Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (61 page)

The light assaults the four of you as soon as you step from Sydney’s airport terminal. Three little Pommies beside you squint in horror as you stand there tall, drinking it up. Can feel it already spining you strong. You breathe in deep the paperbarks in their ragged skin by the car park, willing you home, to your bush. Hire a car and head north along all the roads of your childhood, to your land, your soul place, and know with certainty now you want to slip into this earth in death, the soil you know so well; you never want to be buried in the dark, crowded damp of England where your bones would never dry out.

The prospect ahead: a renovation of your serenity.

You want to be good at being alive again. You have lost the knack in England; need the solace of home. Need to be marinated again in spareness, and space, and light. To find stillness, and rest.

The house for the next three months is a one-bedroom weatherboard cottage found on the internet. In the town that your grandfather was born in, a stone’s throw from your dad. A humble place. White-painted floorboards, clean sun through
the windows, bits and pieces of furniture from various old folk. A perfect place. Three tiny camp beds for the boys, and you in the main room on a high single bed in a corner. You revel in living a lighter life. No DSs, no Wiis. The boys have to make do with slingshots and skateboards and an old cricket bat and a nearby creek, a waiting tyre hanging from a branch.

They’re stolen, often, by their grandfather. It is OK, you just needed to be physically close by; you were too far away in England, lost. The boys are whisked away, often, for fishing trips and sleepovers, movies and larks in the park. He lives for family and there is a beautiful, old-fashioned simplicity to that. It is quiet and unspoken and good and it motivates everything that he does. You know now that your boys are your greatest gift to him. You have receded in his eyes, it is their turn now – your job is done.

You write, up the front of the book, the only blank space left in it.

Nature presses close. You can feel the great thumb of it on your back, forearms, hands, in your face. Soon you wear it like a mark. You look up often, saying hello to your sky in gratitude; scarcely believing you are living under it again. The sun’s stain is at your neck and on your right arm hanging loosely out the car window or tapping the roof along with the radio, just as your dad always drives.

You watch your three Tigger boys grubby up in this land, grow lean. Lose softness, gain muscle definition, tan as golden as honey – become the little men you always dreamt of them being. Running and swimming and mucking about under this wide blue sky, learning to walk through tall grass with caution because of snakes, to shake their shoes out every morning because of funnel-webs, to swing on their tyre over the creek and make slingshots and billy-carts.

And oddly, achingly, you miss Hugh; the feeling of separation is acute. Your love for him is freshened. You want him to see all this, be in it with you, revelling. Watching his boys, stripping down to his shorts, laughing with them.

A smile fills you up at that.

The man who makes you laugh. He always has. It is the secret, you think, to a good relationship.

Your father has stolen the boys again. Taken them to a rodeo and his favourite, secret place that your stepmother and you don’t approve of: McDonald’s. The one thing the two of you have in common.

‘Sssh, don’t tell your mum,’ your father conveys in a conspiratorial mock-whisper when you drop the kids off and they shiver in delight. They adore him. Call him Eddie, his old name from your childhood. The past has won out.

You do not linger. It is still your stepmother’s house; she still makes you extremely aware of that. You are both wary, polite, but you know she will never invite the boys and you in for a big family meal – she cannot bring herself to widen her heart to that extent.

No matter.

She is of another era, a lifetime ago, you have let it go within the busyness of your own life. You wave the boys goodbye and jump in your hired car feeling loosened, lightened. Your father grins at you and there is a sudden recognition – as you flash a smile back – of your face, absolutely, in his. It’s something your
stepmother can never take away and there’s a giggle in your heart as you accelerate.

Along the deeply known, sun-dappled roads, under your deeply known sky, the girl you used to be is uncurling.

