The Dark Threads (10 page)

Cold, black tunnel days. Days when I slept my time away. Days when a soul-aching darkness engulfed me and sucked me into a void. And days when I switched on to ‘automatic pilot' behaving like a zombie that had been programmed to make ‘appropriate' responses. There were times when I feared I might make a crash landing and break into pieces that would be scraped up from the ground, bottled, corked, labelled and stored away in High Royds where nobody would notice that somewhere pushed down underneath a drugged haze there was a real person; somewhere there was JEAN.

Often my ‘automatic pilot' didn't work properly, allowing my old questions and confusion to infiltrate, such as when I was dancing with mock carefree abandon at a disco one weekend and found I couldn't turn off the question: What kind of life
do
I want? I only knew what I did
not
want. I did not want the TV and bingo life of my parents. I did not want the life of the other teenagers in this place. And I definitely did not want the kind of life I was living. If this was all there was, then why bother to breathe?

It was two in the morning and I hated his kisses. I pulled away and pushed through the crowd of sweaty bodies to the edge of the dance floor. The heat was stifling and my throat felt sore with the cigarette smoke which clouded the place.

I leant against the cold, stone wall near where a long-haired, bearded youth, wearing torn blue jeans and a T-shirt displaying a big ‘Free Love' badge, was lying on the floor dead to the world. I watched his long, matted hair change colour in the flashing lights – now green, now orange, now purple – and I wondered if he was happy. I was always wondering that. I could not accept that I alone was acting and that other people were happy with this farce called life.

Those feelings of despair again … I felt like a prisoner longing for a glimpse of the sun.

‘I don't belong here. I can't bear this life. Lord, get me out of this, help me please.' No answer. Nothing. Just lights flashing in darkness and a young woman scantily dressed in a leopard skin dancing in a cage above a platform where a shaggy-haired, guitar-twanging pop group were belting out something about ‘lurrrve' to a hot, sticky mass of gyrating bodies on the dance floor.

‘Wanna dance?'

Our bodies moved to the rhythm of the music. His lips pressed against mine and I felt his tongue in my mouth as his hands wandered over my body. ‘Lord, help me,' I was still praying. ‘I can't live this way.' But I was kissing him too.

‘Great place this, ain't it?' he said.

I nodded.

‘Enjoying yourself?'

‘Yeah, sure,' I lied.

‘Wanna drink?'

I downed it quickly. A double vodka this time. Drinks helped me to act. I was a pretty good actress by now but I wanted out. I was sick to death and wanted to quit the whole damn show. But I didn't know how. What else was there?

He slid his hand up my leg under my mini-skirt and fumbled about. At first I made some feeble attempt to push him away so that I could cling to some shreds of self-respect, but I was so tired; I didn't even know what I was supposed to be fighting against any more. I remembered Mr Roberts, Youth Leader at church, saying ‘It's easiest just to go along with the crowd. After all, a dead fish floats downstream.' But nobody had ever told me that dying fish cry and ache and hurt deep down inside as they feel themselves losing the battle to muster enough strength to turn and swim against the tide.

We sat on the floor near the wall and I leant against his shoulder. Stoned on a mixture of drink and medication, I kept drifting in and out of sleep but I was aware of his hand under my blouse and I kept waking when he squeezed my breast so hard that it hurt.

‘Let's dance again,' I said, disentangling myself from him and pulling him to his feet.

I tottered towards the dance floor, feeling as if I was walking in a dream and nothing was real. Pop records were belting out and I managed to give myself up to the noisy music and wild disco-dancing, my waist-length hair flying about in all directions.

How long can a person go on separating their real feelings from their actions? Acting, pretending. Knowing full well it can only be leading to self-destruction. Being vividly aware of something does not always shed light on the solution, and I could see no way out, didn't know what I should be doing and felt utterly lost and confused about life. So the show went on.

And there was my family situation too. Tap. Tap. Tap.

‘Shut up, Brian.' A foolish grin. More taps. Coins now: that infernal clinking sound. Prods. Digs. Mustn't lose my temper, it would only worsen the situation. Pretend I don't care. Pretend to be reading a magazine. Hum a tune as if happy. Yes, I could carry it off. I was awfully good at pretending with all the practice I'd had. But still the clinking, the tapping, the silly talking. Why? For God's sake, why?

‘Bloody shut up!' I exploded, finally allowing my bottled-up feelings an outlet.

‘Now cut that language out, Jean. If you can't control your tongue, you can't control anything,' Mum said.

More clinking. Louder and louder.

‘If he doesn't bloody shut up I'll kill him!' I shouted.

‘Take your pills,' Mum said, handing the bottle to me.

‘Yeah, take your pills, Jean,' Brian said with a grin.

‘I don't want them. It's you lot who's sick.'

‘Nobody in this family has been in a mental hospital except for you, so don't insult us,' Mum said indignantly. ‘Take your pills and go to bed.'

Well, there was some temptation to do that anyway. So I swallowed several pills and went to bed.

