Hands, p.2
Hands, page 2
The more I’ve spoken about my disorder, the longer its tail has become and the more I’ve thought about Lacy. I’ve felt connected to her in the fear and confusion we’ve felt, more than a century apart, the snowball gathering pace until it floors us. The blood we’ve both shed, the sleepless nights.
Memories have floated to the surface unbidden. Objects, moments – sometimes whole, other times not; sometimes funny, sometimes devastating – have illuminated my lifeline, like a helicopter floodlight sweeping a star-cloaked Grand Canyon that’s but a scratch on the earth’s crust the further you zoom out, up, away. The thin lines that break off from the root line, which at times looks like it spirals into a DNA helix before becoming beguilingly straight again, all the mess untangles for a brief moment, and in those brief moments, I’m – me, Lauren – there.
We’re typing this now, my hands and I, journeying through the canyon, poised to travel back to before the great rift started widening, deepening, in the hope that we can look not in fear but in wonder at the scar in me we caught, just in time.
1
Bird
We found the baby – ‘bird’ wouldn’t apply for a while yet – on the cold side of our front garden on a thin slab of concrete below the living room window. It looked barely alive, so translucent you could see its insides. A withering umbilical cord hung, tiny, from its little round belly, and its eyes – impossibly large, heavily lidded in purple – hadn’t opened yet. It lay on the cold, damp concrete beside the bush that separated our square of grass from next door’s gravel drive. Or maybe it was across the lawn and on the public pavement where we found him (I still think of him as a him). He just lay there, barely breathing, an unbearably thin layer of bare, pink skin stopping his organs from mingling with the dirt and stone of the cold floor. Holding him together. Just.
Mam, Liv – my twin sister – and I scooped him up in a tissue. His ribs were tiny, like fish bones; you could see each one. Mam said he must’ve fallen from his mother’s wings as she flew him to their nest. Even now, that seems unreasonable, improbable. Surely she’d have known her goo wouldn’t provide adhesive enough to keep her newborn baby close. The cruel tragedy of a lack of hands, I thought, my young heart pounding with the urgency of life and death. If only she’d been able to really hold him. Did birds not use their beaks like cats grabbing their young, rough, by their scruffs? Maybe she had, and dropped him from her mouth. Maybe she felt him slipping and her quick mother’s instinct dropped him in the shadowy corner away from predators. Thinking of her in her nest without him made me want to cry.
Every second stretched wide as I begged a God I might have still believed in to spare him, desperately wanting to feel the whisper of his heartbeat against my palms. Desperate for him to understand through the warmth and comfort of my skin that I cared. I cared so hard, in the way perhaps only a child can.
It was as though Mam had prepared her whole life for this very moment, first offering the ‘stuck to the wings’ theory before, without a second’s thought it seemed, packing a bowl full of warm, damp kitchen roll to place him gently in. There was a flash of recognition not yet fully formed that my mother had thoughts and possibly even experiences beyond my own, beyond me: a fully-fledged self outside of the Mam I knew. Where had she acquired such knowledge? Knowledge so far away, I thought, from our experiences.
The bowl was put on top of the small fireplace. The fire had a glass pane behind which lumps of coal sat, and on which Liv and I would, when we were littler, gleefully melt multicoloured crayons. We fed our bird tiny bits of damp bread through a syringe, which we apparently had. It had probably emerged from the drawer of junk and bits next to the cutlery drawer. Then there was the awkward business of going about our daily lives: having chicken nuggets and chips in front of the telly, watching the usual string of kids, shows followed by The Simpsons and the soaps, while he silently battled for survival in his lonely makeshift nest. The moment of crisis inevitably softened into the flow of days and we settled into the new atmosphere of our living room, the new reality we lived in, thin as a thread. We fed him and we waited.
