My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  And then the real terror began, because he did not return alone, but with a short, fat friend, greasy-looking and brutal. He had a thin line of moustache above his mouth, something alien, not youthful. ‘Je suis conscrit militaire,’ he said. I am a soldier, a military conscript. The tall one nodded, weak, upstaged. I wasn’t going home. The conscript wouldn’t let me. This weekend was his leave. He wanted to have fun. He was going to have fun. ‘Or we will kill you.’

  A sick shock of fear as the world turned over. My ribs and stomach crushed together with horror. The room was suddenly a hell, a prison. I had been wicked, and now I would be punished. I had always known that one day I would be killed. Now it had come, the black centre of the nightmare.

  The high bed was in the middle of the room, back to the wall, electric light to the left of the bed and overhead, horribly clear. To my right was a window I am sure was uncurtained, so the house cannot have been overlooked. Outside was the night sky, now almost dark, and the green countryside, and somewhere the village, distant lights under the bulging black trees on the horizon, and normal life, and the hotel, and my parents, who were waiting in ignorance for me to come back, and the future, the life that I might have had if I had not come to this small lighted prison. All of it impossibly far away, and I had left it behind for ever. I saw my own death; there was no way out. The tall boy went away, leaving the fat one, telling me he would soon be back.

  Why was I immobilised by threats of violence? I think my father should answer that question. Our house had been ruled by threats of violence and actual violence, since we were small. He was not very violent, as these things go; he didn’t have to be, the fear was enough. I never thought, as I would now, of fighting those men, of calling their bluff. Perhaps they would have been ashamed to punch me, as they were not ashamed to touch me when I didn’t want them to. How deeply I was part of my difficult family is shown by the thoughts that ran through my brain like electric shocks, agonising, twitching: my parents would be angry. My father would be shamed. There would be a terrible, final scandal. Though I was facing death, I could still feel guilty.

  But as I struggle to remember what actually happened that early summer night in St Aigulin, what that hateful, fat little man did to me, I realise one odd thing that makes me happy: I never considered giving in. Partly, of course, because I was a virgin. I simply wouldn’t have known what to do, or which halfway houses it was tactical to offer. (And maybe, I think now, they didn’t know either. They were Catholics, deep in the Catholic countryside, in 1966, when the pill was very new. Maybe having sex was not something they were used to.)

  But killing he was keen on, the little conscript, keen on threatening it, at least, this olive-skinned, lard-faced, stubble-headed man so far from the tall pale handsome Frenchman I had thought, in the rosy glow of sunset, I was choosing. This one had no aura of youth or glamour. He did not smile under his creepy moustache, a black greasy millipede crawling on the sweat. He did not, like the first boy, try to woo me. He was fat and brutal and excited. I remember clearly asking him if he had a sister, or a mother. Perhaps he was wearing a crucifix. He would not admit to having either, he would not talk to me, I was just a body.

  The title of this book is My Animal Life, and my feelings for animals are interest and respect, but I remember the dread thought: he’s just an animal. For him I had no soul, no special livingness, no consciousness that had to be regarded. And so, in this hot prison, he abolished me — we abolished each other — so he could harm me. I didn’t see sex: all I saw was death. There was nothing alive, just the end of the road. And that longed-for world outside the window. I do not know how long it went on. I know he didn’t rape me, or damage me physically, he just repeated his dead ultimatum. I do remember that I was crying. And I remember I was praying, as well, small stumps of prayer: please God. Please help me.

  And then the world turned. The story breaks, and pivots. The door swings open, and light pours in. My prayer is answered. My prayer was answered. It wasn’t time; this was not the end. In another universe, perhaps, I died, but in this one, suddenly, I slipped my prison. The room was full of people — men — but they were shouting at the conscript, and he was shrinking, and I saw two faces I recognised, my friends from the village, come to find me. They took me downstairs, they were vocal and worried, they grouped around me, excluding the city boys, they found my jacket and my chain pendant, they made black coffee, which I never drank. I stopped crying as they comforted me. Unbelievably, I had been saved. It wasn’t even late; long before midnight.

