By the time I was twenty I was living in a slum house in Sheffield. I had a husband and no money; those things I could explain. I had a pain which I could not explain; it seemed to wander about my body, nibbling here, stabbing there, flitting every time I tried to put my finger on it.
When I packed my bags for London, at eighteen years old, I went to live in a women’s hall of residence in Bloomsbury. It was a haven of warmth, calm and order. My university course was engrossing, and it was taught by lawyers and academics of stature and reputation. I got involved in student politics, in meetings that dragged on towards midnight. I didn’t think it was a waste of time; student politics at the LSE had at least some crossover with the real world. The school was mostly postgraduate, and cosmopolitan. Whatever foreign event made the news, there was someone who would tell you about it, explain the background from their own experience. The rattling, down-at-heel, overcrowded buildings pleased me better than any grassy quad or lancet window. And I was doing well; my tutors were beginning to talk to me about where my interests lay, about how I might like to specialise, in my third year. One of them invited me into his office, which was the size of a modest broom cupboard, and said, go in for constitutional law, constitutional and administrative, you’ll study under Professor Griffith; that’s my strong recommendation to you. How do we delimit authority, where do the powers of the state begin and end? My path seemed to have taken a new turn; it seemed I was a step or two from success. I hugged myself and thanked my tutor, but I walked away thinking, third year, third year, by then I won’t be here.
There are times in life when the next, clear, logical step seems one you can’t take at all. I found it difficult to see myself completing my course, and emerging as a grown-up London person on the verge of a career. I seemed to have less money than other people. I had the state grant and—in theory at least—the small yearly contribution that my parents should make. I schemed to do without that contribution, to spare them the expense, but my schemes didn’t work. The hall fees took a huge slice out of my grant and left me with little room for incidentals, but they covered heat and light, breakfast and supper; in between came a pot of yoghurt. In my second year, I was aware, I would not be able to stay in hall and would have to find somewhere of my own to live. Any place I could afford would be well outside the city centre, so I would have to budget for fares, instead of walking everywhere as I did at present. In those days, students didn’t generally get term-time jobs to supplement their grants; your course demanded your full-time commitment. Intermittently through my first year, I worried about this, and about something more serious and long-term. I wanted to be a barrister. How was I to do this? The facts of life pressed in on me. I was female, northern and poor. My family would not be able to help me through my post-degree studies, or my pupillage—that is to say, the barrister’s apprenticeship. Women barristers were then in a small minority. A few brave women from unhelpful backgrounds had crashed the system. I had assumed I would be one of them. But now my resolve was undermined. I was acquainted with the facts of life, with some unpromising arithmetic. Also, I was in love.
I had known this a while before I came to London, but by the time the calamitous fact was admitted, between myself and the boy who was in it with me, we had already chosen our universities, and secured places at different ends of England. He had just turned eighteen, I was six months younger. We couldn’t do anything about the parting that loomed ahead of us, but we had decided to be married, whenever it looked possible: sooner than that, if by any mischance I became pregnant. When we had a daughter, my lover said, he would like to call her Catriona; would that be all right by me? I was very happy about it. We were both admirers of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.
Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely available, I only half believed I could coerce my body and suspected that it might have some filthy tricks in store; the filthy tricks would be on the line of putting a baby in your arms before you were ready. I assumed I would be able to have Catriona at a time of my choosing. I didn’t know she would always be a ghost of possibility, a paper baby, a person who slipped between the lines. It’s a pity we didn’t like Travels With A Donkey. There’s a good name for a ghost: Modestine.
In our year apart my boyfriend and I wrote to each other every day. There was a hiatus when the postmen went on national strike; I don’t think it was to protest at us personally, though some of the letters were very weighty. In later years, we carried the correspondence about with us, in a plastic bin bag, but when we first went to work abroad we threw it away. After all, we were planning never to be parted again.
Though I was happy in my London life, I looked forward with a sick intensity to his arrival for weekend visits. He had to be smuggled in, and kept like contraband in my room, my roommate quartered elsewhere and a whole corridor of girls sworn to complicit secrecy; it was like Malory Towers, but with sex. When the girl along the corridor had a boyfriend stay with her, the fire alarm rang in the small hours, and I met her among the crowds on Malet Street, two hundred girls turned out in their night attire into the winter cold. Her face was white, her eyes were staring. ‘Where is he?’ I whispered, and she hissed, ‘I put him in the wardrobe.’
The expense of travelling, the logistical manoeuvres required, the wear-and-tear on the nerves, meant that the visits had to be well spaced-out. And gradually, I realised that my world was changing. Light and colour were draining from the streets, and even spring didn’t restore them. The grey ache of absence was too much to bear; why bear it, if it could be remedied? I thought it could. By early summer, when my surroundings had taken on the chewed, grainy monochrome of crumpled newsprint, I went to the university authorities to put my case. Did they think I could go up to Sheffield, and continue my course there? My boyfriend couldn’t come to me, I explained, because he was studying geology, and geology isn’t portable. He had already chosen his mapping area and walked it at weekends, and it was easier to move one law student with a suitcase than to relocate a massive chunk of carboniferous limestone from the Peak District, four square miles of rock swarming with corals, nautiloids and the ancestors of starfish.
Sheffield University’s law faculty was housed, in 1971, in a former maternity home, with ramshackle partitions and makeshift corridors. The students seemed dull, hostile, and pitifully young; they were my own age, in fact, but I felt I had different experiences and was older. They were afraid of their teachers, and before tutorials they stood in rigid knots outside closed doors, waiting, tension building between them; those rooms, full of the awe and anticipation of women’s pain, were now darkened by juvenile dread of donnish sarcasm. But ‘donnish’ is pitching it too high perhaps; one of my tutors was a bored local solicitor who made it plain that he didn’t think women had any place in his classroom. They were just a waste of space; they’d only go and have babies, wouldn’t they?
Some people have forgotten, or never known, why we needed the feminist movement so badly. This was why: so that some talentless prat in a nylon shirt couldn’t patronise you, while around you the spotty boys smirked and giggled, trying to worm into his favour. The birth control revolution of the late sixties had passed our elders by—educators and employers both. It was assumed that marriage was the beginning of a woman’s affective life, and the end of her mental life. It was assumed that she neither could nor would exercise choice over whether to breed; poor silly creature, no sooner would her degree certificate be in her hand before she’d cast all that book-learning to the winds, and start swelling and simpering and knitting bootees. When you went for a job interview, you would be asked, if you were not wearing a wedding ring, whether you were engaged; if you were engaged or married, you would be asked when you intended to ‘start your family’. Whether you were celibate, or gay, or just a sensible pre-planner, you had to smile and jump through the flaming hoops held up for you by some grizzled ringmaster, shifty and semi-embarrassed as he asked a girl half his age to tell him about her sex life and account for her next ovulation.
My transfer to Sheffield University was not as smooth as I had hoped. On paper, my first and second year fitted together. In practice, they didn’t. While the LSE was occupied in wrenching its first-year law studies into some sort of social context, Sheffield was sneaking in extra property law, under the guise of legal history. I found myself at sea, both baffled and bored. My fellow second-years mostly intended to be solicitors. They were going into daddy’s practice, or into their uncle’s. I got into trouble by claiming mischievously that jurisprudence was all an elaborate bluff and that legal language was cognate with magic. ‘Sign your name here or make your mark: pronounce a formula: abracadabra, you are man and wife. I put on a wig, I indict a scroll: abracadabra, your marriage is dissolved.’ If you are right, said my tutor heavily, I suppose we may as well all go home. He stood up and clasped his arms behind his back, and looked out of his window, melancholy, towards the distant hills.
All the same, Sheffield was a good place to be if you were a student. The townspeople talked to you at the bus stop and in the shops, and they didn’t seem to have any money either, so you could buy cheap cuts of meat and bargain tins and sustaining fresh loaves hot from the oven. Do you realise, I would ask my boyfriend, that at your tender age of nineteen, you both run a car and keep a mistress? The car was the product of his summer working in a factory that made cardboard boxes; his hands sliced to pieces, but pound notes stacking up. The car’s labouring engine often jibbed at Sheffield’s steep hills, and gaping holes in its bodywork were patched with a substance called plastic padding, but it hauled us across the moors to see his family; we made the trip often, as his father was sick. I cooked for us every night at my lodgings, an attic room in the house of a kindly, absent-minded divorced woman who didn’t mind that two of us were trooping up her stairs.
There were two electric rings in my room, one for carbohydrate of the day—pasta, rice, potatoes—one for our meat or fish. We were ingenious cooks, and sat smiling over our yellow Formica table, as our dinner bubbled and simmered; I would be shivering slightly, because the only means of ventilation was an open window that admitted the piercing wind. One day, as I was hauling a great bag of potatoes uphill, my landlady stopped me at the gate. Her brow was furrowed. ‘Ilary,’ she said, ‘why are you doing this?’ I dumped my bag at my feet, and smiled up at her, bent double, massaging my carrying arm. ‘You should be going out,’ she said.
I flew out of myself, saw myself through her eyes: a small pale child with cropped hair, wearing a coat outgrown by one of her younger brothers. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m fine.’
I never quite understood what this was, this ‘going out’. What was the gratification in it? It seemed to me, generally, just a polite prelude to sex; if you’ve got beyond politeness, why get dressed up and go off into the cold? You have a person you want to be with, whom you’d rather be with than be on your own; isn’t that, by itself, a sort of fiesta? As for the grocery shopping: I liked to be able to say we ate well, that we stretched our small amount of money as far as a proper meal every night. There was nothing left over. And besides, I was trying to feed us up, trying to pad us against the disaster to come. That was a dark winter; the miners were on strike, and there were long cold hours without electricity. On a January night, we were called home, and the expected death occurred.
My boyfriend’s father was called Henry. He was fifty-three, a professional man, wry and studious, a father of five. In summer he was a well man and in September he was sick and the following January he was dead: cancer. A year later, to the day, my grandfather would die of the same disease; more winter journeys, over the dark Pennines, to stand about in hospital wards while screens were drawn around beds. But we were married by then, and living in a rented room over a garage, a jerry-built extension which had a leaking roof; and when we returned from the funeral, we found that the cracks in the wall had grown wide, and that an aggressive black mould had grown on our food and on our clothes.
Married, why? Because in times of disaster, it’s what you do. When families are destroyed suddenly, you pick yourselves up and glue yourselves together to form new units. More practically, and immediately, we married so that we could spend the night together, so that he did not have to roll out of bed and roll home over the midnight cobblestones; even the kindly divorcée, thinking of her two growing children and their moral development, would not let me have a man in the house till dawn. We had tried to find a place together, in anticipation of our marriage, but the landlords demanded certificates from the university, endorsements and validation on oath to say that we had really truly booked the priest and the registrar. They wanted no fornication mong their Formica, they were not about to yield one curling inch of their old linoleum to the mad young seeking to gratify themselves. In mouse-dropping hallways we pleaded our purity of intent. But the faces were stony with rectitude: no room at the inn.
