With My Body Read online

  A world away from this one, now, sipping your green tea as you stare out the window at 4.30 p.m., your life ticking by, your knuckles white around the mug. It’ll be teatime soon, followed by the pleading to get the homework done, the dragging from screens, the nagging to have showers, do teeth; all the plea-bargaining, negotiating, cajoling in your life, the relentless exhaustion of it.

  Lesson 6

  Married women have cast their lot for good or ill, having realised in greater or lesser degree the natural destiny of our sex

  Hugh and you are bound by an unspoken acknowledgement that you’ll never split—you’re in this together, for life. When you married him you were aching for love, something transporting; he was a friend who had you laughing deep into the night and so it would work, yes. You’ve always cherished his evenness. Were never uncomfortable with him, even in silence—the test of a true connection. You are so fortunate to have him, you know this, you must never forget it.

  You do not like the way he kisses. Do not know how to tell him this, could never hurt him. It will not change. It’s gone on too long. It cannot be taught. How can you say to someone you love that they lack tenderness? It’s impossible to learn, to acquire. You could endure it pre-children, he offered so much else—filling up the glittery loneliness of yet another Saturday night by yourself, another New Year’s Eve; his sturdy, charming presence quelling all those awkward questions on Christmas Days and all the weddings and baby showers you were suddenly going to. Your saviour, you know it.

  Yet it feels like the only thing that unites you now is the children. You dream of another, a girl—the bliss of her—but just couldn’t be bothered; with Hugh, you’re both beyond all that. You never talk about it. About anything.

  He is an Englishman who boarded from the age of seven and from then onward was taught not to trust his feelings; to shut down. He craved his mother, was overwhelmed by grief and loneliness yet all the time was told that his family wanted this, it was for the best. So he learnt from very young not to trust his deepest instincts, to bury far inside what he really thought. He has carried these lessons through life; expects it of others. He never changes towards you—is warm, playful—but doesn’t want all the emotion, the mess of it.

  He calls you Vesuvius to his Pompeii. When all your raging, swamping frustrations blurt out. When a voice in you snaps in the thick of the exhaustion, a voice you’ve never heard before, a woman you don’t recognise, at your husband and your children; a voice of anger and ugliness. You fear your beloved boys will hold its tone somewhere in their memories for the rest of their lives and you’re ashamed of that but still, occasionally, it roars out. Yet you love them to distraction, it’s a swamping that’s greedy, wild, voluptuous; every night in prayer you thank God for the gift of them.

  Motherhood, the complexity of it. The richness, the depletion, the incandescence. The despair, the loneliness.

  Lesson 7

  She has ceased to think principally of herself and her own pleasures

  Once, for a long period, you never had an orgasm. You had surrounded yourself with a boundary of no; your body recoiling, in shock, at what men would do. Or wouldn’t. Their ignorance, clumsiness, lack of finesse. Your body in shock at what was the smarting truth: that some of these men didn’t, actually, like women very much. Wanted to chip away at them, deplete them, make them vulnerable and weak; were afraid of them. And your entire body retracted at the knowing, like a sea anemone flinched.

  But then the lover from long ago, who gave you your first orgasm. Taught you to surrender. And now, at your age, if you can’t have transcendent sex you’re not going to have it at all. It’s as simple as that. You’re too old for anything else.

  Hugh, God love him, is good at sleep. He doesn’t snore or smell, he wings you close on the rare occasions you find yourself in the same bed as him and you love the protectiveness of it. You may have lost your taste for sex but you will never lose your desire for shared sleep.

  With Hugh.

  To the outside world you are blissfully married, one of those rare couples that works.

  Lesson 8

  Marriage: to resign one’s self totally and contentedly into the hands of another; to have no longer any need of asserting one’s rights or one’s personality

  You were born in mountain country, north of Sydney, a place assaulted by light. High hill country with ground leached pale by the sun and tap water the colour of tea and you always looked down when walking through tall grass, because of snakes, and at dusk the hills glowed pink with the force of the sun, trapping the heat under your skin, in the very marrow of your spine; that could not be gouged out. Whispering you back. Home. To a tall sun, a light-filled life.

  When you were eighteen you climbed down from your high mountain place. Went to university and became a lawyer, in Sydney, the Big Smoke. Winged your way to London in your mid twenties: restless, fuelled by curiosity, eager to gulp life. After several years of hard work there was the expat’s dilemma of wanting to return to Australia but unable to decide when; of meeting Hugh—the man who did not excite you but sheltered you; of one thing leading to another and now you are in this rain-soaked island for life, staring at a mountain of washing by your bed and dreaming of the roaring light. After the second bouncy boy the decision was mutual: a move to the west country, the Cotswolds, for space and fresh air, a better life. Your dream of a partnership in the law firm fell away under the demands of motherhood; after the first maternity leave you never went back, lost your professional confidence and now your children cram every corner of your life. You are driven by perfection and ambition as a mother, just as you were driven as a lawyer. Everything you do you dive into completely, attacking with a ferocious will to succeed and hating it when you fall short. Which you do now, often, to your distress.

