Hands, p.8
Hands, page 8
Sourz is a 15 per cent-strength alcoholic beverage best served, regardless of the bottle’s ‘serving suggestion’, neat and, apparently, slightly warm. It also came in a range of flavours – cherry was another favourite – including ones that had milk in them, like strawberries and cream. You had to drink these ones all in the same night (which we also did with the non-perishables) because they did not age well left in the cupboard. No siree. Learnt that the hard way.
Dionysus was the Greek god best associated with wild and ecstatic religious rites, also known as bacchanalia. In later traditions he became associated with wine and the loss of inhibition. See? Sourz. A bacchanalian – also known as a Dionysian – party is a wild night out, essentially. The night out to end all nights out, like your best friend’s 21st. It feels appropriate that there’s a pub in Newcastle, home of trebles and ten-inch heels, called The Bacchus. The idea is tied up with the idea of the self, and the paradoxical live-laugh-love-y notion that you have to lose yourself to find yourself. It’s the idea that only by casting off the shackles of the self, its wants and insecurities and foibles, can we truly experience the fullness of being and reveal our creative, peace-loving selves, man.
Such a dispensation of identity, the drop becoming the wide-open universal ocean free to flow, subjective giving way to objective, has of course a darker, dangerous side. Without our civilised sense of humanity, the moral and societal norms that ostensibly keep polite society ticking away, we’d all be feral and unpredictable (Aristotle thought that going to the theatre would get all this wild instinct out of our systems so the world could stay as it was). Sounds pretty sexy, hey? Well, orgies are part and parcel of the idea of the Dionysian, but so is murder, destruction, inhumanity. That’s what happens to the students in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, who, having become fascinated with the Greeks, performed frequent rituals that brought them out of the mundanity of their lives but ended up leading them to commit a heinous crime. In Athenian playwright Euripides’ play The Bacchae, the women of Thebes in a Dionysian rite tear a man literally limb from limb under the devilish god’s intoxicating influence.
You’ll be pleased to know that I haven’t torn any man limb from limb, though I’ve been sorely tempted. But I do crave the escape from my thoughts, from myself, these mad feral orgiastic parties seem to offer. The Ibiza boat tours marketing people really ought to lead with that, honestly.
My way of numbing myself, of momentarily slipping out of my mind, has for whatever reason taken the form of skin picking. I damage only myself. But is it the same as the Dionysian feeling of utter escape I’ve described, this absence of self? I’m not sure.
For starters I’m far too anxious not to worry that I won’t find my way back to myself again, since losing yourself completely seems kind of the deal. I’d still be holding a finger to make sure if I was taken away I’d wake myself up. There’s no way I could lose myself to picking entirely; I haven’t let myself. I’ve been tempted to just let go, to pick ad infinitum and completely disfigure myself. But even though it’s got to the point that it could very well threaten my way of life – stopping me going outside and socialising, making me a recluse – I’ve always had one foot in. I can’t help it. That belly-seed doesn’t want me to lose myself, no matter how much relief it might bring. I know behind the numbness there’s no ecstasy, no heightened sense of beingness in the lack of beingness, instead just a vacuum.
If the numbing of myself by picking has been my crack of the Dionysian whip, I’m not 21 any more – I can’t keep it up. I think of my ‘picking sessions’ – belly lumped over the white lip of the sink to get as close as possible, never close enough, to my face – as a ‘frenzy’ on very bad days. But I don’t want to spin uncontrollably through life any more, someone who tears their skin apart as though trying to escape it.
I want the peace and quiet and security of not losing myself to paradoxically find myself, but to be very much myself and to be OK with that. Maybe that’s the ‘of this world’ feeling. I don’t want extremes any more; I don’t want all or nothing; I want to accept the existence of both. I don’t want to escape any more, into my numb, picking void; I want to feel it all. But life has always just felt so very, very loud.
