With My Body

by Nikki Gemmell

  Seething.

  As you stare at the gleaming Blundstone boots you have had since teenage years, that you barely recognise now.

  You have to get back.

  Rough them up.

  Reclaim the woman you once were.

  Lesson 172

  Leave no odd hours, scarcely an odd ten minutes, to be idle and dreary in

  You dreamt of Tol last night. For the first time in years. It was strange how fresh it was, rushing back his mannerisms—the feel of his hip under your hand, the softness of his belly to yours as you lay in perfect peace, socketed—the dream bringing it all back with a clarity your memory never could. His voice dropped down to you. He was saying your name as fresh as if it was being spoken aloud at that very moment, as fresh as twenty-five years ago and you jerked awake at his talk, out of the blue, speaking your name as he always said it—with wonder, delight, chuff—the inflection downward, soft; more to himself than to you.

  And then the name Woondala sings through your blood like an illicit drug you have long turned your back on. Woondala, Woondala, it lures, whispering you south and you stretch languidly in your bed, like a cat thrumming in the sunlight, and feel a familiar tingling, after so long, after years and years of not.

  Woondala.

  The great unanswered question of your life.

  The disease lying dormant in your blood. Still.

  Unless something is done about it.

  Lesson 173

  It is not responsibility, but the want or loss of it, which degrades character

  ‘What are you doing?’ you ask.

  Hugh is leaning against the bathroom door, staring as you shower, throwing peanuts into his mouth.

  ‘Examining the goods.’ His eyes are laughing.

  ‘You never bought me.’

  ‘Oh yes I did.’

  You shut your eyes. The authority of his ownership—the sense of entitlement—enrages you. You snap off the shower. Step out, grab a towel.

  ‘I want to go home.’ Just like that.

  Hugh’s fist suspends a peanut high, he is speechless.

  ‘For three months. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ll take the kids. Just for a term. Put them into a bush school. It’ll be an adventure. Be near my dad. He’s getting old … ’ You stare imploringly at him, rush on. ‘I need the sun … I’m going mad with the cold and the dark. Every year it gets worse, not easier; I don’t know why.’ Clotting up as you speak, needing this so voraciously, can’t articulate the enormity of the want, just needing to live in a place with melodramatic skies again and a hurting light. Needing a gust blown through you, flushing you clean, needing out.

  Hugh is nodding, absorbing.

  ‘Alright.’

  Finally. Surprisingly. As if he knows how far you have changed from that woman he fell in love with, so long ago, that he suddenly remembers that bush girl bursting with smile and sun.

  ‘You’re mad, you know that, and you’ll only get madder if you stay,’ he smiles. ‘Off you go. Scat!’

  You know in that moment that he, too, needs a break. And is confident enough in the relationship to let you off the leash; confident you will come back. The rivets are strong in this marriage, you have welded them together, hand over hand. Despite all the little irritations—the little snippings and snappings, all the erasures of wedded life—he never doubts. He knows you. It is as simple as that.

  He doesn’t. At all.

  Lesson 174

  Not a cloud comes across her path—not a day of illness, her own or her little ones’, shadows her bright looks

  You Google Tol every so often as you prepare for the trip. He must be on the internet, somewhere, there has to be some clue to his whereabouts—his writing, his family, his life for the past few decades.

  Nothing. How can someone just … disappear? In this world, now. He has vanished from the face of the earth.

  It is bizarre. You refuse to believe it.

  You will find him.

  There’s a young girl in you who refuses to die—she is uncurling, she will hunt him out. You have friends a few years older, in their mid and late forties, who are lost, keeling, depressed, dramatically changing their lives and their careers at this point as if eager for one last shot—one last go—before it’s too late.

  This is yours.

  Act with audacity, he told you that once, yes. You crawl into the dust under your bed and pull out an old cardboard suitcase that is crammed with the detritus of a former life. In it—wrapped in your mother’s cashmere cardigan, cradled in the crown of an Akubra hat still with its smudges of valley earth—is a tiny, leather-bound book. You breathe its pages in deep, the musty, papery smell plunging you back. You flip to the very end, Tol’s page. It’s been so long since you have opened it up.

  Act with audacity because you are a woman—and because of that you must always do it more so than men.

  To be noticed. Free. Strong. To live life the way you want.

  That is your burden—and the great adventure ahead.

  It is written. In the book, which you pack, of course.

  Lesson 175

  An ever-haunting temptation

  The light assaults the four of you as soon as you step from Sydney’s airport terminal. Three little Pommies beside you squint in horror as you stand there tall, drinking it up. Can feel it already spining you strong. You breathe in deep the paperbarks in their ragged skin by the car park, willing you home, to your bush. Hire a car and head north along all the roads of your childhood, to your land, your soul place, and know with certainty now you want to slip into this earth in death, the soil you know so well; you never want to be buried in the dark, crowded damp of England where your bones would never dry out.

  The prospect ahead: a renovation of your serenity.

