Coming Undone

by Terri White

  After each swig and swallow and sprayed sentence, she passed me the plastic bottle. Both hands around its girth, I put it to my lips and sucked, the bottle collapsing in the middle: the liquid fizzed and burned in my too-small throat as I trotted alongside her, struggling to keep up. We walked for what felt like hours; we walked and talked until we’d walked and talked in circles. There was nowhere to go, just around the estate, round and round, where our world began and ended and began again.

  The sun had set long ago and the air had turned cold. We had no coats; we were just wearing T-shirts and jeans. The bottles were hollow now, the bottom boasted just an inch of liquid. Home was inevitable; he was inevitable. We crashed from the cascading highs of daring to defy him and started to walk back, slowly and solemnly now. Orange street lights guided our weaving way.

  As we walked up the path, I saw the TV still blaring through the living room – he was definitely home and definitely up – and realised quite how drunk I was, though the whole concept was still relatively new to me. Raging, roaring, roll-around-in-a-hedge drunk. My stomach leapt and lurched with the weight and acidity of the booze as we skulked in, heads bowed. He sat waiting, watching the snooker with the volume down low, not speaking, smoking, sucking hard on the cigarette butt clasped tightly between his fingers. His cheeks caved in every time he pulled and I could see every bone in his skull, the way he’d look when he was dead. It was a gift, a power that I’d decided alcohol had given me.

  I sat on the carpet, seeing two of every wild, bright swirl that curled under my crossed legs. There were four men taking it in turns to pot balls on two snooker tables on the one TV in front of me. After a few minutes it was eight men potting balls on four snooker tables on two TVs. I lost count of how many should be there, so closed first my left eye and then my right. I needed to focus. Concentrating hard, tongue between my damp lips, the men continued to multiply and duplicate until there was an army of them with blue-tipped sticks and square glasses and tightly tied waistcoats that looked like armour for a battle.

  The shouts, slams and bangs of Mum and the man flew overhead, settled on my shoulders and caused me to sink until I was submerged and underwater and I was trying to wave at them back on land but they couldn’t see me, wouldn’t notice me. I wondered if I’d died, if my body had been taken by the sea, or just my mind.

  A hand reached out to save me, was offering me help, salvation – the clear liquid in the glass I was being handed by my mum pulled me out. She was in the dining room once more, throwing open the door to the cabinet that we stored the booze in for Christmas – bought bit by bit over the year, saved and stored painstakingly – emptying it out frantically. Then she was back. This time the liquid was brown. Then red. I kept swallowing as directed, taking what was good for me, even when it was rejected and hit the roof of my mouth coming back up from where it had just landed. I kept swallowing, gasping for air, being saved, even when I was sure I was being killed.

  That night was the night of my first blackout. I don’t remember putting down the glass, saying goodnight, walking up the stairs away from their continuing screams, going to the toilet, wiping between my legs, taking off my trousers, taking off my top, putting on my nightie, getting into bed and closing my eyes. But I must have done those things, or at least some of them, just like I did every night.

  My mum woke me just before seven a.m. for my shift in the café in town where I was a £1.88-an-hour Saturday girl. I heard her voice saying my name, telling me to get up, coming at me from far away, somewhere I couldn’t initially see or reach. When it finally did arrive, it was coupled with nausea, which distracted from the pain of the grip on my skull, the handle slowly turning, the nuts, the bolts tightening, closing the gaps in the cracks. I rode the bus to work, clutched my insides in place over every bump. I’d barely got my white apron tied at the base of my back with a bow before I was throwing up on the cobbles of the alley out back. As I spat on the stone, watching what I thought had saved me running downhill into the pavement cracks while trying to avoid the splashback of sick on my shoes, I knew that drinking wasn’t for me, however much I lusted after oblivion. The lack of control. The primal forces that took over my body when it was forced to vomit against my will: stomach tightened, mouth open, teeth bared as whatever was in my gut hurtled up through my throat and out into the air with zero cooperation from me. Eyes bulged, fists gripped, muscles stiffened as my body fought what it must do. I vowed: drinking wasn’t for me. A vow that I was to keep for several years – touching barely a drop, never ever more than three drinks in one night – until I discovered that, actually, drinking was very much for me.

