Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (18 page)

patching is one of the most difficult tasks for unskilled fingers

Exactly two years after the afternoon in Marrakech.

Theo’s birthday, June the first, and it’s marked for ever now by the moment of discovery. You need distraction; you invite three old colleagues from City University to dinner. Cole’s out with a mate from school, seeing the latest James Bond.

As you bumble about in the kitchen, chopping and pouring and stirring, the conversation moves through clothes, haircuts, colleagues, flats and then settles on what it always does with these friends: men. Megan tells you she still hasn’t slept with her partner, Dom, it’s been going on like this for eight years; they’ve become like brother and sister. She’s thirty-nine, she wants a baby. She’s not sure what’s
wrong with Dom; he doesn’t want sex any more, he always pushes her away.

Could he be gay, perhaps?

No.

Leave him, you all say. Before you’re forty-eight and still childless, and it’s too late.

It’s hard, you know, she answers back.

Then she turns to you, God knows why: have you ever been to a male prostitute?

No, you snort, laughing.

Have you ever thought about it?

No.

I really want to do it, but I haven’t got a clue how.

You look across at Cath, conspicuously silent. She’s your closest friend from work. She has one of the happiest marriages you know and two beautiful boys in their teens. She has affairs all the time, has been having them for years; and she has a lot of sex with her husband, Mike, who’s blissfully unaware. It creates this hunger for him, she told you once, I just can’t stop. I don’t want to. Ever.

You always wondered what would happen if Mike found out. You wonder, now, about Cole: it’s a reaction you couldn’t predict. You shudder involuntarily as you stir the pasta, at the thought of him stumbling upon your secret life.

look well after your plants, water them carefully, remove all dead leaves

You try your mother again. Want her close, crave her knowledge now you’re pregnant for she’s been through this too. But she’s on a dig in south-east Russia, for the entire summer. She’s working on a marine predator who terrorised the oceans one hundred and fifty million years ago and had teeth the size of machetes. Six have already been found and are still so sharp that several of the dig team have been cut. She’s assessing the area around the animal’s digestive tract for evidence of what it ate and has unearthed squid-like fossils and ancient fish scales, and is loving the work. And the hot. She tells you there’s a heatwave at the moment and the sky is a screeching blue.

It sounds heavenly, you respond.

It is, she says. Her tone this time is lighter, as if she’s had time to give the impending event some thought. But then she slips in the fish-hooked comment that you might shed all your selfishness once you’re a mother and you feel the familiar tightness in your throat and want to slam the phone down but don’t; you need at least one thing smoothed out in your life.

You don’t know what she perceives as your selfishness. The fact, perhaps, you’ve never expressed gratitude that she raised you for so long, by herself? You developed a defence for her barbs long ago: the phone is put down mid-conversation, or you let the comments pass, or you walk out. It seems so exhausting to stay there and fight.

What’s wrong, Cole asks that night, something’s eating you up.

I don’t know, I just feel all at sea, I’m sorry.

Why don’t you go and see your mum. Take a break. Sort it out with her.

You imagine flinging sun into your lungs; scouring away Gabriel and the taxi drivers with the hurting light, sleeping late, bonding with your mother, sorting out your life. The balm and quiet of a maternal retreat.

Yes, you say to Cole, yes, why not.

You call her back the next morning.

I’m not sure it’s the place for someone who’s pregnant,
she says. It’s pretty rough. It’s dusty and hot, and most of the roads are dirt.

I just need to get out of London. Please.

OK, she laughs, OK. I can understand that.

airing is an essential process

To a plain that was once an inland sea. It’s now crusted over with salt and the bones of old vessels leer up from its bed like the carcasses of the prehistoric beasts underneath. Fishermen had chased the water as it bled from their grasp, they’d tried reaching out to it with huge concrete wharfs stretching like fingers into the vastness. But steadily the water leaked away as the river that fed it was run dry by thousands of miles of irrigation systems, canals and dams, and one day there was no sea left. The skewed three-masted crosses of the long-gone fishermen now shout their accusation on the remains of the old shores. And the only people who still want to come to the dusty town on the plain’s edge are palaeontologists, greedy for bones.

