The Dark Threads (17 page)

‘Where the hell have you been?' Mandy was sitting up in bed, running her fingers through thick, black curls, her dark eyes flashing. ‘Look at the time!'

‘You sound like an angry parent,' I said, grinning.

‘Well, I've been worried about you,' Mandy said with such feeling that I immediately felt guilty.

‘I'm sorry, Mandy,' I said, sitting beside her on the bed. ‘I didn't realise you'd be worried about me.'

She looked as if she was about to cry. ‘How could I
not
worry? I'm your friend, remember? Friends do worry about each other, don't they?'

‘I … I'm really sorry, Mandy,' I said again, deeply moved by her obvious concern. I remembered how I used to worry about her, but she'd grown up a lot since then. I should have grown up too, but I didn't seem to be making a very good job of it.

What do I remember most about that holiday? Was it the thrill of travelling by plane for the first time? Or the adventure of being in other countries? Did I really see that view of Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower, those winding cobbled streets in Brussels, the scenic beauty of the Dutch countryside dotted here and there with quaint windmills? These things miraculously appeared on my photographs when my film was developed, but they had hardly touched me at all.

So what did I see? I saw hippies living in dirty, smelly barges on a river in Amsterdam. In the late sixties and early seventies, Amsterdam was known as ‘Hippysville'. I stared through a barge window watching a hippy couple and their baby until the youth stuck two fingers up at me. I couldn't blame him, of course, for I was being terribly nosey. I wandered back round the corner of Dam Square where there were more hippies, a large gathering of them, sitting around on the ground. Some of them looked ‘together' but others, with their bland expressions and vacant eyes, looked spaced out on drugs. It seemed to me that the ‘alternative' society had as many flaws, pitfalls and hypocrisy as a conventional lifestyle and I suspected that many hippies led lives as barren as my own. But, perhaps because I thought they too were rejecting something, I felt drawn to them.

Holiday over, it was back to England, back to High Royds, back to the familiar hospital routine. Caroline was worried because the staff on her ward had threatened her with a leucotomy for being ‘aggressive and cheeky'. A leucotomy, I learned, was a brain operation carried out by a neurosurgeon, which involves making a cut in the front area of the brain. This operation is irreversible and large mental hospitals, like High Royds, all had their share of the unfortunate recipients of ‘unsuccessful' leucotomies among their cabbage patches. Of course, there is a big difference between threatening to leucotomise a patient and actually doing it, but if the threat is taken seriously (and is there not every reason to take it seriously?) then the fear is very real.

‘Jean, do you think I need a leucotomy?' Caroline asked as we walked in the hospital grounds before dinner. With head hung down, hands in her duffle coat pockets, she was kicking a stone along the path. ‘If they want to do it, should I let them?'

No, no, a thousand times no, I felt like yelling. But if ‘they' decided they wanted to do it to her, then I wondered what kind of choice poor Caroline would have.

‘I don't think I'd let them even if it meant I had to kill myself to stop them,' she said, giving the stone a harder kick as she answered my unspoken question.

Geoff, too, was concerned about choices. He had just returned to the day hospital after spending some time as an in-patient. Standing in the dinner queue he kept asking, ‘Do we get a choice?'

Everybody ignored him except Marlene who suddenly exploded. ‘For heaven's sake, shut up, Geoff. You're getting on my nerves.
Do we get a choice?
What are you talking about?'

‘We got a choice for dinner on the ward,' he said.

‘Well, you're not on that ward now and we've never had a choice here,' she snapped.

A few minutes later Geoff was asking again, ‘Do we get a choice?' but this time I noticed a smile playing on Marlene's lips.

‘Yes, Geoff, you do get a choice,' she said, with a chuckle. ‘You either eat it or you don't.'

I smiled to myself, but then remembered Lynette, the little hunch-backed woman in Thornville Ward, who hadn't even been given that choice.

LOOKING BACK 8

‘
I
DON
'
T KNOW HOW
I'll be able to get a good job with no O levels,' I said to my mother.

‘
You don't need those fancy things. Why don't you get a job at the Fisk television factory like Edna Wright's daughter? Now, that's a sensible, down-to-earth job.'

