Colin’s face at the kitchen door. Colin’s white face. Colin running. Colin shouting. Hitting the artist in his beard and a little mess of teeth and blood. Colin purple in the face. Colin shouting, ‘Get down Elizabeth, get down.’ Colin ripping his jacket off wrapping it round me, wrapping and rough, like I was never going to be opened again. Mary’s face. Smiling. Mary saying, ‘See you round kiddo,’ or something like that.
Part Three
—1—
We were sitting in a pub. It was about eight o’clock. A July evening. Colin and I had driven in from the park where he had been doing some film location work. The evening sun had made the tops of the grass look like gleaming fish. Shoals of gleaming fish.
Colin was edgy. Starting to get drunk. Pints of Guinness and doubles of whiskey. Pints and chasers.
Mary and Ruth came in with a group of ballad singers with whom they had just done a recording session for one of Mary’s Light Entertainment shows. The ballad singers wore pointy black shoes and tight trousers and their legs were white and hairy between their trouser bottoms and short socks. They kept elbowing each other and giving shouts of laughter and saying, ‘Jaysus lads, d’ya remember that one?’ One of them said to Ruth, ‘Are ya not going to introduce us to Miss Gorgeous here?’ Ruth laughed and said, ‘This is Elizabeth, Colin Dempsey’s girlfriend.’ We all shook hands then, and the one who had asked gave an extra-long shake.
Colin said, ‘And what are we all having?’ and ordered up pints and chasers for everyone. Ruth said, ‘Colin really.’ She knew the mood as well.
Colin and Ruth were sitting beside one another. They were talking about something in the station; Ruth was going, Nnh, nnh, and nodding her head. Looking at Colin very earnestly, very attentive. Bitch, I thought, interested in each other’s minds indeed.
I knew the mood well. It would be more drink and then dinner in some restaurant and hopefully a party afterwards. If not it would be a discotheque. Home at five, exhausted, drunk through almost to soberness, poised like a knife, waiting for a fight, pushing for one.
We fought so much now. Not like the fights when we first started living together. Shouting and banging things and then jumping into bed and tears and sex for hours. Now we fought dry, hard fights. Ever since the party, things had been cracking up.
I hadn’t spoken to Colin for three days after it. I went and stayed with Mary. I’d no plans or anything, I just thought, I’ll get out for a bit. Mary was working very hard so I didn’t see very much of her. Then late one night Colin came round. He was terribly drunk, banging on the door and shouting. He came into my room and shut the door and put a chair under the handle and forced me down on the bed and lay on top of me and cried, and said I was never to leave him, and to love him, and then I started crying too, and we lay like children in the bed, holding on to each other and crying. The next day I went back to his flat.
Then there was this business about the psychiatrist. Colin arranged for me to go and see one. He said, ‘Anyone who makes an exhibition of themselves like you did at that party needs to see a bloody headman.’ Well I wasn’t sure about this psychiatrist; I didn’t think the stripping thing was so awful. You get high and you get sad and you do funny things. Not madness. But whenever I started arguing with Colin he’d always win and I’d end up crying and not knowing what I’d meant to say.
The psychiatrist was about thirty-five with this sallow, wet-looking face and long fiddly fingers. His office, or consulting room, or whatever you call it, was completely bare, not a picture, nothing. Just a desk where he sat and a wooden chair for the patient.
He said, ‘Well now, what seems to be the trouble?’
I was very taken aback. I thought they were supposed to tell you what the trouble was.
I thought, I’m in here in the nut house because I’m a flasher. I started giggling. I couldn’t stop. This psychiatrist’s face went all stiff, like sour cream. I thought, If they want me to act mad then mad I will be.
I said, ‘Every time I go into a room where there are a lot of men I get this desire to strip. I want to let them see how beautiful my body is, even if they can’t touch it.’ I said, ‘Nobody touched me much when I was a child,’ and then this wave of self-pity came and I burst into tears and left his office.
