With My Body
Nikki Gemmell
In 2003 Nikki Gemmell created a sensation when, writing under the tag ‘Anonymous’, her novel The Bride Stripped Bare became a literary phenomenon, with its raw and unflinching depiction of female sexuality.Now, years later, Gemmell returns with another tour de force, With My Body, and addresses the question of what is intimacy and whether it is ever truly possible to know another person. It is at once a manifesto of married mothers everywhere and a highly personal story of one woman’s sexual awakening.A wife, comfortably married and with three children, is contemplating middle age along with all the constraints of motherhood. Finding herself numb and locked down in an unending cycle of school runs, laundry and meal times, she cannot at first see a way to live with honesty. Even her husband, whom she loves, has never reached the core of her. Despairing of ever finding a way through her family to her own identity, she returns to the the memory of an old love affair – the consequences of which she has never resolved. She goes back to her past and confronts it, and the result is an exhilarating examination of present-day desire.With My Body is exquisitely raw, emotional and bold, and deeply resonant of the classic French erotic writings of Colette, Nin and Duras – but with a modern and provocative twist.
With My Body
Nikki Gemmell
Contents
Title Page
Prologue
I
Lesson 1
Lesson 2
Lesson 3
Lesson 4
Lesson 5
Lesson 6
Lesson 7
Lesson 8
Lesson 9
Lesson 10
Lesson 11
Lesson 12
Lesson 13
Lesson 14
Lesson 15
Lesson 16
Lesson 17
Lesson 18
II
Lesson 19
Lesson 20
Lesson 21
Lesson 22
Lesson 23
Lesson 24
Lesson 25
Lesson 26
Lesson 27
Lesson 28
Lesson 29
Lesson 30
Lesson 31
Lesson 32
Lesson 33
Lesson 34
III
Lesson 35
Lesson 36
Lesson 37
Lesson 38
Lesson 39
Lesson 40
Lesson 41
Lesson 42
Lesson 43
Lesson 44
IV
Lesson 45
Lesson 46
Lesson 47
Lesson 48
Lesson 49
Lesson 50
Lesson 51
Lesson 52
Lesson 53
Lesson 54
Lesson 55
Lesson 56
Lesson 57
Lesson 58
Lesson 59
Lesson 60
Lesson 61
Lesson 62
Lesson 63
Lesson 64
Lesson 65
Lesson 66
Lesson 67
Lesson 68
Lesson 69
V
Lesson 70
Lesson 71
Lesson 72
Lesson 73
Lesson 74
Lesson 75
Lesson 76
Lesson 77
Lesson 78
Lesson 79
Lesson 80
Lesson 81
Lesson 82
Lesson 83
Lesson 84
Lesson 85
Lesson 86
Lesson 87
Lesson 88
Lesson 89
Lesson 90
Lesson 91
VI
Lesson 92
Lesson 93
Lesson 94
Lesson 95
Lesson 96
Lesson 97
Lesson 98
Lesson 99
Lesson 100
Lesson 101
Lesson 102
Lesson 103
Lesson 104
Lesson 105
Lesson 106
Lesson 107
Lesson 108
Lesson 109
Lesson 110
Lesson 111
Lesson 112
Lesson 113
Lesson 114
Lesson 115
Lesson 116
Lesson 117
Lesson 118
Lesson 119
VII
Lesson 120
Lesson 121
Lesson 122
Lesson 123
Lesson 124
Lesson 125
Lesson 126
Lesson 127
Lesson 128
Lesson 129
Lesson 130
Lesson 131
Lesson 132
Lesson 133
Lesson 134
Lesson 135
Lesson 136
Lesson 137
Lesson 138
Lesson 139
Lesson 140
Lesson 141
Lesson 142
Lesson 143
Lesson 144
Lesson 145
Lesson 146
Lesson 147
Lesson 148
Lesson 149
Lesson 150
Lesson 151
VIII
Lesson 152
Lesson 153
Lesson 154
Lesson 155
Lesson 156
Lesson 157
Lesson 158
Lesson 159
Lesson 160
Lesson 161
Lesson 162
Lesson 163
Lesson 164
Lesson 165
Lesson 166
Lesson 167
Lesson 168
IX
Lesson 169
Lesson 170
Lesson 171
Lesson 172
Lesson 173
Lesson 174
Lesson 175
Lesson 176
Lesson 177
Lesson 178
Lesson 179
Lesson 180
Lesson 181
Lesson 182
Lesson 183
Lesson 184
Lesson 185
Lesson 186
Lesson 187
Lesson 188
Lesson 189
Lesson 190
Lesson 191
Lesson 192
Lesson 193
Lesson 194
Lesson 195
Lesson 196
Lesson 197
Lesson 198
Lesson 199
Lesson 200
Lesson 201
X
Lesson 202
Lesson 203
Lesson 204
Lesson 205
Lesson 206
Lesson 207
Lesson 208
Lesson 209
Lesson 210
Lesson 211
Lesson 212
Lesson 213
Lesson 214
Lesson 215
Lesson 216
Lesson 217
Lesson 218
Lesson 219
Lesson 220
Lesson 221
Lesson 222
Lesson 223
Lesson 224
Lesson 225 – The Last
Other Books by Nikki Gemmell
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE
You begin.
It feels right. At his desk. On his chair. His typewriter is the only thing left of him in the room. The ink ribbon is fresh – the metal letters cut firm and deep – as if he has placed it for this moment, just for you. You start slow, clunking, getting used to the heft of the old way. Working laboriously on the beautiful, antique machine for if you make a mistake you can’t go back and you need these pages methodical, neat. You type with his old Victorian volume by your side, that he gave you once – A Woman’s Thoughts About Women – that logged within its folds all that happened in this place, that breathed life, once. You relive the dialogue of his handwriting and yours jotted in the margins and the back, don’t quite know what you’re going to do with all the work; at this stage you’re just collating, filching everything that’s needed from this notebook whose pages are bruised with age and grubbiness and life, luminous life: sweat and ink and rain spots; sap and dirt and ash; the grease from a bicycle and a silvery snail’s trail and a cicada wing, its fragile, leadlit tracery. You reap his words and yours and then the Victorian housewife’s, her lessons about life, her guiding voice. She will lead you through this. Tell the truth and don’t be afraid of it, she soothes. Yes.
Writing to understand.
And as you work you feel a presence, a hand in the small of your back, willing you on. Every person who’s ever loved and lost, every person who’s ever entered that exclusive club – heartbreak. Your little volume always beside you, the book you came here to bury, to have the earth of this valley receive as one day it will receive your own flesh, you are sure – lovingly, gratefully, because it is so, right, you are part of it.
But first this book must serve another purpose.
You feel strong, lit.
Whole.
Writing to work it all out.
You have never told anyone this. No one knows what you really think. It has always been extremely important to never let them know; to never show them the ugliness, brutality, magnificence, selfishness, glory; never give them a way in. It has always been important to maintain your equilibrium, your smile, your carapace at all times. You could not bear for anyone to see who you really are.
But now, finally, it is time. With knowing has come release. It has taken years to get to this point.
I
‘Even in sleep I know no respite’
Heloise d’Argenteuil
Lesson 1
Let everything be plain, open and above-board.
Tell the truth and don’t be afraid of it.
You think about sleeping with every man you meet. You do not want to sleep with any of them. Couldn’t be bothered anymore. You are too tired, too cold. The cold has curled up in your bones like mould and you feel, in deepest winter, in this place that has cemented around you, that it will never be gouged out. You live in Gloucestershire. In a converted farmhouse with a ceiling made of coffin lids resting on thatchers’ ladders. It is never quite warm enough. There are snowdrops in February and bluebells in May and the wet black leaves of autumn then the naked branches of winter clawing at the sky, all around you, months and months of them with their wheeling birds lifting in alarm when you walk through the fields not paddocks; in this land of heaths and commons and moors, all the language that is not your language for you were not born in this place.
Your memories scream of the sun, of bush taut with sound and bleached earth. Of the woman you once were. She is barely recognisable now.
You do not know how to climb out, to gain traction with some kind of visibility, as a woman. To find a way to live audaciously. Again.
Lesson 2
The house-mother! Where could you find a nobler title, a more sacred charge?
Your husband, Hugh, will be home late. Ten or so. This is not unusual. He works hard, as a GP, and you cherish that, the work ethic firm in him; he will not let his family down. There’s always something he has to do at the end of the day, paperwork, whatever.
It is good Hugh is home late, what you want. You seize those precious few hours between putting the children to bed and his homecoming for yourself. The soldering time. When you uncurl, recalibrate. Draw a bath and dream of being unclenched, of standing with your face to the sky in the hurting light, opening out your chest and filling up your bones with warmth. Becoming tall again, vivid-hearted, the woman you once were.
You have a good girl’s face. Young, still. But Hugh detected something underneath, early on he sniffed it out like a bloodhound. Something … unhinged … under the smile. Something coiled, waiting for release.
He’ll never find it. You have been locked away for so long and your husband does not have the combination and never will, now, has no idea what kind of combination is needed; he thinks all is basically fine with his marriage. You’ve both reached a point of stopping in the relationship. Too busy, too swamped by everything else.
You are the good doctor’s wife. All wellies and Range Rovers, school runs and Sunday church and there is a part of you that your husband will never reach and that elusiveness used to addle him with desire; what went on, once, in your life.
‘Tell me your thoughts,’ he used to say. ‘What are you thinking?’ But you couldn’t let on, ever, didn’t want this good man scared off: he must never know the rawness of the underbelly of your past. This one was marriage material: respectability, kids, the rose-bowered cottage; nothing must jeopardise it.
