Читать книгу With My Body - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 36

To feel that you can or might be something, is often the first step towards becoming it

Your mother’s old boss, from her restaurant management days, invites you for tea. He is the only person you know in the Big Smoke outside of school. He grew up in the bush, like your mother did, and found a way out. He’s now mysteriously wealthy, has a sunken conversation pit and a Porsche.

In his high glass box hovering above the harbour he lifts up your hair – now grown back – and says wondrously that it is just like your mother’s, how about that. He likes to talk about her, was fond of her, always teasing, asking her to marry him. He says he always likes a woman with narrow shoulders and runs his fingers along your collarbone, to see if you’ll do, appraising you like a horse.

At his touch, your stomach feels as if it is being steamrollered.

You catch your breath. You step back.

He laughs.

You are not allowed to know, understand, exactly what this man now does; no one will tell you. All you perceive is that you are not like one of those women he employs and never will be; you will always be apart, removed, from that world. He says with a smile that you’re like a little bush filly he had as he was growing up, with some thoroughbred mixed in there somewhere, wild and sweet and strong and untamed inside that ridiculous school uniform with its skirt too long and its Peter Pan collar and then he looks at you gravely and says he doesn’t want to see the wildness broken, ever, any of it, as he runs his fingers along your collarbone again; as your stomach churns again.

He makes you vividly aware of your teenage body.

Ripening.

The power of it.