by Paul Burston
At this point, most expectant mothers would have stopped to consider what was best for the baby. Not my mother. As far as she was concerned, the new life in her belly was little more than an inconvenience, so she booked herself in for an abortion.
I grew up knowing this. My mother made no secret of it, insisting that it was in everyone’s best interests to be honest about these things. I’m not sure how it served my interests to know that I wasn’t wanted, but my dad did his best to soften the blow, assuring me that it can’t have been an easy decision for her to make. Perhaps not, but she was a card-carrying feminist after all. I’m sure that whatever qualms she might have had were soon soothed away by her ideology. ‘My body, my choice’ is quite persuasive as slogans go, but it’s not the whole truth. It takes two people to make a woman pregnant. I’m inclined to think that the father of the baby should have a say, too. Feminists are quick to complain when men walk away from their responsibilities. They’re not so quick to accept that the father of an unborn child also has rights.
Needless to say, my mother wasn’t of the same opinion. She didn’t notify my father of her whereabouts or her condition. He found out the hard way, from a local gossip who’d caught the tail end of a conversation between my mother and her GP at the doctor’s surgery some weeks before. Ever the dutiful husband, he tracked her down to a hotel in Brighton, where they resolved to give the marriage another go.
I don’t know which of them saved me from the abortionist’s forceps. When questioned, my dad always insists that my mother didn’t take much persuading. But then, what else would he say? He’s always been too kind for his own good. As for her, having planned my termination with a ruthlessness I was to witness many times during my early childhood, she apparently had a change of heart and embraced the idea of motherhood as eagerly as she had once embraced my father. I think of this as her Madonna ‘Ray of Light’ phase. Remember when the Material Girl suddenly went all Earth Mother on us? I have to say, this was my least favourite of Her Madgesty’s reinventions. I preferred Madonna way back when she was a boy toy or now that she’s an unapologetic bitch. But anyway, that was my mother. And like Madonna, she struck that particular pose for as long as she needed to, and no longer. It was all over five months later, from the moment I was born.
So that was it – my introduction to this unforgiving world. Barely out of the womb and already I’d had a narrow escape. I don’t think it’s insignificant that I was born six weeks premature. I’m sure my survival instincts told me to get out while I still could, before my mother’s maternal instincts abandoned her and she reverted to her original plan, flushing me away without so much as a second thought. I think of my unborn self as rather like the creature from Alien, quietly biding my time but ready to burst through the host’s stomach wall at the first sign of trouble.
Having got off to such an inauspicious start, I suppose it was inevitable that my mother and I would be at loggerheads from the day she brought me home from the hospital. I’ve seen the baby photos and I think it’s safe to say that the woman holding the bundle of white cloth with a red face poking out of the top wasn’t experiencing anything approaching joy. If anything, she looks rather repulsed. If these photos were to appear in one of those baby manuals you see in bookshops these days, it would be under the heading ‘Failure to Bond with Your Baby’. My mother, of course, would never have admitted to any such failing. At the very least, she’d have insisted that the failure was mine and not hers.
It was her idea to christen me Eve – the first woman, she who succumbs to temptation, eats the forbidden fruit and brings about the fall of man. How very Spare Rib of her. I hated it and changed my name to Evie as soon as I could.
There was never any question of her breast-feeding. No, it was straight onto the bottle for me. Had it been possible, I’m sure she’d have had me feeding myself from a young age. Hers was the kind of feminism that placed a lot of emphasis on self-sufficiency. Astonishingly, she saw no contradiction between this political stance and her personal circumstances: depending on my father for everything from the roof over her head to the shoes on her feet. In the following years, I would take great delight in pointing this out to her. But for now I was forced to rely on her not-so-tender attentions, unable to put into words what I would later identify as her many shortcomings in the mothering department.