The magnificence, ugliness, beauty, power, transcendence – when you were unlocked. That Hugh will never know, for you did not marry him for that; he cannot lay you bare like you were laid bare once.
Some men know how, but most don’t.
Lesson 3
She is forever pursued by a host of vague adjectives,
‘proper’, ‘correct’, ‘genteel’, which hunt her to death like a pack of rabid hounds
Your children are just back from school. Outside is icy-white but it is frost, not snow, a brittle blanket of stillness that clamps down the world. The frost has not melted in the mewly light of the previous few days. The kids champ at the bit inside, they want to be out in the light, before it is gone; almost. You let them loose. They spill through the kitchen door, run. Storming into the crisp quiet, roaring it up; bullying the frost, its deathly stillness.
You smile as you stare through the window at your boys – so much life in them. Such shining, demanding, insistent personalities, all so different. You make another cup of tea, the last of the day or you won’t sleep; green tea because so many dear friends are getting ill now – three at the moment, with breast cancer. And with your mother’s history you have to be careful of that.
You’re so tired, you have four boys if you count the one you’re married to and the exhaustion is now like an alien that’s nestled inside your body, sucking away all your energy. It’s an exhaustion that stretches over years, since your first child, Rexi, was born; the exhaustion of never being in control anymore, of never completely calling the shots. Once, long ago, as a single career woman, you did. You dwelled within a white balloon of loveliness, in the city, loved your beautifully pressed, colour-ordered clothes and regular weekend sleep-ins, your overseas trips and crammed social life.
But now this. A tight little world of Mummyland, symbolised by a mountain of unsorted clothes on the floor at the end of the bed. You can get the clothes into the washing machine. You can get them out. You can arrange them over the radiators to dry. You can collect the dried clothes and put them in a heap ready for sorting. But you cannot, cannot, get the clothes back into their cupboards and drawers. Until that pile at the end of the bed becomes a volcano of frustration and accusation and despair; ever growing, ever depleting you. Until sometimes, alone, you are weeping and you barely know why, your hands clawed frozen at your cheeks. ‘I can’t do it.’ Sometimes you even say it to your children, horribly it slips out – ‘It’s too hard, I can’t do this’ – bewildering them.
You weren’t this woman, once; despised this type of woman, once.
You are lonely yet desperate for alone; it’s so hard to get away from your beloved Tigger-boys, to steal moments of blissful alone from everyone dependent upon you. You feel infected with sourness, have lost the sunshine in your soul. You do not like who you have become; someone reduced.
Yet you are so fortunate, have so much. You know this, despairingly. Cannot complain but are locked in your demanding little world of giving, giving, giving to everyone else, all the time; trapped.
Lesson 4
Lost women
You have not slept with your husband since the birth of your third son two years ago. This doesn’t bother you. It is a relief. If it bothers Hugh he no longer expresses it. You’ve both stopped talking about your lack of a sex life, the joshing has gone, the teasing; he never talks about it now. He used to snuffle about, playful, trying to unlock his little librarian with her knee-length tweed skirts and demure shirts, unleash whatever it was that was underneath. Now, you suspect, he’s as exhausted as you.
Almost every night it’s musical beds, a different combination of child next to you with Hugh squeezed into various dipping mattresses. Recently you’ve been waking every night, around 3 a.m., hugely, violently. Roaming the house, banging the walls with clenched fists; harangued by sleeplessness, needing to reclaim yourself. Heart thudding, knowing you will not be able to sleep for several hours and then tomorrow will be no better and perhaps worse. Oh for a full, deep, rich sleep, with nothing to wake you the next day, no demands, squabbles, wants. Oh for that sated sleep of deeply satisfying sex. Tenderness, a shiver of a touch.
You love Hugh, of course, feel for him deeply, but would be happy to be celibate from now on. You look at some of the school dads around you and just know they’d be ‘dirt’ – cheeky, playful, a bit of rough – and it’s always the divorced ones; there’s something unfettered, loose, lighter about them. But you’d never do anything about it. Don’t need sex anymore. You wonder at the shine of those women who are man-free by choice: some widows and divorcees you’ve seen over the years, nuns, septuagenarians; those precious few who no longer seek out men and are strong with their decision and lit with it. You recognise that glow.
Unencumbered.
Men, for you, have fulfilled their purpose; you have children, are sated. Once, long ago, you were made tall and strong by the shock of someone who cherished women and was not afraid of them, who revered their bodies. Men like that are extremely rare and when a woman finds one she recognises profoundly the difference in the lovemaking and is forever changed; that man becomes a paragon by which all others are measured and you are lucky, so lucky, to have found it, once. You have girlfriends who never have.
Lesson 5
That season of early autumn, which ought to be the most peaceful, abundant, safe and sacred time in a woman’s whole existence
A memory slicing through your life.
That you slip out every night like a billet-doux hidden in a pillowcase, that you’ve carried through all your adult years. A memory of exquisite shock: that your body was cherished once. Not used but thrummed into life. His touch – you are addled by the remembering even now, after all these years. His touch – sparking you awake, God in it. And his voice. Is that what we remember most potently, out of all the senses, long after someone has gone? You can still recall the exact way he spoke your name when he was deep inside you, moving almost imperceptibly, the nourishment of it. You have pocketed that voice in your memory long after the sharpness of his features has faded.
In no way did he want to reduce you; that above all you remember. His singular aim: to empower you, lift you, unlock you. Teach you to know your body, what it is capable of. How many men give women that gift?
Another country. Another life.
A world away from this one, now, sipping your green tea as you stare out the window at 4.30 p.m., your life ticking by, your knuckles white around the mug. It’ll be teatime soon, followed by the pleading to get the homework done, the dragging from screens, the nagging to have showers, do teeth; all the plea-bargaining, negotiating, cajoling in your life, the relentless exhaustion of it.
Lesson 6
Married women have cast their lot for good or ill, having realised in greater or lesser degree the natural destiny of our sex
Hugh and you are bound by an unspoken acknowledgement that you’ll never split – you’re in this together, for life. When you married him you were aching for love, something transporting; he was a friend who had you laughing deep into the night and so it would work, yes. You’ve always cherished his evenness. Were never uncomfortable with him, even in silence – the test of a true connection. You are so fortunate to have him, you know this, you must never forget it.
You do not like the way he kisses. Do not know how to tell him this, could never hurt him. It will not change. It’s gone on too long. It cannot be taught. How can you say to someone you love that they lack tenderness? It’s impossible to learn, to acquire. You could endure it pre-children, he offered so much else – filling up the glittery loneliness of yet another Saturday night by yourself, another New Year’s Eve; his sturdy, charming presence quelling all those awkward questions on Christmas Days and all the weddings and baby showers you were suddenly going to. Your saviour, you know it.
Yet it feels like the only thing that unites you now is the children. You dream of another, a girl – the bliss of her – but just couldn’t be bothered; with Hugh, you’re both beyond all that. You never talk about it. About anything.
He is an Englishman who boarded from the age of seven and from then onward was taught not to trust his feelings; to shut down. He craved his mother, was overwhelmed by grief and loneliness yet all the time was told that his family wanted this, it was for the best. So he learnt from very young not to trust his deepest instincts, to bury far inside what he really thought. He has carried these lessons through life; expects it of others. He never changes towards you – is warm, playful – but doesn’t want all the emotion, the mess of it.
He calls you Vesuvius to his Pompeii. When all your raging, swamping frustrations blurt out. When a voice in you snaps in the thick of the exhaustion, a voice you’ve never heard before, a woman you don’t recognise, at your husband and your children; a voice of anger and ugliness. You fear your beloved boys will hold its tone somewhere in their memories for the rest of their lives and you’re ashamed of that but still, occasionally, it roars out. Yet you love them to distraction, it’s a swamping that’s greedy, wild, voluptuous; every night in prayer you thank God for the gift of them.
Motherhood, the complexity of it. The richness, the depletion, the incandescence. The despair, the loneliness.
Lesson 7
She has ceased to think principally of herself and her own pleasures
Once, for a long period, you never had an orgasm. You had surrounded yourself with a boundary of no; your body recoiling, in shock, at what men would do. Or wouldn’t. Their ignorance, clumsiness, lack of finesse. Your body in shock at what was the smarting truth: that some of these men didn’t, actually, like women very much. Wanted to chip away at them, deplete them, make them vulnerable and weak; were afraid of them. And your entire body retracted at the knowing, like a sea anemone flinched.
But then the lover from long ago, who gave you your first orgasm. Taught you to surrender. And now, at your age, if you can’t have transcendent sex you’re not going to have it at all. It’s as simple as that. You’re too old for anything else.
Hugh, God love him, is good at sleep. He doesn’t snore or smell, he wings you close on the rare occasions you find yourself in the same bed as him and you love the protectiveness of it. You may have lost your taste for sex but you will never lose your desire for shared sleep.
With Hugh.
To the outside world you are blissfully married, one of those rare couples that works.
Lesson 8
Marriage: to resign one’s self totally and contentedly into the hands of another; to have no longer any need of asserting one’s rights or one’s personality
You were born in mountain country, north of Sydney, a place assaulted by light. High hill country with ground leached pale by the sun and tap water the colour of tea and you always looked down when walking through tall grass, because of snakes, and at dusk the hills glowed pink with the force of the sun, trapping the heat under your skin, in the very marrow of your spine; that could not be gouged out. Whispering you back. Home. To a tall sun, a light-filled life.
