This Be The Verse
This Be The Verse
“‘Things my mother never told me’ is the theme of this piece,” I announce to my aunt as she makes my meal, “which sometimes seems like the theme of my life.” She’s the elder sister of mater dear, and far more similar to me. “How to cook,” she suggests, grinning. “How to fail,” I respond, without a smile.
Let’s begin with the food. My mother’s a control freak, so obsessed with cleanliness and order that I’ve never been allowed in her kitchen (except to come in through the back door, scrubbing my hands and removing my invariably filthy shoes on the way). The proud possessor of a first class honours degree from Oxford University, I don’t know how to make a cup of tea, let alone cook myself a meal. The same goes for washing, drying, ironing and all your other general domestic rites, meaning I exist quite happily in squalor with a lot of burnt-edged holes in lovingly collected vintage clothes. It’s a bit like Medea killing the kids not to piss off Jason, but to keep Corinth clean. The only domestic advice I ever got came when I went to university and, giving me a knife to spread butter on my toast, she commented, pleased, on the sharpness of the blade. I wish she’d told me that she’d made the connection between my sole household implement and the freshest scars on my arms.
I wish she’d told me from the moment I went to school that children are cruel; that there would always be teenage boys shouting gratuitous abuse, abuse that, despite the evidence of the mirrors into which I constantly gaze, would make me feel ugly for the rest of my life. I wish she’d told me, when she collected me from my first, out-of-control university term, that having brief and unsuccessful affairs with every attractive boy in sight would never compensate for childhood slurs still raw in the mind. And I wish she’d told me that, no matter how many men I controlled, there would always be some I could never have. She didn’t tell me I’d be sitting here thinking about the first boy in four years to resist my sneakily feminine wiles, a boy with artfully ruffled hair and thick silver around his wrists, a man whose unutterable beauty takes him, even when he’s sitting by my side, a million miles away.
She didn’t tell me, with the authority only mothers, seemingly psychic, have, what I already knew – that some people are simply supramundane, a physical manifestation of the nebulous perfection we all seek, irrevocably out of reach. She didn’t tell me that romantic love is a bourgeois fiction of which, as Sarah Jessica Parker once mused, no good can come; she didn’t tell me, although she knew, that the only man I ever loved would inevitably break my heart. She never told me, despite their happy marriage, how jealous she was of my excessive devotion to my dad, instead letting it fester and leaving me to interpret it as futile spite – which, of course, only made me cling to him the more. More importantly, my mother didn’t tell me that there always are, or always should be, men who can’t have you. That, in an extremist, the schoolgirl desire to please would be perverted into a drunken betrayal of dignity, a drink-obliterated incident with an American stranger in Italy and a blood test for HIV. And if she can’t tell me these things, I certainly can’t tell her.
Most of all, though, I wish she’d told me how to fail. The first time I applied to the dreaming spires, I didn’t get in; seeing me suicidal and numb, friends suggested that my mother should have told me it was possible for even the highest achiever to screw things up. When she attempted to throw me out of the house at 14, for not spending enough hours a day honing a somewhat prodigal talent for the piano, she didn’t tell me why; despite my reservations and doubts and sheer teenage bloodymindedness, the only reason she gave was “because I said so”. She didn’t tell me that self-discipline was the point, which I didn’t learn until my final four months at Oxford and the eleven hours’ work a day then necessary in order to pass. I wish she’d told me that drinking more than the occasional glass of wine was okay, so I wouldn’t have gone from teetotaller to binge drinker one fateful day in LA when I was 17, trying to escape the influence that makes me more like her every day. I wish she’d told me everything she told my brother, four years younger to the day, after seeing me get it all wrong. I wish she’d told me that, sometimes, everyone has to fail.
Of course, there were things my mother couldn’t have told me, that I had to figure out for myself. That an adolescent obsession with the Manic Street Preachers and Sylvia Plath would develop into a lifelong struggle to claw myself back from the void, into an almost unbearable awareness of the slow-burning grief of living. With a sharp but tragically uneducated mind, she could only tell me that she was scared I’d never be happy; she couldn’t have articulated how difficult I would find it, with an aggressively abstract intelligence, to function in a superficial world, one which censures you for reading Ian Brady’s book on a Mancunian bus, which can’t pronounce Heidegger, which looks at you oddly for doing The Times’ crossword in a hip-hop club. How difficult I’d find it to accept that other people might baulk at my clear superiority, my Freudian belief that most humans are “trash”, and, outrageously, dare to complain. There are many things my mother never told me; some because she didn’t want me to face their pain, and others because I had to discover them alone. But some, the most important ones, she couldn’t tell me. Because she didn’t know herself.
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
The way I feel today - 10 July 2004
Just seventeen - 17 March 2004
Roads to freedom - 25 February 2004
Confessions of a failed self-harmer - 25 February 2004
Manchester, united - 25 February 2004