Nikki Gemmell - With My Body

He laughs.

You are not allowed to know, understand, exactly what this man now does; no one will tell you. All you perceive is that you are not like one of those women he employs and never will be; you will always be apart, removed, from that world. He says with a smile that you’re like a little bush filly he had as he was growing up, with some thoroughbred mixed in there somewhere, wild and sweet and strong and untamed inside that ridiculous school uniform with its skirt too long and its Peter Pan collar and then he looks at you gravely and says he doesn’t want to see the wildness broken, ever, any of it, as he runs his fingers along your collarbone again; as your stomach churns again.

He makes you vividly aware of your teenage body.

Ripening.

The power of it.

The only way to make people good is to make them happy

A weekend at home. Your father picks you up from the train station, a legitimate drive that your stepmother has to allow. His fingertips stray absently to your earlobe, the old caress, and you shut your lids and feel the coming wet prickling in your eyes at the tenderness, so rare in your life, so ached for. Kindness will always crack you now, it is the legacy of your emotionally blunted childhood.

He doesn’t say he loves you. He just gives you his snippet of a touch. It is all you need, it is enough.

Your father’s philosophy of parenting has become: if you want a child to do well you ignore them, so the child will always be striving for attention. It is the rhythm of your boarding life.

‘Look at me. Say something. Notice. Respond!’

You have been screaming it to him silently your entire time away; it is why you do so well in your new school, determined, focused, competitive. It’s the only area of your life you can achieve in. Get right. You’ve always been a thinker, have always devoured anything you could get your hands on to read, being starved of words has worked. Your father doesn’t engage in any of it. Doesn’t read, doesn’t write. The few times you have caught him at it – writing a cheque or a shopping list – he takes careful pleasure in the beauty of the letters, each one strikingly formed, every stroke a pattern, which betrays that he is still a relative beginner; he doesn’t do it much.

And now, in the car, on the way home, his touch. You lean into it. Then as soon as you arrive with a screech of the handbrake and walk into the house he clamps down, no longer shows you the vivid pulse of this love. Is formal, distant, uninterested; veering into coldness, a different person entirely. What is he afraid to show her? What has she threatened?

You’re his daughter.

When you’re at school, in his few, precious phone calls to you – from the mine crib room, never at home – he almost pleads, don’t forget the old man loves ya, and it’s like a momentary weakness, a slip. What bewitchment has she woven around him? What weakness in him lets her? A grown man. So inarticulate, so cowed.

An earlobe caressed; a moment snatched, in secret, too brief. The only warmth you will ever get in this place now.

You will find something else.

We have only to deal with facts – perhaps incapable of remedy, but by no means incapable of amelioration

It is decided. At fourteen.

You will be an archivist, a collector. Of love and everything that comes with it. You will learn how it happens, where it comes from, how it’s snared. For good. Your grand and meticulous experiment. You are aching to begin but do not know how. You must go beyond the four houses huddling under their looming trees, beyond the high convent walls; you just long for touch, warmth. A proper, sustained caress.

You feel so vividly. All your nerve endings are raw, opening out. You are poised, on the brink. Of something, God knows what.

It begins with water.

The house of your grandparents. Whom you cherish but see all too rarely; they’ve retired further north up the coast, six hours’ drive away, and it’s not often that they make it to the Big Smoke to retrieve you.

Inside the house, your nanna communicates all her strength through food – veggies are made lurid with bicarb soda, there’s an endless supply of apple and gramma pies, of custard and porridge, sugary tea and tarts. Her domain is a resolutely interior world. But outside, she has no idea what her little granddaughter’s getting up to, never enquires about her becoming a woman, except to ask once if her ‘friends’ have visited yet.

‘What?’

‘You know, your friends. Your monthlies.’

‘Oh,’ and you’re laughing. ‘Oh yes, just.’

But outside, in your grandparents’ back yard, your new world. Swimming to the pebble dash side of the pool, to the filter hole the size of a fifty-cent coin, to the water coming out at high pressure. Hooking your legs over the edge and holding your hands firm and then the deliciousness coming and you’re stretching back, delirious, buoyed and grinning under your wide blue sky then floating your arms wide and arching your back. And inside the house your grandparents are going about their business, completely oblivious to your jet-pressure secret; your nanna who told you once she always hated sex and your pop doing his crosswords then heading off to the club for a game of bowls.

But you, outside, on your back.

Seared by wonder, made silly by it.

You cannot dawdle away a whole forenoon

You are achingly alone, no anchor, no sense of belonging, of who you really are. But alone, you are learning what you can do with your body, your instrument, coaxing it into technicolour life.

Lune has stolen two Penthouses from the pile under her brother’s bed; she slips you one.

Lune has bribed her older sister with a year’s worth of pedicures and manicures; she buys you each a vibrator.

You squirrel your booty home.

Your hot breathlessness as you open the magazine, as you stare at the pictures. As you devour the letters to the editor at the front, the stories that transform you into something else. In the bathroom, while your stepmother is on her weekly supermarket shop, you slip out the vibrator and turn it over and over and wonder where to begin. Turn it on, turn it off, again, and hold it close, spread-eagled on the cold tiles, terrified she’ll come back.

You work out an orgasm for yourself. You’re confused by the female physiology. It doesn’t make sense, all the nerve endings are on the outside and not the inside where they should be, shouldn’t they, what’s going on? You wonder if it’s just you; if you’re built wrong.

But the clit.

The power lying dormant in it. What it can transform you into. The first time where you have completely, utterly let go.

Jolted into life. Combusted, with light.

One may see many a young woman who has, outwardly speaking, ‘everything she can possibly want’, absolutely withering in the atmosphere of a loveless home

In school holidays, at home, your days are spent as far as possible from your stepmother. She has won, there is nothing left of your mother or yourself; she completely, triumphantly owns her tiny life. A baby still hasn’t come and you had hoped, once, that would make her soften towards her stepdaughter, but it only seems to harden the pushing away: you the constant reminder of your mother’s victory over her.

But beyond Anne, in the bush – your world – it doesn’t matter; you don’t need any of it.

You stride with relief through the dry flick of grasshoppers in long grass bristling with sound, through congregations of cockatoos snowing the paddocks and watch them lifting like clouds from the trees and you are strong in it, so strong, vividly alone and filled up with air and light; your hair matted, your soles permanently toughened.