Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (19 page)

screaming, tossing and wilfulness of all kinds are unworthy of a woman

You vomit up to twelve times a day, especially when you’re tired, and you wonder if it’s right for this to happen so often: for some women, yes, your GP says.

Cole holds back the hair from your face as you crouch over the toilet bowl and swishes out the bucket by the bed and wipes your mouth and puts his lips to your stomach, telling the baby not to make mummy sick and after it your palms hold his head for a very long time, and you kiss him, gently, on his crown, in thanks, for you’ve never appreciated him so much.

You wonder what the baby will look like, if it’ll be a Chinese whisper of you both. If its two middle toes will be fused, slingshotted, like your own. You wish for it your left-handedness, your mother’s smile, Cole’s eyesight, his calm.

But still you vomit, as if you’re trying to expel the guilt.

young wives are among the most important members of the community upon whose health and intelligence depend the welfare of the husband, children and servants

The baby’s turning you from your favourite radio station, you can’t bear the dance beat thumps any more, it’s pulling you to Bach. Slowing you, trying to still you, to sail you into quietness. What’s to become of you now you’re on the path to motherhood? Will you disappear, even more, from the arena of action to become a spectator in life, will you live by reflected happiness? It’s the way of old people, isn’t it, and mothers. You’d always had a niggling disdain for them, those disappearing women, weak, faded, blended in, you’d always thought they’d given up. Now, there’s a disdain for what you were: the career woman determined to cram her living in first, who looked down on young mothers so much.

At night there’s the three of you with your belly pressed into Cole’s lower back and the baby between you and your breathing. Cole worries for the child when your belly fills
with laughter, which is often, and when you carry bags of groceries up the stairs and pick up dirty washing from the floor.

Well, maybe you should be helping me a bit more, you tease, tossing his dirty underpants across at him.

And he does, to some extent. Takes more responsibility with the grocery shopping and the cooking, surprises you with dishes you never knew were in him.

I was single for a long time, too, you know: after an astonishing stir fry he’s never done for you before.

You clap your hands with glee.
You
are doing all the cooking from now on, mate, you laugh.

Hang on, hang on, he chuckles, this only lasts until the baby comes.

Your love is knitting, like a broken bone.

But then the early hours, the lounge room, alone.

A city flat, spare and neat, like a monk’s. Naked on your back, on Gabriel’s rug. Your head rammed against the wall. Your fingers threaded through his hair as you push him further into you and you’re beginning to move under him, your hips are opening out and you’re thrusting, soft, it’s coming up from somewhere deep within you, you’re pushing his head deeper into you and deeper still until you’re fucking his tongue and you want him to swallow you up, to never stop.

Pregnancy has altered the tone of your fantasies. It is not, now, a woman you barely recognise in your head, it is not some fantastical experience you’d never want dragged into real life: it is you, now, it is what you’ve done.

the mother ought to secure the services of a competent nurse and skilful doctor as early as possible

The hospital where you go for the first prenatal visit lies in London’s outskirts, it’s grimly Victorian with windows grubby and tall. In the corridors pigeons flutter through bands of dirty light and there’s blood on the toilet floor. Cole’s rattled that there’ll just be a midwife at the birth and no one else. This overstretched country, he rants, it’s the twenty-first century and it still feels like the days of Thomas Hardy. He wants the best; you feel the umbrella of his ownership and protection opening over you and you feel a wave of guilt, again, and you cannot respond, you just squeeze his arm in gratitude.

But then at the first scan all the laughter returns for the baby keeps on veering wildly from the screen, it’s playing tricks, tumbling and dancing and then there it is, with its
little pod-hands and its strange fierce face staring, it seems, straight at you both.

Tears at this visual confirmation: no, you’re not making it all up.