When I did develop the power of speech, I never cried for her. It was always my dad I called out for in the middle of the night, always him who would mop my fevered brow or soothe me back to sleep. He was the calming influence in our house, and when he wasn’t tending to me, he was trying his best to please her. As the years went by, it became clear that all his efforts were in vain. Nothing seemed to please my mother. She was a woman who was permanently disappointed with life and was largely driven by resentment. I don’t remember her ever smiling. Her features were always pinched, her brows knitted, her mouth a hard, red line.
I remember the day she told me my father was leaving us. I was eight at the time. We were in the kitchen, where moments earlier he’d pleaded with her to be reasonable, and she’d responded by grabbing a plate from the draining board and throwing it against the wall. ‘He’s leaving because of you,’ she told me. ‘He can’t cope with the way you are!’
My therapist would probably have a field day with this, describing it as a childhood trauma. In fact, I found it funny. My poor mother, the proud feminist, unable to cope with the fact that her long-suffering husband didn’t love her anymore, trying to pin the blame on her only child. Later she told the neighbours that the reason her husband walked out was because he had a terminal illness and wanted to spare her the agony of watching him waste away. I wonder what they thought when they saw him walk back in again a few weeks later, looking fit and healthy after a much-needed break from her constant complaints and incessant demands.
What was it Oscar Wilde said? ‘All women become like their mothers – that is their tragedy. No man ever does – that is his.’ Well, I’m pleased to say that Oscar was wrong. In fact, I’d say the opposite is often true. Lots of men become like their mothers – and I don’t just mean the ones who like dressing up in women’s clothing and having their bottoms spanked by a dominatrix in fetish gear. But few women ever do. I think we’re better at avoiding it. Women tend to be more observant than men – we’re more alert to the potential threat. This isn’t to say that some mothers don’t become like their daughters. We’ve all seen those middle-aged women desperately trying to compete with their twenty-year-old offspring. But that’s a different kettle of mutton, and one I never had to contend with. By the time I posed any kind of sexual threat, my mother was long gone.
My mother and I share a few physical characteristics – enough to convince me that I must remind my father of her on some level. We have the same grey eyes, the same long neck, the same honey-blonde hair. But appearances can be deceptive. I’m pleased to say that I am nothing like my mother. When my father looks at me, I hope it’s not her he sees. Because that would be horribly unfair – on him and on me.
I had a nice long soak in the bath earlier, listening to the radio. The water had cooled, my fingers had wrinkled and I was just thinking about getting out when the DJ played ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ by Sinead O’Connor. I’m sure everyone remembers where they were when they first saw that video. I remember reading somewhere that the single tear that rolled down Sinead’s cheek was for her mother, who died in a car accident when the singer wasn’t much older than I was when my mother left. But that’s where the similarity ends. I didn’t cry for my mother. Not a single tear.
Reading back over what I wrote earlier, it strikes me that this is precisely the kind of thing Maria is so keen for me to ‘open up’ about. Imagine if I’d said all this to her today! She’d have been over the moon.
‘I think we’ve made a major breakthrough,’ she’d have said, nodding at me and reaching for her box of tissues. Then she’d have talked about transference and role models and how peo
ple who suffer childhood trauma or rejection by a parent can grow up with a fragile sense of self, blah, blah, blah.
But we didn’t talk about my mother. Instead she kept asking me about my ‘living arrangements’. Have I always lived at home? Was it difficult, caring for my father? Did I have any kind of support? When was the last time I took a holiday?
I told her I was very happy with my living arrangements, thank you very much. And of course I haven’t always lived at home. I went to college for three years, and worked in Manchester for a while.
‘What did you study?’ she asked, and immediately I regretted giving so much away.
‘Does it matter?’ I replied.
‘It helps me to build a clearer picture,’ she said. ‘What interests you. What drives you.’
‘What interests me is freedom of expression. What drives me is the desire to live freely.’
‘And you were able to do that, were you? In Manchester?’
