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

by Gemmell, Nikki

  The thirstlands.

  All through that week and if anyone touches you, brushes by you – near your midriff, belly, chest – you will implode. All nerve endings raw and clenched at the thought of him, and pants damp, soaked with want. Lune gives you a secret smile whenever she catches your eye; you’re a woman now, more woman than her and you both know it. For the first time in your life you have something over her, over all of them, and it makes you walk tall, bold, right down the centre of the convent corridors with their polished parquet floors – you are becoming someone else. No more hugging the walls in this place, you are embarking on a new life.

  Before you catch the bus that will take you to Central Station you change out of your school uniform, preparing for him, making sure you have more time this visit.

  The force of the anticipation, as if a great hand has brushed a sheen of varnish over the tepidness of your life.

  He smiles a triumphant smile as you step from the lift.

  ‘Well well, I wasn’t sure you’d come back.’

  He is not wearing trousers, just a t-shirt. He is ready.

  You hesitate, not sure why; roaming the kitchen, looking at anything but him as he gazes at you like a quarry caught, smiling his smile while he retrieves a lemonade for his guest and a beer for himself, opening it with one finger and still looking. Undressing you, with his eyes, as your fingers scurry to the buckles of your braces in self-consciousness.

  There is a photograph on the battered fridge of three women, one of them is heavily pregnant, they are wearing bikinis on some deserted beach. ‘My flatmate. The middle one,’ he says. CWA is emblazoned in red lipstick across each of their tummies.

  ‘C.W.A.?’

  ‘Cunts With Attitude,’ he laughs. ‘I’ve painted the lot of them.’

  Women who seem a world apart from you with their brazenness, bluntness. As does that word and the way they have colonised it; you’ve never heard it spoken aloud, thought it was only used by men who don’t like women very much.

  ‘Come on. Let’s get going.’

  A new briskness in his voice.

  ‘We don’t have much time.’

  You turn. Take a deep breath. So, this is it. A fresh canvas waits in readiness. The Courbet print is high in its corner with a slice of masking tape. He comes up to you with his knowing smile and unclips you, bold, just like that he draws off your t-shirt and whips off your bra; impatience in his fingers now.

  You step back.

  He grabs your hips, rubs, close. Cups your buttocks under your underpants, draws you into him.

  Right, it must be done, now, this is what you have always wanted, dreamt of – a painter, an artist, you are complicit in this; there will be your triumph over the other schoolgirls, your difference, you cannot go back.

  He spits on his fingers. Gosh, so that is what men must do. A wet finger slips inside you. Another.

  Feel him, exploring. Your eyes blink, smart.

  Lesson 41

  No power on earth can give you back that jewel of glory and strength – your innocence

  Urgent now. Propelling you onto a well-worn fifties couch. Whipping off your undies. Snatching up a paintbrush, clamping it between his teeth. Standing over you, cocking his head, nudging your legs apart. Lifting one knee casually into a crook, with his foot; placing your own foot wider on the couch, wider, it hurts.

  ‘Touch yourself,’ he murmurs.

  You frown, what? But you know, you have seen it in Lune’s magazines, you know instinctively. Your fingers stray, he is holding his penis.

  ‘Slip inside,’ he breathes, directing, as his fingers move slowly, up, down, and you touch yourself, obey, the good girl. Is this right, asks your frown, your concentrating face. He nods.

  ‘Yes, yes, keep going.’ You close your eyes, try to lose yourself, touch yourself like you do at night, every night, when the wet comes, the flooding.

  ‘That’s it. Perfect.’

  So.

  The learning has begun, the collating of experience; you must do as you are told, it all begins from here.

  You widen your legs further, further, splaying your fingers and surrendering to the moment, closing your eyes, arching your back, catching your breath. You open your eyes, watch him watching you. The power in it, the spell that your body can cast. Then suddenly, urgently, need something inside, anything, need to be filled up. You gasp, he groans, holding his firm penis then coming close, whispering the paintbrush across your clit, your lips, your secret mouth. ‘Deeper,’ you whisper, you don’t know why, needing it, something, anything, opening your legs wider.

  ‘Good girl,’ he whispers back chuffed, then to himself, ‘my obedient little schoolgirl,’ and you stop, frown, suddenly don’t like it.

  The tone.

  You shut your legs. He’s having none of it. He kisses you hard, suddenly, on the lips, a knee rough between your legs, and squeezes your chin firm, twisting your skin, pushing in the intrusion of his tongue and sweeping your mouth like a mine sweeper, kissing you hard as if his lips are wooden. You don’t like it anymore, it hurts. He jiggles your breasts, scrunches them up. Flips you over, smartly, like a piece of meat; you’re now kneeling with your belly over the couch and you cry out in shock, it’s too rough, changed, insistent.

  ‘Wait,’ you gasp but he’s not listening anymore, now something is between your legs nudging, pushing, bullying; it’s too fast, there’s no tenderness.

  You pull away before it’s too late.

  ‘Stop!’

