by Jenny Diski
I usually air-dried after a bath. The flat was always warm with the communal central heating kept going in the basement by Bill, the boilerman, and often after a bath, in the living room, my parents would play a game of ‘He’, where ‘He’ was naked me, twisting out of their reach and running away from one, whose fingers tickled their way between my legs to my vulva, to the other, just a few feet across the room, gesturing at me, waiting impatiently to do the same thing. I bounced between them like a beach ball, squealing as they ‘played’ with me, all of us laughing at the huge joke of me being tickled and being unable to escape the grasp of one or other of my parents. The game stopped, of course, when my father left, first when I was about six and then probably some time before he left a second time and permanently, when I was eleven. My recollection of the game comes complete, straight out of the memory box. I see them. I see me. All of us laughing. Me shrieking. Being tickled is a kind of torture – it has its own page on Wikipedia. The laughter it causes teeters on the edge of frantic, with the apparent pleasure of the game and its acute discomfort as being tickled ascends towards agony. My running between them kept the game going. I didn’t run in the other direction, out of the room, as I might have done. By the time I was exhausted with laughing and running, I was dry, and my mother would wrap me up in the bath towel to signal the end of the game. We all understood that such excitement couldn’t go on too long, that I had to calm down and put my nightie on, ready for my bedtime story. One reason for keeping the game going by running between them was my being the centre of attention; another, stronger reason was that while the game continued and the laughter, mine and theirs, filled the air, the possibility of a happy family was sustained. Both my parents were engaged with each other, using me as a magnet between them. Surely that was a happy family. What we were like. The game was one of the very few occasions when all three of us were together, laughing, delighted; no one shouted, there was no crying or slamming the door, no one pulled open the kitchen drawer to find a knife, no one wailing at me about their ruined life, threatening to die. The adult me watches the three of us from a front-row seat, following the back and forth like a tennis game, listening to the high-pitched, breathless laughter. The adult me raises her eyebrows slightly, but makes no further comment.
So I listened to my new, experienced friend at Freeman, Hardy and Willis, who had never once been naked in front of her husband. One morning, sipping coffee, eating bourbon biscuits, she asked me about myself. I told her that my father had got me the job but that I had other plans for my life. At barely fifteen, I still had a notion of what I was going to do when I grew up. I was going to be a writer, I told her. She was impressed, almost as if I’d already achieved my goal just in the wanting of it. That must be very difficult, she said. I’d never thought of it being difficult to do, only that I wanted to do it, but couldn’t imagine myself actually doing it, making it real. I wanted a job on a local newspaper and then – well, I didn’t know how, but I really wanted to write.
My previous downfall had not been my last, as I’d thought; here was my next one. The manager had been passing the staffroom with its open door and me speaking of my life plans. He came in and said in stiff tones that he’d taken me on, young and inexperienced, in order to train me for a career in shoe-selling. I was sacked for wasting the opportunity he offered, one that other young people would give anything to have. Undeterred but rumbling thunderously, my father marched me to the High Street that afternoon and we went into the grocery shop, Cullens. I got the job as shelf-stacker.
I couldn’t find any like-minded or friendly people to chat to at break time; they had their own group and I was too young. The boss didn’t allow dawdling and daydreaming, two skills I did have under my belt. If he saw me idling (another of my talents) he’d call out and wave a pointing finger towards the shelves. Sometimes the shelves were full, but that was no excuse for wasting time, I should at least look as if I was working. My problem was right there. How I looked. It took only a couple of weeks before he summoned me to stand in front of him because he had something he wanted to say. I stood and waited while he gathered his authority. ‘I’m going to have to let you go. No, it’s not the work, or at any rate that’s not what I’m sacking you for. It’s your look.’ What? ‘Whenever I see you in the shop, you have a belligerent look on your face. I can’t have the customers seeing that.’ I pretended I didn’t know what he meant, but I did. It was the look I could feel from inside my face, peering through the eyes, as if it were a mask which on the outside raised a barrier of contempt, a visible defence against everything the world could do to me. I can’t do it now. It’s a look that vanishes with maturity, like that thing you did with your eyes when you were a child, focusing them so that everything looked minute and far away but at the same time near enough to touch. I know I did it with the muscles around my eyes, but now it’s gone. So too my belligerent look, which on the one hand kept me safe from all the real and imagined whacks (Melville’s ‘universal thump’?) coming my way, but on the other hand was so impenetrable that it made people furious and sometimes needing to hit out to break it down. That was the look that my boss called ‘belligerent’ and which made him want me out of his sight, and the look I gave my father when I told him I’d been sacked from my second job and shrugged in silence when he demanded to know what I’d done. He slapped my face. A bad thing, hitting children or even bolshy adolescents, but something I understood. An older friend, a million miles away from anything my father was, understanding, thoughtful, who gave me a place to sleep when I left the hospital for weekends, slapped me for ‘the look on my face’. I can’t bring myself to get self-righteous about it. I think it must have been terrible having someone look at them the way I did. Insolent, uncaring, challenging. And they’d snap. At the time, after telling my father I’d been sacked again, I really didn’t know what my belligerent face looked like. Sometimes I practised it in the mirror to see how it was to be facing it, but I could never get my face to feel right, to feel the way it felt when I did it naturally. It was perhaps like a spell, like a key fitting into a lock, it came to me, I did it, or it did it with me, and I was invincible, but stuck inside my expression.