Truth be told, I haven’t thought about what happened in Manchester for a long time. There’s nothing to remind me. No police report. No contact with any of the people I hung around with back then. No way for them to track me down. I left quietly, without saying goodbye or making any fuss. I changed my number and left no forwarding address. I even changed myself. I’m not the person I was then. I left her behind and with each passing year the memory of that day and the girl I used to be fades further from view. What happened in Manchester stays in Manchester. My dad and I came to an unspoken agreement on this when I came back to live with him. Neither of us has spoken about it since. So why should I discuss it with my therapist?
Besides, I don’t see why one event should cast such a long shadow. I won’t allow it. We can’t always control what happens to us but we can control how we deal with it, and I refuse to let one incident eclipse everything else or redefine me in any way. I had a great time in Manchester. In many ways, those were the best years of my life. I developed a real taste for freedom there. I learned to stand on my own two feet.
But try moving back to London without a foothold on the property ladder. It’s impossible. House prices here are ridiculous. Rent is extortionate. Given the choice between a rented cupboard under the stairs in West Ruislip or my own room in a three-bedroom house in East Dulwich, why wouldn’t I decide to move back home?
‘Still, it must have been quite an adjustment,’ Maria insisted. ‘Giving up this life you’d carved out for yourself. Can I ask how old you were at the time?’
‘I was twenty-three.’
I watched her write something down in her notebook, wondered if she was making some kind of judgement. I suppose some people might have been embarrassed – a woman my age with nothing to her name but bags of clothes and boxes of books. But we had already entered the age of Generation Rent. The age of adults forced to move back in with their parents was only just around the corner. I was simply ahead of my time.
‘And were there relationships?’ my therapist asked. ‘Boyfriends? Girlfriends?’
I smiled knowingly at her political correctness. ‘Boys to fuck and girls for laughs.’
She coloured slightly despite herself. ‘Anyone serious?’
‘Sex is always serious,’ I told her. ‘Even when it’s casual.’
‘I’ll rephrase the question. Did the decision to move back home mean leaving someone special behind?’
‘We’re all special,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that the received wisdom these days? Everyone is special in their own way?’
‘And do you consider yourself special?’
I smiled again. ‘I have my moments.’
She looked at me pityingly, and it was all I could do to stop myself from wiping the look off her face.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I said.
‘What am I thinking?’
‘You’re wondering if I’m a suicide risk.’
‘And are you?’
‘Not on your life!’
What my dear, hopeless therapist fails to realise is that some of us are made of far sterner stuff. We’ve had to be. Whenever I come across someone who claims to have had a happy, well-adjusted childhood, I pity them. They don’t have the resources I have. They haven’t developed the necessary life skills.
When I lived in Manchester, friends were always complimenting me on my culinary abilities. Most of them lived on takeaways. Even beans on toast was beyond their capabilities. And there was me, cooking up a storm. People always assumed that my mother taught me everything I knew, that the meals I prepared for my housemates were from family recipes passed on from one woman to another. I remember the pleasure I took in shattering their illusions, the looks on their faces when I informed them that my mother never taught me a thing.
Don’t get me wrong. I learned a lot from my mother. But that’s not the same as saying she taught me. That would imply some kind of personal investment on her part – and nothing could be further from the truth.
No, I learned from my mother the way a rabbit learns from a fox. I learned how to survive.
16
Maybe it’s the change of scenery. Maybe it’s the hangover from last night sharpening his senses. But the next day, in the stillness of his rented apartment, Tom finally finds the inspiration that’s been eluding him for weeks. The words flow easily and he writes more than he’s written in a long time, passing the thousand-word mark, then getting on for two thousand. Most days he’s lucky if he can manage a thousand words tops, but today he’s on a roll and it isn’t long before he’s completed another chapter.
He heaves a sigh of satisfaction, saves the document and copies a backup version to a memory stick before taking a short break and pouring a glass of Diet Coke from the bottle in the fridge. Returning to his laptop, he makes a start on the next chapter, sketching out the opening paragraph then pausing as he remembers something. He minimises the document and opens another untitled folder on his desktop.
