Except in your head.
Lesson 162
A very large number of women are by nature constituted so exceedingly restless of mind
Graveyard sex.
Lune’s expression for sex with an ex. She’s the only person you have ever told about Woondala. Had to tell someone, as if to anchor it in reality; it wasn’t a dream, it did exist.
‘If you went back to him, sweetie, it’d be graveyard sex. There’d be something so sad, so deadening, about it.’
You laugh, shaking your head. It could never be that with Tol.
‘Don’t even think of finding him,’ Lune warns.
You hear rumours, in literary pages and from bookshop owners when you enquire about his next book. He’s disappeared, he’s still writing. He’s given up. Is changing tack. He’s working on the great Australian novel, a love story; has crippling writer’s block. There’s occasional speculation that he’ll publish something soon, next year or the year after, but eventually it dies out as new successes bloom for the media to gobble up. He’s vanished from the face of the earth. You have no idea where he’s living. Your worlds never collide.
You had nothing in common except love.
‘Stop thinking about him,’ Lune snaps.
Can’t. Imagining the coming together again after so many years—the matey, laughy, fragile tenderness of old lovers, the intense familiarity. The strangeness. Wrongness. He harasses your dreams but you cannot tell Lune that—how you hold and hold him, stirring him just as you used to, urge him deeper and deeper and wake up gasping, wet.
He is holding your life hostage. You do not know how to escape.
He is the roadblock on any experience of love you’ve had since.
Lesson 163
Men may laugh at us, and we deserve it: we are often egregious fools, but we are honest fools
Lune despairs she’s being ‘flattened’ by her divorced lover, Luca, who she has brought back from France, yet does nothing to extricate herself.
‘He is the rock upon which I break, and break, and break,’ she sobs, one red-wine-fuelled night. She’s given up her Economics degree for him, the first man she’s loved in her life; is becoming dependent, fragile, weak. It’s as if she now has an obligation to succumb and there’s nothing her friends can say to stop it. She who was so striking once. Losing all ambition, confidence, strength.
You become a shoulder to cry on. A wise one. Yet she will not listen to reason; is throwing away her future for this one thing only—a man, an unsuitable one at that.
You can see it in another person but could never in yourself. Tell Lune we mustn’t let ourselves be dampened by the confidence of men, their unquestioning sense of rightness; we mustn’t ever be the yes girls Tol hated so much. We won’t capitulate, alright? We must never have that gulf of loneliness as we make love, in a marriage; that poison of never feeling more alone in our lives than within the thick of a relationship. Which Lune will, if she stays with Luca, you just know. So easy to say.
What you cannot tell her is that you crave connection on the profoundest level. Wildness, madness, edge. Again. A holiness fluttering in both Tol and you—no one else—and it is a weakness you can’t bring yourself to articulate. You need obliteration, cleansing, a wiping of every memory of his touch. It was a spiritual intensity and it could never be replaced cheaply; this is the lesson you are learning.
He is the only one you want. If not him, no one else: you will wander the earth crazed, celibate, lone. Riddled by his ghost, a luminous light.
The price of love. So be it. You had it once, and so many don’t.
Lesson 164
From his silence she had been driven to go desperately and sell herself to the old fool opposite
As your twenties gallop on you feel like you’re swimming against the waves of a cold, choppy lake; the waves are slapping and butting you sideways and you’re getting nowhere. Your world encompasses enormous stretches of alone and the bleakness of one-night stands and relationships never quite right that peter out after three months. How easy-perfect the lives of some of your friends seem. Everything, for them, is falling neatly into place.
Saturday night, late. Racking sobs into the dark. How has your life come to this? You’re a bush girl who hauled herself out, became a lawyer in Australia’s largest metropolis. You’re strong, independent, self-sufficient—and swampingly lonely.
Couples, all around you. Reading their weekend papers, holding hands as they walk across a city street, piggy-backing in play in the park. But you.
‘Live audaciously,’ you tell yourself. London then New York, the dream, don’t lose it.
You have to get out of this.
Walk away from these years infected with their sourness.
Lesson 165
Have faith in the wisdom of that we call change
After all the broken days, your face is returning.
Well hello again, you.
You still wear your armour—the vintage dresses, severe hair, glasses—the carapace of the respected lawyer. But you’re rangy now, for out. You’ve always had sunshine at your core and you’ll find it again. Sydney is too small for the two of you; one day there’ll be a party and your paths will converge and you never want to come across him, now—betraying the trembling and the blushing of the life held in limbo, the weakness of it.
It’s time to crash rupture into your life.
Too often now, the feeling of being trapped. At weddings, engagement parties, birthdays. Placed next to someone you barely want to talk to, having to endure endless speeches, unable to pop in for just twenty minutes and then scat. Weighted by obligation, every weekend and most weeknights. Weighted by your stepmother, who betrays her jealousy and bewilderment of the life you have forged for yourself with her silence—she never once asks you about your work, never feigns an interest. Weighted by your father, who just wants you settling down and giving him grandkids, it’s all he can tease you with now. You have a terror of this life closing over you and at dinners you don’t want to go to you step outside for great gulps of clean night air, and space, and quiet. Needing to get away from all this. A world too known.
