‘I unreservedly apologise – that was completely unforgivable. If it’s any consolation, her disposition is mild–’
‘I’ll come after you, and stick a fucking axe through its head!’ he shouts.
I walk on, shaking, to Violet’s house. I am quite rattled by the man’s sudden invocation of an axe, and need to talk to someone, and Violet is my newest and best friend. She is also my only friend – apart from Emily Pagett, who reminds me of Baba in The Country Girls (Edna O’Brien, Hutchinson, 1960), in that she often spreads lies about me – but which I tolerate, because she also tells me gossip about other people, which is fascinating. Even if it’s also not true. I recognise that, ultimately, you have to make your own amusement.
So, in the meantime, I go to see Violet – a seventy-two-year-old woman who lives at the end of our street, with her two Siamese cats, Tink and Tonk.
For the last few months, I’ve been visiting Violet a few times a week. I think it’s a delightful thing – for a young, teenage girl to befriend someone of another generation.
‘She is like a window into the past,’ I think to myself. ‘Also, a widow into the past – because her husband is dead.’
Violet has a biscuit barrel in the shape of a pig that brims with top-quality branded biscuits. It would be fair to say that I visit the biscuits as much as I visit Violet. Once, she had run out of biscuits. That afternoon had been difficult for both of us.
But today, everything is well: ‘Shall we have tea, and biscuits?’ she asks, putting things on the table. I put my hand in the barrel. It makes a snorting pig sound. It snorts at you every time you take a biscuit – which even my balmy exuberance can’t help but interpret as slightly judgemental. Still.
‘Lovely weather,’ Violet says.
‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘Incredibly temperate!’
Tink and Tonk come into the room, and coil around my chair legs, like brown smoke.
‘Did Dennis like it when it was temperate?’ I continue.
I’d read in David Niven’s The Moon’s A Balloon (Hamish Hamilton, 1972) that the worst thing about losing a spouse was that people seemed too scared to ever mention them around the grieving partner.
Learning from the mistakes of David Niven’s Hollywood friends – although not Clark Gable, who apparently always mentioned Niven’s dead wife, because he’d lost his own wife, sexy comedienne Carole Lombard, several months earlier, in a plane crash – I always mentioned Dennis to Violet whenever I could, in order to keep his memory alive for her.
Sometimes, this is difficult. I once tried to bring Dennis into a conversation about people I fancied.
‘Would I have fancied Dennis?’ I asked.
However, when Violet showed me a picture of him, I wasn’t quick enough to stop my face from betraying the fact that, no – I would not have fancied Dennis in the least.
I was hoping for some b&w shot of a hot Resistance fighter from the Second World War, lolling on a Spitfire. Instead, Violet was showing me a recent shot of Dennis, on holiday at the Butlins in Pwllheli, where he looked like the BFG from The BFG (Roald Dahl, Puffin Books, 1984). Even with my freewheeling open-mindedness, I couldn’t fancy Dennis – a man whose ears looked like two long pieces of bacon.
Violet had ended up crying that day. I had taken no pleasure in eating her biscuits, and had limited myself to just one – a bourbon.
Today, Violet says, ‘Dennis loved it when it was temperate. I really think he preferred temperate to all the other temperatures.’
I happily bite down into my coconut biscuit. Dennis loved it when it was temperate. I am totally helping this mourning old woman with a pig-barrel biscuit jar. Today is ending up alright, after all.
Twenty minutes later, I am walking down the road, back to our house, very rapidly.
The last ten minutes have been so odd that I feel lightheaded – like my head is actually a balloon that is simply going to snap off my neck and float away, leaving me to collapse, headless, in slow motion, on the pavement.
God I really do feel odd. I stop, and sit on the grass verge, and put my head between my knees.
‘I have just made the biggest mistake of my life,’ I think.
Sitting in the calm of Violet’s house, with her quietly nodding, everything had been going fine until I had suddenly felt a terrible, fatal need to share. The midwife thinking I had a stitched-up vagina, the Civic Centre, my ongoing lack of being kissed. And then, on top of it all, a man with an axe threatening to kill Bianca.
