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

by Gemmell, Nikki

  Leaving him – magnificent rupture – would humiliate him, of course, the anger would be encompassing and immense. Connie is inside the black oil of his mind now, inside his desire to infiltrate, dominate, swamp. She is all Cliff has. All he wants is for her to stay with him, in this, the husk of his life; be with him for ever, propping him up, his sexual regenerator and adornment. He needs the public show of that, the public theatre of his power over this aspect of his life. This man before her is almost an emotional cripple – and she does not know how she can extricate herself.

  ‘A child would seem just like my own, I guess. If it’s done right. Legally. Emotionally. People will ask. We’d keep things to ourselves, of course. I’d get everything watertight. Contracts and so forth.’ He’s talking it through, trying to make it work. Connie is listening, her heart breaking. He is willing to do this – something he categorically does not want – for their marriage. To keep up the pretence, to have her by his side, to preserve the past in aspic. He is taking over this too as he takes over everything and he doesn’t even realize it; his unbending way with control. No, it could never work. For her or a child, and Cliff doesn’t understand and most likely never would. Connie has wondered if he’d ever fall in love with Marichka – if the hired help could be her distraction, her saviour – but she’s a diversion, nothing more than that. She sees it now. He would never publicly be with her, he wouldn’t stoop. There’s no cachet in the hired help. As for Connie …

  ‘Come here,’ he commands. ‘Kiss me.’

  As if he senses something new in his wife, something quite incomprehensible and he needs to sniff it out. Some straightness of the spine, a looseness, a stepping back.

  ‘Kiss me!’ he demands.

  Connie hackles at the thought: the stumpy, joyless, wooden blocks of his mouth. He revolts her, with every hair of her body, she can’t do it, can’t explain it.

  ‘No, Cliff, not tonight.’

  ‘Why?’ Wounded.

  ‘I just don’t want to. I’m tired.’

  Connie turns, murmurs goodbye, cannot meet her husband’s eyes. Cannot tell him she is not coming near him because another man’s smell and his sperm is strong upon her, smeared lavishly and triumphantly across her stomach, breasts, thighs; and she is rank, filthy with it and cannot hurt him so much.

  ‘Con? Con!’ The voice bewildered suddenly, on the cusp of an understanding, as if Cliff has suddenly caught a glimpse of a future he has never contemplated.

  She does not turn back. Mustn’t.

  42

  My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?

  A restless mongrel of a night, spatterings of rain like hard rice against the high windows. The wind wheening outside Connie’s room is as mournful as a distant aria and the trees from the garden below shake their leaves like the manes of recalcitrant ponies and wet leaves slick the glass. Connie will not bath, wants to keep the animal smell on her, of earth, of sex, of spit and air and grubbiness. She will not wash herself all night, for the sense of Mel’s flesh touching her, his very stickiness, is dear, replenishing, holy. She no longer wants padlocks and blindfolds, sophistication, theatre, clandestine texts, she just wants simplicity. The wonder of that. One man, who listens. Stillness. Spirituality. Quiet. Her cunt reeks, she wants wildness, wants to roll herself in it, wants a different soil, sky, land to this. Wordsworth journeyed back to Wales to listen to the language of his former heart; should she return to Cornwall? With Mel? Go somewhere else? Would he come? What to do, how to begin … what?

  Connie’s mind is jumpy tonight with dreams and plans and connivances and plots as she contemplates a vast spring cleaning of her future, her entire life. Her gods now – the gods of change and rupture and the astonishing earth.

  Connie looks across at her bookshelf, an old shoe rack from the Golborne Road, and skims all the strong female voices that have spined her own life. Any clues? Help? Are all female narratives of empowerment narratives of escape? It’s why Portrait of a Lady is so devastating, of course, why she could only ever bear to read it once. She picks up Mel’s battered old Virginia Woolf. NEVER READ THIS AGAIN – but of course, no, she must. ‘I’m always doing what I’m told not to,’ that’s what he said to her that odd, jangly night. Connie thinks of his separateness, his self-containment, the potency of a man strong with his choices and not wavering from them. She flips open To the Lighthouse and starts to read. The thud of recognition, the heart-stopping thud of it, and she scrabbles for a journal and scribbles in it. Again and again. A roar of pages filled up.

