With My Body

by Nikki Gemmell

  He does not move. He does not speak. But he is smiling, from the corner of his mouth, just. Intrigued, surprised; it’s in his eyes, you note it. He looks at the book shelf and shakes his head—uh uh—something’s wrong, it can’t work like this. He plucks your little leather volume from his shelf and hands it back, insists. The tone has switched again.

  So, an unspoken game, a gift for a gift.

  You flip open a random page.

  Close the eyes that no husband ever kissed.

  You do, and your insides peel away as if he has slipped his fingers into a secret place and brushed a whisper of a touch. You smile, can’t help it. At the book, at the blue bottle, at this speaking silence.

  It has begun.

  Whether he likes it or not.

  Every time you come from now on—and you will come—a gift will accompany you.

  That you will place.

  Lesson 80

  Close the eyes that no husband ever kissed

  Cycling to him the next day, faster than you’ve ever ridden, shackled now by want. A water bag is looped over your handlebars, ‘Austral Canvas’ stamped across its honeyed cloth.

  The next gift. That would have been placed over a car’s radiator once. You can barely think what will be yours in return.

  Thunder threatens, the sky is bruised like a plum; you shouldn’t go today, you must. You glance behind you at a curtain of grey falling across the land and pedal faster, flint in the air and you push yourself to stay ahead of it and then the first, fat splats come; the rain has beaten you. Do you turn back or do you get caught? No time. A flash of lightning. You jump, you hate lightning. Pedal more furiously. The rain catches you, grows heavier, pounds. Mud splashes into your face as you fly down the dirt roads, you are freezing, teeth chattering, your hair hangs in ratty rivulets, wet—it is spitting into your eyes, blurring your vision and you have to drag it off to see, make progress.

  The gate, at last.

  His road barely there in the driving rain, you can hardly make it out, the dirt flies up and the leaves whip across your face, you fall and get up, slimy now with mud and wet. Woondala is just ahead, finally, you are drenched. You see him waiting tall on the verandah and faster and faster you fly, grinning, waving; you only see at the last moment the pothole the rain has carved in the road, huge and filled with its needles of dancing rain. You swerve.

  Too late.

  You try to correct yourself; pitch over the handlebars.

  And black.

  Lesson 81

  The boys may do a thousand things which are ‘not proper for little girls’

  Your earlobe, held in the hollow of a mouth. Hands, lips, the tip of a tongue, waking you up.

  ‘You’re my downfall.’ The whisper of a breath. A mouth in the clavicle of your neck and the violin dip of your hip; against the vulnerability of your inner wrist and on your eyelids, just, trembling.

  Or was that air? A cloud shift? A moth? What are you dreaming and what are you not?

  Your eyelids so heavy, they roll back, again, into the dense lovely rain of deep sleep.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he is breathing, apologetically, ‘you’re soaking wet.’ As you are turned, as your clothes are slipped off. ‘You’ll get pneumonia if I don’t.’ Are you dreaming it, you cannot climb out; hands are hovering, fingertips, the softest of touches, learning you as if they have never learnt a woman in their life, as if you are lit. Eating the dirt and the mud from your skin, licking it off with a tongue-tip; a mouth finding yours, a soul in the lips, waking you up. You shoot up with a gasp.

  You are on the hessian lounge in the piano room.

  A blanket is over you.

  Your clothes are dry.

  You have no idea how long you have been here. The slant of the light tells you it is late afternoon; you have no idea how many minutes have passed, hours, days.

  You are alone.

  Lesson 82

  Driven at last into open rupture

  He is in the kitchen. His back to you, at the sink.

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Good.’

  He does not look at you. He does not turn.

  You are thrumming.

  Unbearably close.

  You know you should go now, you should turn around and walk from Woondala and never come back, you have to.

  You walk up to him, to his back, and you stand on tiptoe and kiss him, a whisper of breath, on the back of his vulnerable neck.

  ‘I’m here.’

  Lesson 83

  Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well

  Done.

  God in it.

  At last.

  A communication between you but more than that—a communion—that word of grace and connection; spiritually softened.

  ‘You feel beautiful,’ he says in the afterwards, a fingertip trailing from the dip of your neck to the top of your pubis. Your belly dips and you giggle, pushing him off.

  ‘You’re like a brand-new ballet slipper. Silky. Unscuffed.’ He shakes his head in wonder; at what has just happened, how it has got to this, how on earth it all began, here, in this lone man’s place.

  ‘Yeah, a ballet slipper just waiting to be all grubbied up,’ you tease. ‘To be flung into a corner and tossed out.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he exclaims, wounded, ‘no, not that. Never that.’

  In the long golden stillness of late afternoon you lie in silence, Tol’s arm a seatbelt across your waist, and listen to the sky outside slowing, fading, in perfect peace.

  The rain has stopped. The world is clean. You lift his arm from your sticky belly and put on your clothes. Slip away without saying goodbye. Without looking back. Your bike is propped by the front door, still with its water bottle looped over the handlebars. You sling the canvas bag over the knocker by the front door, a lion with a ring in its mouth.

  The second gift.

  That you have placed.