When Tom first received the email from Evie Stokes with the zip file containing the manuscript of her book, he didn’t know what to do. It stayed in his downloads folder for days, unopened and unread. Then one morning his curiosity finally got the better of him and he took a look. What he found was that she’d taken his first novel, Boy Afraid, and produced what some might call a work of fan fiction.
Initially, Tom was horrified. Not content with taking liberties with his book, the author had written herself into the story and included an intimate relationship between her character and a male character who was clearly based on him. Alarm bells rang as Tom read of their torrid affair, written in the kind of breathless prose normally associated with cheap romance novels or contenders for The Bad Sex Award. The whole thing was obviously intended as some kind of love letter, but there was nothing remotely flattering or heartwarming about it. It felt sinister. It unnerved him. It suggested that here was a woman with a fixation that went way beyond mere fandom.
It also told him that this was not a woman who would respond well under pressure. A slight nudge was all it would take to tip her completely over the edge.
Up until this point, Tom had found Evie’s attention flattering and considered her a little eccentric but essentially harmless. He’d met her kind before – those often dowdy, somewhat shy women who usually sat at the back at author events, never raised their hand to ask a question but hung around afterwards, edging closer as the crowd thinned and they finally plucked up the courage to introduce themselves. He’d put her social awkwardness down to her being star-struck in his presence.
Having read some of her work, he saw that there was far more to her than that. She was clearly suffering from some kind of mental illness or personality disorder. But there was also a glimmer of talent there – raw and in desperate need of professional guidance, but a talent nonetheless. The question was, should he help to nurture it or distance himself from her as quickly as possible?
The answer was obvious. Evie Stokes wasn’t a woman who took rejection well. He’d gleaned that from some
of her interactions on Twitter. Any perceived slight could turn her from an adoring fan into an angry troll who was easily riled and refused to be ignored. And so it proved. By the time Tom reported her to the police, he’d gathered enough evidence to suggest that she was guilty of harassment. There were the copies of emails and the screenshots of tweets. There were the printouts of her blogs, her comments on Amazon reviews and her doctoring of his Wikipedia page.
The one thing he didn’t mention was her book. That first night at Brixton Police Station, he’d come close to mentioning it, but something had held him back. He’d told himself that there was nothing in the book that seemed particularly pertinent, legally speaking. If writing fiction was a crime, there’d be a lot of people clogging up the criminal-justice system. All the book really showed was that Evie Stokes was obsessed with him – and there was already ample evidence of that. The sheer volume of tweets and emails indicated that hers was not a healthy obsession.
But there was another reason why he kept quiet about the book, and here Tom’s motives were rather murkier. Despite its many weaknesses, the book ignited his imagination. The plot was compelling. It excited him in a way the book he’d been working on for the best part of three years never really had. Somewhere in there was the kernel of a good idea, and if anyone was entitled to run with it, he certainly was. Without his original work, her manuscript would never have existed. He was simply taking back what was rightfully his. So after meeting with his agent at the Groucho Club, and despite denying all knowledge of Evie’s damn book, he took elements of her plot and developed them into a crime novel about a female blogger who becomes fixated with a male author and is charged with harassment.
Several months and sixty thousand words later, it’s fair to say that the novel he’s working on also contains a strong element of autobiography. Tom has never put quite so much of his personal experience into a book before. But as his creative-writing tutor at university never tired of reminding him, ‘Write about what you know. It’s all material!’ What his tutor didn’t say, but could very easily have said, is that writing can also be an act of revenge. Now whenever those writers’ memes pop up on social media Tom feels as if someone is staring through his computer screen and inside his head, seeing every thought process and creative decision he makes – ‘Don’t mess with authors, we’ll describe you’. Or better yet, ‘I’m killing you off in my novel’.