Yet not everyone was hostile to romance. Some comfortable soul could always be found in those days, to recall, ‘They say two can live as cheaply as one.’ Can they? My family fell out with me, and didn’t fill in the forms for my subsistence grant. So we were about to find out if the saying was true.
Seventy-eight Roebuck Road was a back-to-back house; that is to say, it was one room deep, with a cellar, a room, a room on top of that, and an attic. It had one cold water sink, a shared outside lavatory, and a single metered gas fire. Even the hardy cockroach gave it the go-by, but a darting population of creatures we used to call ‘silverfish’ lived in the old chimney breast; they were harmless, I said to my husband, we used to have them at Brosscroft, they’re OK, not dirty. I counted Roebuck Road as one of the greatest pieces of luck ever to come my way. We had not been able to afford the room over the garage: still less, the extra we might have been charged for growing the black mould. One of my tutors—a woman—had told me about a cheaper prospect; her cleaning lady lived there, but was moving on to something better.
No. 78 was the cheapest house in the world. We had to go right across town every fortnight to pay the rent, but the car took us, and even we, having paid the rent, could afford to eat. My grandmother gave us a water boiler to hang over the sink. My new mother-in-law gave us a cooker and some furniture. We slept on a sofa that flattened in the middle and so made into a bed. We couldn’t get the stately family wardrobe upstairs, so it stayed down, its fine mirror reflecting the flickering of the silverfish as they busied cheerfully about their lives. I made stews, pies, cherry cakes, chocolate cakes and chocolate cherry cakes. I answered, as law students do, my weekly ‘problems,’ in the set legal language, and each week turned out essays which were simply a more prolonged exercise in sifting and shuffling the same chary formulations. I complained that law was wrecking my English style, which had been sturdy by the time I was sixteen, a little oak tree: that it was teaching me to equivocate and hedge, to stick to the literal and to lower my intellectual sights.
I complained I had a pain in my legs, and I went to the doctor: and that was my big mistake.
Writing about your past is like blundering through your house with the lights fused, a hand flailing for points of reference. You locate the stolid wardrobe, and its door swings open at your touch, opening on the cavern of darkness within. Your hand touches glass, you think it is a mirror, but it is the window. There are obstacles to bump and trip you, but what is more disconcerting is a sudden empty space, where you can’t find a handhold and you know that you are stranded in the dark. Each day I was taking, though I didn’t know it, a small step towards the unlit terrain of sickness, a featureless landscape of humiliation and loss. At Roebuck Road, the stairhead was dark; and some previous occupant had pinned, on the blank wall you saw as you descended, a poster with an owl on it. It was a child’s owl, a simple and almost a cartoon owl, not less baleful for that. I wanted to rip it down, but I couldn’t reach it.
Letters from the Inland Revenue arrived, tax demands addressed to a ‘Mr Judas Priest’. These made us laugh. I set out my aspirin, one two three four five six. I swallowed them. Once, in error, I picked up and almost swallowed a shirt button, lying on the table waiting for me to sew it on.
‘Sick?’ said the doctor, down at the Student Health Service. ‘Throw up? I’m hardly surprised. You do know that taking six aspirin is no more effective than taking three?’
I didn’t. As it was double any ordinary pain, I’d thought I could double the aspirin. We weren’t very sophisticated in those days. I don’t think we even had paracetamol. I had a big bottle of a hundred aspirin, and I used to take whatever number I thought would get me through the day.
‘Well, Miss--’ said the doctor. He glanced down at his file, and a little jolt shot through him, as if he were electrified. Mrs?’ he said. ‘Mrs? You’ve got married? Pregnant, are you?’
I hope not, I thought. If so, I’ve overdone it with the aspirin. It’ll have fins. Or feathers. Three extra aspirin, three extra heads. I’ll exhibit it. It will keep us in luxury.
‘I’m on the Pill,’ I said. An urge rose in me, to say, we are sexually very keen so I take three pills a day, do you think that’s enough? But then a stronger urge rose in me, to be sick on his shoes.
I can see him, now that the years have flown; his crinkly fairish hair sheared short, his rimless glasses, his highly polished brogues. He was a nervous man, and when I bowed my head towards his feet he shifted them under his desk. I wasn’t sick, not there and then. I put my hand across my mouth, and went outside, and threw up in the Student Health Service lavatories. It was quite a luxurious vomit, private and well-lit. At Roebuck Road, our facility was shared with next door, and you had to plough down their garden to get to it, so that at night dogs barked and householders with their torches came out shouting ‘What’s all this?’ and you were caught in the cross beams, your loo roll in your hand.
I went home. ‘What did the doctor say?’ my husband asked.
‘He said, don’t take so many aspirin. I said my legs ached and he said it was accounted for by no known disease. Except one called idiopathic something-something.’
I didn’t say how I had grinned, when he said ‘idiopathic.’ I knew it meant, disease about which we doctors have no bloody idea. So he had bridled, and swallowed the rest of the medical term; he wasn’t, anyway, entertaining it as a possibility, he was just boasting, showing he remembered his textbooks. And my smile called his bluff; I shouldn’t have smiled it. He was not on my side now. I thought that probably he never had been.
Go back, said my mister, grimly. You haven’t really told him. How tired you are. And how upset.
I was upset, it was true. I couldn’t bear my smashed relationship with my family. That my brothers should think badly of me. That I should have no money to buy a present for Father’s Day, only a bag of toffee, and nothing to give for Christmas but a box of biscuits and a bottle of wine.
That I had money to give even these was because of the intervention of a bureaucrat at County Hall in Chester, where lived the authority who paid (or not) my maintenance grant. For my visit I composed myself into pliant, pleading mode. We went to Chester by way of the grumbling, grunting, plastic-padded car. I went to see him in his office, the necessary man, the bureaucrat who was on my case. I explained that my father hadn’t signed my forms to testify to his income. So therefore, he said, I could get no grant, not even the fifty pounds that every student got, even the rich ones: for those were the rules. I know this, I said, but you see I shall just have to sit here till the rules are amended in my favour, because if I don’t get some money from you I’m out of house and home.
I don’t remember his face, only his office, his desk,his chair, the slant of the light. He left the room. I studied his carpet, on which I had sworn I would be sleeping: unless I slept on his desk. It was a warm, blossoming, summer day: perhaps I could sleep in a flower bed? Sunlight rippled on magnolia walls. He came back smiling. I have got you fifty, he said, and let’s see, hereafter, maybe it can be worked—there are always some strange circumstances…
Perhaps he was an angel. Perhaps a mortal, but one of the elect. I’m praying for him still, in a wild agnostic fashion. Hoping he wins the national lottery: I pray some irregular prayer like that. Or that he’d come to see me and I could make him a pie or a cake.
Go back, said my husband; tell them how you really are. Here you go, said the doctor, scribbling me a prescription; I think what you need is some antidepressants. I was depressed, so I knew it made a kind of sense. Twenty-four hours later, I found I couldn’t read; print blurred before my eyes. I went to the university library and tried to look up the side effects of the drug, but I was labouring under the obvious handicap. In those days, pills didn’t come with a patient information leaflet. Your doctor had all the information you needed, and whether you could get it depended on whether you had pull, face and cunning. I had none of these.
I went to see my tutor in Equity, and said, look, Mr Loath (it wasn’t his name, I didn’t say it, it was just what the frightened spotty boys called him) look, Loath, I’m coming to your next session, but don’t harass me, right? (Really, of course, I spoke to him much more nicely than this.) Loath, please understand that I’ve been prescribed some necessary drugs that mean I can’t read my books. Blurred vision. Side effects, I said. Under my breath: you must have heard of side-effects? Loath gave me a puzzled look, as if he’d never heard of any such thing.
I tried some other tutors. I was asking for a week’s grace, or perhaps a fortnight’s, to audit my courses but not take part. Their reaction was all the same: why was I telling them this? The medical textbook (if I’d read it right, squinting, aslant) suggested that the blurred vision would last only a week or two, whereas the course of drugs lasted six weeks. Six weeks, in clinical practice, was the term set to depression; six weeks was a cure. After that, I was sure, I’d be happy. Never mind who was dead and how. Never mind how few the coins in my purse. I’d be up with the lark and rejoicing with the wrens: I’d be skipping up the hills of Sheffield, my pains vanished, my joints springing, swinging my bags of potatoes and self-raising flour as if they were feathers, as if I were self-raised myself; and scattering my careless laughter to the winds. For the time being, though, my spirits had sunk. The drugs seemed to be having an effect, but not the one required. The pangs of bereavement, of estrangement, had given way to a dull apathy. My sleep was broken and the climate of my dreams was autumnal, like the dim leaf-mould interior of a copse; their content was exhausting and yet somehow banal.
A day or two later, Mr Loath presided over his tutorial: the pasty, sweating, spotty boys, one other girl, and me. A small question of criminality was raised, and Mr L got testy: come along, come along, he said, do you know the maximum penalty under the Theft Act, do you, boy, or next boy, do you? I had to speak up and spare the boys, from their humiliation; oh, Mr Loath, I said, is it not ten years? Mr Loath, fuming with frustration, was just about to snap the arm of his spectacles; his fingers relaxed, and ‘Thank goodness!’ he said. And just as he replaced his glasses on his head, a pain sliced through me, diagonal, from my right ribs to my left loin. It was a new pain: but not new for long. It stole my life: it stole it for ten years and for a double term, and then for ten years more.
A short time later I was vomiting a good deal. I had finished the course of anti-depressants, but felt no more cheerful, and my GP did what you do when someone says she is vomiting: send her to a psychiatrist. I should like to say I protested, but I was willing enough. I thought perhaps I was a fascinating case. I had been tested for anaemia, but I wasn’t iron-deficient. No one seemed to be able to think of another disorder to test me for, and if my body was not the problem it must be my mind that was acting up; I could believe this, and wanted my mind fixed. ‘Psychosomatic’ was the buzzword. Properly understood, the term suggests a subtle interaction between mind and body, between the brain and the endocrine system. Improperly understood, it means, ‘it’s all in the mind’—that is to say, your symptoms are invented. You’ve nothing better to do with your time. You’re seeking attention.
Dr G, the psychiatrist, was remote and bald. He had as much chance of understanding a girl like me as he had of rising from his desk and skimming from the window on silver pinions. He soon diagnosed my problem: stress, caused by overambition. This was a female complaint, one which people believed in, in those years, just as the Greeks believed that women were made ill by their wombs cutting loose and wandering about their bodies. I had told Dr G, in response to his questions about my family, that my mother was a fashion buyer in a large department store; it was true, for at the end of the sixties she had reinvented herself as a blonde, bought herself some new clothes and taken up a career. Oh really, said Dr G: how interesting. Thereafter, he referred to her place of work as ‘the dress shop’. If I were honest with myself, he asked, wouldn’t I rather have a job in my mother’s dress shop than study law? Wouldn’t the dress shop, when all’s said and done, be more in my line?