  Someone took me back to the hotel. Blindly, I did as I had promised and popped my head into my parents’ bedroom. From my father’s point of view, nothing had happened, so long as I did what I was told, so long as I was back before my curfew. Had I had a nice time? Yes, I lied. A lovely time. All my friends had been there.

  (And I still don’t know what happened that night. Did the first boy, Lazy Eye with his dark glasses, panic about the rape he thought was in progress and go and find acquaintances from the village, where everybody knew each other? Did the house belong to someone from the village, sons whose parents were away, who came back by chance and stumbled on the story? It doesn’t matter. Somehow I was saved.)

  But the randomness of it has stayed with me for ever. I did not save myself, by initiative or courage, by strength or cunning or sexual know-how. I was saved by chance, or perhaps by prayers. I was helpless in the power of others. And the underside of that is, I needn’t have been saved. A universe existed where I was not saved. It was terrifying, full of rape and murder.

  I thought I had escaped, but I was only half-right. The school trip ended three days later. I did not say a word to my mother and father, though the story must have circulated in the village. One of my four friends, the boy I least liked, took me out one night and asked me too many questions: ‘Mais qu’est-ce qu’ils t’ont fait, dis-moi, Margaret?’ What did they do to you, tell me, Margaret? He wanted the details. Naïve though I was, I knew he was excited by the thought of what might have happened to me. I closed up tighter, like a clam.

  A week or so after we got back home, my A- and S-level exams began. My mind responded; I sat down and did what I had always done, and did very well. Not long afterwards, the school term ended, and we all stood and cried as we sang the school song for the very last time, ‘To serve is to reign’, that hymn of the female downtrodden.

  And then there was a blank. I did have a plan, to do my very first job, for the civil service, as a filing clerk in an office in Horsham. The job was very boring, and very easy, sorting grey-green cardboard files alphabetically. The pay, I think, was £1 or £2 a week (but then my rent, three years later, was only £3). Only two things were wrong: first, my fellow-workers. One was a stout, glossy-haired girl who had been at my father’s school, and seemed friendly, and offered to take me under her wing. Her name was Thelma; she had a soft voice and a strong Sussex accent. She talked incessantly. Soon she was pouring pure vitriol, softly, constantly, into my ear. Whenever she could get me out of other people’s hearing, she told me bad things about my father. ‘It’s going downhill, the school. He’s losing his grip, everyone says so. Shall I tell you what we used to say about your father?’ I was powerless, fascinated, by Thelma. I did not know how to deal with her, how to stop her talking, or stop myself hearing. I felt I saw evil, once again. And so the second thing went wrong: my mind. The world started to slide under a veil of terror.

  Every lunchtime I escaped from the office, and Thelma, and bought myself chips from the fish-and-chip shop. They were huge and greasy and I could not eat them. There was a phone-box in the street outside. One day I rang up my mother in a panic. ‘I hate this job. I can’t go back.’ She was puzzled, and consoling. I returned to Thelma.

  Poor Mum. I phoned her, crying, every day that week. I did not know what was the matter. My father agreed I should give up the job. I think they told themselves it meant I was special; Margaret wasn’t meant for filing. But giving
up beached me in structureless summer, in the empty days before we went away on a camping trip, the last family holiday, tenting with my parents and my cousin Susan. Something definite: the holiday. But before that, a featureless glaze of time, and beyond, a cliff of anxiety, the beginning of Oxford, at the start of October. The security of school and the prefects’ room, of lying on the sunny garden bank with the girls, my friends, my dear friends who had grown up with me, Jill and Gillian, Jacky and Hilary, Patty and Lizzie and all the rest, that big gang of girls who looked out for each other, sprawled on the short yellow grass we loved under the monkey-puzzle tree outside the library window, giggling and teasing and dreaming of the future, was shrinking inexorably into the past. No more navy jumpers with gold at the neck, no more uniform days promising safety. I sat at home, in the new vacant summer, watching things float away from me. And everything turned blank and grey, a thick goo of slime that choked reality.

