Mouthing the Words (12 page)

I have always taken comfort in thoughts like these,
all
the childlike thoughts you have to make sense of your place in the world. In the thought that the real you is asleep somewhere and you are actually dreaming a life. In the thought that there is a twin of you elsewhere on the planet. In the thought that you are really an adopted child and your parents are out there somewhere, perfect and searching. I have been searching. I am going to England to recover the life that was meant to be mine. I am to be reunited with Janawee, Ginniger and Heroin. I am going to have dinner parties with these three excellent women: Janawee, reunited with her birth family, who is studying piano and riding horses on their farm in the Cotswolds; Ginniger, who is a neurologist conducting experiments on cadavers at Leeds University; and Heroin, who has a feral girl-child strapped to her back and is galloping through Sherwood Forest, trampling snowdrops in search of truth and justice.

—

I live in an old vicarage on Canterbury Road in North Oxford now, the section between Woodstock Road and Walton Street, where the land slopes depressingly toward the Thames. I am not altogether clear about how I came to be here. It was certainly after I left the Magdalen College residence, my first tenancy. I remember feeling OK in the beginning, reassured in my first week by the number of people I met who also thought they were only there as the result of some administrative error. I imagined myself like Jude,
staring
lovingly at the towers in the distance, an outsider looking in. But Jude never made it this far. His feet stopped with women, the women who embodied his class and his culture and proved to be his millstone. I simply brought the women with me. That is the principal difference. And I came by car.

I might not have been certain who I was, but some kindly porter gave me a key to a room in a quadrangle. Above the door to the room was a name—“Miss T. A. Barley”—what excellent luck, I thought, I’ll be sharing a room with Thelma. Miss T. A. Barley also had a little pigeonhole in the Porter’s Lodge stuffed full of invitations to mixers with other graduate students in the Middle Common Room, calls to try out for the rowing crew, and requests for donations to support this year’s Third World Scholar. I was very impressed by that.

I had a neighbour called Miss N. A. Shepherd who introduced herself to me as such. She said, “It’s lovely to meet you, Miss T. A. Barley,” and all I could do was stammer out, “Why?”

“Because you appear to be the only other woman in the place,” she said. I was about to open my mouth and object and say, “Actually I’m not a woman,” but she continued with, “And you know what that means,” (which of course I didn’t), “it means you don’t go traipsing off to the loo in just your stockinged feet,” she declared.

I was nevertheless relieved to meet Miss N. A.
Shepherd
. I had been disheartened to discover that I was housed in a corridor of American Rhodes Scholars, all secretly imagining themselves the next Bill Clinton. An American drawl shouted “Hey” down the hall as I struggled with my bags, “are you another Rhodey?” I hesitated for a moment, flirting with the idea of a simple, uncomplicated, colluding
Yes
, which would have made me immediately acceptable on some level, but said, “Uh, no. Actually, I’m not.” There was clearly no polite question with which to follow this response. He might have said, “Well, what are you then?” but instead he said nothing more than “Oh,” and disappeared into his room never to speak to me again.

I looked around me in these first few days in Oxford, walked down narrow streets inhaling diesel fumes, and noticed how English people don’t seem to acknowledge the presence of anyone else on the street. They walk removed and withdrawn from others, save for the embarrassed scuffle as one is inconvenienced by near collision with another on a sidewalk wide enough for one only. They don’t say excuse me. It’s not that they’re rude, it’s just that they’re defensively preserved somehow, keeping themselves whole and intact. I see myself in the way they walk, and the concentrated obliviousness of their expressions. I see myself and think, Maybe this is where I come from. Maybe this is the way people move in small, tight places. Maybe I am not a social misfit, I just move in the way English
people
move. Maybe I have internalized this sense of space, despite being brought up in the wide, the open, the expanse of Canada. Maybe I am not insane. Maybe it’s just that I am English after all.

Among the papers in Miss T. A. Barley’s pigeonhole was a small white invitation that said, “Dr. Crispin Stuck has been assigned your ‘moral tutor’ and requests the pleasure of your company for drinks in his rooms at 6 pm on Sunday of 0th week, Michaelmas, 1992. Regrets only.” I was relieved to learn that someone had been appointed to take responsibility for my moral well-being. His (for the guardianship of morality here appeared to be an expressly male domain) primary responsibility, however, seemed to be signing consent forms that declared students fit and responsible (read stable and sane) enough to climb the college tower.

