You do not linger. It is still your stepmother’s house; she still makes you extremely aware of that. You are both wary, polite, but you know she will never invite the boys and you in for a big family meal – she cannot bring herself to widen her heart to that extent.
No matter.
She is of another era, a lifetime ago, you have let it go within the busyness of your own life. You wave the boys goodbye and jump in your hired car feeling loosened, lightened. Your father grins at you and there is a sudden recognition – as you flash a smile back – of your face, absolutely, in his. It’s something your stepmother can never take away and there’s a giggle in your heart as you accelerate.
Along the deeply known, sun-dappled roads, under your deeply known sky, the girl you used to be is uncurling.
It is good being back, right. It’s about the serenity that comes from belonging, the ease of it. After fifteen years away you can walk into an Aussie shop and yak away to the stranger behind the counter – because you speak a common language with codes and nuances and subtleties that are utterly familiar. For years you have been an outsider in a foreign land and revelled in that status. But my God, the relief of belonging. Perhaps it has something to do with ageing, with quietening, but it’s hitting you now like a long cool drink after a sweltering summer’s day. Life is easy, known, navigable again. The bread rolls are the same consistency from your childhood and you gorge on them. The cereal hasn’t changed, the apples taste the same, the mangoes, the grapes; there is a comfort in all of it. You’d forgotten what it’s like to live like that.
The windows are down, the music is up. Triple J, the station you used to listen to religiously. Elbow hanging out, sun and wind-whipped. Feeling such an uncomplicated, strong, pure happiness. It is dangerous, this.
You stop to fill up. Wander into the coolness of the milk bar next door through coloured plastic fly strips. Buy an ice-cold strawberry milkshake in a silver canister and drink it through a waxed paper straw. Laugh, at all of it, full of delight that your old life still exists! At a laminated table rimmed in a silver metal strip you slip out the little Victorian manual. Of course you have brought it with you, on this day, this trip into the bush, to God knows what.
You feel completely alone, for the first time in so long – years – and you adore it. You could never tell anyone that.
Lesson 178
If she knows herself to be clean in heart and desire, it will give her a freedom of action and a fearlessness of consequences
You sit in the milk bar with the book before you; the handwriting flooding him back. What was it about his touch that is so insistent, still? Now that you are an adult yourself with years of living behind you?
A cherishing, combined with authority. And not just a cherishing of the female body – a cherishing of sex. All the wonder that is in it. He’d done this many times before, that was obvious, but he made it feel exploratory, fresh. His dubious gift was to make you feel you were the one. The only one. With how many women had he spun that trick? He was like a politician with the knack of making every person they talk to feel special, wanted, unique. It was all to do with focus. The gift of attention, of course.
The knowing that came only once in your life.
It is why, of course, you are back.
Lesson 179
That grand preservative of a healthy body – a well-controlled, healthy mind
No.
You cannot drive past the gate, so close to this milk bar. Too afraid of being caught – your face, what is in it, after all these years. Still snared. What will he make of that? He is a love object, of course, he has shifted into that. Was always in that realm. You cannot even describe him properly; he is not fully rounded, fully human. You never knew him, you only recognised him – as an archetype. Every girl needs one, the obsession, at some point, to learn about life, to grow. To marry the one that is not.
No.
The man who had grown used to sucking on the marrow of other people’s lives. The man who did not like his stillness rattled, his stillness so necessary to create, he made that clear from the start.
But then you.
Does he ever even think about you? Does he ever recall that summer and the whole roaring tsunami of experience that transformed your life?
Or did it just roll off him like water from a duck’s back? His fucking-toy, his summer project, his experiment to some day write about. The distraction. The annoyance. He never gave in, never loved enough; he was too disciplined for that, feared the consequences too much.
You stand abruptly from the table. Snap through the plastic strips.
Need it gouged out.
Lesson 180
Wives either sinking into a hopeless indifference, or wearing themselves out with weak complainings, which never result in any amendment
Finally, the courage. To face him.
To offload him from your life.
Churning through you, churning, as you speed down the roads that your bicycle flew over once. On a day of ringing light, ringing out like a church bell. The little manual beside you, as if to anchor the reality of what went on once. It did happen. This is proof. And a plan, perhaps, to bury the book like a time capsule deep and forgotten under the earth. At Woondala. To return it, to stem it. You slow along the final dirt road that meanders like a pale river amid the green. The deep gash of a wound through the impenetrable wilderness. You do not know what is ahead, you slow in wonder at the dips and curves once soldered upon your heart.
The gate is open.
After twenty-five years.
You gasp. You weren’t expecting that.
You park. As disbelieving as that time when you came upon the gate locked. How long has it been like this? You slip through, just like that. The breezy blue-sky day is so crisp it almost pings; there is a knife-edge sharpness to the light, a tenseness.
