With My Body

by Nikki Gemmell

  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.

  Not a woman’s world.

  ‘For God’s sake, make something of yourself,’ your father often tells you and by this he means: don’t be useless, don’t hang about like a bad smell. He’s taught you to survive a bush fire, find water, read a motorbike manual, mend a chook house and a fence; all his knowledge imparted as you traverse the bush roads in his ute—as if driving, concentrating on something else, is the only time he can properly converse. Your whole discourse, it feels, takes place within cars or when he’s poking in bonnets or tinkering, flat on his back, underneath; he’s always got several old bombs lying about, gutted or up on bricks. Avoiding the slap of face to face, of what he will see in it, who. But with a car, yarning, when you do not have to look at each other’s eyes, there is intimacy.

  It is the only intimacy you get.

  Your toughened, dusty, bare feet are always leaning on the dashboard or the windscreen; the dirty imprints of your toes forever in front of the passenger seat like a dog at its post leaving its mark. You’re continually kicking off your shoes, never wanting that feeling of being confined, restrained, bound by anything. Your father’s always letting you, rarely saying no to his wild, sweet, bush scrap of a kid, who knows nothing of the world beyond this place.

  He tells you on the way home from your birthday dinner that Anne will help you with women … stuff, you know, like what he can’t. Anymore.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Just … stuff. She’ll be good for you. Yeah.’

  His voice trails off.

  In the vivid silence beyond you wonder what he means. He says all this haltingly, awkwardly; and all you really understand is that it’s important. Whatever it is. You take your feet off the dash and look at your father coolly and there is the first sliver of an adult knowing in that look—that your father is just no good with talk, with anything that’s not about spanners and carburettors and saddles and swags. He’s like one of those icebergs with the huge unknown mass of him underneath.

  What you also understand from that night: a new world awaits.

  Lesson 21

  Elegant infamy

  There is only one word for your naivety then. Magnificent. You have learnt no defences for the wiliness of grown-ups, their sophisticated ways, have never had to. You have lived your whole life in a bell jar of isolation.

  Learning how to fashion a bridle out of a piece of rope and splint a broken bone when you’re stuck out bush, learning when to sense a coming rain; how to read a kookaburra’s laugh. Your tiny house is bereft of pictures on the wall, ornaments or books. A Bible on a side table is the only tome—unread—and the television is on every evening but it’s never the ABC with those posh, city voices. A Sydney Morning Herald has never crossed its threshold; classical music has never wafted out, it’s all Johnny Cash and Elvis, talkback and the Daily Telegraph. Your father is deeply suspicious of the world of the Big Smoke, of the well-born and the educated he rarely encounters, their social and intellectual confidence. The ease of them. It is only physically that the likes of him can ever compete, not that he wants to. His world is this valley.

  Not a doll is in the house, not a frill or scrap of pink. Your treasured possessions are your Snoopy diary and your bike, Peddly, which becomes your horse as soon as you sit on its saddle, winging you every day to other worlds than this.

  Your school, at Beddy Number One, is a single classroom. Twelve kids, aged five to eleven. Your teacher is like many of the women of the valley, soft-fleshed and ambitionless beyond snaring a husband and a motherly life; soon to be married and she’ll then leave teaching, which she has never liked, to devote herself to the job of wife. Her job is limbo land, the dead zone until something else.

  ‘Why do you want to do that, Miss? Wouldn’t you prefer to be with us?’ you ask, cheekily. ‘He’s a right old bush turkey the bloke you’re marrying, that’s what my daddy says. Beyond his use-by date.’

  ‘Get out.’

  Which is what you want, of course. Almost every day you are released from the tiny classroom. She has given up on you, doesn’t know what to make of your blunt voice, your absence of understanding what’s wrong and right, your wildness and your wilfulness, your constant gazing out the window, champing at the bit.

  Wanting out. Licked by sun and wind. Now. Not a part of this. Every day.

  She doesn’t see your knottedness, your enormous heart, primed for love—to give and receive it. Doesn’t know what to make of your vast alone that she senses has no desire for her world, for everything she represents. Because you perceive in her, even then, some kind of an erasure, that there is no audacious sense of who she really is. She wants to disappear into someone else’s life; she desires it more than anything else. That, to you, is bizarre. The one message your teacher imparts to you, upon the dewy, blinkered brink of her shiny new existence, is that women who are thinkers do not get married.

  Then there’s Anne. Waiting in the wings to take over your life.

  Lesson 22

  Matrimony in the abstract; not the man, but any man—any person who will snatch her out of the dullness of her life

  ‘In order to be irreplaceable one must be different.’

  A quote from Coco Chanel, from a page of the Women’s Weekly all twelve of you have been tearing up to make collages like Roman mosaics.