Lesson 166
The sufferer has learnt that God never meant any human being to be crushed under any calamity like a blind worm under a stone
When you hand in your resignation at the law firm your middle-aged boss tells you that the readiness to have children is oozing from you, that you must have them, to complete yourself. You laugh it off. You’re going to London to be a lawyer. Just that.
But your periods are becoming heavier, your body is urging you to hurry; there’s the prick of the Saturday afternoon couples as you wander the city alone, in your final weeks, all-seeing, all-alive, in your singleness.
What you have learnt:
The importance of not giving all in a relationship, of retaining something of yourself, for yourself.
What you have learnt:
Love should be empowering not eviscerating.
What you have learnt:
You will always make sure the other person loves you more.
From now on. It is the only way to survive.
What you have learnt:
The authority of distance, removal.
You feel like you’re extending a hand—calmly, strongly—to destiny. You need to, to feel alive again.
Lesson 167
Bid a woman lift up her head and live
And always you flick a glance as you drive past the gate and always it is locked. As if no one ever goes near it, it was a mirage, a dream, he was a ghost. It never happened, it was all in your head, you were so young, addled by hormones, delirious. Occasionally you stop your car and get out, bow against the chain and bounce your weight into it. It doesn’t give. It never gives. Never spills its secrets. You stare through the fence, your fingers looped in the hurting steel that your bare feet couldn’t climb once.
The cairn of him before you.
The shudder beginn
ing in your bowels and travelling deep to your breast, almost hurting, thinking of him and of everything that went on beyond this gate and you squeeze your thighs tight. He is not here, it is obvious.
No one goes in.
Or out.
You turn away, you will never come back. It is time to hold your face high to an unknown sun. To allow forgetting into your life.
That night, as you fall into sleep, you put out a hand to God.
Lesson 168
Rescue, then, is possible
With Tol your name was Ripe.
In the years that followed: Husk.
Your name now: Ready.
Because as your twenties gather pace you know that women have to go after what they want. It’s no use waiting for the phone to ring or the email box to ping—you have to make it happen yourself. Have you ever acted as you’ve honestly wanted? You need a recalibrating. You will make a living in a new world; forge your own life, your own way. Not with anyone else’s expertise or money but with what you have earned yourself. You have your father’s work ethic for that. You will act with audacity. Take full possession of your life. The experience with Tol and its aftermath has taught you one thing: bravery.
You are ready.
To stand at the bow of the ship and feel the salty slap of life firm and cleansing in your face. You take out your Victorian volume. Under the scrawl at the front—about a place that can teach you so much—you jot a scrap from the journal of Katherine Mansfield.
Here is a little summary of what I need—power, wealth, freedom. It is the hopelessly insipid doctrine that love is the only thing in the world, taught, hammered into women, from generation to generation, which hampers us so cruelly. We must get rid of the bogey—and then, comes the opportunity of happiness and freedom.
You shut the book and smile.
Ready.
IX
‘Still
I have not opened my eyes to this world’
Don Paterson
Lesson 169
O women! Women! Why have you not more faith in yourselves—in that strong, inner purity which can make a woman brave
It is 9 p.m. Time for bed.
‘What’s wrong with me?’ you enquire into the ether.
‘Marriage,’ comes the voice from the couch.
You retreat, chuckling, reminding Hugh to check that Jack hasn’t thrown off his blankets; you can feel in your bones an encroaching cough. You never fall asleep with your husband now, he always dozes on the couch and gets to you at 4 a.m. or thereabouts. His hot water bottle. That’s all you’re good for now, it’s become a running joke.
You move into your bedroom, your sanctuary, close the door and breathe out. Uncurl in your bed. It scares you how much you love the alone, but you will never leave Hugh, and he will never leave you. It is unspoken. This is your existence together that you have welded on the great forge of your adult lives, over many years, imperfect but solid enough: it will hold.
So. Now you are middle-aged.
Dipping your toes into the vast zone of invisibility. The signs of slippage everywhere. Your body thickening after its quicksilver years of slenderness, finally you have lost control of it. Your metabolism is slowing, you cannot keep the weight off. Hair is growing in places it shouldn’t be, with vigour—the only vigour in your life it seems. You are tired, so tired, constantly. Your eyebrows have learnt disobedience, are constantly going off-piste—when you pluck the wily ones there’s likely to be a sudden bald patch; some are wilfully grey, others thickly curled. The most important item you now pack on holidays: tweezers. Not just for eyebrows but for your chin, cheeks, upper lip, belly. Greying pubes are around the corner, various girlfriends have warned you of this. The talk is of dyeing, perhaps, no one’s daring to go first. Liver spots are vivid already on your hands—retribution, finally, for a childhood assaulted by its different sun. When you pucker up your lips for a kiss, from child or adult, you can feel the lines cementing into your upper lip. And you think back now to those years when a woman never knew what it was to be dry, internally, those slippy zippy easy years—and laugh.