‘
I don't want to work in a factory.'

‘
I thought you'd turn your nose up at that, Lady Jane. When I was your age I worked in a mill. I don't suppose you'd like to work in a mill either, would you?'

‘
You're dead right, I wouldn't,' I said.

‘
I don't understand you,' she said in exasperation. ‘The mill was good enough for me and for my father before me and for his father before him. Why do you have to be so different? Even Edna's lass doesn't think a factory job's beneath her, and I always thought she was too big for her boots. What's wrong with working in a factory?'

‘
Nowt's wrong with working in a factory. I don't think it's beneath me. But I'm not interested in what Edna's daughter or anyone else is doing. That's up to them, but I am ME.'

I stormed out of the room, slamming the door.

Upstairs sitting on my bed I thought things over. Perhaps I should go for an interview at Fisk's after all. Perhaps it was as good a job as any that was open to me. At least it would be an opportunity for a brand-new start, I told myself, trying to quell my apprehension. This time I would have to force myself to talk from the beginning. At all costs I had to avoid creating the same situation I'd been in at Rossfields.

‘
Please, God, don't let me mess up my brand-new start,' I prayed on my knees on the eve of my launching into the World of Work.

My factory job consisted of brushing grease onto a metal rotor, slotting it into a part destined to fit somewhere inside a television, adding a few screws, wires and metal fixtures, two blobs of hot solder, then passing it on to the next person. A two-minute job which a monkey could be trained to do. Repeated over two hundred times per day: more than a thousand times a week. In less than a week I was struggling to bear boredom so excruciating it was like a physical pain. But my mother was pleased that I had given up my ‘high-and-mighty ideas' and settled for a ‘sensible down-to-earth job'. If only I'd kicked harder in protest. Instead I tried, God knows how hard I tried, to conform to the role that was expected of me. And in so doing I almost destroyed myself.

On the assembly line I sat next to Joanne Foster who, like me, was a fifteen-year-old school leaver in her first job. After a few days, a pattern was establishing with me saying nothing all day while Joanne and the others laughed and talked. Rossfields loomed large. I must talk. I must talk. I must.

I felt uncomfortably warm, warmer, hot, now stifling hot. My clothes were sticking to me as if sweat was seeping from every pore in my body. My heart was beating loud and fast, and I was shaking, literally shaking, as if a giant, quivering jelly had been planted in my insides. Could I do it? Dare I? I'd simply got to.

Ignore the shy feelings and they'll go away, I tried telling myself. But they did not go away. Well, let them wash over me, it doesn't matter. Talk NOW. My heart beat faster; my stomach churned. The only dialogue I was participating in was the one going on inside me. Yes, I can talk. I can. I'll speak to Joanne now. I must. I will … And I nearly burst with the effort of trying to speak.

For part of the day, pop music blared out through speakers. My favourite songs at that time often reflected my mood of hopeful longing. I took to heart the words of the Animals when they sang ‘We've Gotta Get Out of This Place'. Oh God, yes, surely there was a better life than this. I also loved to hear Donovan singing ‘Catch the Wind'. ‘Mr Tambourine Man' sung by the Byrds was another of my favourites; even better than Bob Dylan's version.

The other girls would sing to the songs that came on. If only I wasn't too shy to join in with the talking and singing, my boredom with the job would lessen. How I hated my shyness since it infiltrated into every part of my life and made other problems, such as the boredom, much worse.

One day I was again trying to find courage to join in talking with Joanne and the others, when they lowered their voices. After conversing in whispers for a while, Joanne turned to me and asked loudly: ‘Why don't yer talk to us, Jean? We all want to know.' The chatter around me stopped. Everyone was watching me intently.

‘
Aren't we good enough for yer?' Joanne asked.

The question hurt as if a wet knife had been dipped in salt and twisted inside a still-open wound. In all those months of longing to leave Rossfields, my hopes had been pinned on things being different at work. I wasn't at Rossfields now. The place was different. The girls were different. But I was just the same.

‘
Are yer deaf as well as dumb?' Joanne asked. The other girls giggled. ‘We want to know why yer don't talk.'

