Although . . . ?
Although what . . . ?
Well, it’s also true that the reason I’m sat here with you two tonight is because of my religion. I mean the reason I hate all this capitalist stuff is because it’s wrong. What it does to people. The way it pits them against each other. It’s un-Christian as much as anything else.
So what you’re saying is . . . ?
That maybe religion can inspire people as much as oppress them. I mean isn’t the ‘opiate of the people’ thing a good thing too? Opiates can help you dream. There’s this poet I’m into called Baudelaire and he was into opium and he . . .
Opiates drug you, keep you where you are. In bed or in the gutter. Listen, comrade (a sure sign that the stakes were being raised). Spending your life on your knees before some imaginary being is just being on your knees. It doesn’t matter if it’s God or . . . No one ever changed society with an opium pipe or sticking a needle in their arm. God’s just a drug for people who don’t do drugs.
Drinks are drunk, cigarettes rolled and lit. I agreed with him. So why was I disagreeing with him? Why could I hear my blood flushing through my head like water through a cistern? Why were my hands shaking? I can’t talk properly when I can’t breathe. So: breathe.
But why is it either or? It doesn’t have to be pray or strike. Obviously you could do both. Look at Solidarity. I bet they’re mostly Catholics.
I didn’t say it was. (Bristling) You’re mixing me up with one of your poets. (Ouch) I’m saying that the ideas people have in their heads come from the actual world around them. They’re not beamed in telepathically by some extraterrestrial or some pope who’s never wrong. Infallible fucking pope? How’s that for control? ‘I am the mouthpiece of God and therefore I cannot be wrong.’
Papal infallibility doesn’t mean that. It means . . . never mind. The point is that your version of socialism is going to be pretty bloody soulless if there’s no room for poetry or the spirit.
Poetry that ordinary working people never read or understand, you mean . . .
And the joke about it is . . .
Joke?
And the joke about it is that you have your own version of papal infallibility, it’s called the Party line . . .
I disagree with the Party all the time . . .
About tactics and the odd film review maybe. But you’re not prepared to question the fundamental premise of the Party, which is that you’re right, and you know better and that you’re the fucking messiahs who are going to lead us poor bastards to the promised land of socialism . . .
I thought you of all people would know that religion is the very worst pretext for every form of oppression imaginable . . . (and looking becomes staring. Glasses pushed back.)
(What does he mean? Me ‘of all people’? He means I’m a Catholic. That’s what he means. That’s all he means.)
And every kind of liberation imaginable . . . look at the priests fighting in Nicaragua and El Salvador. They’ve got more revolutionary fucking spirit in their little finger than you’ve . . . (fiery)
Scratch any history of oppression and you’ll find some religious justification for it, someone with God on their side telling other people what’s good for them . . . (pugnacious, head up)
And the hunger strikers and the IRA and the bit in the Bible where Jesus trashes the money-lenders and rich men and the eye of a needle and you are so fucking smug and you don’t even know what you’re talking about and . . . (trembling, the catch in the voice)
Or worse. People using their so-called belief as a smokescreen for doing whatever they want . . . for all sorts of . . . for controlling and brainwashing and . . . keeping them in . . . and . . . Priests. And sex.
And altar boys.
I know then that he knows. That Sara has told him what I told her after we saw Scum and that I asked her not to tell anyone. Looking back it seems ridiculous for me to have thought that she wouldn’t tell her partner, that a young (twenty-four? twenty-five? year-old) woman could have carried round the burden of my secret without feeling the need to share it with someone, someone with whom she shared not just a bed but a whole political worldview. It was something that she could not have not told him.
That isn’t what I thought then. What I felt then was that there is nowhere left for me to go. Not my family (nor the WMC job that was its extension). Not the school and its panoptical library, not my laddish mates with their ‘would you rathers’. And not, it would seem, my newly found friends. It wasn’t just the telling. It was that my secrets had proved to be less important than winning an argument, my suffering secondary to scoring a political point.
This wasn’t the first of our fallouts, and it certainly wasn’t the last. My would-be comrades were not my therapists. They had no obligation to carry my wounds, let alone heal them. They were guilty of not understanding something I didn’t understand myself, of failing to provide a cure for a condition that had not yet been diagnosed. Which didn’t stop me from hating them.
I would behave abominably to Gary and Sara: not then, but later. Marinate resentment in two years of alcohol, bring it slowly to the boil in a cocktail of psychiatric diagnoses and prescription pills. Add the deflated political commitment of two people who had relocated to Sheffield in support of a strike only to witness the demolition of those people and the community they were fighting to defend. Add arguments about AA and failed bids for sobriety. Let those re-kindle the flames of arguments about Higher Powers and God and what we think we owe to each other. Throw in the Leadmill nightclub and wraps of white powder, simmer over petty grievances and serve in the early, truth-telling hours.