It wasn’t until I saw that look on someone else’s face and felt the power it had over me that I understood how anyone could possibly sack a person rather than laughing at them for having a belligerent expression. From the inside, it feels as if your face is expressing the unfairness and arbitrariness of the world. You think that the look you have on your face is telling the world how bitterly misunderstood you are. How wronged. What injustice rains down from the grown-up with all their power? Although I could only imagine it as I went head to head with authority figures, the look on my face had taken in the unfairness and injustice, rolled it up into small balls with spiky edges and shot them through my eyes, killing dead the wrongdoer or the wrongdoer’s representative.
I figured out that look when the alternative school for kids in trouble, which I helped run in my early twenties, went on a trip to the countryside. One girl of fourteen was wandering about looking blank hatred at anyone who came into her eyeshot. Everyone around was furious and getting more furious by the moment at the look of contempt they were receiving from her. One afternoon, someone had been shouting at her to say what was wrong because he’d had enough of her walking around like a harpy. It seemed as if others were ready to join in. I was pretty fed up with her, too, but on a hunch I went over and put my arms around her. In seconds she was sobbing and explaining what we all needed to hear about what was troubling her. It wasn’t world-shattering, just something about how she felt we weren’t including her in what was happening. I wondered whether that would have been the way in to me at my most silently belligerent moments. Maybe not a hug from the librarian, not quite the answer in the world of work, but in the matter of relationships it might be very handy. I must confess I put my arms around her with no emotion, I was still furious, and felt quite cold towards her; from my point of vi
ew the hugging was just something to stop her moody behaviour from ruining everyone’s day. A few years back, I’d have dismissed it as ‘phoney’. No real meaning or feeling, just appropriate actions for the situation. As mercenaries might behave, not morally on either side, simply doing what was needed to sort the situation out. Even the pretence of understanding and a touch with little feeling were enough to bring the girl back into the world of humans where she could talk and tell us what was happening. I saw that look in the reluctant girls I taught at an East End comprehensive school, and I saw it in my daughter and her friends. They could all slip on that superior air of belligerence they had at their disposal but not really under their control. It’s like that very dubious ‘multiple personality disorder’, in which different people ‘came out’ according to what was needed to protect the central self, who had no control or memory of it happening. It’s a doubtful diagnosis, but a useful metaphor for the withering look teenage girls can turn on. Try as I might, I can’t recall any males producing it. Is it a girl thing? Does it come with a bottle of oestrogen? Anyway, that look was what got me sacked again and slapped when I put it on to tell my father what had happened.
I turned on my heels and left the room after he slapped me. I went up to my bedroom and packed some things in a duffel bag, found a capsule of speed (brown, torpedo-shaped, squishy) which I popped into my mouth for courage and moved the wages I’d been given in lieu of notice (all £3 of it, none for Pam) from the small brown envelope into my purse. Then I walked out, past the kitchen where my father and Pam sat with their backs to the door and out, away, off to try my luck in Hove with the other parent.
It was around this moment in the telling that my friend asked why I didn’t do what I was told. One answer might have been that I had another place to go, and that I didn’t have to stay with my father and take a turn at all the shops in High Street, Banbury before I arrived back at the godknowswhere which signalled where I’d end up. I had an alternative, a get-out-of-jail card: a ticket to Brighton to stay with my mother. But the bedsitting-room in which my mother and I lived for the next three days turned out to be more nearly the real where I’d end up, or at least the furthest I could imagine for myself.
The two of us shrieking, me saying I was going to go to London and find a place to live, her wailing: ‘Yes, yes, go to London at your age, show me up, get yourself murdered and raped so they can all say it was my fault.’ After two days of this, and seeing how hopeless my plan was, the small white pharmacy box with my mother’s Nembutal really did look like the only move I had. Couldn’t stay with my mother, didn’t want to be with my father and Pam. Somebody telling me what I had to do would have been welcomed, and then, realistically, dismissed by my mind, which by then was lost in a fog of choices, none of which fitted into the fairy tale or gothic horror we were acting out.
What I had going for me was teen rage, contempt impervious to offers of compromise; the power of the mask capable of turning ice to marshmallow, and all the time in the world, all the ability to sustain it without surrendering. In the cage-fight with my mother, which I knew would never end, just go from one ugly recrimination to another to another, a handful of Nembutal on the chest of drawers was the best weapon I could hope for.
