Unbecoming.
By markbrown
- 2206 reads
Unbecoming. Adventures in the Otherworld V.
For years I'd been haunted by a story I heard about Margot Kidder, the
actress who played Lois Lane in the Superman films of the eighties.
According to the media she disappeared, sparking a police hunt, which
eventually found her covered in dirt hiding in a dog kennel, completely
destroyed. The photographs that accompanied the story showed her with
pale, puffy skin and wild hair, face haunted and greasy. She'd had a
complete breakdown. The photo showed eyes that only betrayed a
betrayal, a lostness and bewilderment where formerly there had been
confidence and sparkly personality. She looked like someone caught
doing something embarrassing but who had no idea what the embarrassing
thing was, like a man admonished for absentmindedly scratching his
crotch.
The police had tried to entice her out by telling her there were
spiders in the dog kennel, to which she replied "Oh, there's much worse
than spiders out there. Much worse."
I must have encountered this when I was relatively young, but it has
left an indelible mark upon me, the simple image of someone losing
themselves, dying inside, but still continuing to live, their body
moving with logic and an impetus of its own while the mind is absent. I
remember trying to imagine what it must feel like to lose your mind but
realising that it was like trying to grasp smoke, you cannot imagine
losing your mind because it is like trying to speak in a language you
have never heard. Everything you are, everything you feel, everything
you perceive, all of this happens as a set of electrical and chemical
processes in your brain. Change these and you become someone else,
something else. Whatever happens to your organic brain changes who you
are, if it changes, even briefly, then so do you. You'd never know that
you'd become someone else.
When I was a kid we used to go and see my Mam's friend Hazel. She lived
in one of the terraced houses in Benwell, which have gone now, knocked
down and demolished. I found a photo of her in among some old stuff of
my Mam's, her and my Mam dressed in nighties at some ridiculous party
at the social club. I used to play with Hazel's daughter Christine, who
had curly black hair and rosy cheeks and had too many teeth for her
mouth, literally another set growing through her palette, like a shark.
My Mam would collect catalogue and hamper money and drink coffee and
chat.
Hazels husband Steve worked as a stage hand at The Theatre Royal and
would gleefully tell me and my Mam what that years pantomime would be
as soon as they started work on it. He was friendly and funny in a way
that appealed to me as a child, a sort of buffoonish, cuddly bluster
which seemed to fit his tall, dark frame. One day he took me upstairs
into the gloom of the bedroom and showed me a bookcase full of
leather-bound books, their spines embossed with titles picked out in
gold.
"Sax Rohmer," he said waving his hand in the direction of the books.
"Bulldog Drummond. Best books ever. When you get a bit older I'll lend
y' them."
I liked Steve. Hazel used to give me Jammie Dodgers when I went round,
but I liked Steve better. Then Steve got hit by a milk float. It sounds
funny, like some Benny Hill sketch, but it wasn't.
He was in hospital for weeks and I remember Christine crying constantly
for weeks at school. This was maybe a year and a half after my best
friend Michael died, so it didn't feel out of the ordinary. The teacher
sat us down on the carpet and told us to be nice to Christine because
her Da was very, very unwell. Apparently it had been touch and go. When
he came home he had a six-inch scar across his forehead and patches of
his hair missing like a dog with mange.
Other things were different as well. Steve stopped working at the
theatre because he couldn't climb ladders anymore, he suffered from
dizziness, he would sit for hours and hours not moving, staring at the
same spot above the fire. Every time we went round he would be sitting
with his back to the bay window, rigid in an armchair, wouldn't even
acknowledge Hazel or Christine, just staring and grinding his teeth. In
my memory he seems surrounded by a halo of shadow, of darkness, like a
negative.
Once when we were walking back home, past what used to be the bakers,
which even then was boarded up, I asked my Mam why Steve just sat there
when we went round. I remember my Mam turning to me and telling me in a
hushed whisper that Steve had a metal plate in his head and that it was
the accident that had made him different. I asked my Mam why they had
put a metal plate in his head and she said it was because the accident
had cracked his skull and they needed to stick it back together again.
In the way that kids do, I just accepted it. My curiosity had been
satisfied. Kids aren't good at implications.
Steve wasn't friendly anymore, not to anyone. Sometimes when we went
round he would start shouting, waving his arms about, swearing at Hazel
and Christine. I would overhear conversations between my Mam and other
people conducted in sharp sibilant whispers, stories that 'Steve had
started to knock Hazel about'. I didn't really know what that meant
until one Saturday afternoon when we went to their house as normal on
the way back from doing the shopping on Adelaide Terrace, and Hazel
opened the door with a black eye so blue and swollen that she couldn't
open it. Christine came to school one day with her arm in a pristine
white cast.
We didn't go round there that much after that, but at the times that we
did a black tension hung over the sitting room. Hazel just seemed to
get older and thinner, as if she were drying out, withering. Christine
didn't smile so much anymore. Everything revolved around Steve, still
sat there in his chair, his hair grown back, the scar hardly
noticeable, the street through the bay window behind him.
Even though his body was still there, wrapped in a brown dressing gown,
tartan slippers on his feet, Steve had gone. There was someone else
occupying the space where Steve had been. Even at such a young age I
could feel it. I would watch out of the corner of my eye in fear as I
sat close to my Mam on the sofa, Steve clenching and unclenching his
fist, staring.
After the accident he never talked to me again, never mind showing me
Bulldog Drummond.
A tiny piece of gravel, a microscopic clot of blood, a wound as thin as
a knife-edge and everything changed. He was not who he had been before.
I suppose even from that young age I realised that it was your brain
that made you who you are, not God or anything else. Seven years old
seems awfully young to solve the mind/body question, but I knew that
somehow what's in your skull and in your body makes you who you are.
Even then there was no soul, just little messy red bits squashed under
a set of tyres.
I couldn't have imagined how important this all would be to me later
on. I've seen too many ghosts now and I could never have guessed that I
ran the risk of being one. The human body has a remarkable ability to
keep on going, it's the mind that's the vulnerable one. I've never
escaped from the fear of the point where being becomes nothing, the
point where you start to unravel, the point of unbecoming. It scares
me, because I've seen it.
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