Giving Up the Ghost

by Hilary Mantel

  At nine stone and size 12, graceful and curvaceous, I got a job. It was quite a menial one, so I got another, for the evenings. One job was in a shop, the other in a bar. The jobs needed a sort of uniform, so I bought some cheap black skirts and white tops. Within a couple of weeks I had grown out of them. My face was round and looked childish; I was becoming like some phenomenal baby, who astounds her attendants. When my next appointment with my consultant came, I said, I’m worried because I’m putting on weight so fast. She shot me a spiteful glance, from amid her own jowly folds. Now, she said, you know what it’s like for the rest of us.

  I found a secondhand shop quite near where I lived; it sold cast-offs from the bored, with the odd designer label. I was determined not to panic, but I stopped eating, of course; what else could I do? In any case, my body was staging some kind of revolt; colic, nausea, an inability to keep food inside me. To get out of the house for eight, I had to get up at six. I spent my scarce free time getting my hair done, lifted and teased and curled into a mane, so that I didn’t look as if I had a pinhead on top of my sweetly plump shoulders. I was a size 14 for a while, and people would say, “You look so well—been away somewhere nice, have you?”

  My ex-husband came back from Africa. He had once told me that I was so vain of my waistline that I would starve rather than gain an inch. But how did he know? In the past it had never been an issue. Now I had starved, and still gained five. Not to worry! He took me shopping. I bought some Englishwomen’s dresses, the pretty, floppy kind that go with creamy skin and broad haunches. We got married again. I had warned him by letter that I was fat now, but I knew I was being meltdramatic. Size 14’s not fat, not really, it’s just—it’s well. That’s what it is. Well.

  I never was a size 16. I shot past it effortlessly. Soon there was nothing in the secondhand shop to fit me; bigger women don’t discard fashions so lightly. The assistants—and hadn’t I been their best customer all summer?—began to give me the smirk, half commiserating and half condescending, that would soon become the usual expression of shop girls when I went to get clad. My skin turned gray, shading to slate blue as the autumn came on. My legs swelled and ached. Fluid puffed up my eyelids. Some mornings my head looked like a soccer ball. I was glad when my husband’s job took us to Saudi Arabia, where women wear drapery rather than clothes, and where no one knew me, so that no one could stop me in the street to say how well I looked; where, in fact, I was more or less prohibited from going out on the street at all. I could stay indoors, under artificial light, waxing like some strange fungus.

  The failure of my drugs had been recognized, and before I left England I was put on a new type. By now I was not so green in judgment. I looked up the side effects. Weight gain—I’d done that, and I didn’t think there were sizes bigger than 20: not really, not for people who’d once been thin. Hair falls out. Well, I had plenty of hair. Voice deepens—never mind, I’d always been a squeaker. Spots—harder to put a good face on spots, but never mind, the clued-up woman knows how to cope with a little outbreak. A general virilization … oh, what’s the odds? I’d always wanted to be a bloke.

  A few weeks on, I had developed a steroid moon-face. My hair had come out in handfuls. I was deaf, my eyesight was blurred by constant headaches, and my legs were swollen like bolsters. And one morning I sat up in bed, and cried out, like a nude exposed in a comic strip, Eek! I clapped my outstretched palms where my breasts had been, and there they weren’t anymore.

  Then I had a bit of luck. I needed a prescription, and a doctor’s letter; my new drugs would have to be sent for from England, as they were not available in Saudi Arabia. I swayed, giddy and wincing, into a doctor’s office. Let me name him—why not? His name was Dr. Fishlock. He sat up at the sight of me, and asked, “What are you taking?” He fixed me with a keen look, of knowledge and concern. I told him. It confirmed what he had suspected. He knew the drug, he said. He had worked on the clinical trials. It was effective: but but but.

  I knew the buts. I was a walking but. A butt of ridicule, in my own eyes; a sad sack enclosing a disease process, no longer an object of respect, or self-respect. He spoke to me kindly, and cut the dose by a third.

