Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (35 page)

In your diary, late that raw, ranging night, you come across a scrap of something from Gabriel Garcia Marquez describing the loss of his virginity as a teenager – how it triggered a vital force within him.

The sense of celebration, the boldness, intrigues and angers you. You wonder if this feeling of empowerment is a particularly male phenomenon.
What
vital force? You’ve been shocked into silence; in the addled aftermath of this episode you’re experiencing a catastrophic loss of spark, of certainty. You can barely record the episode in your diary – the sheer, puny grubbiness of it. Once you felt so cheeky and curious, bold and sure; now, suddenly, you’re faltering. What happened back there? As soon as a man put his arm around you something was rubbed out; some inner certainty. Why the leakage of confidence, the capitulation, as you entered the realm of the sexual? Why did you nod and gush so pathetically, saying ‘yes please, a studio, wow,’ on that concourse?

Your bewilderment, over the lot of it.

You suspect a terrifying secret: that virginity and chastity by choice are the magic elixirs that can make a woman calm,
audacious, strong. You will have to find out. You don’t know how. The experiment feels almost derailed from the start. Love must be tracked, studied, dissected, yes of course, but you must never allow it to snap you in its strong jaws like a steel trap. No, the jagged pain of your father’s withholding has taught you the folly of that.

Several days with your grandmother.

You need her right now, the certainty of her powdery smell and flannelette sheets, her unconditional warmth. You’ve begged your father and he’s complied with phone calls arranging pick ups and train tickets; as if he senses something rattling within you that is beyond him and he’s more than happy to palm it off. Women’s business, all that emotional stuff – his mother will sort it out.

You have not told her anything. Does she sense … something? A changing, a turning.

Over her meat-and-three-veg dinner you talk school and careers and marriage and life, she asks if you’ve got a boyfriend and you shake your head and laugh and she nods – plenty of time, love, plenty of time – and tells you how good she was, once, at so much: maths and English, geography and athletics, but then as soon as a boy put his arms around her she was gone.

‘Just like that.’

She married young.

‘It was all I wanted, and it killed my ambition, every single scrap of it. And my energy,’ she cackles. ‘Which was just bursting from me, once.’

You smile, wondering what she sees in you that has changed and why she is saying all this.

Later, as she’s tucking you into your bed with its electric blanket on and smoothing down the hair on your forehead, she adds, ‘There’s a strength about us women that scares men, I think. You keep your chin up, love. Get a degree; be a doctor or a lawyer. Make me proud. Your father too. You could be the first in the family to finish school, let alone university. Your dad left at fourteen to go down the pit, I left to go into service. Do it for us.’

You will not tell her what has happened, will never tell her, it would break her heart.

No idea where to go from it.

You shut down. For a couple of years. A spring coiled tight.

Waiting, for God knows what.

Lost.

Summer holidays. Eight weeks ahead of thick heat, cicadas, bush-fire alerts.

Your stepmother is ignoring you. It is her one weapon, her only way to have power over you. With silence.

You are too different. You have city-awareness now. You will never lose yourself like she has done, and no matter how much she thinks she has won – when your father doesn’t show up to your speech days, when he never talks with the parents of your new friends, when he neglects to set foot in your world – you would never, ever want your stepmother’s life. The sourness of it, her closed heart. It is the one power you have over her.

The energy between you is wrong. You could never be her, she could never be you. It is never discussed, but you both know it.

Today she has designated a cleaning day, is buried in a flurry of activity. Sorting through her Tupperware boxes, rinsing and airing – she takes them to gatherings to scoop up leftover food. You can’t bear the bustling little world of domesticity she creates around her, crowding out any trace of your mother in this scrap of a house that was renovated by your parents long ago – working side by side, he told you once. And now, an obsessive accumulation of new and shiny possessions from daytime ads on the telly cluttering it up – newfangled mosquito zappers, wall-mounted can-openers, sewing tables, kitchen knife sets.

You have few possessions. Like it that way. Like to see the bones of these old valley houses and their heart, running hands along the old plaster walls like horses’ flanks, marvelling at the carpentry in dinky corner cabinets and the bread tins filled with concrete holding up porch roofs and the mouldings of pressed-tin ceilings and the beauty in deco bush flowers scattered in old bathroom tiles, like your own. Tiles now obscured by a stick-on plastic railing and a matching avocado towel set that you know you must keep straight.

So. Cleaning day. And you’re jumping on Peddly to get away from it all and smiling at the familiarity of that hard, worn saddle. Feel young again, out, shedding your city skin. You’re flinging your bike aside and walking thigh-deep in bleached grass, catching grasshoppers and feeling the dry flick of them inside the bauble of your palm before you free them to leap in a great springing arc of release, laughing, away from your stepmother’s narrow, silent, affronted little world.

Go. GO!

At three o’clock you return.

You hear her footsteps thudding through the house towards you. Furious. You shut your eyes. What have you done now? There’s always something to vex her and usually she doesn’t say, it’s just in the thud of her step, her contained fury when you’re in her space.

She has found your diary.

Which was under your bed, still in your school bag. She has gone into your bedroom, your private place, and dug it out. And read it of course, you know instantly. It’s on her face. You have never seen her so incensed, tight, repulsed.

‘Get out, you …
thing
… you. I don’t want you here. Your words, your filth, in my house.’

‘It’s
my
place as much as yours. I lived here long before
you
.’

You try snatching the book back but the sturdy girl with her big country thighs has it firm.

‘Give it back,’ you scream – because it’s your words, your truth, everything that has happened in your life. ‘You spoil
everything
.’ Clawing your hair in frustration, can’t make this right, win, can’t think fast enough. Your tears in that moment are from years of competitiveness and exhaustion and bafflement – you’re his
daughter
, you were a child, you do not understand the jealousy; what you have with your father is a blood tie, a given, a totally different relationship to hers. But you can’t speak properly, can’t get it out, are clotted before her, as clotted as your father. The only place you can talk is in your diary.

Which she’s got.

With everything recorded in it.

That she has done.

The relationship between the three of you is all about the gift of attention, and your father cannot bestow it upon two women at once. And she will win, always. She is an adult and you are not, she knows how to do it; to demand and punish. To withhold what he wants.

You both know that when your father comes back the two of you will be quiet and he will know none of this, the explosive fury between females. That is the code of you both, the only common code you adhere to; this is women’s business.

She spits on your diary in contempt. Has no intention of giving it back. Stomps inside with a slap of the screen door. You hear your words being flung across the room in disgust.

And then quiet.

The only power in her life. A withholding.

But something new.

What honesty can do. The power of it.

She has opened your words and she has read them. All the little incidents over the years, all the hurts, cruelties, vulnerabilities; all the disobedience and confusion and longing and touch. The truth has been forensically trapped. Your meticulous record. And she has been incensed by it.

You smile.