With My Body

by Nikki Gemmell

  And now this.

  You turn away, your back against the wall, the man inside oblivious. So, one of the ones you’ve fallen for and they’re always the men you can never talk smoothly to, of course. You could never approach him now; your voice would be stopped up and your face held hostage by a furious blush and a tongue like felt in your mouth. You should go. You should leave this place and never come back.

  Can’t.

  Lesson 51

  It is the women who poke about with undefended farthing candles in the choke-damp passages of this dangerous world

  He walks to the window—you flick away. Fingers curl around the sill; he’s gazing out. Clean nails, blunt, not the hands of this land.

  His difference.

  Your back pressing into the sandstone next to him, your roaring heart.

  You glance down in panic at your dirt-laden overalls and grubby shirt; you look like a gypsy child, a bush scamp. His footsteps walk away, returning to his bench. You exhale. You must go now, quick, but there’s too much to absorb, work out. And there’s stubbornness here too, a need to stay out until the worry’s well and truly festering back home. Something dangerous and wilful is colouring this: the desire to alarm. You run across the yard and climb a tree that shelters you in its crook like a great, curving hand, and wait.

  For goodness knows what.

  Reading his land. The fallen branches bleached to the colour of bone in the paddocks. The barely there circular driveway—a past pretension. Fences drooping like a Dali painting, keeping nothing out. Or in. The scrub winning as it encroaches; the greedy lantana, the bush tomatoes. This place hasn’t hosted humans for a very long time. He doesn’t understand it, what will happen soon, the triumphant erasure of all of it. He’s not a bushy, it’s in everything about him—the curve of his hand around his pen and the sound of his footsteps and his clothes—he wouldn’t be able to read this place and protect it. Like you can.

  He comes out. Walking differently to any man you’ve ever known, not quite right, as if his hips are too swivelly and his feet are compensating, especially the right. It doesn’t detract, it intrigues; you want to help him. God knows what’s next. This afternoon already feels tattooed upon your life.

  He holds a mug of something hot. Runs his hand through his hair; he’s buggered, deserves this break. He sits on the top verandah step cradling his mug in both hands, squinting at … what? The stretch of sky, a kookaburra staring straight at him, the land. He’s completely relaxed in it; the chuff of ownership. A dog pads out and shakes its head as if it has just emerged from sleep. A golden retriever but the colour of amber. It settles close. The man’s hand reaches out without looking and plays with its ear with the absent-minded fondness your dad used to have with your own earlobe, long ago, as he was driving. The dog shuffles closer and rests its nose on his thigh in perfect peace. The man leans his head against the verandah post and shuts his eyes, basking in the repairing light.

  Then glances at his watch. Stands abruptly. Flings away the remains of his tea in a whip of gold. Strides inside.

  You start. He might be driving off, locking the gate. You can’t be trapped overnight—can’t get over that fence and God knows how many days, weeks, months he’ll be gone from this place. Before you’re out of the suddenly difficult tree he’s slamming down his study window and hurrying from the house with his dog at his heels and jumping in the car and driving off, fast.

  You slice your leg as you slither down the bark, feel the hot wet of blood, barely notice. You have to get out of here. You grab your bike and streak after him, pedalling furiously, stumbling over rocks. Damn. A puncture. Fling Peddly aside, and sprint.

  He’s gone by the time you get to the entrance. The thick chain is now padlocking the double gate. A gap of just ten centimetres. You can’t, can’t squeeze through. And mean little triangles of wire are too tiny to get your bare feet into, they slice into your soles, it’s impossible. The fence is three times your height.

  You’re stuck.

  The only one here.

  No one knows where you are.

  Trapped with a broken bike and a house full of ghosts.

  For goodness knows how long.

  You dive into the fence in frustration with your hands clenched, it catches your weight and mocks you with its bounce. It’s new wire, it’s not letting you out.

  Lesson 52

  We must help ourselves

  The late-afternoon air is keen with coming rain. Lost people die in this valley. You will have to find shelter, water, warmth.

  You return to Woondala, your best bet. A huge, spreading pine grows to the side of it and the wind whistles strangely through its needles as if it is telling you to be gone, this place is not for humans, the rest have been pushed out in the dropping light. The house is neglected except for the corner you found him in: he’s obviously working his way through the rooms, waking it up, but it’s an enormous task.

  The kitchen has been fixed to a serviceable level. Just. A kettle on a portable gas hob rests by a wide, whitewashed, colonial hearth. A bathroom has rusty-coloured water from its tap—water, thank God—and a toilet that flushes when a broken chain is yanked. A box of tissues is beside it. A bedroom has a mattress on the floor and a single pillow with the indent of a head in it and not much else. His workroom is locked, the battered iron knob of its door won’t budge.

  The only thing locked in this place.

  You thread through other rooms, the thick stone outer walls like a blanket around you. The house has the feeling of being abandoned in great haste, as if news of a coming pestilence has forced everyone to flee in a single afternoon. There are scatterings of past lives, generations of them—convicts, fragrant mistresses, Edwardian children, Aboriginal cooks, ghosts.