I saw Dr G once a week. He must have obtained reports about me from my tutors, for he said, conscientious, hm, it says you’re very conscientious.
Was I? I only turned in the work asked for. Didn’t other people bother?
‘And a mind for detail,’ Dr G said, ‘you have that.’ I tried to imagine the other kind of law student, the kind who favoured the broad-brush approach, who took on the law of trusts, for example, with a grand generalist’s sweep and dash. ‘Tell me,’ said Dr G, ‘if you were a doctor, what kind would you be?’
I said politely that to be a psychiatrist must be interesting. No, pick something else, he said, something less close to home. I’d often thought, I said, that GPs had a challenging job, the variety of people and problems, the need for quick thinking—but no, I could see by his face that wasn’t the answer required. Dr G sat back in his chair. I see you as a medical researcher, he said, one of those quiet invaluable people in the back room, unseen, industrious, unsung—a mind for detail, you see. And wasn’t it the same, he asked, with law? If I did go on with my studies, wouldn’t the niche for me be in a solicitor’s office, conveying clients’ houses—wasn’t it just what people needed, at such a stressful time in their lives, to have the services of someone very conscientious, like me?
I could see her: a clerk very conscientious and quiet and dull, who wore snuff-coloured garb and filed herself in a cabinet every night and whose narrow heart fluttered when anyone mentioned a flying freehold or an ancient right of way. But you’re not looking at me, I thought. I was quite thin; nausea was wearing me away. I left G’s consulting room and stood on the pavement to consider this new version of myself. I felt as if I had been dealt a dull blow, but I didn’t know which part of me ached.
The next time I went to Dr G’s office I sat and wept. It was as if a dam had burst. I must have worked through a box of tissues, and no doubt it was his upset-girl ration for the whole month. Dr G spoke gently to me; said gravely he had not known that things were so bad. I had better have some stronger pills. And maybe a spell in the university clinic? I trucked off there, with my textbooks. At least now my husband would be able to study in peace for his finals. I wasn’t easy company; I was labouring under a violent sense of injustice that may have seemed unreasonable to the people around me; I was angry, tearful and despairing, and I still had pains in my legs.
I think, in retrospect, that it would have been better if I had denied that I had pains in my legs, if I had taken it all back, or brightly said that I was well now. But because I didn’t, the whole business began to spiral out of control. I still believed that honesty was the best policy; but the brute fact was, I was an invalid now, and I wasn’t entitled to a policy, not a policy of my own. I feared that if I didn’t tell the strict truth, my integrity would be eroded; I would have nothing then, no place to stand. The more I said that I had a physical illness, the more they said I had a mental illness. The more I questioned the nature, the reality of the mental illness, the more I was found to be in denial, deluded. I was confused; when I spoke of my confusion, my speech turned into a symptom. No one ventured a diagnosis: not out loud. It was in the nature of educated young women, it was believed, to be hysterical, neurotic, difficult, and out of control, and the object was to get them back under control, not by helping them examine their lives, or fix their practical problems—in my case, silverfish, sulking family, poverty, cold—but by giving them drugs which would make them indifferent to their mental pain—and in my case, indifferent to physical pain too.
The first line of medication, in those days, were the group of drugs called tricyclic anti-depressants—which I had already sampled—and also what were then called ‘minor tranquillisers’; the pills marketed as Valium were the most famous example of the type. Highly popular in those days among overworked GPs, the minor tranquillisers are central nervous system depressants. They impair mental alertness and physical co-ordination. They dull anxiety. They are habit-forming and addictive.
The anti-depressants didn’t seem to be having much effect on me—or not the wanted effects, anyway, only the effects of making me unable to grapple with the written word, of making print slide sideways and fall out of the book. It didn’t seem as if I would be able to sit my finals, Dr G said, but never mind: in view of my good work record, the university would grant me an aegrotat degree. Did I understand aegrotat?It meant ‘he is sick’.
I muttered ‘he, not she?’ It would have been much healthier for me if I had stopped muttering, and kept smiling.
Valium, however, did work; it worked to damage me. Some people, given tranquillisers of this type, experience what is called a ‘paradoxical reaction’. Instead of being soothed, they are enraged. One day I sat by the hearth at Roebuck Road and imagined myself starting fires—not in my own chimney, but fires in the houses of strangers, fires in the streets. Somewhere along the line, I seemed to have been damaged; I imagined myself doing damage, in my turn. I knew these thoughts were not rational, but I was obliged to entertain them; day by day I smouldered in a sullen fury, and when I saw a carving knife I looked at it with a new interest. I agreed to the clinic because I thought that, if I were to act on my impulses, someone would see me and stop me—before, at least, it got to arson and stabbing, and the deaths of strangers who had never harmed me at all.
After a day or two in the clinic I felt a little calmer. No one saw me as a danger; the danger was all in my own head. At first I came and went; I would go back to Roebuck Road during the day and do the cleaning. One day I went down to town to buy myself a nightdress. But because my vision was blurred, I misread the label, and came back with a size 16 instead of a size 10. ‘Look at this monster garment!’ I cried gaily to the nurses; I was having one of my less murderous days, and trying to lighten the tone. ‘Look what I bought!’
My nightdress, I found, was viewed in a grave light. Why had I bought it? It was a mistake, I said, you see I…Didn’t you hold it up? they asked me. Well, no, I, I just liked the pattern, I…Didn’t you remember what size you were? Did you feel you didn’t know? Yes, I know my size, but you see, my eyesight, it’s misty, it’s because of the drugs I…oh, never mind.
But they wouldn’t drop the topic. It was obviously characteristic of mad girls to buy big nightdresses. Every time I spoke I dug myself into a deeper hole.
Dr G came to see me. Well, and what was I doing with myself now that I was free from my struggles with my textbooks? I have written a story, I offered brightly. It was a long story—that is to say, a short story, but long as these things go. Short but long, said Dr G. Hm. And what was it about? A changeling, I said. A woman who believes her baby has been taken away, and a substitute provided in its place. I see, said Dr G, and where and when did this occur? In rural Wales, I said, funnily enough. (I’d never been to Wales.) I don’t have to say the date, but it feels like the early 1920s. I mean, judging by their furniture and clothes. Does it? said Dr G. It’s a time well before social insurance, anyway, I said. The doctor won’t come up the mountain to see them because they can’t pay. I see, said Dr G. And how does it end? Oh, badly.
If you didn’t respond to the first wave of drugs—if they didn’t fix you, or you wouldn’t take them—the possibility arose that you were not simply neurotic, hypochondriacal and a bloody nuisance, but heading for a psychotic breakdown, for the badlands of schizophrenia, a career on a back ward. To head off this disaster, doctors would prescribe what were then called the major tranquillisers, a group of drugs intended to combat thought disorder and banish hallucinations and delusions.
The next time I saw Dr G he forbade me to write: or—more precisely—he said, ‘I don’t want you writing.’ He put more energy into this statement than any I had heard him make. He seemed as remote as ever, and yet inexpressibly angry. ‘Because—’ he added; and broke off. He was not going to impart to me what came after ‘because’.
I said to myself, if I think of another story I will write it. In fact, I didn’t think of another story for quite some years—not a story of the long but short type—and when I did I sent it to Punch and what I got back was not a malediction but a cheque. The changeling too paid off, in time, in a novel published in 1985; the setting was not rural Wales, nor the 1920s, but the present day in a prosperous and dull Midlands town. The novel contained mad people, but no one suggested its author was mad. It’s different, somehow, when you’ve received money for your efforts; once you’ve got an agent, and professionalised the whole thing.
The first drug I was given was called Fentazine. That would do the job, Dr G thought.
Do you know about akathisia? It is a condition that develops as a side-effect of anti-psychotic medication, and the cunning thing about it is that it looks, and it feels, exactly like madness. The patient paces. She is unable to stay still. She wears a look of agitation and terror. She wrings her hands; she says she is in hell.
And from the inside, how does it feel? Akathisia is the worst thing I have ever experienced, the worst single, defined episode of my entire life—if I discount my meeting in the secret garden. No physical pain has ever matched that morning’s uprush of killing fear, the hammering heart. You are impelled to move, to pace in a small room. You force yourself down into a chair, only to jump out of it. You choke; pressure rises inside your skull. Your hands pull at your clothing and tear at your arms. Your breathing becomes ragged. Your voice is like a bird’s cry and your hands flutter like wings. You want to hurl yourself against the windows and the walls. Every fibre of your being is possessed by panic. Every moment endures for an age and yet you are transfixed by the present moment, stabbed by it; there is no sense of time passing, therefore no prospect of deliverance. A desperate feeling of urgency—a need to act—but to do what, and how?—throbs through your whole body, like the pulses of an electric shock.
You run out into the corridor. A man is standing there, gazing dolefully towards you. It is your GP, the man at the Student Health Service, the man with the rimless glasses and the polished brogues. The tension rises in your throat. Speech is dragged and jerked out of you, your ribs heaving. You think you are screaming but you are only whispering. You whisper that you are dying, you are damned, you are already being dipped into hell and you can feel the flames on your face.
And the answer to this? Another anti-psychotic. An injection of Largactil knocked me into insensibility. I lay with my face in the pillow as the drug took effect, and sank into darkness; as I ceased to panic and fight, the hospital sheets dampened, and wrapped around me like ropes.
After I woke up, I was maintained on Largactil, to combat my madness. It was not a friendly drug; it made my throat jump and close, as if someone were hanging me. This is how a mad person appears to the world—lips trembling, speech fumbling and jerky. You can say, this is the drugs you know, this is not me; I am quite all right, inside myself. They say, yes dear, of course you are; have you taken your pill?
But then it was the end of term, the end of the year. My course of studies was over. The university’s responsibility was ended. I was discharged from the clinic. I went home, and was sane. The drugs wore off; I no longer twitched and jumped. I could have passed for normal in any company. My legs didn’t seem to ache so much; I had more abdominal pain, but I knew better than to mention it. For a time I claimed to be well.
But it was not so easy to shake off the events of the last year. The problem was the names of those drugs I had ‘needed’, spelled out like evil charms in my medical notes. Fentazine, Largactil, Stelazine. If I set foot in a GP’s surgery—as I did, when I grew increasingly sick—I ran the risk of being prescribed a dose of them that would knock an elephant off its feet. Then there was my old friend Valium, which I knew I shouldn’t go near: not unless I wanted to be arrested.
So when in time I went back to a doctor, I said I had backache, nausea, vomiting, that I was too tired to move. My GPs—to a man, and a woman—suggested a test to see if I was anaemic. I never was. They had no other suggestions; except perhaps some Valium: and a little spell away might do me good? By the time I was twenty-four I had learned the hard way that whatever my mental distress—and it does distress one, to be ignored, invalidated, and humiliated—I must never, ever go near a psychiatrist or take a psychotropic drug. My vision blurred, in those days, entirely without the help of the anti-depressants. Sometimes there were gaps in the world: I complained one day that the front door had been left open, but the truth was that I just couldn’t see the door. Sometimes it seemed that some rustling, suspicious activity was going on, at the left side of my head, but I couldn’t put a name to what it was. I couldn’t put a name to lots of things, my speech came out muddled: I called a clock’s hands its fingers, and a chair’s arms its sleeves.