When you were eighteen you climbed down from your high mountain place. Went to university and became a lawyer, in Sydney, the Big Smoke. Winged your way to London in your mid twenties: restless, fuelled by curiosity, eager to gulp life. After several years of hard work there was the expat’s dilemma of wanting to return to Australia but unable to decide when; of meeting Hugh – the man who did not excite you but sheltered you; of one thing leading to another and now you are in this rain-soaked island for life, staring at a mountain of washing by your bed and dreaming of the roaring light. After the second bouncy boy the decision was mutual: a move to the west country, the Cotswolds, for space and fresh air, a better life. Your dream of a partnership in the law firm fell away under the demands of motherhood; after the first maternity leave you never went back, lost your professional confidence and now your children cram every corner of your life. You are driven by perfection and ambition as a mother, just as you were driven as a lawyer. Everything you do you dive into completely, attacking with a ferocious will to succeed and hating it when you fall short. Which you do now, often, to your distress.
Hugh has said it’s good you’re Australian in this place; your accent can’t be placed, you can slip effortlessly from lower class to upper, can’t be pinned down. You know it’s good Hugh is not Australian for he can’t nail the broad flatness of tone that any Aussie East Coaster would recognise as originally from the sticks. The bush has never been completely erased from your voice; wilfully some remnant clings to it. Your vowels have been softened by Sydney, yes, but they still carry, faintly, the red-neck boondocks in their cadence. England hasn’t left a trace.
You will always be an outsider here. You revel in not-belonging, enjoy the high vantage point. Marvel, still, at the strict sense of place, of class they cannot breach – the fishing and shooting, the villas in France, the stone walls that collect the cold and the damp, the wellies even in July, the jumpers in August, the hanging sky like the water-bowed ceiling of an old house. How can it hold so much rain, cry so much? Days and days and days of it and at times you just want to raise your arms and push up the clouds, run. Hugh will never move to Australia, he has a blinkered idea of it as the end of the earth and deeply uninteresting, really – that the only culture you’ll find there is in a yoghurt pot.
You can see your whole future stretching ahead of you now until your body is slipped into this damp black earth, the years and years of sameness ahead. Once, long ago, you never wanted to be able to do that, curiosity was your fuel, the unknown. You carry your despair in you like an infection that cannot be shaken.
But now. A dangerous will inside you to crash catastrophe into your life, somehow, God knows how – or with whom. It’s been brewing for years; it’s something about reaching your forties and seeing all that stretches ahead. You’ve never been fully unlocked with Hugh and bear responsibility for that, entirely.
For always wearing a mask. For not being entirely honest. For never showing him your real self.
Lesson 9
Unhappiness of soul – a state of being often as unaccountable as it is irrational
‘How are you?’ the lovely, cheeky Bengali man in your newsagency asked before school pick up today.
You replied, distracted, ‘I have no idea.’
The ultimate flaky mum, you know he thought.
But it was the truth. You have no idea. Have lost the woman you once were. Cannot simplify your life. Had so much energy for so much, once; now your days are taken up with so many bitsy, consuming, domestic things. You catch yourself talking aloud as you walk away down the High Street. Is it madness or preoccupation or mere motherhood. In a window reflection you gasp at yourself scowling, jaw set. There’s the niggle that now you’re married you are somehow less. Just the little wife. Hugh doesn’t mean to convey that but he does. There’s a subtle and discernible loss of confidence, so insidious, as you lean on another for so much and you never did that, once. As you have somehow allowed over the years your petrol tank to be filled and restaurant dinners to be decided for you, sweets secreted to your kids, Nintendo Wiis gleefully bought behind your back, theatre tickets purchased for plays you don’t like.
You cannot explain how circumstances have closed over you, how you became a woman who lost her voice.
But you know there’s only one person who can haul you out.
It is five o’clock.
The potatoes have to be peeled and the toilet unblocked; it’s probably a plastic toy, it’s becoming a habit with Pip, your youngest.
You have to change this life, somehow, or something in you will implode like a depth charge way beneath the surface.
Lesson 10
There are very few families whose internal mismanagement and domestic unhappiness are not mainly the fault of the mistress
Nine p.m. Just the dishwasher to unpack now and then you’ll draw your bath and unclench, at last, in the warmest room in the house, the main bathroom.
The phone. Susan. A mum from the boys’ school and you don’t know how it came to this: a Susan so entwined in your life. Rexi is friends with her eldest, Basti. You met when the boys were in the same nursery and then they moved to primary school together, have known each other for years. It is assumed. But you became friends before you realised how unsettling she is. A mother with an overdeveloped sense of her own rightness, with everything, and there’s something so undermining about that.
Every conversation, to Susan, is a form of competition; there must always be the moment of triumph. When she’s first seen every morning, at the school gate, she forces you to say how lovely her little girl looks, to compliment.
‘Look at Honor, she dressed herself today, doesn’t she look gorgeous?’
‘Where’s Honor, is she hiding on my shoulders?’
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’
Yes of course, and you are a woman who does not have a daughter but it would never cross Susan’s mind that the keenness for a girl once sliced through you like a ragged bit of tin; you can’t deny there was a moment of disappointment at each subsequent son who appeared from your womb – just a moment, wiped as soon as you held them to your breast. And now, every day at the school gate, there is the ritual noticing of what you do not have, every day this conversation you have somehow allowed in your life.
Susan is obsessed by her children. Like no other woman you know. Always talking about how good her Basti is – at maths, swimming, art, he’s just swum four laps, helped plant her herb garden, is never sick, always good – not one of those naughty ones.
You always cringe at this – your boys are boys, you adore them but they are not always the best; often your heart is in your mouth when your family is with other people, about what may be said, knocked over, who may be shouted at. Susan is critical of your Rexi whenever he’s had a play date. Always, on the doorstep when you pick him up, you have to submit to her little ritual of complaint. The only time you can ever remember her complimenting your eldest was when she said, in wonder, ‘He’s good looking … now.’ Now. Your beautiful, sunny, ravishing boy, from day one.
‘Rex didn’t eat his food … wouldn’t play with Honor … was very loud …’
You have allowed it, for so long – Susan’s reward for taking one son off your hands, for giving you a blessed break; it means one less child for a few hours and you both know how needed that is in your life, a tiny sliver of extra space.
Lesson 11
A state of sublime content and superabundant gaiety – because she always had something or other to do.
If not for herself, then her neighbour.
It is nine-fifteen and Susan is still on the phone and inwardly, at her voice, there is a tightening in your stomach, a knot – what has her Basti excelled at today, what triumph has to be endured? And your head is full of the ‘Shout Book’ you have just discovered under your middle child’s bed. Jack has recorded, meticulously, every time he is yelled at. By you. In writing neater than it’s ever been at school.
Saturday: 14th January. 2 times.
Sunday: 15th January. AMAZING. Nothing.
Monday: 16th January. 3 times.
Devastation. Today it was all to do with him wearing a good shirt to his grandmother’s tomorrow, for her birthday tea.
‘I hate that button shirt so much it makes me walk backwards,’ he had shouted.
You laughed at the time and later jotted it down; for what, God knows. You had to laugh, they give you so much and don’t even know it. These bouncy, shiny little scamps fill every corner of your life, plump it out; you love them so consumingly but you’re not sure they believe it, Jack most of all, your middle child you worry will one day slip through the cracks.
‘Please, God, stop Mummy shouting,’ was his prayer tonight.
‘Don’t!’ came his muffled protest from under the duvet when you tried to tickle him into giggles, to kiss away all your guilt, but he recoiled as if your touch would scald him which only made you want to caress him, cuddle him, envelop him all the more.
Susan is prattling on, she wants you to do the coffee before the class assembly on Monday and didn’t catch you today. She is president of the P.T.A., you are a class rep, this is the new world you have thrown yourself into with the zeal you once reserved for law. You’re deeply embedded in this intense little microcosm, yet feel sick every day now as you approach the gates for pick up. Wear a mask of joy – you have perfected it but if only they knew of your relief when for some reason, too rarely, you don’t have to be there. It’s your twice daily torture and you feel ill, sometimes, as you near the school gates. You wait in the car so you’re not standing there early, having to talk. Filling up afternoons with play dates for the boys so they’re not missing out and filling up your own evenings with drinks and dinners with your mummy friends for the same reason and you need the solace and release of using your brain, somehow. You’ve been with some of these women for over five years now. And their flaws are getting worse as they age – as are yours; it feels like you are all hardening into your weaknesses and you’ve got years of this school run ahead of you. The competitiveness, petty power games, boasting, one-upmanship; sometimes you feel like you’re ten again, back in the school yard. It’s stealing who you really are, who you became, once.
Lesson 12
Beware the outside friend who only rubs against one’s angles
Your shout book.
What Mothers Do (or, The Tyranny of the School Gate)
Ignore requests for play dates, just don’t return emails, or constantly say their child can’t do it. Or get their P.A. to decline on their behalf.
Invite every child in the class to their son’s party but yours.
Talk and talk about their own child and never ask a single question about your own.
At every mention of a problem your child has – e.g. crooked front teeth/can’t do the maths/is having difficulties with friends – comes back with, ‘Johnnie’s teeth are beautifully straight, thank God, Johnnie’s always been good at maths, he gets on with everyone,’ etc. Whether you believe it or not.
Drop their child off to your son’s birthday party without a present, pick up their child with no mention of a present, happily take a party bag, say an extravagant thank you but never give a birthday present in return or mention the situation again, as if challenging you. Of course you say nothing.
