With My Body

by Nikki Gemmell

  ‘Yes,’ you whisper, ‘yes.’

  ‘Good girl,’ he whispers, slipping down your stockings, unclipping your belt, parting your cheeks, for them, for the room, for whoever it is. You hear a gasp. His, someone else’s, you don’t know, don’t recognise anything anymore. It’s your cue. You lift yourself higher, higher, giving yourself to the air, rocking with it, displaying your arse, for God knows who, what.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ you whisper under your breath, urging it. Ready for him, his mates, his possession. His creation, ready for whatever he wants.

  ‘This is only the start,’ it is whispered.

  Gently you are turned over. Instinctively you spread wide. Your hands are taken. A belt you don’t recognise—you can feel its difference, its heaviness—someone is binding you with this stranger’s belt. A knee is holding you down. You submit, you trust, the knee is removed, you curve your back, splaying your wetness, your readiness. Strain to hear—you can’t make it out, another presence … or several … movement. Something else in this room, breath.

  ‘Well … well,’ in appreciation, as hands are directing you to the ground, some kind of platform. Hands, you don’t know whose, gently someone blows upon you and you bow your back, you arch your buttocks out, ready, so ready for this—trembling, wet, you feel as if your insides are tumbling in slow motion, with all of it. It is fear, excitement, anticipation; power, surrender, want.

  A finger, you don’t know whose, touches your cunt. Softly, brushing the underside of it, parting your lips. Inspecting.

  ‘Sssssh,’ Tol whispers, reassuring, in your ear. ‘Sssh.’ He angles you head down, so you are opened wide, wider, dangling the collar’s chain—its cold, brutal metal—across your wanton cunt.

  Lesson 141

  Come, just as you are—ragged, dirty, dishonest.

  Only come, and we will do our best to make you what you ought to be.

  Fingers, everywhere. You don’t know whose. You arch your back, giving yourself to them, wanting it all, all, everything. In your arse, in your cunt, your mouth, between your breasts, all at once, blinded but seeing all, in your head; but they don’t let you come, they stop just short.

  Saving you for something else.

  ‘Surrender,’ Tol whispers.

  You groan.

  You are humping a tongue. Urging it deeper, deeper. Something slips into your arse. You fuck it all, all. You want everyone to see, you arch your back, you love that you are giving pleasure, dispensing it; you feel supremely in control—strong, victorious, holding this room captive. Wanted.

  Noticed.

  That you can have this effect. You.

  The power of it.

  The gift of attention.

  Sounds, coming from you, that you did not think you were capable of, in a register lower than you have ever uttered in your life. You are split wide open, stripped, they have seen the core of you and you have never seen it before, in yourself and you marvel at that; the next step. That such a thing exists. That your body is capable of this.

  This tsunami of … pleasure.

  Lesson 142

  We feel we should like to go on living, were it only out of curiosity

  As you come and come you push away, all of it, not wanting anyone, anything, curling in exquisite aloneness, need to savour, scissoring your body again and again and turning brutally, in this needing to be alone.

  When the spasming has finally died down, Tol enfolds your trembling in his arms and holds you and holds you until you stop, until all is quiet. Sssh, he is whispering, smoothing back your hair, again and again, sssssh.

  ‘What exactly is freedom,’ he muses later, close, and you can hear the smile in his voice, ‘but doing exactly what we want to in life?’

  Then he kisses you. Just. The moth’s kiss.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says.

  You are still blindfolded.

  He slips it off.

  His eyes, soft, into yours. Just his eyes, nothing, no one else, in the room. He lifts you like his bride with the dearest and most sacred tenderness and he carries you across the threshold of his bedroom again and he lays you on his mattress with consummate gentleness.

  You have no idea of anyone else.

  No awareness of anything, only him.

  His gift.

  Lesson 143

  Where shall we find the light? In the world and its ordinary code of social morality, suited to social convenience?

  I fear not.

  One last fuck on that seared, soaked day: lying with his stomach pressed into your back, one of his hands across your mouth and the other strong on your pubis, fucking in silence, stifled. Muffling your cries with his hand, you must be quiet, he is giggling, sssh, as if he is not meant to be doing this, others are listening, they’re not allowed to know he is sneaking it.

  ‘I want you to be my woman forever,’ he is whispering deep inside you, moving so slowly, almost imperceptibly as his words pump through you, filling you up. Glow girl. Have you ever felt more alive, more sated, than this? He has removed you, shut the door on everything else, you are his only now, his—his woman, his world—and when he comes it is with a great cry of agony and distress and release, his whole life in it, all his past, all his future.

  ‘Thank you,’ he breathes again, panting, and then tells you he will never forget what you have given him—your trust, the gift of it through all these summer weeks. He will remember this golden, burnished time for the rest of his life —your love, what you have done, all of it. And then he starts to weep.

  The shuddering pressing into your back.

  The tears, the wet, the weight.

  You stay still. You do not turn to him. It is something deeply private, and you do not want to intrude upon it.

