The Bride Stripped Bare

by Nikki Gemmell

  And it has released you, for the time being, from a spikier kind of want.

  He’s called Jack.

  His face is unfolding. His ears are like two little squashed roses. His hair, smoothed, is a shell-spiral; ruffled, a corrugated lake. His tiny nails are soft and ragged until you peel them away, his hands balletic in sleep. His eyes are deep and blank and dark and seem to go on forever. Does he see you? You don’t know. He sees your voice, you’re sure of that, and your smell and your nipple, oh yes, that. You’re exhausted. Transfixed. He fills every corner of your life.

  When your mother visits the hospital she holds him uncomfortably, as if he’s rare china; afraid of his fragility. How strange, you muse: she’s done all this before. Maybe she’s out of practice? Doesn’t want Jack to cry?

  When are you baby-sitting for us, gran, Cole teases.

  Maybe in a year or two, she laughs, a touch too fierce.

  Perhaps that’s the key: she won’t be comfortable with Jack until he’s not a baby but a person, you’ll have to wait for a year or so. Or maybe she wants you to stand on your own two feet with this, give you space. You won’t push it. Watching her, you realize you have no right to expect her close involvement. As much as you’d like it.

  Lesson 134

  misfortunes are brought upon some by the bad conduct of others

  Martha visits you in hospital. Jack cries when she holds him and you tell her to slip her little finger into his mouth. He stops.

  Wow, she says.

  Princess Diana used to do it. I get all my motherhood tips from the telly.

  You both laugh.

  Isn’t your mother helping you, she asks.

  No, not really. She doesn’t seem to want to, I don’t know why.

  Maybe she’s afraid of being shown up.

  How do you mean?

  Well, she’s always done everything so well in her life. She looked after a baby a hell of a long time ago and I guess everything’s changed so much. Maybe she doesn’t want you seeing that she doesn’t quite know what to do any more.

  You think of her holding Jack in her rusty, awkward way, willing him not to cry. Your poor, dear, impenetrable mother; she always hates admitting there’s something she can’t do. Perhaps, perhaps Martha’s right.

  She asks, as she’s leaving, if you’ve heard the news about Gabriel. Your stomach churns; thank God Cole isn’t around to hear the name. What contact has she had, you cannot bear to ask, you know you’ll blush, you don’t want to hear about a marriage, a wife.

  He came back to the library, Martha says. He was completely changed. His hair was cut. He had this crisp new shirt. New shoes. He looked, I don’t know, proper, respectable. And then Martha leans close, she speaks low, distinct: he told me he’d been in Spain. She slows. He told me he’d been getting over this absolutely shattering breakup. It sounded like it was the love of his life or something.

  Your breath catches in your throat.

  Can you believe it? I mean, talk about a dark horse. He didn’t tell me much else. But, then, and this was the funny bit, he said that I had to help him find a girlfriend. He said that was his new goal.

  You cannot speak.

  I tell you, I wanted to jump right in there and say me, Gabriel, me, I’ll leave Pat, anything you want, Martha laughs.

  You murmur, hmm.

  Lesson 135

  let us remember that in helping others and seeking their happiness we are finding our own

  You hear her before you see her, know instantly the clack of those heels on linoleum. The determination in them, the energy of someone who’s never at rest. Then the familiar black suit is striding down the hospital corridor. And the face, you know it so well, every nuance, you know it better than Cole’s or your mother’s. Of course you’ll see her now, you’ve changed. You feel powerful, more powerful than you’ve ever felt before. Like a real person now, richer, deeper, full of juice.

  Hello, stranger, you say, getting in first.

  Hi. She’s wary, one side of her mouth up, one side down. You don’t know why she’s here, perhaps it’s her curiosity but whatever she throws at you you’re ready, she can’t touch you now, it’s in your smile. She carries a bottle of champagne and a romper suit that’s too big, with too many clasps.

  You both examine its complexity: I know about as much as you, you laugh.

  God help you.

  Her fingers are unpracticed with the baby, quickly she places him back. She sits on the edge of the bed and you hand her two coffee cups and the champagne cork pops. You sit without words for a while, gazing into each other’s face. There is too much to say so nothing is said, you sit open-faced, reading the changes over both your lives. Nothing can describe the intricacy of the relationship you’ve shared, and not shared. And where, now, to start. Your son is beside you, asleep, you can feel his body warmth. His arms are wide, all surrender, all trust.

  How’s the breastfeeding going, she asks.

  It’s OK. It’s working, for the moment.

  Good for you. I had a client who could only do it for three weeks because every time the baby’s mouth was on her nipple she’d have an orgasm. She said it was wonderful for the first day, but completely exhausting after that.

  You laugh. It’s good, in some ways, to have Theo back.

  You’re so lucky, she says.

  I know, and then softer, I know. You catch in her face a sudden pain like a rogue cloud scudding across the sun but then it’s gone; your hand reaches across to her. She slides hers away.

  I couldn’t bear to think about you for a while, after I found out you were pregnant. I didn’t expect it to affect me so much. It’s just … and she stops, she looks down at Jack. I’d do anything to have one of these.