  Hugh has said it’s good you’re Australian in this place; your accent can’t be placed, you can slip effortlessly from lower class to upper, can’t be pinned down. You know it’s good Hugh is not Australian for he can’t nail the broad flatness of tone that any Aussie East Coaster would recognise as originally from the sticks. The bush has never been completely erased from your voice; wilfully some remnant clings to it. Your vowels have been softened by Sydney, yes, but they still carry, faintly, the red-neck boondocks in their cadence. England hasn’t left a trace.

  You will always be an outsider here. You revel in not-belonging, enjoy the high vantage point. Marvel, still, at the strict sense of place, of class they cannot breach—the fishing and shooting, the villas in France, the stone walls that collect the cold and the damp, the wellies even in July, the jumpers in August, the hanging sky like the water-bowed ceiling of an old house. How can it hold so much rain, cry so much? Days and days and days of it and at times you just want to raise your arms and push up the clouds, run. Hugh will never move to Australia, he has a blinkered idea of it as the end of the earth and deeply uninteresting, really—that the only culture you’ll find there is in a yoghurt pot.

  You can see your whole future stretching ahead of you now until your body is slipped into this damp black earth, the years and years of sameness ahead. Once, long ago, you never wanted to be able to do that, curiosity was your fuel, the unknown. You carry your despair in you like an infection that cannot be shaken.

  But now. A dangerous will inside you to crash catastrophe into your life, somehow, God knows how—or with whom. It’s been brewing for years; it’s something about reaching your forties and seeing all that stretches ahead. You’ve never been fully unlocked with Hugh and bear responsibility for that, entirely.

  For always wearing a mask. For not being entirely honest. For never showing him your real self.

  Lesson 9

  Unhappiness of soul—a state of being often as unaccountable as it is irrational

  ‘How are you?’ the lovely, cheeky Bengali man in your newsagency asked before school pick up today.

  You replied, distracted, ‘I have no idea.’

  The ultimat
e flaky mum, you know he thought.

  But it was the truth. You have no idea. Have lost the woman you once were. Cannot simplify your life. Had so much energy for so much, once; now your days are taken up with so many bitsy, consuming, domestic things. You catch yourself talking aloud as you walk away down the High Street. Is it madness or preoccupation or mere motherhood. In a window reflection you gasp at yourself scowling, jaw set. There’s the niggle that now you’re married you are somehow less. Just the little wife. Hugh doesn’t mean to convey that but he does. There’s a subtle and discernible loss of confidence, so insidious, as you lean on another for so much and you never did that, once. As you have somehow allowed over the years your petrol tank to be filled and restaurant dinners to be decided for you, sweets secreted to your kids, Nintendo Wiis gleefully bought behind your back, theatre tickets purchased for plays you don’t like.

  You cannot explain how circumstances have closed over you, how you became a woman who lost her voice.

  But you know there’s only one person who can haul you out.

  It is five o’clock.

  The potatoes have to be peeled and the toilet unblocked; it’s probably a plastic toy, it’s becoming a habit with Pip, your youngest.

  You have to change this life, somehow, or something in you will implode like a depth charge way beneath the surface.

  Lesson 10

  There are very few families whose internal mismanagement and domestic unhappiness are not mainly the fault of the mistress

  Nine p.m. Just the dishwasher to unpack now and then you’ll draw your bath and unclench, at last, in the warmest room in the house, the main bathroom.

  The phone. Susan. A mum from the boys’ school and you don’t know how it came to this: a Susan so entwined in your life. Rexi is friends with her eldest, Basti. You met when the boys were in the same nursery and then they moved to primary school together, have known each other for years. It is assumed. But you became friends before you realised how unsettling she is. A mother with an overdeveloped sense of her own rightness, with everything, and there’s something so undermining about that.

  Every conversation, to Susan, is a form of competition; there must always be the moment of triumph. When she’s first seen every morning, at the school gate, she forces you to say how lovely her little girl looks, to compliment.

  ‘Look at Honor, she dressed herself today, doesn’t she look gorgeous?’

  ‘Where’s Honor, is she hiding on my shoulders?’

  ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’

  Yes of course, and you are a woman who does not have a daughter but it would never cross Susan’s mind that the keenness for a girl once sliced through you like a ragged bit of tin; you can’t deny there was a moment of disappointment at each subsequent son who appeared from your womb—just a moment, wiped as soon as you held them to your breast. And now, every day at the school gate, there is the ritual noticing of what you do not have, every day this conversation you have somehow allowed in your life.

  Susan is obsessed by her children. Like no other woman you know. Always talking about how good her Basti is—at maths, swimming, art, he’s just swum four laps, helped plant her herb garden, is never sick, always good—not one of those naughty ones.

  You always cringe at this—your boys are boys, you adore them but they are not always the best; often your heart is in your mouth when your family is with other people, about what may be said, knocked over, who may be shouted at. Susan is critical of your Rexi whenever he’s had a play date. Always, on the doorstep when you pick him up, you have to submit to her little ritual of complaint. The only time you can ever remember her complimenting your eldest was when she said, in wonder, ‘He’s good looking … now.’ Now. Your beautiful, sunny, ravishing boy, from day one.