The single-engine plane skips raggedly over a dirt runway and then pulls up, ballerina crisp, at a terminal resembling a bus shelter. Its tin roof basks under a godless blue sweep of sky. An elderly man tends the flowers in pots by the door; he’s keeping the incongruous colours alive with all the zeal of a pub owner in an English summer. He examines the single suitcase of the lone passenger who alights, the city clothes, the face. All you give him is a nod.

The smell of his hose on wet concrete plunges you back to childhood and you lift your chin to the sky.
This
is your kind of air, as dry as your grandmother’s tissue paper skin and you can feel your body straightening within it. Your mother swerves into the car park in a four-wheel drive from the dig’s sponsors. You haven’t seen her for so long. It’s a shock, the ageing. The old man waves a one-toothed grin in farewell; all’s right with the world now, you’re placed.

As you’re driven to your mother’s tinny little prefab house you know you’ll outstay your welcome. You wonder how long it’ll last, if you’ll have time to unwind.

Her clothes spill across the rooms, pushing anyone else out. There are suitcases half unpacked and piles of unsorted washing. She can’t find a spare towel among the rolls of bubble wrap and bags of plaster of Paris and fine chisels and brushes, and she apologises for not cleaning up. She’s been alone too long.

But it doesn’t matter. You want this to work.

The first night you cackle together as your gift of fresh
Belgian chocolates explode like soft clouds in your mouths. Tonight’s fine, for a couple of days it’ll be fine and if you’re lucky, a week. The plan is to sleep greedily by night and by day to relax and reclaim a simpler life. It begins well: the nuggety people in the few, spare shops beam at your belly. Well, isn’t that something, say their smiles, as if this is what life is all about. You visit the dig site in your hiking boots and hat, and the team leader insists on you taking his fold-up seat. But soon you’re walking the dusty streets churning and damaged and hot, rubbing at the old wrinkle between your eyebrows. Your mother’s house seems to collect the warmth and contain it: the toothpaste’s warm, and the deodorant when you roll it on. You’d always craved the heat but now, for the first time in your life, you buckle under it. The baby’s changing you so much.

But not enough.

For even here Gabriel follows, even while you’re swimming in the town’s pool. You do laps every day, pushing away hard from the edge and stretching the limbs as far as you can and feeling the curve of the muscles as you try to swim him out. But every morning you snap awake to a day that’s raw, with an unexplained panic churning in your gut. Your bones rise tired from your mother’s spare bed as if they’ve been struggling with its softness all night, tensing against it, resisting it. And after six days your mother makes it known that she loves her alone too much. It’s always the pattern, the sudden tightness in her voice and then the explosion from you both, and you turn into
the woman who’s rarely allowed out. This time, over a name for the child.

You could never use your father’s, your mother says. You’d never want a reminder of someone as useless as that.

There’s still so much bottled-up bitterness over him, after all these years, and you can only guess it’s because they were once, consumingly, in love. Your father’s often the reason for a fight, you’re thoroughly sick of this cul-de-sac you both, always, end up in, it’s been going on for twenty-five years. Your mother’s jealous of your love for him, still, she feels your devotion was blinded and foolish, and she’s spent a lifetime, as a consequence, trying to convince you of his flaws. He was always drunk, useless, pathetic, never did a thing with his life, didn’t love you because he never gave me enough money for you, made it so hard for me, the words are always the same, ever since you were ten, and they’ve only succeeded in turning you from her.

Why do you always go on like this, you ask now, I’m so
tired
of it. Then, very quiet: If you don’t watch out you’ll have no one left in your life.

You’re just like him, she attacks. Hopeless, hopeless, the lot of you. It’s always daddy daddy daddy, and she impersonates the tone of your adoring childhood voice. You never say you love me, you never say thank you to me, you never think I was the best thing since sliced bread. You have no idea what it’s like to live in the real world.

Your mother’s words mean nothing to you now, they’re the same phrases over and over again and they lost, years ago, the capacity for any sting. Of course you’ve said I love you to her in the past, but she never seems convinced.