I was all right if I stuck with abstractions, ideas, images. And some days I was half well. I had a job, but I needed a pursuit, I thought. I went to the library and got out a lot of books about the French Revolution. I made some notes and some charts. I went to a bigger library and got more books and began to break down the events of 1789-94 so that I could put them into a card index. I was very conscientious and with a mind for detail. If you had been having a revolution you would certainly—at such a stressful time in your life—have needed the services of someone as conscientious as me. I began to read about the old regime, its casual cruelties, its heartless style. I thought, but I know this stuff. By nature, I knew about despotism: the unratified decisions, handed down from the top, arbitrarily enforced: the face of strength when it moves in on the weak.
One day, on an escalator in a department store, a man put a hand up my skirt. Enough, enough, I thought. I turned around and punched him in the eye. I got off at the top of the escalator and walked away.
I didn’t like the world I was living in. It didn’t seem too keen on me.
I was too sick to do a responsible job, a professional job. I got a job as a saleswoman, and I thumbed my nose at Dr G; I started to write a book. I wrote and wrote it. Time passed. I moved to another country, another continent. Still I wrote it and wrote it.
Christmas week 1979. I was twenty-seven years old. I was in St George’s Hospital in London having my fertility confiscated and my insides rearranged. When I was admitted, I knew I was very ill, but I didn’t know quite how bad things might be, and for a time there was no agreement on the nature of what ailed me. Only that it was physical; only that I had a pain and it was real: only that it was a disease Valium wouldn’t cure.
My life had moved on by then, far from its early confines. We had wanted to travel, to see the world; my husband had exchanged carboniferous limestone for the sands of the Kalahari, fossils for diamonds. For three years we had lived in a small town in Botswana, a railway line settlement, where geologists and agriculture specialists rumbled over the unmade roads in four-wheel drives, where ticks and mosquitoes bit, where the days were short and hot and monotonous, and I sat behind the insect mesh of my veranda frowning over my card index, documenting the fall of the French monarchy, the rise of the Committee of Public Safety. I had pressed the juice of meaning from every scrap of paper I had brought with me, every note on every source. The book was finished now. But so, it seemed, was I. When we came home to England on leave, my book went to a publisher who offered to look at it. I went to a consultant who offered to look at me.
In the beds around me were women with complications of pregnancy, who were trying to hang on to their babies; women having abortions; women having their fertility ended by choice. The latter group were two cheerful middle-aged Londoners, a little worn and raddled by life, who complained at the routine discomforts, the marching up and down corridors and waiting in a draught to have blood samples taken; even their complaints were cheerful, and they really amounted to grumbling about the fact that for a couple of days they weren’t in charge, because they were used to a situation where what they say, goes. They had taken this decision, they, for themselves: another baby, no thank you! They called the surgery ‘having my tubes tied’; I pictured the surgeon hauling ropes, shouting ‘heave-ho!’ and consulting a book of knots. On my right there was a silent Turkish girl in her early twenties, having a termination which she was not, I suppose, discussing with her family; she wanted a cigarette, she said, just a little draw would soothe her. After the operation she appeared to have greenish-dark bruises around her eyes, as if someone had undertaken to knock sense into her. The bruises deepened to caverns, then lightened to a jaundiced tan. Then she was gone, discharged. When she climbed out of bed you saw her vitality, her dark bandy legs, her strength. She would have, you thought, just as many children as she liked.
Her fellow abortionee was opposite me, a towheaded sixteen-year-old on her second termination. We hopped from bed to bed, Kirsty and I, sitting each at the foot of the other. She told me about her life. She went out to dance and to shoplift a little and if anyone looked at the boy she happened to be with she would belt them around the head; isn’t that right, she said, and we agreed that yes, it was the only thing to do. More perplexed than malicious, she called the nurses by whistling for them; she didn’t understand their genteelnursey euphemisms, and when they handed her a flask and asked her to pass water she came across to ask if I knew what the fuck they were talking about.
Kirsty was taken to theatre to have her termination; believing that she had no chance of looking after her body, of regulating her future fertility, the surgeon fitted an IUD while she was under anaesthetic. But then the device fell out, one night when she was in the bathroom; she haemorrhaged, fainted with shock, and cracked her head open on the washbasin. Her life, you felt, would always be like this—the handing out of attrition, without regard to justice; fate would overreact to an ungoverned temper and the impulses of a generous heart. She had adopted me on my first day on the ward; I wasn’t, she thought, getting my due. Until some time after I was admitted, the nurses could not manage to get a doctor up to the ward to organise pain relief for me. The strong pills I had brought with me were taken away, and I was given a Panadol, an over-the-counter remedy for everyday discomfort. A hot bath was promoted as the remedy for my pain; I laughed. That first night, I lay on the bed, my knees drawn up. Kirsty shouted at the nurses. ‘Look at her, look at her,’ she roared. ‘Give her sumfin.’ And they did—a rare opportunity—they told me it was my turn to push around the cocoa trolley. My turn, though I’d only just arrived! So I rolled off the bed and did it. ‘Cocoa? Horlicks? Sugar with that?’ I was not quite able to stand up straight: some inflamed growth inside me was bending me at the waist, pulling my abdomen, knotted with pain, down towards my knees. Silliness, I suspect, had set in; some endocrinological compassion-centre was flooding my brain with substances that suggested nothing now mattered very much.
I had been admitted without any certain diagnosis. The professor in charge of gynaecology had, in a civil way for which I remain grateful, found me a bed at short notice. Provided I didn’t mind being in hospital for Christmas, he said, they could have me in about the 20th and operate before the feast. I had felt bleak, on the journey down the motorway—not afraid, but feeling in a childish way that there was nothing to look forward to. After two Christmases in Africa, when I’d missed my family badly, this was not what I had planned. When the professor had examined me at Outpatients, a week or two earlier, I’d bled everywhere, on to his latex hands and the sheet beneath me. I thought he’d have been hardened to that, but he said, ‘I am afraid I am hurting you. I am sorry. I will stop now.’ I would have liked it if curiosity would have propelled him onwards: pushing into the unseen, smoking meat of my body, and finding out its truth.
How can I write this, I wonder? I am a woman with a delicate mouth; I say nothing gross. I can write it, it seems; perhaps because I can pretend it is somebody else, bleeding on the table.
But at the time, I came to the vertical, sickly swaying. I mopped myself up and got into my clothes. I sat in a chair: black vinyl, splayed legs, the ridge of its back hard against my spine. You say you think it’s endometriosis, he said. There’s a good chance you’re right. But he didn’t look a happy man. Could it be anything else? I asked. How we conspire, not to speak the word ‘cancer.’ His eyes slid away. Oh well, he said, if not endometriosis, then pelvic inflammatory disease, it is a thing to consider. I said, no I don’t think so really. He nodded. He didn’t think so, either. He said by the way, is it, should I, am I speaking to Doctor McEwen? I looked up to see if he was being sarcastic. No, I said, I’m not a doctor, why would you think that? Only, he said, your terminology is precise. Ah well, I thought. If only you knew me: conscientious, with a mind for detail. Little Miss Neverwell had graduated at last.
Endometriosis is a gynaecological condition with a dazzling variety of systemic effects. It is not rare, though mercifully it is rare for the disease to run on, unrecognised, for as long as it did in me, and it is rare for it to do such damage. Because of the number of symptoms it throws up it is sometimes hard to diagnose. It is always hard to diagnose, for a doctor who doesn’t listen and doesn’t look. It is comparatively easy if you are the patient, and get into your hands a good textbook with a comprehensive account of its effects.
A few months earlier—in the remoteness of my small town on the fringes of the bush—I had thought, once again: enough’s enough. My doctor (his dusty downtown surgery darkened by eucalyptus trees) seemed disinclined to investigate, though happy to prescribe me stronger and stronger pain relief. Whatever he gave me (and however much alcohol I knocked back to accompany it) the pain grew over the top. So one day I went up to the capital, to the university library, and combed through the medical books. I found a textbook of surgery, with a female figure, her organs clearly depicted, and black lines—like the long pins with which they used to stick witches—striking through her hips and ribcage, carrying a name for each organ. For each organ, there was a pain, and of each pain, I had a sample.
I learned next how the disease process worked. The endometrium is the lining of the womb. It is made of special cells which shed each month by bleeding. In endometriosis, these cells are found in other parts of the body. (How they get there is a matter of dispute.) Typically, they are found in the pelvis, in the bladder, the bowel. More rarely, they are found in the chest wall, the heart, the head. Wherever they are found, they obey their essential nature and bleed. Scar tissue is formed, in the body’s inner spaces and small cavities. It builds up. It presses on nerves and causes pain, sometimes at distant sites. The scar tissue forms an evil stitching which attaches one organ to another. Infertility is a distinct possibility, as the organs of the pelvis are ensnared and tugged out of shape. Endometriosis in the intestines make you vomit and gives you pains in the gut. Pressure in the pelvis makes your back ache, your legs ache. You are too tired to move. The pain, which in the early stages invades you when you menstruate, begins to take over your whole month. Lately I had known days of my life when everything hurt, everything from my collarbone down to my knees. But hey! There was nothing wrong with my ankles. My feet were performing nicely. And I could still think, and depress the typewriter keys. Stop complaining! I thought. Look where complaining gets you! In the madhouse.
Along with endometriosis goes, not infrequently, a hormonal disarrangement that shows itself as a severe premenstrual syndrome. In my case, it manifested in the prodromal aura of migraine headaches. Migraine, I had to learn, was not just a sick headache. It was a series of linked neurological phenomena of remarkable diversity. It was within the migraine aura that my words came out wrong, that the door disappeared into a black space: it was within the aura that I heard the dull hum and the muttering on the left-hand side of my head. Migraine stirred the air in dull shifts and eddies, charged it with invisible presences and the echoes of strangers’ voices; it gave me morbid visions, like visitations, premonitions of dissolution. For a time, when I was eight years old, my field of vision was filled with a constant, moving backdrop of tiny skulls. As a student, I had told Dr G about them, in a burst of frightened confidence. ‘Black on a white ground, skulls skulls skulls, the size of my little fingernail, unrolling,’ I said. ‘Unrolling, like a satanist’s wallpaper.’
Dr G smiled a wintry smile. ‘Ah well,’ he said. At this stage, I was only a neurotic, not the full-fledged madwoman I would become when he upped my dosage. ‘Ah well.’ His voice was soothing. ‘We all have our little metaphysical fancies.’