Light-headed. The blood pounding in your ears. Breathing fast.
Can you just step back into this life? What is ahead? Can you bear it? You must. A beautifully renovated mansion, perhaps, a solid country wife, roses around the verandah, three kids, Dad at work in the city, he’ll be back tonight, come in, have a cuppa, wait. The blood pounding in your head. What madness to do this? What right do you have?
The right to your own life.
Lesson 181
They were honestly in love
Scored deep in the bark of the Scribbly Gum, still:
‘My spirit so high it was all over the heavens.’
Pound
Your fingers trace the knobbly words gnarled over by a sap as rich as amber – as if the tree bled with it in the years after you left – and you hold your cheek to its coolness, allow yourself this, your heart racing and then you walk on, around the curve in the driveway and past the ditch where you’d always drop your bike, that you can barely discern now the bush has claimed it so triumphantly, and then there it is. Woondala.
As you left it.
That last time.
All those years ago.
The canvas water bag still looped over the knocker by the front door, the nameplate still bruised with neglect. No cars. No bike. No life. Nothing.
As silent as a church.
A ruined church, abandoned to its ghosts.
With the air of a building affronted by its emptiness; that it should ever have come to this.
Lesson 182
The very element in which true friendship lives is perfect liberty
There is no one here. Time has stood still. You step inside and graze through the rooms. Linger over the candelabra in the wide grate, the crazed china tea cups, the piano with its possum droppings, the gutted stool spilling its hessian.
So little has changed. You don’t get it. It is as if time has never passed. But of course it has, so much: your life since – full rich busy bursting – in all the ways! Several rooms upstairs now have crude padlocks on their doors. You peek through a keyhole to a solid wall of furniture. So, what looks like a household
of junk. An entire life packed up.
You return to the ground level, to the bedroom with its mattress still on the floor and pull up the jumble of quilt over the pillow, and straighten it, like it’s a dead man’s bed and then you lie belly down on the couch in the drawing room and breathe it in; still the same smell of age, and love, and wisdom, and weariness. Your arms slip around the padding in a gesture of embrace and you stare at the air all a-hover with its dust, waltzing in the disturbance you always make, spinning and whirling so stately in the slanting lemony light. All is quiet, except the tin roof cracking and pinging in its heat. You let the stillness wash over you – from twenty-five years ago, from when everything was suspended, tremulous, in the now. No future, no past. Just … this. Exactly this.
Did those days ever really exist? Was it all in your head? Your addled, hormonal, aching-with-loneliness teenage head. When love was this truancy from your normal life.
You have your book. Your manicured fingertips idly flick the pages, halting at the ones so busy at the end. Proof. You turn onto your back, vividly wet for him again, for all of it.
To be combusted once more into life, to be turned into someone else.
You squeeze your eyes in pain at the memory of him grabbing your chin and turning it to him, savagely, my wild sweet girl, he’d whisper urgently and it is the voice you hear now.
But who was the ravenous one, the devourer? Who the submissive? Teach me, you demanded, urging him on, further, always further, high on glee and the new, the constant new; the neophiliac, he called you once.
‘I can’t keep up, I need a two-day break just to rest. All that teenage energy, good grief, the sheer overwhelming force of it!’
You still think there is something courageous in the constancy of your love, wrong and ridiculous that it is.
He is the love thief.
Your entire life he has been that.
As were you, once. Sucking at the marrow of his experience.
Lesson 183
In the world’s harsh wear and tear many a very sincere attachment is slowly obliterated
You sit up.
The study.
You haven’t checked it yet. The door always locked.
You passed it before, closed, and assumed it was out of bounds as it always was to you – but you should check. His inner sanctum, workshop, sweatshop; the nub of his life. You rush out, heart pounding, to the door with its battered iron knob.
It swings open at the lightest of touches.
Waiting for you.
Can you? Should you?
Stepping inside, gingerly. Breath held.
As if lifting the shroud from a dead person, lying in state.
Lesson 184
Her conduct and character as a human being is accountable to God as much as the greatest woman that ever was born
A room bare, of everything.
Except your gifts.
Every single thing you gave him, once.
All the books taken from the shelves, all the magazines, the pinned quotes on the notice board, the piles of papers and the manuscripts. Everything of him. Every word, except the words glued in a ladder of permanency once, in furious, tear-brimmed need.
‘So you never forget, mate.’
You soak through and permeate the spirit and skin of my days …
Every conversation I have with you sneaks inspiration upon me … I just want to be with you forever …
The other day I felt as if I had fallen in love with your soul, my feelings were that strong …
On his desk: the old Capstan tobacco tin that fits, perfectly, his architect’s pencils. You flip it open. Empty.