She will not listen to you now, pleading with her to stop. You don’t know why you thought that being pregnant would represent a huge, healing turning in every aspect of your life. You fear you’ll have this situation with your mother until one of you dies, this feeling that you’re engaged in combat with her, you’re not allies. You have to get away from the viciousness in her voice, the jab of her finger in the air, the fury in her face. You walk out the front door, past the spoil heaps from the dig, the crosses on the shoreline like the haphazard masts of ghost ships, the curious faces of the locals; you walk without knowing where you’re walking.

You end up at the settlement’s only public phone.

Change your flight.

Leave without saying goodbye. It’s not the first time you’ve done this.

it is never too late to practise the habit of self-control

You unclench your jaw as the plane takes off. Stare out at what looks like a desert of sand stretching as far as you can see but it’s cloud, endless cloud. You have a black hole in your life, four days where you could disappear, anywhere, do whatever you want. Four secret days. If you were more reckless and courageous you’d call Gabriel, you’d curl up with him and not leave his flat.

You arrive back in London and go straight home, not knowing what to do with your freedom and not having the boldness to seize it. There’s sand in crescent moons beneath your nails and in the folds of your clothes and your hair; it’s scoured away nothing of course.

the new mother enters, at the end of the first three months, one of the most delightful periods of her life

But over the coming days all the exhilaration at the pregnancy crowds back, it will not be stopped. You’re enveloped by people’s joy as you begin telling them the news, it’s lovely to share the wonder of a baby with a much wider circle than just Cole and yourself. Old hands cluck and swamp you with advice: see as many old friends as you can during pregnancy for there’ll be little time afterwards, use disposable nappies because life is too short, don’t fight sleep, chant silently in labour
my vagina is a slippery dip,
that it’ll feel like you’re doing a very big shit, that there’s absolutely nothing elegant about it and you laugh and laugh for it all seems so fresh and strange and unique. And yet this is so many women’s story, since time began, the most universal of all.

There’s no love like it, says a girlfriend with three children, it’s like a drug; you’d die for your kids, you know.

You can’t imagine volunteering your own life for someone else, having a love as big and selfless as that.

For the first time in your life you’re gazing, naked, in front of a full-length mirror and not just registering your body’s faults; for the first time in your life you’re loving the way you look. Everything’s growing and changing. The baby’s darkening your nipples, it’s making them silky, widening them. It’s spreading your pubic hair and strangely greying it. It’s softening and swelling your genitals, ripening them. It’s splashing your skin with pigment, there are sun spots on your face and hands and a dark stripe running bold down your stomach.

Deep into the nights Cole and you joke about what music the baby will like and what its accent will be and its name. All you can settle on is Grain, then Bean, then Mango, following the growth charts in the books. You’ve heard of men who vomit in sympathy with their partners, who put on weight and get sick and are wrung out. There’s none of that with Cole, although he sometimes pushes out his stomach with his hand on the small of his back and demands sympathy and loving and rest.

And is hit on the head with a cushion.

You’re laughing a lot with him again, feel cocooned in your close little world. It’s the baby, the shared dream, it’s thrilling you both. You feel fortunate to have him so close.
What could be more lonely than having a child by yourself in hospital?

Than loving someone too much?

virgin honey is the purest and sweetest of all

A message on your answering machine after a routine doctor’s check. A silence, you know it’s him. Your name is all he says. Just as he was softening into memory, as you were getting your life back.

The phone rings again and you snatch it up.

Hey, he says.

Your breath catches in your throat.

How are you, he says.

I’m good. I’m great.

I’m just checking in, he says, wondering how you are and there’s a laugh. What do you want from me, you ask, what do you want, and Gabriel tells you that you were becoming something else, you were like a Sleeping Beauty waking up, you were blooming, in your prime and it was
fantastic to watch and there’s a silence and then you tut, in annoyance, and he says OK, I’m going: take care, huh, and there’s a click.

You pace the flat, rubbing your hands over your belly, gently rubbing and rubbing as if you’re trying to rub something out.