Читать книгу With My Body - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 38

We have only to deal with facts – perhaps incapable of remedy, but by no means incapable of amelioration

It is decided. At fourteen.

You will be an archivist, a collector. Of love and everything that comes with it. You will learn how it happens, where it comes from, how it’s snared. For good. Your grand and meticulous experiment. You are aching to begin but do not know how. You must go beyond the four houses huddling under their looming trees, beyond the high convent walls; you just long for touch, warmth. A proper, sustained caress.

You feel so vividly. All your nerve endings are raw, opening out. You are poised, on the brink. Of something, God knows what.

It begins with water.

The house of your grandparents. Whom you cherish but see all too rarely; they’ve retired further north up the coast, six hours’ drive away, and it’s not often that they make it to the Big Smoke to retrieve you.

Inside the house, your nanna communicates all her strength through food – veggies are made lurid with bicarb soda, there’s an endless supply of apple and gramma pies, of custard and porridge, sugary tea and tarts. Her domain is a resolutely interior world. But outside, she has no idea what her little granddaughter’s getting up to, never enquires about her becoming a woman, except to ask once if her ‘friends’ have visited yet.

‘What?’

‘You know, your friends. Your monthlies.’

‘Oh,’ and you’re laughing. ‘Oh yes, just.’

But outside, in your grandparents’ back yard, your new world. Swimming to the pebble dash side of the pool, to the filter hole the size of a fifty-cent coin, to the water coming out at high pressure. Hooking your legs over the edge and holding your hands firm and then the deliciousness coming and you’re stretching back, delirious, buoyed and grinning under your wide blue sky then floating your arms wide and arching your back. And inside the house your grandparents are going about their business, completely oblivious to your jet-pressure secret; your nanna who told you once she always hated sex and your pop doing his crosswords then heading off to the club for a game of bowls.

But you, outside, on your back.

Seared by wonder, made silly by it.