Woman of a Certain Rage

by Georgie Hall

  I catch her giving me a thoughtful look, as if questioning how I could possibly have ever been young enough to be a student. Then I sense danger as the butterfly sunglasses come off.

  ‘Better than waking up to find a video has been uploaded online of you having sex that you have no memory of whatsoever!’ She sees my horrified face. ‘Not me! It’s a scenario, Mum. And it happens.’

  ‘Must every conversation we have get so serious?’

  ‘Date and drug rape are commonplace, Mum. And almost 70 per cent of the time, the drink that is spiked is alcoholic. Universities and music festivals are hotbeds for it.’ She’s speaking in short-fire TED Talk bursts again, a technique I suspect is my daughter’s academic leitmotif, and I brace myself for a puritanical monologue on the dangers of drinking.

  Instead, she tells me about a Year Thirteen girl in her school who found out that the classmate she’d believed to possess the soul of a poet had shared sexual images of her online, and when she reported it, she was victim-shamed for being drunk the night they were taken. ‘Her drink had been spiked as it turned out, but for weeks even she thought it must have been her fault because the evidence was out there for everybody to see and – are you even listening, Mum?’

  ‘Yes!’ Worried how shallow the river is here I’m trying to navigate to deeper water. ‘And what you have to say is really important, Summer, truly it is, but I think the boat might be about to get grounded.’ I wince as I hear the hull scraping on the riverbed, but we make it through.

  Meanwhile, Summer starts complaining that older women are diffident on the subject of sexual coercion. ‘You’re continually seeking a greater authority to give you permission to stand up, which is why MeToo and TimesUp revealed the insularity of collective silence.’

  ‘Just who was it that raised all you wokelets to be freethinking and unafraid to speak out?’ I defend, and as I do I find myself visualising Don’t Flatter Yourself man, my skin prickling.

  ‘Yes, and I’m lucky to have the voice to speak out, Mum,’ Summer says in her student debate tone. ‘It’s a freedom so many women throughout history have been denied: for centuries we were treated as property, prevented from controlling our own reproduction, legitimately beaten, disenfranchised, kept from top jobs and equal pay. And it’s still happening all over the world, Mum. Sexually, women are routinely raped, mutilated, trafficked, harassed, exploited, assaulted. We can’t blame all men, no more than we can simply blame white privilege for racial prejudice. But we can call out those at fault, Mum. One by one by one by one if we have to.’

  It sounds like something she’s said before – the namechecks at measured intervals are a bit of a student debate giveaway – but it’s still a magnificent, tub-thumping call to arms and I’m swept away, giving a cheer and letting go of the tiller to clap.

  How does she possess so much self-assurance at her age? I was a political amoeba back then, red-flag-waving for the social life as much as the socialism, harbouring a naive belief that I was more liberated than my mother because I was on The Pill and had read most of The Female Eunuch. Or am I just listening to an updated version of myself thirty years ago, lecturing my parents’ generation on nuclear disarmament, live animal export, the Falklands and the miners’ strike?

  ‘Maybe now you can understand why Kwasi is so special?’ she says and launches into an impassioned description of his authenticity, his humanity and the gross prejudices he’s encountered which leaves me in no doubt just how much she loves him. Then she ruins it by saying, ‘People your age have no idea how hard it is being young, gifted and black in this country, do you?’

  ‘Neither do you,’ I point out gently.

  ‘That’s so typical, shifting the moral emphasis. Generation X’s passivity and inaction is one big deafening silence.’

  ‘And your mewling moralising is just white noise!’ I snap.

  She starts throwing more buzzwords around, but I’m too preoccupied handling the boat through shallow water to argue and, if I’m honest, deafening silence is my secret power when I find myself heckled by my children and their friends. What Summer has yet to realise is that, at seventeen, she’s still encouraged to talk about race no matter her ethnicity, also about climate change, artificial intelligence and gender. At fifty, I’ve grown accustomed to finding myself aggressively muted because I’ve become the most reviled of Twitter memes in the witch hunt: a middle-aged white woman.

  *

  A Newcastle-born radio director I’ve often worked with is very fond of saying ‘it’s a Northern thing’, particularly when other northerners are around, like a rallying cry. (This, despite living in Muswell Hill since 1992.) Whilst we can substitute ‘Welsh’, ‘Scottish, ‘Irish’ with this fairly seamlessly – even ‘Cornish’ or ‘Devon’ – try it with ‘Home Counties’ and bathe in the awkward silence. Miranda Hart might be able to get away with it for comic effect, but not me. Not even if I gallop.

