Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You

by Gemmell, Nikki

  Now?

  I’ve thrown out the pill. We need to start.

  How many years are there left, he jokes.

  None. Come on.

  To purge in one stroke, to distract. To punish Gabriel, to stun him out of your life. And to scare Theo off, perhaps. You gasp, delighted, at the soft spurt and after it Cole and you are laughing like newly weds because you’ve both come to a decision, the most magnificent, surely, in all of life. You loop your legs above your head, tall into the air and your toes touch the wall behind you, spilling the sperm down. You make happiness come, Cole says when you drop your legs down.

  Hmm, you say, your head somewhere else.

  It’s so weird, Cole chuckles over a cup of late-night tea, I found myself falling in love with you again just as we were breaking apart. You murmur hmm, and smile, and pick a thread of lint from his jumper. You’re bemused: perhaps you’ll now disappear again into the quiet life, refreshed and compliant, never needing another hit. But you wonder if those weekday afternoons in a city flat can ever slip docilely into reverie, if the whole experience can be obediently shut away in a box labelled Strictly Unrepeatable; with Gabriel, or anyone else.

  You want a child; it’s the only desire, at the moment, that’s clear-cut. You are thirty-six. You need to start.

  Lesson 90

  when a woman expects her confinement, she should look with more than ordinary care to the general condition of her home. the drains should be tested

  Your palm rests on your belly. You feel nothing. You have no idea if it’s worked.

  Perhaps as a mother you’ll be off limits to Gabriel, the good Catholic boy that he is, you’ll be nullified, out of bounds. The phone calls have stopped but there’s a prickling in the back of your neck sometimes now; you feel watched. You feel sure he’s hovering, somewhere close. You never linger any more by the window. Sometimes when you’re out you’ll snap round, to catch someone out.

  He obsessed about a woman once, he told you that. He loved her too much.

  Would you really want someone who loves too much? How can you measure love, or indeed distinguish it, you wonder, distinguish it from infatuation, curiosity, crush? You’d always dreamed of being firmly at the centre of a man’s life, but now it doesn’t feel right. It’s like being locked in an airless, windowless room.

  And there’s a taxi driver out there with your name and address. Or a woman with a grubby shirt, who knows you in a way that no one else does, and how you hate that. What on earth made you think that just because you fantasise about a woman you’d want it in real life?

  Cole is the one constant. Does every relationship define another, drag into the light the previous one? It’s curious how your time with Gabriel has now reinforced your feelings for your husband, soldered you to his dependability and quiet.

  Lesson 91

  the desire for offspring, for whose sake the mother is even prepared to sacrifice a part of her very life, is the noblest of our purely human passions

  You make happiness come, Cole repeats, his belly at your back as you scrub the pans after a Sunday roast. You smile, say nothing. Out in the world there are babies everywhere, pushchairs, pregnant bellies, slings. A man at a party jokes that he travels home at lunchtime just to smell his newborn son’s head, it’s the most powerful, non-erotic human experience, he tells you, pancakes and vanilla and skin.

  Uh huh, you nod, and step back.

  You read an article by Germaine Greer, that with motherhood women willingly endure a catastrophic decline in their quality of life. You read a scrap from Sylvia Plath’s journal, that she would feel more of a prisoner as an older, tense, cynical career girl than as a richly creative wife and mother who’s always growing intellectually. Did she believe this? Do you?

  You have no idea what’s ahead.

  You want a child as an eradication of everything you’ve done over the past few months. You feel like you’re willing a baby to have someone to love consumingly in your life, to fill it up. You’ve heard the horror stories, that it’ll be difficult even to find time for the toilet with a baby around, to have a shower or answer the phone, that in labour you could be ripped from vagina to anus, that making love after birth is like throwing a sausage down the Channel Tunnel, that some men hate being with women who’ve been stretched.

  All you know is that with a child your life will swing like an ocean liner changing its course. Which is for the best.

  Lesson 92

  the act of reproduction is the highest and least selfish of our physical functions

  Five weeks after Cole and you have made love on a Saturday morning more tenderly than you’ve ever made love before, you vomit into the toilet beside him as he’s brushing his teeth, it comes heaving upon you in seconds. And the next day in a cafe, reading but not, you’re so nauseated after a sip of water that you have to rush to the pavement and throw up into the gutter. Something’s drawing on your energy in a way it’s never been drawn upon before. Cole tells you to buy a pregnancy kit but you want to wait until the weekend, when he’s home and you’re both relaxed: you want some sanctity to the event. It can’t be done at night, it needs the morning when the hormones are strongest, the packet tells you that.

  You bombard the plastic stick with your urine, you piss hot and strong. Two stripes. You shake the stick, they will not be shaken out.

  So, confirmed.

  It’s worked, it’s not meant to work so quickly. Women of your age are always taking months, or despairing years now, or forever.