‘I am always asking Violet about bloody dead Dennis,’ I thought – ‘but she never asks me about my life. She probably thinks I am happy. Ha! Ha! She has no idea of how much bravery and nobleness it takes to present my constantly cheerful persona to the world.’
‘Everyone else has friends they share their problems with,’ I thought. ‘Teenage girls are always telling each other their problems. Well, Violet is my friend – so I’m going to tell her my problems. A problem shared is a problem halved!’
In the next three minutes, I was to find out what a massive, pernicious cauldron of bullshit that was – one of the biggest lies ever told. For, as I told Violet about how much I hated this estate, and how I couldn’t wait for Dadda to get off disability benefit and become famous, the old lady stiffened on her chair. Tink and Tonk came upon her lap and sat, equally cold-eyed, staring at me.
I began to falter. Around the bit where I was going, ‘… and we’ll never fit in here – not while Lupin still wears a poncho,’ Violet spoke, in a voice I hadn’t heard before.
‘I had no idea you were on benefits,’ she said.
I stopped speaking.
‘I had no idea you were on benefits,’ she said again. ‘Dennis was shot in the leg during the war, he was terribly injured, and he never claimed a penny of Disability Benefit in all the years he lived.’
I can’t believe that Dennis has screwed me over twice now. This fucking bacon-eared ghost is my nemesis.
‘I have seen your father mending your car, on the drive!’ she continues. ‘He was doing it this morning! He seemed quite healthy. I had no idea,’ she says again, for the final time, ‘that you were claiming disability benefits.’
Still sitting on the grass, I am biting my knees. I know exactly what will happen next. Our father has told us a million times what happens if you tell the wrong person the wrong thing. Violet will ring social services, and report that she’s seen my dad mending the car – on one of his good days! On one of his few good days! – and that he’s fit for work. And there will be a two-week delay – paperwork – and then someone will knock on our door, or send a letter, and then what will happen … I don’t know. What happens to families when their benefits are taken away? It is the great unknown.
I run through all the available options I have ever used, or known, that can make something better. I can only think of one.
‘Dear Lord Jesus,’ I think, rapidly, in my head, as I approach the house. ‘I know I haven’t believed in you lately and I hope you don’t take that personally, but as you are probably already aware, given your monitoring system, which I imagine to be comprehensive, things are quite bad here, and I want to offer you a deal. If you make it so that they don’t take our benefits away, I will–’ and I pause here, trying to think of the greatest thing I can offer.
It’s a pretty pathetic list. I can make no monetary donation to the church. I have no children to baptise. What else is Jesus into? I’d offer to commit the rest of my life to a nunnery, but I’m pretty sure Wolverhampton doesn’t have a nunnery – unless it’s that weird building round the back of Argos with the high walls, that’s always having meat delivered, out of a truck.
Desperate, and improvising, I finally offer Jesus the nearest I have to life spent as a Bride of Christ: ‘Jesus. If you get us out of this – like, really totally clear this up – I promise I will not wank for six months.’
I think about this. Six months is – maths maths maths maths – one twenty-eighth of my life.
‘A month,’ I compromise, hastily. ‘Definitely a month. I will not touch myself for a month. Not even idly whilst in the bath. Not even after looking at the picture of two hippies doing oral sex in The Whole Earth Catalog, where you can see him put his fingers inside. This will be my holy sacrifice to you, oh Lord.’
We have been brought up resolutely atheist, but I’m pretty sure this is the kind of thing Jesus is into: kids not wanking. He’d have to be down on that. This has got to be a good deal for him. Definite score.
‘I’m going to say “Amen” now. This is a deal now. We are square on this. You will sort this out. Violet will not rat on us. Amen.’
THREE
Do not think any less of my terror of utter destitution when I tell you that I managed nine days without abusing myself.
Let me be clear – these were nine terrible days. Days where I was wracked with a sexual frustration that often bordered on actual pain.
