Coming Undone Page 6

  During the daytime, I now went to a nearby school, where everyone spoke words I couldn’t decipher, who looked even more alien: they ran through the playground so free and carefree. So absent of pain. I stood on the edges of the playground silently, clutching my book. My nights were spent waiting to be taken. When I slept, I’d dream that they were violating and breaking my body under their yellow glare. Long, lumpy fingers jabbed at my skin, pushed inside into my bones, pulled them out to stare at and snap.

  I heard that he was looking for us. He turned up at Nana’s house. He cried. Cried. I tried to imagine him crying, my face scrunching in concentration. I saw him sitting in my nana’s front room, on her green two-seater sofa. On his face were cut-out tears on white paper, coloured in blue felt-tip, stuck on with Sellotape folded into small squares.

  Then one day, several weeks later, just like that, we were going home. He’d gone, apparently. We’d be ‘safe’. But he knew where we lived; he had keys. I didn’t feel safe.

  The first day we got back, the neighbour next door shouted up from the path by her back door.

  ‘We would hear you all screaming,’ she said, then paused. ‘We thought about calling the police. But we didn’t want to interfere.’

  One unremarkable day, years later, when he was long gone, she found it: the one place I’d committed the truth to record – my diary. I wrote every day, confessing, sharing all of the things that would no longer fit in my head, in my body, which was overwhelmed, unwilling. I told it everything.

  She called me downstairs. She’d been drinking. I’d been sloppy in hiding it. I’d described the nights, the magazine, the slap, slap and the white specks. She asked me, is it true? I told her yes, it’s true.

  The next day, I came home from school and she was hoovering the front room. When I walked in, she turned it off with her foot. She asked if I wanted to go to the police about what we’d talked about the night before, or just forget about it. I said I just wanted to forget about it.

  She nodded, kicked the hoover and it roared into life once more. We never spoke of it again.

  CHAPTER 9

  I knew from a very young age that we were poor. Not just struggling, or skint, but poor. A knowledge that instilled fear, insecurity. Hope, optimism was not a familiar taste. I was anxious, constantly. There were the days not answering the door, the phone. The muttered comments at school from parents and their kids.

  ‘Scrubber,’ said my best friend. ‘Their house is disgusting.’

  A house her mum and dad didn’t want her to come to. They laughed at our yellow teeth, our dirty clothes; they knew, somehow, that we only had one bath a week.

  There was the sometimes-empty pantry and fridge. The food that we did have didn’t always stretch. The hunger. The fresh milk in the door that was to last through tens of cups of tea, that we absolutely weren’t to drink on its own. I sipped it out of the bottle after dark, in the light of the fridge, and then replaced it with water, the level monitored and marked.

  But still we needed, wanted stuff. And stuff cost money. Thankfully, there were always solutions for families like ours. Solutions that cost money, in a way that it didn’t for those more fortunate.

  The man from Shopacheck came by every Friday night, through our front door into the front room. He wore a beige suit, a camel shirt, a fat brown tie, had thick bifocal glasses and a parting kept in place with what he said was pomade but looked like gel. He’d hold his book, the one in which he marked down all the money Mum owed, the smaller amounts she paid back, and a key. The key was for our telly, which had a coin-operated meter on the back (all your entertainment needs! 50p a go!).

  Every week, he emptied the slot, the clatter-clatter of coins falling out into the palm of his hand. He placed them inside his deep pockets, alongside a thin pile of notes from Mum’s hand. She flirted with him as she handed over the cash, laughed at his jokes, presumably thinking that one week she might need to rely on his previously unseen generous nature. Meanwhile we sat on the sofa, watching this man warily. Another man who looked at Mum like they were eyeing meat swinging on a hook.

  We never had quite enough 50ps. The TV was practically all we had for entertainment, so the tick-tick-tock of the timer counting down was particularly taunting. There were very few books in our house, bar tatty thrillers and bodice-rippers. There were no cinema trips, museums, parks, play centres. There was just a bare bedroom, the green outside the house or the patch of carpet in front of the telly.

