An plane landing. It has to be both one of the beautiful experiences you can have and one of the most nerve-racking. Descending through the clouds to be presented with the world from above. Yet this time, I don’t see the familiar squares of green, separating the fields and pastures, the oddly formed man made and natural reservoirs, the sprawl of the encroaching supermarket chains and ring roads, street lights and closely set housing estates, each indistinguishable from the last. I no longer squint through the smog, trying to ascertain where we are in relation to my home. My home. It is empty now. I doubt it will be empty for long. It was a happy home for a time. I doubt I’ll be thought of. The next people to live there won’t know how I used to sit in the bathroom and cry, how I used to stare out of the back window over the fields, how I used to share passionate and honest lovemaking in the bedroom. Normal activities I know but each of us carry personal memories, some mundane but all as real as any other memories we may cherish.
199
The scene below is new. I feel sad and excited at the same time. A surge of trepidation. I never saw what I had been doing as a sacrifice before this moment.
Even now, I’m not quite sure if that is what I mean.
There is a feeling of loss, of a kind of death. Yet, there is a balance. A sense of rediscovery. Not a new start as that would mean I regretted my life to this point and I don’t. I’ve always been too emotionally involved and I’ve been hurt in many ways but I wouldn’t change my life. Funny to hear myself say that. I’ve made mistakes, some of which I’ve learned from, some of which I never will. I can just make out the trees below and I think I can see a farm. Childish as it seems, I burst into tears.
Maybe when the plane stops, I just won’t get off.
There is an announcement. We will be landing in approximately ten minutes.
One hundred and seventy-one
I never really expected this book to delve into the serious. I only started off wanting to rant about the things which fuck me off. Turns out there’s quite a lot. I am Eve, you’ve probably gathered that. I was fictional in part to begin with yet as I’ve written, I guess we’ve become slightly more intertwined. I did get on a plane too. Maybe as I carry on I’ll let you know where I went, who I left, or what I was returning to. Maybe the course of the book won’t take us there. It doesn’t really matter anyway because I think you already know. Simply because if you’ve read this far, you’re probably fucked off with a few 200
things yourself and need to do something about it.
That however is your choice. What I would say is think hard about your life and what you can do to give something back both to society and to yourself. Then do something you’ll thank yourself for.
You may have noticed my mood has changed somewhat. There’s a reason for that. I’ve let go of some of the stress in my life. I decided to fuck working for twats, that was lesson number one.
Instead I took a lower paid but meaningful job and decided to take a bit of time out. I couldn’t afford to and have a bundle of red bills on my desk. I don’t know how I’m going to work my way around that yet but to be frank, I couldn’t give a shit at the moment. I caught up on some reading, decided to learn a few more things and slept. It’s amazing how much I slept.
It’s like my body went into meltdown. Now I feel relaxed and ready to cope with the world again. Don’t get me wrong, I still despise what’s happening to humanity and can’t bear that no-one is prepared to change a system so ill-equipped to deal with equality and common-sense as ours and I still get angry with so many things yet on a personal basis I don’t get so upset and disappointed with myself as a person. It’s the first time I’ve started to regard myself as a decent entity.
However, one thing still plays on my mind and that’s this – when did the world go so mad as to create an audience for a Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown look-alike tribute act? It really doesn’t give us much credit does it.
201
One hundred and seventy-two
I read somewhere that it was a good exercise to sit down, clear your head and write the first words that came into being in your mind. To not worry about word order or whether you were writing poetry or prose. In this way what you really want to say will probably come out in one sense or another, even things you didn’t know you wanted to say but were maybe hiding in you subconscious. I tried it and this is what happened.
Sensory exploration,
Vivid pictures live inside you but you cannot find the words to describe what you see,
You feel alive, confused, heartbroken, Senses quicken until you feel the edges of mental meltdown,
It’s a vehicle you do not seem able to stop, it runs away with you, faster, faster and you know there are brakes but you forget where to look, Your conscious and subconscious fight for prevalence, hence those moments where you feel truly lost,
A feeling of inexplicable loss of identity, are these the moments of inspiration, of natural self attempting to escape, screaming for you to stop the madness?
A wilderness inside, sometimes wild, sometimes barren,
Walking you could find yourself in many places, Places which affect your mood, your entire outlook.
You wish you could stay in the place in which you experience contentment but you cannot for 202
contentment is soon replaced without you traveling at all, by mediocrity, of self doubt, So you keep moving, you look back and the old place has gone.
And inside your world, you hear laughter which holds no comfort.
Does appreciation of art you have created bear any resemblance to appreciation of self?
How can one love a work infront of them and wonder if it was they themselves as creater, or if by some slip of fate it was all fictional, to get carried off on a wind of words, an idea which although just fallen upon, enfolds into a valiant expression of life and then to ponder on the means of its arrival.
Can a subconscious fleeting thought be nurtured as ones own talent or as a piece of luck harnessed by the structures of the brain, rising from the depths of human experience and instinct.
