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

by Gemmell, Nikki

  Then jerk awake with a start.

  Lesson 108

  it is wrong to relieve those who beg because it may be encouraging lying, laziness and deceit

  Saturday afternoon. You’re sprawled on the couch, reading, newspapers and magazines strewn before you both. The phone. There’s no time to snatch it up, you’re too far away.

  Your name, enquiringly, on the answering machine. Just your name, twice.

  The voice saying everything.

  Your eyes are shut as you think of that utterly disarming ability to love openly, to declare need in the nuance of a sound and what a rare kind of quality it is in a man; you think of how diminishing it is, that utterly honest kind of love that wilts you, that makes you vulnerable and soft. And makes the other person turn away. Then you think of Cole. Your eyes snap open.

  At Gabriel crash-tackling his way into your married life.

  Lesson 109

  the secret of a healthy home

  Cole simply looks at you.

  It’s nothing, you say in a rising tide of indignation, it’s just some silly crush.

  It’s that guy from the Library, the actor, isn’t it? The one who’s in love with you?

  No, no. Why do you always think that? He’s a friend, just like all the other Library people, he’s part of the gang. In fact, I haven’t been speaking to him for a while because he was starting to get a little strange, all right?

  And then you hear yourself asking and what about Theo, anyway, you’ve never explained that, you’ve never actually said what went on at those cosy little drinks. And why the fuck are they still going on? It’s with a voice you’ve never heard yourself wield before with Cole, only with your mother: it’s as if you want to rip at your husband’s jugular, to have it all, finally, out. What about her, huh? Can we just get to the bottom of this – and there’s an ugliness you can’t stop, it betrays all the beauty of your rounded belly. All the frustration and hurt and rage since Marrakech is finally, finally tumbling out. You tell Cole that he’s a fucking failure at his life, he’s so boring, some stupid paint scraper, that’s all, no world beyond his job and his flat and hardly any friends and you hate him, hate him, you don’t know where all the words are coming from, you hear them slipping out and you can’t make them stop and what about Theo, come on, what about her, you’re stalking the lounge room like a hyena caged up and then Cole is behind you, he’s lifting you up and squeezing you under the belly, so tight, it hurts, he’s lifting you as if he’s going to throw you across the floor and wipe you and the baby out.

  Shut up shut up shut up, he yells.

  You can see in that moment why husbands drive off cliffs and gas children in cars.

  The baby, the baby, it’s all you can say, pushing at his arms, trying to scrabble him off, the baby, the baby.

  Cole places you down. He leans both arms against the wall as if he’s trying to prop it up. His head hangs. You cannot see his face. You go and sit on the couch. You close your eyes.

  A tense quiet hovers in the room.

  You ask Cole if he’s ever smelt a baby’s head, you’re not sure why you’re asking him that or where to from here but you’re filled suddenly with an enormous sadness, you’re filled like a glass to the brim with it. He does not look at you, he tells you not to be ridiculous, why the fuck would he ever smell a baby’s head.

  I don’t know, I don’t know, you trail out.

  You’re a horrible person, he says.

  You know it to be the truth.

  Cole walks from the room. You don’t move. Wishing, so much, you could suck all your talk back, wishing you could vacuum it into your mouth like a bubble of gum that’s burst. But the words are sticking all over your face and your marriage, and you don’t know if they can ever be scraped off.

  Lesson 110

  one cannot speak too strongly on the danger of giving wrong medicines

  Cole walks out the front door. Slams it shut. The noise hurts. He’s never slammed the door before. An hour later he’s back, ignoring you in the living room, striding straight to the bedroom and you do not look at him but you wince at the short, sharp thumps of the banging drawers and cupboard doors. Wince, but do not lift your eyes from the television. He doesn’t speak. He’s never played games like this, he’s never not talked.

  The front door slams.

  Silence in the flat. You walk to the bedroom. Assess what he’s taken. All his essentials: alarm clock, personal organiser, grandfather’s cufflinks, charger for his mobile phone.

  Your thudding heart, your thudding heart.

  You sit on the bed, in the heavy silence. You sit for a very long time and then somewhere within that long, long night you rush to the flat’s window, to the towering out and look down at the far pavement and think of everything solid and safe that has gone from your life. You gulp the night air. Stare down the road. There are no people anywhere, no passing cars, no life, all is quiet.

  You sit back on the bed. You can hear the silence hum, as the rest of the world is tucked up, snugly, to sleep.

  It’s almost unbearably lonely.

  So, your life has come to this. This moment of sitting on the edge of the bed, pregnant, and utterly alone. It feels like your fault. What you did with Gabriel feels, for the first time, like betrayal. You’ve been excusing yourself for so long, for it wasn’t you who took the sledgehammer to the marriage first.

  But here, now, with Cole gone, it feels utterly cold, and foolish, and destructive. You feel a knot in your throat, the tears gather, you squeeze your lips tight.

  You ring Cole’s mobile phone: it’s switched off.

