A Lot Like Eve

by Joanna Jepson

  “But it’s awful.”

  It took a long time for them to crawl their way past our small section of wire but even in the darkening twilight we didn’t want to risk their imams seeing them, so we lay down like soldiers lying in wait. Eventually the boys inched their way past, leaving several feet of space between themselves and us. We hissed loudly to them. “Are you OK?”

  “Is there anything we can do?”

  But their faces, contorted in discomfort and shame, were focused on each new patch of lumpy grass beneath their knees.

  “We’re so sorry”, I whispered.

  Suddenly our God didn’t seem so wrathful, or so insecure, needing to crash down upon our attempts to reach out with cruel punishment. What was it that their imams were so afraid would happen? Could their idle chatter with kafir really wrest away their hearts and minds from Allah? It seemed that their leaders had more faith in our faith than I did.

  12

  Laying Out the Bodies

  Perhaps it is strange that Islam’s covering of female faces and bodies didn’t appeal to me; that I didn’t look across that field at the girls behind fences and veils and wish that I had that kind of relief or protection from unwanted stares. But it didn’t strike me as liberating, because it wasn’t the kind of freedom I wanted. My heart and mind closed down towards these Muslim neighbours and I came away from the fence frustrated and angered by the harshness we’d seen. If Muslims were going to take over Britain then I should probably start taking world evangelism a bit more seriously again. Maybe I would be more successful as a novelty foreign missionary instead of just the weird class Bible-basher.

  The problem was that old-school missionaries no longer existed; now you had to go to another country with a basic skill – something you could usefully do whilst waiting to meet people to share the Good News with. It wasn’t at all clear what my skill might be. Dad certainly worried about it. Perhaps it was because of my school record, so blighted by bad-scoring maths and science results, that he hoped I would be good. If career options weren’t going to be in plentitude then all the more reason to keep me on the straight and narrow and avoid any moral lapse to boot.

  So a cursory glance at my school record didn’t offer any promising options for a would-be missionary. Leaders at camp talked about their ministry travelling the world, seeing people become Christians and the sick healed and the possessed delivered. That was the kind of career I wanted to have. Except, as a girl, I wouldn’t be able to be a preacher, unless I married a preacher man and then got invited to speak to women’s groups. It didn’t altogether matter that the Church of England had voted to ordain women and soon now Emmanuel Church would have a female priest; my parents were against it and so it wasn’t floated as a suitable career path for me.

  When the vote for the ordination of women had passed through General Synod, Julia, Vicky, Rachel, Liz and I had been sitting in the common room vaguely listening to the radio. As the Yes vote was relayed, Vicky commented that she might like to be a lady vicar. I was appalled. All I could think of was Vicky trussed up in a man’s oversized, grey, clerical shirt and ugly shoes, having to engage in constant facial depilation to erase any signs of a beard. What an awful job for a woman. Being a missionary was far more adventurous and I could still wear women’s clothes.

  But, deep down, it wasn’t really the call of the mission field that was burning within me; it was the escape that that would provide. I needed a future that would combine a worthy use of time with an exit from a life etched by poisoned pens and ferocious slanging about my face. Being a missionary or a Red Cross aid worker was the perfect option. It would take me to places in the world where it wouldn’t matter what I looked like: orphans and war criminals wouldn’t have the emotional energy to taunt me.

  The question was: what was my basic skill going to be? Since it had taken three attempts to pass my maths GCSE, it was fair to strike engineering and medicine off the list immediately. That left teaching and nursing, but teaching would expose me to classrooms full of children and I’d had my fill of that already. Sick patients would be far more grateful. So nursing it was. I didn’t pray about it. As far as I could see I didn’t have the luxury of other options. God would have to take me or leave me. I applied to nursing colleges and finally persuaded one that I had what it took. My parents knew it was going to be a disaster, but they didn’t tell me that.

