Читать книгу With My Body - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 25

Truly, in this hard world, we should be accustomed to this law of love – love paramount and never ceasing

You are eleven. It is your birthday. He takes you out to dinner. He tells you he has a surprise. You wonder what: a horse of your own perhaps, a trail bike. Your father takes you to a restaurant in town, you have never been to one like it, it has cloth napkins and waiters in uniform. Your father doesn’t belong in this place. He has a face like a fist – fleshy, knobbly, rough.

There is a woman at your table. She is called Anne. Your father tells you they are getting married. As he speaks it is a father you have never seen before. His soft, surrendering eyes that look at her and not you; his glow.

Your world stops.

Your father tells you you will be a bridesmaid, with a beautiful dress. Anne will help you choose it. Your father tells you there will be proper food, finally, in your home, fresh sheets and a stocked fridge and even – wait for it – an ironed school uniform every Sunday night. The only concession either of you has ever made to the classroom is him brushing your long hair – his hand gently and firmly holding your crown so as not to hurt – at the start of every school week.

You take a deep breath. You nod. Your life, until this point, has been unfettered. You have been marinated by the bush that surrounds you. You are often barefoot, grubby and wild, answerable to no one; your father and yourself a tight buddy-unit. You have soil packed under your fingernails in tiny crescent moons and coal dust ingrained in fine lines along your knees and no one ever worries about that. You cannot do blanket stitch, crochet or knit, but you can change a tyre and suck poison out of a snake bite and shrivel a leech on your skin with salt.

This has been your world, since your mother died of breast cancer when you were a young child.

But now. A new life. Your father’s sparkling eyes and the pretty, mascaraed eyes of the woman opposite. Their shine. And in between them, an aching enormous eleven-year-old heart churning with fear and excitement, and readiness. Because there is so much love in you. To pour out, to swamp, to receive.

Dad loves Anne. So you love Anne. So Anne loves you.

It is as simple as that. Isn’t it?