  CHAPTER 11

  Our house always felt sticky with sex, with lust. It was in the fabric of the carpet, the paint on the walls, always hanging in the air. I knew that Mum was attractive, that men found her sexy. Lots of men. ‘They say I’ve got the best bum in the village,’ she’d say with a smile.

  Saturday night. She’d allow me to be her confidante, her friend, from the moment she ran her bath. I sat on the toilet and talked to her as the water and foam gently lapped her breasts, which had settled down next to her armpits. As I got older, I knew that women’s bodies were meant to curve in and out in specific places and that, when that happened, men would like you and want to be with you.

  I remember times when she called to me, got me to hook her into her stockings and suspenders, worn under her leather skirt on the nights she seemed happiest. After she got dressed, she would be in the kitchen, head down, blow-drying her permed blonde hair until it was big enough, spraying its bombast into place.

  Those were the best nights. The house became slowly infused with new smells, warmth, hustle and bustle. The sharp edges softened, became buttery. It began when the immersion heater was switched on – a very rare treat. We were under strict instructions to use it only in an emergency – we couldn’t afford it – though I was never quite sure what would constitute an emergency. As the water in the tank tucked into the corner of my bedroom started to simmer, then bubble and boil, Mum’s excitement levels rose.

  The kitchen smelled of bubble bath and Elnett and perfume and make-up. She was scarlet-cheeked with excitement and optimism. Anything could happen after she exited the door and was free from us, from that house. I knew that it was this that flooded her eyes with light, that pressed the switch inside her. The nights when she was not our mum, she was just Jane.

  It started to become clear to me how suffocated she felt by motherhood, by us. Her identity permanently erased before she’d properly been able to form her own. If you become a mother at sixteen, you’re barely an adult, barely a person. Sister, daughter, now wife and mother. When did she get to be her own woman? Every time she looked at us, she was reminded of what she’d sacrificed, lost, never ever had.

  I looked at my own body as it changed, and felt so far away from being a woman, that kind of woman. I was plonked onto the dining-room chair, a stained towel around my shoulders, as she undid the boxes that contained perming lotion and bleach. She worked away to put my hair in permanent tight, tight curls and paint it with streaks of yellow. The end of the plastic hook dug into my skull while it retrieved strands of hair for her to stain. I knew I was nothing to look at; I felt she wanted me to look better than I did naturally. And under her hands, as I sensed her stare shifting to something edging towards approval, it seemed like I was becoming someone people might look at. That people might actually see.

  Men liked Mum, liked what they saw when they looked at her. And it seemed as though there were always men in our house. Sometimes they’d be there for years, other times months. Sometimes weeks, nights, hours. The men my mum beckoned over the threshold came in every shape, every size, type, taste. There were lovers, boyfriends, fiancés, friends and husbands – both other people’s and her own.

  Mum’s speciality appeared to be men who shouldn’t be there, who would pay the price for coming over. Who would turn up, invited, in the middle of the day. I remembe
r walking in the back door and hearing a man grunting. Headboards and floorboards banged. I slammed a door to let them know that I was home, that – Christ, anyway, it was only 3.30 p.m. The men who were there at strange hours were oftentimes men I knew. A man whose wife eventually rang the house and told me to tell Mum to leave her husband alone. The men parked their cars at the bottom of our street, letting the world know that they were there to knock on number ten’s door.

