With My Body (17 page)
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
With relief.
With so much else.
You are standing there, strong, a vast smile shining you up; stripping off your singlet like a miner at the end of a shift, crossed hands pulling it over your head in a clean yank. He is reaching you, helping, saying nothing, laughing, falling on his knees as he pulls down your pants, you are almost fucking into the car, you fall to the ground, both, ramming, hard, giggling in the dirt. His finger is suddenly enquiring around your arse and you recoil.
Sssh
, he soothes,
sssh
—and you obey, give in, can’t help it, want it, you spread your legs wider, you feel his two fingers between the thin membrane of skin, exploring, the extreme pleasure of it and you are giving yourself to him, you want to be swallowed up. You can’t bear it, you come and come in great floods of wet and he holds your trembling, he clamps it still like you’re an animal in its death throes caught in a trap and he’s soothing you into a stopping, into quiet,
sssh
. The cheeks of both of you are sudden-soft together and you say nothing and neither does he and above you, around you, is the wheeling sky and then he moves in you slowly, so slowly and he comes, too, withdrawing with a jerk and the hot spumy wet spreads over your stomach and then he flops onto his back in the dust beside you, spent.
You muddle together back to Woondala, dirt encrusted, sex encrusted; holding, pushing, basking, wondrous at this force between you, that has taken over you both. You place one willow crown on his head and the other on your own;
straighten his, giggling at the ridiculousness of it, brimming with laughter and light, both of you, as you walk back to his house, talled up.
You have entered the realm of surrender.
Your summer holiday, now, an enormous cleared path.
To whatever he wants.
A solitude so full of peace and hope that it is like Jacob’s sleep in the wilderness: ‘all things are less dreadful than they seem’
Cracked open into womanhood. Never to reclaim that little girl you once were. An enormous rushing road of experience and knowing and shock now carves you off from that schoolgirl looking at you, from across the far pavement, the child you once were, just several days previously. A lifetime ago.
You have become someone else.
You can never go back.
The learning has begun; the proper learning.
At last.
Labour is worship
You touch, palm to palm. He kisses each knuckle.
‘You have such strong, old woman’s hands,’ he chuckles, flattening them out. ‘I feel very safe with them.’
‘Worker’s hands, mate.’
He wants to watch you. Sawing, hammering, drilling. With concentration and ingenuity and skill; he wants to learn it all, wants you to teach him and to hear you talk. And then he comes at you. Drawing you to him. Drawing in your energy.
You feel entirely awake.
Cicadas all about you, in the solid heat; their wall of shrillness keeping the world at bay, drowning out the sounds coming from you that you have never heard before, from the base of your spine, your core. Joyous and animal and astonished, as loud as you want. Because no one can hear you but Tol, leaning back. Smiling. Observing.
At what he has cracked from you.
‘My biggest turn-on is how much you’re enjoying it,’ he says at one point and you tuck it away, must remember it; so removed from a grubby little episode in a warehouse near a train station once.
Back home, in your real life, your glee is the only leakage from your secret world and it gives you resilience and it gives you strength. To make someone so happy, what a power in that! A supreme power, surely, in a woman’s life. Your days have been shrouded in cloud for so long but suddenly the sun has burst through and you are unscowled; filled with light. Sailing through all the wounds and slights of your stepmother now, through all the silences of your father; everything slipping from you like rain from an oil cloth. Nothing can touch you, nothing. You were born in a happy hour, you remember that from your early childhood; how uncomplicated everything was then, in the cradling, shining happiness of being cherished.
There is a certain amount of work to be done, and somebody must do it
The next gift. A geometry set your grandfather gave you, from his school days; the handmade wooden case a marvel of careful trays and slots. Tol whistles at its ingenuity. Hastily screws a pencil stub into the compass’s rusty metal and draws circles, in delight, on a paper scrap.
‘One thing you always have to do, is tell me—precisely—what you want.’
He hands across a sheet of perfect circles, so carefully done you can’t discern the joins.
