The Little Voice: A rebellious novel

by Joss Sheldon

  But I didn’t scream. It was Quiet Time. And you weren’t supposed to scream during Quiet Time.

  I just scowled at Sleepy Sampson, who was still humming, and I shushed her once more.

  She kicked me. Honest to god. She actually kicked me! Her spiky toe ricocheted into my ankle. It pierced my delicate skin.

  I winced. But I didn’t react.

  We’d all been told that the school had a ‘Zero Tolerance’ policy on fighting; that if two children fought they’d both be punished. The only way to avoid punishment was by refusing to fight, even if someone else was attacking you. You just had to stay calm and take the beating. Then the other person would be punished and you wouldn’t.

  Those were the rules. And you weren’t supposed to break the rules.

  So I took a deep breath, sucked up my pain, and scowled at Sleepy Sampson.

  She threw her pen at me. I tell no lie. She actually threw her pen at me!

  It was one of those inky fountain pens which all the pretentious girls used to use. I never saw the point in them myself; they always created a splodgy mess. So of course a shower of ink went all over the place. It sprayed blue rain all over my white shirt. And it even found its way into my mouth. It tasted alkaline; synthetic, oily and sour.

  I scowled at Sleepy Sampson.

  She threw her rubber at me. She threw her exercise book at me. She jumped over the table, grabbed my collar and pushed me back. My chair tipped over and dumped me onto the floor.

  “You’re not the boy we all used to love,” she growled. “You’re not the boy I used to love!”

  Her right palm slapped my left cheek. Her left palm slapped my right cheek. She slapped me again and again; left, right, left, right; with the up-tempo beat of a hungry jackhammer.

  The indignity of it! The indignity of being beaten up by a girl! A scrawny girl! A girl who spent most of her time asleep.

  The shame of it stuck with me for years.

  The egot writhed around in pain. It took every blow that came my way. But it couldn’t withstand those blows like I could. Its cheeks were too frail. And so its cheekbones gradually inverted. They squeezed into its mouth and applied pressure to its brain. The egot’s face became egg-shaped. Then it became pear-shaped. One of its eyes popped out, bounced off its belly, and rolled into a puddle of fluid.

  The blows kept on coming.

  Mrs Balding was coming too. She was rushing between tables and jinking between chairs. Her hair was clinging on for dear life.

  “Really Sampson!” she screamed. “What do you think you’re doing?

  “Really Yew! What on earth did you do to provoke her?”

  She lifted Sleepy Sampson off me.

  “Really Yew!” she exclaimed. “I thought you’d put this sort of behaviour behind you.”

  My face was on fire. It was sore, itchy and red.

  “What happened?”

  I shivered.

  “Speak to me!”

  I looked up at Mrs Balding and whispered:

  “I can’t speak during Quiet Time.”

  “I’m asking you a question,” my teacher snapped back. “Really Yew! Don’t be so facetious.”

  I shook my head and locked my lips. There was no way I was going to break that rule.

  “If you don’t speak up, I’ll put you on permanent detention!”

  I didn’t speak up. I just closed my eyes and looked inside myself.

  I saw the egot.

  The egot went through a series of deathly convulsions. Its muscles spasmed with horrific violence. It gurgled so much that white chalk bubbled out of its mouth. And it rasped for air in such a high-pitched manner that it made my head throb with anodic pain.

  I didn’t know what to feel.

  The egot’s right arm shot into its chest. Pop! Just like that. It completely disappeared.

  The egot’s left arm followed suit. Its right leg fell off. Its left leg went limp.

  The egot looked up at me with hollow eyes. With my hollow eyes! And with its final breath, it said:

  “Goodbye old friend. Just remember that I always had your best interests at heart. I always loved you. I only ever wanted you to be yourself.”

  THIRTEEN

  The egot died. And then it decomposed. I had to walk around with its decaying body stinking up my brain for a full month. God it hurt! It felt like all of Caesar’s horses were stampeding over my head, trampling my skull; with hooves which were eager to push me down and legs which were determined to crush me.

