Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (82 page)

‘Come here,’ he commands. ‘Kiss me.’

As if he senses something new in his wife, something quite incomprehensible and he needs to sniff it out. Some straightness of the spine, a looseness, a stepping back.

‘Kiss me!’ he demands.

Connie hackles at the thought: the stumpy, joyless, wooden blocks of his mouth. He revolts her, with every hair of her body, she can’t do it, can’t explain it.

‘No, Cliff, not tonight.’

‘Why?’ Wounded.

‘I just don’t want to. I’m tired.’

Connie turns, murmurs goodbye, cannot meet her husband’s eyes. Cannot tell him she is not coming near him because another man’s smell and his sperm is strong upon her, smeared lavishly and triumphantly across her stomach, breasts, thighs; and she is rank, filthy with it and cannot hurt him so much.

‘Con? Con!’ The voice bewildered suddenly, on the cusp of an understanding, as if Cliff has suddenly caught a glimpse of a future he has never contemplated.

She does not turn back. Mustn’t.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?

A restless mongrel of a night, spatterings of rain like hard rice against the high windows. The wind wheening outside Connie’s room is as mournful as a distant aria and the trees from the garden below shake their leaves like the manes of recalcitrant ponies and wet leaves slick the glass. Connie will not bath, wants to keep the animal smell on her, of earth, of sex, of spit and air and grubbiness. She will not wash herself all night, for the sense of Mel’s flesh touching her, his very stickiness, is dear, replenishing, holy. She no longer wants padlocks and blindfolds, sophistication, theatre, clandestine texts, she just wants simplicity. The wonder of that. One man, who listens. Stillness. Spirituality. Quiet. Her cunt reeks, she wants wildness, wants to roll herself in it, wants a different soil, sky, land to this. Wordsworth journeyed back to Wales to listen to the language of his former heart; should she return to Cornwall? With Mel? Go somewhere else? Would he come? What to do, how to begin … what?

Connie’s mind is jumpy tonight with dreams and plans and connivances and plots as she contemplates a vast spring cleaning of her future, her entire life. Her gods now – the gods of change and rupture and the astonishing earth.

Connie looks across at her bookshelf, an old shoe rack from the Golborne Road, and skims all the strong female voices that have spined her own life. Any clues? Help? Are all female narratives of empowerment narratives of escape? It’s why
Portrait of a Lady
is so devastating, of course, why she could only ever bear to read it once. She picks up Mel’s battered old Virginia Woolf.
NEVER READ THIS AGAIN
– but of course, no, she must. ‘I’m always doing what I’m told not to,’ that’s what he said to her that odd, jangly night. Connie thinks of his separateness, his self-containment, the potency of a man strong with his choices and not wavering from them. She flips open
To the Lighthouse
and starts to read. The thud of recognition, the heart-stopping thud of it, and she scrabbles for a journal and scribbles in it. Again and again. A roar of pages filled up.

A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

Yes, yes. Woolf will be her guide, her beacon. All her novels, her essays, her certainties and admonishments and eviscerating truths. Tomorrow she will go to Daunt’s, buy the extent of her.

She must act. Just that. Now, before it is too late.

There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin to say something in my own voice

The intercom, buzzing in her bedroom. Insistent. Connie picks it up. Neither greeting nor warmth. ‘Prepare yourself. You have an hour. I’ll be in my office.’

The voice struts. Ah, the Cliff of old.

Connie’s hand reaches down, she is a different woman now, she has been hauled into a different life and her body blazes it. She is fuller and softer and looser, hairier; her body less brittle, self-hating, desperate. No, she will do this, reveal herself. It is the start of the new life and Cliff must know it. She stands proud in front of the mirror, marvelling at the fresh self. Reclaimed, returned to nature, the earth.

The intercom again. ‘Bring your trinket. I want to put it in. I want to snap it shut.’

Connie does not respond, cannot. The punctures would be closed up now, surely, faint scars all that’s left of her former life. The padlock lies somewhere lost in the dirt near the shed, claimed by the undergrowth. She mustn’t think how much it was worth.

Connie turns back the mirror, biting her lip; back to her new body and everything it signals about her release. Her husband waits. She will not shave herself, she will not give him what he wants; the fury will be incandescent. Connie is very still, for a moment, stuck. What is she doing? What will be the consequences? Is she mad? She suddenly feels like she’s standing barefoot on oysters, stranded by an incoming tide, can’t move but can’t stay, stuck.

She must go down.

Cannot be a fugitive in her own house. She showers, throws on the silken kimono, ties it languidly, ready for a slipping off. Pads slowly down, down the grand staircase, breathing measured and calm, collecting herself.

