Island (5 page)

But for me it is. Due to me living in a prosperous first world democracy where the state has shouldered the responsibility of keeping me clothed and fed and a roof over my head every time no individual human wants to. Which you could see in itself as a crime couldn’t you. If you go back to nature for example; a young creature rejected by its parent – left alone in the wild – will die. Unless another adult creature comes along, takes up the orphan and lavishes it with love. (It’s true. Wolves and monkeys have adopted human babies, ducks have adopted swans, a collie bitch suckled a lion cub – it’s
true
.) Nature’s solution is: die or get another mother. What the hell right has a government got to interfere with nature?

I hope you’re following
my argument. I’ve had time to see the pattern in my own life (flying swooping falling sinking; flying swooping falling sinking) and to realise that I am powerless to change it. I can’t try
not
to have Fear. It comes. It’s just there one day. Like the edge in the air one winter’s morning. Frost. It’s not possible to push it away.

I can’t stop it – even when I’ve analysed it; even when I’ve put my finger on what caused it. (A counsellor I once had swore by that: ‘Articulate your distress. Get it out of your system.’ Well no, actually. Articulating it doesn’t remove it. Strange to say it doesn’t go into a big speech bubble and float harmlessly off into the ether, it doesn’t come out of me as easily as
words
. For christ’s sake. It’s
in
me. I am unlovable. Impossible to love. No one has ever loved me not even my own mother.)

Oh yes; I forgot. When presenting you with the figures for people who have no mother-love, I should have excluded those who have some retrospectively, those whose abandoning mothers have made the effort to trace them twenty years later or sent a card or even made a phone call. Because what any of those shows is an iceberg of love and anxiety under the pinpoint of the contact; a phone call after twenty years indicates to me nineteen years of agonising about whether to do it or not, and a final overwhelming of all other considerations by the absolute desire to hear the lost child’s voice.

Absolute desire. Imagine.

Anyway. You must consider how I felt trapped. When you understand it all and you’ve worked it all out and even articulated your distress and
realised it doesn’t help; if you’re twenty-nine and faced with the prospect of being damaged goods for the rest of your life say another fifty years of flying swooping falling sinking; of enduring altered states, of having Fear; of never getting out of your own head with its own particular problems (getting out of your head is another thing I should talk to you about with reference to chemicals but not to interrupt just now) then you can fall into a depression. I did. I became pissed off. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life having attacks of Fear. Yes I thought of suicide. But it makes me very angry the thought I should have to kill myself for someone else’s bad behaviour.

Who put me in this situation?
She
did. And once I’d killed her, I thought, the problems she created for me would quite likely perish with her. She would have an excuse for not loving me (being dead): she would have got her just deserts for not loving me. And having given an eye for an eye I might resume myself like a phoenix, self-authored, recreated, I might fly, swoop,
fly
. Fly and fly and fly and shed that Fear for ever.

Now. Getting out of your head. To qualify: I required to get out of my head because in my head was Fear, or the danger of having Fear, and no visible escape from that cycle.

Getting out of your head (sic) tends to be done with alcohol or drugs. That’s what other people do, those who feel the need. They get out of their heads and they laugh and sing and dance and feel OK. They lose control – deliberately. They chemically disinhibit themselves.

When I am flying I’m in control. When I was doing my A levels; when I started work at Yewtree Housing; I was in control. When I have Fear I am not in control.

I spend my life being
vigilant – guarding against the oncome, the creeping up of Fear. If I got smashed wouldn’t I lay myself open? Prostrate myself naked in front of it yelling
Come and get me
?

I would like to get out of my head and escape fear of Fear. But I can’t think of anything worse than willingly losing control and letting Fear in. And I’m afraid (I said I wasn’t didn’t I? I said I am not nervous timid afraid etc. it wasn’t true) I am afraid that the me which is tightly constructed would unravel. I want to get out of my head, but not to nowhere. Not to find there’s nowhere, no other land to stand on.