  When there were no 50ps left, and therefore no TV, I fled to the trees, inched up them, hands scraped by the bark, the fear at my back pushing me to climb higher. Branch to branch to branch until I was hidden in the canopy, finding safety under the leaves that tickled my scalp. I looked over the houses that sat snugly side by side up and across the estate and imagined I lived in one of them. I envisioned pulling up a chair at a table in these strangers’ home, being one of their children they loved so much. They brushed my hair gently, smoothed down stray damp strands each time the comb was pulled through. Swallowed me up in a smothering hug, the soft perfume of my non-mother filling my throat as my non-father smiled at us across the warm room.

  When I hid in the leaves, I was hiding not just from the real but from the imagined. And I couldn’t honestly tell the difference between the two. There was a raised bump – or was it a lump? – in the middle of my head, just on the back to the right. I was twelve when I first noticed it – why hadn’t I before? I examined it constantly, fingers probing. It was hard yet soft in places, rising up out of my skull. A mess, a mass of bone, flesh and blood, barely covered by my thin hair: a brain tumour, I was sure of it.

  I read the big grey Reader’s Digest Medical Book with one hand and rubbed my probable tumour with the other. I checked the symptoms off one by one:

  Headache (yes. Pretty sure)

  Nausea/vomiting (I had felt sick the other day)

  Fatigue (I was always tired)

  Drowsiness (I was fairly sure I rolled on my heels in the dinner queue the other week)

  Memory problems (had I?)

  I touched it, rubbed it, kneaded it, a hundred times a day. I knew the shape and scale and slope of it. I knew that each morning it had grown just a little bit longer, larger, taller. Life was now split into two time frames: before and after I felt it, noticed its presence. I definitely remembered the former, even if I couldn’t feel how relatively carefree my life had been without the worry of impending death weighing heavily on my skull.

  Alongside the tumour, I had AIDS. And the question wasn’t going to be if I died but when and who I took with me by spreading my sickness. I thought of the dark nights in my bedroom, my mouth around him and I knew that’s how you got it, how I’d got it.

  I stopped drying my face on the towels in the bathroom and used my sleeve instead. I turned the head of my toothbrush away from the others. I thought of all of us using one toilet seat and added up the likelihood of me infecting everyone else in the family. They’d go out in the world and it would be stuck to them like acid rain. They’d touch the hands of others, it would stick to them and on it would go until I’d killed the world dead.

  As I sat on the floor in the front room, the TV blared dire warnings of death punctuated by close shots of gravestones. Sombre-faced middle-aged TV presenters warned us about the modern plague. The thud of gravestones falling echoed around the chamber of my chest. Was now the right time to tell everyone about my sickness? To warn them? But I didn’t. I pulled my knees close to my chest and turned into myself. If I could get small enough, if I could become invisible then everyone would be safe.

  Eventually part of me broke, it must have done, because I convinced Mum to take me to the doctor. There I sat across from the man who’d tended to my family’s health for decades and told him, face burning, that I had AIDS and was going to die and that I’d probably infected my entire family. He looked faintly bewildered, a small smile playing on his lips while the rest of his face remained a mask of composure
.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s run through the ways you get it.’ He talked about drugs and sharing needles and dangerous sex and gay men and blood blending with blood. I wanted to tell him that I’d had oral sex. That was how and why I knew I had it. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. How could I? I knew he’d think I was a slut. So I looked down, allowed him to finish, didn’t say a word.

  Seven years later, I was in my bedroom, the hi-fi was playing the news. The DJ said something about the world ending; attuned to catastrophe, my ears pricked up. He talked about Nostradamus, who predicted future events, many correctly, how he said the world would end in a nuclear war in the year 2000. It was 1993. Everything stopped. I’d just been given a death sentence; we all had. I found books in the library that told me what to expect, that painted the future for me in black. There would be no plants, no animals, no humans. The earth would be scorched and stripped of everything that made it what it was now. It was all I could think about. I cried for hours, wished that life could have been different. It seemed particularly cruel. I’d be twenty-one. I would finally be free and life would be something other than sadness and pain and then I’d die.