But when will you feel the little astronaut flutter in your belly? At eighteen weeks you feel impatient with its stillness, and it still pulls you into that deep, deep tired where you wake up weary and never find a firm footing with the day. You wonder if that will
ever
pass, if you’ll ever feel normal again. Perhaps it’s worth it never again to have the panicky loneliness of those Christmas seasons of singledom when your heart seemed crazed with cracks. A child, surely, is an insurance policy against that.

You ring your mother. You’ve chosen to apologise. You’re so sick of the tension between you, the weight of it in your life; you want it sorted out. You must swallow your pride and say sorry. Even if you don’t know what for.

She’s so relieved you’ve called. There’s such a sadness in her voice, it’s as if she’s been sad for the entire time you haven’t talked and there’s just a want, like you, to be friends. Neither of you mentions the leaving of the dig site, not wanting to pick at old wounds.

I just can’t wait for this baby, you tell her. I want it to be my little mate. I feel like I’ll never be lonely again in my life.

Ah, but you could be more lonely as a mother than
you’ve ever been, she says. I’m not sure if I should tell you that, but there’s nothing like heartache in the love that a mother can have for a child. A pause. Especially if that child rejects them. A pause. After all that’s been done for them.

So, she can’t resist slipping back, she will always slip back, she will never let up. And what of a parent rejecting a child, you want to say but don’t. You tell your mother you love her, and repeat that you’re sorry, and you’ll call again soon. Trying to keep as much of your life under control as you can, like Sylvia Plath’s beautiful handwriting that was so neat and contained no matter how wild her world got.

good drainage is one of the first necessities of a healthy house

At twenty weeks, you feel the quickening.

That’s what your mother calls it and how you love the term: the child stretches and wheels within you and you can feel it for the first time, its lovely dance. Little seismic tremors shoot across your belly and you smooth your hands over your ripple baby yawling and scrabbling and butting.

Often, in the evenings, a sudden jolt knocks against your hand – the prodder! – and if he’s close Cole will hurry across the room but the baby will have shifted and won’t oblige a second time; it has a mind of its own already and then it’ll scrabble with glee like a kitten with a ball of wool and
now
, you’ll say to Cole,
quick
, and his hand will cup your skin and spread stillness through the child, it will
quieten, as if it’s listening to his touch. How he loves this child so fiercely already.

You kiss your husband, tenderly, on the softness of his lips. You feel sexy and womanly and want a man close but Cole can’t be talked into making love; he fears ramming it, fears the child’s resting too close to where he’d want to go. You can’t convince him that it’s not the case, that the baby’s not the encumbrance you’d expected. So many people think of you now as just one thing: the carrier of a new life. You’re not meant to be sexual, you’re a mother.

Cole whispers into your sleep that you’re going to make a lovely mummy and you smile in your dreaming.

Then jerk awake with a start.

it is wrong to relieve those who beg because it may be encouraging lying, laziness and deceit

Saturday afternoon. You’re sprawled on the couch, reading, newspapers and magazines strewn before you both. The phone. There’s no time to snatch it up, you’re too far away.

Your name, enquiringly, on the answering machine. Just your name, twice.

The voice saying everything.

Your eyes are shut as you think of that utterly disarming ability to love openly, to declare need in the nuance of a sound and what a rare kind of quality it is in a man; you think of how diminishing it is, that utterly honest kind of love that wilts you, that makes you vulnerable and soft. And makes the other person turn away. Then you think of Cole. Your eyes snap open.

At Gabriel crash-tackling his way into your married life.

the secret of a healthy home

Cole simply looks at you.

It’s nothing, you say in a rising tide of indignation, it’s just some silly crush.

It’s that guy from the Library, the actor, isn’t it? The one who’s in love with you?

No,
no.
Why do you always think that? He’s a friend, just like all the other Library people, he’s part of the gang. In fact, I haven’t been speaking to him for a while because he
was
starting to get a little strange, all right?