  Very few doctors understand this: that somehow, you have to live till you’re cured.

  I went home, to the dark, enclosed rooms of our city apartment. I cut my dose by a third. Bald, odd-shaped, deaf but not defeated, I sat down and wrote another book.

  When I was thin I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like. When you sell clothes you get very good at sizing people, but I had sized my customers as if they were fridge-freezers, or some other unnegotiable object, solid and with a height, width, and depth. Fat is not like this. It is insidious and creepy. It is not a matter of chest-waist-hip measurement. You get fat knees, fat feet, fat in bits of you that you’d never thought of. You get in a panic, and believe in strange diets; you give up carbohydrate, then fat, then you subsist for a bit on breakfast cereal and fruit because it seems easier that way; then you find yourself weak at the fat knees, at risk of falling over in the street. You get up on winter mornings to pack ice cubes into a diet shake that tastes like some imbibed jelly, a primitive life-form that will bud inside you. You throw tantrums in fat-lady shops, where the stock is grimy tat tacked together from cheap man-made fabric, choice of electric blue or cerise. You can’t get your legs into boots, or your feet into last year’s shoes.

  You say, okay, then I’ll be fat. As it seems you have no choice, you generously concur. But you become a little wary of adverbs like “generously.” Of adjectives like “full-bodied,” “womanly,” or “ample.” You think people are staring at you, talking about you. They probably are. One of my favored grim sports, since I became a published writer and had people to interview me, has been to wait and see how the profiler will turn me out in print. With what adjective will they characterize the startlingly round woman on whose sofa they are lolling? “Apple-cheeked,” is the sweetest. “Maternal” made me smile: well, almost.

  Okay, you say, it seems I can’t be thin, so I’ll be fat and make the best of it. “Fat is a Feminist Issue,” you tell yourself. Fat is not immoral. There is no link between your waistline and your ethics. But though you insist on this, in your own mind, everything tells you you’re wrong: or let’s say, you’re going in for a form of intellectual discrimination that cuts against the perception of most of the population, who know that overweight people are lazy, undisciplined slobs. Their perception, of course, is conditioned, not natural. The ancient prejudice in favor of fat has reversed only recently. When I taught in African schools, the high-school girls thought slimness was a prize to be gained by hard study. As soon as their certificates allowed them to get away from mealie porridge, the diet of their foremothers, they planned to turn svelte. But poor girls, without certificates, who I met at my volunteer project, were aiming only to get as much mealie porridge as the high-school students. “Tell me about your best friend,” I urged my little maids one day. “Now, write it down. Two sentences, can you?” My star pupil leaned against me, in friendly local style, while she read her composition. Her exercise book flopped in my lap, one sinewy arm was thrown across my shoulders. Her other hand trailed toward the book, her finger stabbed at the words: “My beast friend is Neo. It is a beautiful girl, and fat.”

  I think of her sometimes, my beast friend. In the terms of the church in which I was brought up, the body is a beast, a base, simian relative that turns up at the door of the spirit too often for comfort; a bawling uncle, drunk, who raps with the door knocker and sings in the street. Saints starve. They diet till they see visions. Sometimes they see the towers of the fortresses of God, the battlements outlined in flickering light. They are haunted by strange odors: heavenly perfumes, or diabolic stenches. Sometimes they have to rise from their pallets and ki
ck their demons out. Some saints are muscular Christians. But there are no fat saints.

  When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can’t help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you. When I was thin and quick on my feet, a girl with a head of blond hair, I went for weeks without a kind word. But why would I need one? When I grew fat, I was assumed to be placid. I was the same strungout fired-up person I’d always been, but to the outward eye I had acquired serenity. A whole range of maternal virtues were ascribed to me. I was (and am) unsure about how I am related to my old self, or to myself from year to year. The hormonal profile of an individual determines much of the manifest personality. If you skew the endocrine system, you lose the pathways to self. When endocrine patterns change it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another.

