  Lesson 130

  Lesson 131

  Lesson 132

  Lesson 133

  Lesson 134

  Lesson 135

  Lesson 136

  Lesson 137

  Lesson 138

  Lesson 139

  Lesson 140

  Lesson 141

  Lesson 142

  Lesson 143

  Lesson 144

  Lesson 145

  Lesson 146

  Lesson 147

  Lesson 148

  Lesson 149

  Lesson 150

  Lesson 151

  VIII

  Lesson 152

  Lesson 153

  Lesson 154

  Lesson 155

  Lesson 156

  Lesson 157

  Lesson 158

  Lesson 159

  Lesson 160

  Lesson 161

  Lesson 162

  Lesson 163

  Lesson 164

  Lesson 165

  Lesson 166

  Lesson 167

  Lesson 168

  IX

  Lesson 169

  Lesson 170

  Lesson 171

  Lesson 172

  Lesson 173

  Lesson 174

  Lesson 175

  Lesson 176

  Lesson 177

  Lesson 178

  Lesson 179

  Lesson 180

  Lesson 181

  Lesson 182

  Lesson 183

  Lesson 184

  Lesson 185

  Lesson 186

  Lesson 187

  Lesson 188

  Lesson 189

  Lesson 190

  Lesson 191

  Lesson 192

  Lesson 193

  Lesson 194

  Lesson 195

  Lesson 196

  Lesson 197

  Lesson 198

  Lesson 199

  Lesson 200

  Lesson 201

  X

  Lesson 202

  Lesson 203

  Lesson 204

  Lesson 205

  Lesson 206

  Lesson 207

  Lesson 208

  Lesson 209

  Lesson 210

  Lesson 211

  Lesson 212

  Lesson 213

  Lesson 214

  Lesson 215

  Lesson 216

  Lesson 217

  Lesson 218

  Lesson 219

  Lesson 220

  Lesson 221

  Lesson 222

  Lesson 223

  Lesson 224

  Lesson 225–The Last

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  Other Books by Nikki Gemmell

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  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.

  I

  ‘Even in sleep I know no respite’

  Heloise d’Argenteuil

  Lesson 1

  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.

  Lesson 2

  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.

  Lesson 3

  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.

  Lesson 4

  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, knowi
ng 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.

  Lesson 5

  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.