It is good being back, right. It’s about the serenity that comes from belonging, the
ease
of it. After fifteen years away you can walk into an Aussie shop and yak away to the stranger behind the counter – because you speak a common language with codes and nuances and subtleties that are utterly familiar. For years you have been an outsider in a foreign land and revelled in that status. But my God, the relief of belonging. Perhaps it has something to do with ageing, with quietening, but it’s hitting you now like a long cool drink after a sweltering summer’s day. Life is easy, known, navigable again. The bread rolls are the same consistency from your childhood and you gorge on them. The cereal hasn’t changed, the apples taste the same, the mangoes, the grapes; there is a comfort in all of it. You’d forgotten what it’s like to live like that.

The windows are down, the music is up. Triple J, the station you used to listen to religiously. Elbow hanging out, sun and wind-whipped. Feeling such an uncomplicated, strong, pure happiness. It is dangerous, this.

You stop to fill up. Wander into the coolness of the milk bar next door through coloured plastic fly strips. Buy an ice-cold strawberry milkshake in a silver canister and drink it through a waxed paper straw. Laugh, at all of it, full of delight that your old life still exists! At a laminated table rimmed in a silver metal strip you slip out the little Victorian manual. Of course
you have brought it with you, on this day, this trip into the bush, to God knows what.

You feel completely alone, for the first time in so long – years – and you adore it. You could never tell anyone that.

You sit in the milk bar with the book before you; the handwriting flooding him back. What was it about his touch that is so insistent, still? Now that you are an adult yourself with years of living behind you?

A cherishing, combined with authority. And not just a cherishing of the female body – a cherishing of sex. All the wonder that is in it. He’d done this many times before, that was obvious, but he made it feel exploratory, fresh. His dubious gift was to make you feel you were the one. The only one. With how many women had he spun that trick? He was like a politician with the knack of making every person they talk to feel special, wanted, unique. It was all to do with focus. The gift of attention, of course.

The knowing that came only once in your life.

It is why, of course, you are back.

No.

You cannot drive past the gate, so close to this milk bar. Too afraid of being caught – your face, what is in it, after all these years. Still snared. What will he make of that? He is a love object, of course, he has shifted into that. Was
always
in that realm. You cannot even describe him properly; he is not fully rounded, fully human. You never knew him, you only recognised him – as an archetype. Every girl needs one, the obsession, at some point, to learn about life, to grow. To marry the one that is not.

No
.

The man who had grown used to sucking on the marrow of other people’s lives. The man who did not like his stillness rattled, his stillness so necessary to create, he made that clear from the start.

But then you.

Does he ever even think about you? Does he ever recall that summer and the whole roaring tsunami of experience that transformed your life?

Or did it just roll off him like water from a duck’s back? His fucking-toy, his summer project, his experiment to some day write about. The distraction. The annoyance. He never gave in, never loved enough; he was too disciplined for that, feared the consequences too much.

You stand abruptly from the table. Snap through the plastic strips.

Need it gouged out.

Finally, the courage. To face him.

To offload him from your life.

Churning through you, churning, as you speed down the roads that your bicycle flew over once. On a day of ringing light, ringing out like a church bell. The little manual beside you, as if to anchor the reality of what went on once.
It did happen. This is proof.
And a plan, perhaps, to bury the book like a time capsule deep and forgotten under the earth. At Woondala. To return it, to stem it. You slow along the final dirt road that meanders like a pale river amid the green. The deep gash of a wound through the impenetrable wilderness. You do not know what is ahead, you slow in wonder at the dips and curves once soldered upon your heart.

The gate is open.

After twenty-five years.

You gasp. You weren’t expecting that.

You park. As disbelieving as that time when you came upon the gate locked. How long has it been like this? You slip
through, just like that. The breezy blue-sky day is so crisp it almost pings; there is a knife-edge sharpness to the light, a tenseness.

Light-headed. The blood pounding in your ears. Breathing fast.

Can you just step back into this life? What is ahead? Can you bear it? You
must
. A beautifully renovated mansion, perhaps, a solid country wife, roses around the verandah, three kids, Dad at work in the city, he’ll be back tonight,
come in, have a cuppa, wait
. The blood pounding in your head. What madness to do this? What right do you have?

The right to your own life.