Your nipples shrivel like dried grapes at the thought. The tingling between your legs, at all of it.
Wanting it, all over again.
But you must wait. Tol would want that. Restraint … and release.
Lesson 146
‘To love’ is by no means the sole verb in the grammar of life
Over the coming days you sleep and sleep, gulping up rest, burrowing deep into your lovely bed. Outside your father is burning off and the smoke wends its way through your clothes like the smell of a lover and you turn and smile, scrunching your body in its pyjamas as you repair, and rest. There is a prickling in your cotton pants as the hair starts to grow back; the itch of it, the grate. For three days you can barely get out of bed at all and your father comes to the door of your room and stares, perplexed. Unable to ask, unable to articulate. The great clotted silence of the Australian male, you know it so well – from him, from Tol. So apart yet so similar, the two men in your life, who cannot properly talk out their thoughts except in writing or in work, as they’re distracted, as they teach.
Sometimes your father comes back and strokes your cheek as he used to once, long ago, before stepmothers and boarding schools, before any of that, when it was just him and you, untugged, pure and solid and known and quiet. In the silence of the gesture you hug your glow to your chest and let the stillness seep in, vast and rich.
When he’s gone you roll over. Wonder what on earth’s next. With Tol. So much you want to do and have done; so much you want to do to him, to find out.
It is his turn next. What’s in his head, what he really, deeply wants.
Let’s see how far we can take this …
With knowledge comes generosity. You have learnt that.
Lesson 147
Work is a natural and most holy necessity
Day four. You go back. Whole.
The gate is locked.
It has never been locked, except for those weekends when he’s away or has guests and it is not a weekend now, it is a Monday, your heart is thudding, no, this can’t be.
The shock of it. The disbelief. You shake the gates and shake them but cannot get in. Stunned. You sit slumped by the road, waiting, churning, for goodness knows what. Sit there, a great spanner twisting your heart. You sit there deep into that afternoon, into dusk.
He doesn’t arrive. He doesn’t leave. There is no letter, no jar, no scrap of a note. Nothing. You are swamped by loneliness. The chill of the truth, now, of bereavement. So, this is how he will whisper through your blood for the rest of your life – of course – by abandonment.
By silence.
The most torturous experience of the lot.
On that long afternoon you see your whole life ahead of you … You will live, now, the worst kind of life: within a question.
Over those waiting baffled hours you interrogate the last couple of months, everything that happened, but they stubbornly refuse to yield any answer. You gorge and gnaw on everything that went on inside these gates until you feel ill with it; every sign, signal, every conversation scrap. Everything thrown into confusion by these firmly shut gates. You do not know anything about him, why he did what he did, what he turned you into or why. You are just less when you should be more, so much more.
Why has love done this?
Lesson 148
Kindliness, unselfishness, charity, come to us by nature: but I wish I could see more of my fellow souls practising what is far more difficult – common justice, especially towards one another
You wheel your bike home as dark comes crowding in.
Keening.
So. A new existence now. An ice pick crashed into the underbelly of your life.
That night a rush to words. Feverishly galloping the writing into your little book. It’s all you’ve got now.
Your honesty.
That you gave him.
The sacred, solemn gift of it.
That he has abused most monstrously.
Lesson 149
It is safest, on the whole, to treat people as better than they are, than to check all hope and paralyse all aspiration
Every day you go back.
Every day the gate is locked.
Inexplicably padlocked.
You know him. He would never be so uncaring. Destructive. Cruel. It doesn’t feel right. You know him.
You don’t know him.
Newly alone, eyes glazed, stumbling through your days. You feel quarried. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Can you bear the truth? You don’t think so.
His cold pleasure, it doesn’t make sense.
I feel like you help me to live.
His words are re-written in your book, your heart tells you they were the truth. But every day now, cycling home in shock, every day now, disbelieving, as you turn from the padlocked gate. Like the lion’s victim who is anaesthetised before the kill, a strange, floating calm carries you on, gets you through your days. The love, the God-given love for him still so big and strong and pushing and pulsing under all the bewilderment; the love that is Grand Canyon vast, that you do not know what to do with. Now.
I want to stay forever in your life.
He wrote that once, on his back page, and you know now that ‘to stay’ means as torment, affliction, weight. How could you be so deluded. Young?
A weight like a chain attached to a safe is pulling you down, down into the inky depths; and you cannot untangle yourself.
But you collect yourself, always, as Beddy looms into sight; plumped with tears but walking tall and nonchalant through the front door of your house. If you were pricked by a pin the howling would come raging tumbling tearing out in a great torrent but you cannot do that, you have to hold it all in – as you study at the dining table, as you peel the potatoes, as you clear out the garage, as you hand across the hammer and the screwdriver and the wrench.
Every day a Sunday expanse of loneliness and emptiness. Every day.
