The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness
Page 1
The Boy with the
Perpetual Nervousness
A Memoir of an Adolescence
GRAHAM CAVENEY
PICADOR
To Anja Rutten, with thanks
‘How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.’
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
‘. . . when my pen leaks, I think awry. And who will give me back the good ink of my school days?’
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie
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Afterword
Acknowledgements
She says things like Neural Pathways, and Emotional Processing, and Some Success with Veterans from the Vietnam War. She says things get frozen, shelved, not properly digested. There is a bagatelle behind my eyeballs. She says follow my finger. I follow her finger. It is pulling back the spring on the pinball machine in my frontal lobe. Recall the scenes, she says. Recall them as though they are on a video loop. Got that? Video. You can control what happens. You can pause or fast-forward or rewind. It’s a black-and-white movie, loosely autobiographical: ‘based on actual events’, as the blurbs always put it.
I am playing Me: typecasting, you might say. I am fifteen and I have bad skin. I have bad skin and I have long hair. My hero at the time was Jim Morrison from The Doors and I reckoned that on a dark night, in a fog, at fifty paces, I might be able to pass for him. This was 1980. Punk had already happened, but not in that Ground Zero, Road to Damascus way that is so often attributed to the arrival of The Clash’s / the Pistols’ / The Damned’s first album. Not for intense and bookish young boys from Accrington, anyway. For us, for me, punk was still partly a rumour, even after its demise. We caught it as it was leaving the building. The memory of the Sex Pistols’ Manchester Free Trade Hall gig was mythic, not singular. It was like the Kennedy assassination or the moon landings, both ancient and crushingly modern. (One day, technology will enable us to prove conclusively just who did attend this event, and that day will be a day of terrible reckoning. Names will be broadcast on tannoys throughout the city, and grown men will weep.)
Where was I? That’s right, following her finger. ‘Her’, by the way, is Julie, my therapist. It is 2012 and I am having post-rehab therapy for the issues that led to my addictions. There used to be scare quotes around both these words – ‘issues’ and ‘addictions’ – but not any more. Now they just trip off the tongue with all the sincerity we can muster. She carries on with the finger stuff, the one next to her thumb, right hand, fully extended. As it moves back and forth she is asking me to remember details – the more detailed the details the better. The name for this treatment is EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy. The idea – and there is an impressive amount of evidence to back this up – is that traumatic and distressing events are not processed properly at the point of trauma (it is, if you like, precisely what is traumatic about them). The event(s) thus become buried, only to surface later as neurosis, pathology, disorder. It has an almost tactile specificity to it, this EMDR stuff, as though my brain is Play-Doh and needs to be re-moulded. It’s also had some remarkable success, particularly in the States, and that always makes me suspicious. I may have PTSD, it’s my most recent diagnosis. It would make sense, from what I’ve read. I am, as they say, textbook. And if you have PTSD then you need EMDR – treat one acronym with another. What we’re doing is time-travel. My mind is a Tardis and somehow my experiences can be unlocked and re-processed through this side-to-side eye-movement recall.
And it is true that something is shifting. I am remembering one specific incident within an incident – the feel of bristles on my face. The movie starts to seep into colour. There is a dissolve, a rearrangement of dimensions and perspective. That bit looks sharper, the angle on the bed. There is a softer focus on the lens. Something about it strikes me as ludicrous, it reminds me briefly of a Carry On film. I start to laugh. Julie smiles at my laughter, encouraging me: This is your film now, you can make it into a comedy if you like, it’s yours to view however you want . . .
I am laughing hard now; a contained hysteria that I can feel at the back of my throat. This is absurd. There is a man, look at him! He has hair on his back . . . he’s grunting . . . He’s . . . There’s a boy . . . Underneath him . . . The mise-en-scène is off. The set is made of cardboard.
Julie is staying with me, calm, alert. I’m changing my tenses: ‘It was . . .’ becomes ‘It is . . .’. I switch pronouns, ‘I’ to ‘he’ to ‘it’. Projections onto the back of my closed eyelids; faster and slower at the same time. It’s like old newsreel clips: Pathé, home movies. Clips of people from the silent era walking and waving in that disjointed flickering motion. For some reason I associate old celluloid footage with baseball (Babe Ruth?), although I am not an American and have never seen baseball. The images slow down. There’s an overdub with the kind of hallucinatory soundtrack that gets used in sixties acid indie films, the kind with Peter Fonda, maybe directed by Monte Hellman. And . . . action!
His hand is on my cock, his cock is on my stomach, his mouth is on my mouth. He is masturbating. There’s a boy who looks like me. He’s lying on his back. I’m looking down at him from the ceiling. And cut.