  Lesson 42

  Her poor little bones were crunched between his dazzling jaws

  Stumbling, reeling from his warehouse saturated in its golden light with your legs slightly apart and the ache, in all of you – at your tender parts so sullied, violated. But that is nothing compared to the enormous, flinched hurt of your heart. Where was the mystery, the grace, the empowerment?

  There was no you.

  In any of it.

  From that moment he kissed.

  It was wrong, just that.

  And you knew in that instant something you will now know for the rest of your life, at the first touch of a man’s lips: if it is wrong at that moment then what hope has the relationship got, can it ever endure?

  It’s all in the kiss.

  You recall the lack of tenderness most of all. The violence of that. And the way he spat, sharp, on his fingertips – the cheapness of that gesture. And the sound. Like a fork in fettucini as he worked his way in. Hooked you, hard. In ownership. He had no right.

  My good, obedient, little schoolgirl.

  The chuff in his new voice. The ugliness. Taken over by someone else, a man you didn’t recognise anymore. With … what was it, distance? Yes that, in his tone; you could have been anyone. In an instant he was changed – stripped – his true self and you didn’t like it one bit.

  Only one thing is certain now: they will never know how much you are watching them.

  The way he clumsily jiggled your breasts as if he’d read how to do it in a manual, that this is what turning on a girl was all about. Not feeling it. And you, staring at him in shock, at everything he was suddenly doing. Not participating. You have no idea if this is what is meant to happen but it just felt wrong, mechanical, bleak; it was not the sex of your imagination, your mind defrauded you. Or he did.

  He didn’t like women, that was the most shocking lesson from it.

  The affronted, luminous pain of the experience is like a bell of sadness inside you, pushing against your skin, as you stumble, dazed, into the late afternoon.

  No idea where to go from it.

  Lune will know none of it. You shut down, shamed, will never talk of it.

  And the knowing, now, one other thing: you are too clever to love anything like that.

  Furiously you wipe away the tears, lift your face high to a ravishing sunset. You’ve got a train to catch.

  Lesson 43

  The free, happy ignorance of maidenhood is gone forever

 
In your diary, late that raw, ranging night, you come across a scrap of something from Gabriel Garcia Marquez describing the loss of his virginity as a teenager – how it triggered a vital force within him.

  The sense of celebration, the boldness, intrigues and angers you. You wonder if this feeling of empowerment is a particularly male phenomenon. What vital force? You’ve been shocked into silence; in the addled aftermath of this episode you’re experiencing a catastrophic loss of spark, of certainty. You can barely record the episode in your diary – the sheer, puny grubbiness of it. Once you felt so cheeky and curious, bold and sure; now, suddenly, you’re faltering. What happened back there? As soon as a man put his arm around you something was rubbed out; some inner certainty. Why the leakage of confidence, the capitulation, as you entered the realm of the sexual? Why did you nod and gush so pathetically, saying ‘yes please, a studio, wow,’ on that concourse?

  Your bewilderment, over the lot of it.

  You suspect a terrifying secret: that virginity and chastity by choice are the magic elixirs that can make a woman calm, audacious, strong. You will have to find out. You don’t know how. The experiment feels almost derailed from the start. Love must be tracked, studied, dissected, yes of course, but you must never allow it to snap you in its strong jaws like a steel trap. No, the jagged pain of your father’s withholding has taught you the folly of that.

  Lesson 44

  Nature’s law undoubtedly is that our nearest ties should be those of blood

  Several days with your grandmother.

  You need her right now, the certainty of her powdery smell and flannelette sheets, her unconditional warmth. You’ve begged your father and he’s complied with phone calls arranging pick ups and train tickets; as if he senses something rattling within you that is beyond him and he’s more than happy to palm it off. Women’s business, all that emotional stuff – his mother will sort it out.

  You have not told her anything. Does she sense … something? A changing, a turning.

  Over her meat-and-three-veg dinner you talk school and careers and marriage and life, she asks if you’ve got a boyfriend and you shake your head and laugh and she nods – plenty of time, love, plenty of time – and tells you how good she was, once, at so much: maths and English, geography and athletics, but then as soon as a boy put his arms around her she was gone.

  ‘Just like that.’

  She married young.

  ‘It was all I wanted, and it killed my ambition, every single scrap of it. And my energy,’ she cackles. ‘Which was just bursting from me, once.’

  You smile, wondering what she sees in you that has changed and why she is saying all this.

  Later, as she’s tucking you into your bed with its electric blanket on and smoothing down the hair on your forehead, she adds, ‘There’s a strength about us women that scares men, I think. You keep your chin up, love. Get a degree; be a doctor or a lawyer. Make me proud. Your father too. You could be the first in the family to finish school, let alone university. Your dad left at fourteen to go down the pit, I left to go into service. Do it for us.’

  You will not tell her what has happened, will never tell her, it would break her heart.

  Lesson 45

  To young people, the world is always a paradise

  No idea where to go from it.

  You shut down. For a couple of years. A spring coiled tight.

  Waiting, for God knows what.

  Lost.

