With My Body

by Nikki Gemmell

  His tools.

  A heavy leather collar of some type. Wound around your neck, buckled firm. You gasp. A chain is attached to it, its leather handle is whispered across your pubis. Its coldness is then looped down your back and threaded through your legs and pulled, firmly, once. Again, a gasp. You squeeze your groin on it, into it. Bend, instinctively working the metal deep into your fold. With a steady hand, with firm and gentle fingers, you are led through the listening, waiting house; every so often the chain between your legs is pulled taut—a reminder, a taunt. You are taken to an upstairs room, a room ringing with air and light, you can read it, read the sky in the dark. You are laid down, gently, upon your back on an empty mattress. Your legs are parted. You go to shut them, automatically, they are parted again; firmer. Your hands are taken, they are bound with a thick scratchy rope and secured to the iron bedstead. You are trapped, you cannot move them, you twist on your back. ‘Uh uh,’ he whispers, ‘you wanted this.’ Your legs are pulled apart and tied wide. ‘That’s better, that’s what we need.’

  You arch your back, groan. We?

  ‘Now,’ Tol says, from above, looking down, ‘we can do whatever we want.’

  The metal chain lying along your spine is jerked up, once, savagely, through your legs. You buck, exposing yourself more. You cry out. Tol pauses, you strain to hear anything beyond him …

  ‘Or should I say, whatever you want.’

  A shardy silence. Shuffling in the room, breath, you can’t make it out.

  ‘Fuck me, quick.’

  Tripping with wetness, coming, too quick.

  Now he is unbuckling you, hauling you up on your haunches, exposing you—for what? Who? Opening you wide, dipping in a tongue. Fingers, many. Rim you, probe you. You pulsate, want it. All. All. Everything.

  ‘Well done. Perfect.’ At the end of it, the delight in his voice. ‘This is only the beginning, my beautiful, beautiful love. The very start.’

  The tin roof above you talks in the heat, it cracks and stretches and creaks—or is it something else? In the room, watching. A feminine gasp, no, surely not, is your mind playing tricks? You are still blindfolded, you can feel it, you think, perhaps, you don’t know.

  ‘Again,’ you whisper to him in the dark, widening your legs further. ‘Now.’

  You have tumbled out of yourself.

  Lesson 133

  What a future you open for her!

  Your love has lost its innocence.

  He is greedy. After the librarian, the demureness, the restraint—the whore.

  ‘Let’s play, come on.’ Gleeful, as if a fabulous world of riches awaits.

  He has gone shopping, there are many new clothes, toys. Tassels at the nipples now of a beautiful satin bra, a slit in silken panties he jerks his finger up.

  ‘Be my stripper,’ he’s breathing softly into the back of your neck, a hand looped around your belly with a finger through the slash in your panties that are soaking wet.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she’s such a fabulously glorious mass of erotic contradictions. The girl who promises everything but actually, gives very little.’ His voice drops, his fingertip swirls, inside you, you groan and clamp him tight. ‘It’s all look and fantasise and project—but don’t touch. Don’t possess. The potency in resistance, remember. She’s the girl who’s completely in control but she’s never quite going all the way and she’s revelling in it, that supreme moment of power where she’s got the attention of an entire room and is calling all the shots but is always withholding that final moment.’

  You gasp.

  ‘Imagine you, here, with a room full of men. Imagine the power of it. All of them. Rapt.’ His voice right at your ear. ‘But you don’t have to withhold at the very end … if you don’t want.’

  You touch yourself over his finger, you curl him into you, tumble to the ground. He pulls away your panties but before he gives you the release of his own touch he is parting your legs and staring, appraising, teasing.

  ‘You want others, don’t you? Watching, touching, wanting; hands, everywhere, all over you. Dipping in.’

  His breath brushes your arsehole, he doesn’t touch.

  ‘I know you do,’ as he spreads your legs wide, wider, ‘you’re ready, aren’t you? Just tell me what you want.’

