The Memoirs of a Survivor

***

Things continued to be easier between Emily and me, because of my visit to her other home. I was able, for instance, to comment on her smeared face and swollen eyes one morning. She had not been to Gerald's place the day before, and showed no signs of going now. It was already midday and she had not dressed. She wore what she had slept in, a cotton shift — like garment that had once been a summer evening dress. She was on the floor, her arms around Hugo.

'I don't really see what I am doing there at all,' she said, and meant it as a question.

'I should have said you were doing everything there.'

She held her look steadily on me; she smiled — bitter, and not self-consciously so. 'Yes, but if I didn't, someone would.'

Now, this I did not expect: it was, if you like, too adult a thought. Even while I was privately commending her on it, I was also reacting with alarm, for the other side of this thought, its shadow, is dark indeed, and leads to every sort of listlessness and despair: it is often the first step, to be precise about it, towards suicide… at the very least, it is the most deadly of the energy-drainers.

But I sidestepped with: 'Very true. True for everyone of us. But that doesn't mean to say we can all stay in bed! But the thought in my mind is, why do you feel like this now? This moment. What triggered it off?'

She smiled — oh yes, she was very quick, very shrewd: 'Well I'm not going to cut my throat!' And then, in a complete switch of level, a plunge, she cried out: 'But if I did, what of it?'

'Is it Maureen?1 I asked. I could think of nothing else to offer.

My stupidity enabled her to check herself; she was back again, on her own level. She looked at me; she looked — oh, those looks, which I took one after another, light mocking blows. This one meant: Oh, a melodrama! He does not love me, he loves another!

'Maureen…' she let slip out of her, like a shrug, and did in fact shrug. But then, condescending, she allowed: 'It is not Maureen, actually, at this very minute it is June.'

And she waited and watched, with her little sour smile, for my 'What, nonsense, it can't be!'

'It's not right, is it?' she mimicked.

'But she's — how old?'

'Actually, she is eleven, but she says she is twelve.'

She was smiling now, and out of her own, her real philosophy: my energetic disapproval was feeding energy into her, and she even sat up and laughed. My tongue was rejecting, one after another, an assortment of verbalisations, not one of which, I knew, could earn anything less than mockery. Finally, she did mock me again with: 'Well, she can't get pregnant, that's something at least.'

I wasn't going to capitulate. 'All the same,' I said, 'it can't possibly be good for her.'

Her smile changed: it was a little sad, envious perhaps; it meant: You forget we are not in a position to afford your standards. We are not so fortunate remember?

Because of this smile, I stayed quiet, and then she said: 'You're thinking, Oh she's just a child, how wrong! — that sort of thing, but I'm thinking, June was my friend and now she isn't.'

And now I really was silenced. For what nonsense was this? If June was not a friend now, she would be in a week, when Gerald went on to one of the others. In one moment — and it seemed that this happened a dozen times a day — Emily had switched from a realm of sophistication far beyond me (making that word mean an acceptance, an understanding, of how things work) to being a child, really a child, and even as they used to be… I shrugged, leaving her to it. I could not help it, this switchbacking conversation had been too much for me.

Emily felt the shrug as a condemnation of her, and she cried out: 'I've never had anyone before, not anyone really close, like June.' And her face was turned away to hide a child's tears.

And that is how blind one can be about a thing. For I had been seeing the child June adoring the 'older woman', as was natural, and is a stage in every person's growth. I had never understood how much Emily depended on that thin sharp — faced waif, who not only looked three years younger, but was in a different realm altogether, as different as childhood is from young womanhood.

I could only offer: 'You know he will get tired of her and you will be friends again.'

She almost shrieked in her exasperation at my old-fashioned ways and thoughts: 'It is not a question of getting tired.'

'What then. Tell me.'

She looked at me, in her turn shrugged and said: 'Well, things are quite different, aren't they… he just has to — make the rounds, I suppose. Like a cat marking his territory.' And she laughed, a little, at the thought.

'Well, whatever your original and brilliant new customs are, the point is, June will be free quite soon, surely?'

'But I miss her now,' she wept, a little girl again, thumbs sweeping tears from her eyes; but up she jumped, and said, as an adult: 'Anyway, I have to go there, whether I like it or not.' and off she did go, red-eyed, miserable, full of a suppressed anger that showed in every movement. She went because her sense of duty would not let her do otherwise.

