Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (68 page)

Your little nugget of a secret at your writing desk in the attic.

Steadying your life like a keeled yacht.

Your manifesto, your instruction manual. It will be written with unflinching honesty; you’ve opened a door to a reckless, exhilarating new world and you work in a trance of liberation and defiance. You are stepping out of your normal self, becoming someone more brazen and confident, high on hormones and released. Rubbing your belly in glee. This will be anonymous, it is the only way to do it, with your little family so tight and so cherished around you. And when it is done you will walk away from it like a mother who’s adopted out a child, you will leave it to make its own way in the world and you will get on with your life.

And one day – you dream – Hugh will find it on his pillowslip.

No idea who it’s from. Any woman, and every woman.

But he will learn from it.

Oh yes.

What is healed: the great open wound you have carried all through your life. For a while there in adulthood you thought the searing hurt of your father’s withdrawal was getting worse, you had no defences for the pain of his sloppiness; it was increasing, in fact, as you reached middle age. But finally, after so long, it is cauterised. And you know now what the greatest chasm is between two people, out of all the chasms that can widen and swallow and swamp.

Love withheld, by a parent.

If you want to hurt the most, do the most damage – try that. If you want to see a miraculous healing, try the opposite. Love withheld can lock up a life. Lock up confidence, esteem, strength.

Your father will never say he loves you anymore, never say how proud he is of you, will never ring you on your birthday or send a present for Christmas despite you ringing him every one
of his own birthdays and each December 25th. He will never do any of these things, but he did something for you once.

And it is enough.

Six p.m. Hugh has commanded you disappear. Have a bath, read a magazine, rub lavender oil into your tummy, do all that women stuff.

‘Leave the boys to their men’s business, pizza boxes and beer cans,’ he announces with a cheeky grin, rubbing his hands in glee and flurrying the boys right up. You retreat upstairs, smiling as you hear the squeals and thumps and roars rising below you. A footy’s being kicked, you don’t mind; all you want, all you ever want, is their happiness.

You slip out your little manual with its depth charges threaded through it. Settle your bare feet on the creaky coffin-lid floor.

It feels like you are painstakingly sewing a quilt up here, in your little hidden space, a blanket of warmth and comfort, beauty and secrets – for all women, any women – pouring into it all the wisdom and the heartbreak, all the ridiculousness and the ugliness, all the vulnerability and want and exhilaration and truth.

It’s all you’ve got.

A voice.

And as it’s firmed, the world around you is beauty-ing up. The snow outside your window is ragged, undisciplined, dancing in the air in big, blowsy drops and the restless river churns below you in a beautiful ceaseless rush, somersaulting its foam over the rocks. The wind tugs at the tiny attic window that holds firm but protesting on its latch and the roar in the trees sounds like distant surf but the cosiness of your teapot of a house enfolds you strong in its embrace. It is all ravishing, deeply comforting; and right now, enough.

You are finally stepping into the happiness you’ve spent years backing away from. You didn’t deserve it, that is how you always felt; you couldn’t possibly just lie back in it and bask. But now.

All surrender.

The laughter tripping through you. As you do exactly what you want.

That night you feign sleep, face to face with Pip, to try and drop him into slumber. He puts his face so close to yours that you can feel his warm breath and then he touches, wondrously, learning. He touches your eyelids and tries to make them open, your lips, nose, cheeks, then he plants a huge, slightly askew smack of a kiss on your lips.

You want this to go on forever.

Later it is the man who curls around you. Hugh’s arm locks in yours, seat belt, he calls it, cupping his child in your belly. Firm in his grip you fall into sleep, nourished. Because what you have with Hugh is evenness, you always know his love, do not doubt it as he does not yours; it is a great constant.

What you have, now, is the seductiveness of shared sleep.

Perhaps it is happiness, perhaps removal, but you rarely think of Tol anymore. Is it a travesty, what you have become, from that girl you once were?

No. Biology took over. Your body insisted you go on this path.

Your breasts ache. Filling, once again, with milk. And this one feels different within you – you are spilling out, widening in a way you never did in the past, a regular Venus of Willendorf, good grief.

You begin to bleed.

It begins on a Thursday afternoon. During a huge day of ferrying kids to swimming and piano and play dates, one of those running days where you’re constantly trying to catch up. But you carry on. Need to have the kids sorted before you can get to this.

‘It might just be one of those pregnancy bleeds,’ Hugh says on the phone. ‘Rest. Alright?’

By Friday afternoon you are driving yourself to A and E. Are told to go home, put your feet up. The blood is spilling over the soaked pad between your legs, streaking down your legs; the volume is frightening. You wake up on the Saturday after a despairing, hoping, praying night with a sinking heart. So much blood. You wanted this child – this daughter, you just know it – so vastly. Don’t fall out!

Back to A and E. The doctor tells you your blood/hormone reading is 13,000 – which means it’s still there. Beautiful, radiant, soaring hope. The baby has somehow, miraculously,
gripped on while everything around it is falling away. Inside, still, is a ferociously beating heart. Despite despairing clumps of tissue and blood coming out and at one point, on the toilet, a soft rolling ‘pop’ of a something but the water in the bowl is too murky to get a proper look, and you can’t, quite.

All day, hope.

You’re admitted into a ward of gyni-complicated women. Are handed a grey cardboard bowl to catch whatever will come out. The coldness of the gesture cuts through you. You bite your lip, staring at it. Right. They want the foetus, their prize; want to examine it.

By nightfall the nurse confirms you are miscarrying. There is, of course, nothing that can be done. Nature must take its course. It’s for the best. And now it is as if your body just wants to flush the alien object out, you bleed and bleed in great clumps.

A scan confirms everything.

Nothing left.

‘Cry, and cry again, love,’ the radiographer soothes, her gentle hand on your belly and then around your heaving, shuddering back. ‘It’s a bereavement. Nothing less.’

Oh yes.

The hospital wants you staying but no, you must get out, there’s a family and a house that awaits. It is where you need
to be. You just want to hold your boys at this moment, your beautiful bright boysies, bury your nose into their softness and cuddle them tight, so tight.

As you walk from the fluorescence of the hospital’s bright electric doors: an enormous white balloon of sadness inside you, filling you up.