  I wonder exactly what kind of disaster they foresaw. Would it be my incomprehension of the fine-tuning of sugar intake necessitated by a diabetic patient, and my innocent offer of jam with their breakfast? Would it be my impatience that would see me launch in to deal with a haemorrhaging patient without pausing to grab surgical gloves? Or my absent-minded abandon of the drugs trolley in the corridor complete with used needles balanced on top … “until I could find the right bin, Matron”.

  I was indeed a disaster. In the lecture hall one afternoon I looked around at the other 104 students in my year and felt the discord of being the only person there who didn’t really want to be a nurse. I needed to keep focus on the end goal and so I taped a picture of a poverty-stricken child from an Oxfam advertisement to the inside of my nursing file to remind me.

  In the meantime, I tried to settle down with the other 22 girls with whom I was housed, in a long, wooden hut on stilts. Left over from some hurried post-war erection, its partition walls were thin plasterboard, too fragile, it seemed, to hold the weight of the heavy fire-doors; the whole corridor would shake when a group of us walked down the hallway together. If it looked dark and inhospitable from the outside the atmosphere within did not dispel that impression. Mainly because the glowering, sophisticated 21-year-old business studies student in the room next to me intimidated all of us meek 18-year-olds with her car, boyfriends and imperviousness to the need for friends.

  While we were revelling in the excitement of daily visits to the student bar, Mara held cocaine-fuelled court in her room until 5 a.m. for doped-up third years and, clearly, utterly loathed being housed in the hut with naive school leavers like us. So it is difficult to know whether she made me the target of her disgruntlement because I was nearby or because I was the epitome of everything she resented.

  But it got undeniably personal when at 4 a.m. one morning I heard the chatter coming from her room swerve in my direction.

  “Don’t worry about it,” came her dismissive voice, “she’s not doing shifts.”

  Then, after a moment of indiscriminate chatter, she continued,

  “It’s like living with fucking mice around here.”

  “You said she was a chipmunk.”

  “Oh my God. You’ve seen her right?”

  “She looks like a fucking bent snow-plough.”

  Thwack, thwack, hammer.

  She was bringing it to me. She wanted me to hear and to know.

  The pictures on my wall rattled as her fist hammered against it.

  “Get your fucking ear off my wall, bitch.”

  After half an hour I took my duvet and went to curl up on the floor in the bathroom until it was over.

  The nightly pantomime involving pointed impersonations continued for a further few nights, disturbing other girls who asked with concern what was going on as we walked to the refectory for breakfast in the mornings. Alison offered to leave her door unlocked so I could let myself in and sleep on her floor when I needed, and the others wondered what Mara’s problem was. I assumed that the drugs were doing the talking, which felt like a generous response but was just less frightening than acknowledging I was living next to a sociopath who enjoyed heaping misery on those around her. It was only the following weekend that it became clear that we were actually living with the deliberate ragings of a disturbed woman.

  Mara sped off to the country that Friday afternoon and the whole block breathed sighs of relief, beginning to talk a bit more freely in the kitchen and discussing what kind of penalty could be slapped on her. We talked about getting a student liaison officer to come over and hear our comp
laints the following week. We sat up drinking cocoa, talking about boys and nursing, and planned a Saturday walk and pub lunch. We all went to bed reassured that nothing would wake us that night.

  And nothing did, until 4 a.m. when my dream was slowly invaded by strange sounds. It continued working its way into the narrative of my unconsciousness, and then persisted until it took over, pulling me out of my dream with a vibration that sounded like expanding and contracting machinery. The radiator next to my bed was shaking, the fragile window, running wall to wall across the width of my room, was rattling, and so were the pictures on one wall – the wall I shared with Mara. From the other side of the plaster partition came the audible assault of discordant moans and sounds, too bizarre to be recognized as music. It died away and then started again. Over. And over. Its loudness concussed my attempts to decipher what I was hearing.

