Man Hating Psycho

by Iphgenia Baal

  Parallel to my treacherous home life, which I accepted unquestioningly, was school, which I did not accept unquestioningly but where I was nonetheless sent. School did exactly what it was supposed to do: gave little-me a wide range of little people against which to compare myself.

  My first memory of noticing a difference between my family and other people’s was revealed in Art. Our art teacher told the class to draw a picture of their ʻentire familyʼ. She wrote the words on the board. I got straight to it, drawing my parents, drawing my sisters, drawing me. But when it came to Show & Tell I found that while everyone had drawn parents and siblings, they’d also drawn cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents, aunties, uncles… This would’ve been 1987 or ’88, when both of my dad’s parents were alive, as were his sisters and their children and although I had met them, they all lived ‘somewhere else’ and for one reason or another didn’t figure in my kiddy-world in any real way. My mum’s parents died before I was born but I’m unable to say if I was aware of that by this stage, it being hard to notice the absence of something that’s never been there. There was an uncle, my mum’s brother, who I was vaguely aware of, but I didn’t think of him as my uncle, only as my mum’s brother. The only person who was really around was Kinnie, a big, blonde Austrian woman who I knew was something to do with my mum but they weren’t related. You only had to look at them to know that.

  I don’t remember bringing up my Art class experience with my parents but I do remember a brief obsession with cousins. An obsession which manifested as a short-lived imaginary cousin called Maggie (named, terrifyingly enough, after Margaret Thatcher).

  My next reality check went down in the swimming pool changing rooms — the scene of many a rude childhood awakening. Mindlessly stripping before donning my swimsuit and racing to the pool (swimming was my favourite), one of the four Sophies in my class loud-whispered to one of the three Lauras about me being a funny colour. I remember looking down at my tiny torso under the strip lights and, sure enough where everyone else was pink or brown, I was green.

  And then there was the Christmas party I went to at Nat the Bat’s. Ten or twenty kids high on e-numbers, the grown-ups drinking, when who should arrive but Santa, with a sack full of plastic tat. The other kids crowded round to receive their presents but I hung back, fixated by the sight of Santa’s hands, knowing this couldn’t be Santa because I’d seen pictures of Santa and Santa’s hands were fat and pink but this Santa’s fingers were flat and brown. Hands I’d recognise anywhere: my dad’s.

  In the 1990 recession my dad lost his job. One of the first people at his firm do so. We, the kids, only understood this wasn’t good because when we raced into my parents’ room at 6am to demand the toys being advertised on telly, we were told we couldn’t afford them. Other than that, our new financial status didn’t mean anything to us. We still lived in the same flat and ate the same food and went to the same schools. The only palpable difference was that there were no more holidays and my dad stayed home all the time, under the impression that he’d be re-hired by his old job when things got better. But he wasn’t re-hired, despite them keeping a photograph of him on the company website long after his departure.

  My dad’s unemployment eventually became self-employment. He started his own due diligence company, which proved to be a task suited to his unique and peculiar way of thinking. What had been the dining room became his office, which we, the kids would make a massive deal out of pantomime-tiptoeing past, loudly telling each other to be quiet.

  Any problems that existed between my parents were kept out of earshot from the kids until I was nine or ten, when my dad had an affair. The affair didn’t last long but when he came clean, as might be expected, shit went haywire. It’s hard for me to get a time scale on the fallout. It could’ve been a single day or it could’ve been weeks but there was a lot of shouting, slamming doors, storming off and coming back to shout some more. It was the first time I’d ever seen any shouting in my family home that wasn’t my dad shouting at me and although I was doubtless distressed on some level, I do remember enjoying it being him being shouted at for once.

  Things were touch and go for a while but eventually my mum forgave my dad. The forgiveness was frosty at first but soon a new normal descended. The new normal resembled the old normal with one discrepancy: the fracas had undoubtedly been my dad’s fault, it was (as far as the kids were concerned) my mum who got the blame. We weren’t reacting to what had happened because we didn’t understand what’d happened, or the first thing about gender relations and how women are physically tied to their children in a way which men are not. We were reacting to my mum’s reaction. Her outpouring of vitriol and upset at my dad’s betrayal and, worse than that, the prospect of the only family she had left falling to pieces.