  I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through.

  Yeah.

  Oh Diz.

  Nothing’s worked. They’ve told me to give up. She’s on the verge of tears, she’s holding them back. You lean forward and put your arms round her; she breaks. Hey, you say over and over again, hey. It wasn’t meant to be like this when you finally met up. You hold her until the shuddering stops. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand; mascara is smeared in black streaks.

  I’m so sorry, she says to you.

  You can’t bring yourself to say anything. You just nod, you won’t cry, won’t give her that.

  We should get together some time, she says. When you’re back home. I want to—be a better friend for you.

  Yes, let’s.

  Not sure when you’ll see her again, not sure you want to now, with your new life.

  Cole tells me you still meet up for a drink now and then, you say, nudging a response: wondering if this, too, was yet another clever lie.

  I won’t sleep with him, all right, she snaps, heat flaming her cheeks and she looks down again at Jack. It tells you nothing. You tilt your face to the ceiling, you smile: it doesn’t matter any more, she can’t touch you, can’t wound you. You’re living, now, a much larger life. And in that moment of holding your face to the ceiling with your eyes shut, all the tension of uncertainty that’s been with you since Theo’s letter—about what you’ll do, about how you’ll proceed from this point—is at last snapped and decision is falling over you like soft rain. And Theo knows nothing of that. You drop your head, you smile serenely at her.

  Your son lies beside you; the warm, firm wedge of him, and she will never have that. Finally, finally, there’s something you have that she will not.

  Lesson 136

  the mother has now received the very crown of womanhood, and in the contemplation and care of her child she feels that she herself is new born into a world of delight

  You write in twenty-minute bursts, once a day, twice if you’re lucky. It’s all that Jack will allow you. You sit at your desk in that wonderfully clear, bright, curious time in the morning when his day hasn’t been corrupted by nappy changes and wind and too little sleep.

  Six weeks after the birth, flowers still fill th
e flat, blousing out and tumbling petals. The rooms have the gentle, new glow of the just married. You’re still bleeding, just. Your genitals still smell meaty and fleshy. Your stomach muscle’s split, a line of pigment still dissects it. Your breasts have ballooned and dropped and are marbled with blue veins like river lines on a map and when you go to the toilet it feels ragged and loose, and it’s agony if urine splashes the wound, your whole body winces at the shock. You’re constipated, badly. The muscle’s ripped at the back of your vagina and you’ve been told it’ll heal with a hard line of scar tissue and you may be incontinent in later life. None of this matters.

  Such love.

  The rapture, the rapture of that.

  He’s soaked into your fingers, nails, clothes, sheets, hair. You’ve never known another body so intimately. The smell of his milky breath, the palms of his hands, the powdery folds of his groin. You’re jealous of his sleep, for it takes him from you. Cole offers to feed him sometimes, to give you a break, and Jack suckles the bottle of your expressed milk as furiously as a calf with a teat. You sleep by your son as close as a lover, your arm round him, face to face, and your nipples drip watery, blue-white milk. Sometimes you think that he’s a succubus, that all you are is a feeding machine and you retract from his voracity. But then he smiles and the love you feel is again wild, out of control, it’s bigger than you. Germaine, poor love, was wrong: this isn’t a catastrophic decline in your quality of life, it’s living made luminous.

  You’ve found a kind of peace with him, especially when you’re feeding. You’ve shed all that’s extraneous because, simply, there’s no time any more. You lose yourself staring in whole gold days of him. You know, now, why a man travels home in his lunchtime for his child. Jack’s head smells so strongly of the briny shoreline, of rockpools during low tide and as you sit there holding him, breathing him in, you are back, suddenly, to summer holidays long ago, to the sky and the ocean and salt and sand. The most powerful non-erotic smell, oh yes. You feel drugged within this wondrous little world, this babymoon in which nothing, for the moment, is allowed to intrude.

  Lesson 137

  every day brings fresh delight in conscious strengthening of body and development of mind

  A cheap pizzeria round the corner from your flat. Cole sits before you and Jack is asleep in his car seat at your side, propped on a seat. Cole straightens his little hat. You appreciate your husband for different reasons now; for changing a nappy without complaint, drying his son so carefully after a bath, holding him into quiet.

  Goodness knows when you’ll make love with Cole again, the want has shriveled from your life as suddenly as it exploded forth and you don’t know when, if ever, it’ll be back. You feel no sadness, it’s just a fact. At this point you cannot tolerate lust and nurturing at the same time. Your fantasies have completely gone. You miss them, but suddenly you can’t conjure them out of thin air. You’re sure, one day, they’ll return; you hope.

  Jack wakes and stretches his body as completely as a puppy, his arms over his head and his fists balled. You’re overwhelmed by the crush of love surrounding him. It’s ferocious, the rush of joy, the tenderness of family and friends and strangers surrounding the newborn. God bless the little one says a waiter at the restaurant as you leave and it fills your heart. You smile out loud as you walk down the street, it bursts from you, you cannot hold it in.

  Lesson 138, the last

  bathing washing changing clothes

  Gabriel, in the street.