  You are intrigued by the statement. Slip the cutting into the pocket of your overalls. You are a thinker despite what your teacher puts on your report and you love new words like irreplaceable and you are gleaning, slowly, that in this place it takes a mighty courage to be different, to want to be something beyond your world. In this fragile, uncertain time before your father’s marriage is a tiny seed of a thought, to one day write; to be a watcher, an observer, apart. Because of the shiver of a truth: that the women of this world would only enfold you if everything that was unique about you, everything vivid and sure and free and strong, was gone. And the alternative, here—aching, yowling loneliness.

  You fly home on Peddly that afternoon with the scrap of words in your pocket and sense that one day you will be saved by a world very different from this, saved by everything this world is not. You have no idea what that existence will be or how you will get to it but even then, so young, you have a raging will for a life that is not theirs.

  Lesson 23

  This law of love—love that tries to be always as just as it is tender, and never exercises one of its own rights for its own pleasure and good, but for the child’s

  The wedding. The house of Colin, your father’s best mate, his only school friend who escaped the pit. Chosen because it has a swimming pool and a cabana, the poshest thing possible in your lives, and because the little wife can do prawn cocktails for you, mate.

  Eleven p.m. The latest you have been up in your life.

  Colin lolls up to you, beer glass in hand, in the saggy, stretched time after the main meal.

  He cups your chin and gazes into your fierce little face, at the long golden hair your father brushed last night—for the last time, you suspect—and he murmurs, ‘Your mother was so beautiful.’ Stretching out the ‘so’ with a secret smile, gazing at you like no one has before, as if he sees something of your mother in there, some whisper of potential, suddenly, to mirror her. You jerk back like a spooked pony, afraid of that, in a way you don’t quite understand, afraid your father will reject you because of it.

  But more importantly, that someone else will.

  You glance across at your newly minted stepmother, at her bouffant of a bridal gown and extravagantly thrown back veil, at her crazed untouchable radiance and you know in that moment your past
life is gone. That this triumphant young woman in her gown of a first wife not a second will do her best to erase your father’s previous existence, stamp on any whiff of your mother being the love of his life, without even realising, perhaps, what damage she is doing.

  You start to cry. The last crying of childhood. You weep, and weep, cannot stop.

  You have never done anything like this before. You can pull apart two bush dogs in a fight and shoot a rabbit and crack a whip but cannot explain why you are doing this; it just feels like a giant hand is dragging a piece of jagged, broken glass down the underbelly of your life, splitting you open and all the tears, of all the years, are finally out. Everyone comes up to you: your father, your brand-new stepmother, your grandmother. But the floodgates are opened and cannot be shut. You sense this is horribly unfair on Anne and are ashamed of it but can’t stop.

  Because your father is lost to you from this point.

  And you know that no matter how much she tries, your stepmother politely tolerates you and nothing else; she doesn’t want any of your enormous swamping ready love, actually; she doesn’t want the encumbrance of it in her life. Your stepmother, who over the years will perfect the art of emotional terrorism; an adult upon a child. Who despatches you, from the age of eleven, into an affronted loneliness within the new family she creates. A loneliness vast and raw, horizonless.

  The obscenity of that.

  Lesson 24

  The house-mother! What a beautiful, comprehensive word it is. How suggestive of all that is wise and kindly, comfortable and good.

  You learn to live warily under the same roof. You learn that your presence is a source of distress to your stepmother—she is a good Catholic girl and is ashamed her new husband is not a cleanskin, wants to pretend to the world her husband is not twenty years older than her and never had a former life. She gave up her job in a petrol station at twenty, at the first whiff of matrimony and never worked again. Gave it all up to enter the longed-for world of vibrant tranquillity and status called marriage—and no grubby, gobby child is going to mar that. She is a typical valley girl—early school-leaver, thick set, the expectation that soon they’ll be with child—married or not. The much-anticipated baby doesn’t come, doesn’t come, even though the readiness for motherhood is oozing from her and your father grunts at one point, from under the F.J., to stop asking about it, it’ll happen in good time, ‘zip it’.

  Your father is now called Ted, not his nickname—Eddie—that everyone has always called him; his colleagues, his mates, your mother, even you. She insists. Everything from his past is gradually turfed out, the carpet your mum chose, wallpaper, crockery. Photos disappear into obscure drawers, not only of your mum but of you and him together until suddenly, you notice, there are none in the house.

  ‘Don’t you dare take her for a drive, Ted. It’s my time, not hers.’

  Yet it is only when you are alone with your father, in the car, that his fingertips find your earlobe and his voice softens and he whispers, ‘You’re still my China, aren’t you?’ as if it is the last time he will be able to tell you this and gravely you must hold it in your heart, you must never forget it; he has stolen this chance and it may not happen again. In the car, just the two of you, with his secret voice he never dares give you the gift of when his new wife is present. His life is now held hostage by her and it is only when he is away, in the car, that he is free—his old self.

  You can taste your stepmother’s spirit and are disheartened by it. She has the focus and insecurity and determination of the second wife, to make this marriage work. She crashes into your equilibrium. Living with her is like being trapped in sleeplessness; she sucks the oxygen from your world.