  Similarly, an old drama school mate of mine who is mixed-race has traditionally started a great many sentences through her bright, funny and outspoken acting career with: ‘Speaking as a working-class black woman.’ And she can say that, it’s her absolute right. She was born into it, grew up with systemic racism first-hand. It’s a prefix that says ‘don’t argue with me unless you’ve felt my pain’. It’s her identity, and during our thirty-plus-year friendship, she’s helped educate me about it.

  By contrast, I’ve always taken it as read that if I started a sentence ‘Speaking as a middle-class white woman’, I’d be lampooned. I’d never dream of doing it, of boasting my privilege. I was born into it, grew up with it, and soon learned to be ashamed of it, to seek change and use that education wisely. But now I’m over forty, and find ‘middle-aged white woman’ coined as a euphemism for ignorance and narrow-mindedness, I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t something even more reviled than being born with my social advantages.

  Perhaps, speaking as a woman, my age is the most offensive thing about me.

  *

  We’re too close to the right bank, the hull still dragging hard against the riverbed, unseen stones and silt catching, pushing us off course. In a panic I pull the tiller the wrong way and her stern swings further to the reeds. Then, with a groan, the boat grinds to a halt. No matter how much throttle I give it, she’s just churning up water. We are grounded.

  I cut the engine.

  ‘The propeller’s got caught up in the weeds,’ I tell Summer. ‘No panic.’ (I’m privately panicking quite a lot.)

  ‘Sorry,’ she clambers off the roof, ‘is that bad? I shouldn’t have distracted you. Can you fix it?’

  She so rarely apologises nowadays, I’m surprised enough to look it. ‘It’s all good. I know what to do.’

  ‘You’re the best.’ She smiles and I’m relieved to find I’m Mum again, not a hate figure.

  While she goes below deck to tell Ed what’s happening, I listen hopefully for an engine on the river, a passing bargee I can ask for a tow. It’s silent, the splash splosh of waterfowl the loudest traffic this deep in the Heart of Darkness. There’s nothing but impenetrable green riverbank around us, dense rushes and reeds giving way to flower-jewelled shrubs, overhung with willow, poplars and alder, a tunnel of waterside foliage. There’s a long-abandoned wooden angler’s jetty a few metres ahead, almost buried in the overgrowth, so there must be a path or track somewhere near – and we can’t be too far from isolated ‘haunted Hillboro’ – but you wouldn’t know it.

  You can do this, I tell myself, trying to remember what Paddy does when grounded with a tangled propeller. Swears first, usually ‘Fuckety fuck.’

  I need to clear the prop so we can give her a push off with the bargepole. I step aside to pull up the trapdoor to the inspection bay. At the back is a heavily sealed watertight metal box – the ‘weed hatch’; opened, it’s possible to reach down through to clear the propeller of whatever’s stuck round it. From memory, it’s only possible to open the screw-bar holding its hatch firmly down wit
h the aid of a lot of spanner-levering and kicking. Paddy usually swears even more at this point.

  Summer reappears as I’m mid fuckety-ing. ‘Ed’s stuck on level seven. I just peed in the kitchen sink. Have you sorted it?’

  ‘Almost!’

  For the next five minutes, I kick, spanner and swear some more, but the thing isn’t budging.

  Summer is back on the roof, lying on her front so that she can watch and offer encouragement. ‘Somebody’ll be along in a minute who can help? One of the guys from the last lock, maybe?’

  So much for female empowerment. (I sweep aside the fact that this was my own first option.)

  ‘You could help,’ I point out grumpily, but she’s turned her head away to listen to something on the bank. ‘Did you hear that?’

  It’s incredibly peaceful without the diesel engine putter: birds singing, a few duck quacks, river splashes and distant sheep bleating. ‘Hear what?’

  ‘A weasel maybe? Or a fox?’

  We listen. Then we pick it out, a shrill barking from the riverbank out of sight.

  ‘It’s a dog!’ Summer stands on the roof and calls. ‘Hello? Anybody there?’

