The Bride Stripped Bare Set: The Bride Stripped Bare / With My Body. Nikki Gemmell

entirely on the prey, and your fingers, often, are between your legs, stroking, teasing, stirring as Cole sleeps. You’re appalled by the new appetites within you, kicking their feet and clawing to get out.

      

      You find a calming, over the days, within the pages of your little book. The author’s strong, singular voice never wavers, there’s such a rigour to the text and its exquisite borders of red and black. Was she ever crawling on the floor over a man? You can’t see it.

      Maybe she never had a lover, maybe it was all in her head.

      You wonder, suddenly, if she was unmarried, in a convent, perhaps; celibate, and so much stronger because of that.

      Maybe her isolation was something she revelled in, for it enabled her to work.

      Was the author contemptuous of the married state? Wanting to shake it up? Perhaps the book is even more subversive than you thought. You suspect she was writing it for any woman but herself.

      

       Not woemen be in subjection to men but men to woemen.

      How had she been released?

       Lesson 66

       happiness and virtue alike lie in action

      May. The weather is unclenching, there’s a lightness in the air.

      The library stacks. The light’s buoyant outside but gloomy inside. It’s been a long time since you’ve come here. Each narrow passageway is illuminated by tugging a string at the end of it and your footsteps ring out on the cast-iron grates with the deadening clang of a jailer. A librarian returning books glances up from a floor below and you remember, too late, that you shouldn’t be wearing a skirt in this place, it’s an old Library lore: the wide spaces in the grates allow people to look up. To give you a shot of erotic courage you’ve not worn underpants but it feels suddenly wrong, you being here, in this state; trying to work but wondering if you’ll see Gabriel by chance, trying to erase one obsession with another and in a place so soaked with them both.

      He’s not here. You just want to talk, to put your mind at rest. As you walk from the grills some of the grates shift slightly underfoot and the effect’s dizzying and unpleasant and you’re hating this ragged need in you that doesn’t sit at all comfortably with your public face.

      You sit at a desk. Grip its edge. Breathe deep. You have to concentrate on your own book, you must make it work: you need a spine to your life.

      And then it comes to you, as beautifully and obediently as a tangle of necklaces that you’ve spent so long trying to unpick, and with the simple looping of one set of beads through another the knot of them magically comes apart.

      You will respond to your mysterious seventeenth-century author.

      You will write a book in secret, just like her. Why not? All writing is revenge, is it not. Yes, yes. You lick your lips. Reach for your notebook. And in an afternoon lost within the deep, deep peace of solid, consuming work, you produce three lists:

      Men you have slept with, what you remember most.

      How they seduced.

      And on what.

       Lesson 67

       feather beds are a greater luxury than mattresses but are said to be less healthy

      Beds, of course:

      A stained futon on the floor. A sister’s bed that smelt of grass. An attic eyrie mattress. A caravan bed that was vaguely damp. Your parents-in-laws’ stern spare bed with sheets so slippery you fell off. A deliciously broad hotel bed in Hong Kong, wider than its length. Two single mattresses zipped together and you felt they’d break apart at any moment, they’d swallow you up.

      

      And the non-beds:

      A car bonnet. Shag-pile carpet that burned. A field of curious cows. A swimming pool at three in the morning, with the water buoying you under a circus tent of stars. There was the quiet as you fucked, you remember that so clearly, just the water’s soft trickle and swish as you clung to each other and didn’t speak, not a word, focusing on the intensity of the touch and the water’s caress.

      A hire car. Sand. A kitchen table at a maiden aunt’s.

      

      All the cliches. It’s remarkable how similar most of the men’s techniques were and yet how distinct each one is in your memory even if the name is not. You remember the unpleasant experiences more vividly than the pleasant ones; you remember why they didn’t work. And your let-down. That it wasn’t better than what you’d hoped, at the start, as your clothes were coming off. You always masked it.

      It’s a shame, that.

       Lesson 68

       April is the hopeful month for gardening

      You visit the Library again and again. You walk the bold iron skeleton of the beautiful building, your building as much as his. Just because he comes here doesn’t mean you can’t, and you slip off your shoes and arch your soles and your stockinged feet thrum on the iron. Strips of fluorescent tubing cast baubles of brightness here and there; above and below you readers sit or squat, isolated in their little circles of light. Old wooden desks wait at the ends of the passages like rest bays on a highway and there’s the intoxicating smell of paper and leather, of words, waiting. You begin, finally, to tackle the book. To ask questions:

      Why are women so constrained about pleasing themselves, why are they so focused on everyone else’s pleasure at the expense of their own?

      What happens if they try to live selfishly?

      

      But then a pool of light, philology, one vaulting spring day.

      Your heart somersaults.

      He is sitting on the ground with his back to a wall, reading and jotting on a notebook by his side. You do not go to him, you just look: his nape, his hair flopping into his eyes, his hand curled round the pen that clicks as agreeably as a lipstick, his watch from the forties with its broad, age-spotted face.

      Something makes him glance up. He catches your eye.

      

      His smile, like an umbrella whooshed inside out.

      Yours back.

      

      You’re both trapped in this, you can see that. It’s in his face.