With My Body (8 page)
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
You’re his
daughter
.
When you’re at school, in his few, precious phone calls to you—from the mine crib room, never at home—he almost pleads,
don’t forget the old man loves ya
, and it’s like a momentary weakness, a slip. What bewitchment has she woven around him? What weakness in him lets her? A grown man. So inarticulate, so cowed.
An earlobe caressed; a moment snatched, in secret, too brief. The only warmth you will ever get in this place now.
You will find something else.
We have only to deal with facts—perhaps incapable of remedy, but by no means incapable of amelioration
It is decided. At fourteen.
You will be an archivist, a collector. Of love and everything that comes with it. You will learn how it happens, where it comes from, how it’s snared. For good. Your grand and meticulous experiment. You are aching to begin but do not know how. You must go beyond the four houses huddling under their looming trees, beyond the high convent walls; you just long for touch, warmth. A proper, sustained caress.
You feel so vividly. All your nerve endings are raw, opening out. You are poised, on the brink. Of something, God knows what.
It begins with water.
The house of your grandparents. Whom you cherish but see all too rarely; they’ve retired further north up the coast, six hours’ drive away, and it’s not often that they make it to the Big Smoke to retrieve you.
Inside the house, your nanna communicates all her strength through food—veggies are made lurid with bicarb soda, there’s an endless supply of apple and gramma pies, of custard and porridge, sugary tea and tarts. Her domain is a resolutely interior
world. But outside, she has no idea what her little granddaughter’s getting up to, never enquires about her becoming a woman, except to ask once if her ‘friends’ have visited yet.
‘What?’
‘You know, your
friends
. Your monthlies.’
‘Oh,’ and you’re laughing. ‘Oh yes, just.’
But outside, in your grandparents’ back yard, your new world. Swimming to the pebble dash side of the pool, to the filter hole the size of a fifty-cent coin, to the water coming out at high pressure. Hooking your legs over the edge and holding your hands firm and then the deliciousness coming and you’re stretching back, delirious, buoyed and grinning under your wide blue sky then floating your arms wide and arching your back. And inside the house your grandparents are going about their business, completely oblivious to your jet-pressure secret; your nanna who told you once she always hated sex and your pop doing his crosswords then heading off to the club for a game of bowls.
But you, outside, on your back.
Seared by wonder, made silly by it.
You cannot dawdle away a whole forenoon
You are achingly alone, no anchor, no sense of belonging, of who you really are. But alone, you are learning what you can do with your body, your instrument, coaxing it into technicolour life.
Lune has stolen two
Penthouses
from the pile under her brother’s bed; she slips you one.
Lune has bribed her older sister with a year’s worth of pedicures and manicures; she buys you each a vibrator.
You squirrel your booty home.
Your hot breathlessness as you open the magazine, as you stare at the pictures. As you devour the letters to the editor at the front, the stories that transform you into something else. In the bathroom, while your stepmother is on her weekly supermarket shop, you slip out the vibrator and turn it over and over and wonder where to begin. Turn it on, turn it off, again, and hold it close, spread-eagled on the cold tiles, terrified she’ll come back.
You work out an orgasm for yourself. You’re confused by the female physiology. It doesn’t make sense, all the nerve endings are on the outside and not the inside where they should be,
shouldn’t they, what’s going on? You wonder if it’s just you; if you’re built wrong.
But the clit.
The power lying dormant in it. What it can transform you into. The first time where you have completely, utterly let go.
Jolted into life. Combusted, with light.
One may see many a young woman who has, outwardly speaking, ‘everything she can possibly want’, absolutely withering in the atmosphere of a loveless home
In school holidays, at home, your days are spent as far as possible from your stepmother. She has won, there is nothing left of your mother or yourself; she completely, triumphantly owns her tiny life. A baby still hasn’t come and you had hoped, once, that would make her soften towards her stepdaughter, but it only seems to harden the pushing away: you the constant reminder of your mother’s victory over her.
But beyond Anne, in the bush—your world—it doesn’t matter; you don’t need any of it.
You stride with relief through the dry flick of grasshoppers in long grass bristling with sound, through congregations of cockatoos snowing the paddocks and watch them lifting like clouds from the trees and you are strong in it, so strong, vividly alone and filled up with air and light; your hair matted, your soles permanently toughened.
Remembering the child you once were. Marinated by light.
At school, among the other girls, you are riddled with awkwardness. At having to join them, be one of them, and you will never belong, they all know that but here you are different, you are your true self. Balloon girl, zippy with happiness, flying
on your Peddly, firm, confident; it is your default mode whenever you are back in your world.
At sunset the golden light washes like a mist over the land and then the sun dips behind a hill and the glow is snuffed out, so sudden, and the night chill is there; you gaze from your verandah at the spill of stars and the watching moon and the sky running away and then move to your bed and your hand slips between your legs and the vividness begins, in your head, the technicolour movies, every night, to lull you to sleep: people watching you—fresh, prized,
wanted
; an entirely different world to this; a house of beauty and abundance, of books and talk and laughter and warmth; men, many of them; your legs parted, on your back, your fast breathing, your hot wet.
All that you have, the only power that you have, lies in your body. You are fourteen, you have no other power in your life.
At night, alone, in command, confident; the open wound of your life forgotten, the rawness that can only be sutured by love, the necessary verb.
To rescue.
To
combust
.
‘In this one small thing at least it seems I am wiser—that I do not think I know what I do not know’
Socrates
Tenderly reared young ladies
The art room.
A new teacher. Mr Cooper.
A man.