The year before, two students had jumped. Topping yourself seemed to be all the rage. The media had a field day with it:
Oxbridge Blues: High achievers find final solution to relentless pressure to perform at the nation’s finest
.

“He was terrifically outgoing and extremely popular with his peers,” lamented Mrs. Bosomworth of Tingley Gate, Worcestershire, mother of fresher Timothy, found hanging in his room at Corpus Christi.

Oxford officials declared in their defence that suicide among students at the University was statistically comparable to that among members of the same age group in the general population. Privately, of
course
, they were a lot more paranoid—hence the consent forms now necessary to climb the tower, and the instruction given to scouts—those staff who cleaned rooms—to report suspected drug use, excessive sleeping or disregard for personal care. On that basis, they should have hauled nearly everyone in, including the tutors.

My moral tutor, Crispin Stuck, undoubtedly thought of depression as some tedious form of self-indulgence—nothing that a couple of brandies couldn’t cure. He was expressly flamboyant, a self-proclaimed star in the theatre of life. When I was summoned for drinks just after my arrival, he greeted me at his door with what appeared to be a curtsy, a glass of sherry in his outstretched hand. I think he was expecting a curtsy in return. We weren’t taught finishing school etiquette at my high school in downtown Toronto, unfortunately—except if one counts being suspended for writing graffiti on the bathroom walls. (Willy’s speciality.)

There were two other new graduate students in Crispin Stuck’s room with him, David and Hugh, both young British men, pale, freshly shaven and gawky. David was also studying law, and Hugh, mathematics. I felt distinctly out of place, but fortunately Crispin was there to entertain and demanded nothing more from us than our complete and rapt attention as he took us on a tour of his “collections.” He had crammed into his two
large
rooms more than fifteen harpsichords and virginals, about a dozen gilt-edged mirrors, two enormous chandeliers, and a stuffed deer. It was quite amazing, really. Like the court of some eighteenth-century Viennese aristocrat.

The deer, he told us, was the nemesis of Dr. Pratt, the lately departed proctor of the college. Magdalen College includes a deer park within its extensive grounds, which, Dr. Stuck reported, sheltered at least one deer for every don of the college. When a don died, a deer was killed and consumed at High Table. In this case, Crispin Stuck had killed, stuffed and mounted the deer himself. He performed the deed upon hearing that Dr. Pratt had suffered a heart attack. Much to Crispin’s embarrassment, though, Dr. Pratt quickly recuperated in the Radcliffe Infirmary and lived for another year. The white deer named after Crispin was mysteriously poisoned. “Couldn’t let it go to waste, though,” said Crispin. “Still made a bloody fine Sunday roast,” he mused.

—

It was some time after drinks with Crispin that I moved to the vicarage. Six of us live here and I am not altogether sure who is who anymore. I am sometimes not sure if I am me, or Heroin, or the Thelma who has been undergoing a concurrent evolution on this side of the Atlantic, or even, sometimes, my mother. I am not sure if this was her life at age twenty-five and I keep meaning to write to her and ask her. I want to ask her if
she
ever had a Baby Belling in a bedsit. Ask her if she preferred a madras or a vindaloo. Ask her whether she likes sherry, and whether her shoes used to feel damp in the mornings, or if she knows what a Sloane Ranger is.

We are six women here, six women hiding behind the closed doors of our respective bedsits, making black coffee in the dark. It is dark because we purchase our electricity in fifty pence blocks, and there are only so many fifty pence coins that a girl can accumulate. We are in the dark because it is safer to be here. I pay forty pounds a week in order to hide behind my own door. Forty pounds a week to be safe in the dark.

The woman who first opened the door for me was Lucia. She’s a poet who writes painful pieces about love that yields forgiveness in the rain. The kind of yuck that Corinna really goes for. Lucia lives behind the closed door of the bedsit two floors below mine. She opened the door for me and looked me up and down before looking herself up and down, and realized she was buck naked.