  My head pulsated. My eyes watered and my brow turned dark purple.

  The egot’s rigor mortis gave way to a bloated sort of putrefaction. Its body expanded like a balloon; full of sordid gas and sublime desolation. Froth dripped from its nose, mouth and anus. Pus dripped from its empty eye-sockets.

  My head throbbed like a speaker at a rave.

  The egot’s body crumbled. Its sallow skin turned to ash. Maggots devoured its bones. And my brain matter absorbed its remains.

  My pain began to subside.

  Then, one moody autumn evening, the last remnants of the egot finally blew away. My nostrils opened wide and sucked up the most glorious gulp of air I’d ever tasted. My lungs shook with pure excitement.

  I felt an overwhelming sense of lightness.

  I was finally free.

  FOURTEEN

  The autumn of my youth turned into the winter of my adolescence.

  If one thing defined that period of my life, it’d have to be my subservience to authority. Without the egot by my side, I was simply incapable of challenging people in positions of power.

  I didn’t follow Lao Tzu’s advice, to ‘Respond intelligently to unintelligent treatment’. I went along with whatever ‘unintelligent treatment’ came my way.

  It’s not hard to understand why.

  Years of Operant Conditioning had turned me into an obedient little automaton, like a rat in one of Skinner’s experiments. I followed all the rules. I didn’t need to be threatened or bribed. I just complied.

  And I wasn’t alone.

  Subservience to authority is the norm in our society. This was shown by the social psychologist, Stanley Milgram…

  Milgram conducted an experiment in which two people were given different roles. ‘Mr Wallace’, an actor who was playing the part of a volunteer, was placed in one room. Electrodes were attached to his arms. And a genuine volunteer was placed in the adjacent room. He faced a fake electric shock generator and thirty switches marked from ‘15 volts (Slight Shock)’ to ‘375 volts (Danger!)’ and ‘450 volts (XXX)’. The real volunteer thought they’d been chosen for that role at random, that they could have been in Mr Wallace’s position, and that the electric shock generator was real.

  Mr Wallace was asked to memorize a list of word pairs. Then, when he was ready, the volunteer was asked to test him; to give Mr Wallace one word and ask him to reply with the other word in the pair. Each time Mr Wallace made a mistake, the volunteer was asked to administrate an electric shock, the severity of which went up by one unit for each wrong answer.

  I don’t know what it is with psychologists and electric shocks. I think they’re a little sadistic. But, fortunately, no rats were used in Milgram’s experiment, which was a definite plus as far as I’m concerned.

  Anyway, as the experiment progressed, it would become apparent to the volunteer that Mr Wallace was suffering. Each time he received a shock, that actor whimpered. When the voltage was increased, he began to writhe and yell. And when the voltage reached the highest levels, he screamed out in agony; emitting hellish wails and deathly shrieks.

  If the volunteer asked to stop, an official-looking scientist said, ‘Please continue’. If they expressed concern again, they were told that ‘The experiment requires you to continue’. Then; ‘It’s absolutely essential that you continue’. And finally; ‘You have no choice but to continue’.

  The results were shocking.

  Two-thirds of the volunteers continued all the way to the f
inal level. They even continued when Mr Wallace pretended to be dead! Can you believe that? Two thirds of everyday people, people just like you and me, were prepared to kill an innocent man, just because a scientific experiment demanded it! Those people were more influenced by an authority figure, a scientist in formal attire, than they were by the deathly scream of a dying man.

  It’s not hard to see why.

  Our society encourages us to obey authority. It’s a matter of Operational Conditioning; we’re rewarded when we follow authority’s rules and punished when we break those rules. Slowly but surely, we’re gently coerced into a state of total obedience.

  Well, like the volunteers in Milgram’s experiment, I’d been coerced into such a state. I’d have done anything an authority figure asked me to do. As long as they looked the genuine article, with a haughty title and a well-presented façade, I’d have obeyed them without a second thought.

