Hello,
I’m
Kaye.
I’m
twenty-four and here. Categorised, surrounded, but all alone. Alone, yes, but I
don’t think it even matters because there is no space for any emptiness in my
heart. The last straw for my mother was the year of the car accident.
Twenty-three and on a bender of self-destruction; drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll
never seemed so easy. And in this place, the nuthouse as we so lovingly call
it, no drugs for me, sex on my mind and the musical score of my life tattooed
on my brain.
When
I was seventeen, my father died – committed suicide to be exact – and this is
about those years between his death and Dan’s.
Dr.
Daniel Jones - my young, pretty, dear Dr. Dan – in over his head, out his depth
and all those clichés we shared. He was one of the most wonderfully, misguided
men I have ever known. And it could have been me... I think it was me.
I
have a brother, Neel – us, among two other siblings, but we’ll get to them
later. Me and Neel, we don’t see eye to eye anymore, but we did once upon a
time. We were children, only a year separating us, and were like best friends –
well, as best as siblings can be. But then we grew up, puberty, friends,
weight-loss and football obsessions, me, him, respectively – all of it broke us
up. But in my family, it was a given, we loved each other in the pure hatred
that grows with growing up, and when finally grown – properly adult – we, the
family would be strong, tight, and the love-hate passed onto our kids, the next
generation, and the cycle repeated.
That
was the expectation; what years of Long family ancestry spelt out for us, but
when your brother blames you for your father’s death, how do move on from that
look, those eyes that say all the words he won’t? How do you get past that
hate, expected to step into a mellow love? We move on, or seem to, but I’ll
never forget it. I know he doesn’t think it anymore, but he did once, and I did
too. I still do. We wouldn’t both have been wrong.
After
my father’s funeral, with a few weeks of watching my family rush around and try
to stabilise everything shaken, I went back to school with this strange feeling
- someone had died, but their lack of presence didn’t stand out as much as all
the movies, TV shows and songs said it would. So, I tried my own brand of
grief; I tried to stay still, not smile, or throw about my energy and demand
attention. I suppose that stillness - the sadness I knew everybody expected me
to express - was such a change from my usual never-stopping-self that it
demanded the attention that my personality craves; a new low in the life of
Kaye Long, my father’s death feeding my self-obsession.
Sixth
form went on with a best friend girlfriend’d up, and a new high school love
numbing the guilt, but intensifying every other emotion. I fell away from my
guilt and anger every time I was away from the four walls and watchful eyes of
home. In that, being normal, hormonal, I let the important things slip further
than they ever should have. New friends, new priorities, trying to be a
teenager – that was me.
Being
a student at my school, that godforsaken place determined to crush every soul,
was more than difficult, and me, needing all eyes to fall in my direction and
usually conflicting with the student hierarchy of Forge Grammar, found a new
dynamic having come back with a dead parent. We, the insane best friends
sharing only one class, started to pull away from each other, spending more
time with the respective loves, and their friends - my perfectly popular,
worlds apart from me, love, central to the hierarchy.
Being
welcomed to the hierarchy was nothing that I’d thought it would be. We had
always shunned them as they had shunned us, and now, always off in my own
world, I accepted the new lifestyle of the internal Forgers (me, external, a
transfer to sixth form), and embraced their secretly alcoholic, violent life as
my own without even realising it, falling into their patterns as if it was what
I was born for. Then, as quickly as it had come, that high school love was over
and the guilt, as quickly as it had gone, back.
The
year I should have started uni, I persuaded my mother to let me go travelling
in Asia for a year. With the feelings of Dad’s suicide back, I spoke to his old
friend, our family doctor, Uncle John about needing to escape, recuperate from
everything that happens in England - every turning, sign, bus, shop, smell,
reminding me of all the shit from the past, and how I had been so happy to do
the bad things I had once hated the thought of. John managed to talk mother
dearest around, and, with the assurance that I would call every other day and check
in with her acquaintances, his acquaintances, and a far-off distant cousin
doing charity work in Nepal (the philanthropy of some diluted blood relative
forcing Mummy to believe I would be encouraged to live the proper, lady-like
and conservative life), I was off with my real reason. North to South - Buddha,
Krishna, Jesus. I think I needed to find God, ask forgiveness. Find peace.