  Lesson 144

  The wretched girl lives in terror of being turned from an angry father’s door

  The house feels completely empty, except for you two. You have heard no one leaving, moving about, no cars, nothing. Just you and Tol and a world you have created for yourselves. You lie there and smile in the infinite depths of the silence of the softening day and the stopping and the rest. God in the quiet. Grace. You know now what it is to be a woman who radiates peace. Serenity.

  In a life driven by love.

  You sleep, you stir, you are the salt sweeper now, mining Tol’s body with your lips, your tongue, your breath. You taste regions, delve. The velvet softness of his flaccid penis, the toadstool head freckled softly, endearingly. You remember walking through his drawing room door once, unannounced, and Tol coming at you, rising from the couch, and in that instant you had a vision of him old—the thickness, the tiredness, the slowness—and felt an enormous tenderness for what he would become. You will be beside him, of course, you will not recoil from it; charging like crazed warriors at convention, still. You can see it.

  You float your lips over his body like a metal detector at a beach, trying to know him, extract him, his essence. This man in your life who touches the world so lightly with his living, who has no need of anyone else. With his constant capacity to surprise.

  Now, with stillness.

  The coldness of night is leaking into the air. The real world awaits. You get up. You shower. You leave. With a breath of a kiss on the nape of his sleeping neck.

  Your little Victorian volume is waiting for you on the verandah doorstep, your little manual of scrupulous honesty that has accompanied you the entire time you have been in this house. Smeared by insects and ink smudges and mud from a dam. You pick it up, puzzled. You’d left it in the pocket of your overalls, in the ditch.

  Inside is a fresh inscription.

  Up front, roguishly, in an area that has never before been written in—the writing messy, hasty, not his usual neatness—a person who has been shaken from themselves.

  This place can teach you so much.

  Lesson 145

  From that day this girl never was dependent upon any human being

  Your father looks up from his
tea and chocolate biscuit as you enter the house. As if he knows, as if he can smell something on you. Change, perhaps, as simple as that. Bruises are pluming on your thighs and your upper arms but he cannot see them; you do not know what he senses but it is some subtle thing, perhaps a ripening, a readiness, just that.

  ‘How old are you again?’ he asks absently.

  He always teases you with this, on the birthdays he invariably forgets or ignores, to toughen you up, to get your indignant reminder. He asks you now like he can’t believe you’re growing so fast; he needs affirmation of how young you really are.

  You just roll your eyes and smile the disbelieving, mock-disgusted smile that you always give him at this question then retreat to your room—have to, suddenly an uncontrollable trembling in your legs. Have to rip away your clothes to examine the vivid map on your skin, the imprint of what went on: the bruise on your left breast, deep and angry, the strange colours dancing up. No idea how it got there. The savagery of the lovemaking, all over, an elbow, or a chin, a knee. Embedded.

  Your nipples shrivel like dried grapes at the thought. The tingling between your legs, at all of it.

  Wanting it, all over again.

  But you must wait. Tol would want that. Restraint … and release.

  Lesson 146

  ‘To love’ is by no means the sole verb in the grammar of life

  Over the coming days you sleep and sleep, gulping up rest, burrowing deep into your lovely bed. Outside your father is burning off and the smoke wends its way through your clothes like the smell of a lover and you turn and smile, scrunching your body in its pyjamas as you repair, and rest. There is a prickling in your cotton pants as the hair starts to grow back; the itch of it, the grate. For three days you can barely get out of bed at all and your father comes to the door of your room and stares, perplexed. Unable to ask, unable to articulate. The great clotted silence of the Australian male, you know it so well—from him, from Tol. So apart yet so similar, the two men in your life, who cannot properly talk out their thoughts except in writing or in work, as they’re distracted, as they teach.

  Sometimes your father comes back and strokes your cheek as he used to once, long ago, before stepmothers and boarding schools, before any of that, when it was just him and you, untugged, pure and solid and known and quiet. In the silence of the gesture you hug your glow to your chest and let the stillness seep in, vast and rich.

  When he’s gone you roll over. Wonder what on earth’s next. With Tol. So much you want to do and have done; so much you want to do to him, to find out.

  It is his turn next. What’s in his head, what he really, deeply wants.

  Let’s see how far we can take this …

  With knowledge comes generosity. You have learnt that.

  Lesson 147

  Work is a natural and most holy necessity

  Day four. You go back. Whole.

  The gate is locked.

  It has never been locked, except for those weekends when he’s away or has guests and it is not a weekend now, it is a Monday, your heart is thudding, no, this can’t be.

  The shock of it. The disbelief. You shake the gates and shake them but cannot get in. Stunned. You sit slumped by the road, waiting, churning, for goodness knows what. Sit there, a great spanner twisting your heart. You sit there deep into that afternoon, into dusk.

  He doesn’t arrive. He doesn’t leave. There is no letter, no jar, no scrap of a note. Nothing. You are swamped by loneliness. The chill of the truth, now, of bereavement. So, this is how he will whisper through your blood for the rest of your life—of course—by abandonment.

