With My Body

by Nikki Gemmell

  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.

  Lesson 29

  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.

  Lesson 30

  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.

  Lesson 31

  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?

  You’re his daughter.

  When you’re at school, in his few, precious phone calls to you—from the mine crib room, never at home—he almost pleads, don’t forget the old man loves ya, and it’s like a momentary weakness, a slip. What bewitchment has she woven around him? What weakness in him lets her? A grown man. So inarticulate, so cowed.

  An earlobe caressed; a moment snatched, in secret, too brief. The only warmth you will ever get in this place now.

  You will f
ind something else.

  Lesson 32

  We have only to deal with facts—perhaps incapable of remedy, but by no means incapable of amelioration

  It is decided. At fourteen.

  You will be an archivist, a collector. Of love and everything that comes with it. You will learn how it happens, where it comes from, how it’s snared. For good. Your grand and meticulous experiment. You are aching to begin but do not know how. You must go beyond the four houses huddling under their looming trees, beyond the high convent walls; you just long for touch, warmth. A proper, sustained caress.

  You feel so vividly. All your nerve endings are raw, opening out. You are poised, on the brink. Of something, God knows what.

  It begins with water.

  The house of your grandparents. Whom you cherish but see all too rarely; they’ve retired further north up the coast, six hours’ drive away, and it’s not often that they make it to the Big Smoke to retrieve you.

  Inside the house, your nanna communicates all her strength through food—veggies are made lurid with bicarb soda, there’s an endless supply of apple and gramma pies, of custard and porridge, sugary tea and tarts. Her domain is a resolutely interior world. But outside, she has no idea what her little granddaughter’s getting up to, never enquires about her becoming a woman, except to ask once if her ‘friends’ have visited yet.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, your friends. Your monthlies.’

  ‘Oh,’ and you’re laughing. ‘Oh yes, just.’

  But outside, in your grandparents’ back yard, your new world. Swimming to the pebble dash side of the pool, to the filter hole the size of a fifty-cent coin, to the water coming out at high pressure. Hooking your legs over the edge and holding your hands firm and then the deliciousness coming and you’re stretching back, delirious, buoyed and grinning under your wide blue sky then floating your arms wide and arching your back. And inside the house your grandparents are going about their business, completely oblivious to your jet-pressure secret; your nanna who told you once she always hated sex and your pop doing his crosswords then heading off to the club for a game of bowls.

  But you, outside, on your back.

  Seared by wonder, made silly by it.

  Lesson 33

  You cannot dawdle away a whole forenoon

  You are achingly alone, no anchor, no sense of belonging, of who you really are. But alone, you are learning what you can do with your body, your instrument, coaxing it into technicolour life.

  Lune has stolen two Penthouses from the pile under her brother’s bed; she slips you one.

  Lune has bribed her older sister with a year’s worth of pedicures and manicures; she buys you each a vibrator.

  You squirrel your booty home.

  Your hot breathlessness as you open the magazine, as you stare at the pictures. As you devour the letters to the editor at the front, the stories that transform you into something else. In the bathroom, while your stepmother is on her weekly supermarket shop, you slip out the vibrator and turn it over and over and wonder where to begin. Turn it on, turn it off, again, and hold it close, spread-eagled on the cold tiles, terrified she’ll come back.

  You work out an orgasm for yourself. You’re confused by the female physiology. It doesn’t make sense, all the nerve endings are on the outside and not the inside where they should be, shouldn’t they, what’s going on? You wonder if it’s just you; if you’re built wrong.

  But the clit.

  The power lying dormant in it. What it can transform you into. The first time where you have completely, utterly let go.

  Jolted into life. Combusted, with light.

  Lesson 34

  One may see many a young woman who has, outwardly speaking, ‘everything she can possibly want’, absolutely withering in the atmosphere of a loveless home

  In school holidays, at home, your days are spent as far as possible from your stepmother. She has won, there is nothing left of your mother or yourself; she completely, triumphantly owns her tiny life. A baby still hasn’t come and you had hoped, once, that would make her soften towards her stepdaughter, but it only seems to harden the pushing away: you the constant reminder of your mother’s victory over her.

  But beyond Anne, in the bush—your world—it doesn’t matter; you don’t need any of it.

  You stride with relief through the dry flick of grasshoppers in long grass bristling with sound, through congregations of cockatoos snowing the paddocks and watch them lifting like clouds from the trees and you are strong in it, so strong, vividly alone and filled up with air and light; your hair matted, your soles permanently toughened.

