by Paul Burston
To return to my earlier analogy: when you take a cutting from a plant, it’s important that the blade you use is sharp. I first began cutting myself at the age of twelve, the insides of my wrists and forearms a latticework of red lines. She was long gone by then, but I was simply continuing the work she’d started, managing my rage the only way I knew how.
‘I never really think about my mother,’ I said in answer to my therapist’s question. ‘To be honest, I haven’t thought about her in years.’
‘And is she still alive?’ Maria asked.
‘She died,’ I replied. ‘A few years ago. She fell down a piss-stained stairwell and broke her neck. She was drunk at the time. My mother was often drunk. The coroner returned a verdict of accidental death.’
My therapist’s calm professional demeanour abandoned her for a moment. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
‘Are you?’ I replied, all wide-eyed and innocent. ‘I’m not.’
In matters of great importance, style not sincerity is what really matters. Oscar Wilde said that, though it could just as easily have been me or a thousand others who learned from an early age that all people really care about is how things appear to the outside world. My mother never cared much for my dad or me. Not really. What she did care about was how our dysfunctional little family unit was perceived by the neighbours. It didn’t matter what went on within those four walls, provided we kept up appearances. She was very good at this. So good, in fact, that my dad had no idea what went on half the time. He knew about her extramarital affairs. She made no attempt to conceal them from him, disappearing for the odd night or sometimes weeks at a time, forcing him to tell people that she was visiting a sick relative. I think she enjoyed humiliating him as much as she enjoyed the lavish gifts and illicit sex.
But he knew nothing of what went on inside that house when he wasn’t at home. Had he done, I’m sure the marriage would have ended long before it did. But my mother was cunning. She knew how to cover her tracks. She knew how to silence me. ‘Look what you made me do,’ she’d say. And like the naïve fool I was, I believed her. It wasn’t until after she left, when the dust had settled and the wounds had healed, that I began to put a name to her actions.
I never cried for my mother – and I never missed her, not once. How can you pine for something you never had? When my first period came, it was my dad who went out and bought tampons and sanitary pads. Everything I needed to know about female biology I’d already learned from sex education class at school. Dad taught me to cook and clean, though he never made me work for my pocket money. Not like her. She’d have had me running around after her day and night, had she stuck around long enough.
The day she finally left, I thought it would be a clean break, a new beginning, a chance for us to get our house in order. How wrong I was. My poor father grieved for months. Despite everything she’d done to him, despite all the humiliations she’d put him through, he still loved her. I couldn’t understand it. How could I? I was only ten years old. But it seemed to me that the diseased branch had finally been cut away, giving our little family tree the chance to heal. I assumed that was the last we’d see or hear of her, and the thought filled me with joy.
How wrong I was. Even after she left, she refused to leave us alone. She Who Must Be Obeyed became She Who Must Not Be Ignored. People talk about harassment as if it’s something peculiar to our day and age, a crime committed by isolated individuals who spend too much time online and latch on to people they barely know. They don’t know what they’re talking about. All the things I’ve been wrongly accused and convicted of, my mother was guilty of a thousand times over. First there were phone calls demanding that I speak to her. Despite my father’s protests, I refused to come to the phone. Then there were letters. I don’t know what she wrote, because I never opened them, but I’d always know when one of mother’s missives had arrived. I’d come home from school and my dad would greet me at the door with that hopeful expression on his face. I don’t blame him. He only wanted what was best for me. He wasn’t to know that the best had already happened. She’d finally fucked off, and I wanted nothing more to do with her. She was dead to me long before she drew her last breath.
The letter would be sitting on the kitchen table, addressed to me in her familiar handwriting – all bold strokes and extravagant flourishes, the self-conscious calligraphy of a woman who felt that the world should observe her every word.
‘Why don’t you read it?’ my dad would say. ‘She’s still your mother, after all. There can’t be any harm in seeing what she has to say.’ Even then, he was determined to give her the benefit of the doubt, as if all the neglect and abuse amounted to nothing more than a misunderstanding.
So I’d take the letter from him, and smile and pretend I had every intention of reading it later, after dinner. We’d sit and eat, and all the while I would feel the envelope burning a hole in my pocket and picture her poisoned ink seeping through the paper, through my clothes and into my skin, branding me like a tattoo. After dinner, I’d help Dad with the dishes, insisting that as the woman of the house I wasn’t above doing a bit of housework. Had I allowed him to, he’d have done everything for me. That’s the kind of man he is. That’s how deep his love for me has always been. It takes a particular kind of woman not to appreciate a man like that. It takes a woman so wrapped up in herself she’s never satisfied with anything.
Later, when the dishes were washed and dried, and stacked neatly in the cupboard above the sink, I’d go to my room, take the envelope containing my mother’s letter from my pocket and set fire to it with a cigarette lighter. I’d watch the paper blacken and the flames grow, and I’d wish it wasn’t just her words I was burning but the fingers that held her pen, her hands, her hair, her blistering flesh. I’d think of witches being burned alive at the stake and wonder if maybe those witch-finders had a point. Oh, I know this makes me a bad feminist, but then I’ve never claimed to be anything else. I never swallowed my mother’s doctrine, however much she tried to force-feed me. I’ve always followed my own path, which was one reason she hated the sight of me.
