Mouthing the Words (2 page)

—

I was born into a crowded room at St. Mary Abbot’s hospital, South Kensington, in 1968. Born in London into a month of nights and days only distinguishable from one another by degrees of grey. Born in a nation that regarded the delivery of new life as embarrassing and unseemly, that operated a National Health Service which viewed birth as a pathology necessitating a ten-day internment.

In Grade One, when I was given a fresh clean notebook in which to write something called “My Autobiography,” I wrote according to the certainty of the collective narrative: “I was born purple and dead. I was born in England,” as if to imply that birthplace determined birth state. In fact, as my mother describes
it
, it may well have. I did not burst forth into being. I was pumped into existence by a machine. Although I was the result of premature ejaculation, I was not overly excited about being released into the world.

There are no pictures of Corinna taken while she was pregnant. She was thin as a post and modelling for Debenhams when she discovered the speck within, and she viewed the assault upon her body as both career damaging and soul destroying. She was, however, able to take a certain amount of pride in concealing her pregnancy from the outside world. It was only when she was nine months pregnant and went down to the newsagent’s to buy ten Mars bars at a pop that the truth was revealed. A well-meaning comment from the shopkeeper produced a scream of “Oh my God, I’m pregnant!”, its echo still resounds throughout the streets of South Kensington.

Two weeks later I was reluctantly expelled—mangy and bawling in the bewildered arms of a woman utterly devastated by her demotion from model to mother. By the time Douglas came to visit, she weighed half a stone less than she had before she was pregnant.

“What can I bring you to eat, Corinna? What would you like to eat?” he asked her helplessly.

“What I’d like,” she told him, “is a little bit of chicken,” imagining something delicate and white, skinless, boneless, greaseless and divine.

He cooked her a chicken. Roasted it lathered in pork dripping and delivered it to her the next day in a
brown
paper bag. She took one look at the grease-stained bag and said meekly, “I’m sorry, Douglas, but I think you’ll have to take it away.” He wasn’t sure if she meant the chicken or the child.

Corinna came home to a house Puff had looked after. “Looked after” was apparently a euphemism for making fudge and leaving sticky marks on windows, or burning pots when cooking eggs for Douglas’s tea. Corinna was furious. As soon as she arrived she thrust baby Thelma into Puff’s arms and grabbed the Hoover for a mad vacuuming as Douglas and his mother stood backed against the wall in fearful amazement.

After that Corinna took to her bed, hating husbands and babies and humankind in general. If it were later in history, someone would have suggested postpartum depression as Corinna thought aloud her murderous thoughts. She dreamed of burying her baby in the back yard. She dreamed of a sunflower rising in the very spot, dreamed of being deceived by its beauty, of feeling regret that perhaps her child might have grown to be as striking and majestic as this flower. But then it turned its face toward her and its seeds began to spill on the ground as it cried out in an eerie, high-pitched wail, “Mummeeee!”

“Douglas!” Corinna screamed into the wicked night. “I can’t stand it anymore! Get rid of it!” The words reached his room at the end of the corridor and precipitated her departure the next day. She would stay
with
her sister Esmerelda in Edinburgh and would he please
do something
with the baby.

What he did, as he always did, was call his mother. He drove baby Thelma to Puff and Hugo the peacock farmer’s house in Gloucestershire. Puff was delighted by the opportunity to impose her underutilized parenting skills on her first grandchild. Hugo, however, was not nearly as pleased. “Rug rat,” he muttered as he dragged sawdust from the barn across the carpet, coming in for his tea. “What are you feeding it our good cream for?” he’d shout at Puff. “That’s like wasting roast beef on a bloody dog.”

Eight months later, Corinna returned (a changed woman as the collective narrative has it), bursting to reinstate her claim on motherhood. She declared that her transformation was due to finding, on her return to the farm of her in-laws, that baby Thelma, pale, thin and toothy, had been tied to the bannister. “Bawling like a banshee, she was,” Puff explained to Corinna, by way of justification.

But my mother, in her new-found maternal swell, defended, “It doesn’t matter what she was doing. You can’t just tie the bloody child to a bannister!”

