1976

(Season unknown) 1976

Falling.

Pain.

Sudden. Sharp. Shooting.

I lay on the floor and scream.

I only scream once. Then cry. I just lay and don’t try to get up. It’s morning. Mother comes in and grabs the neck of my pajamas, trying to pull me to a standing position but I can’t put weight on my knee. She’s angry and I’m crying.

The next memory is a hospital. I don’t remember what happened after the initial collapse. I know, … because I know, that it was uncaring, but somehow I’m in a waiting room.

There’s a lady there with her son. All his eyes are puffy from crying and she’s telling my mother what happened, but for the benefit of her son.

‘Well, it was a door. It was a very naughty door. He had his fingers in the hinge, and the naughty door closed and hurt him, didn’t it?’ She glanced at him and his sad face nodded. My mother plays along, blaming the naughty door so that he doesn’t feel bad. They’re protecting him. No one does that for me.

Next I’m alone. I’m lying on my back looking up at a bright light. It’s so bright and harsh that I can hardly keep my eyes open. There’s still pain in my knee but it’s lessened. I hear a female voice tell me to lay my leg flat on the table. I try, but the pain has locked it into position. Suddenly, a nurse materializes beside the table and harshly, without waring, pushes my leg flat.

There’s a burst of pain in my knee but I gasp, swallow it and stay silent or she’ll be mad. She’s brash, and no nonense and there is just… no point. My knee comes up slighly and the pain lessons but she pushes it down onto the table and there’s another burst of pain and I manage to stifle a cry. I know I can’t say anything. Even looking back, as an old man in a cheap restaurant in the tropics, sitting alone typing this with a back pillow for lumbar support and my leg elevated on the chair opposite me and the painkillers and turmeric already in my blood taking the edge of the same pains which are now everywhere, I know there was nothing I could have done, but back there I gritted my teeth silently and pushed my leg down onto the table and watch and bear and suffer the pain in silence.

Next. I’m looking at an xray on the screen. There’s a voice talking. I don’t think it’s the same woman. She’s speaking to my mother but it’s for my benefit.

‘Oh there’s nothing wrong. Look! He’s got strong bones! He’s so strong! He just wanted a day off school! Is that it? Did you want to have a little holiday? Did you think poorly little boys can stay at home playing? If you’re poorly, you can stay at home but you have to go straight to bed!’.

I turned from the xray and looked at her. She’s got a big, smiling expression, exagerated wide eyes in a look contrived for my benefit. The look that tells me how I am allowed to now respond. She thinks I’m going to be OK. She doesn’t know the consequences of what she is now saying to my mother. To me. She has no idea the harm she has done or what will happen to me now.

—

The rest of the memory is bizarre, to me now. Looking back, I’d been labeled a liar, a malingerer. I don’t know. The degree of uncaringness or calousness. I remember being at home in the lounge. I was crawling on all fours because of the pain in my knee; I wouldn’t put weight on it. I don’t know why I remember this detail, but mother was sitting at the table and I was crawling around playing. Clearly the pain had largely gone when no weight was put on it. I looked through the cupboards and found a giant peppergrinder. I know it’s a peppergrinder now, but I didn’t then and it was such a strange shape, all in wood and I couldn’t see what was in it so it’s function wasn’t obvious. I was so curious. I knew it was futile, but I showed it to her over at the table and asked,

‘What is this?’

She stared into space ignoring me. I asked a couple more times but she didn’t respond, just staring at the wall with bloodshot eyes. I know why now, but then, it was just the way things were.

A while later we were in the lounge. I remember the cold wind whistling through the fireplace. She was watching daytime TV. I (also bizarrely) remember the program. It was a group of women sitting around a lounge talking. Their conversation was interrupted by a doorbell and one of them got up and left the shot, and returned with someone who was introduced to the group and joined in the conversation. So it was set up to be like a chatshow but as if in a living room. But I didn’t know that. I thought there were people and their lives were TV shows and they sit around and chat and make food and seem happy. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t be like that, on TV, with people coming round and chatting and cooking things in the kitchen. In our kitchen it was a child’s dream in the way, just whole packs of chocolate biscuits and no rules, but someone cooking something seemed fun. The women were talking about being adopted, when each of them found out. I asked mother if I was adopted and she actually spoke, angrily, to say no.