Lesson 150
As for resting your heart upon such a person, you might as well rest it upon a burning rock or a broken reed
Wailing in the rare alone in this tiny, suffocating house. Wanting, wildly, crawling on your knees; madly cramming your face when everyone’s out and you’re alone, stuffing yourself full of chocolate, biscuits, ice cream; forgetting for an instant the power of slim. Your skin loses its glow and its freshness, he has destroyed your equilibrium. Too big in you, all of it. Your love like black market currency now – vast riches but nowhere legitimate to deposit it. You fear his hesitancy, hate it. His cowardice. His cruelty. His silence. His motive. Grubby with it.
As you hunch over your textbooks, seeing but not seeing, keening under your breath, your father stops at the door and shakes his head, looking at your hands gripping your skull in frustration, your knuckles white, and he murmurs that he wishes for you an ordinary life, that’s all. A solid, ordinary, happy life.
Then he walks off, leaving you to it, all your books. The weight of study, that he has never known in his life.
The dream. Crazed by it. The gate is open, you have stayed and slept beside him, there is the stilling calm of skin to skin, of luxurious hours, of certainty; the feel of his hip, his tender earlobe, the back of his neck. Your bodies softly, rightly, moulding into each other then falling into slumber – what he always dreamt of, just one night, where true love lies, beyond words, beyond sex. He is kissing you in sleep and murmuring how good it is to have you with him then he wakes, boy-startled, a face of light, and smiles to see you there. That moment of vulnerability, of truth; you tuck it into the pocket of your heart, to always have, to always be able to slip out.
Crazed by it.
My heart is now shrouded like a cloth drawn over the dead.
You write in your notebook, can’t haul yourself out.
The only soundtrack in your house, besides the ticking clock, is the talkback radio and once, in the morning, in response to the strident tones of a shock jock is a woman’s steadying voice, all the wisdom of all the ages of all
the women of the world in it.
‘God gave us the gift of suffering,’ she says calmly, matter-of-fact, as if her life is lived by this understanding, this truth. Yes. You have to learn. From her, from her voice. From other women.
To dive into the world with grace.
You have to start.
Because you know now that you feel too much. And you will be cursed by this fragility your entire life. Raw, skinned, with a huge open heart and what a combination to set forth into the real world with.
And him. The opposite, of course. What has happened has taught you that.
The authority of removal, absence, lack.
How dare he.
Lesson 151
Kittens and boys – the former being the least troublesome of the two
A cold that lingers for days. Your body crying. Eyes scratchy with tears and hurt. You wrap yourself in defensiveness. Inside, a quivering core of self-hatred, shock, doubt. He has stolen your confidence. Strength. Spark. The lack of him has become enormous, larger than anything that ever existed between you, fizzing and spitting like an insect caught perpetually in a trap.
Your stepmother comes into your room without knocking, doesn’t tolerate sickness well, is rarely sick herself. Throws a letter onto your bed.
‘The drama teacher again.’ Walks out.
You snatch it up.
Do you dare open it? Your breath hovers at it. The type you know so well. You put it down, can’t bear any more hurt, it will fell you, this.
Our time is up. I have to leave now.
You must live your life. I cannot stop you living it.
I have faith in you to do great things.
I will always love you. I will never forget.
Tol xxx
That’s it. It. Not even his name handwritten, not even the solace of that. Your twisting heart, you clutch your chest, the paper drops on the bed.
You don’t get it. Just this. After everything that went on, after you bared yourself.
Then the anger comes.
Is he afraid of women? Is this his revenge? You thought you had a friendship as much as anything else. Is he one of those men who saps a woman’s self-esteem – by reducing, depleting, chipping away at. It never even veered into sourness or stalemate, just abrupt end. Blown out like a candle. The worst kind of love, because you have no explanation, no closure. Certainly not from this letter.
So, it will never let you go now. The only thing known in your life at this point. And now you are so ashamed at what you did, what he made you do. Did he record it, photograph it, will he write of it?
You pick up the letter and slip it into the back of the notebook that you will never write in again. You are on your own ship now, the good ship heartbreak, lonely at the wheel and not knowing where you are steering to. The storm is endless, the skies iron; when will the clouds break? When?
In passion that has failed is a seed of insanity.
The last entry, from yesterday. Ten days since the padlocked gate. Outside your night is softly spitting tears. The sky is crying and you cry with it, you weep, silently, so no one hears, of course.
It feels so long since you were young.
VIII
‘illum absens absentem auditque uidetque’ (him not there not there, she hears him, she sees him)
Virgil, The Aeneid
Lesson 152
She has opened a gate of misery so wide that one almost shrinks from entering it
You emerge into the light as if from a coma, a sleep of a thousand years, a death. Your girl-face is gone.