‘But I don’t
know
what I want. It has to be taught, doesn’t it? Like the finger in … in … ’
Can’t bring yourself to say it, he whispers it close. The blush burns through you.
‘There’s this Italian author called Italo Calvino, who said something about how the pleasures of love, just like gluttony, depend on absolute … utter … precision.’ His tongue laps your earlobe, once, quick. You shiver.
‘But where do I begin? I don’t know.’
Without a word he leads you to the couch. Unclips one brace then the other. Holds a fingertip to your lips when you try to talk, to find out what’s coming next. Three seconds his finger clamps
your lips, four, five, six. Silence, anticipation, exquisite wet. He unbuttons the sides of your overalls. Kneels. Breathing shallow, pulling down your underpants as if he can scarcely believe he is doing this.
‘It starts … right … here.’
He parts your lips, he finds your bud.
His tongue upon it as precise as a droplet of mercury.
You gasp.
This busy, bright, beautiful world
‘I want to learn. Understand. Be good at it, like you. I did it once before—well, almost’—Tol’s eyebrows raise, he pulls back—‘but it was
nothing
like this.’
Completely serious, baffled; that two experiences, two men, could be so different. The shock of that—that you could have easily gone through life only knowing the former, never the latter; a whole universe denied, that you never knew existed. One experience so reducing; the other so alive, invigorating.
The wonder of that.
‘I need to know more.’ You speak slowly, faltering. It’s so important, this. ‘I have to understand what I shouldn’t allow. Stand for.’ Your voice drops. ‘Ever.’ A pause. ‘And so I can give something back, too.’
He laughs in bewilderment—his fingers running like a rake through his hair—the weight of the request, the responsibility.
You’re revving up, thinking how it can work.
‘Lessons. Yeah. And then from me, something in return.’ Because there must be a sense of giving, generously, on both sides; it’s the only way you’ll be comfortable with it. Thinking, thinking. ‘I can help, of course. Around the house. I’ll be teaching you, too. There’s so much to still do here.’ You clasp
his hands. ‘And you must tell me what you want. From me. With everything.’ Utterly sincere. ‘Please,
please
say yes.’
Tol’s chin disappears into his neck as he stares and stares, blinking. His face saying it all: he doesn’t quite know
what
to make of you, this strange, complex, thinking creature with its tool belt and happily grubby bare feet, so suddenly and forcefully in his midst; so eager to gulp up life, question, dissect. He goes to say something, stops. Holds your shoulders. Screws up his face. Kisses you once, soft, in the valley at the base of your neck then speaks with gravity, straight at you.
‘I could only do it … on two conditions.’
You grin. Gotcha. ‘Which are?’
‘Everything has to be consensual. Always.’
‘On both sides,’ you fire back and he laughs.
‘Of course. You must never do something you’re uncomfortable with—and that goes for me too.’ He winces with helplessness.
‘Oooh, the things I’m going to get you to do,’ you tease, rubbing your hands with glee.
‘And … ’ He bites his lip. ‘I’d love to teach you one thing—’ a pause—‘just one, that I don’t come across, very much.’
Your eyes narrow. ‘Which is?’
‘The woman who makes love heroically.’
‘
What?
’
‘Just remember, a man’s biggest thrill is that his partner is enjoying it. Well,
this
man at least.’ He comes up close, his fingers trickling deftly down your arms. ‘We have to begin with tenderness. Yes. Always. Because that’s all, ultimately, that’s needed. It comes from a cherishing.’ His eyes shine as he looks at you, his funny little scrap of a bush thing; his voice cracks and veers into something else. ‘From love. And with
that comes the best kind of sex. Because it’s tinged with a … a reverence. It’s almost like a holiness fluttering in you both.’
You feel like a blinded pit pony surfacing, coming up, up, into the light.
‘Now,’ you breathe.
He chuckles softly. ‘Hang on, I need to prepare. Think. If we’re going to do this properly. And we must.’ A smile. ‘The Most Secret and Mysterious Woondala Love Academy. Good grief. Who’d have thought.