  Worse, it became reality. Like other people suffering from depression (I had no idea I was depressed) I felt I at last saw what life was: an alternation of emptiness and terror. When I lay down to sleep, my heart beat madly, and I woke terrified, night after night. Then that fear invaded my days, as well. I tried to tell my mother, but I only cried, because I did not know what to tell her, I did not know what was happening, and couldn’t make the connection that now seems obvious, between this terror and my untold story, the thing that had happened in St Aigulin and at once been suppressed when I reported to my parents: ‘I had a lovely time. All my friends were there …’ Yes, watching me, afterwards, pale and worried, wondering if the conscript had raped me.

  I don’t believe in therapies that mean endlessly reliving traumatic events, but I know that I needed to talk to someone. If I had done, perhaps there would have been no breakdown. But physically, the scene had been left far behind, on the other side of a channel ferry, and nothing could be told without appalling my parents and causing — what? Anger, disapproval. So I kept it inside, and slid into paralysis.

  It’s forty years ago, more or less exactly, but I do not enjoy recovering this period, still feel it’s somehow perilous. It has never happened to me again, but sometimes the terror has brushed against my cheek, often at night, like a bat’s wing, passing, a leathery thing whispering of claws in the darkness, hissing that if you fall through the surface, there is nothing underneath, just falling for ever. I won’t invite it to come near again.

  As I said at the beginning of this chapter, 1966 was an eventful year. The good thing I learned, slowly, piecemeal, gathering it as inefficiently as fragments of gold from a dirty river, was that life will save you, if you let it. I saw no doctors, took no pills, talked to no one until years later. But grain by grain, second by second, I began to forget, to be distracted. One night the terror did not come, and I slept till morning with a steady heart beat, even though that was followed by twenty more nights of torment. There were mornings when I managed a couple of hours before the grey veil closed over the day. Then we went camping: there were lots of things to do. I had to be normal for my cousin, loving, cheerful, athletic Susan. We sang on walks and in the tent at night, and even though for me the song had lost its joy, performing it, filling my lungs and sounding the notes of ‘My Favourite Things’ in the clear blue air, made my body remember the feel of being happy, and my body started to save my mind. My animal body. My animal life.

  What finally pushed me back into normality was leaving home. Of course, as I said, I was unready, but if I had stayed, I would never have been ready. I might have been disabled for life. What do children need? They need to leave home, even if home will always come with them. I was nervous, but in a different way, and that normal nervousness, that fear of gaffes, that intense busyness of the first term at Oxford, trying to make friends and fathom the system, going to lectures, joining clubs, slowly crowded out the blankness, the bat’s feet, and made me so tired that I slept at night. Fear came back at Christmas, in my narrow bed, and less strongly in the vacations that followed. Was it the dreadful quietness of the Sussex night, without the happy cries of drunken young people? Was it the oppression of life at home?

  And let’s not forget the deep task of parents is to see that their children can leave home, are enabled to have a life of their own. My parents somehow made it possible. Even my father let me go. There are too many children who never leave. I left, ineptly. I was able to. Though if they had not pushed me so hard at school, I might have been older, and better equipped.

  I see this chapter reads like an indictment of my father, and maybe it should. Maybe he deserves it. Maybe it’s time to recite the charges.

  But if so, I have to defend him too, because he is dead, and I am the writer.

  I hated him, and yet we recovered. I recovered, and he recovered, and one day he would say ‘Sorry’ to me. My mother told me that after they had seen me off at Horsham for the train to Oxford with my vast brown trunk, hand-initialled by Vic in his over-careful lettering, M. M. GEE, my father came home, went straight into my bedroom, and cried for an hour, could not stop.

  What do women need?

  what do men need ?

