When he stomped through her back door he broke up a parent–teacher meeting. A flustered couple dusted themselves down as they blundered out onto the path. We heard him through the windows and the walls, the other parents stumbling over the gravel, looking back. His bellows about the bloody waste of money, the extortionate fees, the incompetence, could be heard right the way over to where more parents slid from their Range Rovers and Jaguars, every head turned towards the Tait kitchen door.
Then there was the crash of my bike hitting her Formica island. I glimpsed it through the window, squealing the length of the worktop.
Perhaps as Mrs Tait contemplated the rageful immaturity of the man in front of her, she spied me hopping one foot to another outside, my arms flapping so hard it looked as though I’d take off. Because soon the shouting broke off, and from within the kitchen there oozed one of those rich, heavy silences that scares a child shitless. It was the last time Dad ever visited me at school.
Lie 40: There’s nothing I can do
One of the clearest memories I have from Gordonstoun is an afternoon in the house television room. It is Saturday and only the saddos are in there, still in uniform, hostage to a daytime line-up of Premiership football or the black-and-white film. I’m wondering whether to go for a ciggy before the rugby match, or after, and whether I should ask Jane if I can borrow her boots. I have grown increasingly ritualistic. To concentrate on the detail means I don’t have to worry so much about the fact that there are still another eight weeks to go.
Through the window, distantly, between the trees, I see Ed walk past. It is autumn, red leaves carpeting the verge, a wind blowing up the road. He walks into it, alone, his shoulders round his ears, hands in pockets. It’s only his second or third week, and he looks so despondent, even from two hundred yards, that I find it unbearable. I look away.
My own boredom worries me as much as the boredom of others. It is when the worst things happen. If I have a ciggy before the match, I tell myself, and one after, then the whole afternoon can be written off.
A couple of hours later and the school rugby match is over. I’ve followed the first fifteen, clattering in their boots, down the road from the pitch. Their legs and shirts are caked with mud, breath clouding the air. They’ve won. But instead of disappearing for my second ciggy Jane persuades me to accompany her. She tells me she needs to pick up the boyfriend’s rugby kit and wash it, and she doesn’t want to be hanging round the boys’ mixed common room on her own.
A boys’ mixed common room is not somewhere I would normally go. Though the furniture is the same as our own, and the plumbing (which runs externally along the top of each wall), a boys’ house is its own country. It smells of feet and damp clothes, the nylon-covered box armchairs ripped. We stand on the brown tiles, watching the boys drift in and out.
I can hear the gathering noise of something kicking off beyond the fire door. Jane, more used to hanging around a boys’ house, moves over to a chair and falls into it. I look at my watch. The noise beyond the door sounds, on the face of it, like something is funny, and yet there’s a tone to it which isn’t.
‘What’s going on?’
Jane shrugs.
‘We could go round by the pitches,’ she says, ‘and have a ciggy there.’
The door thumps open, and it is not a junior but the huge boyfriend, his hair wet from a shower, dirty kit clamped in his fist. Disappointed to find me there, he nods briefly in my direction. Then he throws himself into the chair beside Jane and pulls her onto his knee.
As they whisper to one another, I peer towards the door, which muffles a good deal of shouting. And laughing. It is the kind of laughing which speaks of someone having a terrible time.
Without warning, the door briefly bangs open, wide enough for me to see a senior leaning against the wall, a can of deodorant in his hand. He is yelling back up the corridor and it’s then I see the distant line of smaller boys falling like bruised apples from where they’ve been hanging by their hands from the boiling pipes.
‘What’s with the deodorant?’ I ask when the door bangs shut.
‘What?’ The boyfriend looks round.
‘The deodorant.’
‘It gives an impressive flame when you put a match to it?’ He flaps his hand at me. ‘It’s just a game. You know, to see who can hang on the longest.’
I want to ask him if Ed is there. If Ed is amongst the small boys being tortured beyond the door. Yet to ask would be like gifting my brother a frailty. An interfering sister, especially one of my status, I tell myself, might put him in an even worse position. I am the very last thing he needs.
I smile at Jane and the boyfriend and retreat back outside, onto the concrete steps. The leaves snag amongst the grass and hedges as they fall. He probably wasn’t even there, I tell myself, dodging away between the trees. I fall out of sight from the road and crouch down, rifling through the pockets of my coat. The cigarette lit, already I am wondering what’s for supper and whether I have enough matches to last the weekend. There are many hours of it still to fill.
Lie 41: One day I’ll report him
Ms Clough would sail up the study corridor, breasts thrust out ahead of her for balance, and try to catch us talking during prep. As tutor, the first appointment I had with her she told me that if I wanted to make a success of the opportunities school offered, whether that was being part of the hockey team or playing an instrument, then I must throw myself wholesale into Gordonstoun life.
Four years later, in both cases I had made no progress. Hockey required too much running around in the cold, while the clarinet needed reeds, which I could never be bothered to look after. They were often split and squeaky. Now almost as huge as her, I would turn up and flounder the half-hour on her sofa, careful not to raise anything controversial, like hockey, clarinet or even prep, where I was not getting much done either.