  You arch your back, your nipples erect, you feel all-powerful, tripping with it; you would give him anything in this moment, anything.

  He touches you.

  You explode.

  Lesson 134

  Order is heaven’s first law

  ‘I must know. Everything. What’s in that head of yours? Don’t be afraid. I need to know. So I can help. With absolute, utter trust. Always that.’

  All his words, words, words, over the next few days of apart. Spinning in your head as you help your father with the engine of his ute, handing across spanners and wrenches and bolts. You’re in retreat, here, now—you can’t go back, everything is galloping too fast—you don’t know what’s next, where it’s meant to stop, who he’s bringing in to this; you’re a good girl really, you can’t.

  You will not go back.

  What happens if you’ve fallen in love with a person who will ultimately destroy you?

  It is not the first time you’ve thought this.

  Woondala has woven a spell around you; you are different there. You don’t recognise yourself.

  Your father needs to fix the chook house. It’s falling apart, a big job, you want to do it with him; need his silence, the solidness of hard work, the reassurance. Need the known, everything that is comfortable and secure and known in your life. In the heat that is so thick it is a presence in this place.

  You do not go back.

  Lesson 135

  It often takes years to comprehend the peculiarities of one’s own constitution

  A letter. Your name and address on the envelope, typed. Businesslike, anonymous. Your stepmother turns it over curiously, goes to hold it up to the light.

  You snatch it from her. It is typed with his old typewriter, you just know.

  ‘It’s from my drama teacher at school. She said she’d write.’ Nonchalantly, already ripping it open. ‘It’s about the school play, next term, my lines. She promised.’

  Rushing it to your room, as bored-looking as you can.

  There’s a joy and trust and innocence brimming within you, and a depth which caught me unawares. I’d never want to hurt any of that in you or see you lose it. I feel old and cynical. Don’t inherit that from me, racked with all my doubts and worries. I feel I could poison you. Bring you down. Leave you bereft … but to capture that acuteness of being alive! That razor-edge quality, yes, that’s what being with you is like. I feel like you help me to live. You are so much stronger, freer, braver, than me; I must learn from that. I was feeling so crusted over, so weary of life—and then you came along. I want to make love with you madly, maddeningly. However you want.

  Longing for you.

  Now you must hide this, burn it. And then come. I need you.

  You run out the door with a slap of the flyscreen and leap off the verandah—clearing, cleanly, six steps.

  Lesson 136

  Be scrupulously honest and truthful, in the smallest as in the greatest things

  Sobbing as you’re pushing him away then pulling him to you, animal fucking, eating his flesh, biting, branding him, feeling his seed dribble from your stomach as you lay back on a huge slab of rock and it scrapes your back and you want it to, need it, to be marked forever, scraped by this grit; need it to hurt, to always remember this; want this day’s rawness and hunger tattooed upon the flesh of your back.

  ‘Deeper,’ you command, craving. ‘Fill me up.’

  ‘You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,’ he says in the thick of it.

  Holding you tight, thudding you into the rock, scrunching into your body as if he is clinging onto a lifebuoy in a wide ocean of fear, not wanting to let go, not wanting this to stop. He smells good
, he always smells good and you nestle your face into his armpit, its animal smell, and drink him up—intoxicated, with all of it.

  Soaring with happiness. That he could be so open, honest.

  ‘You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me.’

  You love the vulnerability, the anchoring power of it.

  A dome of secrecy over you both. As you lie there, limbs strewn, inside the raucous, ringing, bang-smash bell of heat and noise, cockatoos screeching above and the wheeling blue, the bubbling creek.

  You look straight into his eyes which laugh back.

  So, now you have it. That bloom of certainty that women who are anchored by a relationship have, that you have envied and craved your entire teenage life. A love that scorches self-hatred and insecurity and doubt. You are the love eaters in this place. Love gorgers.

  Life eaters.

