Ready—and no one to stop her. No one, ever, to stop her.
But I held on tight to her wrist and twisted it, and I realized something. Something incredible. Something I had never known in my life before. I was stronger than her. So I stood up and pushed her backwards, and she looked angrier than I’d ever seen. She clenched her fingers to dig her nails into my neck. But she didn’t look angry when I clenched my hand into a fist, pulled back my arm, and slammed my fist into her evil mouth with the strength of ten thousand beatings. And it wasn’t enough, I wanted more, even though blood burst from her lips. So I swung my arm again and punched her in the face a second time.
Now, she didn’t look angry. She looked terrified. A final punch to the side of the head knocked her flying, and she ran out of the room and left her transistor radio playing on the sofa.
Like a circle in a spiral,
Like a wheel within a wheel,
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning reel…
So I turned it off, and we watched Steptoe and Son. And I could feel all the blood in my body boiling with rage and racing and pumping and making me feel alive. And it felt amazing. Really, really, totally fucking amazing.
I don’t need anyone now. There never was anyone to stop her. No Nana, no Pop, no Dad, no Mum, no God. No one. But now I am eleven, and I have myself. I will never need anyone in this world again.
Never, never, never.
80
The police have a little flashing blue light on a big board with a map of our street. That blue light marks The Mitchell House, and every time someone calls the police to come to our house, which they do every night because someone is obviously being murdered again, they know instantly where to dispatch the squad car with the dogs and guns. And the helicopter. I can picture it in my head.
The police are here most nights now. Well, generally it’s Constable Ferguson, and he has a cup of tea and a cigarette with Mum and asks people to please stop calling him out just because there is a lot of screaming and shouting and banging and smashing and more screaming. If this wasn’t a violent council estate, then he would understand. But there are burglaries and muggings and more important things to deal with, and he doesn’t have an hour every night to come to The Mitchell House.
Except when something really serious happens.
“So she was fucking running down the middle of the fucking road fucking naked?” Danny asked.
“No. I told you. She was in her underwear,” I replied.
“No fucking way! With her fucking little titties out, fucking bouncing around?”
“No. She was wearing her bra and knickers.”
“And her fucking panties fell down round her fucking ankles, right?”
“No.”
“She’s a fucking loony if you ask me. What the fuck was she doing?”
“Trying to get run over by a bus.”
“Fuck. That would be amazing to see! Imagine the fucking blood and guts!”
“Well, she didn’t get run over. The bus driver stopped the bus.”
“Pity.”
She’s seeing a psychiatrist now. Dr Wilmot said it’s gone beyond the scope of a family doctor, and she’s already taking the maximum prescription of Valium, and it’s obviously not working any more. Mum’s taking the Valium too, but I don’t think she’s told Dr. Wilmot.
The psychiatrist is called Dr. Browning, and he asked to see Emily and me too. He asked me what I thought about all of this palaver with my older sister, and I said nothing really because now I can beat the shit out of her if she so much as looks at me the wrong way. I never told him that. I just said I was fine, and that’s all. He said it’s nothing for me to worry about, and everything will be all right once they find out what is wrong with Margueretta.
She’s got a job at the Tampax factory. It’s just up the road. I asked Mum what they make, and she said it’s for women when they get their monthly period and bleed. Danny said that women stuff a Tampax up their fucking quim, and it gives them an orgasm. An orgasm is a feeling you get like when you climb a rope and it rubs on your cock and you get all the way to the top of the rope and nearly fall off because it feels so good. That’s what Danny says. Women don’t have a cock, of course, they have a quim; but it’s the same feeling. Anyway, she’s working on the tampon production line, and Mum says that’s a good thing because the Devil makes work for idle hands, and you can’t be too idle making tampons on the production line at the Tampax factory.
They’re going to do some tests on Margueretta, but Mum said it can’t hurt to have the reverend round so that’s why he came over.
“An exorcism is not my decision alone,” he explained.
“Oh, I don’t think we need an exorcism.”
He was sitting with Mum in the front room, holding her hand.
“We should always look first to the love of Jesus Christ, our Lord. We should take the Holy Sacraments together. The blood of Christ. The body of Christ. I have always found that works best. We will bring the love of Jesus, our savior, into this home.”
“Thank you,” Mum replied.
“The Holy Trinity is no match for the Devil! Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit will be here with you. Where is Margueretta?”
“She’s upstairs in her room. She doesn’t…”
“Doesn’t what?”
“She doesn’t believe in God. I’m sorry.”
“We all lose our way at some point in our lives. My own faith has wavered. Yes, it is true. But it passes. We all find our way home to our Lord eventually.”
“What should we do?”
“Well, if she isn’t coming down, we should pray together. The Holy Spirit will enter her body and her mind.”
We all knelt on the black floor.
Our Father, which art in Heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in Heaven.