  You’re wheeling the stroller beside Cole, you’ve been shopping at Baby Gap. The two of you are squabbling, Cole wants you to put on Jack’s coat but you know he’s warm enough.

  Then this.

  You catch each other’s eyes, you pass each other without a flicker of recognition, just as you’d promised each other once.

  But you both turn back. He smiles secrets at you, for a fleeting moment.

  The crowd closes over you, and he’s gone.

  Your thudding heart, your thudding heart.

  Cole bends at the stop light and buttons on Jack’s coat. You smile, you say nothing. Thinking of the book you’ve been writing; you’ve done all that is in it but your husband will never know, for you are the good wife. This is how you will choose to end it: you are standing on a street corner, a picture of domesticity in your pink skirt and cloche hat with a stroller before you and husband by your side and in that moment you feel as strong and resilient as mercury but no one would ever guess. Your outside and insides do not match, and how you love that. A great gleeful happiness comes over your day. You think of your anonymous Elizabethan friend who’s been with you for so long, pushing you on. You’re telling her the story of a strange, glittery time in your life. There’s no other time worth talking about yet.

  An excerpt from

  WITH

  MY

  BODY

  A NOVEL

  by

  NIKKI GEMMELL

  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.

  Curious as to how to expose your aching, open wound to the light; the wound that can only be sutured by one thing, the simplest thing of all. love. The necessary verb: to rescue, bloom, protect. Aching for something, anything, to heal you and perhaps here in this new life you will find it.

  Your convent school is in the city’s centre, its honey sandstone shadowed by buildings taller than it. Your father’s lucrative night shifts are paying for it – eleven and three-quarter hours, from 8 p.m., triple time. In the Big Smoke you’re still the kid from the bush, like a horse in a box kicking out, strong, if you are too long in it. City-logged. Every so often you can smell the bush when the breeze blows in from the south and you hold your head high to it. Above the pollution and the cram of the noise and the crush of the people you want to feel the dirt between your toes and in your hair, you want to be strong with your land again, want silence and spareness, a place for your eyes to rest.

  Want your father. The one person who gave you the gift of attention, once.

  The one person who gave you the gift of touch, once.

  Touch is taboo in this place. You are young ladies, at all times, no matter what. Eating a banana in public is sexually suggestive and will not be tolerated from girls of this establishment; school shoes must not be polished too highly lest the reflection of bright white cottontails be glimpsed too readily; surfaces of bath water must be encrusted with talcum powder so a glimpse of flesh is never caught under the cloudy surface. The only man you are allowed to adore is God. The Thorn Birds is eagerly, grubbily, passed around the class; Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins. You are growing up. Everywhere flesh, touch, skin, bodies changing, worlds expanding, nights churning.

  You become best friends with lune, the daughter of the French ambassador, the only one in the class whose parents are divorced. lune loves her motherless little bush girl who knows nothing of this world – an outsider like herself. She teaches you about razors and tanning and tampons, French kisses and cigarettes, silk knickers and suspender belts. Europeanknowing, she teaches you about the power in a dirty smile, and the allure of confidence.

  Lesson 29

  Have the moral courage to assert your dignity

  against the sneers of society

  You have been shut away within high convent walls to address the wildness from the bush; to quieten you, dampen you, smooth you down. You are too large-spirited, singular, raw. You have become an embarrassment.

  And yet, and yet, you are not convinced these women who rule over you are so disapproving. The nuns sense your difference, you are sure, that you will never be one of those ranks of girls they brisk out year after year armed with Daddy’s gold credit card and a D.J.’s accou
nt. There is something … carnal … about you. Non-conformist, untamed. Hungry. But for what, no one knows, including yourself. You’re like the parched earth in a drought waiting, waiting, for nourishment of some sort.

  You see something in these nuns, the few of them left, that is strong, lit. They are an intriguing new breed of female in your life. They are doing exactly what they want to and have a great calmness because of it. Precious few women you know have that – certainly not any married ones, the mothers of school friends, the valley women you come across. There is something so courageous about the nuns’ strength in swimming against the stream. You think of your stepmother, riddled with jealousy and insecurity, threatened by a slip of a girl half her size, made sour with it. These women at your school, in their resolutely interior world, are free of the world of men by choice and glow with it.

  Can a married woman radiate serenity? You’ve never seen it in the wives of Beddy, in the brittle women you occasionally glimpse in The Young and the Restless and the harassed mothers at the school gate. Your Mother Superior is fifty-five years old and has a face unburdened by wrinkles and worries, kids and mortgages and debt. There is never make-up, never shadow; it is as if she has washed her face in the softness of a creek’s water her entire life. Washed it with grace.

  The serenity of choice, and you are intrigued by it. The courage to be different.

  Lesson 30

  To feel that you can or might be something,

  is often the first step towards becoming it

  Your mother’s old boss, from her restaurant management days, invites you for tea. He is the only person you know in the Big Smoke outside of school. He grew up in the bush, like your mother did, and found a way out. He’s now mysteriously wealthy, has a sunken conversation pit and a Porsche.