Margot in Pieces

I’m meant to be a writer, say I, but my mother doesn’t understand. She stands over me and my tiny room, towering like a giant. She is the birth beast, the originator, she gave birth to me, and yes, she could kill me too, no jury would convict her. But then with imagery like that, perhaps I’m not quite the writer I claim to be.
               Writing won’t pay your bills, Margot. Writing won’t get you married. Writing won’t feed your family. She says this in a warning tone, the type mothers always use when they want to appear benevolently concerned, or at least hiding the self-loathing at having created the worthless beings they call children.
               No, but writing will save my soul, I want to shout back at her, but it doesn’t scan well, the words aren’t enough, they need to be reconsidered, rewritten, reedited, perhaps double-line spaced, with indentation at each side to emphasis the importance of the statement, but it requires effort, and writers shouldn’t make effort, I think. Now that I’ve thought all this, the moment is gone. No time to rethink past thoughts, instead my mother commands lightening and storms from the room, railing against the world and her womb, and the parasite that escaped it in order to take up residence in her attic.
               Perhaps she’s harsh on me. I’m too used to it to tell, but it might surprise you. She doesn’t mean it, not totally, and at the same time, it’s not totally untrue. And at the same time, it’s no more and no less than I deserve. Her vitriol is born out of frustration (as was I, but I’m sure both my parents, and indeed my psyche, would rather not get into that), because as she keeps telling her sisters, and her neighbours, and that man who works in the newsagent, and my old teachers, and the mothers of my old more successful friends, and in fact anyone stupid enough to get talking to her on the street and foolishly, innocently inquire of her youngest daughter, little Margot, who was so good at school, who had all those little poems published? What of her? and mother invariably replies:

               Oh, Margot. She had so much potential. And now she works in that department store in town. For God’s sake, I mean. She could have been anything. She could even have been a teacher. But no, Margot does what Margot thinks is best. It’s such a shame, but they have to make their own mistakes. But we don’t know what’s going to become of her.

               Oh mother. It’s always bleeding teaching with her. It’s always teaching with everybody. Oh, an English degree? they ask in their vapid, bored manner, so you’ll go into teaching then? and then I reply no, no I won’t, I won’t teach, I won’t rot in a decrepit classroom, desperately telling imbeciles of Burroughs and Byron as they yawn and throw spitballs and swear, except I don’t say that in so many words, I usually giggle and say, oh I don’t know what I’m going to do, because it just doesn’t do to be rude to people.

