With My Body (27 page)
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
Now the shame washes through you as stately as hemlock, shutting you down. Retracting from everyone and everything. You wrap yourself in black, forget to wash your hair, ugly yourself up.
His plaything. His doll.
How
dare
he.
Oh yes. Anger, now, sludgy-black through all your days. At his weakness, his cowardice, his selfishness—alone in his tower, unable to face life. Such a little man.
How
dare
he.
By choosing a definite profession, a woman must necessarily quit the kindly shelter and safe negativeness of a private life
You go back to school, plough yourself into work. You have the gift of an excellent memory; it sees you through. You do not consider yourself especially clever, you can just recall so much, fool everyone.
As the anger congeals it hardens into aspic. But you have a life to live and so you must. Apart. Alone. Doubt and rage still there but it is as if a layer of skin has been peeled from your eyes. The desolation is wolfish, jagged, hurting. This is a stepping stone to the new—your next love will be more owned, more adult.
You are growing up.
You see Tol now. His running life. No woman’s to have or hold. See the essential loneliness of the soul; he demanded it and he has infected you with it. But you don’t like the solitude anymore—he has made you lonely in it, for the first time in your life.
And he has robbed you of your youth.
The chief canker at the root of women’s lives is the want of something to do
You pass your Higher School Certificate. Triumphantly.
The pride in your father’s eyes that he cannot articulate—he recognises that education is the way out. The only way out for his daughter; the only way to escape the life of his wife and all the women around him.
‘I support you in whatever you do,’ he tells you quietly on the day the letter arrives. But you know what he wants. There will not be poetry in grimy attics or acting courses or novels by the sea; none of that is a proper, solid, paying life. You are the first in the family to ever finish school let alone university and you have no choice. It will be a prestigious profession, law or medicine, at one of the nation’s top universities. You cannot let him down. It is unspoken, of course.
What has characterised the relationship between your father and yourself as your teenage years gathered pace: silence, absence, a pulling apart. Perhaps he has sensed you slipping away yourself, that you don’t need him anymore, and it’s his way of connecting—barbing you, hooking you, in the only way he can.
Through withdrawal and silence, the hurt of that.
But you smile now with the release of forgiveness. It is time to pay back all that love, so awkward and unspoken; but constant, like an underground river deep through you; nourishing, replenishing.
Everything Tol isn’t.
Happiness itself has become to her an accidental thing
Sydney, now you’re an adult, feels like a rangy dog in the back of a ute, pacing, cagy, unwilling to rest. The loneliest place you have ever lived in your life and sitting in your local café you are like a blind person, all senses reeling. At the relentless traffic—sirens and accelerations and buses braking with a great squeal—at radio jabber, car fumes, crashing tea cups, clattering cutlery. You understand now where Tol was coming from: yes, this city is too noisy to write in, too aggressive to ever find calm. The exhaustion of just getting by in it.
You walk onto the university campus on your first day feeling completely out of your depth. Old, already. But with no idea who you are. You have to find out. You only know you want to be in London by the time you’re twenty-five, New York by thirty.
And always, your soaring heart when you board the train for home. For your quiet. Your air. Your hurting sky. His too. On the train speeding you home you squeeze your eyes on tears as you take his earlobe in your lips, his vulnerable, creased softness; you know him like a landscape you have played in endlessly, want to enfold his body into yours as the train clacks you on, want to wrap your limbs around the foetal curve of
his back, and hold, just that. Want. Want. Want. As the train propels you deeper and deeper into a secret world of memory—your land, your sky, your learning.
The gate is always locked.
Every time you cycle back. Just in case, just to check.
The weeds grow over it, the scrub grows tall, the land reclaims as it will always reclaim everything, eventually, in this place that is not meant for humans, that will always draw you back.
And then the mornings. Every morning, in your old childhood bed, just before wakefulness. The aching stab of wanting him to touch your cunt, a whisper of a touch and the thrum spreading through your body, from your explosive core, and you are burning with it and you jerk into waking, into emptiness.
For so long you wander, desolate and alone, in the bleak borderlands of the soul. Head down, flinching people off. No touch. Never that. Nothing physical with anyone, couldn’t bear it, the disappointment. All you have to anchor you is work.
She should rouse herself with the thought:
‘Now, what have I got to do today?’
(Mark, not to enjoy or to suffer, only to do)
Those rogue Saturday nights when you haven’t been able to organise going out. Those endless New Year’s Eves by yourself, raw with the alone, in your bedsit. Those keen questions at Christmas from grandparents and aunts:
when are you getting a boyfriend, love? When are you going to settle down? Are you happy? Is anything wrong?
He has sullied your idea of passion. You have lost all sense of love as rescue. You are becoming desiccated and crabby without love, can feel the sourness. Cross and short with people, losing grace. Once, the more sex you had the more you wanted; now the less you have the less you want until desire has stopped, entirely.
For years, the flatlands.
For years, the soft patter of rain, from your heart.
She should be judged solely by what she is now, and not by what she has been
A dinner party. In raffish lovely seedy Darlinghurst—Darling it Hurts in local parlance. The intense curiosity of the boy opposite. Firing questions, rat tat tat, drinking you up. You lean back and smile a crooked smile at his enthusiasm, feel so old within it. You used to be him once, vivid with curiosity, eating up life.
