I Take You: Part 2 of 3. Nikki Gemmell

In the bowl of her hands, a mess of blood and feathers and a racing heart.

      ‘What have you got there then?’ his accent, the strange sing of it. The practised boom to cut across the weather, speaking of another place, world, ancestry, life.

      ‘I found this … by the trees.’

      ‘And what am I meant to do with it?’ His tone detached, cool, as he towels himself dry.

      ‘I don’t know.’

      He comes close, inspects. ‘The sky’s all over the place, it’s throwing a party at the moment. Your little friend won’t last the night outside.’

      He’s laughing at her. Is he laughing at her? Connie will not be deflected. ‘Could you keep it, maybe, perhaps?’

      ‘It won’t last much longer inside. But if I must …’ And in one swift, gentle movement he extracts the dying bird from the cup of her hands and Connie knows in that brush of a touch that there is tenderness in him, and the sky, and the earth, he is touched by it all still; he would move like an animal in her, she just knows, it would be peaceful and different and repairing and right. It strikes her in that moment, like the flare of a match, that here is a soul strong with a simpler, grounded, utterly removed way of life to all this, around them both; it is strong in him, a mode of survival, a necessary distancing. It is utterly compelling.

      And he does not notice her. She is one of a type.

      But, but. Delight licks Connie behind the ear. A shiver of a touch. Her insides pull, contract. Still he discerns nothing of her churn; he turns, with the bird, and she knows it is her cue, she is dismissed. ‘I’ll see what I can do, ma’am.’ She is done, it is time to go.

      ‘Thank you. Mel?’

      ‘Yes, Mel.’ Not looking up.

      Connie stares back at him; for a moment, she lingers and he doesn’t even realize, so busy is he placing the bird in a cereal bowl with a scrap of tissue around it. A man so content, self-sufficient, alone. Not playing the game, any game. But they all play the game. All want the money, the connection, the acknowledgement. Except him. Her husband wouldn’t see him, note him, in any way; Mel is part of the great seething mass of people who are there for his benefit and utterly unnoticed. He has no curiosity and Connie always thought that people without that are like houses without books – unsettling. To have bound her life to a man so narrow! So oblivious of the wonders of life! Cliff would be the type who would tear the wings off a fly, and she feels instinctively that Mel would not, it is as simple as that. It’s odd how you can sense these things from a first conversation, the knowing as sharp as a flick knife. Yet she married him. So desperate for the settling, the security, so afraid. Of what?

      Connie takes her leave, her heart singing from a strange haunting, brightness bleeding from a swiftly shutting sky as she brusques her way home.

      Home. Such a generous word for such a shell of a place.

      26

       The older one grows, the more one likes indecency

      Cliff could never choose this moment, never dare to presume. No man ever could. The mysterious alchemy of attraction, that moment of combustion when all else is forgotten, rubbed out. The animal desire to fuck one person, just one, with driven intent; and utterly, completely, with every bone in your body, not another. The men over the years never got that. Thought they could bend her, change her, break her down, but it is there from the first moment or it is not. Just as they never got that Connie wanted absolutely no talk over the lovemaking, ever; for she needed to imprint her particular narrative upon the process, be alone with her own, quite separate scenario in her head.

      That, of course, was one thing that Cliff did come to understand – that he had become a facilitator, nothing else. In their grand and complicit experiment.

      But now this.

      27

       The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames

      The moon is the colour of old bone that night as Connie stands bold, bared, in front of her full-length mirror. The Anglepoise lamp is glaring fully at her nakedness. She looks at herself, in coldness, in dismay. How odd the human body is in hard light. Frail, ugly, vulnerable, breakable, freckled and crumpled and dimpled; pulsingly primed for its biological purpose, as if it exists for that and that alone and she shivers at the thought.