The Queen of Bloody Everything

by Joanna Nadin

  And then I hear it, the soft thunk of metal falling on lawn. A key.

  The door has been locked, on their side.

  The enormity of it swamps me. I have been exiled from the kingdom. My world has been sectioned off, shrivelled, flung away like a dried-up plum.

  This is your doing, I tell myself. You have turned the key with your neuroses, your narcissism, your need to be different, special, the centre of attention.

  Then you, I decide, will have to fix it.

  I stamp back to the house, slam the door behind me, say your name.

  Nothing. Not the whine of a what?, nor a groan to leave you alone or fetch you coffee and cigarettes. I walk to the foot of the stairs, wait, rigid, my hand poised on the banister. ‘Edie?’ I call again, louder this time. Still nothing but the soft whir of the boiler and the drip-drip of a tap into bathwater. The house sits, as zip-lipped as you.

  And then I sense it, not just in the quiet but in a weakening of air pressure: there is something missing. Someone.

  I feel light-headed, grasp the rail now, try to remember when I last ate – crisps maybe, in the den? But it’s not that. Since when have you taken baths in the morning? Baths are an afternoon affair, or a late-night luxury. For reading Nin and drinking gin and sharing with whoever happens to be in the house and willing to swill in a soup of salts and skin.

  I will not run, I tell myself, as I take each tread slowly, steadily. I am overreacting. There is nothing bad happening. You are confused, or this is a ritual – yes, a ritual! You are washing yourself clean of it, the mess of yesterday. That is all. I will walk across the landing, open the door and find you shoulder-deep in Badedas-green bubbles or blue food colouring, like you would do for Harry and me, letting us dye ourselves for the hell of it, because why not? Never mind that our skin would be tinged for days afterwards, that we would walk to school like washed-out Smurfs.

  But for all my bravado, I do not say your name again. And when I push the door open and see that the water is not green or blue but a deep, dirty red – crimson whirls of it spiralling out from each side of you – I know that you have done what you always told Harry and me was the only way to go, pooh-poohing our imaginary arrangements with sleeping pills and suffocation.

  You have slit your wrists. The blade of a string-handled paring knife that now lies on the lino dragged through your flesh.

  Up. Not across.

  You knew what you were doing. You have always known. This isn’t a cry for help. This is deliberate, determined. This is suicide, and there is not one rock and roll thing about it.

  The next few minutes – I think it is minutes – are played out as if I am wading through sand or am underwater too. I pull the plug, then panic that I have done the wrong thing and push it back, pulling your arms up instead as if the air will stem the flow. But blood pulses out and so appalled am I that I drop them again, sending a wave of bloody water over the side of the bath and onto my feet and a wave of nausea through me that has me hunched over the toilet, seconds wasted while I hurl up what little there is in my stomach – a pale plume of alcohol and bile. Then, somehow sobered, I pull the plug again and haul you out, a harder and heavier task than your still-whip-skinny body should make it; find tea towels to tourniquet, thanking Enid Blyton for filling in what the Brownies could not. And all the time invoking the God you have never believed in, saying, ‘Jesus, Edie,’ and, ‘Oh Christ, Edie, please don’t do this.’

  But you say nothing. You cannot say anything. Your lungs are clear of water, but your pulse – because, thank that God or whatever woke me, there is a pulse – is too weak. Then I do what I should have done the moment I felt unsettled, felt the strangeness.

  I call 999, answer no, yes, give them an address, take instructions and promise to follow them.

  But instead, when they’ve rung off, I do something better. I call for a hero, a saviour who will sweep you up in his arms and carry you as he did me, who will mop your brow and bandage your wounds and make it better.

  I call David.

  The phone rings, once, twice, three times before I hear the clatter of a receiver picked up, the cut-glass pronunciation of ‘two-two-three-one-nine’.

  ‘Angela?’ My voice is pleading, desperate.

  She says one word before hanging up.

  ‘No.’

  I punch the numbers in again, and again, and again, even blurting out a, ‘But Edie—’ And each time she says the same word, and each time she hangs up, until eventually, exasperated, she takes the phone off the hook so that all I get is the insistent mocking of an engaged tone.