  As we drove along in the car and I looked out of the window at the fields we passed, I looked at the cows, imagined their bones burned to dust and then blown away into the air, mixing with all the bone dust of everything and everyone else that had perished when the nuclear bombs landed. I imagined the life I could have had, should have had. It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up every morning, the last thing I thought of when I went to sleep. Everything seemed utterly pointless when death was so close. Every blue sky or toasty summer’s day seemed just to exist to demonstrate what we were set to lose.

  The six-week holidays were the worst time of all. Six weeks without the distraction of school to occupy my mind; six weeks for my obsessions and anxiety to spiral; when I needed comfort more than ever. But Mum couldn’t bear kids under her always moving feet. She was irritated by the very sight of us, around so much, reminding her that we existed.

  ‘I’m going to change my name if you keep using it,’ she’d say as we called out ‘Mum’. I didn’t know much about mothering, or what a typical family looked like, sounded like, felt like, but I knew that a mother should nurture, protect and love their children. I wanted her to hold me, shelter me from the bombs when they fell, take the force of the nuclear blast for me, tell me she loved me as I died.

  I don’t recall any touching in our house and I grew up desperate to feel skin on mine. To be hugged, swaddled, swept up in an embrace. To be kissed on the head, on the cheek, told how much I am loved. I don’t remember there being a single expression of love, either from hands or mouth.

  The bubble around me and the world grew. I looked at the other kids around me as if they were aliens – which, to me, they were. They looked like me on the outside only. I couldn’t talk to them, relate to them. I spent my days inside, reading anything that had words on it – newspapers, dog-eared thrillers, bodice-rippers, the backs of packets and tins. I watched men in bright tights wrestle each other on TV, swept away by the fantasy world they created.

  ‘Why don’t you have any friends and play out like a normal kid?’ Mum asked, at the end of her tether, seeming to be sick of my small, dark presence floating around the house like a ghost. I couldn’t explain to her that I felt so apart from all of them. Like I’d been dug up out of the earth, made to look like a child when, really, I was something else. I sat; I stood. I read. I wrote stories that took me away on pirate ships, eye patch strapped on, hat askew, as I led my men and my ship bounced on the rough sea.

  But at night, I couldn’t hide. I had to go to sleep. And as I lay in the top bunk, my mind raced, filled with images and sounds. I knew they were going to come for me. When everyone else was asleep and I was still awake, they would come. There was no keeping them out. No chains, no locks, no barriers strong enough. I daren’t sleep, because that would let them in, but when I couldn’t fight it any longer and my mind and body closed down, they were in my dreams. Or were my dreams just memories? They appeared in through the ceiling, walked straight through the bedroom door, came in the windows to my right shoulder. They brought me home to my bed each time but I also knew that there might come a time that they decided not to, when I’d be lost forever.

  The nights I didn’t dream of being taken, I dreamt about dying, of being killed. I felt the sharp edge of the knife inside my chest, snaking, as it made its way through bone to the fat and the organs below. The knife was pulled and jammed back in over and over. The skin opened, blood rushed in and filled the hole, spilled out of the sides all over my skin. I turned from white to pink to scarlet red, lying in a river of my own blood. I didn’t scream or fight or twist and turn. I didn’t try to escape. I submitted to the violence, to the pain that poured over me. I knew that I was dying and I was relieved.

  My mind was twisted and torn, but really it was my body that I wanted to destroy. First I had to reclaim it. I knew it had been taken from me, stolen by those who had no right, who took it without asking, who took it with balled fists and set jaws and stuffed it, broken and bowed, into the corner. I wanted to reclaim it and then I wanted to destroy it. To light a match and watch it burn. My mind would finally quieten as the flesh blistered and shrank.