  A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

  Yes, yes. Woolf will be her guide, her beacon. All her novels, her essays, her certainties and admonishments and eviscerating truths. Tomorrow she will go to Daunt’s, buy the extent of her.

  She must act. Just that. Now, before it is too late.

  43

  There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin to say something in my own voice

  The intercom, buzzing in her bedroom. Insistent. Connie picks it up. Neither greeting nor warmth. ‘Prepare yourself. You have an hour. I’ll be in my office.’

  The voice struts. Ah, the Cliff of old.

  Connie’s hand reaches down, she is a different woman now, she has been hauled into a different life and her body blazes it. She is fuller and softer and looser, hairier; her body less brittle, self-hating, desperate. No, she will do this, reveal herself. It is the start of the new life and Cliff must know it. She stands proud in front of the mirror, marvelling at the fresh self. Reclaimed, returned to nature, the earth.

  The intercom again. ‘Bring your trinket. I want to put it in. I want to snap it shut.’

  Connie does not respond, cannot. The punctures would be closed up now, surely, faint scars all that’s left of her former life. The padlock lies somewhere lost in the dirt near the shed, claimed by the undergrowth. She mustn’t think how much it was worth.

  Connie turns back the mirror, biting her lip; back to her new body and everything it signals about her release. Her husband waits. She will not shave herself, she will not give him what he wants; the fury will be incandescent. Connie is very still, for a moment, stuck. What is she doing? What will be the consequences? Is she mad? She suddenly feels like she’s standing barefoot on oysters, stranded by an incoming tide, can’t move but can’t stay, stuck.

  She must go down.

  Cannot be a fugitive in her own house. She showers, throws on the silken kimono, ties it languidly, ready for a slipping off. Pads slowly down, down the grand staircase, breathing measured and calm, collecting herself.

  Shuts the office door behind her. The screen is down; it runs almost the length of one wall. So, a video, porn, right; and usually as she watches them with Cliff the liquid warmth plumes through her despite herself and she cannot help but succumb, despite herself, widening her legs on her chair and playing as Cliff hands across a vibrator, and another, as he toys with his Mont Blanc pen, the secret signal that begins it all and she is opening out, needing the coming, urgently, the next step. And she is greedy with the looking at these films as long as it doesn’t veer into anything too long, or monotonous; it is all the thrill, the anticipation that she wants.

  Cliff wheels up to her now, vividness in his face, a video camera in his lap; he has sometimes filmed in the past and she has played up to it, trusting, yielding so much; entranced. ‘I need my wife back.’

  Eagerly his Mont Blanc pen tugs the bow of her kimono, loosens it. The silk falls open. Connie drops the gown from her shoulders. Her husband gasps. It is as if a vast gulf suddenly separates them. As if his wife has gone on a strange new journey without him knowing anything of it. He has not controlled it in any way, has not allowed it, she is lost.

  ‘It – it doesn
’t mean anything to me any more, Cliff. It’s just … gone.’ She shrugs. ‘Everything we do. All of it.’ She shuts her eyes on hot wet. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  They stare at each other, the two of them who have bared so much, gone on such a journey in tandem, nothing to say because there is nothing to say. The whole scenario worked because it was the two of them together, in an entranced and astonished collaboration. Cliff’s lips tighten. He spins his chair. ‘I wish you’d told me,’ he says, tight. He clicks on the film, a black man with an enormous cock and a white woman with impossible breasts, the ridiculous thrusting, the ugly close-up, the monotony, the bleakness, the utter absence of mystery and beauty in any of it; Connie cannot watch.

  She picks up her robe, puts it back on and ties the belt firm and tight.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  A match snuffed.

  ‘I need something else now.’

  ‘What?’ The word is spat, as if Cliff can hardly bear to ask.