  And then it goes dead.

  ‘Has she done this before?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  This one is a psychiatrist: Dr Calvert – wearing a pearl choker and pursed lips. Before that there was the accident and emergency doctor, before that the admissions nurse, before that the paramedics. Each one calmly reeling off the same list of queries I should know the answers to, but instead have to pluck maybes and I don’t knows from the air, offering apologies for not knowing your blood type, for not knowing what you have swallowed besides bathwater, for not knowing you might do this at all.

  But now, it seems, I have got one wrong.

  ‘Yes,’ Toni says. ‘Well, threatened to.’

  ‘What?’ I turn to her. ‘When?’

  Toni tries to smile, but the five-hour drive on a hangover is taking its toll and her attempt is wan, weak, fake. ‘Before you were born,’ she says.

  I do not ask how long before I was born, but I can guess. Eight, nine months, perhaps? When you knew about me. When you knew what you’d done and guessed what I would do.

  But this isn’t about me, is it? Not really. It never is. This is all about you. You have made it so I cannot hate you, cannot resent you, can only feel pity.

  ‘I thought she was being dramatic,’ Toni continues. ‘She can be quite dramatic, you know. But I stayed with her that night.’ She reddens at this, a bloom of scarlet spreading up her throat and across her cheeks. ‘And the next day she said she was fine. That it was all nonsense. Drunk nonsense.’

  I watch, stunned and sullen in the corner, as she plucks up your pale, fragile fingers, closes her tanned hand around them.

  Without moving your eyes from the wall, you open your mouth to speak. ‘I’m sorry,’ you say at last.

  But it is unclear who you are saying sorry to, or for what. And though Toni will try, these are the last words you will say to either of us on the subject.

  Toni drives me home.

  ‘Is there someone you can stay with?’ she asks. ‘Or who can come and stay?’

  I shake my head. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’m just going to drop some things for her, then I’ll come back. Make you tea.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I say. ‘I can do it.’ Have been doing it for years now.

  Toni nods, knowing. Then, ‘Oh, Di,’ she gasps, and grasps me, pulling me tight to her, so I can feel the bobbled wool of her hand-knitted cardigan, smell fusty patchouli and fried garlic. But I do not give in; instead I stand stiff-limbed like a furious child, refusing to cry.

  Toni promises she won’t be long, that she’ll return – a promise she will keep for weeks to come. I mumble thanks and another apology, one that she wafts away with a flap of her hand, a flippant gesture – stolen from you, or bequeathed – that forces me to clamp my mouth shut, push my tears down anew.

  I wait for the car to start, then, reaching for a sliver of hope as thin and slippery as worn soap, I slip out the back, run to the bottom of the garden, and try the gate one last time.

  It does not move.

  It will be more than a decade before anyone opens it again, and by then the landscape will be changed forever – no ice queen, no Aslan, and the children long since grown.

  And so, my status as outcast certain now, I walk slowly back to the house, close the door, and lie, face down, on the chaise longue. Then, in the insufferable emptiness of this room – of
my life – I finally begin to cry.

  The Bell Jar

  September 1990

  I am not allowed to hate you, you have seen to that. But I cannot love you either. Because while you nearly died, it is me who is now in purgatory. You have prescription pills, some brand of mother’s little helper to carry you through each day in a fug of comfortable numbness. But me? I have nothing to nudge me through this strange hinterland I am forced to inhabit, no one to hold my hand. I am lost, alone. And I feel everything.

  While David and Angela manage to sweep us under the carpet like so much dust, word spreads on small-town tongues and our banishment beyond our back garden is far more brutal. In the supermarket we are stared at, sniggered about, a fact that incenses you so much that you encourage erstwhile strangers to fuck off; curse cashiers who stiffen, or try to catch the eye of colleagues when they see us approaching their till.

  I am less brave.