  By silence.

  The most torturous experience of the lot.

  On that long afternoon you see your whole life ahead of you … You will live, now, the worst kind of life: within a question.

  Over those waiting baffled hours you interrogate the last couple of months, everything that happened, but they stubbornly refuse to yield any answer. You gorge and gnaw on everything that went on inside these gates until you feel ill with it; every sign, signal, every conversation scrap. Everything thrown into confusion by these firmly shut gates. You do not know anything about him, why he did what he did, what he turned you into or why. You are just less when you should be more, so much more.

  Why has love done this?

  Lesson 148

  Kindliness, unselfishness, charity, come to us by nature: but I wish I could see more of my fellow souls practising what is far more difficult—common justice, especially towards one another

  You wheel your bike home as dark comes crowding in.

  Keening.

  So. A new existence now. An ice pick crashed into the underbelly of your life.

  That night a rush to words. Feverishly galloping the writing into your little book. It’s all you’ve got now.

  Your honesty.

  That you gave him.

  The sacred, solemn gift of it.

  That he has abused most monstrously.

  Lesson 149

  It is safest, on the whole, to treat people as better than they are, than to check all hope and paralyse all aspiration

  Every day you go back.

  Every day the gate is locked.

  Inexplicably padlocked.

  You know him. He would never be so uncaring. Destructive. Cruel. It doesn’t feel right. You know him.

  You don’t know him.

  Newly alone, eyes glazed, stumbling through your days. You feel quarried. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Can you bear the truth? You don’t think so.

  His cold pleasure, it doesn’t make sense.

  I feel like you help me to live.

  His words are re-written in your book, your heart tells you they were the truth. But every day now, cycling home in shock, every day now, disbelieving, as you turn from the padlocked gate. Like the lion’s victim who is anaesthetised before the kill, a strange, floating calm carries you on, gets you through your days. The love, the God-given love for him still so big and strong and pushing and pulsing under all the bewilderment; the love that is Grand Canyon vast, that you do not know what to do with. Now.

  I want to stay forever in your life.

  He wrote that once, on his back page, and you know now that ‘to stay’ means as torment, affliction, weight. How could you be so deluded. Young?

  A weight like a chain attached to a safe is pulling you down, down into the inky depths; and you cannot untangle yourself.

  But you collect yourself, always, as Beddy looms into sight; plumped with tears but walking tall and nonchalant through the front door of your house. If you were pricked by a pin the howling would come raging tumbling tearing out in a great torrent but you cannot do that, you have to hold it all in—as you study at the dining table, as you peel the potatoes, as you clear out the garage, as you hand across the hammer and the screwdriver and the wrench.

  Every day a Sunday expanse of loneliness and emptiness. Every day.

  Lesson 150

  As for resting your heart upon such a person, you might as well rest it upon a burning rock or a broken reed

  Wailing in the rare alone in this tiny, suffocating house. Wanting, wildly, crawling on your knees; madly cramming your face when everyone’s out and you’re alone, stuffing yourself full of chocolate, biscuits, ice cream; forgetting for an instant the power of slim. Your skin loses its glow and its freshness, he has destroyed your equilibrium. Too big in you, all of it. Your love like black market currency now—vast riches but nowhere legitimate to deposit it. You fear his hesitancy, hate it. His cowardice. His cruelty. His silence. His motive. Grubby with it.

  As you hunch over your textbooks, seeing but not seeing, keening under your breath, your father stops at the door and shakes his head, looking at your hands gripping your skull in frustration, your knuckles white, and he murmurs that he wishes for you an ordinary life, that’s all. A solid, ordinary, happy life.

  Then he walks off, leaving you to it, all your books. The weight of st
udy, that he has never known in his life.

  The dream. Crazed by it. The gate is open, you have stayed and slept beside him, there is the stilling calm of skin to skin, of luxurious hours, of certainty; the feel of his hip, his tender earlobe, the back of his neck. Your bodies softly, rightly, moulding into each other then falling into slumber—what he always dreamt of, just one night, where true love lies, beyond words, beyond sex. He is kissing you in sleep and murmuring how good it is to have you with him then he wakes, boy-startled, a face of light, and smiles to see you there. That moment of vulnerability, of truth; you tuck it into the pocket of your heart, to always have, to always be able to slip out.

  Crazed by it.

  My heart is now shrouded like a cloth drawn over the dead.

  You write in your notebook, can’t haul yourself out.

  The only soundtrack in your house, besides the ticking clock, is the talkback radio and once, in the morning, in response to the strident tones of a shock jock is a woman’s steadying voice, all the wisdom of all the ages of all the women of the world in it.

  ‘God gave us the gift of suffering,’ she says calmly, matter-of-fact, as if her life is lived by this understanding, this truth. Yes. You have to learn. From her, from her voice. From other women.

  To dive into the world with grace.

  You have to start.