  Various walls are covered with newspapers from the last century and pages from the Bulletin magazine, and in one room sheets of old bush poetry, at head height by a bed: Percy Russell, Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, Dora Wilcox. Thick wide plates crazed with age from some grandness long ago line the pantry, spotted silver spoons and forks in rusty old billy cans are collected on a bench along with encrusted black cooking pots. A tarnished silver candelabra is lonely in the grate of a fireplace. A grand piano awaits in what looks like the remains of a drawing room; keys are missing and possum droppings are scattered on its lid and a stool is drawn and quartered with its horsehair matting tumbling out. A line of five attached theatre chairs watch—God knows what—in an incongruous row. A hessian chaise longue broods in a corner, pining for another chance. Leather-bound books are stacked upstairs by the frames of iron bed heads. Dropped cigars, whisky bottles, stirrups, buttons, empty cotton reels, mustard jars, coins—they all litter rooms gloomed down by corrugated-iron sheets over windows, the insistent light of afternoon straining through in precise pinpoints.

  That light feels like it will eventually triumph in this house, it will one day reach into every window and corner and through the roof until only the strong outer walls will be left. Some rooms, on the top floor, already ring with air and emptiness.

  And waiting.

  You could do so much with this place. With all your bush knowledge, all the watching over the years, everything your father has taught. You spin—a smile filling you up—imagining where you’d start.

  Lesson 53

  A solid, useful, available happiness

  Now you’re standing tall in the attic with its windows punched out to the sky, surveying the vastness around you. This is big sky land. What a find, what a jewel, secure in its corporate disguise as a disused mine. Clever, that. Beside the house is a small, muddy dam the colour of milky tea that looks perfect for a dip on a stinker of a day and rocks like sentinels litter the hills and you stare at the stately migration of clouds across this tall ceiling of blue and the hum of the wind crawls into your skin and always, somewhere, are birds, their sound cramming the air—bellbirds, whip birds, currawongs, kookaburras.

  Kookaburras!

  Whic
h means that somewhere, soon, is rain. You look to the south, a chill is already staining the sky. A southerly buster is hurrying upon you, ready to crack the back of the heat. You wrap your arms around your thinness and retreat, alone and not welcome in this place.

  Need distraction. Something that eats up the wait. You return to a room upstairs of stacked books, flick through them. Old farming manuals, geology guides, a book of sheep breeding, a volume of Shakespeare, For the Term of His Natural Life and some type of manual for women, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women.

  The thick card cover falls away in your hand and you yelp—you’ve broken it. 1858, London, it says on the brittle first page that is spotted with the circular droppings of insects. Hurst and Blackett, Great Marlborough Street, London.

  Great. Impossible to replace, and probably worth buckets.

  You begin to read. The reassuring voice hooks you like a hand around your neck, drawing you in. You smile and settle on your belly, caught.

  Tell the truth and don’t be afraid of it.

  Yes of course. It’s the only power you’ve got, the only way to be noticed in this life.

  In this book many women will find simply the expression of what they have themselves, consciously or unconsciously, often times thought; and the more deeply, perhaps, because it has never come to the surface in words or writing.

  Who was this woman? You flick through the book, the front, the back. It doesn’t say. Anywhere. All you’ve got to go on is the warm, knowing tone of her voice. It feels like she’s been married for decades and had a dozen kids; there’s a richness of living in her words; a certainty you’ve rarely known.

  This book has been planned and completed, honestly, carefully, solemnly, even fearfully, with a keen sense of all it might do.

  You stand, pocketing the little tome.

  Lesson 54

  Courage inexhaustible! Sustain it under difficulties, misfortunes and rebuffs of every conceivable kind

  Now you’re wandering his house, agitated, the air laden with its coming storm. The stillness is banking up at the windows, pushing at the walls, wanting in before the rain comes and hammers the valley in great sheets; you can read this sky. His sky. Yours. You are nervy, skittery, you take off your flannelette shirt and wipe your brow with it; bathing your skin in coolness, God knows when you’ll get rescued from this place. You return to the bedroom and lie like a Goldilocks on the mattress, your head in the hollow of the pillow. It smells adult—hair oil, male sweat, ingrained sleeps.

  Time slips by. The storm threatens, all talk no substance. Your cheeky little Victorian manual is your only comfort in the fading light.

  My young lady friend, your time, and the use of it, is as essential to you as to any father or brother of you all.

  A lady of my acquaintance has as her sine qua non of domestic felicity, that the ‘men of the family’ should always be absent at least six hours in the day.

  In this much-suffering world, a woman who can take care of herself can always take care of other people.

  Far safer to call crime by its right name—treating it even as The Ragged Schools did the young vagabonds of our streets.