At fourteen, I was in the first, devout flush of my relationship with my sexuality. It was the first limitless pleasure I had ever experienced. Food ran out, books ended, albums fell into the run-out groove, clothes fell apart and the TV reverted to pages from Oracle, or Ceefax, by 1am – but with wanking, I could lock myself in my room and come over and over, thinking of a million different people, and never stop: save for snacks and small, refreshing naps, when necessary.
For a few seconds, you could be utterly gone – outside time and space and thought. Behind the clocks and above the sun and before words began. Nothing but white light and joy. Even the thing I loved most in the world – Rik Mayall as Lord Flashheart in Blackadder – was not as good as that single, non-hungry second.
At first, my trusty ally in this was the family hairbrush. By day, I used it to brush my hair, before cutting my fringe with the big kitchen scissors. And by night, I rode the handle of that grooming item like a limitless fuck-pony – doubling its functionalities at a stroke. It was a bit like Bruce Wayne and Batman, in that regard. Bruce Wank. Multitasking. Two very separate lives. Always with the disguise. That brave old brush. And Gotham never knew.
The hairbrush, however – although loved, greatly; in the wrong way – was not perfect. It was obvious after only a couple of weeks that it was too narrow, and a bit pointy, and that even the other big benefit of using it – being able to lovingly brush my bush, so that it looked posh, like we were going to a wedding – was not enough.
Thankfully, around that time, I decided to combat my burgeoning underarm odour issues by shoplifting a bottle of Mum roll-on deodorant, and realised on the bus on the way home that it was shaped – astonishingly, usefully, blatantly – like a cheerful, chunky cock. With its pink-domed lid and carefully contoured bottle, the thinking behind British teenage girls’ most popular deodorant of the late 1980s was a truth hidden in plain view: Procter and Gamble were selling adolescent girls Starter Dildos for 79p.
Did they know? Of course they knew. They knew – and they were playing mind-games with us. For what reason – other than a knowing sadistic streak – would they have named something millions of teenage girls were fapping themselves senseless with ‘Mum’? It was their way of fucking with our minds. The real test of how horny we were. Are you so desperate that you’d have sex with your Mum? To which my simple answer was – locking the bedroom door, and lying on the floor – ‘Yes.’
However, I did have limits. I would never buy (shoplift) the blue or green bottles of Mum – because that would be like having sex with a Smurf, or an alien. For a compulsive masturbator, I was pretty vanilla, really. And I was totally sexually faithful to my Mum for nearly three years. How many people can say that?
So, yeah. Nine days. It was a hot day – I put on a sundress and accidentally seduced myself. I promised me it wouldn’t go any further than heavy petting, but then I got carried away, and ended up doing myself, guiltily and hard, thinking about some monkeys I’d seen having sex in an Attenborough documentary.
I knew there was no point in even trying to explain this to Jesus – our whole deal was crocked – and so I addressed him directly, in a business-like manner.
‘Jesus, I’m sorry. I have wasted your time with a fake deal. I acknowledge that this means you are off the case, and that I am now totally on my own in saving the family from destitution. I shall go back to not believing in you again. We will revert to our former positions. Sorry about all that. Take care. Lots of love to God. Amen.’
And I regretfully killed Jesus, in my head, just as I had resurrected him nine days ago, at the top of Eastcroft Road.
From this moment on, to protect us all, I had a new plan: to stand guard.
‘What are you doing?’ my mother asks, coming into the hall. It is the beginning of the summer holidays, and everyone is running around, shrieking. But I am sitting here, again, at the bottom of the stairs, eating my cereal.
‘Just … hanging,’ I say. ‘There are good ley-lines here.’
My mother stares at me. Clearly, something is going on, has been going on for some time – but then, on the other hand, I am just sitting on the bottom stair. Technically, there’s nothing wrong here, and a mother of five has to pick her battles, lest she die of exhaustion.
‘Well, don’t …’ she starts. There’s a pause. In the front room, a baby starts crying. Her attention disappears entirely. ‘Just …’
She goes to the baby.
My plan is this: all bad news comes in brown envelopes. I know this, from experience. So, every day, I am going to intercept the post, looking for any franked ‘Wolverhampton City Council’. That, will clearly be the letter of doom – the one announcing that they have ‘received information’ about our family, and are withdrawing our benefits.
