Kid Gloves

By the time you're seven, you've already lived a tenth of your
allowed life, a whole decimal place. I guess when you're seven that
other nine tenths doesn't much matter. I guess when you're seven it
stretches away down a dark highway into an unimagined future. You might
think that there, on the youthful seat of the sea-saw, you can't even
see the pivot, let alone the downward slide to the orthopaedic easy
chair at the other end of the ride. You'd be wrong. By seven, we're
equipped to handle everything in the adult world. We just choose not
to, where we have a choice at least.

I might talk about this as if it never happened to me, the only
memories I have constructed from photo memories of another child made
up to look like me, dressed in my clothes, looking awkward. It's never
the same looking out. When I looked out of the windows into the
swarming Rio streets those barely human insects were not something I
could relate to. To think that stick in rags, begging for his baby
sister, could be like me. A nice clean child, always smiling behind the
glass while the city sideshow performed for my amusement, the lepers
and the lame that cried out in foreign languages that could have been
pain or the girls who crowded round an acrid brazier on the way to the
opera while my mother pulled me close to her.

None of those sights fitted into my world. My world was, until the age
of seven, marble cleaned by maid, conditioned air that chased the heat
from lungs and sprinkler fed green acres. My mother told me it was very
different from the damp and shallow English town where I was born. She
told me how fortunate I was to experience paradise so young, that my
father was a fortunate man to be working on the pipelines. She told me
that even when I asked to see him. She said when we were back in the
rain and cold I would see him anytime I wished, and I should enjoy the
place while I was here.

Of course, I did not. After tuition, I would mope around the house,
standing in front of the air blowers until I trembled with cold. Then
I'd rush outside into the heat. I hoped to make myself faint and ill
and force my father to nurse me. Mother called a doctor instead. A
company doctor, a wide man with obscene teeth who took his time
examining my body and concluded, "This child needs rest." Rest. I
needed just the opposite. Confined to bed I read, the light falling
from the window bars hashing the linen. I crept out of bed and pulled a
suitcase from the wardrobe. My secrets, brought from home. The objects,
whatever they were, were all significant back then. Symbols of survival
halfway round the globe. I was playing with them when the first shots
were fired.

My memory ends clearly with a short man holding a sub-machine gun
splintering through the squares of my bedroom door and excavating spy
holes in the white plaster above my head. He was shouting but I could
not say what, or even what language. I remember being lifted into the
air and being shaken when I wet myself. Nothing more.

As an adult, trying to piece the fragments of those months together I
have only the beginning and end of the story. There is no middle. The
beginning is tattooed across my childhood, the broken tape at the
finishing post. The end is documented in cuttings, growing mildew,
dissolving in the English winter. I have read the police reports in
ornate and archaic Spanish, difficult to read, impossible to
comprehend. I've glanced at the photos of my mother's body. I have
faced the remains of my right ear each morning in the mirror. But I
have nothing in between, only speculation.

Where we tortured? It seems likely. It seems our captors were unable to
understand the concept of the telephone, that my mother's screams would
be heard throughout the countryside. I still have small circles of
angry flesh on my forearms. There were no demands. No demands. They had
a ransom in their hands, waiting for collection. My fathers company
annually accepted kidnap as the running cost of their business.

I can only imagine that something when wrong. Their plan was bold and
novel in vision. The company security had been increased for the men in
the jungle so they went for an unprotected source of wives and emotive
hostages in the luxurious villas back in town. Wherever the men took
us, we were not well treated. If they had food, it was not shared. It
seems they did not know the rules of engagement. My mother's body was
half her normal weight. She had been rapped before her death, by
several different men. She carried one of their children inside her.
Was that the breaking point? Did they find out their crimes and cut
their loss' throat? How did I survive? Or did she sell herself to them
to buy my safety?

You might think that, deep down inside we remember everything, that the
unthinkable is locked away behind safe doors, bolted and keys thrown
away. I don't believe that's true. I believe the mind quietly takes its
finger off record. I would have flashbacks, nightmares, anything. The
urchin child that curled her skeleton into the darkest corner of a cell
had been completely rewired. She was addicted to crack, picked up among
the braziers for assaulting a woman and her child in the few steps
between the limousine and the steps of the opera. The woman was ready,
with self-defence and mace, not prepared to become another urban myth,
she held on to her daughter and pinned her assailant to the ground. I
could not speak, in any language, naked feet shredded by broken glass
and burnt by stray coals, nothing made me apart from any of those other
children.

How my father recognised me beneath the laminates of filth I won't ever
understand. Later he told me that I looked the same but I'm sure the
fingerprints were the real answer. That was my entitlement back into
the world. He would not let the company doctor examine me. They argued
loudly in the corridor outside the interview room. I had been through
enough but maybe he did not want to know what that had been. Instead,
he took the money from the company and flew me to the finest hospitals
in Europe.

They treated me kindly even when the worst cramps of withdrawal made me
scream like an animal. They bathed my arms, changed the bandages on my
feet and instructed me until I walked with poise again. I walked like a
sophisticated eight-year-old woman. I would no let them rebuild my ear
though. I wanted to be reminded of my mother, and the choices she had
made, because in the end the only choice any of us has is to
survive.

--This is work in progress. If you would like me to finish it, please
email or vote. Thank you --