the Papist rapist of my therapist … inna rape field … The syllables
form and reform in Camilla’s aching head as, unable to resist, she’s
dragged back into the hateful memory: the oily stems of the plants
she grabbed at as he dragged her by her ankles along the muddy
furrow – the putrescent smell of the drenched vegetation and
the still shittier stench of … my fear. I’m traumatised, she thinks.
That thing he did to me, he did, ooh … twenty years ago – and for
all of my adult life I’ve been t-t-t-traumatised, like when you hit
your head really hard and for a while the whole world’s ringing and
singing the painful vibration that’s you … Fivehunnredansevenyfree,
fivehunnredansevenyfaw … Which is why I’ve ended up like
this: vibrating in time to my son’s monotonous voice as he speaks
the distance … He’s a human milometer – or metronome, and I’m
shackled to his … pendulum. Shackled to it – and by extension to
his father, a man who’s so out of it on sedatives, hypnotics and
antipsychotics he can’t so much as put a hand on my knee – let
alone rape me … The Vauxhall rises and falls on undulating tarmac
waves – while Camilla, falling – falling – falling along the interminable
road, cannot wait to touch down in the sanctuary of their
Kilburn flat, where at last the shelving units piled up with her son’s
ever increasing stuff will shield her from this radioactive landscape,
and her memories, which burn brighter than ten thousand suns – he
got out a penknife, opened it quite casually – cut the hem of my dress and
tore it wide apart … Rolling and tumbling past the slip road to
another motorway services they can’t afford to stop at, Camilla
feels the fart swell more – then mutate into the familiar nagging
pain of her endo … endo … endometri– Fuck it! Woman’s trouble –
which is how her own mother had referred to the affliction sixhunnredanwun
times a day, as she’d squeaked about the house in
her … plastic knickers. Camilla – weighed down and wonky-donkey
that she is, with her autistic son in one straw pannier and his
schizophrenic father in the other – wishes she had one of those
hands-free earpieces so she could talk to the psychiatric grandaddy
of us all … She sees herself sitting at her trestle table in the bay
window, with the dustballs draggled into being by the long blackout
curtains tickling my ankles. She feels the handset pressed so hard
against her ear the cartilage crackles, and she hears herself going
onanon, recounting the deranged doodles and crazy shading of his
male line … Yet he never displays any impatience, my father-in-law –
which is how Camilla mostly thinks of Zack – unsurprisingly,
since their relationship is so often resolemnised, as they jointly make
their signatures, giving consent on the same miserable pro formas
which authorise this test or that futile intervention. He never
shows any irritation – and this, despite his own chaotic domestic
situation: an ageing man who has to wrangle small children of his
own – coordinating lackadaisical au pairs and rushing from hurried
consultations so he can do the schoolrun. And all because the lady
loves getting laid … An ague of hatred for her father-in-law’s errant
third wife, Charlie, grips Camilla – her hands grip and twist the
steering wheel, while through her sudden tearfall she sees this
threatening vision: Zack’s full and froggy features floating above
the middle lane. Keep two chevrons visible between vehicles and
phantoms, she says aloud, easing off on the accelerator, lest she
collide with … the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg. Yes, tomorrow morning
she’ll be at her table – and he’ll be sitting at the counter in the wellfitted
but forever-messy kitchen at Redington Road, spooning up
Cheerios as he listens to her serial woes … Recently, Camilla’s been
unable to prevent this relentless punning sixhunnredanthirtyayt
times a day – it’s become a sorta psychic tic what ticks all the boxes.
Zack has always urged her to view Mark’s wordsplurge as ebulliently
productive – but she’s been listening for years now and it’s tangled
of them are under the same roof – which is becoming increasingly
rare – Camilla still tries to understand. Mopping the dingy linoleum
– picking congealed porridge from a bowl as she receives
her sixunnredandthirtynineth warning of imminent alien invasion,
she’ll think, This is your life – and has been for over a decade
now. A decade during which Mark must have gone on and come off
his medication scores of times, so repeating the same sickening
cycle – the slump into silvery, salival somnolence, being the state of
her own mind, Camilla suspects, as much as his. Could it be that
she unconsciously wills him to stop taking the pills? Because at least
when he’s crazy … he’s alive. She and Zack share, she thinks, a
similar attitude, although in respect of different individuals: for her
father-in-law, while not exactly in denial about Ben, nonetheless
for a long time rubbished the idea there was anything much wrong
with his grandson. Then there’d been the birthday party: they
were living south of the river in the run-down council flat Mark
had been allocated after his last discharge from the Maudsley. She
remembers standing with Zack in the concrete trench of the balcony,
listening to the gasp of the heating system, but still hearing
his son’s schiz-scat. She recalls him saying, You’re a profoundly
unlucky young woman. You fell in love with my son during one
of his less, ah, disturbed periods – then fell pregnant. Now you’re
trying to cope with a highly active toddler and his disturbed father
at the same time – it’s hardly surprising you’re projecting some of
your own distress on to the child, so seeing his behaviour as pathological.
