Somebody Somewhere (2 page)

Unlike Willie, Carol had been all that people wanted her to be: a
smiling, social imp who could hide the child who “should be put to death” or “sent to a home.” If Willie waged war with “the world,” Carol assumed she was part of it. Not knowing what a role was, Carol thought she was a self. With language echoed from storybook records, TV commercials, and stored conversations, Carol could buy my way through life, albeit recklessly and obliviously. She played every role from domestic prostitute to stand-up comedienne. She was obsessed with being treated like everyone else and compelled to play the role of the eternally adoptable. It took this cheery, living façade more than twenty years to learn that to “function” was not to “experience” and that to “appear” was not to “be.”

For my first three years I had moved freely within “my world,” observed incomprehensibly by “the world.” Progressively Donna was seen in smaller and smaller snapshots until there was no longer anything visible left of her.

My awakening to “the world” became the dawning of my own inner integration. I didn't need Willie and Carol anymore. I needed Donna. I said goodbye to the characters who had sustained me for so long and welcomed the me I wanted to know better.

Stuffed to the brim with second-hand clothes, my cardboard suitcase was heavy and ready to fall apart. One and a half years ago it had left Australia and traveled ten thousand miles with a me who wasn't yet me. It was about to do another round. I said goodbye to my tea chest and walked to the bus stop. I was lopsided with the weight. I got off the bus at the train station with my suitcase and guitar, and caught the train that I hoped would take me to Heathrow airport. The plane was due to leave at eleven
A
.
M
. and it wasn't going to wait for me.

My hand on the smooth, cool surface of the train window, I tapped the glass as the scenery sped by.
Tinkle
, said the sound of the glass in its own special way. I smiled, among familiar friends, thoughts of the thirty-hour trip to Australia ten thousand miles from both my body and my mind.

It was time to go back. It was just too easy to hide in a foreign
country, a person detached from the past. Europe had been my present and the turning point, freeing me to have a future as myself, but I could not hide in the womb of anonymity. I needed to return in order to have faith in my own strength. I could not fully trust in me until I saw that I could hold on to me in the face of entrenched expectation to be otherwise. Like the Indian who goes off into the wilderness to find out who he is and will be, to know his own strength of self, I would go back and face those who had tried to know me and those who had exploited the characters. I would go back to face and own the closeness I had run from, the anger I couldn't accept, the fear I had hidden behind laughter, and the sadness I had felt too vulnerable to acknowledge.

The guitar and I boarded the plane together. It had been a good friend and right now a friend was what I needed.

The plane took off and I wondered if I'd be there when Tim met me at the other end of this journey.

It had been four years since Tim and I had stumbled upon each other. He had fought harsh criticism during the four years he had spent trying to unbury the me he had only seen hints of. He hadn't known Carol and Willie by name—nobody had—but he had seen them sure enough. Tim had walked the boundaries between “my world” and “the world,” not quite “one of them” but also not quite like me, either. He knew what it was to live as a mirror, to become other people. He had known there were different “Donnas” but, most important, he had known there was only one real one…the one he could not hold on to…the one he had been able to touch, if only briefly, through music.

I was in the residential version of what the unemployed sometimes call “being between jobs.” I had no particular place to go. I was at home within myself now but still feeling no external place of belonging.

I had only been back in Australia for two months, but already my book and its prospective publication seemed as far away from me as the United Kingdom itself. I had come back because I needed to go
forward, and before fear and compulsion would let me walk free, I had to pick up the pieces of my twenty-five-year war. Those pieces were scattered everywhere at the feet of so-called friends, in the faces of so-called family, and in the bedrooms of so-called lovers. I had a “the world” dictionary of control disguised as caring, of lust disguised as love, of uselessness disguised as charitable martyrdom, and of cheap entertainment disguised as acceptance. I couldn't go forward with the old definitions. But to build new ones—
my
definitions—I would have to face the old ones and tell it like it was. I had to shatter the myths that had me tied in knots upon knots until my selfhood was immobile within a mental, emotional, physical, and social straitjacket.

Homelessness had always been a Carol mode. It was Carol who had made light of living in the black duffle coat she had nicknamed her “mobile home.” It was Carol who had sat casually at the train station watching the last train go before saying, “Oh damn. Missed the last one.” Me? I hadn't been there. I had been a stray cat that Carol had to find. Stray cats have no homes to miss.

Tap, tap
came a knocking of a tiny hand at the door as it got dark. Not even three feet tall, she stood there drenched as the rain continued to pour down. A hand was on the handle to let her in. “Leave It out there
,
” came the voice, referring to the child. “It went out there. It can fucking stay out there.”
Tap, tap
came the knocking at the door again. The adult's hand had moved away from the handle, too afraid to defy the voice and let It in. It went and sat under a tree in the company of the cat It had gone out to play with.

What the hell was I supposed to do with this feeling? I didn't even know what it was called. I needed something but couldn't find it because I didn't know what to look for. Where was Carol now, Carol of the cat-collecting?