“And a lot of nerve you have then, coming into my house and telling me how to look after the daughter you’ve gone and abandoned. Who’s been up with the child in the middle of the night all these months? You’re not fit to call yourself a mother!” my grandmother shouted.

“She’s my child and I’ve come to take her home,” my mother said, untangling me from the bannister and wrapping me in the wing of her coat.

—

Douglas had missed Corinna terribly. “Pussycat, we’ll do what we can,” he said. “We’ll find a nanny if we have to. Hire some help.” Much to his amazement, she replied, “I want another one. I’m afraid I’ve fucked this one up. Let’s try again.”

The truth was, her new-found maternal disposition had had its gestation elsewhere. In Edinburgh in fact, in the arms of a young solicitor with whom she’d had vigorous and indiscreet encounters for the better part of the last month. Her second birth would also appear to be premature. But this time she was ready, and baby Willy sprang forth according to script. Corinna leapt into motherhood with a vengeance. This baby would be different. It
was
different—the fruit of some undisclosed liaison, chosen, the affirmation of womanhood, the spawn of passion and secrets.

I was relegated thereafter to the realm of the rather inconvenient. But since my father lived in that realm too, I discovered an ally in him, and when I became two-legged and verbal, became useful to him as well. My job was to collect the chickens’ eggs and help with the feeding of the pigeons. I called our garden the farm, although it was simply a garden in which we kept a small coop. We had moved from London to a small village called Little Slaughter, off the Hog’s Back. We
had
moved there because my mother, being a rather spoiled daughter, asked Daddy for the down payment on a house. She was sick of the brown flat in London, sick of being reminded every day of lives she might otherwise be living as she wheeled Willy’s pram past shop windows full of glamorous mannequins. “I could have been like that,” she had sighed. Ah, to be thin, manicured and bloodless.

There were no shop windows in the village to remind her of anything but the grim present. In fact, there were no shops, no school or library, nor the faintest display of neighbourly goodwill toward the newly arrived family. There were seven small houses at the foot of a grand manor house and a tiny eleventh-century church. Ours was the smallest of the thatched cottages, shrouded in roses and wrapped in wisteria and so very very picture postcard English in my memory of it. But it was a house bought with Grandpa Harry’s new money and herein lay the problem with our reception. New money was bad enough, but this new money was not even our own.

We were ostracized. There must have been some official village decree stating that the neighbours’ children were not to play with me. My mother was terribly lonely without a soul in sight to be impressed by or adoring of her, so the task fell exclusively to Willy the cherub. My father drove the Mini to Guildford station every day and took the train into London where he had a job he described as “taking fat gits to lunch.”
These
he saturated with gin and tonics and then put on the train back to their wives in Hammersmith, leaving himself enough time for an hour’s kip in the park before making his way back to the ad agency. He hated every moment of it, as he frequently reminded us.

We all sought salvation through imaginary friends. Daddy’s was a secretary named Teresa. I knew, because sometimes he would come into my room at bedtime and say, “Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend we are at work, and I am your boss and you are my secretary named Teresa.” He’d sit on my bed and I would pretend that I was typing. I liked to do that—my fingers tickety-tacketing across an imaginary keyboard.

“And what does Teresa do when the boss comes into the room?” he’d ask me. “That’s right,” he’d say. “She closes her eyes and opens her mouth and the boss gives her a nice kiss.” And he’d stick his smoky tongue in my mouth and I would feel his bristly face. I didn’t like that part, but I liked most of the rest of being Teresa. Especially when Daddy gave me a tiny bottle of perfume and said, “This is what Teresa wears. Why don’t you put it on every night before Daddy comes to kiss you goodnight.”

My mother had Peter. Peter was the pretend man who called her on the phone. I knew, because the phone would ring, “ring ring,” and Mummy, still in her nightgown, would answer it and giggle low and wrap her arm around her waist and lean back in her chair and say, “Oh Peter.” One day she saw me looking at
her
quizzically and said, after she had hung up, “Thelma—haven’t you got anything better to do? You’ve got your imaginary friends, why don’t you go and play with Ginniger and leave me to play with mine?”

“Is Peter pretend?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she sighed. “Peter is pretend.” And I knew what she meant. Pretend people were secret people.