  Sometime about the millennium, I stopped being able to think properly. I lost my capacity for snappy summation, and my sense of priorities went too, so that when I was writing I would dwell on minor points at great length, while failing to get around to the main point at all. I could start things, but not finish them. I had no appetite, but grew still wider. Sleep became my only interest. In the end, it was discovered that my thyroid gland had failed. A simple pill treats it; your brain works again, but your body is slower to catch up. Nowadays, more than twenty years on from my trip to St. George’s Hospital, everything about me—my physiology, my psychology, feels constantly under assault: I am a shabby old building in an area of heavy shelling, which the inhabitants have vacated years ago.

  I am not writing to solicit any special sympathy. People survive much worse and never put pen to paper. I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are. Spirit needs a house and lodges where it can; you don’t kill yourself, just because you need loose covers rather than frocks. There are other people who, like me, have had the roots of their personality torn up. You need to find yourself, in the maze of social expectation, the thickets of memory: just which bits of you are left intact? I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being—even if the writing is aimless doodling that no one will ever read, or the diary that no one can see till I’m dead. When you have committed enough words to paper you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing you find that’s all you are, a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

  When you were a child you had to create yourself from whatever was to hand. You had to construct yourself and make yourself into a person, fitting somehow into the niche that in your family has been always vacant, or into a vacancy left by someone dead; sometimes you looked toward dead man’s shoes, seeing how, in time, you would replace your grandmother, or her elder sister, or someone who no one really remembered but who ought to have been there: someone’s miscarriage, someone’s dead child. Much of what happened to you, in your early life, was constructed inside your head. You were a passive observer, you were the done-to, you were the not-explained-to; you had to listen at doors for information, or sometimes it was what you overheard; but just as often it was disinformation, or half a tale, and much of the time you probably put the wrong construction on what you picked up. How then can you create a narrative of your own life? Janet Frame compares the process to finding a bunch of old rags, and trying to make a dress. A party dress, I’d say: something fit to be seen in. Something to go out in and face the world.

  For a few years, in my dreams, I stayed thin, and I wore a thin person’s clothes. Even today, I sometimes see myself, in one of the cities I go to when I am asleep, coming out of a bookshop or sitting at a café table, trim and narrow, though younger than I am now. It is said that, in dreams—in a lucid dream, where you are aware of your own processes—you can’t turn on an electric light, or see yourself in a mirror. I set myself to test this; thinking that somehow, if I could see my fat self in a dream, I would have accepted it all through, and would accept the waking reality.

  But what happens, when you face the mirror, is that its surface melts, and the self walks into the glass. You step through it, and into a different dream.

  It was 1982 when I went to Saudi Arabia; I was thirty. The expatriate wives of Jeddah plagued the life out of me, sticking me like mosquitoes with their common question: “When are you going to start your family?”

  I didn’t know what was a good answer to this: I’m not, or I can’t.

  When I was a young woman I didn’t want children. I was wary of the trap that seemed ready to spring. I was ambitious, on my own account, to make a mark on the world. I didn’t want to carry someone else’s thwarted expectations. If I failed to make something of myself, wouldn’t I heap my frustration onto my daughter? And she, in course of time, onto her daughter? When is it a woman’s turn, I wanted to know, to get something for herself, and not at second hand through her children? I was good for more than breeding: that was my opinion.

  But my opinion faltered, in the face of the expat matrons smelling so sweetly of baby talc and cream. It was hard to tell them that I had turned my back on everything that gave life meaning for them, turned my back until it was too late for me. Once it was necessary for my husband’s employer to arrange for my drugs to be brought in by courier, the rumor got about that they were fertility drugs. “They can do wonders nowadays,” I was assured. Eyes were on my waistline; which was, of course, ever-expanding. After the natural gestation period had passed, the ladies gossiped among themselves that I was trying to adopt.

