With My Body

by Nikki Gemmell

  And the knowing, now, one other thing: you are too clever to love anything like that.

  Furiously you wipe away the tears, lift your face high to a ravishing sunset. You’ve got a train to catch.

  Lesson 43

  The free, happy ignorance of maidenhood is gone forever

  In your diary, late that raw, ranging night, you come across a scrap of something from Gabriel Garcia Marquez describing the loss of his virginity as a teenager—how it triggered a vital force within him.

  The sense of celebration, the boldness, intrigues and angers you. You wonder if this feeling of empowerment is a particularly male phenomenon. What vital force? You’ve been shocked into silence; in the addled aftermath of this episode you’re experiencing a catastrophic loss of spark, of certainty. You can barely record the episode in your diary—the sheer, puny grubbiness of it. Once you felt so cheeky and curious, bold and sure; now, suddenly, you’re faltering. What happened back there? As soon as a man put his arm around you something was rubbed out; some inner certainty. Why the leakage of confidence, the capitulation, as you entered the realm of the sexual? Why did you nod and gush so pathetically, saying ‘yes please, a studio, wow,’ on that concourse?

  Your bewilderment, over the lot of it.

  You suspect a terrifying secret: that virginity and chastity by choice are the magic elixirs that can make a woman calm, audacious, strong. You will have to find out. You don’t know how. The experiment feels almost derailed from the start. Love must be tracked, studied, dissected, yes of course, but you must never allow it to snap you in its strong jaws like a steel trap. No, the jagged pain of your father’s withholding has taught you the folly of that.

  Lesson 44

  Nature’s law undoubtedly is that our nearest ties should be those of blood

  Several days with your grandmother.

  You need her right now, the certainty of her powdery smell and flannelette sheets, her unconditional warmth. You’ve begged your father and he’s complied with phone calls arranging pick ups and train tickets; as if he senses something rattling within you that is beyond him and he’s more than happy to palm it off. Women’s business, all that emotional stuff—his mother will sort it out.

  You have not told her anything. Does she sense … something? A changing, a turning.

  Over her meat-and-three-veg dinner you talk school and careers and marriage and life, she asks if you’ve got a boyfriend and you shake your head and laugh and she nods—plenty of time, love, plenty of time—and tells you how good she was, once, at so much: maths and English, geography and athletics, but then as soon as a boy put his arms around her she was gone.

  ‘Just like that.’

  She married young.

  ‘It was all I wanted, and it killed my ambition, every single scrap of it. And my energy,’ she cackles. ‘Which was just bursting from me, once.’

  You smile, wondering what she sees in you that has changed and why she is saying all this.

  Later, as she’s tucking you into your bed with its electric blanket on and smoothing down the hair on your forehead, she adds, ‘There’s a strength about us women that scares men, I think. You keep your chin up, love. Get a degree; be a doctor or a lawyer. Make me proud. Your father too. You could be the first in the family to finish school, let alone university. Your dad left at fourteen to go down the pit, I left to go into service. Do it for us.’

  You will not tell her what has happened, will never tell her, it would break her heart.

  Lesson 45

  To young people, the world is always a paradise

  No idea where to go from it.

  You shut down. For a couple of years. A spring coiled tight.

  Waiting, for God knows what.

  Lost.

  IV

  ‘I could fancy a love for life here almost possible … ’

  Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

  Lesson 46

  When it comes to ‘each for herself’—when Miss This cannot be asked to a party for fear of meeting Madame That, or if they do meet, through all their smiling civility you perceive their backs are up, like two strange cats meeting at a parlour door—I say, this is the most lamentable of all results which the world effects on women

  Summer holidays. Eight weeks ahead of thick heat, cicadas, bush-fire alerts.

  Your stepmother is ignoring you. It is her one weapon, her only way to have power over you. With silence.

  You are too different. You have city-awareness now. You will never lose yourself like she has done, and no matter how much she thinks she has won—when your father doesn’t show up to your speech days, when he never talks with the parents of your new friends, when he neglects to set foot in your world—you would never, ever want your stepmother’s life. The sourness of it, her closed heart. It is the one power you have over her.

  The energy between you is wrong. You could never be her, she could never be you. It is never discussed, but you both know it.

  Today she has designated a cleaning day, is buried in a flurry of activity. Sorting through her Tupperware boxes, rinsing and airing—she takes them to gatherings to scoop up leftover food. You can’t bear the bustling little world of domesticity she creates around her, crowding out any trace of your mother in this scrap of a house that was renovated by your parents long ago—working side by side, he told you once. And now, an obsessive accumulation of new and shiny possessions from daytime ads on the telly cluttering it up—newfangled mosquito zappers, wall-mounted can-openers, sewing tables, kitchen knife sets.

  You have few possessions. Like it that way. Like to see the bones of these old valley houses and their heart, running hands along the old plaster walls like horses’ flanks, marvelling at the carpentry in dinky corner cabinets and the bread tins filled with concrete holding up porch roofs and the mouldings of pressed-tin ceilings and the beauty in deco bush flowers scattered in old bathroom tiles, like your own. Tiles now obscured by a stick-on plastic railing and a matching avocado towel set that you know you must keep straight.