Ashrams.
Twenty
– I arrive back to my older sister, Anj, getting married. And as any joyous
occasion demands, a lot of interfamily conflict accompanied it. My big sis, the
one we all looked up to, got up and left. I don’t blame her, none of us,
siblings, did; she had every right to live her life away from our mother. And
with the intermediary of most family arguments gone, Neel did too; happily he
went off to uni, packing his things and moving, the same year I started. Just
me and the baby of family, Jen, left at home in the kid department.
Jen
is eight years younger than me, and I love her with all my heart. I have these strong
feelings, a need, almost, which goes beyond the normal big sis role, to protect
her. I think in my mind I wanted to undo any screwyness being in the Long
family inflicts on her. The rest of us are already screwed, but we are old
enough to try any change the pattern, or at least push it down and attempt to
confirm to social norms. But, she’s just a kid, and I want to save her from all
the pain that that screwyness brings
with it.
At
twenty-one, I say it started to fall apart again and I wonder if it was ever really
together. Maybe my own pushing down? I threw myself into my studies in an
attempt to focus my mind and lose the obsessive tendencies I have to re-think
every moment that happens in my life. In retrospect, I don’t know why I
bothered. But, and it was a big but, I saw him again. No, not the high school
love, but the high school best friend, and this time he was girlfriend’d down.
Enter me, enter love. Love. Cue: the
world exploding into millions of different colours, rising up and swirling
about us as we take each other in our arms, and melt in each others’ gaze.
Love
can be such a beautiful thing. It is one of those things that incorporate a
world of everything in it. Like a sexy word – transcendence, articulate,
incestuous... A world full of scare and danger and desire, if you don’t know
the real meaning. He didn’t and neither did I. The difference between us was
that I knew I didn’t. We did everything. We wrecked our lives, our heads, our
bodies, and we dragged everyone around us down too. There was something in me
that wanted to rebel from every form of God I had found on my trips and falls;
too much anger in me that the new sense of infatuation hadn’t completely
numbed.
Deep
down, I knew that forgiveness – asking for it, and trying to live righteously –
would never be enough for my sins. No: enough for my sin. The only way I could ever earn my father’s suicide on my moral
score sheet – to take it away from his – was to sin outside my body, inside my
body and against it too. On my journey to destruction, mapping out the surest
ways to the devil, to hell or reincarnation as a slug, or some other lowly kind
of being, if anything can be as lowly as me – a hyena maybe, or a coyote - I
found the easiest ways to take myself down. I would ruin everybody else too.
It
was difficult to justify it to myself, the same thought: racking up the points
on others’ score sheets. But I convinced myself, if one is tricked into the
wrongdoing – whatever it is – or if it is done for altruistic reason, the sin
is forgiven. The points passed along to the trickster. Trickster girl, me. If not,
well at least I was racking up my own points, tempting, and why should I ever
care about the world that never cared for me? Selfishness: the power food of
leaders of the people. And me, with my deep brown eyes and face that begs you to
ask me directions and trust me, easy to lead the people.
With
this, I tore myself between the biggest issues surrounding morality, taking the
lessons from every religious person I had ever met – drugs, sex, lies, and
pain. Again. But I went further than just ruining my temple, inside and out, torturing
my organs and breaking, inking my skin. I took all the rules written in
scriptures, preached by sayers and said by preachers, and broke them too, in
every way – the physical-doer, and the scholar, subtle in my way of breaking
the faith of others. I took all the things that are forgiven (or so they say,
reassuringly) because they are done in the best ways and I did them purposely,
determined to evoke any of the rights that grant me a clean slate or
forgiveness.
I inflicted guilt on
others, and I was calculating and
cold in this. I let them sin inside
me, and I sinned against them. What the idea of love does is one of the most
wonderful things in the world, because you will do anything if you believe it is real. And one of the most
wonderful things this world can offer us is the drugs that take these feelings
to the edges of the universe, fill our hearts until they push against our ribs,
trying to break free, amplify every feeling of love thousands of times over. They
believed my love was real. He believed, best friend, and she believed it, pawn
in my score-sheet game.
