With My Body by Nikki Gemmell Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

Lesson 29
Have the moral courage to assert your dignity against the sneers of society
    You have been shut away within high convent walls to address the wildness from the bush; to quieten you, dampen you, smooth you down. You are too large-spirited, singular, raw. You have become an embarrassment.
    And yet, and yet, you are not convinced these women who rule over you are so disapproving. The nuns sense your difference, you are sure, that you will never be one of those ranks of girls they brisk out year after year armed with Daddy’s gold credit card and a D.J.’s account. There is something … carnal … about you. Non-conformist, untamed. Hungry . But for what, no one knows, including yourself. You’re like the parched earth in a drought waiting, waiting, for nourishment of some sort.
    You see something in these nuns, the few of them left, that is strong, lit. They are an intriguing new breed of female in your life. They are doing exactly what they want to and have a great calmness because of it. Precious few women you know have that—certainly not any married ones, the mothers of school friends, the valley women you come across. There is something so courageous about the nuns’ strength in swimming against the stream. You think of your stepmother, riddled with jealousy and insecurity, threatened by a slip ofa girl half her size, made sour with it. These women at your school, in their resolutely interior world, are free of the world of men by choice and glow with it.
    Can a married woman radiate serenity? You’ve never seen it in the wives of Beddy, in the brittle women you occasionally glimpse in The Young and the Restless and the harassed mothers at the school gate. Your Mother Superior is fifty-five years old and has a face unburdened by wrinkles and worries, kids and mortgages and debt. There is never make-up, never shadow; it is as if she has washed her face in the softness of a creek’s water her entire life. Washed it with grace.
    The serenity of choice, and you are intrigued by it. The courage to be different.

Lesson 30
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