  You want to be good at being alive again. You have lost the knack in England; need the solace of home. Need to be marinated again in spareness, and space, and light. To find stillness, and rest.

  The house for the next three months is a one-bedroom weatherboard cottage found on the internet. In the town that your grandfather was born in, a stone’s throw from your dad. A humble place. White-painted floorboards, clean sun through the windows, bits and pieces of furniture from various old folk. A perfect place. Three tiny camp beds for the boys, and you in the main room on a high single bed in a corner. You revel in living a lighter life. No DSs, no Wiis. The boys have to make do with slingshots and skateboards and an old cricket bat and a nearby creek, a waiting tyre hanging from a branch.

  They’re stolen, often, by their grandfather. It is OK, you just needed to be physically close by; you were too far away in England, lost. The boys are whisked away, often, for fishing trips and sleepovers, movies and larks in the park. He lives for family and there is a beautiful, old-fashioned simplicity to that. It is quiet and unspoken and good and it motivates everything that he does. You know now that your boys are your greatest gift to him. You have receded in his eyes, it is their turn now—your job is done.

  Nothing has faded.

  You write, up the front of the book, the only blank space left in it.

  Lesson 176

  The natural calming down of both passions and emotions

  Nature presses close. You can feel the great thumb of it on your back, forearms, hands, in your face. Soon you wear it like a mark. You look up often, saying hello to your sky in gratitude; scarcely believing you are living under it again. The sun’s stain is at your neck and on your right arm hanging loosely out the car window or tapping the roof along with the radio, just as your dad always drives.

  You watch your three Tigger boys grubby up in this land, grow lean. Lose softness, gain muscle definition, tan as golden as honey—become the little men you always dreamt of them being. Running and swimming and mucking about under this wide blue sky, learning to walk through tall grass with caution because of snakes, to shake their shoes out every morning because of funnel-webs, to swing on their tyre over the creek and make
slingshots and billy-carts.

  And oddly, achingly, you miss Hugh; the feeling of separation is acute. Your love for him is freshened. You want him to see all this, be in it with you, revelling. Watching his boys, stripping down to his shorts, laughing with them.

  A smile fills you up at that.

  The man who makes you laugh. He always has. It is the secret, you think, to a good relationship.

  Lesson 177

  We do not present so many angles for the rough attrition of the world

  Your father has stolen the boys again. Taken them to a rodeo and his favourite, secret place that your stepmother and you don’t approve of: McDonald’s. The one thing the two of you have in common.

  ‘Sssh, don’t tell your mum,’ your father conveys in a conspiratorial mock-whisper when you drop the kids off and they shiver in delight. They adore him. Call him Eddie, his old name from your childhood. The past has won out.

  You do not linger. It is still your stepmother’s house; she still makes you extremely aware of that. You are both wary, polite, but you know she will never invite the boys and you in for a big family meal—she cannot bring herself to widen her heart to that extent.

  No matter.

  She is of another era, a lifetime ago, you have let it go within the busyness of your own life. You wave the boys goodbye and jump in your hired car feeling loosened, lightened. Your father grins at you and there is a sudden recognition—as you flash a smile back—of your face, absolutely, in his. It’s something your stepmother can never take away and there’s a giggle in your heart as you accelerate.

  Along the deeply known, sun-dappled roads, under your deeply known sky, the girl you used to be is uncurling.

  It is good being back, right. It’s about the serenity that comes from belonging, the ease of it. After fifteen years away you can walk into an Aussie shop and yak away to the stranger behind the counter—because you speak a common language with codes and nuances and subtleties that are utterly familiar. For years you have been an outsider in a foreign land and revelled in that status. But my God, the relief of belonging. Perhaps it has something to do with ageing, with quietening, but it’s hitting you now like a long cool drink after a sweltering summer’s day. Life is easy, known, navigable again. The bread rolls are the same consistency from your childhood and you gorge on them. The cereal hasn’t changed, the apples taste the same, the mangoes, the grapes; there is a comfort in all of it. You’d forgotten what it’s like to live like that.

  The windows are down, the music is up. Triple J, the station you used to listen to religiously. Elbow hanging out, sun and wind-whipped. Feeling such an uncomplicated, strong, pure happiness. It is dangerous, this.

  You stop to fill up. Wander into the coolness of the milk bar next door through coloured plastic fly strips. Buy an ice-cold strawberry milkshake in a silver canister and drink it through a waxed paper straw. Laugh, at all of it, full of delight that your old life still exists! At a laminated table rimmed in a silver metal strip you slip out the little Victorian manual. Of course you have brought it with you, on this day, this trip into the bush, to God knows what.

  You feel completely alone, for the first time in so long—years—and you adore it. You could never tell anyone that.

  Lesson 178

  If she knows herself to be clean in heart and desire, it will give her a freedom of action and a fearlessness of consequences

  You sit in the milk bar with the book before you; the handwriting flooding him back. What was it about his touch that is so insistent, still? Now that you are an adult yourself with years of living behind you?