               I have to go to work now. I leave my room in the mess that started the argument with my mother that devolved into why a girl like me, with much less of her life in front of her than before this argument started, with an English degree, and such potential, why I’m wasting my life at a low-wage, low-skill, menial job. I don’t have an answer for that question, although I resolve to clean my room when I get home.
               I walk to the bus stop. My mother is too angry to give me a lift in, and I wouldn’t want the chill in the car anyway, as she glares straight ahead and cuts off other cars, and swears under her breath. Those journeys are my least favourite kind. So I walk to the bus stop, and it’s not so bad. There’s a nip in the air, as my old father would say, but the sun is out, and the sky is blue and cloudless, which suggests that it won’t rain, not yet anyway, but I suppose it always rains in the end. My shoes have soft soles, and I feel every dent in the uneven road through them. My feet are my worst feature, curled and crippled, old skin from walking in soft shoes on hard roads, glass stuck deep from walking barefoot on treacherous when too drunk to be careful, but it happens to the best of us.
               It’s spring, and it’s the first day that you can tell. Not only is the world free from rain, for the next forty minutes or so, at least, but you can smell the hedges and trees, all having sex and exploding pollen to torment me once May comes. That last thought bothers me. It’s strangely worded, and I wonder where it came from. I hope it passes as quickly, I don’t enjoy imagining the flora having sex (nor the fauna, if you must be pedantic), but my thoughts frighten me sometimes. They don’t work the way thoughts should, not in straight lines, joining each other and springing in tangents, but rather working parallel, things run apart from each other, and when they collide (which is unusual with parallel lines), something strange emerges, like that idea of trees and hedges having sex (not, as I understand Biology to state, with each other, but themselves, like schoolboys, or Catholic priests), or that time I pondered cutting my tongue out so I wouldn’t have to talk to other people. It’s too bright anyway to think of such things now, and too early. The sun is shining into my eyes, and they’re hardly even opened yet. It warms my face, but the rest of me is chilly. I hate walking into the sun. I walk.
               The bus stop is full of dead bodies, or bodies that might as well be. They spend their lives waiting on things, on buses, on letters, on phonecalls, on Death. I’m the only one in a work uniform. What do they do when they get into town? It’s 8.30am. No shops are open yet, so they might wait on the shops opening. And then they wander, and wait for something to catch their eye. And so what if it does? They probably don’t have money to buy it anyway, seeing welfare and pensions only pay so much. Maybe they’re better off dead, living such empty lives.
               Not that I can judge them anyway. I don’t write anymore. I don’t do much of anything anymore, except for I work. And even if I was gone, there are a thousand over-skilled, desperate workers who could take my place, do my job just as well (although not better, because there’s only so well you can fold clothes and not punch customers. There’s hardly an upper level of excellence with basic tasks like that.). The only reasons I can fool myself into thinking my life isn’t as worthless as theirs is that I write, but like I say, I don’t write anymore. Sometimes I think it, sometimes I think beautiful, amazing things, but I’m too slow to write them down. There are rhapsodies, long lost. Long lost.
               Unprompted, the old man in front of me lets me skip ahead of him in the bus queue, although as I climb aboard, I realise he’s staring at my arse. It’s nice to be appreciated, but I feel like showering, or slitting my throat.
               I know why I don’t write anymore. Nobody liked my writing. I thought I was writing symphonies for a lost generation, one destroyed by Government objectives and a demoralised society, so scandalised by its demoralisation that it became hyper-moral, and the contradiction was destroying its youth. But then the youth weren’t really interested in any writing, never mind my attempts. And the people who did claim to know about writing, they said that nothing happened, that a character study is all fine and well if it’s any good, but mine weren’t any good, and the only way to cure it was to attempt some kind of narrative. Narrative? Narrative. You can imagine me laughing bitterly, for indeed I claimed to be, but rather I was crying. What narrative? Why does writing need narrative? I write…I wrote of life, and life doesn’t have narrative, not until after the fact, and even then, it’s arguable. I wanted to write real, I don’t want to make believe like Enid Blyton. I didn’t want to construct some convoluted plot just in case I bore my readers. Writing doesn't have a standard form. These are probably the people who got Burroughs banned. But no, they told me. That’s all well and good if your writing was incendiary, but it’s not. It’s nice. You have a nice voice, your descriptions are nice, your characters…nice. But nice isn’t enough.
               So I don’t write. I call myself a writer, but a writer writes. I try, I want to, but I don’t do anything. Writers always want to imagine themselves unique. Perhaps instead I should imagine myself oblique.
               I don’t even read anymore. Three years ago, I would be reading on this bus, but instead I’m staring out the window, listening to music, singing and dancing along in my head. Occasionally my mouth and eyebrows twitch to the rhythm, it is the only thing that touches me these days. But I don’t even listen to the words, just feel how the sounds make me feel. Sometimes I dream that I’m going to snap out of the trance I live in, that suddenly I’ll be moved enough to write and to read, and to be somebody real again, instead of someone who is dead and wanders the streets silently sneering at how everybody else is dead and wandering the streets like nobody told them.
               I don’t even bleed anymore. Nothing cuts deep, no outside force touches me. Sometimes when my mother and I fight, it hurts, but nothing I can’t survive. What hurts is that she hurts, that she hurts because I make her hurt. Even thinking of it now is impossible, painful I suppose, but it’s a numb pain, it’s nothing real. No blood. I try to force myself to think of it, to face the truth, but I only face truths that are easy to me, truths I can cope with, truths of my writing, truths of my strange thoughts, not truths of my life. If I think hard enough, I might realise I’m wasting away where I once had so much potential. Instead, I stare out the window. There are hills on each side of me. When I was young, they looked like mountains. I would go rushing past, or they would go rushing past me, or perhaps we were in a state of perpetual motion, between stoic monument to the wonders of geology and small child in car, but I didn’t get into details like that as a child. Instead I wondered what was in them. I thought they might be a giant’s corpse, lying low above me, each trough a tiny millimetre on his long-gone face, overgrown with greenery, each peak a rib, or a dent in bone, and perhaps if I looked close enough, I could see him breathe again. Now, I don’t wonder what’s in them. I wonder what’s behind them, but I don’t wonder too long, because soon enough, town is upon me, and I snap out of memories of childhood dreams into the dull dirge of adulthood.
               I don’t even need anymore. I don’t search the faces of my fellow travellers for contact, some shared glint in eyes of recognised torment. I don’t shield my head from the raindrops that steadily emerge from sudden clouds as I step off the bus in fear that I may get wet. I don’t glance in shop windows, looking at objects I can never hope to have. I never even hope to need them. I’m wet and I’m empty. My soft black shoes, soaked through now to my unexciting black socks, tap embarrassingly on the tiles floor of the shopping centre. I tap to my store, tap up the stairs, tap into the staff room, and put my stuff noiselessly into my locker. I don’t have my key, so I close over the lock to make it look shut, in case the manager decides to check them today. People look up when I enter, and then return to their conversations, bored, tired, making up stories of the night before, of the weekend. I half-listen, but wholly don’t care. I don’t need their eye contact, their stories, their interest, oh God, I’m suddenly overcome by how much I don’t want to be there. I need to be somewhere else, and the despair chokes me. I want to be back in the little town where I live, wandering the streets in air, getting rained on, and then enjoying the after-rain smell, where the hedges glow and the sun shines again, and everything smells fresh, I want to be barefoot and wearing something other than all black and a name badge, but I have to go clock in now.
               Wordlessly, I follow the herd down the stairs (again, a flawed turn of phrase. Herd animals find walking downstairs very difficult, and with scientific facts like that, it’s hard to believe I’m wasting my life in this job when I could be changing the world). As I was pondering, I don’t need anything, but I wonder if I’m lying to myself. Maybe I’m faking this mentality to protect myself from the truth, of how much I hate what I’ve become. But even that rings untrue. I think back to the giant buried in the mountain, unmoving, and wonder what that might mean for me. But it doesn’t mean anything. If this was a story, with a narrative, and imagery, and metaphors, and all those devices I’m supposed to use to be a real writer, then I could claim that the giant is me, trapped beneath long-forged layers of stone. But it’s not. When I was a child, the hills looked like a giant lying buried.