Even looking back, searching for characteristics, one grown-up human imagining the life of another, Ms Clough remains enigmatic. She loved the drama of a house search, sixty of us marooned in the mixed common room for hours at a time while she turned our dorms upside down. In the early days I shat myself. I knew I must be guilty. But the older I grew, and the more guilty I got, the less I worried. Worry was a luxury I couldn’t allow myself. I needed focus.
Usually the crime was a stolen tenner, or a Walkman that had walked. Kleptomania amongst the rich was rife. But what a search threw up was never the stolen, only what was essential – cigarettes and booze.
The particular tutorial I’m thinking of, I can’t remember how the subject of a rectal examination came up. Perhaps, when she asked, I told her the reason I hadn’t practised the clarinet or made the hockey team was my stomach. I had blistering stomach pains, so bad that often I would have to lie down on the floor where I was.
‘And you’ve been to see one of the doctors?’
‘Yes.’
The first time I had gone out of choice, the second because I was ordered.
‘And?’ She peered at me, but I could not catch her eye. ‘Come on, what did he say?’
‘It’s not appendicitis.’
‘He gave you the rectal then?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Did he put his fingers up your bum, dear?’
Ms Clough should have been an adult I could have talked to. Those tutorials necessitated many hours alone together, I adrift on her sofa trying to distract her from the fact I had achieved nothing since we last met.
But that afternoon, when we discussed the rectal examination, was the only time I remember revealing anything personal. When I nodded to her ‘bum’ question, Ms Clough struggled to hold back her excitement, pudgy hands clasped in her lap. Beyond the window three girls galloped through the silence, shrieking.
‘How many times did he do it?’ she asked.
‘Twice.’
‘Twice?’
She got up to stand by her desk, pushing aside pieces of paper, hunting for a pen.
‘I�
��ve been doing a rectal audit.’ She opened a small notebook and marked the page. ‘When I’ve reached enough of a number maybe I’ll report him.’
Lie 42: That was entirely inappropriate
Although infants do have memory, as we grow older we rarely recall those pre-verbal moments. It is as though we need to speak to remember. Before memories can be filed they need to be stitched into a story. Only then can they live.
Aside from language, what we need, in order to consolidate memories, is the ability to locate ourselves in the physical world. We have what are called ‘place cells’ in our hippocampus that allow us to form a cognitive map of the street, a familiar building, the position along the fence of a wooden stile. Exercising how we get from A to B, without relying on that irritating voice from the dashboard: ‘At the next exit turn right,’ helps us to locate both our memories and ourselves.
Nobel Prize-winners John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser argue that what they call the ‘mental travel’ of memory is governed by our place cells. To know where we are may help us to remember who we are too. For instance, London cab drivers literally have more grey matter, because the ability to read a physical map influences the function and size of the hippocampus. When we give up our maps and put away our compasses, we could shrink the hippocampus into early dementia.
What’s of more concern though is not whether I remember or forget, it is whether I indulge in fiction. Are these memories false? Did this tutorial really happen? Of course, I did have tutorials, but it is almost inconceivable that Ms Clough would have discussed rectal examinations with me. There is no record of this conversation in my diary either. Can it really be true?
Some of us are easily led. Elizabeth Loftus, the psychologist who carried out the research into false memories that I introduced in Lie 2, is not interested in how we forget. She is interested in why we remember what never happened. One project in the United States found that 225 innocent people had been convicted on the basis of falsely remembered eyewitness accounts, convictions that DNA evidence later overturned. Loftus argues that memory is like a Wikipedia entry. We can go in and change it, but so can everyone else.
Always I have doubted this memory of the rectal, but I never spoke of it, and therefore it does not fall in beside Loftus’s examples of being influenced by others. Along with T.’s birthday baths this was one of the first Lies that I wrote, and like his swims, I worried that I had made it up. Instead of being led by my audience, I wondered whether my audience needed memoir to be more miserable.
However, not even my fertile imagination could have come up with that phrase: ‘rectal audit’. Nor had I thought there was anything wrong with the KY jelly or the snap of the rubber glove as the doctor lubed himself up. The humiliating discomfort of the procedure is now lost to me, but the strained view of the wall is not. I hunted it for something to fix on, its stains and marks, never imagining that he had his hand up my arse because he liked it. Without Ms Clough’s audit comment, I would have remembered the rectal as a rectal, rather than as abuse. Which continues to be strange proof to me that our conversation must have happened.
Or did it?
In a fit of anxiety I assessed the sexual exploitation memories – T.’s birthday baths; his swims; the rectal – and then lobbed a question at the Gordonstoun Facebook group, regarding what I felt to be the least problematic memory of the three:
‘Does anyone remember T.’s birthday baths?’
Perhaps I over-egged things by including the words ‘dragging’ and ‘stripping’. Then waited.
Those people who had not been at prep school were disgusted, and in the vacuum created by their disgust a yawning lack of corroboration developed, which was soon replaced with fury. Those who had enjoyed school didn’t like my memories at all. I had misremembered, and had been entirely inappropriate.
Three days passed.