In essence it is a search for acceptance. Self approval so often masked by external influences, how can someone who has never grasped a moment of creativity with all their soul criticize something even an artist struggles to explain?
Surely self expression should be encouraged and explored not for fame or as a means to expose egotistical offerings but as a way to search for those moments of inspiration that take our breath away, those few moments where we cannot write quickly enough or the feeling of loss when we see the moment slip by too quickly and the sadness we experience when it has gone, to make time for a courageous voyage,
Of wanting to know who we really are.
203
Well, there we go.
One hundred and seventy-three
What life could I have been leading if I had taken different choices? Have you ever asked yourself? I doubt many people think about it too much. It might be painful to look back and wish you’d done something different. I’ve never really thought much about it until now and I don’t know why I’m thinking about it now, possibly because what I’m doing now is a major life change to say the least. There are a few decisions I have made in my life so far that pretty much dictated events which followed. What would have happened if I’d have taken a different path?
There have been moments where I’d set my mind on something only to change it at the last minute. I’m sure there are many times, now I stop to think about it.
At sixteen, I had just taken my GCSE’s. I had decided what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a hairdresser and beautician. Not just wanted, I had made up my mind. My parents took some convincing but they came around. I even got a place on a local college training course. I had a tour round the place. It was all set. The next week, I changed my mind. I decided I wanted to go to sixth form instead to study drama. Big difference really. Neither option truly thought through now I think about it. At sixteen you don’t look forward that far into the future. At least I didn’t. I thought as far as a couple of years perhaps but the real world of working for a living hadn’t really hit home. A hairdresser? Perhaps I would have made a good one, who knows. I still cut my own hair and 204
some trusting friends and relatives occasionally but for a living, I don’t know if I would have stuck it. Not that it’s a bad job, quite the contrary, people will always want and trust good hairdressers. It’s just I’ve never really stuck to anything, apart perhaps for my desire to write. Yet if I’d have not gone to study A Levels, then a degree, would I have been able to chop and change my jobs at whim, whenever I got bored or depressed? Maybe not. Something tells me my life would have been very different indeed. Where would I be now, who with, would I be happy, would I still be sat on a plane at this point in time?
I toyed with the idea of studying Psychology at University instead of Theatre, which I had become rather fond of. My A Level results were higher in Psychology. For a few years, I really regretted choosing Theatre in the end. Again, if I had thought it through, Psychology would have been the sensible option. I found it fascinating, I seemed pretty good at it and the career choices were both hopeful and highly paid. But no, I decided to study theatre for no better reason than I thought I liked it better. I had no idea what I might do after University, I didn’t think that far. I’m aware I’m making myself sounds ridiculously ignorant but truth is, I was. Instant gratification. you see it everywhere and I was guilty. Still am sometimes. This one was a major decision, although I didn’t give it much weight at the time. When I was about twenty seven I looked into going back to University to take a degree in said declined subject but I couldn’t afford it and deep down I knew it was too late. Funny, I still didn’t get the fact then that all I had to do was get off my arse and have faith in myself. I always believed I wasn’t much good and that if I was good at something, someone would notice me and offer me the world. Yet how can 205
someone offer you the world when you are hiding?
So, back from the tangent, I didn’t become a psychologist (and who says I would have become one even if I obtained the degree?) … but what if? Would I have bags of money and live in a suburb? Would I be down to earth or would I be full of self importance.
These are extremes but who knows? Yet I would be a different person. My personality would have adapted to my situation. I don’t believe a personality is mostly innate, I think it is defined by circumstance. There’s always the chance I could have dropped out. Maybe I changed my mind again at the last moment and decided I had to study theatre or I’d never forgive myself. Maybe I would be sat in a psychologist’s office, looking at my patient list and wondering why on earth I never followed my heart and studied theatre and think myself a coward for not studying something just because I loved it.
When I was close to finishing University in London, I was offered a job in Hackney. It was a low paid job but a first foot on the ladder, working with a children’s theatre. I thought about it briefly. Funny, I do tend to only think about a lot of things ‘briefly’.
It’s not a particularly conscious thing, I just tend to go off instinct a lot. My reason for declining the job was that I didn’t want to stay in London. Instant gratification again? Very possibly. I didn’t even consider working there for a year and then moving on.
I just thought about sitting on the tube, being barged out of the way on a bus, being unknown in a city I despised for its ability to make you feel insignificant.
So what did I do? I moved back to the North of England. I got married to my first love (or so I thought at the time), moved to a different city where I knew no-one and went to work for a chainstore book sellers. Ignorant? No, I can’t really blame ignorance.