My father never enquired about the content of my mother’s letters. Perhaps he thought they were too personal and didn’t like to pry. They stopped after a year or so. There must have been fifty or more by then – all unopened, all reduced to ash as I sat in my room, fantasising about the things I’d like to do to her. Maybe she’d finally got the message. Or maybe whoever she was living off refused to cover the costs of all those sheets of writing paper, envelopes and postage stamps. My mother liked to make a good impression. She always chose the finest stationery – milled and watermarked paper folded into matching cream wove envelopes. I suppose it’s easy to have expensive tastes when you’re not the one footing the bill.
My father regularly sent her money. He never told me, but sometimes, when he was out working, I’d check his bank statements and see that transfers had been made to an account held in my mother’s name – a few hundred pounds here, the odd thousand there. I never questioned him and I never really understood why he continued to help fund her lifestyle long after she’d left him. Even at a distance, she continued to wind him round her little finger.
I know he worried about me. He worried that I wasn’t more outgoing, that I didn’t mix well. I think he thought I was suffering from some kind of social handicap. But here’s the thing about people like me: we make up for it in other ways, like a blind man whose hearing becomes more acute to compensate for his loss of vision. Those teenage years weren’t wasted. Far from it. I read books and I learned how to read people. I developed computer skills and sharpened my understanding of information technology and human behaviour – faculties that would stand me in good stead when the world went online and masses flocked to social media. I didn’t feel disadvantaged in the slightest. On the contrary, I felt as if I could take on the world.
After the letters stopped, I didn’t hear from my mother for a long time. I didn’t know where she was livi
ng or whether she was even still alive, and I honestly didn’t care. She was no loss to me. I meant what I said to my therapist. The day my mother left was the day my life really began. But all good things must come to an end, and in due course my freedom from the woman who’d once been my prison would come to an end, too.
Here’s another thing my therapist said to me this week. ‘I’m concerned about your obsession with sexuality.’
‘Why’s that?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t women allowed to have a sexuality?’
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘But as I understand it, you’re a heterosexual woman. Yet you seem overly interested in gay male sexuality. Why is that?’
You don’t need to be a Madonna fan to know that straight women have been enjoying gay male sexuality for years. Mae West was a fag hag long before Elizabeth Taylor or Princess Diana got in on the act. Obviously I’m no Madonna. I’m no Elizabeth Taylor either. But to hear my therapist talk, you’d think there was something intrinsically wrong with women who happen to enjoy gay male company.
‘Is it because you feel safer around gay men?’ she asked. Clearly she’s never been inside a gay club or heard the disgusting way some queers talk about women.
‘Not particularly,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’
She paused before continuing. ‘In my experience, people displaying the kind of behaviours you exhibit have often suffered some kind of trauma in early childhood.’
‘Well I did fall on my head when I was five,’ I grinned. Some people lie to please their therapist. I lie to test mine.
‘And were you taken to hospital?’ she asked.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you’re not being entirely honest with me.’
Full marks for that startling insight, at least.
‘Abuse happens in lots of families,’ she continued. ‘It’s far more common than most people think. It’s estimated that one in four children suffers some kind of abuse within the family. Fathers and stepfathers are usually the ones responsible.’
I held her gaze for a moment. ‘Are you suggesting that my father abused me?’
‘Did he?’
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So I simply smiled and said, ‘You couldn’t be more wrong.’
My mother tried to kill me once. It was before I was born, so I know most people wouldn’t consider it attempted murder. But most people don’t know what it’s like to grow up knowing that you were never wanted, at least not by the woman who carried you inside her belly and would have ended your life before it had even begun, given half a chance. When you know this, it changes you. I knew from a young age, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it made me the person I am today. The will to survive hardened in me like a protective shell or a coat or armour. I became a ticking time bomb, slowly biding my time.
I put up with the abuse. It hurt but it was never life-threatening. The bruises healed and the marks were easy to hide. I never confided in my father because he worshipped the ground she walked on. What child wants the responsibility of breaking up their parents’ marriage? When she left, I was so relieved and saw no point in telling him what had happened. It was over now. She couldn’t hurt me anymore, and he would only have blamed himself for somehow failing in his responsibilities as a father. I couldn’t bear that.
So the years passed and the communication stopped, and by the time I left home for the great adventure of higher education I hardly ever thought of my mother. There were no photos of her around the house. My dad no longer mentioned her. It was an unspoken agreement between us, a shared silence that spoke volumes about how little she meant, this woman who had once been the centre of his universe and the horror at the heart of mine.
I moved to Manchester, where I studied English and graduated with a first-class honours degree, before landing a job on a local listings magazine. It wasn’t my dream job, but it paid the bills. It was a start. I worked hard and made plans. Dad always said I was a dreamer. But now I started to dream big. I pitched ideas and book reviews to national newspapers and literary journals. I began working on that novel I’d always talked about. Life was good and the possibilities were endless.
