Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (5 page)

making a noise is of itself healthy, when no one is inconvenienced or annoyed by it

Sometimes you wonder if your husband really
likes
women. He speaks dismissively of your girlfriends and female colleagues, doesn’t want a wife who’s pushy or loud, gets annoyed if you talk to your girlfriends too boomingly on the phone and winces if you shriek. He doesn’t like excesses in women of any kind. He niggles when you don’t dry yourself thoroughly after the bath, says it’s so moist down there you must be growing a jungle. His genitals smell unoffensive, milder than your own.

Cole’s parents are very together, very solidly, defensively middle class. They don’t think you’ll look after their son well enough. His mother communicates all her vigour through her cooking and is horrified you’ve only recently learnt how to do a roast. She sends correspondence,
persistently, to Mr and Mrs C. McCain despite you telling her you haven’t changed your name.

Cole thinks your family is eccentric. It used to be delightfully, exotically so, until he got to know them. Your great-great-grandfather made his fortune importing tea from India and your father’s cousin frittered away the remains of the family wealth on drinking and drugs. Your father was from the poor side of the family and was meant to work but never got around to it. He was charming and roguish, all blond hair and cheekbones in his youth, until drink sapped his looks. You adored him because you never saw him enough. He survived by periodically cashing in shares of the family business until he died, when you were nineteen, of drunkenness and poverty and a spineless life.

It broke your heart. Seeing him during your teenage years seemed to consist, almost entirely, of a series of journeys to and from school. He’d pick you up in his old black Mercedes that looked like a relic from some totalitarian regime, and drive and drive, picking the smallest, most winding country lanes to get you to London. It was only in the car that you ever seemed to talk, because his girlfriend, Karen, always made it difficult when you were in their flat; butting into your time and crying over God knows what. Your father’s affection was reserved for the road or the odd moments when Karen was out of the room, when he’d lean across and whisper
I love you
as if it was a secret between you. His voice, now, is what you remember most.

Your parents’ marriage lasted four months. Your mother left its volatility two weeks after you were conceived, left it to hunt for fossils. She’d studied palaeontology at university but had halted the career to be the wife. Your father refused to live anywhere but London even though your mother was an asthmatic who dreamt of a light that would sing in her lungs. Work provided that, and so as a child you lived in a succession of places that were singed by the sky until the courts intervened, at your father’s orders (the only thing he ever managed to do in his life, snapped your mother, more than once) and you were sent back to England, the land of soft days, and, when you grew up, orgasmless fucks.

People who know nothing of your family find it fascinating and charming and extreme but Cole now knows the truth, that little of that extremity has rubbed off on you; it’s only reinforced your own caution. You’ve had to be sensible, had to make a living amid all the chaos.

Cole says your mother is bruised by bitterness, that she’s menopausal and mad and he fears you’ll turn into her. He doesn’t enjoy visiting her cottage on the north Yorkshire coast, an area that’s rich in the fossils of marine reptiles and fish. It’s wilfully remote and she’s hardly ever home because she’s always off on a dig. He doesn’t enjoy the way she absently picks up his toothbrush to scrub at a piece of sandstone she’s working on (or perhaps deliberately, but you could never tell Cole that) and clutters her house with old bones and rocks. Cole finds her selfish and
sloppy: she’s the type of person who washes up in lukewarm water, he said once, and you laughed at the time but didn’t forget.

You’ve tried hard to be nestled within Cole’s family, to be the good wife, but they never trust you enough. Cole doesn’t understand that a stable family’s one of the most desirable things of all when you’ve come from a fractured childhood, doesn’t understand the terrible, Grand Canyon loneliness you feel within his. But you have each other, a sure path, a certainty. Home fills his heart when Cole’s on the road, he just longs for the vivid tranquillity of your flat. It’s his sanctuary from all the anxiety of the world: paintings too traumatised to repair and canny fakes and deadlines impossible to meet. You’re careful not to butt anything too unsettling into his stressful life for you’re so lucky, you know that. Your husband’s a modern man who’s generous and thoughtful, who cooks and cleans; who’s devoted, Theo says, you’re one of the few couples who are truly happy. And she should know. She’s seen a lot of couples. When the women bring their men for coaching sessions to her studio she literally gets into the bed with them both, armed with a pair of latex gloves and a vibrator.

I’d love to have a session with you guys, she’s said, as if she wants to bottle the secrets of why your relationship works.

God no, you’d replied, laughing, appalled. You’ve never been able to shit in a public loo if another woman was in
the room, let alone have sex. When you shared a shower with Theo, at the age of thirteen, it was so excruciating that you vowed you’d never get yourself into such a situation again. You could strip off at a doctor’s surgery or in a public gym, where you were utterly anonymous, but it was another matter entirely with someone you knew, and so well.

