Bethany (10 page)

My stomach knotted. Simon's voice, emotionless, seemed to come from far away.

We were pursuing the theme of responsibility. Asked to define the word, I had said ‘moral accountability', and Simon had asked me to locate an incident where the idea of moral accountability was associated with pain. My mind with scarcely a moment's pause had taken me to a scene twenty-five years ago. A frightened child on a kitchen stool; a desperate, tearful woman. A scene only half-understood.

‘I can't remember what caused it,' I said. ‘I don't know what I'd done.'

My incomprehension was an echo of the incomprehension I had felt then. Whatever I had done could not merit the word ‘evil'. My mother simply did not understand.

‘Go back to the beginning of the incident,' said Simon.

She did not try to understand. Everything was black and white for my mother. Everything was straightforward. For me,
at the age of eight, it was not straightforward. I stole things, all sorts of things, I could not stop doing it. My mother found out and cried. She took it personally. She was right to do so: it was a rejection.

‘Oh God,' I said, and twisted in my chair.

‘Go back to the beginning,' said Simon.

‘I feel guilty,' I said. ‘Terribly guilty at upsetting my mother so profoundly. And I can't cope. She has called me evil.'

I paused.

‘She says I'm a secretive child and I tell lies. It's quite true. I'm secretive because I have no friends. I'm not allowed to play with the other children in the street because they're rough. And I lie … I lie because I can see no good reason for not doing so.'

I had been through it six times, there was no more emotion to be discharged from it. I sat quietly, feeling very sad.

‘Is there an earlier incident which you connect with the idea of moral accountability?' asked Simon.

I could have picked half a dozen, but it was not the memories which came to hand that I wanted. I wanted the thing which was so important that for twenty-five years the mind had walled it up in a cell where it could do no more harm. I waited.

It stirred in its cell, and I had it. I wished it had been something else.

I was watching my father wash his face and hands in a bowl in the kitchen sink. He had taken his shirt off, and I looked at his thin shoulders with distaste. He had just come home from work; he was tired, but before he could rest he had to do something for me.

‘I've stolen something from school,' I said. ‘It's an ornament, a little lighthouse carved out of stone. It has to be returned, but my mother doesn't want me to get into trouble. So my father is going to walk up to the school this evening and throw it over the wall into the flower-bed.'

I stared at the red-necked figure in trousers and vest washing the grime of the day's work from its hands.

‘It's very odd,' I said, ‘but I don't feel at all guilty about
stealing this lighthouse. I feel it's quite unimportant. What I feel most strongly at the moment is anger. That they're interfering again.'

I came back to the present, puzzled at my reactions.

‘Go back to the beginning of the incident,' said Simon.

‘My father doesn't like me,' I said after a moment. ‘And I don't like him.' I paused. ‘I'm jealous of him, that's why. And he seems to despise my intelligence, which I can't understand because I know he isn't particularly clever. So part of the reason why I'm angry is that I don't want to be in his debt.'

I finished speaking rather abruptly, with a feeling that it would be a mistake to spend any more time on this incident. As I turned away from it, something came into my mind so forcibly that I spoke without meaning to.

‘I wanted to be bad,' I said. ‘That's the point.'

Alex's brother Philip called to see us and brought his latest fiancée. He was thirty-nine and she was twenty-four, but Philip, suntanned, muscular and unimaginative, both looked and thought like a much younger man. The girl was ordinary and adoring. They might suit each other very well, I thought, if Philip was sensible this time. Something always went wrong with Philip's plans for marriage, and he exhibited an inability to learn from experience which amazed me.

Alex did not like her brother. Beyond a certain facial resemblance they had nothing in common. I could not make up my mind how he regarded her. At times he seemed solicitous and anxious to help, doing odd jobs for her which required little time but a lot of strength. At other times he was inconsiderate and gratuitously rude. Alex said that whenever he did things for her there was an ulterior motive, and this appeared to be true. He had, for instance, spent several days painting the front of the house after it was stripped of its rendering; it happened to be the summer that Jacques and Manuela stayed with us, and Philip had taken a very strong fancy – unreciprocated – to Manuela.