“Hi, Don,” said Tim as I came through the arrival gate after getting off the plane. I caught the gentleness in his smile, smiled quickly, and
turned my eyes to the floor as I began to fade. It's okay, I said to myself, tuning in to the rhythm of my feet. At least I'm here.

It was easier to look at Tim before when I had been “dead” most of the time. Carol could have looked at him and laughed. Willie could have imparted his latest store of interesting information. But now I was very much alive. It was too much to share, but at least I was there. Tim wasn't a piece of walking slime. He didn't push or try to hug me. Look, I thought, I'm here. Tim smiled.

It was good to be at Tim's place in the country. I was among the familiar: the fence, the curve of the fields, the trees, the rock garden, the cottage windows, the huge mirror in the hallway, Tim, and the piano—all the same. Tim sat at the piano and began to play.

I told Tim about Carol and Willie and about the book. After so many years he was relieved to know his instincts had been right. Trying to make me stay present in company had been like trying to touch a fairy. I had forever “disappeared” at the first sign of acknowledgment. The directness of a compliment, the first inklings of spoken encouragement, killed me off each time as surely as if I'd been stung by a scorpion.

Tim and I stood silently in the kitchen as I handed him the copy of the manuscript. He disappeared into his room to read it. I disappeared into the spare room and traced the pattern of the patchwork quilt upon my bed.

I walked into Tim's bathroom and stood before the mirror. There was a gentle vulnerability and honesty in the face looking back. I could no longer see Carol within those eyes. There was no deadness, no manic smile, no head cocked cutely to the side, no “ideal child” photo pose. I saw me, and it moved me.

I could feel my own heartbeat and wanted to get in there with me where I would be safe and in company. “Take me home. Take me home,” I whispered mentally to the face that held the sense of belonging only found in such addictive familiarity. “It's too hard out here. It's all too hard out here,” I said desperately in the silence of my mind. I looked at the hands upon the familiar cold, flat, mirrored surface that I associated with “touching feelings.”

“Donna, do you want a drink?,” came a voice from the corridor. “Black tea, no milk, no sugar,” came the response from my mouth as I stood lost in the eyes of my reflection. It didn't matter a damn whether I liked tea or not.

Tim and I ran over the curves and jumped over the furrows of the fields. We smelled the different plants and hugged trees and fell into the branches and foliage that were their arms. Tim had spent five years waiting for me to join him in his world. Now he was trying to meet me in mine.

“Donna,” called Tim from the kitchen. We'd collected the colored foil wrappers from a box full of chocolates. I took some and smoothed them flat, laying them out in a repeating pattern. I was getting lost in the colors until I
was
the colors.

With a pair of scissors, Tim began to cut a wrapper into tiny strips and then tiny squares. I took my squares one by one, crimped them in the middle, and made bows out of them. My pile was getting smaller.

“What are you doing?” I asked, watching these shiny foil extensions of myself become disintegrated by Tim.

Tim got a jar, scrubbed the label off, and brought it over to the bench where the sparkly bits were. One of his big hands swept the bench clean, and the sparkly pieces of him and me fell together into the glass jar. He put the lid on this world under glass and shook it. The bits of him and me danced around and touched each other.

For my first three years I had moved freely within “my world” observed incomprehensibly by “the world” which moved around me. Progressively Donna was seen in smaller and smaller snapshots until there was no longer any freedom to be a self within the grasp of “the world.” In my teens the walls had cracked and I was back for a few silent “my world” months. But the walls had been patched up, not with bandages but with steel doors and solid concrete. At twenty-two I had met someone else like myself for the first time in my life. Without tools, I began to smash my way out with my bare hands but gave up. At twenty-five I had met another “my worlder” and I was
handed the tools. I attacked—with everything I had—the walls I had built so well.

In writing the autobiography, Willie, Carol, and I each began to become fully aware of who each of us was and what each of us had lived. A self must have a past. The book was the only place in which that past was strung together as a whole, but it was a start. We had foundations to build upon.

In the solitary confinement of a London flat, the entire story had been spewed onto paper in the course of four weeks. There had been no thought or planning. There was only obsession and compulsion that what was begun had to run its course. More than a book, it had been an exorcism. Writing it had been like a fever before the waking.

Words had attacked the pages, my fingers striking the keys of the plastic typewriter with such speed and ferocity that the manuscript felt like it was written in braille. There was little awareness of what was being written. It hadn't been rewritten, reviewed, or revised. The first awareness of the words came as they were read from each page. In four haunting weeks, Willie, Carol, and I came closer to living together simultaneously than we had in twenty-five years.

As we read the final manuscript we each laughed and cried and feared and burned with anger for parts of each other's lives we had been unable to control.

I
looked at Tim and wondered whether he would be part of a new future or whether we were somehow drinking a toast to the past. I was a bird newly freed from a cage. I had too much yet to discover and needed no reminders of a life before freedom—even at the cost of leaving my would-be rescuers behind.