Someone had to help me. Someone else must remember too. The birthday baths had really happened. I had not made them up. Finally, faced with a deluge of fury and denial, I utterly lost faith in myself. Even Violet couldn’t say she remembered the baths when I asked. Being alone with a memory can be the loneliest thing in the world.
So I withdrew the question. In tears, I apologised profusely for misrepresenting T. If no one else remembered then I would have to accept that perhaps the birthday baths were a fiction. It was one of the most difficult apologies I’ve ever had to write.
Which may have been how it came across, because within an hour Eva, who had lied on my behalf to get us both out of the naked swim, responded. She did remember the birthday baths, but felt there was nothing untoward in them. Then, completely unprompted by me, she asked whether anyone remembered T.’s swims.
To Facebook and this group, I became addicted. I had been scorned and saved in the same afternoon. Revelations of deviant behaviour on the part of both staff and pupils gathered. My sense that those school years had been all wrong was confirmed.
Lie 43: I’m going to kill myself
The first time I contemplated suicide my thought was to leap into the sea.
My grandfather had been transfixed by escape too, standing on the balcony of a lighthouse, telling his fellow keepers he could fly. I had no thought of flying. I had no hope. What I wanted was to jump.
You see, my mother had started delegating the more inconvenient parenting tasks to school. One letter reads: ‘I am writing to the housemistress about your verruca and your teeth and hope that both of these can be dealt with, or at least a start made.’
At some point she also decided to stipulate a weigh-in. I was told to report to the Sanatorium each Tuesday morning. It was explained that my mother had noticed I had put on a considerable amount of weight. She hoped that regular humiliation (though I’m sure they must have phrased it differently) would keep my greed in check.
So on that first Tuesday I stood in front of the vast institutional scales, a gaggle of other girls with me. I would hesitate to call them friends. Moving through the crowd with her ledger, Matron made her way to the huge weight dial, its face orientated away from me, towards her.
‘Go on then, step up,’ she called over the girly din.
The mechanical clank of my step onto the weighing platform was met with a quiet hush. Every head tilted to watch the swinging arrow waver and waver, back and forth, back and forth, until it was still. Someone whispered:
‘Fourteen stone.’
Recording this vast number in her ledger, Matron said loudly:
‘Okay, off you get.’
There were other occasions when I must have gone to the San to be weighed, but neither Matron nor I had the appetite for it. Instead of diminishing my greed, Tuesdays intensified it. With each week the arrow sank deeper and deeper towards fifteen.
But it was the second act of parental delegation that nearly killed me. By then I was in the sixth year of the boarding-school experiment, an experiment that I felt wasn’t working. I begged to leave. Begged.
There was a single payphone between sixty girls. Saudi Arabia was a long and expensive way away, so in the whole seven years I made only one call ‘home’, and this was it. I wasted it crying, too bereft to say anything other than repeatedly to ask if I could come home.
I have hunted this call down in my diary, but there are only oblique references, a panicked return call from my parents, and mention of a talk with the housemistress. All the entries leak despair.
Finally I was told that the headmaster wanted to discuss this request with me himself. The diary records two cancelled appointments, his secretary never offering an apology as I waited impotently at her desk. During that fortnight Dad wrote, the letter paper now grubby from reading.
‘I would like you to stay at Gordonstoun (is that clear?) Only if you are very unhappy there would I think it a good idea for you to leave.’
He gives three examples of people who have become decent members of society despite being academic failures. Although my unhappiness and poor results are
in the same paragraph he cannot seem to make any connection between the two. I am written off.
‘O and A-Levels are not the B-all and end-all.’
He is right. They are not.
When the headmaster finally found the time to see me, I remember him as a small man, behind a big desk, wearing an insouciant smile.
‘So Miranda, your parents tell me that you would like to move to another school.’
‘Yes.’
‘So which school did you have in mind?’
Fearful of the humiliation threatening at the back of my throat, I fixed my gaze on the pattern of his carpet, where countless boys had been beaten.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You understand that you would still have to board?’
I said nothing.
‘Are you listening to me, Miranda? I don’t think you realise what a difficult position you are putting your parents in here.’
When I didn’t answer again, he looked at his watch.
‘So that’s settled then. I’ll call them in the morning.’
In the hours that followed I decided to throw all my books and then myself into the sea.
It was a mile or so from the school gates to the cliffs, between fields, along a straight track up to the brow of the hill. In my arms were the Arden Othello and Hamlet, the Lattimore translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, A Passage to India and the Knight’s Tale (which was definitely going over the cliff edge first).
The day was grey, as school days often were, no cars on the Hopeman-to-Lossiemouth Road. On the other side a small wood had been planted. Tight up against the grass kerb stood sentry lines of young evergreens, their branches still near to the ground. It wasn’t the best place for a cigarette, but since it would be my last …
Over the fence I fought with the needles of what seemed like a hundred Christmas trees and then gave up, still within sight of the road. It would have been a packet of Marlboro or Camel that I carried in my Oxfam overcoat, because anything else was social suicide. I didn’t have money for an acceptable lighter, so was always short of matches. In the wind I would have been going through them like a dog goes through his lunch.
A Book of Untruths Page 11