I had a plastic cricket bat and ball. I put the ball on her lap and crawled over to the dining table, and asked her to roll the ball to me. I kept asking. I asked so many times she answered,

‘I don’t play’.

I asked for food. There were biscuits. I wanted canned soup, with toast.

Nothing. I asked a few times and realised I was sad and so crawled to the front door. I imagined I was starving and started crying. I got louder and louder on purpose, eventually wailing. I think I got into it so much it became an activity carried by it’s own energy and it continued until she burst through the door. I cried that I need soup! I’m dying!

She grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up off the floor, then punched me three times. The first blow hit me in the torso but I got a defensive arm up for the other two. She dropped me back to the floor – then stormed off back to the TV. I wailed hysterically, but not for long. I just lie silently on the floor. I was glad I wasn’t David Sanders from next door. His mother kicks; perhaps I’m lucky.

I stared at the front door. Through the blurred vision of my tears, I could see the small window, or rather boarded plywood where the window had been, before I’d kicked it through.

Insanely, that was a good memory. I hadn’t been in trouble. Auntie had come to visit one afternoon, one of the usual weekly visits, where she’d stay until past my bedtime and there was chocolate and she was someone who talked to me and read a story, while I felt safe.

One visit, she arrived and was settling into the lounge. But then she got up and walked outside and I asked where she was going, and she said home, and laughed. She had only just arrived and it felt like me whole world collapsed when she said it. I screamed, ‘Nooo!’ and the top of my voice and without a moments hesitation, kicked the window.

I watched the glass shatter and spread out before me like a giant wave of diamonds retreating into the sea. I stood on the threshhold and she was around ten meters away on the lawn with her eyes and mouth as open as they could go. Mother was inside somewhere, but not far.

I ran. My aunt was in her fifties, overweight, she had no chance. In an instant, I had the plan to go to Rita’s house, our neighbour, and hide on her property somewhere, but Auntie had no idea what I was doing. As far as she was concerned I was going to run and never stop.

‘Oh no! No! It’s OK! Don’t run.’

I stopped.

‘I’m just getting something from the car! It’s alright. I’m not going. Don’t run.’ She looked terrified… and remorseful. ‘It’s alright’.

A dark figure appeared on the threshhold, out the corner of my eye. I didn’t turn, but walked towards Auntie and she took my hand. She led me back to look down on the shattered glass. I looked up and she was shocked, then smiled a little bit.

‘What’s he done?’ a voice snarled.

‘It’s my fault. I told him I was going home.’ I looked up and she was laughing. I looked at Mother and she was angry, and I looked at Auntie and she was laughing, and holding my hand and I was safe.

Cut to a scene of my Mother staring at me and asking, ‘Why did you do it? Why?’.

She was kneeling down. I was on the sofa. I was lying on my back with my chin pressed into my chest in a position only a five year old would hold for any time. She kept asking me but I didn’t care. Auntie was next to me. Every time I looked at her she pulled a face, a pretend face of being scared, but smiling too. I was safe.

But that was then. Now it’s only a memory. Lying on the floor with my knee still dull and now the lingering sensation from the punches. I crawled into my brother’s bedroom, where the phone was, and called her.

She answered and I explained what had happened, now she’d hit me. I remeber she told me not to worry and it will be OK. I started crying again and mother must have heard. She came in.

‘Who are you talking to?’. She snatched the phone. She dismissed the events in a moment, then switched the conversation to some mundane thing, sat on my brother’s bed and I was again fully invisible as she got lost in a grown up conversation.

The last memory in this sequence is slowly walking across the loungue floor. There was a slight twinge with each step, but the pain was largely gone. I was happy and I said, ‘Look, it’s better.’

‘Right.’

This is all she said, got up, got the keys in one hand and the arm of my shirt, and pulled me outside to the car.

School.

I can’t remember, but looking back, I think I tried to fake it. There was something wrong and pain going forward, but that day I remember crawling around and no one caring. No teachers. No students, except Susan. Susan was morbidly obese and had a harelip and so no one would talk to her. She liked the thought that I was helpless and would need someone to take my work for marking and be helped out to the playground.

