Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (60 page)

Ari is the shining school dad who you just know would spring you alive. He followed a woman to deepest Gloucestershire but they are separating. He does the school run every Thursday. Often you are both the only two parents early, before the school gates open, and you’ve fallen into bantering. Ari is Israeli; sparky, loud, warm, full of shooting laughter and teasing and flirt. You’d forgotten what it’s like to be with people like that. You feel yourself becoming looser, lighter in response. Remembering a woman you once were. Every Thursday now, when you see him, he reminds you that you’ve been in England too long, weighted down by the sheer energy it takes to get by in it. Such a crowded, aggressive, uncertain land – uncertain about where it’s going and what it’s become.

On the last Thursday in January you look at Ari as he tumbles his young daughter around his neck, look at his easy smile and shining teeth and know, beyond anything else, you need the WD40 of sun. Or you will go mad. It is as simple as that. You do not have a sense of belonging in this land, no matter how long you are in it, and as you get older you want the balm of that. You need to get out, get home. The cold in
you like grease, sludging you up; the homesickness corrosive now and something has to be done about it.

But what would you be going back for?

As if on cue Pip propels himself into your arms with a flying leap, almost knocking you over and his little legs lock around your back and you laugh and twirl him around, just as Ari has done, everything else forgotten in the great burning furnace of your son’s love as you bury your face in the warmth of his lovely neck. Everything repaired, forgotten, wiped by the sheer urgent magnificent heft of this.

Hugh forcibly lifts up your feet. He polishes your Blundstone boots. Despite a deadly serious protest. You pull your leg away, viciously. He grabs it back – he will win this. He is doing all the kids’ shoes and his own, it is the night for it, and by God he’ll clean yours too whether you like it or not. What began as a game is now more, much more, than that.

The anger so pure and festering in you that you just want to run outside and gulp the fresh air, run and run and not look back; in this moment, the voice from the woman you don’t recognise roaring inside.

Stoooooooooop
.

The boys are watching. They keep you here. Silent. Seething. On a Sunday night. Before a new week begins, as it will always begin now, over the years and years to come there will be this little ritual because Hugh has discovered an Achilles heel, a new teasing point, and you know him, he’ll be seizing it from now on.

Seething.

At the man who insists on turning the car air conditioning
on in summer even though you crave the slap of fresh air. Who drives too close to the bumper bars of the cars in front and brakes so abruptly you gasp, and never changes this habit. Who litters the house with black crows, the endless clothes he never puts away. Piles of change. Receipts from God knows what. Who leaves the toilet seat up and the toothpaste lid off and who has never learnt, over ten years of marriage, to make tea the way you want it – oh, he’ll make you a cuppa, but it’ll never be right – he’s never bothered to know you enough.

Seething.

At the little snippets of ownership he always has to exercise, all through your days and months and years as the little wife. You stare down in silence at your Blundstone boots that were scarred, once, with the history of your bush life. Now shiny black. As if new.

Seething.

At a marriage that is sapping your confidence, your will, your flinty self-sufficiency. You do not even fill the family car with petrol anymore let alone change its tyres; and once you did all of that. You eat baked beans and fish fingers because Hugh did once, as a child – forcing his habits upon you. You use a microwave even though you don’t quite trust it because Hugh bought one, insisted, just came home with it one night. Within this marriage you are changing, retreating. Becoming as soft as a pocket. And you don’t know how it came to this. Mel’s caress jolted you into life. The tenderness, the caring, the
noticing
.

Seething.

As you stare at the gleaming Blundstone boots you have had since teenage years, that you barely recognise now.

You have to get back.

Rough them up.

Reclaim the woman you once were.

You dreamt of Tol last night. For the first time in years. It was strange how fresh it was, rushing back his mannerisms – the feel of his hip under your hand, the softness of his belly to yours as you lay in perfect peace, socketed – the dream bringing it all back with a clarity your memory never could. His voice dropped down to you. He was saying your name as fresh as if it was being spoken aloud at that very moment, as fresh as twenty-five years ago and you jerked awake at his talk, out of the blue, speaking your name as he always said it – with wonder, delight, chuff – the inflection downward, soft; more to himself than to you.

And then the name Woondala sings through your blood like an illicit drug you have long turned your back on.
Woondala, Woondala,
it lures, whispering you south and you stretch languidly in your bed, like a cat thrumming in the sunlight, and feel a familiar tingling, after so long, after years and years of not.

Woondala.

The great unanswered question of your life.

The disease lying dormant in your blood. Still.

Unless something is done about it.

‘What are you doing?’ you ask.

Hugh is leaning against the bathroom door, staring as you shower, throwing peanuts into his mouth.

‘Examining the goods.’ His eyes are laughing.

‘You never
bought
me.’

‘Oh yes I did.’

You shut your eyes. The authority of his ownership – the sense of entitlement – enrages you. You snap off the shower. Step out, grab a towel.

‘I want to go home.’ Just like that.

Hugh’s fist suspends a peanut high, he is speechless.

‘For three months. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ll take the kids. Just for a term. Put them into a bush school. It’ll be an adventure. Be near my dad. He’s getting old …’ You stare imploringly at him, rush on. ‘I need the sun … I’m going mad with the cold and the dark. Every year it gets worse, not easier; I don’t know why.’ Clotting up as you speak, needing this so voraciously, can’t articulate the enormity of the want, just needing to live in a place with melodramatic skies again and
a hurting light. Needing a gust blown through you, flushing you clean, needing out.

Hugh is nodding, absorbing.

‘Alright.’

Finally. Surprisingly. As if he knows how far you have changed from that woman he fell in love with, so long ago, that he suddenly remembers that bush girl bursting with smile and sun.

‘You’re mad, you know that, and you’ll only get madder if you stay,’ he smiles. ‘Off you go. Scat!’

You know in that moment that he, too, needs a break. And is confident enough in the relationship to let you off the leash; confident you will come back. The rivets are strong in this marriage, you have welded them together, hand over hand. Despite all the little irritations – the little snippings and snappings, all the erasures of wedded life – he never doubts. He knows you. It is as simple as that.

He doesn’t. At all.

You Google Tol every so often as you prepare for the trip. He must be on the internet, somewhere, there has to be some clue to his whereabouts – his writing, his family, his life for the past few decades.

Nothing. How can someone just … disappear? In this world, now. He has vanished from the face of the earth.

It is bizarre. You refuse to believe it.

You will find him.

There’s a young girl in you who refuses to die – she is uncurling, she will hunt him out. You have friends a few years older, in their mid and late forties, who are lost, keeling, depressed, dramatically changing their lives and their careers at this point as if eager for one last shot – one last go – before it’s too late.

This is yours.

Act with audacity
, he told you that once, yes. You crawl into the dust under your bed and pull out an old cardboard suitcase that is crammed with the detritus of a former life. In it – wrapped in your mother’s cashmere cardigan, cradled in the
crown of an Akubra hat still with its smudges of valley earth – is a tiny, leather-bound book. You breathe its pages in deep, the musty, papery smell plunging you back. You flip to the very end, Tol’s page. It’s been so long since you have opened it up.

It is written. In the book, which you pack, of course.