With My Body (35 page)
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
Real marriage, with all its sanctity, beauty and glory
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.
Look up to that region of blue calm which is never long invisible to the pure of heart—this is the blessedest possession that any woman can have
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.
We are able to take interest in the marvellous government of the universe
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.
Marriage ought not always to be a question of necessity, but of choice
Through it all, Hugh.
Your weeping, as you were wheeled into the ward and were told that your husband was over there, waiting; see, look.
And there he was, yes. Standing, glittery-eyed, holding your overnight bag. The leather bag he bought for a surprise birthday trip to Rome, where he played you a clip from
Roman Holiday
on the DVD player in the cab on the way to the airport and teased
guess where we’re off to, guess
? He has packed completely the wrong clothes but never mind, there is so much love in it that you have to laugh. And there is also a cosmetic bag he’s scrambled together with absolutely everything you need; it’s spot on. Fifty pounds for the TV and the phone rental, your favourite magazines. A Colette book about her childhood of rural happiness that you’ve never read. So much thought, all of it.
‘Thank you,’ you say, choked up.
Because you never say it enough.
His disappointment, too. His deflated, telling ‘oh’ when you say to him that you are miscarrying.
‘Bye bye, Bean number four. Hello Bean number five,’ he says into the shardy bright.
You laugh and then keen, barely knowing why. Holding him, feeling his weeping through your hands and wanting to swallow his own shudders, swallow his grief, clamping him down with your body.
You’re in this together, oh yes.
When the day’s work is done
The hour grows calm and quiet like the candle you have lit. You are pulling away from your former life like a ship leaving a wharf, you are sailing far from it. Ahead, the cleanness of a new adventure. You have the shape of your family now, the shape of your life. Hugh and you are not gazing blindly into each other’s eyes—you are both gazing out, keenly, at something else. Your three children. Side by side, focused on something else, and that feels strong and calming and right. This is your reality. This is your life. You have chosen it. You are trusting ahead, for what seems like the first time in your life; trusting the void.
You shut your little Victorian volume. It is no longer needed. Your work, for now, is done.
This is the end where now begins.
And how you love writing that.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More …
About the author
Meet Nikki Gemmell
About the book
“A Book Soaked in Love”: An Interview with Nikki Gemmell
Read on
Have You Read?
More by Nikki Gemmell
About the author
Meet Nikki Gemmell
Francesco Guidicini
N
IKKI
G
EMMELL
is the author of several novels, including
Shiver
,
Cleave
,
The Book of Rapture
, and the international bestseller
The Bride Stripped Bare
. She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her family.
The author of the daringly revealing novel
With My Body
reveals her own loves and fears.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Being immersed within my family, somewhere wild by the sea, having just completed a novel I’m satisfied with.
What is your greatest fear?
That my children will be hurt.
Which living person do you most admire?
My husband, for putting up with me.
What objects do you always carry with you?
A notebook, an old Waterman pen, and a lipstick.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
More sleep.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Don’t let people fool you into giving up; have the courage to follow your heart and do what you really want to do.
Which writer has had the greatest influence on your work?
Michael Ondaatje.
Do you have a favorite children’s book?
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee.
Where is your favorite café/restaurant?
Anywhere that lets me write. At the moment it’s Starbucks, because I can work for several hours on just a Chai tea and a muffin. I’m sure they loathe customers like me.
Where do you go for inspiration?
Anywhere that’s quiet, where I can be alone.
Do you have any pet peeves?
People who are heart sinkers (as opposed to heart lifters): small, ugly-spirited people who want to drag others down.
Which book do you wish you had written?
Jane Eyre.
About the book
“A Book Soaked in Love”
An Interview with Nikki Gemmell
The age gap between the main character as a young girl and her lover, Tol, is fairly large, although unspecified. How do you think people will react to this age difference, and how do you think they will view Tol’s intentions?
The main character is about seventeen at this point in the narrative and her lover, Tol, is substantially older, although his age is unspecified. I wanted to explore the carnality of teenage sexuality and an older man’s wonder at that. He is in thrall to it. I love dangerous writing, risking, confronting. But most of all connecting—through honesty. I was interested in a man who wanted to dive deep into a woman’s psyche, as an act of generosity, yes—but also to learn, and then to unlock. There’s a dubious quality to Tol’s actions even though in one respect there’s a selflessness to it, too, a teaching element. He wants to impart knowledge—but with his steely writer’s eye he wants to gather it, too. The protagonist, unwittingly at first, is teaching him also. It’s an extremely complex relationship, a consumingly passionate whirlwind of a love affair that haunts three people profoundly, and the scars are carried deep into later life.
The book looks at the discovery of sexuality as a teenager and also sexuality as a mother and wife at forty. How do you think women’s sexuality changes over the decades, and are you looking forward to what’s to come, or do you think you’ve hit the apex already?
With My Body
explores the constant fluidity of a woman’s sexuality. I find it fascinating that the female libido can constantly evolve through middle age and beyond into old age; and what may be given up as a lost cause can be sprung into vivid life once again. How extraordinary that a woman who could quite contentedly slip into celibacy at one point find her sexual life suddenly revived, in the most glorious way. The book is about a woman finding her voice, finally, in middle age—and imparting that knowledge. It’s about a woman who decides that if she’s not having great sex she doesn’t want it at all. She teaches a man to give it to her, after years of surrendering to a man’s wants at the expense of her own.
People tend to go directly to the juicy bits when talking about your book, but it’s about a lot more than just sex. The book talks about different kinds of love, not just that between lovers. Can you talk a little about the different kinds of love that are explored in the book?
I wanted
With My Body
to be a book soaked in love, driven by it. Love in many forms. The intoxicating intensity of first love, of course, but also the complex, flawed, movingly quiet love of an enduring relationship. There’s the love of country, of land, the great circularity of life that often brings us back to our earliest landscapes. Then there’s competitive love that can stain a friendship, plus the fraught and demanding love that can exist between parents and children. In a way
With My Body
is about a father/daughter relationship as much as anything. There’s a line in the book, something along the lines of “if you want to inflict the most pain—do the most damage—then try withholding love, as a parent.” I wanted to explore the seismic rifts that can result from that cruelty. But I wanted the novel to be redemptive, too, an uplifting read. The swift and sweet grace that can be found in forgiveness and letting go.
With this kind of book, even though it is fiction, people tend to assume you are talking about yourself. Where do you draw the ideas/inner thoughts for the central character?
Everyone assumes, with
Bride Stripped Bare
and this one, that it is my husband and myself. It is not. The books are fiction. Close friends can vouch for that; strangers may think they know us, but they don’t. I’m a keen observer of life, and it all gets poured into my writing. My writer’s notebooks that I’ve had since the age of fourteen are constantly mined for my fiction—in them are thoughts, conversation scraps, story ideas, observations. It’s my magpie mind, constantly on the prowl. The one thing I demand of my writing is that it has the ring of truth, because
there’s an incredible potency in honesty. I think that’s why there’s often the confusion. I’m fascinated by the things we may be thinking but rarely have the courage to say. Love the “aha” moment when readers may think, “yes, me too,” but perhaps have never articulated that thought, especially to their partners.