  I can recall no formal introduction (or any other kind) to those who stuck around in the morning – there would just be a strange man walking down the stairs. They all seemed to stink of booze and fags and look at us like we were intruding, even though it was our home. They were at home immediately, boots under the table. They filled the entire sofa in the front room, took charge of the remote control, filled the house with smoke and rage. Faces appeared hard against us, three children they didn’t want, but made peace with accepting so they could be with Mum, for however long or short a time that might be. In the morning, they eyed us warily, seemingly wondering in the cold light of day if they had made the right choice. Wondering whether there was another option, whether we were really around for good, whether we were really immovable. When they were gone, when it was just us again, I breathed. I exhaled. I wished, prayed, elbows apart, for there to be no more men. But just days, weeks later they were back again and it was no longer only us. And I felt a new kind of terror in familiar skin inside our house.

  As a teenager, I felt ashamed, dirty by association. How could Mum do this to me? How could she do this to other women? To children? I hated her with a violence and fever I didn’t know I was capable of. She disgusted me. It seemed to me that she gave away her body too easily to men who weren’t hers, men whom she couldn’t always name.

  As an extension of my hatred for her, I hated myself. I became obsessed with how much I hated my face. Not the kind of flippant, lightly held hate that occasionally irritated and wrinkled the skin. But the kind that was felt constantly: when it wasn’t burning right behind your eyes turning them red, it was sitting in the pit of your stomach, swilling and swirling, lapping against your insides, corroding them with each backwash. I never, ever didn’t feel it. And even though I barely recognised my own face, I still hated it. Each time I caught a glimpse in a window, a mirror, sliced in the back of a fork, I was shocked anew. Surprised by the circle of flesh looking back. Who was she? What was she? Sometimes, no matter how hard I looked, I simply wasn’t there to see. There was just nothing. These were also my favourite times.

  When I could, I would lock myself in the bathroom, both desperate and unwilling to spend some time getting to know my own face. I stood in front of the mirror set into the cabinet screwed into the wall. I traced the outline of my own face with my fingers and thumbs. Running from my hairline at my forehead down both sides, past my ears, around and under my chin, up over my nose and eyelids until I was back where I started. Taking one flat hand, I ran it over my skull, traversing the raised bump made of bone and flesh that had sat there since I couldn’t remember when. Then, courage summoned, I headed for the bit I hated the most. The three moles that sat in an almost perfect triangle across my face. One on the right between my mouth and chin, two on the left: one tucked between my nose and my upper lip, the other by the bottom. I ran a single finger over them, feeling their tougher outline. They made me feel physically sick. The brown dots stuck on my face. The reason I kept my head down, always faced the floor, was terrified of looking anyone directly in the face. I took the face-pack sample I’d found in the back of the cabinet, squeezed the white paste out onto my fingers and smeared it as thickly as camouflage paint onto my face.

  I began with the moles, dabbing on top of the brown until it was gone. Mesmerised by the simple beauty of my face without them, I kept going further and further from the brown, smearing the white wider and higher, wider and higher until I reached my ears, my hairline, my neck. I looked in the mirror, my nose, cheeks, chin, all features obliterated. I looked so beautiful, finally.

  CHAPTER 12

  Getting away was the only possible solution. The furthest place away from home I knew was London – and the only way I could think of to get there was by going to university. The first person in my family to stay in education after sixteen, I was met with rolled eyes at home and the assertion that ‘we can’t afford to support you’. Fuck it: I was going.

  I spent the years before leaving home for good holding myself together – barely – by my fingertips. Home was still a battlefield. I was weary. After we ended up in emergency accommodation without beds or hot water, on an estate far rougher than ours, while the latest bad marriage behind the door of number ten was imploding, I went to live with my glorious nana.

  My focus was laser-sharp: I had to pass my exams. I needed to get the fuck out of there as soon as I could. I counted off each minute, each hour, each day: silent, steadfast. Holding my hopes, my dreams, close to my chest. I didn’t dare reveal what I wanted to anyone else, terrified they would take it away from me. But I knew that if I didn’t leave, I’d die there. In between the cracks and fractures I’d fall, into nothingness.