Oblivion. Peace of sorts. Until I awoke …

Bright light hurting my eyes. Sunshine. Daytime? It must be. The sound of an ice-cream van. Children playing outside. More sleep. Darkness. Middle of the night now. More sleep. More pills. Pills and sleep and day and night all mixed together in darkness and confusion. A living death. I used to be happy once. I think I did. What went wrong? Jesus, am I sad or bad or mad?

Church bells ringing. It must be Sunday. Memories of childhood Sundays and childhood schooldays. Shifting myself up into a sitting position I slumped forwards with head in hands before crawling groggily out of bed. I washed my face, put on my old jeans with a crumpled T-shirt, hungrily devoured several slices of toast and gulped down a mug of strong coffee. Then, still feeling like death, I went outside to roam the streets searching for I knew not what. My lost childhood perhaps.

I wandered into the playground of Drake Street Junior School and peeped through the window of my old classroom. How small those desks and chairs were. I pictured a classroom scene from years ago. Christmas in the late 1950s. Bright coloured balloons and paper chains decking the walls. Sylvia and I, aged about eight or nine, sitting there at that desk in the front row, eyes and minds agog as our teacher, Mr Hales, read extracts from
A Christmas Carol
. And I remembered how vividly I'd imagined Scrooge peeping through the window into his old classroom, looking with wistful longing at the child he had once been. Today I was the person looking through the window with the Ghost of Christmas Past at my shoulder.

Before leaving the schoolyard I went to look at the toilets with their funny low pots. Had they
always
been so small? I wandered back out of the old school gates and down the road, stopping outside the Salvation Army to listen to the singing.

I crept inside the Army hall and sat on the end of the back row, remembering a time long ago when life, including religion, was simple. And then back home to more pills, more sleep.

LOOKING BACK 2

T
HE MAN WITH SLICKED-BACK
, greasy hair was up to no good. You could tell that by the way he leered at the woman in the white cardigan. She was strolling along the quiet, leafy footpath. A twig cracked under his foot. ‘Behind the tree,' I whispered, to warn her. Nervous glances over her shoulder. He quickened his pace. His hand reached down into his overcoat pocket. Close behind her now. I strained my eyes to see what he was twisting around his fingers. A piece of rope. And then…

Blackness.

‘
Oh, blow! Where's me purse?' Mum said.

We stared in dismay at a tiny, fading spot of light in the centre of a black screen. ‘I told yer to check the meter before it started,' Dad said.

Mum groped her way out of the room to feed the hungry electricity meter. By the time the telly came back on, the credits were going up. This happened often. Without warning, we'd be plunged into darkness at the part in the late-night thriller where the heroine was about to be strangled, the goody was about to be shot or the snake was slithering up the leg of the cot. ‘We've gotta make sure the meter's full before we start watching owt,' one of us would say.

Apart from those late-night horror films, I loved watching Robin Hood starring Richard Greene. Another favourite was Popeye the Sailor Man who could suddenly turn from a weedy wimp into a fearsome fighter of bullies just by eating a tin of spinach. I pestered Mum to buy me spinach, something I'd never heard of before.

Madras Street had been demolished as part of a slum clearance plan when I was seven. We'd moved to 40 Spring View, a house on a recently-built council estate. Our new house had no play room, no red velvet curtains and no big garden with that clear-blue paddling pool of my dreams. But we had got an indoor toilet, a bathroom, and electric lights. Better still, Brian and I had separate bedrooms. And then we got the telly. We had become posh.

I made f
ive ‘best' friends in my new class at school: Shirley, Sylvia, Carrie, Julia and Jackie. All of us, except Jackie, lived in Spring View, so I always had someone to play with.

My friends and I would set off early in the morning on Saturdays or school holidays, carrying jam sandwiches wrapped in paper and wearing plastic water containers round our necks. We walked miles down Wagon Lane, a pebbly dirt track, leading to swampy pools, stretches of wasteland and a wood; an area we called Rainbow Land. Unaware of the real dangers of such a lonely place, our imagination transformed the area into a perilous jungle, an enchanted forest or an island in paradise.

Mum had a full-time job in a mill now and Dad still worked on the buses, while I enjoyed school holidays unsupervised from an early age. Three of my friends were in one-parent families with a working parent. The way we roamed freely must seem strange today but it wasn't unusual for a lot of children then. We didn't have watches and often only knew it was time to head back home when we became tired and hungry.

The pockets of my old blue jeans bulged with tubes of fruit gums, Swizzels, and the like, as we strolled down Wagon Lane. My friends, too, had knobbly bits caused by pockets full of sweets bought after saving up spending money. We shared them out to get a good mixture. ‘A green fruit gum for a pink loveheart? Not a black fruit gum; they're worth at least three lovehearts.' ‘Only a few Swizzels for a gobstopper? No, get lost!' ‘Oh come on, Carrie, one of my flying saucers with sherbet inside has to be worth more than a lemon Opal Fruit.' (Even our squabbles were fun.)