  ‘Rex didn’t eat his food … wouldn’t play with Honor … was very loud … ’

  You have allowed it, for so long—Susan’s reward for taking one son off your hands, for giving you a blessed break; it means one less child for a few hours and you both know how needed that is in your life, a tiny sliver of extra space.

  Lesson 11

  A state of sublime content and superabundant gaiety—because she always had something or other to do.

  If not for herself, then her neighbour.

  It is 9:15 and Susan is still on the phone and inwardly, at her voice, there is a tightening in your stomach, a knot—what has her Basti excelled at today, what triumph has to be endured? And your head is full of the ‘Shout Book’ you have just discovered under your middle child’s bed. Jack has recorded, meticulously, every time he is yelled at. By you. In writing neater than it’s ever been at school.

  Saturday: 14th January. 2 times.

  Sunday: 15th January. AMAZING. Nothing.

  Monday: 16th January. 3 times.

  Devastation. Today it was all to do with him wearing a good shirt to his grandmother’s tomorrow, for her birthday tea.

  ‘I hate that button shirt so much it makes me walk backwards,’ he had shouted.

  You laughed at the time and later jotted it down; for what, God knows. You had to laugh, they give you so much and don’t even know it. These bouncy, shiny little scamps fill every corner of your life, plump it out; you love them so consumingly but you’re not sure they believe it, Jack most of all, your middle child you worry will one day slip through the cracks.

  ‘Please, God, stop Mummy shouting,’ was his prayer tonight.

  ‘Don’t!’ came his muffled protest from under the duvet when you tried to tickle him into giggles, to kiss away all your guilt, but he recoiled as if your touch would scald him which only made you want to caress him, cuddle him, envelop him all the more.

  Susan is prattling on, she wants you to do the coffee before the class assembly on Monday and didn’t catch you today. She is president of the P.T.A., you are a class rep, this is the new world you have thrown yourself into with the zeal you once reserved for law. You’re deeply embedded in this intense little microcosm, yet feel sick every day now as you approach the gates for pick up. Wear a mask of joy—you have perfected it but if only they knew of your relief when for some reason, too rarely, you don’t have to be there. It’s your twice daily torture and you feel ill, sometimes, as you near the school gates. You wait in the car so you’re not standing there early, having to talk. Filling up afternoons with play dates for the boys so they’re not missing out and filling up your own evenings with drinks and dinners with your mummy friends for the same reason and you need the solace and release of using your brain, somehow. You’ve been with some of these women for over five years now. And their flaws are getting worse as they age—as are yours; it feels like you are all hardening into your weaknesses and you’ve got years of this school run ahead of you. The competitiveness, petty power games, boasting, one-upmanship; sometimes you feel like you’re ten again, back in the school yard. It’s stealing who you really are, who you became, once.

  Lesson 12

  Beware the outside friend who only rubs against one’s angles

  Your shout book.

  What Mothers Do (or, The Tyranny of the School Gate)

  Ignore requests for play dates, just don’t return emails, or constantly say their child can’t do it. Or get their P.A. to decline on their behalf.

  Invite every child in the class to their son’s party but yours.

  Talk and talk about their own child and never ask a single question about your own.

  At every mention of a problem your child has–e.g. crooked front teeth/can’t do the maths/is having difficulties with friends–comes back with, ‘Johnnie’s teeth are beautifully straight, thank God, Johnnie’s always been good at maths, he gets on with everyone,’ etc. Whether you believe it or not.

  Drop their child off to your son’s birthday party without a present, pick up their child with no mention of a present, happily take a party bag, say an extravagant thank you but never give a birthday present in return or mention the situation again, as if challenging yo
u. Of course you say nothing.

  Never reciprocate with lifts to or from school, as if it just hasn’t crossed their mind to do so.

  Like a butterfly buzz from school gate flower to flower, alighting on the freshest and most beautiful–the newest mum, the next best friend–before flitting off to someone else. Dropping you, just like that, into a cold, cold place. Phone calls are suddenly unanswered, coffee requests met with, ‘So busy, another time’. Felling you with silence. Because someone else is filling up their lives now, whereas once you were the loveliest and most intriguing mum in the school; fresh from London, foreign, marked by difference. Long ago. The technique is stunning: how to bring a strong woman down, torment them with bewilderment, force them to ask the question, again and again, ‘What’s wrong with me?’

  Sometimes you just want to scream at these women, at the height of all the pettiness (usually towards the end of term when everyone’s frazzled). Can’t we all just value each other? Please? It’s hard, for every one of us, you’re sure of that.

  And then, specifically, there’s Queen Susan:

  Using the royal ‘we’ when talking about the school because as P.T.A. president she has a sense of entitlement and ownership over the institution–and access to the headmaster–that no other parent has.

  Likes to slip in to conversations, often, her privileged position. For example, parking is difficult around the school and everyone wings it, including you, with illegal, jittery, hovery pulling up at pick up and drop off. Except Susan. ‘I’m president, I just can’t,’ she likes to remind everyone, often, with a rueful smile. ‘I’m president, my boy has to do his homework … I’m president, I can’t be late for pick up.’ If the job came with a badge she’d wear it.