I may very well be overthinking this. It has been known. So let me just say, Sourz and snogs aside, that I think I need to stop trying so hard to escape and instead start inhabiting the present moment, no matter how roaring loud it feels. Without the self-preservation tactic I thought was shielding me from pain. Hands, I know you think what you’ve been doing has been helping. It makes me feel oddly sad when I think about this, but it seems to me that my mind, my hands, have been engaged in a misguided attempt to look after me, not destroy me. But that’s exactly what they’ve paradoxically been doing.
Seaton Carew beach is, I’ve come to realise, one of the places where I have encountered this ‘of the world’ feeling most often. Here, my self-narrated preoccupation with the world and how I’m experiencing it moment to moment slips away; I step out of the way of myself, and I experience life, for however brief an interlude, unmediated.
It’s not a place that’s all golden sand and crystalline waves, though, Seaton – make no mistake about that. I remember in 2007 when the place was dubbed Seaton Canoe after one John Darwin was found to have faked his own death in a ‘canoe accident’ there. Presumed dead, he’d actually been living it up in Panama before coming home to live in a bedsit next door to his former home on the seafront. While he was away he used the name John Jones, disturbingly that of a baby who’d died in Sunderland in 1950. My cul-de-sac was a street of Coronation Street-watching curtain twitchers avid for the scandal its inhabitants so often provided. Mam was mad for it, a shadow behind the blinds watching and tutting and ‘ee’ing as silent but flashing police cars and ambulances pulled into the street in the early hours. And well, what a story Seaton Canoe was. A faked death, forged passports, scandal, intrigue. Watching the coverage as a 12-year-old was riveting and disquieting. Also of urgent national concern that same year, 2007, was the frantic and constant coverage of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. Holding on to Mam’s finger didn’t seem quite so outrageous, then.
When you see your mam cry for the first time, really cry, it shatters irreparably the childhood delusion – exposes it as just that – that the adults know what they’re doing and are in control. That myth is wiped away and the world encroaches, seeping like noxious gas from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’. I was at that age when my boobs were coming in in earnest, when I began noticing myself as a body in the eyes of boys and men, and what little security I felt we had was being undermined by the constant cycle of intense news that filled up the lamp-lit living room each evening. The rules of the world as we’d been taught them were crumbling; people did bad things, and I simply could not look away. I was darkly dazzled by this other, shadowy world that had, unknown to me, been existing alongside my own all this time, just behind the curtain.
At the time all this was happening, our living room rug was spilt with glossy real-life magazines proclaiming from bombastic covers even more outrageous stories of murder, betrayal and botched surgery. ‘My Husband Thinks He’s a Fray Bentos Pie’ here, ‘I Sold My Son for a Bag of Chips’ there. I’d lie on my tummy flicking through them, the Sun and the Sunday supplements. A favourite game of mine and Liv’s was the ‘that or that?’ game, where we’d go through them all front-to-back and speedily choose between the things on the page. That or that? That. That or that? That. That or that? That. We’d read our horoscope together and wonder whether it was true that our love lives really were going to take a saucy twist this week. Unlikely at St Michael’s, in Year 8, but there you go.
Pumped up, then, on EastEnders (Stacey and Bradley, never forget) and tabloids, the fact that Real Life was happening in my real life was quite simply exhilarating. It gave me a taste, too, for the macabre, in a way that was palatable. Close enough to home, but not too close as to be actually scary. As someone whose mind lived on the precipice of constant, unshakeable doom, being able to fall but not really fall was, I suppose, akin to knocking the glass of coke over just to get it out of the way. Schadenfreude is often spoken of only in terms of the enjoyment at watching someone fall, for example, but there’s a darker truth buried therein that underscores horror movies and true crime.
It did get too close to home sometimes, though; the shadows were never really very far away. My mam’s cousin, for example, was stabbed to death in her bed by her copper husband when Liv and I were nine because he’d found out she was going to leave him. We were too young to be told that her kids were the ones who found her; maybe we overheard it, but we knew. Then there was the case of 22-year-old Julie Hogg who was found stuffed underneath a boarded-up bathtub in Billingham, in 1989. Way before my time, but the story was something that haunted me as a kid even more than the bogeyman tales that wafted into the local kids’ collective consciousness. Local lore. And then something happened on Seaton Carew beach, too. Not to somebody decades ago, or even to a parent’s cousin who I’d never met, but to someone who’d combed my hair and plaited it and who’d seemed like a good person but maybe wasn’t.
