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

by Gemmell, Nikki

  You are ready.

  To stand at the bow of the ship and feel the salty slap of life firm and cleansing in your face. You take out your Victorian volume. Under the scrawl at the front – about a place that can teach you so much – you jot a scrap from the journal of Katherine Mansfield.

  Here is a little summary of what I need – power, wealth, freedom. It is the hopelessly insipid doctrine that love is the only thing in the world, taught, hammered into women, from generation to generation, which hampers us so cruelly. We must get rid of the bogey – and then, comes the opportunity of happiness and freedom.

  You shut the book and smile.

  Ready.

  IX

  ‘Still I have not opened my eyes to this world’

  Don Paterson

  Lesson 169

  O women! Women! Why have you not more faith in yourselves – in that strong, inner purity which can make a woman brave

  It is 9 p.m. Time for bed.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ you enquire into the ether.

  ‘Marriage,’ comes the voice from the couch.

  You retreat, chuckling, reminding Hugh to check that Jack hasn’t thrown off his blankets; you can feel in your bones an encroaching cough. You never fall asleep with your husband now, he always dozes on the couch and gets to you at 4 a.m. or thereabouts. His hot water bottle. That’s all you’re good for now, it’s become a running joke.

  You move into your bedroom, your sanctuary, close the door and breathe out. Uncurl in your bed. It scares you how much you love the alone, but you will never leave Hugh, and he will never leave you. It is unspoken. This is your existence together that you have welded on the great forge of your adult lives, over many years, imperfect but solid enough: it will hold.

  So. Now you are middle-aged.

  Dipping your toes into the vast zone of invisibility. The signs of slippage everywhere. Your body thickening after its quicksilver years of slenderness, finally you have lost control of it. Your metabolism is slowing, you cannot keep the weight off. Hair is growing in places it shouldn’t be, with vigour – the only vigour in your life it seems. You are tired, so tired, constantly. Your eyebrows have learnt disobedience, are constantly going off-piste – when you pluck the wily ones there’s likely to be a sudden bald patch; some are wilfully grey, others thickly curled. The most important item you now pack on holidays: tweezers. Not just for eyebrows but for your chin, cheeks, upper lip, belly. Greying pubes are around the corner, various girlfriends have warned you of this. The talk is of dyeing, perhaps, no one’s daring to go first. Liver spots are vivid already on your hands – retribution, finally, for a childhood assaulted by its different sun. When you pucker up your lips for a kiss, from child or adult, you can feel the lines cementing into your upper lip. And you think back now to those years when a woman never knew what it was to be dry, internally, those slippy zippy easy years – and laugh.

  ‘Is that blue ink on your leg?’ Hugh had enquired absently as you passed.

  ‘No. It’s a varicose vein.’

  He shrugged. So what.

  You love him for that.

  You think about sleeping with every man you meet. You do not want to sleep with any of them. You are too tired, too cold and you wouldn’t want to take off your clothes for anyone. Your body has rusted up. Your husband doesn’t mind. So be it.

  But sometimes, at night, the memories. Screaming of the sun. A different life. Being caressed by the air. Lying belly down on the beach with the heat tingling alive your weary back. Here, in deepest England, in mid January, the cold has nestled into your bones like mould and you feel that this world has grown over you, and you will never climb out.

  You rarely speak to your father now. He’s a hopeless correspondent, doesn’t do letters or computers, never rings on your birthday or special occasions. You used to call him religiously for his birthday but often it was your stepmother who answered and she would say without warmth that she would pass on the message, and he never called back.

  Like a piece of ragged tin cutting into your heart, years and years of it, the pain of the silence still fresh.

  You need to get back.

  Lesson 170

  Thoughts do not concern married women

  Ari is the shining school dad who you just know would spring you alive. He followed a woman to deepest Gloucestershire but they are separating. He does the school run every Thursday. Often you are both the only two parents early, before the school gates open, and you’ve fallen into bantering. Ari is Israeli; sparky, loud, warm, full of shooting laughter and teasing and flirt. You’d forgotten what it’s like to be with people like that. You feel yourself becoming looser, lighter in response. Remembering a woman you once were. Every Thursday now, when you see him, he reminds you that you’ve been in England too long, weighted down by the sheer energy it takes to get by in it. Such a crowded, aggressive, uncertain land – uncertain about where it’s going and what it’s become.

  On the last Thursday in January you look at Ari as he tumbles his young daughter around his neck, look at his easy smile and shining teeth and know, beyond anything else, you need the WD40 of sun. Or you will go mad. It is as simple as that. You do not have a sense of belonging in this land, no matter how long you are in it, and as you get older you want the balm of that. You need to get out, get home. The cold in you like grease, sludging you up; the homesickness corrosive now and something has to be done about it.

  But what would you be going back for?

  As if on cue Pip propels himself into your arms with a flying leap, almost knocking you over and his little legs lock around your back and you laugh and twirl him around, just as Ari has done, everything else forgotten in the great burning furnace of your son’s love as you bury your face in the warmth of his lovely neck. Everything repaired, forgotten, wiped by the sheer urgent magnificent heft of this.

  Lesson 171

  Dark deeds and ill feelings can only be conquered by being brought to the light

  Hugh forcibly lifts up your feet. He polishes your Blundstone boots. Despite a deadly serious protest. You pull your leg away, viciously. He grabs it back – he will win this. He is doing all the kids’ shoes and his own, it is the night for it, and by God he’ll clean yours too whether you like it or not. What began as a game is now more, much more, than that.

  The anger so pure and festering in you that you just want to run outside and gulp the fresh air, run and run and not look back; in this moment, the voice from the woman you don’t recognise roaring inside.

  Stoooooooooop.

  The boys are watching. They keep you here. Silent. Seething. On a Sunday night. Before a new week begins, as it will always begin now, over the years and years to come there will be this little ritual because Hugh has discovered an Achilles heel, a new teasing point, and you know him, he’ll be seizing it from now on.

  Seething.

  At the man who insists on turning the car air conditioning on in summer even though you crave the slap of fresh air. Who drives too close to the bumper bars of the cars in front and brakes so abruptly you gasp, and never changes this habit. Who litters the house with black crows, the endless clothes he never puts away. Piles of change. Receipts from God knows what. Who leaves the toilet seat up and the toothpaste lid off and who has never learnt, over ten years of marriage, to make tea the way you want it – oh, he’ll make you a cuppa, but it’ll never be right – he’s never bothered to know you enough.

  Seething.

  At the little snippets of ownership he always has to exercise, all through your days and months and years as the little wife. You stare down in silence at your Blundstone boots that were scarred, once, with the history of your bush life. Now shiny black. As if new.

  Seething.

  At a marriage that is sapping your confidence, your will, your flinty self-sufficiency. You do not even fill the family car with petrol anymore let alone change its tyres; and once you did all of that. You eat baked beans and fish fingers because Hu
gh did once, as a child – forcing his habits upon you. You use a microwave even though you don’t quite trust it because Hugh bought one, insisted, just came home with it one night. Within this marriage you are changing, retreating. Becoming as soft as a pocket. And you don’t know how it came to this. Mel’s caress jolted you into life. The tenderness, the caring, the noticing.

  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 watc
h 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.