With My Body (16 page)
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
‘Why?’ Knowing he’s right.
‘There was this Sydney writer called Michael Dransfield, who said that to be a poet in Australia was the ultimate commitment.’ He shakes his head as if he’s just about given up. ‘All I can say is, I know
exactly
where he’s coming from.’
You step away from his typewriter. Swirl around slowly, breathing his world in. Knowing now what you want more than anything else.
This life. Him. All of it.
The ultimate commitment.
Daughters should be early taught to check every tendency towards ‘a romantic attachment’—the insane folly of loving a man for what he is, rather than for what he has got
There are no words but the Bible’s in your own home. Your life with your father is all gristle; there is no meat in it, no juice. He left school at fourteen and never got around to proper punctuation and when he writes a letter it presses through several pages of his writing pad underneath, the words are so painstakingly formed. The amateur writer, still, like a schoolboy just learning; trying not to betray his ignorance.
He’s only ever written you one letter in his life. He sent it to your boarding school the week you left home. No punctuation, of course.
Don’t forget the old man loves you have to go now crib time don’t forget all right.
It was preserved in the back of your diary.
Burnt, of course.
If you waste time, you waste not only your substance but your very soul—not that which is your own, but your maker’s
‘Why does Julian stick you all the way out here?’
Because everything about them says they’re city types.
‘It’s my choice. Sydney’s too noisy to work in. Everything invades my life there too much. And … I’m a bit shy in it, to be honest. I feel stronger in this place.’ He looks at you; you cock your head, believe him—he’s stripping himself here and it’s something new and you smile, slowly, at it and nod. You feel stronger too in the bush.
‘It’s like, when I’m not given the space to do what I really want to do I get agitated, I’m all at sea, lost.’ He shrugs. ‘I’m a nightmare to be around.’
‘Mmmm.’ You’re smiling in vigorous agreement.
He chuckles; alright. Takes a tumbler from the book shelf and lifts a glass stopper from a crystal decanter and pours out a golden liquid, swirls it, and teases its tart earthiness under your nose. You jerk back like a spooked horse. He laughs, examining you afresh, and downs it.
‘Not for you, eh?’
You sit again at his seat and arch your back with your hands stretching high above you, then flop them over your head and
slowly spin, surveying his lovely cocoon of a world.
‘I want to stay here forever,’ you breathe deep. ‘Dive, right into this life.’
He steps back. Holds up his hands as if everything’s—suddenly—galloping ahead too fast.
‘Oh no, no. Don’t say that. This world would crush you in a week and you’d end up being anything but a writer. A banker, an accountant, anything. You’d be scarred for life.’
He raises his glass to you, it’s not quite celebratory.
‘You, young lady, have what Harper Lee calls “one’s original promise”. And believe me, it’d be lost around here quick smart.’
You screw up your face. ‘What are you
on
about?’
‘You’re an appreciator,’ he says. ‘I am not. I’m far too cynical for the likes of you. You seize life, I watch it. The difference is too great.’
A prickly silence. He’s right; he’s a watcher, like a cat. You’re a participator, every particle of your body is roaring to muck in, to grab and cherish and savour and possess.
The difference, yes, is too great. He said it. Something slinks away in you in that moment like a dog with its tail between its legs.
‘I don’t want any of me rubbing off on you,’ he adds gently. ‘Don’t want you changing. You should go home immediately and never come back.’
He means it.
‘Go on. Scat.’
You’re standing, confused, stopped. Can’t tell if he’s joking or not, can’t tell anything anymore. Everything a sign, everything a signal—or not—you’re breathing fast, too young for this. You’ve entered a new phase of play in this room and cannot read it, it’s
so confusing, adult; he doesn’t seem grumpy and cynical in any way in here, he’s like a man supremely happy with this secret life that he has chiselled out for himself and he doesn’t want anything to invade it.
Which you have, of course. Which you want.
This room, this house—they’re all teaching you the importance of living a light life, of surrounding yourself with things that are beautiful but do not weigh you down and you are learning the great balm of simplicity here; a house that envelops you with reassurance and it’s been so long since you’ve had that. You want it and he knows it and he’s let you in too far. Yes, that’s it.
The ‘annoyance’, he saw that from the start.
With a thudding heart you pick up the ocean-blue bottle from your father’s shed. It’s in front of a row of books, Patrick Whites, all covered in careful plastic. You place the beautiful little object squarely in front of his typewriter, right in his line of sight. As if in ownership. Then you slip out his little Victorian volume from your pocket—that always accompanies you now—and slide it in snugly next to the Patrick Whites.
You turn and look straight at him.
He does not move. He does not speak. But he is smiling, from the corner of his mouth, just. Intrigued, surprised; it’s in his eyes, you note it. He looks at the book shelf and shakes his head—uh uh—something’s wrong, it can’t work like this. He plucks your little leather volume from his shelf and hands it back, insists. The tone has switched again.
So, an unspoken game, a gift for a gift.
You flip open a random page.
Close the eyes that no husband ever kissed.
You do, and your insides peel away as if he has slipped his fingers into a secret place and brushed a whisper of a touch. You smile, can’t help it. At the book, at the blue bottle, at this speaking silence.
It has begun.
Whether he likes it or not.
Every time you come from now on—and you
will
come—a gift will accompany you.
That you will place.
Close the eyes that no husband ever kissed
Cycling to him the next day, faster than you’ve ever ridden, shackled now by want. A water bag is looped over your handlebars, ‘Austral Canvas’ stamped across its honeyed cloth.
The next gift. That would have been placed over a car’s radiator once. You can barely think what will be yours in return.