  So. Cleaning day. And you’re jumping on Peddly to get away from it all and smiling at the familiarity of that hard, worn saddle. Feel young again, out, shedding your city skin. You’re flinging your bike aside and walking thigh-deep in bleached grass, catching grasshoppers and feeling the dry flick of them inside the bauble of your palm before you free them to leap in a great springing arc of release, laughing, away from your stepmother’s narrow, silent, affronted little world.

  Go. GO!

  At three o’clock you return.

  You hear her footsteps thudding through the house towards you. Furious. You shut your eyes. What have you done now? There’s always something to vex her and usually she doesn’t say, it’s just in the thud of her step, her contained fury when you’re in her space.

  She has found your diary.

  Which was under your bed, still in your school bag. She has gone into your bedroom, your private place, and dug it out. And read it of course, you know instantly. It’s on her face. You have never seen her so incensed, tight, repulsed.

  ‘Get out, you … thing … you. I don’t want you here. Your words, your filth, in my house.’

  ‘It’s my place as much as yours. I lived here long before you.’

  You try snatching the book back but the sturdy girl with her big country thighs has it firm.

  ‘Give it back,’ you scream—because it’s your words, your truth, everything that has happened in your life. ‘You spoil everything.’ Clawing your hair in frustration, can’t make this right, win, can’t think fast enough. Your tears in that moment are from years of competitiveness and exhaustion and bafflement—you’re his daughter, you were a child, you do not understand the jealousy; what you have with your father is a blood tie, a given, a totally different relationship to hers. But you can’t speak properly, can’t get it out, are clotted before her, as clotted as your father. The only place you can talk is in your diary.

  Which she’s got.
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br />   With everything recorded in it.

  That she has done.

  The relationship between the three of you is all about the gift of attention, and your father cannot bestow it upon two women at once. And she will win, always. She is an adult and you are not, she knows how to do it; to demand and punish. To withhold what he wants.

  You both know that when your father comes back the two of you will be quiet and he will know none of this, the explosive fury between females. That is the code of you both, the only common code you adhere to; this is women’s business.

  She spits on your diary in contempt. Has no intention of giving it back. Stomps inside with a slap of the screen door. You hear your words being flung across the room in disgust.

  And then quiet.

  The only power in her life. A withholding.

  Lesson 47

  Only be honest. No falsehoods, no concealments of any kind.

  But something new.

  What honesty can do. The power of it.

  She has opened your words and she has read them. All the little incidents over the years, all the hurts, cruelties, vulnerabilities; all the disobedience and confusion and longing and touch. The truth has been forensically trapped. Your meticulous record. And she has been incensed by it.

  You smile.

  Lesson 48

  The most of women are, in their youth at least, decidedly ‘adjective’. Few of them have had the chance of becoming a ‘noun substantive’—they have been accustomed all their lives to be governed, if not guarded; protected

  You run far from her world of Tupperware boxes and spotless surfaces, run and run in your bib-and-brace overalls cut off at the knees and your flannelette shirt; dirt girl, sun girl, strong in it. You find your old bush shelter, still there, just, and curl into it.

  Stilled by the bubble of the creek. Its insistent coolness. You shut your eyes as the talking water soothes you down; you’ll get your book back, you’ll find it, she’s not so smart.

  You jerk up.

  Smoke. On the breeze.

  Fire.

  With a pounding heart you rush back.

  She has stoked up the incinerator in its rusty metal drum, is ripping apart your diary’s spine and feeding great chunks of it to the flames as methodically as she feeds clothes to the washing machine.

  Noooooooooooo!

  Too late. She flings the last chunk of your words into the furnace and turns, and looks at you, saying nothing but everything in her face. She has won. She is burning them because she never wants your father to find the meticulous chronicle of her unkindness. And you know that if you tell him about her cruelty, she will tell him about Central Station.

  So. Caught.

  Magnificently.

  You leap on Peddly, barefoot, the sharp ridges on the pedals press hard into your bare feet but you need that, need the pain to blot everything else out and you spin and ride away from her, faster and faster, away from the claustrophobia; the enormous swamping of hate.

  You won’t be hurrying back. Teaching them, teaching her.

  Forcing them to care. To notice. Finally, please.

  By absence. Your withholding.

  Lesson 49

  Does ever any man or woman remember the feeling of being ‘whipped’—as a child—the fierce anger, the insupportable ignominy, the longing for revenge?

  Gulping your shock, pushing your bike down dirt roads, further and further away from her, down fire trails scarcely used and barely noticing what you’re doing, where you’re going. Wiping away furious tears as you pedal by a tall wire fence you’ve barely noticed in the past, an anonymous, official-looking barrier hiding away some old mine you’ve never given a second thought to; but stopping, this time, skidding in the dirt.

  Its double gate is open. The sturdy chain always locking it hangs limp.

  ‘B.M.C.’ declares a sign on the gate: the Something Mining Company. Of course. So what.

  ‘No Trespassers. No Shooters.’