Never reciprocate with lifts to or from school, as if it just hasn’t crossed their mind to do so.
Like a butterfly buzz from school gate flower to flower, alighting on the freshest and most beautiful – the newest mum, the next best friend – before flitting off to someone else. Dropping you, just like that, into a cold, cold place. Phone calls are suddenly unanswered, coffee requests met with, ‘So busy, another time’. Felling you with silence. Because someone else is filling up their lives now, whereas once you were the loveliest and most intriguing mum in the school; fresh from London, foreign, marked by difference. Long ago. The technique is stunning: how to bring a strong woman down, torment them with bewilderment, force them to ask the question, again and again, ‘What’s wrong with me?’
Sometimes you just want to scream at these women, at the height of all the pettiness (usually towards the end of term when everyone’s frazzled). Can’t we all just value each other? Please? It’s hard, for every one of us, you’re sure of that.
And then, specifically, there’s Queen Susan:
Using the royal ‘we’ when talking about the school because as P.T.A. president she has a sense of entitlement and ownership over the institution – and access to the headmaster – that no other parent has.
Likes to slip in to conversations, often, her privileged position. For example, parking is difficult around the school and everyone wings it, including you, with illegal, jittery, hovery pulling up at pick up and drop off. Except Susan. ‘I’m president, I just can’t,’ she likes to remind everyone, often, with a rueful smile. ‘I’m president, my boy has to do his homework … I’m president, I can’t be late for pick up.’ If the job came with a badge she’d wear it.
Always includes a link to her own website at the bottom of her weekly school newsletter, as if to rub it in that she has a life beyond all this, she has managed to be one of those ones who does it all, effortlessly (she runs a website selling bespoke wooden kitchenware along with her school duties).
If you were content, none of this would infect you; it would just roll away like water off a duck’s back. But one woman, this woman, has become a focus for all your frustration and you know it’s unfair and paranoid and ridiculous, she’s a good person, you’re just jealous of her position and the way she’s worked out her life and it’s eating you up, can’t escape it. But you’d be happy to never see her again. Would never have befriended a Susan in your former existence, are not uplifted by her in any way; your heart doesn’t skip with happiness to see her and you need heart-lifters around you now, more than ever – it feels like you’re becoming more thin-skinned and vulnerable as you age. How can that be? That the great, raw wounds inflicted by others in the distant past are sharpening now, in middle age. You can’t gouge them out and you have no idea why; have lost your voice, your strength.
Lesson 13
Friendship – a bond, not of nature but of choice, it should be maintained, calm, free, and clear, having neither rights nor jealousies, at once the firmest and most independent of all human ties
Your hand is straying into your pants, thinking of other things entirely, school dads, their spark. How one in particular, Ari, would spring you alive, back to the woman you once were. Ari, yes, he’d have the knowledge, the instinct; but you’d never do it. God no, the mess of it. Susan is still in your ear, telling you that Basti is just about to pass his first flute exam, can pick up any piece of music and just play it, he amazes her. (Rexi, God love him, is on page six of his guitar book and unlikely to progress.) And the coffee morning, ‘Can you run it, babes?’ Of course, yes. Susan will bake some muffins for you: ‘I know you’re not good at that bit.’
She is constantly baking, her house a show place, her children spotless – yours are the ones who sometimes wear grubby t-shirts you’ve flipped inside out, have cereal for dinner and Coca-Cola as a treat. In Susan’s kitchen is a huge notice board in an ornate frame crammed with certificates of achievement and baby photos and colourful kids’ drawings. The occasional certificates your own children get are lost in piles, somewhere, along with school reports and photos and Santa lists and they will all be sorted, sometime. Long ago, you were in control of your career, your friends, your life; you never feel in control within motherhood. The guilt at so much.
The time you folded up the push chair and placed it in the boot, only to hear a squeak – baby Pip still in it.
The time Jack rolled off the bed as you were changing his nappy and ended up with a dint in his skull.
The birthday cakes from Tesco, year after year.
The computer games that keep them all riveted, baby included.
The occasional McDonald’s, three quarters of an hour’s drive away on a Sunday night.
Basti, of course, has never had it in his life. He tells you this when he comes to your house. He has inherited his mother’s heightened sense of censorious rightness, about everything in his life, and you fear for what’s ahead of him, how the wider world will chip away at that. Meanwhile Susan bustles about in her flurry of energy, a tiny, dark sparrow of efficiency with an enormous, puffed chest, making you feel deficient in response, that you’re always running and never quite catching up. Have had no role model in life for this. The best mothers are those who had bad mothers, you think, because they know what not to do – but what if you never had a mother? If she died before she was lodged in memory.
Susan’s voice veers you back.
‘Wasn’t that homework hard today? Basti got it, eventually.’
‘Rexi took a while. I had to snap off the TV just to get him to the table …’
‘We don’t miss ours. The kids never ask for it.’
A pause. ‘Lucky you.’
Television, of course, is babysitting for you, your guilty secret. And you didn’t notice exactly what Rexi was doing in his maths book.
‘Just checking you’re still on for Basti this Thursday?’
You’re always scrupulously generous with play dates; it’s why the routine works.
‘Of course … can’t wait.’
‘Did you get the notice about nits? I know you never check their schoolbags, just reminding you. Basti’s never had them. I don’t know who it is …’
You shut your eyes, your knuckles little snow-capped mountains around the phone. Because of bath time, several hours earlier – all the boys, even Pip – and dragging out the lice with all their tiny, frantic legs. And Jack has a pathological aversion to nits, almost vomits with the horror of them, yells like you’re scalping him. Then the pleas, the threats, to finish the homework due tomorrow, to stop the Wii, get to bed. Rexi storming off in frustration, his arms over his head. You feel, sometimes, he’s a great open wound that you’re pouring your love and puzzlement into. What’s going on in there? Does it ever even out? He’s only nine. His teacher says it’s something to do with boys about this age, from seven onwards, their teeth coming through; there’s a huge psychological change in them, hormones swirling. Does he mellow with age, does he strengthen? Is he too much like you, too emotional? You are fascinated and fearful at the depth of his feelings.
You are not responsible for your child’s happiness, Rexi’s teacher in her fifties told you gently the other day.
‘All you’re responsible for is what is said and done to them, as a parent. That’s all. Nothing else.’ You must remember that.
Lesson 14
Herein the patient must minister to herself
Nine-thirty. You step outside. Lock the door.
Now you are in control. You inhale a breath of steely night air; the cold never ceases to shock in this place, after all these years, still. The children are all asleep, you know they will not wake, know them well enough. You stood in the quietness of their rooms and breathed them in deep and felt a vast peace flood through you, whispering a soothing through your veins. Everyone down, your day done.
But now.
Walking fast through a stillness that is holding its breath. Feeling an old you coming back. The stone walls, the close woods, the bridge over the stream are all coated in a thick frost that has not broken for several days and it is ravishingly beautiful, all of it, but it will never hold your heart. Because it is not home.
It is flinchingly cold, you are not dressed for it, have not thought, just needed to walk, get away, out. Hugh has a work dinner, he’ll be home in a couple of hours, you’ll be back for him, of course. It is suddenly overwhelming you as you walk, the tears are coming now. You dream of being unlocked. By spareness. Simplicity. Light, screaming hurting light. Dream of tall skies, endless space, of being nourished within the sunlight, of never coming back. The tears are streaming now, great gulps, your mouth is webbed by wet. You are not strong here.
You are on the road now, not properly dressed, cannot go back, cannot face any of it. A car flashes by, swerves, beeps in annoyance. There are no footpaths, only grass verges, the lanes are too narrow, built for carts centuries ago, you shouldn’t be walking in this place. You freeze in terror like a rabbit, can’t go forward, can’t go back. You hold your arms around you and weep, and weep, vined by circumstance – you are no longer you. Lost.
Lesson 15
We are able to pass out of our own small daily sphere
More headlights. A van.
Slowing, stopping. You shiver, your heart beats fast.
‘Hello, stranger.’
It is Mel. Another school mum. The one who is different, who never quite belongs. Who breezes in and out of the school like she couldn’t care less, who is … unbound. Who says fuck the quiz night, fuck the summer party, fuck the lot of it: I’ve got better things to do with my life. What, God knows.
She wears real, cool, vintage fur: I don’t do fake anything – coats, fingernails, orgasms.
Everyone suspects she’s been given the school fees for free, the charitable slot. She’s a single mum with a son in Jack’s class. You envy the every-second-weekend-off-from-motherhood that she gets – to sleep in, stay in bed all day, go dancing, potter, drink; to do nothing and everything for once. She runs an antique shop on the High Street – erratic opening hours, bric-a-brac from French flea markets – things you love that Hugh bats away as junk.
Mel picked up her boy, Otis, from a play date once, late. She’d come straight from her pole-dancing class and until that moment you’d had no idea such a thing existed in this place. Mel would have been the girl who wore her school skirt too short and had her dad’s ciggies in her pocket and smuggled dope into the dormitory; it’s all in her face. Appetite and passion and life’s hard knocks and a big open heart no matter how many times she’s pounded upon the rocks. An aura of a woman who revels in life. Who has sex a lot.
Mel always lingers after the boys’ occasional play dates. There’s often been some strange pull, in the silence, you don’t know why; you just want to lean across, it’s ridiculous, she’s not your type, your style. She wears skinny jeans, sometimes Uggs; your palette is the colour of reticence, careful camel or sand or chalk with a dash of black. She’s a woman for God’s sake.
Lesson 16
She hath done what she could
‘Hey,’ Mel says soft, frowning, with infinite understanding. ‘Get in.’