Maybe the harshnes was a good thing in some ways. Forty five years later, using a stick, unable to sleep in a bed or sit on anything other than a hard seat, dislocations, waisting, cant’ rise easily from a chair for twenty five years, muscles waisted from my face aging me like a horror film extra, constant pain pushing me to overdoses on painkillers that no one even knows about, two days spent lying on a floor in a desserted hotel in India, and in forty five years, two times I emerged from invisibility. Once, in the middle of the night, I was walking up a hill in Kep, Cambodia. I’d misjudged the distance on a map and was limping along and a policeman drew up. Initially I fliched a little at the uniform, but he was only asking if I needed something.

Another time, I was on a boat. It was quite an intrepid trip, crossing from north Thailand into China’s Yunnan province. Very few travelers entered that way. It was hard to even find out how to get on the boat as it was all arranged for the Chinese, on the Chinese side, for Chinese travellers. But there was some eccentric woman in a remote guesthouse in the middle of some tiny border village who had contacts. I’d already spoken to her to arrange it, and when I turned up, she had some kind of amnesia and couldn’t remember who I was, but then recalled me but accused me of not turning up when I was supposed to. As it was I had to spend a couple of days waiting for the next boat in some little wooden A frame hut on the edge of a jungle waiting for the boat.

I left in the morning, it was still dark and there was a group of young white girls also going. I had worried about the trip. My life then was a constant trip and I was constantly worried. Would I be able to manage things physically, would I be able to walk far enough until the pain started? My fears were confirmed when an old jeep pulled into the grassy opening at the front of the huts and the first challenge was actually being able to pull myself into it. There was a single plastic chair so I made a beeline towards it as, after a few decades, it isn’t just painful to sit on the floor but almost impossible. As I approached the jeep, the eccentric owner grabbed my clothes and pulled me back so the girls could get on first. This was normal. I wasn’t using a walking stick at that point, and my limp wasn’t pronounced – it was basically hidden. Thus my worst fears were realised. I was standing in the rear as it sped along the unpaved roads, every bump and rock driving jagged pieces of iron into my hips and knees.

By the time we got to the boat dock, I was barely standing, but unfortunately, still in my default existence of invisibility. The girls jumped out and started towards the gangplank.

I dropped to my knees and crawled to the edge of the platform, and swung my legs around, bracing for the pain that would be there as I put weight on my joints. Luckily the oblivious staff had taken my single bag and it was going up the gangplank. I remember we were rushed, not a good thing when you are stiff, but I managed to shuffle over and I don’t have so many memories of the trip. The main thing was that it took hours, which is good as time usually restores me. Activity brings my pain to a crescendo and when I stop, if I stop long enough, it will subside. It’s like being on a choppy sea but the waves are heaving and heavy, rather than choppy and fast.

I only have two memories of the trip. One is the lifejacket explanation and distribution: 100% in Mandarin and none provided for the few foreigners onboard. The other is how fast and manuverable the boat was, as we sped along, I would find Chinese people positioning themselves next to me and looking sheepish, and I’d realise their family was to the side taking pictures of thier family being ‘with’ a foreigner. At one point, a girl was seated beside me and when the cameras came out, I put my arm around her and it was like being surrounded by papparazi, everyone thanking me for the great shots afterwards.

None of it lasted. I returned to invisibility at arrival… or so I thought. The boat alighted at a concrete riverbank. It was cold, morning and misty. There was a flat platform we embarked on, and flights of stairs up to an immigration building, flights and flight and flights of stairs – and I was in the worst possible situation for me. I had previously exerted myself (fatigued muscles), then immobile in cramped conditions and it was now cold weather.

Everybody was excited. They were all bounding up the stairs with their stuff and I stiffly shuffled over to my bag which had been dumped in the middle of the platform, and, to keep the weight off my joints, I pulled it over to the first leg of steps.

By the time I managed it, most people were either near the top or already in the immigration building, only a few figures were still visible through the mist, like looking up into the sky itself.

Then from the swirling whiteness, a figure emerged, quickly descending the stairs, and my heart stopped. It was a uniformed official, olive green jacket with red Chinese flags on his shoulders and wide socialist style peaked military cap.

I’m conditioned to fear in these situation in a way that only brown skinned males from the UK can understand. I braced myself for a questioning, aggression or a dressing down, but that’s not for what actually happened.

