Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (59 page)

As your twenties gallop on you feel like you’re swimming against the waves of a cold, choppy lake; the waves are slapping and butting you sideways and you’re getting nowhere. Your world encompasses enormous stretches of alone and the bleakness of one-night stands and relationships never quite right that peter out after three months. How easy-perfect the lives of some of your friends seem. Everything, for them, is falling neatly into place.

Saturday night, late. Racking sobs into the dark. How has your life come to this? You’re a bush girl who hauled herself out, became a lawyer in Australia’s largest metropolis. You’re strong, independent, self-sufficient – and swampingly lonely.

Couples, all around you. Reading their weekend papers, holding hands as they walk across a city street, piggy-backing in play in the park. But you.

‘Live audaciously,’ you tell yourself. London then New York, the dream, don’t lose it.

You have to get out of this.

Walk away from these years infected with their sourness.

After all the broken days, your face is returning.

Well hello again, you.

You still wear your armour – the vintage dresses, severe hair, glasses – the carapace of the respected lawyer. But you’re rangy now, for out. You’ve always had sunshine at your core and you’ll find it again. Sydney is too small for the two of you; one day there’ll be a party and your paths will converge and you never want to come across him, now – betraying the trembling and the blushing of the life held in limbo, the weakness of it.

It’s time to crash rupture into your life.

Too often now, the feeling of being trapped. At weddings, engagement parties, birthdays. Placed next to someone you barely want to talk to, having to endure endless speeches, unable to pop in for just twenty minutes and then scat. Weighted by obligation, every weekend and most weeknights. Weighted by your stepmother, who betrays her jealousy and bewilderment of the life you have forged for yourself with her silence – she never once asks you about your work, never feigns an interest. Weighted by your father, who just wants you settling down and giving him grandkids, it’s all he can tease you with now. You have a terror of this life closing over you and at dinners
you don’t want to go to you step outside for great gulps of clean night air, and space, and quiet. Needing to get away from all this. A world too known.

When you hand in your resignation at the law firm your middle-aged boss tells you that the readiness to have children is oozing from you, that you must have them, to complete yourself. You laugh it off. You’re going to London to be a lawyer. Just that.

But your periods are becoming heavier, your body is urging you to hurry; there’s the prick of the Saturday afternoon couples as you wander the city alone, in your final weeks, all-seeing, all-alive, in your singleness.

You feel like you’re extending a hand – calmly, strongly – to destiny. You need to, to feel alive again.

And always you flick a glance as you drive past the gate and always it is locked. As if no one ever goes near it, it was a mirage, a dream, he was a ghost. It never happened, it was all in your head, you were so young, addled by hormones, delirious. Occasionally you stop your car and get out, bow against the chain and bounce your weight into it. It doesn’t give. It never gives. Never spills its secrets. You stare through the fence, your fingers looped in the hurting steel that your bare feet couldn’t climb once.

The cairn of him before you.

The shudder beginning in your bowels and travelling deep to your breast, almost hurting, thinking of him and of everything that went on beyond this gate and you squeeze your thighs tight. He is not here, it is obvious.

No one goes in.

Or out.

You turn away, you will never come back. It is time to hold your face high to an unknown sun. To allow forgetting into your life.

That night, as you fall into sleep, you put out a hand to God.

With Tol your name was Ripe.

In the years that followed: Husk.

Your name now: Ready.

Because as your twenties gather pace you know that women have to go after what they want. It’s no use waiting for the phone to ring or the email box to ping – you have to make it happen yourself. Have you ever acted as you’ve honestly wanted? You need a recalibrating. You will make a living in a new world; forge your own life, your own way. Not with anyone else’s expertise or money but with what you have earned yourself. You have your father’s work ethic for that. You will act with audacity. Take full possession of your life. The experience with Tol and its aftermath has taught you one thing: bravery.

You are ready.

To stand at the bow of the ship and feel the salty slap of life firm and cleansing in your face. You take out your Victorian volume. Under the scrawl at the front – about a place that can teach you so much – you jot a scrap from the journal of Katherine Mansfield.

You shut the book and smile.

Ready.

It is 9 p.m. Time for bed.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ you enquire into the ether.

‘Marriage,’ comes the voice from the couch.

You retreat, chuckling, reminding Hugh to check that Jack hasn’t thrown off his blankets; you can feel in your bones an encroaching cough. You never fall asleep with your husband now, he always dozes on the couch and gets to you at 4 a.m. or thereabouts. His hot water bottle. That’s all you’re good for now, it’s become a running joke.

You move into your bedroom, your sanctuary, close the door and breathe out. Uncurl in your bed. It scares you how much you love the alone, but you will never leave Hugh, and he will never leave you. It is unspoken. This is your existence together that you have welded on the great forge of your adult lives, over many years, imperfect but solid enough: it will hold.

So. Now you are middle-aged.

Dipping your toes into the vast zone of invisibility. The signs of slippage everywhere. Your body thickening after its
quicksilver years of slenderness, finally you have lost control of it. Your metabolism is slowing, you cannot keep the weight off. Hair is growing in places it shouldn’t be, with vigour – the only vigour in your life it seems. You are tired, so tired, constantly. Your eyebrows have learnt disobedience, are constantly going off-piste – when you pluck the wily ones there’s likely to be a sudden bald patch; some are wilfully grey, others thickly curled. The most important item you now pack on holidays: tweezers. Not just for eyebrows but for your chin, cheeks, upper lip, belly. Greying pubes are around the corner, various girlfriends have warned you of this. The talk is of dyeing, perhaps, no one’s daring to go first. Liver spots are vivid already on your hands – retribution, finally, for a childhood assaulted by its different sun. When you pucker up your lips for a kiss, from child or adult, you can feel the lines cementing into your upper lip. And you think back now to those years when a woman never knew what it was to be dry, internally, those slippy zippy easy years – and laugh.

‘Is that blue ink on your leg?’ Hugh had enquired absently as you passed.

‘No. It’s a varicose vein.’

He shrugged. So what.

You love him for that.

You think about sleeping with every man you meet. You do not want to sleep with any of them. You are too tired, too cold and you wouldn’t want to take off your clothes for anyone. Your body has rusted up. Your husband doesn’t mind. So be it.

But sometimes, at night, the memories. Screaming of the sun. A different life. Being caressed by the air. Lying belly down on the beach with the heat tingling alive your weary back. Here, in deepest England, in mid January, the cold has nestled into your bones like mould and you feel that this world has grown over you, and you will never climb out.

You rarely speak to your father now. He’s a hopeless correspondent, doesn’t do letters or computers, never rings on your birthday or special occasions. You used to call him religiously for his birthday but often it was your stepmother who answered and she would say without warmth that she would pass on the message, and he never called back.

Like a piece of ragged tin cutting into your heart, years and years of it, the pain of the silence still fresh.

You need to get back.