You gulp your tears; the car is warm, the heating on.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong –’ you rush out, your voice veering high, off course.
‘Sssh …’
‘The boys, the school gate, Hugh –’
‘I know, I know.’
Mel has pulled over, down a lane, she is not taking you back, thank God she is not taking you back. You barely register what she is doing: she is listening, that’s all, she wants to know. Her hand is on your knee, just that.
‘Sssh,’ and now the tears are coming again, soft, in the stillness, the quiet; cracked by kindness. You begin to talk, in a way you haven’t for so long.
‘But you’re so lucky.’ Quiet, at the end of it. ‘Don’t you see that? You have so much.’
You look at her. Yes, you nod, yes, you know; yet it has all, bafflingly, come to this.
Mel leans across, holds your chin, and says your name, softly, gently. You smile; no one has spoken to you like that for so long, a cadence of … caring. She kisses you on the cheek, softly, affectionately, in comfort.
It strays.
The tenderness of it, you pull back – but the tenderness, it holds you, draws you.
Something is coming alive within you, after so long, so many years. You go to speak. ‘Sssh,’ Mel soothes, kissing you, kissing you. There is a stirring, like an anemone swaying into life under the water’s caress; your belly is flipping and you remember long ago, the surrendering, opening out, when you had never felt more alive … once, long ago, for six transforming weeks, another place, life. Something long dormant is awakening within you.
Lesson 17
If we do not advance, we retrograde
What you learn, in that tiny lane, in that van, in the darkness seared with light: that feeling, memory, sensation, vividness, can come flooding back. All it takes is the tenderness in a touch. After so long.
You pull away at the shock. Mel laughs softly.
‘You know, sleeping with a woman can be like discovering sex all over again’ – a fingertip slips gently down your cheek, your neck – ‘because we know what works’ – the finger teases – ‘and where.’
You pause. So vulnerable now to touch, kindness, attention of any sort. You shake your head, reach for the door handle, breathe your thanks – the kids, you have to get back. You stumble out.
‘See you at the quiz night.’ Mel smiles a secret smile, starting the van. ‘Or maybe not.’
Striding back, wondrous, tall, through the glittering alive achingly beautiful frost.
Like discovering sex all over again …
It has been so long. So many years, lives, places ago. So many harangued nights of sleeplessness and collapsings into beds without even saying good night to your husband because you’re too tired and too annoyed by some minor irritation like his flossing and his pyjamas pulled up high and his noisy blowing of his nose and anyway he’s already on the way to falling asleep on the couch, in front of the telly, because that is what he always does now, in the shrouded rhythm of your married life.
Lesson 18
Upon which he kisses his little wife, and grows mild
Hugh is home just after 10 p.m., just as he said.
‘He won’t notice, he won’t notice,’ you say to yourself, at the kitchen table, a glass of wine before you.
‘Hiya,’ he yells.
He does not come to you, he never does. Now he is throwing down his keys, his wallet, his change. Now he is removing his coat and tie, littering them around the lounge room, balustrades, bedroom; black crows you call them, black crows roosting all over your life.
‘Hiya,’ he calls again, enquiringly.
‘Hi.’
He does not come to you, he does not see you. At the kitchen table, sitting there, cracked. Like you were once, long ago; that he has never witnessed, that he would not understand.
A woman, now, your mind is churning with it, the one thing you never tried.
But everything else …
‘Thank God that pile of clothes has finally disappeared,’ Hugh yells from the bedroom.
You shut your eyes and throw your head back and smile.
Blazing light, blazing life.
II
‘My words roar, and my salvation is afar’
Psalm 22
Lesson 19
Truly, in this hard world, we should be accustomed to this law of love – love paramount and never ceasing
You are eleven. It is your birthday. He takes you out to dinner. He tells you he has a surprise. You wonder what: a horse of your own perhaps, a trail bike. Your father takes you to a restaurant in town, you have never been to one like it, it has cloth napkins and waiters in uniform. Your father doesn’t belong in this place. He has a face like a fist – fleshy, knobbly, rough.
There is a woman at your table. She is called Anne. Your father tells you they are getting married. As he speaks it is a father you have never seen before. His soft, surrendering eyes that look at her and not you; his glow.
Your world stops.
Your father tells you you will be a bridesmaid, with a beautiful dress. Anne will help you choose it. Your father tells you there will be proper food, finally, in your home, fresh sheets and a stocked fridge and even – wait for it – an ironed school uniform every Sunday night. The only concession either of you has ever made to the classroom is him brushing your long hair – his hand gently and firmly holding your crown so as not to hurt – at the start of every school week.
You take a deep breath. You nod. Your life, until this point, has been unfettered. You have been marinated by the bush that surrounds you. You are often barefoot, grubby and wild, answerable to no one; your father and yourself a tight buddy-unit. You have soil packed under your fingernails in tiny crescent moons and coal dust ingrained in fine lines along your knees and no one ever worries about that. You cannot do blanket stitch, crochet or knit, but you can change a tyre and suck poison out of a snake bite and shrivel a leech on your skin with salt.
This has been your world, since your mother died of breast cancer when you were a young child.
But now. A new life. Your father’s sparkling eyes and the pretty, mascaraed eyes of the woman opposite. Their shine. And in between them, an aching enormous eleven-year-old heart churning with fear and excitement, and readiness. Because there is so much love in you. To pour out, to swamp, to receive.
Dad loves Anne. So you love Anne. So Anne loves you.
It is as simple as that. Isn’t it?
Lesson 20
Utterly ignorant of the framework on which society moves, she is perpetually straining at gnats and swallowing camels, both in manners and morals
You are eleven, you feel too much. You are an open wound that can only be sutured by that simplest of balms: attention. Love as a necessary verb – to rescue, plume, bloom, cradle, encircle, uplift. Protect.
Beyond your father’s flinty, sloppy love there is no rescue in your world. It is a surprise of four little houses huddled amid a great loom of trees. A scrap of a hamlet that barely deserves a name, too small for its own postcode, with just a mine manager’s house, an under manager’s, an electrical engineer’s and a mechanical engineer’s. All servicing a tiny seam of coal called Beddington Number Two, a tiny pebble of a mine in a valley north of Sydney.
On the high hills of this place you feel as if you are standing on the roof of the world, that you could reach up and touch the very cheek of God – the breeze slippery with sun and the great expanse of sky unspooling above you and around you to the very corners of the earth but it is only the ground, of course, that is valued in this place. This glorious land on the roof of the world is scurried by towers and conveyor belts and trucks heaped high with their sooty spilling black, and wire fences keeping everyone but miners out. Above ground: the domain of the dispossessed. Convict ghosts, sandstone ruins, abandoned plots, Aboriginal paintings in under-hangings, families sickened by generations of coal dust. Below ground: energy, productivity, work. There is the smell of greed to extract in the very air of this place.
To get to your father’s weatherboard house with its faded red tin roof you drive down obscure dirt roads that threaten to exhaust themselves, wither and fade and stop, claimed by virulent bush. Then the Beddy road narrows, in the very heart of the valley, and you wonder where you are going; to what dangerous, hidden place. A murderer’s road, this – for dumping bodies, baggage, secrets, lives.
Not a woman’s world.
‘For God’s sake, make something of yourself,’ your father often tells you and by this he means: don’t be useless, don’t hang about like a bad smell. He’s taught you to survive a bush fire, find water, read a motorbike manual, mend a chook house and a fence; all his knowledge imparted as you traverse the bush roads in his ute – as if driving, concentrating on something else, is the only time he can properly converse. Your whole discourse, it feels, takes place within cars or when he’s poking in bonnets or tinkering, flat on his back, underneath; he’s always got several old bombs lying about, gutted or up on bricks. Avoiding the slap of face to face, of what he will see in it, who. But with a car, yarning, when you do not have to look at each other’s eyes, there is intimacy.
It is the only intimacy you get.
Your toughened, dusty, bare feet are always leaning on the dashboard or the windscreen; the dirty imprints of your toes forever in front of the passenger seat like a dog at its post leaving its mark. You’re continually kicking off your shoes, never wanting that feeling of being confined, restrained, bound by anything. Your father’s always letting you, rarely saying no to his wild, sweet, bush scrap of a kid, who knows nothing of the world beyond this place.
He tells you on the way home from your birthday dinner that Anne will help you with women … stuff, you know, like what he can’t. Anymore.
‘Like what?’
‘Just … stuff. She’ll be good for you. Yeah.’
His voice trails off.
In the vivid silence beyond you wonder what he means. He says all this haltingly, awkwardly; and all you really understand is that it’s important. Whatever it is. You take your feet off the dash and look at your father coolly and there is the first sliver of an adult knowing in that look – that your father is just no good with talk, with anything that’s not about spanners and carburettors and saddles and swags. He’s like one of those icebergs with the huge unknown mass of him underneath.
What you also understand from that night: a new world awaits.
Lesson 21
Elegant infamy
There is only one word for your naivety then. Magnificent. You have learnt no defences for the wiliness of grown-ups, their sophisticated ways, have never had to. You have lived your whole life in a bell jar of isolation.
Learning how to fashion a bridle out of a piece of rope and splint a broken bone when you’re stuck out bush, learning when to sense a coming rain; how to read a kookaburra’s laugh. Your tiny house is bereft of pictures on the wall, ornaments or books. A Bible on a side table is the only tome – unread – and the television is on every evening but it’s never the ABC with those posh, city voices. A Sydney Morning Herald has never crossed its threshold; classical music has never wafted out, it’s all Johnny Cash and Elvis, talkback and the Daily Telegraph. Your father is deeply suspicious of the world of the Big Smoke, of the well-born and the educated he rarely encounters, their social and intellectual confidence. The ease of them. It is only physically that the likes of him can ever compete, not that he wants to. His world is this valley.