I could have done that. And I could have told him he’s wasting his time with that prayer. You need a Guardian Angel to whisper your prayers into the ear of God. God’s busy with famine, pestilence, war, hatred, destruction, and death. And the Devil. But if God is All Powerful, why doesn’t He just take away our desire to make war and kill people? For that matter, why doesn’t He take away evil thoughts altogether? And send rain when there’s a drought. And kill the locusts. And kill the Devil. But then people wouldn’t pray to Him. And then we wouldn’t need God or Guardian Angels.
And since He is the Great Creator and He made everything, did He make the Devil? And if He didn’t make the Devil, who did? Is there another Creator? And that whole episode in the Garden of Eden does not make any sense at all. Everything was going really well in the Garden because God created it. Then Eve offers Adam an apple, which is really a serpent, and he eats it. And that’s the origin of all sin. So a woman tempted a man, and he couldn’t resist. The apple is a symbol of sin, even though it’s really a serpent. But God made us and the apple that’s really a serpent. So it’s all His fault. And all this does is prove that we are pathetic weak mortals, which is how He made us. Because He is God.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass against us,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
Deliver us from evil. That’s when Margueretta burst into the front room.
“You have to save me!” she screamed.
“What from?” asked the reverend.
“Up there! In my room! You have to save me!”
“She talks nonsense like this all the time,” Mum responded.
“Come and sit here,” the reverend suggested.
“Can you help me?” Margueretta pleaded.
“God can help you, Margueretta. Will you take God into your heart?”
“You have to help me!”
“I will, child, I will. Hol
d my hand. We will pray together…”
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
He leadeth me beside still waters…
The reverend never finished the Twenty-third Psalm. He was just at the part about “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death” when she jumped up and screamed.
“What is it, my child?”
She never answered. She ran out of the house, slamming the front door.
“She thinks there’s something in this house that wants to kill her,” Mum said.
“This is the Devil’s work.”
“She painted it,” said Mum.
“What?”
“She painted a picture of the thing that comes into her room. The thing that wants to kill her.”
“Really? Do you have the picture? It is important that I see it. I must see it now.”
81
The reverend said we should burn that picture immediately.
“Take the Devil from this house and burn it. Burn it! I smell the brimstone. Forty days in the wilderness could not tempt our Savior. Destroy the Devil! Out, I say! Out with this evil incarnation of Lucifer! Get behind me, vile being! God deliver us from this power of darkness!”
Out! Out! Out!
I knew he should have done an exorcism.
And the other picture, the picture of good, is in fact a portrait of Margueretta’s headmaster with whom she is now in love. He is fifty, and she is fifteen; that is disgusting, immoral, and illegal, even if she does look very grown up for her age. And she wants to run away with him even though he is married with four kids. She is sure that he is also in love with her because he stared at her legs when he was telling her she was expelled. And she was staring at his crotch because he is a real man. She has written a poem about him, but we are not allowed to read it.
Lots of men stare at my sister because she is very pretty, wears really high heels, and extremely short miniskirts so that you can see her knickers—especially when you are walking up the stairs behind her as she swings her bum from side to side. I have not told Danny about this.
She’s been fired from her job on the Tampax production line. You cannot drink cider and make tampons. Unfortunately, this means that she is at home all day long, with one eye on the Valium bottle and the other on Mum’s bottle of Crabbie’s Green Ginger Wine. I knew Mum should have taken the fruit basket for a prize at the summer fête.
Margueretta doesn’t care about getting fired for being intoxicated, and she spends all the money she made at Tampax on cider. She even gives me a glass to drink. She doesn’t care about mixing Valium and alcohol because it’s the only way she can sleep and stop the voices in her head that are telling her to kill herself. It’s a shame that up to this point she has ignored them.
Dr. Browning is very concerned about the voices in her head. He asked us all to come and see him again, which is very annoying because we have to take a forty-five minute bus ride to St. James’s Hospital, which is the local loony bin where Great-Auntie Maisie died. And it stinks of carbolic soap and boiled cabbage. Even though they try to keep the place quiet, there are lots of people hollering and screaming, which is enough to give you bloody nightmares.
“It’s good that you are here,” he said, looking at Emily and me.
Emily smiled. I tried to look intense.
“I told the twins that this was important,” Mum replied.
“How are you coping with all of this, John?”
“He’s fine,” Mum interrupted. “It’s me who’s losing my mind! Ha! Ha! I mean, how could anyone cope with all of this, for the love of God? How am I going to cope? That’s what I want to know. How? How?”
“Well. Let’s see. Why don’t we let John answer for himself? Eh, John?”
“I’m fine,” I replied.
He knew I was lying.
“Your sister is not well. She has been having a difficult time with bad thoughts in her head. Do you ever have bad thoughts in your head, John?”
“No.”
Lying again. I have thoughts about killing my sister by pouring paraffin over her bed and setting light to it while she is in it.