Yet there is a wider issue here, one that justifies neither my disproportionate rage nor the comrades’ emotional myopia. It’s to do with the left’s inability to deal with the complexities of the inner world (not just mine). The Party would insist on how capitalism was riddled with contradictions. They would insist again and again that it was capitalism that produced the human subject. So why then were they unable to acknowledge the fact that the human subject was therefore riddled with all sorts of contradictions? It seemed that the oppositions inherent in being a person produced by the capitalist system could be resolved by the simple act of joining the SWP, an act in which the person would emerge enlightened, Buddha-like, with an understanding of the world so politically acute that those pesky dialectics of history would dissolve in the time it took to sell a copy of Socialist Worker.
There was a machismo and muscularity to the left in the early eighties. They were suspicious of all those other outsiders who dwelt at the margins – queers, artists, pacifists, non-aligned lefties, veggies, cautious progressives. There was a puritanical contempt for anything they considered frivolous – sport, fashion, a whole world of popular culture that was seen as little more than ‘bourgeois deviation’.
And they simply did not know what to do with or about sex, let alone sexual abuse. It was, at best, a conversation to be postponed until after the revolution. Meanwhile sex could not help but reproduce the social relations of capital, and as such was deeply suspect. ‘Out of order’ was the phrase I remember most clearly, as though other people’s thoughts, emotions and opinions were like the toilets on a train.
Next
‘“. . . the peace of a whole family, – the feelings of a father, – the honour of a mother, – the interests of religion, – the eternal salvation of an individual, all suspended in one scale. What do you think could outweigh them?” “Nothing,” I replied ardently.’
Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
How do you disclose your secrets to someone when your secrets are so shameful they remain a secret to yourself? How are we to reveal our selves when we have no language in which to shape or define or recognize ourselves, when we have no frame of reference?
One answer is that we fall back on approximations. We make do. If there isn’t a conceptual framework available in which we can articulate ourselves, then we use the ones that ar
e available – euphemisms, insinuations, disavowal.
If the secrets that are thus shared are shameful, their guilt turned inward, then the inadequate nature of language becomes part of the problem. We feel we have lost some intimate part of ourselves and if we want to communicate this loss we are forced to do so by this second-hand, jumble-sale, ragbag thing called language. No wonder disclosure feels like a betrayal. The abuse is itself a betrayal and now we need to talk about this betrayal through a medium which is bound to betray us.
In disclosing my experiences of sexual abuse I am bound to sell myself short. The available language is inadequate and so I have to cut my experiential cloth accordingly. I tidy it up, or minimize it. I may ironize, or dramatize, or contextualize, and yet after each statement what I want to shout is: But it’s not that. Not really. It’s something else.
This is, I think, one of the many reasons people are reluctant to come forward. There is not only the shame, the fear, the guilt, but there is also the sense that what they have to say is so deeply embedded (and embodied), that talking about it would be failing to do it justice. Each statement or revelation would in a sense be just one more injustice, another thing stolen from you, just another way the inner world and the outer world fail to connect.
This is true now. It was certainly true in 1982. I used to hear my parents talk in theatrical whispers about rumours they may have heard about a friend of a friend, or someone at work, or at the bingo. Eyes would dart and widen, lips would purse. I would feel the whole atmosphere of the room grow solemn. ‘I’m not saying . . .’ The conversation would always begin with a plausible deniability. I soon learnt that ‘It’ was the worst thing someone could be accused of, that you had to be ‘very very careful’ (two ‘very’s, serious stuff) of what got said, of malicious gossip (‘you know what folks are like’).
The most explicit phrase that was used was ‘interfered with’, the last syllable to be said in a way that trailed off, as though fully enunciating the words might bring them to life. Before I’d actually been interfered with, the phrase ‘interfered with’ would always make me think of a science-fiction film in which some new-fangled discovery backfired on its inventors.
‘Interference’; is that what had happened? It didn’t seem right somehow; nowhere near.
When I told Sara that I had something to tell her, I told her that something ‘like that’ had happened to me, the ‘that’ being the rape scene from Scum. This wasn’t accurate, but it was all I had. It hadn’t been rape as I understood it. Nothing violent, nothing stuck up the arse in a borstal greenhouse. I was lying to her even as I revealed myself. I’d said ‘something like that happened to me’ because I wanted to tell her that something had happened to me. I wanted her to know I’d been interfered with without using the words ‘interfered with’. The closest I had was an Alan Clarke film.
Dealing with abuse means talking about something you don’t want to talk about, telling people things you’d rather they didn’t know. It can feel like a violation, or coercion. It can feel like abuse.
If this was a novel, then the scene in which I tell my ‘something’ to Johnny Mullen would start: ‘And so I tell him. I tell him everything.’ It would be a breathless recap on the whole sorry saga; the grooming, the drunken seductions, the molestations. But it isn’t and I don’t.
We’re in the Railway, where else? He’s back from time abroad, Spain or France? Part of his course. I mumble something about being in a relationship that I hadn’t wanted to be in. Or had wanted to be in, but only at the beginning. Or not really a relationship, but sort of. But then it went wrong. I went wrong. It got all fucked up. It was my fault. I’d led this person on, been flattered, used him for all sorts of things. He knew, knows the person. I tell him who the person is. It’s complicated.