Jeans or shorts with bright-coloured T-shirts, and grey plimsolls that had started life white, were my typical Rainbow Land clothes. A casual green corduroy jacket sufficed for the cooler days of which there seemed only a few. It never rained there. No, that can't be true. Wasn't that the place where the biggest and best rainbow I'd ever seen in my life decorated the sky? It must have rained. I can't remember.

From the ages of about eight to twelve, we spent long summer days in Rainbow Land. We rarely saw anyone else there. This was our place where we were free to live and grow. We climbed trees, drew pictures, sang, danced, wrote stories and poems. We also wrote plays which we acted out. And we couldn't have been happier feasting on delicacies at some picturesque beauty spot than we were, sitting among weeds, eating jam sandwiches.

One sunny day in Rainbow Land, I was sitting with Carrie under the outspread branches of a great oak tree. We were both aged nine. She looked up from the picture she was sketching and asked, ‘D'yer have a secret dream, Jean, summat you most wanna do when you grow up?'

‘
Tell me yours and I'll tell you mine,' I said.

‘
OK. But promise not to laugh.'

‘
I won't laugh, cross me heart.'

We lay on our backs in the long grass. The sun was making moving criss-cross patterns through the leaves on our arms and legs. I shut my eyes and could still see them.

‘
I wanna go to Art School when I grow up,' Carrie said. ‘I showed Dad some of me pictures yesterday and he said they're good. He said maybe I'll be able to go to Art School.'

I rolled on to my stomach and picked at the grass. ‘When I grow up I wanna be an author. I mean a proper one, and get stories and books published.'

‘
We could do it together. You write the stories and I'll draw the pictures.'

Jesus was very real to me in those Rainbow Land days. As real as sunshine and dewdrops and woods full of bluebells. Mum hadn't worn the Salvation Army uniform for many years, but Brian and I did; he was in the Junior Band and on my eighth birthday I became old enough to join the Singing Company. If there's one thing I cannot and never could do it's sing in tune. My school teachers knew better than to let me into the school choir, but my wonderful Sunday school teachers must have interpreted ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord' to mean something even a frog could do.

Sunday was The Lord's Day. It started with the junior meeting at 10 a.m. after which Brian rode home on his bike, while I caught the bus. Often, by the time I arrived home, Brian was eating his last mouthful of beans on toast or fish fingers from the plate on his knee. The afternoon junior meeting started at 2 p.m., followed by the adult meeting from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., which my parents sometimes attended.

We clapped and sang rousing songs as the band played and tambourines danced in the air, their coloured ribbons flying. A short, fat man with a shiny bald head sat in the front row of the band, blowing an enormous trumpet. As I watched his puffed-out cheeks growing redder, I imagined him bursting with a loud bang and ending up in red rubbery pieces like my balloon.

For the boring parts of the adult meetings, I invented a game. Timing myself with the second-hand of the big clock on the wall, I practised holding my breath for as long as I could in an attempt to beat my own record. My talent for this improved tremendously during one meeting when a long-winded speaker droned on. But this was the last time I played this game. The ‘Jesus Saves' slogan, which was painted in large black letters beneath the Army crest on the wall, began to dance and spin dizzily. I gasped, and almost passed out.

It was never boring with Captain Ann Costello. In one of the meetings she pulled a mat onto the platform, slipped out of her shoes and bonnet, and did a lively song and dance routine, acting out the parts of David and Goliath alternately. The grand finale was when she ended up as the dead giant lying flat on her back, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.

I was proud to wear the Singing Company uniform of navy skirt, white blouse, red tie, and navy beret with the Army crest, However, I did occasionally hide in a passage to take off my tie and beret before hurrying past gangs of lads on my way from the meeting to the bus stop.

Ashamed of myself for this cowardice, I decided one day to face the den of lions in my uniform. I hoped to slip by unnoticed but one of the lads pointed at me and yelled, ‘Look at her! Sally Army!' About eight pairs of eyes were on me. I held my head high and strode along boldly, trying to hide my nervousness. The knot of tension in my stomach tightened even more when they all closed in on me. They began chanting familiar lines:

Salvation Army free from sin
All went to heaven in a corned beef tin.
The corned beef tin was much too small.
They all fell out and the devil got 'em all.

But that was it. I'd got off lightly. Jesus had protected me.

I was still young enough to believe all I was taught at Sunday school. Many of my favourite songs were in my starcard, the children's slim songbook stamped with stars denoting our attendance. Mention of hell didn't bother me. I wasn't questioning then how a loving God could send anyone to suffer in torment for all eternity. All they had to do was ask Jesus to come into their hearts. I was safely protected by the simplicity of a child's mind from the deeper complexities of religious belief, of death, of life.

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity,
Suffer me to come to Thee.

Throughout the years of my childhood I said these words in prayer each night. Throughout the years of my teens I looked back with a wistful longing for that simplicity which I had lost. Pity my simplicity. Pity?