In
my journey, my pulling the righteous off their paths, there was one redeeming
feature, but I tried to hide it as much as I could – I wanted to keep Jen out
of it, make sure she never saw what the others did, so she could be the best
she could, and be it on her own. No gratitude owed to the family. To any of us.
My mother screaming, Where did I go
wrong? at us, and me holding Jenny, Jana, my Jenna, and I’ll never forget
wanting to protect her. She’d freak out as Mum’s voice would get higher and
higher, shriek – conditioning from her childhood - and I’d cover her ears and
smile down at her, remembering Anj doing the same with me. Anj - bulimic, Neel
– completely taken himself away from all things Long, and me – everything else.
I
don’t hate her; it’s not even her fault. Mummy - as we called her, children,
bouncing around the room, trying to get her attention, and sometimes even when
we were older – had her own problems. Her own family things before I can
remember, but I heard all about it from Aunties and cousins and Uncles. Mum and
Dad never spoke about it though. Too much hurt there. It’s never easy for a
person to lose a parent early in their life, and maybe that was passed down
from Mum’s side. But ours was a lot simpler than hers. Grandmamma gone long
before to cancer, and my mama trying
to support Grandpapi in his manic depression, as she was the only girl in her
family that didn’t hide away when she married off – maybe down to my Dad’s own
family, her in-laws not being there to demand her attention, but her trying to
support them in country far away on top of all her other duties.
Like
I said, the year of the car accident was it for my mother. Maybe she decided
she had hit the limit of craziness in her family: father, husband, daughter,
and now second girl. Neel ended up driving to the wreck, tired, but there like
any good brother should be. Pissed off secretly, but showing all the concern
one should. The guy in the other car was young; he didn’t even consider it
could have been my fault. The girl covered in talcum powder, sideswiped,
silent. He took the blame, but my mother, fed up, frustrated, frightened,
feeling all the f’s in the world, turned to John. He – doctor to the family
Long, family broken, with a fresh-faced, kind of round, colleague - sent me
here.
And
we get back to the beautiful, young Doctor J, Jones, Daniel, Dan. I could say
his name over and over again. We kind of conflicted at first, I think. Not
greatly, but in a way that we would never have even looked at each other. He was
blonde, I was crazy. Crazy. It was
the kind of thing, unless thrown together and possibly even when thrown
together, there would be no spark – we would do what was expected of us and
continue with our lives. Separately, and not looking back.
I
think about it, and I have no idea how it happened, both of us dysfunctional in
our own ways perhaps. I did watch him, observe his little movements in our
sessions, but never for the reasons with which I watched everyone else. I
watched him because he watched me, and it was just another person to lie to.
Even the little bad things added up.
Eventually,
I found myself not lying, but thinking, and seeing everything clearly, a little
more spaced out – not just all cramped up in my head – but making all the score
sheet connections. I suppose that was when Dr. Jones started to see me
differently. The sessions became something more. Down time; slow and careful
and thoughtful. I don’t know if that is what made Dan start to think about me
more, fill the bland confliction with spark and light.
Our
conflict was now something real. Blonde became beautiful to me, and crazy, to
him, maybe? And I began to tell him the truth... Every single bit of it. I
didn’t come up with justifications, but he did, as he turned from being the man
who was suppose to sit back, listen, analyse, to the man becoming obsessed with
the obsessively determined. In our talks, over the suicide chess and coffee
table, I started to feel a bit sorted out, stopped watching him so much. If
only I hadn’t stopped watching him, maybe I would have seen him take on all my
sort-out and mess it all up again, log it in his head and like me, begin to
obsess.
It
was like he was playing my life backwards, only he didn’t get too far. Dan
Jones, Doctor Dan - the man I would have passed in the street, him blonde, and
me crazy - took on all my insanities. And the spark that bought me here, the
final point for my mother, the car accident that told everyone I was in pain,
insane, deranged and strange, it became his last point. I think insanity should
be for only those who can handle it, or you get overwhelmed with it, dragged
down by it, cut up, and you never make it out alive.
