Nikki Gemmell - Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome - The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You

Trapped by blandness. And fear. And a knowing that it’s easier to instruct than to act.

You wonder about those people who just disappear. Theo had a friend who was stuck in a life she didn’t want and one day she said I’ve just got to pop into Tesco and she left her husband in the car park, and never came out. He waited for three hours before raising the alarm.

You wonder about mining a more dangerous seam of yourself. You’d like to try harder to be beautiful, or at least interesting; beauty is power, your mother’s taught you that. She’d say for God’s sake get rid of those glasses, when you were a teenager, try and make yourself presentable, as if you couldn’t possibly be hers.

You glimpse your first grey hair and twang it out, and then you pluck at the tiny almost invisible hairs on your chin and your belly and feel a thrill as they slide out, feel as if your life, your real life, is perhaps beginning. You have to make it begin, you can’t just give up. Before, life was something that always seemed to happen to other people. Like Theo.

the great necessity of life is continued ceaseless change

A resolution, in mid-August. You have to move beyond this mewly time, all whingy and wrong, you have to haul yourself out. A resolution that some of the momentous issues in a relationship can in the end only be ignored if you want the relationship to survive, they can’t be worked through and tossed out. Which is why, perhaps, some people in long-term partnerships have learnt to to live with what they don’t like. To reclaim the calm. You’ve seen it in marriages that’ve weathered infidelity, have seen them contract into a tightness in old age. Do you want the relationship to survive?

It’s easier to stay than to go.

You can’t bear the thought of parties again and singles columns and intimate dinners that don’t work, of always trying to find a way to fill up a Friday night. And you were meant to be trying for a baby soon. Cole wants to be a father some day. When you found him it was like a candle to a cave’s dark and to throw it all away after you’ve got to this point, you just can’t. You’ve had the most satisfying relationship of your life with him: you’re sure the glow of companionship can come back.

Cole wants the marriage to last. Everything is denied. He doesn’t want to bail out.

You don’t want Theo to win. Sometimes you fear this consideration drowns out everything else. You can beat her with this; you can’t recall beating her at anything.

So, a resolution.

You will live with the silences between Cole and you now. For you’ve stopped the talk, both of you, you’re away in your separate rooms: he in his study, you in the bedroom, too much. At least there’s no sex and you’re relieved at that, for the memory of it has now distilled to two things: when he didn’t come it was frustrating and when he did it was messy, often over your stomach and face, like a dog at a post claiming ownership.

So many ways to live like a prisoner.

But a resolution, to find a way back into a happy life. Although God knows when the fury will soften from you.

You concentrate for the moment on making the flat very beautiful, very spare and pale, like the inside of a white balloon. To your taste, for compromise has been lost. You’ve never dared impose your will so much. The builders come to know a woman who’s never been allowed out before, especially with Cole, a woman stroppy, shorttempered, blunt.

And the flat, the beautiful flat, fit for a spread in Elle, is as silent as a skull when you enter it.

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying goodnight, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone’s passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realise that the loneliest you’ve ever been is within a marriage, as a wife.

provide yourself with a good stock of well-made underlinen

The café in Soho. The Friday before the August Bank Holiday. Hot, festively so. A man is at the table beside you, reading a newspaper, The Times. You notice the nape of his neck: how odd to be attracted to someone just by a glance at their neck. The hair’s black, like the night-time deep in the country.

You’re outside on the pavement. A water main has burst nearby and water’s spreading lazily across the street. No one seems bothered, yet. Two men and a woman shout and laugh into the water and kick it about, they’re in their twenties, they shouldn’t be doing this. They’re oblivious to their audience and soon drenched.

You smile. Your Evening Standard is folded into your bag, you’ll finish it on the tube – God, rush hour, you’ve left it too late, you’ll be standing all the way. You’ve left it too late because you don’t want to be in the flat by yourself, in the silence like a skull. You hate the emptiness when Cole’s there and yet when he isn’t, too, when he’s deliberately out; it’s like nothing, now, is quite right in your life. You stand, ready to step into the stream of commuters with their faces anxious for the cloistering of home, and a car careers round the corner and carves through the water, veering away from the trio, and a fan of water arcs up: you’re hit. You’re stricken, can’t move, your mind blanks as if someone has told you a joke and you’re meant to get it quick.

You look across to the man next to you. He, too, is wet. You blurt a laugh; here at last is the joke. So does he.

You need some help, you say.

So do you.

You look down. Your white cotton dress is triumphantly wet in a huge patch at the front, it clings like a piece of recalcitrant silk slicked about a tree. You throw back your head and grimace: oh God. And then a man’s jacket is wrapped round your shoulders, a man’s leading you back to the table, he’s holding you in a way that only a husband should hold you: with ownership.

It is, of course, your man with the beautiful nape.

hooks and eyes

Everything is changed.

Gabriel Bonilla, that is his name. You repeat it; the sound is all mealy in your mouth. You smile in apology at that. You must wait until your dress has dried to decency; it may take some time and this Gabriel Bonilla asks if you need to get home straight away – no, it’s all right, there’s nothing to go home to – and you laugh, too loud, and as it comes out it’s as if something within you has cracked.

Well, hello.

So there you are, an hour or two in that greasy spoon of a café and you’re both talking about everything and nothing, voices tumbling over the top of each other, learning lives.

Shaking free.

You’d never talk with this freedom, this lightness, if you were unattached. Being married gives you a bloom of certainty, a confidence. But it doesn’t stop the blushing. Gabriel Bonilla blushes too, just like you, fully, completely, ridiculously and you dare to think it means something. You’re hesitant to ask about a partner and a family, you want to know, must know, but fear the effort of asking will reveal too much, that you’ll redden once again. Like after the water splash when you realised he’d seen your body so vulnerably, too many things, the thighs too fat and the nipples through your bra, God, all of it, and your hand flies to your mouth at the recollection but he drops his eyes as if he doesn’t want to intrude, as if he’s opened a door by mistake to your thoughts.

There’s something fascinating about this man sitting before you in his summer-weight suit. You can’t quite put your finger on it but it’s something decent, old-fashioned, polite. Wrong for this world, for this cram of sex shops and neon lights where a girl languid by a doorway has a junky’s spots. This Gabriel Bonilla shouldn’t be here. He’s from another time, another place; the type of person who wouldn’t expect a woman to be driving a car if there was a man in it. There’s his Spanish name and yet fluent English – my mother is English, my father Spanish – and again there’s your laugh, bursting out; ah ha, so that explains it.