A Lot Like Eve

by Joanna Jepson

  Foddered into an enormous local secondary school at the age of eleven, I was exposed to the judgement of every scornful boy and girl I was unlucky enough to be noticed by. This was no longer primary school where we no longer noticed what each other looked like because we had grown into comfortable familiarity. The recognition that, on the cusp of an adolescent growth spurt, my teeth were beginning to jut out of my mouth at odd angles had passed most of my classmates by. But Rachel Humsley, a latecomer to Christchurch Primary, was a portent of the ridicule I was about to experience among 1,500 teenagers.

  On a bright morning in early September Julia, a girl from church, called for me and, scooting my bike out of the garage, we set out for the first time on our journey to a new school, crisp in our brand new navy and emerald uniforms.

  In the reception area large signs were placed directing Year 7 down the ramp towards the hall. Beyond the doors the drone of 220 nervous boisterous pupils rumbled as they buzzed around looking for their old friends, plucked up courage to begin making new ones and tried to find others with the same colour button on their jumper. I was in Curie, which was yellow, but in the confusion of brown, green, blue, purple and red buttons darting around me I made my way to the edge of the hall and began circling it looking for the twins, Louise and Jess, girls who were also in Curie. I found them standing near a smart, bespectacled man who looked like a wrinkly hound-dog, and was relieved to discover that this was Mr Williams, our new housemaster.

  Class 7C, as we were about to become, followed Mr Williams back up the ramp into reception and on through a maze of corridors towards a spacious wing of the school. Scanning the faces of the other boys and girls for friendly smiles I waited to be assigned to a seat. And so my mind was elsewhere when, as I took my desk next to an unknown boy, I heard someone behind me comment that it was too bad he’d got “Goofy”. That was the first name I heard and I didn’t even realize it was referring to me. Turning to the boy next to me I shyly introduced myself, “Hi, I’m Joanna.”

  His body turned towards me, one arm resting on his new desk and the other along the back of his chair, and a kind of amusement on his face. I waited expectantly for this friendly boy to tell me his name.

  Instead he turned and guffawed to the boy behind.

  “Oh my god, you’re right!”

  “I’ve never seen teeth like that for real.”

  “I am actually sitting by the living, breathing Goofy.”

  This time I heard it, but still its cultural reference was almost lost on me; I’d never seen the Disney film and was only vaguely aware that one of Goofy’s characteristics were two teeth poised like overhanging tombstones from below his protruding snout. So I wasn’t hurt by the name-calling, only by the unseen barrier that had mysteriously prevented me from making friends with the boy I would have to sit beside for the next year. I didn’t get the joke that he was making with the kid behind us but I didn’t need to get it. Turning back to the front I sat silently, doodling on the inside of my fresh exercise book, wishing I could have been paired with one of the twins, or even Andrew Wells, the nerdiest boy in Sunday school.

  I had been trying to keep a grip on today, trying to find the stepping stones of familiarity to get me across the maelstrom of strangeness and overwhelming enormity of this new life in senior school, I was trying to reach out and build bridges. Now here I was, somehow blind to a fault of which I hadn’t been aware but knew that I needed to figure out fast. Then we could sit together and get on and talk, like equal human beings.

  That evening over supper Mum and Dad were keen to hear how my first day had gone, and so I pieced together my day for them with descriptions of teachers who seemed nice and friends with whom I’d been reunited. Dutifully I got out my timetable for Dad to inspect, his eagerness that my science and maths would now improve tempered by the limited appearances they made on my schedule of classes. As soon as I had finished helping to clear away supper, I escaped up to my room and looked up the word “goofy” in my encyclopedia.

  * * *

  A few months before starting senior school I had performed in a show produced by my dance school and my class had been given the lamentable role of portraying a shadowy underwater blob. No girl goes into ballet to play the part of a blob, underwater or not. Girls start doing ballet because they want to be transformed by tutus and satin and sequins into something breathtaking and marvellous. And to have the chance, in a Darcey Bussell kind of way, to get on stage and show everyone how breathtaking and marvellous they are.