  At school my stock falls to an all-time low, my choice of canteen seat, of classroom clique, confined to an obese boy whose hunger extends to his nose pickings, and the four months pregnant Susan Roots. So, appalled, adrift, I give up study and take up chain-smoking. When I bother to eat lunch, it is fridge pickings and corner shop junk, crammed down in the stacks of the library. When I bother to turn up to school at all. Because on several days a week – on the days when the whispers, or, worse, silence, threaten to deafen me, I skip class and slip into the park, huddle in the folly and get high, lose myself in my drug of choice, party with my new friends: Cathy, Rebecca, Jane Eyre. Tragic women trapped in bleak landscapes and little lives. These are the girls I will become – am already; not a Bennet, not Becky and definitely not Cassandra.

  I become a cause for concern for staff and the school board, who send letters home worrying about my sudden lack of focus, my loss of interest in sixth-form life, and beyond – letters that I lose, or hide, or reply to in your crabbed hand, claiming constant colds, and a persistent fever, possibly glandular. And so you seem surprised when I fail one A level, barely scrape two Cs in the others; rage at the school for letting me down, then, later, when they have asked why you ignored the warnings, why you assured them I was fine, rage angrily at me.

  ‘Why would you do that?’ you demand. ‘And how? How do you go from being bookworm of the bloody century to an F? An F, for fuck’s sake. That’s not even just . . . just getting something wrong, that must have taken effort to screw up on that scale.’

  I shrug but say nothing. Because we both know the answer to that. ‘I can retake,’ I say. Though I don’t even mean it. Because the school is right, I have no interest in life beyond sixth form, beyond this town, this house. But I do not lack focus. My concentration is pin sharp and poker straight, and directed entirely at the Lodge.

  I have called – of course I have called, on a daily basis at first, then at odd times of the day and night, trying to catch them out, trick them into talking. But at the sound of my voice, the phone is slammed wordlessly down. I try letters – sheets of painstakingly inked-out Basildon Bond pushed through the letter box. The first few are returned unopened; the rest are, I assume, dropped into the dustbin or perhaps pored over in the corner of the common room for kicks, pathetic evidence of how freakish and fucked-up we are, me and you.

  Toni says I need to stop loving them, that it’s not healthy, that I don’t need them; life moves on. But she hasn’t moved on, I tell myself, she is still here every weekend, cooking for you, cleaning for you, bringing you make-up and Merlot and magazines. So while you fix yourself with pills and soap and salacious gossip, I slink upstairs, sit on my bedroom windowsill, tapping ash onto the tops of bare-branched trees, or skulk past, hood up, head down, and I watch them.

  This is what they – you – have reduced me to. I am a stalker, a peeping Tom – a name whose irony is not lost on me.

  I watch David wear a suit again, watch him join the briefcase rank and file of the morning commute to Liverpool Street. I watch Angela, watch her alter her haircut, her wardrobe, her weight, all of them rigidly monitored, as if this control will afford her some small victory. I watch Harry most of all. Watch her slam the door of Simon’s Golf, storming into the house as its wheels spin, churning pea gravel for David to rake later. Watch her lying out on the lawn, her slender limbs amphetamine-skinny now, her eyes shaded – always shaded – by outsized glasses, giving her the fragile appearance of a starving fly. Watch her stack the back of the Volvo with boxes and bags and a rabbit called Pig; the last remnants of her wardrobe, her childhood – our childhood – being exported to a new world.

  It is a kind of exquisite torture, a persistent digging at a self-inflicted wound, like the peeling off of a ripe scab to find the flesh beneath still raw and bloody. And the deepest cut of all, the hardest to heal?

  Tom.

  I have sent letters to Hull too, called the house on Park Grove countless times, heard him yello cheerfully down the line before hearing my voice, my stuttered plea. Then he mutters back, ‘I can’t,’ ‘Don’t,’ or, once, a moment of hesitation so ripe with possibility that I sob, and then hear a hurried, ‘I’m sorry,’ and the clatter of the receiver being replaced. Those three syllables are as much as I get and eventually I swallow Toni’s bitter pill, and try to stop loving him.

  This, I discover, is a full-time job, requiring both rigid discipline and total abandon.

  I take down photos and file away notes. I stop wearing the perfume he so adored and buy own-brand body spray from Boots instead. I make New Year’s resolutions on a monthly basis. Lists of things I will and will not do.

  I will not call him.

  I will not write to him.

  I will not write his name on my arm in blue ink.