‘Dissociation’ is one of those terms that has entered our collective wisdom in ways that I am both thankful for and irritated by. Thankful in that it gives legitimacy to the experience of sexual trauma. Irritated that the experience can be reduced to a one-word tickbox. The ambivalence about being diagnosed speaks to the condition itself. Who doesn’t want their experience to have a description? Yet who doesn’t want to be more than their diagnosis? ‘Dissociated’ it is then, for the moment, and amongst other things.
It is certainly my experience that when reality is overwhelming, unprocessable, non-computable, our minds simply take us somewhere else. We replace unacceptable truths with fantasies – fantasies which may have a truth of their own, yet w
hich place us at odds with the cold unforgiving empiricism of the-world-as-it-is. Thanks to genre fiction, Hollywood and popular psychology, we now expect the Mad and the Dangerous to have rationales of their own. The fucked-up kid is our new femme fatale. The kid locked in a stranger’s basement. The kid who witnesses his mother’s murder. The kid forced to participate in genocide. We love our fucked-up kids nearly as much as we despise the adults they become.
What we know is that trauma is never something that is simply left behind, like blood at the scene of a car crash. Rather it is something that the survivor, the sufferer, carries within them; the wreckage that is part of their self. The first time that I heard the term ‘dissociation’ was in relation to chemistry, whereby it describes the process of ionic compounds being broken down into smaller particles and ions. I remember sitting in chemistry labs as a kid watching obscure-sounding acids or salts being dissolved in water, and watching this kaleidoscopic process of crystallization as each constituent part . . . what? retreated? was liberated? got banished from? all the others. I remember asking the teacher, a disappointed man named Mr Stokes, if these dissociated parts could be reunited or reintegrated. He assured me that, with a few exceptions, they could.
Of course, this idea of a traumatized childhood carries with it the implication that there could be such a thing as a non-traumatized childhood. Readers of Freud will know that, for him, childhood was itself a kind of trauma – a time when the infant has to relinquish his tyranny over his parents and be coerced into the dreaded disillusion of the Reality Principle. According to this model, no one emerges unscathed. We become who we are by abandoning our most primal desires, being born again into the laws of our Father (societal norms, non-incestuous desire, relationships with bodies other than our own). The ‘traumatized child’ then is nothing more than a tautology, a description of an inevitable process of disenchantment.
To which I want to add: if growing up is traumatic enough in itself, then getting fucked as well kind of adds injury to insult. I didn’t get a free pass on all the other horrors of adolescence on the basis that I was busy dealing with the specific horror of an unwanted cock.
It seems to me now profoundly unfair that I still had to contend with wet dreams as well as abuse; romantic rejection and sexual assault. Abused children often talk about having their childhood stolen from them, and for good reason. What is harder to describe is the feeling of having been robbed of a childhood that you didn’t have – the childhood you imagined you might have had had it not been for the being-fucked stuff. Put another way, the question becomes something like: if I was being abused during a period of my life that I know to be experienced by people who weren’t abused as still volatile, traumatic and confusing, then to what extent are those feelings specific to my abuse? How could I ever know? Only a non-abused me would be able to solve this fucking riddle, and a non-abused me would not be me. Answers please on a postcard.
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When a Person From Accrington (PFA) meets a Person Not From Accrington (PNFA), there will, at some point, be the following exchange:
PNFA: So where are you from . . . ?
PFA: Er . . . (either sheepishly or defiantly, embarrassed or proud) Accrington.
PNFA: Oh . . . (delighted by their perspicacity) . . . Stanley . . . !
Accrington Stanley FC was indeed the only claim to fame that my hometown had when I lived there. Years later we would be able to add Jeanette Winterson and Julie Hesmondhalgh to our roll call of Accrington’s great and good, but in the seventies and early eighties, the folk memory of a founding first-division football team was as close to recognizable as Accrington got.
When I first left home and went to university, I probably had a dozen such exchanges within the first day. Such was my annoyance that I tried to fudge it with a vague ‘Lancashire way’ which only served to make me seem either evasive and furtive, as though I was on the run from the police, or dim and uncertain, like I’d just had a course of ECT. I tried amending my answer to ‘Manchester’ for a while, mainly on the basis I had a northern accent and a record collection which contained the Buzzcocks, Joy Division and Magazine. This would work until I actually met someone from Manchester, or anyone who had been to Manchester, or anyone who knew anything at all about Manchester. Within minutes I would be forced into mumbling something about ‘a town near to . . . er . . . cotton mills . . . close to Blackburn.’ Eventually I would blurt out ‘Accrington’, they would say ‘Stanley’ and another little bit of me would die.