Shuts the office door behind her. The screen is down; it runs almost the length of one wall. So, a video, porn, right; and usually as she watches them with Cliff the liquid warmth plumes through her despite herself and she cannot help but succumb, despite herself, widening her legs on her chair and playing as Cliff hands across a vibrator, and another, as he toys with his Mont Blanc pen, the secret signal that begins it all and she is opening out, needing the coming, urgently, the next step. And she is greedy with the looking at these films as long as it doesn’t veer into anything too long, or monotonous; it is all the thrill, the anticipation that she wants.

Cliff wheels up to her now, vividness in his face, a video camera in his lap; he has sometimes filmed in the past and she has played up to it, trusting, yielding so much; entranced. ‘I need my wife back.’

Eagerly his Mont Blanc pen tugs the bow of her kimono, loosens it. The silk falls open. Connie drops the gown from her shoulders. Her husband gasps. It is as if a vast gulf suddenly separates them. As if his wife has gone on a strange new journey without him knowing anything of it. He has not controlled it in any way, has not allowed it, she is lost.

‘It – it doesn’t mean anything to me any more, Cliff. It’s just … gone.’ She shrugs. ‘Everything we do. All of it.’ She shuts her eyes on hot wet. ‘I’m so sorry.’

They stare at each other, the two of them who have bared so much, gone on such a journey in tandem, nothing to say because there is nothing to say. The whole scenario worked because it was the two of them together, in an entranced and astonished collaboration. Cliff’s lips tighten. He spins his chair. ‘I wish you’d told me,’ he says, tight. He clicks on the film, a black man with an enormous cock and a white woman with impossible breasts, the ridiculous thrusting, the ugly close-up, the monotony, the bleakness, the utter absence of mystery and beauty in any of it; Connie cannot watch.

She picks up her robe, puts it back on and ties the belt firm and tight.

‘I’m so sorry.’

A match snuffed.

‘I need something else now.’

‘What?’ The word is spat, as if Cliff can hardly bear to ask.

Connie shrugs, helpless. ‘Life.’

Cliff’s face. Pale with fury and devastation and loss.

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself

Sunday morning. Needing a quietening. A necessary removal from all of them, to recalibrate. What is happening to Connie as uncertainty and indecision stain her life? A drawing to … what? Mystery. A veering towards it like an ocean liner subtly altering course for a new destination in the great ocean of life. Yet the destination’s unknown.

Before Cliff’s accident Connie had attended church. He certainly didn’t, ever, still doesn’t; one of those pitbull atheists, a sneerer à la Dawkins. Yet increasingly she’s finding there’s something … all-calming … about her Sunday morning experiences at the family-crammed church of St Peter’s in its high, shouting ochre on Notting’s hill. It’s an astonishing leak through a veneer of aspirant coolness and moneyed cynicism; a gentle drip, drip, through her restless, caged, unsettled life. Connie feels righted by these assignations, balmed, lit.

‘I like that you go to church,’ Mel said to her once, even though he doesn’t go himself. As if it softens her. As if it separates her from those who are the jeering, the sneering, the unsettled – and the ones with a chip of ice.

So. Sunday mornings, quite bravely alone. Connie’s brief coracle of solace. Brought down into stillness by a spiritual enveloping from a service mostly sung. The hour or so freshening, shining, rejuvenating. At times she says no, it’s ridiculous, she’s with that gentle atheist, Alain de Botton on this one; tipping her hat to the graces within organized religion but not sucked in by them. Yet Connie knows that she’ll never be aligned with the Cliffs and the Dawkins of the world, thumping that believers are deluded, stupid; she has too much respect for the mysterious in life. Which includes Mel. Can’t turn her back on wonder, craves it, in a sense. Found it, long ago, in the wild places of her travelling youth, the places where the silence hums – Greenland’s ice deserts, Cornwall’s high moors, under a full butter moon – yes, yes. She wants those places again. Somewhere in her life. Her rescue is tied up in them, she just knows it.

Connie feels silted up, often now, with the great weight of acquiring and cramming and rushing and worrying and just getting by; grubbied. Needs the simplicity of a spiritual way, its light touch, a tuning fork back into calm. The ocean liner on its unknown path is veering her towards those most shining qualities of religious practice: pilgrimage, contemplation, quiet. With Mel, she hopes. Somehow.

What she does know: that religion’s a miracle of survival. That places of potent spirituality do not belong entirely to earth. The tugging, the faint whisper of a tugging … and Connie has to find her way back to them. Urgently, it feels now.

Alone, or with someone else.