I told Colin I wasn’t going back. It was the first time I think that I completely refused to do something he wanted. I just said, ‘No. I’m not going back.’ I went out of the flat and walked down to the sea and was shaking.
Colin was angry for days afterwards. It wasn’t the damn psychiatrist; it was just me saying no. Even still I could win sexually. He’d sit up late pretending to read and refusing to answer anything I said. I’d go and sit at his knee and start stroking him and feeling him coming up and sometimes we’d make love right on the floor.
I kept thinking, It will get better, it will, it will. And still I felt there was absolutely nothing I could do to make it better. I got really fanatical about my body, bathing it, creaming it. Colin would watch sometimes when I was in the bathroom. I was standing in front of this long mirror one day and he was sitting behind me. He got up and came over and our glass eyes met in the mirror. He said, ‘All women love themselves, especially beautiful ones.’ He started stroking me, stroking my breasts and belly and then down, and he made me come, standing there, the two of us looking in the mirror and my legs were trembling. Afterwards he laughed; he said, ‘There, I told you, you’re more excited by your own bodies than by men’s.’
Mary said, ‘That’s true.’ She said, ‘We’re all so bombarded with sexy images of the female body, on every hoarding, in every magazine, that it’s surprising men aren’t leaping on women in the street and raping them. The poor buggers must go round with erections most of the time.’
‘If you say, “Mary said” once again,’ Colin shouted when I told him that, ‘I’ll hit you over the bloody head. I’m sick of hearing Mary said this, and Mary said that. Fuck Mary.’
I said, ‘Maybe she wouldn’t like that.’ He threw a book at me.
I liked Mary. I think she was the first woman I really liked. She was so calm. She wasn’t like most women who narrow their eyes and go hate, hate, as soon as a new woman comes along. She’d say Hello, and ask them what they were doing, or whatever. You felt she was interested. Also she didn’t change when men were around; not like those women who talk to you about this and that and then a man turns up and you’d think they were a different person. Oh I’d done it myself. I knew the tricks. Mary was never like that.
I used to go and see her at the television station whenever I went to collect Colin.
I used to talk to her a lot about Colin. Those three days I spent at her flat I was trying to tell her why seeing Colin in bed with that girl had been so awful. It was something you could think about in your mind and say, ‘Well of course we’re liberated, and don’t mind little things like that,’ and so on. You could accept it in your head. But finding him there with her, seeing him do the same things as he did with you, going over and over it in your head …
Colin didn’t like Mary. He couldn’t understand a very attractive woman who didn’t respond to him sexually. I think that was it. Colin was the Wham, Bam, Thank you Ma’am type. He said he was sexually liberated, free. He said if he fancied a girl, he’d give her the eye, she’d concede, or not, and they’d go to bed and have sex. That was the end of that. Unless she was really good in bed in which case it might last a bit longer. But no strings attached, he’d say. I’d seen one or two girls falling for him. Heard the chat. ‘Do you believe in free love? Come on then, darling, don’t be such a square, whip off your panties and bow down to the great age of permissiveness.’ Some girls! You’d think they wanted to be trampled on, oh yes, yes, and off to the slaughter house—and the next day feeling all crumpled inside. Feeling like tarts and never being able to understand why.
We were talking about this in the pub. Free lov
e and all that. Mary said, ‘Free love, my arse. It’s a bloody myth, man-made of course, to keep the sex thing going their way. All the little dollies desperate to show they’re hip and modern and dropping their drawers for any hick passing by. Free indeed.’
Colin said in this very snotty voice, ‘So what, my dear Mary, is free love?’ His face was blotchy, belligerent.
Mary said, ‘“Free” means, I think, being independent. If both the man and the woman were independent, if one didn’t crave security through establishing the omnipotence of his penis and the other didn’t crave security by giving up everything and attaching her lifeline to that penis, then you might get your free love.’
The ballad singers had gone very quiet at this stage. Colin was laughing and going, Ha, ha, but you could see he was searching around for something cutting, a little bonk on the head for the brave Mary.