  Connie shrugs, helpless. ‘Life.’

  Cliff’s face. Pale with fury and devastation and loss.

  44

  To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself

  Sunday morning. Needing a quietening. A necessary removal from all of them, to recalibrate. What is happening to Connie as uncertainty and indecision stain her life? A drawing to … what? Mystery. A veering towards it like an ocean liner subtly altering course for a new destination in the great ocean of life. Yet the destination’s unknown.

  Before Cliff’s accident Connie had attended church. He certainly didn’t, ever, still doesn’t; one of those pitbull atheists, a sneerer à la Dawkins. Yet increasingly she’s finding there’s something … all-calming … about her Sunday morning experiences at the family-crammed church of St Peter’s in its high, shouting ochre on Notting’s hill. It’s an astonishing leak through a veneer of aspirant coolness and moneyed cynicism; a gentle drip, drip, through her restless, caged, unsettled life. Connie feels righted by these assignations, balmed, lit.

  ‘I like that you go to church,’ Mel said to her once, even though he doesn’t go himself. As if it softens her. As if it separates her from those who are the jeering, the sneering, the unsettled – and the ones with a chip of ice.

  So. Sunday mornings, quite bravely alone. Connie’s brief coracle of solace. Brought down into stillness by a spiritual enveloping from a service mostly sung. The hour or so freshening, shining, rejuvenating. At times she says no, it’s ridiculous, she’s with that gentle atheist, Alain de Botton on this one; tipping her hat to the graces within organized religion but not sucked in by them. Yet Connie knows that she’ll never be aligned with the Cliffs and the Dawkins of the world, thumping that believers are deluded, stupid; she has too much respect for the mysterious in life. Which includes Mel. Can’t turn her back on wonder, craves it, in a sense. Found it, long ago, in the wild places of her travelling youth, the places where the silence hums – Greenland’s ice deserts, Cornwall’s high moors, under a full butter moon – yes, yes. She wants those places again. Somewhere in her life. Her rescue is tied up in them, she just knows it.

  Connie feels silted up, often now, with the great weight of acquiring and cramming and rushing and worrying and just getting by; grubbied. Needs the simplicity of a spiritual way, its light touch, a tuning fork back into calm. The ocean liner on its unknown path is veering her towards those most shining qualities of religious practice: pilgrimage, contemplation, quiet. With Mel, she hopes. Somehow.

  What she does know: that religion’s a miracle of survival. That places of potent spirituality do not belong entirely to earth. The tugging, the faint whisper of a tugging … and Connie has to find her way back to them. Urgently, it feels now.

  Alone, or with someone else.

  45

  I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts

  Everywhere the lovely tight buds of the roses, waiting for a springing into bloom, everywhere the vast loosening as light floods weary, winter-bowed bones, everywhere an uncurling, an unfolding. People, their faces open to the sky, flowers, the happy philadelphus and yellow-wort and the springing grass before the dryness of summer and it all turns to leaching heat and spareness and dust; it’s a tingling day of high giddiness and Connie wants to grab all of it, all, this teeming exuberance, wander through it with eyes wide and fingers trailing and be replenished, by all of it, smell it and giggle and delight. In the garden, of course.

  ‘I want to touch you like you touch me,’ she tells Mel. ‘I’ve never really touched your body, properly, like you have mine.’

  ‘How do I touch you?’

  ‘With reverence. I’ll never forget it. Because no man’s ever touched me like that before. If I never saw you again, after this day, I’d remember your touch for the rest of my life. It’s … stamped. Yes, that’s the word. Stamped. By tenderness. I’ll never forget it.’

  Connie straddles Mel’s supine body and shuts her eyes and places her two palms flat on his chest.

  ‘You feel me as if you’re blind. As if it’s the last time you’ll ever touch me, every time you do that. It’s like you’re committing everything to memory, wondering and delighting and … sanctifying … yes, that. So I’ll never forget you. It’s a gift, you know.’

