Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1 (33 page)

‘His attitude was different, right. I think it was his friends. We had the Old Bill come round a few times because there'd been trouble. He was throwing his weight about on the estate. Showing off. He started asking me to do stuff when I didn't want to. If I wasn't keen he'd have a go at me, “You never minded before, come on Mand” (he's the only person ever called me Mand), “Don't put on airs, you know you like it.” I did, too. But by now I knew what we was doing weren't normal. That it was big time bad, right? All the same, I couldn't stop it. Thought it was all my fault.

‘One night I said, “What if Mum knew what you do to me?” He said, “Are you going to tell her? You little scrubber. She'd throw you out on the street.” Then he did it angry and it hurt. Afterwards he said he was sorry. “Don't cry, Mand. We're friends, right. It's our special secret. We stick together, right.” He cuddled me tight. I think he cried too.

‘But he carried on sneaking into my bed whenever he got the chance and asking me to do stuff. If I tried to stop him he'd be, “You know you're the only person in the world for me, the rest of them are shit,” or he'd go, “Come on, you're a big girl now, your titties are starting to come,” or he'd go, “You like it as much as I do, you dirty tart.” Sometimes he didn't even bother to cuddle me or talk to me, he just told me to give him a blow job. If I tried to say no he threatened me. Other times he cuddled me tight like when we was little.

‘As he got older him and his mates started chasing girls. They went out to clubs up West. Sometimes he stayed out all night. A few times he brought a girlfriend to the flat to watch TV or have a beer. When that happened he ignored me like I wasn't there. Just the little sister. But then if things went wrong with the girlfriends, or even if they didn't, he'd get up off the sofa in the night and he'd be groping his way into my room, finding his way under my nightie.

‘I was older by now, my friends didn't know why I wasn't interested in boyfriends. But I felt all used up. And I didn't think anybody would want me if they knew. I used to listen to my mates going on about boys, heavy petting and that, their daft talk. I knew all about it, but I couldn't say nothing. I couldn't talk to no-one.

‘As he got older he wanted more. He was horny as hell. He didn't have much style, it was wham bam, I thought that was how it was done. Then he'd do it again. Over quick every time. Then just when I was falling asleep he'd wake me up to do it again. Slapped me round the face sometimes, playful. “Come on, Mand, what's up?” I couldn't tell him. That I didn't bloody want to do it any more. “You and me, we're special together,” he'd say, “We're family. There'll never be anyone like you for me. I'll always look after you.”'

‘Did he?' I ask.

‘Did he fuck. He was only 17 when he got nicked. Armed robbery and GBH. Next thing you know he's in Borstal. One day he was here and the next he was gone. You know, I cried when he left. Like the only person who cared for me was gone. He abandoned me. I thought my life was over. How crap is that?'

I say, ‘It could have been a lucky break for you.'

‘It didn't feel that way. When Mum and Dad started having a row, I hid in my room on my own. I had no-one to talk to. I missed him. Either way I was fucked.'

‘Between Scylla and Charybdis,' I say.

‘What you talking about?'

‘That's a monster and a whirlpool. Between the devil and the deep blue sea. A choice that's no choice.'

‘You could say that. After he left it wasn't long before I was doing it with someone else. Then someone else. I got a reputation for it. They said I was a good fuck. No-one knew how many years I'd spent learning.'

Back in the cell, Mandy throws up in the toilet and then disappears into bed in her wet clothes. I go to sit by the wall. There's hardly an inch on it that isn't covered with the maze of pale blue lines tracing out big and small spiders' webs.

A web of confusion. We're all lost.

Beverley's giving Debs a neck massage with big, capable hands. Nobody speaks.

9

Letters of Liberty

Thursday 20
^th
December 1990 3.30 pm

‘I brought you one of the bones,' Anthea said, as she sank into the wicker chair.

She unwrapped the small cream-coloured object from a piece of paper towel and put it on the table.

Ren raised her smooth brows and looked at it.

‘You can touch it if you like,' said Anthea.