Quite why I took so vehemently against my hometown’s football club I don’t quite know. It’s partly the name. Could we not have been a robust United or a stoical Town? ‘Stanley’ made us sound as though the team consisted of one man, or, worse, eleven men all with the same name. It added to my sense that I wasn’t from a place so much as a punchline to some unimaginative Southern scriptwriter’s joke.1 Where you from? Accrington? Sorry to hear it. I did try on the football thing as a kid for a while. I decided that if supporting a football team was compulsory (and it felt as though it was), I would at least give it a perverse twist and support Burnley. My dad dutifully took me to Turf Moor. I still remember the chant – ‘Leighton James, Alan West, Martin Dobson and the rest . . . na na na na na na na nana’ – sung by the Longside with boozy exhilaration. I remember getting a hot pie and Bovril at half-time and scalding fat oozing out of the crust onto my paws. I remember thinking, as we stood behind the goal, how unfair it was that we had paid a full price but only really got to see half a game, and wouldn’t it be better if they used one end of the pitch rather than both. I remember the fence being charged, the one that separated the Away fans from the Home fans, and a chant going through the ground ‘A G R O / A G R O / Hello’ to the sound of Gary Glitter’s ‘Good to Be Back’. I remember feeling sick and grabbing hold of my dad’s hand and him telling me not to worry. I remember the chants getting louder – ‘You’re gonna get your fucking head kicked in’; ‘You’re goin’ home in a fuckin’ ambulance’ – and sharpened coins and empty crisp bags filled with piss and crushed beer cans and darts all being thrown from one side of the railings to the next. Ah, the beautiful game.
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‘Her legs, pumping up and down the cold street, had the regularity and power of pistons.’
Pat Barker, Union Street
I was born in Roughlee Hospital on the 26th of November 1964. It’s just a few miles from Pendle Hill, a place famous for its witches, one of whom, Alice Nutter, has been memorialized with a statue near the hospital. I am looking at my birth certificate now. It’s my mother’s writing, no doubt about it. Name and Surname of father: john CAVENEY. That’s how my mum has written it; lower then upper case. No middle name, like me. The family joke that we couldn’t afford one.
Under ‘Occupation of father’: ‘maker, lorry driver’. ‘Maker’? I suspect that my mum meant labourer, but she is clearly emphasizing that there is a Skilled element to her husband’s labour. I don’t remember him being a lorry driver. For most of my life, he was the groundsman at the local comprehensive – a job that suited him fine; solitary, outdoors, practical. ‘Signature, description and residence of informant’: k caveney, mather, (sic) 47 Cedar Street, Accrington.
The ‘k’ was for Kathleen, her maiden name Smethurst. The youngest of three daughters, she had gone with her two sisters, Mary and Margaret, into the mills when she was fourteen. The girls had lost their mum to breast cancer when they (and she) were still young, and so it had fallen to them to cook and clean and generally keep house. Her dad re-married – a textbook evil stepmother according to my mum, although the resentment would always be tempered with a ‘but it was good of her to take us all on’.
One of her favourite could-have-been stories was that there was an older cousin who wanted to adopt her when her mum died, and who had made a few quid (where? how?) and would have sent her to Secretary School (you could hear the capital letters when she told this tale) but that her dad had wanted to keep the girls togethe
r. Just quite what this story was based on I could never find out, but it clearly troubled my mother, this sense of having been sold short.
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‘Though I have asked many of my acquaintances at what stage in their childhood or adolescence they became class-conscious none has ever given me a satisfactory answer.’
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
If you turn to any sociologist’s dictionary and look up the term ‘Respectable Working Class’ (RWC), you will find a picture of John and Kathleen Caveney. I’m told that we don’t have a working class any more, let alone a respectable one. Aspiration and ambition have embourgeoised us all apparently, although I’d like to see Westminster’s finest sell that on the streets of Accrington. Yet RWC is what my parents were: unproblematically (mostly), unashamedly (on the whole), non-class-consciously (virtually).
It was my dad’s boast that he wasn’t frightened of hard work, of graft, of getting his hands dirty. For my mum, her house was ‘spotless’ and she ‘kept a good table’. Just what constituted a ‘good table’ we will find out later, but looking back now I’m struck by the glaringly obvious (but never discussed) gender divide. My mum’s work in the mills was never really discussed as work, as ‘graft’. I remember going to visit her factory once and being rooted to the spot by the sheer noise of the machines. It is to my shame that I can’t tell you the difference between the weaving and the spinning, the shunting and the braiding.
All I can tell you is that the place was stifling hot, deafeningly loud, with huge machines that needed to be manually operated by a workforce who were mostly female. They were communicating with a mixture of sign language and lip-reading, the machines having drowned out any hopes for speech. Here was ‘hard graft’: the women’s hands were getting dirty, their bodies were clearly sweating. Yet it was to my dad’s world that such language belonged. My mother ‘simply’ went out to work.