1979: I must admit that the very act of climbing into the hospital bed had brought me a kind of relief. I could stop pretending to be well. The odd thing, though, as I had already observed, was that the staff were inclined to treat the patients as malingerers. We could see them huddled at their nurses’ station, flicking through our notes and discussing our body parts. Young girls with flaky cervixes were probably no better than they should be, and anything in the pelvic inflammatory line attested to a vibrant sex life. Pregnant women weren’t sick, women wanting abortions weren’t sick, and as for the sterilisation brigade, they should probably be up and scrubbing the latrines. (That wouldn’t have come amiss.) And as for me—I soon got a jolly diagnosis. The Senior Registrar examined me and thought I was pregnant. He winked at me. That’s a baby in there, he said, confidently patting my swollen abdomen. He ran off to get a foetal heart monitor.
But there was no baby. Not Catriona, not Modestine: not anyone, only the ghost of my own heartbeat, amplified to the outside world. Oh well, the registrar said. Looks like I was wrong, eh?
The houseman came, to take a history. He was very new and young, with a starter moustache, which could be studied bristle by bristle; some bristles stuck out at a right angle to his skin. I kept my eye on it, and the movements of his mouth. You are very young, he said, and I am going to ask the professor, yes yes (he got up his resolve) I am going to talk to the professor, I am going to ask him if he can make a neat low incision, so that afterwards, you will be able to wear a bikini. He looked almost tearful. I nodded. I knew he would not be able to effect this, but I liked it that he cared so much. It is strange, to expose your soft girlish body to a man of your own age, who has not yet acquired dispassion but wears a white coat. In fact, I said, I never wear a bikini because I am too—I wanted to say, modest. But what modesty was left? I’d had more gynaecologists than I’d had lovers; alien fists in my guts. I said, you see, I am too white for a bikini. Too pale. I burn. Of course, he said. But all the same. He got up, flustered, his clipboard almost spilling his notes. At the bed’s end, he turned and smiled, and winked at me.
Two days after I was admitted I needed to have an ultrasonic scan. For this I needed to cross London. St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner was in its last weeks of occupation; it was gaunt, grubby and nearly empty. My ward was almost the last to be kept open, I was told, and for the hi-tech stuff I needed to go to the new St George’s at Tooting. I expected them to bring my clothes up the ward, but I was told, no, you have to go in your dressing gown, that’s how patients go.
The only such garment I owned, myself, was a black satin wrap with a plunging neckline. But before I had been admitted to hospital my kind, practical cousin Beryl had said that she didn’t think it would do, and lent me a green velour item, cosy and modest, that came to my ankles and buttoned up to the neck. I was very glad of it, when told I was to go by taxi to Tooting. They would organise the taxi, they said, no worries. Oh, I said to myself, I don’t have to go out on the street and whistle for it? And, they said, they’d send someone to escort me.
Before I began the journey, I was to drink as much water as I could possibly bear to drink, to distend my bladder, which was a good thing for a reason nobody explained. In a way, you didn’t want to ask. What if they didn’t know? There was a trade-off in ignorance going on. They told me nothing, and I didn’t ask questions in case I was shocked by finding how much they didn’t know. I waited, sitting on my bed, pensively swigging from a hospital tumbler.
‘Here’s Della!’ somebody shouted.
‘Hello, hello!’ Della shouted back. She rolled in like an Oscar candidate, like the belle of the ball. ‘Wha-ay, Della!’ rose the shout. Della whooped back. I know a character when I see one. And oh God, how a character shrinks my flesh with dread. I took one final sip of water.
Della was a Jamaican auxiliary, in her fifties or sixties. She was very wide, so that you felt you couldn’t quite see around her. People must feel that about me, nowadays, but I don’t think I block the light like Della did. She had a broad forehead and she glowered. She reminded me of a bison; not a bad thing, really, because as a child I liked the bisons at the zoo; they would stand near the fence, breathing bulkily, while you wormed your finger through the netting and scratched the expanse of sparse hair between their ears. But depend upon it: once on the open range, they could charge you down.
It was Della who was my promised escort to Tooting. They brought a wheelchair up to the ward. ‘To take you to the taxi,’ they said. But I said (maybe I just thought) I can walk, you know that, you make me walk, last night you invited me to operate the cocoa trolley…But they were insistent. They said it was a rule.
I was wheeled to the entrance and packed into a taxi with my bison. ‘Wotcha, Della!’ said the porters at the main door (or some other vile mock-cockney exclamation). Della had, I suppose, been given a letter to hand to someone at the other end, but she didn’t seem to know why we were going to Tooting together, regarding it with levity and as a kind of holiday treat. She hollered back to the porters, ‘Ray, what! Gwine Tootin, see yer, wot?’
The door slammed. We inched forward into the traffic of Hyde Park Corner. The driver kept his glass screen closed. But chat ran out of Della, chat chat chat. Who was I and why there, for what? I replied, a steady even flow of answers, censored against self-pity, censored against the personal, my face turning again and again to the taxi window. It took a long time, that journey, through the midday traffic, inching south, crossing the Thames. I have never come to terms with London as a city, but I like to look at it silently, from taxi windows, and appreciate it for what it is, and for how it makes me feel provincial. On this day I felt possessed by the idea that I might not see it again. Even two days in the enclosure of a hospital ward changes your vision, and the buildings to me seemed distant and heroic, like the buildings of a dream city. I felt emotional, but couldn’t put a name to my emotion. My bladder, which had been attacked by the disease process, had swollen obediently, and already I had a pain: a new sort of pain, quite a change really. Della was talking, loosely, fluently. I was replying to everything she said. Then she began a new story. My mind rejoined her. She told me about her youngest daughter, only eighteen, who had gone into hospital five years ago to have an operation on her hand. ‘Just a little swellin,’ Della insisted. ‘I told her, don’t you bother about that. Would she listen? Would she listen? Ho no!’
I swivelled from the window. For much of the journey till now I hadn’t known what Della was talking about, but surely this was something I could understand? And how did it go for your daughter, I asked, did it work out all right, did they fix her up? Ho no! Della said. It all went wrong when they put her under. She’s, like, a vegetable now. She got her brain destroyed. Vegetable’s what they call it.
She spoke dispassionately, as if she were talking about a Martian. The law student in me was sick, but not entirely dead. In almost any circumstance, I would have leaned forward—conscientious, mind for detail—and said, you had a claim for negligence, did you get a good solicitor? I would have been slow to censure Della, for bringing up such a gloomy precedent, and considered that in fact she might have done me a favour: it gave me something other than my pains to think about. Did the hospital admit liability, and what damages did you get? Five years, I thought—five years, the case could still be enmeshed in the system. Only part of my mind flinched from what she had told me. The other part was about to ask her for the figures, for the dates. I was about to speak.
But then Della did a terrible thing. She let her head sag forward and her jowls hang, and she imitated her daughter’s speech. ‘She goes, Ma, Ma Ma. La, la, la. That’s all she can do.’ Della protruded her tongue. She grunted. ‘Ma, ma, ma. La, la, la.’ She lolled her head on her thick neck. ‘Ma, ma, la, la.’ At length, after time for consideration, Della put her tongue back in.
We travelled the rest of the journey in silence. The taxi driver put us down at the wrong entrance. Della seemed to know where we ought to be, and we set off together, she with unclouded brow, as if rolling across the grassy plains, me in my dressing gown and bare feet in slippers: bending a little over my pain, as if I were brooding. I had come from the heat of Africa, at the hottest time of year, and we were in December. In fairness, I must say, it was neither raining nor snowing. It was one of those days so near the end of the year that it won’t put the effort in: only a stray sullen flake drifted down, out of a sullen sky.
I had worked in a hospital, at one stage in my career, and understood medical signposts, so I wasn’t happy with Della’s choice of destination. But she insisted. She kept charging, her bison head down; I had to follow her. I wanted to crouch down, on the gravel path, and urinate beneath my skirts, like Marie Antoinette on the way to execution; it is a sad detail of that sad life, which in my manuscript about the Revolution I had thought long and hard about suppressing, but had not. Della led me to the liver unit, where people thirty years my senior were standing in line. They were waiting for scans, it was true, but special ones, peculiar to them. They were yellow, bloated people, who resembled each other, who seemed to have joined the same family. None of them spoke to me. They just looked. They were stooped, like me. They held their abdomens draped over their forearms, holding up their own swags of flesh: like debutantes scooping up their trains to nip out of Buckingham Palace after their presentation.
A nurse shook his head at Della. He pointed. We backed off, away from the yellow people. I looked into the moons of their faces and they looked back at me, tolerant, indifferent perhaps. We set off again, me and Della, out of the liver unit and into the open air, up the gravel walks and down. The cold was raw and wet, like a salt bath. When I got to the right place, they were expecting me. Perhaps they had been expecting me for the last hour, but they didn’t criticise. A technician, kindly but dispassionate, slicked jelly on to my abdomen. It reminded me of Swarfega, a product with which the men in my life degreased their hands after tampering with a car engine. Perhaps the hospital could fix me, with some plastic padding? The technician loomed above me and rolled me with a roller. Lifting my head, I saw the pictures on the screen. It didn’t look sensible, it didn’t look reasonable, and perhaps he didn’t think so either. But he was helpful in pointing out the salient features. ‘Nice full bladder,’ he said, ‘I expect you can’t wait to get rid of that.’ He showed me the blossoming growths around my ovaries. For the first and last time, I saw my womb, with two black strokes, like skilled calligraphy, marking it out: a neat diacritical mark in a language I would never learn to speak.
After the rolling was over, I was allowed to fall from the examination table, and urinate. When we got back to St George’s, after another hour in a taxi, Della lolloped out of the cab and I followed gingerly, setting my slippered feet on the pavement. The porters shouted ‘Whoa, Della! Wha-ay, ducks!’
‘Bin Tootin,’ she bawled.
‘That’s our gel,’ the porters bawled back. They ran out a wheelchair and looked at me expectantly. I’m not getting in that, I said, don’t be ridiculous; I’ve run halfway round south London in my dressing gown.
But you have to, they said, aghast. There’s no two ways about it. We can’t have you walking; what a notion! It’s more than our job’s worth.
Della was singing now, her attention elsewhere. Oh, if it’s your jobs, I said. I wouldn’t like to get you sacked. That’s the way! they said. I sank into the wheelchair for the ride up to the ward.
As Christmas approached, the ward emptied. The cheerful women went home, sterilised, healed, still grumbling. A husband brought a suitcase for a young wife who had been caught in the early stages of cervical cancer—cured, she thought, she hoped. In bed she had looked like a ten-year-old boy, buttoned up inside a sensible warm top, her blonde hair tousled, her sharp face peaky. Now when the bed curtain swept back she stood straight and slim in three-inch heels, her angles encased in careful, beautiful clothes, which fitted her so exactly that you knew they had been made, by or for her; the precise hemline, the loose wool coat with its calibrated swing. She shook her head, and her thick blonde bob, precision-cut, settled into place, grazing her shoulder pads; she picked up her burnished leather bag, and stepped out into the rest of her life.