“Goodness,” she said. “I’ve even forgotten to put on my shoes.”

Her feet were tiny, red and callused. She was tiny, red and callused, blue-veined from top to bottom. She promised me that one day soon we would share a bottle of wine. “I have a bottle, you know,” she told me slyly. “I’ve had a bottle since Christmas.” But we have yet to
share
that bottle. That was two months ago, the day I arrived, and I have caught only fleeting glances of her since. Lucia’s taxi driver rings the bell at eight o’clock every morning. I don’t know where she goes, but she leaves clutching a handbag overflowing with tiny scraps of paper, and returns home late. I hear her mumbling and scuffling through the corridors in those early morning hours.

There are a lot of noises here, the new noises of a new place that must become familiar before you can ever hope to sleep again. Clare is the noisiest: howling in her sleep, my walls reverberating with her agony. She has metal braces screwed into her legs and takes lithium and smells like sweet sticky vomit all the time. She is afraid to wash her hair and she spends the whole day knitting and unravelling in front of her television. Sometimes I offer her a cup of coffee, but she has never once accepted. In lieu of speech she leaves gifts for me every day, little parcels wrapped in layers of old newspaper—coins, carrots, pieces of chewing gum, or prunes.

We move, for the most part, autonomously in this shared space, each governed by our respective ghosts. This is a halfway house for women between life and somewhere else, and I’m sure, like me, no one knows exactly how she came to be here. Vera tells me she was passing by one day and stopped to stroke the belly of a big orange cat in the front yard of the vicarage. She felt a hand on her shoulder, and she turned and looked up
into
the strangely gentle but stern face of a weathered old woman who asked her if she needed a place to live.

Mona says that God brought her here. She claims that she and her husband were missionaries in the Philippines in a past life. She paints pictures of tropical vegetation in gaudy primary colours and then photographs them and sticks them askew onto cards. “Only a quid each,” she tells me, pressing a stack of fifty into my reluctant hands.

The old woman is Mrs. Morin. At eighty years old, she pushes her bicycle everywhere, and carries the orange cat in a basket at the front. “Oh no, I never
ride
it, my dear,” she says to me.

Mrs. Morin and her charges: the five women she must keep safe. We try to keep each other safe. We do not pass judgement here, we are each struggling to create some tiny space in a world that feels alien and hostile. Mrs. Morin, the matriarch, writes long-winded messages for us in her shaky scrawl, and calls us “beloved.”

This is a religious house. It was advertised on the church notice board, and I can still hear my mother’s friend Pam saying, “Jesus, the girl’s got religion.” Well, I haven’t. But I have started hearing voices. My male-infested residence seemed to be full of voices. I was spending nights at the library just to avoid going back there. I was avoiding sleep because I’d been having a lot of dreams about floating, and rowing crews. On my way home one early morning I collapsed on a bench in
a
churchyard beside a big and bloody statue of Jesus, and then I noticed a small piece of cardboard tacked to the church’s notice board which read: “Room for nice young woman. Forty pounds a week. Electricity extra.”

I must have slept on the bench for some time. I awoke abruptly at sunrise as someone across the street threw open the wooden gates to the drive. An old woman, a big bun like a rather solid-looking meringue perched on her head, was thrusting a bicycle aggressively through the gates. She was talking to herself, and muttering banal words of comfort to the mangy calico nestled in a towel in the basket on the front of the bike.

“Good gracious, child, what are you staring at?” she shouted across at me.

“I … I was just … waiting,” I said, startled.

I stared at the cat and she moved to explain.

“Pretty” she said, “is seventeen years old. We are going to the library. We always go to the library.” And then, looking at me quizzically, she asked, “Child, what exactly is it you are waiting for? I know you’ve been out here most of the night. I saw you from my window.” She pointed up to the open bay window of the old vicarage.

I looked up and imagined windows full of cats peering into the night through translucent curtains. Creatures saying silent prayers to the God of the small as I rubbed the splinters of Jesus into my back. “It’s about the room,” I said meekly.

“Goodness,” she said, “you should have just rung the doorbell last night instead of camping out here like some homeless urchin!” But then she added more soberly, “
Are
you a homeless urchin, dear?”