All of Me

by Kim Noble

  That’s the problem with sensory deprivation, I’ve read. It’s meant to promote some meditative behaviour. In small doses I believe this is possible. Anyone exposed to these conditions regularly over a long period of time might suffer different effects. Paranoia, hallucinations, depression and anxiety are natural consequences. By the time I was released I was convinced I was suffering all four.

  And of course it happened to me again and again.

  And again.

  I didn’t know how I’d got that weekend job in Shirley but I do know it didn’t last long. At least it didn’t appear to. After being driven like slaves we were too tired to walk home. Dad had to come and pick us up instead. I hated it but I don’t recall being fired or resigning. In fact, I went to bed one Friday night expecting to turn up at work the following day as normal.

  That didn’t happen.

  The first thing I noticed was that I wasn’t in the kitchen. Okay, that’s fine. It can’t be far away.

  But where was Clare? For those eight or nine hours each day we barely left each other’s side. We worked together, took our breaks together and left together.

  She must be in the loo.

  I waited for a few minutes, then decided to look for her. The room I was in was dark and filled with coats on hooks. I didn’t remember coming in but there was my jacket. The door was ajar so I went out.

  Straight into a shop.

  Panicking, I dived back into the room and slammed the door.

  Okay, that’s weird. It’s not the kitchen. It’s not even the restaurant. It’s a department store full of people.

  When I heard footsteps approaching I thought I’d die. If I’m found in here they’ll think I’m shoplifting. I considered hiding behind the coats but decided against it. If they discovered me there it would look even more suspicious. No, better to front it out. I took a deep breath and felt my heart almost bursting through my top. I wished I was invisible.

  The door suddenly flung open and a neatly coiffed woman bowled in.

  ‘There you are!’ she called cheerily. ‘All ready to get started?’

  ‘Er, yeah,’ I heard myself say. ‘I’m ready.’

  I followed her back out and a girl called Kelly showed me how to fold clothes, tidy shelves and generally make our section of the huge shop look presentable. Of course, you only have to look like you vaguely know what you’re doing and customers are soon queuing up with questions. I did my best but by the tenth one I just felt like screaming, ‘How should I know? I don’t even know which shop I’m in!’

  As I said, just another one of my typical scrapes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My pilot light is going out

  Judy cringed as she pulled on the skirt. She hated squeezing into these stupid tight clothes. What was the point of PE anyway? It only made her sweat. Sport was for thin girls who looked good in their gear. Not people like her, people with legs as fat as hers, people who just looked so hideous stomping around the ball court. It was embarrassing. It made her want to curl up and die. She wished she had a chocolate bar.

  She knew the boys would see her as she made her way out to the court. She knew they’d call her ‘fatty’ like they always did. She knew they’d be making their lists and giving all the girls marks out of ten for this and that. And she knew she’d be getting zero for her figure. A big, fat zero.

  For a big fat girl.

  It didn’t matter if she scored ten for prettiness or cleverness or funniness. Nothing mattered apart from that zero.

  Judy looked around. The last stragglers had gone, dragging themselves out to their weekly humiliation. The changing room was empty. If she didn’t hurry she’d be told off again. But if she did hurry, she’d have to endure the vicious taunts as usual.

  Judy picked up her bag and headed to the toilets, went into a cubicle and slid the bolt.

  I’m better off here, she thought. No one will find me here.

  When you do a jigsaw puzzle you start with the corners, then hunt out the edges, then try to pull them into order. Finally you can think about looking for some sense in the middle section. Without knowing it, that’s how my early years felt. And without understanding why, the older I got I was happy if I could just get the borders lined up. Much more than that was a real bonus.

  School wasn’t the problem. There you are compartmentalised and everyone knows where they should be and roughly what they should be doing. It was the journeys to and from Tavistock that threw up the problems. I’d suddenly be aware of walking and not remember where I was going. If I had my school uniform on then it was a good guess that it was a school day. If there were others around I could work out whether they were heading for lessons or escaping home.

  Once I found myself alone near the gates. I didn’t know how I’d got there or where I’d come from. Nothing unusual about that.

  I did the standard checks: I was carrying my school bag and wearing my uniform. It was a weekday.

  But the path was deserted. Either everyone was already in and I was running late, or they’d left hours ago and I was still here. Or was I ridiculously early for some reason? I studied the building. There were a few lights on. That didn’t help.

  Is it morning or evening?

  Should I go in or walk home?

  Either could get me in real trouble if it was the wrong choice.

  Where are my friends? Where’s Clare? Where’s Irene?

  I must have stood there for a quarter of an hour, anguishing over which way to head. Then I noticed something familiar.

  Cooking! One of the nearby houses had the oven on.

  That was all the information I needed. It was dinner time.

  I have to get home.

  Getting home after an episode like that would usually follow the same pattern.

  Mum: ‘Where have you been?’

  Me: ‘I don’t know.’

  Mum: ‘Fine. Be like that. Dinner’s ready.’

  She never probed any further. I suppose she thought I was keeping secrets. What would I have said? ‘I sometimes appear in places or with people I don’t know.’ I wasn’t even sure that was what was happening. How could I put it into words?