  The same focus propelled me through university, then down to London. By the time I arrived, just weeks after my final exam, to start my job as a magazine PA, the determination was being replaced by anger. I was, to my surprise, perpetually furious. I was consumed by an anger that made me pink, made me tremble. Why me? I raged. Of course, the real question was: why not me? But I imagined my life otherwise: I saw the woman I could have become, if I hadn’t been changed, marked forever. Nothing could ever make me clean, make me like new. He – the first of the two of my mum’s boyfriends to sexually abuse me – had broken me, right there under the light of the moon, and every night when I saw it rise and set, I saw once more what and who I was, irrevocably. What and who those hands, in those hours, had shaped me into. And I hated him for all of it. I hated the moon for all of it. And more than either, I hated myself for every last tiny bit of it.

  The men who came after broke me in different ways – with their fists, with their words. They called me stupid, pathetic, nobody. I willed myself into invisibility, kept silent, kept still, tried to be the nothing that they were so sure I was. But inside, the voices were loud. My fight was simply being stored for a safer time. It looked like I’d shrunk, curled up inside myself, but I hadn’t done it with passivity and compliance. I’d done it with patient fury – a coiled spring, waiting for release.

  That fury became something I couldn’t control. I persuaded myself that I had a handle on it. I called it strength. I called it fortitude. But it circulated throughout my body, making me not just hard, but brittle. In the end I decided that there was only one way to sate the rage fizzing against my gums. To fix what the man who had stolen me from myself had done.

  As I worked for a media company, I now had access to the electoral roll. All I had to do was send a name and a town to the woman who ran the library and I had an address in return. She had no idea that I was going to use that address to find and kill him.

  He lived just six miles away from our village, in the centre of town. I memorised the address, could see his road, house, the street light outside. I planned what I was going to do. What would happen when I visited him. I would arrive in his town, wait until the sky blackened, the street quietened, night fell. I would walk down the street, slowly, arrive at this gate, lift the latch, walk through, close it and – quietly yet firmly – let the latch lock.

  I would knock on his door; he’d open it, look at me and know who and what I was. My body, my brain dug up from beneath the soil he’d thrown and patted down over my head. He thought I was buried. He thought I was dead. He thought he’d been the end of me: his cock, his fingers, the whispers in his mouth murdering me. I’d lain dead and buried for twenty years, but now I’d come to find him, to get my revenge. To watch him twist and turn and break. In that moment, he’d know why I was there, why I’d come looking for him. That he w
as the one about to die, about to be buried, my name escaping his bleeding lips as brown soil filled his mouth and choked my name out of him.

  We’d go inside, and I’d tell him: nothing you did touched me; your attempts to destroy my life, at the age of five, were for nothing. I’ve always been stronger, harder, braver than you. He would gasp and panic for breath, for the words to make it all OK. He’d try to work out what could possibly save him in the coming seconds, minutes. And while his mind raced, his fingers jerked and retracted, I’d pick up the bat and swing it at his head.

  The first thwack would be the single most satisfying, pleasing sound I’d ever have heard. The sound of wood meeting bone, specifically skull. It would crack on impact, fracturing and piercing his brain. Blood, brain, leaking out into the space between his mind and his head, sloshing around like a baby in a bath. He’d be on his knees as I took the bat to both arms, his hips, the ribs. I’d take a knife and stick it into the white expanse of his throat. It’d lodge and stick and I’d pull with both hands: down, across, blood spurting, gushing out as he tried to scream, tried to stop the wound, but could only mouth silently while his flapping hands jammed inside his open throat and he impaled himself on his own fist, his body jerking and bucking under the weight.

  I’d stand over him, watching the last twitches and spasms of his body in his final moments, as he clasped and grabbed at my feet and ankles, smearing blood all over me. I would look deep into his eyes as he died, the light fading from his big brown eyes until they were empty and flat. I would step over him and leave his house exactly as I entered, the blood under my feet creating a trail out of the door and down the street.