  You wonder what a ragged school was, smiling as you curl on the bed, devouring the tiny print. The sky is still pregnant with rain yet it doesn’t fall, everything is waiting, poised: the world outside softens as night comes stealing in, dusk is like a thin film of milk washing over the land. You read on, fast, before you lose the light; there are candles but no matches in this place. The night pushes up the band of sunset in the sky and finally you close your book, defeated by the gloom. The distant thunder rumbles in the floorboards, far away, moving on to somewhere else and you can feel the house talk, willing you out, leaving it to its darkness. If you don’t return to Beddy soon it will mean search parties—your father will be home shortly from his afternoon shift, wondering where you are. It will mean helicopters and sniffer dogs and you stand, in panic; don’t want anyone to find this, your fragile discovery, don’t want anything from your real world crashing in on it.

  Taking it from you.

  Your hidden place, that you will find a way back to.

  To help. To mend. To patch up. To watch his hands as he works, as he caresses his dog. If he is like that with animals what must he be like with people? A tenderness you have never seen in a man before, a grace, and you just want to watch, nothing else. You have not grown up with the expectation that someone will look after you and it’s not what you want from this world—it’s the promise it holds. Of a different life, a different way, an escape. You just want to watch and learn and be nourished by it. So much enchantment in this place.

  But first you have to get home.

  To keep it safe.

  Lesson 55

  If there is no joy like the rapture of a first love, God’s great mercy has also granted that there is no anguish like youth’s pain

  A car. Its sound as it climbs, carefully, the rough winding road. You leap to a window. Can see the search of its headlights threading through the dust. Rescue. You shut your eyes in relief.

  The old Volvo. Back, thank God, back. You are safe, this world is safe, no one will find it; you can go home now. A screech of the handbrake and a slam of the car door and then he is here, the great loom of him striding in strong and you are rushing out with his dog jumping about you in a mad flurrying cacophony of barks. The dog grabs your wrist in its jaws and has you tight by its gums and its owner is exclaiming in shock and stepping back, as if he’s seen a ghost, dropping his groceries and a bottle of wine is smashing and a thread of red shoots out fast across the floor.

  ‘What—’ In absolute bewilderment.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ as you try to bend down and clean up but the dog has you firm.

  He can’t comprehend, someone here, in his space, now. How? He sees the book you’re still holding.

  ‘Is that—?’

  Your face reddens. ‘I wasn’t stealing.’

  You hand it back with the quickness of guilt. He looks at the the title, the cover falls off. Frowns as if he didn’t realise he had it. Is it his, is it yours, did he break it, did you?

  ‘Any tips?’ he murmurs.

  You don’t know what to say, whether to laugh or explain or run. Totally stumped. By this man, six foot tall with his vigorous strap of black hair over his high forehead, and green eyes, curiously pale, a paleness that doesn’t match the vigour of everything else about him, that feels all of the mind, seems so wrong in this house. Physically, he is not of this valley world. The dog still has your wrist in its gums, you try to extricate yourself. He suddenly realises.

  ‘Bec, down!’

  Free.

  ‘I—I got stuck. By mistake.’

  ‘What?’ As if it’s impossible that anyone but him could be in this place, could have stumbled across it let alone got into it.

  ‘The gate was open. By accident. You drove away and locked me in. I want to go home.’

  ‘But no one lives around here. Where on earth did you come from?’

  ‘B—Beddy,’ you stumble out.

  He looks at you as if he has no idea what language you’re speaking; sideways, as if he can’t make head nor tail of it. Looks at the book—nope—it’s not going to yield a clue.

  ‘Beddington.’

  Your head indicates, frustrated, over the ridge.

  It dawns—obviously not from these parts. He nods. Right. One of them, now he has you placed. He looks you up and down and you see, suddenly, what he is seeing—the horror of your clothes, wild hair, general grubbiness—a bush scrap of a thing. Everything that you are, that you represent. He looks at your pockets as if he suddenly expects them to be bulging; at the book as if he can’t believe someone from there would be reading it. Would be reading full stop. Flips it open like he’s expecting stolen sheets of gold to fall from it. Snaps it shut, pockets it in ownership.

  ‘Can you leave now, please. I have work to do.’

  You stare at hi
m, rooted to the spot.

  ‘Shall I involve the police?’

  As if you are about to bring an entire mining community of thieves and claimants crowding into his place.

  Too much gap.

  Not seeing you. Who you are, who you’re not.

  Just wanting you gone and his world back.

  The piracy of indifference; and your hackles rise at it.

  Lesson 56

  Some instinct warns you that you are making yourself ridiculous

  Anger unlocks you. You’d never be able to talk to him but for this.

  ‘I’m stuck. I need to get home but the gate was locked.’ Indignant, slow; as if it’s him, now, who doesn’t understand. ‘I’m not staying.’

  ‘Well off you go then.’ He scoops up his groceries. ‘I left the gate open again, I’ve just realised,’ he mutters absently, furiously. ‘And yes, it’s the last time that’ll be happening.’

  As if he suddenly can’t bear to have you here, in his secret place; an uninvited encroachment from the surrounding world—he’s been found out and he’s consumingly distracted by the thought of that. As he lifts up his groceries they tumble out of a slit in the plastic: tin cans and sausages, bread, chocolate biscuits.

  ‘Blast.’

  He has to bend to scoop them up, awkwardly, with those gammy hips. It makes him curiously vulnerable and it spines you up.