  It went on for an hour, exactly. With the volume set to max, her alarm clock stereo had been timed to play ‘666’ from The Omen. Set to repeat, its drone rose and died again and again, dragging us from our sleep. After several repeats I staggered out of my dark room and knocked on Alison’s door. Other doors were beginning to open and weary faces appeared in hope of answers. Only Adele, from further along the corridor, recognized the sound from the horror film. We were suitably horrified. I tried Mara’s door but it was locked. Alison stepped out of her doorway and around me to try and peer through the keyhole. Although it was dark she could see the pale lights of the stereo sat on the floor pressed up against the wall adjoining my room.

  “What a bitch”, her Lancashire accent softened the bluntness of her exclamation.

  “She’s turned her stereo towards Joanna’s room.”

  “What?! Let me see.” Judith pulled Alison back to get a look.

  “I can’t believe her. Why would she want to do something like that?”

  “Oh God, can’t we break her door down to make it stop?”

  “I’m going to set the fire alarm off.”

  “No! Don’t do that, JJ, you’ll get kicked out if you set off a false alarm.”

  That struck me as a fitting way to bring the misery of my university existence to an end. But Adele took charge and, pulling a hoodie over her pyjamas, she slipped out to go and find the student accommodation liaison officer. The rest of us decided to retreat to the kitchen at the other end of the corridor and make tea with the placebic conviction that it would make everything feel much better. When, at 5 a.m., the noise suddenly stopped we sat silently looking at one another with relief.

  Within a couple of weeks three girls had packed up their suitcases and moved to alternative accommodation, but the student nurses had to stay. Our placements were to begin a couple of months later and the college authorities wouldn’t countenance our petition to move. Mara’s presence seethed over our weekdays and for the next six Saturday mornings she continued to leave Satan’s own soundtrack to shudder through our creaking rooms at 4 a.m. Out in our far corner of campus property, away from pay phones and liaison officers, nothing could stop the number of The Beast groaning and whining its eerie doom into our weekend slumbers.

  It no longer mattered that we knew the music so well that the horror of surprise had now given way to sheer irritation that we were being regularly woken so early. I began to wake early anyway, my body anxiously jolting me in preparation to withstand a new round of assault. Even when sounds didn’t come, because it was 3.15 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the contrails of dread wound slowly through my body. I lay there, aware that the alarm in my body would not switch off within an hour. The wretchedness heaved through my senses, ripping away the remaining threads of confidence and hope I had spent years trying to hold together.

  Without the safety of a home to retreat to at the end of each day I withered fast. Making my way after supper each evening to the pay phone booth, I dialled my home number and let the voice of Mum or Dad catch the torrent of sobs erupting from deep within me. If it hadn’t been for the nearby church with its lively group of young adults I would have sunk by Christmas. But in time this crowd gathered me up in their welcome and spontaneous adventures to climb Snowdon or camp on freezing Dorset beaches, or to hand out sandwiches to the homeless in London. Here I was welcomed and there was no viciousness to bar me.

  Except on Monday morning the peace was gone. And so was my enthusiasm for nursing. My friends from church returned to their careers, while I limped through lectures on biology and first aid and diabetes and stared at the Oxfam child on the inside cover of my notes. Her little face was the only thing connecting me to the picture of my future that I had built up, and that was waiting for me in a far-off mission field. Every essay on the physiological process involved in vomiting or the treatment of bedsores reduced the dream to a drag of grinding irrelevancies, which I had little energy to learn. It was now eight months until the first major operation and it rose up before me on the horizon, the Alpha and Omega of my life’s vision.

  And this is a problem when you find yourself in church on a Sunday singing songs about Jesus being the centre of our life and the one for whom we lived.

  It was blatantly disingenuous and Jesus knew, even if nobody else did, that Mr Harrison, my surgeon, was the first man on my mind, not just during church, but most of the time. He was the miracle-working genius to whom I was going to submit my face and my future. Not Jesus.