  Remembering the child you once were. Marinated by light.

  At school, among the other girls, you are riddled with awkwardness. At having to join them, be one of them, and you will never belong, they all know that but here you are different, you are your true self. Balloon girl, zippy with happiness, flying on your Peddly, firm, confident; it is your default mode whenever you are back in your world.

  At sunset the golden light washes like a mist over the land and then the sun dips behind a hill and the glow is snuffed out, so sudden, and the night chill is there; you gaze from your verandah at the spill of stars and the watching moon and the sky running away and then move to your bed and your hand slips between your legs and the vividness begins, in your head, the technicolour movies, every night, to lull you to sleep: people watching you—fresh, prized, wanted; an entirely different world to this; a house of beauty and abundance, of books and talk and laughter and warmth; men, many of them; your legs parted, on your back, your fast breathing, your hot wet.

  All that you have, the only power that you have, lies in your body. You are fourteen, you have no other power in your life.

  At night, alone, in command, confident; the open wound of your life forgotten, the rawness that can only be sutured by love, the necessary verb.

  To rescue.

  To combust.

  III

  ‘In this one small thing at least it seems I am wiser—that I do not think I know what I do not know’

  Socrates

  Lesson 35

  Tenderly reared young ladies

  The art room.

  A new teacher. Mr Cooper.

  A man.

  Extremely rare in this place. He is one of a series where visiting artists run workshops in the school, explaining what they do; he is collected by the parents of Sophia Smegg, the richest girl in the class. He is young. A painter, apparently, a good one—his work has already been hung in the Archibald Prize.

  His trousers have worn, grubby knees and paint splatters; a red sock peeps from the toe of a sneaker. He has made no concession to being in this place of constraint.

  You are riveted. You are not the only one. You can taste the alertness in the air. And as the entire class of fourteen year olds gaze at this new specimen in their midst, something happens to his trousers. They grow. They stick out. At the crotch. It is excruciating, it is fascinating, it is appalling. Every girl in the class knows what it is. Every girl in the class cannot take their eyes from it. The entire phalanx of girls is silent, spellbound. Mr Cooper’s face reddens, he has barely begun his talk. He falls silent.

  He excuses himself.

  Mr Cooper does not come back.

  He has left the school, it is understood.

  The next artist is a porcelain painter, a woman of seventy-six.

  None of you know what happened after Mr Cooper left the room. You suspect he exited so rapidly because of deep embarrassment; couldn’t face any of you again and you are intrigued by that, the blushing, mortification, vulnerability.

  So. Mr Cooper. Gone from your life. And you will never forget. The power in you, in all of you. That collectively you could do this to him.

  You feel too much, think too much; the intensity of the fantasies, every night before sleep. The Penthouses, at home on weekends, for when you are alone, vividly alone; you cannot look too much, it is un
bearable, the intensity. And it is not the pictures of the men that excite you, intrigue you, it is the women; the men look terrifying, you cannot deal with that bit, but at night, every night, to lull you into sleep, the movie begins in your head. You are fourteen, you are not meant to know any of this. You are intrigued by your body, the concentration of what’s between your legs, the potency of it, the way it changes its viscosity, its dynamism—what is it for? Your hand, in wonder, exploring.

  Your life hasn’t begun yet. When will it? You are aching for it to start.

  Lesson 36

  Would it raise the value of men’s labour to depreciate ours? Or advantage them to keep us, forcibly, in idleness, ignorance, and incapacity? I trow not.

  You have a fascination with artists, creators, thinkers; people who express and reveal and articulate. Because you come from a world that resolutely does not and as you get older the exclusion from family and home and hearth—the lack of explanation, the silence—only gets worse.

  Your father walks into your verandah room one Saturday and almost steps on a canvas flung across the room, a self-portrait screaming its paint, and murmurs, ‘Sometimes I wonder what I’ve raised.’ Serious, befuddled, fearful. Of the female with a voice in his midst.

  In your early twenties you will say to him, ‘You know, Dad, some time I’d like to write a book.’ And he will respond, swiftly, ‘Waste of time, that,’ and never sway from his thinking and the distance will grow even wider between you. The two Chinas joined at the hip, once, bush mates—and that chasm will only be broached when you become a parent yourself; put in your proper place. Normalised. To your father, come good at last. And by then the writing dream will have long gone because you have always taken heed of what your father says; he is that ingrained in you, you have wanted to please him that much.