NS November 16th, 2009
This post is a departure from my usual fare in that the following is a piece of fiction, the first I’ve written in a very, very long time. I’m not really a fiction writer so please excuse its presumed awfulness. The reason for this departure is because I thought it would be fun to take part in one of Josie’s great Writing Workshops and when I read the list of prompts for this week, the last one (Write about a deep and dark fear) caught my attention. I decided that instead of writing about myself and my own views I’d try my hand at making something up. Be gentle with me, this is (most likely) a one-time experiment.
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Fact: one needs a car to reach the cliffs of Beachy Head on Christmas Day. I know this because I’ve been looking at train and bus schedules for the Eastbourne area all morning and was disappointed to discover that they will not be running a service at all, not even a limited one.
I suppose I should’ve expected this; I mean, what operates on Christmas Day besides the most local of local pubs, where the regulars have practically grown into the seats they’ve claimed as “theirs” and where the tinsel looks like it was purchased shortly after Margaret Thatcher came to power? Oh, sure, a few Pakistani-run newsagents will open, the raised graffiti-strewn shutters a welcome sight to those who forgot to stock up on milk or paracetemol or lottery tickets. The toffee-coloured man with the kind, tired eyes and fingerless black gloves will smile half-heartedly as the pale-skinned and native-tongued shift uneasily when they say “Happy Christmas” very tentatively, with a rising cadence at the end, like a question, unsure if it is polite or offensive to wish a Muslim man a happy holiday that he likely doesn’t celebrate, at least not in the same way.
But see, this is why I want to get out of London. I can’t bear to watch seven-odd million dreary souls faking cheer and joy and peace when, really, they don’t even know how to interact with one another when buying a newspaper and secretly can’t wait to get back home where they can make racist jokes and drink their body weight in booze and be as horrible as they like. Oh, you think most people are beyond this and don’t think these things? You think people are inherently good and it’s only a few rotten apples that give us all a bad name? You think being “PC” is an admirable thing and that if we all just linked arms and sang ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ our eternal souls would be saved by that mythical man in the sky?
Jesus, you’re one of those, aren’t you? One of the gullible, cheery, optimistic, opiated masses who put knitted sweaters on dogs and nod approvingly when you see children sitting silently and perfectly still in cafes and on airplanes and think the epitome of class is a prawn starter with a nice glass of bubbly, enjoyed in an Ikea and Habitat-furnished living room. You probably have track lighting to display the original artwork you brought back from the indigenous Bolivians you met while on your six-month trek across South America and claim to speak a foreign language, though your pronounciation is terrible. I knew there was something about you I didn’t like.
I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you more about why I need to get to Beachy Head then, because you will undoubtedly try to stop me, spew some psychobabble Freudian analysis and tell me to see a doctor and that they make medication for what I’m suffering. Suffering. As if you — any of you — could know the meaning of that word. As if any of you knew what it was like to be completely, utterly useless — a failure. And more than that, a failure at the one thing you were meant to be good at; the one thing you’d been told all your life you were destined for and biologically designed to excel at. No, not screwing and pleasing men, but you’re close. It’s the screwing of men (or one man, rather) that got me in my current predicament but still, that’s not what it is.
No, it’s motherhood I’m talking about. Or, should I say, Motherhood (TM). This sanitised, idealised, patronised, demonised version of what mothers are supposed to do and be and feel; a Mary Poppins-inspired, vicious lie of finger paintings and songs that make messes disappear and children that can be patted on the head and sent up to bed with no screaming, no tears and no fits of rage, by neither child nor parent. No, my kid and my life are not the version I was sold from the time I was old enough to cradle a baby doll and force a bottle between its smiling lips. I glowed when I was repeatedly told, “Aw, look at you. You’ll be a fantastic mummy!” I now hate every person who told me that, who made it seem so easy, who never told me that the plastic doll in my arms wasn’t anything like a real, live baby; that real, live babies would get trapped wind or colic or whatever upsets newborns and that it would make them scream and scream and scream, all night and into the morning, and that after months of this one would likely sit on the floor in a crumpled heap of defeat, sobs wracking a body tensed with rage and exhaustion. And when I say rage, I mean RAGE. You didn’t think it possible to feel rage at an 11-week-old baby? You didn’t think normal people fantasised about bashing their baby’s head or their own against the wall to Stop. The. Crying. For. One. Goddamned. Minute? You didn’t think normal people resisted this urge by digging their fingernails into their palms with such ferocity that the nails all broke off and fell, tinged with blood, to the unswept floor?