  There’s a great spreading warmth as you cup your belly in the palm of your hand. Well, hello, my little one, tummytucked, firm in the world, hello. You walk out of the bathroom and Cole’s nodding and smiling and enfolding you in his arms, so tight, it hurts, and tears are pricking the eyes of you both.

  So, to be wiped, cleansed, to start afresh. You hope.

  Lesson 93

  when unwell we required to be healed

  You call your mother with the baby news. She’s not as joyful as you’d expected, there’s a tone in her voice; it’s a shock to you. You wonder what, if anything, you’ve done to irritate her. Perhaps she feels the baby will be limiting, that she’s still waiting for you to have a bigger life. Perhaps she fears her own ageing. Can’t stand the thought of being called gran. Doesn’t want a child all over again, messing up her comfortable world and forcing her to babysit. You sometimes got the feeling, as a teenager, that she was a little too eager to expel you from the nest: she encouraged you often to get your own place and, when you did, could barely contain her annoyance if you returned to wash clothes or use her sewing machine.

  The relationship is always like this, up and down, best friends one day and not speaking the next. She asks how you’re feeling. She says she vomited for the entire nine months. She says that having a child will settle you.

  Oh, really?

  You don’t ask what she means by that, don’t want to set her off. Generally you live in terror of each other, of the hurt you can both inflict. Something changed when Cole firmed in your life. Your mother knows where your jugular is and sometimes, viciously, goes for it, as if hurting you is a way of holding you. She used to do it, occasionally, when you were child. Like when your report card announced lacking in initiative and you’d had to ask, as an eight-year-old, what the strange word meant, and she’d reminded you throughout your childhood and teenage years and with your teaching career and your marriage choice.

  Lacking in initiative. You hang up the phone and have to chuckle, wondering what she’d say now. You’ve been chuckling a lot lately; your mother can still hurt but not as much. For the baby inside you is flooding you with joy, is evening you out.

  Lesson 94

  there are plenty of indoor games, such as romps, acting charades and so on

  But sometimes you feel a slipping, usually in the morning, around the time Gabriel used to ring. A haunting, like a war veteran’s missing limb. When you need it back, the vividness of that time of the t
eaching.

  Want, again, unfurls under your skin.

  There was nothing resigned in those afternoons you both swallowed in one gulp like an oyster slurp. There was a lesson near the end, the one before you walked out, when he was holding your toes and saying he didn’t want to lose you for sex was you to him, you embodied it. The honesty of it was dumping you like a wave on the hard sand and you’d stumbled and laughed that it was impossible, how could a relationship ever work and anyway, all women had this in them, not just you, all he had to do was find a way to unlock it in every woman he was with. To listen. To ask. To learn. There was a whole world out there and he was shutting down as you spoke and nodding, yes, of course and he was kissing you, softly, yes, tremulously, yes, as if, suddenly, he had no right to kiss you at all.

  And now in the morning, around the time Gabriel would ring, you waver, you wonder if you’d been too harsh. During that penultimate lesson, as you said goodbye, you’d held his head in your hands and knew that you were already, then, beginning to let go; even though you couldn’t bear the thought of it happening just yet.

  Lesson 95

  the mother’s moral unfitness is to be greatly deplored

  At seven weeks old the baby makes you vomit on the pavement outside the post office and then outside the news agency and there’s no time even for the gutter; like a dog with its posts you mark your haunts. But it’s joyous sickness, if there can be such a thing, for it’s telling you that the baby’s strong within you.

  It’s changing you already. You crave fresh meat and rice cakes and raw vegetables, fruit and milk. It drags you from your ruby wines and limpid cheeses, your peanut butter and pates. It spoils your taste for chocolate, the canny thing. It urges you to the freezer, to trays of ice cubes which you consume in frenzies of furious crunch.

  And now we are three, Cole says softly, wondrously, one night in the close dark. Yes, you reply, yes, thinking of the strange motivation for this child, its frantic, panicky kickstart into life. Thinking of Theo. You wonder if she fell pregnant as quickly as you; if she’s been flooded with the happy hormones, too. It feels strange, in a way, to be embarking on this journey without her close.

  Lesson 96

  there should be free admission of light and air

  Someone hangs up the phone on the answering machine so all that’s recorded is a click, and after being exasperated once too often you answer. Silence, on the other end, and the receiver is put down.

  You don’t want games, you have no time for them any more, you have something else in your life.

  Then another letter arrives. It’s hand delivered, there’s no postmark. You’re not even sure you want to open it; you hold the envelope by a corner like a detective with a forensic specimen, you toy with just throwing it out.

  It’s me. I can’t do this any more, I’m sorry. I wish we’d had a chance to talk.

  That’s it. You crumple it into the bin. Return to your pregnancy book.

  Lesson 97

  filth fevers cause more deaths than either war or famine

  You sprawl on the couch in the living room, ripely alone.

  Cole lies asleep in the bedroom.

  He doesn’t want to be intimate any more, he’s afraid of harming the baby now you’re showing, he’s repulsed by the thought of making love to a pregnant woman. That Demi Moore, on the cover of Vanity Fair, it was disgusting, he’s said.