  She never teaches you what your father wanted, all that woman stuff he could not articulate. Your father never asks. He assumes everything is alright. You do not tell him. Your whole relationship is built on inarticulacy, it would not feel right to suddenly blurt. You are learning silence and watchfulness and the solace of a pen that speaks when you cannot, as an explosive combination is being brewed: frustration, anger, boundless curiosity—and enormous innocence.

  Lesson 25

  When I go from home to home and see the sort of rule or misrule there, the countless evil influences, physical and spiritual, against which children have to struggle, I declare I often have to wonder that in the rising generation there should be any good men and women

  Your bedroom is now the verandah at the back of the house with a roll-down canvas flap at night. It is not far away enough. You are no longer a part of the main house. It has not been done by pushing you out, it has been done by removal, by erasing everything that was secure and known in your past life. All the roaring absences now; the hidden photographs, the taken-down curtains, the painted-over marks of your mother’s on the kitchen door, as you stood up, grew tall, and then they stopped. Aged three years and eight months. The whole interior has become a ghost house to you; holding its breath for someone who will never come back. You still see it—searingly—as what it was. Not what it is now.

  When it thunders in your back room you drop to the ground with your belly to the floorboards and hear the house talk through the rumbling in your skin. You smell the earth opening out to the rain, opening wide, drinking it up, wider and wider the ground opens out, every pore of it, and you smile and breathe it in deep.

  No respite, but the bush.

  Lesson 26

  Every family is a little kingdom in itself: the members and followers of which are often as hard to manage as any of the turbulent governments whose discords convulse our world

  By a shaded cleft of a creek you make a bush hut out of broken branches—widow makers, they’re known as locally—and great brooms of leaves; your home away from home, just for you. You love the cool smell of the water on the rock, the rich rust of the wet stone, the startling green of the ferns sucking from the restless stream. You love the clutter of vibrant life drawn to this secret tranquillity, the frogs, lizards, birds, wallabies if you’re very still. The land beyond it is bleached pale, the colour of the sheep that feed from it, but you’d never know within this.

  You stay out later and later in your sanctuary. Are intrigued the first time you come home—after dinner, but before your father has returned from his shift—to see the worry lines creasing your stepmother’s face. It is the first time you have seen concern on her, with anything to do with you.

  You learn, in that instant, the authority of removal.

  You stay away longer and longer.

  Then one day, after a big rain, the mosquitoes come. You need something to keep them away. There is only one thing in your world that is a length of fine netting, and you know exactly what room to find it in.

  Lesson 27

  Never expect in the child a degree of perfection which one rarely finds even in a grown person

  You never enter your father’s bedroom anymore. He no longer brushes your hair on a Sunday night, no one does. And the room is not his now, in any way; it’s been prettied up. It feels alien, forbidden, scrubbed; sanctified by something unknowable. But in it, now, is the only thing of hers you will ever want.

  She is away, visiting her mother. When she is gone it is as if the house breathes out, with a sigh—your whole world unfurls and you can move freely in it. You won’t have long. You scrabble through her cupboard and rigidly ordered drawers; God, an entire life spent making things neat, what a waste. You find what you’re looking for in a leather suitcase under the bed.

  A carefully folded veil, under a circle of dried roses.

  Your mosquito net lasts through storms and winds and possums rampaging and the time you jumped away from a red-bellied black snake and crashed through it; lasts through days of you returning later and later until finally, one morning, she follows you; to work out where you are disappearing to all these God forsaken days, to work out what on earth is going on. And with a scream of rage she flurries upon your hidden place and drags down her precious veil, now
ingrained with grubbiness and torn beyond repair.

  She gets you home by the hair, your long golden hair, and knees you in the back and now finally you see the strength of this hefty country lass, and you’re so slight; she knees you like she would a calf and grabs your mother’s old dressmaking scissors and hacks off all your hair, in great ragged clumps—as if this will be the only veil you will ever have in your life and she will destroy it, oh yes, and may it never grow back. So much hate in her, so much frustration at this stain in her life. Then she gets a bottle of black ink that your father uses for writing cheques and she tips it over your head so it runs down your face like black blood in huge streaks and screams, ‘Get out, get out, get out of my life,’ her voice naked, now, finally, with the one thing she has wanted ever since she came into this place.

  That night, you gallop your hurt and your howl into your Snoopy diary, the only voice you have. Because you are becoming a woman in this claustrophobic place—you are learning not to let slip the roar of your true self, and your father, of course, will not be told any of this, what goes on between his two women. You are learning how it is to be female in this life.

  Lesson 28

  Follow openly and fearlessly that same law which makes spring pass into summer, summer into autumn, and autumn into winter

  Suddenly, boarding school. Just like that.

  Cast adrift. Unwanted. Emotionally whipped.

  But curious. About a new life, a new chance.