I used to be normal. I think I still am, deep down inside, but I don’t know anymore. No one has told me how hard it would be, how soul-destroying and tiresome and lonely. I love my daughter in an abstract, distant way, sort of like the way one loves an idea or appreciates a work of art. But that’s it. There is no heart-melting, goo-goo ga-ga baby love, just crushing responsibility and a sense of mourning for what I used to be and could’ve been.
So you see, this is why I need to get to Beachy Head on Christmas Day. My parents want to take the baby off to some la-di-da family party, stick a pink bow on her bald head and show her off to the cousins and aunts and uncles who haven’t got to meet her yet because I’m “too selfish” and “too nervous” to let them come round for a peek. But I couldn’t let them come round and see the gouges in my palms and the bags under my eyes and the dirty dishes stacked up in the tub, could I? I couldn’t answer the door in the only trousers that fit me and don’t rub against the scar on my stomach where they removed her, the ones covered in milky vomit (hers) and snot from crying with my head between my knees. I couldn’t bear to see their sympathetic looks and clucking reassurances about it all “being okay” and offering faint, non-specific offfers of help but only if they involve cooing over and holding the baby. No one wants to help a single mum with the mopping or the shopping or scrubbing the shit stains out of the toilet, do they? They want to give a bottle or push a pram in the park or make a lovely cup of tea.
No one thinks to ask how I’m feeling or what I need. It’s all baby, all the time now. It started the minute I discovered I was pregnant and hasn’t stopped since. I am no longer Georgina: lover of rock music, maker of the perfect gin and tonic, Jane Austen fan, aspiring writer, former massage therapist at a chic and popular spa with clients who loved her and claimed she had The Touch and with whom she felt connected and grounded and respected. Now I’m just Mother: a vessel, a peabrain, the scourge of society needing handouts to survive. No one sees me for who I am anymore, but what I represent and what I can do for them. I am no one.
This is why the Christmas plan is perfect. Or would be, if I could get there. If public transport was running I could wait until Mum and Dad had pulled away with their precious cargo, their granddaughter, believing they were giving me the gift of several hours’ rest and respite, and then dash to the station, just making the 10.23. I’d sit near the toilets, just in case I needed to be sick, and stare out the window with an unopened copy of Practical Parenting in my lap. I’d be in Eastbourne in time for lunch, though I wouldn’t have any. What would be the point? After strolling through the town for a bit, I’d get the number 13 bus to the top and feel myself growing lighter and lighter as we ascended upwards, in anticipation of the flying, floating relief I’d find at the summit.
Why don’t I just drive you ask? Yes, I do have a car — a shitty old banger from my youth nicknamed Lola. She used to purr like a kitten but now the growls coming from her bowels are more like that of an aging tiger. She is my oldest friend. Yes, she’s parked right here in front of the flat, actually. But I only use her for pottering around town, I never drive her more than about 5 miles away. I’m terrified of driving on motorways, you see. I get all white-knuckled and knock-kneed and sweaty-browed as I plunge down what I call The Deathway in my tube of terror, feeling as if I’m going to faint with anxiety the entire time. Every time a car brakes in front of me or passes me on the right just a little too closely for my liking, I tense my entire body and wait for the inevitable crash and clang of metal that will rip me from the seat and send me spiralling headfirst out of Lola’s windscreen like a torpedo, like how an American football looks as it sails through the air.
Now, I know it might seem ludicrous to you — you and your lovely job and perfect children and happy faces — to be afraid of dying while driving myself to the spot where I plan to die, but (to use a tiresome cliche) it is what it is. There’s no other way to get to Beachy Head on Christmas Day and that’s that. I’m too embarrassed to admit my fear of driving to anyone but the baby and she certainly doesn’t give a toss. She’s got her own stuff to deal with; namely having a horrendous, incapable mother and a father who walked out in the middle of a ferocious argument in the seventh month of my pregnancy, about how best to assemble the flat-packed cot we’d bought for her. Something about those screws and bolts fitting together and the promise of a solid structure at the end of our hard work spooked him.
Maybe I’ll give it ’til the New Year and see how I feel. If I could only get enough sleep to think straight, perhaps I could come up with an alternate plan. Maybe instead of Beachy Head I’ll take Mum and Dad up on their offer and spend the day in bed. Either way, come Christmas Day, I will sleep. Sleep and the sweet nothingness it brings. That’s all I want.