On the blank book shelves: the old blue bottle with its bubbles of clearness. Two desiccated willow crowns. A line of photographs, perfectly neat. A girl in a cheongsam dress. Leering at the camera, poking out her tongue, scrunching up her nose in cheekiness. Her long blonde hair ratty across her face, freckles smeared across her nose, sharp teeth. A cheeky gap in the front, now fixed. A girl who owned her sexuality – that young, ready body – filled up with sun and wind and light.
Over the writing chair: the dress itself in the faded Liberty spring print. You stare at its slimness that once fit you perfectly. How on earth did you ever fit into it? It still smells, faintly; cripes, never washed.
On an old wire coat hanger hanging from the door: a flannelette shirt with the sleeves torn off. How he got that, God knows. Can’t remember leaving it.
On the floor, some French homework you must have left behind, your funny looped handwriting back then that still had the nuns’ imprints upon it, but was trying to cut loose.
Against a far wall, propped: your old bicycle, Peddly. You kneel down in wonder at the trusty wheels, the dusty spokes, the chain that always fell off. Your dad had tossed it, that much you know. Abandoned it by a roadside or the local tip. And now, here. Gosh.
In his typewriter: the sheet of paper you scrawled yes on once in gleeful blobs and scratches. When you finally had him caught. That moment of knowing, in your exuberant script.
Beside it: the very first souvenir, the scrap of checked cloth from a cut-away shirt, still with its tractor treads of grease. From your grandfather’s drill, long lost.
Now, here. All of it.
You spin around, in bewilderment, the old tobacco tin in your hand. A tear splashing on the scurried surface, varnishing it up.
A shrine …
To a girl, once. Long gone.
You sit gingerly on the hard, worn saddle of your bike. Trying to work it all out. Your fingers fit perfectly into the handlebars worn into a smoothness on their undersides. A whole other narrative – a whole other book – in all this.
The other side. Of a secret life.
A man you know nothing of.
Lesson 185
The greatest blessing of all external blessings is to be able to lean your heart against another heart, faithful, tender, true and tried, and record with a thankfulness that years deepen instead of diminishing, ‘I have got a friend!’
A museum of you.
Nothing else in the bareness. An emptiness that is beautifully clean, swept.
Tended.
You gasp. Everything here is kept, as opposed to removed and you weep at that for it is the exact reverse of your father’s house; it is the way you always wanted, dreamt of your childhood world being preserved – everything of your mother’s stark in it, vivid and cherished, highlighted by the absence of everything else. But of course it never was, all of that was tossed out in the indifferent vigour of the new marriage.
As it should be, perhaps. As life goes on.
But this.
One searing summer, thrown into stark relief. As if it was all that mattered in the end. A secret place in the wilderness, washed by its beautiful light. Commemorating a moment in time when you were both haunted together. Both of you. That is clear, from this, and your hands are now at your mouth, in shock.
Lesson 186
Her own sphere cannot contain her
You ring your father on the iPhone – you’re with an old friend you’ve run into, you have a lot of catching up to do. He’s fine with that, the kids are tops, they loved the rodeo – wouldn’t get off the bucking bronco, had three goes each, are covered in ice cream and dirt.
‘As little boys should be, mate,’ you laugh.
You stay in Woondala deep into that swirling evening, roaming the rooms, lying on the couch and the mattress and then belly down on the floorboards of the verandah, listening to the bush settle into its quiet, trying to work it all out. You’d stay longer if you could but the blankets on the bed are musty, the sheets are stained by too much living, too long ago. And this is a ghost house, a dead house. You’d always felt it would be a different entity entirely, at night.
In two days you go back, and then again.
Drawn to his study, the vivid core of him, then.
You begin to write.
It feels right. At his desk. On hi
s chair. Your little volume beside you, combing through all the words with the perspective of a middle-aged woman who’s lived a crammed life since. Writing to understand, to work it all out.
Lesson 187
There is a solitude which gradually grows into the best blessing of our lives
You used to swim laps, several times a week, and then you went to church, evensong, on a Sunday night; and then you sat and typed, in a room that catalogued a relationship once.
The feeling at the end of each activity the same: a cleansing, a serenity. That you have done something solid. Good. Right. Seizing the alone, and lit with it.
No longer feeling you are the rubbed-away housewife with absolutely nothing to contribute, the little woman being pushed to the side of her own life. Here, anonymously, you are the pulsing beating glittering centre of it. Secretly, deliciously.
It feels good. To have found a voice.
To be honest, at last.
Lesson 188
After marriage, for either party to desire a dearer or closer friend than the other, is a state of things so inconceivably deplorable that it will not bear discussion
It is Friday. You are staying late. You have told your father you’re at your friend’s house again; not sure why you want to be here this night, alone, can’t explain it, even to yourself. But it is a Friday, a weekend is ahead, when people pay visits to their country places …
Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Page 43