  That was the story of my teenage years.

  They are not years which I wish to dwell on. I wouldn’t want to bore you, dear reader, with lots of anecdotes which all highlight the same state of affairs. Having spent the first part of this book talking about my childhood, a period in which my elders took the wet clay of my personality and moulded it into the shape they desired, I wish to move on to talk about my early adulthood, when the effects of that manipulation hit home. But before I do that, I feel that I should give you a few brief examples of my subservience, just to demonstrate where I was at…

  Like the volunteers in Milgram’s experiment, who did whatever the scientist told them to do, I believed everything my teachers told me, even when they were lying.

  When they told me that Christopher Columbus had discovered the Americas, I believed them. I didn’t think to ask about the people who’d been living there for tens of thousands of years. I didn’t think to study the Vikings, who’d made the journey five hundred years before Columbus, or the Africans, who’d been making that journey for centuries. (‘Trading in gold-tipped spears’ according to Columbus’s very own journal). I didn’t think at all. I just accepted what I was told.

  I accepted that we had once had a ‘Great Empire’ which had ‘Civilised’ the world. I accepted that we had defeated the evil communists and fascists. I was oblivious to the fact that we’d killed millions of people in the process, invented concentration camps, and pushed opium onto the Chinese. That sort of stuff was brushed under the carpet.

  My teachers told me that the ancient Egyptian civilisation was founded by white people, despite all the hard evidence which proves it was founded by black people. They told me that paper and printing were Western inventions, when in fact they were developed in China. And they told me that Galileo discovered the movements of the planets, even though scholars in Timbuktu knew about them two centuries before.

  I believed it all. I devoured that propaganda without thinking twice. Without thinking at all. It made me feel good to believe that the majority of human advancements had been made by white men, just like myself. That kind of patriarchal white-supremacism really swelled my ego.

  Well, my whole education was tinged with historical misrepresentations like those. Historical misrepresentations which justified the status quo. Historical misrepresentations which glorified the status quo. And which, therefore, helped to maintain the status quo.

  It’s like George Orwell said; ‘He who controls the past, controls the present. And he who controls the present, controls the future’.

  Well, my teachers were trying to control my future. But they weren’t at it alone. Oh no! My parents were at it too!

  Like my teachers, my parents were authority figures. The law gave them ‘Parental Rights and Responsibilities’, including the right to administer punishments. And their religion commanded; ‘Honour your father and mother. Then you will live a long, full life’.

  I wanted to live a ‘Long, full life’.

  So when my parents asked me to perform a ‘Coming of Age’ ceremony, to confirm my dedication to their religion, I was inclined to acquiesce. They were authority figures, after all, and I was just a subservient little boy. What choice did I have?

  However, a small part of me wasn’t so sure.

  It’s hard to explain. It wasn’t as if the egot had returned. I wasn’t being pushed to refuse or rebel. But I did feel a nagging. A dull, gentle, element of doubt, which pulsated beneath the surface of my conscious mind, and asked; ‘Do I really want to do this? Do I really want glorify my parents’ vicious, egotistical god? A god who inflicts disease, war and famine upon his people? A god who judges us like a crazed dictator? A god of Operant Conditioning, who bribes us with heaven and threatens us with hell?’

  So I raised my concerns during a family dinner, in-between mouthfuls of gravy-drenched roast potatoes and salty green beans.

  I didn’t refuse, please understand. That would have been naughty. And I was a good little boy. My rebellious days were behind me.

  But I did express my discomfort:

  “I don’t really think I want to do the ceremony,” I said. “You know, if that’s okay with you.”

  My family were aghast.

  My dad’s chin jutted forward.

  My mum said:

  “Oh Yew! My angel! Be a good boy. Please be a good boy.”

  And my favourite cousin took into my uncle’s study for a chat:

  “Think of all the presents you’ll receive,” he told me. “People you’ve never even heard of will give you money! You’ll get more gifts than you’ve ever been given before. It’ll be the biggest payday of your life!”