Relations between Alex and Philip had sunk to an unprecedented level of hostility within recent memory, but since the start of the group Alex had resolved to be friendly, and in response to a cautious overture Philip had paid this visit. I could see that Alex, although civil, wished he hadn't come. If he was aware of her coolness he didn't show it; he seemed much at his ease, chatting to Pete and Coral, and glancing from time to time, half-puzzled, half-entranced, at Dao. At ease, that is, until Simon entered the kitchen. At the sight of him something seemed to happen to Philip: he quivered, like an animal sensing the presence of a natural enemy. They had never met before: it could only be fear. Simon's eyes struck fear into many people.

Alex introduced them and there was an exchange of courtesies in which I had a vivid impression of Philip in headlong flight with no pursuer. Dao must have perceived the same thing, because a few days later she asked Alex whether she had said anything to Philip to prejudice him against Simon. Alex was justifiably surprised.

I drifted off to the fields. I did not feel inclined to talk to anyone that afternoon. I had a lot on my mind.

‘I can't remember writing it,' I said. ‘And yet now it's been discovered I recognise it with a sort of surprise, as if it was something I thought I'd only dreamed about, and it's turned out to be real.'

‘It' was a small black notebook. It contained a record of the most appalling crimes and atrocities the imagination of an eight-year-old could invent. I had committed them.

‘I'm not surprised by my mother's reaction,' I said, ‘but I feel that it's none of her business. It was a game and she's taking it seriously.'

Simon directed me to go through it again.

‘My parents don't know who I am,' I said. ‘I've always felt that. I feel I know things they don't know. And I feel that I'm important in a way that wouldn't mean anything to them.'

‘Go back to the beginning of the incident,' said Simon.

I was finding it hard to breathe.

‘I feel exposed,' I said, and paused to gulp in air. ‘I feel something is terribly unfair. And of course I feel humiliated. Because I'd like to play king, and I'm just a child.'

My forehead was clammy. I had nearly got to the core of this awful experience, the thing that had never been understood.

‘Go back to the beginning,' said Simon.

‘I have cut myself off from the human race,' I said. ‘My mother's reaction is that I'm a monster. But that's what I wanted. That's what this notebook was all about. It was completely mad. It was about power and cruelty.'

Then at last I remembered writing it, and was overwhelmed by an emotion so painful, so disturbing, that I had to fight for breath. It was an emotion grotesquely out of place in childhood. It was an emotion I knew, and could not identify.

‘When I put down my pencil,' I said, ‘it was like waking from a beautiful dream. There was a moment of intense sadness.'

I felt again the deep, uncomprehended anguish that followed the exhilaration of writing in the notebook.

‘It was like a drug,' I said. ‘These exploits of mine had to get worse and worse. I went from excess to excess. I killed thousands of people, in the most unpleasant ways I could devise. I crucified them, I burnt them alive. For some reason they were usually women. And babies. God, how I hated babies.'

With the eyes of an adult I surveyed the torment of a child, and still could not understand. The horror and the beauty, how could they be the same? I shut my eyes and tried not to think.

‘It was like flying,' I said suddenly. ‘I used to dream a lot about flying. It was the same feeling.' A startled moment later I added, ‘There's a very strong sexual element in it.'

I opened my eyes and sat back in my chair. I had found it. I felt exhausted, but physically lighter. I breathed deeply for a while. Simon waited.

‘I don't know what it means,' I said at last. ‘I know it's right, but I'm no wiser. There's something impenetrable there.'

The bell rang for supper. I heard the click as Simon put away his pen. We smiled at each other and walked towards the house.

Alex had decided to go to London. She had received a terse letter from her bank manager requesting specific proposals for the reduction of the interest on £18,600. She would go to see him, and would also see various other people who might be of assistance in selling a roofless property which nobody wanted to buy. She departed turbulently, after losing, bewailing and finding again the ten-pound note with which I provided her for the journey, at half-past six in the morning.

I was not sorry that she would be away for a few days. I had no room in my mind for the demands of a personal relationship. I was in a dream, sleepwalking through the days towards the hour in the evening when I would sit down with Simon and resume my journey through the dark cavern that held the secret of my childhood.

