Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You
Page 60
Because Connie will no longer let a man dictate her story, nor quash it, nor control it nor represent it. This is who she is and she has found the courage, finally, to speak out. This is a woman’s vulnerability. Her complexity. Her hiddenness and contradictions, her defiance and her daring. She knows there will be hatred and belittling and derision and scorn but still she writes on, and on. Because she is no longer afraid. Because she will not be objectified. Because she has to own her story, her truth – no one else.
65
The world is crammed with delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about that – not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness is the only thing that counts
A little fishing village on the cusp of the Pacific. Roaring light. All wondrous, strange, fresh. The trees shed their bark here but not their leaves; ‘the ripping trees’, Connie calls them, to Mel, in delight. So much delight! He has told her that at times he is afraid of all this, starting flush, the huge differences; but he believes in her being with him, in the peace of them being together and in the peace of their fucking and so they are here in this place. Where people smile when they talk. Where you cannot be boxed in. Where the top schools in this country, in terms of academic results, are all free, state. The optimism of a meritocracy! Where there’s not the bitterness of envy like in England because anyone can be anything here, if you work hard enough; they both hear it all the time but, most importantly, they see it.
Connie rubs her growing belly, often. Looks across to the venerable mulberry tree in the unfenced park next door that’s like a benevolent god with its long arms dipping down, dispersing its joy to all in the know. She watches the tree shivering, the local children high in its limbs, arms and legs and blue-swabbed faces briefly bursting out only to be drawn back inside the green depths to more juicy baubles of sweetness, and yet more, higher and higher as the lower branches are denuded and she smiles vast, listening to shrills and shrieks of triumph and it’s pure exhilaration, to bottle, to pass on to the next generation, and the next. Her little one will be a part of all this. This freedom, this hurting light. And she is glad, so immensely glad of that.
For Connie, this is a place where the eye rests. Yes, the talking dark of night is crammed with feral screams and rustlings and hoots and squawks, possums and foxes and cockatoos, kookaburras and lorikeets, but by day she sits on her balcony, writing out her truth. Virginia, dear, wise Virginia, her guide and barometer of honesty in all this. The words prowl until they are written, for Connie will no longer let a man dictate the parameters of her life and with that resolve comes a vast relief. She is swept clear of Cliff. Of all that he threatens. She has found a voice. And so the happiness plumes through her in this tiny old teapot of a weatherboard house that rings with its foreign air and light and squawks.
How strange and terrifying it must have been for those first British settlers, Connie thinks, as if an alien god had created this world to astound, to terrify: it sounds like it hurts to be in this place. She comes from a country of soft days, soft rain, soft light, where the morning quietly clears its throat. Australia’s not like that – it’s a full roar into the day and how she loves the exuberance of that. Through wide windows the garden greenery tosses in the sea breeze like the heads of wild ponies and nature presses close, she can feel the great thumb of it. She is as calm as an eiderdown, here, within it, an eiderdown lying snugly, quietly, in readiness for its bed. Connie sleeps deeply here, her nights unbroken, for her man strong beside her is like a cool trickle of water upon her soul and it is all bringing her into stillness, to rest, for the first time in her life; she is content, she is content. As she steps into a new life unbound, optimistic, freed, by the truth; as if a great corset has been unloosed.
Note
The author acknowledges with gratitude the words of Virginia Woolf, which provide each chapter with its opening quotation.
About the Author
Nikki Gemmell is the author of The Bride Stripped Bare, the original publication of which sparked tremendous media interest. Both The Bride Stripped Bare and its follow-up With My Body went on to become huge bestsellers. Nikki Gemmell has written eight novels and regular columns for the Mail on Sunday and the Australian Weekend Magazine.
Also by Nikki Gemmell
FICTION
Shiver
Cleave (published in the US as Alice Springs)
Lovesong
The Bride Stripped Bare
The Book of Rapture
With My Body
NON-FICTION
Pleasure: An Almanac for the Heart
Why You Are Australian
Honestly: Notes on Life
Copyright
Fourth Estate
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This omnibus edition first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013
The Bride Stripped Bare
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2003
Copyright © Nikki Gemmell 2003
‘Hallelujah’ written by Leonard Cohen; lyrics reprinted with kind permission by Sony/ATV Music Publishing. ‘Laid’ written by Booth/Glennie/Gott; lyrics reprinted by kind permission of Blue Mountains Music Ltd. ‘Small Wire’ reprinted by kind permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.
With My Body
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2011
Copyright © Nikki Gemmell 2011
‘The Son’ by Pablo Neruda, translated by Donald D. Walsh, from The Captain’s Verses, copyright © Pablo Neruda and Donald D. Walsh 1972; reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Group.
I Take You
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013
Copyright © Nikki Gemmell 2013
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2013 ISBN: 9780007530045
Version 1
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These novels are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Nikki, Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You