by Jean Davison
Drinks. Laughter. False gaiety masking the tears inside. Mustn’t let anyone know. Got to hold myself together, face the world, and pass for ‘normal’. Who keeps putting ‘Behind a Painted Smile’ on the jukebox?
More drinks. More laughter. Have another gin. And another. See how it sparkles in the glass. Looks pure and clean as spring water. Goes down more easily than pills too. In the purple shades of evening I made my way home past street lamps that wobbled on pavements that tilted.
Mum and Brian were at work. Dad was asleep on the sofa when I arrived home. He woke when I gave a loud hiccup.
‘Why haven’t you got a job?’ he demanded.
I shrugged my shoulders and giggled, then I stumbled into the bathroom to clean my teeth. Dad came in and dragged me away from the washbasin, knocking the toothbrush from my hand. I was gagging on a mouthful of frothy, minty toothpaste as he made me go to bed.
‘Tomorrow you get a job,’ he said firmly.
Toothpaste and gin. Headache and nausea. The room spinning. I’m falling down, down, down into darkness …
I must have been asleep for a few hours but it seemed like only minutes before I heard my father’s voice again.
‘You get up now, do you hear?’ He flung off the covers and tugged roughly at my arm. I glanced at the clock. Four in the morning. I dressed quickly and sat, shivering, in the kitchen.
‘Go out and get a job,’ Dad said, glaring at me fiercely, as if he expected me to do so that very minute.
‘I can’t at this time of the morning, can I?’ I said this timidly, not defiantly; his moods could still frighten me.
‘Well, if I come home from work and find you in your pyjamas again I’ll kill you. When the Sister at High Royds told me you were in need of discipline, I couldn’t understand it because –’
‘What? She told you that?’
‘Yes, when I came one visiting time. I couldn’t understand it then because it was Brian, not you, who needed discipline, but I won’t put up with the way you behave now. You grumble about the state of the house but you don’t lift a finger to clean it. Lazing in bed all day, staying out late at nights, coming in drunk. Well, I’m not having it any more. The first thing you’ll do is get a job and start earning your keep. Do you hear?’
I stared at some crumbs on the faded brown lino.
‘I said, do you hear?’ he shouted, his lips close to my ear. My aching head reverberated with sound.
‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘I hear.’
When he’d set off for work, Mum came into the room, and I vented my feelings on her.
‘He drags me out of bed at four in the morning and tells me to get a job,’ I grumbled.
‘Well, you should try to be sensible.’
‘Where did trying to be fucking sensible get me?’
‘You should cut out that disgusting language, and you shouldn’t have come home drunk last night.’
‘Anyway, I’m supposed to be sick. If I’m treated like I’m sick in the head, then why shouldn’t I act like it?’
‘You should go to bed early at night, then you’d get up early next day. And you should take your pills.’
‘I do take the flaming pills. That’s why I’m always either asleep or wandering about like a zombie. I might as well be dead.’
‘You are dead. Dead in trespasses and sins.’
‘Don’t talk so fucking stupid! Why can’t you try to understand?’
‘I do understand. You know yourself what you really need. You ought to go back to church.’
‘You don’t understand anything,’ I said.
But I was thinking: And neither do I.
A cold, damp evening a few months later. Brian and Dad were on late shifts. I was staying in with Mum. She sat reading a magazine. Disturbing images filled the TV screen. I watched, transfixed, and then I began scribbling some thoughts on to paper.
Television brings news and documentaries about human misery into the comfort of our living rooms. I can watch people dying in Vietnam, and right here in the corner of my room, starving children in Biafra rub their bone-thin fingers over grotesquely swollen bellies while I’m eating my tea and counting the calories. Not one of these children (who have never really been children) will even have the chance to grow up into a confused, cynical adolescent like me with time to bother about the meaning of life. As soon as the television is switched off, it’s easy for us well-fed English teenagers to forget about what’s going on in faraway places, as long as we drop a coin in a collecting tin every now and then, and proudly display our ‘Make Love, Not War’ badges. And yet what can I do anyway? Why doesn’t He who promised to feed even the sparrows help them?