I’m afraid of drugs. I’m afraid of losing it. I’m so afraid that when people joke about how pissed they were I start to feel sick. After one drink my whole body goes hot and cold like an early warning system, I couldn’t drink more if I wanted to, my throat constricts. When I see someone smashed I feel horror and disgust.

It’s not something other people like (why should they? Look. I’m not asking you to like me. I’m telling you the truth, I’m telling you about a change. A kind of transformation. It is lucky I planned to kill her or none of this would have happened. You don’t have to like me to see the way things have changed, sea changed. Do you?)

No one likes a person who doesn’t drink or do drugs. A no-fun abstemious teetotalling creep; foul, I agree. I just daren’t. I’ve never told anyone that before, and that’s the truth.

6
Falling

You might say this was predestined. It happened
because I caught the fag end of a TV documentary in the pub. Ten minutes later and I’d have missed it. And then I wouldn’t have had a clue. Before I decided to kill her you see, my position was
fuck her
. She doesn’t want to know me, I don’t want to know her. I’ll never give her the satisfaction of imagining I’ve wasted even ten seconds’ thought on her.

But I happened to arrive for work early. And there was this worthy female bleating on about adoption. With a couple of live
oh-yes-please-expose-my-private-parts-to-six-million-viewers
guinea pigs. Adoptees. Trying to trace their mamas. And the first thing they did was to write to the Office of National Statistics in Southport, and that’s how they got their birth certificates.

You don’t have a birth
certificate, you see. Not like any other human being. All you have is an adoption certificate, a nice little fake, a bit of plastic panelling tacked over the void.

So I thought well it’s a gift. A nudge. I’ll write to them and see. What the hell. I might be the illegitimate daughter of Mary Whitehouse, you never know.

It was drip-feed for about a year then because I wasn’t pushing and people in those places are basically paid to be retarded newts. Then there’s the bureaucratic obstacle course; I even had to see a counsellor and convince the sucker I was sane.

However, in the end I got my hands on two photocopies: the birth certificate (Susan Lovage) and a page from someone’s notepad, social worker or police, about finding me. The date at the top was 1968 October 3. The day after my birthday.

I was found in a cardboard box on the doorstep of Camden High Street post office. Found by the cleaner at 6.30 a.m. I was wrapped in a towel and I was newborn.

So where did my mother expel me? In a bed in a nearby house? Squatting in the bushes in the park? In a pub’s back-yard toilet after closing time?

When did she put me there? Midnight? 3 a.m.? Or was it someone else, maybe? Her
mother
. Yes, what if she had a mother, who helped her get rid of me?

She chucked me away but didn’t want me to die. That’s the puzzle. The towel, the box, the post office. Maybe she even knew how early the cleaner came. Chose the post office above the bank or the greengrocer’s, for that reason.

Or was it
because she
really
wanted rid: not just chuck me in the bin; post me. Send me
far
.

They alerted the local hospitals. She pitched up at Casualty that afternoon, bleeding too much. Was she alone? It doesn’t say. It says she couldn’t keep me, she gave me for adoption. Gave. They got her name and address on a birth certificate and through that they got a name for me. It’s the Susan is the only question. Her choice? Oh sure. Most likely the name of the cleaner who found me. Or the policeman’s girlfriend. The worst name anyone there could think of and put on for a joke.

It’s a crap name anyway. Her date of birth was 18 January 1948. She was
twenty
.

When you watch a woman with a baby she’s always looking at it. On a bus for example, or just sitting in the park. She’ll talk to someone but her eyes will rest on the baby, like the moon and the earth, she can’t escape its gravity. She’s constantly checking it, making sure it hasn’t got its sheet in its mouth or its hat strings strangling it or its hands cold or its nose snotty or flies in its eyes.

Not my mother.

You see them with their knuckles clenched tight around the buggy handles battling round small shops, eyes alert for baby snatchers.

Not my mother.

You see big fat pregnant cows patting their bellies with complacent dozy smiles, planning names and clothes.