  Yes. You feel so alive with all this.

  You tell him, at last.

  What he wants.

  Lesson 137

  It matters little when, or how, or by how many, truth is spoken, if only it be truth

  You are thinking of someone else. Other men. He is the trigger; he is only the start. It is all in your head, the movie running concurrently with the physical action, it needs momentum, it does not need his talk crashing into it.

  ‘Men,’ you whisper, ‘a lot, looking at me, all around me, running their hands over me, dipping their fingers in. A dog, brought in on a leash. They are all watching, my pleasure, someone … someone parts my cheeks. They all fuck me, one after the other, again and again. I am favoured, caged, bound, handcuffed, displayed—the object they all want.’

  You are deeply red, deeply shamed, at the end of it. Your face is flaming. You are quiet, cannot look at him, cannot say anything more. Can’t believe you have allowed this.

  He turns you around. With great certainty, with gravity. In silence.

  ‘Thank you for trusting me. I’m your helper, your facilitator. I will never hurt you, I will never exploit you. Let’s see how far we can take this. But only if you want to … ’

  His tongue flicks into you, as deft and cool as a snake.

  You clench on it, groan.

  His answer.

  Lesson 138

  A friend. Not perhaps until later life do we recognise the inestimable blessing, the responsibility awful as it is sweet, of possessing or of being a friend.

  Later, in the kitchen, cradling a mug of tea.

  ‘But how can you love me yet even think of doing … everything … that I said?’ The blush is deep; what you have revealed, oh my God. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘I love what you have given me. What we are doing here. You will never forget it and neither will I. We have released you, and so few women get that chance. We are doing this together. You’re a work-in-progress, but then so am I.’

  He comes right up close, his face tells you he is confident that no one, ever, can take his place, no matter who comes next; he is inked through your heart, through your blood, until the day you die he is there and he knows it. His smile tells you your pleasure is his, that he knows he will have succeeded if he sees you gaining ultimate pleasure, beyond him, beyond anything he can do; it will be his greatest gift.

  ‘But how?’ You furrow your eyebrows, frown, still don’t get it. He tells you he is doing all this because he is a student of women and he needs to learn, as do you, it is the writer’s curiosity—he is a student of life, of living to the limit in pursuit of love, connection, soul-sharing, radiance.

  He loves you, never forget that. No matter what comes next.

  ‘I want to unlock you completely and fully and absolutely. Give you the tools of womanhood, the most splendid of experiences. My ultimate lesson. I want you to know the choices you will have—the breadth of the experience—and believe me, many women, most women, don’t. Consider it an act of generosity, if you like.’

  ‘But what’s in it for you?’

  ‘It’s exciting. I want to watch. I want to see your pleasure and know that I, ultimately, am responsible for it. I want to give you an experience that will be with you for the rest of your life.’

  He asks you to shut your eyes.

  He leaves the room and returns; buckles the collar around your neck. You are free to look but don’t, in perfect obeyance.

  No more words, as his rigid cock presses firm into your flesh.

  He takes the collar off.

  The breath of a kiss, on the nape of your neck.

  ‘Friday. We’ll be ready.’

  Before you can ask him what he means, again, he is gone, he has shut the door on you, the study door that is always locked now; his secret refuge you are not allowed to trespass across anymore. You walk out of Woondala. The afternoon has turned, is now grey, sullen, waiting. You retrieve your bike. You don’t have to return. You don’t have to ever see this house again.

  ‘It’s your choice.’ The yell from the verandah to your departing back. ‘It’s always your choice.’

  You do not turn around.

  Lesson 139

  Be honest with me. I don’t expect from you more than human nature is capable of.