  I was nineteen years old when I first had full sex with a man, which seemed shamefully behindhand. I think we were all eager not to be virgins, we clever girls at Somerville, but men were not allowed to stay overnight, and college rooms had thin walls like eggboxes. So it couldn’t really happen till I moved out of college. The man, also, had to be vaguely right, though the muddle and chaos of those times, and my life, is shown by the fact that to this day I am not quite sure which of two men first went ‘all the way’. One seemed to get quite far up my way, and it didn’t hurt, and felt fairly pleasant; I was glad it was happening at last; but then the second one went deeper, further, and I liked it, and him, a great deal better. On balance I decided the second was The First, and told him he was, and I think he felt betrayed when in the course of a quarrel a few years later I chose to announce it wasn’t him after all. The truth was perhaps that a girl who’s been a tomboy and done a lot of hurdles races at school has little physical virginity left.

  I found I had no shyness about sex. It seemed perfectly natural and very exciting and I wanted to try out more of it. The fear I had felt that evening in France (which came back again when on two more occasions I was physically attacked by strangers, once in Italy, once outside my house in Oxford) never affected consensual sex. I think I came across as rather highly strung and difficult in ordinary human intercourse, because I was shy, so men were often pleasantly surprised to find that in sexual intercourse I was quite different (my animal luck: my luck, again. Though of course it is also about both partners, and I can think of four or five times when I didn’t enjoy it; once when the man was very much older, and something in me felt it was wrong, and shrivelled; twice when there had been a lot of begging and drinking but I still in my animal heart did not want it; once when the man in question and I had spun an overstretched myth of romance and the sex was doomed to be a disappointment, for my body was truthful when my mind was not.)

  There followed more than a decade of practising before I found my lifetime partner. The sex, in itself, was enjoyable, and yet I never knew what lay behind it, and nor, I think, did my male partners. I was on the pill, so the obvious biological point of sex was missing, and besides, we were all deaf and blind to that aspect. I wasn’t really pair-bonding. What was going on? I don’t think we knew. The late sixties were an astonishing time. We were no longer using a rule-book. What did men want? What did women want?

  What do women need? What do men need? I didn’t have a clue in my twenties.

  I don’t have an answer even now. Except that the sexes intertwine. I have always felt both male and female, have always known I could be bisexual, though the love I cleaved to was heterosexual. Women need men; men, women. In my novel The Ice People, set forty years hence, in the middle of this century, I wrote about what I called ‘segging’, a segregation that comes upon the sexes as fert
ility drops and each gender turns inward, suspicious and hostile, resentful of what it is no longer being given. We aren’t there yet, and I hope we never will be.

  We need our own sex, especially as we grow up, to learn from, to relax with, to nurture and be nurtured; to form alliances that last a lifetime. (I went to a girls’ grammar school, an all-female college.) But we also need our opposites. Gay men need mothers, grandmothers, aunts and female friends; lesbians need fathers, their own and their children’s, grandfathers, uncles, male pals. Even hermits need someone to bring them food and drink, someone to admire their sacrifice.

  I went through hermit phases in my twenties and very early thirties, trying to escape the messy relationships with men I had unconsciously pursued in the first place: not answering the doorbell, or the phone, or letters, not talking for days as I read or wrote. A reaction to sending too many letters, making unwise phone calls, seeing too many men, who sometimes turned up at the same time on my doorstep. I hadn’t a clue how to deal with them. (Now I wouldn’t touch men like those with a bargepole. What was I thinking? Alcoholics in the making, actors manqués, serial adulterers, glamorous but faintly sleazy men, the opposite of my upstanding father (which must have been the point. Of course it was the point.) Though most of them were also handsome and clever and fun, often from a higher social class than my own, ex-public school boys who knew restaurants and taxis. I was young, upwardly mobile, fond of sex. But why didn’t I expect them to love and marry me? Was I trying to avoid a constricting marriage, or simply lacking in self-confidence? Trying to punish Vic, perhaps? Trying to prove I was as bad as he feared? Or avoiding the virginal path of my mother? I really don’t know. A combination, surely.)