  This unconscious siding with my dad created friction between me, as the eldest of the children and spokesperson, and my mum. I stopped listening to her when she asked me to do things and started answering back. Early warning signs of my imminent teenage rebellion. Instead of confronting me over my bad behaviour, my mum simply relayed word to my dad. A fight I’d got in, a scribble I’d done on a wall, the tantrum I’d had when I was caught. It wouldn’t take much to rile my dad, who was on tenterhooks and spinning out about his life choices as it was. He’d march into whatever room I was in, demand an explanation, wouldn’t get one, and then explode.

  Where, as a young child, I’d accepted my dad’s divine authority, outbursts and all, my new go-to was to challenge it. Safe in the knowledge that my dad would never really hurt me, while knowing that he himself had done something ‘bad’ and was ‘in trouble’, I began to square up to him, shouting back, refusing to accept his version or my mother’s version of events of what I’d done, calling them both hypocrites. They screamed and shouted and threw things at each other so who were they to tell me how to behave?

  My escalating naughtiness made my parents decide I needed therapy. So to therapy I was sent.

  I hated therapy. Boring hours sat in a beige room, being stared at by a long-skirted, cloying woman who spoke in the patronising tone of voice that adults who don’t remember being children use on them. I was less than forthcoming, often refusing to speak for whole ʻsessionsʼ – the word still makes me barf.

  The therapist tried to get me to draw, hoping I might spin off a few doodles of a sacrificial lamb with its innards out or a house with my family in it on fire. No such luck.

  Every few months my parents would meet the therapist to discuss my ʻprogressʼ. I’m telling you I would’ve paid good money (which in those days, on pocket money of £10 a week, would’ve been maybe £100) to have sat in on those meetings and hear their resentments refashioned into concern as they tried to figure out what to do with me.

  Although I hated therapy, the idea of not going never occurred to me. My parents would drop me off at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital for the appointments, but I was always made to go in alone (part of the ʻtreatmentʼ) and because I was at my core a good girl who did what she was told, it was months before it occurred to me to ditch the dreaded session, to go in the front entrance and then skip out the back to goof around the Embankment for an hour.

  Teenagehood kicked in. I started going out, dying my hair, going to parties, getting drunk, kissing boys, falling in swimming pools, shaving my head, smoking hash, going to gigs, huffing cans of Lynx Africa through a sock. My bog-standard rebellion sent my parents into panic mode. New rules were plucked out of thin air. Things I couldn’t do, people I couldn’t see, times I had to be home by, all without explanation.

  Appalled by the arbitrariness of the new rules, bored by playing dress up with my sisters, embarrassed by how lame my parents were and raging with hormones that convinced me that I was right about everything, my confrontations with my dad went up a notch. Knowing the answer was gonna be no to whatever I was asking, I began starting fights pre-emptively going for my dad before he could get a look-in and leading him in cat-and-mouse scrambles ro
und the flat. It was during one of these early teenage fights that I had the police called on me for the first time. I must’ve been around fourteen-years-old because I was already into Nirvana (Kurt two years dead). I can’t remember what the initial disagreement was, but I do remember the aftermath. Me sitting on the balcony outside my room in my underwear boo-hooing and bashing out Nirvana’s version of ʻIn the Pinesʼ on my acoustic guitar. My refusal to come in or shut up for several hours summoned two uniformed police officers into my bedroom, the only sanctuary I had in the world. Walkie-talkies blaring, handcuffs clinking. I remember how big they looked against a backdrop of Oasis posters and I remember their hot, clammy trotters pawing at my naked upper arms and thighs as they dragged me and my guitar inside.

