Читать книгу With My Body - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 28

Matrimony in the abstract; not the man, but any man – any person who will snatch her out of the dullness of her life

‘In order to be irreplaceable one must be different.’

A quote from Coco Chanel, from a page of the Women’s Weekly all twelve of you have been tearing up to make collages like Roman mosaics.

You are intrigued by the statement. Slip the cutting into the pocket of your overalls. You are a thinker despite what your teacher puts on your report and you love new words like irreplaceable and you are gleaning, slowly, that in this place it takes a mighty courage to be different, to want to be something beyond your world. In this fragile, uncertain time before your father’s marriage is a tiny seed of a thought, to one day write; to be a watcher, an observer, apart. Because of the shiver of a truth: that the women of this world would only enfold you if everything that was unique about you, everything vivid and sure and free and strong, was gone. And the alternative, here – aching, yowling loneliness.

You fly home on Peddly that afternoon with the scrap of words in your pocket and sense that one day you will be saved by a world very different from this, saved by everything this world is not. You have no idea what that existence will be or how you will get to it but even then, so young, you have a raging will for a life that is not theirs.