‘I’m not saying’—Mary paused and looked into her glass, and then looked up at Colin—‘I’m not saying that it’s only women who suffer from our fucked-up sex lives, but women suffer more.’
‘Would you say a twenty-five-year-old man could have free love with a seven-year-old girl? Well most women’s emotional and intellectual development stops when they’re seven. That’s when they reach the Age of Reason. That’s when they give up the unequal struggle, accept that coquetry, nattering, cock-sucking and cock-teasing are the tools of their trade, their weapons for survival. If that’s your famous free love—you can stuff it.’
Mary got up and said she was going to the Ladies’. Her back was stiff. It was like a cat’s back when it’s angry. Arched.
One of the ballad singers said, ‘Well I dunno I’m sure, women is gettin’ terrible peculiar these days.’
‘Bloody lesbian,’ Colin said. He was trying to pretend it was nothing. His hand shook as he reached for a cigarette. I was just sitting and watching and listening. Very quiet. Frightened.
When Mary came back she was quite calm again. She said, ‘I’ve got a terrible habit of making speeches.’ She bought everyone a drink. She said, ‘If I sing will you join in?’ The ballad singers were delighted with relief. They had all been sitting stiff. Their buttocks shifting on the leatherette seats, squeaking; looking up at the ceiling, laughing, and then silence and then shifting and squeezing their buttocks again on the seats.
Mary sang a long lonely ballad about this girl who loves a butcher boy and is going to have a baby and hangs herself in a bedroom because it’s all hopeless. She half closed her eyes and was feeling the words as they came out: a strong, smooth, oaken sound.
The ballad singers were saying, ‘Good on you girl’ and ‘Arraigh leat.’ I thought, If I start to cry now I’ll never stop. I wanted to hold Colin’s hand and tell him I loved him, and that we would be okay, and that everything would be all right between us for ever and ever.
‘You stoooopid bitch!’
Colin’s face was twisted. I jumped up. I had been crossing my legs and hit the table, knocking over a pint. There was Guinness everywhere. All down Ruth’s dress. The table awash. The ashtray with butts and ash floating. Colin’s eyes had gone tiny; he looked like a snake, his mouth poisonous, those tiny black eyes.
I said, ‘For God’s sake Colin, it was a mistake, I didn’t mean to spill the bloody drink.’ I was standing up and Guinness was dripping down like black blood. I was shaking all over.
He said, ‘Don’t shout and don’t use that language.’ ‘Bugger off,’ I said. ‘Just leave me alone.’ Colin was half standing too, ready to hit. I thought, If he hits me now I’ll hit him back, as hard as I can, I’ll hit him with all that I am.
We were both standing there; it must have been just for a minute but it was a minute that ballooned out into hugeness.
Colin said, ‘Oh piss off.’ He picked up his drink. I suddenly felt very cold. I thought, Hate will be my strength; it will carry me through.
I said, ‘I’m going now.’ I could hear my voice coming from a long way off. A mountaintop voice. I said, ‘I’m going back to the flat to collect my things. I never want to see you again.’
I picked up my bag. The car keys, cigarettes. The ballad singers were all looking at the floor, their shoes, the ground, anywhere. Only Mary watched. She didn’t say anything. Ruth was holding Colin’s arm. He was screaming. I didn’t hear. The words were coming at me and I thought: They’ll hurt later, it will all hurt later, like after an accident they say you’re numb at first and then the pain starts deep in the wounds and gradually possesses you, nerve cell by nerve cell. Later, I thought, later, and the words just kept coming.
—2—
Mary said, ‘Okay. You can stay the night, but tomorrow you’ll have to start looking for a flat of your own.’
Tomorrow. I’ll do everything tomorrow. Just let me sleep now. Let me rest. I was sitting on her sofa between piles of newspapers, books, files. An advertisement in this magazine said, ‘We want to make you useful … even interesting.’ The phrase kept clanging round in my head.