After a stomach pump, and a few days in Brighton General, I arrived at the Lady Chichester Hospital, a refuge from both parents. A place as funny as it was sad, where I settled in with some relief to try and construct a future for myself. I applied for a job at Bourne and Hollingsworth. It had Soho no distance where the Beat poets and writers hung out, pay that was not turned over to Pam and a pound returned to me. No mother, no father (no Pam). Independence: the parallel universe where it was possible to get to the part of the world you wanted, instead of getting sacked from a shoe shop for wanting it.
I was to start at the end of March, but in February I got the letter from Doris offering a home. I sat on the edge of my bed, alone in the four-bed ward, and read it. And again. An entirely new world was on offer almost, the same one that had got me sacked from Freeman, Hardy and Willis. But I’d be already there, with the writers. And with just the single name: Doris (Lessing) she signed off.
You might think that after being offered such an opportunity, having experienced such unasked-for kindness from Doris and her son, been taken in sight unseen, given the chance to make real dreams of writing and the company of writers, the belligerent look on the girl’s face would have vanished. It did. I took every opportunity to express my gratitude, promised Dr Watt, Doris and myself that I would repay the confidence shown in me and put an end to the sulky, angry girl who kicked against everything, especially herself. If my father allowed me to go back to school (the one point he’d set his face against, saying I’d have to show my quality and gratitude to Mrs Lessing for her kindness, by becoming the writer I said I wanted to be without the benefit of higher education – an act of jealousy that he said he wouldn’t budge on, while offering only his gratitude to Doris and the promise of a pound a week which he would put into a Premium Bond account until my twenty-first birthday), I’d work hard and come away from university with a good degree and excellent prospects. All that. And I’d put away my belligerent face, which now, surely, was no longer needed. A proper middle-class teenage girl of her time, finished in ways her time extolled. Serious, studious, making Doris proud of me. Of course I would do all that and more to express my thanks.
But I was that girl whose face was twisted into a snarl when the wind blew in my direction and fixed it that way. I left school with a small handful of O-levels and no university education in prospect, made friends with the Covent Garden arty drug types, was living in a squat in Long Acre, and finally went into Ward 6 of the Maudsley Hospital. A friend of Doris’s who came to visit me there told me that she (Doris) had washed her hands of me and expected that I would become a heroin addict, get pregnant and die an early death. I suppose there was a 50 per cent chance of each of those things happening to me. Or rather of doing those things to myself, compelled by my self-destructive nature, Doris would have said. The belligerent look barely had time to wash and brush up in readiness for hibernation when it rushed back to the face of its owner. You were very difficult, they tell me. You are very difficult, they say. It turned out that ‘doing what I was told’ was not so much following orders, it was some innate understanding of how the world was supposed to work and conforming to it, so as not to make trouble. By the time someone had to tell me what to do, it was already too late. ‘Difficult’ was how the lay population described what the psychiatrists called ‘disturbed’. When all was said and done, I would be a disappointment to Doris as I settled in to the house in Charrington Street. She had made an offer of herself and her home, more difficult a thing to do for her than for most people, but in a very fundamental way, I wasn’t really what she wanted. Imagine how frightening it must have been when, holding on to the new kitten, Doris stood behind the front door before opening it to me.
I was getting on as anyone of my age might, given my previous circumstances and the fact that I had been taken on, for I didn’t know how long, as a house guest, or a foster child. Not all that well. I had lived with strangers before. I had been sent to a foster home while my mother had a catatonic breakdown and was in Friern Barnet, and later to a children’s home, where we took walks in crocodile formation along a coastal pathway above the surf, as social services tried to sort my mother out with social security and a bedsitting-room, while getting me admitted to St Christopher’s. After that, when I was twelve, an overzealous young rabbi – with Humbertian hankerings – sent me several times to stay with his parishioners during school holidays to help out my mother, and to enable him to visit me alone. He only shuffled on his knees across the room to ask if I would kiss him, and when I said ‘no’ never brought it up again except to ask if it had altered my feeling about ‘our religion’. I assured him that it hadn’t and could we please carry on driving to London.
By the time, two or three years l
ater, that I got to Doris’s I knew from experience how you tiptoed around a house that wasn’t yours, fearing the sound of your own footfall, creaking doors or floorboards. I remembered not knowing the household arrangements, when was it OK or too late to get up, did I wait for others to have breakfast or get on with it myself? Was it OK to use this or that bathroom, which things were special to whom? I never knew the rules of each family or group, the systems, what is and isn’t done in other people’s houses and when. I always tried to make myself invisible and inaudible. Doing nothing was best, except that sometimes it turned out people were waiting for you to appear. I tried not to leave footprints, to erase any clues that might show where I had been and what I had done. But always eventually I had to decide to enter and leave rooms, to answer a phone or not, or to confront a closed door without knowing if it was the right time to open it. People weren’t unkind, but I was never at home when not at home, which by the time I was twelve no longer existed, though it remained as a pattern, the only pattern of how to get through the day. It never seemed to coincide with other families’ routines and expectations.
