Читать книгу With My Body - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 34

Follow openly and fearlessly that same law which makes spring pass into summer, summer into autumn, and autumn into winter

Suddenly, boarding school. Just like that.

Cast adrift. Unwanted. Emotionally whipped.

But curious. About a new life, a new chance.

Curious as to how to expose your aching, open wound to the light; the wound that can only be sutured by one thing, the simplest thing of all. Love. The necessary verb: to rescue, bloom, protect. Aching for something, anything, to heal you and perhaps here in this new life you will find it.

Your convent school is in the city’s centre, its honey sandstone shadowed by buildings taller than it. Your father’s lucrative night shifts are paying for it – eleven and three-quarter hours, from 8 p.m., triple time. In the Big Smoke you’re still the kid from the bush, like a horse in a box kicking out, strong, if you are too long in it. City-logged. Every so often you can smell the bush when the breeze blows in from the south and you hold your head high to it. Above the pollution and the cram of the noise and the crush of the people you want to feel the dirt between your toes and in your hair, you want to be strong with your land again, want silence and spareness, a place for your eyes to rest.

Want your father. The one person who gave you the gift of attention, once.

The one person who gave you the gift of touch, once.

Touch is taboo in this place. You are young ladies, at all times, no matter what. Eating a banana in public is sexually suggestive and will not be tolerated from girls of this establishment; school shoes must not be polished too highly lest the reflection of bright white cottontails be glimpsed too readily; surfaces of bath water must be encrusted with talcum powder so a glimpse of flesh is never caught under the cloudy surface. The only man you are allowed to adore is God. The Thorn Birds is eagerly, grubbily, passed around the class; Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins. You are growing up. Everywhere flesh, touch, skin, bodies changing, worlds expanding, nights churning.

You become best friends with Lune, the daughter of the French ambassador, the only one in the class whose parents are divorced. Lune loves her motherless little bush girl who knows nothing of this world – an outsider like herself. She teaches you about razors and tanning and tampons, French kisses and cigarettes, silk knickers and suspender belts. European-knowing, she teaches you about the power in a dirty smile, and the allure of confidence.