  In itself, the fact that Mum, or Nan for that matter, never questioned my behaviour reassured me that everything was normal. If people act weird around you, then you ask them if they’re all right. That’s the natural response, isn’t it? That’s how I am with my daughter. Get everything out in the open. If no one questions you for acting oddly, you infer from that that they know what you’re going through. That it’s how they live as well, even if you can’t necessarily see evidence of it. And so you just carry on as normal. Carry on in the only way you know how.

  Mum had her own problems, of course. The whole family did. I was only a child but I could see that things with Dad were at best tolerable and at worst downright unpleasant. At the same time as never telling us anything, neither made any attempt to hide anything either. I just wasn’t considered important enough to be informed. If they wanted to fight, they did it right in front of me. I heard all sorts of accusations flung in Dad’s direction. Then he’d take off as usual. It didn’t matter if I was in front of them or safely upstairs. Even from the sanctity of my room I’d feel the shudder of the front door slamming.

  I don’t remember discussing anything with Nan. Maybe she didn’t know what was going on either. In the evenings we would sit together and she would stroke my hair. But we never spoke. Not really. We all just concentrated on our own lives.

  I noticed Lorraine start to pop round more and more often. She’d begun to moan about her husband, which was a shame. They’d only been married five minutes but I suppose they’d been together since they were young. You’re not the same person at nineteen that you were at fourteen. Hearing her suspicions of his behaviour made me sick. It was Mum and Dad all over again.

  Speaking of Dad, he wasn’t quite himself. Every time I saw him, which wasn’t that often, he seemed to be complaining about a bad back. I d
on’t remember him being particularly active but suddenly he was coming straight in from work and collapsing onto the sofa. Even that seemed to cause discomfort after a while. One day I came downstairs and he’d moved onto the floor. It wasn’t the biggest front room in the world and he took up most of the space. I didn’t know anything about bad backs but I thought he should see a doctor.

  ‘It’s just a bad back,’ he insisted. ‘A bit of rest and I’ll be right as rain.’

  Day after day, week after week, this went on. Whenever I was in the house he’d be stretched out on the floor, writhing around.

  ‘I’ll be all right when I get comfortable.’

  He didn’t look all right, though. And he didn’t sound it.

  Then things started getting weird.

  I got home one day as Nan was cooking dinner. Dad was already on the floor in the front room. He hadn’t been to work for weeks. I stuck my head around the door to say hello but all he could say was, ‘Shut the door, for God’s sake! I can’t stand the smell.’

  What smell? The only aroma in the house was food – onions and mince at a guess. But I didn’t question. I pulled the door closed and went upstairs.

  Dad didn’t join us to eat.

  ‘He’s not up to it,’ Mum said.

  I could work out that for myself. The sounds through the thin partition wall were awful. One moment Dad was shouting at himself because he couldn’t get comfortable. Then he was swearing at the foul smells seeping into the lounge. Poor Nan, having to listen to her food compared to everything from rotting veg to blocked drains to dog mess.

  ‘Well, I like the smell, Nan,’ I said, although I didn’t seem to eat anything as usual before finding myself in bed.

  The next night was the same. By the end of the week Dad was shouting from the moment I got up until the time I went to bed. Always about the food. Always about the vile stench. If anyone dared open the front room door while there was any vegetable preparation going on, you soon closed it again. Any conversation at breakfast was drowned out by his ranting. Same with dinner. At the weekend it was easier to just stay out for most of the day.

  But still he just said it was a bad back.

  ‘Leave me alone. I know my body. I just need a rest!’

  Eventually he gave in and a doctor was allowed in to see him. Dad told him the same story. It was just his back. He just needed some peace and quiet – ‘although chance would be a fine thing in this house.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ the doctor said.

  I don’t know what went on in that room but after ten minutes the doctor was on the phone ordering an ambulance.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Mum asked him.

  ‘Your husband’s got extremely low blood pressure. He needs hospital treatment. Urgently.’

  I don’t remember Dad being carried into the ambulance or whether Mum went with him. But I do recall sitting down for mealtimes was enjoyable again without the soundtrack of his abuse.

  Mum went to the hospital at some point and Dad revealed he had a stomach ulcer. That was why his back was hurting. It also explained why eating was a complete no-no, and how even the smell of food set him off.

  ‘They’re going to operate and then I’ll be fine.’

  Mum was quite matter-of-fact when she relayed the details to us that night. I don’t remember visiting Dad. Weirdly, a school friend was admitted to the same hospital for appendicitis and I did go to take her a bunch of grapes. Half the class was there whenever I went. I recall seeing her and later standing outside Dad’s ward. But I don’t remember going in. Just standing there, wondering where I was, then going home again.

  Mum went in after the operation. Dad was asleep in his bed so she went to speak to the consultant.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, perfectly straightforward procedure. We were lucky to catch it in time.’

  ‘Will it return?’

  ‘Will what return?’

  ‘The ulcer.’

  The consultant stared at Mum like she was mad. She wondered if they were speaking about the same patient.