The sharp ringing of the phone broke into my thoughts. Mum jumped up and rushed to answer it as if she’d been waiting for a call.
‘What? Now?’ Mum asked with a giggle. ‘Well, I suppose I could do. Yes, OK then.’
She giggled again, twisting the telephone wire round her finger. I picked up her discarded magazine and pretended to read. More girlish giggling. When she put the phone down she rummaged in a drawer and pulled out her make-up and blonde wig.
‘Are you going out?’ I asked in mock surprise.
‘I might do.’
‘Oh? Ten minutes ago you said you were going to have a bath and an early night,’ I reminded her.
‘I might happen to change my mind.’
‘Call me and I’ll come running. So you’re off to meet your fancy man?’
She was having an affair with Roy, a bus conductor in his twenties. Almost young enough to be my boyfriend.
‘What I do is my business. I’ll mind my business and you mind yours, Lady Jane.’
‘That lipstick looks awful,’ I told her.
She pulled the blonde wig over her straggly, greasy hair which was once a rich, dark brown, now heavily sprinkled with grey.
‘If you must wear a wig why don’t you buy one that at least looks like real hair? And why blonde? It doesn’t suit your complexion.’
She changed into a short skirt.
‘Cor, talk about mutton dressing up as lamb,’ I commented.
The front door banged and I listened to the sound of her high-heeled shoes as they clicked along the pavement.
‘You’re a cheap tart!’ I yelled at the closed door.
What a fool she was making of herself. Oh, if only I had sensible parents, I thought, then maybe I, and even Brian, would have turned out all right.
I pulled on a thick woollen jumper over my faded blue jeans, grabbed my jacket and left the house. I was determined not to go back that night. Let Mum worry about me. Serve her right. ‘I must ditch the self-pity and stop blaming others’, I had written in my diary only the previous evening. But I was sick of trying, sick of everything.
I caught a bus into town and wandered the streets aimlessly before heading for the Big Sound, an all-night disco. It’ll be safer and warmer to spend the night in a disco than out on the street, I thought decisively, turning up my collar against a chilling breeze and the first spots of rain. But the thought of the ear-splitting music, the dismal, smoky atmosphere, the sweaty bodies packed together like sardines in the dark and, worst of all, the endless ritual of kissing and petting with lads I neither knew nor liked, nauseated me. I stopped and leant against a wall to think things over. I didn’t want that way of life. Not tonight. Nor any other night.
I roamed the streets for what seemed ages; head down, staring at pavements shiny with rain. The town hall clock struck eleven. I had an idea. My last bus was due to leave town in fifteen minutes. I would be on that bus. But I wouldn’t be going home.
Sitting on the smoky top deck watching the heavily made-up wives with their red-faced boozed-up husbands and eavesdropping on their meaningless talk, I felt more and more isolated. Surely people were meant for better things, yet what ‘things’? Supposing those religious experiences, which had seemed so wonderful, if only for a short time, had awakened in me a craving for ‘spirituality’
that would never subside, leaving me destined forever to be disillusioned with the world?
Now that I’d no longer got my pie-in-the-sky-when-we-die beliefs to make it more palatable, I still had to live in this rotten, lousy world that I didn’t feel at home in. One glimpse of heaven for the price of hell!
‘Fares please!’ said the conductor, jolting me back from the edge of the abyss.
Force of habit almost made me stand as we neared the stop where I usually got off. But as I gazed through the rain-splattered bus window at our house, all I could think was I didn’t want to go home. More than anything else I didn’t want to go home.
At the terminus I pretended to adjust my shoe until the other passengers had gone, then I tiptoed to a seat near the front and crouched. I listened anxiously as the conductor climbed the stairs and walked along the aisle sliding windows shut. His footsteps grew nearer but then, to my relief, I heard him going back down the stairs. The lights were turned off and the bus, with its stowaway, sped towards the depot.