London emptied. The traffic stilled at Hyde Park Corner. A young woman remained in an opposite bed, six months pregnant, her face mottled with fever; she had a kidney infection and was, in the ward’s parlance, ‘poorly’. When the antibiotics began to work she sat up and looked about her with misty, Celtic eyes; her dark hair filmed the white pillow.
When the kidney girl sat up, it was already the eve of my surgery. No one had agreed yet on the nature of my problem. My husband had been told that, in the event that the growths were malignant, he should expect my death. I had not been given the message, but I didn’t really need it. I stubbornly believed in my own diagnosis. If I was right, I would survive.
Many hours after dark, the carol singers came. I was in the bathroom at the time, standing with my back to the dark mirror. I had begun to feel, not afraid but very lonely; I had given way to self-pity, and tears were springing out of my eyes when they piped up with ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. I stood till it was over, leaning against the wall. Then I heard a woman say, in a sweet bossy voice, ‘Perhaps you would care to choose a carol, dear?’ And Kirsty laughed: a long peal, like glad tidings. They had swooped on Kirsty because she was in the first bed they came to; they had handed her a hymn book, and when I shot out of the bathroom she was holding it as if it were hot, and her laughter was the sound of her incredulity. I took the book from her; she darted a grateful glance. I flicked the pages over, and asked for ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’. The singers complied, though they looked a bit disappointed at such an old-fashioned choice. But I was thinking of our surgeons, coming tomorrow to cut me up; it was the last thing they would do, before going home to their families to carve the Christmas fowl.
After the singers had gone Kirsty fell into a dead sleep. I sat on the end of the kidney girl’s bed and we smoked a cigarette. ‘Ladies, back to bed!’ the staff cried. I was the only one up, but they made me plural because they didn’t care to confront me. Eventually I kissed the kidney girl goodnight, stroking back her dark hair; there was no one else to do it. I shuffled across to my own bed and edged myself beneath the covers. The mound of my abdomen was almost as big as kidney girl’s pregnancy, and they still hadn’t sorted out pain relief. They gave me a sleeping pill, but it would have taken a mallet to knock me out. I was not afraid, but my brain was active.
In the silence of the night, towards two o’clock, came an African woman in trouble, rocking her head from side to side, on a stretcher which had taken on the aspect of a bier. Two men, their faces stricken, walked behind her. The cold had given them an ashy hue, and they carried woollen hats, which they wrung between their hands.
I was brought up as a Christian, insofar as a Catholic may be so called. (My grandmother thought you didn’t want to be reading the Bible, she thought it was a Protestant book.) Christians are given, for their psychic support, the model of a man dying in extreme agony. As Catholics we were encouraged in my childhood to follow the ‘Stations of the Cross’, praying certain prayers at each depiction of the stages of Christ’s Passion. We were taught to be thankful that, whatever was in store for us, it wasn’t crucifixion: unless we were a missionary or really unlucky.
As a Catholic, you were taught to contemplate your last end. You were encouraged to rehearse, in advance, your own death: with its accompanying agonies of mind and body, and (I found this a homely touch) your friends and relations hovering about your bed.
It is true that the ‘Litany for a Happy Death’ didn’t form part of the prayers I was taught in school. But at eight or nine years old, bored with the unvarying form of Holy Mass, and in despair of hearing a good sermon, I used to thumb through to the back of the prayer book.
O Lord Jesus, God of goodness and Father of mercies, I draw nigh to thee with a contrite and humble heart; to Thee I recommend the last hour of my life, and that judgement which awaits me afterwards.
When my feet, benumbed with death, shall admonish me that my mortal course is drawing to an end, Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my hands, cold and trembling, shall no longer be able to clasp the crucifix, and, against my will shall let it fall on my bed of suffering, Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my eyes, dim and troubled at the approach of death, shall fix themselves on Thee, my last and only support, Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my lips, pale and trembling, shall pronounce for the last time Thine adorable name, Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
I take death as serious and proximate, I always have. But recently, when a doctor asked for my family history, I had to knock him back on every score. No heart disease. No strokes. No cancer: except for Grandad, and he was a smoker. No reason, in fact (I said this wonderingly, raising my face) no reason, it seems, we should ever die.
But the litany tells us we will, and how it will look:
When my face, pale and livid, shall inspire the beholders with pity and dismay; when my hair, bathed in the sweat of death, and stiffening on my head, shall forebode my approaching end, Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When mine ears, soon to be for ever shut to the discourse of men, shall be open to hear the irrevocable decree, which is to fix my doom for all eternity, Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my imagination, agitated by dreadful spectres—
But no, perhaps I have agitated you enough. I admire particularly the phrase about the hair stiffening on the head. This road to dissolution, the good Catholic was encouraged to walk regularly, following Christ to Calvary. St Peter, we were taught, was crucified upside down; this was more merciful for him, since he would have lost consciousness. I was told this three times during my high school education, by the same woman, and each time in my mind I rehearsed her solemn upending, as if she were a geometrical figure that I had been asked to envisage in some other position. I think she believed Peter had got off lightly.
When the last tear, the forerunner of my dissolution, shall drop from mine eyes, receive it as a sacrifice of expiation for my sins; grant that I may expire the victim of penance, and in that dreadful moment, Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
Note that excellent semicolon. People ask how I learned to write. That’s where I learned it.
The whole of a Catholic life is lived in the shadow of the happy death—as if your life were to be enacted through a silvered, speckled mirror, ancient and flattering.
La la la. Ma ma ma. December 1979: I felt the urge to leave a note by my bed: if I wake up a vegetable, put me in a stew.
When I was half awake, a day later, they came to tell me what they had done. After a general anaesthetic, you dip in and out of consciousness: sitting up and smiling, you may be the picture of alertness, but your attention has faded. They should have told me again, I think, when I was properly awake. They should have told me once or twice. They should have written me a letter, they should have written me an essay or maybe a small book.
Certain things were over for me now. I sensed it would not be easy to shore up my collapsing marriage. When women apes have their wombs removed, and are returned by keepers to the community, their mates sense it, and desert them. It is a fact of base biology; there is little kindness in the animal kingdom, and I had been down there with the animals, grunting and bleeding on the porter’s trolley. There would be no daughter, no Catriona; not that I could claim I had wanted her too hard; at twenty-seven I hadn’t ever tried to have a baby. We seemed fine as we were, the two of us. ‘The children of lovers are orphans,’ said Robert Louis Stevenson. That would have been a sad fate for her, little Miss Cat. She would never be born now, and we were no longer lovers.
I was missing a few bits of me, besides my womb and ovaries, my reproductive apparatus. A few lengths of bowel: but you’ve plenty to spare.
Do you know what worries me most about this memoir? That I’m always the smart one. Always the one with the last word. Always the one with the heartless quip, the derisive bon mot.
But now I had to reckon with this: I hadn’t been smart at all. Like a cretin, like some dumb little angel, I had believed what I was told. I believed that the pains which ran through my body each month were part of the burden of womanhood. I didn’t say to my doctors, by the way, my menstrual periods are agony. I thought they would say, get away, you, little Miss Neverwell! And when I had, timidly, approached the topic, they’d said robustly, whoah, now, you don’t want to worry! Period pains? That’ll clear up, my dear, after you have your first baby. Just you wait and see!
I was brought up as a Catholic and it’s not easy to throw over the faith. I believed that, short of crucifixion, you shouldn’t really complain.
I was quickly out of bed. I tried to persuade the surgeons to let me go early, but they wouldn’t. One of the girls on the ward had got a make-up kit for Christmas, and told me to help myself to it. I thought we should have our faces on, to meet 1980, so though I wasn’t very upright, because of my stitches, I painted us, young and old. Even Elsie, who was eighty-three, blushed beneath her blusher when I held up the hand mirror so she could see my work. ‘Look at me,’ she said, ‘Is that me? I’ve never worn rouge!’
For the rest of us I painted deep kohl eyes and ruby lips. The Senior Registrar came in and caught me crouching over my patient. ‘Oh, you girls,’ he said, laughing. He walked away, chuckling happily to himself: another bunch of happy punters.
Oh, you girls! What are you like?
The incision ran up the midline of my body, slashed from pubic bone to navel.
About four months later, after repeated courses of penicillin had got me over the infections that I had contracted while in the hospital, I returned to Botswana, to my ailing marriage, my house, my dogs and cats. I am going to be better now, I said, I am going to be different. I went back to the GP who had been treating me, or failing to treat me: downtown, the dusty consulting room under the eucalyptus trees. I found it hard to talk; I thought I had nothing to be ashamed of, but somehow I felt ashamed, and I was not sure how confidential was my consultation; secrets did seem to leak, in this small bush town. I told him about the surgery, shuffling my feet. ‘So,’ I said, ‘you see, in the end, it turned out there wasn’t much to be done, by the stage I’d reached. It turned out a bit of a catastrophe.’
‘Oh well,’ he said. He shuffled his own sandalled feet under his desk. ‘There’s one good thing, anyway. Now you won’t have to worry about birth prevention.’
I had been, until Christmas, a woman who thought she had a choice. I was twenty-seven and I thought I could have a baby, even if I didn’t want one, even if my husband didn’t; I was free in the matter, there were possibilities. Now I was not free and the possibilities were closed off. Biology was destiny. Neglect—my own, and that of the medical profession—had taken away my choices. Now my body was not my own. It was a thing done to, a thing operated on. I was twenty-seven and an old woman, all at once. I had undergone what is called a ‘surgical menopause’ or what textbooks of the time called ‘female castration’. I was a eunuch, then? Castration is a punishment; what was my crime? It used to be fashionable to call endometriosis ‘the career woman’s disease’: the implication being, there now, you callous bitch, see what you get if you put off breeding and put your own ambitions first. I was no good for breeding, so what was I good for? Who was I at all? My hormonal circuits were busted, my endocrinology was shot to pieces. I was old while I was young, I was an ape, I was a blot on the page, I was a nothing, zilch. The publisher had turned down my French Revolution book. It seemed I couldn’t even write. But come now—let’s break open the champagne! At least I won’t have to worry about birth prevention!
There are times in life when you are justified in punching someone in the face. But I didn’t react. I knew it was for the doctor to direct the blow, and me to absorb it. Sometimes one takes a little pride in endurance of this kind. At that stage it was all that was left.
When I left St George’s Hospital, I imagined that aspects of my past had been excised, cut cleanly away. My long scar would knit and the memory of the pain would fade. For a time I went to and fro, between England and Africa, and in the end I tried to put down roots in the colder climate, and make my way alone. But by 1982 I was sick again, pain slicing through my vital organs and leaving me breathless in public places, leaning against a grimy wall at Euston Station, or clinging like a derelict to a park bench. My skin turned grey, and my weight began to fall, so that one day, when I saw myself sideways through a mirror, I shocked myself: I looked like one of those beaten dogs that the RSPCA used to photograph, with bones sticking through the hide. I hadn’t known that the endometriosis could come back.