  I give up trying to open the weed hatch. Perhaps if I can push her off the bank first and restart the engine, I might be able to get her moving and the prop can clear itself. Unclipping the bargepole from the roof, I swing it down into the water to find the riverbed like I’m punting, pushing with all my might. Nothing.

  The dog barks again, closer now.

  ‘Maybe the owner can help?’ suggests Summer, calling again, ‘Hey, helloooo, help! Anybody there?’

  The dog barks once more.

  And from inside the boat, we hear a muffled voice cry, ‘Help! Super Mariooo Galaxy! Need a plumber! Luigi! She’s taking on water! Maaamma-hoo-ha-hoo, wow-wow! I am GOING TO DROWN!’

  *

  When I was pregnant for the first time, an older friend, already a mother, said, ‘Nobody can tell you how it feels to be willing to walk unhesitatingly through fire to save somebody until you have children.’

  From the heart-stopping moment I turned to see Joe rolling off our sofa as a baby, to searching frantically for Summer when I thought we’d lost her in London Zoo, to picking Ed up from Reception, red-eyed and raw-kneed after being bullied, nothing prepared me for the fierceness of motherhood. It never leaves us, like a pilot light, requiring one click to ignite.

  *

  Water’s gushing out from under the bathroom door, and Ed’s having a Grade A meltdown, repeatedly shouting, ‘Mario time!’, ‘Mamma Mia!’ and ‘Here I go!’

  ‘Stand back. I am going to break the door open, Ed.’ I prepare to take a run at it.

  ‘Maaamma-hoo-ha-hoo, wow-wow!’

  I kick with all my might. The thing was designed to hold an army. My foot throbs. The door doesn’t budge. More water races from beneath it.

  Summer holds her hands up helplessly. ‘Don’t look at me!’

  ‘Could you search for a crowbar maybe?’ I kick the door again, my toes crunching.

  ‘Here I go!’ Edward wails. ‘Mario time! Wake up Luigi! The only time plumbers sleep on the job is when we’re working by the hour.’

  ‘He’s a fictional plumber, Ed. We need a real one. And fast. Or at least a manual.’ We’ve run aground in a mobile Not Spot, so I can’t Google how to stop the supply pump forcing out the boat’s stored water at such speed it’s hammering against the bulkheads and rising fast underfoot.

  ‘Ed, is it the shower?’ I shout. ‘Or a burst pipe?’

  ‘Here I a-go!’ keeps coming back at me through the door, along with, ‘Mamma Mia!’

  ‘Stopcock!’ I remember as I hurry through the boat to switch off the water beneath the well deck, then I wade back through the flood to address the bathroom door. ‘Is the water still coming out, Ed?’

  ‘No! Babies!’ He laughs shrilly. ‘Maaamma-hoo-ha-hoo, wow-wow!’ He’s already sounding less stressed, although I can hear a lot of squelching and muttering. (Ed’s always incredibly hard on himself when things break or go wrong, swiftly becoming non-sensical or non-verbal, which makes it hard to gauge how bad it is.)

  ‘I’ve got a crowbar!’ Summer hurries up wielding the big curved rod.

  ‘NO!’ comes a scream from the other side of the door. ‘Do NOT touch the Ashwell’s Patent Toilet Lock, Luigi! Mamma Mia!’

  ‘Ooookay,’ I promise cautiously, beckoning Summer into the saloon and whispering, ‘Maybe we should let him calm down and focus on trying to get the boat going? We can stop downriver to try to get him out.’

  There’s another flurry of Mario catchphrases from the bathroom and the sound of a 3DS starting up.

  Summer looks downcast. ‘Sorry I was useless.’

  Another apology. We are breaking records. I tell her she wasn’t and give her a hug which she shrugs off.

  ‘Things break in threes,’ I tell her brightly, another saying brainwashed into me by Granny. ‘Jammed door lock, snagged propeller, flood – so we’ll be fine from now on.’

  ‘You don’t really still believe all that, Mum?’ She raises the inherited ironic eyebrow far better than her grandmother or I could hope for.

  I jump as I feel something cold against my ankle. The empty prosecco bottle’s still on the floor. When I stoop to pick it up, I spot something glinting by the cooking range. It’s Matteo’s cornicello.