  Running to him two days later, in your overalls, the shirt flung from underneath them as soon as you have slipped through his gate and tossed your bike aside. Running to him, for him—you can’t help it, he has you snared, trapped. He loves you earthy, sweaty, loves you brimming with vividness, his child of nature, that girl he first knew, and so you are running and running in your Blunnies, through deep fern gullies and over rocks and through his creek; thudding away spiders and cobwebs and snakes; grimy with sweat and exhilaration and the slap of his bush; grimy with its life. There’s the crispness of an approaching storm in the air, an exhilarating readiness and you feel alive, on edge, shivery on the precipice of a something—God knows what—and you are poised to leap off and you are so ready, trembly wet, laughter shooting out. Ready to act volcanically however he wants, your heart pumping with greed and hunger and dread and desire; you are pure emotion now, shameless, unmediated by discretion or convention or decorum. You have entered a new world. You are someone else.

  No name, no age. No future, no past.

  Just this, the varnished present. Pure, lovely, ravenous want.

  He walks out to greet you.

  As if he knew it would always come to this.

  The curve of his cock, erect, through his trousers.

  He is holding a black silk blindfold and a pair of black opaque stockings and a suspender belt in one hand, and in the other, some beautiful Manolo Blahnik stilettos, of spindly black velvet, exactly your size of course. He places everything down, methodically, he has thought carefully about all this. He unclips your braces, pulls them down. You are wearing nothing underneath and you are shaved, in readiness. He shuts his eyes, briefly, as if he can’t bear to see it. He asks you to put on the stockings and the shoes. You have never worn anything like this in your life.

  Trembling, you obey him, breathing deep.

  He turns you around. He covers your eyes.

  Blindfolded by the softest of black silk. Two tiny metal weights on the ends. They slither, icy, against the skin of your lower back, a thrill of cold. Your flesh springs into goosebumps. He buckles the heavy collar around your neck.

  All sensation now. Nothing else.

  He dribbles the lead of the collar down your stomach then threads it between your legs. He pulls it up sharp. Between your lips. Forcing them apart. Exposed. You wince, with exquisite hurt.

  ‘Steady, my beauty, I’m with you,’ he whispers, a calming hand on your back, murmuring as if you are a wild brumby he has to lead into a horse float for the very first time, guiding you gently, all the way, every step.

  ‘Remember, confidence.’

  He leads you into the cool dark house you know so well, every crevice, wall, crack. He leads you into the main room, his hand still holding the chain taut at your back. You grip his arm tight, blinded, breathing dee
p. The chain cuts through you. Flipping open a lip. You are ready. Your nipples ache with anticipation. All your senses on alert.

  He stops you.

  Works the chain up higher, higher, so you have to spread your legs, open yourself wider, groan. You hold your voice, leaning your back against his stomach with his fingers in your bare cunt, splayed; as if on display.

  All is still, all is quiet.

  Just the tin roof above you, cracking and ticking in its heat.

  The roof you know so well.

  The only thing you know, now, in all of this.

  Lesson 140

  Our interests gradually take a wider range

  Gently, so gently but with firm authority, like a doctor before an operation, he lies you, belly down, on the couch. Your buttocks are placed over the roll of its arm. He trills his fingers up and down your back, then your thighs, dipping inside, further and further, soft, so soft and you lift up your arse, out, up—have to. His hands help you, his knowing hands, you open yourself out, groan, it’s unbearable, you want him, here, now, so much. You are left alone. Your body keeps pulsing, opening out. Then you hear another noise, the sound of a belt being taken off, trousers unzipped.

  In the room.

  With you.

  Who? You don’t know, who else, how many.

  Yes, no, you can’t make it out.

  ‘Only do what you want to do.’ Tol is back, beside you, whispers his soothing words, ‘I’m here, I’m with you, everything’s your choice, it’s what you want.’ Then he leans close and his fingers continue murmuring over the back of your thighs, loving, so tender—it moves you to tears, it’s unbearable, you spread your legs wider, you want it, want everything, all your clothes gone, on show for anyone here in this place, men, women, whoever is here, everything, trying to scrabble off the Manolo Blahniks, the belt.