The anger, still. That you were a lover before you were entirely a person. A lover before you were a woman and something is wrong with the natural order of that. Perhaps he has gone back to his Cecilia, perhaps she was in the room that final afternoon; it was all for her, a porn movie sprung to glary life.
Now the shame washes through you as stately as hemlock, shutting you down. Retracting from everyone and everything. You wrap yourself in black, forget to wash your hair, ugly yourself up.
His plaything. His doll.
How dare he.
Oh yes. Anger, now, sludgy-black through all your days. At his weakness, his cowardice, his selfishness – alone in his tower, unable to face life. Such a little man.
How dare he.
Lesson 153
By choosing a definite profession, a woman must necessarily quit the kindly shelter and safe negativeness of a private life
You go back to school, plough yourself into work. You have the gift of an excellent memory; it sees you through. You do not consider yourself especially clever, you can just recall so much, fool everyone.
As the anger congeals it hardens into aspic. But you have a life to live and so you must. Apart. Alone. Doubt and rage still there but it is as if a layer of skin has been peeled from your eyes. The desolation is wolfish, jagged, hurting. This is a stepping stone to the new – your next love will be more owned, more adult.
You are growing up.
You see Tol now. His running life. No woman’s to have or hold. See the essential loneliness of the soul; he demanded it and he has infected you with it. But you don’t like the solitude anymore – he has made you lonely in it, for the first time in your life.
And he has robbed you of your youth.
Lesson 154
The chief canker at the root of women’s lives is the want of something to do
You pass your Higher School Certificate. Triumphantly.
The pride in your father’s eyes that he cannot articulate – he recognises that education is the way out. The only way out for his daughter; the only way to escape the life of his wife and all the women around him.
‘I support you in whatever you do,’ he tells you quietly on the day the letter arrives. But you know what he wants. There will not be poetry in grimy attics or acting courses or novels by the sea; none of that is a proper, solid, paying life. You are the first in the family to ever finish school let alone university and you have no choice. It will be a prestigious profession, law or medicine, at one of the nation’s top universities. You cannot let him down. It is unspoken, of course.
What has characterised the relationship between your father and yourself as your teenage years gathered pace: silence, absence, a pulling apart. Perhaps he has sensed you slipping away yourself, that you don’t need him anymore, and it’s his way of connecting – barbing you, hooking you, in the only way he can.
Through withdrawal and silence, the hurt of that.
But you smile now with the release of forgiveness. It is time to pay back all that love, so awkward and unspoken; but constant, like an underground river deep through you; nourishing, replenishing.
Everything Tol isn’t.
Lesson 155
Happiness itself has become to her an accidental thing
Sydney, now you’re an adult, feels like a rangy dog in the back of a ute, pacing, cagy, unwilling to rest. The loneliest place you have ever lived in your life and sitting in your local café you are like a blind person, all senses reeling. At the relentless traffic – sirens and accelerations and buses braking with a great squeal – at radio jabber, car fumes, crashing tea cups, clattering cutlery. You understand now where Tol was coming from: yes, this city is too noisy to write in, too aggressive to ever find calm. The exhaustion of just getting by in it.
You walk onto the university campus on your first day feeling completely out of your depth. Old, already. But with no idea who you are. You have to find out. You only know you want to be in London by the time you’re twenty-five, New York by thirty.
And always, your soaring heart when you board the train for home. For your quiet. Your air. Your hurting sky. His too. On the train speeding you home you squeeze your eyes on tears as you take his earlobe in your lips, his vulnerable, creased softness; you know him like a landscape you have played in endlessly, want to enfold his body into yours as the train clacks you on, want to wrap your limbs around the foetal curve of his back, a
nd hold, just that. Want. Want. Want. As the train propels you deeper and deeper into a secret world of memory – your land, your sky, your learning.
The gate is always locked.
Every time you cycle back. Just in case, just to check.
The weeds grow over it, the scrub grows tall, the land reclaims as it will always reclaim everything, eventually, in this place that is not meant for humans, that will always draw you back.
And then the mornings. Every morning, in your old childhood bed, just before wakefulness. The aching stab of wanting him to touch your cunt, a whisper of a touch and the thrum spreading through your body, from your explosive core, and you are burning with it and you jerk into waking, into emptiness.
For so long you wander, desolate and alone, in the bleak borderlands of the soul. Head down, flinching people off. No touch. Never that. Nothing physical with anyone, couldn’t bear it, the disappointment. All you have to anchor you is work.
Lesson 156
She should rouse herself with the thought: ‘Now, what have I got to do today?’ (Mark, not to enjoy or to suffer, only to do)
Those rogue Saturday nights when you haven’t been able to organise going out. Those endless New Year’s Eves by yourself, raw with the alone, in your bedsit. Those keen questions at Christmas from grandparents and aunts: when are you getting a boyfriend, love? When are you going to settle down? Are you happy? Is anything wrong?
Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Page 40
