Read With My Body for Free Online Page B

none in the house.
    ‘Don’t you dare take her for a drive, Ted. It’s my time, not hers.’
     
    Yet it is only when you are alone with your father, in the car, that his fingertips find your earlobe and his voice softens and he whispers, ‘You’re still my China, aren’t you?’ as if it is the last time he will be able to tell you this and gravely you must hold it in your heart, you must never forget it; he has stolen this chance and it may not happen again. In the car, just the two of you, with his secret voice he never dares give you the gift of when his new wife is present. His life is now held hostage by her and it is only when he is away, in the car, that he is free—his old self.
    You can taste your stepmother’s spirit and are disheartened by it. She has the focus and insecurity and determination of the second wife, to make this marriage work. She crashes into your equilibrium. Living with her is like being trapped in sleeplessness; she sucks the oxygen from your world.
    She never teaches you what your father wanted, all that woman stuff he could not articulate. Your father never asks. He assumes everything is alright. You do not tell him. Your whole relationship is built on inarticulacy, it would not feel right to suddenly blurt. You are learning silence and watchfulness and the solace of a pen that speaks when you cannot, as an explosive combination is being brewed: frustration, anger, boundless curiosity—and enormous innocence.

Lesson 25
When I go from home to home and see the sort of rule or misrule there, the countless evil influences, physical and spiritual, against which children have to struggle, I declare I often have to wonder that in the rising generation there should be any good men and women
    Your bedroom is now the verandah at the back of the house with a roll-down canvas flap at night. It is not far away enough. You are no longer a part of the main house. It has not been done by pushing you out, it has been done by removal, by erasing everything that was secure and known in your past life. All the roaring absences now; the hidden photographs, the taken-down curtains, the painted-over marks of your mother’s on the kitchen door, as you stood up, grew tall, and then they stopped. Aged three years and eight months. The whole interior has become a ghost house to you; holding its breath for someone who will never come back. You still see it—searingly—as what it was. Not what it is now.
    When it thunders in your back room you drop to the ground with your belly to the floorboards and hear the housetalk through the rumbling in your skin. You smell the earth opening out to the rain, opening wide, drinking it up, wider and wider the ground opens out, every pore of it, and you smile and breathe it in deep.
    No respite, but the bush.

Lesson 26
Every family is a little kingdom in itself: the members and followers of which are often as hard to manage as any of the turbulent governments whose discords convulse our world
    By a shaded cleft of a creek you make a bush hut out of broken branches—widow makers, they’re known as locally—and great brooms of leaves; your home away from home, just for you. You love the cool smell of the water on the rock, the rich rust of the wet stone, the startling green of the ferns sucking from the restless stream. You love the clutter of vibrant life drawn to this secret tranquillity, the frogs, lizards, birds, wallabies if you’re very still. The land beyond it is bleached pale, the colour of the sheep that feed from it, but you’d never know within this.
    You stay out later and later in your sanctuary. Are intrigued the first time you come home—after dinner, but before your father has returned from his shift—to see the worry lines creasing your stepmother’s face. It is the first time you have seen concern on her, with anything to do with you.
    You learn, in that instant, the authority of removal.

    You stay away longer and longer.
    Then one day, after a big