  My utter focus on surgical renewal would have been understandable to most people, and even to God. But God doesn’t settle for being merely understanding of our idols and addictions. And in the early weeks of 1995, as my church pastor talked about the story of Abraham and how God asked him to give up everything that mattered most to him and sacrifice even his son, I weighed heavily with the conviction that I must do the same.

  At my next appointment in Cheltenham I dreaded telling Mr Harrison that I had changed my mind. A group of medical students were following me through this journey of orthodontic transformation and there was no easy moment to manhandle things from fifth gear into reverse. Which might be why I chose the most impossible moment to get Mr Harrison’s attention: when his hand had clamped my teeth together and the metal ruler was being slid down the side of my jaw to get a precise reading of my overbite. I pushed the words out from inside my shut mouth. “I’m having second thoughts.”

  Out came the ruler and Mr Harrison looked down at me as if I’d reached an inevitable halt in this journey. Clipboards were lowered and everyone was sent out of the room. The nurse set her notes down and left too, while Mr Harrison flicked the switch to raise the chair so that I could look at him upright, face to face.

  “Is it the risks involved?” he asked.

  He seemed glad that I was taking the possibility of a severed facial nerve seriously. But it wasn’t the idea of having a palsy; the possibility that the left side of my face might droop and my mouth drool forever. I squirmed slightly in the chair wondering how to bring the messiness of my theological angst into the sanitized order of his NHS clinic. How do you tell your doctor that you are conflicted by the fact that his handiwork has become your means of salvation and that it has become an idol that you have to let go of and relinquish? Silently I comforted myself with the devotion of my Abrahamic obedience and I insisted that the operations were off, hoping God was sufficiently appeased.

  Mr Harrison assured me that I would remain in his diary of clinic appointments just in case this was a temporary falter of nerves. I agreed, knowing that there was no point because I’d truly let it go. As I walked through the car park to find Mum, my heart slumped with inertia at the now empty horizon ahead.

  That afternoon, as Mum waved me off on the bus back to college, there were tears in her eyes as she thought about what I was returning to. My hospital placement had begun three days previously and I hated it. It only took three more weeks of my escalating liabilities on the ward for my nurse mentor to quietly begin giving me the dead bodies to lay out. It seemed safer for everyone. I was about to turn nineteen, and I wished I was one of
those dead bodies.

  In the evenings I walked around the ward sitting on the end of patients’ beds for a chat, but the gentleness of those encounters, in which I brushed against their loneliness and fears, only made me feel my own more intensely and I couldn’t stop my tears falling. The pummelling daily anxieties, whether on- or off-shift, twisted my stomach into knots and gnawed away at my resolve. Daydreams of Red Cross field hospitals became an end that the means rendered improbable. I didn’t have what it takes to become a nurse, and was rapidly heading towards the status of patient. My throat began to constrict, tightening until I could no longer swallow food. One of the nurses started giving me build-up drinks from the patient’s supplies but it was going to take more than calorific milkshakes to ward off the impending avalanche of unmitigated strain.

  A week after my nineteenth birthday I collapsed. My parents jumped in the car and drove over to pack my bags and take me home.

  13

  Alastair

  There was a mirror leaning up against the wall next to the window in my bedroom when I got home. The kind of unremarkable rearrangement that happens as parents’ belongings begin to spill into the no-man’s-land of a grown child’s old bedroom. Alastair found me sitting cross-legged in front of it one evening and squeezed himself down into a crouch next to me while I studied this now gaunt face that, I’d overheard Grandma remark, “the light had gone out of.” Nestling his face next to mine, Ali’s eyes were alight with enthusiasm. He had his big sister home and all labels of depression and nervous exhaustion plastered upon me were meaningless to his mind. There was no worry for my health and future, only excitement and happiness that I was back where I ought to be, in the bedroom across the hall from his, to be reassuringly found each morning once he woke up and shuffled sleepily across the landing to climb onto the end of my bed while I drank my tea.

  Now we looked into the mirror together, Alastair’s hand cradling my head up against his face.