“Well, we all have bad thoughts. We call them intrusive thoughts. They come from somewhere within us, but they are not really our thoughts. Not conscious thoughts. Sometimes they’re violent or sexual or inappropriate in other ways. But they’re just thoughts. Your sister thinks the thoughts are coming from someone else, someone or something that exists outside of her. And sometimes she talks to that person or thing. Does that make sense?”
It makes sense. But they’re not just thoughts. The thing is getting into her head.
“Your sister is also suffering from depression. We doctors call it manic-depressive disorder. But don’t worry about that! Just take it that she’s sad a lot. Do you get sad, John?”
“Not really.”
More lies.
“Well, we all get sad. And sometimes Margueretta will seem perfectly normal. Then she might get some more bad thoughts, which make her sad. And she’s having difficulty in knowing the truth about where the thoughts come from. OK?”
“That’s all well and good,” Mum added, “but how do mothers cope with this? It’s been going on for years now. And it’s driving me up the wall! Dr. Wilmot said it was her periods.”
“I think we can safely say it is not her periods, Mrs. Mitchell.”
Which is a pity because Margueretta was getting free supplies of tampons before she got fired. There’s a whole box of them in the scullery.
We went home after that and Mum had a good cry and said she was going mad with it all, and the house makes her depressed, and she needs help as much as Margueretta, perhaps more. I think it is the black floors. Yes, it’s the black floors.
But the good news is the scars have mostly healed up on my face, and I am going to grammar school and will not be called Scarface when I get there. According to Mr. Hudson, I am not nearly as stupid as I look and through some bloody miracle managed to come top of my year in our final exams. What is more, twins should not be separated, so Emily is going too. The other 142 kids in my year will go to an open prison, according to Mr. Hudson.
We will need school uniforms, but we don’t have any money for those sorts of luxuries. So Mum has got out her needles to knit me a uniform. She is a dab hand at knitting, but we don’t have any money for wool either so she has retrieved a faux chainmail tunic she picked up from the Methodist Church jumble sale. It was used for the part of a knight in an amateur dramatics performance of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Mum has ripped the wool back down to balls ready for re-knitting. It is very shiny wool.
Things are worse for Emily. In the summer, girls have the option of wearing dresses to school. The School Bursar runs a second-hand uniform store from her office, and that’s where Mum found Emily a dress that she could grow into. It is a very large dress. Emily has to wrap it around herself three times and pray that it won’t be a windy day. A couple of good gusts, and she will be blown halfway to Portsmouth. And in the thirty years that it will take for her to grow into it, assuming she gets very fat, Emily will be able to throw small tea parties using the dress as a marquis tent.
Mum is knitting along to Gustav Holst’s “The Planets Suite.” We are up to the track “Mars, the Bringer of War.” I can feel the tension, and I expect her cable stitches will be a lot tighter than usual. She has knitted a sleeve already. It is very metallic.
I will look like a Brillo pad.
82
Woolworth’s has a sale on. Dunlop Superior Self-adhesive Floor Tiles are half price. Those bastards may have confiscated the Sweet Shop and my Fry’s Turkish Delight bars, but they never confiscated the profits. I have also saved my pocket money for months. The tiles come in red, white, green, and blue. I like the blue best. It will remind Mum of the ocean.
Unfortunately, there were only three packets of blue tiles in the sale,
which is very misleading if you ask me. I have, therefore, had to compromise on the color scheme, and it will now be blue and green. This is not ideal, but it is better than black. I shall start with the kitchen and create a contrasting pattern of blue and green to create an effect that is durable and yet decorative. But for now, I am keeping the tiles under my bed because Nana is coming to stay for a few days, and she’s bringing a surprise guest.
“Och, ma wee Johnny, ma wee Johnny, ma Scottish soldier! How I’ve missed you so. God knows I’ve missed my wee boy. My, but you’ve grown. And bonnie like your grandfather!”
I love my Nana. But it makes me sad that she’s starting to smell like other old ladies—of onions and perfume and pee. And always the same sweet smell on her breath from the wee dram to keep out the cold, morning, noon and night.
Mum thought the surprise guest might be my dad but it turned out to be a man called George who happens to be married, and Nana is having an affair with him. But she is sixty-nine, and he is only sixty, which Mum says is not right at any age. They met in The Hope on Acre Lane when he was telling a wee joke at the bar.
“A Scotsman is leaving a pub with a bottle of whisky in his back trouser pocket. He’s trying to board a bus but he falls backwards and lands on the bottle. Feeling a wet patch he shouts: My God—I hope that’s blood!”
“Och, that’s a good one, isn’t it just? He takes a meat pie with his pint, don’t you, Georgie?”
Squeeelch!
“Och, it’s the pickled egg, excuse me.
Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry.
When the boys came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away!
“Och, here’s a couple of bottles of something to keep out the cold.”
The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir Page 23