Not a doll is in the house, not a frill or scrap of pink. Your treasured possessions are your Snoopy diary and your bike, Peddly, which becomes your horse as soon as you sit on its saddle, winging you every day to other worlds than this.
Your school, at Beddy Number One, is a single classroom. Twelve kids, aged five to eleven. Your teacher is like many of the women of the valley, soft-fleshed and ambitionless beyond snaring a husband and a motherly life; soon to be married and she’ll then leave teaching, which she has never liked, to devote herself to the job of wife. Her job is limbo land, the dead zone until something else.
‘Why do you want to do that, Miss? Wouldn’t you prefer to be with us?’ you ask, cheekily. ‘He’s a right old bush turkey the bloke you’re marrying, that’s what my daddy says. Beyond his use-by date.’
‘Get out.’
Which is what you want, of course. Almost every day you are released from the tiny classroom. She has given up on you, doesn’t know what to make of your blunt voice, your absence of understanding what’s wrong and right, your wildness and your wilfulness, your constant gazing out the window, champing at the bit.
Wanting out. Licked by sun and wind. Now. Not a part of this. Every day.
She doesn’t see your knottedness, your enormous heart, primed for love – to give and receive it. Doesn’t know what to make of your vast alone that she senses has no desire for her world, for everything she represents. Because you perceive in her, even then, some kind of an erasure, that there is no audacious sense of who she really is. She wants to disappear into someone else’s life; she desires it more than anything else. That, to you, is bizarre. The one message your teacher imparts to you, upon the dewy, blinkered brink of her shiny new existence, is that women who are thinkers do not get married.
Then there’s Anne. Waiting in the wings to take over your life.
Lesson 22
Matrimony in the abstract; not the man, but any man – any person who will snatch her out of the dullness of her life
‘In order to be irreplaceable one must be different.’
A quote from Coco Chanel, from a page of the Women’s Weekly all twelve of you have been tearing up to make collages like Roman mosaics.
You are intrigued by the statement. Slip the cutting into the pocket of your overalls. You are a thinker despite what your teacher puts on your report and you love new words like irreplaceable and you are gleaning, slowly, that in this place it takes a mighty courage to be different, to want to be something beyond your world. In this fragile, uncertain time before your father’s marriage is a tiny seed of a thought, to one day write; to be a watcher, an observer, apart. Because of the shiver of a truth: that the women of this world would only enfold you if everything that was unique about you, everything vivid and sure and free and strong, was gone. And the alternative, here – aching, yowling loneliness.
You fly home on Peddly that afternoon with the scrap of words in your pocket and sense that one day you will be saved by a world very different from this, saved by everything this world is not. You have no idea what that existence will be or how you will get to it but even then, so young, you have a raging will for a life that is not theirs.
Lesson 23
This law of love – love that tries to be always as just as it is tender, and never exercises one of its own rights for its own pleasure and good, but for the child’s
The wedding. The house of Colin, your father’s best mate, his only school friend who escaped the pit. Chosen because it has a swimming pool and a cabana, the poshest thing possible in your lives, and because the little wife can do prawn cocktails for you, mate.
Eleven p.m. The latest you have been up in your life.
Colin lolls up to you, beer glass in hand, in the saggy, stretched time after the main meal.
He cups your chin and gazes into your fierce little face, at the long golden hair your father brushed last night – for the last time, you suspect – and he murmurs, ‘Your mother was so beautiful.’ Stretching out the ‘so’ with a secret smile, gazing at you like no one has before, as if he sees something of your mother in there, some whisper of potential, suddenly, to mirror her. You jerk back like a spooked pony, afraid of that, in a way you don’t quite understand, afraid your father will reject you because of it.
But more importantly, that someone else will.
You glance across at your newly minted stepmother, at her bouffant of a bridal gown and extravagantly thrown back veil, at her crazed untouchable radiance and you know in that moment your past life is gone. That this triumphant young woman in her gown of a first wife not a second will do her best to erase your father’s previous existence, stamp on any whiff of your mother being the love of his life, without even realising, perhaps, what damage she is doing.
You start to cry. The last crying of childhood. You weep, and weep, cannot stop.
You have never done anything like this before. You can pull apart two bush dogs in a fight and shoot a rabbit and crack a whip but cannot explain why you are doing this; it just feels like a giant hand is dragging a piece of jagged, broken glass down the underbelly of your life, splitting you open and all the tears, of all the years, are finally out. Everyone comes up to you: your father, your brand-new stepmother, your grandmother. But the floodgates are opened and cannot be shut. You sense this is horribly unfair on Anne and are ashamed of it but can’t stop.
Because your father is lost to you from this point.
And you know that no matter how much she tries, your stepmother politely tolerates you and nothing else; she doesn’t want any of your enormous swamping ready love, actually; she doesn’t want the encumbrance of it in her life. Your stepmother, who over the years will perfect the art of emotional terrorism; an adult upon a child. Who despatches you, from the age of eleven, into an affronted loneliness within the new family she creates. A loneliness vast and raw, horizonless.
The obscenity of that.
Lesson 24
The house-mother! What a beautiful, comprehensive word it is. How suggestive of all that is wise and kindly, comfortable and good.
You learn to live warily under the same roof. You learn that your presence is a source of distress to your stepmother – she is a good Catholic girl and is ashamed her new husband is not a cleanskin, wants to pretend to the world her husband is not twenty years older than her and never had a former life. She gave up her job in a petrol station at twenty, at the first whiff of matrimony and never worked again. Gave it all up to enter the longed-for world of vibrant tranquillity and status called marriage – and no grubby, gobby child is going to mar that. She is a typical valley girl – early school-leaver, thick set, the expectation that soon they’ll be with child – married or not. The much-anticipated baby doesn’t come, doesn’t come, even though the readiness for motherhood is oozing from her and your father grunts at one point, from under the F.J., to stop asking about it, it’ll happen in good time, ‘zip it’.
Your father is now called Ted, not his nickname – Eddie – that everyone has always called him; his colleagues, his mates, your mother, even you. She insists. Everything from his past is gradually turfed out, the carpet your mum chose, wallpaper, crockery. Photos disappear into obscure drawers, not only of your mum but of you and him together until suddenly, you notice, there are none in the house.
‘Don’t you dare take her for a drive, Ted. It’s my time, not hers.’
Yet it is only when you are alone with your father, in the car, that his fingertips find your earlobe and his voice softens and he whispers, ‘You’re still my China, aren’t you?’ as if it is the last time he will be able to tell you this and gravely you must hold it in your heart, you must never forget it; he has stolen this chance and it may not happen again. In the car, just the two of you, with his secret voice he never dares give you the gift of when his new wife is present. His life is now held hostage by her and it is only when he is away, in the car, that he is free – his old self.
You can taste your stepmother’s spirit and are disheartened by it. She has the focus and insecurity and determination of the second wife, to make this marriage work. She crashes into your equilibrium. Living with her is like being trapped in sleeplessness; she sucks the oxygen from your world.
She never teaches you what your father wanted, all that woman stuff he could not articulate. Your father never asks. He assumes everything is alright. You do not tell him. Your whole relationship is built on inarticulacy, it would not feel right to suddenly blurt. You are learning silence and watchfulness and the solace of a pen that speaks when you cannot, as an explosive combination is being brewed: frustration, anger, boundless curiosity – and enormous innocence.
Lesson 25
When I go from home to home and see the sort of rule or misrule there, the countless evil influences, physical and spiritual, against which children have to struggle, I declare I often have to wonder that in the rising generation there should be any good men and women
Your bedroom is now the verandah at the back of the house with a roll-down canvas flap at night. It is not far away enough. You are no longer a part of the main house. It has not been done by pushing you out, it has been done by removal, by erasing everything that was secure and known in your past life. All the roaring absences now; the hidden photographs, the taken-down curtains, the painted-over marks of your mother’s on the kitchen door, as you stood up, grew tall, and then they stopped. Aged three years and eight months. The whole interior has become a ghost house to you; holding its breath for someone who will never come back. You still see it – searingly – as what it was. Not what it is now.
When it thunders in your back room you drop to the ground with your belly to the floorboards and hear the house talk through the rumbling in your skin. You smell the earth opening out to the rain, opening wide, drinking it up, wider and wider the ground opens out, every pore of it, and you smile and breathe it in deep.
No respite, but the bush.
Lesson 26
Every family is a little kingdom in itself: the members and followers of which are often as hard to manage as any of the turbulent governments whose discords convulse our world
By a shaded cleft of a creek you make a bush hut out of broken branches – widow makers, they’re known as locally – and great brooms of leaves; your home away from home, just for you. You love the cool smell of the water on the rock, the rich rust of the wet stone, the startling green of the ferns sucking from the restless stream. You love the clutter of vibrant life drawn to this secret tranquillity, the frogs, lizards, birds, wallabies if you’re very still. The land beyond it is bleached pale, the colour of the sheep that feed from it, but you’d never know within this.
You stay out later and later in your sanctuary. Are intrigued the first time you come home – after dinner, but before your father has returned from his shift – to see the worry lines creasing your stepmother’s face. It is the first time you have seen concern on her, with anything to do with you.
You learn, in that instant, the authority of removal.
You stay away longer and longer.