Thunder threatens, the sky is bruised like a plum; you shouldn’t go today, you must. You glance behind you at a curtain of grey falling across the land and pedal faster, flint in the air and you push yourself to stay ahead of it and then the first, fat splats come; the rain has beaten you. Do you turn back or do you get caught? No time. A flash of lightning. You jump, you hate lightning. Pedal more furiously. The rain catches you, grows heavier, pounds. Mud splashes into your face as you fly down the dirt roads, you are freezing, teeth chattering, your hair hangs in ratty rivulets, wet—it is spitting into your eyes, blurring your vision and you have to drag it off to see, make progress.
The gate, at last.
His road barely there in the driving rain, you can hardly make it out, the dirt flies up and the leaves whip across your face, you fall and get up, slimy now with mud and wet. Woondala is just ahead, finally, you are drenched. You see him waiting tall on the verandah and faster and faster you fly,
grinning, waving; you only see at the last moment the pothole the rain has carved in the road, huge and filled with its needles of dancing rain. You swerve.
Too late.
You try to correct yourself; pitch over the handlebars.
And black.
The boys may do a thousand things which are ‘not proper for little girls’
Your earlobe, held in the hollow of a mouth. Hands, lips, the tip of a tongue, waking you up.
‘You’re my downfall.’ The whisper of a breath. A mouth in the clavicle of your neck and the violin dip of your hip; against the vulnerability of your inner wrist and on your eyelids, just, trembling.
Or was that air? A cloud shift? A moth? What are you dreaming and what are you not?
Your eyelids so heavy, they roll back, again, into the dense lovely rain of deep sleep.
‘I’m sorry,’ he is breathing, apologetically, ‘you’re soaking wet.’ As you are turned, as your clothes are slipped off. ‘You’ll get pneumonia if I don’t.’ Are you dreaming it, you cannot climb out; hands are hovering, fingertips, the softest of touches, learning you as if they have never learnt a woman in their life, as if you are lit. Eating the dirt and the mud from your skin, licking it off with a tongue-tip; a mouth finding yours, a soul in the lips, waking you up. You shoot up with a gasp.
You are on the hessian lounge in the piano room.
A blanket is over you.
Your clothes are dry.
You have no idea how long you have been here. The slant of the light tells you it is late afternoon; you have no idea how many minutes have passed, hours, days.
You are alone.
Driven at last into open rupture
He is in the kitchen. His back to you, at the sink.
‘I’m here.’
‘Good.’
He does not look at you. He does not turn.
You are thrumming.
Unbearably close.
You know you should go now, you should turn around and walk from Woondala and never come back, you have to.
You walk up to him, to his back, and you stand on tiptoe and kiss him, a whisper of breath, on the back of his vulnerable neck.
‘I’m here.’
Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well
Done.
God in it.
At last.
A communication between you but more than that—a communion—that word of grace and connection; spiritually softened.
‘You feel beautiful,’ he says in the afterwards, a fingertip trailing from the dip of your neck to the top of your pubis. Your belly dips and you giggle, pushing him off.
‘You’re like a brand-new ballet slipper. Silky. Unscuffed.’ He shakes his head in wonder; at what has just happened, how it has got to this, how on earth it all began, here, in this lone man’s place.
‘Yeah, a ballet slipper just waiting to be all grubbied up,’ you tease. ‘To be flung into a corner and tossed out.’
‘Oh no,’ he exclaims, wounded, ‘no, not that. Never that.’
In the long golden stillness of late afternoon you lie in silence, Tol’s arm a seatbelt across your waist, and listen to the sky outside slowing, fading, in perfect peace.
The rain has stopped. The world is clean. You lift his arm from your sticky belly and put on your clothes. Slip away without saying goodbye. Without looking back. Your bike is propped by the front door, still with its water bottle looped over the handlebars. You sling the canvas bag over the knocker by the front door, a lion with a ring in its mouth.
The second gift.
That you have placed.
We begin to taste the full meaning of the world as a place where ‘we shall know even as we are known’
Days stagger by. You do not go back. Cannot. Cannot bear to return to find him gone, spooked, the gate padlocked; he didn’t want to do it, of course, his back was turned in the kitchen as if in shame, he was resisting, it was a dream—was it a dream?—he can’t go on, you’re a schoolgirl, you have exams to study for, a proper life, your father must never find out.
Too much no in it.
But then one—enormous—yes.
That moment when he turned from the sink, and kissed you.
When you forgot everything else.
Those only can find true friends who have in themselves the will and capacity to be such
Endlessly you flick through his little Victorian volume in your room on the back verandah. The brisk, sparky voice released by its anonymity, glowing with honesty and common sense. Then you come across it.
Let there be no hesitations, no regrets, no compromises—they are at once cowardly and vain.
You snap the volume shut.
Jump on your bike.
Love, also
Because you are the collator, the collector. Because this is the next phase of the experiment begun at fourteen and abandoned for a couple of years and now re-awakened, you need to know what follows, you are learning, deepening, opening up. Because he has shown you another way and it cannot stop yet. Because he pressed his disbelief into you at one point—that you were both doing this, that it had gone this far—and you don’t want that as an abiding memory for you both; a sense of wrongness, the stain of it.
Because you cannot stay away.
As simple as that.
Flying on your bike, arrowed to his north. Trembling between your legs, trembling in your chest. Your head telling you this is ridiculous, you have to stay away, he won’t be there, the gate will be locked—you feel too much, have to turn back, you’ll be hurt. You can’t. You must.
You stop at a willow tree and plait two crowns. The third gift.
The gate is ajar.
As you knew it would be. Your belly is somersaulting, you are wet. He wants this; he cannot bring himself to say it because of the illicitness in it and you need to come back to show him it’s
alright, your choice, you are absolutely complicit in this. Flying down his driveway and he is there, on the verandah, waiting; he sees you and stands, comes striding down the drive, runs.