‘So, do you have a boyfriend?’ He’s asking playfully, greedily. ‘Have you ever had one?’
You bite your lip. He thinks you’ve never had one. Good grief. Because there’s something so closed about you now, demure, shut off, in your fifties cardigan and dress.
You are twenty-two. Something snaps in you.
Once, you were a collator of experiences.
Once, you were conducting a grand and most exhilarating experiment.
You smile at him, a new smile.
Ready to begin again. Just like that. To unlock the more dangerous side of yourself, to take her out, to drink his enthusiasm up.
You cross your legs, wet.
The happy duty of helping others
‘I bet you don’t even fart,’ he says, working his finger into your arse. You wince. ‘Real closeness between people is when they can fart in bed, don’t you think?’ He’s a talker, he giggles, wants you loosened, wanton, he’s roughing you up.
You let him go on.
You use him.
Ask him to shave you. To bind you to the bed post. Blindfold you. Later he asks if he can get out his video camera. You just look at him.
He’d never get close.
You knew this from the first kiss.
You get up. You leave. Without saying anything, without looking back.
As you have learnt.
But he has served his purpose. You are woken up.
Counting-house, shop or college afford him a clear future on which to concentrate all his energies and aims. He has got the grand pabulum of the human soul—occupation
It feels as if you are being returned to the world in a wheelchair, crippled and bowed but ready—you have survived. Suddenly it is different, the way you look at men. Every one a prospect. The old carnality back. Curiosity is how you began and you still have it in you and you smile at that, slipping it out like a long forgotten book that woke you up, once; thrilled you into life like a golden varnishing washed over a painting.
So. Other men, viciously now, other sexual experiences.
You have developed a laugh that could be described as filthy, at odds with your image of containment. It is an invitation. You use it often.
It works.
These chapters do not presume to lecture the lords of creation
What you learn, what you jot down in your Victorian notebook that you vowed you would never write in again, in another life:
Example One: The shopping centre executive twenty-two years older than you. Because perhaps he, too, can teach.
He fucks you from behind with your legs clamped together by his as if he wants you a virgin again, wants you snug and tight. Cries
take me, take me
as he comes. You don’t want to. He tells you confidently you have not yet discovered your sexuality. You don’t tell him that with him you’ve shut your sexuality down like a snail in its shell, everything in retreat. He does not like women, you sense that from the start. It will never work. You walk away, you do not look back.
Example Two: The perfectly decent, gentlemanly, engineering flatmate you are not remotely interested in, who blackmails with generosity.
O worst kind! Crowding in, hovering, leaving roses by the bedroom door, chocolates and favourite books. You can’t ever hurt him but you will never sleep with him. You can’t bring yourself to say this. Don’t they realise that this knowing comes within the first seconds of meeting? He is not a possibility. You can’t be veered into that path. Love is an energy between two people—a recognition, a likeness—you catch something of yourself and it is there or it is not. As simple as that. It cannot be manufactured.
Example Three: The colleague. Almost.
His touch an echo of Tol’s, the tenderness and the expertise in it and you think, perhaps, oh my goodness, is this love, yes, and you open out, become younger for him, shed years, shine up. Fuck like a teenager again, abandon yourself.
But my God that vulnerability of saying you love someone—and feeling stripped. The solitude of love. Not hearing from him for a week and you’re going to pieces: unknowing fells you.
Just tell me
, you beg on his answerphone, so you can have your strength back. When he finally calls he tells you he’s slept with men, occasionally, and something contracts. So. It will never be. Because he may go back at some point, maybe you’re just an experiment, a one-off, and you can never compete with that thought. You walk away without looking back.
Example Four: The college boy into anal sex.
His reasoning—it’s quick and easy, and there’s no risk of pregnancy. He tells you of a Uni Drinking Society toast—‘To anal sex!’—and that it’s the girls always cheering the loudest.
‘Because if they’re tired they can just turn over and let the guy get on with it.’
They have a point.
So much energy expended now trying to make unsuitable men suitable, so many wasted fucks. The bleakness of it. The astonishing emptiness of one-night stands where naked, with another person, you’ve never felt more lonely in your life and the trembling never comes again and you’re faking so much and they never know it. It’s easy, just as Tol said; you’re becoming precisely what he didn’t want.
Inauthentic.
Searching, searching. For something to wipe away Tol, to release you into the light.
Example Five: The actor.
Textbook handsome. The remoteness, the bloodless sex. As if he’s never had to try too hard, never got his hands mucky in the mess of life. He never engages too deeply, leaving you cleaving to him. He says absently one night he doesn’t have a passion in life, for anything, and he’s right.
But then you. A world apart.
At night, late, after every one of them, taking out your little Victorian volume and flipping through the pages crammed
with handwritten notes from both Tol and you, among rain spots and sap and bicycle grease and snail’s trails and the knotted remains of clamped ants. So much text, from all those years ago—duelling, fuelling, itemising—that you have to scribble any new notes up the sides and in between and then leak them through all the Victorian declamations of the anonymous woman who would have applauded, once, long ago—for what you had, what you learnt, what you felt.
Then Tol’s hand, strong at the end of it:
‘Sex pleasure in a woman … is a kind of magic spell. It demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.’
Simone de Beauvoir
Did your Victorian author ever experience something of that?
You are sure. It is in her voice. You envy it.