He came straight up to me where I was standing impotently beside by bag, didn’t glance at me but took the strap from my hand, threw it over his shoulder, and bounded up all the stairs back into heaven, wordlessly and effortlessly. Maybe he floated up? I can’t remember. I just remember step, by step, by step, by step…

… this is literally all the help I have had. Back there at school, when the pain went and I thought I could play it up and gain favour and sympathy or advantage. The school system gave me me what I need to know, preparing me for the world, what will come. None of us are worth anything. None of us matter. There will be no help. And we grow strong under this harshness. I’m still strong because of it, in a little restaurant, with a back pillow and stick and paracetomal and just me sitting typing this on a bluetooth keyboard and feeling OK here and if I don’t later, I’ll either take a pill or I won’t. This is it. This is all there is.

And Susan, the social pariah, bringing me her food and taking my work to the desk to be marked. Maybe it’s better. Perhaps it steeled me to a self-reliance I would need for the rest of my life. It wasn’t only me. Other boys had it worse. Yes, the only black boy, Nigel…

I don’t remember the rest of that specific day. The whole institution, the Lower school, is a grey haze of cruelty. I do remember the first ever day. I was essentially ignored. The first indication I had that it wasnt’ going to be a normal day was mother driving into a carpark, walking me into a nursery, putting me in a seat and walking out and leaving me. That sounds bewildering, but even as a four year old, her going didn’t inspire panic in me. I recall there was some other boy there, that first day, who seemed to be having some kind of fit, completely screaming, rolling on the floor in existential agony. I remember his unkept, long curly hair and the staff kneeling beside him and trying to calm him.

The main thing that first day, and all the following days of the next five years, was the bordom. This was pre-school nursery, and so there wasn’t a set thing to do. I just wandered around a room aimlessly. There was a woman with an upside down empty washing up liquid bottle full of sand, suspended on a string. Under it was a piece of paper. She caught my eye, so I approached her. She took of the lid of the bottle and let it loose to swirl around and make a pattern as the sand went on the card below. After a few seconds, the spirals became just a growing heap of sand, so she put the lid back on, picked up the paper balancing the sand, and poured in back into the bottle where it had came. Then she leant back and did nothing, indicating it was over. Then it was back to just wandering around the room.

The break was wandering around the playground. I realised I only has one mitten, and I asked the staff and they said they don’t know about it. Some kid told me he’d seen it in the road and a car had ran over it. I had the image of it going under the wheel. I recalled the memory of Auntie giving it to me and I wanted to run away to her house. She lived far away in town, in what I called a sweet shop, from my child perspective, but really a newsagents. I did run away once.

We were in a corridor, and Mrs. Frost, my form teacher, was explaining some boring thing to the students. I drifted away and the headmaster said, ‘Is he with you?’, I guess as an act of passive aggression to her, suggesting she wasn’t watching the students. He left and she took it out at me by making me stand infront of the class while she screamed questions at me about the lesson, and I remember giving the answers and being quite sure they were the right answers but she just kept screaming at me as though they were wrong because the point wasn’t that I could even be right, the point was she felt aggrieved and wanted to take that emotion out on me and there was nothing I could do but be ‘wrong’. Really, that is the essense of schooling, to teach you the futility of resistence. It was further illustrated for me when, at lunch time, I simply left. I started the long journey to Aunties house. It would be about three kilometers. I think I got 500 meters until the headmaster, Mr. Care, drew up beside, me, opened the door and ordered me in.

I cried for the journey back, and he walked me as far as the playground, then let go of my hand and disappeared into his office.

I collapsed into complete despair, lying on my back and crying in total misery. A crowd of five year olds gathered around me speculating what was wrong. ‘He pooed himself.’ or ‘He’s sissy, he wants his Mummy’. I remeber a boy, even his name, Garath Turner, who wanted to be kind. As I lay there in tortured impotence which a circle of kids around me staring, he spun this story that I had ran away and Mr. Care had been racing the car around trying to catch me but could barely keep up as I raced away. He explained the climax excitedly, as Mr. Care had fought with me and barely been able to keep me in the car I was so wild. Now Mr. Care is crying in his office because I hit his face and he’s scared to come out.

Half a century ago. … Now I’m sitting in the tropics waiting for a fruit salad. Typing on a little ten dollar bluetooth keyboard. I’m smiling and there’s a sense of wanting to cry as well. I haven’t thought about it for fifty years in this way, that on that day, in that recollection of the total misery of that situation, surrounded with nothing but cruelty and harshness, I realised today there was that incredible little act of kindness from a five year old I barely knew.