  This made me angry; after a bit, it made me laugh. Would any agency have thought me a suitable adoptive mother? Adoption agencies don’t like sick women for parents. And why would I want a child not my own? I needed to reflect my glorious ancestry. My forebear who crushed a riot, who was made a sanitary inspector. My great-grandmother, who liked a drink but never smoked a pipe. My great-grandfather, who built a wall an army could have marched on.

  I should have been a “schoolgirl mother,” I thought: that social scourge. At fourteen I might have been fertile. At seventeen. But after that—I have to read my pain backward, to know what was happening inside me—I guess my chances were decreasing. Those crippling spasms that had to be ignored, those deep aches with no name, those washes of nausea, were not evidence of a neurotic personality, or of my ambivalence about my gender, and they were not brought on by “nerves,” or by fear of failure in a man’s world. They were evidence of a pathological process that would destroy the chance of my having a child and land me with chronic ill-health. I wonder why, despite all, I did not insist, could not insist, that doctors paid attention to me and located my malaise. There are several possible explanations, on several levels. One is that, in the time and place where I grew up, expectations of health were low, especially for women. The proper attitude to doctors was humble gratitude; you cleaned the house before they arrived. The deeper explanation is that I always felt that I deserved very little, that I would probably not be happy in life, and that the safest thing was to lie down and die. The reasons for this elude me now. I wish I could explain them better, and make them add up. But we were always told at school, when tackling a sum, to “show your workings.” Even if you didn’t get the answer right, we were told, you might get the odd mark for honest effort.

  What I would have liked was a choice in life. Leisure, to reverse my earlier decision that children didn’t matter to me; leisure, to ask if circumstances or my mind had changed. No one can predict that the game will be over for them at the age of twenty-seven. The time I fell in love is the time I should have acted, and now that an era of my life is over, and my schoolfriends are becoming grandmothers, I miss the child I never had. I know what Catriona would have been like. I have a mental picture of her, which I have
built like one of those criminal profilers whose formulations—let’s be honest—never fit too well. She would be nothing like me at all. She would be strong like my mother, broad-shouldered like my husband, with that milky Irish skin that freckles but never tans. I see her small competent hands, chopping an onion; making unwritten dishes, which she has never been taught to make. She would manage her money well, and perhaps manage other people’s; perhaps that’s how she’d make a living. She would drive a car, and sing in tune, and know about things like making curtains, which have always defeated me.

  People romance about their children long before they are born—long before, and long after. They name them and rename them. They see them as their second chances, “a chance to get it right this time,” as if they were able to give birth to themselves. They have children to compensate themselves for the things they didn’t do or didn’t get in their own early life. They conceive because they feel impelled to make up, to a nonexistent person, for a loss they themselves have suffered. Children are born because their parents feel the defects in themselves, and want to mend them; or because they are bored; or because they feel that in some mysterious way it is time for children, and that if they don’t have them their selves will begin to leak meaning away. Some women have babies to give a present to their own mother, or to prove themselves her equal. Motives are seldom simple and never pure. Children are never simply themselves, coextensive with their own bodies, becoming alive to us when they turn in the womb, or with their first unaided breath. Their lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialize at all, they become ghosts within our lives.

  Women who have miscarried know this, of course, but so does any woman who has ever suspected herself to be pregnant when she wasn’t. It’s impossible not to calculate, if I had been—it would have been born, let’s see, in November, ice on the roads, early dark; it would have been the offspring of late March, a child of uncertain sun and squalls. There are ghosts within the lives of men; a man with daughters brings his son into being through wishing him, as a man somehow better than himself, and a father of sons wraps his unborn daughter in swaddling bands and guards her virginity, like an unspoiled realm of himself. Even adulterers have their ghost children. Illicit lovers say: what would our child be like? Then, when they have parted or are forced apart, the child goes on growing up, a shadow, a half-shadow of possibility. The country of the unborn is crisscrossed by the roads not taken, the paths we turned our back on. In a sly state of half-becoming, they lurk in the shadowland of chances missed.