Frankly, Milla, I don’t think anyone would blame you
if you felt you had to choose between them. Meaning what? Send
Mark off to chemical concentration camp forever? Abandon the
man who’d touched her so gently – held her so tenderly, whispered
to her so … lovingly. Had it been Mark’s schizophrenia which had
made him such a demon lover? Falling into his arms –falling into the
abyss. His mouth on my mouth – his mouth on my … Falling down
to London AYSIXTYWUN, SKIPTON-ON-SWALE … My
guts falling out … of my fanny. A fallen woman, Camilla thinks,
that’s me. She glances over at Mark, slumped in the passenger seat,
angelic face distorted by his diabolic muttering: Whykaytooyouwant-mesixsixsicks?
Choose between them? How could Gramps’ve said
such a thing – yet he did, and lots more besides. Because he’d always
been sorta schizy too – full of warmth, affection and concern, but at
the same time coldly, clinically observing his grandson. And Ben
had been the terriblist toddler – a frenetic ball of blond curls and
brown stains … from the Marmite. Didn’
t matter how carefully she
hid it – he found it, got it open and smeared it … Mark does exhibit
some egregious stereotypies, Gramps had said, standing there in the
trench, peering through two layers of dirty glass at his son. Mark
would’ve been wearing a Power Rangers mask – which, he used
to say, shielded him from interstellar surveillance – while Zack’s
grandson wouldn’t keep his clothes on ‘til he was four, so ran around
annaround, naked except for an ugly tan biodegradable nappy.
Camilla sees her son as he was: hunched over his meticulously
lined-up toy cars and holding both hands, fingers spread and
fluttering, before his startling blue eyes … please fly away forever,
Peter – fuck off for good, Paul. He does it all the time, is what she
would’ve said to his grandfather … ‘cause I said it all the time: He
does it all the time – and if he isn’t doing that, he’s spinning round
annaround ‘til he’s so dizzy he falls over. Or else he’s pelting up and
down the hall – then charging into the kitchenette and banging
his head against the fridge – see? See? You can see the big dent
he’s made in it from here … Yes, you could see the dent from the
balcony – see it also from the AyWunEmm a decade later. See it,
and see as well meticulously lined up all those occasions when she’d
pleaded with Zack: You see that? You see what he’s doing now? See,
see, see! Sixhunnredanfawty times every bleeding day, or hour …
It’s been her fate, Camilla realises, to be compelled always to look at
her fidgeting, rocking and rolling son, while he never so much as
glances at her for a second! At Heath Hospital, shortly after Ben’s
bloody becoming – wrung out, a soiled dishcloth of a woman following
thirty hours of gas-tank-deflating and botched-epidural-inserting
labour – it’d been Zack she’d babbled to: H-He, w-won’t look
at me … Staring down at the baby’s whorl of mucus-lacquered
hair – Where? Where’d Mark been? Out of sight, and … out of his
mind. Tush now, Zack had said, or words to that effect: Tush now,
newborns don’t focus right away – it takes days, sometimes a week
or more for their eyes and their minds to fully connect … G’dunggg!
G’dungggg! Khhssshhhkkkkhhhhssschhhg’dunggg! ESTABLISHING
NETWORK CONNECTION … Who knows what this little
chap’s seeing right now? P’raps it’s some other reality altogether. But
when they do focus for the first time, it’s always on their mother’s
eyes. Little Ben will see you, Milla – and he’ll see that you’re seeing
him, see also that you’re focusing on other things, other people …
Camilla often didn’t have the froggiest what Frog-face was banging
on about … but I got that. Our bubble-worlds, her father-in-law had
speculated as he peered into her teary eyes, are so very delicate – so
easy to pop. Nevertheless, we pierce them thousands-upon-millions
of times … Pierce them, then sew them together with our sightlines.
That’s how we know what someone else is thinking about –
even before they speak … I was raped once – inna rape field. Around
this time of year – a flowery torture. He – he looked lovingly into my eyes
the entire time he was … punching me in the face. It’d been the middle
of the night when her son was born – Zack had taken a banana
from the bowl on the windowsill and held its up-curving and
sweetly-rotten-smelling prong against the cold black glass – he punched
me in the face, and kicked me … down there. Zack had said, Mummy
looks at the banana – baby thinks: She’s thinking about the banana.