I’m not racked by uncontrollable sobbing. I don’t wrap my arms around my shoulders and sit, head down, rocking to and fro as my shoulders heave and snot accompanies my barely audible confession. There’s no catharsis or clarity, and no close-up.
I’m looking at my friend, who must be what – twenty? – but who is impossibly wise by virtue of going to university, to Cambridge University. And by virtue of being wise. He still cuts his own hair; there’s bits of red in it and a plait that he’s made at one side that he tugs at all the time we’re talking. His second-hand jacket is covered in badges, including a badge that says ‘Wearing Badges Is Not Enough’. There’s a pause that lasts for about a minute but feels like ten. And then he says, ‘Fuck.’
‘Fuck’ felt right: it still does. It captures the mixture of outrage and futility, an excuse for the jaw to drop and the mouth to remain frozen It was a ‘fuck’ that registered disbelief even as it registered the truth of what I was saying, a ‘fuck’ that acknowledged the impossibility of saying anything else.
I’ve had my share of therapists over the years (collective noun: a sincerity of? a self-harm of?) and not enough of them have said ‘fuck’. A few have said ‘bastard’, which sidesteps the ambiguity and makes me feel bastardized. Most, at some point, have said, ‘I’m sorry,’ to which I always want to say, ‘It’s OK, it wasn’t you that fucked me.’ Their sorrow can often feel like a burden, uncomfortably close to pity. It can float around my digestive tract producing stomach acid, or replay itself resentfully at the back of my eyes. ‘Fuck’ I still find the most therapeutic, a singular declaration with lots of room for manoeuvre.
Next
‘I want no secrets or soul-states, nothing ineffable; I am neither virgin nor priest, to play at having an inner life.’
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
I was made guardian of secrets, made to protect myself from the adult world whilst protecting adults from each other. And themselves. I swallow the injustice whole. It makes me seethe. It makes me generate internal dialogues, dialogues in which I emerge vindicated and victorious. I say to myself that when he says . . . I will say . . . He might say This, and I will say That. It will be beautiful, my saying of the That. It will be a That that everyone will understand, and, once I’ve said it, all the other This-es will fall into place. But I also know that I’ll never get the chance to say anything, which makes my rehearsals all the more frantic.
And, looking now at my Dear Diaries from then, I see that:
My handwriting has become fucked up. I used to have ‘a lovely hand’, or so I was told; the kind of hand on which you could build a career (clerk, cushy job. Look at his hands). My parents and teachers were committed graphologists; both believed that legible handwriting was the sign of a trustworthy character. And so my ‘J’s and my ‘G’s announced themselves with a flourish, imperiously self-contained in upper case, swinging and flirtatious in lower. I was taught to turn a page upside down once it was written, to appreciate the harmony between the vertical and the horizontal, the bold slants and promiscuous vowels.
Now (i.e. then), post-fucked and moody, I’m told that I have ‘doctor’s writing’, a phrase I’m pleased with until I find out what it means. Now (i.e. now) I see exactly what it means. My handwriting has become a thing trying to hide from itself, something that is reluctant to express what it is there to express. My ‘M’s and ‘N’s are indistinct, as are my ‘I’s and ‘L’s. My once proudly descending ‘Y’s now seem apologetic, embarrassed, whilst the upstrokes of my ‘E’s and ‘C’s guiltily merge into their next letter as though they are ashamed to show their face. My handwriting is the bearer of bad news: it resents itself and wants me to know that it is there under protest.
None of which would really matter if I didn’t have to sit A levels in six, five, four and counting weeks.
My interview at Warwick University has gone well. A giant of a man, with jam-jar glasses, crazy hair and a booming voice told me that Warwick University is nowhere near Warwick, but that I should be thankful as Warwick is a ghastly place. That it is closer to Coventry, which is also pretty ghastly but redeemed by the fact that no one from the university lives there. That those who are at the univers
ity live either in Leamington (students mainly: fairly ghastly), Kenilworth (admin staff and the occasional poet: completely ghastly) or London (lecturers: ghastly, obviously, but in ways that often mitigated against its ghastliness).
It was love at first sight.
The giant’s name is Tom Winnifrith. He gave me a poem by William Carlos Williams which began: ‘I will teach you my townspeople / how to perform a funeral’. I had ten minutes to think of ‘something, anything, interesting to say about it’. The only thing I knew about Carlos Williams was that he was mentioned on the sleeve notes to Dylan’s Desire (‘Dr Poet WC Williams dying nearby said, “A new world is only a new mind.”’) This, I suspected, would not be sufficient to appease the other Dr, not dying, waiting even nearerby.
I went into his office and say, ‘Alienation! From death! And everything! Once people died and everyone was, er, sad, grieving. And now people die and we don’t know how to, um, be sad, or, like grieve, not like they used to . . . It’s like Bob Dylan said . . .’
Tom Winnifrith sighed. It was a sigh that belonged to a benevolent Greek deity looking down at the tenth mortal this week who had come to ask for a favour that would be his undoing. He may not have actually said, despairingly, ‘Oh God,’ which doesn’t stop me from remembering him saying it. But grant me the favour he did: he made me an offer. Two Bs and a C.
Next
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 19