Just Ignore Him

Later, I imagined that the past is not behind us at all, but unseen beneath our feet. We are supported by it as we walk, sometimes balanced, sometimes not, and if we tried we could reach below to grasp the person we once were. It might even be possible to pull them up to join us. Now I wonder if our past is always nearby, and our future too, and if we look carefully we can see both. But who wants to look carefully?

...I have set out to tell you the things you don't know about me, in the hope that, one day perhaps, you will feel able to tell someone what they don't know about you.

My answer was that a person who wants the victim to be quiet is on the side of the abuser. Mine wants me to be quiet, and all other abusers would also want me to be quiet, in case their victims take a lead from my speaking up and raise their hands and confide to their friends, and possibly to the police and realize the shame is not theirs to carry.

The upside for him was that my worsening reputation meant no one would believe me about anything else. He acted as if behaviour like mine (boy nicks thing) was beyond his comprehension. He’d never do anything wrong, upright citizen that he was, respectable, civilised and legally parked, he was in the privileged position of having absolute power in a world where racism, misogyny and in-house child molestation lay within the parameters of acceptability. If you queued properly, had a current tax disc in your car and always watched the Queen’s Speech at Christmas then you were exemplary (provided you were English).

Unfortunately the accumulation of physical objects doesn’t disperse bad memories.

Breaking free of my father’s strong psychological influence to tell the truth had been my struggle, made easier because of the feeling engendered in me by my close friends that I could, and would be believed.

This is the true inheritance tax of life. Behaviours and habits, ingrained, your own but not your own, a duty on your existence, a tariff to be levied on those who try to love you.

If everyone is asleep in bed and it’s dark and something happens, then that event is deemed to have taken place in The Middle Of The Night.

I looked up at the rack of magazines on the wall. There was a handsome man on the cover of one, smartly dressed in a shiny grey suit, striking a dynamic pose. It was an appealing image, but I didn’t want to be like him, I didn’t want a change of life. I’ve never not wanted to be me.

I have come to realise that no one sees the world quite the way you do. Even with a great deal of shared experience there is always a shift of a few degrees in perspective, and no one’s pain is ever the same as yours.

But who else would indulge you, smile at you and laugh on queue, for ten, twenty, thirty minutes or longer while you fool around in front of them? Only an audience member in a comedy club or your mum; no one else could stomach that degree of need.

There is a bright light generated by the love I feel for them and the love I witness between them and their mother, and it’s as if it shines in all directions, so there are no dark corners, even reaching back through the shadows of the past, illuminating more clearly than ever the wickedness I was subjected to and helping me to find the strength to have one last go at confronting it.

I don't see the point of leukaemia. Some diseases are using you as the host for a time and then they transfer to someone else, they survive that way, those pathogens, airborne or waterborne, jumping from person to person or cow to cow or rabbit to rabbit. But leukaemia just sets up a malfunction in you that you can't survive. Nothing grows or thrives except tiny cell-size tumours inside your bones. No one knows what causes it. It's a genetic mutation that occurs when you're making jam or putting your kids in the bath. The advice is: don't smoke and eat more vegetables. That's the best they can offer, even now in 2020, never mind 1972. My mother did not smoke and was in the greengrocer's almost daily. What a pointless thing it is. And people say they don't understand why there are wasps.

Taking this step might shift too many supporting pillars in my emotional infrastructure, which already resembled a makeshift shanty town put together after a hurricane, with psychological corrugated sheeting and unbalanced blue tarpaulins. It lacked stability but it held, some new life had grown up around it, there hadn’t been a storm for a while and I didn’t want my shack of feelings blown down, like a little pig’s in a fairy tale.

I’m just leaving actually and I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that.

I’d begun to assume he lived a lonely life and was starved of affection. It didn’t occur to me to think what my life was like, or what I might be missing.

Her relief flooded over me and, in the mysterious world of emotional alchemy, transformed inside me to joy. That is a memory of love, I know what love feels like, it feels like that.