  After the final performance of “The Snow Bird”, which unaccountably featured this underwater blob, a trail of disappointed and frustrated ten-year-olds exited the stage door of the theatre wondering how to put into words their existential angst at being relegated to this useless and ugly part. We’d wanted to be snowbirds in white sparkly tutus and feathers, daintily flitting across the stage and delighting the audience with our effortless grands jetés. Instead we were clad in black catsuits with face-paint and lipstick to match and bits of torn bin-liners billowing out behind us. Later on Mum had commented on how well I danced my part, to which I retorted, “How did you know? It’s not like you could distinguish one part of the blob from another.” And without malice came the answer, “We could tell it was you from your teeth.” In a nebulous body of blackened dancers it seems I could stand out from the crowd, the whites of my pointy front teeth breaking through the black-lipped anonymity of the rest of the dancers. So somewhere in my mind was an awareness that my teeth were noticeable to others and that the name “Goofy” was probably referring to them. But only now did it become a taunt, an accusation: an identity. My mouth began to feel like a mask from which I couldn’t step out; leaving a shadow of Joanna invisible behind the barrage of names hammered onto me.

  Maybe if you’re eleven when you start hearing these things about yourself you’re too young to get defensive. Maybe you have to know that there is something to defend in the first place. Maybe if I had been eleven and thought I was destined to be a super-model then I would have got agitated and upset at being told my limb-to-height ratio was just nowhere near long enough for that career path. But those kind of life-expectations and values were not on the radar of eleven-year-old me. Sure, I’d had Barbies but I had never expected to one day be Barbie. I liked being a Brownie, and going on summer camp, and roller-skating parties, and watching Davy Jones in The Monkees. I loved ballet, and had read in a book that ballet dancers had to be tall but not too tall and have pretty hands. Pretty hands, I pondered. And I looked to see whether my hands had the potential to reach the required level of prettiness.

  I also loved Anne of Green Gables and she was taunted at school. She got called “Carrots” because of her red hair. Perhaps that was why I loved Anne and looked up to her, because she had the guts to break a slate over the bully’s head. But when, during the Christmas of 1987, the film appeared on television it turned out that Anne was a beautiful redhead. So smart and alabaster-browed that Gilbert Blythe only teased her because he was in love with her. I looked in the mirror to see if that could be the case for me too. But my hair was brown and I was in bottom set for maths. Nobody was mistaking their love for derision in my case.

  When sent to get something from the school librarian one afternoon I was bewildered to realize that I had become a muse for the jibes of a table full of boys. Pretending to stifle their laughter they attempted, in stage whispers, to outwit each other with comedy descriptions of my jaws. They were Year 11 boys. I should have been invisible to them. And in a way I was. I was not Joanna: I was chipmunk, can-opener, wood-chipper, metal-masher, scrap car-crusher. All of which might be very cool things to identify with – if you’re a boy combining imagined superpower abilities with your love of all things big and mechanical. But for this eleven-year-old girl it did not signal a hidden superhero alter ego. The daily round of names came like incantations, banishing me to the edges where I must watch without a voice or part to play. The Chosen were gathered up into experi
ments with make-up, and gossip about boys and party invitations. The Unchosen were condemned to look in from the outside where our buck teeth or ginger hair or thick NHS glasses or dumpy thighs had relegated us, stunted and silent.

  In the Easter holidays, when I asked the hairdresser to cut my hair into a bob the way other girls were styling theirs, I didn’t see what a mistake it would be. Returning to school on Monday the class bully, and my personal nemesis, Tessa Drew, a deep-voiced drama queen for whom the boundary between imagination and real life were so blurred she was openly known as a pathological liar, stood up to answer the tutor as to why she was laughing during registration. “Jo’s face, Sir. From the side it looks like her teeth have munched a straight line through her hair.”

  Pausing for an eruption into husky laughter she made way for the class to turn and look at me, before continuing to play to the class-wide audience she had now drawn in.