  A cherishing, combined with authority. And not just a cherishing of the female body—a cherishing of sex. All the wonder that is in it. He’d done this many times before, that was obvious, but he made it feel exploratory, fresh. His dubious gift was to make you feel you were the one. The only one. With how many women had he spun that trick? He was like a politician with the knack of making every person they talk to feel special, wanted, unique. It was all to do with focus. The gift of attention, of course.

  The knowing that came only once in your life.

  It is why, of course, you are back.

  Lesson 179

  That grand preservative of a healthy body—a well-controlled, healthy mind

  No.

  You cannot drive past the gate, so close to this milk bar. Too afraid of being caught—your face, what is in it, after all these years. Still snared. What will he make of that? He is a love object, of course, he has shifted into that. Was always in that realm. You cannot even describe him properly; he is not fully rounded, fully human. You never knew him, you only recognised him—as an archetype. Every girl needs one, the obsession, at some point, to learn about life, to grow. To marry the one that is not.

  No.

  The man who had grown used to sucking on the marrow of other people’s lives. The man who did not like his stillness rattled, his stillness so necessary to create, he made that clear from the start.

  But then you.

  Does he ever even think about you? Does he ever recall that summer and the whole roaring tsunami of experience that transformed your life?

  Or did it just roll off him like water from a duck’s back? His fucking-toy, his summer project, his experiment to some day write about. The distraction. The annoyance. He never gave in, never loved enough; he was too disciplined for that, feared the consequences too much.

  You stand abruptly from the table. Snap through the plastic strips.

  Need it gouged out.

  Lesson 180

  Wives either sinking into a hopeless indifference, or wearing themselves out with weak complainings, which never result in any amendment

  Finally, the courage. To face him.

  To offload him from your life.

  Churning through you, churning, as you speed down the roads that your bicycle flew over once. On a day of ringing light, ringing out like a church bell. The little manual beside you, as if to anchor the reality of what went on once. It did happen. This is proof. And a plan, perhaps, to bury the book like a time capsule deep and forgotten under the earth. At Woondala. To return it, to stem it. You slow along the final dirt road that meanders like a pale river amid the green. The deep gash of a wound through the impenetrable wilderness. You do not know what is ahead, you slow in wonder at the dips and curves once soldered upon your heart.

  The gate is open.

  After twenty-five years.

  You gasp. You weren’t expecting that.

  You park. As disbelieving as that time when you came upon the gate locked. How long has it been like this? You slip through, just like that. The breezy blue-sky day is so crisp it almost pings; there is a knife-edge sharpness to the light, a tenseness.

  Light-headed. The blood pounding in your ears. Breathing fast.

  Can you just step back into this life? What is ahead? Can you bear it? You must. A beautifully renovated mansion, perhaps, a solid country wife, roses around the verandah, three kids, Dad at work in the city, he’ll be back tonight, come in, have a cuppa, wait. The blood pounding in your head. What madness to do this? What right do you have?

  The right to your own life.

  Lesson 181

  They were honestly in love

  Scored deep in the bark of the Scribbly Gum, still:

  ‘My spirit so high it was all over the heavens.’

  Pound

  Your fingers trace the knobbly words gnarled over by a sap as rich as amber—as if the tree bled with it in the years after you left—and you hold your cheek to its coolness, allow yourself this, your heart racing and then you walk on, around the curve in the driveway and past the ditch where you’d always drop your bike, that you can barely discern now the bush has claimed it so triumphantly, and then there it is. Woondala.

  As you left it.

  That last time.

  All those years ago.

  The canvas water bag still looped over the knocker by the front door, t
he nameplate still bruised with neglect. No cars. No bike. No life. Nothing.

  As silent as a church.

  A ruined church, abandoned to its ghosts.

  With the air of a building affronted by its emptiness; that it should ever have come to this.

  Lesson 182

  The very element in which true friendship lives is perfect liberty

  There is no one here. Time has stood still. You step inside and graze through the rooms. Linger over the candelabra in the wide grate, the crazed china tea cups, the piano with its possum droppings, the gutted stool spilling its hessian.

  So little has changed. You don’t get it. It is as if time has never passed. But of course it has, so much: your life since—full rich busy bursting—in all the ways! Several rooms upstairs now have crude padlocks on their doors. You peek through a keyhole to a solid wall of furniture. So, what looks like a household of junk. An entire life packed up.

  You return to the ground level, to the bedroom with its mattress still on the floor and pull up the jumble of quilt over the pillow, and straighten it, like it’s a dead man’s bed and then you lie belly down on the couch in the drawing room and breathe it in; still the same smell of age, and love, and wisdom, and weariness. Your arms slip around the padding in a gesture of embrace and you stare at the air all a-hover with its dust, waltzing in the disturbance you always make, spinning and whirling so stately in the slanting lemony light. All is quiet, except the tin roof cracking and pinging in its heat. You let the stillness wash over you—from twenty-five years ago, from when everything was suspended, tremulous, in the now. No future, no past. Just … this. Exactly this.