And then you hear yourself asking and what about Theo, anyway, you’ve never explained that, you’ve never actually said what went on at those cosy little drinks. And why the
fuck
are they still going on? It’s with a voice you’ve never heard yourself wield before with Cole, only with
your mother: it’s as if you want to rip at your husband’s jugular, to have it all, finally, out. What about her, huh? Can we just get to the bottom of this – and there’s an ugliness you can’t stop, it betrays all the beauty of your rounded belly. All the frustration and hurt and rage since Marrakech is finally, finally tumbling out. You tell Cole that he’s a fucking failure at his life, he’s so boring, some stupid paint scraper, that’s all, no world beyond his job and his flat and hardly any friends and you hate him,
hate
him, you don’t know where all the words are coming from, you hear them slipping out and you can’t make them stop and what about Theo, come on, what about her, you’re stalking the lounge room like a hyena caged up and then Cole is behind you, he’s lifting you up and squeezing you under the belly, so tight, it hurts, he’s lifting you as if he’s going to throw you across the floor and wipe you and the baby out.

Shut up shut up
shut up
, he yells.

You can see in that moment why husbands drive off cliffs and gas children in cars.

The baby, the baby, it’s all you can say, pushing at his arms, trying to scrabble him off, the baby, the baby.

Cole places you down. He leans both arms against the wall as if he’s trying to prop it up. His head hangs. You cannot see his face. You go and sit on the couch. You close your eyes.

A tense quiet hovers in the room.

You ask Cole if he’s ever smelt a baby’s head, you’re
not sure why you’re asking him that or where to from here but you’re filled suddenly with an enormous sadness, you’re filled like a glass to the brim with it. He does not look at you, he tells you not to be ridiculous, why the fuck would he ever smell a baby’s
head.

I don’t know, I don’t know, you trail out.

You’re a horrible person, he says.

You know it to be the truth.

Cole walks from the room. You don’t move. Wishing, so much, you could suck all your talk back, wishing you could vacuum it into your mouth like a bubble of gum that’s burst. But the words are sticking all over your face and your marriage, and you don’t know if they can ever be scraped off.

one cannot speak too strongly on the danger of giving wrong medicines

Cole walks out the front door. Slams it shut. The noise hurts. He’s never slammed the door before. An hour later he’s back, ignoring you in the living room, striding straight to the bedroom and you do not look at him but you wince at the short, sharp thumps of the banging drawers and cupboard doors. Wince, but do not lift your eyes from the television. He doesn’t speak. He’s never played games like this, he’s never not talked.

The front door slams.

Silence in the flat. You walk to the bedroom. Assess what he’s taken. All his essentials: alarm clock, personal organiser, grandfather’s cufflinks, charger for his mobile phone.

Your thudding heart, your thudding heart.

You sit on the bed, in the heavy silence. You sit for a very long time and then somewhere within that long, long night you rush to the flat’s window, to the towering out and look down at the far pavement and think of everything solid and safe that has gone from your life. You gulp the night air. Stare down the road. There are no people anywhere, no passing cars, no life, all is quiet.

You sit back on the bed. You can hear the silence hum, as the rest of the world is tucked up, snugly, to sleep.

It’s almost unbearably lonely.

So, your life has come to this. This moment of sitting on the edge of the bed, pregnant, and utterly alone. It feels like your fault. What you did with Gabriel feels, for the first time, like betrayal. You’ve been excusing yourself for so long, for it wasn’t you who took the sledgehammer to the marriage first.

But here, now, with Cole gone, it feels utterly cold, and foolish, and destructive. You feel a knot in your throat, the tears gather, you squeeze your lips tight.

You ring Cole’s mobile phone: it’s switched off.

every girl should make her bed and tidy her room for her health’s sake

The next day, no call. You ring Cole’s studio to check on him, pretend it’s business. He’s out. You leave your mobile number. No one calls back.

The baby squirms and stretches inside you, seal happy, oblivious. You imagine having it by yourself, now, holding it afterwards in the high hospital bed surrounded by clusters of happy chatty families at all the other beds, by their flowers and teddy bears and chat. And then there’s you, smiling tightly, in the glittery alone.

He’s never not called.