Lilian's Story (24 page)

Up Father's Sleeve

I should have seen that Father was waiting for his moment, but I did not.
I did not send you to the university to have you run
wild
, Father said, but did not sound as if he cared much. He was gathering evidence, and was becoming silent on his feet in the house, so that more than once, when I was conducting a conversation with myself, I looked around and found Father watching and smirking.
Eloquence, Lilian
, he would exclaim.
Ah, what a future you have as a statesman!
he would shout at me, and laugh so that it hurt my ears.
Perhaps you are thinking of becoming Napoleon, are you, Lilian?
he cried, and laughed to see me flinch.

They were waiting for me when my hair still held the dawn. Father was fully dressed in spite of the early hour and his boots were as black and shiny as spiders as he stood on the front step, waiting for me. If I had turned back then, gone back to the beach, lived on gull eggs and kelp, I would never have known what there is to know about the nature of man.

There was a lot of smiling going on on either side of Father, where two men in black jackets stood showing their teeth at me as I walked up the driveway. Mother was standing in her dressing-gown, confused by these smiling men greeting her daughter and by Father appearing at this hour.
Lilian
, she hissed at me,
get them
away quickly, the paper will arrive any minute
and smiled and nodded, and winked at me, as the smiling men took my elbows and walked me to their car. Mother nodded and waved, and Father withdrew into the house and did not wait to see me driven off. It happened very quickly and I did not struggle with the silent smiling men, because I was confident that nothing could be done to me that I did not wish. For this moment, it was something like an adventure to be sitting between these men driving through the bird calls I knew so well. We passed John, hurrying back to the house, and I tried to lean over one of the men to wave, and called out,
John, John, they are taking
me away!
so he could share the fun.

It was a surprise to me how quickly the smiling men had me crushed back against the leather of the seat.
It is
my brother
, I tried to explain, but they were leaving me no air to speak with. The fun was crushed out of me in that moment and a hot fear began in my heart. This was not an adventure, I saw suddenly. This was a trap, and from one moment to the next, unknowing, I had become a prisoner. I saw that the smiling men had stopped smiling now, and looked as if made of stone or metals.

I caught a last glimpse of John watching the car as it passed him, but I knew he could not see me, and I was helpless, pinned against the springs, and knew that I could not hope to enjoy the next part of my life.

3

A Woman

Behind the Walls

Days in the institution were all the same colour and time's flow was sluggish. I could watch my cheeks becoming pasty with institution food and was forced to submit to haircuts once a month. The month arrived when I could see that the last of the hair I had entered with was being snipped off by Jewel, who had been a beautician up at the Cross. and palm reader part-time, before becoming the Blessed Virgin Mary.

They told me I was an exhibitionist.
Psycho-pathological
, they told each other, and even Jewel screeched at me when she had stopped being the Blessed Virgin Mary for a moment, and gone back to being Jewel from the Cross.
Your trouble, Lil, is you want to hog the whole show.

Jewel knew a thing or two, and she became a friend behind these walls. She was young, and confided in me as in a mother, and I enjoyed watching her long eyes flicker over her thoughts as she put her story together.
I have been fucked
by God, see
, she told me on the grass beside the wall.
They are
scared because I am going to have God come out of me.
Jewel's strong crimped hair framed her plain face like a clinging animal, and her lips shook with the urgency of her tale.
They had to
shut me up because I am going to be God's mum, see.
She smiled and simpered a simper like a tic.
It was that bitch of a mother of mine
, she explained further.
She wanted God to fuck her, too.

As a student of life I recognised that life was going on behind our high walls, too. Father could stop me running wild but he would not stop me being alive and enjoying whatever was to be enjoyed.

The doctors did not trouble me much and Riser the head nurse was someone it was fun to imitate behind his back, the way he hit us over the head at mealtimes when we slobbered or would not eat, and the way his round buttocks stuck out when he became shrill at us.
You are a
bloody moron,
he shouted at Esther, who was seeing if you could eat through your ear,
a bloody pea-brain, you are
, and I stuck out my bottom the way he was doing, and perched my hands on my hips as he did. Then rude May, who piddled wherever she happened to be, pointed at me and laughed with a mouthful of creamed corn so that she began to choke, and Riser had to yell,
Slap her on the bloody back
, and the new nurse belted May on the back until she stopped laughing and the creamed corn dribbled down the front of her dress.
You, Lil, no need to try your bloody smartness with
me
, Riser threatened, and whacked the iron spoon into his palm. I looked as stupid and moon-faced as I could, the way I did for the doctors when they asked me questions.

Days were boring, full of basketmaking and walking up and down the same dull strips of overused grass. Everything here was undersized, overused, tired from so much madness and boredom. I watched the tops of trees over the high brick wall, but it was not the same as watching trees on the headland. But I was in the loony-bin for long enough to see one of those trees flame orange like a tree of fire year after year, and fill with parakeets that swung from branch to orange branch, pecking their way all over this miraculous burning tree.

Long Dark Nights

There were times when confusion overwhelmed me. Frightening sobs tore themselves up from deep in my chest where my heart was, and I could not see anything but my life passing in anguish. On those days I rocked from side to side with my pain. It tasted of salt and shame, the loneliness that ate away at me, that cut like a knife when I thought of Father, straddling the world with his muscular legs. There was a space in my vision of the world that Father filled and blocked like a great rock at the mouth of a cave, and behind that rock, locked in, I whimpered and shrieked for something I longed for and would never have.

When these passions overtook me I was left alone, even Jewel leaving plenty of space around me as she walked up and down showing off her belly. That made me all the more desperate, because the thing I longed for, and seemed further and further from finding, had something to do with the touch of another spirit against my own. I shrieked louder and louder, locked into my lonely self, but could not make anyone hear, none of these faces here, creased with their own turmoil, or falsely serene from whatever consolation they were inventing for themselves.