               I try not to get too bogged down in existential angst in my job, but it’s easy to get trapped in your own mind when there’s little else going on. Sometimes my manager will shout at me because I’m working too slowly, or I haven’t done that task that she forgot to tell me to do, but aside from that, it’s me and my thoughts. I stand stoically at the fitting rooms (I’m not allowed to sit on the chair provided, as I’ll look untidy), not handing out the tags, not counting the items being taken in or out. Maybe they will shoplift, maybe they won’t. The only real certainty is that I won’t do anything about it, because I fear assault charges in a litigious society.
               The only way to break up my day is through Alfie. Alfie hates his name the way I hate mine, and we don’t hate each other. Alfie hates his job because he is an anarchist, but even anarchists must eat, so currently he works for the man. Sometimes I comment that maybe he doesn’t understand what an anarchist is, but he replies that writers are always arrogant. Today he approaches me, reciting a list of women and the perfume they wear. Later, I’ll realise he is singing a Sparks song to me, and I’ll appreciate it. That’s why I want to spend my life with you, he repeats at me, in a kind of monotonous tone. Then he talks of burning things in his vague Welsh lilt. As far as I know, he isn’t Welsh, but I’m too polite to inquire further, and it seems pointless to destroy a perfectly faint acquaintance with familiarity.
               Alfie doesn’t work, or if he does, it’s by accident. You’ve changed your hair colour, he says emphatically. About a month ago, I reply calmly, fingering the fading red. You look like Rita Hayworth, he says to make me smile, though I know he doesn’t mean it. Alfie tries to charm me out of boredom, because it helps him pass the time. Write anything lately? he asks, the same question he has asked for the past eight months that he’s worked here. I shrug in reply, as I’ve done for about the same length of time. Bring down many governments lately? is the retort I reserve for bad mood days, but he escapes it today. He usually laughs heartily at my amateur rage. Today he touches my hair.
               It’s hardly worth examining the working day. It’s standing around, folding clothes, and removing used underwear from the cubicles. I wonder why people steal underwear by leaving their own. Why swap when you can have two bras? All they’d have to do would be to put one on over the other. It’s not like I’d check. Such questions fade into the air. Alfie returns to tell me about a club where everyone dresses all in white and drinks milk. Like in A Clockwork Orange, I say. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. The clock ticks slowly. I consider mentioning the giant to Alfie, but the moment never arises. He complains that his dad wants him to go to university. That’s nothing, I say, my mother controls the weather.
               Alfie drives me home. Perhaps all anarchists drive Hondas. I don't know. He changes gear and brushes his hand against my knee. Perhaps it’s by accident, but I still blush and look out the window, afraid that Matt and Louise noticed from the back seat. I don’t want anything to happen that would cause them to talk to me in work. I don’t want to be noticed, I want to fade away into the darkness of the world.
               Narrative writing is full of fat that could be skewered by excising the story. I get bored by flowery descriptions, essential plot points that I don’t care about. I care about hair colour and whether or not characters like snakes. I ask Alfie if he likes snakes. He tells me that his boa Min died three months ago. Sadness flickers across his face, echoed by regret on mine.

