Read With My Body for Free Online Page A

swimming pool and a cabana, the poshest thing possible in your lives, and because the little wife can do prawn cocktails for you, mate.
    Eleven p.m. The latest you have been up in your life.
    Colin lolls up to you, beer glass in hand, in the saggy, stretched time after the main meal.
    He cups your chin and gazes into your fierce little face, at the long golden hair your father brushed last night—for the last time, you suspect—and he murmurs, ‘Your mother was so beautiful.’ Stretching out the ‘so’ with a secret smile, gazing at you like no one has before, as if he sees something of your mother in there, some whisper of potential, suddenly, to mirror her. You jerk back like a spooked pony, afraid of that, in a way you don’t quite understand, afraid your father will reject you because of it.
    But more importantly, that someone else will.
    You glance across at your newly minted stepmother, at her bouffant of a bridal gown and extravagantly thrown back veil, at her crazed untouchable radiance and you know in that momentyour past life is gone. That this triumphant young woman in her gown of a first wife not a second will do her best to erase your father’s previous existence, stamp on any whiff of your mother being the love of his life, without even realising, perhaps, what damage she is doing.
    You start to cry. The last crying of childhood. You weep, and weep, cannot stop.
    You have never done anything like this before. You can pull apart two bush dogs in a fight and shoot a rabbit and crack a whip but cannot explain why you are doing this; it just feels like a giant hand is dragging a piece of jagged, broken glass down the underbelly of your life, splitting you open and all the tears, of all the years, are finally out. Everyone comes up to you: your father, your brand-new stepmother, your grandmother. But the floodgates are opened and cannot be shut. You sense this is horribly unfair on Anne and are ashamed of it but can’t stop.
    Because your father is lost to you from this point.
    And you know that no matter how much she tries, your stepmother politely tolerates you and nothing else; she doesn’t want any of your enormous swamping ready love, actually; she doesn’t want the encumbrance of it in her life. Your stepmother, who over the years will perfect the art of emotional terrorism; an adult upon a child. Who despatches you, from the age of eleven, into an affronted loneliness within the new family she creates. A loneliness vast and raw, horizonless.
    The obscenity of that.

Lesson 24
The house-mother ! What a beautiful, comprehensive word it is. How suggestive of all that is wise and kindly, comfortable and good.
    You learn to live warily under the same roof. You learn that your presence is a source of distress to your stepmother—she is a good Catholic girl and is ashamed her new husband is not a cleanskin, wants to pretend to the world her husband is not twenty years older than her and never had a former life. She gave up her job in a petrol station at twenty, at the first whiff of matrimony and never worked again. Gave it all up to enter the longed-for world of vibrant tranquillity and status called marriage—and no grubby, gobby child is going to mar that. She is a typical valley girl—early school-leaver, thick set, the expectation that soon they’ll be with child—married or not. The much-anticipated baby doesn’t come, doesn’t come, even though the readiness for motherhood is oozing from her and your father grunts at one point, from under the F.J., to stop asking about it, it’ll happen in good time, ‘zip it’.
    Your father is now called Ted, not his nickname—Eddie—that everyone has always called him; his colleagues, his mates,your mother, even you. She insists. Everything from his past is gradually turfed out, the carpet your mum chose, wallpaper, crockery. Photos disappear into obscure drawers, not only of your mum but of you and him together until suddenly, you notice, there are