  Lesson 111

  every girl should make her bed and tidy her room for her health’s sake

  The next day, no call. You ring Cole’s studio to check on him, pretend it’s business. He’s out. You leave your mobile number. No one calls back.

  The baby squirms and stretches inside you, seal happy, oblivious. You imagine having it by yourself, now, holding it afterwards in the high hospital bed surrounded by clusters of happy chatty families at all the other beds, by their flowers and teddy bears and chat. And then there’s you, smiling tightly, in the glittery alone.

  He’s never not called.

  Lesson 112

  flowers speak to the kindly heart in most miraculous tongue

  On the fourth day a letter arrives from Cole’s studio. He’s in Rome, working on a commission he’d been putting off. He’d mentioned it a couple of months back, a minor Descent from the Cross the Jesuits own. There’s not much money in it and it’s not a great work. Cole had shown you the photos and you remember being struck by the peculiar twist of the torso as gentle hands lifted the body down. Something about it wasn’t right, the artist got the physique wrong, as if he was working from his head and not from life.

  The letter tells you that Cole is, for the moment, uncontactable and there’s no indication of when he’ll be back. His assistant has sent it. There’s no mark of your husband upon it. You can’t imagine him dictating it to someone else, something so cruel and impersonal and blunt. Your mouth is dry and your fingers feel light and detached as you hold it. He’s never done anything like this.

  You don’t know anything now, what comes next.

  You ring his parents and leave a message on their machine, asking him to call, hating having to turn to them for help. You roam the apartment and realise how lightly Cole touches it. You were always hounding him to clean up his mess: clear away his magazines, sort through his letters and bills. All that’s left of him are little heaps of loose change and a pile of receipts and now, suddenly, it’s not enough, it seems nagging and wilful to have reined him in so much. You wash his fugitive smell from the pillowcases and sheets, and instantly regret the impulse, once again, to scrub him out.

  You want Cole back. Very much.

  Your mother rings. I’m just checking up on you, she says, and at this unaccustomed tenderness the tears come and come, great gulps of them, your mouth is webbed
by wet.

  I’m coming to you, she says, just give me some time to organise a flight.

  For two weeks your mother’s at your side, ensuring there are always fresh flowers and making batches of home-made soup and filling the freezer with tubs of it just like her own. Making you cups of tea without waiting to be asked and exactly how you like them, milky, very weak; Cole has never, in all the years you’ve known him, perfected that.

  For two weeks you curl up with her in her bed in the spare room; you haven’t done this since you were ten. Your mother doesn’t know the extent of what’s gone wrong, just that Cole’s stormed out and it’s unknown when he’ll be back. Her focus is getting you on your feet. You know, now, that she’s at her best when you’re vulnerable, spent, when things are falling apart. The relationship has been simplified to the fundamental need of a child for its mother, and with that, something vicious between you is gone, the fury is blown out. You don’t know how long this ceasefire will last but you want to bask in its calm while you can.

  She has to leave after a fortnight, it’s all the time she could get off from the dig. She doesn’t want to go but you tell her she must. You should try and work again, she says, as she waits for the minicab to pick her up. Get some focus back in your life.

  You retract.

  No, not teaching, she laughs. But you have to find something else to love in your life besides a child, and a man, because they’ll always break your heart.

  Ha! But what?

  She can’t tell you that. The minicab driver buzzes up.

  I’ve started to write something, you tell her, I haven’t got very far. It’s a modern version of grandpa’s old book. A warts and all look at a marriage – what a wife might think, but would never say.

  Does Cole know, she asks.

  No, not exactly. He knows I’m working on a book, but he has no idea what it’s really about. I don’t want to hurt him. I think…I think he’d be devastated. I don’t know what he’d do.

  Write it anonymously then, she says, as the minicab driver buzzes again. That way no one’ll get hurt.

  Lesson 113

  bank notes are paper money

  No word from Cole.

  No phone calls from Gabriel, after the one that exploded your world.

  But there’s a new life force within you, competing with the men. Your stomach is public now, hands reach to it often and amid all the mess you’re falling in love with a body not your own. It’s beautiful and terrible what the baby is doing to you, there’s a great violence to the beauty, it’s fascinating, erotic, obscene.

  How can skin stretch that far? Will it ever shrink back to what it was, or will it be rumpled and slack like a pouch?

  You haven’t taken your wedding ring off; you don’t want the complication of that, it’s too final, too abrupt, it closes off, in your head, the possibility of everything being sorted out. At least the money’s still coming into your account but your mother’s right, you have to find something to do that you love, to fill up your life.

  Make the book work, if you can. It feels like your last shot, before motherhood closes over you and your own life recedes as another gathers force. And the money, perhaps, stops. For all that’s happened to you, financial independence is the biggest thing you’ve given up. It feels too uncomfortable, now, being so beholden to someone else; it could sneak all the confidence from your life.

  But Gabriel.

  He whispers unceasingly through this newfound sense of purpose. You’re seven months pregnant and you know it’s wrong to want him, to plunge him back into your life. You want to call him. Time has wearied the intensity of those afternoons in his flat, but not enough. For the vividness of him is back, often now, like waves at a shore he’s back and back.

