Mouthing the Words (11 page)

“I’ll be a lawyer. I’ll be an animal rights lawyer so I can prosecute pharmaceutical companies that experiment on rabbits in order to manufacture that crap you
cake
on your face and produce those ridiculous silicone implants you’re taking such pride in. Or I’ll be a human rights lawyer and save children from parents who neglect and abuse them.” Corinna’s first reaction is to smack me across the face. Her second is to stand at arm’s length from me and look at me like I’m a stranger. Clearly, she is relieved to hear that I have chosen a profession.

—

That was it for me. Since I couldn’t be adopted myself; since I couldn’t seem to embrace a religion or a lover because that would involve ghastly deeds for which I was quite unprepared; since I couldn’t adopt a child, or a cause, or a nation, I became a lawyer, or rather, I adopted the idea of the profession. It would take me many many more years to actually become a lawyer. I still had all my madness to get through, after all, but at least the declaration was the start of something. While everybody was so preoccupied with their bodies—their breasts, their exotic dancing, their “bonking”—I would devote myself to logical arguments and Faustian bargains. Of course it didn’t occur to me then that as an anorexic I was probably the one most preoccupied with the body. I thought I had transcended my body by refusing to yield to its basal demands. I wasn’t really going to make much of a lawyer until I could come to terms with the fact that I inhabited both a mind and a body. At least if I focused my mind I’d inhabit something.

—

I worked extremely hard at law school. For the first year I was something of a fanatical student, undoubtedly annoying in the extreme to my fellow classmates, who probably dismissed me as a smarmy butt-kisser. I studied, I went to class, and I studied some more. I subsisted on black tea, Carr’s water crackers and Marmite, and slept with the curtains drawn and the windows open in the depth of winter to prevent myself getting any more than minimal sleep. I ran up and down staircases in a paranoid frenzy and I studied some more. In fact, I just assumed everybody else was doing the same. What else was there, after all, to do?

Losing my mind was one possibility. And I seemed to do that with alarming proficiency as well, although I didn’t know it was happening. I just thought I was too worried to sleep, too worried that I would fail, too worried about school work to leave the house, to answer the phone, or to eat. Everything in the outside world threatened to overtake me, to distract me from my new-found purpose in life. What was that purpose? I don’t really know. But I knew the outside world threatened to overtake it. To overtake me, to envelop me in its huge, twisting undertow.

I got to my classes by taxi. In a taxi I could sit alone in the back and strap my seat belt on and lock the doors. I shook all the way, looked around nervously once I got there, balked at the challenge of small talk. I could hear my classmates talking. See them talking
without
their lips moving. Their voices were alive in my head.

“Maybe she’s retarded.”

“I don’t know. Maybe her sister wrote her LSATS for her.”

“I don’t know. Something’s definitely wrong with her.”

“She probably just needs a good fuck.”

“Well, I’m not volunteering to do the dirty deed!”

“I can’t believe they ever let her in here.”

“Does she stutter?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never heard her talk.”

“Yeah, she makes weird noises.”

“Like a dog.”

“Or a cat in heat.”

“And she smells like piss.”

“Dirty.”

“Gross.”

“Who’d ever want to sleep with her?”

“No thank you.”

“I’d rather fuck my brother.”

“Don’t you anyway?”

“Ha ha.”

“We should get her drunk.”

“Rip off all her clothes.”

“See how many of us can fuck her.”

“Make her scream.”

My God, they were coming. Coming to get me. I
could
hear them coming, rushing like a wave, whispering along the hallway to my residence room, getting louder and louder, and I was sure that I had forgotten to lock the door but I was too afraid to get out of my bed to check. I pulled the sheet over my head, and I could feel them breathing down on top of me—all the men in my class crowding through the doorway and the women not far behind, shouting:

“There she is.”

“The little shrew.”

“You have no idea what’s coming.”

“Not even in your wildest dreams.”