Behind my flowery wall was a straight-upstanding, a tall, fine, white-shining house. I looked at it from some way off, then came closer, noting that this was the first time I had approached a house from outside, instead of finding myself in side another building from the moment I crossed the mysterious frontier. It was a solid and well-kept house, in style rather like the Cape Dutch, whose every sober curve speaks of the burgher, the bourgeois. The house shone, with a peculiar soft glisten. It was made of a substance which was familiar in itself, but not when shaped into a house. I broke a piece off it and ate: sweet, dissolving on the tongue. A sugar house, like the one in fairy tales; or if not sugar, then the edible substance they once used to wrap bars of nougat. I kept breaking off bits and eating and tasting… it was compulsively edible, because it was unsatisfying, cloying: one could eat and eat and never be filled with this white insipidity. There was Emily, breaking off whole pieces of the roof and cramming them into her healthy mouth; there, too, was June, languidly picking and choosing. A fragment of wall, a piece of windowpane… we ate and ate our way into the house like termites, our stomachs laden but unsatisfied, unable to stop ourselves, but nauseated. Eating my way around a corner I saw a room in that region I knew was the 'personal'. I knew the room. A small room, with strong sunlight coming through the window. A stone floor, and a cot in the middle of it, and in the cot, a child, a small girl. Emily, absorbed, oblivious. She was eating — chocolate. No, excrement. She had opened her bowels into the freshness of the white bed and had taken handfuls of the stuff and smeared it everywhere with quick shrieks of triumph and joy. She had smeared it on sheets and blankets, over the wood of the cot, over herself, over her face and into her hair, and there she sat, a little monkey, thoughtfully tasting and digesting.

This scene — child, cot, sunlit room — diminished sharply, dwindled in the beam of my vision, and was whisked away to be replaced by the same scene made smaller, reduced by the necessity to diminish and so to contain pain; for suddenly there were heavy clanging steps on the stone, a loud angry voice, slaps, heavy breathing — there were low mutters and then exclamations of disgust, and the child yelling and screaming, first in anger, and then after an interval when she was half — drowned by the vigour with which she was scrubbed and swished about in a deep and over-hot bath, in despair. She wept in innocent despair, as the big woman snuffed and sniffed at her, to see if the stink of shit had been washed away but found (still, in spite of the too-hot water that had scalded and burned, in spite of the scrubbing which had left the fragile skin painful and red) a faint tainted odour, so that she had to keep on exclaiming in disgust and in fright. The mother was exclaiming over and over again in dislike of her; the child was sobbing with exhaustion. She was dumped down in a playpen, and her cot was taken out for a scrubbing and a disinfecting. Alone in her disgrace, she sobbed on and on.

A child crying. The miserable lost sound of incomprehension.

'You are a naughty girl, Emily, naughty, naughty, naughty disgusting, filthy, dirty, dirty, dirty dirty dirty dirty, a dirty girl Emily, you are a dirty naughty, oh disgusting, you are a filthy dirty dirty girl, Emily.'

I wandered looking for her in adjacent rooms, but never finding the right one, though I could hear Emily's misery sometimes very close. Often I knew her to be through a single wall: I could have touched her if there had not been a wall there. But, following that wall to its end, it led beyond the 'personal' and I was out on a bright green lawn or small field with summer trees standing about its edges. On the lawn was an egg. It was the size of a small house, but poised so lightly it moved in a breeze. Around this brilliant white egg, under a bright sky, moved Emily, her mother, and her father, and — this was as improbable an association of people as one could conceive — June too, close to Emily. There they strayed, contented in the sunlight, with the light breeze moving their clothes. They touched the egg. They stood back and looked at it. They smiled; they were altogether full of delight and pleasure. They laid their faces to the smooth healthy slope of the egg's surface, so that their cheeks could experience it; they smelled it; they gently rocked it with their fingertips. All this scene was large and light and pleasurable, was freedom — and from it I turned a corner sharp back to a narrow and dark passageway and the sound of a child's crying… of course I had been mistaken, she had not been behind that wall at all, there was another one, and I knew exactly where it was. I began to run, I ran, I had to reach her. I was conscious that I was also reluctant, for I was not looking forward to the moment when I, too, would smell that faint contaminating smell in her hair, her skin. I was setting myself a task as I ran: I was not to show my repugnance, as her mother had done with her sharply indrawn breath, a controlled retching, the muscles of her stomach convulsing again and again, her quivering dislike of the child communicating itself down through the arms which lifted Emily up and away from the scene of her pleasure, and dropped her sharp and punishing into the bath where the water, from the need for haste, was still cold, but where very hot water was flooding and the two streams of very hot and very cold water swirled all around her, scalding and freezing her legs and stomach. But I could not find her, I never did find her, and the crying went on and on and on, and I could hear it in the day, in my 'real' life.