Then, just when I thought I’d never see my mother’s evil face again, she reappeared. So I did what any self-respecting survivor of abuse dreams of doing. I took back all the power she’d ever taken from me. Every hateful word, every hurtful action, every twisted thing that woman ever did – I took it all back in one fell swoop. I did what I had to do. I did what I should have done a long time ago.
I killed her.
18
Hastings is shimmering under a heatwave. It’s barely noon and already the temperature is in the mid-twenties. Tom has spent the morning trying to write and achieving very little. But no matter. The important thing is that he’s completed a further five chapters since arriving here a little under a fortnight ago. Just a few more and the book will be finished. Time to take a break and head to the beach. The sea air will help clear his head, and he can return to his writing later. He saves this morning’s work to a memory stick, logs off his laptop and goes in search of his beach bag.
By now Tom has settled into a routine. He’s awake each morning by 6.00 a.m., largely thanks to the seagulls, who begin their dawn chorus an hour or so earlier, and whose cries gradually filter into his dreams. He drinks his morning coffee, writes for a couple of hours, then goes for a run. This is followed by a few more hours writing, an early lunch, possibly another hour or so editing, and then he’s done for the day. He’s had a similar routine for years. He even wrote about it in one of those ‘How I write’ pieces for the Guardian.
Only now he’s in Hastings and not London, the routine has changed slightly. He’s swapped his morning run beside the river for a run along the seafront, up over the East Hill or through Alexandra Park. It’s the best way to get to know a place, and he’s discovered a lot in a relatively short space of time. He’s aware of the rivalry between the Old Town with its boutique shops and the New Town, where much of the gentrification is now taking place. He’s conscious of the positive impact the pier has had on the local area, the growth of new businesses and the steady influx of tourists and second-home owners. He’s aware, also, that not everyone is as enthusiastic about the changing fortunes and demographics of the town.
Tom hasn’t heard anyone refer to out of towners as FILTH and suspects this may have been Luke’s idea of a joke. But he has heard the term DFL used in a disparaging fashion, as if people ‘down from London’ aren’t to be trusted, and their investment in the local economy is something to be sneered at. A few days ago, he met his downstairs neighbour, an older chap named Colin, who’s as deaf as a post and wears the least convincing toupee Tom has ever seen. If the thick brown thatch didn’t look unnatural enough on his pale shrunken head, the tufts of fine white hair sticking out at the back and sides soon give the game away.
Cornering Tom in the hallway, Colin began by asking him where his car was parked, before launching into a tirade about the recent spate of vandalism on the seafront, something he attributed to the arrival of the nearby skate park.
‘We never had any trouble here until they opened that park. Now you take your life in your hands the minute you open the front door.’
Tom nodded sympathetically. ‘How long have you lived here?’
The old man cupped his ear with his hand and frowned until Tom repeated the question, slowly and louder.
‘Too long,’ Colin replied, eyes wide and watery behind thick spectacles. ‘I’m ready to go, but the man upstairs has different ideas.’
It took Tom a moment to realise that the man upstairs wasn’t him or a previous occupant but a higher being altogether.
For all of Colin’s reservations – and Tom can see where the old boy is coming from, even if he doesn’t share his belief in where he’s going – it’s hard not to feel enthused about a place going through a period of reinvention, looking to the future while retaining such strong
links with the past. Tom loves the fact that the area known as the America Ground is so-called because this small patch of land was once declared an outpost of America, whose inhabitants flew the stars and stripes as a symbol of their independence from the crown. He finds it even more charming that this historical dispute is re-enacted in period costume in the run-up to Bonfire Night. Just one of the many quirks he’s come to associate with the town – and proof of the local community’s willingness to adopt fancy dress at the drop of a hat.
Hastings isn’t quite the hipsters’ paradise described in the weekend supplements. For every bearded creative in skinny jeans or crimson-haired woman on a butcher’s bike, there are men in track pants and football shirts, and women with Croydon facelifts, pushing baby buggies. It may be on the up, but parts of Hastings are still very down at heel. And much to his surprise, Tom likes it that way. He likes the shabbiness, the grit in the oyster. But mostly he likes the fact that he’s by the sea.
He’s spent hours watching the tide coming in or going out, exposing the glittering stretch of sand below the shingle. He’s even been swimming. The sea is warmer than he was expecting – hardly the Med, but not so cold you fear you might die of hypothermia. Swimming at Pelham Beach or diving off the groynes by the pier at high tide, he could almost convince himself that he’s in another country.
It seems hard to believe after so short a time, but Tom is beginning to feel like a different person. It isn’t simply that he’s swapped his sharp suits and crisp white shirts for loose-fitting T-shirts and cargo shorts. It goes deeper than that. The heat has warmed his tired muscles and worked its way deep into his bones. He feels less on edge, more at peace with himself. It’s as if the combination of sun, sea and sand has buffed and pummelled him into submission, easing away knots of anxiety the way a good massage might. He can feel the changes in himself – the loss of tension in his neck and shoulders, the relaxing of his jaw.