Free With My Body by Nikki Gemmell Page B

around her, crowding out any trace of your mother in this scrap of a house that was renovated by your parents long ago—working side by side, he told you once. And now, an obsessive accumulation of new and shiny possessions from daytime ads on the telly cluttering it up—newfangled mosquito zappers, wall-mounted can-openers, sewing tables, kitchen knife sets.
    You have few possessions. Like it that way. Like to see the bones of these old valley houses and their heart, running hands along the old plaster walls like horses’ flanks, marvelling at the carpentry in dinky corner cabinets and the bread tins filled with concrete holding up porch roofs and the mouldings of pressed-tin ceilings and the beauty in deco bush flowers scattered in old bathroom tiles, like your own. Tiles now obscured by a stick-on plastic railing and a matching avocado towel set that you know you must keep straight.
    So. Cleaning day. And you’re jumping on Peddly to get away from it all and smiling at the familiarity of that hard, worn saddle. Feel young again, out, shedding your city skin. You’re flinging your bike aside and walking thigh-deep in bleached grass, catching grasshoppers and feeling the dry flick of them inside the bauble of your palm before you free them to leap in a great springing arc of release, laughing, away from your stepmother’s narrow, silent, affronted little world.
    Go. GO!
     

    At three o’clock you return.
    You hear her footsteps thudding through the house towards you. Furious. You shut your eyes. What have you done now? There’s always something to vex her and usually she doesn’t say, it’s just in the thud of her step, her contained fury when you’re in her space.
    She has found your diary.
    Which was under your bed, still in your school bag. She has gone into your bedroom, your private place, and dug it out. And read it of course, you know instantly. It’s on her face. You have never seen her so incensed, tight, repulsed.
    ‘Get out, you … thing … you. I don’t want you here. Your words, your filth, in my house.’
    ‘It’s my place as much as yours. I lived here long before you .’
    You try snatching the book back but the sturdy girl with her big country thighs has it firm.
    ‘Give it back,’ you scream—because it’s your words, your truth, everything that has happened in your life. ‘You spoil everything .’ Clawing your hair in frustration, can’t make this right, win, can’t think fast enough. Your tears in that moment are from years of competitiveness and exhaustion and bafflement—you’re his daughter , you were a child, you do not understand the jealousy; what you have with your father is a blood tie, a given, a totally different relationship to hers. But you can’t speak properly, can’t get it out, are clotted before her, as clotted as your father. The only place you can talk is in your diary.
    Which she’s got.
    With everything recorded in it.
    That she has done.
    The relationship between the three of you is all about the giftof attention, and your father cannot bestow it upon two women at once. And she will win, always. She is an adult and you are not, she knows how to do it; to demand and punish. To withhold what he wants.
     
    You both know that when your father comes back the two of you will be quiet and he will know none of this, the explosive fury between females. That is the code of you both, the only common code you adhere to; this is women’s business.
    She spits on your diary in contempt. Has no intention of giving it back. Stomps inside with a slap of the screen door. You hear your words being flung across the room in disgust.
    And then quiet.
    The only power in her life. A withholding.

Lesson 47
Only be honest. No falsehoods, no concealments of any kind.
    But something new.
    What honesty can do. The power of it.
    She has opened your words and she has read them. All the little incidents over the years, all the hurts, cruelties, vulnerabilities; all the disobedience