I've said, I think, that when I was in one world — the region behind the flowery wall of my living-room, the ordinary logical time-dominated world of everyday did not exist; that when in my 'ordinary' life I forgot, and sometimes for days at a time, that the wall could open, had opened, would open again, and then I would simply move through into that other space. But now began a period when something of the flavour of the place behind the wall did continuously invade my real life. It was manifested at first in the sobbing of a child. Very faint, very distant. Sometimes inaudible, or nearly so, and my ears would strain after it and then lose it. It would begin again, and get quite loud, and even when I was perhaps talking to Emily herself, or standing at the window watching events outside. I heard the sobbing of a child, a child alone, disliked, repudiated; and at the same time, beside it, I could hear the complaint of the mother, the woman's plaint, and the two sounds went on side by side, theme and descant.

I sat listening. I sat by myself and listened. It was warm, over-warm; it was that hot final summer. There was often thunder, sudden dry storms; there was restlessness in the streets, the need to move… I would make little tasks for myself, because I had to move. I sat, or kept myself busy, and I listened. One morning Emily came in, all brisk and lively, and, seeing me at work setting plums on trays to dry, she joined me. She was wearing that morning a striped cotton shirt, and jeans. The shirt lacked a button at breast-level, and gaped, showing her already strong breasts. She looked tired, as well as full of energy; she had not yet bathed, and a smell of sex came from her. She was fulfilled and easy, a bit sad, but humorously so. She was, in short, a woman, and she sat smiling and wiping plums with slow easy movements, all the hungers, the drives and the needs pounded and hunted out of her, exorcised in the recent lovemaking. And all the time, that child was crying. I was looking at her; I was thinking as the elderly do, wrestling with time, the sheer cussedness of the thing — futilely (but they cannot help it), using the thought over and over again as a kind of measure or guideline: That was fourteen years ago, less, when you wept so painfully and for so long because of your incomprehension and because of your scalded buttocks and thighs and legs. Fourteen years for me is so short a time, it weighs so light in my scale: in yours, in your scale, it is everything, your whole life.

She, thinking of time, speaking of it as a girl was once expected to while she marked the slow overtaking of the milestones one by one into womanhood and freedom, said 'I'm coming up to fifteen,' because she had just passed her fourteenth birthday. She had said that only yesterday; she was capable of talking like that, even pertly and with a fling of her hair, like a 'young girl'. Meanwhile she had just come from lovemaking, and no girl's lovemaking at that.

All that morning I listened to the sobbing while I sat working with her. But Emily heard nothing, though I couldn't believe it.

'Can't you hear someone crying?' I asked, as casual as could be, while I was twisting and turning inwardly not to hear that miserable sound.

'No, can you?' And off she went to stand at the window, Hugo beside her. She was looking to see if Gerald had arrived yet. He had not. She went to bath, to dress; at the window she stood waiting — yes, he was just arriving. And now she would stand there a little longer, careful not to see him, so as to assert her independence, to emphasise this other life of hers with me. She would linger half an hour, an hour. She would even sit down again with her ugly yellow animal, fondling and teasing him. Her silence would grow tense, her stares out of the window more stylised: Girl at Window Oblivious of her Lover. Then her hand on the animal's head, stroking and patting, would forget him, would fall away. Gerald had seen her. He had noticed her not noticing him. He had turned away: unlike her, he genuinely did not care very much, or rather, he did care, but not at all in the same way. At any rate, now, this afternoon, June was there, and Maureen, a dozen other girls. And Emily could not bear it. She went, with a kiss for her Hugo. As for me I got the ritual: 'I'll just go out for a little if that is all right with you.'