  We returned to the dinner table.

  My grandma scowled at me.

  God I loved my grandma! For me, she was like a portal into another time. A lavender scented goddess. Maternal. She always gave me chocolates and ice-cream. She always smiled when she saw me.

  But she wasn’t smiling then.

  “You won’t be my grandson if you don’t perform the ceremony,” she said. “I’ll disown you! No grandson of mine would choose not to do it.”

  I froze, like a deer in the headlights.

  My lips turned to wood.

  My dad’s chin jutted forwards.

  Well, dear reader, I suppose it’d be easy for you to consider this a case of Operant Conditioning. After all, I was being bribed with rewards (the gifts), and I was being threatened with a punishment (disownment).

  But by that stage in my life, I didn’t need to be threatened or punished. I just needed to be shown that the issue was serious. That was all.

  My whole persona had already been coerced. My fear of being punished was so great that I didn’t need to be threatened. My imagination filled the gaps. I imagined far worse punishments than being disowned by my gran. I imagined being disowned by my whole family. I imagined being banned from family dinners, trips and holidays. I imagined being ignored; as if I was invisible; as if I didn’t even exist.

  I was weak. I was like a boxer on the ropes, pummelled within an inch of his life by a far superior fighter. I couldn’t stand up for myself. All I could do was move my head, in a vain attempt to soften the blows.

  “My dear Yew!” my mother repeated. “Please be a good boy.”

  And I listened to her. I did behave like a good boy. I obeyed my family, just like Milgram’s volunteers had obeyed the scientist.

  I did it because it was clearly important to my family. It was something I was clearly supposed to do. And that was enough. I didn’t need to be threatened. I didn’t need to be bribed. I just needed to be told. That selfless urge of mine, that deep need to please others, took over and did the rest.

  I went to a religious service for three hours each week. I went to an evening-school twice a week. And I celebrated every religious festival which came my way.

  After two years, I finally performed my Coming of Age ceremony.

  Although I don’t think my parents ever appreciated it. They never said ‘thank-you’. I think they just took it for granted that I’d do as
they pleased; that I’d be deferential. They were authority figures, after all. I was supposed to do everything they wanted. I was supposed to be a good boy. They didn’t consider it a big deal.

  Anyway, that all happened when I was about twelve or thirteen. And there’s just one other event which I’d like to mention at this juncture; an event which took place when I was about to turn sixteen.

  I had to make a decision which would shape my entire future:

  ‘Should I find a job?’

  ‘Should I do an apprenticeship?’

  ‘Perhaps I should do a vocational course?’

  ‘Perhaps I should set up a business?’

  ‘Maybe I should live a self-sufficient life out in the country?’

  ‘Or maybe I should continue on at school and then go to university?’

  I liked the idea of living a self-sufficient life. Of getting close to Mother Nature. Of living like my ancestors had lived.

  But, for my parents, there was only one option. I was going to stay on at school, whether I liked it or not. My indoctrination was going to continue.

  “You’re going to university,” my dad told me. He was sitting behind his leather-coated desk, looking like a real boss; with his poncy suit and his smug sense of superiority. He looked sly. Vicious. His chin jutted forwards and his eyebrows jumped for joy.

  “If you go to university, I’ll support you,” he continued. “You won’t have to worry about paying for bills or fees, food or accommodation.

  “But if you leave school I’ll kick you out. You won’t be welcome in my house anymore. You’ll have to fend for yourself, out there in the big bad world.”

  Rewards and threats!

  Rewards and threats!

  I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I was petrified of being homeless. I imagined myself lying beneath the sweaty arches of a busy train station, covered in soot, with worms in my pockets and ants in my hair. I imagined myself being mugged, beaten and raped, on a regular basis.

  And I also thought about my father. I felt a duty to stay on in education for him. It clearly meant a lot to him. And I did want to make him happy. I really did believe that staying on at school would make him pleased. I dreamed that it would make him smile and say ‘Thank-you’.