  Being manhandled by the police, who were gruff and yelled at me to ʻcalm downʼ with a threat of arrest, shut me up, but once the policemen had gone and the shock and embarrassment faded, the only thing I was left with was disgust. It is hard to convey quite how appalled I was by my first taste of state authority and just how low my parents fell in my estimation. The era where my dad switched between being my best friend and confidant to my worst enemy was over. He’d called the police on me and I could scarcely stand to look at him. And by the look on his face when he looked at me, the feeling was mutual. He bristled with rage and resentment at the way I was turning out, as if my character, my behaviour, my very appearance (which at this point was pretty ridiculous) revealed something he didn’t want the world to know. Something that needed to be corrected, fixed, reconditioned.

  From this point, shit unravelled. There was fight after fight after fight. Fights about me going out, fights about me not eating my dinner, fights about things my parents had found in my pockets, fights about playing music too loud, fights about what I was wearing, fights about where I’d been, fights about getting kicked out of school, fights about stealing my sister’s pocket money. But by this stage I was hip to the fact that there was a world outside home and outside school where my parents had no jurisdiction. I took to the streets.

  The first time I left after a fight all I did was prowl the local area until I was sure everyone was in bed, but the worse the arguments got the further afield I ventured. I’d go to friend’s houses and stay multiple nights without calling my parents to let them know where I was. Or, if things were really bad and I couldn’t find a friend’s house to go to, I’d sleep with tramps in Oxford Street doorways, choosing Oxford Street for its proximity to school, which for some insane reason I still attending, even if what they were teaching seemed more and more convoluted and less and less relevant to the very pressing issues I was facing in day-to-day life. I’m all for Katherine Mansfield but I could’ve done with a little Artaud.

  Some days I’d arrive at school without books, and on one particularly memorable occasion, without shoes, having run out of the house in a state without time to get my things in order. When my friends asked me why I’d come to school with no shoes I told them I’d had a fight with my dad but I felt stupid saying it because I didn’t have any injuries to show. When I thought of parents who hit their children, I thought of the Childline ad that ran on breaks between cartoons, of a kid in a vest chained to a radiator but that wasn’t what my fights with my dad were like. My fights were like fights between equals. Mano a mano. Or at least that’s what I told myself when I was feeling brave. When a little less puffed up, the truth was that I found it all really confusing and couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was about me that wound my dad up so much.

  From the age of sixteen I left home so many times it’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly when I left for good, if ever. Disavowing my family, I’d march off, determined never to return. Not having any money and being utterly disinterested in getting a job, I dived headlong into a series of abusive relationships with men who were significantly older and/or richer than me in order to survive. My abuse of these men was using them to live off, theirs was fucking a half-crazed child. But I wasn’t the easiest paedophilic lay. Bubbling with mistrust and used to being fucked over, I was always testing, always wanting to find out what these men were made of, and as it turns out they weren’t made of much. These men weren’t my dad – who might have been an abusive weirdo but his abusive weirdness was rooted in love: the men I was fucking didn’t give two shits. There was no substance to it. All these relationships ended the same way. With me feeling betrayed. One insignificant sleight and I was off, throwing phones out of windows and tagging front doors like a deranged Wee Willie Winkie. I (unsurprisingly) found myself ostracised, broke and homeless again and again but worse than being billy-no-mates, I was also getting arrested all the time. Criminal damage, harassment, common assault, the charges piled up. What was it about me that made everyone so eager to call the cops? I’d seen much worse behaviour, sometimes by the people who did the calling, sometimes by their friends but I was the only person who ever seemed to have the police show up.

  I’d return to my parents house, tail between legs. I didn’t want to but what choice did I have? I had no other back up in the world. My parents welcomed me with semi-open arms. Yes, I could stay, yes, they had missed me but no, they hadn’t kicked me out, I’d chosen to leave and what were my long-terms plans? They tried to coax me back into education, suggesting I sit the A Levels I’d walked out on, or apply for University but I found their simpering respect for qualifications immensely irritating and bourgeois. What use was knowing History, English or Chemistry in a world where all it took was one call to undermine someone completely?