Eventually, his sealed, swollen eyes opened. Joy of joys, the crumbs soaked in milk and water were working. God knows what first impression lay deep within those pools of absolute black, surrounded as he was by our yellow-painted living room, yellow sofa and red cushions (that was the theme at the time; it would go through many B&Q and Boyes trips yet). We loomed over him, gawping, wanting to touch. Where were his wriggling siblings? Perhaps high up among the leaves and brushed by a cooling breeze. He likely awoke to the sound of Dick and Dom in da Bungalow instead of hungry chirping or the distant call of other birds caught on the coastal wind. He soon filled the room with his own voice. He warbled, shrieked, his mouth a wide open ‘O’ with a darting tongue raised to the air. Often.
Though we were sadly unable – or rather, unwilling – to cater to his taste for regurgitated matter, the syringe food nevertheless seemed to be doing the trick and, like any healthy young lad, no matter how much he got he cried and cried for more.
Ecstatically, we watched him change. The constellations of red and purple veins were replaced at pace with the stubble of emergent feathers, the ornithological parallel to too-big teeth protruding awkwardly from kids’ shiny, pink gums. They grew like leaves from small, twisted things before emerging in patches like teenage stubble.
Then he choked to death.
At least we think that’s what happened.
We didn’t hear it or realise at first. Just, I assume, found him sleeping in his bowl one day. Maybe after school. I don’t remember, but I do remember Mam breaking the news that a bit of his food had, it seemed, got stuck on the way down. Maybe it was too big, I thought angrily, but he’d survived for what must’ve been two weeks to that point, and each day she’d given him the same amount of food. It seemed like he’d been thriving, hot life running through his veins ever more assuredly, and then he just went.
Sadness hung like a rock in a blanket in me, feeling heavier at times than others. Had it been a freak accident? Or had we unwittingly tortured a poor, helpless being for two weeks? Would he ever have survived without his mother? What had he thought, if anything? If my faith, nurtured and cultivated by a Catholic primary school, was a string tying me to a God, I’m sure it was thinning, fraying. But even so I felt watched in some damning, judgemental way.
In reception class I’d had a teacher who I simultaneously remember as being both sweet and unconscionably cruel. She’d get annoyed and shout at me whenever I needed a wee, which, either because of or in spite of the reaction I knew I’d get, would only make me need it all the more. I can still remember the smell of the child-sized bathroom that seems now like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or a doll’s house. Once, when I stood up, the cold black porcelain nipped my bum and I cried and cried in agony. I remember her anger. I think the impulse, which has in different ways dug its claws into me ever since, to dispel the anticipation of her wrath by, whether I needed the toilet or not (probably convincing myself I needed it, for no child could go that often) telling her I did, started here; the impulse to just ‘get it out of the way’. I still feel profoundly anxious going anywhere I’m not in close proximity to a known public toilet. My worst nightmare is a Megabus with an out-of-order loo.
The words ‘coach’ and ‘bus’ continue to send a shiver down my spine today. We were returning home from a Year 9 trip to Lanehead in the Lake District. Liv, my friends and I had joyously rambled, gill-scrambled, and scraped our knees; we’d put our phones down and acted like the kids we were. Before we boarded – and feeling free, my anxieties and foibles cast to the north-western breeze – I did something so unlike me that to this day I can’t quite believe it happened. I chugged FOUR Capri-Suns. I’ve endeavoured in my adult life to match this level of rock and roll ever since: to proclaim again unapologetically and unthinkingly how little I give a shit for convention, to plant a flag down hard in my freedom as if to say, chin bucked, ‘Yeah, and what?’ Four. Capri. Suns. You little fucking legend. But, alas, it may very well be the painful knowledge of what happened next that made me the cripplingly thoughtful adult I am today – in a ‘she has so many thoughts, hope she’s OK’ kind of way.
Those of us who were conscientious buckled in, ready for the three or however many hours’ drive. Others threw themselves into the backseats, immediately put their feet up and blasted DJ Boonie’s ‘Concrete Angel’ out of their Sony Ericsson W850i Walkman mobiles. Whatever, let’s get out of here. But not whatever. It wasn’t whatever at all. The bravado in me, so bold only moments ago, crystalised into shards of panic digging at my insides, because as soon as I took my seat – somewhere between the lawlessness of the back row and the goody-two-shoes-ness of the front – I noticed a sign on the door I’d strategically positioned myself near. Those three, stomach-dropping words, the punch of four black syllables right to my gut, came into view: Out of Order.