  IV

  ‘I could fancy a love for life here almost possible …’

  Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

  Lesson 46

  When it comes to ‘each for herself’ – when Miss This cannot be asked to a party for fear of meeting Madame That, or if they do meet, through all their smiling civility you perceive their backs are up, like two strange cats meeting at a parlour door – I say, this is the most lamentable of all results which the world effects on women

  Summer holidays. Eight weeks ahead of thick heat, cicadas, bush-fire alerts.

  Your stepmother is ignoring you. It is her one weapon, her only way to have power over you. With silence.

  You are too different. You have city-awareness now. You will never lose yourself like she has done, and no matter how much she thinks she has won – when your father doesn’t show up to your speech days, when he never talks with the parents of your new friends, when he neglects to set foot in your world – you would never, ever want your stepmother’s life. The sourness of it, her closed heart. It is the one power you have over her.

  The energy between you is wrong. You could never be her, she could never be you. It is never discussed, but you both know it.

  Today she has designated a cleaning day, is buried in a flurry of activity. Sorting through her Tupperware boxes, rinsing and airing – she takes them to gatherings to scoop up leftover food. You can’t bear the bustling little world of domesticity she creates around her, crowding out any trace of your mother in this scrap of a house that was renovated by your parents long ago – working side by side, he told you once. And now, an obsessive accumulation of new and shiny possessions from daytime ads on the telly cluttering it up – newfangled mosquito zappers, wall-mounted can-openers, sewing tables, kitchen knife sets.

  You have few possessions. Like it that way. Like to see the bones of these old valley houses and their heart, running hands along the old plaster walls like horses’ flanks, marvelling at the carpentry in dinky corner cabinets and the bread tins filled with concrete holding up porch roofs and the mouldings of pressed-tin ceilings and the beauty in deco bush flowers scattered in old bathroom tiles, like your own. Tiles now obscured by a stick-on plastic railing and a matching avocado towel set that you know you must keep straight.

  So. Cleaning day. And you’re jumping on Peddly to get away from it all and smiling at the familiarity of that hard, worn saddle. Feel young again, out, shedding your city skin. You’re flinging your bike aside and walking thigh-deep in bleached grass, catching grasshoppers and feeling the dry flick of them inside the bauble of your palm before you free them to leap in a great springing arc of release, laughing, away from your stepmother’s narrow, silent, affronted little world.

  Go. GO!

  At three o’clock you return.

  You hear her footsteps thudding through the house towards you. Furious. You shut your eyes. What have you done now? There’s always something to vex her and usually she doesn’t say, it’s just in the thud of her step, her contained fury when you’re in her space.

  She has found your diary.

  Which was under your bed, still in your school bag. She has gone into your bedroom, your private place, and dug it out. And read it of course, you know instantly. It’s on her face. You have never seen her so incensed, tight, repulsed.

  ‘Get out, you … thing … you. I don’t want you here. Your words, your filth, in my house.’

  ‘It’s my place as much as yours. I lived here long before you.’

  You try snatching the book back but the sturdy girl with her big country thighs has it firm.

  ‘Give it back,’ you scream – because it’s your words, your truth, everything that has happened in your life. ‘You spoil everything.’ Clawing your hair in frustration, can’t make this right, win, can’t think fast enough. Your tears in that moment are from years of competitiveness and exhaustion and bafflement – you’re his daughter, you were a child, you do not understand the jealousy; what you have with your father is a blood tie, a given, a totally different relationship to hers. But you can’t speak properly, can’t get it out, are clotted before her, as clotted as your father. The only place you can talk is in your diary.

  Which she’s got.

  With everything recorded in it.

  That she has done.

  The relationship between the three of you is all about the gift of attention, and your father cannot bestow it upon two women at once. And she will win, always. She is an adult and you are not, she knows how to do it; to demand
and punish. To withhold what he wants.

  You both know that when your father comes back the two of you will be quiet and he will know none of this, the explosive fury between females. That is the code of you both, the only common code you adhere to; this is women’s business.

  She spits on your diary in contempt. Has no intention of giving it back. Stomps inside with a slap of the screen door. You hear your words being flung across the room in disgust.

  And then quiet.

  The only power in her life. A withholding.

  Lesson 47

  Only be honest. No falsehoods, no concealments of any kind.

  But something new.

  What honesty can do. The power of it.

  She has opened your words and she has read them. All the little incidents over the years, all the hurts, cruelties, vulnerabilities; all the disobedience and confusion and longing and touch. The truth has been forensically trapped. Your meticulous record. And she has been incensed by it.

  You smile.

  Lesson 48

  The most of women are, in their youth at least, decidedly ‘adjective’. Few of them have had the chance of becoming a ‘noun substantive’ – they have been accustomed all their lives to be governed, if not guarded; protected

  You run far from her world of Tupperware boxes and spotless surfaces, run and run in your bib-and-brace overalls cut off at the knees and your flannelette shirt; dirt girl, sun girl, strong in it. You find your old bush shelter, still there, just, and curl into it.