  So, the lounge room, by yourself, and your fingers float down between your legs, they circle and tease and dip inside and tremors flutter in your stomach and then your fingers move faster and deeper and the tremors sharpen, they shoot upwards into your belly and your chest and you can hardly breathe; you grab at the rug and come like you’ve never come before, for the pregnancy is making you more sensitive than you’ve ever been, it’s tuning you as finely as a concert grand.

  You expected a life made stodgy by fat ankles and smocks and bloat. But as the child brews in its vat you’re thrumming with life and with want, it’s a halo of energy around you and you never anticipated that.

  Cole stirs. Come to bed, he cries out, get some sleep.

  Lesson 98

  patching is one of the most difficult tasks for unskilled fingers

  Exactly two years after the afternoon in Marrakech.

  Theo’s birthday, June the first, and it’s marked for ever now by the moment of discovery. You need distraction; you invite three old colleagues from City University to dinner. Cole’s out with a mate from school, seeing the latest James Bond.

  As you bumble about in the kitchen, chopping and pouring and stirring, the conversation moves through clothes, haircuts, colleagues, flats and then settles on what it always does with these friends: men. Megan tells you she still hasn’t slept with her partner, Dom, it’s been going on like this for eight years; they’ve become like brother and sister. She’s thirty-nine, she wants a baby. She’s not sure what’s wrong with Dom; he doesn’t want sex any more, he always pushes her away.

  Could he be gay, perhaps?

  No.

  Leave him, you all say. Before you’re forty-eight and still childless, and it’s too late.

  It’s hard, you know, she answers back.

  Then she turns to you, God knows why: have you ever been to a male prostitute?

  No, you snort, laughing.

  Have you ever thought about it?

  No.

  I really want to do it, but I haven’t got a clue how.

  You look across at Cath, conspicuously silent. She’s your closest friend from work. She has one of the happiest marriages you know and two beautiful boys in their teens. She has affairs all the time, has been having them for years; and she has a lot of sex with her husband, Mike, who’s blissfully unaware. It creates this hunger for him, she told you once, I just can’t stop. I don’t want to. Ever.

  You always wondered what would happen if Mike found out. You wonder, now, about Cole: it’s a reaction you couldn’t predict. You shudder involuntarily as you stir the pasta, at the thought of him stumbling upon your secret life.

  Lesson 99

  look well after your plants, water them carefully, remove all dead leaves

  You try your mother again. Want her close, crave her knowledge now you’re pregnant for she’s been through this too. But she’s on a dig in south-east Russia, for the entire summer. She’s working on a marine predator who terrorised the oceans one hundred and fifty million years ago and had teeth the size of machetes. Six have already been found and are still so sharp that several of the dig team have been cut. She’s assessing the area around the animal’s digestive tract for evidence of what it ate and has unearthed squid-like fossils and ancient fish scales, and is loving the work. And the hot. She tells you there’s a heatwave at the moment and the sky is a screeching blue.

  It sounds heavenly, you respond.

  It is, she says. Her tone this time is lighter, as if she’s had time to give the impending event some thought. But then she slips in the fish-hooked comment that you might shed all your selfishness once you’re a mother and you feel the familiar tightness in your throat and want to slam the phone down but don’t; you need at least one thing smoothed out in your life.

  You don’t know what she perceives as your selfishness. The fact, perhaps, you’ve never expressed gratitude that she raised you for so long, by herself? You developed a defence for her barbs long ago: the phone is put down mid-conversation, or you let the comments pass, or you walk out. It seems so exhausting to stay there and fight.

  What’s wrong, Cole asks that night, something’s eating you up.

  I don’t know, I just feel all at sea, I’m sorry.

  Why don’t you go and see your mum. Take a break. Sort it out with her.

  You imagine flinging sun into your lungs; scouring away Gabriel and the taxi drivers with the hurting light, sleeping late, bonding with your mother, sorting out your life. The balm and quiet of a maternal retreat.

  Yes, you say to Cole, yes, why not.
r />   You call her back the next morning.

  I’m not sure it’s the place for someone who’s pregnant, she says. It’s pretty rough. It’s dusty and hot, and most of the roads are dirt.

  I just need to get out of London. Please.

  OK, she laughs, OK. I can understand that.

  Lesson 100

  airing is an essential process

  To a plain that was once an inland sea. It’s now crusted over with salt and the bones of old vessels leer up from its bed like the carcasses of the prehistoric beasts underneath. Fishermen had chased the water as it bled from their grasp, they’d tried reaching out to it with huge concrete wharfs stretching like fingers into the vastness. But steadily the water leaked away as the river that fed it was run dry by thousands of miles of irrigation systems, canals and dams, and one day there was no sea left. The skewed three-masted crosses of the long-gone fishermen now shout their accusation on the remains of the old shores. And the only people who still want to come to the dusty town on the plain’s edge are palaeontologists, greedy for bones.