  Lesson 84

  We begin to taste the full meaning of the world as a place where ‘we shall know even as we are known’

  Days stagger by. You do not go back. Cannot. Cannot bear to return to find him gone, spooked, the gate padlocked; he didn’t want to do it, of course, his back was turned in the kitchen as if in shame, he was resisting, it was a dream—was it a dream?—he can’t go on, you’re a schoolgirl, you have exams to study for, a proper life, your father must never find out.

  Too much no in it.

  But then one—enormous—yes.

  That moment when he turned from the sink, and kissed you.

  When you forgot everything else.

  Lesson 85

  Those only can find true friends who have in themselves the will and capacity to be such

  Endlessly you flick through his little Victorian volume in your room on the back verandah. The brisk, sparky voice released by its anonymity, glowing with honesty and common sense. Then you come across it.

  Let there be no hesitations, no regrets, no compromises—they are at once cowardly and vain.

  You snap the volume shut.

  Jump on your bike.

  Lesson 86

  Love, also

  Because you are the collator, the collector. Because this is the next phase of the experiment begun at fourteen and abandoned for a couple of years and now re-awakened, you need to know what follows, you are learning, deepening, opening up. Because he has shown you another way and it cannot stop yet. Because he pressed his disbelief into you at one point—that you were both doing this, that it had gone this far—and you don’t want that as an abiding memory for you both; a sense of wrongness, the stain of it.

  Because you cannot stay away.

  As simple as that.

  Flying on your bike, arrowed to his north. Trembling between your legs, trembling in your chest. Your head telling you this is ridiculous, you have to stay away, he won’t be there, the gate will be locked—you feel too much, have to turn back, you’ll be hurt. You can’t. You must.

  You sto
p at a willow tree and plait two crowns. The third gift.

  The gate is ajar.

  As you knew it would be. Your belly is somersaulting, you are wet. He wants this; he cannot bring himself to say it because of the illicitness in it and you need to come back to show him it’s alright, your choice, you are absolutely complicit in this. Flying down his driveway and he is there, on the verandah, waiting; he sees you and stands, comes striding down the drive, runs.

  With relief.

  With so much else.

  You are standing there, strong, a vast smile shining you up; stripping off your singlet like a miner at the end of a shift, crossed hands pulling it over your head in a clean yank. He is reaching you, helping, saying nothing, laughing, falling on his knees as he pulls down your pants, you are almost fucking into the car, you fall to the ground, both, ramming, hard, giggling in the dirt. His finger is suddenly enquiring around your arse and you recoil. Sssh, he soothes, sssh—and you obey, give in, can’t help it, want it, you spread your legs wider, you feel his two fingers between the thin membrane of skin, exploring, the extreme pleasure of it and you are giving yourself to him, you want to be swallowed up. You can’t bear it, you come and come in great floods of wet and he holds your trembling, he clamps it still like you’re an animal in its death throes caught in a trap and he’s soothing you into a stopping, into quiet, sssh. The cheeks of both of you are sudden-soft together and you say nothing and neither does he and above you, around you, is the wheeling sky and then he moves in you slowly, so slowly and he comes, too, withdrawing with a jerk and the hot spumy wet spreads over your stomach and then he flops onto his back in the dust beside you, spent.

  You muddle together back to Woondala, dirt encrusted, sex encrusted; holding, pushing, basking, wondrous at this force between you, that has taken over you both. You place one willow crown on his head and the other on your own; straighten his, giggling at the ridiculousness of it, brimming with laughter and light, both of you, as you walk back to his house, talled up.

  You have entered the realm of surrender.

  Your summer holiday, now, an enormous cleared path.

  To whatever he wants.

  Lesson 87

  A solitude so full of peace and hope that it is like Jacob’s sleep in the wilderness: ‘all things are less dreadful than they seem’

  Cracked open into womanhood. Never to reclaim that little girl you once were. An enormous rushing road of experience and knowing and shock now carves you off from that schoolgirl looking at you, from across the far pavement, the child you once were, just several days previously. A lifetime ago.

  You have become someone else.

  You can never go back.

  The learning has begun; the proper learning.

  At last.

  Lesson 88

  Labour is worship

  You touch, palm to palm. He kisses each knuckle.

  ‘You have such strong, old woman’s hands,’ he chuckles, flattening them out. ‘I feel very safe with them.’

  ‘Worker’s hands, mate.’

  He wants to watch you. Sawing, hammering, drilling. With concentration and ingenuity and skill; he wants to learn it all, wants you to teach him and to hear you talk. And then he comes at you. Drawing you to him. Drawing in your energy.

  You feel entirely awake.

  Cicadas all about you, in the solid heat; their wall of shrillness keeping the world at bay, drowning out the sounds coming from you that you have never heard before, from the base of your spine, your core. Joyous and animal and astonished, as loud as you want. Because no one can hear you but Tol, leaning back. Smiling. Observing.

  At what he has cracked from you.

  ‘My biggest turn-on is how much you’re enjoying it,’ he says at one point and you tuck it away, must remember it; so removed from a grubby little episode in a warehouse near a train station once.