  Although my parents didn’t have the full picture, they could tell from the bizarro anarcho theories I was starting to spout that I was struggling. They tried to get me to open up about what was going but I didn’t want to talk to them about what I was gonna do with my life. If I was going to talk to them about anything, it was gonna be about what they’d done to it. Didn’t they understand that I’d slept on the streets? Didn’t they understand the danger they’d put me in? Didn’t they understand how much they fucked me up in terms of understanding love and relationships? These conversations went in circles, with my parents eventually getting fed up and falling back on the same tropes everyone was applying to me: I was lazy, crazy, a liar, a thief, wouldn’t know the truth if it hit me over the head with a skateboard…

  It was after one especially humiliating arrest, where I was dragged out of party in front of crowds of cheering toffs, that I finally dropped my guard enough to share an edited version of the current unfolding disaster with my dad.

  I told him about the cheating ex-boyfriend who had started the whole thing, about the cheating ex-boyfriend’s brother who’d hanged himself, about being frozen out by everyone after the funeral. My dad knew exactly what I was talking about without me needing to go on. I was amazed how good it felt to be confiding in him again, like the old, old days, when I’d confided in him about my sticker collection or my favourite beetle. It wasn’t like talking to other people, where I needed to reexplain things several times until they understood it, it was like talking to my people.

  It was during this conversation that, in response to my list of woes, my dad came back with something typically left-field but surprisingly insightful. He said, ‘The thing these people don’t understand is that the more a person ignores or denies something in life, the more ruled by it he becomes. By cutting you out, these people simply create a boundary, which will go on to shape and inform their lives, arguably giving you far greater influence over them than if you’d simply been friends.’

  The complicated truth of what my dad was saying (essentially a psychoanalytical version of ‘denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, honey’) settled upon my thoughts with a strangely calming effect. I turned the concept over in my head: by saying no to me, by cutting me out, by silencing and disallowing me, ‘these people’ would have to silence a whole load of other things too. Things that reminded them of me, things that looked like me, things that sounded like me, things that acted like me. T
he idea slotted so gracefully into my thoughts that it was impossible to deny it. It was if my brain had been a messy desk, piled high with random papers and suddenly a filing cupboard ready-filled with pre-labelled folders had appeared, as if by magic, providing a place for everything. Once it was tidy, another thought occurred to me, which was this: what if ‘these people’ weren’t responding to me at all? What if it was that I reminded them of something they were already trying to suppress? Someone else they’d wronged, someone else they’d fucked over, someone who just happened to look and sound and act like me.

  Delighted with my epiphany, which allowed me to dismiss anyone who didn’t like me as racist, I spent a couple of days enjoyably applying my dad’s words to every neg-out situation I could think of: ex-boyfriends, ex-bosses, ex-teachers, ex-friends. Dirty, naughty racists. Hateful, old deniers. It was only when I ran out of other people to apply my dad’s wisdom to that I finally (actually by accident) applied it to myself. The unwelcome thought popped up into my brain on a walk through Fitzrovia: I had just spent the last decade doing my utmost to live as if I didn’t have any parents. I’d put all my energy into trying to get away from them, to shut them up, to silence them, just like the world was doing to me. Had the world done the same to them? I wondered. I had no idea. I tried to collate what little I did know into some kind of order and found it severely lacking. I knew my mum was born in Australia and that her parents were maybe Russian, maybe Polish, maybe Ukrainian, definitely Jews, who’d gone to Oz after the war before coming to England. I knew my dad was born in Holland and that his parents were from Suriname, but I’m not sure I could’ve located Suriname on a map and definitely couldn’t tell you the name of the capital. I knew my mum’s parents had died when she was small. Her mum when she was maybe nine, maybe ten, her dad when she was twelve or thirteen, and that she had a brother. I knew my dad had three sisters, one who’d converted to Islam. I might’ve been able to conjure up a couple more random factoids but that was essentially it. Standing on an Oxford Street corner, outside the Boots where I’d slept for a few nights during my GCSEs, the spectres of my parents and my parents’ parents and all their parents before them loomed large. Where were all these lost people and what were they to me?