Me
.’
You laugh, rubbing your hands in glee.
‘Now. We need something to write in. Notes. Observations. So you’ll always have them. They might come in handy one day. I’m a great believer in it.’ His face lights up. ‘That little instruction manual.’
You shake your head—‘I couldn’t’—it’s too old, valuable.
‘Come on. Cough it up. Writers are always scribbling in books. It’s often the only paper we can find. It’s got some blank pages up the back, I remember.’
You slip it out of your pocket. He seizes it, flips through it, lingering over a line here and there.
‘She’ll be pleased, the old fox, chuckling away at it all, willing you on. She’s a joy-seeker, this one. Cheeky. I just know.’ He kneels, his hands travelling down your body. ‘Yes, yes,’ he’s whispering, his mind galloping ahead, kissing your scuffed knees with their runnels of black, the rim of ochre between your toes, your ankle bone. He stands and holds your arms, looks straight at you, smiles secrets.
‘My hidden … lovely … fabulous … crazy … school.’ As if he can’t quite believe it.
You smile, complicit. ‘
Our
hidden school.’
He nods. ‘God yes. I need to do it better.’
‘What?’
‘Oh, everything. Life. Houses. Love. The lot.’
Your fingertip presses his lips,
sssh
, he kisses your nail in obeyance. ‘But who’s going to be the teacher here,’ he murmurs. ‘I wonder, I wonder.’
‘Sssh,’ you whisper again, hurry in your fingers as you pull him outside, to the waiting dam, the allure of its silky softness and the shock of its coolness in the heat, the possibility within it. He has never walked into it, felt the ooze of the mud between his toes, you can tell.
‘The first classroom,’ you instruct, ‘come on.’ Dropping the notebook down into the dust and whipping off your top and kneeling and unbuckling his belt.
Holding, in laden water, feeling the drips of your sweat, feeling yourself turning to water beneath him as you wrap yourself around him, in tenderness, where it always must start—holding and holding in the stillness and feeling him firm; reaching down, guiding him in; need him, crave him; you are all fluid, all marine under the cavern of that sky, briny and tasty and trembling and rolling and now you are a skin-diver, drinking in his depths with your lips and your breath and the wetness of your cunt—letting his world, this world, wash over you, drown you.
Total and sublime equality
That night, late, you open your notebook, the meticulous record from now on; your voice adding to the author’s over the coming days and weeks, the accumulation of your knowing in all its pages at the back. Your hands sweep across their waiting emptiness in exquisite anticipation. All the riches ahead that will fill it.
You flick back through her musings. A phrase leaps out.
Total and sublime equality.
Yes, of course.
It’s the only way it can work, can ever work. You dog-ear the bottom of its page, the paper so brittle with age it’s almost severed.
An invisible thumbnail beside her command—your first, secret indent in his book.
‘You should flee Eros: empty effort! How shall I elude on foot one who chases me on wings?’
Archias
You will recognise the presence of a happy woman the moment she crosses your path—by a sense of brightness and cheerfulness that enters with her
Love.
The sheer malevolent force of it.
Stealing your sleep, stripping the flesh from your bones, watering your bowels, scrambling your thoughts; maddened by it all, when you are away from him. Maddened by tremors deep in your belly and tiny jolts unfurling through your groin, those sweetest shudderings of all—for the promise that’s in them.
‘Wait, wait,’ he laughs. ‘We have to do this methodically.’
‘I can’t.’ You haul him down, hungry, always hungry.
He is careful, he is always thinking. You have a rash between your legs from his stubble but around your lips he never leaves a visible mark, so as not to draw attention to any of this. You are young, from the valley—this is a fierce mountain place—you are surrounded by mining men and he is everything this world is not. They will never know that you are snared in the heady days of this secret, illicit, cicada-shrill summer and you cannot escape, all these days when you both burn burn burn like a raging fire across a dry grass plain, consuming everything in its path.