  I will not write stories in which he repents and returns to me, and we elope to America.

  I will stop reading stories while imagining he is the hero.

  I will find someone else – anyone else – to play that part.

  And I try. Because though friends are few, and female friends non-existent, there is always an unwitting but willing boy to fill the void.

  I let Bruce Cooper push me over the photocopier in the solicitor’s office he cleans on a Saturday.

  I let a skinhead called Colin pull me into the field behind our primary school, counting his grunts as I count the coloured globes that decorate each classroom window.

  I let Carl Jennings drag me onto the back seat of his Beetle in a pub car park in Harlow.

  I screw and I get screwed over, again and again, and though each time I am further away from that bedroom in Hull, I cannot push him, wash him, out of me.

  I try employment instead and acquire a pointless, thankless job stacking shelves and restocking pick-and-mix peppermint creams in Woolworths. It is a level of drudgery and servitude only accentuated by the navy nylon of my knee-length uniform, an outfit that disgusts you and delights me with its shapelessness.

  ‘Do they think dressing you like a blind bloody nun boosts sales?’ you ask when I clump in one evening, sweat-smelling and foul-tempered from a ten-hour stocktake.

  ‘Nuns don’t wear American tan tights,’ I bat back.

  ‘No,’ you concede. ‘Even they draw the line somewhere.’

  ‘At least someone does.’

  ‘You’re being deliberately difficult again,’ you accuse.

  ‘Did Dr Phil tell you that?’ I ask, nodding at the stack of self-help books Toni has been adding to on an alarmingly regular basis. ‘Or is that one all your own work?’

  ‘God, Di,’ you snap. ‘At least I’m trying.’

  ‘And I’m what, exactly?’

  ‘You tell me. You’re wearing a pinafore and lace-ups like some outsized primary school pupil and spending five days a week fucking about with fruit sherbets and Tupperware.’

  Two can play at this game, I think. ‘At least I have a job.’

  But I am wrong. Always wrong. ‘Better unemployed than . . . this . . . whatever it is.’

  ‘Because I�
��m stacking shelves and that’s beneath me? Or because I’m working for the Man. Is that it?’

  You roll your eyes. I pull a face back.

  ‘You know there is no Man,’ I say then. ‘There’s just jobs and everyone has one.’

  ‘They’re all men,’ you say. ‘And if you’re determined to work then at least find something you’re good at.’

  ‘I am good at it,’ I yell. ‘I bloody excel at restocking cotton reels and – and coat hangers.’

  ‘And I suppose no one is quicker with a price-tagging gun.’

  ‘No,’ I retort. ‘I am fucking supreme.’ The Queen of Bloody Everything. I sound ridiculous and we both know it. But though we cannot cry, we cannot laugh at each other either. Not yet.

  ‘I just want you to find yourself,’ you say eventually.

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to be found,’ I say, at once desperately, self-consciously profound and pathetic.

  ‘No, you just want to bury yourself in books,’ you say.

  ‘I wonder why,’ I say.

  For once you let me get the final word, though I hardly feel I can claim victory. And anyway, it’s a lie. I do want to find me. That’s why I read. Because in books I can be better, bolder, braver. I can have a bigger life, and a happy ending.

  Whereas out here in the real world? Without Tom, without Harry, I have a feeling I don’t exist at all.

  In the end, it’s Toni who shows me the way.

  ‘Have you thought about college?’ she asks.

  ‘Nowhere will take you with two Cs,’ I tell her, wearily. ‘Nowhere decent, anyway.’

  ‘Unis, maybe. But there’s polys. FE colleges.’

  I know this. Have still got the pile of pamphlets and glossy brochures that a well-meaning Mr Collins sent home for me when I failed to register for resits. But I don’t want to do Teeline or typing. I don’t want to study business or tourism. Or learn how to mind a child. How can these last resorts come close to literature? To Lawrence and Larkin? To Woolf and Wilde? How can anything they could possibly offer make up for not spending three years wrapped up in books, and in bed with the boy I love? (Loved, I remind myself.) I could write, I suppose. I used to. But even with the overconfidence of youth on my side, I know my clumsy attempts at prose showed at best promise, not accomplishment.