My mam had been friends with her, let’s call her Kate, for a couple of years. She was the girlfriend of an acquaintance. She had dyed-blonde hair and a voice croaky from smoking, but was tanned and youthful with a wicked cackle of a laugh and always treats in her bag for the kids. Kate had a daughter younger than Liv and me, about six, who we played with and doted on. Her hair was naturally blonde. When I look back, it’s obvious now Kate was troubled, like Mam. Maybe that’s what brought them so close. They’d sit and drink together, and once, my mam being the deeply giving person she is, told Kate, after Kate had complimented her shoes, that if she liked them she could have them if she wanted. I remember next standing peeking around the corner of Mam’s bedroom door frame while Kate proceeded to ransack Mam’s wardrobe for shoeboxes that were then hastily ferried to her car.
In 2007 Kate killed herself on Seaton beach. The beach where we’d pitched a tent, roasted marshmallows and barbecued, where we’d paddled in icy water that would make us shriek as it reached our white pot bellies. She had drunk a lot and taken a lot of tablets; they were lying next to her. Her body was found by a man walking his dog one morning. She’d apparently sent a flurry of text messages and calls to a friend that night. She was 34 and had in her hand a picture of her daughter. I can’t remember ever seeing her daughter again after that.
We’d been to Seaton Carew with Kate before, going to a little bay round the side I’ve never been back to since. The day was long, so long, and we drank up every last drop of it. A ramshackle tent was packed in the car and put up beside a wind-breaking dune whose rushes swayed like air-whipped hair. We hunkered down until the sun set and the glow of firelight was increasingly all we could see. That, and the twinkling many-coloured lights emanating from the intricate frame of the steelworks that are as much a feature of the Teesside skyline as the stars. Like Miyazaki’s clanking, tin-banging Howl’s Moving Castle, disused oil rigs add to the ruinous cityscape like metallic plants pulled up hard from the roots. As you drive by, you can see the parts that were below the water’s surface, rusted and fraying, the scrapyards a not-quite ghost town whose spectral flames illuminate a rat race of meandering, endless tubes. Grey chimneys pump out great billowing plumes that disappear into the white sky like the pipes of the men who’d clock off and go down the working men’s club for a smoke and some darts.
It seems so unmanned now, despite all appearances still chugging away, still flame-lit and bright on the horizon. From the distance of the beach it’s impossible to see any people, but on the drive past the gull-swarmed rubbish tip towards Seaton you can occasionally spot men in hard hats, and a security barrier letting cars in and out. But it’s infrequent, and to me it seems as abandoned as the swathe of old pacer train carriages lining the abandoned tracks near Middlesbrough that you can see from the A19 fly-over, or the half-sunken asbestos-filled boat still moored in Middlesbrough’s dockyard where my mam’s dad, Joseph, apparently used to work.
Grandma and Grandad Maureen met when they were both working at the ICI. Each looked like a Hollywood movie star. In one black-and-white photograph shown to me by my Grandad, he’s 18, shirtless, and hanging off the side of a sailing boat. He was in the army, then, travelling around Asia, and in the picture he’s overexposed by bright sunshine and absolutely beaming. They each had a very different temperament, my grandma and grandad, but it worked. My grandma was boisterous and loud, bolshy and unafraid to be forward. I have a hazy memory of her telling me that when she saw my grandad from a walkway above, looking down at her, she said something to the effect of ‘Well there’s no use just standing there looking. Aren’t you going to talk to me?’ He’s very shy, my grandad, quiet, was happy to let her wild, irresistible personality take centre stage. When she was really ill, the dementia taking root, she’d think they were young again and would flirt so shamelessly with him at family gatherings she’d make him blush. She had an incredible set of pipes on her and sang all day every day. She was one to be heard, alright. They used to go dancing in Middlesbrough, she no doubt dragging ‘my Mr Brown’ reluctantly onto the dance floor or crooning wickedly at him as he’s nudged in the ribs by teasing mates. Apparently, she sang on stage sometimes. Back in those days you could walk up the many, many steps of the Transporter Bridge to a nauseatingly high gangway that linked Billingham to Middlesbrough across the Tees, so they’d stumble home either along the quiet A19 or over there. It had to be closed eventually because people would drunkenly fall off, or sometimes jump. You can do bungee jumps off it now.