The bus stopped with the engine still running. Then it started moving again. Slowly, and from all sides, came swishing, thumping, rubbing sounds with a closing in of something dark green. ‘Help, what’s happening?’ I whispered, gripping the metal handrail on top of the backrest of the seat in front, but it was only the large, mechanical bus washers. At last the bus was parked for the night. The driver and conductor whistled and chatted as they walked away.
An eerie silence descended over the lingering smells of the engine and stale cigarette smoke. Peering through the windows I saw that my bus was flanked on either side by two empty buses. I stretched my legs, moved into a more comfortable position – and began to wonder what the hell I was doing alone on a cold, dark bus in the middle of the night.
Then the thoughts really started. First, about High Royds; a painful reliving of those four months. And then about the church beliefs. Could anything be worse than living for ever and ever with no hope of annihilation?
‘God, how can you be so cruel?’ I whispered accusingly. ‘Why can’t non-Christians cease to exist when they die? What kind of God are you? Sadistic? Oh, I …’ But I stopped short of saying, ‘I hate you.’
I tried again: ‘Jesus, I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything.’
Humbled, I was praying in a different vein now. ‘Help me get through this difficult stage of my life.’
But the more I tried to invoke the intervention of God with my last remaining grains of faith, the more the conflict intensified. I sank to my knees, my face buried in the bus seat, cold beads of perspiration sticking my fringe to my forehead. ‘Please help me, God, if you are there. Oh, please still this storm inside of me … It’s tearing me apart.’
Just look at you, Jean, I said to myself as if observing coolly from a distance. A weak, snivelling wretch who is looking for easy answers. You still haven’t let go. What do you expect now? An Angel of Light to appear?
No, no, there is no God to help me and no Satan to hinder me; that’s just superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
Yes, but the conflict in your mind indicates you’re mentally sick, Jean. If a psychiatrist could see you now, you’d be taken straight back to High Royds.
No. No. It can’t happen to me.
Oh, can’t it? Of course it can. Plenty of other people have gone crazy and ended up in mental hospitals, so why can’t it happen to you? There’s nothing strong or clever or special about you.
I was shivering; the air on the bus seemed icy. I hadn’t known it would be so cold here.
I searched my bag for pills but I hadn’t brought them. How I wished I’d something, anything, that might blunt the edges of pain for tonight, be it gin or pills or some grass to smoke. I’d never taken illicit drugs. But what did abstaining from pot and the like matter now that I was living on daily doses of drugs which were probably far more potent than ‘soft’ drugs like marijuana?
I went to lie on the back seat where there was more room and closed my eyes tightly, willing sleep to come to blot everything out.
Time passed. How long? An hour? Several hours?
As if awaking from a trance, I sat up with a jolt. What was I doing here? I had to go home.
I was outside roaming dark, lonely streets in the early hours of the morning, lost in a street lined with derelict buildings. I glanced behind me. A shadow shifted revealing a man in a dark overcoat. I walked faster. A tense, tingling sensation crept through my body. I jerked round. The gap between us had narrowed. I feared coming to a dead-end. I’d had nightmares like this.
I turned a corner, climbed over a wall near a boarded-up warehouse, stumbled in the dark across a yard, squeezed through a fence and ran along deserted moonlit streets. Exhausted and with a stabbing pain in my side, I could go no further. I stopped near a block of empty houses awaiting demolition and leant, panting, against a wall overlooking a paved yard. After resting there, I hurried along and came to the comparative safety of a familiar main road. I was several miles from home but was able to find my way in the steadily increasing light of early morning.
Dad was setting off for work when I arrived home. He showed no surprise on seeing me and I guessed (rightly as I found out later) that my parents had assumed I’d gone to a disco with Jackie or Mandy and then slept at one of their houses, as I often did.
‘Don’t you and Brian be noisy today,’ Dad said. ‘Your mum’s in bed with a migraine.’
‘She’s always got a bleedin’ headache,’ Brian commented.
‘I don’t wonder, living here,’ I said.
I opened the pantry door and began eating a slice of bread, too hungry to bother buttering it. After a few mouthfuls I saw the green mould and flung it down in disgust.
‘Aren’t you going to finish it?’ Brian asked.
‘No, ’cos the bloody bread’s green.’
