Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [60]
Beneath the breeches, or perhaps the breech, as the garment must be called, having one leg and not two, was a stocking fastened at the knee, and a stout leather shoe on the bottom of the stocking.
The Creature had no beard, but wore in his single ear a single gold earring.
His other half was just as bizarre. This lady wore half a skirt, half a chemise and half a hat on her half of their head.
At her waist, or that portion of herself which would have been a waist, dangled a great bunch of keys. She wore no earrings but her hand, more slender than the other, had a ring on each finger.
The expression on either half of the face was disagreeable.
My own vicious disagreeable creature liked me writing The Battle of the Sun. She and I started talking. She said, ‘No wonder Deb left you – why would she want to be with you? Even your own mother gave you away. You are worthless. I am the only one who knows it but you are worthless.’
I wrote this in my notebook. I decided that I was only prepared to talk to this savage lunatic for an hour a day – and while we were walking. She never wanted to go for a walk, but I made her.
Her conversational style was recriminatory (blame, fault, accusation, demands, guilt). She was part Mrs Winterson, part Caliban. Her preferred responses were non sequiturs. If I said, ‘I want to talk about the coal-hole,’ she said, ‘You’d sleep with anybody, wouldn’t you?’ If I said, ‘Why were we so hopeless at school?’ she said, ‘I blame nylon knickers.’
Our conversations were like two people using phrasebooks to say things neither understands; you think you asked the way to the church, but it translates as ‘I need a safety pin for my hamster’.
It was mad – I said it was mad – but I was determined to go on with it. What made it possible was the sanity of the book in the mornings and the steadiness of gardening in the spring and summer evenings. Planting cabbages and beans is good for you. Creative work is good for you.
The afternoon madness session contained the oozing lunacy that had been everywhere. I noticed that I was no longer side-swiped and haunted. I was no longer being attacked by sweating terrors and unnamed fears.
Why didn’t I take myself and the creature to therapy? I did, but it didn’t work. The sessions felt false. I couldn’t tell the truth, and anyway, she wouldn’t come with me.
‘Get in the car …’ NO. ‘Get in the car …’ NO.
It was worse than having a toddler. She was a toddler, except that she was other ages too, because time doesn’t operate on the inside as it does on the outside. She was sometimes a baby. Sometimes she was seven, sometimes eleven, sometimes fifteen.
Whatever she was, she wasn’t going to therapy. ‘It’s a wank, it’s a wank, it’s a wank!’
I slammed the door. ‘Do you want to learn to eat with a knife and fork?’
I don’t know why I said that. She was feral.
So I went to therapy and she didn’t. Pointless.
It wasn’t all pointless though, because after therapy, in Oxford, I was always so fed up that I went to Blackwell’s bookshop, and down to the Norrington Room, looking at the psychoanalysis shelves. The Norrington Room is a serious place – designed for the university, and stocking every text on brain/mind/psyche/self.
I had been reading Jung since 1995 – I bought the whole hardback set. I already had the whole hardback set of Freud, and I had always read Mind Body Spirit stuff, because if you are raised on the Bible, you don’t just walk away, whatever anybody says.
Now, I was looking for something, and I found Neville Symington, a priest turned shrink, who had a simple direct style and was not afraid of talking about the spirit and the soul – not as religious experiences but as human experiences – that we are more than body and mind – and I think we are.
Symington helped, because I was getting well enough to want a framework in which to think about what was