  “I was just saying that it’s a shame her teeth can only cut a line at that one length. Now you can see that she’s got no chin.”

  This time it seemed Tessa was at least attempting to tell the truth. As Mr Perrott’s bemused gaze followed the laughter across the classroom to where I sat, I quietly pressed my chin and mouth into my hands, and vowed never to cut my hair short again. It turns out that after a while outside the warmth of Eden the cold does get to you. You realize you are exposed and in need of something to shield and comfort you.

  It’s funny, isn’t it, that when Adam and Eve took their bites of the forbidden fruit they knew that they were naked? They knew that everything was different now, that their sense of belonging was ruined and replaced by the need to hide. It wasn’t God who came along and told them to run and hide. They saw it themselves; it was their own judgement on each other that declared them shameful and in need of some foliage to hide behind. God never said, “Good grief, look at yourselves! You’re naked! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves … you’d better string some leaves together and hide.” We hear that from other voices.

  4

  Angels and Demons

  Over long months my hair slowly grew long enough for me to brush it down to hide the worsening protrusion of my growing face. No longer just a case of goofy gawkiness, my adolescent bones now developed so that my upper jaw pushed forward exposing my teeth, pointed like the bow of a ship. Perhaps if my lower jaw had also grown forward to match it I could have justified the nickname “metal-crusher”, but instead it failed to grow much at all and, with the lack of a clearly defined chin, my face seemed to disappear down into my long neck. The arrangement of this rather wonky facial architecture made it impossible to hold my lips closed together, though in moments where I thought there was dignity to be salvaged I would brave the discomfort. Like when I met someone new and wanted to hold out as just a regular-faced-girl, before being outed as NFWK.

  With new people there’s a chance. How long do they say you’ve got? Thirty seconds? Seven seconds? One tenth of a second to get that person to see you and like you and believe that there is something worth knowing? I could keep my lips shut together for less than ten seconds, which meant my bids for a new friendship might just succeed, if it weren’t for the crooked shape made while smiling with my mouth shut. Sooner or later the hope of meeting and making a new friend would collapse in the taut grimace of my pursed smile, or with the gush of words revealing not just my name but an unexpected flash of pink, bony jaw.

  If I’d lived in a world where faces were not the litmus test against which a person was judged or if I had simply learned not to take to heart the judgement of my peers then I would have continued, as I had since I was a child, to smile uncompromisingly. In the face of new friendship I would have smiled widely and openly, allowing the edges of my eyes to crinkle with mischief and glee. That is the story I would like to have written – about how, at twelve years old, I faced my tormentors and frenemies with an unshaken belief in who I was. How I met the stares of school peers with unblinking self-possession, rooted in the knowledge of all that I knew lay behind that misshapen fraction of my face. But at twelve years old I wasn’t telling the world who I was, because I was listening to voices that were giving me the answer: the wrong voices – the ones that summed all of me up as defective and ugly. Voices that dismissed the whole of me in a scourge of name-calling about my mouth.

  When girls giggled about a boy they fancied and dreamily etched his name inside their pencil-case, I looked on not daring to mention the boy I had spied in Year 10 whom I would watch playing football at lunchtime. It was not my place to have crushes. If I had named a crush out loud my friends would have to acknowledge him and cheer me on in this new drama. They would have to sound like they believed something could happen between him and me. It would be like standing on the sidelines of a hockey game talking animatedly about the goal you were hoping to score. I couldn’t bear provoking the look of embarrassment in their eyes while they searched around for some disingenuous words of encouragement.

  It’s not that you forget the other voices, the voices of love that tell you who you are and where you have come from; it’s just that you allow other voices to grow louder. You give them more airtime, listening and learning that not all of you is acceptable or welcomed. And so you begin cordoning off parts of yourself, silencing them and shunning them. Until you are fractured and unwhole, unable to look at what doesn’t seem to fit, or to embrace all the unfinished parts of yourself and no longer sure how to let the beautiful or the broken parts reflect the light.