               I’m sorry, Alfie.
               That’s okay, you weren’t to know. I like snakes, but I won’t get another one, not yet. It’s too soon, you see.

               He lets the others out before me, and then onto my mother’s terraced house. It’s not my home, not for some time. It’s just a place I live now, where I put money towards bills, and write down how long I’ve been on the phone for (although I never make phone calls, removing that torturous exercise from my lifespan). I consider asking Alfie in, and I think he wants to be asked, but nothing would displease me more than watching my mother, doubtless still furious after nine hours, plaster on her visitor face, one of joviality and photo albums, and anecdotes and tea. I think Alfie deserves more than cream buns being offered by a woman with a smile on her face and eyes glistening with rage, so I thank him and get out before he can ask me to the Clockwork Orange-style club. I don’t look right in white anyway.
               My mother is in the kitchen, with the door closed and music blaring, something she does when she’s angry. It’s a sign that she doesn’t want to see me. The first thing I do is turn on the TV. I don’t know what I’m watching, but the grainy footage places in the late eighties oeuvre, which means generally unsafe for human consumption, so I turn over. The next is a talking heads programme, a retrospective of past political events. I’m dizzied by the cultural commentators, who are strangely flowing and distant, as though filmed from within a glass box, giving it a strangely cinematic quality. My mind wanders because I do not understand.  I look out the living room window into the street. It’s as bright now as it was when I woke up. Daylight at half past six is an unusual phenomenon, I tell myself, then immediately wonder why I would think such a thing. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s not true. Maybe in the depths of winter, which it isn’t. It’s spring, I remind myself. It’s spring.
               In a mood, I go up to my room. It’s dark and cool up here, and I don’t examine the corners too closely, in case I see the spiders I know exist with me, big giant bastards with hairy legs and segments to their bodies that you can count, and jaws you can imagine clamping down on your arm in your sleep. My philosophy is that I cannot fear what I cannot see, at least until it crawls out into the middle of the floor and stares up at you, with too many eyes. I look through drawers, and pull out old work, old writings I crafted, exercises I practised with my own self and my own ponderings barely disguised. Margot is not a writer, I think sadly, looking over the old words, spying phrases that don’t scan, word choices I wouldn’t make now. Thoughts on an old ex-boyfriend strike me first, and then imaginings of stalking an old enemy, originated from the opposite, of my old friend who used to follow me, and how I wondered what she was thinking of when she did it. I realise I wonder a lot, and imagine perhaps the creative spark is not lost, not totally. All the old characters that I’ve long since let die. I laugh grimly at how frightened I was to age, and how everything I feared I would become has become true. My teenage astuteness is impressive, but unfulfilling.
               But there is a glimmer. Lines about my mother, alternatively loving and hating, and usually both. Words I wrote about her that I would still write about her. Old passages that still make me smile. Turns of phrase I’d forgotten that impress me still. Maybe who I was survives, somewhere, if I stop pretending things.
               I wander downstairs after some time, and find dinner cold in the kitchen. My mother sits on the couch in the living room, colossal in her silence. I am like her, I decide, pride not letting me speak to her. I want to apologise. I was meant to be something else, but I do not know what. She will forgive me, but not yet.
               Tonight I dream of fire and explosions, torrential rainfall and the giant in the hill. I don’t know what it means, but I consider writing it down when I wake. But it eludes me, because I write too slowly.

               But I am a writer.