  ‘Yes I do!’ I snatch it up too, the gold charm digging into my palm, the memory of how it came to be here digging into my head, of how alive I felt. Mamma Mia, but I have to make things right again. Opening a kitchen drawer, I drop it in and slam it closed, repeating the phrase my grandmother often quoted: ‘Luck affects everything; let your hook always be cast; in the stream where you least expect it, there will be fish.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Doris Lessing, maybe?’ I wrack my foggy brain for Granny’s favourites.

  ‘Ovid,’ comes Ed’s voice from the bathroom door. ‘Mario Time!’

  *

  Certain superstitions stick for life, I find, even if we dismiss them as hokum in adulthood. My maternal grandmother was responsible for most of mine, from counting magpies to pulling wishbones. She was basically Baba Yaga in a twinset and pearls, which is dangerous company for a slightly OCD overthinking grandchild; I was well into my teens before I could bring myself to pass somebody on the stairs or accept that faces I pulled wouldn’t stick if the wind changed. I still hunt for four-leaved clovers, avoid treading on lines in the pavement, and of course it’s a professional duty never to whistle in a dressing room or name the Scottish play in a theatre.

  Paddy, who greets my irrational ‘that will bring bad luck’ moments with a long-suffering smile, takes great pleasure in breezing beneath ladders, putting new shoes on the table to be admired and spilling salt. There’s just one superstition that has been handed down through his own family that he has always half-believed: it’s bad luck to change a boat’s name while she’s in water.

  Like rechristening Lady Love ‘The Tempest’.

  *

  I’ve managed to mop up the worst of the flood inside the boat and persuaded Ed to break off from his game long enough to throw all available towels on the bathroom floor. He insists he’s fine, although he’s now repeating ‘so long, King Bowser’ and quoting Ovid.

  ‘Keep him calm,’ I tell Summer, going back up on deck to empty the pail of water over the side and make another attempt at opening the weed hatch, now using the crowbar.

  It won’t budge. Taking a breather, I can hear the same dog barking once more, but there’s no sign of anybody around, the banks impenetrable. ‘Hello? Anybody there?’

  I try once more to push the boat away with the bargepole, finding it too heavy and cumbersome. It’s no good, we’ll need a tow-out if I can’t get in the hatch.

  Try the engine again. Maybe I wasn’t using enough throttle. As The Tempest fires back into life and churns up water going nowhere, I feel something I haven’t for years.
>
  I am utterly out of my depth. I have no idea what to do. I’m entirely in the hands of fate.

  I should want to cry, but it’s so outrageously rejuvenating, I feel almost high. I’ve not felt like this in more than half a lifetime.

  *

  I hate to admit to biting off more than I can chew; it’s not in my language. ‘Don’t ever give up’ and ‘keep dreaming big’ are all amongst my well-worn phrases. That and ‘No, I don’t need any help, I can do it better myself!’

  One summer job I had whilst at university was delivering flowers around west London in a rusty transit van nicknamed Wendy, back in the days when a standard driving licence qualified us to take to the wheel of everything from minibuses to Luton vans. A week in, Wendy and I set off to drop some zinnias in Chiswick – stereo blaring Old Skool courtesy of Kiss FM (Old Skool being a new sound then and Kiss a pirate station) – only to find ourselves hopelessly lost, the broken-spined London A to Z in 430 separate pages in the footwell. How I ended up at Reading Festival watching a band called Gaye Bykers on Acid is a long story involving a pair of Dutch hitch-hikers and a flat tyre, but I still remember just what it felt like, because I feel a bit like that now.

  The difference between now and thirty years ago is that I found myself out of my depth on a fairly regular basis back then, the years between childhood and motherhood packed with uncharted oceans, whereas fifty is the shallow end of life, as I’ve just proven running a slow boat aground.

  Not for the first time today, I feel a deep need for Paddy. He would have her back out on open water in seconds. In fact, we’d probably be hidden away in rushes alongside derelict Harvington Mill by now if Paddy was in charge, knocking back the champagne and laughing like teenagers.

  But I wouldn’t have proven anything to him if we’d done that, and he might still expect me to be trussed in a basque and Love Lubed in gratitude.

  I need to do this myself, just as I needed to get out of trouble thirty years ago, when I left Björk and her band playing on the Mean Fiddler stage to find my transit and reassemble 430 pages of A to Z, plotting a route home via the doorsteps of half a dozen lucky west Londoners who woke up the next day to find bouquets waiting there.