Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (62 page)

Scored deep in the bark of the Scribbly Gum, still:

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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 his 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.