Why didn't I talk? All I knew was how much I wanted to, how much I tried and how miserably I'd failed. Now I wanted to go off alone somewhere to cry out the hurt and disappointment in myself. I was looking down at a blob of solder on my bench as if it had assumed tremendous importance. Joanne was still waiting for an answer. I forced myself to meet her gaze. ‘I … I do talk,' I said feebly. Joanne raised her eyebrows to the ceiling and everyone collapsed into fits of giggles.

After this, it would have been no harder for me to jump over the moon than to talk. If I couldn't do it at first when Joanne had been friendly towards me, how could I do it now?

‘
Open yer mouth,' Joanne said, turning to me one day. ‘Go on, open it. Or I'll burn yer with this.' She picked up her soldering iron.

‘
Get lost!'

‘
I saw it! I saw it!' she exclaimed, amidst peals of laughter. ‘We thought yer hadn't got a tongue.' She stood up and shouted: ‘Hey, come and look, everyone! She's got a tongue!'

Even the girls facing me on a different assembly line were staring at me and joining in the laughter. I was drowning in a sea of smiling faces all around me.

While my shyness with colleagues seemed unmovable, I improved at small talk with lads who ‘chatted me up'. I palled up with my old friend Jackie again, and hung about town till late every night.

Some boys who tagged on to us one night took us down an alley to show us where Baxter, a sixteen-year-old gang leader, had been knifed.

‘
It was just here. I'm standing on the exact spot,' said a greasy-haired youth who was wearing a black leather jacket with a skull and crossbones painted in luminous white on the back. ‘He was stabbed here in the ribs and you should've seen the blood oozing out,' he went on, his eyes shining coldly. ‘Wish I'd got a torch to show you the bloodstains.' He turned his back to us and bent down in the shadows. All we could see was the skull and crossbones moving and gleaming in the darkness.

‘
Is … is he dead?' I asked. My memory of Baxter, a handsome, tall guy with a ‘little boy lost' look in his eyes, was merging with the skeleton skull bobbing about in front of me.

‘
Not yet, I don't think. He's in hospital and he's dying.'

‘
But why?' I asked in dismay. ‘Why did it happen?'

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows or cares? Hey, you didn't fancy him, did you?'

‘
Get lost!'

Jackie and one of the boys started ‘necking' and the rest of them walked away. All except the boy with the cold shining eyes who had located the ‘exact spot'.

‘
Well, what are we waiting for?' he asked, grabbing hold of me. ‘You're a real cutie.' I disliked him so much that I instinctively stepped back.

‘
What are you doing?' a voice boomed out. Startled, we all looked round to see two policemen who shone their torches on us.

‘
Necking,' replied Cold Eyes. ‘Ain't no law against that, is there?'

One of the policemen addressed me sternly: ‘You're too young to be roaming around town at night.'

‘
No I'm not,' I retorted. ‘I'm fifteen.'

That night in bed I thought about Joe Baxter. It seemed such a depressing, senseless way for a sixteen-year-old life to end. Nobody seemed to know what the fight had been about. Even Cold Eyes, who'd been there at the time and knew all the gory details, hadn't known or cared why it had started. He was more interested in the ‘How?' than the ‘Why?'

A hundred WHYS were pounding my brain. Dismayed by the things I saw in newspapers, on TV, and at night in the rough streets and bars of Bradford, I was becoming increasingly disillusioned at the seeming emptiness and superficiality of everything. The talks I had with Jackie when there were just the two of us were as refreshing as a tumbler full of cool, clear spring water. We took ourselves so seriously, moralising smugly about the state of the world and the pressures placed on us poor teenagers of today, then we would see the funny side and laugh at ourselves till our sides ached. But the only boys we met seemed as shallow as Cold Eyes. And then we would all use so many words to say absolutely nothing.

I stopped thinking I could help my parents or Brian with their problems; I knew now I needed all the strength I possessed to cope with my ‘growing pains'. I felt alienated from my family and wanted to be in the house as little as possible.

I decided it was time to take stock of myself; to think about what I was doing and where I was going. But this kind of thinking was depressing. I was fifteen years old. Life had only just begun and already I was stricken with an aching sense of disillusionment. Surely life was never meant to be like this? There had to be an answer.