Though it is true that radical surgery is usually a cure for the condition, it is also the case that it is difficult to eradicate every misplaced cell, to pick off those minute guerrilla fighters waging a long war in the obscure cavities of the body. The hormone oestrogen, like fresh supplies and matériel, allows the guerrillas to flourish. I didn’t know that then. If I didn’t take oestrogen replacement, I had been told, my bones would crumble. How much to take? No one seemed to know. Trial and error, I was told breezily. Take enough so that you don’t get the symptoms of the menopause.
Soon I was suffering almost continuous pain. Ignorant doctors whom I encountered told me the disease could not return. The pain was the pull of scar tissue, adhesions, or if it wasn’t that, then once again I was imagining things. This should have made me angry, but I was too fragile and worn to react as I should. There was little information available to the public, no support groups in those days. When I found a doctor who believed in my problem and was prepared to treat me, my reaction was only gratitude.
The treatment was drugs now, hormones. The first weeks were tough. On a summer’s day, wrapped in a big quilt, my teeth chattered as they had in Africa when I had contracted dysentery. But the tropical infection had left me light and hollow; now, I seemed to be gaining flesh. I entered treatment weighing something over seven and a half stone. By the end of nine months, which was the usual duration of the course, the pain was no better, but my bodyweight had increased by over fifty per cent and was rising.
When I gained the first stone or two, I didn’t really mind. If you are secure in one aspect of your appearance—and there had never been anything to quibble about, with my shape—you don’t mind small changes, they don’t seem threatening, and in fact they give you a chance to alter your style. I’d always been afraid of showing my arms, in case people thought I was from the Third World and gave me a donation; and my upper ribs, I’d always thought, looked somewhat tubercular. It was good that I looked healthier; I was tired of people asking what was wrong with me, and giving me those dirty looks that very thin women get all the time. I’d even been turned down for a job, by a broad-beamed horse-faced woman who said I looked weak; other jobs had been barred to me as soon as my medical record was discovered. It was a bit like going back to the nineteen seventies. In those days, interviewers looked sourly at me because I was married, and looked fertile; so why didn’t they like me any better, now I was on my own and incapable of childbearing?
At nine stone and size twelve, graceful and curvaceous, I got a job. It was quite a menial one, so I got another, for the evenings. One job was in a shop, the other in a bar. The jobs needed a sort of uniform, so I bought some cheap black skirts and white tops. Within a couple of weeks I had grown out of them. My face was round and looked childish; I was becoming like some phenomenal baby, who astounds her attendants. When my next appointment with my consultant came, I said, I’m worried because I’m putting on weight so fast. She shot me a spiteful glance, from amid her own jowly folds. Now, she said, you know what it’s like for the rest of us.
I found a second-hand shop quite near where I lived; it sold cast-offs from the bored, with the odd designer label. I was determined not to panic, but I stopped eating, of course; what else could I do? In any case, my body was staging some kind of revolt; colic, nausea, an inability to keep food inside me. To get out of the house for eight, I had to get up at six. I spent my scarce free time getting my hair done, lifted and teased and curled into a mane, so that I didn’t look as if I had a pin-head on top of my sweetly plump shoulders. I was a size fourteen for a while, and people would say, ‘You look so well—been away somewhere nice, have you?’
My ex-husband came back from Africa. He had once told me that I was so vain of my waistline that I would starve rather than gain an inch. But how did he know? In the past it had never been an issue. Now I had starved, and still gained five. Not to worry! He took me shopping. I bought some Englishwomen’s dresses, the pretty, floppy kind that go with creamy skin and broad haunches. We got married again. I had warned him by letter that I was fat now, but I knew I was being melodramatic. Size fourteen’s not fat, not really, it’s just—it’s well. That’s what it is. Well.
I never was a size sixteen. I shot past it effortlessly. Soon there was nothing in the second-hand shop to fit me; bigger women don’t discard fashions so lightly. The assistants—and hadn’t I been their best customer all summer?—began to give me the smirk, half-commiserating and half-condescending, that would soon become the usual expression of shop girls when I went to get clad. My skin turned grey, shading to slate-blue as the autumn came on. My legs swelled and ached. Fluid puffed up my eyelids. Some mornings my head looked like a soccer ball. I was glad when my husband’s job took us to Saudi Arabia, where women wear drapery rather than clothes, and where no one knew me, so that no one could stop me in the street to say how well I looked; where, in fact, I was more or less prohibited from going out on the street at all. I could stay indoors, under artificial light, waxing like some strange fungus.
The failure of my drugs had been recognised, and before I left England I was put on a new type. By now I was not so green in judgement. I looked up the side effects. Weight gain—I’d done that, and I didn’t think there were sizes bigger than twenty: not really, not for people who’d once been thin. Hair falls out. Well, I had plenty of hair. Voice deepens—never mind, I’d always been a squeaker. Spots—harder to put a good face on spots, but never mind, the clued-up woman knows how to cope with a little outbreak. A general virilisation…oh, what’s the odds? I’d always wanted to be a bloke.
A few weeks on, I had developed a steroid moonface. My hair had come out in handfuls. I was deaf, my eyesight was blurred by constant headaches, and my legs were swollen like bolsters. And one morning I sat up in bed, and cried out, like a nude exposed in a comic strip, eek! I clapped my outstretched palms where my breasts had been, and there they weren’t anymore.
Then I had a bit of luck. I needed a prescription, and a doctor’s letter; my new drugs would have to be sent for from England, as they were not available in Saudi Arabia. I swayed, giddy and wincing, into a doctor’s office. Let me name him—why not? His name was Dr Fishlock. He sat up at the sight of me, and asked ‘What are you taking?’ He fixed me with a keen look, of knowledge and concern. I told him. It confirmed what he had suspected. He knew the drug, he said. He had worked on the clinical trials. It was effective: but but but.
I knew the buts. I was a walking but. A butt of ridicule, in my own eyes; a sad sack enclosing a disease process, no longer an object of respect, or self-respect. He spoke to me kindly, and cut the dose by a third.
Very few doctors understand this: that somehow, you have to live till you’re cured.
I went home, to the dark, enclosed rooms of our city apartment. I cut my dose by a third. Bald, odd-shaped, deaf but not defeated, I sat down and wrote another book.
When I was thin I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like. When you sell clothes you get very good at sizing people, but I had sized my customers as if they were fridge-freezers, or some other unnegotiable object, solid and with a height, width and depth. Fat is not like this. It is insidious and creepy. It is not a matter of chest-waist-hip measurement. You get fat knees, fat feet, fat in bits of you that you’d never thought of. You get in a panic, and believe in strange diets; you give up carbohydrate, then fat, then you subsist for a bit on breakfast cereal and fruit because it seems easier that way; then you find yourself weak at the fat knees, at risk of falling over in the street. You get up on winter mornings to pack ice cubes into a diet shake that tastes like some imbibed jelly, a primitive life form that will bud inside you. You throw tantrums in fat-lady shops, where the stock is grimy tat tacked together from cheap man-made fabric, choice of electric blue or cerise. You can’t get your legs into boots, or your feet into last year’s shoes.
You say, OK, then I’ll be fat. As it seems you have no choice, you generously concur. But you become a little wary of adverbs like ‘generously’. Of adjectives like ‘full-bodied’, ‘womanly’ or ‘ample’. You think people are staring at you, talking about you. They probably are. One of my favoured grim sports, since I became a published writer and had people to interview me, has been to wait and see how the profiler will turn me out in print. With what adjective will they characterise the startlingly round woman on whose sofa they are lolling? ‘Apple-cheeked’ is the sweetest. ‘Maternal’ made me smile: well, almost.
OK, you say, it seems I can’t be thin, so I’ll be fat and make the best of it. ‘Fat is a Feminist Issue,’ you tell yourself. Fat is not immoral. There is no link between your waistline and your ethics. But though you insist on this, in your own mind, everything tells you you’re wrong; or, let’s say, you’re going in for a form of intellectual discrimination that cuts against the perception of most of the population, who know that overweight people are lazy, undisciplined slobs. Their perception, of course, is conditioned, not natural. The ancient prejudice in favour of fat has reversed only recently. When I taught in African schools, the high school girls thought slimness was a prize to be gained by hard study. As soon as their certificates allowed them to get away from mealie-porridge, the diet of their foremothers, they planned to turn svelte. But poor girls, without certificates, whom I met at my volunteer project, were aiming only to get as much mealie-porridge as the high school students. ‘Tell me about your best friend,’ I urged my little maids one day. ‘Now, write it down. Two sentences, can you?’ My star pupil leaned against me, in friendly local style, while she read her composition. Her exercise book flopped in my lap, one sinewy arm was thrown across my shoulders. Her other hand trailed towards the book, her finger stabbed at the words: ‘My beast friend is Neo. It is a beautiful girl, and fat.’
I think of her sometimes, my beast friend. In the terms of the church in which I was brought up, the body is a beast, a base, simian relative that turns up at the door of the spirit too often for comfort; a bawling uncle, drunk, who raps with the door knocker and sings in the street. Saints starve. They diet till they see visions. Sometimes they see the towers of the fortresses of God, the battlements outlined in flickering light. They are haunted by strange odours: heavenly perfumes, or diabolic stenches. Sometimes they have to rise from their pallets and kick their demons out. Some saints are muscular Christians. But there are no fat saints.
When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can’t help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you. When I was thin and quick on my feet, a girl with a head of blonde hair, I went for weeks without a kind word. But why would I need one? When I grew fat, I was assumed to be placid. I was the same strung-out fired-up person I’d always been, but to the outward eye I had acquired serenity. A whole range of maternal virtues were ascribed to me. I was (and am) unsure about how I am related to my old self, or to myself from year to year. The hormonal profile of an individual determines much of the manifest personality. If you skew the endocrine system, you lose the pathways to self. When endocrine patterns change it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another.
Some time about the millennium, I stopped being able to think properly. I lost my capacity for snappy summation, and my sense of priorities went too, so that when I was writing I would dwell on minor points at great length, while failing to get around to the main point at all. I could start things, but not finish them. I had no appetite, but grew still wider. Sleep became my only interest. In the end, it was discovered that my thyroid gland had failed. A simple pill treats it; your brain works again, but your body is slower to catch up. Nowadays, more than twenty years on from my trip to St George’s Hospital, everything about me—my physiology, my psychology—feels constantly under assault: I am a shabby old building in an area of heavy shelling, which the inhabitants have vacated years ago.
I am not writing to solicit any special sympathy. People survive much worse and never put pen to paper. I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are. Spirit needs a house and lodges where it can; you don’t kill yourself, just because you need loose covers rather than frocks. There are other people who, like me, have had the roots of their personality torn up. You need to find yourself, in the maze of social expectation, the thickets of memory: just which bits of you are left intact? I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being—even if the writing is aimless doodling that no one will ever read, or the diary that no one can see till I’m dead. When you have committed enough words to paper you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing you find that’s all you are, a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.