The way they perceive the actual physical object may be radically
different – but the mental object they create together, by definition
… it’s the same thing. Bananas and babies, Milla – atom bombs
and Arthur Askey. Have you ever wondered how it is that the
world, in all its confusion and complexity, is nonethleless entirely
legible to us the moment we attempt to read it? From earliest infancy
our perception has this fluency – p’raps it’s because the world is a
book that’s been read by us before … A month or so later she’d
revisited this conversation – and asked Zack to write down what
he’d said so she could get to grips with it. He’d searched out a jotter
from his corduroy pocket, each page of which carried the same
exciting news about an ulcer drug, and set this down: Ultimately
perception isn’t individual but collective, and the world which
is its object is nothing more or less than the analogue of all those
myriad moments when we look into another’s eyes and see them
looking elsewhere — I’m gonna shit myself – we’ve got to stop! My
legs! are magically unscrewing from their threaded sockets, while
My ribs … Camilla lifts a hand from the juddery steering wheel,
clutches her breast … are popping one by one from their cage – until
there’s nothing to spare … only a jumbled slurry of bones and guts
rollin’ on down the road at sixhunnredanfiffyfive miles an hour. You
can stop, she commands her chanting son, ‘cause we’re gonna stop
– I’ve gotta go to the loo. But he goes on relentlessly enumerating –
just as the pile of persistence in the passenger seat keeps tossing his
word-salad: Machine stops – planesfallouttathesky … Squashed-peopledie
– death’n’destructioneverywhere … Eyewarned’em …
The signs charge towards them: WALSHFORD … washed up,
HUNSINGORE … hunting gore, WETHERBY – which sounds familiar
in a Northern accent: Where-there-bee, which also sounds like a
kazoo up yer ‘ooter, or buzz-buzz-buzzing about in your beehive
‘airdo spend! Spend! Spending! even though you ain’t got it. You go
swanning along the high street, underneath the striped awnings,
avoiding the bat-eared boys in cloth caps playing with the metal-hoop-type-thingies
from barrels. On their way up to Ma Peggotty’s
place: Get it inside you, boy, and y’ull be goin’ oop that hill as quick
as you coom down … Where-there-bee – wheaty-germ … Ben had
been Ay. Layt. De. Vel. O. Per. Not when it came to talking – that’d
come quickly enough … that’d come quickly enough … But he
wouldn’t read until Gramps had bought the seedee for him: Bobby
the buzz-buzz-buzz Bee and his Jollyphonics. Bring your Bee-Bee-Bat
and your Bee-Bee-Ball to the park. Little Ben, sat up on a
high stool, demonstrating dynamical movement and gesture as he
ham-ham-hammered away at the Bee-Bee-Bee-buttons helping him
to develop the ability to hear and discriminate the forty-two-letter
sounds in the English language. Little Ben, a strange smile on his
Marmite lips as he played upon his dee-dee-dee-drum. No Powder
Puff girls for Benny – no desire whatsoever to catch ’em all … His
only friends Bobby-the-Bee and his great pal, Phonic-the-computer
– his hands never still – always ay-ay-ay-agitated, ‘cause he’d got
ay-ay-ay-ants on my arm and they were causing me alarm … !
Where-there-bee … what? As the Vauxhall samb
as off the motorway
and on to the slip road, Camilla envisions Harold Shipman
lookalikes walking arm-in-arm with Myra Hindley doubles. Sees
their trowel-shaped beards and cold complacent eyes – sees them
munching on Eccles cakes and brushing crumbs from the lapels of
their waterproof jackets. Sees them laughing all the way to the
blood-bank – I haemorrhaged … And the worst part of it had been
I gorra lorra blood … the phonics rattle around in her head jo-lli-ly,
as the car rushes between vernal hedgerows. Camilla spies a lonely
phone booth … Hello? Hello? Where am I? Inna phone booth inna
rape field, which may be postcard pretty from a distance – but up
close it’s rotten and slimy, the oilseed rape – where I was raped. Did
I tell you about that, Doctor … Who? Yes – yes, she’d told him all
right – told him very early on, in the kitchen at Redington Road,
which was where Mark was staying the night he’d picked her up at
the poetry reading – a wild and wordy night of phonics and philthy
phucking – up the stairs, past the stained-glass windows, up my back
passage. Preferred it that way – felt less violated … Can’t’ve been
more than a fortnight later – Mark prob’ly upstairs in his childhood
bedroom slopping about in a tank of Stelazine, while he stared
sightlessly at the cut-out-and-keep posters still stuck to the walls:
sharks, Second World War aircraft, Cold War spying gadgetry.
Downstairs, over a bottle of plonk, Zack had probed Camilla, and
she’d thrown up right away: I was raped once … inna rape field …
an I s’pose you’re gonna tell me that explains everything … She
pictures him eating toast – he’s always eating toast. Hears this low
crumbling: Not everything – but some things … I’d imagine.
I mean, you realised very quickly, I think, that my son is “mentally
ill” … The quotation marks are always present when he uses
such terms, two crooked fingers shoved down the throat of the conversation
… Up he’d chucked: It’s purely speculation, but I’d imagine
you were drawn to him – albeit unconsciously – by this fact alone:
for him – for you – the worst has already happened … The Vauxhall
idles noisily at a pelican crossing, and Camilla hearkens to its
costly clatter – its nuts and bolts and cogs and cables are all my