None of these faces could hear my cries for help, and even when I summoned up the faces of others in my mind, those who might have been able to come close to me, they stayed at a distance, whispering and pale like the shades of the dead. Mother nodded and smiled her vague unlistening smile, fingering her pearls and thinking about ferries, John's pain was even greater than my own, and could not be transformed into consolation, and Alma was too sad to bear. The image of her hopeful plain face came to me in my tears, and I began to clutch at myself, to rip that unbearable image of sadness out of my mind's eye, until Riser would come over with an assistant and the vest, and threaten, and many times even the threat of the vest was less powerful than my pain. On those occasions I spent the rest of the day wailing and rocking, locked in the stiff grey canvas as I was locked in myself.

There were times when, locked in the canvas or locked for the afternoon in the room where the walls swallowed my voice, I could console myself by inventing works of great poetry. I amazed myself at such times by the way the words poured out of my mouth with such ease, and my mind created them so effortlessly it seemed they had always been there.
I am a great poet
, I would tell Riser when he came to see how I was getting on, and if I was feeling jubilant at my genius, I would let him in on the secret.
I am
Shakespeare, Riser
, I would confide, and was not hurt when his hard laugh filled this small padded room, because I knew that it was the lot of genius to suffer.

Love and Marriage

I was growing used to expecting little from other people and their faces, full of themselves, and was becoming my own admirer.
Lil, you are not lovely, but I love you,
I told my hand, turning it over and over in front of me.
Anyone can
be lovely, but you are rare
. In my boredom, in the hot droning days of summer, I decided I was enough in love to marry myself, and twisted a piece of silver paper from someone's cigarette around my finger, and I could turn my hand in front of me as I had seen girls do when they wanted their diamonds to sparkle, and admire the evidence of love.

When love was not enough, there was always fighting. Jewel watched and cheered me on and grunted along with me while Ruby and I strained against each other. Ruby was a big woman and I could take her on without being afraid of breaking something.
By Jove, Lil, by Jove
, she panted as we struggled together.
By Jove, but you are strong, Lil.
I felt the heat of her body next to mine, smelt her sweat, felt the slipperiness as my palm slid over her skin, holding her tightly. She sighed in my ear as I got my arms around her and squeezed, but when she sagged against me, moaning, and gave up, I had to push her away so we could start again, and pull and strain at each other's limbs until we were again locked together, breast to breast. Jewel panted with us, but would not join in, protecting her belly with her hands and becoming solemn.
But I have got God inside me, Lil, and cannot fight.

Stone and Sky

As I had come to know the stars, all those nights out on the headland, I came to know sun and shadow in the loony-bin. I lay for hours in the interminable afternoons with my feet in the sun, the rest of me in the thick shade of the wall, and watched my feet turn brown. It amused me to smuggle a circle of orange peel the size of a sixpence out of the dining room and to give myself a white untanned circle on the front of each foot.
I am war wounded
, I practised saying, and here, where everyone muttered as they strolled and lay, I could say it as often as I liked.
I have been shot
through the feet. I am a person wounded in war.
It gave me great satisfaction to think of myself that way, for indeed I had been shot through the feet, and could no longer move around, and had indeed been wounded in a war.

Lying like this gave me an opportunity to study the sky in a way it had never occurred to me to do before, and sometimes I became so lost in its blue, so filled with its space, that I forgot, and the shadow of the wall consumed my feet so that I lay stretched out ridiculously in deep shade, a mad woman with circles of orange peel on her feet. That blue entranced me if I stared long enough, and although there were days when I was impatient, and said,
Yes, yes, sky, I have seen plenty of you before
, the sky succeeded every time in drawing me up into its thoughtless blue, in which nothing could possibly matter for very long.

There were other things to examine, too, during endless afternoons full of cicadas. Sunlight became a friend that could always surprise me, and the stones and bricks of the wall were endlessly interesting in the way they held the light or filled with shadow. There were times when sunlight could lie in just the right way along the side of a square of stone in the wall, and penetrate that hard stone so that it became transparent, so anyone could see that this was a living thing, too, a family of crystals that could catch the light when they chose and make it break up the way a diamond could.
Lil, they will not let you out if they
catch you talking to the blooming wall
, Jewel, who knew a thing or two, warned me when she was not being the Blessed Virgin Mary. But I had seen pictures of rows of people talking to a wall not unlike this one, serious men in hats and dark suits, and the sky that I had seen above that wall was of the same endlessly calming blue as this sky of ours, over our wall.
There is only one sky
, I reminded Jewel.
It is the
only thing we need only one of.
I could see that Jewel was about to become the Blessed Virgin Mary and would probably spend the evening in the vest, because the Blessed Virgin Mary always became upset at the way her halo was kept from her, and even the mistress of God had to be restrained sometimes from forcing a spoon down her own throat.

But I wanted Jewel to share what I felt about that blue, this sunlight, this stone, and asked her,
Can you think
of anything else, besides the sky, that we only need one of?
When she continued to blink and grimace in the way she did before becoming the Blessed Virgin Mary, I took her by the elbow and made her look at the stone.
Listen,
I told her.
They are speaking to us, do you hear?
But Jewel kicked at the wall so that crystals fell away, and was starting to grunt and pant with the stress of being the Blessed Virgin Mary.
It cannot be destroyed
, I told her, even though she was starting to shout, and become dangerously red in the face.
We can crush them, but they can never cease to be.
By this time they were coming across the grass with the vest and I picked up one or two crumbs of stone that lay on the ground and moved away with them in my hand, because there was nothing more I could do for anyone, be it Jewel or the Blessed Virgin Mary, if she did not want to be consoled by the endless life of things.