With My Body

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.

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 of a 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 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.

Lesson 31

The only way to make people good is to make them happy

A weekend at home. Your father picks you up from the train station, a legitimate drive that your stepmother has to allow. His fingertips stray absently to your earlobe, the old caress, and you shut your lids and feel the coming wet prickling in your eyes at the tenderness, so rare in your life, so ached for. Kindness will always crack you now, it is the legacy of your emotionally blunted childhood.

He doesn’t say he loves you. He just gives you his snippet of a touch. It is all you need, it is enough.

Your father’s philosophy of parenting has become: if you want a child to do well you ignore them, so the child will always be striving for attention. It is the rhythm of your boarding life.

‘Look at me. Say something. Notice. Respond!’

You have been screaming it to him silently your entire time away; it is why you do so well in your new school, determined, focused, competitive. It’s the only area of your life you can achieve in. Get right. You’ve always been a thinker, have always devoured anything you could get your hands on to read, being starved of words has worked. Your father doesn’t engage in any of it. Doesn’t read, doesn’t write. The few times you have caught him at it – writing a cheque or a shopping list – he takes careful pleasure in the beauty of the letters, each one strikingly formed, every stroke a pattern, which betrays that he is still a relative beginner; he doesn’t do it much.

And now, in the car, on the way home, his touch. You lean into it. Then as soon as you arrive with a screech of the handbrake and walk into the house he clamps down, no longer shows you the vivid pulse of this love. Is formal, distant, uninterested; veering into coldness, a different person entirely. What is he afraid to show her? What has she threatened?

You’re his daughter.

When you’re at school, in his few, precious phone calls to you – from the mine crib room, never at home – he almost pleads, don’t forget the old man loves ya, and it’s like a momentary weakness, a slip. What bewitchment has she woven around him? What weakness in him lets her? A grown man. So inarticulate, so cowed.

An earlobe caressed; a moment snatched, in secret, too brief. The only warmth you will ever get in this place now.

You will find something else.

Lesson 32

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.’