And, when that letter comes, my plan is: to burn it. Then when the follow-up letter comes – I will burn that, too. And I will keep burning the letters – one after another – until I come up with a better plan, which surely I will if I can buy time until, like, September. I will, surely, be loads cleverer by then. By September, I will have come up with a better plan to save my family from certain ruination.
However my vigil by the front door has not gone unnoticed by my siblings, as a) I am absent from all their games now, and b) they’ve had to step over me to get upstairs to the toilet.
‘Come and play with us, Johanna,’ Lupin begs, on the third day of the holidays, hanging off the outside of the bannister, where he climbs up, like Spiderman.
‘Get off the stairs, you lumpen blockade,’ Krissi says, pushing into me as much as he can on his way up.
But I do not move. I am like Greyfriars Bobby, waiting on the grave. I am a constant guard. I am going to save this family.
It turns out to be the most miserable summer holiday of my life. Last year, on the day we broke up from school, we flooded the back garden with a hose: the low-hanging branches of the hazel-tree reflected in the brown soup. It looked tropical – a bayou.
We had jumped out of the kitchen window into it – the water up to Lupin’s knees, all of us soaked. And then we had climbed up the tree and sucked cubes of frozen Ribena, singing the Beach Boys’ ‘I Get Around’ in shrill, high voices until the neighbours leaned out of upstairs windows, and told us to shut the fuck up. We had a plan.
This summer, well, this summer is already ruined. I cannot lose myself in a game with the kids, lest I miss the clatter and flap of the letterbox. I sit on the edge of their games, half-heartedly joining in, constantly jerking and bolting to the door – then coming back, temporarily relieved, but fearful of the next post. In the daytime, I am distracted.
And at night, I lie awake next to the sanctuary-seeking Lupin, playing, in my head, over and over, the moment the letter can’t be stopped any more, and my parents learn the truth, and turn to me, broken, terrified, and go, ‘Johanna – what have you done to us? What have you done, Johanna?’
What have I done? What will be done?
In truth, I am basically going mad. I feel I have betrayed my family. The fe
ar that I have put our poor, rickety family – with its ghost as a mother, and an undiscovered popstar as a father – in peril makes me feel constantly unwell; like a terrible brain-fever. I am over-adrenalised. I am flooding with it – I am sick with it, I am drowning in it. I feel like I am perpetually thirty seconds away from the Apocalypse knocking at our door.
All this adrenalin works by way of a second, freak, hormonal high-tide – a bad, shadow puberty. Just as testosterone and oestrogen fused new neural pathways, when I was twelve, so, now, at fourteen, the adrenalin burns out a whole new map of them – fly-overs over and subways below what was already built; places where terrifying thoughts can hide, or travel faster. Faster faster faster. Terror makes me think faster, with a hectic, tumbling gallop that sometimes flattens me – it feels like it will never stop.
I sit in the front room with my family as they discuss various plans for the future – buying a new back door, or visiting uncles in Wales – and think, ‘But when that brown letter arrives, we won’t be able to do any of this. We’ll be in the poorhouse, barbecuing rats over a lit candle, and it will all be my fault.’
The adrenalin makes me constantly restless. My fists are clenched. I grind my teeth in my sleep.
In later years, I can always recognise someone else who received this shot of fear at an early age – other kids from frangible houses; kids who felt the sand collapsing under their feet; kids who sat awake in the dark, imagining their whole families burning down, and planning planning planning who to save first from the future, and the flames, like The Amazing Mr Blunden (Antonia Barber, Puffin Books, 1972). Children raised on cortisol. Children who think too fast.
‘This is probably what it’s like to be bitten by a radioactive spider,’ I think, gloomily, in the second month of my breakdown. I do feel insect-like. My eyes feel shiny, and black. The adrenalin keeps the pupils dilated – blasted.
I confide a little of this to Krissi – my new, unhandle-able worry – and he recommends I read The Metamorphosis by Kafka (Bantam Classics, 1972). I read two chapters and get so freaked out I have to leave the book on the landing, away from my bed. Turning into something else seems terrifying.