‘Is that blue ink on your leg?’ Hugh had enquired absently as you passed.
‘No. It’s a varicose vein.’
He shrugged. So what.
You love him for that.
You think about sleeping with every man you meet. You do not want to sleep with any of them. You are too tired, too cold and you wouldn’t want to take off your clothes for anyone. Your body has rusted up. Your husband doesn’t mind. So be it.
But sometimes, at night, the memories. Screaming of the sun. A different life. Being caressed by the air. Lying belly down on the beach with the heat tingling alive your weary back. Here, in deepest England, in mid January, the cold has nestled into your bones like mould and you feel that this world has grown over you, and you will never climb out.
You rarely speak to your father now. He’s a hopeless correspondent, doesn’t do letters or computers, never rings on your birthday or special occasions. You used to call him religiously for his birthday but often it was your stepmother who answered and she would say without warmth that she would pass on the message, and he never called back.
Like a piece of ragged tin cutting into your heart, years and years of it, the pain of the silence still fresh.
You need to get back.
Lesson 170
Thoughts do not concern married women
Ari is the shining school dad who you just know would spring you alive. He followed a woman to deepest Gloucestershire but they are separating. He does the school run every Thursday. Often you are both the only two parents early, before the school gates open, and you’ve fallen into bantering. Ari is Israeli; sparky, loud, warm, full of shooting laughter and teasing and flirt. You’d forgotten what it’s like to be with people like that. You feel yourself becoming looser, lighter in response. Remembering a woman you once were. Every Thursday now, when you see him, he reminds you that you’ve been in England too long, weighted down by the sheer energy it takes to get by in it. Such a crowded, aggressive, uncertain land—uncertain about where it’s going and what it’s become.
On the last Thursday in January you look at Ari as he tumbles his young daughter around his neck, look at his easy smile and shining teeth and know, beyond anything else, you need the WD40 of sun. Or you will go mad. It is as simple as that. You do not have a sense of belonging in this land, no matter how long you are in it, and as you get older you want the balm of that. You need to get out, get home. The cold in you like grease, sludging you up; the homesickness corrosive now and something has to be done about it.
But what would you be going back for?
As if on cue Pip propels himself into your arms with a flying leap, almost knocking you over and his little legs lock around your back and you laugh and twirl him around, just as Ari has done, everything else forgotten in the great burning furnace of your son’s love as you bury your face in the warmth of his lovely neck. Everything repaired, forgotten, wiped by the sheer urgent magnificent heft of this.
Lesson 171
Dark deeds and ill feelings can only be conquered by being brought to the light
Hugh forcibly lifts up your feet. He polishes your Blundstone boots. Despite a deadly serious protest. You pull your leg away, viciously. He grabs it back—he will win this. He is doing all the kids’ shoes and his own, it is the night for it, and by God he’ll clean yours too whether you like it or not. What began as a game is now more, much more, than that.
The anger so pure and festering in you that you just want to run outside and gulp the fresh air, run and run and not look back; in this moment, the voice from the woman you don’t recognise roaring inside.
Stoooooooooop.
The boys are watching. They keep you here. Silent. Seething. On a Sunday night. Before a new week begins, as it will always begin now, over the years and years to come there will be this little ritual because Hugh has discovered an Achilles heel, a new te
asing point, and you know him, he’ll be seizing it from now on.
Seething.
At the man who insists on turning the car air conditioning on in summer even though you crave the slap of fresh air. Who drives too close to the bumper bars of the cars in front and brakes so abruptly you gasp, and never changes this habit. Who litters the house with black crows, the endless clothes he never puts away. Piles of change. Receipts from God knows what. Who leaves the toilet seat up and the toothpaste lid off and who has never learnt, over ten years of marriage, to make tea the way you want it—oh, he’ll make you a cuppa, but it’ll never be right—he’s never bothered to know you enough.
Seething.
At the little snippets of ownership he always has to exercise, all through your days and months and years as the little wife. You stare down in silence at your Blundstone boots that were scarred, once, with the history of your bush life. Now shiny black. As if new.
Seething.
At a marriage that is sapping your confidence, your will, your flinty self-sufficiency. You do not even fill the family car with petrol anymore let alone change its tyres; and once you did all of that. You eat baked beans and fish fingers because Hugh did once, as a child—forcing his habits upon you. You use a microwave even though you don’t quite trust it because Hugh bought one, insisted, just came home with it one night. Within this marriage you are changing, retreating. Becoming as soft as a pocket. And you don’t know how it came to this. Mel’s caress jolted you into life. The tenderness, the caring, the noticing.
With My Body Page 21