Then as I walked pensively through the fields waiting for that hour, I realised that I already knew it, and stood amazed at its simplicity and my obtuseness.

‘I spent a large part of my early childhood in a state of bitter anger,' I said. ‘I felt I had been cheated. The reason was that I wanted to be a boy.'

The tension in my stomach had gone, and I spoke confidently. I had made a vital connection, and it illuminated everything around it.

‘It wasn't envy,' I said. ‘It was a passionate yearning. I couldn't understand why I wasn't a boy. When I was very little I believed God would one day turn me into a boy if I was good, but eventually I realised it would never happen. I felt it was a terrible injustice. I looked at the little boys I knew and it seemed to me that most of them didn't deserve it.'

I was conscious of smiling wryly. I had never quite lost the
feeling that the male in general was not worthy of its biological privileges.

‘So,' I said, ‘I tried to be as much like a boy as possible, but it didn't work. I wanted to wear jeans – or whatever they were called in those days – but my mother didn't approve of trousers for little girls. And I wanted a toy revolver.' I stopped, momentarily assailed again by that desperate childhood lust.

‘No one would give me one,' I said. ‘It became an obsession. In the end, I took some money from the hallstand and went to the toyshop and bought a black toy revolver in a holster. I couldn't wear it openly, of course, I had to wear it under my raincoat. It was discovered and I had to send it as a Christmas present to my cousin. He probably had a dozen of them.

‘By the time I wrote the notebook,' I said, ‘I'd more or less given up trying to acquire a gun. I'd always thought the notebook was an expression of alienation and something to do with my relationship with my parents, but I've realised that it wasn't. It was a sadistic fantasy based on the childish equation: male equals big and strong equals cruel. My dislike of babies was simply a rejection of the maternal role, of course. I still don't like children much.'

Simon wrote busily. He took notes during all the Sessions now. He spent most of each day writing at speed. I thought it must be very tiring.

He asked me what physical feeling I associated with the experiences I had just described.

‘Being bottled up, caged in,' I said. ‘A feeling of rage.'

He told me to locate a particular incident when I had felt that. I hesitated. There were so many. I selected the one that seemed to have the strongest emotional charge.

‘I'm six years old,' I said. ‘I'm standing looking in a toyshop window at something I want which will change my life. I know I can't have it. There is no good reason why I can't have it. Nobody understands why I want it. I hate them.'

I stopped abruptly. I was looking at an expensive toy revolver with an imitation ivory handle. It was the biggest and
best in the Lone Star range and I looked at it every day on my way home from school. Every fibre of my being yearned towards it. I felt that it was already mine. Yet as I thought that, that it was mine, I felt a strange dissatisfaction.

I, as adult, examined this dissatisfaction and saw that it was not the normal boredom that ensues on getting what one wants, nor was it a consciousness that the thing was a toy and not a real gun. It was the tip of an insatiability. As I saw it, I experienced an avalanche of comprehension. For I was prepared to do anything to obtain this revolver – lie, cheat, steal. And as the years went by I did precisely that: I lied, cheated and stole. I had never made the connection, because I had never stolen anything I really wanted. Instead, I had …

I slammed my hand down on the arm of the chair with the force of the insight. ‘
That's
where it started!' I exclaimed.

Mindlessly I had accepted the dictum that the kleptomaniac is looking for love, and blamed my compulsive childhood thieving on loneliness. I had been looking for nothing of the sort. With newly-opened eyes I scanned the wretched catalogue of things I had stolen from relatives, school-mates and shopkeepers – the little lighthouse, dozens of pens, pencils and crayons … I remembered stealing money from my mother's purse to buy a cheap fountain pen I didn't want; I remembered the strange episode in which I had stolen a pound note from my grandmother and obliterated the memory of the theft, so that my first consciousness of it, and all I could subsequently recapture of it, was the moment when my fingers contacted in my raincoat pocket a stiff papery cylinder which my mind desperately interpreted as a toothbrush. I had coveted and by devious means obtained another child's plastic retractable dagger, and the last thing I had ever attempted to steal was a model soldier with a rifle. All this, and a six-shooter too. A parade of phallic symbolism almost embarrassing in its orthodoxy. Seldom could Freud have been so simply and triumphantly vindicated.