Extremely rare in this place. He is one of a series where visiting artists run workshops in the school, explaining what they do; he is collected by the parents of Sophia Smegg, the richest girl in the class. He is young. A painter, apparently, a good one—his work has already been hung in the Archibald Prize.
His trousers have worn, grubby knees and paint splatters; a red sock peeps from the toe of a sneaker. He has made no concession to being in this place of constraint.
You are riveted. You are not the only one. You can taste the alertness in the air. And as the entire class of fourteen year olds gaze at this new specimen in their midst, something happens to his trousers. They grow. They stick out. At the crotch. It is excruciating, it is fascinating, it is appalling. Every girl in the class knows what it is. Every girl in the class cannot take their eyes from it. The entire phalanx of girls is silent, spellbound. Mr Cooper’s face reddens, he has barely begun his talk. He falls silent.
He excuses himself.
Mr Cooper does not come back.
He has left the school, it is understood.
The next artist is a porcelain painter, a woman of seventy-six.
None of you know what happened after Mr Cooper left the room. You suspect he exited so rapidly because of deep embarrassment; couldn’t face any of you again and you are intrigued by that, the blushing, mortification, vulnerability.
So. Mr Cooper. Gone from your life. And you will never forget. The power in you, in all of you. That collectively you could do this to him.
You feel too much, think too much; the intensity of the fantasies, every night before sleep. The
Penthouses
, at home on weekends, for when you are alone, vividly alone; you cannot look too much, it is unbearable, the intensity. And it is not the pictures of the men that excite you, intrigue you, it is the women; the men look terrifying, you cannot deal with that bit, but at night, every night, to lull you into sleep, the movie begins in your head. You are fourteen, you are not meant to know any of this. You are intrigued by your body, the concentration of what’s between your legs, the potency of it, the way it changes its viscosity, its dynamism—what is it for? Your hand, in wonder, exploring.
Your life hasn’t begun yet. When will it? You are aching for it to start.
Would it raise the value of men’s labour to depreciate ours? Or advantage them to keep us, forcibly, in idleness, ignorance, and incapacity? I trow not.
You have a fascination with artists, creators, thinkers; people who express and reveal and articulate. Because you come from a world that resolutely does not and as you get older the exclusion from family and home and hearth—the lack of explanation, the silence—only gets worse.
Your father walks into your verandah room one Saturday and almost steps on a canvas flung across the room, a self-portrait screaming its paint, and murmurs, ‘Sometimes I wonder what I’ve raised.’ Serious, befuddled, fearful. Of the female with a voice in his midst.
In your early twenties you will say to him, ‘You know, Dad, some time I’d like to write a book.’ And he will respond, swiftly, ‘Waste of time, that,’ and never sway from his thinking and the distance will grow even wider between you. The two Chinas joined at the hip, once, bush mates—and that chasm will only be broached when you become a parent yourself; put in your proper place. Normalised. To your father, come good at last. And by then the writing dream will have long gone because you have
always taken heed of what your father says; he is that ingrained in you, you have wanted to please him that much.
But at fourteen, you crave difference. So, the obsession with artists, creators, thinkers, the opposite of anything you have known in your life. All that: an escape. A world where people communicate honestly and openly; touch, laugh, cherish, seize life, sizzling like luminous fireflies in the dark; feel deeply and passionately, yes, yes, all that.
Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily
Friday afternoon. Central Station. You have just bought your train ticket to get you home for the weekend; you are walking across the concourse.
Ahead. Mr Cooper.
You, in your school uniform.
He glances at you, blushes. You are one of those girls he never wants to see again in his life; the whole school is laughing about it, at him. It is a split second, a moment. You could walk straight past him, not look.
You walk up to him.
‘Are you OK?’ Not knowing why that comes out, all you can think of is his reddening face, the vulnerability, the sweetness in it. It makes him oddly approachable.
‘Yes,’ he stammers, bewildered. ‘Were you … ?’
‘Do you live near here?’ Blurting it out, covering up his awkwardness.
‘Yes, my studio’s across the road.’
‘A real, live studio?’ Your eyes sparkle. ‘Wow.’
‘Yes,’ he laughs. ‘It’s disgustingly messy, I’m sure it’d disappoint you.’
‘No!’ In the presence of a man you are blushing, changing, becoming something else. Losing the sharp flint; have you ever been like this?
‘Come and have a look.’
You nod, barely knowing why or what you are getting yourself into, words won’t come, you’ve lost your voice, your heart is thumping, you walk beside him, your insides flipping. If only the other girls in your class could see you now. Something, someone, has taken over your body, your talk. Your curiosity has emboldened you; yes, the experiment will start here, now. You have to do this, you need to know.
‘You don’t have somewhere to go, do you?’ he says at the entrance of his scruffy building.
‘My train’s delayed. Trackwork. I’ve got an hour to kill.’
The lie slips out, it surprises you, the ease of it. And the impertinence of your voice, your boldness—the collector, the archivist, with a task to complete.
‘My parents don’t like me hanging around Central alone.’ A pause. ‘I don’t like it.’
Your desire for friendship, companionship, someone, anyone, is insatiable; your desire, too, to have something, one thing, over all those girls in your class, over their ease and smoothness and confidence, their sense of entitlement. You can’t wait to tell Lune. She’ll be so proud of you. An artist, the coolness of that.
The
artist. Yours.
It is beginning.
And you are following this man from the railway concourse because of something else that has recently crept into your life. The possibility of aloneness, all through your days. You feel you could be very good at being alone and it frightens you; needs arresting.
Easy, pleasant and beautiful as it is to obey, development of character is not complete when the person is fitted only to obey