This is a stream of conscious brain dump of ideas for my nanowrimo project. As all my future entries will be. It wont be coherent or even remotely polished. I don't even know why I'm putting this out there in public. Anyway, with that public service announcement out of the way, welcome to the tangled balls of string that is my mind.
I would be lying if I said Ray was my first. He's not even my second really. I feel like a building made of paper. I lack internal structure. I cannot hold myself upright and needed to figure out a way to stop me from blowing away in a stiff breeze. Also, I'm just really lonely. I've never been good at making friends. I'm not on any sort of spectrum or a serial killer or anything. I can't speak up. I'm too shy. People don't respect me. I don't get bullied or anything, I tend to just get ignored.
I went through a really tough time when I was a teenager. My parents got divorced after a very bitter and unhappy marriage. I didn't see my dad much afterwards as he made no effort to remain in contact with me. Drinking beer and vodka with his friends at the pub had always been his priority anyway.
My mum had always been wound extremely tightly. A doormat to anyone outside her immediate family, she was a raging tyrant to anyone within our four walls. She saw me as her best friend and confidant, a role no child should ever be forced into. Her mothering technique consisted of keeping us helpless by never teaching us anything or letting us touch anything because we would surely break it, then berating us for not knowing how to do anything. Threats of beatings were constantly used to get anything done or to keep us in line. Shouting and cruelty were all she knew. There was no love in her. My earliest vivid memory is being aged five and asking to help her set the table for lunch. I had only just started school, and put the knives on the left and the forks on the right instead of the other way round. A simple mistake, easily fixed, especially easily done considering I was left handed. A normal person would have pointed out the mistake for the child to fix. Not my mother!
She swooped down to my level and screamed in my face, 'NO, YOU STUPID LOOKING WHORE!'
For five year old me this was a real gut punch. I tried my best. I didn't know what a whore was but I knew it wasn't anything good. I stood there and looked over her left shoulder and gazed into the middle distance, letting my eyes slip out of focus. She was still shouting at me but I was concentrating on not crying. I never let anyone see me cry, I never have done and I don't know why. It feels like too great a show of vulnerability. I would always hide in my room and shed my tears there.
The strange thing was, I wasn't shocked by mum's outburst. I was taken aback, and I felt like a puppy being kicked. I couldn't remember it happening before but I knew it had. This wasn't new. This was normal. This is just how my life was going to be. I felt a huge weight of sadness, like drowning, like lying at the bottom of the sea.
This became my everyday. I didn't know it was wrong. I had a strong inkling. It didn't feel right. I felt scared all the time. I dreaded going home some days. Life was always exhausting.
When I got to about twelve or thirteen, on a subconscious level I had just had enough. It was so hard getting out of bed in the morning. I've never been a morning person, but getting out of bed became such an endeavour. Getting through a day of school was a titanic task. It was tiring beyond words. Physically, mentally, emotionally, I was just done. I couldn't do it any more.
I stopped going to school. Or rather, I stopped being able to go to school. I just couldn't do it. My mum started work at 8am so was out of the house as I was getting up in the morning. The thought of school was just too terrifying. The mental load was more than I could bear. I would curl up in a ball and watch daytime tv until mum got home from work at 2pm. This was the scary part, her finding out I hadn't gone to school again. Fortunately mum didn't care about my education. She had no education herself and had done nothing but minimum wage jobs her whole life. I had always done really well in school and it came easily to me. I wanted to go to university, something no one in my family had done before. Mum's priority was what people would think of her. She wanted people to think she wasn't a slut and that she was nice. That's all, anything else didn't matter.
During this time I developed a teenage crush on the bass player in a Scottish band. I wont say who because they are lame and I'm embarrassed by how shitty my taste was back then. I spent my pocket money on a limited edition of one of their singles that had four separate sleeves, one for each member of the band. I bought the one with Graeme the bass player. I would gaze at it tenderly and lovingly. One winter afternoon when I was absent from school mum was upstairs doing housework and I was in the living room listening to his band on the stereo. I got up and started slow dancing around the room with the imaginary figure of Graeme, carefully listening out for mum coming downstairs and catching me. She would mock me horribly and probably shout for no good reason.
I know this sounds like normal adolescent behaviour, developing crushes on popstars. Everybody does it. We all kiss posters and daydream about our idols. This felt like something bigger though. If I can pinpoint a moment things took a sinister turn for me this would be it.