And they ripped down the sheet over my face and exposed my skeletal body, trembling in its nightgown, and said, “Look at the delicate little leaf shaking in the wind / come meet your maker / look at the tree from which you came / look at this big tree / now suck it little girl / put this tree in your mouth and suck it,” and my mouth is full of the hard and smelly and I am choking, vomiting, and it is pushing, thrusting through my vomit and then another one, spreading my legs and pinning them down and shoving inside, the pain, the burning, the rip, the rupture. “God, she’s got a tight little cunt, no one’s ever been in here before,” and my whole body twisted, searing, flaming, flooded, flying, shrinking, inhaling, disappearing, up and up, away, floating, levitating, small, shrivelled, stick-like, watching. If only my eyes, if only I was blind, but the images are there, even when my eyes have turned inward, the
people
are still there. The people are rolling over my brain like they are writhing on a bed in hell, swimming in the blood in my head.

It is worse here, in my head. You don’t need eyes and ears to be here.

Thelma of Distinction

IT IS A
week after our exams. I am sure that I have failed. I am convinced I am stupid, have only the vaguest grasp, but I nevertheless drag myself to the law faculty on the day when our names, with pass or fail grades, will be posted.

There is a sea swirling around the board outside the Dean’s office. A sea of rapists and cheerleaders. But I am here because I have a purpose. I am here to read my name under failure and then I can kill myself in peace.

I feel the sea part. There is a strange hush as it parts to let me through. Faces of rapists and cheerleaders stare at me and whisper as I move toward the board. I see my name there. Alone, set apart. I have failed. The only one to fail. But above my name it says, “With Distinction.” Mine is the first name, and I am bewildered. I am perplexed. I run my fingertip over my
name
, mesmerized. Thelma Ann Barley. That’s me, I think. I am Thelma.

I feel an arm around my shoulder. “You deserve it, Thelma,” says a man’s voice. “Yeah, none of us could ever keep up with you,” says another. “Your dedication is truly inspiring.” I hear the Dean’s voice. But I am confused. That’s me. I am Thelma. I am Thelma of Distinction. I am crying now, confused, and the tears are streaming down my face, but God, they are stinging so much I am wincing and can no longer open my eyes. I hear a female voice, “Yeah, it must be pretty overwhelming,” but all I can do is scream:

“My eyes!”

—

It is a hospital. Evidently. You don’t need to be a lawyer to figure that much out. It is me, waking up in a bed, but I cannot move my hands, because they are strapped down with white canvas to the metal frame of the bed. It is a doctor; no, two; and a nurse, and the Dean of Law, and God forbid, my mother, and some other people who look official.

“And what’s your name?” asks a voice.

“That’s a question from the movies,” I mumble, and I hear my mother say with some embarrassment:

“Oh God. That’s Thelma all right.”

“Mum,” I moan, “just get over it. Things seem to be past the point where we need to be embarrassed.”

“She’s quite lucid,” says another voice.

“It would appear so,” I say. “In which case, what the hell am I doing here? I feel fine.”

“You don’t look fine, sweetheart,” says my mother.

“Well, my eyes hurt a little.”

“We’ve put some drops in them and applied antiseptic cream over the scratches on your cheeks. Your hands are tied down to prevent you from touching your eyes or doing any further damage to your face.”

“What’s wrong with my face?” I ask, scared now. Perhaps I have been in a terrible fire or a car accident and am permanently disfigured. Perhaps my mother has voluntarily offered me up for plastic surgery without my consent.

“You’ve really scratched it up,” a voice says.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “Who did this to me?”

“Well, evidence seems to suggest that you did this to yourself.”

“How? When?” I ask, unconvinced.

“Your face was covered in scratches when you came in to check the exam results this morning,” I hear the Dean say. “Your eyes were very swollen.”

“And then the stinging,” I remember. “I couldn’t believe my name was there. Was it my name there?”

“The one and only—”

“You seem to be having a marked reaction to stress, but we’d like to do some further assessment,” speaks one of the doctors.

“Can I still graduate even if I’m insane? Am I insane?”

The Dean says, “Provided it is your work, you can most certainly graduate. At the top of your class, in fact.”

“But what if it isn’t my work?”

He asks, “Do you have some concern that it isn’t?”

“Well, I mean, what if I am insane and it was the devil or something? Or what if I have a multiple personality disorder and it was some person other than Thelma?”