Then one day, after a big rain, the mosquitoes come. You need something to keep them away. There is only one thing in your world that is a length of fine netting, and you know exactly what room to find it in.
Lesson 27
Never expect in the child a degree of perfection which one rarely finds even in a grown person
You never enter your father’s bedroom anymore. He no longer brushes your hair on a Sunday night, no one does. And the room is not his now, in any way; it’s been prettied up. It feels alien, forbidden, scrubbed; sanctified by something unknowable. But in it, now, is the only thing of hers you will ever want.
She is away, visiting her mother. When she is gone it is as if the house breathes out, with a sigh – your whole world unfurls and you can move freely in it. You won’t have long. You scrabble through her cupboard and rigidly ordered drawers; God, an entire life spent making things neat, what a waste. You find what you’re looking for in a leather suitcase under the bed.
A carefully folded veil, under a circle of dried roses.
Your mosquito net lasts through storms and winds and possums rampaging and the time you jumped away from a red-bellied black snake and crashed through it; lasts through days of you returning later and later until finally, one morning, she follows you; to work out where you are disappearing to all these God forsaken days, to work out what on earth is going on. And with a scream of rage she flurries upon your hidden place and drags down her precious veil, now ingrained with grubbiness and torn beyond repair.
She gets you home by the hair, your long golden hair, and knees you in the back and now finally you see the strength of this hefty country lass, and you’re so slight; she knees you like she would a calf and grabs your mother’s old dressmaking scissors and hacks off all your hair, in great ragged clumps – as if this will be the only veil you will ever have in your life and she will destroy it, oh yes, and may it never grow back. So much hate in her, so much frustration at this stain in her life. Then she gets a bottle of black ink that your father uses for writing cheques and she tips it over your head so it runs down your face like black blood in huge streaks and screams, ‘Get out, get out, get out of my life,’ her voice naked, now, finally, with the one thing she has wanted ever since she came into this place.
That night, you gallop your hurt and your howl into your Snoopy diary, the only voice you have. Because you are becoming a woman in this claustrophobic place – you are learning not to let slip the roar of your true self, and your father, of course, will not be told any of this, what goes on between his two women. You are learning how it is to be female in this life.
Lesson 28
Follow openly and fearlessly that same law which makes spring pass into summer, summer into autumn, and autumn into winter
Suddenly, boarding school. Just like that.
Cast adrift. Unwanted. Emotionally whipped.
But curious. About a new life, a new chance.
Curious as to how to expose your aching, open wound to the light; the wound that can only be sutured by one thing, the simplest thing of all. Love. The necessary verb: to rescue, bloom, protect. Aching for something, anything, to heal you and perhaps here in this new life you will find it.
Your convent school is in the city’s centre, its honey sandstone shadowed by buildings taller than it. Your father’s lucrative night shifts are paying for it – eleven and three-quarter hours, from 8 p.m., triple time. In the Big Smoke you’re still the kid from the bush, like a horse in a box kicking out, strong, if you are too long in it. City-logged. Every so often you can smell the bush when the breeze blows in from the south and you hold your head high to it. Above the pollution and the cram of the noise and the crush of the people you want to feel the dirt between your toes and in your hair, you want to be strong with your land again, want silence and spareness, a place for your eyes to rest.
Want your father. The one person who gave you the gift of attention, once.
The one person who gave you the gift of touch, once.
Touch is taboo in this place. You are young ladies, at all times, no matter what. Eating a banana in public is sexually suggestive and will not be tolerated from girls of this establishment; school shoes must not be polished too highly lest the reflection of bright white cottontails be glimpsed too readily; surfaces of bath water must be encrusted with talcum powder so a glimpse of flesh is never caught under the cloudy surface. The only man you are allowed to adore is God. The Thorn Birds is eagerly, grubbily, passed around the class; Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins. You are growing up. Everywhere flesh, touch, skin, bodies changing, worlds expanding, nights churning.
You become best friends with Lune, the daughter of the French ambassador, the only one in the class whose parents are divorced. Lune loves her motherless little bush girl who knows nothing of this world – an outsider like herself. She teaches you about razors and tanning and tampons, French kisses and cigarettes, silk knickers and suspender belts. European-knowing, she teaches you about the power in a dirty smile, and the allure of confidence.
Lesson 29
Have the moral courage to assert your dignity against the sneers of society
You have been shut away within high convent walls to address the wildness from the bush; to quieten you, dampen you, smooth you down. You are too large-spirited, singular, raw. You have become an embarrassment.
And yet, and yet, you are not convinced these women who rule over you are so disapproving. The nuns sense your difference, you are sure, that you will never be one of those ranks of girls they brisk out year after year armed with Daddy’s gold credit card and a D.J.’s account. There is something … carnal … about you. Non-conformist, untamed. Hungry. But for what, no one knows, including yourself. You’re like the parched earth in a drought waiting, waiting, for nourishment of some sort.
You see something in these nuns, the few of them left, that is strong, lit. They are an intriguing new breed of female in your life. They are doing exactly what they want to and have a great calmness because of it. Precious few women you know have that – certainly not any married ones, the mothers of school friends, the valley women you come across. There is something so courageous about the nuns’ strength in swimming against the stream. You think of your stepmother, riddled with jealousy and insecurity, threatened by a slip of a girl half her size, made sour with it. These women at your school, in their resolutely interior world, are free of the world of men by choice and glow with it.
Can a married woman radiate serenity? You’ve never seen it in the wives of Beddy, in the brittle women you occasionally glimpse in The Young and the Restless and the harassed mothers at the school gate. Your Mother Superior is fifty-five years old and has a face unburdened by wrinkles and worries, kids and mortgages and debt. There is never make-up, never shadow; it is as if she has washed her face in the softness of a creek’s water her entire life. Washed it with grace.
The serenity of choice, and you are intrigued by it. The courage to be different.
Lesson 30
To feel that you can or might be something, is often the first step towards becoming it
Your mother’s old boss, from her restaurant management days, invites you for tea. He is the only person you know in the Big Smoke outside of school. He grew up in the bush, like your mother did, and found a way out. He’s now mysteriously wealthy, has a sunken conversation pit and a Porsche.
In his high glass box hovering above the harbour he lifts up your hair – now grown back – and says wondrously that it is just like your mother’s, how about that. He likes to talk about her, was fond of her, always teasing, asking her to marry him. He says he always likes a woman with narrow shoulders and runs his fingers along your collarbone, to see if you’ll do, appraising you like a horse.
At his touch, your stomach feels as if it is being steamrollered.
You catch your breath. You step back.
He laughs.
You are not allowed to know, understand, exactly what this man now does; no one will tell you. All you perceive is that you are not like one of those women he employs and never will be; you will always be apart, removed, from that world. He says with a smile that you’re like a little bush filly he had as he was growing up, with some thoroughbred mixed in there somewhere, wild and sweet and strong and untamed inside that ridiculous school uniform with its skirt too long and its Peter Pan collar and then he looks at you gravely and says he doesn’t want to see the wildness broken, ever, any of it, as he runs his fingers along your collarbone again; as your stomach churns again.
He makes you vividly aware of your teenage body.
Ripening.
The power of it.
Lesson 31
The only way to make people good is to make them happy
A weekend at home. Your father picks you up from the train station, a legitimate drive that your stepmother has to allow. His fingertips stray absently to your earlobe, the old caress, and you shut your lids and feel the coming wet prickling in your eyes at the tenderness, so rare in your life, so ached for. Kindness will always crack you now, it is the legacy of your emotionally blunted childhood.
He doesn’t say he loves you. He just gives you his snippet of a touch. It is all you need, it is enough.
Your father’s philosophy of parenting has become: if you want a child to do well you ignore them, so the child will always be striving for attention. It is the rhythm of your boarding life.
‘Look at me. Say something. Notice. Respond!’
You have been screaming it to him silently your entire time away; it is why you do so well in your new school, determined, focused, competitive. It’s the only area of your life you can achieve in. Get right. You’ve always been a thinker, have always devoured anything you could get your hands on to read, being starved of words has worked. Your father doesn’t engage in any of it. Doesn’t read, doesn’t write. The few times you have caught him at it – writing a cheque or a shopping list – he takes careful pleasure in the beauty of the letters, each one strikingly formed, every stroke a pattern, which betrays that he is still a relative beginner; he doesn’t do it much.
And now, in the car, on the way home, his touch. You lean into it. Then as soon as you arrive with a screech of the handbrake and walk into the house he clamps down, no longer shows you the vivid pulse of this love. Is formal, distant, uninterested; veering into coldness, a different person entirely. What is he afraid to show her? What has she threatened?
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.
Lesson 32
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.
Lesson 33
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.
Lesson 34
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.
III
‘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
Lesson 35
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.
Lesson 36
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.
Lesson 37
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.
Lesson 38
Easy, pleasant and beautiful as it is to obey, development of character is not complete when the person is fitted only to obey
His studio is in a warehouse, a proper one, whose second floor is reached by a scuffed and clanking goods lift. You say nothing as you are lifted high, high, but you are breathing tremulous, fast, clutching the straps of your backpack. Not looking, biting your lip, scarcely believing you are doing this. Trying not to show him anything of the great churning within you. He is wearing jeans and t-shirt, he looks different, a student himself. He shares the space with three other people, it is a hot Friday afternoon, they are out.
He gives you some lemonade. Lemonade! You are not allowed it at home.
You sit at the table, he accidently brushes your leg as he sits, you pretend not to notice, breathe shallow. You look around. Tacked on the wall are various postcards from galleries, and photographs, black and white and colour. Your eye rests on a print of a painting, a woman naked, the artist looking straight up her legs.