Not my mother. Push it out and get rid. Couldn’t wait to get her eyes
off
me. OK if she was a kid. OK if she was fifteen. But
twenty
? Cunt.

She dumps me on a
doorstep in a box; another bit of rubbish. She hasn’t even got the courage to stuff me in a bin to die.

From then onwards I went down. Down down down down down. I stopped sleeping, I was pacing my room all night listening to the noises, then I fell asleep in the day and missed my shift at the pub. I missed a few and he sacked me. It didn’t matter because I wasn’t spending anything – I wasn’t going out, I could survive on my giro. But the landlady gave me a month’s notice. People sniff out weakness, don’t they, if you’re just hanging on by your fingertips, nothing gives them greater pleasure than to unclasp your fingers one by one and prise you off. What did she want me out for? She wasn’t going to use the room. I paid my rent, I was quiet and tidy, I never lost my key. She said she didn’t know I’d be around so much in the daytime, she liked people to work. Well whoopee-doo, she didn’t work. Just hung in there like a great bloated leech sucking up cash from her tenants. I wasn’t in a good state for finding another place, there didn’t seem to be much available and one house I rang was always engaged and at another no one ever came to the door. I was blurry and dizzy I told her I wasn’t well, which completely pisses me off now, that I was reduced to appealing to that old shark for sympathy. I made myself feel better by planning how I’d leave the room but it was difficult because I was at the top of the stairs and she always knew as soon as I came out. Also I needed my deposit back. Bitch. I had to content myself with flushing a gigantic sanitary towel down the toilet. It was an easy toilet to block.

But I was falling. I hadn’t got anywhere to go. I was out on the street in the morning and nowhere to lay my head that night, and a rucksack and a bag weighing me down.

There’s nothing more
disgusting than being pitiful. Asking for things. I had to find a floor to sleep on. I rang Karen, the other barmaid; I rang caring Bill from the last home; I rang that bastard Vince who dumped me for no reason and I knew perfectly well in advance that each of them would have cast iron reasons why it was impossible for me to curl up on four square feet of their floor for a night or two.
She
made me this; the one you can walk away from.

Oh ha ha. Don’t go thinking I’m sorry for myself. I’m not that soft. I see them in their little relationships and families, maintaining their values and their property and their gene pool. At least I’m not hypocritical enough to want any of that shit. But I didn’t do anything to Vince. I was nice to him.

Phoning was the most I could do, the whole of outside was so big and light and noisy and I’d hardly been out for days I was in that state where I knew all I must do was sit it out last it out endure the Fear until it rolled on over me. I had to go in somewhere I was exposed as a peeled shrimp. I went into the big marble mouth of the library, shuffling under my rucksack and bag, like those old codgers who go there for the day out of the cold to sit over a newspaper and stink. I stayed till hunger drove me out and when I went I left my rucksack there as if I’d just gone to get a book so I wouldn’t have to carry it.

This is what it reduces you to. I went to university you know. I got away with pretending to be one of them, I wrote essays I talked to tutors I sat in the union bar I took notes in lectures. I screwed boys who’ll be lecturers themselves by now. I was a perfectly convincing student and then I went down.

When I did resurface I couldn’t go back because it was a joke. All these middle-class kids
playing
. Playing
house, playing being poor/drunk/smashed/in love/broken hearted/naughty/off the rails/irresponsible/behind with their work. All cavorting in their self-invented fucking dramas and all precisely on course; with Mummy and Daddy and money behind them, through the nice straight little Uni channel where with any luck they’d pick up a well-qualified spouse from the same socio-economic bracket as well as sound qualifications for themselves – and out into the charmed world of graduate employment and starter mortgages and a car from proud Daddy on graduation day and on and on into their cushy stifling protected little lives. Once you blow out of something you see it clearly don’t you. A charade. I would have gone back to puncture some of them if I’d had the chance. But the money and the energy and the perseverance required are all daunting. When I’m flying they’re all there – at my fingertips, at my feathertips. But from down in the depths they’re unreachable.