  There were moments of mercy when I was caught in the light of another’s reach. Strange occurrences where, through the crush of bodies heaving along the one-way corridor at break time, I was seen, not as sport to trample against the wall, but as something else. I don’t really know what, because what could account for a Year 10 girl reaching through the door and pulling me out of the throng and into the safety of her classroom? Popular, talented and distinctively impish Beckie Harper was one half of the identical Harper twins, recognizable to anyone in a crowd from their eruptions of pale fluffy hair. Three years above me, the twins were the kind of girls I knew but who certainly wouldn’t know me. So I’m not convinced that Beckie really recognized me from way back in junior school when she hauled me in and offered me a table to sit on while I ate my crisps. She was just very kind. Which is how I became friends with Beckie and her friend Lauren, and began a rhythm of lunchtime escapes from school, accompanying them on walks across the fields and scrambling through hedges to the forbidden woods beyond. With them there was never any need to explain the misery that school had become; I guessed that they already knew that and that’s why I was here with them, invited to tag along.

  When, one day, after a group of girls rounded on me in the girls’ loos stabbing their fingers at my torso and shouting that I was the cause of all ugliness in Curie house, Beckie and Lauren listened with serious faces, unfazed by what they were hearing. Kindness shone, not in phony attempts to tell me I was fine or in pretence that my face wasn’t really problematic for other kids, but in their determination to open up a different vista for me. They asked questions about what I liked, what was I good at, who my friends were, and trod carefully to find out if life was any easier outside the school campus. Discovering that church was the main feature of life beyond school, Beckie invited me to her confirmation service at Christchurch. When I told them I loved dancing she found out where my ballet school was and turned up with Emma the following Saturday to see if I was free to wander into town with them after my class. But it was too late. The lazy Saturday pastime of wandering around town had begun to induce cramps of fear, causing my stomach to revolve turbulently. Going to town was about buying stuff: clothes, make-up, things that would make you look better. It was about seeing people, and I no longer wanted to be seen or reminded that I didn’t fit, and that no amount of make-up or new clothes could alter that.

  Saturday was where I reclaimed territory and made the world my own again. It was spent in ballet lessons, and cy
cling over to Jane’s where we rearranged her parent’s basement into an office suite in which we played out our business idea. “Problem Page” was a couple of desks, two telephones, a pile of notepads for our case files and us, with our fake American accents. We had to have accents and they had to be American – it added instant sophistication to what was otherwise a game of social workers answering the phone on imagined basket-cases and proceeding to solve their problems. It could have all run its course within the space of a couple of Saturdays, except it ran on for months once we introduced the added plot-line of our imaginary boyfriends, Dan and Tim. Interspersing our client calls every once in a while we would lean back on our swivel chairs and, thinking ourselves into the heavyheartedness of a woman in love, solemnly tell each other the difficulties of our love lives. All with very bad American accents.

  Problem Page was my turf; an afternoon a week where I could put things right and life’s impossibilities could be waved away by my soothing, simple answers. Here I knew what I was about, because in this bunker no other voice but mine could be heard. The imaginary clients unloading their imaginary woes were my chance to be something; they asked me for help and gave me a voice that I hadn’t worked out how to use anywhere else. Into the receiver of that old disconnected phone I seized the opportunity to speak words that proved that I was not my teeth, my braces, a girl hiding behind her hair. I was grown up, independent, useful and had my stuff together.

  5

  Good News Crusaders

  Then once a year, another spacious place appeared on the landscape of my summer as our family packed up the caravan to head 20 miles down the road to the Malvern Hills. Specifically the Three Counties Showground, which for one week a year became home to Good News Crusade Bible camp. We had been attending this annually since I was five, along with most of our church congregation, and the Jepsons were stalwarts; part of the Good News Crusade scene. Mum and Dad were camp counsellors and everyone knew Alastair from his appearances on main stage with his junior-sized guitar accompanying the band.