I was still folding my case. I couldn’t remember what I’d put into it. I remember standing at the cupboard in the flat thinking I could stand there forever. Then the phone rang. I didn’t answer it. But suddenly I began to move, to stuff things into the case. I kept running backwards and forwards taking things, then dropping them. What would I take? What would I need?
It was an odd assortment. Two evening dresses (in case somebody asks you out); a shirt of Colin’s (a memento), a picture (he might sell everything when you’ve gone), a doll (comfort for the long nights), two books: How to Keep the Body Beautiful and The Faber Book of Modern Verse (for the long, long days).
Mary made a cup of tea. She didn’t say anything. I thought, For God’s sake I wish she’d say something—anything. Even, ‘Why don’t you go back to him?’ I would have gone.
It was midnight. I must have spent a long time looking in that damn cupboard. How pain changes time. An hour becomes a yawning chasm, a night a full stop between what was and what is going to be. A gap between your action and its consequences.
I’d sat in the car outside the flat with the suitcase in the back wondering where to go. I hadn’t wanted to go to a hotel. I couldn’t go home. I thought of David and then thought, ‘You can’t use people that much; they’ll turn on you.’ I thought of Valerie, but I didn’t want to be told about different men for different moods. I thought then of Mary. I thought, Mary will know what to do.
‘So what do you do now?’ Mary said. She was sitting on the floor, cross-legged.
I thought, I shouldn’t have come here. David would have hugged me; he would have said, ‘It’s all right old girl.’ Something. Why was she so cold?
Mary said, slowly, not to me, sort of to the room: ‘If you can’t get along with your lover you can always get out of his bed, but what do you do when your country is fucking you over?’ She laughed. ‘Who said that?’ I didn’t know. Didn’t care.
I started to cry. I thought, I’m alone now, completely alone. At least Colin was there. At least he was mine, part of me. We were Colin and Liz, a unit. A something. I felt, Now I’m a nothing. I’m just a piece of pain.
‘Don’t cry,’ Mary said. ‘There’s no point in crying. Women are always bloody crying. It means you don’t have to think. You fuddle up your brain with tears and pain and go, Oh, oh, and wait for a man to come along and pick up the pieces.’
She was walking up and down the room now. I wanted her to stop. Be quiet. Let me have the pain, let me alone.
She went on: ‘If you want to go back to Colin, then go. You know now what it means, living with him. You don’t have to pretend any more. It can be good and bad. It’s not a dream, not a romance of Coca Cola and ever-so-fresh and non-stop kissing and hugging and fresh coffee and rolls in the morning. You know him. Go back to him if you realize that. If you don’t then you’ll have to start building your own life.’
S
he was standing in front of me. The words were spinning in my head, spinning and then dropping into this enormous void. Building your own life … decide … pretend …
She said, ‘One thing is sure. You’re not going to stay here and weep on me and then go running back to Colin the first time he asks you.’
I stood up. I said, ‘I’ll go now. I just thought you could help me, that’s all—I just thought I could stay here for a few days.’ I had this weird sensation of sorrow at the sound of my own voice, such a sad, cracked voice.
Mary put her hand out; she said, ‘Look I’m sorry Liz, I’m sorry, you must be exhausted.’
—3—
I was turning over, the warmth of the blankets around me, the womb warmth of sleep … stretching … then looking up and seeing the light bulb hanging over my head … and then …
Where am I?
…and then the hurt creeping in, seeping in like in a wound. I was alone. I’d left Colin. The bed was so narrow. So single. I turned over on my stomach, that way it ached less, the lack of another body, the gap around my body, its nakedness to the whole world’s laughing and pinching and horrors.
Such an emptiness … but the pain begins to fill that until you think you’ll scream, till you think you’ll destroy yourself with your pain; that your being and its being cannot go on together. One or the other must die or win. Your eyes are dry then; you can’t imagine ever crying—crying seems warm, crying seems like a river, not this—with this you could never cry; this is a bleaching and stretching and yawning until you exist only in the perimeters of your body, on the very surface of your skin, until you are made of glass and the top of your head has been sliced off like a boiled egg’s and air and wind are rushing in. Painfully.
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