You’d think I had in that moment woken up in pitch darkness buried six feet under the ground. Over the years I’d become familiar with that panic rush of coldness through the veins. One of the CBBC TV shows we watched at the time featured a young Fearne Cotton and science experiments that provoked a ‘Eureka!’ from giddy, wide-smiling presenters. Google’s definition of the word includes this usage example: ‘The answer hit me. “Eureka!” I cried.’ Aptly vague, something monstrous peeking through the cracks of ‘I cried’. My feeling was the ghoulish photo negative of that scene, the presenters’ mouths and eyes glowing green. Eureka indeed. Eureka, I’m fucked! I cried.
I probably wasn’t sitting next to Liv at this time. At that age, 13 or 14, we didn’t quite appreciate or realise in any fully formed way exactly what we were to each other. If anything, we were a nuisance to one another. Or at least, I was a nuisance to Liv. That I can say with 100 per cent certainty. Around this time, we’d started staying at my dad’s more often, him having come back into our lives after a few post-divorce years of inter-parental acrimony and meeting him at the end of the cul-de-sac for a hug.
MSN was our entire life. We would fight over the one laptop Dad got for us, lest we end up rocking back and forth in a corner deprived of SmarterChild (a very noughties chatbot) and boyfriends, until he eventually decided we were allowed half an hour each. The second we’d get home from school at twenty to four, the metronomic, begrudged passing of the laptop across laps would begin in frightful earnest. The atmosphere was brittle. We were the anti-Chuckle Brothers, stuck in an endless, purgatorial loop of to-me-to-you-ing. If Sisyphus had been given the option of sharing his endless uphill boulder rolling with an uphill-boulder-rolling companion, he’d say absolutely not if he had any sense. We were opposite poles of a magnet, destined to be forever together but repelled. The sun and moon, yin and yang.
This teenage angst would wear off, eventually, but here on this bus home from Lanehead it is unlikely we sat together. This distance between us was a blessing and a curse. She was the only person to whom I could disclose my sudden screaming need to go to the toilet, but I’d also have smarted painfully at the inevitable ‘for God’s sake’ frustration that I was doing this ‘again’. Now I’m older I think it’s a kind of claustrophobia, and though my friends gently tease me about what is an enduring bladder-based anxiety, there’s a gentle undercurrent of understanding simply unreachable by kids. In Year 4 a girl had thrust her hand desperately into the air to try and alert the teacher she needed the bathroom and was told she should’ve gone at lunchtime, which we all know is bullshit, and on her long grey skirt a circle of darker grey bloomed. Maybe this is what got it into my head. I don’t know. But to this day I can’t sit in the middle of the row at the cinema, or worse, the theatre, in case I need the toilet and have to disturb people.
The cinema has always been a bit of a trigger point for me because when I was really diddy, like even diddier than Year 4 or Dick or Dom, I’d left a screening to go for a wee on my own like a big girl, before re-entering the wrong screening and sitting down next to the wrong dad who was watching the wrong film. The first thing I’d ever seen at the pictures, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, remained a mystery to me since my dad had to take me out every ten minutes. I just hate being hemmed into a confined space and the feeling that I can’t get out whenever I want to without disturbing anyone and publicly humiliating myself.
So there I sat, freaking the fuck out but not saying a word to whoever I was sat next to. Considering what comes next there was probably no one sharing my seat. I was both overjoyed and devastated not to be with Liv and filled with an urgent sense that I was about to piss myself, if not filled with actual Capri-Sun piss itself (if you, dear reader, have ever had a UTI, you’ll understand the impossibility of deciphering whether you’re actually desperate or just feel desperate, a brutal severance of mind and body that would make Descartes wince). In that moment, four OJs down, there was no way of me knowing because the fucking toilet was out of order. Just as pain floods the mind so completely no other thoughts can squeeze in, so impossible was it for me to think of anything other than my bulging bladder and the imminent social suicide of actually wetting myself, so I probably wasn’t thinking about the mind–body problem.