  Mel’s penis stirs under her hand, Connie slips it into her, moves on him, soft. Brings him into a coming with her sensitivity learned and her quietness and as he peaks she bears down on him, voluptuous and feels him spasming in her like a dying animal and embraces as if it’s the last time, the last time ever, and she will never forget.

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ he pants. ‘You’re trapping me.’

  ‘Yes, ssssh, it’s all right, no talk.’ A fingertip brushes down Mel’s lips, a vast smile fills her up.

  46

  They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions

  On a glary morning of high heat Connie feels a quickening in her womb, as if the sunshine has touched it and bloomed it into happiness. All about her, nannies and babies in the garden and chitter-chat, all about her, friends falling pregnant, baby showers, girlfriends needing coffees and catch-ups and movie nights. Connie’s always a good sounding board, someone peaceful and repairing to have about. They call her a lot, checking up. She’s a listener, a deep pool of stillness and quiet just waiting to receive, one of those rare ones who never wants to talk about herself. She doesn’t butt in over sentences, trying to dazzle with her own thoughts, doesn’t crash into conversations with ever bigger and better and more hilarious anecdotes.

  Connie wonders, though, at yet another brasserie of blonde wood and ringing talk, if the social world is becoming a little more shouty now, raucous, in your face? Everyone’s so eager to talk at you, over the top of you, cram in their two bobs’ worth – but actually, quietly, to enquire? To listen deeply? No, she doesn’t see much of that. Only with Mel, who asks so many questions of her and it’s so odd in a man; he seems at times as if he wanted to drink her up. Needing to understand.

  She longs often for Mel’s quiet. The comfort of their silence, in sync. With Cliff the silence was oppressive, accusatory, as it shouted their differences, that they had so little in common and how did they get to this and they must spend the rest of their lives amid it.

  Connie’s book club is fracturing as hospital appointments, pregnancy yoga classes, exhaustion, end-of-year concerts and summer parties disrupt life. Again and again it feels like Connie’s friends are succumbing and falling pregnant but they’re always careful with this news around her, Cliff be
ing Cliff of course, and the accident … and she’s always so reticent about that side of her life now, poor lamb … there’s been a vast reassessing, a reining back … it must be very painful, not too much is asked.

  ‘Tragic, all of it. Such a supreme alpha male. He probably couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else’s child so that’s that, I guess. She’s the good wife, Con. Bless.’

  No, Connie would not be drawn. On any of it. Such a rare orchid in her exquisitely tasteful, lonely married life; pitied, talked about, endlessly called on to be godmother as if that would be enough. But her thinking veers so fundamentally, often now; she’s reluctant to bring a child into this jangly, jittery world of keeping up, couldn’t say any of this to any of them. Sees it again and again, all around her: how children seem to send the women around her slightly mad. Piteously obsessed. Is it exhaustion? Empowerment now they’re no longer at work? Competitive banker husbands demanding too much of everyone? Too much time on their hands?

  The friends who turn into harridans, bullies, where their child’s school is involved, haranguing the teachers and the principals over their precious, infinitely talented darlings; demanding better results, more readings in church, a bigger role in the school play, more tuition, attention, certificates. Imogen has a poo phobia so can never change her baby’s nappies, has to have round-the-clock help and Connie wonders if it’s a secret canniness. Charlotte, Honor and Floss have weekend nannies alongside nannies for each child during the week; when, Connie wonders, are those children actually noticed, let alone surrounded by their parents, basted in love like butter and cherished? India endlessly rails over the mobile phones given out as party gifts at a girl’s twelfth birthday, yet gives out goldfish to every child at her son’s sixth. Then the flurry of end-of-year teacher presents: the voluptuous bouquets from Wild at Heart as big as a television, bottles of Moët, exquisite gift boxes from Space NK. Then there’s the horror of the entrance exams, when her friends disappear into an insanity of pushing and tutoring and hating and shouting and deep, wrenching torment over who got into what. For Connie, sitting back among it all and quietly listening, endlessly listening, this world feels mad, unhinged, overripe.