No one, though, has any idea of the churn of a secret life. Your desire to crash catastrophe into your world is like a tugging at your skirt. But only sometimes, and then it’s gone. With the offer of a bath, or a cup of tea, or the dishes done.

the importance of needlework and knitting

You have a book given to you by your grandfather that’s a delicious catalogue of unseemly thoughts:

That a wife should take another man if her husband is disappointing in the sack.

That a woman’s badness is better than a man’s goodness.

That women are more valiant than men.

That Adam was more sinful than Eve.

It was written anonymously, in 1603. It’s scarcely bigger than the palm of your hand. The paper is made of rag, not wood pulp, and the pages crackle with brittleness as they’re turned. You love that sound, it’s like the first lickings of a flame taking hold. The book is tided
A Treatise proveinge by sundrie reasons a Woemans worth
and its words
were contained once by two little locks that at some point have been snapped off. It smells of confinement and secret things.

You imagine a chaste and good wife writing secretly, gleefully, late at night and in the long hours of the afternoon. A beautiful, decorative border of red and black ink hems each page. It’s a fascinating, disobedient labour of love. You wear cotton gloves to open it. You’ll never sell it.

It’s been in the family for generations. A rumour persists that the author’s skeleton was found in some cupboard under a staircase, that she’d been locked into it after her husband discovered her book. Your father told you stories of her scrabbling at a door and crying out and of her despairing nail marks gouged into the wood, but you suspect the reality is much more prosaic: that your great-grandfather acquired the book at auction, as a curiosity, and it may even have been written by a man, as an enigmatic joke.

Cole calls it The Heirloom, or alternatively, The Scary Book. He teases that he’ll toss it in the bin if you’re naughty, or lock you in the cupboard and never let you out. You love all this banter between you; he makes you laugh so much. You never see any irony in it. He calls the bits and pieces of your father’s furniture dotted about the flat The Ruins. And you, affectionately, The Old Boot. It never fails to get a rise out of you; Cole loves seeing that.

the chief causes of the weak health of women are silence, stillness and stays; therefore learn to sing and dance, and never wear tight stays

The hanging sky. The air smelling of the sea. You don’t even need an umbrella as you lie on a sunlounger next to the pool. The breeze blowing in from the desert plays havoc with your
Herald Tribune
and you give up and watch the people around you, you’re more interested in the women’s bodies than the men’s, all women are, Theo has said and she’s right. You remember exactly her body when she was sixteen, the short waist and long legs and moles on her chest, and yet you can hardly remember the men you’ve slept with, any of them. The names or the bodies, only the faces, just, and the shape, vaguely, of penises, whether they were long, or too thick—God, you dreaded that, the grate of it.

The attendant presents you with a gin and tonic on a
silver tray and you look around, startled. The man from the lobby smiles his beautiful boy smile from a distant sunlounger and you lower your head and do nothing more, don’t drink, don’t look, you’re confused and you know that Theo’d be cross at this, a missed opportunity.

Theo. Such a pirate of a woman, with a different energy to her. She’s thirsty and needs to drink, it’s in the way she walks and listens and leans and talks. She’s a woman who
overlives
, she has so much life in her, it shines under her skin. Does that mean you
underlive?
Your heart dips with panic as if a cloud has skimmed across it.

You look across to the man on the sunlounger now reading his
Tribune
and tilt back your head and close your eyes. You’re living your days at the moment how a sheep grazes, meandering, not engaged with anything much. And yet, and yet, you’d never wish for Theo’s kind of existence. She’s so free, so answerable to no one that she’s lost.

The sky deepens, bathers pack up their suntan lotion and one by one leave, the baked breeze stiffens and umbrellas are snapped down for fear they’ll cartwheel away. You slip into the pool. The water’s ruffled like corrugated iron. You’re the only one in it and you slide through the coolness and strike out for the first time in years, feel unused muscles creaking into working order and think of your mother and her strong, confident hands and the ribbons of water when you were seven. You’ve no family consistently around you now, your friends have become
your closest relations: Cole, of course, and Theo, your sister of sorts, although at times there’s the intensity of lovers between you.

It’s her birthday today, you must call.

You smile as you pull your body through the water and at the end of the pool look up to great plumes of ochre dust blown in from the desert; it’s as if the dusk is being hurried centre stage. The attendants move with crisp deliberation now, clearing towels and cushions from chairs. Most people have gone. Palm trees toss their branches like the manes of recalcitrant ponies, twigs and leaves blow into the pool and you climb out of the water at the first fat splats. You smell the earth opening up as if it’s breathing, feel the thundery day sparking you alive and you lift your chin to it and inhale deep and gather up, reluctantly, your sun gear. You pass the man from the lobby, still reading valiantly. He looks up at you.