  Right. But you’re not a trespasser, you’re an observer; you’re not going to steal or destroy anything. It’s just that in all your life this gate has never been ajar and you can’t not do this. You feel the old sizzle of curiosity revving up. A mine of your own, an enormous playground to colonise, hide away in, to fall down a shaft and be rescued by your father, after several days in an agony of unknowing; his arms in a furious embrace of relief and love and torment.

  Imagine her face at that.

  Maybe there’s a rusty tower you can climb, a queen surveying the roof of her world; maybe a metal cage that sinks to the hot, drippy bowels of the earth; an abandoned office with a typewriter and forgotten safe. Mine records in meticulous ink, faded photographs, mysterious pulleys and rail tracks. Who knows what’s in there. A washroom containing lockers with forgotten treasures—penknives and hard hats, tin cribs and cap lamps. You once snuck near the washroom of your father’s mine and caught the men with their shirts hanging off their waists as they prepared to slough away the black dust from the bowels of the earth; the torsos and taut flesh, so different to the men of the city, so different to Mr Cooper with his softness, round shoulders, paleness, city sweat. You are addicted to the unknown, love not knowing what to expect.

  No Trespassers. No Shooters.

  You are neither. You are a lookaholic.

  You push your bike through the gate.

  Lesson 50

  The wicked world without

  A narrow dirt road. Forbidding trees. Trunks leaning from high banks. Not a mine road, you know that almost instantly, and not a welcome place. You do not turn back. Glints of light flash through the trees. You feel your back prickling up: go away it all seems to be saying as you climb higher, higher, and start to pant, standing up on the pedals of your bike and pushing hard as the spikes dig spitefully into your feet. The twisted bark of the trees spirals as if a furious wind has whipped it but then at the top it all clears, magically, into an exhilarating table top and you smile in wonder: a cap of cleared land awaits.

  But not a mine at all.

  A house.

  A colonial mansion. Honey sandstone. You never knew it existed; that your dusty, blackened valley could conceal something so beautiful. Two storeyed, a verandah like a collar around it. Tall windows are blank or shut off by corrugated iron like a blindfold over a face, daylight floods from the front door to the back.

  You fling your bike down a ditch. Creep forward on high alert; someone might be in it, might react. No shooters, but they could have a gun themselves, you never know in these parts. As you approach, the thick shrill of cicadas—their deafening chorus—abruptly stops, as crisp as an orchestra. It’s as if the whole world is watching, listening, waiting. A trickle of sweat rolls down your stomach. The tin roof cracks in the heat, from somewhere a door bangs shut, you jump; the breeze, just that. By the front door is a brass nameplate mottled by age and neglect. Woondala.

  The far left corner, ground level: a shadow of movement through shredded lace curtains.

  Someone inside. Right. You lick your lips. Catch sight of an old car parked to the side of the house. A Volvo, playful and low and nothing like the boxy ones now, corroding with rust and as faded as the building. You can’t go back. You have to investigate. You hope the old wooden floorboards on the verandah won’t creak and with a pounding heart inch to the window as silently as an Aboriginal tracker. The lace of the curtains is fragile, feminine, blackened and hanging in strips.

  A man.

  His back to you.

  He seems to be working but you can’t make it out. Leaning over a bench that runs almost the length of the room, an industrial high table. On it, resting against the wall, is a line of objects with the precision of a museum arrangement: shells as big as fans, plaster cornices, photos in tarnished silver frames, dried seed pods, teapot fragments, old plates as wide as clocks. You look and look. You have blundered into a secret place. A magpie’s lair of loveliness.

  You cannot move, transfixed.

/>   The man is bending over his bench with the concentration of a monk at an illuminated manuscript. He is left-handed. You always notice this and trust it; you also are left-handed, close friends always seem to be. His hand curves awkwardly around a pen with such complete absorption that to disturb it would feel like violence; it curves just as yours does, as if you’ve never properly learnt how to do it. He is dressed like no man you have ever seen, there is something English about it, careful, a traveller perhaps, a collector of some sort. You have no idea what he is doing except that it is something completely consuming and a great warmth spreads through you, a dipping in your belly: you want all of it, all—his desk, house, stillness, car, work, this entire secret place. So close! A world utterly alien in terms of everything in your life. And you were expecting corrugated sheds and conveyor belts; coarse language, heavy work boots.

  There is a great silence—the silence of creativity, of being lost in a world that’s not physically around you. He never looks up. He wiggles his finger in his ear, runs his hand through a flop of fringe, hitches up his belt; trying to make something work and frustrated with it but not giving up. He never looks around, trusts this place. No one will disturb it. You bet he has no idea his gate is open, it’s an oversight that won’t be repeated, you’ll never get inside here again and don’t know what to do with the gift of it. All you can see is his back, the grace in it, and all you can feel is something unfurling within you as you look, and look.

  You have fallen for a flop of hair and the curve of a back.

  How can that be? So fast, just a back, a hand through a fringe, irrational and senseless but you’re always doing this; with boys on a bus or behind the counter of a milk bar or in a school art room. All it takes is the nape of a neck, the shyness in a glance, a curve in a lip and you’re gone, instantly. The mere idea of them.