206
In fact, I find it really difficult to explain why I did this because I don’t understand it myself. I know it has something to do with the fact that my last year at University was a very difficult one. I felt unliked, paranoid and stupid so when I sensed this was coming to an end, I accepted a way of life in which I would be sheltered, protected. I was kidding myself and when I think back over that time I feel embarrassed at my behavior. It ended with me hurting people (not exactly unjustified) and I’m not proud. If I had taken that job, what then? Would my confidence have re-emerged?
Would I have realized that I didn’t need to get married to a man I wasn’t sure I should be marrying and hide away from everyone? Or would I have become consumed by different lifestyle, taking me somewhere else completely?
After eighteen months of marriage, I knew something was seriously wrong. I’d always thought I was in love.
I wanted to believe it. The problem is you can’t love someone who has no respect for you. It doesn’t work like that. People try and believe it but what they will probably realize eventually is that they had so little love for themselves, they’ll believe anything to justify the decisions they have made. I couldn’t truly love someone who made me feel so bad about myself. I didn’t do what I imagine many people in a similar situations do and stay for a while, see if things improved. I made my decision and I went. Don’t get me wrong, it was a painful time, for both of us. I’m grateful now that he made it fairly easy for me to leave by being such a twat and his misguided belief that threats, bullying and bribery were the way to win me over. I felt guilty for leaving. I justified it by telling myself if I didn’t stand up for myself now, I never would. I thought however about the mound of money that was lavished on the wedding. Then I 207
remembered I never wanted it in the first place. I guess I should have stood up for myself then and saved everyone all the bother. Hindsight. I left. I could have stayed. Maybe we would have worked it out? Highly doubtful. I’m pretty sure if that’s the road I had pursued I’d be a bored housewife with little to look forward to. I already was restricted in what I was allowed to wear, how much make up I could apply, who I could have a telephone conversation with and where and when I must comply to sex. I honestly can’t bear to think where that would have gone if I hadn’t hijacked my passport, bank book and third priority on my list, my writing…… I didn’t get many more of my possessions back, only the things that weren’t worth anything. If I hadn’t taken my writing, my first novel infact, would I have carried on? Yes, I would, I’m sure of it…. But I’d hold one hell of a grudge.
I sat outside a bar in the Castleton area of Manchester one evening. It was a summer’s eve and the weather was beautiful. I was working for a television company on work experience. I was twenty five. I thought this was my big opportunity. I had an idea that I would like to work behind the scenes in television. I had been pretty well received and had been working on a well respected television programme. I was offered cocaine by someone fairly important. I declined. I discovered in that one moment that I would never ‘cut it’ (nasty phrase but one they still use) in such an environment. It’s cliché but true. Life in the entertainment industry is all about who you know and how much of yourself you will sacrifice. It has little to do with talent. That’s where things need to change.
It’s a vicious circle, I know people who had the intention of initiating change. They got swallowed up and now they sit there in the bars talking shit with 208
everyone else. It makes me feel sad but at least I’m not there with them. I have at times an addictive streak. I’m also blessed with a little sense which happens to offset it.
Talking of addiction, I also had a phase of sitting in the pub every evening until I was completely pissed, smoking every cigarette offered to me as well as all my own. Sitting talking with other pissheads, all of whom, had big problems. I put on a lot of weight and bitched about anyone whose name I could still utter.
Ashamed of myself? Absolutely. It was the same time as I was suffering gynecological problems. My hormones were all over the place, sending me mad. I don’t think I’m using that as just a phrase either. I’m pretty sure I did change mentally for a time. I wouldn’t call it a nervous breakdown, just a sense of utter confusion about who I was and what the point of my life was. At that time, I thought there was no point. I never contemplated suicide, I just turned on everyone close to me and tucked my perceived problems away inside my head until they slowly began to gnaw away at my very being. I’m glad to say I came out the other side, once I finally admitted I needed to rethink what the fuck I was playing at. I could have chosen to stay in my drunken and shallowly happy state. I had a lot more friends when I was a funny pissed person. I was great. A laugh. I wouldn’t be such a good laugh ten years down the line, still sat there with a fag permanently wedged between my lips, wondering how I’d managed to piss my life up the wall. Yet it could have happened.
Couldn’t it? Or would I have brought it back round in a different way to wind up sat here now, writing the same thing but with a slightly different slant?
209
Hormone interruption….. I’m wondering what sticking pins in my eyes would actually feel like. I was happy ten minutes ago, what the fuck is this all about? Now I feel like I want to die. I hate the way my life is interrupted by this nonsense. I want to do one of two things, one is to stare out of the window and sob helplessly, the other is get in the car and drive, just keep going with no plan of where exactly.
It’s not me talking, it’s something inside me steering my mind in an odd direction. Yet, it is me, it is part of me. I wish it would go away and leave me alone.
Where was I? How life could have been. Maybe you believe in parallel universes. Places where lots of different you’s exist, all taking slightly different options along their life span. Anyway. I wonder, thinking about the above as examples, what decisions I may make along the line which will alter the way I live. What decisions I have already made.
That’s what I’m thinking as we come in to land.