  Back home, in your real life, your glee is the only leakage from your secret world and it gives you resilience and it gives you strength. To make someone so happy, what a power in that! A supreme power, surely, in a woman’s life. Your days have been shrouded in cloud for so long but suddenly the sun has burst through and you are unscowled; filled with light. Sailing through all the wounds and slights of your stepmother now, through all the silences of your father; everything slipping from you like rain from an oil cloth. Nothing can touch you, nothing. You were born in a happy hour, you remember that from your early childhood; how uncomplicated everything was then, in the cradling, shining happiness of being cherished.

  Lesson 89

  There is a certain amount of work to be done, and somebody must do it

  The next gift. A geometry set your grandfather gave you, from his school days; the handmade wooden case a marvel of careful trays and slots. Tol whistles at its ingenuity. Hastily screws a pencil stub into the compass’s rusty metal and draws circles, in delight, on a paper scrap.

  ‘One thing you always have to do, is tell me—precisely—what you want.’

  He hands across a sheet of perfect circles, so carefully done you can’t discern the joins.

  ‘But I don’t know what I want. It has to be taught, doesn’t it? Like the finger in … in … ’

  Can’t bring yourself to say it, he whispers it close. The blush burns through you.

  ‘There’s this Italian author called Italo Calvino, who said something about how the pleasures of love, just like gluttony, depend on absolute … utter … precision.’ His tongue laps your earlobe, once, quick. You shiver.

  ‘But where do I begin? I don’t know.’

  Without a word he leads you to the couch. Unclips one brace then the other. Holds a fingertip to your lips when you try to talk, to find out what’s coming next. Three seconds his finger clamps your lips, four, five, six. Silence, anticipation, exquisite wet. He unbuttons the sides of your overalls. Kneels. Breathing shallow, pulling down your underpants as if he can scarcely believe he is doing this.

  ‘It starts … right … here.’

  He parts your lips, he finds your bud.

  His tongue upon it as precise as a droplet of mercury.

  You gasp.

  Lesson 90

  This busy, bright, beautiful world

  ‘I want to learn. Understand. Be good at it, like you. I did it once before—well, almost’—Tol’s eyebrows raise, he pulls back—‘but it was nothing like this.’

  Completely serious, baffled; that two experiences, two men, could be so different. The shock of that—that you could have easily gone through life only knowing the former, never the latter; a whole universe denied, that you never knew existed. One experience so reducing; the other so alive, invigorating.

  The wonder of that.

  ‘I need to know more.’ You speak slowly, faltering. It’s so important, this. ‘I have to understand what I shouldn’t allow. Stand for.’ Your voice drops. ‘Ever.’ A pause. ‘And so I can give something back, too.’

  He laughs in bewilderment—his fingers running like a rake through his hair—the weight of the request, the responsibility.

  You’re revving up, thinking how it can work.

  ‘Lessons. Yeah. And then from me, something in return.’ Because there must be a sense of giving, generously, on both sides; it’s the only way you’ll be comfortable with it. Thinking, thinking. ‘I can help, of course. Around the house. I’ll be teaching you, too. There’s so much to still do here.’ You clasp his hands. ‘And you must tell me what you want. From me. With everything.’ Utterly sincere. ‘Please, please say yes.’

  Tol’s chin disappears into his neck as he stares and stares, blinking. His face saying it all: he doesn’t quite know what to make of you, this strange, complex, thinking creature with its tool belt and happily grubby bare feet, so suddenly and forcefully in his midst; so eager to gulp up life, question, dissect. He goes to say something, stops. Holds your shoulders. Screws up his face. Kisses you once, soft, in the valley at the base of your neck then speaks with gravity, straight a
t you.

  ‘I could only do it … on two conditions.’

  You grin. Gotcha. ‘Which are?’

  ‘Everything has to be consensual. Always.’

  ‘On both sides,’ you fire back and he laughs.

  ‘Of course. You must never do something you’re uncomfortable with—and that goes for me too.’ He winces with helplessness.

  ‘Oooh, the things I’m going to get you to do,’ you tease, rubbing your hands with glee.

  ‘And … ’ He bites his lip. ‘I’d love to teach you one thing—’ a pause—‘just one, that I don’t come across, very much.’

  Your eyes narrow. ‘Which is?’

  ‘The woman who makes love heroically.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just remember, a man’s biggest thrill is that his partner is enjoying it. Well, this man at least.’ He comes up close, his fingers trickling deftly down your arms. ‘We have to begin with tenderness. Yes. Always. Because that’s all, ultimately, that’s needed. It comes from a cherishing.’ His eyes shine as he looks at you, his funny little scrap of a bush thing; his voice cracks and veers into something else. ‘From love. And with that comes the best kind of sex. Because it’s tinged with a … a reverence. It’s almost like a holiness fluttering in you both.’

  You feel like a blinded pit pony surfacing, coming up, up, into the light.

  ‘Now,’ you breathe.

  He chuckles softly. ‘Hang on, I need to prepare. Think. If we’re going to do this properly. And we must.’ A smile. ‘The Most Secret and Mysterious Woondala Love Academy. Good grief. Who’d have thought. Me.’