Free With My Body by Nikki Gemmell Page A

on that concourse?
    Your bewilderment, over the lot of it.
     
    You suspect a terrifying secret: that virginity and chastity by choice are the magic elixirs that can make a woman calm,audacious, strong. You will have to find out. You don’t know how. The experiment feels almost derailed from the start. Love must be tracked, studied, dissected, yes of course, but you must never allow it to snap you in its strong jaws like a steel trap. No, the jagged pain of your father’s withholding has taught you the folly of that.

Lesson 44
Nature’s law undoubtedly is that our nearest ties should be those of blood
    Several days with your grandmother.
    You need her right now, the certainty of her powdery smell and flannelette sheets, her unconditional warmth. You’ve begged your father and he’s complied with phone calls arranging pick ups and train tickets; as if he senses something rattling within you that is beyond him and he’s more than happy to palm it off. Women’s business, all that emotional stuff—his mother will sort it out.
     
    You have not told her anything. Does she sense … something? A changing, a turning.
    Over her meat-and-three-veg dinner you talk school and careers and marriage and life, she asks if you’ve got a boyfriend and you shake your head and laugh and she nods—plenty of time, love, plenty of time—and tells you how good she was, once, at so much: maths and English, geography and athletics, but then as soon as a boy put his arms around her she was gone.
    ‘Just like that.’
    She married young.
    ‘It was all I wanted, and it killed my ambition, every singlescrap of it. And my energy,’ she cackles. ‘Which was just bursting from me, once.’
    You smile, wondering what she sees in you that has changed and why she is saying all this.
    Later, as she’s tucking you into your bed with its electric blanket on and smoothing down the hair on your forehead, she adds, ‘There’s a strength about us women that scares men, I think. You keep your chin up, love. Get a degree; be a doctor or a lawyer. Make me proud. Your father too. You could be the first in the family to finish school, let alone university. Your dad left at fourteen to go down the pit, I left to go into service. Do it for us.’
    You will not tell her what has happened, will never tell her, it would break her heart.

Lesson 45
To young people, the world is always a paradise
    No idea where to go from it.
    You shut down. For a couple of years. A spring coiled tight.
    Waiting, for God knows what.
    Lost.

IV
‘I could fancy a love for life here almost possible … ’
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Lesson 46
When it comes to ‘each for herself’—when Miss This cannot be asked to a party for fear of meeting Madame That, or if they do meet, through all their smiling civility you perceive their backs are up, like two strange cats meeting at a parlour door—I say, this is the most lamentable of all results which the world effects on women
    Summer holidays. Eight weeks ahead of thick heat, cicadas, bush-fire alerts.
    Your stepmother is ignoring you. It is her one weapon, her only way to have power over you. With silence.
    You are too different. You have city-awareness now. You will never lose yourself like she has done, and no matter how much she thinks she has won—when your father doesn’t show up to your speech days, when he never talks with the parents of your new friends, when he neglects to set foot in your world—you would never, ever want your stepmother’s life. The sourness of it, her closed heart. It is the one power you have over her.
    The energy between you is wrong. You could never be her, she could never be you. It is never discussed, but you both know it.
     

    Today she has designated a cleaning day, is buried in a flurry of activity. Sorting through her Tupperware boxes, rinsing and airing—she takes them to gatherings to scoop up leftover food. You can’t bear the bustling little world of domesticity she creates