Brian laughed loudly.
‘Shut up, you’ll wake Mum.’
‘How can it be red if it’s green, or green if it’s red?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t you get it? It’s a joke. You called it bloody bread. Blood is red but mould is green. What a face, Jean. You’ve no sense of humour these days.’
I filled my hot-water bottle and went upstairs. Oh, the bliss of hugging something warm. I pulled an old overcoat of Dad’s over my dirty, crumpled clothes, slipped off my shoes and crawled into bed. Outside my room Brian continued his silly talk.
‘Hey, Jean, you said the bloody bread was green, didn’t you? Blood is red, not green. Don’t you know that? So was the bread red or green? Tell me that, then. You can’t, can you?’
He showed no signs of ending this monologue so I got out of bed, opened the door, and said softly, ‘Be quiet, Brian. You’ll wake Mum and she’s not well.’
‘No one tells me to be quiet! I’ll make as much bleedin’ noise as I want,’ Brian said loudly.
‘Oh, you stupid ass!’ I said before climbing back into bed.
‘That must mean you want to hear my ass noises,’ Brian said. He stomped into my bedroom and leant over my bed going ‘Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Hee-haw …!’
I was shivering and aching all over. The last thing I wanted was Brian around. About five minutes later he was still hee-hawing beside my bed and I made the mistake of saying, ‘Shut up, you fuckin’ swine!’ which promptly caused the hee-haws to turn to oinks.
‘Oh, I’m a pig now, am I, Jean? All right then. Oink! Oink! Oink! Oink! Oink!’
When he finally left my room, I lay on my back, feeling hot, silent teardrops escaping from the sides of my eyes and trickling into my ears: tears of self-pity because I felt cold and sick and isolated, so achingly, despairingly miserable. I reached for the bottles on my bedside orange-box and swallowed the handful of pills which would transport me to my temporary haven of oblivion.
LOOKING BACK 3
I WAS VERY CLOSE to my father. Among my earliest memories are those of him lying with his head over the arm of the sofa while I, pretending to be his bar
ber, combed his thick, black hair. We also played hide and seek, and he carried me up to bed on his shoulders.
But his ‘bad moods’ frightened me. Sometimes he’d wake me in the middle of the night, claiming my bed. I’d go into the ‘big bed’ but Mum would say, ‘If yer dad’s sleeping in your bed, I’m sleeping downstairs.’ I could never understand why she preferred the small, lumpy sofa to sleeping with me. And why did Mum and Dad keep hurting each other? School in the morning. Tired at my desk. Questions unanswered.
I didn’t see why God couldn’t step in and sort out the troubles at home. But even back then, as early as the age of ten, the first big doubt was already tugging at my sleeve. How could I know for certain that God, unlike Santa Claus, really did exist? One afternoon, alone in the living room, I decided to settle the matter by a little experiment. After all, if angels appeared before mere mortals in biblical days, then why not now?
‘Listen, God, I’m going to count up to three,’ I told Him, ‘and on the count of three, let an angel come into this room, then I’ll never doubt again. OK?’
I took a deep breath and counted. One. Two. Three.
Exactly on the count of three the door opened. Startled, I almost screamed in fright. In came my father who tossed a white paper bag into my lap. ‘A little present for you,’ he said. I opened it with trembling fingers. Inside the bag was an angel. The kind that is put on Christmas trees and shines in the dark.
Inspired by Captain Costello of the David and Goliath sketch, I wanted to star in our Sunday school plays. Despite my shyness I could speak out loudly and clearly when acting. Mum and Dad were at the adult meeting to watch me when I led a group to follow the Bethlehem Star in our nativity play. My Sunday school teacher decided I would look more the part if I had a long, black pigtail. She pulled a black, nylon stocking on my head, the ‘leg part’ dangling down my back. When I made my entrance someone at the back of the hall sniggered and then loud laughter erupted throughout the congregation. Bravely, I launched into my eloquent speech, which I had practised every day to reach perfection. After a few sentences I was struggling not to laugh. Unfortunately, people remained more interested in the stocking on my head than the Star in the East.