I can still hear my grandma singing ‘Do-Re-Mi’. She loved The Sound of Music. Once, in Berlin, my friends and I went for tea at this wartime dance hall strung with big fat fairy lights. The weather was temperate, so we ate outside (I had a beige soup that was surprisingly good for something so bland looking) and when the boys went off we three girls went excitedly inside. I thought of her immediately. She’d not yet passed away; it was just that the space reminded me so much of her I felt I could see her, young, twirling completely freely on the wooden dance floor in an A-line dress making perfect circles as she moved. With dance-hall-cum-bingo-hall vibes, it had glitzy red and gold streamers pouring down the walls and people of all ages danced together. Heads pressed to life-partners’ chests, kids stomping and spinning and running, young Berliners, us.
Now she’s gone. My grandad lives alone in the bungalow where they spent their last years together, scared to come outside even for a socially distanced walk, no doubt eating the chopped pork and lettuce sandwiches he used to make us in that little kitchen out the back when she was still here.
The decrepitude of Seaton Carew, Seaton Canoe; its dated art deco architecture; glorious summers spent unselfconsciously stripping down in blinding sunlight; the semi-abandoned aura of the distant steelworks; Kate; her daughter; the way the wet sand reflects the sky so perfectly it feels like walking through heaven; the treks up and down the dunes, getting further and further away from the car – all of it makes up the haunting splendour of the place. The laid-bare history of an empty kids’ paddling pool, fairground rides covered with waterproof sheets. You’d think they’d been left there, that the pool wouldn’t ever have lukewarm water in it again. But then you’d return and, like a clock that had been wound back to a minute before midnight, the place was alive with toddlers held by the armpits, spreading who knows what grim infant disease into the water, and the smell of cheap burgers next to a ticket booth. (My favourite food stall, which remains shuttered there, simply offers ‘pork’ as one of its advertised options.) The next time you returned, it would be still again, as though the chatter and action and fairground rides had all been a ghostly mirage.
The bus station, flanking the white art deco clock, felt Victorian. Maybe I’d been influenced at this time by a school trip, chaperoned as always by Grandma Mary, to a museum where we’d been allowed to dress up in Victorian garb, but as we sat and ate fish and chips on those wooden benches, I could see ladies of the promenade holding their parasols in one hand while urging littl’uns to ‘mind your ice cream doesn’t drip on your nice clothes’. I don’t remember ever seeing any actual buses go by or stop at the station.
You could feel history in the air, so nearly see it exactly as it once was: every beach-side B&B sign as bright as the day it was freshly painted and bursting with guests ready to head out tomorrow to secure a decent chalet. I can remember being inside one of those multicoloured chalets, now gone: a mere wooden hut with a bench, the smell of damp salty wood, chattering teeth and feet swinging. They were nothing, but to a kid they were a brand-new house with a driveway and gated entrance.
Seaton was one of the locations Dad would take me, Liv, and our cousin Aidan to on days out. Being a year older and a boy almost as boisterous as I was, I’d follow Aidan to the ends of the earth, doing whatever cheeky thing he was doing, be that splashing in brown puddles, launching ourselves into piles of autumn leaves or racing to the top of the playground climbing thingy. The thingy was a vast matrix of interlocking blue rope in a diamond shape; you climbed on and into this thing and got swallowed up by its maze of endless footholds. And there were two of them, two azure ziggurats connected by a wibbly-wobbly bridge made from the same thick, scratchy rope and wooden planks. Climbing to the top sorted the wheat from the chaff, and my body flew up there faster than my mind, such that I’d occasionally have to whine to Dad to lift me down. But the best fun wasn’t to be found in the playgrounds but among the trees. Regardless of the weather, we’d wrap up on Sundays and go for a walk in the woods or a park.