You don’t look at him. You walk inside, to your husband, a fluttery anticipation within you.

lending is, as a rule, the greatest unkindness we can be guilty of, unless we can give

The elderly man who looks after the roses lets you into the room, bowing and smiling his gentle smile. He’s presented you, gallantly, with a single stem and you’ve accepted it graciously; it’s a game played with some seriousness. The petals are deep red, almost black, and you plunge your nose into their oddness: it’s a wild plump garden scent from your childhood, not the tight manufactured whiff from the buds you buy at the supermarket. You enter the room soundlessly, you’ll surprise Cole, he’ll throw you on the bed and make you laugh and kiss you in his special way and you’ll melt, succumb, even though you’re still menstruating. Sexy sex, hmm, grubby, spontaneous, impolite kind of sex, you haven’t done that for years and all of a sudden it seems necessary. The room’s
dim from the darkening sky and you can taste the thunder outside and lift your chin to it. Cole’s on the phone. You’re cross, he shouldn’t be doing any work during this trip, he promised.

I can’t wait to get out of here, it’s driving me crazy, the heat, and he says this in his special voice,
your
voice, but there’s a playfulness, a lightness, it’s a tone you haven’t heard for so long. All she wants to do is run off to the markets and have rides in those fucking carts, I can’t stand it, I get so bored, I just want to relax. He pauses. Diz, Diz, no, you can’t. He chuckles. Yeah, me too. I’ll see you soon, thank God.

air ventilation oxygen

You’re very still. You walk past Cole without looking at him. You walk through the french doors, to the veranda, and sit, very carefully, on the wicker chair.

Your thudding heart, your thudding heart.

You sit for a very long time, soundlessly, into the rich silence after the storm. At the end of it the sun feebles out and nothing has cooled down, nothing, it is as hot as it ever was.

My soul waiteth on thou more than they that watch for the morning,

I say more than they that watch for the morning.

Psalm 130

there ought to be no cesspool attached to the dwelling

The Monday after the return from Marrakech. A cafe in Soho, alone. An old London chophouse selling beans on toast and Tetley’s tea in stainless-steel pots, the menu padded and plastic covered. Reading the paper but not.

Like you are skinned.

I can’t explain it, he has said, reddening, every time. When you’ve asked him again and again. You’re overreacting, he has said. She’s a friend,
our
friend, we’d just have a drink now and then. And then he stops.

As if what he wants to say can never be said, as if it will never be prised out. But you will not let up.

Just a friend. Uh huh.

You sit back at his words, you fold your arms. At his
explanations that are scattered bits of bone, that are never enough.

You haunt the cafe in Soho. Want to crawl away from the world, curl up; want to shrink from the summery lightness in the air, the flirty pink on the girls in the streets.

Within this God-tossed time he’s never stopped telling you he loves you but you’ve no desire to listen any more. For the relationship has been doused in a cold shower and you are chilled to the bone with the shock.

Just a friend. Uh huh.

You will not let up.

Now it’s a week since you’ve known; now two. Everything is changed and nothing is changed, you’re reading the paper but not. You prefer this cafe in Soho over the American coffee chains that seem of late to be everywhere, despite Cole’s certain horror at the choice. Before, you’d let his likes and dislikes shape the movement of your day, even when he wasn’t with you. But you’re disobedient often now, in little ways. For realisation of the affair has snapped upon you as fast as a rabbit trap, and you are exiled from your marriage and home and life.

The elderly man behind the till senses something of all this; he smiles warmly in greeting, now, and hands you your cup of tea without waiting to be asked.

We’d. just. have, a drink, now. and. then. All right?

I don’t believe you. I’m sorry, I can’t.

It’s the truth, I am
so sick
of telling you that.

I don’t believe you.
I can’t.

Your hands hover, frozen, by your head. Your fingers are clawed, your knuckles are bone-white. You have turned into someone else. You do not recognise the voice.

Day after day you shelter in this cafe in London’s red light district. It’s a small indication of something that’s burst within you. You’re not sure why you’ve picked this place, you never go to cafes or restaurants by yourself, it’s too exposing. All you know is that the two people closest to you have gone from your heart, it’s flinched shut. And it’s only as you spread your newspaper and pour the milk into your tea that you feel the tin foil ball, tight within you, unfurling. No one would guess just by looking at you, the quiet, suburban housewife, that recently in a hotel room in Marrakech your entire future had been crushed by a single blow from a rifle butt.

And all that’s left is rawness, too deep for tears.

She’s a friend, just a friend, it’s all he can ever say and in this Soho cafe, the third week of your purgatory, your teacup is slammed down. So hard, the saucer cracks.