What were you doing at Christmas in 2002? Can I take you back?
Nicole Kidman and Robbie Williams are at number one, with Something Stupid. The Twin Towers is out at the Cinema.
It is dark and wintery, I'm a student and I'm skint. Always, utterly, skint.
It was the time of year that I dreaded my sister calling on my Nokia 3210.
She ran an entertainment agency called Big Hand People. And so when her name appeared on my phone screen, I knew I had no choice but to say….
I surface in a river. The water is cold and clear. I am told I must wear a T-shirt at all times. Fine. I enjoy the iciness. I can feel the current around my waist. I am wearing a swimming mask that l have to push hard on my forehead to make it watertight. It leaves a red line when I take it off. I push it on and dive. This is what it must feel like to be a piece of ice in my father’s Vodka flowing down his throat.
We Fly oto Serve
I open the book and a hand comes out and grabs my throat. The book is full of gruesome black and white photographs, burning waxwork figures with faces dripping off, severed hands that crawl along the ground, lizard monsters that walk into swamps carrying unconscious victims. Each page is a delight to me. Cat people! A cyclops! Monstrous mouths! People are being chased, eaten, kissed and killed! Werewolves! Men in capes with their hands round throats. I LOVE IT.
My cheeks leave blood stains on the pillows of the couchette on the way home. We are handed over to Gloria and Mike at Victoria Station whilst it is still dark. At first, they take no notice. Then Gloria sees. Her dental training kicks in and she kneels and touches my cheek. She looks at my mother with fury.
These are deep scabs. Hair may never grow here. He will never shave. What did you do?
My father is in the doorway to my room. He is in shadow, light shines behind him and I see him swaying. He comes into my room and lifts back the duvet and gets in next to me. I punch him away. I tell him to stop. He is paralytically drunk. He weighs so much. He thinks he is in his room. I am not his wife. I scream at him. I kick him hard with all my strength.
Michael Jackson has arrived in my life, in the form of a cassette tape which has been posted to me by my mother. I am sitting on the end of my bed and being shocked by it. Not by him or his dazzling white suite, nor because he is black and I lived in very white Bournemouth, I am shocked because I haven’t thought about my mother in a while, and there, written on a card are the words.
Mon Cheri
Joyeuse Anniversaire.
Love Maman.
I get out of bed and place the cassette into the brand spanking new stereo stacking system (668/3746) that is next to it. I put headphones on over my bed hair, and sit cross legged, directly in front of the red light that shows what radio station you are on. I enjoy it when I look into that red light. I put my eye right up to it. It is one of the best things about it.
It is confusing, because as far as I can remember, it is a normal Saturday morning. My birthday isn't until August. Then I look at the post mark. It had been posted a year before. Mike and Gloria must have lost it I thought. Maybe when we all moved house.
Play.
‘Thriller’ begins with three electronic claps from a drum machine. Then a baseline so good it has people in their coffins tapping their toes. Then an optimistic shuffle of Marracas. A soft and utterly determined voice says ‘Wanna be starting something?’
Yes. I listen closely.
I climb into the stacking system through the tiny red door.
Did Michael just say ‘You’re a vegetable’? ‘You’re a vegetable’
He did? Why does he say that?
Maybe because he gets eaten by people.
Maybe it’s about disabled people.
My head starts nodding.
I want to be starting something. I do. What though?
The next track is shit. Sounds like a balad. Boring.
Baby Be Mine.
Fast Forward.
My sister would like this one. She lives down the corridor. She has a bigger room than mine. It has its own bathroom. She needs that space because she has a brace. She needs somewhere to keep all her dental paraphernalia. My sister’s teeth stick out like a rabbit, other than that she is utterly beautiful with long black hair and a mole in the same place as Marylin Monroe. There is a gap between her teeth that over the next three years gets pushed together like very slow lift doors. My mother has the same gap. Hers remains open. Despite losing custody of my sister and I, she refuses to leave the UK. She is holding the doors open.
I love my sister utterly. She is my protector, but I am jealous of my sister’s brace. It has a metal cage at the front which is linked to a head-cap with two tiny rubber bands. She has to put it on every night, all night. There are hundreds tiny rubber bands that that live in a box in front of a huge mirror they look like baby spiders coming out of an egg. I take one every single time I sneak in. What makes me jealous is the whole faff of the head brace. My sister’s teeth need a lot of attention. My teeth are straight. I do have a slight overbite, but the orthodontist isn’t interested in me.
It has been six years since my mother and father divorced. Every one is used to it. Mother once a fortnight and that’s what fortnight means. Except then suddenly it turns into a month and we have moved towns completely. We used to live in Richmond, now we live in Boscombe in a house on the clifftops. Boscombe is a well to-do suburb of Bournemouth. It has its own Victorian pier.
Boscombe is the sunniest place in Britain, but that’s not the reason we live there. We live there because my father, and my stepmother detest my mother. They define their relationship by being against my mother. Her crimes are huge.
She’s French.
They call her ‘Merdi Collette’.
It places a lead feeling in my belly I can’t understand.
Very early on after the divorce, during one of my fortnightly visits I ask to play with the feet of chicken that my mother is preparing for dinner. They seem like dinosaur feet to me. I walk them around the kitchen. When I get home and tell Mike and Gloria, they call her up and accuse her of voodoo.
Gloria and Mike are my stepmother and father.
After losing custody, my mother begs that my sister and I go to a French school in London for 3 years so we can learn French. So she can talk to us in her native language. One day, in the playground a nest falls from a tree. It contains an ‘Oeuf’. I run and get the teacher. Soon, 18 five-year-olds crowd round Madame Pott’s legs. We are all desperate for the baby chick in the egg to be okay. The teacher opens the egg, and we all see a bird foetus. We are sad. I tell it when I get home, and my mother’s status as evil French Sorceress is confirmed. How dare she make me see a foetus. I’m only 5!
I put my mother out of my mind between visits.
I close my eyes and tear off the receipt and run to see if there is anything on the shelf. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t. What you will read next is what is left in stock room of my early life.