Ren stretched out her fingers and let them rest on the bone. ‘I can see what you mean,' she said. ‘It's hard as a stone.'

‘Do you want to hold it?'

Ren took the fragment in her hand, closed her fingers and shut her eyes. She said nothing.

‘I know it's stupid,' said Anthea, ‘but when I hold it, it's as if there's a person speaking to me. And I get pictures, like the sea and mountains. And I get a feeling, as if someone is trying to warn me. It's nonsense, I know… Morton says I'm imagining it.'

Ren said nothing.

‘Can you feel anything?' asked Anthea.

Ren placed the bone back on the table and opened her eyes.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘I can feel something. But we're here to talk about your experience. What this bone means to you.'

‘I feel the bones are my friends,' said Anthea. ‘Especially this one. I've had a sense it's telling me… that something bad will happen if I go back to Greece. I keep getting fears about this field trip we're doing in February. That something will go wrong. I get such a strong feeling about it.'

‘Just because you have a feeling about something, it doesn't necessarily mean it's true.'

‘Do you think I'm crazy to be listening to bones?'

‘I can't know that,' said Ren. ‘All our experience has meaning, on some level, even if it isn't literal. We need to pay attention to all of it. Make choices and decisions on the basis of all the information we have.'

‘I didn't tell you about the nightmare I had yesterday,' said Anthea, putting the bone back into one of her bags.

‘Do you want to talk about it?' asked Ren.

‘Not really. It's still too close,' Anthea pushed her hair back from her face as if to wipe the dream away. ‘What we've been doing here seems to help. Unpeeling the memories like layers of clothes to get back to the flesh. Back to the beginning to see how I got to this place.'

‘OK. This is your time.'

‘I've put off talking about our night at Knossos. It was really the weirdest experience I've had. That was when I first got this sense of being unprotected, that things could get at me. That was when I began to believe that I'd be killed.'

‘Go ahead.'

Anthea took a tissue from the table and blew her nose. Then she began:

‘Morton and I first went to Knossos together nearly a year ago. What happened there tipped me over the edge.

‘The place we stayed in there used to be a taverna in the 19
^th
century. Arthur Evans bought it, and now it's a hostel for archaeologists.

‘It was February. Bert was in the UK with my mother. There was a group of archaeologists there doing a survey on a Roman site nearby. The hostel building is in the middle of several archaeological sites. The Knossos Palace is down the hill over the road. The Little Palace is further along. There are remains of house walls and dancing circles up the path. There are thousands of years of history under that hostel. Pots, foundations, rubbish pits, sealstones, tools, figurines, bones… The ground is saturated with past lives. Knossos is one of the oldest sites in Greece. The palace dates from the second millennium BC; but underneath it, settlement debris goes back centuries more to the Neolithic period. The whole area is a magnet for archaeologists and tourists alike. Am I boring you?'

Ren shook her head. ‘Not at all.'

‘This is all relevant, you see, to what happened.' Anthea fished in her handbag for a scrumpled piece of tissue and blew her nose. ‘The rooms where visitors sleep are converted horse boxes, from the days before cars. When Crete was a malaria-ridden backward province under Turkish rule. The walls of the rooms are painted white, it's rather Spartan with a stone floor, iron beds and a cylinder gas heater. It can be cold there in winter. Toilets are across the courtyard. You eat in a big common room in the main building.

‘On our first night we found that the meals were an uncomfortable affair. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement to denigrate as many other archaeologists as possible before dessert. We were sitting eating quiche when a PhD student asked a professor if he had found any Middle Minoan 1a pottery at his site in East Crete.

‘The professor smirked. “Smithson thinks there is – but that's not necessarily anything to go by.”

‘Snide laughter at that. Any kind of loyalty got cut down with a knife. An American woman archaeologist with a bun tried putting in a word, “Smithson puts forward evidence for his dating scheme, doesn't he…”, but the excavator made short shrift of her: “It depends what you think passes for evidence. Send the potatoes down, would you?”

‘More mirthless laughter.