  Lesson 114

  the worth of fresh air

  A weekend away, in the Cotswolds, a girly indulgence in a spa hotel. Martha’s driving, she’s speeding down the narrow roads, she wants to arrive before the light completely drops. The sky’s blood-red and gold in great bands of brightness; in London it’s never like that. Or perhaps you don’t remember to look.

  How’s the gang, you ask.

  Oh fine, fine. Julian’s just about to deliver, way before deadline, of course. Tim’s had to give up for a while and go back to the building site; his advance has run out. Natalie, poor love, is on her seventh rewrite, she’s at that horrible stage where she’s convinced it’ll never work.

  What about Gabriel, you ask, trying to smooth the rise in your voice.

  Haven’t heard a peep, she says, but he’ll be back. He’s so good at disappearing and then suddenly popping up, you know that. I think he’s in Spain, I’m not sure why.

  You prop your bare feet on the dashboard, your knees cradling your belly, and think of the times in your life when you’ve been most free, invariably alone, when you’ve been vivid and alive and aware. Can you ever have that life again? Martha butts the steering wheel with her hand and says of course, just take the baby with you; women are always doing that.

  Look at your mother, she says, traipsing around the world with her little bundle strapped to her front.

  Yes, I suppose.

  But you’re not your mother. You feel an anchoring now. You can’t explain it to her, a woman who’s resolutely childless, who declares that she can’t get her own life in order let alone anyone else’s. In a couple of months you’ll never again control your life with the tightness you’ve been used to, you’ll have to surrender to the will of someone else. A child will drag you into life, you’ll have to participate as a parent.

  The sky is shutting down, the colour is almost gone. You tell Martha you haven’t had the energy or the confidence to make proper inroads with your book and you fear you’ll never, now, for you’ve left it too late.

  You’ll find a way, Martha laughs, if you want it enough. Write as if you’re dying, I’ve heard that’s a great way to motivate yourself.

  You look out the car window. The sunset peeps through the black like a rip in a curtain. Cole still hasn’t called. You’ve rung his parents, told their answering machine it’s urgent, three times. You’ve asked them to pass on that you love him. No one rang back. You didn’t think they would. You’re old enough now, and have been through enough, not to expect anything you wish for to happen. Unless you make it.

  Lesson 115

  in rainy weather we may be able to take only indoor exercise

  You’re cow-slow, now, huge and waddling. Your breasts have swelled from a D to a G cup and there’s no bra that’s sexy or even black in that size. You’re becoming less you, more generic pregnant woman. It’s sharp, suddenly, the loss of esteem. Will you be diminished as a mother? Made invisible?

  But amid all the uncertainty there’s a knuckling of creativity. You go back to the Library. Sit at your laptop, jot notes. The baby doesn’t like you working, it squirms and kicks when you sit as if it’s saying hey, swing your focus back to me. But you can’t, not just yet. You muse over the question of anonymity: it has such a bad name, it’s the way of kidnappers, murderers, blackmailers and women who want to reveal something of their secret lives; lay themselves bare. Your decision not to put your name to the book gives you an exhilarating, audacious freedom: you could never write what you wanted to with your name attached, the personal consequences would be too great. You’re so accomplished at suppressing the truth in your everyday life; of how you really feel, of what you really want. Your Elizabethan author, you’re sure, felt a similar kind of constraint. Otherwise she would have put her name to her book.

  He calls.

  He’s on the answering machine, you can’t bear to pick it up, fearful of what he might say, needing to collect your thoughts.

  He’ll be home in a week.

  No love in his voice, businesslike, abrupt.

  The night sours around you.

  So, no apology, no explanation, no hope that you, and his child, are all right.

  You have one week, just that. One w
eek to refresh yourself, so you can slip back into the wifely life, because isn’t that what he expects? As do you. One week to spoil yourself, to act completely selfishly, wilfully, indulgently: it’s the last chance you’ll have for a very long time. How many times in your past have lovers, who’d never returned your calls, suddenly phoned up out of the blue and pulled you back for a quick fuck. And you’d always, always said yes. You want to live like those men, just once.

  I have no sooner spoken of power and authority than methinks I hear some man begin to interrupt me, and goe about to stop my mouth with that punishment laid upon woman: Thy desire shall be subject to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

  Lesson 116

  how to treat ailments as they arise

  The next night, a Saturday. Desultory in front of a documentary about Edward and Mrs Simpson. A chocolate bar is unfinished beside you; it’s brittle, not soft enough. Your mood, country-dark. You flick the television off.

  The piracy of Cole’s indifference.

  You pick up your book; you’re reading Martha Gellhorn—I was only ever lonely when I was married—and you snap it shut and head for the phone and your fingers trip over the numbers still too much in your head, and almost immediately he answers. As you hear his familiar hello again you feel as if your insides are being pulled to the floor.

  It’s me, you say.