Nikki Gemmell - With My Body

You look at her. Yes, you nod, yes, you know; yet it has all, bafflingly, come to this.

Mel leans across, holds your chin, and says your name, softly, gently. You smile; no one has spoken to you like that for so long, a cadence of … caring. She kisses you on the cheek, softly, affectionately, in comfort.

It strays.

The tenderness of it, you pull back – but the tenderness, it holds you, draws you.

Something is coming alive within you, after so long, so many years. You go to speak. ‘Sssh,’ Mel soothes, kissing you, kissing you. There is a stirring, like an anemone swaying into life under the water’s caress; your belly is flipping and you remember long ago, the surrendering, opening out, when you had never felt more alive … once, long ago, for six transforming weeks, another place, life. Something long dormant is awakening within you.

If we do not advance, we retrograde

What you learn, in that tiny lane, in that van, in the darkness seared with light: that feeling, memory, sensation, vividness, can come flooding back. All it takes is the tenderness in a touch. After so long.

You pull away at the shock. Mel laughs softly.

‘You know, sleeping with a woman can be like discovering sex all over again’ – a fingertip slips gently down your cheek, your neck – ‘because we know what works’ – the finger teases – ‘and where.’

You pause. So vulnerable now to touch, kindness, attention of any sort. You shake your head, reach for the door handle, breathe your thanks – the kids, you have to get back. You stumble out.

‘See you at the quiz night.’ Mel smiles a secret smile, starting the van. ‘Or maybe not.’

Striding back, wondrous, tall, through the glittering alive achingly beautiful frost.

Like discovering sex all over again …

It has been so long. So many years, lives, places ago. So many harangued nights of sleeplessness and collapsings into beds without even saying good night to your husband because you’re too tired and too annoyed by some minor irritation like his flossing and his pyjamas pulled up high and his noisy blowing of his nose and anyway he’s already on the way to falling asleep on the couch, in front of the telly, because that is what he always does now, in the shrouded rhythm of your married life.

Upon which he kisses his little wife, and grows mild

Hugh is home just after 10 p.m., just as he said.

‘He won’t notice, he won’t notice,’ you say to yourself, at the kitchen table, a glass of wine before you.

‘Hiya,’ he yells.

He does not come to you, he never does. Now he is throwing down his keys, his wallet, his change. Now he is removing his coat and tie, littering them around the lounge room, balustrades, bedroom; black crows you call them, black crows roosting all over your life.

‘Hiya,’ he calls again, enquiringly.

‘Hi.’

He does not come to you, he does not see you. At the kitchen table, sitting there, cracked. Like you were once, long ago; that he has never witnessed, that he would not understand.

A woman, now, your mind is churning with it, the one thing you never tried.

But everything else …

‘Thank God that pile of clothes has finally disappeared,’ Hugh yells from the bedroom.

You shut your eyes and throw your head back and smile.

Blazing light, blazing life.

‘My words roar, and my salvation is afar’

Psalm 22

Truly, in this hard world, we should be accustomed to this law of love – love paramount and never ceasing

You are eleven. It is your birthday. He takes you out to dinner. He tells you he has a surprise. You wonder what: a horse of your own perhaps, a trail bike. Your father takes you to a restaurant in town, you have never been to one like it, it has cloth napkins and waiters in uniform. Your father doesn’t belong in this place. He has a face like a fist – fleshy, knobbly, rough.

There is a woman at your table. She is called Anne. Your father tells you they are getting married. As he speaks it is a father you have never seen before. His soft, surrendering eyes that look at her and not you; his glow.

Your world stops.

Your father tells you you will be a bridesmaid, with a beautiful dress. Anne will help you choose it. Your father tells you there will be proper food, finally, in your home, fresh sheets and a stocked fridge and even – wait for it – an ironed school uniform every Sunday night. The only concession either of you has ever made to the classroom is him brushing your long hair – his hand gently and firmly holding your crown so as not to hurt – at the start of every school week.

You take a deep breath. You nod. Your life, until this point, has been unfettered. You have been marinated by the bush that surrounds you. You are often barefoot, grubby and wild, answerable to no one; your father and yourself a tight buddy-unit. You have soil packed under your fingernails in tiny crescent moons and coal dust ingrained in fine lines along your knees and no one ever worries about that. You cannot do blanket stitch, crochet or knit, but you can change a tyre and suck poison out of a snake bite and shrivel a leech on your skin with salt.

This has been your world, since your mother died of breast cancer when you were a young child.

But now. A new life. Your father’s sparkling eyes and the pretty, mascaraed eyes of the woman opposite. Their shine. And in between them, an aching enormous eleven-year-old heart churning with fear and excitement, and readiness. Because there is so much love in you. To pour out, to swamp, to receive.

Dad loves Anne. So you love Anne. So Anne loves you.

It is as simple as that. Isn’t it?

Utterly ignorant of the framework on which society moves, she is perpetually straining at gnats and swallowing camels, both in manners and morals

You are eleven, you feel too much. You are an open wound that can only be sutured by that simplest of balms: attention. Love as a necessary verb – to rescue, plume, bloom, cradle, encircle, uplift. Protect.

Beyond your father’s flinty, sloppy love there is no rescue in your world. It is a surprise of four little houses huddled amid a great loom of trees. A scrap of a hamlet that barely deserves a name, too small for its own postcode, with just a mine manager’s house, an under manager’s, an electrical engineer’s and a mechanical engineer’s. All servicing a tiny seam of coal called Beddington Number Two, a tiny pebble of a mine in a valley north of Sydney.

On the high hills of this place you feel as if you are standing on the roof of the world, that you could reach up and touch the very cheek of God – the breeze slippery with sun and the great expanse of sky unspooling above you and around you to the very corners of the earth but it is only the ground, of course, that is valued in this place. This glorious land on the roof of the world is scurried by towers and conveyor belts and trucks heaped high with their sooty spilling black, and wire fences keeping everyone but miners out. Above ground: the domain of the dispossessed. Convict ghosts, sandstone ruins, abandoned plots, Aboriginal paintings in under-hangings, families sickened by generations of coal dust. Below ground: energy, productivity, work. There is the smell of greed to extract in the very air of this place.

To get to your father’s weatherboard house with its faded red tin roof you drive down obscure dirt roads that threaten to exhaust themselves, wither and fade and stop, claimed by virulent bush. Then the Beddy road narrows, in the very heart of the valley, and you wonder where you are going; to what dangerous, hidden place. A murderer’s road, this – for dumping bodies, baggage, secrets, lives.