The Dark Threads (11 page)

CHAPTER NINE

I
N THE WASTELAND
of the days following my stay in hospital, how I wished I could return to the ‘pity my simplicity' days of childhood. Dear God, I had come a long way since then.

Must get up now to meet my friends for another evening at the pub. I crawled out of bed in the early evening and put on my lime-green mini-dress that zipped up the front from neck to hem. No, not a good idea. Gropers were keen on that dress. I changed into my cream flared trousers and a psychedelic-patterned tunic top, my prize from Bo's Boutique for winning the Twiggy competition. No, too gaudy and snazzy. Didn't feel right somehow. Try again. I got into my old pair of denim jeans and a grey-checked shirt-style blouse. Yes, that would do. I used to enjoy shopping for clothes but since the hospital I couldn't be bothered. Anyway, a pair of old jeans and a few non-iron tops were all I needed.

My long, straight hair required minimal attention. All I had to do was attack my fringe with the kitchen scissors each time it grew long enough to make me cross-eyed. Lopping a lot off it that night made my dull, tired eyes show up. On with the dark-grey eyeliner and brownish-black lash-thickening mascara. ‘Oh well, better to look made up than drugged up,' I said to myself, staring in the mirror. Trouble was I looked both. But in the dimly lit pub it didn't matter.

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.