‘Reputations got bitten on and chewed up. Wine flowed freely for the senior people, and the rest of us had to try to grab a little as the bottle, and the conversation, swept past. Morton watched in silence and I could tell from the sparkle in his eye that he found it all funny.

‘After two evenings of this, we decided to get a bus into Heraklion for a moussaka on our own at a restaurant. It was in that restaurant after the main course that we made a big mistake.

‘Morton had the bright idea of us sharing a slice of hash cake Freddie passed on to him before we left London. Morton had the cake with him in his pocket, folded in silver paper. He unwrapped it on the starched white restaurant tablecloth, and we nibbled it discreetly without anyone noticing.'

Anthea stopped. ‘I'm assuming you're OK with me talking about illegal substances. This is all confidential, yes?'

Ren nodded, ‘Of course.'

Anthea continued: ‘So, the problem with the hash cake was, we didn't realize how strong it was. We ate it and sat looking out of the window at the stylish Cretans strolling up and down in the evening lights of the town centre, on the pedestrian precinct around the lion fountain. Then, while we were still in the restaurant, the edges of the world started to blur. As we walked through the dark to the bus stop, things were slipping and sliding around me. I wondered if I could stay upright long enough to get back to the hostel.'

Anthea stopped and looked down at her feet. ‘Telling you this, I imagine you might be shocked.'

Ren thought for a moment. ‘It's not my job to be judgmental. My job is to listen to your experience. To help you process it and find a place where it can sit as comfortably as possible inside you.'

Anthea said: ‘This experience I'm telling you does not sit comfortably inside. Nor did that hash cake.

‘By the time we got off the bus I felt really ill.

‘As we stumbled across the gravel of the hostel courtyard, I was praying we wouldn't meet any of the other archaeologists. We didn't. Perhaps they had turned in already. Or maybe they were over in the common room doing jigsaw puzzles and exchanging critical comments about absent friends. In the whitewashed outdoor toilet the glare from the bare bulb shocked me. I staggered back across the courtyard to our room.

‘By the time I got in through the door I could barely stand. The room was cold. The two iron beds stood there separate. We had planned to put them together and make it up as one double bed. That task was beyond me now. My arms were heavy, my brain wouldn't work. Then teeth to clean. These were all insuperable obstacles. Inanimate objects seemed to be moving in unusual ways. My body was pulling me irresistibly towards the earth. My stomach felt like the bilge of some old ship in a thunderstorm.

‘I can't remember if I told you that Morton's into survival training. Lighting fires without matches, building tree houses, picking berries, finding direction by the sun, that sort of stuff. Anyway, that evening he rose to the occasion. He was moving strangely too, but he put toothpaste on a toothbrush and put it in my hand. “I can't face putting the beds together,” he said, “Let's just share the one.” In slow motion, I found my nightie in my rucksack. Like a child doing it step by step for the first time, I took off my clothes. Each button took time. The tiles of the stone floor were cold. My nightie was a labyrinth. I fell onto the bed and with a last effort I tugged the sheet and woollen blanket out from underneath me and pulled them on top. I had to squash up against Morton who was already there. He's thin, but as you can see I'm not.

‘He said “Are you all right?”

‘I said “I don't think so. Are you?”

‘He said “I'm going to switch the light off.” I saw a vision of white flesh staggering towards the light switch, then darkness. I felt his warmth rolling in to the bed. I clung to the mattress so as not to slide off.

‘He said, “Try to sleep. You'll feel better.”

‘I lay and stared into the darkness at the far end of the room. My muscles felt paralyzed, but inside me a thousand wires were twisting and crackling. Ten thoughts at once but I could not give words for any of them, like parallel lives racing blindly to their culmination.

‘High on the far wall, on the opposite side from the door, there was a horizontal rectangle of light. It must have been coming from the outside light in the courtyard. Shining through an oblong pane of glass above the door, which was behind me. As I stared at that rectangle of light, the world seemed to crack up around it. I seemed to remove from my present situation. Drawn into another where I didn't want to go.

‘I told Morton I was scared.

‘“Don't be daft,” said Morton. “What of?”