I did have “better things to do,” as a matter of fact. I had tea parties and burial ceremonies to attend. I had my imaginary friends—Ginniger, Janawee and Heroin, and Teddy and my favourite doll, Blondie, with the outrageous hair. It was my job to round up the silent troops, make sure their hair was brushed, and pour the tea. Little chairs were arranged around Bah the blue blanket, the table for the tiny tea service that soaked up its water and our conversations. Sometimes we played office.

A year later I was sitting in a waiting room by myself with some dolls I had never met before, waiting for Mummy to finish her doctor’s appointment. I said to Ginniger, “These dolls are naughty secretaries. And you know what that means. Help me tie them to the chairs, Ginniger.” We took off their knickers but there was no rope in the waiting room, so the best I could do was rip out some of their long hair with my teeth and tie them down with their own nylon fibres.

That night Daddy didn’t come to say goodnight. He was busy with Mummy downstairs in the kitchen, dodging flying plates. “You bastard!” she screamed.
“Where
the hell did she get the idea of naughty secretaries! What have you done to her?”

I hugged Teddy, and whispered to Heroin at the top of the stairs. “Oh no, Heroin, Mummy knows the secret. Do something.” Heroin, as silent and stoic as ever, motioned to me to climb on her back. She is my horse sometimes when we are afraid and she takes me galloping so hard and fast that the ground looks like a green river. She has thick heavy hooves that crush flowers and bad people and when I turn my head to look behind us I see trampled irises and squashed brains.

Not only did Mummy know about the secretaries, but so did a psychiatrist named Dr. Reginald Knowles who watched me play through the glass at the Guildford hospital. Corinna took me there after her sister Esmerelda had been to visit. I liked Esmerelda. She was bigger and softer than Mummy, and her voice was sweet and soothing. She cooked Willy and me crêpes with lemon and icing sugar when Mummy was in bed having a migraine. And then she asked me, “What would you like to do today?” I led her by the hand into the garden and introduced her to the pigeons. There were twelve of them, special ones with Elizabethan ruffs around their necks, each of them known to me by name. She said nice things like, “Well, she’s a pretty bird,” and I said, “How do you know it’s a girl?” and she answered, “Well, because it’s so pretty.”

“The girls are the ones with the tight fannies,” I
pointed
out to her, and then Auntie Esme said she felt a little flushed and could use a nice cup of tea.

In my bedroom she tried to squish herself into the chair that Janawee was already sitting in. “Oh no, Auntie Esme,” I winced. “That’s Janawee’s chair!” I saw Janawee sliding down under the threat of obliteration.

Auntie Esme said, “Sorry, petal, can I sit in that one?”

“Well, normally that’s where Heroin sits, but Heroin will sit here on Bah just for today.”

“And who else have we got here with us?” Auntie Esme asked with interest.

“Ginniger. And Teddy and Blondie. Janawee’s the baby so she doesn’t talk yet. She doesn’t even have any teeth yet. Heroin’s the biggest. She is bigger than me. And Ginniger is in the middle.”

Heroin was the biggest, the bravest, the most grownup. She slept apart from us in the cupboard under the staircase and she knew the alphabet and copied down letters meticulously in a blue-lined book with
MY NAME IS
… written on the cover. Heroin was teaching me the alphabet, although sometimes she lost patience with me and told me that I was too old to “behave like such a baby,” but usually she just nodded and shook her head without words.

Janawee really was the baby. She had shoulder-length blonde braids on either side of her head and a little pink flower of a mouth. She would only eat burnt toast with Marmite. She cried an awful lot because she
was
scared of almost everything and she was as small and fragile as a baby bird and slept nestled in my underarm at night because she was afraid of the ghoulies that lived under the bed. I was afraid of them too, and I would pull myself into a little ball so they couldn’t reach out and nibble my toes.

Ginniger was, well, just like me. Somewhere in the middle. Sometimes a mother to Teddy and Blondie and Janawee, sometimes Heroin’s baby girl, sometimes Daddy’s naughty secretary, sometimes his pet, sometimes Mummy’s little inconvenience, sometimes Daddy’s little helper, sometimes Willy’s sister, Auntie Esme’s petal, or Grannie Puff’s big girl now, but always rather moody and timid and quiet. She said very little and she rarely, if ever, laughed.