And in a moment she was with them, her family, her tribe, her life. A striking-looking girl, with her dark hair flat on either side of a pale, too-earnest face, she was where Gerald was, who swaggered there with the knives in his belt, his whiskers, his strong brown arms. Good Lord, how many centuries had we overturned, how many long slow steps of man's upclimbing did Emily undo when she crossed from my flat to the life on the pavement! And what promise, what possibilities, what experiments, what variations on the human theme had been cancelled out! Watching, I fell into despair at the precariousness of every human attempt and effort, and I left the window. It was that afternoon I tried deliberately to reach behind the wall: I stood there a long time looking and waiting. The wall did not have light lying there now, was uniform, dull, blank. I went up and pressed my palms against it, and moved my hands all over it, feeling and sensing, trying everything to make the heavy solidity of the thing go down under the pressure of my will. It was nonsense, I knew that; it was never because of my, or anybody's, wanting when that wall went down and made a bridge or a door. But the interminable low sobbing, the miserable child, was driving me frantic, was depriving me of ordinary sense… yet by turning my head I could see her, a lusty young girl on the pavement, unsmiling perhaps, because of her in nate seriousness, but very far indeed from weeping. It was the child I wanted to pick up and kiss and soothe. And the child was so close, it was a question only of finding the right place on the wall to press, as in the old stories. A particular flower in the pattern, or a point found by counting just so many inches from here to there and then gently pushed… but of course, I knew there could be nothing in a deliberate attempt of the will. Yet I stood there all afternoon, and into the evening, as it darkened outside and the flares were lit on the pavement, showing the crowding masses eating, drinking, milling about in their clans and alliances. I let my palms move over the wall, slowly, inch by inch, but I did not find a way in that day, nor the next, I never did find that weeping child who remained there, sobbing hopelessly alone and disowned, and with long years in front of her to live through before time could put strength into her and set her free.

I never found Emily. But I did find… the thing is, what I did find was inevitable. I could have foreseen it. The finding had about it, had in it as its quintessence, the banality, the tedium, the smallness, the restriction, of that 'personal' dimension. What else could I find — unexpectedly, it goes without saying — when behind that wall I ran and ran along passages, along corridors, into rooms where I knew she must be but where she was not, until at last I found her: a blonde blue-eyed child, but the blue eyes were reddened and sullen with weeping. Who else could it possibly be but Emily's mother, the large carthorse woman, her tormentor, the world's image? It was not Emily I took up in my arms, and whose weeping I tried to shush. Up went the little arms, desperate for comfort, but they would be one day those great arms that had never been taught tenderness; the face, scarlet with need, was solaced at last into a pain-drained exhaustion as the fair little child collapsed, head on my shoulder, and the soft wisps of gold baby — hair came up dry and pretty as I rubbed the dank strands gently through my fingers, to absorb the sweat. A pretty, fair little girl, at last finding comfort in my arms… and who was it I saw at an earlier stage than the scene where a little girl joyously smeared the chocolate-brown faeces into her hair, her face, her bedding? For once, following a low sobbing, I walked into a room that was all white and clean and sterile, the nightmare colour of Emily's deprivation. A nursery. Whose? This was before a brother or sister had been born, for she was tiny, a baby, and alone. The mother was elsewhere, it was not time to feed. The baby was desperate with hunger. Need clawed in her belly, she was being eaten alive by the need for food. She yelled inside the thick smothering warmth; sweat scattered off her scarlet little face; she twisted her head to find a breast, a bottle, anything: she wanted liquid, warmth, food, comfort. She twisted and fought and screamed. And screamed — for time must pass before she was fed, the strict order of the regime said it must be so: nothing could move that obdurate woman there, who had set her own needs and her relation with her baby according to some timetable alien to them both, and who would obey it to the end. I knew I was seeing an incident that was repeated again and again in Emily's? her mother's? — early life. It was a continuing thing; had gone on, day after day, month after month. There had been a screaming and hungry, then a whimpering and sullen, baby, wanting the next meal which did not come, or if it did come, was not enough. There was something in that strong impervious woman which made this so, dictated it. Necessity. The strict laws of this small personal world. Heat. Hunger. A fighting of emotion. The hot red running of flames from a barred fireplace on white walls, white wool, white wood, white, white. The smell of sick rising from the wet that grated under the chin, the smell of wet heavy wool. And smallness, extreme smallness, weakness, a helplessness reaching out and crying for the little crumbs of food, freedom, variation of choice which were all that could reach this little hot place where the puppets jerk to their invisible strings.