The meticulous detail.
He catches you looking.
‘Courbet. The Origin of the World.’
A prickly silence. You don’t want to look away, in shock, don’t want to give him that; can feel a familiar tingling, in your belly, between your legs.
‘Incredibly bold for way back then.’ A pause. ‘And now.’
You nod. Blush. The good student, taking in your lesson.
He stands in front of you. The bulge between his legs has grown again, he is right in front of you.
‘Do you want to sit for me?’ he breathes.
You try to still your breath.
So, this is it. You close your eyes, nod, can’t speak. Finally you will learn how love happens, touching and cherishing and nourishing and wanting, you, just you; you will learn where love comes from, how it’s snared, yes, this is the beginning of everything.
You stand, your finger finds the back of the chair, you don’t know what to do next.
He strokes your cheek. It slips down. Over your neck, chest, breast. Something is taking you over, a vast yes. You are angling up your arms and awkwardly unzipping your school uniform, and now he is helping you, he is undressing you, leading you; reaching behind your back, as if this moment will disappear if he doesn’t hurry, stumbling with the clasp and finally slipping off your small, pale bra then kneeling and holding his face to your skin, your quivering skin and with a great sigh burying himself in you, breathing you in. And staying there, staying.
Then his fingers. Slowly, slowly, like a daddy longlegs. Working their way into your white cotton panties.
Spidering inside, to your core, your great warmth; slowly prising your legs apart. You watch him watching, his mouth parted, his breathing. You are intrigued – his face, that you can do this to another person.
Transform them.
The power in that, and you have never felt such power in your life as he undresses you until there is nothing left.
So wet you feel you could crumble with it, now, buckle with his touch. You clutch his hair. Your legs collapse under you. He catches you and lays you on a worn Persian rug on the floor. Stands over you, smiles, assesses. Whips off his t-shirt.
Picks up a paintbrush.
Lesson 39
Would that, instead of educating our young girls with the notion that they are to be wives, or nothing – we could instil into them the principle that, above and before all, they are to be women
You feel suddenly, brutally, exposed.
‘Uh uh,’ he admonishes, as your legs instinctively entwine, shutting you away.
The rug is threadbare, thin, you can feel the sharpness of the floorboards underneath.
He unzips his trousers, fast, and you are astonished at the length of his penis, the size of it, it looks so big, it could never fit.
‘Are you a virgin?’ he asks.
Yes, you nod, breathe, biting your lip, can scarcely talk.
‘How old are you?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘No one must know we’re doing this.’ No talk in his voice, just breath.
‘Yes.’ Your face turns away, to the Courbet, so this is what women do, all women, you will learn, it is time.
‘I don’t know if I –’ you suddenly blurt, the voice of a child.
‘Sssh,’ he says.
You glance across at his canvases, stacked against walls and on easels, the paint is viscous, tumultuous, raw; among the portraits are some other ones, secret ones, bodies, just bits, never a face; men and women, their genitals in stark, cold, medical close-up. You look and look at those ones and then something cold touches you, playfully, and you start; the paintbrush, it parts your lips, you yelp in shock, it brushes your clit, plays with the entrance of your secret interior, then slithers across your mouth and your taste the tang of it, of you. And he dips the brush inside, gentle but insistent and you gag and he stops, it goes back to your clit and your stomach flips and despite yourself you’re suddenly opening your legs wider, wider, surrendering, arching your back and gasping, suddenly, and there is a great warmth, a tingling, something is taking over you, you are becoming someone else.
Who opens herself. Who is turned over. Who lifts her buttocks out, high to the sky, wanting, waiting, for God knows what, as the tip of the brush plays, explores. Teases and you wince and flop – no, this is going too fast, it’s too unknown. All of it. You twist onto your back, legs clamped.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he says, matter-of-fact, smiling, placing the paintbrush back in a crammed jar. You look at him, no one has ever said you are beautiful before. A blush roars through your body.
‘I really want to paint you.’
You nod, the good girl, still biting your lip.
‘Now,’ he whispers.
But the spell is broken, you should be getting back, the golden light of late afternoon is slanting too obliquely through the tall, dusty windows and you must hurry to catch the next train, you’ll be just in time for Dad to not be worried if you go now, quick.
‘Next Friday,’ you manage to stumble out. ‘Same time.’ Don’t know what you’re saying.
His fingertip draws a line across the top of your pubis, then slowly, slowly – as your belly rolls under him – his touch, teasing in the crevices and you rise to it you meet it then his finger darts inside, once, with a swift, hard jerk; he hooks you; you tense in shock. The tone, in an instant, has shifted into something else.
‘Our secret, remember. No one must ever, ever know about this.’
You are too young for this, you are not sure, you shouldn’t; you are the good girl. You nod, next Friday, yes.
Desperate to begin.
Living. Loving. Life.
You need this.
You are on a path now, you cannot turn back.
Lesson 40
Let us turn from the dreary, colourless lives of the women who have nothing to do
The thirstlands.
All through that week and if anyone touches you, brushes by you – near your midriff, belly, chest – you will implode. All nerve endings raw and clenched at the thought of him, and pants damp, soaked with want. Lune gives you a secret smile whenever she catches your eye; you’re a woman now, more woman than her and you both know it. For the first time in your life you have something over her, over all of them, and it makes you walk tall, bold, right down the centre of the convent corridors with their polished parquet floors – you are becoming someone else. No more hugging the walls in this place, you are embarking on a new life.
Before you catch the bus that will take you to Central Station you change out of your school uniform, preparing for him, making sure you have more time this visit.
The force of the anticipation, as if a great hand has brushed a sheen of varnish over the tepidness of your life.
He smiles a triumphant smile as you step from the lift.
‘Well well, I wasn’t sure you’d come back.’
He is not wearing trousers, just a t-shirt. He is ready.
You hesitate, not sure why; roaming the kitchen, looking at anything but him as he gazes at you like a quarry caught, smiling his smile while he retrieves a lemonade for his guest and a beer for himself, opening it with one finger and still looking. Undressing you, with his eyes, as your fingers scurry to the buckles of your braces in self-consciousness.
There is a photograph on the battered fridge of three women, one of them is heavily pregnant, they are wearing bikinis on some deserted beach. ‘My flatmate. The middle one,’ he says. CWA is emblazoned in red lipstick across each of their tummies.
‘C.W.A.?’
‘Cunts With Attitude,’ he laughs. ‘I’ve painted the lot of them.’
Women who seem a world apart from you with their brazenness, bluntness. As does that word and the way they have colonised it; you’ve never heard it spoken aloud, thought it was only used by men who don’t like women very much.
‘Come on. Let’s get going.’
A new briskness in his voice.
‘We don’t have much time.’
You turn. Take a deep breath. So, this is it. A fresh canvas waits in readiness. The Courbet print is high in its corner with a slice of masking tape. He comes up to you with his knowing smile and unclips you, bold, just like that he draws off your t-shirt and whips off your bra; impatience in his fingers now.
You step back.
He grabs your hips, rubs, close. Cups your buttocks under your underpants, draws you into him.
Right, it must be done, now, this is what you have always wanted, dreamt of – a painter, an artist, you are complicit in this; there will be your triumph over the other schoolgirls, your difference, you cannot go back.
He spits on his fingers. Gosh, so that is what men must do. A wet finger slips inside you. Another.
Feel him, exploring. Your eyes blink, smart.
Lesson 41
No power on earth can give you back that jewel of glory and strength – your innocence
Urgent now. Propelling you onto a well-worn fifties couch. Whipping off your undies. Snatching up a paintbrush, clamping it between his teeth. Standing over you, cocking his head, nudging your legs apart. Lifting one knee casually into a crook, with his foot; placing your own foot wider on the couch, wider, it hurts.
‘Touch yourself,’ he murmurs.
You frown, what? But you know, you have seen it in Lune’s magazines, you know instinctively. Your fingers stray, he is holding his penis.
‘Slip inside,’ he breathes, directing, as his fingers move slowly, up, down, and you touch yourself, obey, the good girl. Is this right, asks your frown, your concentrating face. He nods.
‘Yes, yes, keep going.’ You close your eyes, try to lose yourself, touch yourself like you do at night, every night, when the wet comes, the flooding.
‘That’s it. Perfect.’
So.
The learning has begun, the collating of experience; you must do as you are told, it all begins from here.
You widen your legs further, further, splaying your fingers and surrendering to the moment, closing your eyes, arching your back, catching your breath. You open your eyes, watch him watching you. The power in it, the spell that your body can cast. Then suddenly, urgently, need something inside, anything, need to be filled up. You gasp, he groans, holding his firm penis then coming close, whispering the paintbrush across your clit, your lips, your secret mouth. ‘Deeper,’ you whisper, you don’t know why, needing it, something, anything, opening your legs wider.
‘Good girl,’ he whispers back chuffed, then to himself, ‘my obedient little schoolgirl,’ and you stop, frown, suddenly don’t like it.
The tone.
You shut your legs. He’s having none of it. He kisses you hard, suddenly, on the lips, a knee rough between your legs, and squeezes your chin firm, twisting your skin, pushing in the intrusion of his tongue and sweeping your mouth like a mine sweeper, kissing you hard as if his lips are wooden. You don’t like it anymore, it hurts. He jiggles your breasts, scrunches them up. Flips you over, smartly, like a piece of meat; you’re now kneeling with your belly over the couch and you cry out in shock, it’s too rough, changed, insistent.
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