  Ever since I could remember I’d wanted to make my skin sting, my eyes burn, my insides bleed. I broke rulers, careful to let the end form into a point sharp enough to slice my skin open until, at last, I saw red. Snapped biros between my teeth and scratched at my thighs until they were inflamed; bits of plastic sat inside new rivets. I hit myself in the head and recognised the pain and jolt of my brain banging against my skull momentarily. I pulled at the skin under my eyes and wondered how hard I’d have to pull to tear it off my face entirely.

  I had a brown bottle filled to the top with blue capsules. I wasn’t sure what they were or why I was taking them. I rolled the lid between my thumb and forefinger and imagined the relief if I took one, two, three, four, five until the bottle was empty. I knew very little but I did know that existing was painful, too painful, already. Every second of my existence was pain. All I wanted was for it to end. I was just twelve years old.

  CHAPTER 10

  If it was escape I longed for, there was one sure-fire route to oblivion, well trodden by members of my family, going back generations.

  The first time alcohol touched my lips, I wasn’t yet as tall as the mantelpiece: the taste delivered by a few slurps out of a can of cheap lager from the Spar, handed to me by my mum.

  But it was so much more than how it tasted. Boy, did it make me feel. The warm, beautiful, bouncing buzz didn’t stay just in my belly – it flowed, flooded down into my thighs, floated to my chest and curled up inside my head. There it sat; it settled, for a moment, cotton wool around my brain, protecting it from the bruises, momentarily filling in the scars. And for that moment, I held my breath and felt something remarkable, something that I struggled to recognise when it began. I was comfortable, standing right there in the world, wearing this skin. A feeling I’d forgotten, if I’d ever in fact had it. Shoulders back, stomach out, spine straight. I felt brilliant and bold. My bones rattled, my body flinched and jerked, as if I’d been plugged into the mains, the dial turned up to ten.

  The second time, it was the same hand – my mother’s – reaching out, offering more, more, more. Smiling as I shyly accepted. Now I swam around the room bobbing up and down, in and out, swimming, sinking, drowning, surviving. My ideas were bigger, my visions brighter. Colours popped and jumped and kicked and caressed my eyeballs. I wasn’t just ready to face the world but straining at the leash. The collar around my neck that kept me quiet, kept me small and scared, was stretching, ready to buckle and break under my new will.

  I was in my teens: it was the night Mum fought with another of the men in her life – the man who we, she, had to ask permission from. His particular torment for us was control, not sexual violence.r />
  Can I use the car?

  Can I turn the TV on?

  Can I turn the TV over?

  Can I have a bath?

  Can I go out?

  Can I speak?

  Can I drink the milk?

  Can I read the newspaper?

  Can I listen to music?

  Can I have some money?

  Can I have a drink?

  Can I love my own children?

  Tonight, she snapped and kicked out from under the suffocation of his control, freeing her head first and then her body. Words were spat and she stormed out of the living room, over the lino in the kitchen and out of the back door, grabbing her purse and me – ‘Terri, come on’ – as she went.

  I jumped up without a second’s thought, figuring there’d be punishment but buoyed by the slightest chance that this time she was busting herself, us, out for good.

  Once we were down the path and over the green we looked at each other wild-eyed, high on disobedience and the prospect of freedom, however brief. We turned left at the bottom of the road and walked up the winding streets of the estate. We reached the corner shop, halfway up the estate, where she bought the cheapest cider and lager they sold, litre bottles of each; she’d loosened the cap before we’d even left the shop.

  She marched quickly, furiously swigging from the bottle while she told me in detail how much she hated him and why. How he controlled her. How he wanted to crush who she was. How insecure and weak he was. How she was so, so sick of staying quiet, being good.

  I hated him, too. For all the reasons she said and so many more she didn’t. ‘You should be seen and not heard,’ he’d say and I’d spend days and nights sitting quietly, my thoughts and arguments and resentments screaming around the edges of my mind while a man who couldn’t even begin to match me told me why I wasn’t worth anything and would always be ‘nothing’.