Eventually, after sitting squirming for what must’ve been a noble hour or so, I reached crisis point and, swaying, reluctantly and conspicuously walked the gangway up to the front of the bus to deliver a furtive tap on the teacher’s shoulder. She was clearly agitated – she quite understandably wanted to get home after spending nine days or so in the middle of nowhere with poor phone signal and a group of thirty-odd pubescent kids – as we pulled into an abandoned-looking petrol station. The only toilet was a single stand-alone brick cubicle outside. It looked like the punishment that in my head it was. The coach devastatingly ground to a halt, just for me, and as I closed the toilet door behind me and perched my bum on the cold seat, I was overcome with utter mortification. But what bliss, what relief! It wasn’t long, however, before I was struck by a grim, portentous thought. What if I need it again? What if I have to stop the entire bus and make everyone wait for me and me alone … again? Hello darkness, my old friend.
We were only about halfway home, I realised with a shiver, so instead of just getting back to the bus sharpish so we could hit the road again, I tried to pre-emptively squeeze out any urine I might need to expel further down the line. If God had presented me with an option to have one big hour-long wee in the morning instead of a rolling need depending on my liquid intake, I would’ve snapped his hand off. Would’ve enjoyed it, the big long wee, and all. No such luck. Instead, this habit would continue long after. There were spells when I’d sit on the toilet at Mam’s for what seemed like hours, sure I needed a wee and forcing myself to try and go despite the fact nothing but intermittent drops were infrequently, painfully extracted. ‘You don’t need it, Lauren,’ my Mam would say, but I was so so sure I did. Or might, in a bit, at least.
So I couldn’t time travel. I couldn’t wish future piss into my bladder, and brutal, unstoppable time had won again. I gave up, surrendered to the vast unknowable future, and solemnly re-entered my metal prison, burdened by fate. The door pffed shut behind me in a swift motion, and I was sealed in once more. We continued our journey, and I looked pensively out of the window in a pose usually reserved for Mam’s Golf on the A19 listening to ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams, or Moby, palm pressed dramatically on the wind-up window as it rained.
Of course, I needed it again immediately. As the minutes slugged past, I choked back tears. Maybe if I let them fall it would cleverly lessen the need to wee? All bodily fluids came from the one in-built reservoir, no? But no, there was absolutely no way I could cry and absolutely no way I could stop the bus again. I didn’t then have the language or self-knowledge to go to the teacher and explain that maybe I was claustrophobic and probably wouldn’t have needed it even once had the toilet been in service. Maybe she’d have been sympathetic, but maybe she’d have been angry. I stayed quiet. The tension filling me up turned to a deep pain, and for the final two hours of the journey I prepared myself for the worst. I’d heard once that a king had died of needing the toilet, and in the back of my mind I wondered whether I too was about to meet my end.
I’ve always wildly catastrophised in even the most blatantly innocuous situations. When I was 15, so only a couple of years after Lanehead and this fateful coach trip, which I’ll reluctantly return to in a moment, I had to go to counselling because whenever someone took a while to get back to me via text or call I’d assumed they’d died. Like, literally shuffled off this mortal coil. A pretty distressing rigmarole to go through all day every day and a habit that took a long, long while to break. It didn’t help that a boyfriend I had when I was 20 decided to text me ‘Night, love you’ before disappearing off the face of the earth. Suffice to say I thought he’d perished in some horrific accident, but of course I found him in his pyjamas in his shit university halls looking like he’d seen a ghost.
The less destructive flip side of this catastrophising tendency was my proclivity to be a complete and utter drama queen at every minor injury or inconvenience. Whenever I was tired as a kid I’d just cry and cry and cry. I once dropped my head asleep in a bowl of soup and I probably would’ve drowned had Mam not noticed. I even came out of the womb like a diva, feet first and with the cord wrapped so tightly around my neck that I was blue. Once it had been unwound and I’d been slapped on the arse like Lucien from the Cramp Twins’ opening credits (iconic), I started crying and pretty much haven’t stopped since. Liv, on the other hand, slid out like the chosen child, with a mop of black hair and huge eyes. Not a peep out of her.