  ‘Jim Noble,’ she said. ‘You just operated on him. You took out a stomach ulcer.’

  The consultant stared at Mum and said, ‘My dear woman, your husband didn’t have an ulcer. He has cancer. We’ve just removed three-quarters of his stomach.’

  Cancer? Dad hadn’t told anyone. God knows what the consultant thought but Mum felt such an idiot. Typical of him, though, she must have thought. Always keeping secrets.

  Dad was put onto a ward with the other people who’d had similar operations. He was only forty-two and the youngest one there by several decades. Mum hated going to visit him. One day she came back and said one of the old boys who’d had the same op as Dad had died in the night. The next day she said another one had gone. Then a third.

  ‘I think we’re going to have to prepare for the worst,’ she said. She burst out crying, joined soon after by Lorraine. Later Mum told me, ‘You never cried. You were always so hard.’

  But Dad was a fighter. They might have been dropping like flies around him but he plugged away. After a few weeks the doctors said he could come home. The next thing I knew, he was back in the lounge, because he was too weak to climb the stairs every day. But at least he wasn’t angry any more. We could cook without listening to him screaming about the smells wafting in.

  For a while things were back to normal. Then one day Lorraine arrived and announced she’d left her husband. He’d cheated on her. They were over. There was no way back. I didn’t want to give up my room but she refused to go in with Nan. Everyone else agreed.

  ‘It’s not right for a married woman.’

  I wasn’t too happy about that but generally Lorraine and I had never been closer. Five years is a huge gap when one of you is interested in boys and the other is still playing with dolls. By the time Lorraine had moved back in we were both old enough to get along. The older we got, the less important the gap seemed.

  Friday nights were important times for Lorraine and Mum. That was Mum’s night out with the girls and once Lorraine was back, she started going out with her as well. At fourteen, I was too young so I stayed in with Nan. Sometimes we played games, sometimes we listened to the radio or watched television if Dad didn’t mind our being in the front room with him.

  One Saturday Dad had felt strong enough to leave the house, although his bed was still set up in the front room. Mum and Lorraine were out for a good time as usual. Nan and I were talking when the phone went.

  ‘Who’s ringing at this time?’ she said as I went to answer. ‘Give them a piece of my mind.’

  I picked up and said, ‘Hello?’

  For the next minute I just listened as an hysterical Lorraine screamed down the phone. I managed to pick out bits and pieces.

  ‘Mum’s been run over! You’ve got to come down. Don’t tell Nan. Whatever you do, don’t let her worry.’

  So many instructions I barely had time to respond. Then the line went dead.

  I went back to Nan.

  ‘Who was that?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, it was Lorraine,’ I said. That was the easy part.

  ‘What does she want at this time?’

  ‘Mum’s fallen over. She’s drunk. Lorraine wants me to go and help her back.’

  ‘That girl,’ Nan tutted. ‘I’m not waiting up to see this.’

  I grabbed my coat and ran out the door. It was a five-minute run from our house. Mum, Lorraine and a man friend had been crossing the road at the roundabout joining the A23. A car had come bombing around the corner while they were all mid-crossing. Lorraine had been last in the line so she was just scraped. The man was knocked clean over and Mum, who’d been furthest into the road, was slammed onto the hood. Lorraine said that was the only reason the driver stopped, because he couldn’t see anything with Mum filling the windshield.

  I didn’t know any of this as I tore along the pavement. All I knew from Lorraine’s messag
e was that things were bad. Terrible even. But nothing prepared me for the sight of dozens of flashing blue lights dominating the night sky. Police cars and ambulances were completely blocking the road. Vehicles were backed up in both directions as cops tried to keep the traffic flowing. A small crowd of people had gathered around the scene. As I fought my way through, I saw Lorraine sitting with a blanket round her. A policeman was talking to her. But where was Mum?

  Then I saw her and my heart sank.

  She was lying in the road, exactly as she’d landed. Two medics were checking her. They were talking anxiously. But worst of all, I could see a policeman crouching down, shuffling around her like a crab. He was marking her outline on the road.

  I thought they only did that for dead bodies.

  Then the other shoe dropped.

  Oh God!

  Lorraine saw me, then we forced our way over to Mum. She was out of it, completely unconscious.

  She’s not going to make it.

  We shoved past the medics and I sighed with relief when I saw Mum’s eyes flicker open. When she saw us she said, ‘My pilot light is going out.’

  What a time to be thinking about the cooker, I thought. But at least she was alive.

  She said it again. ‘My pilot light is going out.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ Lorraine assured her. ‘I’ll light it when I get home.’

  But Mum wouldn’t stop. That’s all she could manage to say in her weak, pathetic little voice. ‘My pilot light is going out. My pilot light is going out.’

  Then she passed out again and I thought we’d lost her for good.

  I stared at Lorraine. What do we do now?

  Suddenly, there was a twitch and Mum came back. And what did she say?

  ‘My pilot light is going out.’

  As petrified as I was, I struggled to keep a straight face. It was so bizarre. Mum was flitting in and out of consciousness and all she could think about was that.