“Well, that sounds unlikely,” says the doctor.

“But I mean legally?” I ask the Dean, seriously concerned. “Legally, if it were some alter ego of mine and not actually Thelma who wrote the exam, could you really allow Thelma to pass?”

“Thelma,” interjects my mother. “Have you gone loopy?”

“Stay out of this, Corinna,” I chide. “I’m quite serious. I mean, in cases of criminal negligence where an alter ego is thought to have been the perpetrator, the body housing said alter ego is not necessarily convicted. On the basis of that precedent, if my work were to be deemed the product of an alter ego, I would not necessarily pass.”

“In light of that kind of reasoning, Thelma, I don’t care whether it was the devil within you who wrote that splendid exam. I would pass you with distinction,” says the Dean.

“But legally?” I persist.

“I don’t know exactly,” states the Dean, losing patience.

“But you’re the Dean!”

“Perhaps when you’re better, you can research it and tell me,” he says.

—

There seems to be a lot involved in this assessment. A lot of talking with a lot of different people, and a lot of waiting, and a lot of time wasted in between. I haven’t dared look at myself in a mirror—which is a good thing, because the mirrors here are buffed aluminum screwed into the wall, so it wouldn’t make a pretty sight even under the best circumstances.

This isn’t a psychiatric hospital, I have discovered, but the acute wing of a major hospital. Acute seems to be some code for people who have tried to kill themselves in the past twenty-four hours but have yet to awaken from comas or be assessed and sent off home or to psychiatric hospitals. Like purgatory for nutcases. At least that’s as much as I have deduced although no one is telling me a hell of a lot. I am pretty sure I have not tried to kill myself, but then so is the woman in the bed across from me shouting, “I just wanted to see if I could fly.” Sure, I do too sometimes, lady, but I do it from the safety of my own bed, not from ten storeys. Sometimes I am grateful for my imagination.

There are a lot of sick individuals here. Most of them are young women. Some of them are wheeling
IVs
down the hall and into the elevator and out onto the street to have a cigarette with their IV and a nurse, their gowns open at the back, flapping in the wind. Other people look like they’re never planning to leave their beds, some because they’re strapped in, others because they’ve broken their legs, still others because they are overcome by a pill-induced coma or because they simply don’t see any reason to move.

People are asking me about my eating and sleeping habits and I seem to be giving them the answers they want to hear, because they are smiling and writing everything down. They are developing a psychological profile, they tell me. And do I hear voices? Well, of course I do, but they’re usually coming out of a mouth attached to a face. And do I think people are out to get me? Well, sometimes—because I have good intuition and I’m usually right. And on we go, and I am relieved to learn that they don’t think I am capital I Insane, but they think I am reacting to stress and I’d be better off under observation for a week in a hospital.

It’s fine, really. It’s more peaceful than home and it’s not like the last place, where everybody looked all sick and purple-mouthed. I sleep through most of it and leave with a prescription for antidepressants and the name of a therapist and the advice that I take the summer off and relax. I am willing to try the antidepressants but I’m not interested in picking up any orange baseball bats or seeing some therapist who gets confused about whose father we’re talking about,
so
I leave the hospital and bin the piece of paper at the first opportunity.

“Do you think that’s wise?” asks Corinna, reaching her hand into the garbage can.

“Look, I don’t need that,” I assert. “I am perfectly fine. I just want to get on with my life,” I say, storming toward the car.

Jesus Blinks

I HAVE WON
a scholarship to Oxford to do an advanced degree in law. Willy calls me a brainiac and my mother says, “Don’t let this go to your head,” but secretly I know they are proud, if not somewhat amazed. I am excited about the prospect of going back to England because that’s where Heroin, Ginniger and Janawee are, having decided to return several years ago. I remember the message Heroin mimed at me one morning from behind the garden wall: we’re not leaving you, we’re simply going to live your lives. I am quite sure they have been busy leading the lives I was supposed to live had I not left. Surely I aborted a life in mid-sentence by being whisked away to Canada. Perhaps when I return I can pick up where I left off and lead the life of the clear and confident English woman I was meant to be.