When you were a child you had to create yourself from whatever was to hand. You had to construct yourself and make yourself into a person, fitting somehow into the niche that in your family has been always vacant, or into a vacancy left by someone dead. Sometimes you looked towards dead man’s shoes, seeing how, in time, you would replace your grandmother, or her elder sister, or someone who no one really remembered but who ought to have been there: someone’s miscarriage, someone’s dead child. Much of what happened to you, in your early life, was constructed inside your head. You were a passive observer, you were the done-to, you were the not-explained-to; you had to listen at doors for information, or sometimes it was what you overheard; but just as often it was disinformation, or half a tale, and much of the time you probably put the wrong construction on what you picked up. How then can you create a narrative of your own life? Janet Frame compares the process to finding a bunch of old rags, and trying to make a dress. A party dress, I’d say: something fit to be seen in. Something to go out in and face the world.
For a few years, in my dreams, I stayed thin, and I wore a thin person’s clothes. Even today, I sometimes see myself, in one of the cities I go to when I am asleep, coming out of a bookshop or sitting at a café table, trim and narrow, though younger than I am now. It is said that, in dreams—in a lucid dream, where you are aware of your own processes—you can’t turn on an electric light, or see yourself in a mirror. I set myself to test this; thinking that somehow, if I could see my fat self in a dream, I would have accepted it all through, and would accept the waking reality.
But what happens, when you face the mirror, is that its surface melts, and the self walks into the glass. You step through it, and into a different dream.
It was 1982 when I went to Saudi Arabia; I was thirty. The expatriate wives of Jeddah plagued the life out of me, sticking me like mosquitoes with their common question: ‘When are you going to start your family?’
I didn’t know what was a good answer to this: I’m not, or I can’t.
When I was a young woman I didn’t want children. I was wary of the trap that seemed ready to spring. I was ambitious, on my own account, to make a mark on the world. I didn’t want to carry someone else’s thwarted expectations. If I failed to make something of myself, wouldn’t I heap my frustration on to my daughter? And she, in course of time, on to her daughter? When is it a woman’s turn, I wanted to know, to get something for herself, and not at second hand through her children? I was good for more than breeding: that was my opinion.
But my opinion faltered, in the face of the expat matrons smelling so sweetly of baby talc and cream. It was hard to tell them that I had turned my back on everything that gave life meaning for them, turned my back until it was too late for me. Once it was necessary for my husband’s employer to arrange for my drugs to be brought in by courier, the rumour got about that they were fertility drugs. ‘They can do wonders nowadays,’ I was assured. Eyes were on my waistline; which was, of course, ever-expanding. After the natural gestation period had passed, the ladies gossiped among themselves that I was trying to adopt.
This made me angry; after a bit, it made me laugh. Would any agency have thought me a suitable adoptive mother? Adoption agencies don’t like sick women for parents. And why would I want a child not my own? I needed to reflect my glorious ancestry. My forebear who crushed a riot, who was made a sanitary inspector. My great-grandmother, who liked a drink but never smoked a pipe. My great-grandfather, who built a wall an army could have marched on.
I should have been a ‘schoolgirl mother’, I thought: that social scourge. At fourteen I might have been fertile. At seventeen. But after that—I have to read my pain backwards, to know what was happening inside me—I guess my chances were decreasing. Those crippling spasms that had to be ignored, those deep aches with no name, those washes of nausea, were not evidence of a neurotic personality, or of my ambivalence about my gender, and they were not brought on by ‘nerves’, or by fear of failure in a man’s world. They were evidence of a pathological process that would destroy the chance of my having a child and land me with chronic ill health. I wonder why, despite all, I did not insist, could not insist, that doctors paid attention to me and located my malaise. There are several possible explanations, on several levels. One is that, in the time and place where I grew up, expectations of health were low, especially for women. The proper attitude to doctors was humble gratitude; you cleaned the house before they arrived. The deeper explanation is that I always felt that I deserved very little, that I would probably not be happy in life, and that the safest thing was to lie down and die. The reasons for this elude me now. I wish I could explain them better and make them add up. But we were always told at school, when tackling a sum, to ‘show your workings’. Even if you didn’t get the answer right, we were told, you might get the odd mark for honest effort.
What I would have liked was a choice in life. Leisure, to reverse my earlier decision that children didn’t matter to me; leisure, to ask if circumstances or my mind had changed. No one can predict that the game will be over for them at the age of twenty-seven. The time I fell in love is the time I should have acted, and now that an era of my life is over, and my schoolfriends are becoming grandmothers, I miss the child I never had. I know what Catriona would have been like. I have a mental picture of her, which I have built like one of those criminal profilers whose formulations—let’s be honest—never fit too well. She would be nothing like me at all. She would be strong like my mother, broad-shouldered like my husband, with that milky Irish skin that freckles but never tans. I see her small competent hands, chopping an onion; making unwritten dishes, which she has never been taught to make. She would manage her money well, and perhaps manage other people’s; perhaps that’s how she’d make a living. She would drive a car, and sing in tune, and know about things like making curtains, which have always defeated me.
People romance about their children long before they are born—long before, and long after. They name them and rename them. They see them as their second chances, ‘a chance to get it right this time’, as if they were able to give birth to themselves. They have children to compensate themselves for the things they didn’t do or didn’t get in their own early life. They conceive because they feel impelled to make up, to a non-existent person, for a loss they themselves have suffered. Children are born because their parents feel the defects in themselves, and want to mend them; or because they are bored; or because they feel that in some mysterious way it is time for children, and that if they don’t have them their lives will begin to leak meaning away. Some women have babies to give a present to their own mother, or to prove themselves her equal. Motives are seldom simple and never pure. Children are never simply themselves, co-extensive with their own bodies, becoming alive to us when they turn in the womb, or with their first unaided breath. Their lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts within our lives.
Women who have miscarried know this, of course, but so does any woman who has ever suspected herself to be pregnant when she wasn’t. It’s impossible not to calculate, if I had been, it would have been born, let’s see, in November, ice on the roads, early dark; it would have been the offspring of late March, a child of uncertain sun and squalls. No doubt there are ghosts within the lives of men; a man with daughters brings his son into being through wishing him, as a man somehow better than himself, and a father of sons wraps his unborn daughter in swaddling bands and guards her virginity, like an unspoiled realm of himself. Even adulterers have their ghost children. Illicit lovers say: what would our child be like? Then, when they have parted or are forced apart, the child goes on growing up, a shadow, a half-shadow of possibility. The country of the unborn is criss-crossed by the roads not taken, the paths we turned our back on. In a sly state of half-becoming, they lurk in the shadowland of chances missed.
I never saw a ghost in Africa, though more than once death came so near me I had to grapple with him. It seemed to me that ghosts—the knocking, echoing, pesky sort—were a manifestation of Europe that would trail after the person who was not yet at home in Africa: who was only half-adjusted to a new, deeper state of emergency. I never felt that unease in the empty house, the queasiness of populated rooms where you can’t see the population: or fear of the dark. It seemed to me that symbols in Africa organised themselves differently. Outward manifestation of inner chaos came in fatal road accidents and suicides: the truck without lights, the one drink too many, the misspelled police report that got filed in the waste bin. Any number of lives were trashed, casually, born and unborn; and in Africa, I actually knew a woman who died in childbirth. She was just one among the continent’s casualties, but the one I used to speak to every day. I didn’t like her much, in fact; I’d like to say I mourned, but it would be stretching a point.
Jeddah was different. My life in Saudi Arabia, for at least two years, was like life in gaol. Simple force of will—or the force of simple will—could move the furniture and rip off the wardrobe doors. At times of stress, or on the brink of change, you can seem to act as a conduit for whatever disorganised, irrational forces are in the air. Shut in those dark rooms, life going on elsewhere, my body subject to strange mutations, I accumulated an anger that would rip a roof off.
When I came back to England, and gave up my concealing Islamic draperies, neighbourly eyes would note my bulk and ask, when is your baby due? Sometimes kindly women, waiting on a station bench, would edge along for me. Once, a young Scots boy, too new to London to have lost his natural grace, offered me his seat on the tube and, because I felt so ill, I thanked him with an astonished smile, and sat on it. The unborn, whether they’re named or not, whether or not they’re acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt. No advance in medical technology was going to produce Catriona; she was lost. But when biological destiny veers from the norm, there are parts of the psyche that take time to catch up. You understand what has happened, the medical disaster; you reason about it. But there are layers of realisation, and a feeling of loss takes time to sink through those layers. The body is not logical; it knows its own mad pathways. Mourning is not quick; when there is no body to bury, mourning is not final. I used to say (because flippancy was my weapon) look, it’s a good thing I never had children, because I’d be putting them outside the door while I finished a paragraph; I’d be saying, don’t you know I’ve this piece to do for the newspaper, why don’t you go and play in the road? No more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall: did Connolly ever write a truer word?
But at a less conscious level, I kept on planning for Catriona: for her brothers, and for their children too. This is the only conclusion I can reach, when I look at the strange decisions I took about real estate in the late eighties, the nineties. Property was a sound investment, of course, but I think I had investments that went beyond the financial. The larders were stocked with food, the presses with sheets. We could have provisioned a small army from the stuff that was stacked in the garages. After we bought Owl Cottage, we had accumulated a total of seven bedrooms, four lavatories, a duplication of domestic machines, the capacity to wash clothes for eight people at once, to do the dishes for sixteen. Who did I think was coming, unless the unborn; or possibly the dead? The hungry family of uncles, wanting ham and Cheshire cheese: their own dead offspring, that missing generation: my own missing daughter trailing her offspring, a green-eyed girl with my green-eyed grandchildren. What’s to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?
There is a certain pathos attached to ghosts, to household sprites and those hobgoblins that jump into the vision between waking and sleep. At one time, I was plagued by a spate of dreams in which I was a midwife who had let a child die; but when I got my first book on track again, and when, after many years in limbo, it was published at last, those dreams ceased. But time goes on, you think of more and more books you should have written, stories half-fledged and left in the file called ‘Work in Progress’. I know some of these narratives will never be finished. I dream of half-formed, foetal beings, left abandoned on a cold floor. Sometimes they are blackened, like frozen corpses. They take malign forms: I dream of a castle floor, where the children come shrieking through, and so evil are they, that they have the actual capacity of revolting stone, of making the flags shrink away from them. Risen from the ground, they are naked and sexless, foul-mouthed and knowing. My impulse is to injure or kill them, swat them like flies, like little demons that, if they’re left, will range about the world and will bad-mouth me and misrepresent me and filch from me everything I have.
But then I wake up, chilled, and put out my hands to be sure that surfaces are solid, that my own flesh is still warm. I grope for a pen and write down my dream; when the day has settled around me, the prosaic Surrey light, I take my dream to the keyboard and mince it through a second draft.