With My Body. Nikki Gemmell

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      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.

      Remembering the child you once were. Marinated by light.

      At school, among the other girls, you are riddled with awkwardness. At having to join them, be one of them, and you will never belong, they all know that but here you are different, you are your true self. Balloon girl, zippy with happiness, flying on your Peddly, firm, confident; it is your default mode whenever you are back in your world.

      At sunset the golden light washes like a mist over the land and then the sun dips behind a hill and the glow is snuffed out, so sudden, and the night chill is there; you gaze from your verandah at the spill of stars and the watching moon and the sky running away and then move to your bed and your hand slips between your legs and the vividness begins, in your head, the technicolour movies, every night, to lull you to sleep: people watching you – fresh, prized, wanted; an entirely different world to this; a house of beauty and abundance, of books and talk and laughter and warmth; men, many of them; your legs parted, on your back, your fast breathing, your hot wet.

      All that you have, the only power that you have, lies in your body. You are fourteen, you have no other power in your life.

      At night, alone, in command, confident; the open wound of your life forgotten, the rawness that can only be sutured by love, the necessary verb.

      To rescue.

      To combust.

      III

      ‘In this one small thing at least it seems I am wiser – that I do not think I know what I do not know’

      Socrates

      Lesson 35

      Tenderly reared young ladies

      The art room.

      A new teacher. Mr Cooper.

      A man.

      Extremely rare in this place. He is one of a series where visiting artists run workshops in the school, explaining what they do; he is collected by the parents of Sophia Smegg, the richest girl in the class. He is young. A painter, apparently, a good one – his work has already been hung in the Archibald Prize.

      His trousers have worn, grubby knees and paint splatters; a red sock peeps from the toe of a sneaker. He has made no concession to being in this place of constraint.

      You are riveted. You are not the only one. You can taste the alertness in the air. And as the entire class of fourteen year olds gaze at this new specimen in their midst, something happens to his trousers. They grow. They stick out. At the crotch. It is excruciating, it is fascinating, it is appalling. Every girl in the class knows what it is. Every girl in the class cannot take their eyes from it. The entire phalanx of girls is silent, spellbound. Mr Cooper’s face reddens, he has barely begun his talk. He falls silent.

      He excuses himself.

      Mr Cooper does not come back.

      He has left the school, it is understood.

      The next artist is a porcelain painter, a woman of seventy-six.

      None of you know what happened after Mr Cooper left the room. You suspect he exited so rapidly because of deep embarrassment; couldn’t face any of you again and you are intrigued by that, the blushing, mortification, vulnerability.

      So. Mr Cooper. Gone from your life. And you will never forget. The power in you, in all of you. That collectively you could do this to him.

      You feel too much, think too much; the intensity of the fantasies, every night before sleep. The Penthouses, at СКАЧАТЬ